Barry only saw the abomination briefly. Without warning, the room went dark, and he smelled the acrid wisps of smoke from the blown-out candles. Nickolas moved beneath him, crawling upward in a slithering motion, until his muscular body encompassed Barry’s possessively. The other man’s lips returned to his throat; given his paralysis, Barry wondered if they’d actually ever left. How much of their sexual fumbling was real, and how much had he imagined?
“Nickolas?”
The mouth on Barry’s throat sucked harder in response. Cocks ground together. A finger invaded Barry’s asshole.
“What are you doing to me?”
The finger became two, filling him while searching for the trigger of sensitive nerves buried deep at his prostate. Nickolas kissed,
The fingers found their target, and Barry started to unload. Something warm and wet engulfed his cock. A mouth? The only other mouth in the room was at his neck, feeding. Curiously, the thin flicker of pain added to his pleasure, and Barry’s cock continued to ejaculate, and the shivers and ecstasy engulfed him without abating, a tantric wave that showed no sign of slowing.
Through that inhuman pleasure, Barry somehow focused on the book, that vile text bound in human flesh, and how it had seemed to come alive beside him on the bed. The mouth on his cock sucked, and the fingers inside him wiggled… if they were actual fingers.
“Feed, my love,” Nickolas whispered. “Feed on the young and the living, until you are whole and back with me again, after these many centuries apart.”
Barry’s climax, growing more painful with each second, ebbed. This level of sexual stimulation wasn’t possible to maintain, he thought, because it wasn’t natural, wasn’t human. Neither were the two horrors draining the blood and the life out of his body, he realized, Nickolas and the body being reborn out of the book, right before his dreams of the woods faded, and the darkness claimed him.
HAG RIDE
Eden Royce
Frieda stood in the kitchen’s fading light with a chopping knife clutched in one hand. The dinner on the table laid untouched, ice-cold and bathing in congealing fat. Her cinnamon coloring disguised the angry flare of heat in her cheeks. Still, she knew yelling wouldn’t get her husband’s attention, so she forced a calm tone into her voice.
“Why aren’t you staying for dinner? I made your favorite.”
“I told you, I got to go out.” Henry came out of their bedroom, buttoning up his good shirt and tucking it into the slacks she had taken her time to press that morning.
“Out where? You can’t eat dinner with your wife before you go? Give me some of your time?”
“Thought I just gave you some,” Henry laughed, his tongue grotesquely pink against his smooth ebony face. He waggled his long, limp penis at her before he tucked it into his pants.
“Good thing you put that away. I was going to lop it off.”
“You wasn’t gon’ do that to this valuable piece of merchandise.”
“I wanted to spend some time with you. Just us. Like we used to.” Tears threatened to fall from her maple syrup-colored eyes.
“A man needs some time to hisself, baby. I told you that long time ago.”
“I know, but…”
He took a pick from his back pocket, the metal one with a balled up fist for a handle and ran it through his short, tight afro. In the hall mirror, he patted it with both palms to even out the ‘do.
“You never said where you were going.”
“Goin’ out with the fellas,” Henry said. “Relax and get a couple drinks.”
“You look mighty nice for a night out with Butch and that gang. You promised me no more sleeping around, Henry.”
“I know, baby, I know. Don’t you worry ‘bout nothing.” He kissed her cheek and grabbed a pork chop from the platter before heading for the door.
“When are you gonna be home?”
“Late, baby. Real late.”
Frieda parked the aging Chevy at the edge of the dirt road leading to the marsh. She sat in the driver’s seat with the window down and breathed in the sulfurous scent of pluff mud and sea grass. Although the marsh teemed with life, loneliness pressed in on her like an unwelcome suitor in the dark.
She walked along the water’s edge toward the small house nestled in the marsh’s protective embrace, unafraid in the blackness. The moon parted the dark in shifting layers as clouds crept across the Carolina sky. As the toe of her shoe hit the porch, the front door creaked open.
“Evening, Big Mama,” she said.
Big Mama was barely on the right side of six feet without shoes. Her massive bosom filled the doorway like shells in a double-barreled shotgun. Her hair, fluffy and cotton white, stood out against pecan tan skin.
“Lawd, Frieda. You here in the middle of the night? I know what this must be. Come on in.” The Gullah accent, born on the coastal waterways of the Carolinas, was musical as it fell from her dark, unpainted lips.
The muggy night gave way to the cool marsh breeze fluttering through the thin curtains. Frieda sat at the rough-hewn table in the middle of what served as the cabin’s kitchen while Big Mama bustled around in cabinets and muttered under her breath. She returned to the table with two jelly jars filled with rose-colored liquid.
“Big Mama, I—”
“Drink some of this first.”
The homemade liquid scorched her throat and she coughed, but the burning cleared her head. The swirling thoughts she’d brought to the cabin solidified into a concrete block of determination. She took another sip while her godmother pulled a cheroot and a lighter from her generous bosom. The sweet scents of tobacco and clove danced entwined.
“What Henry done now?” The wicker chair creaked as Big Mama settled her bulk into it.
“Same old. Still cheating. Staying out all night. I’m tired of it.”
“Mmmph.” Rings of smoke dissolved in the air.
“I’m married. I shouldn’t have to bump around in that house alone all the time.”
“That why you got married? To never be alone?” Her snort made smoke shoot down from her wide nostrils like an enraged bull. “I got news for you, chile. Alone you come in this world and alone you go out. Nothing gone change that.”
“I got married because I love him. I just want him to love me back.”
“Henry love you in his own way. But that ain’t the way you want, huh?”
“I can’t live like this.”
“You still a beautiful, young woman. Find yourself somebody else. Don’t let no man be the death of you. Not like your Daddy was to your Momma.”
Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. “I don’t want another man. I made a promise before God and everybody and I will not leave Henry.”
Big Mama tapped ashes in a chipped china teacup. “He ain’t worth the heartache. You better off alone.”
“I don’t ever want to be alone again. I hate it.”
“You sure it not his ding-a-ling you missin’?”
“That’s not the problem.” Her face heated under Big Mama’s intense gaze.
“No shame in it, girl. You supposed to like going to bed with your husband. That what make him feel like a man. But it seem your man like going to everybody else’s bed.” A look of sympathy crossed the heavy woman’s face. “You can’t change him. You married him that way.”
The heat in Frieda’s face blazed. Henry had been late for their wedding. Big Mama and Francis, her fourth
