The Wicca-Man: Tongue-Tied

by Emily Veinglory

  “Thane ...”

  But Thane only pulled the blanket further down. Sean put both hands on Thane’s chest to push him away, but it was a feeble gesture. Thane took Sean’s left hand in his right. He held it with effortless strength. He bent and ran his tongue along the inside of Sean’s wrist, and then he bit. Sean watched the teeth sink into his frail skin, with a slightly detached fascination. From such a slight contact, the sensation spiraled outwards, amplified by every sinew and nerve. His felt his breath catch, and his whole chest seemed to constrict. It was rather like vertigo. It was rather like ...

  Sean moaned. It was rather like falling in love. It hardly seemed possible, given what Thane was, how little he knew about the vampire and how much of that was no reason for joy. Perhaps only a few years or months ago, Thane had been a young man anyone would be proud to make a life with. Now he was just a revenant in an occult cage. An animal who only thought he knew what he wanted. Rationally Sean knew this all, and yet ...

  Sean remembered how many times some smug couple had told him he would know true love when he finally felt it. Well, he felt it now, and Thane didn’t seem to have any qualms at all about using what advantages he was given.

  Sean leaned back, sliding down almost flat on the bed. Thane pushed the blankets aside and stooped down over him. Thane’s lips continued on their inexorable path. He pushed back Sean’s robe as his lips wandered down Sean’s torso and stomach. Sean made a last abortive attempt to push him away, but as Thane reached his penis, he was defeated.

  His cock slid inside Thane’s mouth smoothly, and he was lost. Thane sought nothing for himself. His taut lips encircled Sean and stroked hard and wet along his length, almost hard enough to hurt.

  Sean had seen blowjobs in bashfully rented porn tapes but had never found a girl (well, perhaps until recently) who would consider giving him one, let alone a guy. No scripted moan or yellow-backed novel’s purple prose even began to capture the feeling. Thane bent to his task with ruthless efficiency as Sean reached up and grabbed the bars of the headboard. His back arched as he felt his hips shudder with incipient climax. For a moment he struggled. “No ...”

  All of a sudden he wanted to hold on to this moment, make it last. But it was already too late. A sudden orgasm ripped from his stomach and shot out wetly. Sean’s vision dimmed for a moment before it dawned on him to be embarrassed at such a premature conclusion.

  Thane curled protectively against his side, one heavy arm across Sean’s chest.

  “You’ve got a bit of time to get used to this,” Thane whispered. “So relax. We have all the time in the world.”

  The irony was that Sean had rather assumed that he was the one in charge of what was going on with his so-called thrall. But there’s a saying about riding a tiger -- you really can’t afford to fall off. As Sean lay in the unfamiliar comfort of a close embrace, the implications ran through his mind like a tangled skein of very dark threads indeed.

  Chapter Two

  The next morning, Sean snuck out past the vampire now sleeping snugly in Sean’s narrow bed. He was very careful to take his diary, phone, and every other thing that he might conceivably need. As he reached for the doorknob, he heard a droll voice call out from the bedroom, “What, no kiss goodbye?”

  Sean slipped out and shut the door firmly behind him without even looking back. There was something disquieting in the patient tone of Thane’s voice. Like everything was already settled in the vampire’s head and he was just waiting for Sean to get used to it.

  A long day dragged by as he slogged through arcane tomes trying to do his own research on protections and realizing, reluctantly, that there was no way he would master that new discipline in a few days. Real occult practitioners were rare enough, and most were competent only in one small area. Sean, to the extent he was a competent witch at all, was a master of mass suggestion. He had no idea how to narrow the focus of a working to one specific man.

  It did not help that an interminable stream of students barged in to ask last-minute questions about a final exam they should have started studying for weeks ago.

  “Dr. Watkin, is this going to be in the test?”

  “Dr. Watkin, can I hand in this essay three weeks late? I had to go skiing while the powder was still good.”

  “Dr. Watkin, is the vein on your temple meant to throb like that?”

  Rhea also rushed in and out, making him promise not to attend her lecture because it would make her far too (giggle) nervous. The fact that this infatuation of hers was making a sensible woman act like a Barbie-girl was altogether too depressing. The fact that, by not pulling her up on every aside and innuendo, he was letting this stupidity go on was just par for his cowardly course, but no less depressing for that.

  And through it all, flashes came to his mind, fragments of sensation, pain, sex, surrender. In between them, Sean realized that he had almost no idea of what Thane was really like as a ... person. A person? Damned if last night didn’t feel right. Surely there’s more to Thane than some Hollywood monster or poorly understood pseudoscientific curse. Or is that just me trying to make sex into love -- trying to change reality to suit my libido?

  He began to walk home, rather reluctantly, at the end of the day. He turned onto a cobbled-over road, just a few blocks from his apartment. There were shops on each side, and clusters of customers and loiterers filled the small area. Sitting and sprawling across a larger concrete planter was a group of young goths. But there was a way they moved, a quality to their skin, dullness in their eyes. Vampires, no doubt freshly out with the dusk.

  One of the girls, in a red retro dress, caught him looking. She stood, erect and tense like some animal spotting its prey. Sean was torn between the desire to get away and the fear that it would only draw her attention more. She strolled over to him, and everything from the smoothness of her gait to her faint Mona Lisa smile spelled trouble. A few of the others straggled after her. Sean glanced from side to side, wondering what made them fix on him all of a sudden.

  She leaned her head to one side. “Not so much a witch as a what, isn’t it?”

  Ah, the joy of interrogative pronouns. Maybe it was because she looked more like an overconfident undergrad than a creature of the night, but her insult freed Sean’s tongue. He just hoped to bluster through and get away.

  “At least I do as I wish,” he said. “Not playing follow the leader like you all are.”

  “Oh, yeah, you have a problem with the elder,” one of the men said. He was a tall but skinny guy dressed all in black and strangely didn’t look half as threatening as his posture suggested he thought he was. They couldn’t really do too much out in public only three blocks from the police station, surely?

  “The elder has got a whole lot of you together in one place. A whole flock. It draws attention. It’s not a good idea.”

  The girl cut in with her affected lisping voice. “I think you’ll find the word is pack, or maybe murder. That’s the word, isn’t it, for cats?”

  “Crows, actually,” Sean corrected, feeling more certain of his ground, but he could see the rest of them were starting to circle around him. “Cats are a clowder or, more aptly here, a clutter; for house cats the collective noun is ‘nuisance’. And your elder is going to get the lot of you drowned in a sack if he keeps drawing attention to you like this. You need to find someone better to follow.”

  He turned and stepped quickly away from them through the only small gap left for him.

  “Like who, eh, like y--” the man said.

  Glancing back, he saw the girl had grabbed her companion by the arm, curtailing his comment. There was a sharp, suspicious look in her eyes as she whispered something to him. Although quietly pleased at his bravado, Sean still hurried to get out of their sight as soon as possible. He kept checking back until he was sure they weren’t following.

  As he walked down the hill, his heart was thumping, and at the thought of going back to Thane, it didn’t slow down any. In fact, sweat was pooling in ev
ery crease of his body by the time he got in the elevator of his apartment building. His hand shook as he swung open the door to his apartment to find, dum de dum ... nothing. Unless you counted the fact that the place was tidy; every surface gleamed, free of clutter, and there was no sign of Thane. Sean drifted around the place, wondering how he had come across quite such a nicely domestic undead thrall. Oh, he’d make somebody a lovely wife, he would.

  A few hours later Sean was lying on the sofa staring accusingly at the ceiling when Thane came home bearing at least a month’s worth of groceries in two dangling clusters of flimsy supermarket bags.

  “I told my lot to let things be,” Thane said as he packed everything away in the tiny kitchen.

  “You told them about the spell!” Sean sprang to his feet with alarm. The last thing he needed was to give those vampire thugs some concrete reason to take after him. That girl could undoubtedly tear him limb from limb, even without any help from her little band.

  Thane smiled. “Now, I don’t think that would keep you safe. Besides, I’m not in the habit of explaining myself even to them. The elder, well, I had to do as he said. But I’m not his concern now, and I don’t think it will bother him much. I was less than a glowing asset to his rule -- more a thorn in his wrinkly hide.”

  Thane stepped back into the living room, gave Sean an up-and-down look, and smiled in that crooked way he had. There was obviously a story behind Thane’s brief assessment of his own shortcomings. Sean supposed he ought to find out everything he could about these vampires, but rather than pursue it, he fled to his bedroom-cum-study. Just looking at Thane made his cock stir and his brain wind down into mute monomaniacal lust.

  “I have some, ah, ‘stuff’ to do tonight,” Sean ad-libbed brilliantly as he exited the living room.

  He had the nasty feeling that he really needed to dig down and find whatever he had that passed for guts, but he would need to be backed just a little further into the corner for that to sound like a real possibility.

  He did everything he could to take his mind off Thane, who now seemed to be cooking with the TV turned up loud enough for Sean to hear from the study. Except it was dark enough now that Thane could probably hear TVs playing in the building across the road, so maybe he was just making some kind of point. Sean prayed that Thane would leave him be and yet furtively hoped he would do anything but. After a few minutes of quiet pacing and staring out the window, he sat down at his narrow desk.

  In the next few hours he made great inroads into marking term essays, but every time he paused for a moment, his thoughts swung towards Thane like the needle of a compass towards true north. He was reading every sentence of every essay three of four times just to get his lust-obsessed cerebrum to register its meaning at all. Other parts of his anatomy sent increasingly vehement updates to confirm they were fully functioning and ready for action. Sean shifted awkwardly in his chair. He was at his wit’s end.

  His first thoughts had been almost entirely of self-preservation, but now the real issue became rather clearer to him. As a Wiccan he knew that it might just be accepted to use the spell to save himself, but not to turn that slavery to his advantage. His mind wandered to what had happened in his small bed last night. It had been ... His breath shook with excitement just to remember it. He had not ventured to act upon his desires for so long, and now he had made the leap in the worst conceivable way. If he balanced everything he had experienced in his life so far up against that single and rather brief encounter, he wasn’t entirely sure which way the balance would tip.

  In a way it was typical of Sean’s self-confessed sexual slow-wittedness. It had taken him the first twenty years of his life to fully realize why girls did not excite him all that much. Even then he had persisted stupidly with a line of bemused girlfriends before one of them had told him to come to terms with just how far to the right-hand side of the Kinsey scale he truly was. After that he was honest enough with himself, and a complete coward about the rest of the world. He had never ventured into those places that gay men met; the very idea terrified him. So, way to be a late bloomer: his very own vampiric love slave. It would be funny if it weren’t so horrible.

  He felt the urge to call up Laura. She was a friend of a few years, and he’d always felt she could’ve been a closer friend if he’d really reached out to her. Laura was a fellow witch in their small coven and the only member who knew how he had struggled with being Wiccan. She knew about Sean’s harsh Catholic upbringing and how it still cast a long shadow on his life, but he hadn’t even told her that he was gay. Sean kept his work and Wiccan lives far apart and his private life so deep in the closet that it had a Narnian zip code.

  Sean evaded Thane’s invitation to dine with the excuse that he was not hungry -- receiving little more than an indulgent but exasperated sigh in response. By ten the text was swimming before his eyes. But if he went to bed, he was sure that his sin would be compounded yet again. Sean sighed and laid his glasses aside. A repressed fool with an immortal thrall and an uneasy conscience -- ah, how the gods must be laughing now.

  Thane looked in on him. “I’m making you uncomfortable,” he said solemnly. “I’ll go out.”

  There was the simple compulsion of the binding again -- Thane had to do what he could to make Sean happy. Sean felt his heart crumpling up. He could see his own haggard reflection in the blank computer monitor before him, mousy hair in ragged tufts, plain face not much helped by rough shaving and vigorous eyebrows. On his bolder days he’d say it was a strong face, the sort a young wizard should have. But a strong face did little to hide the craven heart within. Sean shut his eyes and heard the front door open and close again. Desperately, he looked for some solution, but there was nothing but bricked-up doorways every way that he turned.

  He could almost have been a wizard. Sean had studied hard how to sway the minds of men and women. Wizards and sorcerers both saw the occult just as a kind of technology, no different to electricity or computer software. His studies had drifted towards grand spells that worked on the scale of towns and communities. He told himself that it was innate respect for the existing balance that made him drift into Wiccan circles. That even were it wise to have such power, the consequences of wielding it were unconscionable. But deep down he knew it was fear, fear of the voice that had come out of the darkness the one time he tried to work true sorcery.

  He had experimented for an occult PhD that he’d never completed, had tried to make a whole city believe a person was dead. He’d spent two days near invisible with the whole of Woollington convinced they’d buried him the prior week. The lack of marked distress or mourning was the first nasty surprise, but on the third day he had an experience that he’d struggled hard to forget ever since. A dark hand reached out for him, squeezing his chest, and a mocking voice proclaimed triumphantly, “The dead are mine.” Convulsing as his vision fogged and tight pain burned up his right side, Sean had accidentally pulled loose some of the string on his symbolic net and had broken the spell. Perceptions sprang back to their native state, erasing all memories of the spell. And Sean, previously a foggy atheist-leaning agnostic, suddenly realized that overt magic trespassed in areas mortal men were not meant to go.

  So Sean had sunk into obscurity as an observer, always reluctant to act when actions, in the modern world, worked for ill a hundred times more often than for good, no matter what the intention. Sean was simply not a doer. He had a sneaking feeling that might just be about to change -- and probably with no better outcome than before. Maybe whatever it was in the darkness was destined to claim him in the end, regardless.

  * * * * *

  Sean had a pretty good idea of what he needed to do, but it was Bessie who had the skills. He just had to get through two more days, until she got back. All he needed to do was keep his head down and hope the coven wouldn’t notice. They would take a very dim view of coercive spells of any sort. An it harm none. They didn’t have a self-preservation clause in their book -- and even if they did, it wouldn’
t cover him for four days post-peril. Their rather strict adherence to their codes of conduct meant he couldn’t even think of going to them for help. Which was a damn shame because he knew he was a poor, academic sort of Wiccan, and advice from a practitioner at any level would have gone a long way right then.

  As plans went, ‘wait for Bessie’ was pretty pitiful, but it was enough to allow Sean to sleep fitfully, and he dropped off into oblivion somewhere on the wrong side of midnight, still alone in the house. He struggled with dark dreams: Thane’s face loomed over his, cold as a mask. Death came with his lover’s eyes, sparking with crimson hatred. Sean felt no urge to flee. Only dimly aware that he was dreaming, he stepped forward into Thane’s embrace. The dream felt real. Too real.

  He awoke with a start from a deep sleep and a Fuselian nightmare, to a heavy weight on his chest, definitely no longer alone. For a moment he was merely irritated with Thane’s forwardness. Then the bedside lamp snapped on, and he looked into the eyes of a savage stranger. Any complacency in the face of death evaporated in its all too immediate presence.

  Oh, this was a vampire certainly, but not Thane. Chalky skin stretched over high cheeks and crinkled around deep black eyes. Breath reminiscent of rotting tuna reeked from the man’s mouth as, macabrely, he smiled. Great hooked teeth showed behind his taut, dry lips; the vampire was ready to feed. Sean felt his legs tremble, and his bladder released. He had never felt such deep, instantaneous terror. His whole body shook.

  The gaunt-faced man had Sean pinned down, and he only belatedly noticed the pale, black-haired girl that stood beside the bed -- the same one he had seen on the street. She watched calmly and with a certain knowing smile, wearing the same wispy scarlet slip of a dress. It was the girl who had turned on the lamp as she leaned over to peer down at Sean’s face. Her expression suggested she was not greatly impressed by what she saw, but it was devoid of any particular anger.