A Small Sacrifice: Sacrifice Tales

A Small Sacrifice

Part One of the Sacrifice Tales

Mary Not Wollstonecraft

© Copyright 2020 by Mary Not Wollstonecraft

NOTE: This work contains material not suitable for anyone under eighteen (18) or those of a delicate nature. This is a story and contains descriptive scenes of a graphic sexual nature. This book is purely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously--any resemblance to actual persons, whether living, deceased, actual events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

A Small Sacrifice

--Lazarus by the Sea, Maine, 1896--

Lacey strolled east from the estate. Keeping a steady pace, she walked in a straight line to the cliff overlooking the sea. As she approached the precipice, Lacey turned her attention to the small collection of houses, businesses, and docks with ships moored in the harbor. If things went according to her plan, the terror would end.

In the sleepy fishing village, a man moved from one lamp to another, lighting the streets in anticipation of the approaching darkness. The grand, old manor west of town, perched atop a hill, cast an ominous shadow across the settlement. While no light showed in the windows of the massive house, and the mansion appeared empty and abandoned, everyone realized he had returned.

The dead girls littering the beaches, alleys, and their beds testified to his return. And unlike him, they wouldn't be coming back. Taking only a few sips of their blood and breaking their necks, to be found by a loved one, a friend, or the township constable, in a plot to instill fear in the citizens.

It worked.

Others died slower after many visits and nights of torrid sex, making a banquet of their deaths. Feeding on their sex and blood, perhaps giving them his ichor, the purer fluid of his veins. No chance taken. Each victim, all fifteen of them, had stakes driven through their hearts, their heads severed, and their bodies burned. The women's ashes carried far from shore on a ship and spread on the waves to ensure they wouldn't return.

The sun sank below the horizon. Lacey stood at the cliff's edge, peering down at the rocks and waves crashing over them. As the darkness descended over the coast, she wondered if she might be strong enough to end the evil. Already, she sensed him, rising from the dust of his coffin, an evil god with a vengeful spirit.

To him, Lazarus, the woman well understood she was more than a lover, more than food, more than the value of her life; she was revenge. An act of proper vengeance against her father. Taken for that which her father had stolen from him. For Jason Anderson destroyed Lazarus's only true love. A timeless lover destroyed while she slumbered, months before, hundreds of miles from this place.

Destroyed is the correct word, for one cannot kill the dead.

For the past week, Lacey Anderson had a visitor in the darkness of the wee hours of the morning. Appearing from a fog in her room, Lazarus made love to her for hours and fed on her life's fluid. As the sky lighted, in those fleeting minutes before dawn each morning, he vanished, leaving her weak and ashamed.

Thoughts of him invaded her waking hours, his icy touch, the fires inside her as they rutted in her bed, wild animals in the heat of passions fires. Becoming one flesh as he sipped the life from her. Long, rough strokes deep into her throbbing center.

The passion built inside her until a cataclysmic explosion of rapture shattered her. The euphoria rumbled over her essence like thunder rolling through the skies. From peak to peak, the two copulated, and he feasted on her life.

Each gave and took in equal portions. Though Lacey's giving was not from her free will but from dark urges buried under the layers of Victorian constraints of polite society.

The most dreadful thing, Lacey coveted his touch. Longed to make love to him and desired those sweet, sinful kisses more than the breath of life. Deep in her heart, she yearned to taste his vitality, sup on his grume, share his existence, and become the thing she abhorred.

Life, everlasting, and perpetual youth, is its own reward.

As the darkness deepened, the air chilled, and a thick and foreboding fog covered the village, ocean, and surrounding countryside in a shroud of dread. The woman needn't rush to her home; Lacey understood she had time. After all, Lazarus wouldn't come to her until after midnight.

First, the vampire would find one or two maidens, a prostitute on the wharf, a young woman rushing home from a shop, or a tender morsel slumbering beside her husband. With them in a spell, he'd ravage their body, sup on their blood, and murder one or two women before he found his way to her boudoir.

At last, the fog covered the area so thickly that Lacey felt the need to return to her home. Being careful, like a blind woman, she returned to her father's estate.

The persistent ache throbbed inside her. A gnawing hunger, a dry thirst, demanding appeasement and quenching. She required a reckoning. But what remuneration she needed, wanted, escaped her. The encounters left her in an uncertain stupor of not quite appeased desires, which only lessened, never leaving her, never fully gratified.

Entering the home, Lacey found her father sitting at his desk, head in his hands.

"All will be better in the morning, Papaw."

"No one will go with me," he said. "Not one man will venture into the house of Lazarus, with or without me. I fear the wily old demon has guards. My sweet child, I can't go alone. None of the sheep will lift a finger to save their wife or child. And most assuredly will not for others."

"By morning, everything will be right, Father."

"No, my darling daughter, it shall not."

The debate ended without a conclusion. After supper, Lacey went to her room and read a bit, all the while...plotting.

The fog clung to the glass of balcony doors in a thickness one would only call pea soup. The railing was only visible once you opened the door and stepped through. This mist could serve her purpose. Having changed into her nightdress, Lacey stood, concealed by darkness and the murkiness of the atmosphere.

A chill, unrelated to the night's air, passed through her body. Lacey stepped back, and Lazarus stood facing her. Coming from nowhere, he formed from the fog. Lacey moved back another step, opened her gown, and exposed her neck to him. Red eyes glowered as Lacey moved away three more steps, dropping the nightdress to the floor.

Laying on top of the covers of the bed, Lacey ached for his torrid touch. The brume boiled through the open doorway, obscuring the room, the contents, and the lovers in a haze of indefinite thirsty yearning. When Lazarus emerged from the mist envelope, he touched her burning flesh with his icy hand.

Their lips met, they kissed, their tongues entwined, and he entered her with one swift, sharp stab. Before long, he kissed her neck, his long fangs running over the surface. Finding the previous picks, he dug into her flesh, suckling on her nectar. Her body jerked, her hips pounding against his jabs. They writhed in ecstasy for hours and hours.

At last, she sliced his neck with her fingernails and put her mouth over the wound, feeding on him. Drinking Lazarus's rich sap of life, sucking the lineage of those who'd created him into her. Pulling eternity from his veins with one eye on the window and the other on the clock. The fog faded from the room, and the mist thinned into the air.

Lazarus continued in his frenzied rutting. Fucking her deep and hard, unmindful of the surrounding changes. The room lit in pale shades filtering through the thick fog. The beast struck himself into her, unaware. Soon, the fog burned off, and bright, blistering sunlight washed over his body. Jerking away from her.

She grabbed his hand, holding him in the rays of the sun's cleansing light. In one moment, his agony flooded him. Opening his mouth, as flesh dissolved from his back, he screamed a silent shriek. Flames rose from his flesh. In a moment of weakness, Lacey released him.

Turning to the window, he scanned the room for safety. Taking a step towards the wall, he tried to move from the direct, searing rays, but with her strength renewed, Lacey pushed him toward the balcony. Shoving him outside, she slammed the doors, holding them shut.

Reaching into her mind, he shouted, "Help me!"

"No," was her response.

After the sun purified Lazarus, a gust of wind from the sea blew the ashes from the balcony. All that remained of him wafted away in the breeze. The century-old curse broken, Lacey lay on the bed for some time.

It dawned on Lacey, in a dazzling moment of clarity, she was dying, and she understood what was to follow. Dressing in her nightdress, growing weaker by the moment, having spent all her life destroying him, she left her home. Strolling, stumbling now and again, across the fields toward the grand old manor, Lacey pondered her fate.

Near mid-afternoon, she entered the catacomb underneath the mansion. She found the box in the middle of the long dead and the longer dead. Oblong, carved with intricate, ornate figures, and a massive L in the center of the lid. Opening the top, she gazed at the dirt covering the cushioned bed.

Clambering into the coffin, she lowered the lid and died.

Sleeping in the stilled dead slumber of the undead, she dreamed of vengeance on her father for forcing her to murder her lover. Life is in the blood, and the vampire's blood has a mind of its own. She'd reign down such terror that they'd long for Lazarus to return.

With the sun setting, the urgent necessity niggled in her soul, and she rose. A thirsty, persistent, lustful necessitude required satisfaction. With her yearning nibbling at her, she thought of her father.

"Papaw, come to me. Now!"

He'd searched for his daughter for hours, then she called him. With mindless abandon, he strolled, with quick steps, toward the manor. She wanted him, needed him, and somehow, he realized she'd be his death. A small sacrifice in the grand scheme of things, giving one's life to one's progeny.

A small sacrifice, indeed.