Red Grow the Roses Read online

  His eyes were wide now, but his mouth a hard tight line.

  ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ she whispered. ‘Aren’t they all big and soft and juicy, just ready for you to stick your face in?’

  With a convulsive movement he flung her away from him and she sprawled back on the bark-covered ground, breasts bouncing and the wind knocked from her lungs. Robert took a step forward, looming over her, his fists clenched as if in revulsion – but the bulge in his trousers betrayed him. Lilla raised herself to her elbows, but didn’t try to sit up for the moment. This position suited her quite well: her legs had fallen apart and the crotch split in her capacious Victorian drawers was undoubtedly revealing her blonde snatch. And she had a very good view of Robert’s erection, which looked like it threatened to split the worn fabric of his tented trousers.

  ‘I don’t feed from humans,’ he hissed, trembling.

  ‘That’s what I heard. I just find it hard to believe.’ Rolling on to her knees, she reached out across the bark, to the discarded rose he’d cut for her. ‘Nasty sharp thorns these things have got,’ she mused, laying the stem across her bare breasts. With a twitch she drew it down, scoring her flesh with half-a-dozen needle-pointed thorns, shuddering as the pain burned through her. Pinpoints of blood rose on her pale skin and swelled, a string of rubies decorating the white flesh and the roseate nipples. ‘Ah,’ she groaned.

  Robert Wakefield seemed to grow taller; his hard-on bulged. She could taste the coppery tang of her victory.

  ‘Tell me, have you ever whipped a girl with your roses, Mr Wakefield?’ Lilla began to crawl backwards from him on hands and knees, arse swaying, breasts wobbling. ‘Maybe one of your servants? The parlourmaid perhaps? You ever taken a bunch of roses and whipped their tits?’ She put on a country accent for her next words, her voice suddenly breathlessly innocent but at the same time teasing: ‘Oh, Mr Wakefield, you wouldn’t be thinking of doing that to a poor innocent girl? I couldn’t bear that, sir – it’ll hurt something cruel. You wouldn’t want to ruin a helpless maid, would you, sir? You wouldn’t want that on your conscience?’

  Inhumanly swift, he lunged and grabbed the front of her bodice and yanked her up to slam her against one of the wrought-iron pillars. Eagerly Lilla extended her hands over her head and crossed them at the wrists, thrusting her breasts out so that he might feed. But he didn’t, not right away. He looked down at her with a face hollow with hunger, and then he took hold of her long drawers at the waist and snapped the drawstring with one tug of his wrists. He tore the damp, clinging cotton from her thighs to bare her sex, and then he tied her wrists with the twisted strips and secured her to an ornamental bracket high on the pillar, hauling her up on to her toes. She said nothing, breath and words robbed from her by anticipation, lips parted about her shallow breaths.

  His face mask-like, his eyes burning, he plunged his cold fingers between her thighs and up inside her, breaching the gates of her sex to take the measure of her heat, the slick of juices, the yielding sucking flex of her tight hole. Lilla writhed on his hand, twisting helplessly with each thrust of his wrist, and he watched her breasts jiggle and bounce, their pink points dewed in red. His teeth were so extended now that his upper lip did not hide them.

  ‘Oh, please,’ she gasped.

  ‘Shut up,’ he snarled. ‘You’ve said quite enough already.’

  Then he walked away.

  Lilla’s exposed skin seemed to crawl under every tiny movement of the air. The bite-marks of the rose burned. She watched in terror as he cut himself half a dozen long-stemmed roses without even looking at her and methodically stripped off the leaves. The crimson buds seemed to blaze on the tips of the stems as he turned and swished them experimentally.

  Oh, God, thought Lilla, her mouth dry and her pussy running wet. The dread and the desire for pain were part of her wiring as a vampire’s donor: for the icy stab of the incision followed by the rush of the bite itself, the magical whatever-it-was in their saliva that made being fed upon even better for the victim than for the devourer. She craved being eaten almost as much as she wanted to eat, and far more viscerally. Her whole body was inflamed with arousal now at the sight of a few droplets of her blood, with the anticipation of hurt. Reynauld himself had never whipped her – the bastard had such a poker up his arse that he would never stoop to indulging such a kink – but she wasn’t new to the pleasure of pain. She knew how well her body responded to a good spanking or to the bite of a crop, and roses were just a new variation on an old theme.

  When Robert Wakefield came back he had eight stems bunched in his hand. He took his stance on her right and used his left hand to push her head back, gripping her jaw and part-covering her mouth. Then he brought the whip flat across her breasts with a loud and stinging slap. Lilla convulsed, feeling the pain stab her with scores of tiny teeth. He struck again and again – not hard, but then he didn’t need to because the thorns did all the work for him, biting and tugging at her skin. She began to shriek, because she needed to and because she knew he wanted to hear it too, her screams breaking the seal of his cold fingers. Her whole body writhed and jerked, utterly helpless but cold no longer, burning now and wet with perspiration.

  After a dozen blows he stopped, breathing hard. He kept her head forced back so that she couldn’t see what sort of mess he’d made of her, but she could feel something damp trickling down between her tits and she didn’t know if it was sweat or blood. Stopping, he licked her breasts, his tongue cold and smooth and leaving a wake of prickling pleasure as he lapped and sucked. Even his tongue, for God’s sake, she thought, as he stirred her nipples and their buds burst into what felt like multi-petalled blooms of ecstasy, making her groan.

  ‘Bite me,’ she begged. ‘Please. Bite me.’

  He lifted his head to glare into her face, his mouth and chin smeared. But it was punishment she read in those pale eyes. He lifted his flail again and struck at her – this time harder, and across the tops of her thighs and her sex. Rosebuds broke, the petals falling. Lilla screamed. Each blow felt like sparks of fire landing on her skin; each sent a jolt through her sex straight to the nub of her swollen clit, stoking its own heat. Pain made pleasure. As the whipping continued, her legs, which had kicked out in protest and tried to escape the first blows, grew stiffer and began to tilt her pelvis forward, that whole area of her body transforming into a zone of arousal. Even those slashes which scored her legs and lower belly seemed to add to the accumulating wave of need. Her squeals of shock became staccato cries urging him on, and as the measured slaps he dealt her became crueller and swifter she broke down suddenly into heaving thrashing orgasm, drinking the pain that was no pain, nearly pulling her arms from their sockets. Robert Wakefield paused, watching her intently as she spiralled down from her orgasm.

  She curled a lip. ‘Bite me. Bite me, you fucker.’

  ‘You need to learn some manners,’ he snarled. Reaching up over her head he tore her bonds apart and then pulled her forward, right off her feet, throwing her down on hands and knees in the soft bark at his feet. She stared dumbly at the shredded cuffs around her wrists that were the remnants of her knickers, lying between his cracked leather boots. He grabbed the corset at the small of her back and hoicked her arse up, then he stood deliberately on her wrists, one foot on each. Lilla bit her lip and burrowed her wrists into the soft path to ease the pressure: she was pinned to the ground now. He didn’t want her escaping. He was going to hurt her some more.

  And oh, he did. He laid into her upraised bum with the bunch of roses, sparing her not at all this time, painting her buttocks green and crimson as he thrashed her, striping the backs of her thighs. The stems couldn’t take it for long, cracking and snapping off and turning to shredded string in his grip, the last remaining flowers pulped while all the time Lilla squealed, exhilaration mixed with her anguish, her backside dancing from side to side in panic. When the last stem fell apart he threw the ruined stubs aside and paused. She gasped into the loose bark, her mouth coated with dust.
There was a moment’s respite as he fumbled at his trousers, a movement she was only dimly aware of, and then he stepped round behind her and bore down on her stinging, burning rear, shoving his cock deep into her hole. She was wet with readiness, her soil well prepared for the root he was planting in her. He took her with four or five ruthless thrusts and she felt her core gather and clench.

  ‘There now!’ he gasped – though whether to her or himself she couldn’t tell – and thrust to the hilt as he bit her shoulder just by the nape of her neck. The pain was like lightning, the pleasure that followed as deafening as a clap of thunder. Lilla began to come as the jolt coursed down her spine; she was peripherally aware that he was coming too, a cold flood, shuddering into her as he gnawed.

  The rolls of thunder rumbled through every part of her body, wave after wave, as he fed on, his hunger fierce. By the time he was slaked enough to lift his face, her shoulder felt numb and the tears of release that had escaped her had dried to stickiness on her cheeks.

  ‘Make me a vampire,’ she moaned, ‘and we can do this for ever.’

  He sat up, pulling out from her sex but slipping his fingers back in where his cock had been. She heard him swallow and clear his throat. ‘This is what you think it means to be a vampire?’ he asked, his voice still thick with lust and rage. ‘This is your hope of eternity?’

  ‘Fuck yes.’

  Lifting her by her pussy for a moment, he licked at the torn skin of her buttocks. His fingers withdrew on a slick of her juices and his own seed and he scooped the slippery mess further up the crack of her arse. Two fingers, closely pressed, found the aperture of her anus and, twisting, pushed into it. He didn’t ask permission or persuade her flesh gently: he just opened her up. Lilla moaned in her throat, forcing herself to ignore the instinctive spasm of panic at his invasion and to relax. She was glad for the soft ground under her knees as she spread her thighs wider, the pursed mouth of her arse unfurling like the petals of a rose as she bore down.

  There was a tiny grunt of satisfaction from behind her. His cock slithered in the trough of her pussy, rooting greedily. Fingers slid out again. Then – there – that was the head of his cock: hard and cool and polished as wood, as the handle of a trowel, pressing in on the ring of muscle that had tried so quickly to tighten again. It shouldered its way in, implacable, overcoming all resistance, until the glans was resting just within her.

  Sweat gathered in the hollow of her back.

  ‘I used to be a painter, you know,’ he whispered. Adjusting his knees and hands, he sought a better angle. ‘Understand: I was good. Driven, talented, inspired. The Royal Academy accepted me at twenty. My classical scenes hung in the best galleries, the most discerning households. I was sought after.’ With a shift of his weight he bore in on her, his cock sliding past the portal of her arsehole and into the hot depths beyond, filling her up. God, but he felt so much thicker in her butt than in her pussy – and cold as stone. She imagined his unseen cock the colour of marble. She was sensitive to every tiny movement in there. Her sweating hands clawed at the bark and her pulse hammered in her ears.

  ‘Then I became … what I am now.’ He started to thrust, not hard just yet, each stroke ruminative and punctuated by the rhythm of his words. ‘And I lost my talent. Oh, I can still paint. Technically … I have improved. But it’s worthless. No vision. No muse. These days, all I do … is tend my roses. And fuck trollops … up the arse.’

  His thrusts were threatening now. Lilla closed her eyes tight. She loved being shafted in the butt, but it was no less of an ordeal than being whipped. That was what she liked about it.

  ‘Look around you, Lillabet. How many great buildings were designed by vampires? How many symphonies have they created? How many poems? How many paintings … or new schools of art? Shall I tell you? None. All those years … and nothing to show. Nothing new. Inspiration comes only … to those who live brief lives.’

  ‘I was never going to write a great symphony,’ she groaned. ‘I just want to live for ever.’

  ‘We’re parasites. A dead end.’

  ‘You’re perfect.’

  ‘Fool.’ He added a savage thrust.

  ‘Bite me!’ She pawed at her face in frustration. ‘Make me into one of you!’

  ‘You stupid girl!’ he snarled, riding her hard now, nipping at the back of her neck and between her shoulder blades. Safe places, as she knew: despite his aggression he was still a gentleman. The first precursor of a new orgasm humped and flexed in Lilla’s pelvis and she let rip with a gabbled string of words.

  ‘You have to! You have to! Turn me, you fucking bastard!’

  He began to roar wordlessly, his pounding brutal. She started to claw at her own throat, gouging at the skin with her nails. ‘Bite my throat, you cunt!’ she screamed. ‘You fucking coward! It’s what you want! It’s what you really want!’

  He grabbed her hair and wrenched her neck over. There was blood under her nails now, though she barely felt the hurt. ‘Yes!’ she cried as he fell on her, grabbing for her throat, his teeth slicing into the flesh, fire and light and everything her body craved exploding through her.

  And a hot gush over her fingers.

  ‘Save me!’ she choked, triumphant, blossoms of blue and black flame clustering at the corners of her vision. ‘You have to save me!’ He clamped down hard over the wound and she felt the indescribable bliss of his kiss as the fireworks exploded and fell, smothering the world in darkness.

  * * *

  He crawled away afterwards, retching, his stomach a boiling cauldron. Fifteen years he’d managed – fifteen years without giving way to the shame of his base urges. Fifteen years of animal blood and black-market plasma and soy products. All alone. Fifteen years of self-respect, bitterly won. And now this. Now this.

  He hadn’t meant to. He hadn’t. It had been a mistake. If she hadn’t torn at her own throat like that …

  There’d been far too much blood for him to drink once he’d sliced her jugular, no matter how eagerly he’d gulped it down. Too much damage for the wound to seal itself too. Most of the hot liquor had gone to waste and was soaking away, invisible, into the red-brown bark chippings.

  Wakefield wiped at his face, utterly ineffectively. His hands were crooked into claws and trembled wildly, and his head buzzed. Dizzy and with limbs aching, he twitched with the desire for escape. As the hothouse spun around him he pitched over sideways into the dirt, but he didn’t want to lie there and rest; far from it. He felt like running. Like bursting out of the stone confines of the building and running through the wet streets and never coming back.

  I’m just not accustomed to it, he told himself, huddling up in a crouch, clasping his arms about his knees. He rocked himself back and forth, trying to soothe the demon within. I’ve fallen off the wagon and now it’s rolling right over me. That stupid stupid selfish girl …

  Turning his head, he looked over at Lillabet’s still body.

  She’d been convinced he would save her a second time. She’d been wrong. Once on the bridge, yes, but not here. Not this way.

  He’d felt her die. He’d done nothing.

  Shaking, he forced himself to his feet. He’d have to burn these clothes, he thought. He’d have to …

  What do I tell Reynauld? Oh, God in Heaven: what do I do?

  There was a rosebush with arm’s reach and he ran his open palm up a long stem, the thorns raking through his skin but the pain hardly registering. His fist closed over the full flower at the tip, robbing the head of its crimson petals. Four stumbling steps took him to Lillabet’s corpse, to look down on her slack and ashen face. For a moment his mouth twisted.

  ‘I am weary of days and hours,’ he quoted, so soft a plaint that she might not have heard even if she had been alive; ‘Blown buds of barren flowers / Desires and dreams and powers / And everything but sleep.’

  Opening his hand, he scattered rose petals as darkly red as a vampire’s tears, drifting down gently to lie upon her face.

  (Wakefiel
d)

  And this is Wakefield, who doesn’t feed from humans. Who hides himself away, reluctant to face the turn of the years or his own predatory condition: aching, ashamed and tormented. And hungry. Always hungry. He doesn’t even have more than fleeting contact with the staff of his company, for fear of the temptation they proffer. Of necessity, therefore, he is celibate and has to tend to his own sexual needs. His restraint is legendary among vampires, a topic discussed with awe and incomprehension and derision.

  You are safe from Wakefield. Unless you enter his lair of your own will. Unless you provoke him. Then, beware his appetites, so cruelly suppressed.

  The most sedentary of the City’s vampires, he remembers this land before it was built over, when as a youth he would come down with his father to hunt duck, with long-barrelled fowling-pieces over their shoulders and spaniels casting about at their feet. He was always keen on the wide green marshland, and the great wedge of the asylum meant no more to him at that time than a landmark to guide their feet back to the dry track at the end of the day. They are among his fondest memories, those days with his father: the yelp of the dogs, the grey light over the open water, the wet soaking into his tweed coat as he crawled on his belly through the sedges, the comradely walk home with the feathered bodies slung in braces. James Wakefield, owner of a string of drapery and haberdashery emporia, was proud of his son: the first of the line to be born into respectable estate, the first to speak like a gentleman and attend a good school where he learned Latin and was beaten with commendable regularity.

  He remembers his father’s distress and fury the day he announced he was going to be an artist, that he was submitting paintings to the Royal Academy.

  He remembers that autumn in 1857 when, just before dawn and in the middle of a thick fog that tasted of coal dust and made his throat ache, he was crossing a park in the centre of the City and first saw her sitting on a bench, all alone, shawled in white with her long red hair coiled about her shoulders like a cat. Red hair fit to catch the attention of Rossetti himself. He’d stopped at a nearby bench and taken out his sketchbook, pencilling the lines of her delicate, pensive face. She hadn’t moved, just sat there in the wreathing yellow mist like a statue. When he’d finished he’d walked away, but as he reached the wrought-iron gates of the park he’d found her somehow there before him, waiting.