RED GROW THE ROSES
Janine Ashbless

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

(Prologue)

Ten for the Ten Commandments

(Ben)

Nine for the Nine Bright Shiners

(Roisin)

Eight for the April Rainers

(Wakefield)

Seven for the Seven Stars in the Sky

(Estelle)

Six for the Six Proud Walkers

(Reynauld)

Five for the Symbols at Your Door

(Naylor)

Four for the Gospel Makers

Three, three the Rivals

Two, two the Lily-White Boys, clothed all in green-O

One is one, and all alone

And ever more shall be so

More from Mischief

About Mischief

Copyright

About the Publisher

Dedication

to Adam Nevill,

who let me be the exception.

Prologue

I’ll sing you Ten-O,

Green grow the rushes-O!

What is your Ten-O?

Ten for the Ten Commandments:

Nine for the Nine Bright Shiners:

Eight for the April Rainers:

Seven for the Seven Stars in the Sky:

Six for the Six Proud Walkers:

Five for the Symbols at your Door:

Four for the Gospel Makers:

Three, Three the Rivals:

Two, Two the Lily-White Boys, clothèd all in green-O.

One is One and all alone

And ever more shall be so.

(Folk song)

There is a City. Maybe you live there: eight million people do. Maybe you’ve visited it. Maybe you’ve only heard of it. It’s an ancient place, founded by the Romans on a marshy floodplain watered by a great tidal river. Its foundations go deep into the sucking mud of history. But these days its population is young, its faces diverse. More than three hundred languages are spoken in its schools and malls and streets. Proud new buildings are hatched among the husks of ancient architecture.

There is only one person left who still remembers the rushes and the bog myrtle and the wild ducks in what is now the heart of the City. And she is not a living person, not in any real sense.

Come to the City. Take photos of the famous landmarks on your cell phone. Shop for designer clothes and tourist tat. Walk the frantic streets of the theatre district at night. What will you see, there in the neon dark? Is that shadow behind you someone following? Is that reflection in a plate-glass window horribly distorted, or horribly accurate? Are those eyes that watch from the night even human? They must be, surely. He looks like a man – though his eyes reflect the dimmest of lights in crimson circles.

Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe he’s not human. Maybe he’ll take you in his arms and you’ll feel his strength – a strength that makes it impossible to fight him, even if you did want to. But you’ve already lost the will to resist, that moment when he looked into your eyes and showed you all his hunger and his promise. You knew then. You knew, quite suddenly, that this is what you are for – what we are all for – with our warm beating hearts and our aching sexual needs.

We are for them.

He’ll hold you like a lover. You’ll feel his breath on your throat and think to yourself: it’s so cold! His fingers will be cold too – cold on your puckering nipples, chill as they slide between your legs and inside you. Perhaps he’ll rip your clothes as he works them off; his nails are sharper than they look. No matter: it’s not as if you’ll have much use for them afterwards. His hard cock will seem startlingly cold, as cold as glass chilled in ice-water, as it presses into you. You’ll feel your body yielding to him just as eagerly as your will did, all your hot secret places opening to his gelid insistence. Then he’ll enter you, and your flesh will be impaled inexorably on that brutal length. For a moment he might only fuck you. He’ll wait for your cries, thrilling to the noises that burst from your throat as he rides you. It’s not for your sake but for his, since anticipation sharpens his pleasure. When his teeth first shear through your flesh the pain will make you panic – but only for a second. After that there will be no more pain, only desire. His and yours, as you feed ravenously upon each other, frantic to be filled.

In the morning they will find you limp and drained, the splashes of your spilt blood scattered on you and about you like fallen rose petals.

There are no rushes growing around here any more. But in this City there are always roses.

1: Ten for the Ten Commandments

Sophie met the vampire while speed-dating.

There were twenty numbers printed on the paper, each with a tick-box next to it. So far Sophie had ticked two, slightly reluctantly, and she wasn’t all that sure about Number Eight: he’d had an annoying laugh that ended in a snort each time. It was a good thing, she told herself, that this wasn’t a professional event, just a charity do put on by their regular bar in aid of some cancer relief charity. She and Netta had only paid a tenner each to enter.

And oh, boy, are we getting our money’s worth, she thought, suppressing the urge to giggle.

‘I’ve got a classic MG that I’m doing up myself in my garage,’ said Number Nineteen hopefully. ‘I’ve just had the new front wing sprayed British Racing Green.’

This meant nothing at all to Sophie. She stole a glance sideways at Netta, perched just like her on a high barstool at one of those teeny little round tables you could never quite fit all your glasses on, her legs crossed, her foot twitching sharply as she listened to a beaky-nosed man talk. They had five minutes with each guy and this time it had turned out to be four minutes and fifty seconds longer than she needed to decide No. ‘Really?’ Sophie said.

Luckily, that was the moment the host by the bar picked up the wineglass he was using as a signal and tapped it with his pen. As the ringing died away all the men at the tables stood and started to move on.

Last one, thought Sophie.

‘It was nice meeting you,’ said Number Nineteen with gallant desperation.

‘And you,’ she said cheerily. No call to be rude, was there? He wasn’t going to be getting a tick though. He wasn’t going to be getting hold of her name or her e-mail address.

She was still looking down at her slip of paper in despair when the last of her ‘dates’ sat down in front of her, saying, ‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’ Then, looking up, Sophie thought: Oh … wow.

Maybe this was going to be worth doing after all. Number Twenty was easily the best-looking man of the evening. He was one of those scruffy stubbly dark-blond types with hair and skin sun-kissed to nearly the same colour, and rather thick eyebrows. She liked that outdoorsy look. His athletic build was well displayed by a white T-shirt. He grinned at her, an open easy grin. ‘You having fun?’

I am now, she thought, but said out loud, ‘It’s … different. I’ve never tried speed-dating before.’ What lovely eyes he had, she noted: brown, but flecked with gold. All the patter honed by repetition over the evening suddenly deserted her and she realised she was staring. To cover her unexpected awkwardness she took a sip of her vodka and orange, then berated herself inwardly for wasting time.

‘So.’ He put his hands on the table. Blunt hands with clean square nails, and a silver thumb-ring on the right. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

OK, so he wasn’t exactly bursting with originality either. It gave Sophie a little confidence back. ‘I work at an art gallery in town,’ she said. ‘A commercial one, not high art or anything – and I’m just an assistant – but I want to run my own gallery one day. I like hanging out with friends and going out on the town …’ She ground to a halt as she realised she was being obvious and dull. ‘What about you?’

He just sat and looked at her with his face almost alight, like he was full of sunshine. She could imagine him climbing a mountain or white-water-rafting or hitchhiking around Asia. ‘Me?’

‘You. You’re supposed to say something interesting,’ she reminded him.

‘Oh. All right then. I’m a vampire.’

She had, she thought, never met anyone who looked less like a vampire. ‘As chat-up lines go,’ she said, a little acid now, ‘that’s better than “I’m a serial killer.” But, you know, a bit worse than “I’m a big Star Trek fan.”’

‘Ouch.’

‘You could try it in the Fox and Grapes though. They have a Goth Night on a Wednesday, I think.’

‘I’ll remember that.’ His brow furrowed humbly, but he grinned.

‘And to be honest,’ she said pointing at him, ‘even if I wanted to be impressed, that’s just not vampire at all.’

‘What?’

‘Your teeth. Unconvincing. Where’s the fangs?’

‘Retractable.’

‘Really?’ She was actually enjoying herself now. He didn’t seem at all put off by her sarcasm.

‘Of course. Otherwise we’d be lisping and drooling all over the place.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Hold on. I’ll just …’ He pursed his lips and wrinkled his nose back and forth as if something were stuck in his teeth. Then he peeled back his lips and opened his mouth. He had fangs this time: translucent as Chinese rice porcelain, sharp as thorns.

‘OK,’ she admitted. ‘That’s quite impressive. And … different.’

He shut his mouth and flashed his eyebrows in a smile, vindicated.

‘Did you show that to all the girls?’ Sophie turned to the table at her right. ‘Hey, Netta, did you get a look at these?’

Netta looked startled to be interrupted. ‘At what?’

But when Sophie glanced back, Number Twenty was gone. ‘I … uh …’

Gone. Completely gone. Sophie’s eyes searched the room. There were plenty of people in buying drinks, apart from those engaged in the speed-dating, but none of them looked like him. Sophie bit her lip. She didn’t understand where he could have disappeared to; she had barely looked away from him. She supposed that if he’d leapt up and hand-sprung backwards he could have jumped over the bar itself in time, but that was a bit too Ninja-like to be actually believable. She got up from her stool anyway, and walked over to the bar to check for herself. He wasn’t hiding down among the glasses and the plastic crates.

‘Weird,’ she said.

It was another three minutes before the last round of the speed-dating was over. They were the longest, most awkward three minutes of her life, but at last the chime was sounded and all the couples broke up and she was able to make a beeline for Netta.

‘Did you see where he went?’

‘Who?’

‘The guy with me. Number Twenty … well, he would have been your Number Nineteen. The really good-looking one.’

Netta frowned. ‘Really good-looking? You sure?’

‘Oh, come on! Blondish, white shirt … nice teeth.’ She was even more confused now.

‘Uh, no.’ Netta looked down at her tick-sheet. ‘I didn’t mark him down anyway. I can’t really remember him, to be honest. There were so many guys, I suppose, Sophie: you just stop noticing after a while.’

Sophie passed her hand over her face. ‘Can we get out of here?’ It was the state of her own mind that was worrying her, but she tried to hide it. ‘I’m scared the one with the bad breath is going to try and carry on our chat.’

‘You’re not going to hand your sheet in?’

The piece of paper had grown damp in her hand, she realised. She crumpled it up. ‘No. I didn’t fancy any of them, really.’

Netta sighed. ‘Me neither.’

They made their way to the door – and there he was, Number Twenty, bathed in the magenta strip-light of the Bar Trattoria sign, chatting amiably to the bouncer. His eye fell on Sophie. ‘Hey there. You going before I can buy you a drink? I’m Ben, by the way.’

She blinked. Face to face with him once more, she couldn’t believe there was anything weird about him. Not that the teeth thing had actually worried her: she’d assumed that was just a trick of some sort. ‘Um. We thought we’d head out somewhere else.’

He glanced questioningly at Netta, who looked very pleased indeed. Plump and pretty, she always made the most of her capacious cleavage and now Sophie saw her swing it into action, turning those orbs on Ben like twin lamps, in the hope of dazzling him.

‘I’m Netta. Short for Agnetha – my mum was a big ABBA fan.’ She giggled. ‘We work at the same place, Sophie and me.’

‘Ah … the art gallery?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, can I buy you both a drink then?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

Sophie shrugged and nodded, pushing any lingering disquiet aside.

‘You want to go to a club?’ suggested Ben. ‘How about the Rose Garden? We could skip the queue: I know the guys on the door.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Netta.

‘Yeah,’ Sophie agreed. The Rose Garden was expensive and she’d never been there.

He held the glass door open for them both and followed them out on to the street. Netta took the chance to catch Sophie’s eye and mouth ‘Hot!’ at her. Sophie wanted to ask her if she remembered him from the speed-dating line-up now, but she didn’t have the chance.

He didn’t let them down at the Rose Garden either, marching them straight up to the bouncers and inside, after a nod and an exchange of greetings. He made sure he paid too, and bought the drinks at the bar, slipping an arm round each of their shoulders as he stood between them and ordered, encouraging them to choose the fanciest cocktails they could find on the bar menu. The dancefloor wasn’t yet packed as it was relatively early in the evening, so there was plenty of space for the three of them to go on and dance together. He was a good mover, Sophie noted, though his eyes only really lit up when they played a remix of some jangling 60s hit by a group she was too young to be able even to picture. He flirted with both of them, paying each equal attention and obviously enjoying their company, wriggling up against Netta with a cheeky twinkle during a dirty song, dancing away insouciantly a moment later with an ironic wink at Sophie. Every move he made proclaimed: ‘I’m having fun and I’ll take the fun as far as you like but I’m not after anything heavy.’ His grin gleamed under the UV light, but his teeth were completely normal. Well, Hollywood normal.

Taking a break, they retired to a quieter corner to rest their feet for a few minutes. Netta went off to the toilet then. Normally Sophie would have gone with her, but they had a fresh batch of drinks on the table before them by this point and she wasn’t going to be so naive as to leave them unguarded, not with the stories you heard these days. Ben seemed nice, right, but … they didn’t know him. Not yet. You had to be careful, didn’t you? So she sat and they made light talk and that was when Ben kissed her, leaning in and brushing his lips softly to her own.

All the noise of the club seemed to fade to nothing.

Oh, thought Sophie in the sudden silence inside her head: Oh, I like this. She was flushed and warm from the dancing; his lips felt cool, yet the flicker of his tongue-tip hinted at a deeper heat. She could taste the tang of the lager he’d been drinking. His stubble was softer than she’d expected on her skin as his mouth moved over hers, swallowing her breath. And oh, his hands – one arm around her, smoothly, like she might startle: the other now on her knee, his fingertips the lightest of caresses, not at all intrusive even as they slid up the inside of her thigh, over the lace patterns of her black tights. His cool fingers sketched pointillist pictures of sensation on her skin as they played over the tiny holes in the lace, and Sophie felt a sly seep of moisture within her, a secretly avid response to his touch. And how she wished she’d worn stockings now, as he reached the hem of her skirt.

Ben’s tongue was in her mouth now, smooth as cream liqueur and just as sweet. Not boorish, not greedy. She wondered what it would feel like between her pussy lips and, catching herself at that thought, she squirmed beneath his hand and broke the kiss with a little gasp. His teeth caught her lower lip, gently, and she froze.

He let her go. He looked, with a faint but pointed smile, down at his hand on her thigh, as if surprised to find it there. She looked down too and they both watched as her legs eased apart to grant him narrow passage between thighs barely illuminated by the distant flicker of the dancefloor lights. Slowly his hand disappeared under her skirt, following that warm cleft. His cold fingers tickled their way, like water running underground, to the mound of her sex. His nail caught on the threads as he flicked it, quite accurately, over the hidden spot where her clit burned – and Sophie nearly left her seat, trying in vain to mask the spasm of her arousal. Ben scraped his finger up and down on the coarse weave, and smiled as he looked into her eyes. Sophie couldn’t grin; her mouth went slack instead as he played with her, her eyes glazing over.

Then he stopped and sat back, without haste. Sophie shook herself from her trance and realised that that faint bloom of light had been the door of the Ladies opening and closing, that Netta was on her way back over to their table. For cover she lifted her cocktail to her lips and sipped from the glass, crossing her thighs. There was a bubble of heat between them that glowed as she squeezed her legs together.

‘This might be a flash place but they’ve still run out of hand-towels in the loo,’ announced Netta cheerily as she sat down.

Ben casually rubbed his fingertips together and lifted them to his face as if inhaling the bouquet; the gesture was smooth and almost unnoticeable. ‘Hey, it’s always best when the girls are a little … damp.’ The weak joke made Netta squeal and pretend to slap him and he played along.

‘My turn then,’ said Sophie, rising. She’d had more to drink than she thought, it occurred to her as she staggered slightly. Or maybe it was just that her legs were wobbly.

‘Careful, love.’ Ben placed a hand lightly on her thigh to steady her. It didn’t help.

In the ladies’ toilet there was chill-out music playing and a row of mirrors a mile long for the customers to examine their make-up in. Sophie larded on another layer of lip-gloss and stared at her reflection, wondering if Ben was making a pass at Netta while she was away. She wouldn’t put it past him; he seemed the sort to try anything and his flirting was aimed in every direction. A critical examination of her reflection didn’t make her feel too bad, though. She was slimmer than Netta at least, though she’d never manage to match those fabulous tits. With a slight frown she undid the top button on her dress and tucked the cloth down to reveal more of the valley between her own, imagining Ben’s head nuzzling between them, his tongue lapping at the silky skin of her breasts. Even the thought made her wetter. God, he’d turned her on. She wanted more of that. She hadn’t particularly come out to get laid tonight – she didn’t count herself as that sort of girl – but now that it was looking like a possibility her pulse was running faster. She didn’t want Netta to snatch him from under her nose – and Netta was so much brassier than her and more likely to get what she wanted.

Maybe Ben was hoping to pull both of them, she thought suddenly. In the mirror her reflection blushed and her eyes snapped. ‘Oh,’ she mouthed with her bright fresh lipstick. That sort of implied he had a place of his own, if he was planning anything that elaborate. She’d never done it before but the novelty had a certain trashy sort of appeal – and she and Netta were good enough friends that it might work. They’d seen each other undress often enough, and talked about sex without any restraint. She wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of Netta.

It could be fun. Ben looked like, no matter what, he would be fun.

Making up her mind, Sophie returned to the toilet cubicle and pulled the skirt of her dress up so she could grab the top of her floral lace tights. It was a warm end-of-summer night after all. She could go barelegged.

By the time she left the Ladies she was wearing nothing beneath that short skirt at all.

Back at the table, she wasn’t surprised to see that Netta was sitting up close to Ben’s side and that his arm was resting down the back of the padded bench behind her shoulders. Nor was she surprised at his cheeky smile. But his words weren’t what she’d expected: ‘I was telling Netta here that I have a friend who’s an artist. A really good one. Sculpture mostly. You want to see his work?’

‘Now?’

‘What – don’t you mix work and pleasure?’

‘I just … well … it’s pretty late.’

‘Oh, he’ll be in his studio. He likes to work late. It’s not far, if you want to take a look. And he’s … a really interesting bloke. You’ll like him. He’d like to meet you two, I’m sure.’

Oh, thought Sophie: that’s how it is, then. He was pulling on his friend’s behalf too. She tried not to consider whether she was disappointed or not.

It wasn’t actually all that late by the time they emerged from the Rose Garden; not that late if you were out on the lash on a Saturday night, that is: late for everyone else. Bars and takeaways were doing a booming trade but the only vehicles on the streets were taxis and buses and police vans. Ben slipped an arm around each of them.

‘Ooh,’ said Netta: ‘you’re cold.’ She was right, thought Sophie: he wasn’t icy, but there was none of the heat she’d been expecting from his body. That white cotton T-shirt might as well have been draped over a mannequin’s torso: toned and unyielding and cool.

‘Yeah, I am. I need you two to keep me warm.’

Netta giggled and pressed herself up against him in a hug that only looked innocent.

So Ben walked through the night streets with them flanking him, his arms around their shoulders, their arms about his hard waist. He steered well clear of loud and dangerous-looking revellers, but kept to the lighted main roads as if to reassure them. And he kept up a stream of chatter all the way, all about Warhol and Lichtenstein and other names Sophie knew she should have paid more attention to on her art-history induction course, until they crossed under a flyover and followed the road in a curve and there were suddenly trees and a big black building looming over them. A church. It stood in a little island in a whirlpool of main roads and it wasn’t floodlit like some of the city-centre churches. Victorian Gothic in style, its stones were black with soot dating back to the Industrial Revolution and it was close-grown with big dingy sycamores.

‘Here we are,’ said Ben, suddenly grabbing their hands and skipping them across the road under the nose of a taxi. They reached the pavement beneath a white streetlamp that made the building beyond look even more shadowed.

‘A church?’ asked Netta, pulling out of his hand. She wrinkled her nose. ‘It looks derelict.’

‘It’s an artists’ centre now. Naylor’s studio’s inside – see the light?’

They peered into the gloom, and Sophie was relieved to see that there was a glow high up in one of the tall stained-glass windows – though it barely showed through the encrustation of soot and the thick protective wire lattice over the exterior of the glass.

‘Looks spooky,’ muttered Sophie.

‘Looks like a place for freaks to hang out,’ Netta grumbled.

‘Aw,’ he mocked softly. ‘Are the little girls scared?’

Netta cast him a sharp glance. ‘Hey – how old are you?’ she asked. It sounded like a change of subject but Sophie knew where she was coming from. She’d assumed all along that Ben was their own age or thereabouts: mid-twenties at most. That’s how he’d looked under the indoor lights. But out here under the harsh white light of the streetlamp he looked suddenly older. It wasn’t wrinkles; he didn’t look wrinkled. It was something less definable, something about the way the shadows fell or the look in his eye as he derided their squeamishness. Something about his eyes, for sure – as he turned his face down to them he looked almost blind for a second.

‘How old do you think I am, love?’

‘Thirty? Thirty-five?’ Netta was being deliberately nasty, trying to get a reaction; Sophie could hear it in her voice. But Ben didn’t reply. He just smiled, and it was a different sort of smile to the others he’d used upon them. Secretive and coldly amused.

Netta readjusted her bag on her shoulder. ‘It’s getting late,’ she said in a hard voice. ‘You know, I think I’m going to go back. My mum’s coming over to visit tomorrow and I need to get up early to clean the flat.’

Sophie was surprised and dismayed. So, their hot date had turned out to be a bit of a cradle-snatcher – but did it really matter how old he was, when he was this fit? Wasn’t Netta over-reacting?

‘Don’t you want to meet Naylor?’ he asked.

‘Maybe some other time.’

‘You’d like him, I promise.’

‘Like I said, it’s late.’ Netta looked sharply at Sophie. ‘You coming then?’

‘I think I’ll stay.’ She saw the spark of shock and outrage in Netta’s eyes, the look that said: You can’t stay on your own. You stick with your girl friends whatever. That’s the rules.

‘Sophie!’

‘You go home if you like,’ said Sophie, nettled. She wasn’t letting an opportunity like this pass. ‘I want to see these sculptures.’

Ben folded his arms, counting himself out of the discussion. For a moment the two girls glared at each other. Sophie could hear the unvoiced accusation: On your own?

‘Suit yourself,’ said Netta with a sniff. ‘See you Monday.’ Unspoken was the sneer: Don’t come crying to me if it goes wrong. With an irate bounce in her step she marched away up the street, toward the neon glow of a Chinese takeaway sign and the taxi rank beyond. Sophie watched her go, then turned to Ben, who was waiting with eyebrows raised.

‘Sorry about that.’

‘Why be sorry?’ He took her arm and slipped his hand in hers. ‘Now I get to enjoy the undiluted pleasure of your company.’

Sophie’s pulse jumped, and she felt her sex clench in anticipation.

He led her into the churchyard, under the black shadows of the trees, and took her not to the front porch but around the north side of the building. The gravestone slabs had long been cleared away but a few table-tombs remained, and there in near-darkness he backed her up against a cold gritstone box and kissed her, harder this time.

Harder, deeper, hungrier.

Sophie slid her arms around his neck and ground her thighs against his, feeling for the telltale bulge of his erection. And oh yes, there it was – his cock hardening in response to her heat, her softness, her willingness. He put his hands on her waist and lifted her to sit on the tomb-top, and she opened her legs so he could stand between them, pressing up against her. Her skirt rode up, stretched tight across the very tops of her thighs. He took her left breast and squeezed it to the rhythm of his kisses, making her groan into his mouth. The sound seemed to galvanise him and he trapped her nipple between forefinger and thumb, twisting it until she squeaked again.

She’d never fucked in a churchyard before, she thought. It was exciting, in an old-fashioned way. His cock had clear definition now under the fabric of his trousers, and he was pressing right up against the mound of her sex, and she wondered if he’d realised yet she wasn’t wearing any knickers or whether his own clothing had fooled him. She wrapped her legs about his muscular ass. Her head started to swim; he seemed to have no intention of coming up for air.

Gasping, she broke from his lips. He laughed low in his throat.

‘God, girl: you’re hot, aren’t you?’

‘Uh-huh.’ She was seething with heat. She nibbled at his lips, finding them by feeling his face, and heard the hiss of breath between his teeth. He abandoned her breasts to push both hands up her smooth thighs, questing all the way to the top, finding the rucked-up skirt and then her soft, shaven, plump-lipped sex, a fashionable landing strip of hair the only veil to its nakedness. His thumbs plunged into the wet, twin divers, and she writhed with pleasure.

‘Oh, let me guess what you want,’ he whispered. It made her giggle.

‘I’ll give you three guesses.’

‘Really? One,’ he growled, massaging her clit with both thumbs. She arched her back, speechless. ‘Two,’ he continued, parting the folds of her sex and opening her wide with those thumbs, then working the rest of his fingers into the hot oil she was leaking, getting them good and slick, opening her up. ‘Three,’ he concluded, entering her with three fingers at once, his right wrist locked like a weapon, the muscles of his forearm tense as he pushed those fingers in deep, right past all those thick knuckles until he was holding her by her pussy, his thumb in possession of her clit – then out, then in again. His fingers were blunt and determined and brooked no refusal. Sophie jerked her hips and squealed and writhed, raking his skin with her nails. He pinned her with his other arm, pulling her hard against him. ‘Did I guess right?’

‘Mm,’ she nodded frantically, her lips bruising themselves on his hard jaw. She wanted his cock even more, but his fingers certainly had the right idea.

‘Then guess what I want, love.’

‘You want to fuck me,’ she whispered.

He chuckled – that dark low rumble again, deep in his throat. Lingeringly he withdrew his hand, enjoying her little whimper of loss. ‘Let’s go see my friend,’ he whispered, confounding her.

‘What? Now?’

‘We walked all this way.’

‘Oh … can’t we … first …’

‘Don’t be impatient. Everything comes to those who wait, love.’ He tickled her clit teasingly, then slipped from her embrace, secure in the knowledge that she would follow. Sophie slid off the stone feeling like there was a hollow void inside her, and sure that Ben was getting off on her discomfort. She tugged her skirt back down over her thighs and brushed specks of lichen off her behind. She couldn’t care less about Ben’s friend or his artwork now, to be honest, but she wanted his cock so badly she would have followed him almost anywhere.

‘Ready?’ He took her hand and led her off, surefooted even in the darkness. He led her to a small door in the north wall, one so low he had to stoop under the arch. It was unlocked, and a light burned in the room beyond.

Sophie knew almost nothing about church architecture; she was expecting them to emerge into the main body of the building among the pews. She’d expected gloom and age. She wasn’t expecting a small room full of shelves and cupboards, or a set of unpainted plywood stairs that took them up into the roofspace. There was a strong smell of new plaster and paint.

‘I knew you were lying,’ she said, trying to be sparky, as Ben led her up. Her thighs felt sticky.

‘What?’ He frowned back at her.

‘About the vampire thing. You wouldn’t be able to walk on consecrated ground.’

He turned away again. ‘This was deconsecrated in the nineteen-nineties.’

They came out into a big white space – almost the whole of the interior of the church roof – illuminated by a few floor lamps. Every surface was painted white. There were pale human figures dotted about the place, on dustsheet islands spattered in paint, but none of them moved. Only one was animate: a slim figure crouching over and dabbing at one of the sculptures with a brush.

‘Hello, Naylor.’

The young man stood. He moved with great fluidity and, though Sophie’s spike heels made a terrible racket on the wooden floor, his bare ones made no sound at all. He was standing in front of them almost before Sophie, transfixed by his grace, had grasped that he was moving at all.

‘Ben. Hi.’ He smiled at Sophie, not even bothering to hide the fact he was checking out her tits, her hips, her legs. ‘You’re a pretty one.’

‘Sophie,’ she said weakly.

He was breathtaking. Slight, not tall, with sharp cheekbones and slanted, narrow eyes that turned out to be a wild pale green when they caught the light. A full lower lip gave him an incongruous pout. He was startlingly pale. Black hair flopped over those eyes, partly veiling the finely angled brows but not the wicked glint beneath them. There was a grace about his narrow hips and wiry limbs that seemed almost dangerous, as if he were poised in readiness for something. Something swift and ruthless, she thought; something never regretted. He looked younger than Ben and considerably more slender, but there was nothing weak about him at all. He folded his arms, having looked her over.

‘I can smell pussy,’ he said, gazing into her eyes, the corner of his mouth hooked in a smile.

‘Yeah … it’s all over my hands, I’m afraid,’ Ben answered, as she started and flushed.

‘You been taking her out for a trial lap, you dirty beggar?’

‘Just warming the engine.’

‘Huh. You want a beer, Sophie?’

The abrupt switches in conversation stunned her a little, and she barely managed to nod and squeak an affirmation. Ben had been right: she did like Naylor. He looked like bad news – but wasn’t that always more fun in a man? She had a clear idea where this was going, she thought, and she didn’t object – but a little Dutch courage wouldn’t hurt. She’d never been with two guys at once. It excited her a lot more than the thought of her and Netta and Ben. It scared her quite a lot more too.

Naylor retreated to a cool-box that stood near one wall, near a pile of dustsheets. She watched as he groped inside for three bottles of beer, then prised the caps off against the angle of the lid with three casual flicks.

‘Sophie works at an art gallery,’ said Ben.

‘Is that so?’

‘Just Yardley’s,’ she answered, her voice husky.

‘What do you think of my stuff, then?’ he asked, indicating the sculptures with a twist of his head.

Politely she turned to look them over. A standing figure nearby appeared to be a resin cast of a naked woman, her skin the stippled grey of poplar bark, her nipples black knots. But her eyes were only holes and from behind she was hollow, the bark curled and flaked at the edge, her insides cobwebbed. Sophie swallowed. How was she supposed to judge real art? Yardley’s didn’t cater to the high-concept end of the market, just to people who liked a nice picture and wanted something that would match the wallpaper. Sophie worked selling the products of conveyor-belt artists. There was the one who painted nice autumnal landscapes, and the one who did portraits of cheeky 1930s urchins, and the one who did the red canal perspectives … Nothing like this. What did she know?

She moved to the next sculpture, a heap of reclining naked women. Their skin had the texture of sand and their sleeping faces were peaceful and beautiful – but once again they were hollow, this time from the ribs to the hips, their abdomens smooth white concavities.

‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘Powerful.’

‘You think?’ Naylor was at her shoulder, though she hadn’t heard him approach. She turned a little abruptly, and he slipped a cold bottle into her hand. ‘Cheers.’

‘Cheers.’ He was standing unsettlingly close, almost touching her.

Naylor tilted his own bottle to his mouth. Sophie glanced at the label, but it was some Continental brew she’d never heard of. She took a sip of her beer, all too aware that both men were taking a very personal interest in watching the neck of the bottle ease between her lips. She felt self-conscious: she’d never been the focus of such undisguised greed. She normally was the sort of girl that men could take or leave; rarely without some sort of masculine action in her life, yet never the centre of any drama. Procrastinating, she glanced away at the room again.

‘Is that one of yours?’ she asked, peering at something a bit different: two large wooden boards mounted on a wall that part-divided the roof-space. They were covered in black and gilt lettering that was hard to decipher.

Naylor snorted. ‘Nah. Fixtures and fittings, doll. This was a church, remember.’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ She could make out some of the words now: Thou shalt not …

‘The Ten Commandments. Not that anyone takes any bleeding notice of any of them these days. “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy,” eh? “Thou shalt not covet.” The country would fall apart.’

‘There’s still one left,’ said Ben, stepping in closer and running his fingers down Sophie’s spine. ‘“Thou shalt not kill.”’

Naylor sniggered. ‘Yeah, well. Our Good Shepherd is still keen on that one, that’s true.’ He jerked his head. ‘You like the beer, dollface? Is it to your taste?’

Sophie opened her mouth but didn’t manage to reply, because on the word ‘taste’ he dipped his hand beneath the hem of her skirt and touched the neck of his bottle to the juncture of her thighs. The glass was chilly and she staggered a little; instantly Ben was behind her, steadying her – and making sure she couldn’t retreat. Sophie’s mouth went to an O shape as round as the mouth of the bottle that was pressing the mound of her sex – and then nudging to the split there, and the swollen petals that were so puffy with arousal. For a moment she resisted his entry and then Ben slipped his arms round her from behind, cupping her breasts and tipping her weight back against him, and at the same time Naylor changed angle and thrust the bottle between her thighs and then up, into the furrow of her pussy, sliding the bottle-mouth back and forth, cold and frictionless as only lubricated glass can be.

Sophie gasped. She felt the little round mouth embrace her clit momentarily, like a kiss. Then it dived back again, into her molten flesh and then – changing angle again – up into the wet clench of her hole. He ran the bottle up into her all the way to its shoulders, watching her face all the time. Then he pulled it out. Milky streaks patterned the brown glass. He licked the bottle, swirling his tongue right around the rim, and sucked the glass.

‘Only two things taste better than beer,’ said he softly. ‘And one of them’s hot wet cunt.’ He took her own bottle out of her limp hand. Sophie sagged back into Ben’s embrace as he pinched and played with both her nipples through the thin layers of her clothes. She could feel his hardening cock, crushed against the soft jut of her bum and struggling to rise.

‘Nice tits, love,’ he breathed in her ear.

‘You’re up for this, aren’t you?’ Naylor asked, dipping the neck of his bottle into the cleft of her cleavage and rubbing the glass suggestively from swell to swell of her breasts. His lips were parted and shiny. ‘You’re game for it, I can tell.’

‘Mm,’ she whimpered, nodding.

‘Told you you’d get everything you wanted, love,’ Ben said hoarsely. ‘Everything and more.’ He nuzzled at her ear and took the lobe between his lips, nipping softly.

‘Ben …’

Her head seemed to swim. Naylor had set the beers aside and was stripping off his clothes now. He shed his T-shirt and kicked his trousers off, revealing a slim smooth body, the only visible hair a black nest at his crotch that climbed in a narrow line to his navel. His beautiful smooth cock was already stiffly erect and nodding in the free air: it had a slight curve back toward his stomach and looked almost out of proportion to his delicate frame, so engorged was it. He stroked it like it was a hunting-dog waiting to be unleashed, as he stalked back to her and looked down into her face.

‘This is what you were hoping for, wasn’t it, doll?’ he asked, taking her hand and rubbing it over his cock. It seemed to pulse against her, its sticky mouth kissing her palm. ‘A bit of fun?’

Sophie nodded.

‘It’s going to get a bit messy.’ His gaze lifted to Ben over her shoulder. ‘Clothes off, I guess.’

They stripped her of everything: the purse hanging from her shoulder, the cherry-coloured dress from the boutique she couldn’t really afford on her wage, the lacy bra she’d bought only last week. All but her high-heeled shoes. Everything was tossed aside in a heap. Her boobs bounced free as Ben whipped the bra off and her nipples stiffened in the cool air of the church. She didn’t seem to be required to do anything but accept their hands and the liberties they took groping her as they pulled at her clothes, playing with her tits and ass and pussy, pinching slyly between caresses until she squirmed. Ben pushed her into Naylor’s grasp as he wrenched off his own clothes, clearly impatient now. She caught a flash of his body, golden fuzz marching up his stomach and down his legs, before another shove landed her back in his embrace. He caught her wrists and pulled them to the small of her back, guiding her hands to the vertical staff of his cock.

‘Hold this,’ he said: ‘That’s right.’ Then his own hands went back round her, holding her under the jaw and around her waist.

She wasn’t quite sure she liked that. Without the use of her hands to fend anyone off, she felt strangely vulnerable, and she whimpered when Naylor patted her breasts back and forth with stinging force.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said; ‘does that hurt? Kiss it better.’ Falling to a crouch he caught her right nipple in his lips and sucked it long and slow and expertly. Pleasure crackled through her nerves, and she squeezed Ben’s cock hard in her hands. But it lasted all too brief a moment before Naylor lifted his mouth away and grinned. She saw his teeth, cruelly pointed fangs, just before he stooped back down on her breast and sank them in.

It wouldn’t be quite true to say she was surprised, not really. She’d known, after all, from the beginning; she’d just avoided thinking about it. But she tried to scream anyway, except that Ben’s broad hand clamped over her mouth and the sound was trapped in her heaving chest. There was no outlet for the pain, the searing hot cut of his fangs puncturing her skin.

Then the pain was gone, and something entirely different took its place. Sophie, pinned and thrashing, took a long time to grasp what it was, as it flowed through her right breast like melted sugar fizzing in every capillary – like worms of sparkling fire – like a hundred tiny meteors circling the burning sun of her nipple. She stopped fighting and sagged back against Ben, only half-aware that her hands were still clenched, sweating, around his erect cock, that Naylor was nursing on her tit, his throat working as he swallowed.

Slowly, Ben slid his grip from her mouth to her lower jaw so that she could breath. She whimpered, ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck,’ her panic now swamped in the glorious sensation of the suckling, but horror making her pant.

‘“Oh Fuck No” or “Oh Fuck Yes”?’ murmured Ben. ‘Sounds like an “Oh Fuck Yes” to me, love.’ Lifting her left arm he sank his teeth into the fleshy bulge of her bicep.

Again – a white flash of pain, a wave of coruscating pleasure.

Then Naylor stopped feeding and lifted his mouth. There was surprisingly little mess on her breast, only two puckered puncture marks over her enflamed and aching nipple, each filled with a little ruby bead. No blood ran. But when Naylor licked his lips his tongue was red and wet.

‘Oh, please,’ she moaned. All her will seemed to have faded away as the wild chemistry of their saliva ran riot in her body tissues. Her right breast pulsed with the hungry need for Naylor to latch on again and her left breast ached to join it, even though her stomach recoiled from what it meant that their mouths were that colour.

‘You like that?’ he asked with a mocking scarlet smile.

‘It feels … nice,’ she whispered. She felt drunk with shock and her voice broke on the last word into a strange giggle she had no control over.

‘You do like it, don’t you?’ He nuzzled against her, grinning. ‘Naughty girl.’ His fingers slipped up between her thighs and paddled in the ooze of her sex juices. ‘Dirty fucking little girl.’

‘Look at this,’ chuckled Ben, brushing her turgid right nipple with his thumb; it was as swollen as if it’d been stung by a bee, and so sensitive that she gasped. ‘Just bursting with juicy goodness, aren’t you, love?’

‘Want another kiss, don’t you?’ Naylor lapped teasingly at her breast. ‘Let’s try something a bit different, heh?’ Then he sat back on his heels, took her thighs in his hands and spread them, lifting one to drape over his shoulder. He and Ben took her weight easily, as she was pulled on to the kneeling man’s mouth and he buried his face in her crotch.

‘Oh!’ she wailed reflexively, as his tongue broke the split of her sex, as he lapped and sucked at the juices welling there. She tried half-heartedly to struggle but her body wasn’t co-operating, and even if it had done the two men were far too strong. For a long moment the sensation of his mouth was just one of simple pleasure and she stopped twisting altogether. That was when he bit down, and his fangs pierced the mound of her pubis either side of her clit. She spasmed once – and that was the last time, the last vestige of any resistance that night, because the bite was all ecstasy. Pleasure took no prisoners. Naylor sucked and she burned, and soon she was coming into his mouth, blood and juices together, and Ben was biting at the back of her neck and her shoulders, feeding greedily, the stabs of his teeth no longer even painful as her climax turned everything to gold. She thrashed wildly in their embrace, crying out. Naylor’s eyes flashed with triumph. And she couldn’t stop coming, even after the first burst was over – he kept sucking and she kept rolling down the waves of orgasm, each lifting her to the crest of the next. She couldn’t even draw breath.

‘Jeez,’ said Ben, gasping. ‘Give her a rest, Naylor!’

Naylor dropped her. The deprivation was instant and vertiginous: she felt like the sun had been torn from the sky. He stood up and faced her, lifting her and crushing her against Ben’s torso as if the other man were a wall, and then he pressed into her and lifted her thighs apart and thrust his cock up into her pussy and began to fuck, fiercely. His face was knotted into a mask of concentration, his eyes narrowed, his lips tight over his monstrous teeth. Sophie’s inflamed sex responded with gratitude to the impaling pressure of his cock inside her, to the battering he was giving her clit, to the pressure from behind as well as before. She began to groan with each thrust, the air forced from her lungs. Ben helped by slipping his hands under her thighs and holding her up, splayed, for Naylor’s easier access, and she could feel Ben’s cock under her ass-cheeks, rubbing along the spread cleft of her behind as the two men sandwiched her and pummelled her between them.

Naylor slipped a hand round the back of Ben’s neck for better purchase.

Taking his cock only momentarily stilled the burning itch of Sophie’s clit. Her body was already primed and charged, orgasm throbbing just below the skin and ready to burst out under pressure, so she came first. For all the two men’s fierce lust she hit orgasm before Naylor did, and her screams sent him over the edge, pumping into her. She felt the gush – she’d never felt ejaculation before, not inside her – and it was cold, even colder than their sweatless inhuman skin. Then Ben bit her again, on the angle of her shoulder and neck, and that rolled her into orgasm and lifted her again, burning like the sun. She nearly passed out.

‘Fuck, that’s sharp,’ whispered Ben.

His ejaculation spent, Naylor stepped away and left Ben to lower her to her knees and let her fall slowly backward, her legs tumbling apart in disarray. Sophie’s head was swimming, and in the afterwash of her orgasm she felt faint. Too stunned to support herself, she hung limply at the full extension of her arms from wrists which were gripped easily in Ben’s off hand, and her head rolled back as black and red circles bloomed behind her half-closed eyes. His flexed arm didn’t even tremble. He took his stiff cock in his right hand and began to tug with the determined motions of a man who knows he’s ready to unload.

‘Open wide, love.’

Sophie parted her lips and in seconds his spunk jetted out to splash on her – the first squirts on her breasts, the final couple on her face. They kissed her skin like drips of melted ice cream. When she licked it off her lips she found he tasted like fresh-turned earth, with a metallic, coppery tang.

They’ll stop now, she thought weakly. They’ll have finished with me.

They didn’t. They hadn’t.

Ben’s erection didn’t even flag. He lifted her and flopped her forward on to her belly, then took her hips and pulled her ass up as he crouched over her. His teeth pierced the downy globes of her bum, first one side then the other, then he spread her cheeks and munched down on the hole of her ass, each bite a torment and then a beatification, each drawing no more than a single sucked mouthful of her blood. Sophie, her face lolling on the whitewashed floorboards, spasmed at each bite and tried to lift her head, but her arms felt as limp as dishcloths and she could hardly bring them up and plant her palms against the floor. As Ben stood, lifting her, and braced his thighs in a straddle so that he could slip his cock into her burning slot, she could do nothing but hang doubled-up from his grasp, spine and legs limp. It took Naylor sliding beneath her and pushing her up with one casual hand to lift her to even a horizontal position. And as Ben powered into her from behind, Naylor lapped at her dangling breasts once more.

‘Ah!’ gasped Sophie, as his mouth moved over the tingling ice-water splashes that Ben had left on her skin. Naylor laughed a low throaty laugh and bit her over and over again from below, Ben’s semen and her blood melting together on his tongue.

Both men laughed as she wailed and came once more.

The physically strenuous aspects of their recreation were easy for them: effortless. She was no heavier than a rag doll in their arms, and no more capable of rebellion. Her body drove them crazy, her blood intoxicating them so that they fucked her over and over again, as playful and heartless as young lions. Each time she came to climax they both bit her and drank, tasting the spike of her orgasm in her blood. Nor were they restricted, it seemed, in the number of their own orgasms, and in exchange for what they drank from her they washed her in copious outpourings of their own fluids. She took cock like she’d never taken cock before, until she felt like she was an empty sack they were trying to fill, until she was streaked and smeared and musky with come, her hair dishevelled, her make-up smeared.

They never fucked her mouth though.

At the end they carried her to the pile of dustsheets and snuggled up around her, all three of them on their sides, their arms a languid tangle. She liked that: they felt warm now and she was cold, washed in a dark sea. Ben embraced her from the front, his cock wedged up her pussy, while Naylor impaled her ass from behind for the third or fourth time. It didn’t hurt: nothing hurt any more. Every inch of her body was numbly replete from their bites. Together they rocked her in slow luxurious rhythm as they fastened their teeth in her shoulders and sucked slow and long. Sophie felt herself falling toward sleep, the room spinning about her as consciousness ebbed. She tried to speak, though her mouth was dry and she had no idea what she wanted to say, only that she was possessed by a strange sense of regret, not even dismay, only the faintest sense that she was unravelling, her soul frayed to loose red threads that would never be whole again. But only a dry croak escaped her lips as she dissolved into unconsciousness.

* * *

‘Whoa,’ said Ben, unfastening his mouth. His eyes were dark with repletion. He squirmed out from Sophie’s limp embrace and looked down at her. ‘Better stop.’

Naylor rolled away on to his back and squinted at her, sucking his teeth. ‘Let’s just finish her off,’ he grunted. ‘The dregs taste the best; you know that.’

Ben sat up on his haunches. His body was speckled and streaked with dark drops and he absently licked at a smear down the inside of his forearm. ‘Do you want to piss Reynauld off?’ he asked sweetly.

‘Well, now that you suggest it,’ answered Naylor with a switchblade grin, ‘that would be a bonus.’ He sat up though, and scratched at the little spills that had dried on his smooth chest. Ben snorted.

‘I’ll go drop her off on the embankment, shall I?’

Naylor waved a hand. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ve finished here.’

‘What about these?’ Ben looked around at the pieces of sculpture. ‘They’re good.’

‘Estelle’s sending somebody to pick them up.’

‘Estelle?’

‘Yeah. Wants them for one of her clubs, she says. Let her worry about the red tape.’

Ben nodded, then as Naylor stretched and wandered off he walked over to the small pile of Sophie’s belongings and rummaged in her purse. First he extracted the bank notes, folding them between his fingers. Then, opening her cell phone, he thumbed the keypad three times and then held it to his ear, ambling about the room and shuffling one-handed into his jeans, hopping as he pulled them up over his legs. ‘Ambulance,’ he said after a pause.

Naylor necked a beer chaser.

After Ben’s first answer the woman’s voice on the other end of the phone connection kept talking, but he took no notice. He dropped the squawking phone on the sheets next to Sophie and looked down at her with a little smile. She didn’t stir. Pale as marble, she looked like one of Naylor’s sculptures. Her eyes were half-closed, showing crescent-moons of sclera. Her lips were blue, her features relaxed and peaceful. If there was no obvious movement of her ribs, the thready pulse at her throat – quite audible to him – attested that she was still alive for the moment. Her whole body was covered in paired puncture marks, everywhere but over the major blood vessels at the neck and the insides of her thighs.

‘Thanks, love,’ he whispered. ‘You were a blast.’

But Sophie heard none of that.

(Ben)

And this is Ben, the golden boy, youngest of the six vampires in the City. Young enough that he can still pass for human and that he can still go out in daylight, though he wears long-sleeved shirts and sunglasses then and keeps to the shade of buildings because direct sunlight stings him. His hair is cut fashionably short and quirky now, and his eyes are warm and direct. His skin is still tanned from the sun that shone in 1967, a year of wild fashion, wilder youth and chemical revolution. The year he died.

You wouldn’t know that Ben was different from anyone else, meeting him. Undeath hasn’t changed him much, not yet. His demeanour is relaxed and he likes a beer, and in fact it’s easiest to bump into him in a bar or a nightclub. Only in sudden strong light might you notice anything, because his eyes are so sensitive that he can see even in total darkness and under bright light the pupils contract to invisible pinholes, leaving his irises blank. But his eyes never were windows to his soul; even in life they were more like silvered mirrors, reflecting the gazer’s desire.

As a youth his aims were to have fun and chase tail, and in over forty years as a vampire they’ve altered remarkably little. His life revolves around sex and food, which are almost always the same thing. For vampires, there’s no distinction between thirst and desire. Blood-lust and fuck-lust come as a package, one engendering the other. He’s constantly horny, eternally obsessed with pussy. It’s one of the things he likes so much about his new life: he never has to stop. There are other advantages: he’s become faster and stronger and has keener senses, he heals cuts in minutes, his flab has converted to muscle and even his face has subtly changed, honed to a new beauty – but the buzz of rampant desire, the priapic stiffy that threatens to wear a hole in his pants, the heat that grips him every time he spots a potential target: that’s what he really trips on.

Being dead – What’s there not to like?

He’s vaguely aware that others of his kind are different, that things do change with time, but he doesn’t worry about that. Ben is young; still young enough to eat, even. Perhaps only a few mouthfuls a night – pizza and Chinese takeaway mostly, and hold the garlic because in the last couple of decades it’s started to turn his stomach – but he’s still capable of digesting some solids. That will be the first faculty to go, and he will miss it when it happens. The multiple flavours of life will be lost to him, the spices and the textures. All that will be left will be hot, sweet, infinitely appealing blood.

In a big city like this, a world hub, there’s no problem with him taking a different person a night as prey – so long as he doesn’t kill them – and enough places to hunt in that his face doesn’t become known. Notoriety would be a handicap, and Ben likes to fly below the radar. Bars are the easiest places to pull in: hothouses of exotic painted blooms. There’s never a problem if you look like he does, and everyone is awash with alcohol, and they’re all young and hot and eager to be plucked. He does a lot of plucking.

You might well meet Ben that way, particularly at night. But he is a seducer by nature rather than a hunter, and he’s surprised himself in recent years by discovering a taste for the more difficult target. The plainer girl – not the dull, slack-jawed type who’ll do it for a bag of chips or the cheery twinkly one who’ll do it for a laugh, but the buttoned-down type. Does that describe you? There are more women of that kind about than people think, though they’re invisible to so many eyes. Perhaps he’d find you that way, by daylight, when you’re least expecting it. He’s taken to haunting university buildings, parks, art galleries, even botanical gardens. He’s looking for the girls who wear sweatshirts even in warm weather, the ones who haven’t starved themselves or fried themselves orange on a sunbed or bothered to use hair-straighteners for that compulsory sleek look. Sweaters … Sweaters drive him half crazy with lust. Soft, pale, unfashionable girls. The ones who don’t actually believe that a man like him would hit on them. He can smell their defensiveness and the aching eagerness buried beneath.

Is that you?

It’s hard work to get past their disbelief. They often think he’s taking the piss, that he has a coterie of friends hidden nearby killing themselves laughing as he mocks their naivety with his attentions. Oh, but it’s worth it for the first bloom of their sexual scent, the rush of heat and wet, the look in their eyes as they tip from suspicion to hope to surrender. He’s prepared to work for days to get that.

So perhaps he’ll find you when you’re concentrating on something else entirely. At work maybe – your frustrating, claustrophobic job, the one you took just as that first stepping stone, the one that tides you over until you move on to something really worthwhile. Or perhaps he’ll find you in a line at a shop counter, or queuing up to hand in a form in some official waiting room. And he’ll catch your eye with his frank, humorous gaze, so warmly that you’ll wonder, ‘Is it me he’s looking at?’

Yes, it’ll be you. It’ll be hard to believe, but even harder to resist. You might be in a relationship, or you might be resigned to celibacy, but it almost certainly won’t make any difference – so long as there is a sexual instinct buried in you, he will bring it out and reel you in. He’ll use your own nature against you. He’s just too good-looking, too charming, to shrug off, and sexual heat radiates from his cold body like an aura. And you can forget morality or common sense: those things won’t save you. They don’t ever save anyone. Sex, when it kicks into gear – that raging appetite, that dizzy high of anticipation – trumps everything else. Don’t you know that yet?

He can be subtle or he can be pushy, whichever works best in the circumstances. In either case he is persistent. Before you know it, your head will be awhirl and your heart will be beating faster every time you see him. You’ll feel a cramping thrill every time he smiles, every time his hand brushes yours, every time he leans in a little closer. You’ll wonder what is happening to you. Reflected in his eyes, you’ll see yourself as if for the first time: beautiful, desirable and free.

And then, finally, you’ll let him cross the line. Because by then you’ll want nothing in the world more than the sight of his golden skin, his parted lips, his naked body. By then you will be weak-limbed, dizzy, breathless. Your skin will be running hot and cold chills. Your nipples will be so sensitised that the rub of your own clothing is almost painful. Your sex will be heavy with moisture, like a storm ready to break. When he takes you in his arms it will be like a profound pain has finally found release.

Where do you want him, when he takes you at last? In your apartment, in secret? In the park, under a full moon? Behind the shelves where you work, muffled and frantic and daring? He doesn’t mind, so long as he can fuck you. So long as he can have your sex juices and your sweat and your surrender, your cries and your tears of joy. Your bright and racing blood.

It can’t be denied that he’ll give you a good time. Just hope he doesn’t bring Naylor in on it, though.

On his own, Ben is about as harmless as a vampire can be – but Naylor is his weakness. Naylor is the trigger for him going badly wrong, because he turns Ben’s simple lust to his more sadistic ends.

It was the itch of Ben’s lust that brought him to this city in the first place, when he was still alive and living with his parents in a provincial town and had a job as an apprentice repairman, in those days when they still bothered repairing televisions and radios and kettles. He wanted a chance at the big-city nightlife he’d heard so much about, and he found to his delight that there was plenty of sex available: with the Pill now available, trendy chicks had no excuse to say No. He shacked up in a squat with a girl calling herself Moonbeam who had a seemingly endless supply of pot and LSD and a similarly endless line of parties to go to, parties at which the right people showed up to mingle with the hip young things, or if they didn’t they should have and everyone said they had done anyway, the next day. He thought he was in love with her, just a bit, though that didn’t stop him sleeping with other girls. And she went with other blokes too, of course. She was the one who introduced him to Naylor.

She said he was this totally amazing guy who hung out with the Stones and had insights into history and eternity like no one else.

Ben ended up in a room draped with Indian-printed cotton and reeking of patchouli, on his knees with his cock down Moonbeam’s throat, watching awestruck while this skinny beautiful youth fucked her from behind and she gobbled his dick and made noises like she was seeing Krishna himself. Ben had never shared a girl with another man. He thought it the hottest experience of his life, and he didn’t mind even when Naylor began to bite at Moonbeam’s back and shoulders, sucking her blood. Admittedly, the pot probably helped with that surprise. And Moonbeam didn’t seem to mind either; in fact she seemed to revel in the sensation, climbing to new orgasmic heights. It wasn’t long before Ben was finding out for himself what it felt like.

In the whole wide world, there was nothing at all he’d ever known that was as good as the sensation of Naylor sucking his dick. Teeth and tongue. Blood and spunk. People who derided that sort of thing didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. Sometimes, thanks to that magic bite, he walked round with a hard-on all day. Sometimes he woke so drained that his hollow balls just about clanged together.

For a little while the two of them were Naylor’s favourites. The vampire fucked them together and separately, whenever he felt like it, without asking any leave and without needing to. All shame and propriety vanished from Ben’s life. He’d bend over and spread his ass-cheeks in the middle of a crowded room at the flick of a finger, the crook of an eyebrow. He’d offer his arms and his anus and his cock. He’d ask for nothing in return but the benison of Naylor’s razor-edged kiss.

That all stopped when Moonbeam’s heart gave out, quietly and without any warning, one night as she lay with her head tilted backward off the edge of the bed with Naylor sucking at her crotch and Ben’s cock so far down her throat that she didn’t even cry out as she died. The two men buried her body in a patch of wasteland and then Ben threw a tantrum of recrimination and they fought, very briefly and with devastating effect as far as the human one of them was concerned. Naylor must be credited with some impulse of contrition, because he saved Ben from bleeding out by force-feeding the boy his own vampiric blood. That was how Ben was reborn.

In very short order he decided that he hadn’t loved Moonbeam that much after all.

He was luckier than he knew: it so happened that Reynauld was away abroad that month, and his conversion was revealed as a fait accompli upon the older vampire’s return. Moonbeam’s death never came to Reynauld’s attention at all and Ben was permitted to stay, so long as he swore loyalty like the others.

Ben doesn’t resent Reynauld. But he’s still close to Naylor, and that way danger lies. Ben’s bad at spotting danger, though: he lives his life – if that’s the word – on too much of a high. Ironically, these days he’s completely straight, chemically speaking. Psychotropic drugs don’t work on vampires. He can’t even get drunk – except on blood, of course.

That’s all that’s left to him now: blood and sex.

2: Nine for the Nine Bright Shiners

‘Come on. Oh, God, yes – come on!’

And I do. Like I’m told. Filling her.

Sometimes I feel like all she wants of me is the gush of fluid, that I’m nothing but a donor to her. It’s the tiniest bit demoralising. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I want this baby as much as Penny does. I’m totally committed to the effort. I’ve given up coffee and alcohol and even fish, to my dismay – they’re supposedly caked in pollutants that depress sperm count – and I’ve switched to boxer shorts instead of briefs to keep the Boys optimally cool. I take my mineral supplements: zinc and selenium and vitamin C. It’s just as important to me as to her.

OK, so if I’m honest it isn’t. It couldn’t be. It’s all she thinks about these days. Sometimes I look at her and wonder how the dance-till-dawn party chick I first met turned into this macrobiotic-organic obsessive with the body honed by swimming and Pilates into a lean, mean, baby-bearing machine. Fitness is considered vital in the mum-to-be, these days, it turns out. No one just gets pregnant and carries on any more; it has to be conducted like a military campaign instead. Not that I object to a toned tum and a firm butt, obviously; it’s the look in her eyes that worries me, the way they’re like holes going down into a big dark place. Whenever we meet someone with a pushchair she tries to hide it but I see. I can see her hunger.

* * *

I get called away from the table during a dinner the mayor’s hosting at his official residence. It’s not a particularly formal do, luckily: just a Spanish business delegation and some potential local investors and a couple of members of the European Parliament. Not exactly exciting stuff, but not much potential for messing things up either; they’re all happily chowing down so no one’s going to miss me for a few minutes. Penny has turned up at the front gate, and security have rung through to me.

‘It’s all right,’ I tell them: ‘She’s my wife.’ And I bring her inside. She’s dressed up enough not to look out of place, thankfully, in a little cobalt-blue number I’m rather fond of because of the cutaway back. ‘Is anything wrong?’ I ask, drawing her into a corner of the hall, under a portrait of Gladstone. There are waiting staff at practically every corner so I keep my voice low. It’s odd seeing your wife in a work context. Two halves of my brain are in collision.

‘I’m ovulating, Richard.’

I try not to frown, though I’m secretly exasperated. ‘Couldn’t it wait?’

‘Well, you’re not planning on coming home tonight, are you?’ That’s true enough: with the mayoral elections coming up in a fortnight, once the guests are gone we’re all likely to be in a strategy meeting until the small hours. I’m going to have to sleep over here or else I’ll get back home by taxi somewhere near 4 a.m., at a guess. ‘And I have to be up early tomorrow,’ she continues, ‘to catch the train to my seminar.’

I nod reluctantly. Penny is a freelance consultant for the hotel industry and gives talks all over the country.

She switches tack, from rational argument to tease: ‘Bet you can’t guess what I’m wearing under this dress.’ Her eyes glitter and she moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue. It evokes the first stir of a reaction in the region of my crotch, just as she intends. Tease works.

‘All right then.’ I look up and down the corridor. The diners will be well into the bottles of Krug by now. And it’s not as if I’m the only political adviser the mayor’s got to hand. ‘Down here.’

I need a room with a lock on the door, which means a guest toilet unfortunately: I pick the one furthest from the dining hall. It’s an exceptionally well-appointed toilet of course. It also happens to be occupied, because as I lay my hand on the door I hear a voice within. A man’s voice, deep and measured. He’s talking to someone, although the other voice is not audible.

‘Blast,’ I mutter. I might think about heading to another location, except that Penny takes the opportunity to lean against the wall and brush her fingers up my fly, a furtive tickle that deprives me of the will to move anywhere. Her eyes are bright, her breasts plumped up even more than usual to create a mesmerising cleft. ‘Careful,’ I admonish weakly. ‘We need to be discreet.’

‘How can we be, when I’m gagging for your cock?’ she mouths. I love it when she talks filthy, which she knows, of course. That perfect, preened exterior combined with whorishly low speech makes for a delicious frisson.

Then the door opens. A man comes out, looks at us both, nods with a faint smile and walks away. I think for a moment that I recognise him but the familiarity is fleeting. Penny’s eyes follow him down the corridor. ‘Who was that?’ she asks with undisguised admiration.

I sigh and steer her into the bathroom. That’s certainly one sign she’s ovulating: she becomes a rapacious flirt. Another man in my position might not take it so well. ‘I don’t know him. One of the Spanish group, I should think – they’re in the running for a contract on the integrated transport initiative.’

‘Well, he knew you.’

‘Did he?’

‘He called you Richard.’

I blink, nonplussed. I can’t recall him saying anything to me at all. I can’t actually remember his face right now, come to think of it. He was tall and looked like he might have been Spanish; that’s all I recall. ‘Did you yank me out of dinner just to talk?’ I’m a little brusque, I admit, to cover my confusion. Penny rolls her eyes.

‘OK, love.’ She stalks over to the sink and drops her handbag while I give the room a once-over glance, just in case the conversation we’d overheard had been taking place live and not over the phone. But the room, though spacious for a toilet and slightly over-furnished – an antique armoire against one wall, a small but fiendishly ornate sofa upholstered in brocade, a huge matching gilded mirror over the marble counter that cups two sinks and a large vase of fresh roses – is empty of all human forms but our own. I push the door-bolt to.

‘So what are you wearing?’

‘Come and find out.’ She smiles at me, heavy-lidded, in the mirror. I walk over behind her, Mr Dick already doing his wake-up stretches under my uncomfortable goddamn boxers. ‘Inappropriate Behaviour’ while working is strictly forbidden even if it is with one’s spouse; there’ve been more than enough embarrassing headlines in the press about waste-of-money politicians and public employees gadding about when they should be doing something worthy and abstemious. The fact that this could get me into terrible trouble adds a distinct spice to the occasion. Standing behind her, I watch in the mirror as she lifts her hands and rubs lazily at her breasts, slipping the shoulder straps of her dress to reveal more of those delectable twin slopes – so pale they make me think of snow, so smooth I want to ski down them into the ravine between.

‘Show me,’ I whisper, and my voice is thickening. ‘Get them out and play with them.’

With a languorous smile she obeys, scooping each orb from dress and bra to prop them on the rumpled fabric, circling her nipples with her fingertips. The blushing points harden under the attention. I reach round and assist her, tweaking and flicking the stiff nubs until she surrenders them to me with the sigh I know very well. At the same time I press her to the marble slab, my awakening cock nuzzling up against the cushions of her bum. I enjoy watching us in the mirror; it’s almost like being in our own movie. I can see my hands looking coarse and dark on her cream-coloured skin, catch every flash and flicker of her eyes as my touch sets off cascades of reactions in her body. At this time of the month she’s quick to arouse, already primed. I feel her cheeks squirming back against my pressure. She’s ready for it.

‘As you were,’ I whisper. ‘Keep playing with those.’ As she takes over again I step back so that I can look at that wriggling ass, at her taut legs and her bunched calves, straining on the spike heels of shoes that exactly match the colour of her dress. Sheer blue stockings complete the ensemble. I lift her skirt, and stare. It must have taken some careful work with a mirror: she’s not wearing any panties, but written in blue felt-tip down the last couple of inches of her spine is the neat instruction FUCK, with an arrow pointing down into the crack of her behind. And across her bum cheeks is the broken word CUM SLUT.

Well, that puts lead in my pencil: six inches of solid graphite. My cock bounces out into my hand as I unzip. ‘How did you get here?’ I ask.

‘Black cab.’

‘With no knickers on?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘It’s a very short skirt,’ I muse, lifting her right leg right up to open her wide as I seek entry. My stiffy goes in like a hot knife into her butter. ‘Do … hh … Do you think the taxi-driver noticed?’

‘He might have,’ Penny gasps. ‘He was looking.’

That is enough for me: she knows how to push all my kink buttons. I’m in and I’m thrusting, pushing her forward over the sink, plunging the depths of her lubricious hole. Her four-inch heel skids about on the marble benchtop. I know better than to try and take it slow, or to reach for her clit. She doesn’t care about coming, she just wants me to come. That’s why she’s put so much effort into this. She grips the curve of the sink and shuts her eyes, lips open in an O of sympathy for her impaled sex.

God, she feels good. Tight, yet so welcoming.

And as I pound away, as my whole body clenches toward ejaculation, I look past her face in the mirror and see another behind us both. A woman’s. She stands on the upright back of the French settee, her bare toes gripping the gilding and her arms stretched behind her to touch the wall, like a Rolls Royce hood ornament: the Spirit of Ecstasy. I know she can’t really be there, that there’s no way anyone could be in the room with us. It’s an optical illusion conjured by my horny mind as it catches in the fire of orgasm. A wraith-woman moulded from shadows, dressed in only a veil through which her delicate body glows, her hair a cloudy nimbus floating about her head. But that’s all I glimpse, because just then my climax shakes me and I’m pumping my cum into my wife’s hot cunny, and the whole room goes nova.

When I come back down to myself there’s no one but us two in the mirror. And no one else in the room, of course.

Penny fishes a pair of knickers from her handbag almost before I’m out of her, then goes to lie down on her side on the couch. Thirty minutes letting gravity help the little swimmers on their way, that’s the rule. She smiles at me when I go over and kiss her temple, but the smile is wan. ‘That was lovely,’ she says. ‘Thank you, Richard.’

It was great, I want to say. Didn’t you enjoy it? You don’t look like you did. It was great … but weird. Where in my head had that girl come from?

‘You OK, Pen?

‘Of course.’ I can see it in her eyes, which don’t really focus on me. They’re like empty wells but at the bottom gleam burning coals: the hope that this time it will take.

Like I say, sometimes it’s a bit disheartening.

* * *

Christ, if she actually caught me going on like this she’d kill me. I’m supposed to be 100 per cent supportive. It’s not as if I actually have to do that much except get my leg over with clockwork regularity and provide the seed. I’m supposed to enjoy that bit, aren’t I? And of course I do. Penny’s invested in a whole range of fancy underwear and some kinky little costumes – a French maid, a pirate lass, a naughty nurse – so that my co-operation can be guaranteed. I’m getting more sex now than in years. Every other day throughout her cycle, to be precise, with a week off when the red flag of yet another failure paints her pantyliners: mornings preferred because there’s a higher sperm load, and if I’m always in a bit of a rush before work that’s not a problem; there’s no need to linger and coming back for seconds is not encouraged.

* * *

I’m in a taxi on the way home, thinking about our little assignation as I look out at the deserted streets, and wondering when was the last time we had sex just for the fun of it. I’m not complaining; I’ve no right to complain. Penny has made it her business to find out everything that turns me on and she applies it with ruthless efficiency and not the tiniest smidgen of shame. She’s lifted from me the onus of actually giving her pleasure and made it clear I only need to think about my own orgasm; that’s enough to satisfy her. Isn’t that what every overworked man wants?

Well, maybe.

And I can’t help suspecting that the second that blue cross shows up on the plastic wand, all the feathers and fishnets are going straight in the bin. Luckily Mr Dick isn’t much interested in the long view. He just goes ‘Stockings? Wow! Count me in!’

The streets slip past with unfamiliar swiftness: small shops and tree-lined avenues. It’s the dead time of the night and anything that does close down has done. The entrance to my local Underground station is barred with a metal grille, but the illuminated sign warns me I’m nearly home. I shake myself from my reverie as we pull up outside my apartment block. It’s only a year old and it gleams darkly against the sodium glow of the sky. It won an architectural award, did Mavin Wood Towers. It’s a nice place to live. They had to cut the wood down to build it, of course.

Then the taxi-driver switches on the interior light and all the cab windows turn to mirrors, and I see her in the reflection. She’s in the seat next to me, her feet drawn up on the upholstery: the girl from the bathroom mirror. She’s very pretty but completely colourless, like she’s been sculpted in ash, and only her eyes look truly real. I jump nearly out of my skin this time, and turn without thinking to swipe at the place she sits. My hand bounces off the empty seat cushion.

‘You OK, mate?’ The cabby sounds suspicious.

‘Uh,’ I say. ‘Yes.’ I shove notes into his hand and don’t wait for any change. I’m out of the taxi without another glance at my reflection, and as my feet touch the pavement I suddenly remember the identity of the man who came out of the bathroom. It’s like a door opening in my head. Of course I knew him. I’d seen him a number of times around the mayor’s office. Reynauld.

‘Oh, fuck,’ I say to myself, suddenly sweating with anxiety. The bastards know how to mess with your head like that. They can do more or less what they like, I gather. I’m not directly involved in liaison, but everyone in city politics knows about them.

I hurry to the front door of the block. It’s made of smoked glass and, as I reach for the number-plate to type in my security code, I see that behind my own dark reflection there’s a woman standing on the pavement under the streetlight. The woman. She’s veiled from head to foot, but the light goes straight through the gauze to outline her delicate body. She’s not moving, she’s just watching me.

With a convulsive movement I yank open the door and pull it to behind me. There’s resistance and I feel a frisson of panic, but it’s probably only the hydraulic spring. I’m inside and safe.

They can’t come inside unless you invite them, isn’t that right?

* * *

I’m doing my best to help the process along. I want to be a dad. I mean, I guess I do. I accept it’s going to change my life, it just doesn’t seem real yet. If it were up to me we’d both just bumble on as usual and leave it all up to chance, so it’s a good thing Penny’s got her teeth into the matter, I suppose. She always gets her way in the end.

Of course, even Mr Dick can be cussed and rebellious. Certain things are on the Forbidden List now, with the inevitable consequence that I’m constantly thinking about how much I want to do them. Like, no more hand-shandies; I’m not allowed to waste good cum.

How strange is it that masturbation is now an unattainable privilege?

* * *

I step out of the bath and towel myself down as the water drains. Somehow I manage to catch my own eye in the mirror. I’ve been a bit wary of mirrors since seeing that wraith-woman, but there’s been no sign of her since that first night and I’m feeling reasonably secure here. I’m at home for the weekend and it’s daylight, even if it is a watery winter light. It was probably all a figment of my imagination anyway, I know. If you’re awake and working for twenty hours in a day it’s no wonder that you start dreaming on your feet.

The bathroom’s tiled and accessorised in black and white and the towels match; my body is the only object in the mirror with any colour to it. I look at myself critically, but I’m pretty pleased, let’s face it. I look fit. I’ve kept the stomach bulge and the man-boobs at bay. I’ve still got a full head of hair, cut in a style that says ‘prime’ and not ‘middle-aged’. My cock and balls look just fine. I focus on the latter, hanging low in their sling of flesh, a bit struck all of a sudden by the magical potential of their bag of tricks. Whole new lives nestle in those spheres. Million of potential futures. If I was the last man alive I could repopulate the whole country, the whole world, given enough women and enough time to fuck them all. The thought makes Mr Dick swell a little, and I cup my balls encouragingly. ‘Come on, Boys,’ I whisper, giving them a little squeeze. ‘You can do it.’

It’s my day off: we’ve not had sex this morning. And now I want to stroke off, but it’s not allowed. I lift my cock away from my scrotum, feeling the slight pull as the damp skin separates. My cock responds to the touch by filling up a little, bobbing free of gravity. I shift my hips, restless. My scrotum is gathering to wrinkles. I want to jack off. Just solo, with no expectations and no consequences. A nice leisurely wank without the weight of Penny’s need. But I feel guilty; she wouldn’t know, of course, but I’d still be letting her down. I stroke the long curve of flesh and feel the swell surge down to the head. Aw, hell. Now it really is a semi.

‘Richard! I’m off!’

Wrapping the black towel about my hips, I exit the bathroom. In the hallway Penny is making last-minute adjustments to her make-up in front of the narrow wall mirror. ‘How do I look?’ she asks as I approach.

She looks great. She always looks great. Even in her winter clothes she’s sexy: she’s wearing burning red lipstick and a trenchcoat number that just screams of 40s repression and daring, and patterned stockings under that. Well, they might be tights but I can’t help seeing them as stockings. I embrace her from behind, my cock pressing with incorrigible hope into her through layers of towel and clothing. ‘You look lovely.’

Penny sighs slightly. ‘Save it for later, tiger. I’ve got a train to catch.’ It might be a weekend but she’s got an exhibition to attend and a stall to run.

I’ll be quick, I want to tell her, but I know better than to argue. It would just upset her schedule. I content myself with a goodbye grope and kiss before seeing her off and locking the front door. Then I look in the mirror, shaking my head at myself with blokish sympathy. I can see the bulge Mr Dick is making under the towel.

I need a wank. I mean I really need a wank. It makes me feel irritable and bold. I drop the towel on the laminate beech floorboards and strum my cock with slow, defiant strokes.

You going to show up then, ghost-girl?

Nothing stirs in the reflection behind me. Of course not. It’s broad daylight and I’m safe in my own home. I begin to stroke in earnest. God, this is good. My cock is growing stiff and straight and tall, pointing at the glass. My balls are bunching to a fat mass like a fist. I put my hand on the wall and rise up on my toes a little, enjoying the clench of muscles that seems to focus my whole body’s attention at my groin. My eyes are open but I’m not really seeing. Instead I picture Ruth, the grumpy clerical secretary at work. I imagine her walking around as we sit in a focus-group circle, circulating the handouts. She always wears her blonde hair in a chignon and a skirt that is tight on her big thighs: in my fantasy she’s wearing seamed stockings too. She gets to my place, walking inside the circle of chairs, and as she turns from me I stick my foot out and trip her up. Down she goes on her hands and knees, files scattered everywhere, her head ending up nearly in my lap. She’s so surprised she doesn’t even get angry; she just stares at me with her eyes wide and her mouth set in a luscious O. I take advantage of the moment to whip out my thick cock and stuff it between her lips, so deep that for a moment she chokes. I grab her hair and use it to pump her head up and down on my huge length, and after a moment’s resistance she crumbles and begins to suck obediently. Everyone else seated round the circle makes gasps of lecherous appreciation; it’s such a fine sight and we’ve all fantasised about what that big surly mouth could do if put to proper use. They’re getting out their own cocks too; they mean to follow my example and take their own turns once I’ve come. And I’m going to come right now. ‘Take it,’ I grunt, spurting into Ruth’s mouth, down her eager, gobbling throat.

All over the mirror.

Afterwards I go into the kitchen and find a J Cloth and some glass cleaner under the sink. But when I get back into the hall there’s no spunk on the mirror at all. Not a drop. Just the mothprint of a pair of lips, halfway down the glass as if someone had knelt there and kissed the hard surface. It’s almost invisible unless you’re looking for something. I spray the smudge and rub hard with the cloth but it’s no good: the kiss is on the other side of the glass.

* * *

Worse than the prohibition on beating off is the one that says No Blowjobs – not even as an opening move, because saliva inhibits sperm motility or something. Which is especially cruel as Penny used to give head so good that it’d make my brain melt. I miss that. I fantasise about oral all the time. Even when I’m on the job, I might be humping away on top but I’m imagining sinking my cock between her lips, smearing her high-gloss scarlet lipstick all the way up my shaft, feeling the lap of her agile tongue on all the right places. Or I’ll be banging her from behind, those ass-cheeks which appear so neat when she stands looking huge now, uplifted under my hands with that black satin corset cinching her waist, and I’ll be thinking about how good it would be to slip into her tight pucker instead and waste all my jizz in the wrong hole. Because that one’s way off limits now too.

I fantasise about coming on her breasts. She has fantastic breasts, neither flabby nor flat but a good handful each, still as firm and perky as a younger woman’s, with the most beautiful big nipples that go hard as pink icing rosettes when I tease them. The areolae crinkle to the texture of cookies. Remember those Iced Gem biscuits you used to be able to buy? That’s what I think of when I’m sucking Penny’s nips. They’re that sweet. Her skin is the colour of rich cream and there’s a scatter of tiny moles or freckles from her left shoulder to her nipple, like the splatter flicked from a paintbrush, like droplets of dark cum already spilt in homage to her beauty. And her breasts are full enough that I can straddle her torso and slip my shaft into the valley between them as I cup and squeeze them together, making a sheath for my length. I remember leisurely tit-wanks that seemed to go on for ever, her tongue lapping the head of my knob as it popped out of the ravine to wink at her. I fantasise about doing that again. About taking myself in hand as my orgasm approaches. About feeling the cum gather in my balls and surge up and out to rain on the uplands of her breasts, obliterating the freckles, painting her creamy skin in my whiter shade of pale.

I want to come on the small of her back, and on her bottom and her thighs. I want to watch my spunk slowly dry on her hot skin and ease away the flakes between my fingers, feeding them between her lips to melt upon her tongue like communion wafers. I want to see her kneel before me one more time, the shiny brown swing of her bobbed hair framing her face, her mouth open like a baby bird begging to be fed, her tongue pink and eager to taste my spilt salt.

I miss her.

* * *

I wake in the middle of the night, or perhaps don’t wake at all. The covers are thrown back and I’m sweating, I’ve been having restless dreams and perhaps this is just another of them. There’s a glow emanating from the mirror over Penny’s dressing table, the reflection of the bedroom light, but it takes me a moment to realise that our own bulb isn’t on. And as I contemplate that, my head still full of sleep, the mirror-ghost appears and, stooping forward, steps out through the frame. Just like the girl in that Japanese horror movie, only without the jerky corpse/insect shuffle; she’s consummately graceful in fact. She stands on the dressing table with her bare feet not stirring the myriad bottles of perfume and moisturiser and pigment. Naked.

Naked, except for a veil of gauze that wraps spiralwise about her body in that way fabric only ever does in paintings, hiding nothing. I can see the tremble of her breasts as she breathes. Then with a light step she lands on the footboard of our bed. There’s no bump, no sensation of descending weight. I feel nothing. Thank God, I think: this is a dream.

She looks down at me with a slow, sweet smile. She’s beautiful, my mirror-ghost. Almost girlishly delicate, with a hairless sex, but with curves to her hips and breasts that are far from childlike. And the eyes in her piquant face are ancient and knowing, her lips lush with promise. She is a fairy maiden, a nymph risen from some still and secret pool. If only she weren’t so pale she’d be astoundingly beautiful, but she’s the colour of the Portland Stone statues that grace the pediment of the mayor’s residence; not a warm and creamy pallor like Penny’s, but a delicate grey. I’m reminded of the allegorical figure of the City who sits with her scales and her portcullis in either hand. Even her eyes are colourless, and her erect nipples are white like quartz pebbles.

Down to her knees she slides, slow as oozing cement, eyes huge and fixed on my uncovered form. I think maybe I should protest. But this is only a dream, nothing to worry about – and if it isn’t a dream then I’ll have to wake Penny, who sleeps beside me, still muffled under the duvet.

I can’t wake Penny. It’s too much. She can’t be expected to deal with this too.

With softly creeping movements the mirror-girl inches her way up my legs, her lips almost brushing the hair that stands erect on my spooked skin but her shining eyes fixed on me. Her own hair billows around her head like smoke: it’s a grey like the rest of her but streaked with rust. I think she must have been a redhead once. The lips in that pointed face are incongruously full, almost swollen. The tongue that laps out between them is the palest shade of pink and as she kneels over my crotch and takes me in her mouth I catch a glimpse, the merest hint only, of teeth.

She’s cold. Her mouth is cold. It’s like being sucked by a cream dessert, yielding and smooth and sweet. My cock responds to the slick embrace with an instantaneous surge of heat, and I arch my back off the mattress as my whole body goes rigid with shock and pleasure. Then she drops me, letting me ease from between her lips as she withdraws her head – only it takes much longer coming out than going in because it’s twice as long now and getting longer by the heartbeat. Her saliva gleams on the ruddy column, giving it a pearlescent sheen. She smiles at me questioningly and bats at the crown of my cock with teasing little licks. My hands are pinned by my sides, too heavy to lift from the sheet.

This has to be a dream.

With a tilt of her head she crouches lower, her mouth opening wide to suck my scrotum. Into that cool cave goes first one bollock and then the other, bathed in her wetness. I am shaking now where I lie, every fibre quivering, and my erect cock points up at my face and nods against my belly with every jerk. But as she releases my balls and licks her way back up its length it rises clear of my supine form, twitching. It doesn’t give a stuff about dreams or reality, cold or hot. It just wants her mouth. So she engulfs me, a cool ocean in which my body swims, my mind trailing helplessly behind like a plastic float. I surrender all control of my limbs and give myself up to her moon-cold kisses until I’m leaping wave after wave of arousal and surging toward the light. When she bites, I barely feel the pain. I feel the pelagic upswell that follows in its wake though: the perfect wave. It drags me down into the deep and everything turns to black.

It was certainly a dream. I wake in the morning with a monumental hard-on and mount Penny almost before she’s awake. And she doesn’t object, of course, even though it takes me – despite my breathless horniness – nearly for ever to come.

* * *

I’ve been having these lurid fantasies, sleeping and waking, for months now. It’s a case of what you can’t have, that’s what you want. And what I want is sex that hasn’t a thing to do with procreation. It’s become an obsession. I used to be so pedestrian in my fantasies, I’d imagine what it would be like to fuck newspaper models and pretty Australian soap starlets and that girl in the canteen I never spoke to. Now I catch myself in crazy musings. There’s a big Catholic church with a convent attached to it down the end of our road: I’ve screwed Penny while picturing myself standing on the altar, cock in hand, jerking off an impossible spunk-shower over the upturned, outraged faces of the nuns kneeling before me. There’s a public garden where, if it’s a quiet day at work, I take my packed lunch to eat; there are often students there sketching the statues and the plants because there’s an art college on the boundary road, and for some reason a lot of them seem to be Italian or Spanish. I find myself eyeing them up, fantasising about having three or four of those cool, aloof girls on their knees before me, their sleek hair swept behind their shoulders as they take it in turns to suck my cock, squabbling delightfully when one gets too greedy and holds centre-stage too long.

Christ. I’m turning into a real horn-dog.

Maybe the more sex you get, the more you want.

* * *

I come out of the rather fancy town house and stand on the top step with the computer printout in my hand, feeling sick. When I look down at the paper the figures blur and dance, meaningless. It’s a good thing the doctor explained the results to me.

A good thing … Oh, God.

I went to a private clinic for the semen analysis, keeping it quiet, not telling Penny. I just wanted to be sure it wasn’t me that was holding us back. Well, now I know. Low sperm count, and those that are there have something wrong with them. Stunted tails, I gather from the doctor’s sympathetic words, that cause them to swim in fitful spirals instead of straight ahead.

Fuck fuck fuck. What’s going to happen when Penny finds out? Because she will: eventually she’ll have us both down our local GP, demanding medical check-ups and assistance. It only counts as infertility if you’ve been trying for two years, but she’s going to lose patience sooner rather than later.

How’s she going to react when she finds out it’s me, that I’m the one letting her down?

I stumble to the car and drive all the way home without the slightest awareness of my surroundings. It’s only when I’m in the big basement car park under Mavin Wood Towers, reversing into my parking space, that I register anything outside my own head, and then I nearly accelerate into the bloody wall because the mirror-girl is back, sitting behind me, bisecting the rear window and visible in my rear-view mirror. ‘Ah God fuck!’ I shriek, slamming the horn by mistake. The cacophony in the concrete undercroft is horrible. I’m out of the car in a flat second, staring in at the back seat – but no one’s visible, of course. She was only there in the reflection.

I feel sort of foolish then, and ashamed of my cowardice, and pissed off. I look round to see if anyone’s witnessed my panic, but the parking area is deserted.

I make myself take the elevator up to the twelfth floor, not the stairs. The interior of that little box is lined with smoked mirror-glass, but I grit my teeth and step inside. I refuse to be afraid of her. What has she done, after all, but crawl out of my dreams and bestow her cool kiss? Does she even exist outside my head? Should I be afraid of that? Resolutely I turn my back on the mirrored wall and stare at the numbers over the door.

Halfway up, between the sixth and seventh floors, the lift slows to a halt and the lights dim. I shut my eyes. I’m sweating: I can feel the cold trickle inching down my spine toward the cleft of my ass. My shoulder blades bump lightly against the glass and under my suit jacket I feel my skin crawl.

Something brushes my thigh and the front of my trousers. I look down to see a slim, naked arm draped about my hips, the pale hand stroking my crotch and searching for my fly. Her nails are long and just a little too pointed.

Oh, hell.

My eyes flick upwards. There’s a camera in one of the corners, of course. It won’t get the best angle, but if it’s still working – and I’ve no way of telling that – it’ll see enough. The thought of being filmed on CCTV while an unseen woman opens my flies and pulls out my cock is too uncomfortable. I turn my back to the lens and face the mirror.

She’s kneeling there beyond the glass, and her hand juts from its surface as if from peaty water in a still pool. I can imagine that easily: there’s something about her that makes me think of Celtic twilight and ladies of the lake. But she’s perfectly conversant with the uses of buttons and zips, I find; popping one and pulling down the other, reaching beneath to the cotton that’s sticking to my skin, finding her way to my over-eager cock and my useless balls.

And my only response is to hold my waistband so my trousers don’t fall down. Because all of a sudden those balls don’t feel so useless. She doesn’t care if my sperm can’t swim straight; she just wants to feel the hot spurt of my cream over her cold tongue.

She just wants to suck me.

I lay my forehead on the cool glass. I can see her smooth inhuman face swimming toward me through the depths of the smoky glass, breaking the surface, lifting out from the mirror. Her hair is sleeked behind her as if wet and gravity are drawing it down. Her pale lips part, spreading for the ruddy blunt bell end of my erection. Cold: cold like moor water. The hair rises on the nape of my neck and my scrotum contracts with a heave, but the chill is nothing compared to the slick caress of her mouth.

And I’m so fucking grateful. I could drown in gratitude, if I wasn’t going to drown in pleasure first.

* * *

‘What’s that?’ Penny asks, pointing at my chest. I pull my dressing gown over hastily to hide the paired dimples of the puncture wounds.

‘Dunno. Just insect bites, I think.’ I feel groggy, hungover.

‘The mayor’s residence has bedbugs, does it?’

‘You’d be amazed. Old building, you know. There’re all sorts of dirty old corners.’

‘Ew. Don’t go bringing anything home with you, that’s all.’

Too late, I think. I pour my third cup of tea since staggering out of bed.

‘Are you going into work then?’

I ought to. Not that there’s anything to do, because it’s the election today. Far too late for him or me or anyone else to affect the vote, but we’ve got to be seen to be around. ‘Later,’ I mumble. ‘We’re going to be up most of the night waiting for the results to come in.’

‘Well, I’ve got to get going.’ She heads off to the bathroom to finish her morning ablutions. I’m so dull-witted that I don’t immediately notice that she doesn’t come back. I just sit there nursing my cup of tea and staring at the cloudy sky through the window. Picturing a face as pale and luminous as those clouds. When I rise from the breakfast bar the apartment feels eerily still. I wander down the corridor and tap on the bathroom door.

‘You still in there?’

There’s a soft noise: a sob. My heart sinks. Opening the door I find Penny sitting on the edge of the bath. She lifts her face and tries to smile, but her mouth is all over the place and all the blinking she’s doing doesn’t hide how wet her eyes are.

‘My period’s come on.’

‘Oh, love,’ I whisper.

‘I thought this time … I was late … I really thought …’ She stops talking and clenches down. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she grits out. ‘Not to worry. We keep trying.’

And all I can do is hug her and rub the stiff angles of her shoulders and wish helplessly that there’s something I could do to make her happy. And hate myself.

From the corner of my eye I see pale shadows shift in the bathroom mirror. I press Penny closer to my chest and shield her face, not wanting her to see the girl in the glass – and certainly not that look of possessive avarice burning in those pale eyes.

* * *

The mayor loses the election. It’s no landslide, but by shortly after midnight enough of the ballot boxes are in and counted that we’ve got a clear picture of the results. It’s not going to be made public until tomorrow, of course, but a silence falls over those of us gathered in City Hall as the phones ring and the same message is relayed from ward after ward. It’s always harder for the sitting candidate to win, of course, and we’re not entirely surprised.

I leave the scrum of officials and PR men and activists and head upstairs, wanting to be on my own. The top floor has a famously good 360-degree view of the City from its conference suite: this isn’t the mayor’s gracious official residence but a modern oblate high-rise that squats on the north bank of the river, an architect’s wet dream of steel and glass. The windows run floor to ceiling on the top storey. I stand in the unlit room, looking out over a landscape as darkly glittering and beautiful as the bottom of the sea, the outlines of water and stone picked out only by the phosphorescent glow of individual lights, the sky as opaque and starless as if it’s a mile of water pressing down upon us. The creep of car headlights brings to mind the gleam of bottom-feeding crustacea.

I feel the numb ache of defeat in every fibre of my body. In days I’ll be out of a job. Perhaps it’s a good thing I’ve not been able to give Penny a child; we’re going to need her income. Hah. There’s cold comfort for you. I’m a failure, let’s face it. Unable to do my job and sway the pendulum of political opinion, unable to provide for my family, unable even to father a baby – that simplest of biological functions. Isn’t the most primal and basic goal of all life to replicate itself? Isn’t that what we’re designed for? Even microbes can reproduce, but not me.

My cell phone rings, making me quiver. It’s Penny. I don’t take the call. As silence returns I move over to the room’s environmental control panel next to the elevator, and turn on the lights.

Instantly the night outside vanishes, the windows becoming mirrors.

She’s there, waiting for me. I’m cerebrally intrigued to see that she’s only reflected in one of the angled panes, even though I’m visible in several. Her long hair is fox-red now, after days of feeding from me. There is even a hint of colour in her cheeks.

Gracefully, almost idly, she circles my reflection and, as I watch, begins to dance. It’s strange to see her brushing up against me, draping her arms about my neck, rubbing her rear into my crotch – all without me being able to feel a thing. The tease is entirely visual. Each flick of her hips makes the blood surge in my veins. Each jiggle of her breasts makes my need grow. But I feel oddly discomfited in the midst of my fascination, as if I’m jealous of my own reflection. I move my hands, trying to interact with her dance, and she laughs silently as my mirrored self moves too, clumsily encircling her undulating hips. Turning in my arms she grasps the front of my shirt and tears it open.

My real shirt, the one on my material body, remains unscathed. The one in the reflection is shredded and my chest revealed. The look of confusion on my face is comic. She’s mocking me, I suspect – mocking my desire to rationalise, at any rate. She rakes her nails across my bare skin and my reflection bleeds, yet I feel nothing. She shreds my trousers – effortlessly; her nails must be sharp as knives – and squirms her pert little rump against me.

‘Come here,’ I say hoarsely. ‘Come on out.’

Her eyes lift and meet mine, looking straight out from the glass, her lips forming a smile so wanton that it makes my cock stiffen all on its own. Then she abandons my reflected self and walks out from the mirrored room into the material one. Her feet make no sound on the carpet, of course, but I feel the caress of the cold air that surrounds her. I take a deep breath as she closes on me, lays a slender hand on my breastbone, and then pushes me backwards on to the table and climbs on top.

This time I hear the fabric of my shirt tear.

* * *

She tastes like that Chinese tea: lapsang souchong, that’s the one. Slightly smoky, slightly tannic. Cold.

Eat me, I beg. Eat me up. Take me down to that dark place and let me never come back.

* * *

When the elevator door opens I’m lying supine on the polished conference table, speckled with love-bites, and she’s kneeling over me. She’s framing my head with her straddled thighs and grinding her pubic mound down over my face, but I’m not exactly applying myself to the job. Traumatic pleasure has got me pinned, capable of nothing more than groans. She’s got her teeth buried deep in my balls and she’s sucking hard, and that’s about all my mind is capable of grasping right now.

Until Penny steps out of the lift.

I look up from between the mirror-girl’s white thighs as my world cracks like a dropped glass. ‘It’s not what it looks like’ – isn’t that what I’m supposed to say, caught in flagrante like that? That’s the cliché. Try and talk your way out of this: Mr Dick is standing at full mast, angled as a gnomon over my belly. ‘It’s not what it looks like, darling: I’m not really fucking her.’

The mirror-girl makes the point far better than I ever could, lifting her face from my punctured balls and stiff cock to snarl at Penny, showing a red mask that’s all savage teeth.

‘Richard?’ Pen takes an unsteady pace forward, dropping her handbag.

Light as a cat, the mirror-girl springs off me and the two women stare.

‘That’s … That’s my husband.’ Penny sounds aghast.

The mirror-girl doesn’t reply. I’ve never heard her speak. She snatches my wrist and pulls me up from the table, heading for the window. She’s strong, but I’m so weak I can’t keep my legs under me. I’ve lost too much blood, I think, as the floor shoots up to meet me and my shoulder is wrenched at an unnatural angle. Blue-black explosions of colour flare behind my eyes. My knees burn on the carpet as she tows me. I see her bound through the pane of glass and my arm follows, tight in her grasp.

It’s like jelly; gelid but yielding. My hand sinks into the pane and it doesn’t appear on the outside of the glass where the walkway is, waving over the city landscape, but only in the reflected room. With a jerk she drags me through up to my shoulder. For the first time I try to resist, though not wholeheartedly.

A warm hand grabs my other wrist, drawing it out behind me. Penny. It’s Penny, holding me back.

The mirror-girl pulls again, much stronger, and my head is wrenched through to the other side. For a moment, strung between both worlds, I see what the reflection looks like from within. I see what she looks like in her own world.

I scream, but I know Penny can’t hear me any more. The warm hand is nearly pulling my left arm off: the cold one is wrenching at my right. I shut my eyes and haul backwards as hard as I can, twisting my wrist in the mirror-ghost’s grasp. Her fingers feel as thin and hard as bone.

Then she lets go. It’s so abrupt it has to be deliberate: I pitch over backwards and the glass shatters to tiny cubes, letting in a ferocious blast of night air. Every light on the observation floor goes out as I tumble into Penny’s arms. It’s freezing cold. She gasps my name over and over, and we crawl together over the crunching safety glass toward the lift. We end up crouched together by the wall, and she takes my head in her hands and presses her cheek against mine, trembling.

‘Pen. Oh, thank God.’

‘I came … I came to see if you were OK.’ Her skin feels hot and even though I’m dizzy and shaking I wrap my arms around her, craving that warmth. The tears running down my face – hers or mine – burn my cheeks.

For a moment the memory of what lies beyond the mirror fills my head, and then I push it away, burying my face in my wife’s warm scent.

This is terrible. I’ve still, despite everything, got an erection that could stand for Parliament. My balls seethe, swollen and tight with the urge to erupt and shed – well, I can’t even guess: the mirror-ghost has drained me dry and I ought to be shrivelled and flaccid but I’m not, I’m burning with arousal. Pulling Penny further up on to my lap I kiss her fervently and push her skirt up her thighs. She makes an incoherent noise that might be protest, but she kisses me back and clings to my neck. My fingers find the edge of her panties, and I pull at them, sharply, my hands clumsy and quivering. Her gusset is thick with the sanitary pad that I wrench aside. Then I pull her up and over my stiffy, impaling her slippery depths.

‘Richard!’

‘Please,’ I groan, my dry lips mumbling her in the half-dark, my breath coming hard and bitter. ‘Please, Pen.’ I have to: I have to slake this torturing tumescence. All my cum’s been drained already but I need to go again. Right now.

‘Oh, God.’

‘Please. Yes. Oh, yes.’

Grunting, sweating, clumsy – we slither together, frantic now. Penny’s thighs rise and fall and I grip her hips with desperate strength. She’s gasping. I’m nearly weeping with the need for release, because I can’t possibly come again, not now.

But somehow I do. Riding a long white streak of pain I flood her, pulse after pulse.

* * *

And now Penny is pregnant. When she couldn’t have been fertile. When I had nothing left to give her, from testes inflamed with poison.

Now I’m really scared.

(Roisin)

And this is Roisin, the mirror-ghost. She is the oldest of the vampires in the City: so very old that she hardly remembers her first life, so old that only her name remains to her. Her history has dissolved in the murk of years, her ambitions and personality washed away by the tide of time. She has forgotten almost everything. Her body too has surrendered its identity, even its reality. It has become as tenuous and fragmented as her mind.

Matter is no longer material. The material is no matter. She is on her way to becoming a ghost, or a god.

She remembers only how to love. The thirst for love still drives her. She doesn’t feed casually, not like Ben or Naylor, Reynauld or Estelle. She doesn’t choose a different lover every night then abandon them disbelieving and distraught before morning. When Roisin feeds, it is with passion. She falls for her lovers with the swift, heart-clutching imperative of romantic fervour. She becomes obsessed and will woo a new flame for weeks, lavishing her kisses upon them alone. She shadows and protects them, keeping them close, shutting the world with all its dangers and horrors away, spinning a cocoon of love to cradle them.

And she will be gentle as she eats you. Tender as her lips wrap about your warm flesh and seek the throbbing pulse. She will mourn you with exquisite sorrow when you leave her bereft.

Fear her love.

Roisin will come to you out of a silvered glass. Be not too vain, or the white lady may spy you and want you for her own. Under the moonlight, she will stoop to kiss your flesh with her pale lips and fill you with her cold fire. In silent places she approaches, her presence marked only by the faintest whisper, a stir of chill air not strong enough to break the cobwebs spun on an autumn night. Her skin is whiter than porcelain, her lips full, her breasts small and soft, her eyes an empty void aching to be filled with the sight of you. She needs. She is the embodiment of need.

She is beautiful, and she will break your heart.

It’s hard to say what it is that attracts her in the first place: a look in someone’s eye, perhaps; a particular indefinable scent of skin or the sound of a racing pulse. It’s the indescribable chemistry of passion: a mystery. Perhaps she sees or tastes in them a faint echo of her first love. And yet every time she is betrayed; that is her tragedy. Her lovers grow wizened and ungrateful, dull as clods of earth where once they were brimming with life, and unresponsive to either pain or pleasure. Just as swiftly as she falls for them she inevitably finds herself one night, without warning, perplexed and frustrated and indifferent, and she turns away in search of new succour for her empty and aching heart.

And she forgets.

Once outside of the fierce focused light of her love, the living are too ephemeral to make any impression on her memory. Roisin has lived so many years, seen so many faces, that mortals are like transient patterns formed by mud swirled in water. She finds comfort in places she knows, but even places change. Meadows are suddenly covered in swathes of housing, trees grow to giants and then vanish in the blink of an eye, skylines rise and fall like a tide. She clings to those people whose immortality – if not their permanence – makes them more than passing shadows, to Reynauld and Naylor in particular. They are the anchors of her disintegrating life. They are beacons in the fog.

The present washes over her, too ephemeral to grasp. The past decays. She recalls … What? Fragments only.

The smell of the wild briar roses after which she was named.

A lead-weighted spindle hanging from her fingers, twisting flax to thread.

The seep of bog water into leather shoes stuffed with fleece to cushion her numb toes. Hands heavy on her arms, marching her too fast through the puddles, the mud splashing up under her woollen skirt all over her bare legs.

Long-handled, Y-shaped lengths of wood. They pushed her underwater, face down, pinning her limbs to the muddy bed. The water looked yellow as piss from below, and bubbles of air rose like golden balls from her open lips.

She remembers love. It was love that destroyed her and love that kept her alive through death. She’d loved someone, though she can’t remember who – or what. Just the ferocious, all-consuming passion of his embrace; the terror and the ecstasy. Only that it made everyone afraid. That they’d met in darkness, though she cannot recall whether it was once or many times, and that dogs had been howling.

Some things still prick her memory at odd moments, recalling briefly that first raw passion – strange things, like the lift of a white dog’s muzzle, or the feel of leaf mould under her nails, or the smell of wet and sweating horses.

The first, fresh, coppery taste of blood.

They staked her in the swamp because they were afraid of the one she loved. All winter she lay there, while the ice thickened over her head and in the tissues of her body. Nothing lived in that acid water: no fish or insect gnawed at her cold flesh. Nothing moved except the occasional bubble of gas ascending to the surface. Then when the spring thawed her out she rose from the mud, thrust aside the stakes and went home. Looking for love, hot and red.

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