Demimondaine Page 3

  Selar whimpered with hunger. “I’ll take it slow. You’ll hardly feel anything.” Her soft palms embraced Nico’s cheeks. Her tongue flicked out over her lips again and again, in terrible ardor. “Then you’ll feel everything. Everything. You want to feel everything, don’t you Nico?”

  Nico reached out, to gently touch the map of ages contained in Selar’s freckles.

  A needleprick broke the skin on Nico’s neck. Selar’s fingers curled around her thigh, to lift her leg into proper position. Nico’s rapid, lust-glazed nods of assent were masked by Selar’s hand cradling the back of her head. Blood was too good a medium for exposing the aether to air, and her bruised nose was starting to throb. Aether filling her sinuses and spreading like opening leaves into a tension headache. But even that felt good. Too good.

  Chest seizing, head buckling forward as her body tremored. Nico groped herself beneath the pliable material of her sports bra. Toying uncharacteristically with her small breasts as she enjoyed the fluid sway of Selar’s above her, yanking forward with each thrust of Selar’s hips that followed the inward motion of her tail, then snapping still with each abrupt cessation of momentum. Her lips felt cracked and dry. She parted them. And badly, she wanted to take one of those round, full nipples in her mouth and—

  All in all, it wasn’t such a bad way to go out. As the East Coast’s #1 DeathFuck fan, obviously, she had to know this was a risk. Well she didn’t, not until tonight. But oh well.

  Time had seemed to reach a point of absolute stasis, where the barriers between their flesh spread away like oil on the water’s surface. It—they—grew all wobbly at the edges, and as her head grew light, Nico could see each mote of time like a shivering soap bubble as big as her head, shivering all over like bellies full of jelly. So much of Selar was inside Nico that she, for a moment, looked down at her own face, and thought it was kind of cute, how her fangs glistened in the light, her mouth ringing open with a fresh, ecstatic O with each renewed plunge inside her.

  Selar might’ve been good, but she was young. If Nico wasn’t teetering over the brink of her triplicate orgasm, she might’ve remembered this. She might’ve remembered, that you don’t let any Succubus under eighty near a girl like Nico without strict supervision and a lot of sports drinks for after—

  “Usually I don’t drain them this bad…” Selar moaned. “You probably won’t die,” Selar whispered. “You almost definitely won’t. I’m good.” Selar trembled, and Nico trembled through her. She saw herself through Selar’s eyes. Saw her beautiful face as Selar saw it, wracked with terrible ecstasy. Nico felt Selar’s lips move. Heard herself speaking with Selar’s tongue. “I’m so awfully, terribly… good—”

  This was it, she thought, as the boundaries between Selar’s body and hers dissolved, and Nico seemed to lick away the sweat and the droplet of blood draw from her own neck. It was comfy, melting away like this. Selar’s tail rippled through her, raw with possession. It was magnificent. And it had been an age, for Nico, at least. When certain things are gone for certain lengths of time, pleasure and risk create a circuit, magnifying one another, and that’s before you…

  Selar read the motes of invisible, wanton aether evaporating from Nico’s skin like a trained musician reads the room. Again she flipped her, without a single slowing stroke of her tail. Face to face, she fell upon her. Their tits kissed before their lips. Nico whimpered with the engorgement of her own fangs, her ears rotating and flexing wildly with the groaning frenzy of Nico’s thrusts. A boot shot into the air, clipping Selar’s cheek, but she didn’t slow a bit, merely ducked her shoulder so Nico’s leg could hook over it. Better angle, for pelvis seeking pelvis.

  See, that was the thing about Succubus Inchoates. It wasn’t Selar’s fault. She probably was telling the truth—Nico was sure she was a very nice succubus under ordinary conditions (well ordinary conditions for a succubus band leader feeding on groupies). There were all kinds of ways for succubi to live happy lives with many consensual partners. It’s just… confronted with the absolute vault of aether that any Demimondaine worth her salt represented, it would be like dumping a pile of cocaine in front of a 1980s investment banker, pointing a stern finger at them, and saying “okay, now don’t you touch all this sweet, delicious, beautiful, horny cocaine, or you’ll be in big trouble.”

  Selar fell forward, rutting into Nico’s hips, tail plunging forward into untold depths with her, flaring at the apex of each ardent stroke. Nico was familiar with the sensation; the rapturous exhaustion that pulls your nipples into pained peaks. She had a scar beneath her lower lip, on the left side, from where she fanged her own stupid self too hard while Marigold worked her magic one bawdy night after too much weed and way too much reality TV. Weed always did this, got her stupid.

  But frickin’ hell did she enjoy being stupid.

  She cried out, as her fang inlaid a twin wound on the opposite side of her mouth, to match the old scar. Shit! That hurt worse than the first one. Maybe it was supposed to? She was with a rock star, after all.

  Tendrils of murky desire pierced the slim medium of Selar’s skin, growing out of her shoulders, her neck, and wavering like globules in the air above her as her lust spiked and grew, corporeal. Unlike a Succubus Incarnate’s, whose tended to take on a violet hue, these were black, pure black, a sure sign that Selar hadn’t grown into her powers enough to handle the discharge from a current like Nico. It was a bad wavelength. Incarnates spent a decade in that chrysalis, honing their harmonies and making sure their phonic resonance stayed under their skin until the feed was at its apex.

  Selar slavered with this feast of essence, pounding her tail into Nico, groping with sharpening nails, and the aether coalescing into razor-sharp, half-corporeal wings over her, spreading as if in flight. Where her flesh curved, her shoulders, her elbows, her back, grew rigid carapace, bony and hollow, to vent the aetheric heat she siphoned from Nico before it overwhelmed her body, burnt her from the inside out. Near as soon as it was formed, the grey chitin streaked all over with lines of heat. Red, then orange, then dazzling blue, and nearly white. Her fishnets sizzled, the nylon melting with the burning temperature of her skin. She was secreting, the phase shift was triggering too early, and she was—

  Nico reached for the carapace, glowing white, that bristled from Selar’s cheekbones. She was beautiful, like this, a pure beast, a thing of hunger and without sense. No morals, no anxiety, just wants, and the ways to achieve them. Envy muddled in Nico’s stomach. She wasn’t sure which of them it belonged to. She yelped, when the Selar’s heat scalded her fingertips—but she had to pull away and look at them, all throbbing and red, before she was sure the pain belonged to her.

  Even the pain, Nico had to admit, felt really good. Like really frickin’ good. To the point that she didn’t really care that she could feel the moorings of her memories being stripped from her head, and the will evaporating through her skin. The slowing of her breathing and her heart. It was like spreading your arms with a cliff behind you, falling backwards into a sea of pleasure. Also, the sea was made of super soft down pillows with silk pillowcases. Dazed and glazed, she lifted her arms. Climax overcame her, again, and again, each one stinging deeper, higher, into her belly than the last. Selar’s immaterial wings beat a current of air against Nico’s face, somehow real. Her heart beat so hard it shuddered her ribs, and yet she was calm, dissolving into her surroundings and becoming one with the world. She made Ls with her fingers and thumbs, framing Selar’s face. She wished she could get her phone out, so she could memorialize this moment forever. Just beautiful, bonny Selar, winding the precious string of her essence, delicious and red, around her long index finger like a weaver preparing a loom……….

  BA-KOOM!

  Well that was awfully loud… for an imaginary picture…

  A crack of thunder split the door, literally, Nico discovered from where she now lay, prone and ass up on the carpet. The forcible entry into the room had thrown her to the floor, and flung Selar against the make-up
station at the back of the room, broken glass from the mirror and ring lights glittering in her dark clothing. Nico could’ve had a laugh at the stunned Selar blinking the comical cartoon stars from her eyes, if she weren’t doing the same.

  Standing tall in the ruin of the doorframe, hair blowing in the tempestuous wind, was Marigold, who asked, simply, “What are you doing with my Nico?”

  The slap of Selar’s tail against the wall behind her rippled a spiderweb crack through the plaster. Her eyes glow ochre with Nico’s stolen energy; she was more aether than sense, hopping to her feet, splinters of broken glass shaking loose in sharpened snowfall. “Sorry babe.” Heavy boots tromped over carpet, casually kicking an end table out of her path. Nico cried out as Selar bent over, grabbed her by one of her sensitive ears, and yanked her up onto her knees beside her. Her tail, glistening, wound around Nico’s shoulders, her wings split, the shadowy tendrils of her power coursed in the air with keen-edged threat. “But finders-keepers, you know?”

  The wind of Marigold’s tempest swirled around her. Gale force picked up some of the lighter objects in the room, swirling them in her orbit. Her grin was barely visible, as the immediate area around her grew dark with stormy aether, but her words were clear as day:

  “Guess who found her first.”

  Selar roared, baring claws and fangs at their full glory.

  “This is your sole warning, dear. I tend to be impatient when—” A stab of one of Selar’s shadowy tendrils, easily dodged with a twist of her hips, and she set her glasses back up her nose with two fingers at the side. “People treat my familiar with disrespect.”

  With a flick of her outstretched hand, Marigold summoned a rainbow of aether lilies from Nico’s shape, which buzzed past Selar and arrayed themselves in a crescent above Marigold’s head. A throw of her fingers, and the indigo lily impaled Selar’s shoulder, but Selar, slavering, stalking forward, powered by insensate lust, didn’t so much as flinch.

  “Mmm, bit off on that one,” Marigold murmured.

  Selar pounced, and Marigold evaded with a subtle pirouette. At the brief moment their backs touched, a thrust of her hips into Selar sent the succubus stumbling forward into the wall. “Girls, keep her busy, will you?”

  The aether lilies giggled, zipping in kaleidoscopic arcs around Selar, consuming her attention with the temerity of particularly ill-refined mosquitos, swishing through her hair and between her grasping fingers. As one kissed along her burning cheek, another stabbed through the astral point in her left instep to pin her foot to the floor. When she squatted, grasping at it with furious claws, to remove it and free her foot, another pierced the astral point on her forehead, sending her tumbling across the floor.

  Marigold knelt by her familiar, scooping her face with both hands. “Still alive in there, Nico?”

  Nico found herself stripped from her daze with the rough patting of Marigold’s hand so close to her damaged nose. “Mmmnn?” She groaned, brain like jelly, with the slow evaporation of her lust, tongue thick in her mouth. “Marigold? Where’d Selar go—oh cripes, Marigold! Selar! She’s—”

  With a burst of black ichor, Selar roared, and the the aether lilies scattered to all four corners of the room.

  “Yes, quite!” Marigold nodded with the composure of a schoolmarm. “So, if you don’t mind, time is of the essence.”

  Without waiting for Nico’s brain to catch up and give its permission, she sat her upright against the couch, paying no mind to her relative dishevelment. “Let’s see… let’s see…” She whispered, fingertips bringing light to the hidden leylines that ran beneath Nico’s skin.

  One of the lilies razzed, bobbing effervescently in the air before dissipating with a thbbht! just before Selar’s clawed grip crushed it into its constituent motes. The rest, seeing the sense of their companion’s retreat, similarly fled this corporeal plane.

  Scooping Nico beneath the back, Marigold dipped her, as if in tango. At the nadir, Nico’s ears flicked with panic along the carpet as, inverted, she watched Selar lumber towards them, legs shaking, tensing with goaded, supernatural muscle. To Nico’s painfully over-exposed perception, each step seemed to take an hour, but that hardly mattered, when wasn’t but six feet away, and her many—and quickly multiplying—tendrils easily made up for half the distance, stabbing holes straight through the carpet and piercing the hardwood beneath.

  Hardwood? They covered hardwood

  “M-Marigold…” Nico said.

  “Nico, shush. I’ll just be a moment.”

  Marigold tended to be like this, absorbed in her work, far too busy to be bothered with the terrestrial worries of familiars with spectacularly poor judgment. “Hmmm,” she said, squinting as if her eye held an invisible jeweler’s loupe. Her nails zeroed in on a particular point. “You’ll do.”

  From Nico’s flesh, she cajoled out a single, orange aether lily with a crook of her finger, splitting it twain with the nail of her pinky finger—it giggled as if receiving a particularly fervent tickling. Holding one half between pinched fingers, Marigold set the other half in her palm and, with a puff between her plump lips…

  Blew it towards the menacingly stalking Selar…

  Selar hollered, freezing in place for a moment and holding her impaled nose. Nico watched frame-by-frame through the leaden, slow-motion blinking of her eyelids, as the razor-flail of Selar’s tendrils shredded the closest third of the couch into bite-sized pieces.

  “Marigold.” Nico repeated, this time gripping the witch by her shoulder.

  “Now then,” Marigold replied. “I expect this will tickle.”

  With that, the other half of the orange lily stabbed into the astral point by Nico’s carotid, phasing through flesh with that splendidly vibrant sensation of aether, and bringing a strangled, erotic tenor to her final scream of:

  “MARIGOLD—!”

  “That’s my name!” With a show-woman’s flourish, she stood, the limp Nico tucked under her arm like a wilted waif, facing down the drunken stagger of Selar, raising her hands to the heavens (or the drop ceiling, anyway) priming her fingers and, when the sympathetic resonance of the lily lodged in Selar’s forehead matched that of the one in Nico’s neck—

  *SNAP!*

  Succubus and Demimondaine nearly jolted out of their respective skin, as Marigold rocked Selar with the feedback of Nico’s aether current using the predominant energy in the room—namely, Selar’s extruded lust. Overwhelmed with her own sexual energy, amplified by Nico’s particular condition, Selar stood ramrod straight an impromptu lightning rod for an overwhelming core of sexual energy that grew, and grew, as the electric chain shackled between Nico and Selar manifested into physical form, expanding and expanding and expanding and—

  KABOOM!

  Shredded fliers, cigarette ash and tattered upholstery fluttered in the air, and Marigold was the only woman still standing, in the aftermath.

  Nico sighed, thankful that she’d at least fallen face-down in the relative softness of the one-third of the couch that somehow escaped the wrath of both succubus and witch.

  Selar, flat on her back and twitching, stared blindly at the ceiling, eyelids endlessly fluttering with the flash impulse of hyper-hedonia. She had receded—wings, carapace, claws, and fangs, and a keening song of ancestral memory was struggling to clear her throat.

  “Good thing you’re soon to chrysalis.” Marigold held a hand in front of her mouth to conceal her unsportwoman-like smirk. “After that, a decade would be a promising estimate for the next time you’re able to get it up.”

  Replete with the satisfaction of victory, not to mention a solid verbal drubbing, Marigold put her fists to her hips, threw back her head, and enjoyed approximately 2.3 seconds of uncapped, triumphant o~ho~hos of laugher before exhaustion, combined with that fateful second cocktail, really hit and she crumpled atop (what remained of) the carpet with a dull thump.

  “Nicooooooooo…” She moaned. “Why did the air suddenly get so…” The pweh-pweh-pweh of carpet fibers in her
mouth as she talked. “Fuzzy…?”

  Nico pushed herself up on her elbows, ears twisting like radio antennas honing in on a signal as she numbly looked this way and that. The carnage of the room was all around her. Busted beer bottles, shattered light fixtures, and the couch—absolutely obliterated. She sighed, dragging a hand through her sweat-damp hair. Vaguely, she knew she’d be throwing a shit fit about who was going to get the bill for all this, if it weren’t for the muddling of Selar’s waning aether lust and last lingering vestiges of the high keeping her anxiety in check. So stood, struggling her shorts back up her legs, and squatted by Marigold.

  “Can you walk?”

  “Are all concerts this entertaining?” Marigold drawled through a dipsy smile.

  Nico threw the witch’s limp arm over her shoulder, and hefted her to standing with a grunt. She was dead tired, and Marigold was worse than dead weight. Her tongue felt ten times as large as it should be, and she had cotton mouth something fierce. Dammit, weed always did this to her. Still, she hefted the helpless load of her boss-slash-mistress-slash-powerful witch who gave her corporeal form-slash-roommate, shivered against the already-expanding wet spot of Marigold’s drool on her new shirt, and sighed.

  “Let’s go home, okay?”

  Though she couldn’t resist aiming a square kick directly into SelarLet’s upturned ass on the way out the door.

  Liked Demimondaine? Next, try Contractual Obligations!

  The call pulls her across the void, her first appearance in the human plane announced by an acrid burst of purple smoke and a peal of thunder. Told to expect something the candle-lit den of someone’s slumber party or maybe a ring of stones in some wooded copse, Arsa is surprised to find herself in what looks like… a corner office?

  No matter! Though the dim fluorescent lights sting her eyes, Arsa does not hesitate. Setting her feet against the floor, she exclaims, “Rue the day of this ritual, human, for—”