Château de la Faime

The rebellion against Lady Callista was doomed to failure from the start. How could it ever have been otherwise? She was a vampire, those who dwelt in the shadow of her castle were mortal, and Séraphine Favreau deeply wished her parents had considered both facts more seriously before supplying the rebels with weapons.

She stood before the castle gates, glaring at a mother and father who refused to look her in the eye. Magnanimously—after slaughtering the masterminds of the rebellion on the church steps—Lady Callista had declared she would forgive and forget the Favreau’s contribution to the uprising, on the condition they give her whatever gift she asked for.

They’d agreed.

“I won’t stay here,” Séraphine declared, turning her ire from her cowardly parents to the vampire whose fault all this was. “You can’t keep me.”

Callista laughed; a sound like red wine and silk sheets. She was tall, pale as milk, with pitch-black ringlets and a waist cinched as narrow as Séraphine’s thigh. She wore silk; grey and silver brocade decorated with ruched ribbons, twin cascades of lace billowing from her sleeves at the elbow, of a white so pure they glowed in the moonlight. “Such admirable fire! I do despise a cat without claws.” She gestured a long, slender hand at Séraphine’s parents. “You are forgiven and forgotten. See you do not give me cause to remember you.”

And just like that they were gone, and Séraphine was alone. She balled her fists at her sides. “I mean it,” she hissed. “I’ll escape. If I have to break my legs jumping from the rooftop to do it, I’ll escape.”

Callista touched her cheek. Her fingers were ice cold and hard as iron. “By the time I’m finished with you,” she said softly, “you won’t want to leave.”

---

The Château de la Faime was no mere fortified manor house pretending at grandeur, but a true castle. Séraphine expected to be dragged through cold, ancient stone halls to a rotting, lightless dungeon of dripping walls, rusted manacles, and the half-devoured remains of Callista’s previous playthings. Instead, she was escorted through a series of spacious, opulent rooms—all silent and as devoid of life as her captor—up a grand staircase and into an enormous bedroom. It was twice as large as her family home, and dominated by a richly carved bed hung with red velvet. Intensely dark, modern still-lives vied for space between centuries-old tapestries on every wall; thick rugs covered the floor beneath elegant stools, lacquered cabinets, and a table topped with elaborate floral marquetry in at least three different woods; and flanking the blazing hearth were a lacquered folding screen and a heavy, gilt-framed mirror, flames flickering in the brightly polished glass.

“How do you like it?” Callista asked. She hadn’t let go of Séraphine’s elbow since they’d entered the castle. Her grip was bruising. “Does it suit?”

It was more wealth and luxury than Séraphine’s entire village possessed. It was beautiful, each piece chosen and arranged with artistic precision. It was the kind of room that, as a child, she’d dreamt princesses lived in.

“I hate it,” Séraphine said.

“Good,” said Callista, and dragged her behind the screen.

At home, the bath was a small wooden tub, and Séraphine and her parents bathed in order of age such that she got the water that was dirtiest and coldest—excepting when her father was away at market, and her mother let her go first. Callista’s bath was deep and wide, of gleaming copper, the water within already steaming. There was no sign of who had filled it, or how.

Séraphine folded her arms. “I’m not dirty. I don’t need to bathe.”

“You smell of sweat and fear and defiance,” Callista said. “You stink of your father’s forge and your mother’s kitchen. You reek of mortality.”

She stripped Séraphine of her clothes, ripping her best dress—worn at her parent’s behest, not her own choice—right down the back, and dragging her by the hair into the bath. Protests and curses and the violence of her feet and fists did nothing, all of it as futile as the rebellion, so in the end she went silent and sat like a statue in the water, staring straight ahead as Callista bathed her.

When it was over, she was dried and dressed in a white silk chemise. It clung possessively to her warm, damp skin, as hungry for her curves as Callista’s eyes were. She sat before the mirror, resentful of how much finer even so plain a garment was than any of her own clothes, whilst Callista brushed her hair until the pale blonde shone.

“There, my pretty pet,” she said, at last setting the brush down. “How lovely you look.”

“You’re a monster,” Séraphine spat. “If I could kill you, I would.”

“Yet you did not join your parents in their rebellion.”

“Because it was stupid. You can’t be killed like a beast in the woods. You’re not a deer, you’re a fiend.”

Callista drew her hair aside and bent so her lips brushed the shell of Séraphine’s ear. “Go on.”

“You’re a blight on this land. You’re a rot, a parasite—no-one here loves you; you rule by fear and fear alone, and alone you’ll be for the rest of your life, however many years you prolong it with murder. You’re the most disgusting thing for miles around, and if your face matched your heart, there wouldn’t be a mirror in the country uncracked by it.”

Callista’s hands slid across her shoulders and down her arms, raising gooseflesh in their wake. They settled over Séraphine’s breasts, palms cold enough to make her nipples harden—that was all she could see in the mirror: the bunching of fabric, the reactions of her body, and her own flushed, fearful face.

“I disgust you, do I?” Callista whispered. Her left hand roved south, over the soft swell of Séraphine’s belly. “Your very soul recoils at my touch, does it?” Séraphine pressed her legs together, but it was no use: Callista tugged up the chemise and delved beneath it, into the corn-coloured curls that covered her sex. “I am a foul and wicked thing, am I?”

“All that and worse,” Séraphine forced out through gritted teeth. “And you can take all you want of my body—my soul will never be yours.”

Hot breath on her neck. The points of hard, sharp teeth against her skin. “We’ll see about that.”

Séraphine shut her eyes and waited for violation and death, but neither fell upon her. The hands withdrew, the teeth vanished, and when she opened her eyes, she was alone. She sagged, heart thudding painfully, and allowed herself a moment to indulge in relief before forcing herself to her feet. The door was locked, as she’d expected, and far too heavy for her to break or force. The room had clearly once possessed windows, but all that lay behind the curtains now was solid grey stone.

Eventually she went to bed and an uneasy sleep, clutching the only weapon she’d been able to find—the fire poker—tightly in her fists.

---

The days passed in identical horror. Callista woke her with a whisper, smiled indulgently when Séraphine thrust the poker into her chest, and made her undress and be bathed and brushed before setting out a meal. When Séraphine tried to refuse the food, Callista made use of her irresistible strength to force open her mouth and make her chew. When she tried to bless the bathwater, so it might burn the vampire’s hands, Callista held her under whilst she thrashed, and reminded her that she was the daughter of a blacksmith, not a priest.

When the door opened and she tried to run, Callista caught her by the throat and pinned her to the wall until her vision blacked and her struggles ceased.

And every night, the vampire touched her. Fingers as delicate as frost traced her neck, her shoulders, her breasts; her stomach, her hips, her thighs. She would lay her lips against Séraphine’s throat, yet never sank her fangs into the pulse that beat with fear and fury beneath them. Séraphine wished she would bite. To exist as no more than a doll for Callista to play with was intolerable.

A part of her still believed she might somehow be able to break out of her gilded prison of a room; find a way to slip past the monster and escape. A larger part—a more pragmatic part—told her that if she could not escape in life, the only remaining route lay in death.

One night, about two months since her arrival, counting by the tallies she’d scratched into the bedpost, she committed herself to pragmatism. She would be a doll no longer.

Callista brought her food, as was usual, and—less usual, yet not uncommon—left her alone with her meal. It had been some time, after all, since Séraphine had refused to eat. Once she was gone, Séraphine took up her dinner knife and, with shaking hand, plunged it into her wrist. She couldn’t hold back the cry of pain, but she kept going, dragging the blade up her arm, widening the wound, spilling her life away.

The door slammed open and in a heartbeat, like a whirlwind, tapestries and drapes fluttering in her passage, Callista was there. “Foolish little cat,” she admonished, snatching up Séraphine’s arm. The knife thumped to the rug. “How clumsy you are. Here, I shall kiss it better.”

She lay her lips over the wound. Her mouth was hot, and Séraphine gasped as the vampire sucked at the incision. All the places Callista had touched her ignited in a web of sensation across her body, a dizzying entanglement of unnatural feeling that left her powerless to resist as Callista drew her up onto unsteady feet. Séraphine made some small effort to pull away, but a single step sent her into a swoon, the room blurring and swimming around her.

Callista licked into the gash on her wrist and, against all will and sense, Séraphine let out a muffled moan. “Stop,” she groaned. “Stop, let me go…”

But her words were slurred, her resistance as nothing. Callista, still suckling at her lifeblood, stroked from her neck down to her breast, where she lingered, tender and cold, for a long, terrible moment before descending, as she had so many times before, to slip her hand between Séraphine’s legs. Séraphine wanted, as she always wanted, to clamp them tight together, keep the fiend out. Usually, it was Callista’s great strength that denied her. Now it was some weakness in herself—the loss of blood, surely, for why else would she willingly part her legs for that wicked, murderous hand?

“You’ve never known real pleasure, have you?” Callista murmured, as she caressed the downy hair over Séraphine’s sex. “Innocent virgin that you are—you’ve never even indulged your own self, have you?”

One slim finger pressed into Séraphine’s core, and she whimpered.

“It pleases me to have you at your first flowering,” Callista continued, stroking her as gently as one might pet a kitten. “I am so very glad you never surrendered to the temptations of the rough boys of the village. They wouldn’t know the first thing about how to excite you.”

Heat rose in Séraphine, like some internal forge had kindled to life. Callista’s finger drew up, dragging wetness over a bud of pleasure that made her sigh and, despite herself, arch into the touch. Callista hummed a laugh, and licked along the length of her wrist. The wound, Séraphine realised, was gone. Healed. Not a single trace of her self-inflicted escape attempt remained.

“Well, pet?” Callista asked, tracing circles with her fingertip. “Would you like to know pleasure? Will you bloom for me?”

“Never,” Séraphine whispered, though her voice shook. A wave built within her; a dark and dreadful hunger that didn’t want Callista to stop.

“A shame.”

Abruptly, Callista released her. Séraphine almost fell, and she almost, before she caught herself in mind and body, reached for Callista to keep steady.

“Sleep well, pet,” Callista said. She stooped to recover the knife, then very deliberately set it back on the table. Her terrible red eyes—glowing with wicked life—raked over Séraphine in apparent satisfaction, then she was gone with all the jarring speed of which a vampire was capable. The door slammed behind her, the lock clicking firmly a moment later.

Séraphine staggered to the bed and collapsed atop it, overcome with weakness and confusion. She lowered a hand between her legs to find her sex drenched and swollen. As she explored the site of violation, a tremor went through her and, unconsciously, she found herself replicating Callista’s movements. After a moment she realised what she was doing and snatched her hand away.

“She will not have me,” she whispered furiously, scrubbing her damp fingers on the counterpane. “She will not have me.”

Her dreams, though, were filled with red lips on her neck and slim fingers moving within her, and each day she woke filled with that dreadful wave and longed, no matter how strenuously she denied herself, to find a way to make it crash.

---

Twice more she tried to take her life to escape the Château. Twice more Callista drank from her wounds and, in so doing, healed them. Twice more Callista pierced her with those cold and cunning fingers, leaving her breathless and hate-filled and frustrated in a way she couldn’t overcome. She refused to touch herself. That was what the vampire wanted—for her to debase herself, to give in to the foul imitation of seduction and the lie of carnal pleasure. She wouldn’t do it. She would never do it.

But there was a pressure in her head and in her belly; one that crawled up and down her thighs and tormented her with relentless visions of Callista’s swan-like neck and graceful wrists; of her dark lashes and lush lips and the cruel confidence of her touch.

Somehow, Callista seemed to know the path of her thoughts. Séraphine could see it in her smile, in the glimmer of her eyes, and that made her all the more determined not to break.

“Why do you fight so, pet?” Callista asked, perhaps a week after the third attempt with the knife. With only her tally-marks to keep time, Séraphine had begun to lose track of the days. “It only hurts you, and what wounds you wounds me also.”

“You savour my blood each time I spill it,” Séraphine said. Callista was bathing her again—that daily ritual was a fight she had lost long ago, and now she simply let the vampire wash her as she pleased. She never saw how the bath was filled, or where the water was warmed—whatever route it took to reach her, it wasn’t one she could follow to freedom.

“Yet I do believe you savour how I heal you.” Callista swept the washcloth over Séraphine’s breast. “You sigh and shudder and cling to me. You pant and fair drown my fingers with your gratitude.” She let the washcloth fall as it reached the water, dipping her hand beneath the surface to plunge directly to Séraphine’s sex. There was no wound, no blood loss, no fangs at her flesh, but Séraphine’s legs parted nonetheless. It was almost an instinct, for all the control she had over it.

“You work some evil magic on me,” she said, as Callista began to stroke her. “You take control of my mind.”

“I control nothing,” Callista said. “I grant you pleasure, that is all. Is it my fault you relish it so? Is it my fault your body craves such touch as this?”

Two fingers slipped inside her, and Séraphine put her hands over her mouth to stifle a mewl. Callista worked her slow and steady, arousing that internal wave that no longer simply begged but screamed to be allowed to crash. The bathwater lapped against the copper to the rhythm of Callista’s hand.

“I swear to you, I have never touched your mind.” Callista kissed her neck; a hot, languid kiss, fangs scraping the tender skin. “Only your body—and such a body you have.”

She pressed deeper and Séraphine arched, gasping, head falling back. Callista pushed into her with greater speed, curling her fingers to stroke Séraphine’s innermost walls, and the wave was so high now, so terribly, horribly high; she was surely about to capsize.

“Please,” she begged, “please, I…”

“For what do you beg?” Callista asked. With her other hand she caressed the curve of Séraphine’s breast, pinched her stiff and sensitive nipple. “Tell me, my pet—what is it you desire?”

“Stop!” Séraphine cried, though her heart howled for the opposite. Callista was gone at once, standing over the bath, gazing down impassively at her heaving chest, her flushed face, her panting mouth.

“Goodnight, then,” she said, and oh, how Séraphine hated her. Her pulse beat between her legs, furious and hungry. Callista started for the door, and Séraphine sat up so fast she almost tipped out of the bath.

“Wait!”

Callista glanced over her shoulder. “Yes?”

“I…” Séraphine gripped the bath so tightly her knuckles paled. “Nothing. Leave me alone.”

Callista left. And she didn’t return for three whole days.

---

On the fourth day, Séraphine gave in. Maddening dreams had tormented her all the long hours of the night: Callista purring sweet nothings against her throat; icy hands raising fire over every inch of her body; a crimson mouth suckling at her breast—all of it thrilled through her mind in a rush of heat and hideous longing, her hungers tangled in a knot of desperation, so that when she woke, facedown on the bed, her hand was already buried between her thighs.

She ventured inside herself, mapping places she’d scarcely thought of before her imprisonment, petting herself the way Callista petted her. She panted against the pillows as the wave rose, carrying her higher and higher until it could no longer hold its form, and she cried out as much in fear as in release as it crashed through her. Her body spasmed around her fingers, pleasure coursing through her in fits and starts that, no matter how desperately she clung to them, refused to remain in her grasp.

The slam of the door brought her back to herself. She bolted upright to find Callista gliding towards her, skirts billowing like living shadows. Before Séraphine had time to think, Callista had thrown herself upon the bed beside her and caught up her hand, wet with desire, and brought it to her lips. She sucked at Séraphine’s fingers with undisguised pleasure, pulling off with a deep, adoring sigh.

“Ah, pet,” she breathed, stroking Séraphine’s hair back from her face, “how I do delight to see you so.”

“What have you done to me?” Séraphine asked brokenly. Her body still thrummed. She wanted more. She needed more, the way she needed food, and the size of that need repelled her.

“Is this then my hand?” Callista asked, holding the treacherous limb up between them. “Were these then my fingers that so caressed you? Tell me, how was your first ecstasy? I could hear you from my chambers, I could smell you from my bed—and oh, how I longed to come to you, to claim the right of first surrender…but I feared you would yet shy from it again, should I interfere. It is no matter—you have granted yourself this gift, true enough, but I may yet grant the rest.”

“I don’t want the rest!” Séraphine exclaimed, starting up. “I don’t want any of this! I don’t want whatever that was, I don’t want you, I don’t want to be here—let me go!”

She ran for the door, as she hadn’t for so many months. She expected Callista’s iron hand to halt her, but it was her own feet that betrayed her—she tripped on one of the rugs and went sprawling, all the air knocked out of her. Callista was atop her in moments.

“Oh, my darling,” Callista crooned. “I thought we had come at last to an understanding.”

“Let me go!”

“Hush,” Callista said. “Hush and lie still whilst I teach your mind what your body already knows.”

Three days without food had reduced her to a child-like weakness, her resistance naught but a vague suggestion. Callista put her on her back and held her down, gripping her thighs tight as she drew them apart to lower her mouth between them. Her lips closed over Séraphine’s sex, and her tongue took the place Séraphine’s fingers had not long since occupied. She licked as she had at Séraphine’s wounds, delving into her with a hungry insistence.

“Stop, stop!” Séraphine cried, beating at her with all the strength she had left, tearing at her hair—all to naught. The tongue dived yet deeper, flexing snakelike within her; the base of it, wide and wet, pressed against that outer place, that slick bud of pleasure, every motion drawing from her a fractured, wanton moan. Then, to Séraphine’s horror, she felt the sudden sharp sting of fangs entering her flesh. What Callista was biting she didn’t know, only that first it hurt, then it aroused a fresh wave within her, one so sudden and powerful that it left her voiceless, arching off the floor like a woman possessed.

“Fiend!” she accused, as she felt the heat of blood running down her thighs. “Devil! Beast! Monster, you monster, you are a monstrous thing, you—!”

Her words broke off in a high scream of ecstasy. She clawed at her chemise as Callista’s tongue flicked over some part of her too deep to name. It thrust into her as her own fingers—as Callista’s fingers—had, only harder and faster, and all the while the fangs pulsed where they pierced her, throbbing in time to the pounding of her heart.

Séraphine’s eyes rolled back in her head, red spots dancing at the edges of her vision as yet another wave wracked her body. Her struggles, feeble as they were, grew ever weaker, her breathing laboured, coming in fitful gasps and desperate whimpers. She pawed at her face, her hair, her chest, her own skin a prison too taut to contain the vast mountains of pleasure that rose within her.

She had wanted to escape this. Why had she wanted to escape this? What world was there worth living in outside of Callista’s mouth?

“More,” she begged raggedly, bucking her hips. “More, oh, more!”

A glorious bolt of pain stabbed through her abdomen as Callista sank her fangs as deep as they could go. The undulating thrust of her tongue seemed to reach all the way up past Séraphine’s heart and into her brain. It blanked out all thought, overrode all notion of self she had once possessed until she lay limp beneath it, making no sound but blunt, mindless noises of need.

This was her place. She understood that now. This was her proper place—a pliant doll pinned by the vampire’s fangs, writhing upon her exquisite tongue, a perfect slave to all the heavenly sensations only she could bestow.

When, after an interminable period of absolute bliss, Callista drew away, tears sprang at once to Séraphine’s eyes, the loss of her reason for existence leaving her hollow and shaking. Callista knelt up between her legs.

“There, now,” she said tenderly, reaching down to brush a lock of sweat-slick hair from Séraphine’s face. “There’s my pretty pet.”

Her face was red from nose to chin. Blood caught in the gaps between her perfect teeth, her eyes shone with a brilliant crimson light, and her skin, though still milk-white, glowed with an inner radiance that held Séraphine utterly spellbound.

“Here,” Callista said, and held something out. It took several blinks and a long, intent observation to discern what it was that dangled from her fingers.

A key. A heavy iron key.

“This is yours,” Callista said. “It will open every door between here and the castle gates.”

Energy rushed through Séraphine like lightning. She hurled herself into Callista’s arms. “Don’t send me away!” she cried, on the point of weeping. “Please, please don’t send me away!”

Callista stroked her hair. “Oh, pet. You can stay as long as you like.”

“Forever?” Séraphine asked.

“Forever,” Callista breathed, and kissed her, filling her mouth with blood as she crushed the key to dust in the palm of her hand.