Author’s note:

My focus is still very much on completing “To Hell and Back, Book 2: Rebellion” but, being something of an ADHD writer, sometimes I need to switch gears to keep the creative juiced flowing. As a fan of horror, this is one of those side projects I like to play around with. Enjoy and check out my profile page for links to more of my fiction

 

“Oh, mon Dieu. Tellement bon. Plus. S'il vous plait!” The sound of the flight attendant’s bliss, whispered in her native French, was like silk against my ears. “Oh god. So good. More. Please!”

I adored the language.  More than any other dialect on Earth, French was the voice of all that is sex and sensuality. Under better circumstances, I would have been tempted to drive her rising pleasure to the edge of madness, just to hear her scream for release in that beautiful, silken tongue.

“So good,” she panted, rolling her hips on my lap and leaning forward to give me a wondrous view of her full, pale bottom peeking out from beneath the navy-blue skirt bunched carelessly up around her hips. “Magnifique.”

I reached up to gently wrap the fingers of one hand around her throat and pulled her head back to rest on my shoulder. My other hand roamed across the open expanse of her unbuttoned blouse, teasing and pinching at her exposed nipples. My lips brushed against her ear.

“Quietly,” I commanded.

The change was immediate. No more words spilled from her lovely mouth. Only soft mewling sounds rising from her throat and the gentle slap of flesh could be heard as she impaled herself on me time and again.

It was a necessary, if unfortunate, precaution, given the less than ideal circumstances of this, our first encounter. Necessary because the wall of the private jet between the passenger compartment and cockpit was likely not soundproof and I did not wish to distract the pilot from his duties. Unfortunate, because her French accent had been the first thing to attract my interest. Thus, discretion was a necessary precaution at thirty thousand feet above the earth.

A pity, to be sure. I longed to hear her scream words of pure sexual abandon in that beautiful language. To thrash naked beneath my touch and babble in helpless, incoherent bliss.

Later, I promised myself. Once we were safely on the ground and in the privacy of my hotel suite. When there was time to attend to such things properly. For now, we would both simply have to make do with a mere taste of the many boundless pleasures to come.

Quietly, of course.

I felt her sex tighten around my shaft as I slid with steady strokes into her warm body. She began to spasm with the first signs of her imminent climax and tremors washed through her lovely body. I caressed the curves of her flesh with my fingers and the pleasure centers of her mind with my will, stoking the fires of need into a long, gentle bloom of orgasm. A soft wail rattled in her throat. It was all the poor woman could manage under the constraints of my previous compulsion.

When the wave of pleasure finally began to recede, she fell back against my chest, gasping for breath. Beads of sweat rolled down into the valley between her naked, heaving breasts. My lap was damp with her sexual fluids. Slowly, those lovely, brown eyes came back into focus. She moved her hips and gasped to find my cock still hard and still firmly buried in her wet depths.

“You didn’t…?”

I smiled and kissed her neck. “Non, ma cherie. We are only just getting started.”

My left hand drifted down between widespread legs. The other held her to my chest by the throat. I began to move inside her with purpose as my fingers brushed against her clit.

She whimpered and writhed on me. “I… oh god… not again…”

Distracted as she was, Marie, the French flight attendant, never saw it coming. My fangs pierced the smooth skin of her neck with a soft pop. She panicked, of course. They always do at first, but never for very long.

Vampire venom grows more potent with age and mine was quite powerful. The effect was almost immediate. As her blood spilled, hot and sweet, into my mouth, toxin began to saturate through the tissue of her brain, rendering her ever more compliant and suggestible to my control.

In that moment, we were one. I could taste the faint, poisonous flavor of the menthol cigarette she had smoked before take-off and the hot wash of shame that came with it that she could not find the strength to quit for good. Her feet, pulsing with a dull pain from standing in heels all day, were my feet. The sweet pressure of my phallus filling her body was mine to experience as well.

Me into her. Her into me. A union of such deep intimacy that few mortals will ever experience. The blessing and bane of my world.

I was the musician and her body was my instrument. Together, we wove a carnal, primal music of flesh, and blood, and soul. I focused the entirety of my thoughts into that connection.

Cum for me.

Euphoria washed through her bloodstream, stimulating her every erogenous zone all at once, and pushing her over the edge into a second, more powerful orgasm of almost agonizing pleasure. This time we climaxed together. I gave her my seed even as I took her blood. Emptying myself into her warm, welcoming body and drinking just enough to ease my hunger and do her no lasting harm. Me into her. Her into me.

A lick of my tongue closed the two small wounds as she lay twitching from post-orgasmic pleasure in the circle of my arms. They would be entirely healed in a matter of days with no permanent damage done. By then I would be nothing more than a half-remembered fever dream. At best a vague bi-product of a healthy, sexually active, young woman’s imagination.

I turned her head toward me and looked into her unfocused eyes. “You will remember nothing of this encounter except an acknowledgment of mutual attraction. You will quit smoking cigarettes and this time you will succeed in kicking the habit, once and for all. You will clean up and return to your duties feeling stronger, healthier, and happier. Before the plane has landed, you will provide me with a phone number to call you later. Finally, you will clean me up before you go.”

She smiled. “Let me help you clean up.”

Free will is a remarkable, and entirely human, characteristic. In my mind, I had envisioned a simple, damp paper towel for my final command. I was pleasantly surprised when she stood, turned around to kneel at my feet, and took my softening cock into her mouth. Her interpretation of my compulsion strongly suggested my lovely flight attendant had a fondness for oral sex. That was encouraging for the later play date I had in mind to pursue.

While I could compel almost any behavior, forced compliance required crude and distasteful methods that too often left permanent damage to the subject. Working with natural inclinations was far more satisfying for all involved and leaving my victims a little better than they were before my hunger allowed me the conceit of believing I was less of a monster for that small kindness. It was the only mercy my nature would allow.

Marie was thorough in her efforts. When not a drop remained, Marie gently tucked me back into my slacks. She even zipped and buttoned my trousers.

I brushed my hand against her cheek, then stood. “Merci’, my dear.”

“Non, merci’!” she beamed a smile up at me. “That was the most amazing sex I have ever had.”

I offered a wooden smile and could only nod in response. What could I say? The moment she stood and walked away, I knew that “the most amazing sex ever” had already been forgotten.

Ships passing in the night. Pleasure without permanence. Such was the nature and necessity of my immortal existence.

The only sound was the low hum of the engines as I returned to my seat. For a brief, golden moment, my hunger was sated and there was only tranquility. I drank deeply of the silence and floated in the stillness. The silence was precious to me because I knew it would not last.

“Monsieur?” my lovely flight attendant leaned in at my side to whisper. I could still smell my scent clinging to her skin. “Do you need anything?”

“No, my dear,” I answered in soft-spoken French. “You have seen to my needs quite well enough. Thank you.”

“Of course,” she replied, her smile a benediction. In her eyes, I saw the glimmer of interest, the dilation of her pupils with desire, the flutter of her pulse beneath the soft layer of her skin. Yet there was no recognition of our union from only minutes before. Her hand brushed against mine as my empty glass is taken away. In its place was a new napkin with a handwritten phone number.

 

*****

 

Endless waves of mortals swirled around me as I made my way through Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Through the swirling currents of flesh and blood, I identified one of my kind moving among them.

She was young for a vampire, not even fifty years old by my estimation. I could see it in the arrogant way she moved through the world, still drunk on her own power. Still believing that she would live forever.

I made certain that she was unaware of my presence. Just as the shuffling herd was blind to us both. Two wolves moving quietly through the herds of sheep.

Ironically, we are not so difficult to notice for those with eyes to see. It is our good fortune that such people had always been few and far between. Humanity, as a whole, was content to swaddle themselves in the false comforts of this modern world and believe that the monster under the bed was just a bedtime story to frighten children.

That was as it should be. Some things were never meant to be dragged out of the darkness.

Evening air, cool with the first kiss of winter and thick with the sour stench of petroleum and rubber, washed over me as I stepped out of the airport through sliding, glass doors. I locked eyes with a nearby taxi driver waiting for his next fare. My will fell over him like a cloud. When I was gone, he would remember nothing except an unremarkable man in a charcoal gray suit.

“Any luggage?” he asked.

I shake my head and settle into the back seat with my one carry-on bag. One learns to travel light in my line of work. Everything else I needed would have already arrived.

The driver navigated his cab into the heavy, restless flow of traffic. Once beyond the concrete canyons of O’Hare airport, the cityscape began to flow past through the side window. It had been nearly a hundred years since my last visit and I recognized little.

Such was the nature of my existence. Life flowed around me in a blur of frantic motion, ever-changing. I blink and a decade had come and gone. I sleep and wake to a new century, bursting with the revolution of new ideas and the ever more intrusive and sterile march of technology.

How quickly everything was changing! Only a hundred years ago, the world had marveled at the idea of manned flight. Now, every human on Earth was armed with a hand-held computer, a video camera, and instant access to an audience of billions.

I directed the taxi to drop me off at a random corner of a downtown street. Protocol dictated that my first stop should be to announce my arrival to Alexa Vital, the Prince of Chicago, and for good reason. Vampires were both territorial and paranoid by nature. None more so that the man or woman who ruled over, and accepted responsibility for, all other vampires within their dominion. New arrivals were assumed to be a threat to their shadow kingdom.

Those who hid their presence all but confirmed it.

Even so, it would have to wait. Announcing my arrival would set certain inevitable consequences into motion. By the following night, my presence in Chicago would be an open secret throughout the vampire community. My every movement would be monitored, weighed, and measured.

Before that happened, I had a need to listen to the beating, concrete heart of this city. To feel the electric flow of her pulse and observe what “normal” looked like among its nameless, writhing masses.

After all, a surgeon does not begin surgery without understanding the baseline health of his patient.

I wandered about for hours letting the tidal surge of humanity pull me with it. A hundred sounds and a thousand scents washed over me. Neon signs glowed in all colors of the rainbow beneath a partial moon in the star-filled, autumn sky. Lovers strolled arm-in-arm. Music of every sort blared from crowded venues. The smell of freshly cooked food that I could no longer consume drifted on the cool, evening air.

Officially, Chicago was not even two hundred years young. Like most modern urban centers, the cityscape was tightly packed with gleaming monoliths of glass and steel that towered over prefabricated cubes stuffed full of bookstores, restaurants, coffee shops, and every imaginable expression of modern capitalistic life.

Unlike most other American cities, her history had not been sacrificed and forgotten on the altar of modern convenience. Though still “new” by European standards, Chicago retained a subtle elegance in the orderly design of her streets and historic buildings that her people protected with fierce devotion.

And yet, for all of that, beneath her charms was a pulsing darkness older than the first white settlers to this area. The city’s location was no accident. More than just vampires haunted the shadows that pooled just beyond electric lights. She was lovely, this city, but she carried a knife behind her back and knew how to use it.

Every city had a personality and a voice. I had known many over the centuries and, slowly, I learned to hear this one again. She breathed wordless promises in my ears of darker delights and brooding danger waiting to be discovered beneath the modern, brightly lit surface.

Chicago whispered her sweet seductions in my ear and I followed.

I found a nest of my own kind soon after in a decrepit little nightclub called “Dante’s”. I knew it before ever walking through the doors. The scent of old blood, recent sex, and cold, immortal flesh hung in the chill air like a cloud. Abandon all hope ye who enter here blazed over the door in blood-red neon.

Mortals who knew no better would smile at such theatrics, never seeing it as the final warning it was meant to be. Some of them would return home, weak and yet possessed of an emptiness and a strange longing they would never be able to identify. Some would never return at all.

It caused me no discomfort to admit this reality, even to myself. Some sheep are sheared and returned to the flock. Some are butchered to become dinner.

“Twenty-dollar cover charge.”

The man who spoke was swollen with muscle beneath a tight, black t-shirt. He sat to one side of the narrow door that was the only entrance to the depravity within. The flame of life in his eyes was dim. One of my kind had long ago molded this man’s limited mental capacity like clay. Perhaps he had once been something more; a poet or doting father. Now, all that remained was the slab of meat standing sentry by the door, more than a guard dog only by his ability to speak.  

I pulled a twenty from the clip in my pocket, dropped it into his open hand, and walked into darkness.