The Wicca-Man: Tongue-Tied

by Emily Veinglory

  Almost without exception, they dropped out of their former lives and gravitated to one of the illicit clans, leaving everything behind. The vampires were a great mystery, but every reputable occult source agreed it was nothing to do with magic, just some new retro- or hantavirus that was proving very difficult indeed to understand. A complex medical mystery that Sean knew he was unlikely to unravel in a few short days.

  And it was almost lunchtime. Sean sighed. What a mess. But he had to conclude that whatever had made him resort to the binding, his conscience, so far, was clear and his virtue continued to be altogether too inviolable. He had needed to protect his own life, and he had done Thane no permanent harm. Yes, he had manipulated and effectively enslaved him -- but as soon as he could see a way to do so, he would set the vampire free. In fact, after lunch he would stop procrastinating and start researching.

  Bessie over in History could probably help with that. He’d never had much to do with her, but she seemed a nice old lady in her knitted cardigans and sensible shoes. She was a real sorcerer with a PhD in colonial history and a covert qualification in circles of protection. If anyone knew a way to deal with this, it would be the coolly professional Bessie van de Weerd, the first female sorcerer accredited by NASA (National Accredited Sorcerers’ Association, that is). Sean had attempted such a double qualification himself, but the occult portion was never completed, and the notes and workings were stored in dusty folders under the bed. No follow-through, Sean. Just like your father always said.

  Which was beside the point. All he really needed was for Bessie to help him out with some new trick to stop Thane from turning on him, so that he could let the altogether too handsome little monster go. No doubt off to kill countless innocents -- almost all vampires were murderers. But that ‘almost’ made a lot of difference. Somebody was going to have to catch Thane at it before they were justified in doing anything about it. Yes, it was only what a man did that could be held against him.

  With that thought, Sean thrust his frustrated libido back into its usual cage and wandered over to the staff club for lunch, stuck in the rut of habit despite a complete lack of appetite. He made his way to the clubroom to meet up with Kevin from Chemistry for the usual egg sandwich and a cup of execrable coffee. On this occasion the sandwich was soggier than usual, the coffee even more reminiscent of feces, and the conversation distinguished mainly by its absence. Kevin indulged Sean’s reticence for a few minutes, browsing the student newspaper and making occasional comments about errors in grammar and punctuation and the implications for undergraduate literacy as a whole. Then the large room became strangely hushed. The reason was all too clear.

  Thane was standing in the doorway, wearing his motorcycle jacket over a devil-may-care slouch and skintight tee. He looked like some leather-man’s wet dream as he strode over to Sean and dropped his appointment diary on the table in front of them. At a nearby table, Professor Patty Findley-Barker poured a spoonful of soup right down her ample cleavage as she stared at Thane’s tight, well-worn jeans struggling to cover his muscular thighs. Sean had to admit he, too, wasn’t missing how they fit so well that he could make a pretty good guess which side Thane hung to.

  “Thought you might need this,” Thane said huskily.

  Sean replied curtly, “Ta.”

  Thane leaned over to give Sean’s thigh a casual squeeze. “Don’t be late home. I don’t often get a chance to cook.”

  Kevin didn’t miss a second of Thane’s rear as he sauntered out. Then he turned to Sean. “You old devil,” he said. “Have you actually found a young hunk who cooks, or just one who uses obscure but equally appealing euphemisms?” Despite the light tone, he was obviously a bit indignant about not having an insider’s edge on a piece of gossip this good.

  “It’s not like that.” Sean knew absolutely nobody was going to believe that. Indeed, Kevin stayed silently skeptical. If a ... well, the closest thing he had to a friend, wasn’t buying it ...

  Sean’s mind was preoccupied by a few things, including the fact that Thane must have become a vampire very recently if he could go out in the light of day and not look any different. There must still be people alive who’d known him as he was before the change. Somehow that made him seem more real -- more human. Sean wrenched his mind back to the present. He supposed that he was now officially outed -- and without even having had gay sex, in the conventional sense.

  Sean knew that Kevin had thought himself the science department’s only queer, with Sean just a woolly enough liberal to be his friend despite it. He cursed his absentmindedness in leaving the diary behind -- but he cursed Thane more for taking advantage of the oversight. The spell was more than doing its job if Thane was running errands and trying to get people to think they were together.

  “Damn,” Kevin said in delayed reaction to the sight of Thane’s departing buttocks as the distant elevator door closed to conceal them.

  A buzz of conversation swelled around the room. Sean felt his ears prickling as a blush spread across his face. Damn involuntary peripheral vasodilatation anyway. He pulled his cell phone from his back pocket and dialed Bessie’s number. He had to get rid of that vampire while he still had some kind of reputation to salvage.

  Voicemail picked up without a ring. “Professor van de Weerd is on sabbatical until October the twenty-first. Please call Humanities reception at extension 4202, or leave a message after the tone.”

  That figured. He had three days to try and figure it out on his own. It wasn’t low self-esteem that made Sean a tad pessimistic about that -- it was the undeniable empirical fact that he sucked in any kind of crisis. The strategy of never doing anything important enough to create one had been working out just fine for him, until now.

  Kevin wasn’t asking any more questions -- at least not out loud -- but his crinkled brow made him look like a bemused bloodhound.

  “Well, um. I’ve got some stuff to do,” Sean stuttered.

  “I just bet you do,” Kevin replied smugly. Oh, yes, Kevin was going to want the full story some time real soon.

  Sean figured he’d better get used to innuendo; he was going to be number one on the grapevine charts so long as a fit vamp was hanging around running errands and feeling him up. Another man might actually enjoy the attention. Sean wasn’t another man. He just wouldn’t be going to the staffroom until he sorted this all out.

  Who else did he know who was a pretty good sorcerer? Where could he find a good cut-price amulet effective against vampires? EBay? Sean bustled back to his office, on a mission.

  * * * * *

  It was, by now, early afternoon on a Wednesday, so most of the level-five labs would be full of students finding new ways to break the equipment and piss off the tutors who, given that they weren’t paid enough to give a damn, would inevitably pass the problem on to Rhea. Life had sure been easier before the cutbacks, when the T.A.’s and all their concerns were confined to the third floor. But when the overhead charges went up, the department traded that area to Biology in return for splitting the costs of the animal lab.

  Sean opened his office door perfunctorily to find Rhea not at her own desk by the door, but at his desk around the corner, with the shallow drawer at the top pulled wide open. The shallow, allegedly locked drawer in which he kept his small workplace altar. It wasn’t a lot to look at, really. A square mirror tile anchored with elemental symbols -- a feather, a candle, a shot glass of water, and a terracotta shard. A jade rat figurine sat near the centre next to a tangle of colored string and a card, face down, that belonged with the pack of Rider-Waite tarot cards pushed to the back. Could that pass for normal drawer clutter? And hell, he really should have spoken to Rat by now -- as a spirit guide he wasn’t much use, but he really hated to be left out of things.

  Rhea was in the process of lifting the card; it had come from the centre of his spread a few days ago and hadn’t made much sense at the time, so he’d laid it down to contemplate for a while. Rhea looked up from the Death card to Sean’s face. I
t had been Death covering the Crossroads crossed by the Priestess, he recalled. Major arcana, every one, and on a reading just after the new moon. He really should have paid more attention to that, but ‘nothing important will actually happen’ had seemed like a good bet when it came to his life up until yesterday.

  She gestured with her other hand, the one holding the drawer key Sean had hidden not-so-cunningly in the tray of his potted fern. “I am so annoyed with you,” she snapped.

  Sean gaped. He closed the office door very carefully and stepped towards her. “You’re annoyed?” he said. “With me?”

  “I always knew there was more to you,” she began. “Well, quite frankly, there had to be. But to find that you are a pagan, Dr. Watkin, an actual practicing pagan, and I hadn’t the slightest idea.” She advanced on him, waving the card, and they met -- predictably -- at the filing cabinets. “Well,” she pressed. “That shows that even after working together for over a year, you don’t have any trust in me at all.”

  Her full lips pouted. Up close there was no denying that Rhea was model perfect, somewhat super-sized, but in all the right areas. As a bright, beautiful woman, she hadn’t been short of offers when she started looking for work to support herself after her PhD scholarship ran out the usual two-point-five years into a three- or four-year endeavor. She’d told Sean she had chosen his teaching assistantship because he was the only professor who addressed her face rather than her cleavage. Apparently either she was having some second thoughts on that one, or the girl just liked a challenge.

  She was now officially standing well within his personal space. The corner of the cabinet poked into Sean’s shoulder as he tried to edge away without being too obvious. His mother had taught him to be far too polite for modern society.

  “I was thinking of moving these cabinets,” he said, indifferent to the non sequitur.

  “Great idea. Then you’ll be able to see me at my desk, while you’re sitting at yours.” Rhea looked noticeably less annoyed. “And you can stop pretending you’re trying to get me my own office, because I am quite happy here. And before you brush this whole thing off, I do want to say that you shouldn’t feel you need to hide anything from me. I mean, sure, I’m Christian and you’re pagan; I’m black and you’re white -- that’s just all part of what makes our relationship interesting.”

  Our what?

  Rhea leaned in close enough that Sean was acutely aware of the contact her soft breasts were making with his chest. Thanks to her platform boots and his average-at-best height, they were pretty much eye to eye as she added, “So is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  I’m gay!

  As Sean struggled with the realization that he must not have said that aloud, she leaned in and planted her lips on his, then tried to pry his frozen teeth apart with her apparently rather muscular tongue. Sean was dimly aware of Maggie, the department administrator, throwing open the door and saying, “It is true what Patty is say--? Uh, my mistake.”

  By the time he pushed Rhea away, Maggie had backed off and all but run off down the corridor, leaving the door just open enough for a couple of gawking graduate students to get an eyeful. Sean pressed the door shut again and turned to Rhea.

  “We have a professional relationship, and that is all. Do you understand me, Rhea?”

  “Of course, Sean,” Rhea replied contritely but with sudden informality. “I should never have done that -- without locking the door first. We do need to think of the proprieties, after all.”

  “That’s not what I ...” Goddammit, you were close enough to me to count as outer wear. How could you not notice the utter indifference of my cock to that unprovoked attack?!

  The door swung open again. It was Derek, one of the tutors, looking flustered. “One of the students has been bitten by a lab rat! I told them -- I did tell them, like you said -- not to put their fingers through the bars.” Even as he addressed Rhea, Derek’s eyes seemed to be glued to Sean with unusual fascination. Sean could only wonder which rumor had made it to the fourth floor first. Maggie had a shorter distance to travel, but the staffroom incident had a head start on the timeline.

  Rhea intercepted Derek calmly and started to steer him down the hall. “Now, have you asked them if they’ve had a tetanus shot within the last eight years?” She looked over her shoulder just long enough to smile flirtatiously and wink before they disappeared around the corner.

  It wasn’t until he went to the toilet an hour later, after conducting three student consultations, that Sean saw the plum-colored lipstick smeared across his face.

  * * * * *

  Sean spent most of the afternoon and early evening staring at a blank spot on his office wall -- broken by a spell of highly ineffective meditative visualization that kept transforming into an undead edition of the gay Kama Sutra. He updated the grades database and waited to straighten things out with Rhea, except that she didn’t come back to the office for the rest of the day. Tomorrow was her first turn at lecturing to the full class, so she must have gone home early to prepare. He was both annoyed and relieved to postpone the increasingly inevitable scene he would have to make to get through her delusions.

  He dined out, if you could call pasta at a grungy café ‘dining’. And as much as he tried to convince himself he was deliberately doing the opposite of what Thane asked, he knew it was really just cowardice. The longer he delayed going home, the more his head ached with what promised to be the mother of all headaches. His all-round reputation was starting to spiral down the drain, and he couldn’t come up with a single coherent plan to avoid the final gurgle. He even considered finally summoning Rat, his spirit animal, but was almost afraid to know what that might reveal.

  Finally, well after dark, he went home -- and found the apartment empty. In the absence of hemlock, Sean took three aspirins and went to bed, firmly shutting the door into the living room behind him. With the covers pulled over his head, he felt his mind dive into sleep like a terrified animal retreating to its den. He could only pray that the morning brought some kind of inspiration. Or perhaps he would be lucky enough to just die in his sleep instead.

  He awoke reluctantly from a confused dream in which a huge plum-colored fish was trying to eat him alive, to discover it was dark and quiet and Thane was standing at the foot of the bed.

  Naked.

  The vampire’s skin was dusky, absorbing the sickly yellow light from the reading lamp beside Sean’s bed like blotting paper. Sean looked, and just kept looking. To be completely frank, Thane took a lot of looking at -- and there was a lot of him to look at. He was a good six feet tall, with a lean frame hung from broad shoulders, tapering to slim hips and distinguished by a smooth, proud cock that definitely broke with the traditional understatement of Greek statuary.

  He looked like a fantasy brought to life, with the one minor problem that he was actually a corpse animated by a poorly understood disease. Sean tried to hang on to that thought. Once a man turned, he died. That was the ‘amnesiac haemophagic syndrome’ that medical science was slowly discovering; anything else was an illusion. Thane had become infected and lost all memory of his former life; he had been born again with a new personality. Often it happened so swiftly and smoothly the person simply disappeared. Somebody out there was probably still wondering what had happened to their son, friend, or even husband or father, and if they were lucky, they would never find out.

  “It’s the binding,” Sean said. “You must know that. It just makes you think that you like me.”

  His voice trembled as he spoke, partly from fear and yet partly from simple lust. The two impulses curdled in his stomach and formed an unlikely fusion of excitement. Thane leaned forward slowly and put his hands on the mattress. He began crawling up the bed towards Sean. It was an assured gesture, like some big cat about to seize its prey and drag it up some gnarled tree, yet in a way that didn’t make that seem like such a bad prospect.

  “I don’t care,” Thane said. “What is real for me is real for me, whethe
r it’s Cupid’s arrow, fate, genetics, or bad advice from a magic eight-ball. It just does not matter to me. I know what I feel, I know what I want, and I can smell what you want.”

  His voice was husky with desire and shivered down Sean’s spine like an auditory aphrodisiac. “Aren’t there people missing you?” Sean said as he shrank back against the bedstead. “Vampire family, friends, jealous lovers -- you know, anyone who I can expect to hunt me down and kill me for what I’ve done to you?”

  “Nobody that’ll miss me,” Thane said. “I drifted in with a few others. I was a lackey, a follower of no importance. They’ll not miss me, and that’s just as well. I’ll not be leaving you. Now everything has changed -- and I don’t care why or how, I like it. I mean to see that you like it, too.”

  “It’s just a sp-spell,” Sean stuttered as he pulled the covers up to his chin like some prudish old maid. “It matters to me. It would be the black arts, to ... use you. To use my arts to ...” He struggled his way back towards conscience like a drowning man fighting for the surface of the water but not quite sure where to find it.

  Thane kissed his mouth with a moist exhalation. Sean cringed away, but Thane’s firm lips pursued him, pressing down with firm insistence. Thane slid gently downwards, his warm breath scudding over Sean’s skin, and then kissed his neck. Sean shuddered. Thane’s bite from the previous night had already marked him; Thane’s touch was synonymous with pleasure. Without conscious thought, Sean’s fingers loosened their grip, and he shivered in anticipation.

  Thane pulled the blankets down slowly. Sean was wearing a robe beneath; the belt had slipped to bare his skin. Thane’s lips moved down to Sean’s clavicle, his chest. Thane kissed his left nipple and brushed it with his teeth.