“Handcuffed to a post in the bedroom. We wanted to check in on you before we went to bed. We wanted to see how you are doing. Of course, this wasn’t exactly what we were expecting.” Niki answered
“Handcuffs, where’d you two get handcuffs?” I asked.
“What do you mean were did we get handcuffs? Please, I always come prepared.” Niki laughed.
“And you’re always prepared to cum!” Danika chuckled.
“Hey! That’s not nice…at least without taking me back for a demonstration.” Niki cooed.
“Soon baby, but first we check on family. Then, we’ll go back to our bed and work on that O face.”
“What about Jes?” I asked.
“Well, if she wants to join in I’m not opposed to the idea. It’d sure make it easier to keep tabs on her, and she has the good handcuffs.” Niki shrugged.
“Good handcuffs, so there are bad handcuffs?” I asked nervously.
“Oh, there are definitely bad handcuffs, but only when I’ve been really good.” Niki laughed. I sat there for a moment before it really sank in, and then I felt my face flush deep red. “Oh my God, you’re blushing! How can you be blushing?” Niki began cackling with delight, and soon Danika joined her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I grumbled.
Danika held up one finger, “First, you hang around with all of us. I could say more about that but it kind of makes us all sound like horny sluts.”
“I prefer the term wanton hussy, thank you very much.” Niki said before kissing her on the cheek.
Danika smiled, “Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe.” She then raised a second finger, “You have that giant vibrator.”
“Had.” I mumbled, and for a moment I thought I might actually cry.
“Had?” Niki asked.
“Jes used it to get Sam off.”
“Wow, kinky.” Niki started laughing.
I turned an even deeper shade of red, “I mean she hit him over the head with it. It’s broken.”
“Oh, that’s horrible. I remember when Xander’s motor finally stopped working. I wanted to cry.” Niki looked at the floor.
“Xander?” Danika asked.
“I really loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and when I’d go out I took Xander with me. I thought it worked out brilliantly. I got to say I was going out with someone named Xander, and then I’d use it on my girlfriend. That way I could stay in the closet in front of my parents.”
“Except they already knew you were gay.” Danika chuckled.
“Well, I thought they were going to be mad, so I tried to hide it. Now I know I wasn’t fooling anyone. I still feel pretty stupid when I think about it. I mean looking back on it, I really lucked out. Mom and Dad really lov-“ Niki froze.
Penny was staring down at her hands. “My mother’s dead, and I never even knew she was gone. I thought maybe I’d done something wrong. I still can’t believe she just isn’t here anymore.” She then looked up, and her eyes were bloody orbs. “I’m so sorry I lied to all of you.”
Niki wrapped an arm around her, “Hey, you’re family. That’s why we dropped in. We love you, and all of us are worried about you. You don’t have to tell us anything, but if you do feel the need to talk about it, then we’re here.”
Penny wrapped both arms around Niki and hugged her, “Thank you.”
“Air…need air!” Niki gasped.
“Sorry.” Penny released her. The little neck biter was practically overflowing with gratitude.
“That’s fine, and if you want to talk about it, we’re here.” Niki smiled.
Penny’s face darkened, “I suppose you all deserve to know something.”
“No, we don’t deserve anything. We’re family. You never owe family anything but love.” Niki said as she gave Penny a gentle hug.
Penny looked a little confused, as though what she was being told made no sense to her. Eventually she shrugged and then said nervously, “I don’t want to discuss everything, but I do want to talk about it. I’ve kept it all bottled up for so long.” She then took a deep breath and started telling us everything she could.
Chapter 27
We all found somewhere comfortable to sit down, and Penny steadied herself. The room was completely quiet except for the slight ping of the ceiling fan that wasn’t properly balanced. For a few moments she kept quiet, and we were almost certain that she wasn’t going to speak. Niki and Danika looked as though they’d resigned themselves to being in the dark. They were about to walk off.
Then Penny started, “I was born in 1692. My great grandfather, John Cowper, was Baronet of Nova Scotia. He died in the Bishop Wars in 1640. He left the lands of Gogar near Edinburgh to his son William Cowper. When Grandpa died, the lands went to my uncle William. William became the first Lord Chancellor of Great Britain. When he took his new position, he turned over Gogar and Gogar House to my father. My father, Spencer Cowper married Pennington Goodere. She was a kind woman. She overlooked a lot of what my father did. When my father became a vampire, she covered up for him. She was a devoted wife. She protected all of us until her dying day. She became like a sister to my mother. In fact mother wanted to name me after her, but Da wouldn’t allow it. He wanted another son, and so they compromised. Pennington became Peniworth just like Cowper changed to Cooper when I awoke in this time.
Pennington was almost a second mother to me. She was such a classy woman. She understood that my mother really was as much a victim of the time and circumstances as she was. My mother, Mary Stout, was placed in a position where she had no choice but to accept my father’s advances. It was a different time back then, and women didn’t have the same kind of rights as they do now. My father kept my mother like a second family. He even sometimes called my mother his second wife. Pennington could have really made our lives miserable, but she understood my mother was in no position to tell someone like my father no. She could have found herself imprisoned, or worse. So while she had every reason to treat us like a family embarrassment, she chose to see us as an extended family of sorts.
Father was changed by a Spaniard in 1712. He began changing my mother and my sisters almost immediately. My mother fought him to let us all stay human, but once my father set his mind to something there was nothing that could change his mind. Once my mother was brought over he turned his attention to Cassandra. Mother was going to fight him with everything she had to keep us safe. So he changed my oldest sister on a night when mother and I were away. Cassandra was the most like him, and probably the most willing to help. Mom tried to keep him away from the rest of us, and even tried to run off with us, but we were caught and they brought us back with the understanding that the next time it happened, he’d remove one of our heads.
Mother couldn’t protect us after that. She might have been able to fight him off for another few years, but she couldn’t protect us from them both. Cassandra distracted mother one evening, and father took my other sister Delila. Poor girl was never the picture of sanity to begin with. She was one of those special people that have one foot in this world, and another foot in the hereafter. She could see the future. Delila’s visions had shaped much of my father’s decisions and policies. He thought that by bringing her over he’d be able to keep her visions forever, but after father finished with her…she was just broken. She still saw things, but she couldn’t control it anymore. Control it…she couldn’t even process what she saw anymore. Before father attacked her, Delila would just sit around and tell us all the wonderful things that would happen to us, but afterward…it was like she had crawled into some dark hole and was only barely peeking out to laugh at us. She went from being this sweet, hopeful older sister, to something that was almost malevolent. Father did that to her.
I thought Father was sometimes cruel, but I didn’t realize how evil he could be until the night he changed me. You all know how our bites affect you, but what you don’t know is that they affect us as well. More importantly, if we are healthy then the venom is constantly being produced, and s
o both are almost always running down from our fangs. Thankfully our second venom, the one that causes people to bleed out, mixes with our more pleasurable venom and is then neutralized. We produce so much more of the venom that brings pleasure that it is constantly draining into our mouth. That means we’re almost always in a state of immense arousal.”
“So that’s why you are always so…frisky.” I said carefully.
Penny nodded, “If by frisky you mean I’m considering pinning you all onto this bed so that I can fuck and feed on you all until dawn, bending you in ways that might make Gumby scream, and pushing so much orgasmic venom into you all that you won’t even remember your own name, then yeah, I’m a little frisky.”
“So, that’s why you are all over Grim?” Danika questioned.
“Partly, it’s more than that, though. I love being around him. He doesn’t judge me. He already knows a lot of what I’m telling you, and what he doesn’t know, he leaves it alone out of respect for me. He respects me. I was staked in an age where men viewed women as property and playthings, and woke up in a time where a man loves me. He actually considers making love to me as a gift, and every time I give myself to him he cherishes it. That man practically worships me, but Lord knows why?”
“You have looked at yourself in the mirror recently, right? I mean, my Brother isn’t ugly, but you’re definitely cranked up to eleven on the sexiness scale.” Niki laughed.
“Joseph loves me. I thank God every day for the chance to just be around that man. He’s everything my sister said he’d be.” Penny said calmly.
“What?” We all said in unison.
Penny eyed us warily, “My sister Delila said that I’d go through a lot of pain and suffering. She said I’d find a man that was unlike anything I knew growing up. He’d be someone that loved me. Someone that had seen too much pain and suffering in his life, and that he’d spend every moment he could trying to make me feel loved. In order to find him I’d have to lose everything that I cared about. Of course she was right about that too. I lost my mother. She loved me. Da called me his embarrassment, but Mother always said that I was her most precious treasure. We used to just sit together and knit. That’s what my mom did when she was upset. We knitted a lot. We’d sit together and discuss everything. She was always my mother, but when we were knitting she was like my best friend. Of course, she’d have to be because I didn’t have any others.
Being the child of your father’s mistress comes with a stigma. It was accepted to a point, but father had lived a scandalous life. He’d been suspected of killing Sara Stout. She would have been my grandmother. They found her floating face down in the water, and he was the suspect. Mother was too young to really remember it, but we all heard the whispers, or at least I thought we had until the night father changed me. Cassandra had been causing a disturbance with the cook. My mother went to check on the problem, and Delila found me. She tried to at first talk me into escaping, but when I refused, she started telling me about the man I’d fall in love with. She said the man would serve God with all that he is, but that I’d never doubt that he’d place me at the very center of his heart.” Penny looked to Niki, “I knew that your brother was that man from the moment I saw him.”
“Aww.” We all said in unison…again.
“So it was love at first sight, huh?” Niki smiled.
“More like terrified at first sight. I mean, I just knew that he was meant for me, and that scared me. I’ve never felt that before. It shifted my whole perception of the world in the blink of an eye, but I’m getting off topic. I wanted to tell you about how I became a vampire. I was twenty one years old, I had no prospects. There were no suitors because of my father. He was suspected of killing my grandmother, but even worse was that, he was seen as a traitor amongst the locals. Most of the families in our area weren’t exactly fans. Most marched to some foolish war that was doomed from the beginning, but my father backed the British, and the locals hated him for it. Delila’s gift was already pretty well known, and when she told father how the uprising would end, he switched to the Brits and never looked back. My oldest sister had married one of the other families. I can’t quite remember his name. What I do remember is that he died within a few weeks of the wedding. His lands and money were taken over by father. It wasn’t long before there were whispers that Cassandra had just taken up the family hobby of killing lovers. Once that sunk in, nobody was willing to court me. There were already jokes amongst the servants that I’d be an old maid. Pennington’s children fared much better. They weren’t technically bastards, and she was just so much…better than anyone else. I don’t mean it like she was stuck up or anything. She was just so classy that you were willing to forgive, or forget that she was married to my father. As sweet as my mother was, she was still just the mistress, and that meant we were just fatherless bastards.
So anyway, Delila would sometimes torment me with little tidbits about my future. She liked to tease me with it. I was a foolish girl that still believed the heroes always won, and that the princesses always got the handsome prince at the end. It was naïve, and I paid for it dearly. So Cassandra distracts my mother one day, and Delilah shows up. She looks scared, and starts trying to convince me that I should leave the castle immediately. When I refuse, she started teasing me with facts about my future husband. You have to understand how I felt right then. I was a woman with no suitors, and it was likely I never would. In my day, a husband was the goal of every woman’s life. A husband meant you’d have some security. Even if the husband was a bastard, it was still better for you than being alone. A single woman was just a walking victim, but a married woman had rights…even if those were only because she was basically the property of her husband. A husband had the right to do almost anything he wanted to you, but at least you only had to deal with him. A single woman had to fear the motives of every man. So every young woman prayed for a man that wouldn’t sleep around too much, and didn’t hit her too often. When Delila told me about a man that would love me tenderly and faithfully…the shock was almost too much. I begged her to tell me where this man was, and when I’d see him.
All she would ever tell me was that he was a long ways away, and it would be a long time, but that to me it would only seem like a few years. She wasn’t kidding. That night she gave me little descriptions of him. Things he’d like, and she even gave me little facts to pique my curiosity. I got up and followed her. She told me little nothings that were just interesting enough to keep me following blindly. When she stopped, we were standing beside the door. She stepped aside and gave one last attempt to talk me into leaving. I shook my head, and that’s when father grabbed me.
He took me right there. I’ll spare you the details, but I will say that he wasn’t gentle in any way. I’d never even kissed a boy before then. While he was on top of me, Delila stared down and kept saying that this had to happen. I’m not sure if she was telling me this, or herself, but she watched as father used me, and then bit me as he was finishing. He drank from me until I lost consciousness.”
“I’m so sorry.” I said as I leaned over to hug her.
“No!” Penny recoiled like we were going to attack her. Then she seemed to come to her senses, “Please, I have to say this or I’ll never get it out.” We all kept quiet so that she could finish.
“I woke up on the floor with my dress flung up over my face. Father had just finished and left me on the floor like some discarded piece of trash. I knew immediately what he’d done. Not just the rape, but that he’d made me a vampire. It was just too much to deal with, so I kind of went on autopilot and stumbled back to my room. When I reached my room, I became aware of my improved hearing. I could hear everything in the castle. My mother was screaming at my father about me. She told him that she’d never allow him in her bedroom again until he apologized. Father just laughed, and said why waste his time on an old ragged sow when there were plenty of nice little piglets roaming around. I didn’t understand what he meant until the next night when he came
into my bedroom. I was pretty much numb when he pushed me down. I couldn’t even bring myself to fight him off. I just lay there staring at the ceiling trying not to feel anything, but you know how my bite works. Well, once he bit into me, I lost control. The more I tried to fight him, the more venom he’d inject. I think his favorite part was when I fought to get away. He always talked about how much he loved to feel an angry tiger turn into a purring kitten.” Penny hung her head in shame.
Niki knelt in front of her and forced Penny to look her in the eyes, “None of that was your fault. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.” But Penny didn’t sound so sure. “I know.” Then Penny started fidgeting with her hands, “Mother avoided me. I thought it was because she was embarrassed of me. With vampire hearing…you hear everything, and so I could hear her cursing him when he was using me. I even heard her start crying whenever he bit me, but once I had enough venom inside of me, I just didn’t care anymore. It felt too good. I didn’t want any of it, but I still reacted. One night, father brought Cassandra and Delila into the bedroom. They each took a vein and started forcing as much venom as they could into me. He wanted to see how much venom a vampire could take and still maintain their sanity. They’d done it to a few of the humans in the area. They went mainly after prostitutes and the poor widows in the area. He’d go until he couldn’t produce anymore, and all it did was drive them mad. I wasn’t much better off. Three vampires pushing every ounce of venom into me…it wasn’t long before I was begging for someone to take me. I didn’t care anymore. I couldn’t form a coherent thought. I remember screaming for someone, anyone to enter me. I heard my mother crying. She was in another part of the castle. She was screaming for father to let me go. She kept saying about how evil it was for a father to do something like this to his daughter.
Father withdrew just long enough to say that until recently, she never complained about what he’d done to her. He called us all whores. Then he looked at me and told me if I begged my mother to come down and join in, that he’d give me exactly what I wanted. God help me, I begged her to join in. I begged her to do things that I’d only vaguely heard about. The last thing I wanted was her involved in this, but the venom had me and it wasn’t letting go. I screamed and begged for her to take me, just like my father wanted. Father then leaned back and laughed. He told me that I was just like my mother. I put up a good fight, but in the end I was a mewling little whore begging for a good, thorough fucking. Then he told me my mother had been the child he’d had with Sarah Stout. I heard mother screaming for him to shut up, but he laughed and said it was time I knew the truth. It was time I knew that I wasn’t just his child, I was his granddaughter, and that my mother was also my sister. It felt like something broke inside of me. Father bit me again, and shoved every last drop of venom into me. Then called for a servant to feed off in order to replenish his venom and bite me again.
Midnight Squad: The Ties That Bind Page 46
