Patteran Ch. 01

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Wanderer in Appalachia meets a vampire goddess.
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Patteran (1 of 3): The Black Comely

The three Marys had been dead for decades, and Sara was the only one left from that small group in the south of France. She had floated down the Agiqua on her skirt, and had spent the last fifty years at the foot of Bays Mountain, feeding on the animals and a stray tourist or three. The scientists were a tricky enemy to defeat. They took the animals before she could forage them, and they drained them of blood and dried them out for the sake of academic preservation. They were more vampires than she was, she thought occasionally as she nestled amidst the trees and feasting on bits of rabbit, stringing their bones as a bracelet.

She could not win against them. They had forced her out with their experiments and greed, and she would have to go in search of more prey. The forests were disappearing, and she would have to move further west.

The river promised safe passage, and so she slipped free of the mountains, leaving only a scrap of ribbon from her hair, tied around a bundle of leaves. The People would surely find it and know what it was, but the scientists would miss it entirely in their zeal for small woodland mammals.

There should have been a ghost nearby for her to ride, but nobody had died at that particular ridge of Bays Mountain recently enough. She found only bones and dust, but no spirits, and so she walked. Her feet were tough enough that she needed no shoes, and she felt little pain, anyway. Thousands of years ago, she would have been aware of every particular pebble, especially the sharp ones that jabbed into her soles, making travel difficult. Now, she floated well enough without need of a ghost. The pebbles may as well have been sand.

The banks of the Agiqua were a guide, and Sara stayed clear of civilization. At night, when she curled up to sleep in small forests, she could barely see the stars for all the lights of the gas stations and all-day supermarkets a scant few miles away. When she had traveled to Calais, she had been able to track individual stars as she moved northward. This country did not appreciate stars wandering through heaven, and did not care for wanderers on the earth, either. She drew a sharp-nailed finger down the belly of a squirrel, and tried to read its entrails, but it was twitching too much for her to get a good sign, and as she pressed the creature to her lips, she decided that she needed a champion for the daylight hours. She needed someone to move about when the stars were as invisible to her as they were to the rest of the county.

She knew just what sort of acolyte she wanted. She wanted a man with some spirit to him, someone who posed a challenge. The last boy, a blond skateboarder from Atlanta, had been disappointing despite how much he had mouthed off to her. He hadn't lasted until the morning light, before she had seized a limb in each of her true, four hands and pulled. His screams had not been heard in the dark, thick void of the Georgia woods, and she had replaced one of the oldest of the fifty-one heads on her garlands with the skateboarder's skull.

The squirrel convulsed against her lips, severed veins and arteries spraying blood, and she laughed. Her laughter could be heard miles away, but to most, it would sound simply like the cackling of a bird, or a lunatic noise easily dismissed as the natural weirdness of being in the middle of nowhere near the center of a busy country.

There was someone in the area who could understand, and he would come to her. He would be her servant. She would be able to command obedience, because of the reverence the People had for her. She had a brief vision of one of them baring his neck for her, his chin tilted up, his eyes begging her to sink her teeth into his neck and to share the knowledge of death and impermanence. It was a pleasant vision. They would do anything for her. They would destroy themselves for her. They would reduce themselves to empty husks in their quest for understanding and worship. It was better when they wanted to do it.

Sara tossed the squirrel away, watching it thud against a tree and then slither down in a pile of guts and miasma. It was no good for either blood or bones. She would look for a cattle farm tomorrow, if the People did not bring her food instead. She thought she saw a star twinkling above, but the way the sky started to light up was sign enough. She reached for the cover of branches she'd scrapped together, and draped it over herself, breathing in pine bark and shutting her eyes. She sank into inertia, and went cold just as the nearly invisible sunlight started to sizzle against her face.

#

The entire bar was uncomfortable with him. Joe could tell. He could see it in the way one of the rednecks seated behind him shuffled his feet, and the supposedly sly looks the guy in the trucker cap was sending his way. He knew he had found the boondocks when his mere looks drew attention. In Memphis or in Atlanta, nobody had cared enough to bother him, but in a place where people were scant and usually on the paler side of white, he stuck out.

He drew comments among his own people, too, if for the opposite reason. His mother's mother had not been full-blooded, and so he was not pure. That showed itself in brown hair instead of black, and in the small features of a WASP, mixed with the Romani blood that predominated and gave him olive skin, deep brown eyes, long fingers, and a sharp jaw and brow. He looked native to neither group. Among his people, the European influences he showed drew comments. Here in the bar, they saw him only as a minority, and a dangerous one at that.

The bartender set down the booze he'd ordered, and leaned in from the heels to deliver a warning. "Steal anything, and I'll call the cops." Joe couldn't look at the man, or he might have thrown a punch. His shoulders tensed anyway, and his jaw tightened, and then he grinned as the absurdity of such a threat came to him.

There was nothing to steal in this shack. Even if there had been, calling the county cops would have taken several miles. He would have been in the next town over by the time any theft was reported. He was not desperate enough to steal even a single piece of silverware -- not real silver -- from a low-down bar.

So let them take offense at his presence. They weren't worth getting angry about. Joe sipped the beer, and paused to taste the quality. It wasn't quality at all. That's what he got for not calling his brand, the cheapest stuff in the place. He managed to drink it down, but without much enjoyment.

He'd left the company looking for something he couldn't have exactly defined at the time. Now he could define it, but he wasn't going to find it in this bar. He wanted a change. He wanted to feel alive. He could not feel alive in the company, already thirty and expected to have been married for ten years. Those old-fashioned rules weren't for him, and he had lost the ability to pretend to follow them.

They hadn't cast him out. He had left on his own. However, if they had known what he was doing, a week after he took off, drunk in a gadje bar and surrounded by rednecks, they'd have had reason to call him unclean and send him away for good. They would never find out, though. He'd promised himself that. He'd gone a state away from the Ocracoke camp to make sure that his family would not find him in this state.

Down the bar a little, a guy was staring at him. Trucker cap, flannel shirt, jeans, and a sloppy patch of beard on his chin. The sallow color of his skin gleamed yellow in the harsh, sparse lighting, and a beer gut distended the fabric of his wife-beater. Joe knew a threat when he saw one, and he turned a bit, adjusting his shoulders and tensing his legs so that he could spring off the barstool and throw a quick uppercut to the jaw if he needed to. The bearded guy didn't move. He wasn't spoiling for a fight. He wanted to say something instead, and he recognized Joe.

Joe felt a chill run down his spine, like a finger running down it. He set the lousy beer down, letting the coldness jolt down from his shoulders, over his curve of his back, ending at his tailbone. He'd made it this far west without getting in trouble, but he knew that was at an end. It wasn't a flash of the future, like his youngest aunt claimed to receive every other day, but a dead, still certainty.

The evening news had started on the television, and Joe dimly heard the anchors commenting on the fire that had started at the base camp of one of the mountains around here. It had spread to the nature park, burning up the preservation station. The wolves were safe, but singed. The scientists weren't. The bodies had been pulled out of the fire, burnt and somehow bloodless.

The chill tracked over his back again. Somewhere, a woman was laughing. She was probably laughing at him. He wouldn't have been surprised, for sitting and shivering at nothing deserved plenty of mockery. Joe tipped his beer up and finished it off. He couldn't taste it. It tasted better that way. The news went onto other subjects, but the man in the trucker cap still hadn't looked away. Now the stranger spoke. "She wants to see you."

Joe stopped short, set the glass down, and stared at the guy. "What?" His voice sounded hollow.

The man shrugged. "She hitched a ride with me into town. Black girl, dark, nice-looking. She said she wanted to see you. She paid me fifty bucks to tell you. You're Joe Lowell, aren't you? She said you wouldn't be hard to find." He grinned, showing fewer teeth than spaces of blackness. "She said she wouldn't be hard to find, too."

He heard the laughter again, and he knew. He knew. The woman was here for him. His aunt, the seer, had warned him about this, but he hadn't listened, and now he was in Eastern Tennessee, at the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, with nothing familiar to him except the girl that the trucker had unwittingly helped. He wanted to ask the man questions -- was she wearing a skirt or a necklace? Did she call herself Callie or Sara? She wouldn't have told the trucker anything, though. The trucker wasn't worth telling secret names to, and he wouldn't have noticed the girl's clothing.

Another stranger stood decisively, and Joe could hear the floorboards creak as the fellow rose to his shitkicker-booted feet. He could feel the man starting to loom over him. Time to leave. He pulled out a few wrinkled bills, washed with his clothes in the local laundromat, and started for the door. Something was breathing on his neck enough to make his heartbeat pulse in his throat, and he headed for the door, feeling the bright summer sun envelop him in hazy, sickly warmth.

#

The gypsy she had tracked, Joe Lowell, left the bar like a drunk, but Sara knew he hadn't had enough beer to lose his senses. The trucker must have given him the information, because the man looked around expectantly, waiting a moment. She did not show herself. That would have been too easy for him, and she wanted to test him, to see how he would handle the situation. She lay in the earth, her bones turned to twigs, and her blood became fine dust. Her eyes, she put in a pair of stones that sat on the edge of the sidewalk across from the bar. She waited.

Moments passed while he stared at the ramshackle town as if waiting for her to materialize. He laughed then, the sort of laugh that comes when someone feels foolish, and turned back towards the bar. He didn't go in, though. His arms extended, and she saw the glint of metal on his fifth and second fingers on one hand. He did not turn around towards her, but he was speaking to her. His voice rang with silver, like his rings. He was reckless, but he was brave. He had left his family, and he had found her.

"I know you, Sara-la-Kali. I know you've come for me. I will meet you, but I will not serve you. I serve no one but myself."

His command of Romani was not as good as his ancestors might have had many years ago. It was fluent enough, though, and fluid; the liquid nature of his voice made it sound better than it actually was. He was confident, and she appreciated that. Slowly she unearthed herself, gathered the twigs together for her bones, and rolled her eyes into her head. She could not show herself entirely, or he would have died from fright. She knew what he expected, and so she showed herself exactly as he wanted to see her.

Her garland molded into a necklace. The diaphanous wrappings around her twined themselves into a skirt, long enough for respectability. Her skin was almost as dark as the leather on his jacket, but it was a rich, deep brown, not the colorless sheen of night. Her hair flowed around her, and she appreciated the slight breeze that made it flow and flutter where her long skirt could not. Her face was flawless, with high cheekbones, a strong nose, and eyes like burning coals.

Her voice flowed as smoothly as his had, but where his voice was like water or mercury, hers was dark and earthen, crackling every so often with a thrust of fire. "You will serve me in time, Camlo. You have wanted to serve me since you were a child, and you sought me from the ocean to these woods. Did you expect me to float towards you, so near a gadje lighthouse? I thought you were not a fool, but that was a foolish dream indeed."

The man recognized the name she used, and his jaw dropped for a moment. He was startled first at the use of his proper Romani name, she figured, and then stunned at the sight of her. His knees buckled, and he knelt involuntarily. They always did, and although Sara appreciated the respect, she was disappointed that this young man had given in so easily. She floated towards him, and saw him still looking at her. He did not have the rapt fascination and idiot's grin that so many had upon catching a glimpse of her, though. His senses were still sharp, and he was staring at her out of curiosity, not devotion.

Her hand lifted his chin, and she knelt down, slipping out her long tongue to trace the curve of his jaw. The Atlanta skateboarder had tasted like lemons, his fear sour and acid. Joe tasted like the forest she'd lived in before she had been forced to burn it down, like bitter roots and sweet pine needles, without a single trace of unpleasant sourness. Her tongue was long, and she traced it towards his ear, before curving it under his chin to taste the hollow, sensitive spot where his throat began.

She longed to unleash her fangs to the man. She dreamed of piercing his olive skin and drink her fill of him, like she had drank of the demon Raktajiba, consuming him, his children, his grandchildren, and all the descendants of his blood. Sara wanted to taste his life flowing into her, and she wanted to have it all.

She drew him to his feet, and he stood, wavering unsteadily for a moment before wrapping a hand around her waist and drawing her close. He thrust himself against her, and she could feel him press up against her, his cock hard and his eyes like flint chips. He lifted his face up further, letting her tongue and teeth graze his throat again before they settled against his mouth. Heat passed between them, and she pressed her tongue against his lips, letting her sharp nails rake the back of his neck. His lips parted, and she slipped in. His mouth was cool to the taste, the beer he'd consumed making his teeth slick and his breath intoxicating.

She could not have him all, not outside the bar, not with people coming out. She embraced him for a moment before pulling away, and she saw confusion cross his face. Her voice issued forth again, bubbling like lava. "We need a better place." She wanted a battleground, littered with corpses, where the sight of fucking would be as natural as death to anyone that stopped by. There were no battlegrounds in Tennessee anymore, though. She'd come a century and a half too late.

Joe smiled at her. His eyes were dark and luminous, and he was drunk with her presence as much as he was drunk on alcohol. "I will go anywhere with you -- but I will not serve you. You will not turn me." He dropped his hand from her waist, trailing it over the curve of her backside. His words were serious, with all the childish self-assurance she had come to expect at first from her best worshippers. "I know who I am, and I know what I am. You won't change that."

Sara only smiled. She did not plan to change him. She only planned to help him realize exactly what he was. She had known since she'd become aware of his presence, and soon enough, he would know too. That revelation had been what had broken the skateboarder, showing him what a wretch he was, and making him crawl for her. She only hoped that this man would be able to stand a little more. He had challenged her, and she intended to test the limits of that challenge. He wanted to know his limits, and she would show them to him.

"Come," she said. He followed without complaint, his gait sure and steady. If he noticed the command, he did not comment upon it.

#

His aunt had said that he would die in trouble, and if this was how he was going to die, Joe resolved to make the best of it. Sara-la-Kali, Black Sara, Black Kali, had taken him as a follower. She had been watching him, and she wanted him. He was already unfit to return to his tribe, and he would not have been able to face them. He would become this mullo woman's servant, the vampire's consort.

She had stripped him of his clothes with the impossibly sharp knife she always carried, and her wrappings had slipped to the ground and become grass. She had lain down atop a gravestone, and he had followed, forgetful of the taboo against dishonoring bodies. He remembered his morals when she had stroked his shaft, her palm rough but pleasantly so, only bringing him more sensitivity. That pleasure had come mixed with the horror of what he was doing, and he had almost screamed. Her hand over his mouth had muffled any cries, and her smile, knowing and gentle, had calmed his fears for the night.

She suckled on him, her right hand below reaching for his testicles, tracing lines of fire up the inside of his thighs. He could feel his skin burn, but it didn't hurt at all. She traced designs on the inside of his thighs, old sigils that even he did not know and could not describe. Her mouth toyed with the tip of his cock as the left hand held his foreskin away from the head, index finger trailing over the flap of skin in smooth, confident motions. Her tongue, as long as a gentleman's tie, snaked out towards him, wrapping around the shaft.

No human woman could have done that, Joe knew, and he thought for a moment of pushing her off, but the slight corkscrewing motion of her tongue presented a far more enjoyable alternative. She closed her lips around him, and then let go, but she could not breathe and the effect was one of mere suction. She hummed a song he had known when he was a child, and he was so caught up in trying to figure out the melody and lyrics that he did not notice she had drawn blood until he felt her lips streaking it across his length. The cut still did not hurt, and he began to thrust, his rhythm that of a drumbeat, and his heart beginning to pound in time with each stroke.

#

Sara could hear his breath begin to settle into that familiar sound, whispering like dead leaves. It had been pounding before, but his orgasm had made him skip a beat and he had lost the rhythm. His semen was alkaline and slightly bitter from the beer he had drank, but it was palatable, and more importantly, it was his. She had tasted a part of him, and now she needed to have all of him.

She could bring him into ecstasy again and destroy him so easily, but he had nearly begged for a challenge. She would give him one. Slipping her lips from between his legs, she trailed her mouth up, leaving cuts where her fangs broke skin. One foot found its way to his thigh and the other rested upon his chest, and she thought of how she had stood on Shiva the same way, many years ago.

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