Red Grow the Roses (16 page)

What now? she wondered. The audience were waiting for something, shifting restlessly, almost swaying on their feet, pressing forward. The air felt heavy in her lungs; every breath she took was laden with male sweat and the reek of their impatience. She could hear the men on either side of her panting.

Spinning him on his chains the Boss thumbed the control once more, raising him a foot or so, putting them face to face. She kissed his upside-down lips cruelly, more bite than kiss, then dropped him back with a jerk. Her head was on a level with his chest now. She twisted his nipple between her fingers, then stepped in to embrace him and took a big hard bite. No kiss at all in that. For a moment suction hollowed her cheeks, then she pulled back with a wet noise and bit him again, a little further over. A thin trickle of scarlet ran down toward his throat. She worked her way up his body bite by bite, lowering him on his tether to get access. Leon quivered in every fibre, his legs jerking, and a long dark note of suffering tore from his chest.

And this was what the crowd had waited to see: this feeding. They groaned softly with every bite. The guy to Jacqueline's right had his hand on her bum-cheek, someone had his spread fingertips planted in the small of her back, and the one at her left had his flies open and was jacking off. She didn't look. She didn't care. It wasn't personal. She wasn't the focus of their desire because that was the woman up there on stage, the one with the teeth and the thirst; she – Jacqueline – was just a part of the crowd, one of the worshippers, a fragment adrift in a sea of longing and lust. The scent of her arousal was another note in the crowd's scent, the gasps of her breath just some of a thousand thousand whispered prayers. ‘Bite him,' they prayed with every breath: ‘Bite him; bite him; bite me.'

Then that monstrous goddess reached Leon's cock, which hung down stiffly against his belly. There was a momentary pause before – at last – she took it in her mouth. Her jaw clenched. Leon roared, thrashing in his bonds, arching backward then banging his head on her thighs and pubis. There was agony in his cry but ecstasy too: broken words shot from his mouth like spittle, a hailstorm of blasphemy and obscene release. Jacqueline felt the crowd surge forward and she was shoved against the wire, hot bodies grinding against her back, the whole audience writhing in sympathy with the hanged man's immolation. A nubbin of curved wire rubbed against Jacqueline's own pubic mound and in a moment she found her own orgasm: not a big earth-shaking one, because she didn't have a cock inside her or a vibe pressed to her clit, but a twisting shameful thrill of pleasure that spread through her whole body in a slow-motion wave, leaving her gushing and aching in its wake. ‘Oh, fuck!' she squeaked under her breath, her words echoing Leon's roar.

He kept on groaning even when he ran out of breath for words. He kept groaning even when the Boss let him go and walked away back to the elevator, her eyes heavy-lidded with satisfaction, her beautiful dress no longer white or pristine. His cock was purplish, swollen, still grossly erect, and it pulsed and jerked as he hung there shaking just as if it was ejaculating, even though no emission was visible. He was still coming, Jacqueline realised, appalled. His balls had been sucked dry by that bitch-goddess and he was still coming, empty.

It took him a long time to stop. He was still groaning softly when the staff came to lower him down.

As the crowd unfurled like a poisonous flower releasing its sticky scent of semen and lust and male sweat, individuals drifting away, she wove slightly unsteadily back toward the cloakroom. Moisture slicked her inner thighs. She felt filthy and shamed and excited. There were stains on her designer dress too, stains from other crowd members; she'd actually felt the man on her left splash against the split of her thigh. It didn't matter. She had seen: she had taken part: she had understood. She'd seen her husband with new eyes. Seen him not in relationship to her but most primitively, as a man. A body. An object of desire. She'd got hot and wet for him in a way she hadn't since their earliest years.

And she understood Leon. In a few days he'd be healed up and recovered, and when he came home she'd be waiting for him. She understood him now: his need for pain, his ruthless hyper-masculine urge to test his courage and endurance, the demand of his body to be taken to the very limit. She needed to consider everything, and to be ready.

She still had her purse with her, and the divorce papers inside it. Let them stay there. She had other plans now.

(Estelle)

And this is Estelle: beautiful irresistible Estelle. ‘The Boss' is her nom de guerre only in some of the establishments that she owns; she has half-a-dozen different titles and four times as many businesses under her control. She's had time to build up quite a portfolio since the 1920s.

She was born in Mississippi, but she doesn't like to remember that these days and when she's excited or tired her accent slips to French rather than that of her childhood. The eldest of seven daughters, she grew up on a farm her father worked as sharecropper for a white landlord and she spent most of her youth chasing round after her siblings, trying to keep them fed and safe and obedient. Her family were good churchgoing folk and the girls all learned to sing long before they could spell out their alphabets. A few of them could sing really well, Estelle in particular, so they became a regular feature of Sunday meetings, and with the addition of a name – ‘The Seven Little Sisters of the Lord's Gracious Mercy' – they began to tour the circuit of country churches and gospel gatherings.

Estelle was sixteen when a visitor from out of state spotted her potential and persuaded her to come to Chicago to try for a singing career. Alcibiades Nash was like no local man she knew: smooth and scented and cultured, full of stories and a knowing humour, he carried himself with an arrogant confidence even around white folk and didn't appear to mind the danger. Yet with her he was always polite, seeming almost awed by her talent. He called her ‘Miss' and told her she was beautiful and walked with her after church, describing how much the people up north would love her for her voice and her lovely face. He said she had a glorious future ahead of her, and he took her hand and stroked her palm and wrist with one finger until she was squirming and wide-eyed and half out of her skin with wanting what he had to give. The stranger woke in the young girl feelings stronger and wilder and sweeter than any she'd known before, and she fell for every one of his honeyed words.

Her father and mother, rigidly respectable folk, wouldn't hear of their daughter going into the theatre, so she ran away with Alcibiades Nash.

Estelle grew up fast after that. Fast and bitter. Too proud and ambitious to break, she hardened instead, losing old comforts and finding new consolations. Knowing that the powerless obtain no mercy, she worked hard not to be in any one man's thrall, playing one off against another to find her independence somewhere in the cracks between. It was a risky strategy and she took her share of pain, but she survived and more.

These things are beautiful to Estelle: ruby beads of blood like strung gems on masculine skin; the thickness of a weightlifter's neck, tendons corded with strain; the gather of sweat at the very base of a man's spine, just at the cleft of his proud butt-cheeks, and the way it hangs and drips from his balls; the smell of his anguish, sharp and bitter on the oozing skin of his crotch; the gasp of agony and surrender as his skin gives between her teeth. Above all she wants to see the look in their eyes that tells her that they need her, that they need the pain she brings.

You will not find Estelle casually, and she will not seek you. You have to be the right sort of person, and you will have to go looking for her, and you will have to bring her the things she desires. Offerings to her divinity.

You will have to earn the right to be her victim.

Unusual among vampires, Estelle is specific about the gender of her donors. For her it's always men; she doesn't touch women. Ask her why, if you dare. She has said, and quite possibly even believes, that it's because of her sisters. She grew up looking after girls, after all: she can't bring herself to prey on them. It's not the whole truth, but she's not introspective.

From Chicago she moved to New York, where – ‘tall, tan and terrific' as the management required – she danced and sang in the chorus line before all-white audiences at the Cotton Club, and began her first forays in singing jazz. She has a low, husky voice, does Estelle, and she still likes to sing. Her private collection of original 78s and studio recordings is worthy of a museum.

In 1926 she signed on for a revue tour of France, and her life changed. To her bemusement, she became exotic overnight: ‘Une Princesse d'Afrique', they billed her in the Folies Bergère. From
une petite danseuse
she became a well-known singer in the more exclusive clubs and restaurants, and soon she had a number of male admirers only too willing to supplement her wage with extravagant gifts. It was during this time that she developed her stage persona, haughty and merciless, and she grew into that armour like a crab into its shell.

God, how those sophisticated men loved to play the trembling swain to that sassy, hard-edged chanteuse. To turn the world and its rules upside down in the perfumed sanctuary of her boudoir. To have her slap their faces and mock them and jiggle her dark-nippled breasts before their pleading mouths, flaunting her contempt for them. To have the proud African Princess thrash their flabby white backs and asses until they begged her for mercy, then make them crawl and kiss her beautiful cinnamon feet and bury their faces in the dark curls of her sex. It astonished and delighted her, what they wanted from her. She learned to use the whip and the paddle, the rack and the strap-on dildo, all instruments of a private theatre that earned her far more than the public stage. She learned how much strength and endurance is needed to wield a whip, and how much cunning and invention goes into breaking a man in ways he can't anticipate but wants with all his heart.

It was during this time that she met Reynauld and he fell in love, ignoring the self-imposed rule of centuries – and for the last time. He was not like her other lovers. Charmed as he was by her public persona, he saw beyond it. And there was of course the matter of his being immortal, ageless and terrifying. She could not despise him: not entirely.

It was also at this time when the tuberculosis incipient in her lungs made itself fully known, flying its crimson flag. When she retired suddenly from the stage and fled Paris he tracked her to an exclusive TB sanatorium in Switzerland and offered her the only cure at his command. Coughing blood and fighting for breath, she didn't hesitate to accept.

He took her on a silvery night, under the snowfields of the watchful mountains. He'd fed from her before, of course, but only lightly. This time she had to surrender herself entirely to him, baring her long throat. This time she had to trust to his embrace and let his strength carry her to the edge and beyond.

She hated that, and died hating.

Crossing the dark waters of the Jordan, she found new life on the far shore: eternal life, just as she'd been promised when sitting on those hard pews in the whitewashed church so many years ago, holding her head high in order to catch the breeze from her mother's fan. ‘Life in abundance,' as the preacher had roared. She has, she believes, made good use of it. Almost the first thing she did after coming into her power was to return to the States, leaving Reynauld bereft. She spent a year hunting down every person she remembered as having hurt or exploited or slighted her, and took her revenge with consummate thoroughness, Alcibiades Nash first and last. But she didn't stay after that. Mississippi was no longer her home, and at least in France she had status.

She loves the limelight. Don't ever forget that: what she craves is adulation. Adulation … and blood, of course. She regards both as her due, earned with hard work. She stayed in Paris until the Nazi invasion in 1940. Only then did she seek out Reynauld once more and make her new home in his domain, their relationship strained but mutually acceptable.

She likes power. She likes notoriety, of a certain sort. She likes money because it gives her control, and allies herself with Reynauld because his rule is peaceful, which allows her to make more money and enmesh donors. All those she feeds from are men in the prime of life: big, hard, confident men at the swaggering apex of their prowess. For her, blood isn't enough: she likes to inflict pain. She gets excited beating up on men – especially but not exclusively, in fact, white men. Luckily there are more than enough willing participants for her games, and she's got the self-discipline to make sure she doesn't fall foul of Reynauld's rules even in the extremity of her desire.

They are queuing up, all those men who want her to test their manhood to the limit, who want to make their pain an offering upon her altar. The fight clubs and the BDSM dungeons under her aegis, both gay and straight, are flourishing. The Pleiades is only one of several locations where the secret needs of men are met; and the deepest and darkest human need is to be not simply the one who sacrifices to his god, but the sacrifice itself.

The Seven Little Sisters are commemorated now only as a nightclub sign: the years when she herded and hugged them, slapped and comforted them, a memory coated in nacre. If she ever thinks of those six little girls it is with an uncomfortable twitch of the shoulders and a faint sense of nausea at their tears and their fear and their silliness, their helpless need exposed before a world of hurting and injustice, as unappealing in its nakedness as a hairless baby possum.

This is something even Estelle doesn't know about herself: that it's not entirely lust or vengeance she brings to her cruel games, though both are there in abundance. There's a twisted admiration too. The traits she values – physical strength and courage and independence – she sees in men, so she spares women not out of kindliness but because they're not good enough for her. She wouldn't take well to being told so, but it's decades since she last identified with any gender, ethnicity or species that isn't top of the food-chain.