Whispers of the Flesh (4 page)

Shit.

She whipped her head back around, her eyes black with fury. “You knew he was there, but you didn’t tell me. You wanted him to see us, to think we were . . . That’s why you . . .” She looked down at their bodies clasped together, then unwrapped her legs from around him and pushed him roughly away.

“Lili—”

She cracked her palm across his face, hard, throwing him off balance. His feet skittered on the floor of the pool. The water closed over his head as he flailed and choked, engulfed in a cauldron of lust, female rage—and shock.

She’d never struck him before, never come close to that kind of anger—not toward Elic, her Beloved, her
Khababu
.

Choking and sputtering, he found his footing and stood, water sluicing off him as he clawed his hair off his face. She was already out of the pool, facing away from him as she reached for the silken
lubushu
she’d tossed onto an iron chair before bathing—the yellow one, his favorite. She’d worn it tonight, he knew, as a gesture of conciliation after the tension between them earlier.

“Lili—”

“You think you’ve staked your claim,” she said unsteadily as she knotted the saronglike garment over her shoulder,“but you deceived me to do it. I should say that claim is now on rather shaky ground.”

She stalked off into the night.

Four

L
ILI AWOKE THE next morning to the dipping of her mattress and the familiar pressure of a hand, Elic’s hand, stroking her hip through the blanket as she lay curled up facing away from him. They usually slept together in one of their apartments—but not last night.

“Shalamu,”
he said softly. It was how they always greeted each other, each offering the salutation of the other’s homeland.
Shalamu
was the Akkadian equivalent of “Good day,” “Goodbye,” and “Peace.” Her customary response in the ancient tongue of Elic’s youth was
kveðja
. Lili couldn’t recall when it was that they’d developed this little ritual, but it had become, over time, their own private tradition, a way to connect with each other’s far-distant pasts, to remind each other that they weren’t alone anymore, that they shared a bond of intimacy and love and trust that was unsullied and absolute.

Until last night.

Tell me you’re mine . . . Say it.
He’d wanted Beckett to hear her say that, to know that although she might be free with her body, her heart belonged to Elic.

Lili still smoldered with indignation at his subterfuge. It wasn’t the fact of being seen naked and in the throes of passion that offended her; she often made love in the company of others—but by her own choice, and with her knowledge.

Elic was waiting for her to respond to his greeting with
kveðja.
“Good morning,” she said softly, tonelessly.

His hand left her hip.

Without turning to face him, she said, “How did you get in here, Elic?” She’d locked the door to her apartment on the top floor of the north range upon retiring, something she almost never did.

“I climbed up to a window.”

Of course.
“You shouldn’t have done that. Beckett might have seen you.”

“Why didn’t you go to him last night?”

She rolled over to face him. He was sitting on the edge of her big bed in his shirtsleeves looking pale and grim, his hair pulling free of the strip of leather tied around it at his nape.

“How do you know I didn’t?” she asked.

“I don’t smell him on you. I thought you were going to use your
mashmashu
and take him. Don’t tell me you’ve lost your desire for him.”

“No.” Her passion for the Englishman was like a fever; it made her skin prickle with heat, her heart quiver in her chest. She had wanted to go to him, wanted to whisper her Akkadian incantation and devour him, to slake her terrible hunger. Instead, she’d lain awake half the night envisioning his body laid bare to her eyes, her hands, her mouth, her savage, ungovernable lust.

Many times during the night, she’d tried to sweep such thoughts away, to pacify her mind so that she could sleep, but she couldn’t stop imagining David Beckett stripped of that reserve he wore like armor, groaning and shuddering as she coaxed him into one ferocious climax after another. The fever had consumed her, seething through her to pool wet and pulsing between her legs. She’d whimpered in frustration with her breath coming fast, hips straining. How dearly she’d wished, not for the first time, that she had the ability to bring herself to orgasm. Of the few human traits that she envied, that one was foremost.

It had taken a grueling effort of will to keep from stealing into Beckett’s chamber and relieving that agony of arousal, as Elic had expected. But she had a different plan altogether for this
gabru.

“Why don’t you just fuck him and get it over with?” Elic asked.

“Is that what you want me to do?”

Grimacing, he said, “Yes, goddammit, if that will get you to stop mooning over the bastard.” It was a reflection of what she’d told him last night in the bathhouse.
Once I’ve had this
gabru,
and my cravings have been fed, my ardor will diminish—you’ll see.

Sitting up with the bedcovers tucked around her, for she did not care to be naked for this conversation, she said, “I have decided not to use the
mashmashu
with the Englishman. It’s been some time since I’ve attempted to seduce a
gabru au naturale
.It takes a bit longer, to be sure, and there can be complications, but the anticipation adds a piquant dimension, and I do so love a challenge.”

“What challenge is there in running prey to ground if that prey so clearly wants to be caught?”

“I’ve been bored. It’s a diversion.”

“Or perhaps it’s just a way to hurt me,” he said. “Is that it, Lili? You want to punish me for last night, so you set about
wooing
this fucking gardener instead of just—”

“I’m not wooing him,” she said, “just . . . enticing him, as human women do.”

“No incantatory assistance?” he asked skeptically. “None at all?”

She thought about it. “I might expose him to the
magnétisme hallucinatoire
if my unalloyed charms prove insufficient. It would be more entertaining, however, to rely solely on the dance of flirtation and possession.”

“Humans cannot perform that dance cold-bloodedly—you know that. You should be discouraging any feelings he may be harboring for you, not nurturing them—and your own, in the bargain. But that’s really the point, isn’t it? To make me watch the two of you become more and more enamored of each other as you conduct this
dance
of yours, all the while knowing it’s my fault you’ve chosen this route instead of just taking him like you take all the others.”

“Elic—”

“What do you want of me, Lili?” he demanded, that vein distending on his flushed forehead as it did whenever he was agitated—or climaxing. “I would take back what I did last night in a heartbeat if I could. You must know how sorry I am. When will you stop giving me the cold shoulder and let things go back to where they were before?”

Lili looked away from his bleak, searing eyes so that she could sort through her thoughts. She could chide him for how long it had taken him to apologize, but what purpose would that serve?

“I know you’re sorry,”she said softly, “but you did bring this on yourself, and I . . .” Her voice breaking, she said damply, “I’m hurt, Elic. It stung, you deceiving me like that. Of all the people to do that to me . . .” A spasm gripped her throat, choking off the rest of her words.

Elic stroked her arm, saying softly,
“Mins Ástgurdís . . .”

“Please don’t call me that, not now,” she said, flinching away from him.

He sighed.

She said, “If you decide to turn the tables on me by transforming into Elle and taking him before I’ve had the chance to—”

“I won’t do that.”

“If you do, the cold shoulder will be the least of it.”

There came a long moment of awful silence, and then he got up and left—through the door this time.

She scrubbed the scalding tears from her cheeks, drew in a breath, and let it out in a long, shaky exhalation.

Even when Lili yearned for a human man as she yearned for the handsome, quietly intense David Beckett, her beloved Elic always occupied the deep, warm center of her heart. He was the other half of her, her bedrock, her one and only
Khababu
.

He should know that. He should have enough faith in her, in them, to know that her feelings for Beckett, springing as they did from her bodily needs, were trifling compared to her feelings for him.

But he didn’t have that faith. He didn’t trust her to keep her passion for this
gabru
in perspective. His jealousy had impelled him to stage that tableau of ersatz lovemaking as a demonstration to his imagined rival of his possession of her.

He truly had deceived her. It was the first time he’d ever done anything like that.

It would be the last.

Five

L
ILI LEANED AGAINST a massive oak late that afternoon, watching David Beckett, his back to her, drawing in a sketchbook propped on an easel he’d set up facing the château on the West Lawn. She was more than a quarter mile away from him, at the edge of the sprawling woods surrounding the castle, but by concentrating her vision, she could see him as clearly as if he were standing right in front of her.

Upon his return around noon from Clermont-Ferrand, Beckett had changed into the same wide-brimmed hat, brown frock coat, loose nankeen trousers, and scuffed, utilitarian boots that he’d worn during his moonlight stroll the night before. He’d spent most of the afternoon touring the castle and grounds with the sketchbook, in which he’d recorded his observations in the form of notes and quick drawings, with Lili watching from time to time at a discreet distance.

About an hour ago, he’d set up his easel on the carriage drive out front in order to sketch the gatehouse and the drawbridge spanning the last remaining section of dry moat, the other three having been filled in long ago. He’d then moved the easel to its present location so that he could capture the castle’s western aspect and the rose garden that had been there when Lili first came to Grotte Cachée in the spring of 1749.

She’d arrived with Sir Francis Dashwood’s infamous Hellfire Club, their Black Masses and orgies serving to satisfy her incessant sexual cravings without subjecting her to social stigma and the wrath of the Church. Elic, beautiful golden Elic, had captivated her from the first. Like her, he was a slave to his sexual passions, an enslavement that had doomed them both to an interminable lifetime of physical intimacy with strangers and emotional intimacy with no one. It had taken very little time for them to develop a deep communion of the soul. Communion of the body, true communion, they would experience only in their dreams.

Lili shifted her gaze from Beckett to the distant castle, peering through the double glass door that led from the rose garden into the dining room. She had to squint to penetrate the glare of sunlight on the myriad leaded panes, which painted a stream of radiant little squares on the two-hundred-year-old Savonnerie carpet and the Flemish lace tablecloth swathing the long dining table.

Scanning the shadowy perimeter of the room, she spotted, high up at the edge of the door to
le Salon Ambre
, a pale smudge that had to be a face. She homed in on that face to find that it belonged, unsurprisingly, to Elic, who was evidently spying on her as she spied on Beckett. No doubt he thought himself too well concealed for her to spot him, even with her keen eyesight; were it not for the sweeping brim of her straw sunbonnet, which helped her eyes to focus by shading them, he might have been right. As for his view of her, she was certainly much too far away for him to make out clearly. Attired as she was in a day dress of sea green shot silk, she would be visible to him as a pale speck against the ancient woods at her back.

Fluffing up her skirt, she strode across the lawn toward Beckett. The Englishman, having no doubt heard the whispering of her skirts against the grass as she approached, turned and stared at her. He set down his pencil, removed his hat, and bowed.

She smiled her most engaging smile. “I have been watching you, Mr. Beckett.”

He looked as if he were scrabbling for a response.

“The intensity with which you steep yourself in your work fascinates me,” she said as she came up to him. “You keep so very still, save for your right hand and the occasional movements of your head. I find it curious that you look at the château more than you look at your drawing.”

“Ah. Yes. Well . . .” Clearly rattled by her sudden appearance, he gestured toward the castle and said, “One must scrutinize one’s subject if one is to capture the truth of it.”

“The truth? It is naught but a building.”

“I meant, well . . . not just the outside, but all of it, the entirety of—”

“Oh, my word,” she said when she saw the drawing he’d been working on, which was rendered in deft and subtle strokes, the highlights and shading so skillful that the west wall of the château and the garden bordering it seemed almost to rise off the page. “It is really quite wonderful,” she said sincerely. “You’ve a remarkable gift, Mr. Beckett.”

“You are too kind, Miss Lili.”

She invited him to replace his hat, restating the request more firmly when he demurred, one of those mannerly but pointless gestures inculcated in well-brought-up gentlemen these days.

Resting a gloved hand on his arm, she said, “Please call me Lili, without the ‘Miss.’ Such formality only serves to discourage free discourse and intimacy, do you not agree?”

“I . . .well, if you insist.” She could feel him tense slightly through his coat sleeve. Of course he said, “You must call me David, then.”

“I would like that.”

Nodding toward his sketch, she said,“Pray, what fate do you have in store for our venerable old rose garden?”

“Venerable it may be, but it is passé in its formality, and rather tired-looking. I propose instead that the dining room open onto a terrace garden planted with ornamental trees and bushes and, of course, flowers. Not roses, though—they don’t quite suit what I have in mind. There would be a colonnade for shade, and appropriate statuary, and a small fountain. Stairs would lead down to a reflecting pool on the lawn, this stretch of which”—he gestured with a sweep of his arm—“will be reshaped in a more pleasing manner, with rolling hillocks, and trees planted in picturesque clusters. Oh, and stone bridges should be built over the streams to facilitate strolls about the grounds.”

“It sounds lovely,”she said,“and most ambitious, but I must say it saddens me to think of destroying all those beautiful old rosebushes.”

“Oh, they won’t be destroyed. I’ve another garden in mind—well, several others—but one of them is to be a small, walled rose garden tucked away in the woods that one can only find if one knows about it. The roses can be transplanted there.”

“A secret garden? How tantalizing.”

“I shall propose as well that something be done with the castle courtyard,” he said. “Aside from the central fountain and a few hedges, it is quite bare. At the very least, I would suggest perennial beds with stone benches, but what I would truly love to see is fruit trees—cherry, perhaps, say two dozen arranged in . . . I’m boring you.”

“Not at all,” she said earnestly. “It sounds beautiful.”

“I say, are you not chilly without a shawl?” he asked. “For all that the sun is shining, it is still a bit cool.”

“Not to me. My blood tends to run a bit warmer than most.” Taking his hand, she pressed it to her cheek. “You see?”

“Ah. Why, yes.” David surprised her, given his reserved manner, by keeping his hand there after she’d taken hers away, his expression one of unaccountably keen interest. “Very warm, indeed.” He stroked her cheek as if unaware of what he was doing, only to yank his hand away a moment later, clearly appalled at the liberty he’d taken.

He turned away, saying, “I, er . . . I suppose I’m done for now. The light has shifted. I shall finish up tomorrow.”

He lifted the sketchbook, whereupon she took it from his hand, saying “May I?”

“There’s really nothing much to—”

“Oh, how lovely,” she remarked when she turned to the previous page, on which he’d drawn the entrance to the château. “Such detail. I love how you’ve captured the shadow of the gatehouse on the drawbridge.”

“Thank you,” he said as he held his hand out for the book, “but I daresay there is little else in there of interest.”

She flipped back through the previous pages, covered with dense paragraphs of penciled notes interspersed with sketches of the landscape and outbuildings—though not of the bathhouse, which he had evidently yet to revisit. The drawings all looked to have been hastily executed except for one—of her.

“Oh,” she breathed. It was a portrait of her lounging on that gilt chaise in
le Salon Ambre
the night before—just her, not Elic, who’d been sitting next to her. The black, burnished mass of her hair contrasted sharply with the whiteness of her throat and shoulders, their curves delineated in loose, undeniably sensual strokes. Her own eyes gazed back at her with dark, dreamy interest; her generous lips were parted in a secret smile. That he’d executed such an evocative likeness from memory made it all the more remarkable.

She looked up to find David regarding her pensively. His eyes, shaded by the brim of his hat, were huge and dark; his color was high.

Closing the sketchbook, she set it back on the easel and curled her arm around his. “Walk with me, David. There’s something I’d like to show you.”

David couldn’t help but recall, as Lili guided him, arm in arm, toward the bathhouse, what he’d seen last night as he’d walked up this same path—Lili and Elic, awash in moonlight and completely naked, locked in illicit union. At first, he hadn’t realized they were actually copulating, given their upright position.

He wished he could erase the image from his mind. If only he were devoid of fleshly desires, how much easier it would be to remain pure and continent, to keep his mind on higher things without being reminded incessantly of the pleasures he’d foresworn when he entered minor orders. Such pleasures, being reserved exclusively for the marital act, were to be abjured for the remainder of his life on earth. Only a handful of times since adolescence had he resorted to self-gratification, each occasion leaving him deeply ashamed and penitent. When his body betrayed his moral resolve by ejecting its ever-burgeoning cache of seed during a libidinous dream, as it had last night, he felt nearly as much shame as if he’d expelled that seed by his own hand.

The dream had begun with a sense of suffocation as he awakened, or dreamt he’d awakened. Panic flooded him as he tried to fill his lungs with air, and couldn’t. The reason was immediately apparent.

A woman, or a creature that resembled a woman, was sitting astride his chest, grinding against him in a slow, voluptuous rhythm. She was naked, with torrents of glossy black hair, reptilian eyes, and a tail that flared out at the tip before narrowing into a point, like a fleshy arrowhead.

He tried to rise up so as to fling her off, but he found he couldn’t move and couldn’t speak, although he could breathe again, albeit stertorously. Her tongue, which was long and forked, slithered out from between a pair of needle-sharp fangs. She lifted her full breasts and flicked that snakelike tongue over the nipples until they grew long and stiff and purplish red.

Kneeling over him—she was farther down now, near his hips—she seized her tail and licked the tip, growling with lust as it swelled, a treacly fluid oozing from a little slit on the end. She pressed it to David’s own rigidly erect organ, squeezing out a dribble of fluid as she stroked it up and down his length, the lubricious caress wresting a moan from him.

The tail twitched wildly, thickening to several times its original girth. Using her fingers, with their clawlike nails, she spread her labia wide open and pushed the engorged tip into her sex until she couldn’t shove it any farther. She aimed David’s slickened organ at her nether orifice, rubbing the glans against the puckered little opening while thrusting the tail in and out of her sex.

“I’m yours,” she hissed. She pushed him into her, then pressed down slowly, groaning with the effort.

He groaned, too, as he penetrated her, his shaft inching deeper, deeper, into the impossibly snug flesh. It gripped him like a fist gloved in cool satin. The lack of warmth should have repelled him, as should his being forced to perform an act of sodomy, but the pleasure was mounting too swiftly, robbing him of his qualms—of his very thoughts.

“Yours, all yours,” she whispered in Lili’s voice, her movements growing sharper, more frenetic. “I belong to you, David, and you belong to me. You’re
mine
now.”

She was kneading her sex with one hand and manipulating the tail with the other, as David thrust faster, deeper . . . for he found that he could move his hips now. He’d been reduced to a rutting beast, straining and grunting in a frenzy of lust.

“Fuck me,” she ordered in a hellishly deep, hoarse voice. “Fuck my arse. Fuck it hard, David. Squirt it full.”

Loath to submit to this unholy creature, he tried to lie still, to resist his body’s urgent quest for release, but it was so hard, agonizingly hard. His ballocks tingled and swelled, his groin growing tight and heavy with seed. He was gasping for air, his heart racing.

Hold back, hold back. Don’t let her make you spill. Don’t give her that victory.

“Ah, yes,” she said as the tail began to pump, pulsating tremors coursing all along its length. She milked it as she rubbed herself, moaning the foulest things David had ever heard as her body convulsed wildly. Hot cream oozed from her sex onto David’s lower belly.

“No,” he groaned, struggling to stave off the inevitable as the tingling in his ballocks spread down his legs and up his turgid organ to the throbbing tip.

“Yes, David. Now,” she rasped, riding him hard, churning her hips. “Shoot your load. Shoot it deep.”

His back locked into an arch as the spasms ripped through him, discharging gush after gush of pent-up seed, a screaming deluge of it.

He’d awakened moaning in time with the last few diminishing spurts, lying on his back with his buttocks clenching, clenching . . .

“God’s bones,” he’d whispered as his lungs strove to stop heaving, his body to stop quaking. Throwing aside the bedcovers, he’d lifted his shirt, muttering “Shit” upon finding his thin linen drawers soaked through with his spendings.

He’d rinsed out his drawers and lain awake the rest of the night, wondering what to make of that dream. In its immediate aftermath, he’d briefly nurtured the notion that it might not have been a dream at all, but a real diabolical visitation. However, even with his mind prone to flights of fancy as it tended to be during nocturnal musings, he’d had to conclude that it had been no actual succubus ravishing him in his sleep, but rather his demon-obsessed mind.

“What do you think of our bathhouse?” inquired Lili from the arched doorway of the edifice, which looked rather like a Roman temple fitted out with wrought-iron furniture and scatterings of jewel-toned pillows.