The Vampire Lord

"Look, I don't know who you are," Kursor said, "goodbye."

"Can I come in?" she asked.

The intruder smiled wider, her eyes narrowed, and Kursor saw long fangs glisten behind her moist lips. A strong, strawberry tongue snaked up and wet them with her cherry saliva. Kursor gulped as she showed off her menacing merchandise. He felt a small, cold hand pressed flatly against his abs.

He opened the door wide and gestured for her to come in, watching her, mystified. She was a monster and he knew it even before he saw the fangs, but deep down, so was he.

"What a depressing place," she said as she sat down on the edge of his grey couch and straightened her tight, red dress over her pale thighs. Kursor was struck with the strange paradox of the mature and graceful movements of her young woman's body, she smacked weirdly against his intuition.

"Uh, do you mind taking your shoes off?" Kursor asked, a little miffed she marched in so rudely with her dirty boots or whatever they were.

"Later," she said, "first, I want to look at you, come here. And turn the lights off."

Kursor found himself obeying her despite how weirded out he was. She had a kind of voice that sank into the warm folds of your will. He felt her tongue dipping in between the syllables of his thoughts and throwing him off with her every word.

"What's your name?" Kursor asked, trying to regain some control, "I'm Michael."

"You can call me Mux," she replied, examining him. Mux was taking him in greedily with every sense she had, "what's that smell?"

"What smell?" Kursor said, confused.

"There's a wild smell, its intoxicating," Mux said, "is that your hair?"

"You can smell that from the couch?" Kursor said, impressed. "Look are you a stalker or something? Why are you here in my apartment?"

"Come here, I want to touch you," Mux said, animated. Kursor obliged, he felt strange, the whole scene was surreal, maybe he was still dreaming. She disconnected him from the drab reality of his everyday nothingness. He was both repulsed and attracted to her mystery.

Mux gripped his wrist with her small hand and ran her fingers up his creamy smooth skin. Kursor watched in awe as she became visibly excited, exploring the cyan rivers of his arm with her hungry eyes and fingers. She swallowed and broke her trance looking up at him suddenly. Those two white fangs beamed into him with a violent promise. He stood transfixed, gazing into the wetness of her sparkling coal eyes.

"Do you want to feel them?" Mux asked.

"Feel what?" Kursor said, wrinkling his brow.

"Do you want to feel me coursing inside you?" Mux asked, "do you want to feel my loving teeth pierce the veil of your sorrows? Do you want to be reborn into the darkness of my embrace? Do you want to leave this drab human world?"

Kursor swallowed with anticipation, "you're a vampire."

She nodded and sank her fangs deeply into his left wrist with a muffled moan that sent her eyes fluttering into the back of her head. He felt the sudden pain of her sharp pricks like two rose thorns digging deep into his flesh. Soon the pain died away, replaced by the cold fire of numbness. Her frigid kiss sucked him hard with thirsty lips and a squirming tongue. The girl-vampire's shining dark holes peered lovingly and fiercely into his own as she hungrily consumed him with strange moans.

He was close to fainting when she stopped slurping and pulled her teeth away in a long dangling trail of bloody saliva. She stood and he saw her bite down on the edge of her tongue with a single fang, producing a thick ink that began to fill her mouth. Her hands threaded into the dark curls of his head and pulled his face down to hers. Mux locked her mouth to his and he felt her strong tongue and cold blood surge into him with the torrential bliss of obliteration. Mux held him fast as he squirmed from the intensity of her fixing kiss.

Kursor tripped out of his memories when he saw a black spider crawling across the intricate wall behind Mux.

"What's it like in Car-Ko-Va?" Atheros asked, "are there pretty vampire men like me?"

"Yes, but none as beautiful as you, my love. In the heart of it, there's the night, all the time, you can walk freely outside without fear of frying your eyes," Mux laughed, "it's our natural habitat, the first vampires came from the dark heart of Carkova. I haven't been back there in so long, I can hardly wait to return. As soon as you touch its chaotic shores, you find yourself wrapped up in alien delights."

Mux drifted off to her own memories for a second.

"But what's it like?" Atheros asked, unsatisfied with Mux's answer.

"The vampire city is called Magulaster," Theros piped up with what he had learned in the palace library, "it's home to the eleven high houses of the civilized colonies. Everything you would ever need as a vampire is in the night city of Magulaster."

"Civilized colonies?" Kursor said, taking his eyes away from the ambling arachnid and looking at his bookish brother.

"Yes, not all vampire lines are as civilized as us," Theros continued, "some give into the blood-lust and are unable to bond with their thralls as easily."

"How do you know all this?" Kursor said impressed by his condescension.

"The library," Theros said.

"What do you think the nerd does all day in there?" Atheros chimed in, his head on his hand.

"Yeah, but how can you read the language?" Kursor asked, "I checked it out once and every book was in Rosethorn or some other weird language, I couldn't read any of it."

Theros smiled and began wiping his glasses off.

"Because I tutored him," Mux said.

"What?" Kursor said, sitting up in his chair, "how come you never tutored me? Atheros did she tutor you too?"

Atheros shook his head delicately, "she taught me other things." He smiled at Mux. She returned it, bloodied, over her miniature goblet.

"That's because Theros has an aptitude for it," Mux said, patting a hand on the table towards him, "He was a Doctor before I turned him. Kursor, you and Atheros are not the type to learn different languages, so easily."

"Well how are we going to function in this new land if we don't know the language?" Kursor asked, insulted.

"Everyone in the house speaks English silly, Rosethorn isn't necessary, at least not yet," Mux said, "so you won't have a problem, you'll pick up Rosethorn eventually just by living in Carkova. No sense wasting all our time if you don't have the type of mind for it. Plus..." She stopped and frowned.

"Plus what?" Kursor asked.

"Never mind," She said, her mood darkening a little over her goblet.

Kursor was quiet, that sense of foolishness came over him again and spread apart the pages of his ignorance wide with two mighty fingers. He was going to some magick fantasy land in a month and had no idea what he was in for. He looked at Theros, he wanted to be mad at him, but it was impossible, there wasn't a malevolent cell in the pretty nerd's body. Kursor also knew what the perverted price his horny tutor was probably costing him in stamina too.

"So there are others in our 'family'?" Atheros asked, air quoting the word family.

"Yes, our family is the smallest," Mux said, pausing briefly and shifting in her seat uncomfortably, "but third oldest. I have four other sisters who each left at the same time I did to bring back our own brood. That's our house sigil over there," Mux said pointing to a purple stroked, black banner with a red hourglass in the center. Her smile returned, "the hourglass of bloody sand, time conquered, it's eternal in its stillness." She sighed nostalgically, "I can't wait to see my sisters and breathe Carkova's musky night air again." Mux smiled a deep smile. Then it changed slowly into a deep grimace and her eyes were distant, but only for a second. Kursor found it curious.

"Is there anyone else in the family, or is it just your sister's and their broods?" Atheros asked.

"No, there's one more," Mux said, hiding her face with her empty glass. Kursor saw her hand tremble just once.

"Well? Who is it?" Atheros pressed, his little bat shaking with curiosity. Kursor assumed Atheros probably felt the same way he did, they hardly knew anything about what they were or where they were going.

The door to the kitchen opened and the four thralls entered the room in their usual order three of them carrying a unique glass with an ounce of their blood. They stood next to each of their masters and presented a squat glass to them, except for Mux's thrall.

Kursor looked up at his thrall from his seat and took the shot from her dainty hand. The smell of her blood flooded his mind and he felt his fangs salivate. His thrall noticed this and she bit her lip and looked at him with an intensity of one presenting her slippers for inspection. Her large sapphire plates gazed at him with a great impatience. Kursor took her in, staring at her longer than usual, almost for the first time.

Her pale golden hair moved slightly in the airflow of the room, her smooth cheeks were faintly blushed, her coral lips were moist, yet despite this, there was an innocent split in her bottom lip. Her skin was healthy and dewy, her petite elegance enhanced by the quiet expressions of silent longing for him. Her neck was long and tender, the brand of his teeth was well taken care of and on display at all times. His thrall began to melt under his glare, never had he looked at her so long, truly looked at her, these seven cold years and it was making her waver like a hot flash in the arctic.

Kursor noticed her lip, that split was always there, wasn't it? What secrets did it hold? He extended a thumb and pressed it like a stamp, she winced with surprise. The soft warm cut left a vivid red "I" on his icy finger. She had the brightest, most saturated blood he had ever seen, it was always a pure red, not rusty, not orange, not brown, but always the virgin ruby (#FF0000) red (255,0,0). Kursor licked his thumb and looked at her. Her eyes quivered and fluttered, she gripped her skirt and sucked in her bottom lip, tasting his touch just as he tasted her.

"Cheers!" Theros called out. The corny ejaculation interrupted Kursor from his new discovery. He lazily raised the small warm glass with the rest of his family at the table, his brother's gesture somehow always ruined the mood.

He drank her in a gulp and tasted her life flow through him in tangy sweet pleasures. He looked at her again as he rode the wave of her heat. Something was stirring in him. He made eye contact with her as he absorbed her. The heady flood of euphoria filled him with a hot sucking kiss. His eyes lowered as he crested hill after hill of ecstasy, all the while looking into her. The fresh aperture in his mind throbbed and parted slightly. Something fell in from her look.

Intimacy.

That was the word they was searching for and it hung out in the void like a plump gumdrop. It dawned on him, the relationship between a thrall and its master was nothing but one of the most intimate. He realized he had been foolishly running away from that with her. But now he saw, understood. For the moment at least, while she was in him. His words in her.

She watched him intently as he tasted her life, consumed her, enjoyed her. Her cheeks were on fire and her eyes aflame as she read every subtle expression on the beautiful page of his face. He took in that little morsel of her with a thirsty word. Just a small drop of her gave him great pleasure and now she could finally confirm it through the unguarded honesty of his brilliant green eyes.

The funnels surged like vortexes of emerald flames, sucking her into pale fires of strange desires letter by letter. She had wanted this for so long, the shared experience of knowing. Of him knowing her through her blood. His pleasure infected her through his eyes and she let out a silent heated sigh and gripped the folds of her skirt harder with desperate fingers. She wanted more, the cerulean oceans of her eyes turned to whirlpools as she turned the page.

Their windows sucked each other in greedily as their minds entwined line by line.

Kursor saw everything inside her. He lifted the small glass of her mind to his lips and licked it dry with a thirsty tongue in front of her. Her heart was beating beyond measure, Kursor could hear it. She wanted to rip it out and have him eat it. She wanted to bite her tongue off and spill into him, become the blood, the ink that pumped through his wonderful body, merge with him utterly. She felt his mind probe into her for the first time like a black snake squirming through the holes of her eyes. She let him in. The two became lost in their first shared:

intimacy.

Mux cleared her throat once.

Kursor turned towards her. She wore a big grin. She stared at the two of them.

"Finally, you actually see each other," Mux said.

Kursor sighed and looked down into the retina of his thrall's empty glass. That little hole Wheeler made was starting to do exactly what he worried it would. Emotions new and old were leaking in and out of him now.

Time was waking up and things were beginning to move quickly, he could feel the wheel start to pick up speed as the new sense in him began to develop. It was something fresh and thrilling, a pristine fruit with a glossy skin. His mouth watered. What was the idea he had discovered? He tried to recall it, searching the manifold of his mind for the tender sprout of that delicious notion:

intimacy.

~3~

Kursor sat at a large winged desk in his study. The red cocoon of a lamp hung over his journal as he scribbled away with a pen and ink. He was trying to dive deeper into his experience with Wheeler earlier in the night. Writing always helped him find ways of understanding himself and what was happening to him.

He lost himself in examining his own will, what he wanted. His body and mind relaxed as he sunk the inky strokes into the paper before him. The orifice in the wall of his mind unclenched and loosened without him realizing it and a black snake thudded with a clatter onto his desk from thin air. Kursor's eyes widened and the scratching of his pen stopped as he stared into its rings of black and white eyes. The serpent flashed a green forked tongue and disappeared. Kursor blinked.

He rearranged the ink pot on the desk that the snake had disturbed. The snake had disturbed? How did a hallucination disrupt his desk? Kursor shivered and decided to give it up for the night, he was starting to go mad. He blamed Wheeler, that fucking bat messed up the sanctity of his mind.

His thrall was waiting outside his study door and he almost ran into her. She followed him down the hall and he thought about her. Did he still hate her? No, something was happening to him. It must of been that fucking bat. Kursor pinched the bridge of his nose, the grip of his control was slipping, things were leaking out and in, out and in. He was filling her up.

But why this thrall, why her? Kursor thought as he entered his bedroom The thrall still trailed behind him, expecting her nightly dismissal to come at any moment. He plopped down on the edge of his large, black, silky bed and began stripping for sleep.

"Close the door," Kursor commanded. She jerked to leave before realizing what he said. She shut the door, perplexed. He usually told her to go her by now.

He dug his fingers distractedly into the intricate wooden grooves of his bed, lost in the thought, why her? The fractal carvings surrendered under his powerful nails and he felt the inky lacquer giving way, he relaxed and dropped his hands into his lap. He analyzed the dark crud under his claws as they shrank back into him. Why did this thrall choose him of all the other books on the shelf? Why him?

The question bugged him, he couldn't stand not knowing. He added up what he had learned from the night in his head, the thrall seeks out their master, the master has no choice. Why? Shouldn't it be the other way round?

"Come here," Kursor said, without looking at her, still halfway in his thoughts and clothes.

She stood in front of him, anxious. All these new highs were exhilarating, but she was starting to become afraid. More than anything, the thought of losing these newfangled emotions scared her. So she stood there before him, nervous, and excited, hungry in her own way. Staring into the dream of his white chest.

"Take your dress off," Kursor ordered, flatly.

He wanted to take her all in, to memorize her body, to figure out why the universe matched her with him. The first place he thought to start with was with her visible form. Kursor believed everything, even living things, were symbols of what they truly represented. Just by studying the physical appearance of something, anything, you can begin to know what they were all about. What they meant.

The thrall complied and skittishly stripped before her master. She had done it countless times before when he fed on her, but never had he specifically asked to see her body without the intention of sucking her. Her heart was a swarm of bees in the moonlight.

Her dress glided to the ground in a cascading waterfall of silky blues and she reached around her back and undid the thin straps to her lacy bra. They fell down over her shoulders and slipped down her front, gliding along her shy arms to rest in a pile on top of the dress. The thrall stepped out of her dainty slippers and presented them to him. She stood before him in her thin silk panties, panting slightly. Her flat belly moved raggedly, filled with butterflies. Her hands and fingers skittered around the page nervously, unsure of where to rest.

"Everything, please," Kursor said.

Her eyes widened and she hesitated for a nanosecond. Everything? Never had he seen everything. What if? She gulped and slipped her long legs through her panties and added them to the pile next to the slippers.

Every little chamber in her body was going haywire under his glare. A million worries floated to the top of her head like dead fish. What if he didn't like what he saw, found fault? Oh no, she could feel the sweat of the pressure begin to drip from her armpits. What if he thought she was gross? The entire universe was on her shoulders, she was going to faint. He just sat there, his brow split with concentration as he examined her nubile, smooth, rosy body. She awkwardly stood still trying to keep her hands from trembling by pressing them flat against her sides. Her fingers dripped from his thick attention.

Kursor took her in slowly, the single freckle under her left eye, the one on her forearm, another on her neck. He examined her small breasts and perky, peachy nipples. She was sublime and he finally admitted it to himself. This was the first time he truly looked at her body. Her pale pink skin glowed with the yellow-gold aura of her near invisible blonde hairs. Her hair done up in braided loops around her ears like soft, platinum halos. A radiant glow of health poured from her small precious face as she peered into him. She was just a tad shorter than himself and everything about her made his libido scream. She was a treasure chest. His words a pirate.

His eyes traveled lower to her lengthy legs and he found two sets of three thin scars stacked one over the other, each with a small break in the middle of its line on her upper thigh. They would have been hidden under shorts or a dress. Kursor dragged a finger down the empty middle of the six straight delicate marks. She must of made the cuts sometime in her life before he turned her. He continued on.

Her curly blonde triangle of pubic hair rippled out from her rosy shrine like pale fire. Another dark freckle floated just on the edge before her silky thigh. Molecular chains of sweet, feline-scented musk tantalized him. Kursor ran a curious set of fingers through the shiny, coarse mangrove on a hungry whim. His thrall shivered with suppressed ecstasy under his touch. His fingers played with the sensitive smooth skin in between the thick sunny hair. His round nails danced in her forest like satyr's hooves. He had never touched her like this before, she glanced down and watched him play with her. She dripped. A powerful urge filled her, she wanted to guide his hand even lower. Those expert fingers teased and obsessed her, they infested her mind as she closed her eyes in utter delight of her Master's touch. She always had a thing for his fingers. His eyes and his deft fingers were her favorite pieces of him. She licked her lips.