BLOOD FRUIT
edited by
James EM Rasmussen
Stories by
Laramie Dean; Jamie Freeman; Shanna Germain;
Garry McLaughlin; TA Moore; Stephen Osborne; Trent Roman;
Mark Silcox; Nathan Sims; Quinn Smythwood; Raymond Yeo
QUEEREDFICTION PRESS
Gillitts, Durban
Republic of South Africa.
www.queeredfiction.com
QUEEREDFICTION PRESS
First published by QueeredFiction in 2010
The Lure of Dangerous Women ©Shanna Germain; A Different Kind of Monster ©TA Moore; Just Past Winter ©Nathan Sims; Hemophobia ©Trent Roman; The Diarist ©Mark Silcox; After All ©Laramie Dean; Happy Anniversary ©Stephen Osborne; Tombstone ©Raymond Yeo; Captive Magic ©Garry McLaughlin; Hollow ©Jamie Freeman; For Her Eyes ©Quinn Smythwood.
Blood Fruit Copyright © 2010 QueeredFiction
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. Any characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted—in any form or by any means—without the prior permission, in writing, of the publisher. Nor may it be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.
BLOOD FRUIT
First Edition
ISBN 978-1-920441-04-3 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-920441-05-0 (Electronic Book)
QUEEREDFICTION PRESS
Gillitts, Durban
Republic of South Africa.
www.queeredfiction.com
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Contents
The Lure of Dangerous Women/Shanna Germain
A Different Breed of Monster/TA Moore
Just Past Winter/Nathan Sims
Hemophobia/Trent Roman
The Diarist/Mark Silcox
After All/Laramie Dean
Happy Anniversary/Stephen Osborne
Tombstone/Raymond Yeo
Captive Magic/Garry McLaughlin
Hollow/Jamie Freeman
For Her Eyes/Quinn Smythwood
THE LURE OF DANGEROUS WOMEN
Shanna Germain
We had to move inland after the incident. That’s what we call
it. The incident. A euphemism of denial; the worst kind of
lie. In New Orleans there was too much water, too many wet and
unfettered places. Sometimes, when the rivers rose and the bayou
broke against the dams, I would dream of skin beneath my hands,
shimmering, shimmering. Singing almost, as the curves strained and
fell against the touch of my fingers. I’d close my eyes and hear
the growled break of her voice washing over my skin, rivering though
the empty space between my thighs.
Michelle dreamed of other things. I knew from the way her voice caught in her throat. From what spilled between her clenched teeth in a shored-up, lyrical language. Nonsense words, but anyone could hear the stutter, the bone-deep pain in their sharp sounds.
***
How much blame do I take? I’m never sure. After all, I was the one who found her—if her is the right term. I’d come upon her in a New Orleans dive, as easy as if she had picked me out of the crowd. As if it was predestined and maybe it was. Or maybe I tell myself that so my heart won’t dry up and crack open under the weight of blame.
Michelle and I had moved to NOLA, a temporary stay, right after the big flood, so Michelle could work—she was on the film crew for a documentary series. She spent her days documenting the destruction—land, lives, legacies—while I spent my waking hours shiftless and jobless. I’d taught painting classes back home, but I’d decided to take a break and come with her, thinking a new place would get me painting again.
“It’s fine,” she said more than once about my lack of job, kissing the side of my mouth, her breath smelling of coffee. “We don’t need the money.”
But I needed something to keep me afloat; to keep me from floating off. I couldn’t partake in the local seafood—a near-death-like allergic reaction to shrimp when I was twenty made me cautious about anything that lived in water. I wasn’t much of a drinker, either. Not a gambler or a girl-whore—Michelle and I had been seriously monogamous from the start. So what was there to do, but prowl the streets, listening to the musicians, finding places to take Michelle once the sun settled down in its watery bed? She loved music. I loved music too, in a visceral, pulse-speeding way that I couldn’t explain. Michelle loved music in a way that was knowledgeable and clinical, from how the bones in our ears heard sound to the reason new age music appealed. She’d once done a documentary on great classical players and had tried to explain what made one good and another bad, but I could only say, “I like that one.” It became my daily goal to find a hidden gem of a musician that would make her sink into her seat giving me that small, half-smile of hers. And then later, our desire heightened by the music, she’d pull me back to our extended-stay hotel, laughing and swinging her hips, pushing me down onto the bed, tongue dragging along my mouth like a cat, like I was irresistible cream.
***
Despite the aimlessness of my day-to-day life, I liked New Orleans. Liked the cheesiness of it: the tourist bars, the two-for-one, the girls in their beads—all of which were the first things to come back, as though flashing a magic marker beer sign and a bit of boob were all it took to rebuild a city. Even the voodoo was cheesy.
The scent in those weeks following the flood could be potent when the wind turned. Things had been brought from the depths of lakes; hundred- and thousand-year old things that had never seen the light of day. The air smelled of algae and long-rotting bodies dumped in the dark of night. Even that didn’t turn me away from the city I was coming to love.
I liked that sometimes Michelle worked late, filming in the dark, and I could walk the streets and alleyways alone, savoring the pulsing heart beat of tourists and music and sex. The girls didn’t turn my head, but then I never felt they were there for me; they were casting their lures to drag the guys in.
We’d been there nearly two weeks when Michelle came back late to the hotel, wrecked and weeping. She was not much of a weeper, not for herself. But it happens with her, around half-way through any tough documentary and I’d been expecting it. It’s when they start editing. Michelle could watch anything through a lens but after, watching it over again, it tears at her.
I waited while she stripped off her jeans and boots—muddied and caked with who knew what—then let her shower away as much of the day as she could. I stood on the hotel balcony while she dressed. I didn’t want to go too far, in case she needed to talk, but I didn’t want to be in her face either.
“Beth?”
I turned toward where she was leaning against the doorway. Long dark hair damp and curling, shoulders still wet from the shower. She was wrapped in my bathrobe, the mint green all wrong for her olive skin. She was beautiful and I wanted her with the urgency of surfacing, of needing to breathe after having been under too long.
“Come to bed with me?” she asked. And I felt a breeze of relief. I nodded and took her hand and pulled her back into the room, toward the ridiculously oversized king size bed that I’d begun to think of as ours.
Michelle’s a sweet lover. All tongue, no teeth, is how I used to describe it. But it was good that way, her hard body contrasting her soft touch always left me arching into her for more.
This time, she barely let me get on the bed before she was digging her fingers into me. Her skin felt too dry beneath my fingers, as though it would crumble and slip away if I held on too hard. Her aggressiveness was unusual, but I was swept under by the sudden clench of her fingers. I couldn’t do anything but call her name—Chelle and Chelle and Chelle—so that it was crashing through me, as caressing and killing as the sea.
***
“Beth…?” she said, after. Her cheek rested against the curves of my chest. Her drying hair curled around the play of my fingers.
“Mhn?”
“Let’s do a baby. I can try this time.”
I itched suddenly for a cigarette and I had to close my eyes to keep from seeing her face, the broken blood vessels that lined her eyes from crying. “Fuck, Michelle.”
Every couple has its points of contention, some worse than others. This was ours. She pushed her head forward, resting it on my stomach, her fingers reaching to play in the short curls between my legs. “Baby, it won’t be like the last times. I know it won’t. Maybe we should try me this time.”
I had a sudden urge to slap her hand away and I gritted my teeth, saying nothing, a sharp pain pushing up through my stomach in memory.
She looked up and saw me flinch. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
And she sounded like an after-school special, like a badly cast school therapist patting the heroine-strung teen on the head. I did something I’ve never done before. I lifted myself from the bed, got dressed and I left her. The best I could do was growl “I’m going for a walk,” before I shut the door.
That was the night I found her. I wanted cigarettes, wanted them bad. I’d quit at Michelle’s urging back before we tried to get pregnant, but I’d taken to sometimes having a smoke in the evenings. A single, slow-puffed reminder of something I’d loved once that was no longer good for me. Now, I wanted a pack.
I stepped out onto Marion Street with my cigarettes, packing them against my palm—a motion that never goes away, I don’t think, no matter how long it’s been since your last. The wind turned, bringing with it the funk of the strangely sour and sweet scent of the bayou. It brought the sound of her voice too. Ragged, broken, like she’d been smoking too many cigarettes herself, but wild and feral, a growl of the blues that sank through my ears down into the space between my thighs.
I froze. I had one of those sudden glimpses of how I looked from the outside—hair sex-tousled and in need of a cut, dressed in jeans and a man’s t-shirt. Scowling, inhaling desperately on a cigarette while I listened, entranced. It was the first time I’d wanted to paint anything since I’d arrived in New Orleans and what I wanted to paint was me; me in the act of listening to her.
Then the moment passed and I was just me, inside myself. I realized I was at the intersection of the hotel and I could take a right, turn back to Michelle. I knew I didn’t want to. I knew I wanted to find the voice, to sit in a dark and smoky room, filling an ashtray with butts, losing myself in the rugged purr of her.
She wasn’t hard to find—her voice carried through the streets and caressed me, guided me like a native to her place. I slipped in, took a seat in the back. The bar, poorly lit, like so many in New Orleans, was perfect to hide in.
She was dressed in flowing green pants that curved around her hips and flowed around her legs. A tight, shimmery shirt—black or grey—that showed off a strip of smooth belly beneath the hem and cap sleeves that did nothing to hide her arms. Strong, lean. Swimmer’s arms that held the mic while she swayed, lush as seaweed, rocking in tune to the music of the seas.
And her voice, ah, god her voice. Didn’t matter what she sang—oldies, blues, a pop request from a drunk—she crooned and cranked, a sound that I could feel not just in the hammer, anvil and stirrup of my ears, but in every bone of my body. I don’t know how long I sat. An older man who was trying to kiss the singer’s feet was rewarded with a choke-hold from one of the bouncers and led out the door. The couple off to the right of me started making out; she was nearly under the table. But none of this really held my attention. I watched her move through the grey screen of my cigarette smoke and I listened and listened.
At some point, she let the band take over. The guitarist sang and she slipped off the stage with a bucket for tips. The guitarist had a good voice, but the energy had changed. People turned away from the stage, ordered drinks or slipped out. It seemed I wasn’t the only one enraptured by her.
She carried her tip bucket around the room, touching people on the arm, talking, laughing. I watched, smoking, hoping she’d come to me, hoping she wouldn’t. I was suddenly nervous and fumbled in my pocket for cash to put in her bucket.
When she reached me, she leaned in, but I couldn’t hear above the guitarist’s yell. Tucking a finger into my ear, she pressed at the front of it, which somehow shut out all the music without shutting out her voice. Her fingertip was cool despite the heat, her touch so sensual. It felt wrong to be touched by her, as though she wasn’t supposed to be this close to humanity, surrounded by the stink and filth.
“Anything special you want, love?” she asked in that hoarse and perfectly ruined voice, her lips moving against my ear.
And God help me, I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t give her one single thing. I could only shake my head, blushing like a schoolgirl. Mute.
She laughed as though she’d seen it before. “Don’t worry, baby,” she said. Her fingertip slid down my neck, following the river of my throbbing pulse. “I know what you want to hear.”
***
Michelle was asleep when I got home, sprawled on top of the covers, the ceiling fan buzzing overhead like a swarm of flies. The light was nearly up by then. I could see a hazy grey batten of clouds flowing like dirty water across the sky. I don’t remember getting home. I knew I stank of whiskey and cigarettes, of muck water and fetid, damp air. In the odd light, my skin wore a green-gray hue of the undernourished and over alcoholed.
I slid in beside Michelle and despite my throbbing head, I could see her again for all that she was. My Chelle, my music-lusting, film-maker, big-hearted lover. I put my arm over her and she moved closer without waking. But I knew things were different. They’d been changed. I’d been changed.
I hadn’t done anything. I hadn’t touched the woman beyond that innocent finger at my ear. I’d left before she ended the next song. It was old, something I’d never heard before, Gaelic or Scottish, one word crashing and rolling into the next. Her voice beckoned and her eyes. She never took them off me. Not once. Not even as I was walking out the door.
I’d wanted to go back, wanted to fall into her music, let her fingers play through my hair. Mostly I’d wanted to hear her, that sea-shelled voice in my ear as she dug her fingers into me as she came. I didn’t. I wouldn’t.
I barely fell asleep before Michelle was up, wanting to talk, wanting to make things right. As she talked, I found much of my anger had slipped away. Fear, shame, guilt; these were all that I had left.
“What did you do last night?” She finally asked the question that had been in her eyes since she opened them. She was hesitant to touch me, keeping her fists curled softly at her sides.
“Oh,” I couldn’t look at her and I slid from the sheets. “I saw this woman last night, this singer. She was fantastic.” I talked about her voice and the music while I tried to spoon coffee into the tiny hotel coffee maker. Grounds were spilling and sticking to my skin.
“Sounds great,” she said, pulling herself from bed and coming to wrap her arms around me. “Let’s go and see her tonight. I’m taking the day off. I need it.”
Suddenly, I didn’t want to share her. I didn’t want to hear Michelle take her apart note-by-note. “See, that’s a c-sharp and it should have been an f-flat…” What? Did I think I was going to have an affair with her? Maybe. I think it was more than that. Something that I had that was all mine. She made me want to paint again and that was something I wanted to hold on to.
Michelle was watching me expectantly, her dark eyes meeting mine in the mirror, a hand trailing along the curve of my thigh.
“She was probably a one-time thing,” I said. “Down at the dive bar, near Marion.”
Michelle stood on her tiptoes and nipped at the side of my neck and a dark shudder wove up through me. “Oh, I haven’t been there yet. Come on. It’ll be fun.”
I flicked the coffee maker on with a click, watching my own movements, unable gaze into her eyes. “Fine.”
“Great,” she said. She turned me away from the mirror and slowly sank down in front of me. She spread my legs with her hands and then curled her tongue into the heat of me, her dark eyes laughing as she looked up. I closed my eyes, arched into her glossy stroke. I imagined it was her, singing to me, singing songs deep into the bones of me, until my blood beat in tune to the graveled, husky shore of her voice.
***
I didn’t mean to crash. But I was so tired and we’d been up all day; Michelle apologizing about the baby thing and me saying, “Shsh, it’s okay,” even though something had hardened inside me. A tiny bit of me that knew, even then, that there was an end in our future.
In the end, I slept. Michelle went out. Not to find her, she says. She says that still. Just to go out. But that’s where she ended up. Sometimes now when I look back, I wonder. Did she suspect something all along? Or did she just end up, like me, enthralled, entranced, dragged there against her will. Why else didn’t she wake me? Why else didn’t she take me with her?
I’ve pieced it together in my mind, what happened, although Michelle’s never said. I lay in bed while Michelle walked to the bar in the early evening. Catching her croon from down the street; already dissecting her voice with her trained ear and brain. I could see Michelle sitting there, a drink in her hand, cocking her head, her dark eyes on the sway of hips. I still wonder now what she sang to Michelle.
I woke up late, the dark night fallen and my head swimming with images of spiraling hips, songs-upon-songs that I followed, but couldn’t find. In my dreams I’d ended up at the water’s edge, its dark seep covering my bare toes in muck and grime, pinning me there.
“Chelle?” I knew even as I spoke that I was alone in the room. I knew where she’d gone.
Michelle wasn’t at the bar; neither was she. Somehow I knew where I’d find them. I followed my half-dream, let it lead me to the edges of the city. Down to where there was nothing but dirty water and broken pieces. When I heard her voice, its voice, not the smoked-out, glass-edged honky tonk from the other night, but a high, sweet, pitch-perfect note, I knew.
I came over the rise, stepped onto the low edge where the lap of water was still too high, too fast. In the almost-moon, I could see them: Michelle, her skin glistening in dirt-water and meager moonlight, buried beneath the singer’s body. The way she crawled over Michelle on hands and knees; alligator, serpent. Their bodies so entwined, I could only watch while she bent her head to Michelle’s ear and whispered something that made Michelle bridge upward off the sand. Michelle’s head turned my way. If her eyes hadn’t been pulled shut from pleasure, she would have seen me standing there. For one brief flash I imagined myself painting this. Her. Michelle. Me.
Then a low moan of desire. I knew that sound, a sound like no other—even if I didn’t have the technical terms for it, the way to describe its tempo and beat—rose from Michelle’s throat. It tore the breath out of my chest, sent my knees tumbling to the wet muck beneath me.
I waited until I could almost hitch a breath, still watching, unable to close my eyes. If I go back to that moment I can tell myself that I didn’t know what the creature was, or what she wanted. I tell myself I would have fought for Michelle. But that’s not the truth. Pushing myself up slow, like a child learning to walk, I started to turn away. I would have left Michelle there. I meant to leave her there.
It was the creature who let her go, spit her out as fast as she’d wrapped her up, leaving Michelle still and closed-eyed, as though she was far in sleep, dreaming. The creature raised its reflective blue eyes to mine, let them rest there a long time. A soft laughing hiss that could have been waves or the wind through stones or my own breath curled up through my ears. The stench of bog water rose in my nostrils and I gagged. Slowly, it moved back, disappearing into the darkness of the water. Still, when the notes came, as I knew they would—as jagged and cigarette-sucked as they were before—I wanted to follow them.
***
We’ve been inland for six months now. I’m painting again. Giant canvases that fill the living room, muddied and blurred. They sell for a good amount of money and earn me praise like, “Ahead of her time” and “Up-and-coming queer artist.” I use a lot of grays and browns and greens. The critics ask me what I’m trying to say about my experiences as a lesbian or what demons I’m trying to expel. I can’t tell them the truth. I’m not trying to expel any demon. I’m trying to get it back.
Michelle stopped working when she got sick. The doctors are varied in their diagnoses. They thought cyst. They think tumor. But I know better. I know that it’s neither. Not the way Michelle is in the morning, not the way her skin has turned rosy, or the way her stomach would feel beneath my hands if I could bear to touch it. I know it’s an egg filling Michelle. The gift that should have been mine.
I won’t be here much longer. I’m waiting, with my hands on a brush and my ears always craning to hear. I’m listening for the song of death or the keen of birth, whichever comes first. Some days I don’t know which one I’m wishing for.
***
Shanna Germain once saw a siren in a New Orleans bar, and she carried the creature’s music in her blood for weeks. When Shanna’s not traveling to places full of water-women and notes, she writes. Her work has appeared in Best American Erotica, Best Gay Romance, Best Lesbian Erotica, Hint Fiction, Pank and more.
Swim her seas at www.shannagermain.com.
A DIFFERENT BREED OF MONSTER
TA Moore
Peter’s cock tasted like the liquid soap from the dispenser in
the bathroom as it slid between his lips.
On his hands and knees under the table, safely hidden, Sol pulled a face as the taste ran over his tongue and down the back of his throat. He supposed he should be grateful that Peter was hygienic but to be honest he’d rather taste sweat and musk when he was giving a blow job than detergent and the lavender flavor of old ladies’ breath mints. It was too late to back out now though, not without having to deal with one of Peter’s screaming tantrums, so Sol folded his lips over his teeth and took the rest of the limp, freshly scrubbed dick into his mouth.
“Oh fuck.” Peter hissed as he felt Sol’s mouth around him. Without even looking Sol knew what the look on his face would be; patrician features slack with lust, a flag of bright color on each cheek and his frost blue eyes half closed. “That’s it, baby. Don’t stop.”
Sol tuned out the litany of encouragement as he worked his tongue over the thickening cock in his mouth. The width of his shoulders pushed Peter’s knees apart as he shifted closer and ran his hands up over Peter’s thighs and around to grip his ass. The black vinyl was slick and hot under his fingers as he kneaded the firm curve of flesh in time with the rise and fall of his head.
Limited by the tabletop of painted MDF over his head Sol sucked hard each time he raised his head slightly—Peter groaning thickly at the sensation—and let his teeth scrape lightly along the skin as he lowered his head again. After three months with Peter the hand on the back of his neck—thin, hard fingers scruffing him like a dog and pushing his head down—was predictable.
In fact, gagging perfunctorily as Peter’s cock hit the back of his throat Sol swallowed convulsively until the thick, hard shaft slid down his gullet, everything about Peter was becoming rather predictable.
He might even go far as to say that Peter was actually growing to be something of a bore.
Nose pressed against Peter’s waxed smooth balls, the teeth of the zipper chafing his cheeks, Sol brought the other man to climax. Semen ran down the back of his throat and into his stomach as bucking hips slammed the back of his head against the bottom of the table.
Fuck.
If he got chewing gum in his hair he was going to be pissed off. He let the limp cock slide out of his mouth. The sight of it, shiny with spit, as it flopped against Peter’s black vinyl thigh made Sol feel briefly sentimental, he crawled out from under the table. Ice cubes rattled against glass as he grabbed his drink from the table and took a swig of the harsh tasting vodka. Swilling the liquid around his mouth he resisted the urge to spit and swallowed instead.
“Shit, Sol.” Peter drawled as he tucked himself back into his pants and zipped up. “You could suck the chrome off a tailpipe.”
How romantic.
Vodka sloshed against the side of the glass as Sol toasted Peter. He stiffened when Peter slid along the bench towards him. His pale blue eyes were fevered under the dip of thin, blue veined lids as he slid his hand over Sol’s stomach and then down to cup his groin.
“I want you, Sol.” He whispered as he rubbed his cheek across Sol’s shoulder, his fingers kneading hard at the soft bulk of flesh at the dark haired youth’s crotch. “I want you so fucking bad. All of you.”
Sol shook his head, shoulder length curls spilling over his brow, and tried to push Peter away but the man clung to him.
“It’s alright.” Fingers tightened around their handful of flesh hard enough to bruise. Peter grinned; his lips a gaudy slash of red over his face, as he pulled Sol’s thin, hard body into his side. “I know. I know what you are.” Stretching up he pressed his mouth against Sol’s unresponsive one, tasting his own seed and vodka on the soft pout. “I know why you’d never let me do you. But I’m not afraid, babe. Hell, I want to be like you. To be with you forever, both of us young and beautiful for eternity.”
Oh yes, Sol mused as Peter pawed at him, his lover had definitely started to pall.
It was almost sad. He had loved Peter so in the beginning.
He had been abject.
***
It wasn’t his beauty that had first attracted Sol—although he was beautiful. Pale, whip-thin and androgynously perfect with his bleached white hair and sharp, sparse features. He held court in Sin-Eaters like the crowned Ice Prince of the Philly goth scene.
But it was his cruelty that infatuated.
The flicker of pure pleasure in his eyes as he whipped his lovers and friends with razor-sharp, viciously honed words. His alcohol and drug fuelled tantrums left his intimates battered and wan but, bathed in the aftermath of his remorse, still staunchly loyal.
He was like a cold flame to Sol’s moth.
In the
back of the club, a shot of rum sitting untouched by his elbow, Sol
watched intently as Peter savaged his latest lover. The words were
lost under the throbbing bass but the meaning of the impatient,
latently violent gestures was unmistakable.
Mascara black tears ran down the boy’s round cheeks as he folded in on himself in mortification under Peter’s mockery. When a plea for support went unanswered—his erstwhile friends averting their eyes for fear of drawing Peter’s temper down on themselves—he turned and fled. Sol’s dark eyes followed the redhead’s flight briefly before returning to Peter. The black clad youth reveling, face white and eyes fever bright, in his lover’s rout.
“Nasty git.” Ginny commented mildly as she took a drag on her clove cigarette. “Bet he got off on that.”
Attention straying from Peter for a moment, Sol frowned through a haze of smoke at his lanky, harsh featured companion. Her eyes, big and honey brown, blinked back at him through a frizz of food color blue bangs and the hitch of a pierced brow challenged him to disagree. When he just smiled, a cat secretive twitch of his lips, and turned back to his study of Peter, she grunted and stubbed her cigarette out on the table.
“You’re a masochistic little bastard, Solly.” She grumbled as she slid out from behind the table and wiped her ash-smutted fingers against her black jeans. “Not that that’s a surprise. Give me a call when you get it out of your system.”
Sol caught Ginny’s hand before she could walk away and squeezed her fingers affectionately. His lips skimming her knuckles.
“Yeah, yeah.” She rapped her knuckles on the top of his head gently as she shook her head. “I love you too. Don’t get too hurt.”
Sol turned to watch Ginny, spare and lean as a boy from behind—and from the front for that matter—walk away. Guilt tugged briefly at him, Ginny had been his friend for years and had offered him sanctuary in her home after he had been forced to leave Baton Rouge, but an earnest promise to make it up to her later quieted the moral qualms nicely.
She understood, anyhow. Ginny had her own appetites to sate.
Sol sniffed the rum in his glass, savoring the bite as the fumes hit his sinuses and then tossed back a mouthful for luck. He slid out from the booth and scanned the room. His eyes flickering over the black clad, flailing bodies that packed the floor, as he searched for Peter.
After he caught a glimpse of white hair by the bar Sol cut over the dance floor. It took a few minutes to push through the tightly pressed dancers and by the time he reached the bar the DJ had changed the track from The Rasmus to a guitar heavy Metallica track that distorted on the upper notes.
Peter was sitting on the end of the bar with his fingers wrapped around a glass of bitter green liquid. He swallowed the last dregs of the absinthe and smacked the glass back down on the bar. The tumbler hit the counter hard enough that the base cracked from one side to the other on impact.
As Peter lifted his hand, finger crooked to order another drink Sol reached out to catch it, silver ringed fingers pressing against the back of his hand. He smiled slowly when Peter’s head snapped around to glare at him. He knew what the other man saw: a short, slight boned young man with curly brown hair framing a powdered pale, aquiline face dominated by the prow of his nose and the sensitive curve of his lips. Nice looks, though not as beautiful as Peter himself, and—more importantly—soft, sensitive looking. Someone that could be hurt easily: someone bruisable.
Sol’s smile widened, the tip of his tongue flickering over his lower lip, as he watched the interest bloom in Peter’s eyes. He pulled the pale, young man from the barstool and led him towards the alley in the back of the club.
***
Sol led Peter down the steps that led to the dank, basement flat that had been his home for the last few months. He hopped over the last step, a puddle of stagnant water in the dip of it, and dipped his hand into his pocket. His knuckles tented the black linen as he groped for the cool, metal wafer of his door key.
“This is where you live?” The shadows of the railings painted bars over Peter’s face, running dark highlights through his white hair, as he glanced around. His face screwed up in distaste as he took in the water streaked concrete walls and the damp bubbled, flaking puce green paint that covered the door. “Place is a shithole.”
Sol answered the criticism with a neutral hitch of shoulders. He unlocked the door and kicked it at the bottom to jar water-swollen width from the doorframe. It swung open and Sol led Peter into the room.
The walls were painted a shabby, drip scarred black and plastered with creased, dog-eared posters of punk and nu-metal bands. The only furniture was a single bed in the middle of the room, draped in a moth-eaten shroud of tattered black velvet, and a grubby fridge against the wall under a Johnny Rotten poster.
Peter licked his lips, tongue dabbing nervously at the slick of dark lipstick, and mustered a ragged laugh. His expression was uncomfortable as he glanced around the room
“I guess you don’t need much stuff, huh.” He asked as he stepped into Sol’s back, his hand running down the smaller man’s wiry arm. “Just a coffin and some blood packs. Right?”
Sol turned in Peter’s embrace and tipped his head back as he smiled. Full lips stretched back to reveal straight, white teeth. Horror films had so much to answer for. Reaching up he let his fingers trace the contours of Peter’s face, following the path of imaginary lines that time and nature would scour into that perfect skin.
If it was given the chance.
He gripped Peter’s jaw in his hand, fingers and thumb pressing into the warm skin, and watched as for the first time in a month Peter’s pale blue eyes showed an unfamiliar emotion.
Fear.
Sol kept one hand clamped over his lover’s jaw as he pushed backwards until his knees hit the edge of the bed. He let go and watched the white haired youth fall backwards onto the dusty throw in a tangle of long, vinyl-dipped limbs. Crawling onto the bed he straddled Peter’s hips and ground himself hard against the other man until he felt his lover’s thickened cock pressing against his inner thigh.
Sol tuned out Peter’s groans as he stretched up to the top of the bed, fingers finding the stiff tags of leather that hung there. He pulled them tight and then looped them around Peter’s wrists, the rough cord digging into sparse skin, knotting them securely. Finished he sat back and watched as Peter, muscles straining over his shoulders and chest, tugged on the shackles.
The rise and fall of his chest sped up with excitement as he realized he couldn’t get free. Peter let his head fall back against the hard mattress. Sol reached out and brushed stray locks of brittle white hair from where sweat had plastered them over Peter’s brow. His fingers lingered on the soft, damp skin.
“I knew.” Peter smirked up at Sol. His bound hands clenched into fists. “I didn’t want to believe it at first but I knew you were different, a vampire. And now you’re going to make me one…” His voice trailed off as Sol shook his head slowly. “What? It’s what I want and we can be together.” His voice dropped seductively. “We’ll be together forever, baby.”
Sol’s eyes glittered with silent amusement as he rolled off Peter and got to his feet. The concrete floor cold against his feet as he toed his boots off and kicked them out of his way. Next he tugged his thin, wool sweater up and over his head. Even with his head still muffled in the folds of wool and acrylic mix he could hear Peter’s ragged, shocked intake of breath.
Sol pulled the jumper off the rest of the way and tossed it in the direction of the fridge. A darkly amused smile set on his usually solemn face as he stood and let Peter’s horrified eyes take in the ruin of his flesh. The mottled purple-black blotches that stained his pectorals and filled each muscled ridge of his abdomen could have passed for normal, albeit severe, bruising. An explanation for the raggedly stitched, black Y that started at the points of his shoulders and disappeared into the waistband of his trousers was harder to come up with.
“What happened to you?” Peter demanded, his voice ratcheting a notch closer to hysteria, as his eyes roamed over Sol’s pallid, sunken chest. Swallowing a retch as he saw the explanation for Sol’s muteness, an unhealed, unstitched tracheotomy scar in the middle of his throat, he wrenched at his bonds. The wooden bed creaking as he struggled frantically. “Why…? You’re a vampire. You shouldn’t look like…like that. Can’t you heal yourself?”
Sol unbuttoned his trousers and pushed them down over narrow hips, his cock soft and bloated with rot as it flopped against his thigh. He almost—as Peter’s panicked demands echoed off the solid, stone walls—wished he could explain where the other man had gone wrong in his assumptions.
Not that he thought it would be much comfort. He crawled back onto the bed and kissed Peter’s thigh, his tongue lapping at the slick film of vinyl. He ignored the bound man’s disgusted groans he crawled up Peter’s long body, hips bucking against him in a frantic parody of passion, and buried his head in the crook of his shoulder. He sucked the soft, cologne-scented flesh between his teeth and bit down, gently at first and then harder. The skin split between his front teeth and filled his mouth with blood, coating his tongue with a thick film as he suckled hungrily at it.
But the mouthful of blood wasn’t enough to sate him.
He tossed his head back, shreds of flesh stuck between his teeth and blood smeared over his mouth and chin. He stared down at Peter through wide, dilated eyes. The beautiful boy wasn’t so beautiful anymore with blood pumping from his throat and his face smeared with tears and sweat.
“Why?” Snuffling back a noseful of snot Peter sobbed the question desperately. “I loved you, why are you doing this?”
Sol wiped his hand across his mouth and shrugged. The coarse stitches that held the incision on his chest closed pulling at the parchment thin skin with the gesture.
Even if he wanted to, he had no way of explaining what he was doing. Instead, he had to demonstrate as he opened his mouth as wide as he could, his lips peeling back from bloody teeth, and plunged his head down to rip a mouthful of flesh from Peter’s cheek. The agonized screams filling the small, thick walled room and going unheard in the empty building above.
Fingers prying at the hinges of Peter’s jaw he forced the man’s mouth open to get access to the sweetmeat of his tongue. The flap of muscle made a crackling noise as he tore it away from its moorings in a gush of frothy, saliva-thinned blood. Cheeks pouched out like a gerbil’s as he chewed the tough, savory flesh, Sol tossed his head back and swallowed.
By this time Peter, sobs bubbling in the back of his throat and drowned in blood, were beyond understanding any answer.
Even if he could have understood that Sol was a different breed of monster altogether than he had thought.
***
T.A Moore is a speculative fiction writer from Northern Ireland. Her prose is elegant, surreal and disturbing, generally eliciting the response of ‘but you seem so nice!’ from readers. She takes this as a compliment. Her first novel, The Even, was published in September 2008.
JUST PAST WINTER
Nathan Sims
Frail skin is gone. In its place a thick hide and wheat-colored
pelt. Cold night air bracing after a long captivity. Clawed feet race
down the dark city street, the moon washing it in a pale white light.
Shadows cling to the tattered remnants of the buildings lining either
side of the cracked pavement. Just a few miles more, just a little
further, just past Winter Street and he’d be safe. He would be home
in his own pack’s territory.
Somewhere another scream, another kill is brought to ground, muscle ripped clean from bone. Marrow sucked dry and warm flesh devoured. He wasn’t the only prey brought before the pack tonight, just one with a better hope of survival.
***
The bracket was bolted to the thick, stone wall. The chain’s links crept their way across the concrete slab to the metal collar fastened around his neck. A padlock joined the chain and collar together, making escape impossible.
Tethered like a dog, Marcus thought, like some flea-ridden mongrel waiting for his master to come home and take him for a stroll.
When his brother and the rest of their pack came to rescue him, his captors would pay. Throats would be torn. Blood would be lapped. Of that he would make certain.
His thoughts shifted to the large bed taking up most of the room and to its owner. Well, he decided, perhaps not all of them should pay so dearly.
Reason told him he should hold the pack’s leader as responsible, perhaps more so. Instead he felt an odd gratitude for the man who had chained him to the wall. If not for his watchful eye, there’s no telling what the others might have done to him by now.
The bed reflected its owner well. The massive mahogany headboard
was intricately carved; an austere, gothic design almost daunting in
its presentation. Conversely, the thick blankets tossed and tumbled
over the mattress told a different story, tantalizing Marcus with
warmth and comfort. Just like its owner, the bed tempted him with
relief from the cold, concrete slab he had lain on for the past month
now.
Relief, yes, Marcus thought, but at what price?
The previous night’s fire had burned itself out before sunrise and the hole in the ceiling meant to vent the smoke was allowing the first chill of fall into the subterranean room. The washbasin standing nearby had gone unused that morning as he dismissed the thought of stripping to wash in the cold morning air. He hunkered down and wrapped his arms around his knees. The thin blanket he’d been given did little more than his worn shirt and tattered pants to ward off the chill.
Not for the first time since his capture Marcus wished for his other form of thick fur and unbridled strength. Like any of his race, he could change at will…or had been able to. The collar at his throat had refused to give even a little during his early attempts at shifting, choking him as his neck broadened during the change. Now fed only enough to stay alive, he had no strength to shift. Only the full moon could bring on him the unavoidable change it initiated. If the nervous edge of anticipation in his muscles was any indication, he didn’t have long to wait now. He only hoped the chain would be broken before that.
He caught the man’s scent before he spoke, reeking like wet fur and the brazen scent of fungus.
“You doing all right there, tasty?”
Marcus turned to the doorway and found Taint leaning against its frame. The man’s slight build was not much thicker than the door itself.
He studied Marcus from across the room and smiled, or at least Marcus thought it was a smile. It was hard to tell. The other man’s features were lost in the creases and folds of his face. It reminded Marcus of a sponge squeezed tight and left to dry that way.
“I asked if you was doing all right.”
Marcus didn’t answer.
Taint took his silence as a challenge. The shorter man crossed the chamber and jerked Marcus to his feet using the chain. Taint yanked the blanket from his shoulders and tossed it aside. With both hands he ripped open the shirt, buttons rattling as they scattered across the floor. He reached out a dirt-crusted hand and ran it across Marcus’s chest. His skin, already sensitive from the chill in the air, responded to the gentle touch, goose flesh rippling up on demand.
“Yep,” Taint said, leering, “looks to me like you’re doing just fine.” Grimy fingers found his left nipple and twisted hard.
Marcus bit back a cry of pain.
“A little nippy, perhaps,” Taint grinned, “but doing just fine.”
Logic told Marcus there was little point in fighting off the manhandling. He had no rights here in this pack and to fight back would only invite worse treatment. Besides, he knew Taint would only go so far. He wouldn’t dare cross the pack’s alpha. A fact Marcus was more than happy to exploit.
“You sure Joshua would be pleased…you here alone with me?” Marcus watched his words hit home as Taint released his flesh and retreated a step. His head tilted forward, he eyed Marcus through thick eyebrows for a moment before slamming his arm up under Marcus’s chin, pressing him back against the cold stone wall. With his other hand he dug dirty, jagged nails deep into the flesh of Marcus’s stomach, tearing at his skin. This time he couldn’t hold back a yelp of pain.
“Time’s up, tasty.” Taint said, leaning in close, his stench overwhelming. “Can’t you feel it? There’s a full moon tonight.” He breathed in a rattling hiss through his teeth and went on. “Tonight’s our hunt. Tonight you’ll be hunted and there’s not a damn thing anybody can do about it.”
Taint stepped back, releasing him. Marcus crumbled to his knees.
Hunted.
Despite the feel of his own warm blood oozing down his abdomen, Marcus felt a chill slice through his guts like a knife. His heart shuddered in his chest.
Taint stared at him intently, licking blood from beneath dirty fingernails.
Marcus forced himself to regain his calm, refusing to show weakness. Leveling his gaze at Taint, he said, “I don’t believe you. Your alpha won’t allow it.”
“My alpha can’t stop it, tasty,” the man replied. “You rejected his offers. You refused to submit. What kind of a leader lets himself seem weak to the rest of his pack? He’s got no choice. If you won’t have him, you have to be given to the hunt. It’s our way.” Taint smiled through the winkles and folds of his face. His tongue darted out across his lips. “You should’ve given him what he wanted. It would’ve gone a hell of a lot better for you.”
Marcus curled his lip in a snarl and said, “I am no one’s bitch.”
Taint’s grin deepened and he leaned over, grabbing Marcus’s chin. Marcus felt the other man’s tongue slather past the scruff on his jaw and up the side of his face. It wasn’t fat and fleshy like a human’s tongue – more slick and toned. When Taint reached his ear, he said, “After tonight you’ll either be dead or somebody’s bitch…just depends on who catches ya.”
“But…” Marcus floundered.
“No, tasty, uhn-uhn-uhn,” Taint said, tracing his finger through the blood staining Marcus’s stomach, drawing lazy patterns across his chest. “Sorry, no more time for ‘but’. I’m not too sure how your pack works, but our alpha doesn’t usually choose a male for his mate. It raises…concerns among the pack.” He lifted his bloody finger to his mouth and sucked hard on it.
“But for an alpha to choose a male and be rejected—that’s cause for more than concern. That leads to doubt, and doubt…well, that leads to contempt. And that just won’t do, tasty. Our alpha has to regain his standing among the pack. The only way to do that is to give you to the hunt.”
Marcus clung tight to his one last hope. “My brother will come for me. He’s the alpha of my pack. He won’t leave me here for long.”
“No?” Taint asked, his smile only deepening.
Marcus met his gaze defiantly and said, “No.”
“Come on, now,” Taint said. “How long you been here, near a month? You really think he’s coming for you?”
“Tonight is the full moon,” he said as much to himself as his tormentor. “They will come for me tonight.”
Taint ruffled the rust-colored hair on Marcus’s head and said, “Aw, maybe so, maybe they will come for you. Question is, will you still be in one piece when they get here?”
Marcus knew it was true. It was only Joshua’s strength and will that had kept his pack at bay this long. If not for the alpha, they would have torn him to shreds long before now. If that protection vanished tonight, there was no telling how long he might survive.
Taint cut through his thoughts, leaning in close and whispering, “I can make sure you make it through the night, tasty. I can make sure you’re alive and taken care of. All you’ve got to do…is trust me.”
One moment Taint was there. His lips to Marcus’s ear, his rank scent hovering like a shroud. The next he was a flying through the air and landing hard against the far wall. Marcus looked up to find Joshua standing above him.
“No one comes into my chambers,” the alpha said. “Taint, you were warned to stay away.” The words rumbled out from deep in a thick barrel chest covered in rich, black fur. The chill in the air didn’t seem to bother Joshua. He wore no shirt, only a pair of dark pants that vanished into his black boots. His short dark hair traced down from sideburns into a pencil-thin beard running along his jaw then up again to his lower lip. His amber eyes were slits as he looked across the room to where Taint lay.
The smaller man picked himself up and smiled at his alpha. “Can’t tame a mate; what makes you think you’ll be calling these chambers yours much longer?”
Marcus watched the frown deepen on Joshua’s face. Then the alpha was moving, leaping across the room, lifting Taint off the floor with one hand and raising him high in the air.
“What did you say?” the alpha asked.
“Nothing, Joshua,” Taint whined, “nothing!”
Joshua turned and threw him out the door. Marcus heard the man’s arm clip the doorframe as he passed through it and Taint squealed in pain.
“Get out,” Joshua said. He lunged at Taint and the man scampered down the hallway out of sight.
The alpha turned back to Marcus. He crossed the room and lifted him to his feet. “Are you all right?”
Joshua’s musk hit Marcus flush in the face. It invaded his nostrils; the mingled scent of sunlight and autumn wind on Joshua’s skin. His nerves, already on edge with the approaching full moon, jangled against his flesh in the alpha’s presence.
A small crease of concern folded between the man’s dark eyebrows. Marcus followed Joshua’s gaze to his own stomach where the wounds from Taint’s nails were already beginning to heal, a benefit of his heightened metabolism.
Joshua reached out a hand to the bloodied streaks running down Marcus’s torso. Marcus’s skin prickled in anticipation of his touch. His body moved closer to the outstretched hand. He knew the reaction was involuntary, but he chastised himself nonetheless.
He placed his own hand on Joshua’s chest to keep their bodies from pressing closer together and said, “I’m fine.” His fingers dug deep into Joshua’s chest hair and felt firm muscle beneath. Thick black hairs tickled the soft skin on the inner sides of his fingers, sending shivers up his arm. He pulled his hand away. “I’m fine.”
“I’m sorry,” Joshua said still standing so close Marcus could feel his breath. “If I’d known he was going to do something like that I never would have left you alone.”
“Was he right?” Marcus asked, meeting the taller man’s gaze. “Am I part of the hunt tonight?”
The alpha’s expression turned from concern to misery. He plopped down on the foot of the bed. His eyes studied the floor beneath his boots.
“So, it is true,” Marcus said.
“It’s not too late,” Joshua replied. “You could still say yes.”
The suggestion didn’t seem unreasonable, standing in the alpha’s chambers, the man sitting only a few feet away offering a tempting path to salvation. Still, doubts lingered of whether he could ever submit to this alpha—whether he should. Ultimately, Marcus’s commonsense won out. “I think your pack might doubt my sincerity, accepting your offer at the eleventh hour and all.”
Joshua leaned back on his elbows, his broad shoulders pressed to his ears, his legs spread wide at the knees. With a wicked leer, he said, “Well, then, I guess we’d have to prove to them just how sincere you are.”
From somewhere above, Marcus felt the pull of the full moon beginning to rise, urging him to return to his other form, his natural state. She called him to the night, to the wild, to freedom from this weak shape. Her urgency confused him, muddying his brain and making it difficult for him to think clearly. He had a hard time not focusing on the alpha sprawled on the bed before him. He struggled to suppress the desire he had sworn to avoid, but the yearning now was overwhelming.
The hairs across his body stood on end. His breathing was short and rapid. His heart throbbed in his chest.
Joshua leaned forward and rolled off the bed onto his knees. He crawled to Marcus and placed a finger through a belt loop of his loose-fitting pants, tugging at them. They slid down Marcus’s hips, revealing a trail of auburn hair below his navel. The alpha leaned in close and inhaled deeply. A moan of pleasure rumbled in his hairy chest and across his lips. It cascaded through Marcus’s body like a wave. He sensed a stirring just inches from where the alpha’s hand rested on his hip. From the smile on Joshua’s lips, Marcus knew he sensed it too.
“See, you want this,” Joshua said, pressing Marcus against the wall. Marcus didn’t answer. He closed his eyes as the alpha unbuttoned his pants but stopped short of unzipping them. Instead he began rubbing the bulge of Marcus’s erection through the fabric. Hands soon gave way to teeth and lips which proved equally adept at the job.
“Just think what this might be like—you and me,” Joshua proposed between nibbles.
Marcus had thought about it. He had thought about it a lot. In the quiet days of his confinement he wondered what giving in to the alpha—in to his own desires—might be like. And in the night when Joshua would lie gently snoring only a few feet away, he pondered what he might discover if he climbed under those blankets and crawled into the man’s arms. His imaginings, however, had never come close to what he was experiencing now.
He felt a pinch on his nipple, the one still sore from Taint’s earlier handling. Only, this pain felt promising and tinged with pleasure.
Joshua rubbed his face against the firm lump of flesh still hidden behind Marcus’s pants, using his forehead and chin to dig deep. Marcus felt the first drops of moisture dampen the fabric. The pack leader stopped and sniffed the spot. His grin deepened.
“This could be our life. Here. Together.”
Marcus grabbed his suitor’s head and ground against his face. Joshua grunted, gripping Marcus’s lean hips. Marcus moaned.
His pulse quickened. His breathing came in quick, uncontrolled bursts. He was blinded by the need to succumb to the alpha. A growl startled him escaping from his throat. He laughed in surprise.
He was no longer sure where the moon’s influence ended and the alpha’s began. It excited him, this urgency he felt to release the beast, to let it wreak havoc. In a deep corner of his mind the irony of submission leading to aggression wasn’t missed.
He felt a pull on the chain around his neck as Joshua dragged him down to his knees. The cold links of metal were wrapped around his wrist and his hand was guided to a welcome surprise waiting just inside Joshua’s pants. Marcus set to work quickly, unzipping the man’s fly.
He had never held another man before and the way the silken skin slid back and forth over the heavy girth it sheathed intrigued him. Curious, tentative thrusts came faster, harder, each one taking his hand down into a thick mound of curling hair.
Joshua leaned his head back, mouth open and slack. Marcus took advantage of the open mouth, pressing his lips firmly against it.
Joshua’s hands slipped inside Marcus’s shirt, pulling him close. Marcus felt the brush of thick fur against his bare chest. The alpha’s tongue pressed forward into his mouth, demanding, penetrating. The grip on his body tightened aggressively. Something was being reached, something hot and wild, something that would free the wolf in both of them—no need for a moon in the sky.