Catch Your Shadow

Nadim felt a moment of white-hot terror as one of the rods between him and Vanessa's shadow failed to ignite immediately. He watched, paralyzed with dread, as the shade lunged for him with a contortion of the inky, empty darkness where its face should be that he could only describe as rage, and he knew in that moment that he was going to die. The shadow couldn't go back to Vanessa, not with the fire behind her, and Nadim was the only possible host to contain it. It would rend his soul, or the thing that walked with him that called itself his soul, and then it would hide inside him and make him a completely different person. It would lie, it would call itself Nadim, but he would be dead. Shredded. Torn to pieces. Gone forever.

But then the torch flared into life, and the shadow recoiled and squirmed and finally fled the only place it could-into the bottle. And just moments after that, the cork squeezed into place. Nadim finally let out a long, ragged sigh of relief, and looked over at Vanessa.

She looked... absent. Still the same brown eyes, but they were dull and lifeless. Still the same topaz skin, but hanging slack and expressionless from her face as though she'd forgotten who she was. Still the same lithe, sensual body, but now standing loose and relaxed like a puppet with cut strings, held up only by the force of inertia. It was in that instant that Nadim realized what he'd truly done. He felt a pang of sadness and shame, deep enough to make his eyes sting with tears, but it was too late now. The book was clear. No power on earth could restore a lost shadow. Even if it could, opening that bottle was the worst mistake Nadim could possibly make. And the last.

He staggered over and turned off the camera-he could erase the footage later, it didn't matter right now. Then he went to Vanessa and took her hand. "Can you hear me?" he asked, his voice still shaky with pent-up adrenaline. His clothes were soaked with sweat. He wanted to get them off as quick as possible, but that had absolutely nothing to do with their cleanliness.

"Yes," Vanessa said. Her voice was a dull, empty monotone. It wasn't even bored; that suggested the possibility of enthusiasm for another act, another context, and Vanessa clearly didn't possess even that anymore. She spoke with the neutral reflexiveness of someone accustomed her entire life to obeying orders so completely and totally that it never even occurred to her that her thoughts weren't her own. Nadim wondered if he even needed to feel guilty about severing her shadow-the body he was guiding gently over to the couch was always a slave. He was just giving her a new master to serve.

It was a lie and he knew it, but it helped Nadim come to terms with his next words. "Get down on your knees and suck my cock," he heard himself say. "And call me Master." He felt for a moment like it was a stranger sitting there, watching Vanessa slowly sink to the floor and unbutton his jeans. It seemed like it wasn't him at all, tangling his fingers into her curly brown hair and tugging her head forward until her mouth engulfed his hard, throbbing shaft. Of course, if everything in the book were true... it really wasn't.

But Nadim didn't want to think about that right now. He only wanted to think about Vanessa's lips wrapping around his cock, her head bobbing up and down between his legs. About the beautiful blankness in her voice when she said, "Yes Master," just before her mouth became too full to speak for a while. He didn't want to think about anything but pleasure... and his new slave was happy to make his dreams a reality.

THE END