Cruel Enchantment (Black Lace)

by Janine Ashbless

  He’s not even erect, Annette thought with confusion and a touch of chagrin – then he took his tool in his right hand, set his hips in a straddle and began to piss on her.

  Annette burst into struggle but Michel was too strong and too well prepared for that, so when she cried out it was partly humiliation and partly the pain of her wrenched scalp. Gaspard laughed. The bright pungent stream of his urine splashed on her tits, on her aching nipples, on her belly and splayed thighs. Annette froze, let the terrible sensation of the hot, tickling, gushing stream soak into her. This was a shock unlike any she had anticipated, not painful, not dangerous – but nevertheless agonizingly cruel in its insidious gentle caress. Her belly seemed to melt. It felt unbelievably good. The male stink of it made her head swim. He had a copious, full bladder and took his time, sending rivulets of golden piss tumbling like mountain cataracts off her peaks and into her wooded valley. As the stream finally slowed he directed it up on her throat and then her face, splashing her eyelids and probing her lips. Annette took her courage in both hands and opened her mouth to the insistent stream, letting the last acrid drops gush over her tongue. Her lips grazed his loose, wet foreskin. She was rewarded by a flash of surprise on his face and a sudden stiffening of his cock. Gaspard let her mouth linger at his swelling glans for a few incredible seconds, then stepped back out of range, trying to hide his obvious reluctance. He did not bother to stow his tackle away, but smirked up past Annette at Michel and then reached out to cruelly squeeze the other man’s turgid bulge over her shoulder. Michel bit down on a grunt. Gaspard, ambling back to his seat, seemed well satisfied with his vicarious revenge.

  Annette could feel her heartbeat thudding between her thighs.

  His Lady, the Châtelaine, was next in line, stepping between the seated assembly as delicately as a well-bred filly. Only a pink flush high over her breasts marred the pale satin of her skin, her features otherwise composed and calm. She paused in front of Annette and considered her. Her right hand was cupped and held at the same level as her perfect rosy nipple. She opened it to reveal a palmful of glistening semen – from Father Emil, Annette supposed – from which she scooped a pearlescent gobbet with one finger of her other hand, and conveyed it to Annette’s parted lips. Annette accepted the cold offering with slight reluctance, letting it melt on her tongue as if it were the holy wafer, then swallowing the salty moisture with a shiver. She had no choice then but to humbly offer her mouth for another morsel. The Châtelaine fed her with unhurried delicacy, then pressed her spread palm forwards. Annette licked the last slick traces of spilt semen from her fingers. The Châtelaine nodded.

  ‘Raise her up, Michel,’ she said.

  Annette found herself lifted to her unsteady feet once more. The Châtelaine slipped a slender hand into her hot crotch and Annette moaned with fear. Fingers spread her pulsing, unsated hole and delved within, causing new moisture to well up. The Châtelaine’s face was a study in cool interest. Annette twisted on the rippling, teasing fingers and pressed her groin forwards hopelessly, unable to resist the hot waves of need that were breaking there.

  ‘You are an eager little jade,’ Marguerite murmured. ‘Like a bitch on heat, my sweet Annette. Oh, my poor dear – do you need a good hard shafting?’ She stepped back, smiling with a benevolence that was chilling to see. ‘Bernard, my love,’ she called, ‘I believe your new pupil is ready to begin. Would you like to go first?’

  Bernard slipped off his belt as he approached, though he did not shed his robe. Underneath, his body was hard as sculpted bronze, though the hair on his chest and curled at his loins was steely grey. His erect manhood was thick and stiff, marbled with blue veins. Annette, trembling with anticipation, met his gaze anxiously. His dark eyes glittered, pinning her with their easy authority. ‘What is there to be afraid of, child?’ he asked in that rich, reassuring tone.

  She could not answer. He stooped, grasped her thighs and lifted her on to his hips, lowering her down over his rock-hard prick. Annette grasped his shoulders with a cry and wrapped her sundered legs around his rigid arse. She was tight from disuse but dripping with the juice of her wantonness, and though it felt as if he were splitting her apart she grasped him like she was drowning and he was rock she had to cling to. Michel’s arms tightened around her in support; Bernard began to thrust into her, pushing her hips away and then ramming up into them, using Michel as a buttress against which to fuck her. He worked slowly, but struck deeper and deeper and without mercy. She was slammed between them as helplessly as flotsam on the sea, her back slapped against the smooth wall of Michel’s chest, her cunt impaled on Bernard’s terrible, implacable cock, the rhythm of his surging tides battering her. She came quickly, twice over, and then with a single grunt he spent his load inside her, his hands biting painfully into the flesh of her thighs. His face the whole time remained masklike, as impersonal and majestic as a god’s, but when he lowered her to her feet he held her tenderly for a moment in the circle of his arms.

  She whimpered as he left, wanting more. Her sex was burning.

  It was as if Bernard’s finishing was a signal to the remainder of the audience. They rose to their feet as he withdrew. Michel picked her up and walked back a few paces to where a number of blankets had been piled on the flat earth. He laid her down gently, kissed her lips and murmured, ‘Be strong. Give way to everything.’

  The circle closed.

  She spun in the night; luminous, beautiful. She was the Earth, the centre of the circling planets, the focal point of the universe. She was a goddess, the idol of countless prayers, her supplicants kneeling in turn to worship her. Her flesh was the recipient of a thousand kisses, a thousand heartfelt groans, a thousand caresses. Oblations were poured out before her and upon her, the rich and fragrant scent of their liquid offerings perfuming the temple of her body. She shone. She received them all, turning none away.

  They filled her, in every orifice. They soaked her in semen and sex-juices, pouring their essences one after another into and on to her. Her cunt was so filled with jism that it ran down her thighs and arse in silvery streams and her pubic hair was wringing wet, twisting into little curls. Her mouth grew bruised and slack with accepting their rigid cocks. Her breasts and belly were coated with a sheen of drying semen. One man wrapped her long hair around his penis and jerked off, clotting her scalp with pale droplets.

  She came, over and over. She thought she would grow numb or start to hurt, but instead waxed drunk upon pleasure and shuddered into climax after climax.

  Gaspard was one of the first to mount her, crushing her buttocks flat against the rough blankets, biting at her lips and moulding her breasts in his greedy hands. He was unsubtle and unimaginative, but he was huge and he rode her as if he wanted to break her. She screamed, clawed and struck at him, took everything he had to give and sobbed with frustration when he left. The Châtelaine silenced her tears by sinking down on her face, smothering her cries. Annette had never tasted a woman before, and drank in her wetness with desperation, her tongue lost among formless folds of smooth flesh and wiry hair, almost choking on the sweet, musky juices that flowed as Marguerite shuddered and wriggled into ecstasy. Annette learned the taste of another dozen women before the hour was past.

  Michel, her guide, was by her the whole time, directing the next partaker into the field, turning her, comforting her, wiping her eyes, encouraging each coupling and each orgasm from the icy vantage-point of self-denial. She thought blurredly how unfair was his frustration and reached several times for his yearning member where it struggled in his trews, but he deflected her firmly each time.

  When they had finished with her, the participants turned to each other for further play, rutting and writhing at the edge of her limited field of view. It seemed to Annette at one point that there were more wolves now than there had been to start with, but she was distracted by a couple straddling her head and fucking like dogs an inch from her face. Annette could see the thick root of the man’s penis sliding in and out of the
impossibly stretched hole of the woman, her juices coating his cock, his balls hanging down like ripe fruit and brushing her own forehead and nose. She stretched her head up to lick the woman’s exposed clitoris, felt her start to spasm, kissed and licked her way from that burning point up along the slithering ridge of the penis to the wrinkled, tight pouch of the bollocks and back again. The woman climaxed loudly and the man followed in instants, slamming into her split lips and then withdrawing to let the last jets of his come splatter down on Annette’s face. The woman finished by sitting back on Annette, anointing her with a heady mixture of her and her lover’s fluids. Annette drank it like wine.

  As soon as she was released this time, Michel rolled her over on to her front. Someone took her from behind, quick and slippery and panting, his balls slapping audibly against her pussy, and after he had finished another mounted her. Her first thought was that this man had an extraordinarily hairy chest and thighs – and then her second thought was a white streak of incredulity, but Michel held her down hard so that she could not wriggle round and look behind her. She buried her face in his leg, half laughing and half sobbing, and pure shock wrenched another orgasm from her.

  It was not enough. She kept climaxing, but each peak left her unsatisfied. Something knotted in her chest, a fist of frustration. If, she thought, if only she could come hard enough …

  Someone, tempted more by the amber rose of her unused arsehole than her sodden cleft, smeared her with her moisture and pushed into her tight opening. Annette, face down in Michel’s arms, shrieked. Her husband had tried this with her before on several occasions but it still hurt; her whole body went hot and then cold with shock. She tried to flail about, but was pinioned and, without thinking, her mind a red jelly of panic, she bit Michel hard on the upper arm. He yelped and knocked her away, and her sphincter took the invader up to the hilt. Suddenly it didn’t hurt at all. Her rider moved, gently but inexorably, spreading her wide. The orgasm seemed to start at her anus and ripple up the entire length of her spine, thundering through every muscle in her body. She nearly collapsed. Her partner stiffened and filled her tight passage with his cream. As he withdrew, she fell on her belly.

  ‘Is that really the way you prefer to do it?’ Michel snarled. His teeth were pushing forwards, distorting his face, his eyes flashing with pain and anger. Then he looked closer at her and mastered himself. ‘Right,’ he said softly. He pulled her up and pressed her mouth against the bite-mark. ‘Lick it,’ he grunted.

  Annette swallowed blood, tasting its metallic tang. It made her feel sick. She felt as though the world were spinning round her. The knot in her chest swelled. She began to gasp, sucking at Michel’s torn skin; he had to push her away before she bit him again.

  ‘You,’ he said over her shoulder. ‘Sodomise her again. She’s going.’ Then he reached down and freed his own smooth member from its prison. ‘Don’t you dare bite me this time, not if you want to live,’ he hissed in awful warning, then pushed it, long and glistening and solid with frustration, into her mouth. Annette wrapped her lips around the rigid shaft and sucked it into her, drawing it as far down her throat as she could. His pubic hair scoured her nose as he moved within her. She did not need to breathe. Behind her, unseen, some unknown man shoved his fat cock into her arse again. The pain and the pleasure throbbed through her in waves as her muscles clenched and released. The fist in her chest became a flame. She was going to come again – but more than that. Her head filled with white fire. Her nails scored bloody streaks down Michel’s legs, even through the cloth. Her spine glowed and burst apart, her skin incandesced, her hips thrust against the earth, her arse opened, spread, unfurled like a flower. She felt Michel’s red-hot penis jerk as he rammed it down her, felt the thick foam of his seed fill her throat and nose, tasted it as he pulled back, still ejaculating so that it flooded her mouth and tongue. She came – and it was agony, and it was a savage ecstasy that was worse than agony, as her soul and body exploded into a thousand pieces and flew back together in a maelstrom of knives and moonlight.

  In that brilliant furnace of a moment, Annette tore through the veil of unreality to erupt into the world. The barrier before her mind, the haunting sense that she was somewhere else, that this was not happening to her, that nothing mattered, that her body did not belong to her – all that was destroyed utterly. She became, as she had never done before. She was, and she was herself. The clarity, the reality, the naked truth of her own presence filled her like a white light.

  And she woke as if from a dream, the dream that you do not know is a dream until you realise it is gone. She lay sprawled on the blanket, her legs crumpled under her. Moonlight dazzled her weeping eyes. Michel pawed at her anxiously, nipped and licked along her dark muzzle. As clearly as if he had spoken, she understood his meaning: ‘You must get up.’ She struggled to comply, fanning her tail weakly, but her legs were as wobbly as those of a newborn foal. Her fur was damp. Michel and Claudette – she recognised them now by their scent more than anything else, for their forms were unfamiliar as yet – put their noses under her and pushed to help her rise. She had to lean against them for a few moments until she had regained her strength. The rest of the wolf-pack danced and circled around them impatiently, anxious now to be off on the hunt.

  Annette put her head back to see the moon and whimpered with wonder. Claudette – very dark and long of pelt, still – licked at her muzzle. Michel bit her ear tenderly. Strength seemed to flow into her limbs. She took her first few hesitant steps; the pack greeted her with joy. Then they turned as one, gathered themselves for speed and poured out of the hollow into the night. Annette raised her voice with them and took up her place in the pack, running with the wolves.

  The Temptation of St Gregory

  GREGORY KNEELED BEFORE the plain wooden cross on the eastern wall of his cell and prayed that she would not return. He prayed with real fear, a cold knot in his gut, his eyes tight shut but tears squeezing from under the lids. ‘Father have mercy. Against all the attacks of the Devil I have stood and will stand again in Your Name but, if it be Your will, let this cup pass from my lips.’

  He did not look as if he should be afraid, this monk kneeling in his rock-hewn cell. He was a tall man and broad-shouldered with it, even if his long hair was grey now and his square face lined. The broad span of his hands, clasped here in devotion, and the hard ridges of his bare, muscular forearms testified to a previous career that was not spent in either fasting or meditation. Well-fed, he would have been formidable in any estimation; even now – gaunt and craggy-faced, the hollows deep about his eyes and under his cheekbones – he resembled an ageing warrior more than a monk. Which appearance was misleading, for Gregory truly was a man of God, sworn to poverty, chastity and prayer, and he had never been a warrior. His history – extraordinary enough for a hermit – was that of a steward in the Palace at Constantinople. Those hands had wielded a whip in their time, and those bare feet had trodden upon marble and silk.

  Gregory was afraid. More afraid than when he had stood before the Emperor and reported that his imperial daughter had been discovered in the act of congress with a slave; more afraid than when he had placed every last coin he owned at the feet of the Bishop and kneeled for the first time in his camel-hair robe to make his vows. He was afraid for his soul. He had overcome pride and greed and doubt in his time, denied his flesh every particle of comfort, starved until he saw visions … and it appeared now that it was not enough. Around every corner a new trial waits, and even here in the desert there was no escape from temptation. Three days’ ride from the nearest town, a day’s walk from the nearest human soul – and that Father Rufinus, entombed in a cave with only a high slit left open to admit air and the occasional bowl of food – in a place where even the vultures did not circle, so rugged was the land and so empty of life; even here there was no hiding place from sin. The battleground between good and evil is the soul, not the market-place or the bedchamber. God is never finished testing his servants.

&n
bsp; While he prayed the sun sank and, with the oozing of the red sunset light into his chamber and the climbing of the shadows up the cliff-faces, she arrived. Gregory’s voice faltered as her presence momentarily plunged the room into darkness; it was not a large window to his cell and she filled it before she pressed through into the room. She always arrived by the window, perhaps because climbing the stairs that spiralled the rock to his room would have been too mundane. The ruddy light broke in once more. Her feet, bare, were almost silent on the stone floor.

  Gregory turned. He knew it was of no use ignoring her; when he had tried to close his eyes upon her first visit, she had amused herself by riffling through his small store of scriptures, mockingly mispronouncing the Latin words.

  The succubus smiled, though her mouth was so heavy that it seemed unsuited to the task; her lips, red as the stains of pomegranate juice, fell naturally into a lascivious pout. Her huge wings, folded now and arced high above her head, the black, velvety flesh and spines like those of some Queen of Bats, were visible for a moment before she shifted her stance and they became nothing but shadows behind her, a darkness against which her form seemed to glow.

  ‘Gregory,’ she murmured in a voice of silk. He crossed himself and crouched before the altar as if defending it with his life’s blood, a martyr out of the old days of Empire. His eyes sought the floor, but he could not thrust her from his view and now he could smell her, a warm, musky scent like that of crimson flowers opening under moonlight.

  She was sexuality incarnate, everything that Gregory had forsworn and denied himself. She was an ancient goddess come to earth, but a goddess of night and mystery, not some bright Olympian deity. Her skin was copper, her hair copper made molten and poured over jet, coiling in serpentine ropes across her skin so that it concealed her bare breasts but only just; enough to hide nearly everything but suggest all, the nipples threatening to peep out from behind their curtain at every moment. Her breasts were like large ripe fruit ready to be plucked, promising sweet juice and rich flesh. The full curve of her hips, the narrow span of her waist, the pool of her navel, the firm rounded lines of her legs – all were visible. She wore nothing but a small kilt of bronze pieces that hung at her groin and clashed like the ringing of tiny cymbals at the gate to her sacred temple; that and the gold snakes that spiralled up her forearms and lower legs, their cunningly moulded coils clasping her limbs and striving ever inwards to her torso.