by Kat Turner
A hum of energy skated across the spot between her legs as she realized those slivers of blood were only visible at kissing distance. A slowdown seized her. All she wanted to do, all she could do, was stare at his face. The scariest part? He wasn’t using his powers. The rapture came from within, the sense in which she’d agreed to her own bewitchment.
“You feel things on a deeper level than I do.” His tongue swiped across teeth, pairing with the clouds chasing over his dark eyes. In a zip of inhumanly fast motion, he shot out his hand and grabbed her chin, then bent her head back with firmness not approaching brutish force, though it bared her neck to an invisible lance.
A maelstrom of energies thudded inside of her as she merged with her deepest, most forbidden desires. Perhaps she’d danced with the dark so long, she now craved the border-crossing thrill of taboo. And what captured that better than a vampire’s teeth in one’s throat? Her chest heaved with breath.
“Makes me want to devour you. Drink that current of thick, wet awareness pumping through your body. You’re primordial, Eve, a fecund creature. A repository of energies. God, the things I could do to you. That I want to do to you.” He spoke a dark dream.
He pressed his other hand against the crotch of her cargo shorts, fingers offering hardness and enticing pressure. Her clit swelled, aching against his still touch. The moisture of her excitement mingled with teeming humidity, slicking her head to toe with juice.
Fluid need ripened her, changing her into a fantasy version of herself. She was a peach for him to pluck, to eat, tender flesh in his mouth. She would dissolve into sweet liquid running down his lips and chin as she offered her life to his consumption, a selfhood surrendered to bleed as it dribbled off.
“Tell me.” Her whisper was fast and lascivious, obscene in its sharpness. She widened her legs, feeling the spreading damp of excitement in her core, merging panties to skin.
A taunting brush of knuckle over cloth gave way to real strokes, his grip on her chin persistent. She gasped at the friction, the sweet ache at the juncture of her thighs gaining a modicum of satisfaction.
“Your throat hides the fountain of youth.” Rubs intensified, fast enough to bring her close to release.
She humped his hand, hips rising and rolling, lungs panting the pitiful affirmation of a flesh prisoner blood-bound to him. “Take it already.”
“I think of you submissive, giving it to me. My source to feed off of. My supplicant. I think of breaking your skin, tearing it. The flow of ambrosia. Red at first, bright trickles from my first cut, then a scarier color as your artery ruptures. Dark and thick, syrup, as primal as the magic in your soul.” His posh voice had grown menacing, the snarling, fire and ice timbre of a villain in control.
God, he rubbed faster. Her motions quickened against his, her body begging him for relief. For abandon. For surrender and escape.
In her throat, a fast, hard beat thumped. She swallowed, snapping her head down to catch his reaction to the movement in her neck. He surely saw the pulsing throbs in there. Did he register the pattern with his musician’s acumen?
Could her daydream of their blood-erotics make a symphony, melodies both sacred and profane? Could their taboo art smash all walls, fold heaven and hell into an undifferentiated flow of good and evil, chaos into order?
He hadn’t morphed into vampire face, but the lust in his expression gave enough of an illicit thrill to tide her over for now. Eyelids at half-mast, ringed by thick lashes the color of soot. Lips he’d licked, the smell of musk and sweat. The long outline of his cock stood in sharp relief against the fabric of his shorts.
“Keep talking about what you’d do to me after you turned into a vampire.” She dry fucked his hand, shameless as a happy whore.
“I’d lick your deepest secrets off your own skin and drink them down like warm red wine. I’d eat the essence of you, the enigmas encoded in your DNA. Take you. Make you. I’d open you up and consume you until you are mine and I own the extent of you.”
From some pit crawled a boundless shadow demon. It mated with Jonnie and revealed a bit of itself through his crisp vocal inflection. Teetering at the edge of madness, Eve courted the imaginary fiend like a snake charmer.
A tangle of pressure built at the base of her spine. She smelled her own excitement, fleshy and tart in the relentless equatorial heat.
Deft, Jonnie popped the button of her shorts. Unzipped. She moaned as his middle finger breached her soaked underwear, parted her soft curls as he shot his touch to her clit. Desperate for him, she gazed into his eyes. Somehow they stimulated her too, rubbed a secret spot in her reptile brain, provoking her pleasure. “Please keep talking dirty. Please, please.”
“I’d make you into nectar of the gods. Lap your port wine from those hard nipples, scoop it from your belly button. Make your hot, sweet pussy a sacred chalice for your precious fucking blood. For my blood.” His warm breath kissed her neck, merging with jungle steam.
With one callused finger pad, he circled her clit in wide, fast motions. Her mouth dropped as she pushed into his touch, pushed at him to relieve her greed, her pressure, to take away the constant pushback of her dull pain. So mystical, so sacred and strange.
“I’d turn you, Evelyn. Turn you into what you really want to be. Someone who isn’t frustrated or confused by those dark waters you skate over as you teeter on the ice. You’re a mermaid who swims in them. A sorceress who commands them, controls them. They fill your veins and you shoot them back out as magic.”
She came in a violent, cracking jolt, erupting hard in erasing shocks. He changed up his strokes as she did, doing it faster and faster, hard, lubed flesh on hard, lubed flesh.
Eve bowed her back and shoved her belly forward, moans and pants in her ears as she burst, taut and erect and slippery against his hand. Her own ugly, uninhibited noises carried her through the upending wave of destruction as he milked the climax from her.
When oversensitivity set in, she ripped his hand free, knelt, and went for his shorts. His hands were in her thick hair. The world spun off its axis.
“Yeah.” Still humming with aftershocks, she gasped out the wicked word as she opened his pants and grabbed the silken bar that she craved.
Eve looked up into his eyes as she freed him and lapped at his slit with the wanton ways of a pagan sex goddess coaxing his fluids forth. He grunted, hair in his face, and urged her head down. She licked up the first dot of white cream like a dirty little cat girl, her tongue flicking and darting over the opening. The crown of his tawny cock darkened to a plum shade, jerking as it begged her for more sustained attention.
“You want to drink me, too, don’t you Eve love? Feed on me.” He smirked a twist of a smirk, the nastiest and hottest thing she’d ever seen.
“Give me a taste of you. Please.” Invested in her performance of submission, she tugged at his waistband but didn’t urge the shorts down. Not without his permission.
Jonnie fisted his cock, hard enough to make the fat crown throb with a fresh bloom of blood. Another milky bead of pre cum bubbled at the tip, and she went for it with her mouth agape and tongue outstretched. Sweat taped streaks of hair to his face, making a peekaboo of his features that brought both the danger inherent in him and the abandon of their passion into relief.
“Beg for it.” His voice came out a gravely grunt. He shook a finger at her and waved his straining dick, gripping the base.
“One taste. Please.” Her fantasies danced a circus as she licked her lips, batted her eyelashes, stared up at his affected sadism.
They skirted the edges of something mean, played at the borders of doom. He could bite, attack, drink.
In the landscape of her imagination, he had. This would be the cure for her. His seed down her throat would make her sickness better as she knelt before him and wheedled, weak from blood loss and sticky with the residue of her own life painting the hot skin of her neck, chest, tits.
“Just a little bit, love.” He swiped the tip across her parted lips
, leaving a treat of bitter musk.
“More.” She stuck out her bottom lip in a theatrical pout.
He lifted his ass, pushed pants and underwear to his knees, and sat back down. “Slow. Start with my balls.”
His brown, heavy sac was drawn up close to his body, full and tense. She licked the rigid seam dividing his testes. When he sighed in pleasure, she sucked one heavy ball into her mouth, massaging with lips and tongue. He moved one hand from her head and pumped his length.
Eve drew his other ball into her mouth and nursed the entire bundle, teasing deep grooves in leathery ball skin with her naughty tongue.
He slid his hand up the shaft and stroked his cockhead with a curled fist. Snatched his bottom lip in his teeth and bit, increasing the speed of his pumps. Fangs came down.
Yes.
“Yeah, Eve. Suck my balls.”
Emboldened on her knees, Eve surged with a dark charge. Whether it was his bossiness or the appearance of his vampire teeth, she couldn’t say. But in the interests of stepping it up a notch, she secured a thick fold of his loose skin between her teeth and nipped.
A suck of air hissed between his pursed lips. The hand on his cock dove into her hair and pulled, close to the scalp, drawing her off his steely erection with a stinging pull. “Careful.”
In that moment, Jonnie infiltrated Eve’s head. Not literally, but through insidious seduction more potent than any drug. Jonnie used Eve’s craving, her forbidden curiosity, against her, opening dark doors in some subbasement of her self. A dungeon where hunger and torture danced, a hidden chamber of horror-delights and whining, whispered pleas of kill me. But not to kill in the permanent or literal senses. Here, to kill was to break down to zero and remake, to sire a phoenix born of abjection, to produce glory from the ashes of misery. Here, killing meant alchemy.
“Or else what?” She fired off the taunt in a warning shot. She was utterly defenseless and far from unaware of the contrast inherent in her word combined with the supplicating posture. Wood slivers burrowed grit into her sensitive kneecaps, the sting of some emergent S&M ritual unveiled. She licked and kissed his stiff shaft, keeping him primed.
“Or else you might be in real danger. I changed.” Unambiguously, he cautioned her, the voice he used firm in its concern. “Into something I haven’t felt before. And it wasn’t good.”
Eve backed away from the edge. Not because Jonnie scared her, he didn’t. But because she scared herself. The caves in her soul, full of monsters, scared her more than anything. She’d already unleashed enough. Harmed enough. Nothing good would come from skipping around the borders of the abyss.
Yet she kept its temptations in her periphery as she lowered her head and took him in her mouth. Kept it looming near the forefront of her conscious mind as she teased at first, caressing his hardness with her tongue, massaging the head with her lips. Her curls tangled in his fingers. She bobbed. He groaned and grunted, thrusting tip into tonsils.
Eve slowed her technique, delaying his climax as she delighted in the visual of her saliva running down his erection in clear rivulets that made his dusky, veined staff glisten in the sunset. Rolling his balls in her free hand, she sucked in a steady pace, working him over.
After a few minutes, he clamped his hands to the sides of her head. He punched up his hips, thrusting his dick down her throat. Her gag reflex seized, but she kept up her motions until he stiffened to fleshy steel against her tongue and moaned out her name, followed by a long groan of male pleasure and satisfaction.
His thick fluids coated her mouth, salty and rich. Grateful for his essence, she gulped him down. His handsome face melted into a mask of pleasure, reverent and boyish in its disbelief. She swallowed until he stopped spurting, thinking of the magic powers of blood as she drank cum.
Two fluids comprising the ancient, liquid life beneath and behind us all coiled a vortex in her mind.
The shift in Eve was subtle, a blink-and-miss level of nuance. But pieces inside of her broke off and reformed, sending currents into motion as they clicked into fresh alignment. And what emerged from those new relationships was power. From her gut, ancestors or God or something else, chanted. Though she didn’t trust it, she moved in the groove carved by its authenticity.
Eve smiled at Jonnie as she pulled back from him, sending a signal of awareness as a slow morass of oil seeped coolly through her system, sealing holes and cracks as it did. It was macabre and morbid, primordial ooze, ancient tree roots stabbed into graves and drawing forth their energy. Skeletons and rot, the dark and heavy drag of what remains.
The things we bury, shove into the ground out of sight and mind, don’t go away. They lie in wait. They remain.
They awaited her, and they’d found her.
Her heart beat faster as she knelt there smiling, feeling that obsidian magic course through her veins and penetrate the cells of her marrow. Her core temperature dropped a few degrees as some part of her psyche broke away and wormed deep, deep into the earth. Into the crevices the life force leaches into, the part of the world that absorbs and holds those elements of the dead not allowed to join the pretty golden spheres.
She could gather that darkness, take it in through a controlled osmosis. Two versions of her thrived now, the one on her knees before Jonnie in the bunk, and the one patrolling the bowels of the earth. Magic stepped in to replace the part of her that fled, or perhaps that part of her fed on necrotic magic from her station beneath, amidst opportunistic worms and decomposing flesh.
Jonnie was not smiling back, not by a long shot. He regarded her with two fingers pressed to his lips.
“I can bring it up.” Dark death magic sealed her gaps, rendering her whole. “Death. I can marshal and manipulate the essence of death.”
The force inside of her buzzed in a bass tune, a response of confirmation. Uncertainty dissipated into the ether as Evelyn actualized, became one with herself. Unified.
Jonnie opened his lips, though he made not a sound.
Eve rubbed his bare thighs in playful reassurance. He’d said that this development was bad, but it wasn’t, not at all. It was glorious. It was crucial. It was key.
Twelve
Jonnie had been distant ever since the pair had set off on the trek to the jungle camp. He walked beside Eve, silent, radiating an unapproachable aura with his hands shoved in his pockets. Working with people in a de facto caretaking role had groomed Eve to notice nonverbal gestures and the messages behind them.
Taylor, sensing the tension, had taken up the conversational mantle, which Eve admitted she appreciated. He needed space, fair enough. Whatever development she’d ridden after they’d fooled around was new and wild to her. She could only imagine how strange he must feel being implicated in it.
Their three-person and one-horse march concluded at a flat patch of land enclosed by trees. Four reddish log cabins ringed the area in a wide half-circle, and an extinguished pit fire flanked by benches sat in the middle of dirt ground. A large, fenced-in pen and three-stall equine stable rounded out the arrangement, a rustic setup which reminded Eve of the summer overnight camp she attended annually as a kid.
She drew in a lingering breath of cedar and burnt embers, looking up at Taylor on her steed. “Thank you for coming back.”
Taylor dismounted and led her horse into the corral. She pulled a paper lunch sack from her backpack and fed the animal apple slices from it. “I want to apologize for freaking out earlier.”
The white horse accepted the treats in its big humanoid teeth, huffing as its owner stroked its snout.
“It’s fine. Extenuating circumstances. Do you think your work with the water might have some answers?”
A few feet away, someone whistled. “Hey, man, you’re the one who needs the ayahuasca, yeah?” A hippie guy with beads woven into natty brown hair halfway down his back shouted the interruption, tanned arms full of firewood.
“Yeah, mate.” Jonnie sounded relieved to have something else to do.
“Step into m
y pharmacy, brother.” The hippie dropped his load by the ashy remnants of the fire, wiped dirty hands on tie-dyed sweatpants, and motioned for Jonnie to follow him to a cabin identical to the others. A cloth flag bearing the band name Phish hanging in one of the windows distinguished his pharmacy from the other structures.
Jonnie hustled on over, hazarding Eve not so much a single backwards glance.
She sighed, a screw of regret and frustration drilling into her heart.
“What’s his problem?” Taylor sat on a bench and patted the seat next to her.
Eve picked up a long stick and drew random shapes in the dust. “We fooled around, and I felt changes in me. New magic. It’s hard to explain.” She etched swirls and clouds in the dirt, a halfhearted attempt to give form to the gooey morass teeming within her. A tsunami of sludge storming at her gates, a drooling tongue of molasses licking her veins.
“This place will do that. I leveled up when I first touched the river. It’s a node down here, charged with mystical energies and forces. My theory is that if you have anything in you, no matter how latent, being here will bring it out.”
A faint southern twang in Taylor’s voice coaxed a smile from Eve, the little reminder of the south demystifying the other woman and imbuing her with the sound of an old friend. She traced a series of three cresting, crashing waves with her branch.
Taylor watched, pulling a piece of twig from her blonde hair. “Earth.” She muttered the muted word with the certainty of a shouted eureka.
Eve got it. “Earth magic. I have some kind of earth magic. But it feels like more than that, like there’s a connection to death in there. Which would make sense, given the other things I can do.”
“Right. Earth and death are related, as you of course know. The body returns to the earth, the soul flies away. As above, so below.” Taylor pointed up, then down.
Eve smirked at the other woman. “Uh oh. Don’t go all basic witch on me now.”
A good-natured chuckle from Taylor. “I’m serious. You’re earth, I’m water. Two elemental witches, both activated as soon as we show up here.” The pregnant blonde stamped a hiking-boot-clad foot into the ground, kicking up a puff of dust. It dissipated, catching the remaining sunlight as the bleeding orange orb dipped below the tree line.