This is an erotic fiction
excerpt, which is sexually explicit and intended for adults. By reading it, you
are affirming that you are 18 years of age or older.
The
Opening of “Hunger”
From
In the Garden of Sin
A July 2009 trade paperback from
Bantam
Copyright © 2009 Louisa Burton.
All rights reserved.
The Middle of the Night, Early September
Greenwich Village, New York City
“How about a bite?”
Anton Turek heard Galiana Solsa’s seductively
husky voice, raised a few decibels for his benefit, as he stood in a moonlit
alley off Bleeker Street, lighting a fourth Gitanes off the third.
Took
you long enough. Turek ground the unsmoked cigarette underfoot
and retreated deeper into the brick-walled passage, ducking behind an artfully
arranged jumble of old wooden pallets. He crouched, rather than knelt, so as to
keep the knees of his new black Dolce & Gabbana jeans from coming into
contact with the grimy concrete.
The crack-crack-crack of Galiana’s stilettos
grew louder, underscored by thudding from the big, multi-buckled boots worn by
the guy she’d been rubbing up against at The Fallout Shelter around the corner
on Macdougal. Fallout was a teeming, murky, screaming-loud little joint with
cinderblock walls that drew a punk-goth clientele of which Galiana’s take-out
du jour, who’d introduced himself as Oxy, was drearily typical: swastika neck
tattoo, studded motorcycle jacket, striped stovepipe pants, the clown boots,
and chopped-up lampblack hair that had been waxed and sprayed into a calcified
semblance of disarray.
Oxy and Galiana had been tossing them back for
about an hour—Irish whiskey for him and silver bullets for her, both on her
tab—when she whispered something in his ear while molding his hand to the
crotch of her low-rise spandex booty shorts.
The
mind is subtle, she liked to say. The cock is not.
She’d caught Turek’s eye, smiled, and gave him
a little nod. He’d drained his Booker’s Manhattan, bit the cherry off the stem,
laid a fifty on the bar, and made his way to this, her favorite alley in the
Village.
That had been forty minutes ago. She didn’t
give a damn how long she made him cool his heels, she never had.
“Well?” Galiana’s footsteps ceased, followed
by Oxy’s.
Turek’s gums tickled as he peered between the
weathered wooden slats of his “hunting blind,” as he thought of it—although it
was Galiana who did most of the actual hunting, per se. He had a hard time
getting humans to let down their defenses enough to go off alone with him.
Something about him put them off. It didn’t used to be that way. Before his
forty Lost Years, as he thought of them, he’d been fairly adept at the kind of
interpersonal bullshit that won people over. It had come naturally to him; in
fact, he’d been known for his savoir faire.
Not anymore.
Galiana and Oxy stood facing each other on the
sidewalk right outside the alley. He was quite the strapping specimen by punk
standards, but Galiana, propelled to six and a half feet in those heels and
draped in one of the “zip-capes” she liked to wear when she was on the
prowl—long and hooded, with linebacker shoulder pads—could have been Darth
Vader next to his puny Luke Skywalker.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“You fucking bitch, you gotta be shitting me.”
Oxy’s booze-thickened snarl made Turek smile. His cock twitched. Galiana didn’t
care to be spoken to that way. It made her cross.
It made her ravenous.
“You rub a guy’s hand on your snatch and
whisper that dirty shit in his ear,” Oxy said, “you don’t just take him outside
and tell him it’s time to eat.”
In a cartoonishly suggestive purr, she said,
“I didn’t say what it was time to
eat.”
It took him a second, and then he snorted in
an “I get it” way that prompted Galiana, as she turned and strode into the
alley, to roll her eyes in Turek’s direction. Tonight, her blue-black hair was
sculpted into fat coils and severe bangs—a neo-forties, Blade Runner look enhanced by those ink stroke brows and
kohl-limned eyes.
The zip-cape was fashioned, like her
thigh-high boots, of licorice-black vinyl. It billowed with her leonine strides
despite the fifty pounds of lead ingots sewn into its hidden pockets, since
their weight was located mostly in the upper back and shoulder pads. Most women
could barely lift such a garment, much less wear it. Brass zippers lined every
edge, from the floor-skimming hem to the deep hood, and there were two
oversized belt loops, or what looked like belt loops, one on each side.
“Yes,” Turek breathed when, instead of hanging
the cape on the old wrought iron lamp hook halfway down the alley, as she most
often did, she swung it onto the ground, lining side up. She walked right over
it, chuckling when Oxy hesitated to do the same.
“Go ahead,” she said as she turned to face him
in front of the alley’s only window, which was tall, narrow, and iron-barred.
“I’m chucking it tonight. I’ve had it for ages.” Since 2002, to be precise,
which was when she had ordered yet another gross of them from the Hong Kong
raincoat manufacturer that had been producing them to her specifications for
some twenty years. The remaining three dozen or so of the current batch were
hanging in the twenty-by-sixteen-foot dressing room she’d created out of a
spare bedroom in their apartment.
Galiana leaned against the window, leveling
her most pheromone-drenched gaze at Oxy as she caressed her breasts through her
spandex top. It had an ultra-deep U-neck that showed off not just a luxuriant
expanse of cleavage, but three glittering strands that might have been taken
for the bottom loops of a triple diamond necklace—except that she wasn’t
wearing a necklace.
Oxy leered as she pulled the elastic fabric
open, stretching it around her breasts. Inserted in each nipple was a small
platinum ring to which the ends of the three diamond strands were attached.
“On your knees,” Oxy said as he unzipped his
fly.
“Yeah, right,” she snickered as she shimmied
out of the shorts. Beneath them, she was bare except for a little black
lightning bolt of pubic hair and the five-carat diamond adorning her clit.
“You’re the one who’s going to be genuflecting tonight, my friend.”
“The fuck I am. Get on your fucking knees,
bitch.” He grabbed her shoulders and tried to shove her down.
She swatted him away as casually as she would
swat a mosquito.
He slapped her so hard, her head snapped
around.
Galiana smiled slowly as she rubbed her cheek.
“Ooh, a bad boy,” she said. “You like it rough, bad boy? You like to show your
bitches who’s boss? I guess that’s something we have in common.”
She hauled back and punched him in the face.
“Fuck!”
Oxy stumbled back, cupping his abraded cheek. “Shit!”
He balled a hand into a fist and whipped it
toward Galiana’s head.
She seized his wrist, hissing with bared
teeth. With her other hand, she reached into his pants, the muscles of her
forearm flexing as she squeezed.
He yowled and tried to wrench her arm away, to
no avail.
“Shh.” She whispered some words in the
long-dead Etruscan tongue of her homeland.
It was like flipping a switch. Oxy’s mouth
still gaped as if in mid-scream, but all that emerged from it was a strangled
whimper.
Still gripping his balls, she said in the low
feline rumble that Turek thought of as her Hell Voice, “Who’s the bitch now,
bitch?”
His throat spasmed as he tried in vain to form
words out of the helpless gurgle rising from it.
Reverting back to her usual Kathleen Turner
purr, she said, “I’m not letting go until I get an answer, and I am a very
patient woman. Who’s the bitch?”
“I... I... I am.” It was a barely audible
rasp, but an impressive effort, considering the grip Galiana had on him, both
psychic and physical.
“You’re what?” she demanded. “Say it.”
Fucking
drama queen, Turek thought as his stomach grumbled.
Galiana loved to toy with her pigeons, get them in a corner with their wings
broken, and bat them around a bit before she pounced.
“Th-the bitch,” he croaked.
“Whose bitch?” she demanded.
“Yours.”
“On your knees, bitch.”
She pushed him down, clutching his spiky hair
as she thrust herself against his mouth. “Work that tongue. Flick the diamond.
Faster.” She slapped his head. “Faster. Oh,
yeah. Oh, yeah... Now, slow down. Back off a little. Make it last.”
Make
it last? “Verdammt,” Turek whispered as he crouched there, his
knees aching like a motherfucker. “Blöde
Fotze.” When a swear word leapt to his lips, it was more often than not in
the language of his Bohemian youth, although he’d trained the last vestiges of
a Germanic accent out of his English after World War I broke out; too much
bullshit to have to deal with during one’s world travels. Galiana had
cultivated an American accent, but Turek went with refined British, the better
to score the best tables and otherwise throw his weight around in
English-speaking countries.
Between the First and Second World Wars, he
was occasionally mistaken for Edward, Prince of Wales, which he didn’t get at
all. Granted, they were both champagne-blond and Teutonic, and they both knew
how to properly tie an ascot, but Turek was a hell of a lot taller and better
built, and facially, there was a world of difference. Turek’s eyes were pale
gray, not blue, and he had—back then, before 1982 and his “Post Fuck-up
Makeover,” as Galiana insisted on calling it—a much stronger jaw, a broader
brow, fuller lips...
His virile good looks and that oh-so-flaxen
hair had made him a pussy magnet for six centuries, so it had killed him to
have to get the plastic surgery and hazel contacts, not to mention having to
dye his hair and eyebrows a darker shade of blond every few weeks. Galiana had
wanted him to go with brown or even black, but it wouldn’t have looked natural
with his pale complexion. The physical transformation was jarring enough
without ending up looking like Wayne Newton.
When Galiana first started talking surgery,
he’d tried to argue his way out of it, but eventually he’d had to concede that
she was right. They had his mug shot; they knew his name. He was bound to be
re-arrested eventually; even if he were to leave the country, he could be
extradited back to New York. Two centuries had passed since his forty-year
stint in a Parisian prison cell, but the memory was still pretty fucking fresh.
It wasn’t going to happen again if he could help it.
And it wasn’t like he hadn’t brought the whole
shitstorm down on himself. He’d been an asshole to let himself be seen dumping
that disco bitch’s drained corpse in that Staten Island landfill. If Galiana
hadn’t pulled off her “Mission Impossible Jailbreak,” as the New York Post had trumpeted it, he might
still be serving time.
“Can you save the dimples?” he’d asked the
plastic surgeon as the anesthetic was being injected into his IV.
“You don’t have dimples,” replied the doc, a
guy Galiana had found who had his own private little hospital in the Caribbean
for well-heeled Bad Guys. “They’re just creases.”
“Chicks think they’re dimples. Can you save
them?”
“Sure. Whatever.”
Sure.
Whatever. Just the kind of precise, scientific response
you like to hear from a guy who’s standing over a tray of knives and bone saws
while you’re heading into la-la land.
The dimples—and they were dimples—were still there after the surgery, but otherwise
you’d never have recognized him from before. His jaw, while still manly, was
narrower, and the cleft chin was history; his eyes were a little smaller, but
not unattractively so. Turek’s nose had gotten badly broken when one of New
York’s finest grabbed his head and slammed it face-first into asphalt. Injuries
to an Upír healed swiftly, but not always tidily. The nose was a mess, but
rather than surgically reshape it, Dr. Whatever had suggested leaving it unset
and seeing how it healed. It healed looking like some five-year-old had made it
out of Play-Doh.
“It looks like shit,” Turek had said as he
inspected his new face in the little hand mirror they gave him after the
bandages came off.
“You look like a prizefighter,” Galiana said.
“Women will want to kiss it and make it feel better.”
“I can make your cock look like that, too, if
you want,” offered Dr. Whatever, and he’d laughed like hell without missing a
stroke as he fucked Galiana against the wall next to Turek’s hospital bed.
The good doc had altered his physical features
quite thoroughly, right down to grafting on new fingerprints from “a guy who
never even got a speeding ticket, so we’re talking squeaky clean.” Turek didn’t
ask whether the guy in question was a cadaver or alive, not because it made him
queasy, but because he simply didn’t care. He did care that his fingertips had
looked a little odd ever since the surgery, but that was a small price to pay
for a nice, shiny new set of prints.
By the time Turek got out of the hospital,
Galiana, in an effort to make their “after dinner clean-up” a bit simpler and
more discreet in the future, had already ordered her first batch of zip-capes.
She had also arranged for new personal documentation—driver’s license,
passport, the works—identifying him as Anthony Prazak, a name he’d chosen
because it meant “from Prague,” the city of his birth. He’d taken Galiana’s
suggestion to change “Anton” to “Anthony,” only to find himself dubbed “Tony” by
just about everyone he met. When he complained to Galiana about being saddled
against his will with a nickname that he regarded as juvenile and low-class,
her advice was for him to lighten the fuck up.
“My name for the first couple hundred years of
my life was Thanchvil Vestarcnies,” she’d said, “and it was a butt-ugly name
even back then. Most people have to take what they get when it comes to names.
At least you got to choose your last
name.”
Small comfort, especially four years later,
when a new antidepressant hit the market, and “Prazak” morphed overnight into
“Prozac,” always uttered with at least a hint of a snicker.
Because it was just so fucking funny.
“Yeah, Oxy, that’s the way,” Galiana said in a
shuddery voice. “Get some fingers up there. More, bitch. Fill me up. Both
holes. Good boy...”
When she finally came, it was with a low,
voluptuous moan that drew giggly whispers from a pair of hipster chicks in
sloppy sweaters passing by on the sidewalk with their cigarettes. They glanced
into the alley, but it was too dark for them to see much.
“Stand up,” Galiana commanded, as imperious as
before, if a bit more breathless. “Get those pants down.”
Oxy unbuckled his belt and shoved the pants
down to the knees. His ass was small and muscular. Not bad, if you ignored the
testosterone-poisoned dickhead it was attached to.
“Now, make yourself nice and hard. Good boy,”
she praised as Oxy masturbated with brisk strokes, ass flexing.
Reaching overhead, Galiana grabbed a high
crossbar of the iron window grille, pulled herself up, and wrapped her
vinyl-booted legs around his hips. “You know what to do.”
He fumbled between them.
“Come on, push,”
she said. “Haven’t you ever done this before?”
He grabbed the bars and flexed his hips,
groaning.
“Deeper,” she said. “Deeper. Now stop. Don’t move. That’s right,” she said, the diamond
strands glinting as she undulated in a slow, serpentine rhythm. “You just stand
there nice and still and let me pump that cock.”
Still gripping the bars, Oxy closed his eyes
and let out a quavering moan, his head falling back. Galiana’s internal muscles
were amazingly strong, the most powerful Turek had ever experienced, and she
had complete control over them. Fucking her was like sticking your dick in a
milking machine.
“Not so bad now, are you, bad boy?” With one hand still gripping the iron bar,
Galiana slid out the partial denture that mimicked lateral incisors to either
side of her front teeth, whereupon her fangs—curved, sharply pointed, and
longer than Turek’s, because of her age—sprang down from their grooves in the
roof of her mouth.
Setting the denture carefully on the
windowsill, she yanked Oxy’s head forward by the hair and glided her tongue up
the side of his neck from collarbone to jaw.
It’s
about time.
Turek stepped out from behind his blind as he
removed his own two-tooth denture, which he tucked into a pocket of his
lambskin blazer. His hollow fangs snapped down, sparking electric tingles that
buzzed along the conduits in the roof of his mouth all the way to his cock,
which grew half-erect in anticipation.
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