Like Blood for Coffee Pt. 04

"I was going to, but something higher pri came up," Chuka sighed. "Remember that dead intern?"

Noth felt a cold finger of dread run up her spine. "Yes?"

"Found another dead employee all bit up just before earnings," the younger vampire said. "The one we fed on - Little Miss Damage?"

"Christy," Noth said. Fuck, fuck, fuck... "Let me guess - they found more of that stuff on her? That got Tony all hot and bothered?"

"They did," Chuka said. "I told them what you told me - it's their own fault for fooling around with magic on coffee treated with blood. I even got a elf priest to send an angry email about the prohibitions on blood magic. And they still wanted to bring in only the vampires for interrogation - just like after the lunchroom blew up!"

Dread turned to anger. "And?"

"I told them to fuck off," the younger vampire replied. "Sent Phil and Tony home so they couldn't get to them for a divide-and-conquer. I can hold down the fort. Even better if you can get out of fairyland every so often, show your face around the office."

Really, I did train her well! Noth thought, feeling a little wistful. She missed work life almost as much as she missed her sex life with Eiri.

"Well, let me show my face around this office party, at least," Noth said.

...

Eiri never came to the apartment. Noth's assistant told her that he had been there in the last few days; she hoped to catch him at the Harvest Festival.

I need a good fuck in the worst way, she thought, waking two hours before sundown to find herself wet and writhing. Still in the grips of an erotic dream where Master punished her. In those dreams, she couldn't see his face - but her body knew the touch of his hands.

Night descended, cool and clear. As soon as the sun lef the sky, Noth rose from her coffin and made her way to the Starbucks campus. Throngs of nude elves and humans flooded the streets, migrating like salmon upstream to festival sites all over the city - large, grassy clearings with bonfires and at least one elven priest to tend them.

The Harvest Festival was when elves celebrated fertility, giving thanks to the Earth Mother for the bounty of her fields. The moon was viewed as the eye of some Goddess connected to the Earth Mother, a symbol of fertility, round and full like a pregnant woman's belly. For a race stricken with infertility, it was their most important religious observance - laden with symbolism and brimming with expectation.

She saw it on the faces of the elves walking to the fires beside her. The heat Noth felt in her dream seemed to linger around her, like an aura. It attracted lustful gazes. The elves were ready to receive their Moon Goddess, and they'd take it from anyone giving it. Probing fingers and curious palms brushed against her as she walked - over her buttocks, across her belly. Testing, tempting.

Noth wondered if they knew she was a vampire. She couldn't come away from the fires pregnant with an elf baby; would they avoid her if they knew?

She arrived at the Starbucks headquarters, badging in through the doors and surrendering her ID to a security guard to be handed back afterward. For a moment, she was tempted to go up to her old office, poke around. Concerns about Fulbright gnawed at her.

She didn't like the thought of a coffee granting a high like meth and a thirst like vampirism, particularly not coupled with mild mind control. Two employees dead already - what would happen if something that strong got out into commercial distribution? She glanced at the naked human bodies pressed around her, searched their faces. How many here would drink a beverage that turned them into raging, bloodthirsty monsters?

Not that they aren't already... but it's not blood they thirst for, Noth thought, observing the glazed eyes and half-hard cocks all around her in the lobby. It would only get worse when the fires were lit.

She gave up her plan to visit her old desk and went out into the courtyard to join the festival.

The campus looked beautiful. Fairy lights and little lanterns dangled seemingly from midair all around. Charming flute music rippled across the sky, carried by a soft evening breeze. Late-blooming flowers gave off a spicy aroma of sage and sweet alyssum, dotting the paths with their purple and pink buds. The last gasp of summer in autumn.

Chuka found her in the crowd. She was licking a bit of blood from her lips.

Noth shook her head. Already?

The younger vampire took Noth by the hand, leading her over to where a handful of skittish naked humans giggled and fidgeted, trying to hide their privates with their hands. First-timers, with no idea what to expect. Noth and Chuka killed the quarter hour leading up to the festival kickoff snatching sips off them - pulling them aside to whisper in their ears, mesmerizing them into offering their tender necks, their soft wrists.

Whatever the elves spiked the food with entered the bloodstream. Noth felt it rise up from her mouth to her head, an almost-painful pressure that made her blood rush in her ears as the humans' blood ran down her throat. Her knees wobbled and her stomach fluttered, a feeling of elation spreading.

When the time came for Noth to join her husband at the main fire, on a dias with the elven priest administering the rites to Starbucks employees, she went willingly. The hair between her legs damp, labia swelling with anticipation. All the executive team stood there, their nude elven bodies painted with ancient symbols, the ink shining on their tan skin in the moonlight.

When she reached her husband's side, he passed her a small bowl, brimming with a dark liquid. Noth sipped the bitter brew, feeling it slide down her throat past the hot human blood in her belly to settle somewhere near her navel, throbbing. She closed her eyes, fighting a sudden urge to vomit.

And when she opened them again, the sight of the harvest moon in the sky made her breath catch, stunned at its beauty. The light from the distant heavenly body seemed to move all around her, moonbeams drifting over the flesh of the bodies and the plants and the trees like caressing fingers.

Eldunord saw her watching the moon, enraptured, and he draped an arm around her shoulder, his hand hooking up across her torso to rest on her breast. He cupped it tenderly, lifting the unbound flesh until it rounded perfectly at the top - mimicking the moon. She smiled up at him, dazed, drugged.

"Fuck me," she begged her husband.

"Not yet," he murmured, pinching her nipple. "Not yet, little wife..."

The priest began to recite something, raising his spindly arms to the sky and crying out in shrill elvish. The elves followed along with a call and response. The humans shifted, impatient, yearning.

Then the smoke appeared, snaking up out of the stacked logs like white fingers curling into the night sky. Noth smelled it, acrid and sweet - tinged with sacred herbs and something to make the orange flames spread evenly over the wood. She felt the heat of the fire on her back, radiating in waves. And as they rippled out over the crowd, elves and humans embraced. Sank down. And joined together.

Her husband guided her down onto her hands and knees, his rough hand sliding along her back to delve between her buttocks, down to where they valleyed into her sex. He spread her lips there, already slick with sweat and want, and she felt the familiar nudge of his smooth cock against her flesh. And then he was in her, thrusting with more force than he ever used in their marital bed at home.

Noth grunted under his assault, a low animal noise ripped from her throat. She felt his hand tangling in her hair, yanking backward as the cock went deeper, and deeper. Stabbing a tingly place inside of her just behind her bladder, making her legs shake and her belly contract. She screamed, thrashing in a wild frenzy - trying to fling herself forward and back, to feel more of the shaft inside her, touching all around.

She lost herself in the rhythm, feeling other bodies around her moving in time to it. The heat of the fire sent rivulets of sweat over her shoulders, down between her breasts that heaved and swung with her husband's every pound against her.

At some point, he let her go. Whether he had cum or not, Noth couldn't say - she knew he needed to find a vessel for his seed that could bear fruit. She got to her feet, urged on by the drug in her blood and the light in the sky to seek another cock to satisfy her. Her legs wobbled and shook under her, wetness running down her legs.

All around her, men and women - elf or human - were joined in fierce, strange couplings. A woman knelt beneath two men embracing one another, fitting the underside of both their cocks to her mouth. Two elven wives held a human woman between them, dandling her breasts, each inserting many fingers into her cunt, her anus. A human man bore down on a prone body, his naked cock a wet pink flash in the light from the fires.

Noth quivered with jealousy. She wished it were her - everywhere she looked, where elves and men bent and thrust, pulled and pinched, she longed to see herself.

Master, she thought, eyes scanning the crowd. Only half-aware of what she wanted, she went searching for Eiri among the twining, writhing flesh. Where are you...?

Somehow, Noth found herself beside Chuka. Their mouths were both wet with blood, though Noth could not remember feeding. Panting, dizzied, she became aware that they were kissing one another, tasting the blood on each other's lips and laughing like children. She pulled Chuka along with, seeking more prey, seeking Eiri.

They found Hallanewae straddling a lithe elven girl, her legs flailing wildly beneath him. He saw them approach and jerked his cock out of her, pushing himself up off of her to face them, his dick quivering, unspent. Noth looked - it was bigger than she expected, its length and girth exaggerated by his slight hips and lean thighs.

She licked her lips and held out her hand. Somewhere in her mind a savage desire bubbled up, to mount this elf, kinsman of her husband and Eiri's bully. To subjugate him beneath her, drown him in her satisfaction.

He bared his teeth in something between a grin and a snarl, grabbed his cock and waved it at them - inviting. Taunting.

Chuka went to him first, grasping his proffered staff with both backs and rolling her palms over it. Noth came up behind her, kissed the younger vampire's neck and locked eyes with the elf, compelling him to go to his knees.

He fought her and she felt a moment of struggle, rebellion in her mind making her legs shake. Chuka knelt and put his cock in her mouth and Hallenwae's eyes closed, his head lolling back - those leaves in his hair shaking and waving. Noth reached over Chuka to grasp, lower him to the ground.

They kissed him, moving their heads all up and down his body. Noth found his mouth and rammed her tongue between his narrow lips, tasting the bitter cordial, the salt of someone else's seed in his mouth. Her head was clearing, her senses sharpening. She did not want to look into his eyes again, lest she lose her appetite.

She straddled his head, swinging her leg over his head to rest her knees on either side of his shoulders. She buried that smug face with her sex, lowering herself down onto him. She felt his little tongue dart out, flicking her. Like the rest of him it was narrow, pointy. He thrust the tip of it into her like a dick, up through her folds to the place where his kinsman had been only moments before.

Was it moments? Like in Faery, time under the Harvest Moon didn't matter. Noth swayed against the stinging, stabbing kisses underneath her, rubbing her engorged clit against the elf's chin. Chuka sat across from her, riding his cock, her small, firm breasts bouncing. Noth stopped to watch her, watch the moonlight move over her skin like a living thing - ghostly pale moonbeams like fingers on her chest. They rocked together like children on a playground toy, one rising up when the other thrust herself down.

The stinging kisses between her legs began to burn. Noth twisted, rising up on her knees to get away from Hallenwae's smothered face, looking down between thighs legs. His face was sticky and wet with her juices - and a smear of blood along his mouth.

His or mine? she wondered, dazed.

Then he turned and bit her thigh, hard - every single one of his teeth sinking deep into her skin.

...

"We need to talk," Noth began.

Her thigh still stung where Hallenwae bit her even now, three days after the Harvest Festival. She ached somewhere else, too, but the bite marks there were shallow - less deliberate. Without a proper coffin sleep, the wounds were slow to heal.

Eldunord dressed her thigh for her, pressing an herb poultice into the punctures and binding it with a clean linen bandage. She sat in the bowl of his favorite tree, letting him tend to her. For the first two days, she forebode to confront him - sitting quietly while he murmured solicitously at her and tended her. But now, having thought it over, she couldn't put it off any longer.

"Husband," she said. "Look at me."

They locked eyes. He was kneeling between her legs, his hand still on her wounded thigh. She couldn't compel him, but she wanted him to know her thoughts. At any moment, he might melt away, slip off into Faery.

"I need to know what you're making instead of Fulbright," she said.

"Hallenwae was just got carried away with the festival..." Eldunord began to say, dismissing her.

"Bullshit. He drank from me," Noth said, slapping her thigh. The pain shot up her leg, keeping her mind clear, focused. After the festival, she no longer trusted that her husband wouldn't slip something into her food to make her as pliant and willing as she'd been that night.

She continued, "I've worked in product a long time. You don't make things that people don't need or didn't ask for; there's no money in that. So I need to know: who asked for a coffee that grants vampirism?"

It was the kind of question her father would ask when she reported back to him. If there was some business case for a coffee like that, which Starbucks hadn't outlined in their agreement, Ipomoea was potentially getting screwed out of profits and stuck with costs and liability. If it was something else - like a partnership with some other entity unknown to the vampires supplying the blood - it was fraud and theft of trade secrets.

Beyond even that, Noth needed to know why an elf bit her. Particularly as her husband saw fit to scold her for beating the shit out of Hall after he did it. As far as she knew, the elf was still alive. But he hadn't been conscious when the priests pulled her off of him.

"How jealous you are," her husband said. "Is it only that you miss your job so much that you concern yourself? Or that you regard your nature as something secret?"

If only you knew how secret my nature really is, she thought. She touched her wound, pressing her thumb into the poultice. Pain kept her focused, the promise of the quiet gray sanctuary somewhere behind it.

She even had to admit that in the moment - when she still rode Hall's face and whatever madness that possessed him to bite her first struck - the pain had been part of the pleasure. Not dissimilar from feeling Eiri's stinging slaps to her face. Tingly, and warm behind the delicious shock.

Focus on the issue, her father would have scolded her.

"That's not the issue," Noth said to her husband. "This is a business agreement. From what I can see, you're in violation of the terms - tampering with the formula, running up the budget. And where is this even being sold? Is it being sold?"

He started to rise, to drift away into the mists where she couldn't follow. She felt the tree around her responding to him, sagging a little as he withdrew his mystical energy from it.

"Don't walk away from me!" she shouted. But of course, he kept walking - swallowed by the mists. "How can you call this a marriage? You're not even trying!"

He left her there, miserable and out of sorts. Noth sat in the tree, too upset even to wander off alone. For the first time in what felt like decades, she let herself cry - finally giving vent to all the pain and frustration and lingering after-effects of the Harvest Festival. Self-loathing lurked under her tears; the delusion that if only she were better, stronger, or smarter, she wouldn't be trapped in a bad deal, a bad marriage.

Once, centuries ago, she'd expressed something like this to her father in the rare one-on-ones he held with his children working in the family business. She couldn't remember what set her off at the time, but she felt miserable and worthless. Pathetic and small.

"Nothera," her father said back then. "We're practically immortal. Stronger and smarter than almost anything else on earth. But do you know what your brothers and sisters say to me when they tell me their worst fears? 'Why doesn't he like me?' 'I'll never find a girlfriend!' That's what worries them, what keeps them up at night. Keeps me up, too! As it turns out, we never really stop being human."

...

Sometime later, he came back. It could have been hours. It could have been days. But Noth was dry-eyed and calm, ready to renew the discussion. Bring up divorce, if it came to that.

"I'm sorry," he said. Eldunord knelt at her feet, his great head bowed. He reached out her hands to her, his fingers trembling. She took his hands and felt the tension there, strung tight.

"I don't want to make you unhappy," he continued. "I want to make you feel the way you did the night of the festival. I want to see you, trembling and joyful, in the eyes of the Mother who shines down on us both. We are worlds apart, you and I. But through Her grace, I can make you feel good. And we can be together."

"How?" Noth asked. She wanted to talk business, but she had to meet him where he was to negotiate to where she wanted to be.

He lifted his head and looked into her eyes. Still holding her hands, he slid his fingers up her wrists, to the crook of her elbows. Soft, caressing. His familiar preamble to sex.

She felt weary, exasperated. Not in the mood to be touched. But under his gaze, his pleading amber eyes, she softened. Willed herself to yield to his advances.

Marriage is compromise, she repeated to herself. He was trying. So should she.

He wound his arms around her and she reached hers up to clasp his back. Feeling his body pressed to hers, alive and trembling, the leaves of his hair tickling her face. He stood, still holding her, pulling her to her feet. He started to turn her toward the tree trunk, pushing her toward it.

Noth pressed herself to the wood, sighing a little to herself. She closed her eyes, trying to conjure a familiar fantasy of being tied to the tree.

Opened them again, shocked to find vines curling from the branches to encircle her wrists, her ankles. She gasped and turned to look at Eldunord. He stood behind her, smiling, elfish mischief glinting in those amber eyes.

"I can make you feel good," he repeated.

The vines were strong and springy. He controlled them as elves controlled all plant life, bidding it bend and twine to his will. He bound her with them, scratchy green tendrils coiling around her arms, beneath her thighs - lifting her against the trunk, spreading her legs. The gown she wore hung down, covering her sex pressed against the tree. She tested the strength of the coils, pulling. Shifting. They held fast, keeping her in place. Tied to the tree just as she fantasized.

Figures! Noth thought. Just when I'm thinking of divorce, my husband starts giving me the sex I like...

She strained against the vines, her breasts and thighs scraping the tree trunk as she struggled. Her husband stood just behind her, reaching out to caress her back, moving her hair a little over her shoulder.