House of Dark Delights

by Louisa Burton

“Ah, but you are not laughing, are you? You know, I think, why I have brought you here, what I have in mind for you.”

  “I assume you mean to feed from me. Go to it, then.” She turned her head and raised her chin to bare the left side of her neck in a bold invitation that stole Turek’s breath. Never before had his prey willingly volunteered to be taken. The gesture excited him in a far more visceral way than did mere hunger. His spine bristled as the little hairs all along it stood on end; a spasm quivered through his cock.

  He stepped closer to brush his fingertips ever so lightly along her throat, feeling the carotid pulsing seductively just beneath the surface. She closed her eyes, waiting.

  “Unafraid, are you?” Leaning forward, he glided the sensitive tip of his tongue along the artery’s path, reveling in the hot thrum of blood beneath the flesh. “A curious reaction,” he said. “Or it would be, if you were human.”

  She grew very still.

  He stepped up onto the platform, seized her head with both hands and raised it, forcing her to look him in the eye. “I could suck you dry and leave you for dead, and within hours your veins would be humming with fresh blood, the color would blossom once again upon your cheeks, and you would arise and walk away, laughing at me. Is that not true, my sweet, devious little succubus?”

  She held his gaze unblinkingly.

  “I must admit,” he said, “I failed to see through you when you first joined us. Just another dasher who can’t keep her legs together, that’s what I took you for. I’d intended to use you as I use your sisters in harlotry at the first convenient opportunity.”

  “By knocking me senseless with gin, then feeding on me as you vent your lust,” she said. “I’d have awakened in the morning too battered and bitten to notice the puncture wounds on my throat—”

  “Or they may very well have been here,” he said, reaching up to stroke her inner wrist. “Or here.” He licked the inside of her elbow, feeling her shiver from the sensation. “Or even here,” he added, fondling the aureola around her left nipple. “It can actually take very little to satisfy me if my hunger has been recently slaked, and I do love to suckle at a ripe breast from time to time.”

  “And if your hunger hasn’t been slaked?” she asked. “If you’re ravenous?”

  “Do I drain my prey to the point of death?” He shrugged negligently. “More often than not, if I’m feeling peckish, but never with those whose demise would attract untoward attention. The nuns of the Order of St. Francis are quite secure in that regard, I assure you.”

  “A murderer who only kills when he doesn’t think he’ll be caught is still a murderer,” she said. “How many have you butchered? Hundreds? Thousands?”

  “Just as humans feed on the lower beasts, so vampyres feed on humans. ’Tis the natural order, the way of the world. I must say, I’m surprised to find you so sentimental about the welfare of humanfolk. After all, you’ve a bit of the vampyre in you already, no? You’re a creature of dark passions and terrible, ungovernable hungers, as am I. We are really much the same, the succubus and the Upír—both predators seeking our own particular sustenance, which we derive from humans—willing or unwilling. We both do our prowling at night, for the most part. We are both singleminded in the pursuit of our prey. And we are both susceptible to the same means of destruction—immolation—which makes me suspect that your race and mine are perhaps more closely related than one would think.”

  “How long have you known what I am?” she asked.

  “It came to me gradually, from observing you. You’re quite the debauchee, to be sure, but not like the others. Their carnal appetites are juvenile and easily gratified, whereas it became clear over time that yours…” Turek slid a hand down her belly to brush the very edge of her sex, smiling to himself as she cringed away from his touch. “Yours are as deep as the night, dark, complicated, inexorable. My suspicions about you, about what you might be, came to fruition when you took a fancy to that handsome young vicar who showed up without warning during our weekend at Bute’s country house last month. His nephew, was it? Painfully earnest, went on at some length about the poor ‘unfortunates’ selling themselves on the streets of St. Giles and Whitechapel, and our obligation to rescue them from their lives of sin. Joseph, I think his name was.”

  “Josiah,” Lili said quietly.

  “I followed you that night when you slipped upstairs to his bedchamber and—”

  “Impossible,” she said. “’Twas the middle of the night, and there was no one about. I was very careful not to be seen.”

  “I followed you from outside the house, crawling along the brick walls while tracking your movements from within. I watched through young Josiah’s window as you crept into his bed and whispered the words that rendered him immobile while you fucked him senseless. Lucky fellow, I thought, falling victim to the likes of you. Gets to eat his cake and have his virtue. He couldn’t move, but he did manage a few halting words now and then. He called you…Eliza, was it?”

  With a sigh, Lili said, “She’s his housekeeper’s daughter. He’s infatuated with her.”

  “An infatuation the upstanding reverend would never stoop to act upon, of course—but he might dream about her, yes? About her coming to his bed and doing things to him, dark, bestial things he’d never imagined in that unsullied mind of his. ’Twas a revelation, Lili, watching you entice him, over and over again, into a frenzy of lust. The way you used your hands, so slowly and softly at first, then your tongue and teeth, that juicy peach from the fruit bowl, the knotted scarf, the candle…Ah, and the things you whispered in his ear to rouse his passions…Bless me if it wasn’t the most exquisite filth I’d ever heard. More than once, I thought the poor boy might die of apoplexy, the way he shook and panted while you kept him hovering on the edge, his face gone purple, fingers clawing at the sheets. How many times did he come off, do you recall? Five? Six? And each time just as violently as the first.”

  Lili made no response to that.

  “That was when I grasped what you were and resolved to possess you,” Turek said as he caressed her face, her throat. “Not just for one night of casual bloodfucking, but wholly, and forever.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “I’m actually quite rational, as vampyres go.” Turek rubbed his thumb firmly along her right carotid to stimulate and plump it, making it easier to locate and pierce. “We incline toward lunacy, sad to say. Not the Upír so much, but the others.”

  He tilted her face to expose the side of her neck, his fangs prickling as the little nerves there prepared to draw blood up through the conduits in his palate to his own depleted vessels. Bending his head, he chose a spot high on her neck where the artery was likely to be closest to the surface, and planted a soft, preliminary kiss there.

  Lili hitched in a breath at the first light touch of his fangs against her skin. Not so blasé now at the prospect of being fed upon, she twisted and writhed, wresting her head from his grasp.

  “Fight me all you want, my dear. I rather fancy it.” Grabbing a fistful of her hair, Turek jerked her head aside and pierced her throat.

  She wrestled and kicked, crying out hoarsely as he worked his fangs through the shallow muscle, deftly puncturing the carotid sheath and the artery itself while taking care not to nick the jugular. So violent were her struggles that he was forced to unhinge his jaw and latch on hard to her throat, using his entire mouth—not a technique he liked to employ on such a beauty, given the unsightly bruising and teeth marks that would result, but with prey this frantic, it was the only way to keep his fangs seated. He lifted her legs to either side of him, both to thwart those painful kicks and to raise her to a more convenient height so that he wouldn’t have to feed hunched over.

  Lili’s blood ran very warm, with a distinctive essence redolent of rainwater and figs. Turek moaned deep in his throat as he siphoned it, his fangs tickling as it pumped through them, gums pulsing. Like a nursing babe, he worked his tongue in a firm, steady rhythm so as to encourage the flow
. Bracing his legs, he strengthened his grip on Lili as she strained vainly but heroically against the steel cuffs and the weight of his body crushing her to the statue.

  Yes. Oh, here it comes… Lili’s blood percolated through Turek’s brain in a rush of pinpricks that made him feel weightless, exhilarated, his vision stained red, heart thudding in his ears. His hunger faded, replaced by the intoxicating bliss of fulfillment as the crimson nectar flooded his tissues and organs, infusing them with blessed nourishment. His cock and nipples grew erect, tingling at the surge of fresh blood.

  As Lili’s veins emptied, rendering her weaker and weaker, her struggles gradually devolved into a feeble, desperate writhing. Though she was, by now, too delirious to realize it, her languid movements as Turek stood pressed into the cradle of her thighs, feasting on her, only served to stoke his carnal excitement, his cock rising like a curved spike against his belly.

  How tempting it would be to hammer himself into her now, as he fed on her, he feverish with lust and fresh blood, she too frail to resist him but knowing what was happening, knowing he could fuck her at will and that she, the proud goddess who’d spurned him for weeks, was powerless to stop him. Perhaps, given her succubitic nature, he could even make her share in his pleasure, despite herself. How he longed to feel the cool and indifferent Ilutu-Lili moaning and bucking in his arms, like any hot-cunted wench getting a good grind.

  But how much better it would be, how utterly rapturous, to wait until he’d drunk his fill, then take her as she drank from him. To be inside a female undergoing vampyric conversion was always marvelous, sexual passion imparting a sharp, breathless intensity to the transformational process.

  Of course, with female follets—those rare ones who were not only willing but able to be converted, for some were immune—the results were unpredictable and often unsatisfying. Some members of the faerie races, especially the sheltered and naive forest types, found the experience so overwhelming that, like infants, they would close their eyes and sleep through the entire thing. Skoggra and their first cousins, wood-wives—delicate and lovely despite their razorlike claws—tended to lose control, leaving Turek slashed to ribbons. Even worse were the rusalki of Turek’s homeland. While splendid fucks, they were so unrelentingly vicious—toward him as well as toward their prey—that he’d all but given up trying to turn them.

  Ah, but succubi…No claws, no killer instinct, no tiresome naiveté, just an all-consuming, inexhaustible hunger for the joys of the flesh. To screw a succubus while she underwent the change was sheer ecstasy, in large measure because her pleasure fed his, and vice versa. He felt it all as if it were happening to him—the thrill of penetration, the tang of hot blood, the synchronous pounding of their hearts with every sex-thrust, the woozy euphoria as their life forces mingled, recasting her bodily humors in a new mold, that of the noblest of predators…the Upír.

  The succubus occupied, in Turek’s estimation, a unique and lofty position in the distaff pantheon of follets—and Ilutu-Lili, with her moonlit beauty, her lush sensuality and keen mind, was the de facto queen of her race. They belonged together, she and Turek. She didn’t realize it yet, of course, but she would, once she’d shared his lifeblood and become as he was.

  Through the blood-haze that held Turek in its thrall, he became dimly aware that Lili had grown heavy and limp in his arms. Scheisse. Lost in his reverie, he’d overfed. Were she human, she would be on the verge of death, if not lifeless already. He carefully extracted his fangs, unlatched his teeth from her flesh, and snapped his jaw back into place.

  Her neck bore the imprint of his bite, so badly contused that his fang marks were all but invisible amid the purpling wound—or so they would have been but for the blood trickling from the pair of pinhead-size punctures, which Turek instinctively licked.

  He lowered Lili’s legs and stepped down from the platform. She hung slackly in her wrist cuffs, head slumped down. Pushing her hair off her face, he leaned her head against Dusivæsus’s right breast. “Wecken sie.” He underscored the command with two sharp slaps on the cheek. “Come, my dear. You must feed now.”

  She muttered something incoherent.

  “You’ll feel better once you’ve got some fresh blood in you. Just a sip,” he said in response to her drowsy look of disgust. “A drop, even. One drop of my blood is all it will take, one warm, sweet, miraculous little drop—and then you shall become as I am. But you must drink it of your own free will, knowing the outcome and accepting it, for the conversion to take effect.”

  Lili stared at him through heavy-lidded eyes, shook her head blearily. “Never.”

  It was remarkable that she could communicate at all, considering how much blood he’d drained. She was recovering with astonishing speed even for an immortal—just that much more evidence that Ilutu-Lili was an extraordinary being, worthy to take her place at his side until the end of time.

  “Why do you suppose I went to the trouble of bringing you here?” he asked. “Were it a simple matter of hunger, I’d have chosen one of the others.” Taking her face in his hands, he said, with genuine feeling, “I don’t just want your blood, Lili. I want you. I need you. I’ve been alone far too long, for my entire existence as an Upír.”

  “H-how long?” she managed.

  She was probably stalling for time, hoping to figure out a way to free herself from his clutches. Still, why shouldn’t she know something of his past, if they were truly destined to share eternity together?

  He said, “I was born—as a human—in Prague in 1329, and I became an Upír in June of 1348, while studying to be a physician at the University of Bologna. So next month will mark the four hundred first anniversary of my vampyric conversion.”

  “A physician? You?”

  “’Twas that or the priesthood. I wanted to help people,” he said with a sardonic smile. “I settled on medicine because it didn’t require a vow of celibacy. Even in my altruistic youth, I knew my limits.”

  “How…Why…?”

  “Why did I trade in medicine for vampyrism? ’Twas the Black Death—it ravaged Italy that year. I tried to treat the poor bastards who’d been struck down, thinking surely God would keep me well so that I could continue His work. He had other ideas, though. One morning I awoke seething with fever, my hands and feet gone black, blood dripping from my mouth. I realized I’d be dead by nightfall. I knew a woman, Galiana Solsa—somewhat older than I, but dazzling, brilliant, reckless. She exuded danger like an aphrodisiac.”

  “She was a vampyre?”

  “So she’d told me.”

  “She told you? Wasn’t that risky?”

  “We’d had a liaison some months before, very brief, but very impassioned. She’d wanted to turn me. She told me I could live forever if I were only willing to, in her words, harvest humans rather than healing them. I thought she was mad—literally. I thought, ‘Dear God, I’m in love with a gibbering lunatic.’”

  “You loved her?”

  Turek looked away with a studiously blasé shrug, wishing he’d had the presence of mind not to blurt that out. “I was nineteen, and she was magnificent—or so I’d thought until she started in about the harvesting and so forth. I ended the affair, much to her sputtering rage, and threw myself into my schooling—until the morning I woke up dying. I knew no surgeon could help me, so in desperation, I sent for Galiana. She scoffed at me as I lay there vomiting and shaking and oozing blood, all the while pleading for her to turn me. She told me I’d made my bed, that I ought to have taken her up on her offer when I had the chance, that sort of thing. ’Twasn’t till I was on the verge of death that she finally turned me. She’d intended to all along, of course—just having a bit of fun at my expense, which I suppose she was entitled to.”

  “Did you go back to being lovers?” Lili asked.

  “God, no. She was much too vexed at me for having cast her aside. There’s been no one since her, no one I’ve thought of as a lover, certainly, nor even a mistress.”

  “What about friends
?” she asked.

  “Vampyres don’t form friendships easily, and humans are for feeding and fucking. No, as I say, I’ve been alone for four centuries.”

  A hint of something that might have been pity shadowed Lili’s eyes for a fleeting moment, or perhaps it was just a fancy of Turek’s imagination.

  “And you,” he said, “you’ve been alone, too, no? Roaming the earth like a gypsy, trying desperately to conceal your true self, to pass for human. But you aren’t human. You’re different, Lili. You’re better than them, a higher being, an immortal—a goddess.”

  “Not anymore,” she said.

  “A succubus, then.”

  “A succubus,” she agreed. “But not a bloodsucker. Not a murderer. I’d rather die than become what you are.”

  “Such pedestrian platitudes are beneath you, my dear,” said Turek as he rolled up the right sleeve of his robe. “I changed my tune, and I wager you will, too. And I think you’ll be surprised at how readily you take to the vampyric way of life. Before this night is through, you’ll be reveling in it. You will prey on humans to appease not just your lust, but your hunger as well. Yes, you will kill them, time and time again, and you will feel not a moment’s remorse. We will prey on them together, you and I, sharing our quarry as we share all else. We will savor their blood as if it were the sweetest wine. But first you must savor mine.”

  Turek raised his right wrist to his mouth and pierced one of the fat blue veins just beneath the surface of the skin, using the very tips of his fangs. Withdrawing them, he watched two slender red ribbons emerge from the minuscule punctures to crawl around his wrist like twin bracelets.

  “One drop.” Turek offered his blood-banded wrist to Lili, who turned her head, her lips pressed tightly together. He grabbed her jaw and forced her to face him. “One tiny lick—that is all it will take to initiate the change.”

  Eyeing him with revulsion, she said, “You are mad if you imagine that I would ever choose to become like you. You fancy yourself godlike, but to me, you’re just some vile little bloodsucking insect—a mosquito with delusions of magnificence.”