Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (5 page)

Lucy bustles away, praying that she looks like what she’s pretending to be: a middle-aged professional gardener, a charming woman with a head for business. Could Marie have glimpsed the lithe, golden-haired maiden under the plump, freckled shell? Out of all the hours of sensual pleasure she’d enjoyed in her many years, would she remember a handful of afternoons in Versailles?

* * *

Winter sunlight seeped through rose-colored sheets and glided across the snowy belly of Lucille d’Arlennes. It illuminated the sparse golden tendrils below. Her lover rolled his head between her thighs, letting his glossy hair brush her skin in cool caresses before the rougher treatment to come. He followed the same paths with his tongue, lapping and teasing, melting her pussy as he nipped and suckled at her dusky nipples. He painted her with his tongue from throat to thighs, stopping to pry open her moist lower lips.

“Have you ever felt the little death, cherie?” the man asked Lucy, glancing up from between her warm, white legs.

“I don’t ever want to die,” Lucille moaned. She lifted her bottom toward her lover’s mouth in a silent plea for him to go on. His tongue found a spot in her folds that Lucille had only ever touched herself, the kernel of sensation that gave her such delight when she stroked it with her fingers. But this tongue was so much more skilled than Lucy; this man’s tongue was a master of pleasure, while Lucy was just an amateur.

“We all have to surrender eventually,
ma petite.”

A woman’s voice broke through Lucille’s haze. The girl gasped. She looked up to see the sheet lifted away, and the Countess de Mortoise gazing down upon them. Her cheeks, normally painted white as ivory, were tinged with the pink of an excited voyeuse. A woman with a heart of ice.

This man was not in love with Lucille. He belonged to the woman who hovered over them, Marie de Mortoise, whose appetite for watching her partners tutor younger women was legendary. This was the first of countless times that the countess would feed off Lucille’s pleasure, but today Lucille was still innocent enough to feel a rush of shame at being caught like this: nude, spread open like an oyster shell, hips rising to meet a climax that she couldn’t stop or control.

“Go ahead. Give in,” whispered Marie.

Lucille’s skin began to hum. Her back arched. Her lover began to shake his head furiously, so that his tongue and lips created a blur of feeling in that warm place between her legs. When Lucille’s swollen mouth opened to howl, Marie de Mortoise leaned over her and captured the sound with a hard kiss. As her lips met Lucille’s, Marie’s teeth clamped down on the younger woman’s lower lip, hard enough to draw blood.

Lucille would have screamed, if her mouth hadn’t been filled with Marie’s greedy tongue. But the pain of that kiss startled Lucille to new heights. A glass butterfly between her legs lifted into the air and shattered into fragments of stained glass. Lucille wept at the miracle.

There were times when Marie stroked Lucille’s golden hair after her orgasm and called her a spun-sugar angel; at other times, a scalding jealousy seized Marie’s heart while she watched her lovers feasting off Lucille’s young, succulent flesh. Marie’s threats had rung through the hallways of the palace. “I’ll stab her in the heart and drink from the wound!”

But instead of killing Lucille, Marie used her again and again. She gave the spun-sugar angel to lovers who had killed or stolen for her, and she found her own delight in watching Lucille’s pleasure.

Finally, there came a day when the kisses and caresses weren’t enough to feed Marie’s hunger. She needed a stronger, darker liqueur. She wanted to see scarlet fluids splashed against white skin; she wanted to smell the reek of fear; she wanted to hear the throb of a dying heart.

* * *

Inside the cottage, Lucy peers out at the garden through the eyelets in a lace curtain. Marie and Charlot haven’t left. They stand under one of the rose arbors talking to each other, glancing around the property. Marie’s posture is as steely and proud as ever. Her sleek burgundy hair, black velvet leggings, and black turtleneck sweater belong to the twenty-first century, but her lips are painted the same Chinese scarlet that she wore more than two hundred years ago.

As if she weren’t busy enough, Lucy will have to keep a close eye on the greenhouse today. If those glittery eyes hadn’t recognized her, then the delicate nostrils would have caught the scent of Madame’s blooms.

Marie is here to reclaim the resurrection rose. Marie always gets what she wants.

* * *

The rosarian’s hands were as hard as cowhide, toughened by thousands of rose thorn pricks. His palms were broad and black, like burnt earthen bowls, but when he held one of the rose blossoms, those palms became as gentle as porcelain teacups. The intimate secrets of all the king’s roses were embedded in his fingers and his nostrils; he could identify any one of the flowers by its texture and scent. This was vital to his success because the rosarian was blind.

“How do you know that this is a saffron rose?” Lucille asked. “How can you tell that this one is the color of snow, and that one the color of water at twilight?”

“I wasn’t always blind, little fool,” he said. “Any rosarian who relies on his eyes alone is no good, especially to a king.”

“What makes the fragrances different?”

“A hundred things. The earth they root in, for instance. The way they feed.”

“How do your roses feed?”

“Ravenously. Without cease. They have to, or they wouldn’t live past a generation. With the right nourishment, they can live forever.”

“What do they eat, then?”

“See for yourself.”

The rosarian reached for Lucille’s hand. As his fingers clasped her smooth flesh, he rolled the ball of his thumb around in her palm, then stroked the silken pads at the base of her fingers. Back and forth, the skin of his thumb grated her sensitive hand in a coarse caress that made her giggle and blush.

“I can tell what color you are right now, mademoiselle,” he said. “Your cheeks are the same bright pink as the rose that blooms in the east end of the king’s garden, and your nipples are as tight as its buds in early spring.”

The rosarian reached for one of those very buds and tweaked the nub hard through Lucille’s gown. She yelped in pain, then sighed, as her nipple tingled between his viselike fingers. A starburst of desire radiated from her breast to her belly—she didn’t want the old man, couldn’t want someone so gnarled and stern and crusty, but she was blooming for him under her skirt, her hidden lips wet.

He held out her wrist to one of the plants. The leaves began to rustle, and a long thorn protruded through the foliage. Lucille gave another high-pitched laugh, thinking of what the growing shaft reminded her of. But her laughter stopped when the thorn pierced the transparent skin of her wrist. Instead of flowing freely, her blood disappeared into the thorn.

Lucille could not move. A whimper rose in her throat, but her lips wouldn’t open to release it. Her heartbeat slowed to meet the rhythm of the rose’s suckling. The rosarian gently backed her toward a wooden table crowded with his tools. How kind he is, she thought, as he leaned her against the hard surface, so that her slack body wouldn’t drop to the floor. His hands foraged through her long skirt, lifting the brocade like a tent so he could kneel at her feet and press his sightless face against her damp golden pelt, lapping the juices that slicked her thighs. The scent of her own musk mingled with the spicy smell of the rose’s leaves. The flower sucked at Lucille’s wrist, and the rosarian sucked with equal hunger at the fruit between her legs. In her waking life, she never would’ve dreamed that the muddy old man could make her come, but in the spell woven by the vampire flower, Lucille dissolved into cries and shudders under his mouth.

The plant drank and drank, until Lucille thought it would drain her dry. The rose surged with new life. Its petals flushed with color, its stems straightened and lengthened. The incredible thorns grew long and sharp and gleaming, like ebony knives. When the rose was finished, it released Lucille. She swayed back and forth, her vision clouded by a red mist.

“What was that?” she gasped. Her eyelids floated open. The rosarian clambered to his feet with surprising agility, making her wonder if his lovemaking had been a dark fantasy woven by the flower. “The rose tried to kill me!”

“Not kill you. Share your life. You have youth and time in abundance. Feed some to the rose, and you’ll be rewarded.”

“How?”

The rosarian clamped his hand over Lucille’s mouth. His skin smelled of earth, dung, crushed rose petals, and something else. His thighs, hard as wood, leaned against her. Feeling his cock through his muddy trousers, she knew she hadn’t imagined coming under his greedy mouth. She’d never known he desired her that way; she thought he preferred the textures and fragrances of roses to anything the female body had to offer. Now she could feel proof she’d been wrong. She couldn’t help imagining what his cock would look like, twisted and knobby, like a rose root. The thought made her titter, and he tightened his grip. Lucille cringed, whimpering against his dank hand as she tried to shrink away from him. But he bracketed her so firmly against the table she might as well have been paralyzed.

“You ask too many questions, little fool,” he said, as tenderly as a lover. “If you give me some peace, I will consider creating a rose for you. She will be the palest gold, the darkest ivory, with a pink star at its heart. A blossom to match your face.”

Behind the barrier of the old man’s hand, Lucille squealed with joy.

“Ah, but I haven’t promised you anything. Many rosarians name their flowers after beautiful ladies, for no other reason than to honor the faint blush on a cheek, or the softness of the hair. I don’t take my flowers so lightly. The roses I breed are different from any other flowers on earth, and of the few I’ve grown, only a few have survived. You have to prove that you have the heart to keep your bond with the rose. Your beauty isn’t enough to win you this honor; you have to be passionate and strong. Can you do that?”

Lucille nodded, batting her eyelids furiously to convey her promise.

The rosarian removed his hand from Lucille’s mouth. He lowered his voice to a cracked whisper. “This bond will be much stronger than anything you’ve shared with your … lovers. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Lucille felt her cheeks redden. How did the old man know about her long afternoons in the room draped with satin?

“To make the rose your own, you will have to feed her daily—more often if she demands it. You will have to open your wrist to her, your thigh, even your throat. Wherever you feel a pulse, that’s where she might ask to feed.”

As the old man spoke, he touched Lucille’s wrist, thigh, and throat. Wherever his fingers rested, her blood thrummed in response.

“What about my heart?” she asked. “Will the rose want my heart?”

The rosarian said nothing for a moment. He gazed at a point above Lucille’s head, with his silver, unseeing eyes.

“A rose that truly loves you may ask to feed from your heart. But don’t worry, little fool. The rose will never drain you. She’ll take enough blood to make you a weakened captive, but never so much that you can’t care for her.”

Lucille tipped her head and let her hip sway into the old man’s firm belly. “What if I gave you something else instead? Something very, very special?”

The rosarian shoved himself away from her and turned away with a grunt.

“Why should I go to all the pain and trouble of letting a flower feed off of me?” Lucille grumbled. “What would I get in return?”

“Eternal life,” the old man said.

“Hah! That’s not so grand. I’ll have eternal life if I say my prayers.”

The rosarian limped back to the corner of his shed, where he went back to fumbling with his pots. Lucille flounced out of the shed. The late afternoon sunlight and clean formal lines of the gardens were a relief after the moldy smells and lumpen shadows of the rosarian’s lair.

Eternal life. Who needed a promise like that? Lucille had no intention of doing anything as dull as dying. As her feet flew across the grass, she could already hear the strains of music floating from the palace.

But the next morning, and every morning thereafter, Lucille would go back to the rosarian’s shed to find the rose. Again and again, she would let the flower feed.

* * *

Lucy yawns and glances at the numbers on the face of her digital watch. It’s almost midnight, way past her bedtime, but she’s sworn she’ll stay awake till dawn to guard ‘Madame de Mortoise.’ Outside the greenhouse the gardens are ghostly, the rosebushes arching toward each other like dancers frozen in time. Lucy’s customers have long gone home, and her greenhouse is draped in mist. Lucy lies on a pallet of blankets at Madame’s feet, a thermos of black coffee by her side. A half circle of beeswax candles gives her enough light to see into the shadowed hallways of the rose’s foliage. Madame fills the entire structure. Lucy’s blood has turned her into a cathedral.

“I’ve cared for you well, Madame. You’ve never been beautiful, but you’ve grown magnificent.” Lucy fondles one of the rose’s blooms. The blossoms remind her of shriveled monkey heads. “Marie was never beautiful, but so many men wanted her. She made me sick with envy. I was too young to understand.”

Lucy reaches up and pulls down one of Madame’s branches. She pokes her index finger with one of the thorns and lets Madame drink.

“You see, my blood is sweet. Marie’s was bitter but powerful, like water from the River Styx. That’s what her lovers wanted, a taste of oblivion. And cruelty. Don’t ever forget Marie’s cruelty.”