be not afraid 02

You see shock on her face. The other stations are occupied by the faintest after-echoes of heavenly puissance. And now she is faced with an invocation so potent she could almost reach out and touch you. In flesh and spirit she raises a hand to shield her eyes from the glow behind your head, which catches liquid highlights on your flowing black hair, and on the great wings which brush opposing walls of her bedroom.

“Be not afraid,” you intone, voice terrible and eyes burning into hers.

She staggers back and steps outside her chalk circle, catching her weight clumsily on the corner of her nightstand. No one downstairs hears over their music.

You smile. With the circle unoccupied you silently dismiss the East, South and West. While you are fairly certain you could have overcome the neophyte’s completed defences, there is a pleasing anticipation in peeling her.

“Are you Uriel?” quavers the young woman, getting back on her feet. She straightens her glasses, and that’s when she notices she has cut herself. Blood drips from her palm near the wrist. She puts it in her mouth and sucks.

“You make a blood sacrifice for me?” you say, staring down your nose imperiously at the cringing occultist. She goes pale at the thought. You can practically see her trying to calculate the least scary course of action.

“I offer no blood without, um, let or lein… are you, like, really here?” She pushes her glasses up her nose and stares. “I can see you as clear as day.”

“I am here, and I am not here. Come child, re-enter the circle. You have lost your place in the ritual.”

She blushes, bringing out freckles across her apple cheeks, then complies with an apologetic slant to her shoulders. Her ritual dagger is still in her hand. She brandishes it at you, confidence eking back into her voice. “Uriel.”

“Hmm? Sorry. Mind was elsewhere.” In fact you were distracted by the blood that has slightly slickened the handle of the knife. “I am not Uriel.”

“Oh? Then… who are you?” A tiny crimson bead appears on the heel of the knife’s blade. A potent symbol, if she but knew how to employ it.

“I am here to give you knowledge. To teach you the relationship between the physical and the spirit. You will be in great danger, otherwise. Watch.”

The hold out you hand palm up. Her brandished knife wavers but you follow it, keeping a non-threatening distance below it. When the droplet of her blood finally swells and falls, you catch it in your palm. Eyes as wide as saucers follow as you raise it to your lips and roll out your tongue. Her blood shines red against the pink of your tongue for a moment, then with a swish inside your mouth and a subtle swallow, is gone forever. Her taste is bright, like the sun wrapped in copper foil flows through her veins.

The occultist’s mouth falls open in horror. You’re about to speak again but she gets there first. “Charlotte,” she says tremulously; and then, finding steel: “Charlotte Walker.”

Her name, you guess. You remember using this technique when you started out.. Charlotte reaffirms herself and repossesses her domain. It’s enough to make you waver—

—like in a dream, your eyes open. Your mouth, too, is open, accepting the corner of a new slice of pizza. I look up to your eyes with recognition and give a faint smile. You chew and swallow, sending another mouthful of meat feast to a caustic end in a stomach that feels heavy. You must be most of the way through the second pizza judging by the tight feeling in your dress. You forestall the next bite with an urgent ~kuh-bwoOoourap~, releasing air you’d mechanically swallowed and not relieved. As the pizza passes the welcoming portal of your lips you dive back into the trance, trusting your physical body to eat—

—the familiar room, bookcases of mostly fiction and one or two grimoires; unmade bed; tapered candles; and anime posters. Charlotte is still in the circle, teeth gritted together, gripping the knife. “How did you—”

“Look down.” You flex your wings again, a sensation that gives you an awesome sense of weight through very powerful chest and back muscles. “At your feet.”

She stares at you a moment, unwilling to take her eyes off the threat.

“I told you I’m here to teach.”

Her eyes flicker down. A speck of crimson glistens on the wood-effect laminate floor.

“It was a trick?”

Not the angle you were planning to take, but you’re enjoying playing with this mouse. “I cannot touch your blood or your body like this. I am merely a projection, like most beings you ever invoke.”

Charlotte stops and processes your words. You give her the time, taking the occasion to fold up your wings. The wrists of your wings are tall enough to disappear through the ceiling, an effect you permit to make yourself seem less corporeal and threatening.

“So I’m safe, then?”

That’s simply too much.

“Your body is safe,” you say, stepping forward from your spot at the North station. Hunger shades into your visage and something primal in Charlotte picks up on this. “Except that it is under the control of your mind. Which I may touch.”

Charlotte, to her credit, holds her ground until your next trick.

This requires no expenditure of craft. The form you adopt is your own. The wings disappear in curlicues of ash but your body alters, becoming taller, broader. Your chest is firm, your hips narrow. Facial hair precisely the right degree of manicured graces three borders of your mouth.

You fix her with a rakish smile and her heart speeds enough to send another droplet to the floor. She practically staggers back. The effect redoubles when your smile broadens to show off elegant fangs. In the aspect of Crow, you know, you must appear to her precisely like the confident, dominant men whose pictures feature in so many of her posters. And how many occultists are indifferent to the mystique of the vampire?

“Your heart is beating faster, my dear.” The strange thing is how not strange it is to hear your voice bassy in your ear. What could be more natural than being yourself?

“Th— this is a trick—”

“I appear to you truly. This is no trick. But listen to your body. What effect am I having on you?”

You both know damn well the effect you’re having on her. Your own form tingles and grows firm at the idea you’re making her wet. Perhaps, if you had more time, you could seduce her, gain her trust, and satisfy an urge you seldom get to gratify. All that desire still smoulders in your eyes as you take another step forward: this time, she doesn’t retreat.

The way she must raise her chin to look you in the eyes exposes a neck you long to plunge your teeth into.

And so you do.

“Nnng— no…” she murmurs, shivering in place. Not moving away. What does she feel? Probably heat. Perhaps tingling. An onlooker would see her standing alone in her room, practically on tip-toes, quivering with eyes closed.

What do you feel? The closeness of her heat. The brightness of her soul. Both somehow out of reach, bound as they are to her living body. You can only drink the faintest draught of blood essence offered up by her earnest wish to become the prey of the vampire.

Your arms encircle her as you drain two more great pulls. In her room and in your arms she whimpers.

When you withdraw she stares into your eyes with tears in her own. You are both so close. She whispers, “Why are you doing this?”

“Have you not longed for it?” It feels right to guide her head down and to kiss her on the forehead. She follows your lead and the unshed tears streak down her cheeks.

“How can you know that?”

“I know.” Tender as a lover you wipe away the tears with your thumbs. “Charlotte. I want you to give me more. I want all of you.”

“Is it…” she swallows, barely able to speak in your arms. “Is it dangerous?”

“Not so long as your heart still beats, and I cannot stop it. This I swear to you.” You gaze into her eyes with fierce desire, silently letting her own fantasies dissolve any hesitance. It is hard to chain up someone who does not wish to be chained, but you have learned how to recognise those who will happily turn the key on themselves.

Her voice is a whisper. “Okay.” She closes her eyes and bares her throat. “Please be gen— ~glomph~”

She never sees you slip into a form more accustomed to the wild and wanton act of total consumption. But it is Raven’s throat that stretches wide to admit the crown of her head, and raven’s tongue that squishes rudely against her now-staring face. When she screams and falls to the ground out of shock, it is Raven who braces herself so Charlotte forces her whole upper body into her oesophagus.

It is a strange duality. On the one hand, Charlotte is unaccountably stretched out on her bedroom floor, kicking her legs and rocking from side to side. In the other, her whole world is being reduced swallow by swallow to the slick, searing depths normally reserved for home cooking and wine.

You crawl over her, unconstrained by physical floor, feeling her heart flutter as it chokes on adrenaline. When her awareness pops into your stomach you imagine, and so she experiences, your merciless stomach enzymes slopping into wide-staring eyes. No sooner is her mouth also squeezed into the chamber of annihilation than her scream of pain and disgust gurgles beneath a wave of acids that threatens to oozingly drown her. Your insides churn so violently she never draws breath to scream enough to be heard by her friends over their music.

Charlotte curls up as more of her is born into your guts. Monstrous, relentless pressure grinds her bones, threatening to shear tendon from joint, leaving her a drowning ragdoll helpless inside you. Soon only her calves are free, squeezing down the relative hospitality of your oesophagus; and then she’s all gone, locked away in the nightmare cauldron of your ravenous stomach.

If she but said her name to get clarity… or drew a breath… or stood up… she would have been fine.

Survival instincts make her claw at hot mucous-slick walls that aren’t there but which are killing her nevertheless. You lie atop her and belch raucously, a new one coming with every stoppered cry for help.

“The knife,” you say, knowing you will be heard even over the liquid chaos in which she consents to be boiled alive. “Cut yourself out…”

Charlotte gropes around in the stinking, increasingly bloody darkness inside of you, and her hand eventually stumbles across the ritual dagger. She stabs violently at random but finds your walls impervious. Another stab, but a contraction turns the blade. Over the agony of having her skin stripped away and her eyeballs fizzed into nothing she doesn’t even feel the slight extra pain of a shoulder cut so deep it exposes muscle…

You lie on your side and watch your stomach stretch and squirm around its prey. You are spectacularly vulnerable here. If she stood up she’d pick you up with her, light as a ghost and pinned impotently to her body until you spit her out. But instead she murders herself inside you, flaying herself until the blood loss is too great and her body shuts down.

Your stomach doesn’t stop squirming, though. You stroke your skin affectionately and rock yourself to your feet. The body is left behind but Charlotte never notices. The entire rest of her existence is spent rubbing against or being crushed by or being drunk up by the muscular surfaces inside you.

She’s still struggling in your soul when you re-enter your body. You wake to find that you are stuffed to bloatation there, too, four platters lying empty nearby. Instead of blood there is the scent of cheese and tomato when you belch. Two strong hands knead at your risen gut, helping massage the food into paste inside of you.

“I thought you’d be back, soon.” I sound breathless. “You started to get wet. Did you get her?”

“No.” You buck your hips, pressing your tummy back against the massage. “Made a friend.”

I go quiet a moment, thinking what that might mean given your excitement. Then I grasp a familiar silicone object and lean down to murmur into your ear. “Want to be filled up every way?”

“Mmmmmmhmmm.”

We fuck long and slow. At least one of my hands is massaging your gut at all times. Every time you cum your stomach clamps down on the pizza, the buttplug quivers with tension, and Charlotte—poor Charlotte—experiences a moment of peace… before the digestion of her immortal soul begins again.