Red Grow the Roses

by Janine Ashbless

  As a youth his aims were to have fun and chase tail, and in over forty years as a vampire they’ve altered remarkably little. His life revolves around sex and food, which are almost always the same thing. For vampires, there’s no distinction between thirst and desire. Blood-lust and fuck-lust come as a package, one engendering the other. He’s constantly horny, eternally obsessed with pussy. It’s one of the things he likes so much about his new life: he never has to stop. There are other advantages: he’s become faster and stronger and has keener senses, he heals cuts in minutes, his flab has converted to muscle and even his face has subtly changed, honed to a new beauty – but the buzz of rampant desire, the priapic stiffy that threatens to wear a hole in his pants, the heat that grips him every time he spots a potential target: that’s what he really trips on.

  Being dead – What’s there not to like?

  He’s vaguely aware that others of his kind are different, that things do change with time, but he doesn’t worry about that. Ben is young; still young enough to eat, even. Perhaps only a few mouthfuls a night – pizza and Chinese takeaway mostly, and hold the garlic because in the last couple of decades it’s started to turn his stomach – but he’s still capable of digesting some solids. That will be the first faculty to go, and he will miss it when it happens. The multiple flavours of life will be lost to him, the spices and the textures. All that will be left will be hot, sweet, infinitely appealing blood.

  In a big city like this, a world hub, there’s no problem with him taking a different person a night as prey – so long as he doesn’t kill them – and enough places to hunt in that his face doesn’t become known. Notoriety would be a handicap, and Ben likes to fly below the radar. Bars are the easiest places to pull in: hothouses of exotic painted blooms. There’s never a problem if you look like he does, and everyone is awash with alcohol, and they’re all young and hot and eager to be plucked. He does a lot of plucking.

  You might well meet Ben that way, particularly at night. But he is a seducer by nature rather than a hunter, and he’s surprised himself in recent years by discovering a taste for the more difficult target. The plainer girl – not the dull, slack-jawed type who’ll do it for a bag of chips or the cheery twinkly one who’ll do it for a laugh, but the buttoned-down type. Does that describe you? There are more women of that kind about than people think, though they’re invisible to so many eyes. Perhaps he’d find you that way, by daylight, when you’re least expecting it. He’s taken to haunting university buildings, parks, art galleries, even botanical gardens. He’s looking for the girls who wear sweatshirts even in warm weather, the ones who haven’t starved themselves or fried themselves orange on a sunbed or bothered to use hair-straighteners for that compulsory sleek look. Sweaters … Sweaters drive him half crazy with lust. Soft, pale, unfashionable girls. The ones who don’t actually believe that a man like him would hit on them. He can smell their defensiveness and the aching eagerness buried beneath.

  Is that you?

  It’s hard work to get past their disbelief. They often think he’s taking the piss, that he has a coterie of friends hidden nearby killing themselves laughing as he mocks their naivety with his attentions. Oh, but it’s worth it for the first bloom of their sexual scent, the rush of heat and wet, the look in their eyes as they tip from suspicion to hope to surrender. He’s prepared to work for days to get that.

  So perhaps he’ll find you when you’re concentrating on something else entirely. At work maybe – your frustrating, claustrophobic job, the one you took just as that first stepping stone, the one that tides you over until you move on to something really worthwhile. Or perhaps he’ll find you in a line at a shop counter, or queuing up to hand in a form in some official waiting room. And he’ll catch your eye with his frank, humorous gaze, so warmly that you’ll wonder, ‘Is it me he’s looking at?’

  Yes, it’ll be you. It’ll be hard to believe, but even harder to resist. You might be in a relationship, or you might be resigned to celibacy, but it almost certainly won’t make any difference – so long as there is a sexual instinct buried in you, he will bring it out and reel you in. He’ll use your own nature against you. He’s just too good-looking, too charming, to shrug off, and sexual heat radiates from his cold body like an aura. And you can forget morality or common sense: those things won’t save you. They don’t ever save anyone. Sex, when it kicks into gear – that raging appetite, that dizzy high of anticipation – trumps everything else. Don’t you know that yet?

  He can be subtle or he can be pushy, whichever works best in the circumstances. In either case he is persistent. Before you know it, your head will be awhirl and your heart will be beating faster every time you see him. You’ll feel a cramping thrill every time he smiles, every time his hand brushes yours, every time he leans in a little closer. You’ll wonder what is happening to you. Reflected in his eyes, you’ll see yourself as if for the first time: beautiful, desirable and free.

  And then, finally, you’ll let him cross the line. Because by then you’ll want nothing in the world more than the sight of his golden skin, his parted lips, his naked body. By then you will be weak-limbed, dizzy, breathless. Your skin will be running hot and cold chills. Your nipples will be so sensitised that the rub of your own clothing is almost painful. Your sex will be heavy with moisture, like a storm ready to break. When he takes you in his arms it will be like a profound pain has finally found release.

  Where do you want him, when he takes you at last? In your apartment, in secret? In the park, under a full moon? Behind the shelves where you work, muffled and frantic and daring? He doesn’t mind, so long as he can fuck you. So long as he can have your sex juices and your sweat and your surrender, your cries and your tears of joy. Your bright and racing blood.

  It can’t be denied that he’ll give you a good time. Just hope he doesn’t bring Naylor in on it, though.

  On his own, Ben is about as harmless as a vampire can be – but Naylor is his weakness. Naylor is the trigger for him going badly wrong, because he turns Ben’s simple lust to his more sadistic ends.

  It was the itch of Ben’s lust that brought him to this city in the first place, when he was still alive and living with his parents in a provincial town and had a job as an apprentice repairman, in those days when they still bothered repairing televisions and radios and kettles. He wanted a chance at the big-city nightlife he’d heard so much about, and he found to his delight that there was plenty of sex available: with the Pill now available, trendy chicks had no excuse to say No. He shacked up in a squat with a girl calling herself Moonbeam who had a seemingly endless supply of pot and LSD and a similarly endless line of parties to go to, parties at which the right people showed up to mingle with the hip young things, or if they didn’t they should have and everyone said they had done anyway, the next day. He thought he was in love with her, just a bit, though that didn’t stop him sleeping with other girls. And she went with other blokes too, of course. She was the one who introduced him to Naylor.

  She said he was this totally amazing guy who hung out with the Stones and had insights into history and eternity like no one else.

  Ben ended up in a room draped with Indian-printed cotton and reeking of patchouli, on his knees with his cock down Moonbeam’s throat, watching awestruck while this skinny beautiful youth fucked her from behind and she gobbled his dick and made noises like she was seeing Krishna himself. Ben had never shared a girl with another man. He thought it the hottest experience of his life, and he didn’t mind even when Naylor began to bite at Moonbeam’s back and shoulders, sucking her blood. Admittedly, the pot probably helped with that surprise. And Moonbeam didn’t seem to mind either; in fact she seemed to revel in the sensation, climbing to new orgasmic heights. It wasn’t long before Ben was finding out for himself what it felt like.

  In the whole wide world, there was nothing at all he’d ever known that was as good as the sensation of Naylor sucking his dick. Teeth and tongue. Blood and spunk. People who derided that sort of
thing didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. Sometimes, thanks to that magic bite, he walked round with a hard-on all day. Sometimes he woke so drained that his hollow balls just about clanged together.

  For a little while the two of them were Naylor’s favourites. The vampire fucked them together and separately, whenever he felt like it, without asking any leave and without needing to. All shame and propriety vanished from Ben’s life. He’d bend over and spread his ass-cheeks in the middle of a crowded room at the flick of a finger, the crook of an eyebrow. He’d offer his arms and his anus and his cock. He’d ask for nothing in return but the benison of Naylor’s razor-edged kiss.

  That all stopped when Moonbeam’s heart gave out, quietly and without any warning, one night as she lay with her head tilted backward off the edge of the bed with Naylor sucking at her crotch and Ben’s cock so far down her throat that she didn’t even cry out as she died. The two men buried her body in a patch of wasteland and then Ben threw a tantrum of recrimination and they fought, very briefly and with devastating effect as far as the human one of them was concerned. Naylor must be credited with some impulse of contrition, because he saved Ben from bleeding out by force-feeding the boy his own vampiric blood. That was how Ben was reborn.

  In very short order he decided that he hadn’t loved Moonbeam that much after all.

  He was luckier than he knew: it so happened that Reynauld was away abroad that month, and his conversion was revealed as a fait accompli upon the older vampire’s return. Moonbeam’s death never came to Reynauld’s attention at all and Ben was permitted to stay, so long as he swore loyalty like the others.

  Ben doesn’t resent Reynauld. But he’s still close to Naylor, and that way danger lies. Ben’s bad at spotting danger, though: he lives his life – if that’s the word – on too much of a high. Ironically, these days he’s completely straight, chemically speaking. Psychotropic drugs don’t work on vampires. He can’t even get drunk – except on blood, of course.

  That’s all that’s left to him now: blood and sex.

  2: Nine for the Nine Bright Shiners

  ‘Come on. Oh, God, yes – come on!’

  And I do. Like I’m told. Filling her.

  Sometimes I feel like all she wants of me is the gush of fluid, that I’m nothing but a donor to her. It’s the tiniest bit demoralising. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I want this baby as much as Penny does. I’m totally committed to the effort. I’ve given up coffee and alcohol and even fish, to my dismay – they’re supposedly caked in pollutants that depress sperm count – and I’ve switched to boxer shorts instead of briefs to keep the Boys optimally cool. I take my mineral supplements: zinc and selenium and vitamin C. It’s just as important to me as to her.

  OK, so if I’m honest it isn’t. It couldn’t be. It’s all she thinks about these days. Sometimes I look at her and wonder how the dance-till-dawn party chick I first met turned into this macrobiotic-organic obsessive with the body honed by swimming and Pilates into a lean, mean, baby-bearing machine. Fitness is considered vital in the mum-to-be, these days, it turns out. No one just gets pregnant and carries on any more; it has to be conducted like a military campaign instead. Not that I object to a toned tum and a firm butt, obviously; it’s the look in her eyes that worries me, the way they’re like holes going down into a big dark place. Whenever we meet someone with a pushchair she tries to hide it but I see. I can see her hunger.

  * * *

  I get called away from the table during a dinner the mayor’s hosting at his official residence. It’s not a particularly formal do, luckily: just a Spanish business delegation and some potential local investors and a couple of members of the European Parliament. Not exactly exciting stuff, but not much potential for messing things up either; they’re all happily chowing down so no one’s going to miss me for a few minutes. Penny has turned up at the front gate, and security have rung through to me.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I tell them: ‘She’s my wife.’ And I bring her inside. She’s dressed up enough not to look out of place, thankfully, in a little cobalt-blue number I’m rather fond of because of the cutaway back. ‘Is anything wrong?’ I ask, drawing her into a corner of the hall, under a portrait of Gladstone. There are waiting staff at practically every corner so I keep my voice low. It’s odd seeing your wife in a work context. Two halves of my brain are in collision.

  ‘I’m ovulating, Richard.’

  I try not to frown, though I’m secretly exasperated. ‘Couldn’t it wait?’

  ‘Well, you’re not planning on coming home tonight, are you?’ That’s true enough: with the mayoral elections coming up in a fortnight, once the guests are gone we’re all likely to be in a strategy meeting until the small hours. I’m going to have to sleep over here or else I’ll get back home by taxi somewhere near 4 a.m., at a guess. ‘And I have to be up early tomorrow,’ she continues, ‘to catch the train to my seminar.’

  I nod reluctantly. Penny is a freelance consultant for the hotel industry and gives talks all over the country.

  She switches tack, from rational argument to tease: ‘Bet you can’t guess what I’m wearing under this dress.’ Her eyes glitter and she moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue. It evokes the first stir of a reaction in the region of my crotch, just as she intends. Tease works.

  ‘All right then.’ I look up and down the corridor. The diners will be well into the bottles of Krug by now. And it’s not as if I’m the only political adviser the mayor’s got to hand. ‘Down here.’

  I need a room with a lock on the door, which means a guest toilet unfortunately: I pick the one furthest from the dining hall. It’s an exceptionally well-appointed toilet of course. It also happens to be occupied, because as I lay my hand on the door I hear a voice within. A man’s voice, deep and measured. He’s talking to someone, although the other voice is not audible.

  ‘Blast,’ I mutter. I might think about heading to another location, except that Penny takes the opportunity to lean against the wall and brush her fingers up my fly, a furtive tickle that deprives me of the will to move anywhere. Her eyes are bright, her breasts plumped up even more than usual to create a mesmerising cleft. ‘Careful,’ I admonish weakly. ‘We need to be discreet.’

  ‘How can we be, when I’m gagging for your cock?’ she mouths. I love it when she talks filthy, which she knows, of course. That perfect, preened exterior combined with whorishly low speech makes for a delicious frisson.

  Then the door opens. A man comes out, looks at us both, nods with a faint smile and walks away. I think for a moment that I recognise him but the familiarity is fleeting. Penny’s eyes follow him down the corridor. ‘Who was that?’ she asks with undisguised admiration.

  I sigh and steer her into the bathroom. That’s certainly one sign she’s ovulating: she becomes a rapacious flirt. Another man in my position might not take it so well. ‘I don’t know him. One of the Spanish group, I should think – they’re in the running for a contract on the integrated transport initiative.’

  ‘Well, he knew you.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘He called you Richard.’

  I blink, nonplussed. I can’t recall him saying anything to me at all. I can’t actually remember his face right now, come to think of it. He was tall and looked like he might have been Spanish; that’s all I recall. ‘Did you yank me out of dinner just to talk?’ I’m a little brusque, I admit, to cover my confusion. Penny rolls her eyes.

  ‘OK, love.’ She stalks over to the sink and drops her handbag while I give the room a once-over glance, just in case the conversation we’d overheard had been taking place live and not over the phone. But the room, though spacious for a toilet and slightly over-furnished – an antique armoire against one wall, a small but fiendishly ornate sofa upholstered in brocade, a huge matching gilded mirror over the marble counter that cups two sinks and a large vase of fresh roses – is empty of all human forms but our own. I push the door-bolt to.

  ‘So what are you wearing?
’

  ‘Come and find out.’ She smiles at me, heavy-lidded, in the mirror. I walk over behind her, Mr Dick already doing his wake-up stretches under my uncomfortable goddamn boxers. ‘Inappropriate Behaviour’ while working is strictly forbidden even if it is with one’s spouse; there’ve been more than enough embarrassing headlines in the press about waste-of-money politicians and public employees gadding about when they should be doing something worthy and abstemious. The fact that this could get me into terrible trouble adds a distinct spice to the occasion. Standing behind her, I watch in the mirror as she lifts her hands and rubs lazily at her breasts, slipping the shoulder straps of her dress to reveal more of those delectable twin slopes – so pale they make me think of snow, so smooth I want to ski down them into the ravine between.

  ‘Show me,’ I whisper, and my voice is thickening. ‘Get them out and play with them.’

  With a languorous smile she obeys, scooping each orb from dress and bra to prop them on the rumpled fabric, circling her nipples with her fingertips. The blushing points harden under the attention. I reach round and assist her, tweaking and flicking the stiff nubs until she surrenders them to me with the sigh I know very well. At the same time I press her to the marble slab, my awakening cock nuzzling up against the cushions of her bum. I enjoy watching us in the mirror; it’s almost like being in our own movie. I can see my hands looking coarse and dark on her cream-coloured skin, catch every flash and flicker of her eyes as my touch sets off cascades of reactions in her body. At this time of the month she’s quick to arouse, already primed. I feel her cheeks squirming back against my pressure. She’s ready for it.