Whispers of the Flesh Read online

  During our postprandial conversation, I overheard a brief, whispered exchange in French between Lili and Elic. Their words, which concerned myself, had clearly not been intended for my ears. When asked whether I understood French, I replied misleadingly that I had never studied the language in school, which is true. I declined to mention that my father was from France, as were my nanny and nursery governess, and that I had a thorough command of French before I was speaking full sentences in English.

  As for the castle itself, it is of a quadrangular configuration around a courtyard, with corner and postern towers, and appears to have been built several centuries ago of dark volcanic rock. It is tucked deep into a heavily wooded valley beneath looming mountains, including an extinct volcano that houses the cave mentioned by Serges Bourgoin, which I am eager to explore despite Mr. Archer’s admonition that I not venture too far within.

  In his book, Vitturi remarked on the bizarre phantasms one is likely to encounter deep within the cave, which would appear to echo Bourgoin’s experience. I should like to determine the veracity of these reports, and to locate the curious little bedchamber described by Serges Bourgoin, if it indeed exists. I should think I stand a better chance of locating its entrance in the interior of the cave rather than the one in the woods through which Bourgoin gained access. Mr. Archer, however, seemed quite adamant that I avoid a thorough investigation of the cave. Were I to remain within it for longer than was deemed appropriate, I would no doubt be escorted out by le seigneur’s Swiss Guards and banned from reentering. For this reason, it is wisest, I think, to conduct this particular aspect of my investigation under cover of darkness.

  Tonight, after the household has quieted, I shall take a lantern and a compass and explore the cave to as great an extent as practicable—provided I can cross from the castle to the bathhouse, from whence one enters the cave, without being seen, as the moon is quite full tonight.

  Given my disinclination to entrust my correspondence to the hands of strangers, this will likely be the last letter I have the chance to post until I return to England to make a full report in person.

  Until then, I remain

  Your Lordship’s

  devoted and humble servant,

  David Beckett Roussel

  Three

  I’VE RARELY SEEN you as rude as you were this evening,” Lili told Elic as they floated side by side in the bathhouse pool, naked beneath the steam-hazed dazzle of moonlight pouring in through the open roof, their hair swirling together like black and gold snakes.

  “I’ve rarely seen you as smitten with one of our guests,” he replied, grateful that her ire toward him appeared to be thawing. So vexed had she been by his display of “absurd jealousy” that he’d had the deuce of a time talking her into this midnight swim.

  “Wanting to have my way with a man and being smitten with him are two different things, as you are very well aware, Khababu. He is a gabru, and I sense that he has promise. Why should I not desire him?”

  He turned to look at her, a heavenly being floating in the mist, the most exquisite creature he had ever seen. She was his beloved, his Nyidís. In the dönsk tunga of his early years in Norvegr, it meant the Goddess of the New Moon, which was what she had been worshipped as in her own motherland of Babylonia some four thousand years ago. Although mankind in its arrogance and narrow-mindedness had long ago ceased believing in the nonhuman races, Lili still wore the gold and lapis lazuli anklet that was the symbol of her divine status. Elic loved her with all his heart, with his very soul. He needed her, he craved her. It was a longing in his skin, utterly consuming. And despite their testiness this evening, he knew that she shared his complete devotion; there was never any doubt of that. Still . . .

  “I thought you fancied fair-haired men,” he said.

  “I fancy men.” Reaching across the water to take his hand, she added softly, “But most of all, I fancy you.”

  The very touch of her soft, cool fingers against his engendered a tremble of desire in Elic’s loins—a futile response, but his body still stubbornly refused to acknowledge what his mind had accepted long ere this, that he and Lili were doomed to a love that would never be consummated.

  Bringing Elic’s fingers to her lips, Lili said, “I can’t help my needs, Elic, any more than you can help yours. You know this. After all these years, why should it trouble you to know that I want this man? He is just another human to take and use, one of many who’ve gone before and many more to come.”

  “Yes, but he’s not just one of many, is he, Lili? He’s special. You desire him more than you’ve desired the others.” Most of the others. From time to time—it didn’t happen often, every few years—Lili became enamored of a gabru to an extent that made Elic want to throttle the bastard to within an inch of his life. “It isn’t just about slaking the hungers of your body,” he said. “You are utterly enamored.”

  “Nonsense. It is simple lust, nothing more.”

  “I can feel it, Lili.” He scooped up a handful of the water on which they floated, letting it slide through his fingers in glimmery, moonlit ribbons. The stream that fed this pool, which gurgled from deep within the adjoining cave, took on a faint, almost electrical resonance as it percolated through fissures in primordial bedrock and solidified lava. On cool autumn nights like this, it ran right around body temperature; on sweltering summer days, a good deal below. In the winter, entering this pool was like slipping into a steaming hot bath. It was also remarkably conductive, transmitting feelings and sensations between bathers, especially lust, in a way that was sometimes subtle and sometimes a potent galvanic charge, depending on the depth of the infused emotion.

  That was how Elic knew for sure that Lili’s protestation of “simple lust” toward David Beckett was so much dissembling. He felt it in the water that buoyed him, even in the steam rising off its balmy surface to drift away in the cool night air—a frisson of passion flavored with fascination; the thrill of the new, the unknown, the mysterious; a breathless anticipation that had less to do with lust than with discovery, connection, possession. It wasn’t just David Beckett’s body that Lili longed for, it was something more, and that something made Elic’s heart squeeze into a tight little knot in his chest.

  “You can’t hide your feelings from me, Lili,” he said, “not here. You’re besotted with him.”

  “For pity’s sake, Elic.” She released his hand and looked away, rather petulantly, he thought. “It isn’t love, or anything like it. It’s . . .”

  “I know you’re not in love with him. But you are infatuated.”

  She looked for a moment as if she wanted to deny it, but then she just sighed and said, “It is different for me than for you, Elic. For my sex, human or non, desire can be a complicated business. Lust is rarely about simple physical gratification. One can find oneself harboring feelings—even for perfect strangers—that defy all reason. You’ve experienced this yourself, when you go through The Change and become Elle. More than once, you’ve found yourself captivated by the gabrus you’ve taken. You’ve told me as much.”

  “Only while I’m taking them,” he said. “When it’s over, I feel nothing.”

  “Because when it’s over, you are once again a male. Yet when you take a human woman, regardless of how desirable she is, how much you’ve wanted her, how exciting it is to be inside her, your passion always has its limits. It is your body that longs for her, and your body alone.”

  “If only it were the same for you. I feel sick when I think of you fucking that goddamned gardener. He fancies you, too, you know. He doesn’t think it shows, the English never do, but he’s mad for you. That’s why he can’t bring himself to look you in the eye.”

  Lili stroked Elic’s face tenderly, soothingly. “Do not fret so, my love. I’m not really so very different from you. Once I’ve had this gabru and my cravings have been fed, my ardor will diminish—you’ll see. My lust will be less tangled up with sentiment. It will be purer then, a simple physical need, as it is meant
to be for our kind.”

  “I want to be with you when you take him—at least tonight.” He knew she wouldn’t wait to have him; she was far too eager. Not that tonight would be the end of it, of course. By the time Beckett left here, Lili would have enjoyed him in ways his prosaic human brain could never have imagined.

  “Of course you may be there, if it will ease your mind,” she said.

  “I’ll put a liggia spiall on him,” Elic said. “Let him think it was all just a dream. And I want you to use your mashmashu kasaru. I don’t want him to move a muscle. I’ll be damned if I’ll watch him putting his hands all over you.”

  On a weary exhalation, she said, “I hate it when they can’t thrust or touch me. It doesn’t feel the same.”

  “I’ll touch you.” Grabbing the pool’s marble rim for purchase, Elic rose to his feet in the hip-deep water and leaned down to kiss her as she floated in the moonlit mist. “I know what you like.”

  Elic closed his hands over her breasts, giving her nipples a sharp little tug that made her moan. He pinched them hard, rolling them back and forth, but slowly, pulling them a little from time to time as they grew stiff. He knew, from his female transmutations, exactly how this felt for her, the stinging pleasure that fell just short of pain, shooting darts of arousal directly to her clit. So sensitive was Lili’s succubitic body that she could climax just from having her nipples excited, if it was done properly. He’d made her come merely from caressing certain areas of her body in just the right way; her lips, her ears, her throat, and the cleft of that exquisite derrière were particularly sensitive.

  She grabbed fistfuls of his trailing hair, her back arching, the earthy-sweet perfume of her arousal making Elic’s cock thicken and rise. He braced one hand under the small of her back to support her while he brushed a finger slowly, lightly, up and down the seam of her sex.

  “I know how you hate to be rushed,” he said as he slid the finger deeper, stroking the ultrasensitive inner lips very slowly and gently. She moaned deliciously, the water roiling beneath her as she tilted her hips up, up . . .

  Elic positioned himself between her outspread legs as he continued the intimate caress. Fully erect now, he steeled himself against his own arousal, for which there would be no relief tonight—he didn’t bed the maidservants, and there were no female houseguests at present—and tried to think only of Lili.

  He would pleasure her before Beckett did, and he’d make it good for her, he’d make her wait for it, make her scream. The consummate succubus, sexual excitation was like a drug to her; she was addicted to it, ravenous for it, utterly intoxicated in its clutches. She could come twenty or thirty times before she was through with a man, sucking him dry and leaving him deliriously satisfied and utterly wrung out—whereas she, having revived herself with the gabru’s carnal excitement, would be flushed with renewed vitality. As with most females, human and Follet alike, her first climax was usually the most powerful. Tonight the first would be his, and a string of others besides; Beckett would get what was left.

  “I’ll touch you like this while you’re on top of him,” Elic murmured. “I’ll tell him you’re really mine and mine alone, heart and soul, and that he’s nothing to you but a convenient cock. I’ll hold you still with him swelling and twitching inside you while I flutter a fingertip on your clit, bringing you right to the edge and keeping you there while you shake and groan. I’ll push a finger up your ass like this.”

  Lili threw her head back as he demonstrated, squirming the finger around inside her to make her exceedingly aware of it. Suspended on the water as she was, it would feel as if her entire body were supported by that one skewering digit.

  “You’ll be filled up and quivering and begging me to finish you,” Elic said. “He won’t be able to take it anymore. He’ll scream as he comes, and you’ll feel every spurt, every throb, but I still won’t let you come, not yet.” He ceased his ministrations and grabbed her hips to still her. “Not till you’re wild with lust and ready to explode.”

  “Elic, don’t tease me,” she pleaded, struggling against his grip. “I’m so close.”

  So was he, painfully close. Ten days had passed since his last opportunity to bed a female visitor to the château. The water lapping against his cock made it throb like a sore tooth.

  He was pondering what to do to Lili next—kneel between her legs and fuck her with his tongue?—when a breeze wafted through the bathhouse, carrying with it a medley of scents that made his nostrils flare: musty autumn leaves, ripe juniper berries . . . tobacco with a hint of frankincense . . . Castile soap . . .

  Beckett. He was out there somewhere, and coming closer, because the scent was growing stronger.

  “Elic . . . oh, God, please.” Like Elic, Lili was incapable of achieving climax by her own hand. Most incubi and succubi were entirely at the mercy of others to provide the sexual release on which they thrived.

  The Englishman was headed straight for the bathhouse, Elic was sure of it. In half a minute, he would be upon them. He would see them.

  He would see them.

  “Oh, God . . . Elic, don’t leave me this way.”

  “Of course not.” Elic gathered her up and held her close with her back to the arched doorway of the bathhouse, her legs wrapped around his waist. He rocked his hips, sliding his erection against her damp cleft in a sensual rhythm, gritting his teeth against the stimulation. Were Lili a mortal woman, someone he could fuck, he would relish the sensation of being so close to climax, feeling it gathering in his veins, his balls . . . He would ram himself into her and no doubt spend within seconds, given how ready he was. But Lili wasn’t a mortal woman, and no matter how close he got, there would be no relief.

  “Elic, you mustn’t,” she breathed, even as she writhed against him, too lust-drunk to resist. “It will only hurt you.”

  The pain, when he teetered on the edge of an unattainable climax, could be overwhelming; the longer he’d gone without spending, the more excruciating it was. Already his balls felt as if they were on the verge of splitting open; the shaft felt almost scalded.

  Testing the air, Elic guessed that Beckett was close, very close, no more than fifty feet away. “Tell me you’re mine,” he said softly, peering through the doorway to the gravel path that led to the bathhouse.

  “You know I am.” She was breathless now, and moving against him with increasing urgency as she gripped his shoulders.

  There came into view a figure so well lit by the full moon as to cast a sharp black shadow on the path—Beckett, wearing an open frock coat, boots, and a wide-brimmed hat, an unlit lantern in one hand and a walking stick in the other. He slowed his gait, and then stopped, staring into the bathhouse as Elic pretended not to notice him.

  He imagined the scene from the Englishman’s perspective—Elic and the enchanting Lili, making love standing up in the moonlit pool, her moans growing frantic as her pleasure crested. Grimacing at his own, nearly unbearable arousal, he thrust harder, faster.

  “Oh, yes,” she moaned, her entire body undulating in a primal rhythm. “Yes, like that. Mamitu, I’m so close. I’m going to come. Oh . . . Oh, God . . .”

  “Say it.”

  “I’m yours,” she cried. “I’m yours. I belong to you.”

  Beckett turned and strode quickly back down the path. Elic smiled to himself.

  Lili, still on the verge of climax, grew still, her breath coming in harsh gasps. She’d seen him staring over her shoulder. Before he could distract her, she turned and looked through the doorway, tracking his gaze down the path.

  Beckett had already disappeared into the night, or so it appeared to Elic, whose night vision, though excellent by human standards, wasn’t remotely as keen as Lili’s. Her eyes and brain were structured so as to capture and interpret an unusually wide spectrum of light, not just the narrow range that was visible to humans and most of her fellow Follets. Even Darius, in his feline incarnation, couldn’t see as well as she in the dark. And in daylight, her vision was as sh
arp and far-reaching as that of an eagle.

  Elic cursed inwardly when he heard her indrawn breath. Her entire body seemed to stiffen.

  Shit.

  She whipped her head back around, her eyes black with fury. “You knew he was there, but you didn’t tell me. You wanted him to see us, to think we were . . . That’s why you . . .” She looked down at their bodies clasped together, then unwrapped her legs from around him and pushed him roughly away.

  “Lili—”

  She cracked her palm across his face, hard, throwing him off balance. His feet skittered on the floor of the pool. The water closed over his head as he flailed and choked, engulfed in a cauldron of lust, female rage—and shock.

  She’d never struck him before, never come close to that kind of anger—not toward Elic, her Beloved, her Khababu.

  Choking and sputtering, he found his footing and stood, water sluicing off him as he clawed his hair off his face. She was already out of the pool, facing away from him as she reached for the silken lubushu she’d tossed onto an iron chair before bathing—the yellow one, his favorite. She’d worn it tonight, he knew, as a gesture of conciliation after the tension between them earlier.

  “Lili—”

  “You think you’ve staked your claim,” she said unsteadily as she knotted the saronglike garment over her shoulder,“but you deceived me to do it. I should say that claim is now on rather shaky ground.”

  She stalked off into the night.

  Four

  LILI AWOKE THE next morning to the dipping of her mattress and the familiar pressure of a hand, Elic’s hand, stroking her hip through the blanket as she lay curled up facing away from him. They usually slept together in one of their apartments—but not last night.