It won’t take long, I think. I’m even further out onto that edge than I imagined I was, though I swear I didn’t imagine much of it at all. I never pictured him rubbing that red, red tongue back and forth over my swollen clit. I didn’t think he’d ever want me to cry out in something other than fear or pain – but I do.
‘Merrith,’ I say, and I don’t do it quietly. It rings out over the ever-repeating song, so loud and so obvious that I’m sure he’s going to stop now. He’s going to take it away from me again, and go back to the way things were. He’s tried this and found it wanting, even if his grasping hands and his hungry, generous mouth suggest otherwise.
He’s almost eating at me, now. I can feel the glancing edge of his teeth whenever he insinuates his mouth through my folds. I can feel his hot breath rushing over me, when he licks and licks over the entrance to my cunt – as though he can’t wait for more now. He has to stuff it all into his mouth, quick, before it comes to the only kind of ending it can.
I’m going to die of pleasure, I know it. I’m too weak to resist, too weak to do anything but lie here and feel this bloom of sensation in my sex, working its way up through my body until it has me around the throat. And when it finally does come, and I arch my back for it and cry his name again, I’m almost stunned to find that at the end I’m still conscious.
My eyes are closed and I’m barely breathing, but I’m here, I’m here. I’m alive and I remain so, in those arms that go around me. He doesn’t try to bite me again, or force me into some strange perverted memory he has of what sex is supposed to be.
He just takes me like that, on my back, slow and almost languorous. Each thrust like rolling thunder, while the needle scratches and scratches on the record and the crooner tells the tale for me. Heavenly shades of night are falling, he sings, just as I dig my nails into Merrith’s back. They make a little popping sound as they pierce his flesh, so faint you could almost miss it.
Though of course my vampire doesn’t. He hisses for me instead and bares his teeth, but now they’re blunt and harmless – not so scary any more. And when I bare my own teeth back at him he retreats, just a little, even as my body keeps him right where he is.
I’ve drawn blood now. I’ve held him tight inside my slick heat, and though he makes a show of resisting I can hear that sigh in the back of his throat. I know what the expression on his face means – I’ve seen it a hundred times before.
‘Please,’ he says to me, like the last little dot on the final i of the contract.
And then I roll my hips, just so. I work myself on his cock, over and over, until the pleasure swells through me as fiercely as it did a moment ago – only better this time. Sweeter. I feel him cling to me as it takes me down, because he’s drowning, too.
‘I’d forgotten,’ he tells me, in his new voice – as the pleasure makes him arch his back and jerk his hips too hard against my still swollen sex. ‘I’d forgotten.’
But he doesn’t have to tell me about that. I know what forgetting is.
I used to be human, after all.
But now I don’t even remember what that is.
Slave of the Lamp
Janine Ashbless
Rub it! Rub it harder! Oh – oh, yes! Don’t stop! Yes, I’m coming!
In an indigo-hued cloud I gush forth from the neck of the Lamp, swelling immensely. Flesh thickens into solidity as it contacts the air. New skin, the colour of a twilight sky, webs across sheets of muscle. I open my just-formed mouth to take great breaths, smelling wild sage and dust, incense and cardamom and the hated stink of humanity. Then I stretch my limbs and groan with the indescribable pleasure of incarnation.
There’s plenty of room to stretch. I am outdoors this time. As I blink my eyes into focus I see I’m standing in a broad valley walled by yellow hills. Around me kneel the Children of Earth, their faces hidden in their sleeves. They are so small that I might crush one into the dirt with the ball of my bare foot, and I laugh in contempt. My shout booms from the cliff faces.
‘Djinni!’ Only one figure does not kneel or avert her gaze. She stands in her royal robes under a canopy, surrounded by a sea of bowed heads, and she looks at me without flinching. Her hair is like the mane of a lion, though the pelt across her shoulder is that of a leopard. A broad collar of gold lies upon her breasts, and in her hands sits the Lamp.
Bilqis: Queen of the Land of Sheba. Under the necklace, the jut of her breasts is most enticing to the eye.
‘Djinni,’ she says, in that throaty voice, ‘you should appear in more seemly guise.’
I glance down at myself, pleased by what I see. Every inch of my flesh thrills to the sensation of release from confinement, my male member no less than the rest. It stands as solid as the central pillar of a temple, and as blue as a storm cloud. I grasp it in my fist, caressing it lovingly, rediscovering that particular pleasure.
‘Does it not please you, mistress?’ I ask, grinning at her. My cock is hot and full, and so hard that if I lay upon a mountaintop I could prop up the dome of the sky with it. And it has not escaped my notice that the mortal queen stands almost exactly as tall as it does. I might wear her as an ornament. That mental picture is gratifying.
She jerks her head, and I am pleased to have discomfited her. I give myself a stroke and my cock springs back and slaps against the hard wall of my stomach.
‘Cover yourself!’ she mouths. Then, louder: ‘I command it.’
I shrug, trying not to show my prickling irritation. I cannot disobey, of course. She summoned me from the Lamp, and I am its slave. With the mere lift of an eyebrow I attire myself in loose turquoise-blue trousers, then I tuck my swollen glans behind the waistband. I put my fists on my hips, largely to stop me reaching down and sweeping into ruin the whole verminous swarm at my feet. ‘Your every whim is as divine law to me, mistress,’ I say silkily.
She relaxes a little. She is beautiful – no longer with the fawn-like charm of youth, to be sure, but lushly curved – yet she stands upon her modesty among men, as I remember. I comprehend how my naked masculinity must disturb the peace of her woman’s mind, like a wild bull rampaging through a tidy garden.
‘I have a task for you, djinni,’ she says.
A baby wails.
My interest sharpens as I recall that she was pregnant the last time I saw her, though now her womb is empty. Looking among the entourage crouching in the dirt, I spot the small form cradled in the crook of a nursemaid’s arm. It appears to be trying to escape from its captivity. The girl pulls it to her anxiously.
‘Is that the child?’ I ask, my voice a rumble like distant thunder. ‘Is that the get of Solomon the Wise?’ It is hard to conceal my loathing of that name and Bilqis casts a sharp, maternal glance over her shoulder, bristling.
‘He is my son,’ she says. ‘And it is my command that you never bring him to harm.’
‘A son?’ I laugh, wanting to hurt. ‘After sixty generations of queens in Sheba?’
‘My son,’ she repeats, warningly. ‘And he will
