Thane retrieved the receiver and set it back on the phone, only to have it start ringing again immediately. Thane held the receiver to his ear, and a voice could be heard buzzing from the other end.
“Hello, Laura, this is Thane,” he replied tersely. “And I believe Sean is already up to speed on that, thank you. Do you have anything of use to add?”
Well, even though being defended by one’s love slave is predictable, it is also surprisingly gratifying.
And shortly thereafter Thane hung up the phone.
Sean sighed and said, “At the rate it’s going to take me to get dressed and out the door, I had better start now.”
Thane was modeling himself upon the proverbial immovable object. “You need to rest, Sean. If you want to get out of this bed, you’ll have to climb over me.”
And it didn’t sound like that option would be distressing to him, either. But the spell gave Sean a handle and an irresistible compulsion to use it. Perhaps on a good day, he would have hesitated, but this did not qualify.
“Look, Thane, if my coven declares I am not in good standing with them, things rapidly will become very difficult for me, even in a group as eclectic and ostensibly free-spirited as the Wiccan practitioners. I start to lose access to the support and co-operation of the followers of the rede, and pretty soon somebody’s got me staked out as a juicy sacrifice for their demon-of-the-month club.”
“The rede?”
“‘An it harm none, do as you will’. That’s the rede. It’s more like a piece good of advice, really, a guideline, but Opal tends to hold it as a firmer sort of rule. She is very resistant to any later amendments and no doubt thrilled to have a chance to deploy her hard-line attitude to the fullest extent. Opal has a lot of ideas about what people should do and the willpower to get the woollier-minded -- which is most of the rest of the coven -- to follow her lead.”
“So you have to go and argue with an old woman?”
“An old woman who has the power to issue a little occult memo declaring me to be a black witch. And that would make me very unhappy indeed. Do you understand?”
Thane regarded him rather mournfully. “I understand that you feel the need to jerk the leash. Very well, let’s get up.”
“I didn’t ... hell. Fuck.” Thanks for the guilt trip, Thane.
Thane pushed back the covers and slipped from the bed. Sean considered his own body a work in not a great deal of progress. Not fat but not fit, and now artfully embellished not only by bruises of every hue but splashes of encrusted blood. The sight of it eclipsed his pique at Thane.
“Let’s start with the shower,” Thane said, apparently willing to enable even though he didn’t agree. He leaned over and helped Sean up, supporting him as he staggered stiffly to the small bathroom.
“Thane, are you seriously intending to get in the shower with me? It’s on the small side.”
Thane just guided him over the threshold and stepped in after him so they stood face to face. “Just think of it as training for when you come to stay at my place.”
“Oh, very droll. Your former associates seem to be willing to hurry me on my way.”
Thane pulled the shower nozzle off on its flexible hose and set it carefully to tepid, low pressure. With enormous care, he picked up a flannel and cleaned around the puckered punctures on Sean’s shoulder. Sean peered obliquely at the wound; deep rather than wide, it wept a yellowish fluid. He closed his eyes and swore silently. One more look at that and he’d faint.
Thane continued his work fussily, moving down the body. And Sean was lulled by the gentle rasping contact, like the tongue of a giant cat. Eventually it trailed down to the area of his groin.
“Thane ...”
“Just making sure you’re nice and clean.”
But Thane had dispensed with the flannel. Sean could feel as it dropped down beside his foot. It was the soft crease of Thane’s palm that slipped under Sean’s circumcised cock. His thumb pulled down gently, teasing over the sensitive head.
Sean reached out instinctively, grasping at Thane’s firmly muscled body. “Thane, you don’t have to ...”
“What makes you think I don’t want to?”
Thane was infinitely gentle, coaxing Sean’s cock to firm until it pressed nearly upright in the tight space between their damp bodies. Thane leaned in even further, pressing Sean back against the cool Formica of the shower stall. He ran the water down over Sean’s cock as he worked it slowly, pausing to stroke the head with the calloused ball of his thumb, then cupping and firmly massaging Sean’s balls. Finally Thane leaned in, pressing Sean’s cock against his flat stomach with the palm of his hand. Thane worked his own body in small, vertical movements, and just as Sean was on the brink of coming, he felt Thane’s thick cock pressing up between his legs. The vampire certainly wasn’t indifferent, though what he was attracted to right now was a little hard to imagine.
Sean came, pushing his head back, little more than a shudder releasing the ache in his balls. And with disbelief, it was only a few moments later that he felt Thane make one muted thrust again the tender seam between Sean’s balls and ass, and his cock wilt away.
A vampire love slave who gets off from giving me a hand job. Maybe being a black witch is worth it.
Sean pushed the thought from his mind forcefully, leaning his head forward to rest against Thane’s shoulder, ridiculous, ambiguous tears in his eyes. The shower basin was filling with lukewarm water, the shower head lying forgotten and the flannel blocking the drain. Thane just held him, the touch of skin on skin comforting, like some forgotten memory of the womb. Thane seemed content to hold him, waiting for some sign ...
Then through slitted eyes he saw himself reflected in the mirrored front of the bathroom cabinet. His first thought was, Hey, that anti-misting spray really does work! Then a full grotesquery of the sight sank in.
Thane’s muscular back tapered to tight, high buttocks. His skin was a natural tanned shade, although it seemed unlikely he spent much time in the sun these days. Just Sean’s side and hand could be seen, pallid, slack, and soft. Bruised and wet, he looked like little more than human roadkill. There was no way Thane would be with him, except through compulsion. Sure, he was a monster, but he was also an attractive man with people of his own kind that wanted him back. If he was released, even for a moment, he would go. If you love something, let it free. But practicalities aside, as Sean clung to Thane he wasn’t sure he had it in him to give this up.
Sean shuddered and closed his eyes. Which was hardly a long-term solution.
* * * * *
Thane declared that catching the bus, followed by a ten-block uphill walk, was not a reasonable option and vanished with Sean’s wallet. He returned about an hour later, leaving limited time to make the meeting.
“Now, don’t freak out,” Thane said.
“What!”
Thane sighed. “Well, at least that saved us some time. You went from zero to freaked out in well under two seconds.”
“Just tell me what you mean before I become completely neurotic!”
Thane crouched down beside the couch and put his hand casually on Sean’s knee. “Love, you’re so freaked out you’re sweating, and, so far as you know, about nothing at all. I think neurotic is already a very small dot in the rearview mirror.” He had to raise his hand in order to demonstrate just how small the dot was.
“Thane,” Sean said with exaggerated calm. “Tell. Me. What. You. Have. Done.”
“I went to get a rental car. Now, it turns out they didn’t have much in, so they offered us a limousine for the price of an economy car. It’s a good idea really because the back seat is deeper and the chassis is wider. I’ll take down a pillow, and you can relax on the backseat. Because you know you really shouldn’t be out of bed at all.”
“Thane, I’m going to convince my coven that I am not a black witch, being chauffeur-driven to the meeting, in a limousine, by a vampire. So much for first impressions. It’s black, isn’t it?”
> “Oh, you know what they say: It’s always darkest before the -- Actually, for my kind that saying doesn’t --”
“The car, Thane, it’s black?”
“Yes, Sean, dearest, the car is black. It matches at least one of your eyes. Now, if you really insist on doing this, we had better go.”
He supported Sean and stayed close by his side as they shuffled out of the apartment and down the stairs to where the vamp-mobile was parked on a double yellow.
“Do you have a license, Thane?”
“Yes.”
Even on short acquaintance, Sean knew a brief and solemn answer was cause for concern, but he couldn’t muster the energy to pursue the matter. He let himself be helped down the stairs and coaxed into the wide backseat of the gleaming behemoth. His head rested on a freshly laundered pillow, and the smell of fresh linen soothed his mind. There was a faint smell of lemons, and he was struck by a mental image of Thane in his leathers and shades choosing between lavender fresh and citrus breeze in the detergent aisle. He had to admit he really didn’t have a handle on Thane yet -- what he was, let alone what he was meant to be.
Never mind that right now. Arguments, I need arguments to convince these women to support me rather than shove me out into the cold.
But as the car swayed and hummed along the city street, all he felt was mild motion sickness, and no useful thoughts floated up to the surface of his mind. Finally the car idled to a stop. Sean peered at his watch ... A few minutes late, to boot.
Opal was holding court, settled in her usual velvet armchair with the dozen or so members of the coven perched about her staid living room in a rough circle. Sean went in alone and found himself standing on the rug with no clear place to sit.
He looked from face to face, most of the witches not meeting his eyes. Knowing the odds were against him, he tried to make his best defense at least ... well, offensive wasn’t really what he was going for, but by the look of Opal’s pursed lips, that was what he achieved.
“So, now that I’m in dire need of your help, I find myself, what, on trial? This is hardly a warm reception.”
“You use the arts to enslave another. That is not ‘harm none’.”
Sean faced Opal. He hated confrontation; his heart thudded achingly hard within his chest, and he heard a tremor in his voice. But the words he needed came to him, at least. “Trust you to take a body of law so pithy that eight small words sum it up, and to throw six of those words away,” he snapped. “‘An it harm none, do as you will’. Fine. And if some harm is inevitable, as is so often the case in life, is it so terrible I choose to bend a vampire’s will to save my life? With your help, he can be freed again. With no lasting harm to anyone.”
He glared around, but once again only Opal would look at him, her small eyes glinting with outrage. “I will have none of that lily-livered revisionism in this coven. True Wiccans harm none. It is that pacifism that sets us apart from the rest of this gods-forsaken world. If you cannot abide by that, you need not stay within our number.”
Sean kept his voice carefully quiet to contrast with Opal’s shrill rebuke. “Are you giving me that choice? Do you presume to speak for everyone here?”
He looked at each of the coven members in turn, but they would not meet his eyes, not even Laura. Only Opal’s pug-faced Persian cat looked back at him with its habitual expression of disdainful indifference.
“I did the best I could,” he said in a voice less steady than he would have liked. “With your help, the least possible harm can still be achieved.”
He reached out to the coven as a whole. Opal struggled to her feet like an overweight heifer. It had been a foregone conclusion, he realized. His time would have been better spent trying to find some other group to sign him on before the word got out.
“Our coven is founded on a simple understanding that our role in this world is to be part of a harmonious natural order,” she said with patronizing faux pity. “Not to enforce our will on others or our natural world. I had hoped that even you, as a man, a professor, could take part in this understanding. But at the first temptation, you revealed yourself to be a pollutant in our spiritual grove. For if there was any truth in your protestations, you would not have stooped to making use of the creature you enslaved, as I know you have.”
And the glint in Opal’s eye made it clear what she had seen. He had long suspected Opal’s scrying glass was largely an extension of her busybody ways. But it was true, wasn’t it? And denial or rebuttal froze on his tongue. She seemed to take his silence as a concession, content to leave the full meaning of accusation between the two of them -- and keep her prying ways on the down low.
“I call on my sisters,” Opal proclaimed, “to issue a formal proclamation excluding you from the green accord. May we have a show of hands?”
That was clearly intended as a rhetorical question.
The green accord was a list to which all the recognized covens contributed. Anyone not so listed was deemed a black witch and was to be shunned. To the best of Sean’s knowledge, although many had been refused the protection of membership, no one for many decades had actually been removed from the accord. Perhaps objectively, it did not matter all that much. But each hand that inched upwards under Opal’s beady glare was like a stab wound.
There were few places where he had ever felt welcome. After leaving the church, being cast out of his own family, failing to find a tenured position ... there was really only one place that had ever welcomed him in -- the Spindle Coven, pleased for so many years to have the novelty of a practicing male witch in their midst. Their ethos of pacifism had not only accepted his passive approach to the art, but valorized it. Now he saw how craven he had been to accept their warm, but ultimately shallow, embrace.
Only Laura hesitated. Her eyes flicked between Opal and Sean. “It’s all right, Laura,” Sean said. “I understand.” He did not mean that he understood Opal’s reasons, but that he knew Laura, like he, depended heavily upon the coven as her only family.
“But it’s not, is it?” Laura said. She bent, picked up her old denim tote bag, and stood, turning to address the others. “When I left my husband, I thought I understood the creed here. To never, ever do anything to a person without their consent, not even healing, nothing. But when you turn that respect for autonomy into a command that we should allow ourselves to be victims, not even defending our own lives -- I cannot support it. So I ask you ladies to take down your hands. To realize that each of us, man or woman, has the right not to be harmed ourselves. It is easy to say only acts that do no harm may be performed. But sometimes there is no harmless path, and we as individuals, and as groups, must take responsibility for our actions. Not always following the frankly patriarchal nonsense of strict laws, but just doing the best we can. Take down your hands, and together we can help Sean, and Thane, and maybe all the people in the city now that so many vampires seem to have come into our midst.”
It was a heartfelt plea, and Sean really thought for a moment that it might sway them. But each lady’s eyes flickered to Opal’s face, which remained crumpled in disgust, and dropped back to the floor. The hands stayed up.
“Well, then,” Laura snapped. “I had the strength to leave Frank when he became a tyrant; he thought he was doing the right thing, too. I can leave you, as well. You can shout from the windows that I am the wicked bloody witch of the west. But I am not the one who deserted a friend in need.”
Laura grabbed Sean’s arm and steered him from the room.
Outside, Thane was leaning on the hood of the car, smoking a cigarette, looking like a cross between the Marlboro man and the Batman. His usual slick leather jacket over scuffed blue jeans leant him a slightly dated air of macho cool.
“Tell me you didn’t sell your soul to the devil for a stretch limo,” Laura said. “Because that would really take the edge off my righteous indignation.”
“It’s a rental.”
“What, your soul?”
“Yeah, I needed it back by
Sunday. Those holy-water burn marks are a bitch.” Sean laughed. “Are you sure about this, Laura?”
“We’ll call around and find another group. We better get on with it, though. Opal will have the word out faster than the speed of spite.”
Sean grunted noncommittally. Groups in some other tradition would usually turn them away as a matter of course -- the druids, neo-shamans, Hedonians, true paths, and wizards. Especially the wizards, as he had defected from them to become Wiccan. The other Wiccan covens in town were strictly female, which was fine for Laura. The eclectic groups were mainly cranks, crooks, and crazies, none with members who were considered real practitioners rather than just hopeful believers. Their word would not weigh up against Opal, who was an uber bee-yotch but also a powerful far-scryer. Which is to say, a magic busybody who could see anyone, pretty much anywhere.
Thane came around and opened the back door for them with a bow of servitude that Sean could tell was sardonic, but Laura looked worried about. She didn’t seem totally sure she was betting on the right horse. But she climbed in and slid over, letting Sean fold himself cautiously into the backseat.
“Home, James,” he said. “Laura’s, that is. She has some calls to make. You always got on well with Jen from the Motherpeace Coven, I thought,” he added to her.
“So what about you?”
He eased back carefully as the car began to move. The shaped upholstery pushed against his shoulder, and it seemed impossible to find a comfortable position. Laura was obliging enough to give the vampire her address -- something of a vote of confidence, perhaps?
“I’m still thinking about it,” Sean said. “Maybe being cast into the outer darkness isn’t so bad. Plenty of people aren’t listed in the accord.”
“But they never asked to be, Sean. They are the grey, the uninvolved -- or the black, who can look after themselves or have their own groups. You know that practitioners on their own tend to not last long. You don’t know what will happen without the decree, but the less-wholesome cabals and circles are bound to take an interest in you.”
The Wicca-Man: Tongue-Tied Page 5
