Seductress, page 11
He started to fade at work, exhausted to the point that his concentration ebbed. As the markets collapsed, he lost the edge he needed now more than ever to shift and sell, buy and jettison. The computer screens blurred, his mind slowed down, clotted with images of Sekhmet. Physically, he was a ruin. His body was one big bruise.
He was summoned into Sir Trevor’s office.
“What the devil’s going on, Spencer? Your figures are atrocious. We’re all in the same boat here and we cannot afford this kind of slippage. Are you on drugs?”
“God, no. No, sir…” he stammered. “I, just, er, I’m a bit tired that’s all.”
“Tired? Tired!” exploded Sir Trevor. “You can’t afford to be tired. Nobody can these days. This is your one and only warning. Shape up or ship out.”
He went back to his station, depressed and totally demotivated.
“You wimp,” she said, when he unwisely told her of his troubles at work. “Why didn’t you tell him where to get off?”
“Because I’ll never get another position like this. The market is already overcrowded. And there are plenty of younger chaps out there just itching to step into my shoes. There’s a recession on, you know. In case you hadn’t noticed.”
Clearly, she hadn’t. Whatever it was that she did, which remained a mystery to him, Sekhmet was evidently well heeled. Her flat in Chelsea was spectacular, filled with expensive objets d’art of museum quality, however she acquired them. Yet she treated everything around her with a cavalier disregard for its value. In the throes of passion, they had smashed at least two Chinese vases from the Tang Dynasty and toppled a Roman sculpture, chipping off an ear—events which would have caused apoplexy in any curator. Sekhmet simply brushed the pieces into a black plastic bag and dumped them in the dustbin.
“What do you, er, do?” he asked Sekhmet as she untangled herself from the sheets and stood up.
“I’m a consultant,” she said over her shoulder and went into the kitchen to locate a bottle of champagne.
“Who are your, uh, consultees?” he asked, attempting to rise from the wrecked bed.
“Oh, you know. The British Museum. The Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Places like that.”
“I see.” He didn’t.
“Anyway, why do you want to know?”
“No reason. It’s just…”
“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked, pushing him back down onto the bed. “We’ve only just started.”
Oh, Christ, he thought.
“I hope you’re thirsty,” she said, looking down at him, swinging the freshly popped bottle of bubbly from one hand like a club.
“Yes,” he said. “Parched, actually.”
“Good. Stay there and don’t move.”
She lay on her back beside him, raised her hips and opened her legs. While he watched, fascinated, she inserted the neck of the bottle between the ever-hungry lips of her cunt and tilted it upward, emptying the contents inside her.
Oh, my god, he thought, suspecting what was to follow.
She tossed the empty bottle aside, knocking an ancient Greek amphora off a plinth onto the floor, where it broke into thirteen pieces.
Pinning his shoulders to the bed with her strong hands, she sat astride him, sliding her wet cunt up his chest until she was sitting astride his face. Positioning herself over his lips, she relaxed her vaginal muscles and pissed the newly aromatized champagne into his open mouth. He drank and gagged, choked and spluttered as the foaming liquid sluiced down his throat and entered his nose, virtually drowning him in a stream of vintage Bollinger and Eau de Vulva.
As it ended and he started to get his breath back, she lowered herself onto his face and began rubbing herself back and forth over his lips and nose, smothering him in her musky, salty, champagney cunt.
“Stick out your tongue,” she commanded. “Make it stiff.”
She rubbed faster, sliming his face with a combination of juices and secretions, locating his nose with her engorged clitoris.
As she moved faster and faster, her orgasm rising from her center of operations, Spencer felt that his features were being rubbed away and that he would end up a faceless zombie doomed to roam the city streets after dark. The Erased Man.
She roared as she came, clawing the wall in her ecstasy.
A little while afterward, she flicked his flaccid cock with a contemptuous fingernail.
“Well, lover. What shall we do now?” she asked, with a cruel curve of her mouth.
Too drunk to fuck and too fucked to drink, he could do nothing but groan in reply.
The following morning, having called in sick, he looked up the number of the British Museum and dialed. Three tablets of Berocca fizzed noisily in a glass on his faux-granite kitchen counter.
“British Museum.”
“Hello. Can you put me through to the Egyptology Department?”
“Certainly, sir. Hold for one moment, please.”
Three seconds passed.
“Egyptology.”
“Oh, yes. Hello. I am trying to trace one of your consultants. I am doing some research and someone gave me her name as a possibly useful contact.”
“I see. What is the name?”
“Sekhmet.”
“Sekhmet what?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
“Is this some sort of joke?”
“Oh no, not at all. But I assume there can’t be many people with that name working there.”
“I can assure you, sir, that there is no one of that name working here or associated with the museum. Not alive, at any rate.”
Spencer’s scalp tingled.
“What do you mean?”
“Sekhmet is the name of an ancient Egyptian deity. There are several extant images of her in existence. It is highly unlikely that anyone would name their daughter after her.”
“Why would that be?”
“Because she is considered the most formidable and destructive of the Egyptian gods. She is usually depicted with the head of a lion. In the Ancient Egyptian world her name is synonymous with overwhelming female power and bloodshed. She is also known as the Mistress of Dread or the Lady of Slaughter.”
“Oh, er, I…”
“Now, if you’ve quite finished wasting my time, I have better things to do. Good-bye, sir.”
The line went dead. Spencer put the receiver back very, very gently.
The crunch came when he failed to perform one Saturday afternoon, after she grabbed him on the sofa where he had been dozing in front of a particularly important match in the Six Nations Championship.
She stood over him, having pulled on her jeans without bothering with underwear, and sneered down at him.
“Time to go,” she said. “The Sales are on.”
“Oh, no,” he groaned. “There are loads of sales. Why now?”
“There is only one,” she said.
And so he found himself standing on the Egyptian escalator as she spat her venom at him. Too tired to respond in kind, diminished and defeated, he suffered the agonies of public humiliation in a kind of bewildered daze, like a naughty little boy or a dog who had peed on the carpet.
“You’re useless!” she screamed, glaring down at him from the step above. “Call yourself a man? You’re so fucking wet you should be going out with a sponge, not a real woman. You’re nothing but a loser. Go back to Mummy, loser!”
Although he was dimly aware of people staring at him he just stood and took it, a half smile on his lips.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you! See? You can’t even look me in the eyes. Where is your spunk? I don’t know what I ever saw in you.”
He was about to say something when she turned and stared across at the descending escalator. A young blond man with a rugged, weather-beaten face and an athletic figure was staring at them with amusement. He looked pityingly at Spencer who could do nothing but smile stupidly back and watch as the guy turned his attention to Sekhmet. Spencer recognized the look—the blond guy was experiencing the same impact that had struck him a few months earlier. Don’t, he thought. Don’t look. And whatever you do, don’t turn back. You’ll be sorry.
But it was too late. The guy was hooked.
Spencer was so weak he couldn’t summon the energy to challenge her, to resist the inevitable. Trailing behind her he could feel himself growing smaller. It was an illusion, of course, a manifestation of his psychological diminution.
All the same, when the escalator reached the top and Sekhmet walked off, she heard a woman who was standing two steps behind her comment in a conspicuously loud voice: “God, this place is filthy. Look at that pile of dust. You’d think that loathsome little rug merchant could afford to employ decent cleaning staff.”
Not that it mattered. Spencer was nowhere to be seen. And by the time the escalator had completed its circuit, the pile of dust was gone for good.
THE SORCERER’S CATCH
Angela Caperton
Now I have you,” the young man in the black robe said.
He spoke the truth. Anastasia was pinned within the magic circle drawn in red paint around the man’s bed, trapped as securely as the least devil in the hands of Faust himself.
The magician—the first conjurer she had met in the twenty-first century—had drawn his circle tightly enough that Ana could not move off the bed even a single step, so she knelt there on red silk sheets, trying to look demure. She had approached his bed gowned in smoke and when he had sprung his trap, bringing her out of dreams and into his world, the smoke solidified into black lace, draping her ivory skin like alluring spiderwebs that left her all but naked before his direct gaze.
She covered her breasts, gratified by the disappointment in his eyes. He was very young, no more than twenty-five years old. Was he powerful in his magic or just lucky?
“What shall I call you?” she asked him, trying not to sound surly.
“Adam.” She had hoped he would be stupid enough to tell her his real name, but she knew at once that he had given a false one.
“What do you want of me, Adam?” The name would suffice for now. It said something about him that he chose that name. “What must I do to be free again?”
“First, Anastasia, you will teach me,” he said. From within his robe, he produced four golden chains, delicate things, like jewelry, but she sensed the inscriptions on the links: binding runes that would cage her.
He looped her wrists and ankles, pulled tight and spread her faceup on the crimson sheets. He touched her with strong, firm hands; spoke words of protection as he worked, careful, as though fearful of releasing some demon inside her.
No, she conceded as he finished forcing her legs well apart, he was not stupid.
When Adam finished his work, he had bound her to the four posts of the bed and she lay helpless before him. The situation was not unpleasant, even though she faced the direst sort of danger.
“Teach you what?” she asked, tugging the unyielding chains, testing them.
He watched for a moment then reached down to part her robe of webs, baring her breasts and belly and the little wisp of lacy shadow that covered her pussy.
“Carnal knowledge,” he replied formally. “Teach me all things, both lawful and forbidden.”
He had called her by her favorite name, Anastasia, a name she had taken from the dream of a Bolshevik soldier long ago. The man had guarded the Romanoff family in Ipatiev’s house and, days later, after the soldier had helped to kill the girl, he dreamed about her. His guilt and obsession had drawn the attention of a bored succubus. It had heralded a new beginning for Ana, awakened her to the dawning century and the grand dreams of men and women with plans to remake the world.
When the whims of dreamers demanded another name, she would take one, to seduce and entice, but Anastasia had become the name she called herself for almost a hundred years.
And now this young wizard, this barely grown man, had summoned her by her name, in the voice of rituals unspoken in three generations, drawn her with the rich lure of her own curiosity. She had descended into his dream and his magic circle had closed like a foothold trap. Now she lay bound to his bed.
“Wait,” she breathed, as he reached for the wisp of her panties.
He regarded her for a moment then proceeded with his intention. His fingers burned like brands and her garment disintegrated, fragile as smoke. Ana had the sudden fear that her flesh might prove as delicate. Her gasp barely seemed real as it passed her lips.
Adam liked that, a tight smile betraying his delight. Then he turned his gaze directly into her eyes. “I cannot wait.” He wet his fingers and rubbed the bud of her clit. He wasn’t bad looking at all, hollow cheeks and serious, beautiful eyes, with strong, smooth hands. Her pussy slicked at his touch, her nature dependable even in dire circumstance. He dropped his robe, an acolyte approaching the altar, prayed in Sumerian, then probed the wet line of her pussy end to end, opening her.
She rose in the chains, enough to see his cock just as he put it in her, a respectable appendage, wonderfully hard and ready. Her vision clouded with the bliss of penetration. This was better than a dream. His chains held her while he fucked her with hard, expert thrusts, his hands raising her butt and stroking her anus and crack. She bucked against him as best she could, but there was little question of cooperation. He fucked her with purpose and she, who had once toppled an empire by touching the dreams of a queen, was helpless to do much but take it, and to come almost at once, then again and again, before Adam finally erupted inside her, his precious seed hot and alive.
He stroked her hips, his touch efficient but almost tender as he withdrew stickily.
“Now maybe we can talk a little, eh?” she asked him with a little laugh and a punctuating tinkle of chains.
He smiled—full of afterglow, she imagined, and replied, “The old books say I should only ask you questions and tell you nothing.”
“That’s a start. Can you unbind me?”
“And if I do?” he asked, smirking as he donned his robe again. She hated to see him cover up. She would have to rely on more subtle visual clues to know when she had aroused him again and, well, he had a nice-looking cock, even spent. She settled on his beautiful eyes for an alternate indicator of his passion. Analytical and inquisitive eyes, but she had seen real fire there too, and she knew she could kindle it again.
“So, what do you want to know?” She tried to sit up but her wrist chains held her. He worked on the headboard a moment and lengthened the span of her bonds. Still cuffed, she had more room to move. She sat upright and he settled at the foot, just out of her reach, his silk-robed thigh a quarter inch from her bare calf.
“How old are you?”
“A meaningless question, Adam. I have always been.”
“What happens to men and women when we die?”
“I don’t know.”
He frowned, but nodded, accepting her ignorance. She didn’t care if he believed her. Her answer was truthful.
“Do you remember a man named Herbert Stanley?”
She shook her head and smiled. “Often I know only the names mortals wear in dreams. I might remember him if I saw his picture.”
“It doesn’t matter. Mr. Stanley gave me the crucial information to find you, Anastasia. It was in his records that I first read your name.”
“I don’t understand.” She had certainly given her name to hundreds of souls within dreams, but it had never occurred to her that they might remember or share the knowledge once they woke.
“I’m a psychologist, Ana. Do you know what that is?”
“Of course: a physician of the mind.”
“My family also has a tradition of magick—we have been summoning imps and spirits for almost two hundred years. I’ve been learning that craft too. You might be surprised at how many people share my twin professions.”
“Clearly you have surpassed your ancestors,” she purred with a touch of playfulness. “They might be proud.” She smiled as she said it, and arched her back. In dreams she would have shaped herself to his desires, but in the flesh, she had to rely on simpler bait. Her nipples drew his gaze.
He laughed. “Do you want something to cover you?”
“By the nightmare, no! Why would I want that?” She smiled at him, spirits of purest mischief playing in her mind. “Tell me about this man,” she said. “This Mr. Stanley.”
“There’s not much to tell. He was a policeman in…Boston, if I remember right. His case study was part of my research in my first year of postgraduate study. He was classified as schizophrenic, but the details of his dreams were especially well documented. You made quite an impression on him. One thing led to another. Do you know that tens of thousands of case studies are available now in digital files? Searching them isn’t hard. You’ve left quite a trail in the treatment records of doctors all over the world.”
“If any of these patients said I caused them harm, they are lying.”
Adam stroked her calf, the top of her foot, and brushed the sole, tickling delightfully. “We do not always know the harm we cause, Anastasia.”
“I gave them dreams.”
“Yes, and then you took them away. The more I read, the more convinced I became that you were probably the same… figment…in patient cases that went all the way back to the early alienists. Before that, I found your traces in madhouse diaries and church records. I know a lot about you, Anastasia.”
She stretched her ankle chain to its limit and pinched the muscle of his robed thigh with her toes. “You don’t know anything about me.”
He jumped and laughed. “I didn’t expect you to be like this,” he said. “You’re easy to talk to.”
“I am so much more than that.”
The fire had returned to his eyes and he tossed his robe aside, already impressively hard. He left her wrists enough play to allow her to hold him while he sat astride the bed, her butt cradled in his lap as he pulled her onto his erection. Rituals of domination, she mused, wand and chalice. She hummed. The wand fit the chalice perfectly, thank you very much.
