In the Garden of Sin (26 page)

He fell asleep again, only to awaken to the presence of two people in the room with him—Galiana and Clara, whom she’d fetched from her sister’s house in the country. Clara threw herself on Turek, babbling about how grateful she was that he was still alive. Galiana had told her how he’d fallen ill with the plague, only to heal himself through prayer, and that he’d been asking for Clara the entire time.

She kissed him, the first time she had ever done so. Turek
returned her kisses carefully, mindful of his fangs. Galiana left, closing the door behind her. He heard the key turning in the lock.

Clara felt incredibly soft and heavy and warm in his arms, her flesh seeming to hum with the blood coursing through it. He couldn’t stop rubbing her, squeezing her, yanking at her clothes so as to feel her body against his. She rucked her skirts up, opening her legs for him and saying something about marriage, to which he grunted an affirmation as he licked her throat, tasting salt and savoring the roiling heat beneath the surface.

He sank his cock into her first, and then his fangs, deeply, hungrily, clutching her hard and tight as she struggled, clamping a hand over her mouth to stifle her cries. Driven by newly acquired instinct, he worked his tongue against the flesh of her neck to get the blood flowing. He groaned in bliss when it started drawing up through his fangs in rhythmic surges, creating a sensation similar to that of ejaculation, only in reverse.

The thumping of Clara’s heart was like a drum being pounded all around him, echoing, reverberating, driving the fierce, insistent pumping of his hips. Drunk with the novel influx of fresh blood, he was only dimly aware that she had stopped struggling and was ardently meeting his thrusts.

He came with volcanic intensity, ejecting what felt like years of pent-up seed as he bucked and thrashed atop Clara, who was no longer moving. As he lay there sucking in hoarse breaths and shaking, his fangs still embedded in her throat, he felt a cool, soft hand stroking his naked buttocks. Galiana had returned—he had no idea when—and was now sitting on the side of the bed, saying “You can unseat your fangs now,
cucciolo
. There is no more blood to be had in this one. You’ve drained the little
porca
quite thoroughly.”

It was true, he realized. Clara was as white as marble, her filmy eyes rolled up and her mouth agape. She looked for all the world like a statue of a saint depicted in a state of rapture.

“I killed her,” he said, both awed and appalled at what he’d done.
“Mein Gott.”

“Your God is through with you, Anton,” Galiana said as she rose and crossed to the door. “You are an abomination in His eyes, a demon.”

“Nein,”
he whispered, shaking his head dazedly. But of course, it was true. A demon. That was exactly what he had become, what she’d turned him into, at his own request—a bloodsucking monster, godless and godforsaken.

Turek’s gaze sought out the little crucifix nailed to the wall over the bed, to which he used to offer such fervent prayers. His stomach lurched, and he wretched, but nothing came up.

Standing in the open doorway, Galiana said, “You will leave Bologna and never seek me out again. If you attempt to communicate with me in any way, I will make you extremely sorry. I almost killed you once, in a most unpleasant fashion. I can still do it,
cucciolo
. I can chain you up and burn you to death in increments—first your feet, then your hands, your legs, your arms… You’ll die in agony with no chance of ever coming back. Do not make the mistake of doubting my sincerity in this.”

“I don’t,” he rasped.

“In future years, you will curse me for turning you. I meant it when I said that you don’t have what it takes to live contentedly as an Upír. Just remember that you begged me for this. You were foolish to have done so, and now you will spend eternity paying for that mistake.”

“Wait,” he said as she turned to leave, yanking his drawers up as he struggled up off the bed, his mouth smeared with
blood. “Where are you going? I… I don’t know what to do. What am I… suppose to do with her?” he asked, pointing to Clara’s body. “And how do I…how do I find more…”

“Pigeons? You didn’t ask me to teach you how to be a vampire, you simply asked me to turn you into one. You shall have to sort through the details by yourself, I’m afraid. I have no desire to hold your hand while you do so.”

“But…”

“Arrivederci
, Anton. We are through with each other until the end of time.”

As it happened, they were through with each other only for the next four and a half centuries. After failing to locate Grotte Cachée upon his release from the Bastille in 1789, Turek had returned to Paris, where he spent the next few years venting his bloodlust in a city gone mad with it. Follets of a predatory bent, including vampires of every race and subrace, flocked to Paris in great numbers during those years. Such beings found human turmoil intensely seductive, not only because it made people more susceptible to demonic machinations, but because those machinations were less likely to be noticed in an already brutal and chaotic environment.

Also prowling at night for the blood of unsuspecting Parisians was Galiana Solsa. Turek tried to avoid her, but she tracked him down. Gratified to find him so cold and bitter— evidence, she said, of his “vampiric maturation”—she swept him once again beneath her dark wing. The searing passion of their first few weeks together would never be renewed, but at least he was no longer alone.

She’d been right about him, of course, about the human weaknesses that had kept him—would always keep him— from true fulfillment as an Upír. Most vampires tended to be comfortable with solitude, but Turek could never quite accustom himself to it. For centuries after his conversion, he had
felt his aloneness all too keenly. Had he not, he would hardly have slid so easily under the thumb of Galiana, with her unrelenting, strutting rapaciousness.

Of course, it never would have come to that—his playing the lapdog in perpetuity to that vicious cunt—had he prevailed in his campaign to win over the only female for whom he had ever felt true reverence, true devotion: Ilutu-Lili.

In the brief time he’d had alone with her during the Hellfire’s two-week visit to Grotte Cachée in 1749, he’d tried to reason with her, to make her understand that she was, in her way, as much of a vampire as he.
You’re a creature of dark passions and terrible, ungovernable hungers, as am I
, he’d told her.
We are really much the same, the succubus and the Upír—both predators seeking our own particular sustenance, which we derive from humans—willing or unwilling. We both do our prowling at night, for the most part. We are both singleminded in the pursuit of our prey. And we are both susceptible to the same means of destruction—immolation—which makes me suspect that your race and mine are perhaps more closely related than one would think
.

She’d had none of it, of course. He had used entirely the wrong strategy with her, a blunder for which he’d paid with forty years of his life. If he had to do it over again, he would dispense with pointless logic. He would get her alone somewhere, spirit her away from her home, from Elic and anyone else who might be inclined to come to her aid. He would keep her in complete seclusion at his country house in the Carpathian Mountains with only himself for companionship for as long as it took to sway her, years if need be. The more vulnerable she felt, the more quickly she would break down and let him turn her.

Although of far stronger constitution than humans, both mentally and physically, even Follets were susceptible to
extended isolation, hunger, sleep deprivation, and physical restraint. How long would she be able to maintain her façade of cool contempt for him, chained naked to a cot? No, not naked. She was a succubus; she loved being unclothed, because of the effect her nakedness had on men. It made them want to fuck her, and she was all about fucking.

Lili reveled in sex; she craved it like humans craved food and water. Succubi spent every waking hour consumed by constant, seething sexual hunger that came rushing back almost as soon as it was satisfied—and it could be satisfied only by absorbing the carnal vibes generated by their sex partners. Unlike vampires and most other nonhuman races, incubi and succubi were generally incapable of achieving orgasm through masturbation, as a result of which they were on the make pretty much 24/7. The more erotically stimulating the encounter, the greater the boost to their life-force, which was why they tended to seek out humans with outsize sex drives, like their own, and a taste for kink.

Lili’s unquenchable sexual appetite could be Turek’s most powerful weapon in a campaign to convert her to vampirism, he realized. It would take a monumental effort of will to keep from ravishing her once he had her in his complete control, but if he could manage it, her own escalating arousal would be her undoing. Forced to go without sex and the vital energy she derived from it, she would grow weakened, maddened, defenseless. He could even escalate her torment by bringing in women and fucking them right in front of her, or doing what Doug had done to Nicky when he first brought her home— coaxing her right to the edge without letting her come. How much of that kind of thing could a succubus take without surrendering?

Turek grew hard, imagining her sobbing and straining against her chains as he fucked some whore doggie style
between Lili’s outspread legs, the whore’s face right over her snatch, her hair tickling it, her hot breath making it gape and weep…
Lick it
, he would order, pushing down on the whore’s head.
Just one lick, no more…

Enough of that, and Lili would be begging him to turn her, just as he’d begged Galiana.
Please, Anton. I’ll do anything. I’ll drink your blood and become what you are. I’ll be your queen, I’ll be yours forever. Just fuck me. Please, I’m begging you, just fuck me. Fuck me hard…

The crack of leather against flesh made Turek flinch.

“One,” Nicky said through clenched teeth as a red-hot stripe materialized on the roundest part of her ass. “Thank you, master.”

Doug shifted his aim with the belt; the next blow branded her upper thighs.

Nicky let out a sharp little cry. She also smiled. It was subtle and brief, and seen by Turek only because he had a better view of her face than the others.

“Two,” she said a little breathlessly. “Thank you, master.”

Each subsequent stroke, which Nicky dutifully counted off and offered thanks for, landed on a slightly different spot, until she was bright, scorching red from her lower thighs almost to her waist.

Turek couldn’t help but recall that time in Rome back in ’39—or was it ’40?—when he seduced one of Mussolini’s mistresses because she reminded him so much of Galiana—tall and gorgeous and built like a frigate, with all that thick, gleaming black hair, and of course the stone-bitch, ain’t-I-grand attitude. He’d bought Enrica a black satin dinner suit of the type favored by Galiana—low-cut and wasp-waisted, with massive Joan Crawford shoulders—as well as a mannish little hat to go with it, and high-heeled spectator pumps, and of course the much-prized silk stockings. Chocolates and stockings: the
universal currency back then. He had her put on these things, and then he bent her over a blanket rack in her bedroom, binding and gagging her with Mussolini’s own neckties. He bared her ass and whipped it to ribbons with Il Duce’s riding crop, and then he fed on her as he fucked her, nice and slow, reveling in her frantic thrashing and the heat of her abraded skin, timing it so that she breathed her last just as his pleasure erupted.

Turek rubbed his erection as he relived it… Her muffled whimpers and pointless, diminishing struggles, the gradual cooling of her flesh as he drained it dry, the drunken bliss as her blood percolated through his tissues and organs, tickling his cock, crackling along his nerves, making him feel as if he were floating, soaring… It was rapturous, one of the most memorable death feeds of his vampiric existence.

Having concluded Nicky’s punishment, Doug made her kiss the belt. As he threaded it back through the loops, he said, “When I give you the signal, you’ve got twenty seconds to make yourself come.”

ROM ZERO TO SIXTY in twenty seconds?” Lili asked skeptically.