Necroscope V: Deadspawn

must know that by now?'

He nodded, took a chance and inched closer yet. And: 'Yes, I do know,' he answered. 'But in a way I did cure you. You had a vampire in you, the sort the Wamphyri called a 'mother'. If you had spawned so many vampires, in the end it must diminish you, kill you. Am I right?'

'We'll never know, will we?' she growled.

Harry stood directly before her, less than a pace away, well within the arc of her gauntlet. 'So you came to kill me.' He nodded. 'But surely you can see I've suffered my own change? And surely you know in your heart that I was never your enemy, Karen? I was merely innocent. In my way.'

She stared hard at him for a moment, narrowed her eyes a little, then nodded and smiled. But it was more a sneer than a smile proper. 'I've found you out!' she said. 'I sense your door, Harry! You took me there once, remember? You carried me from the garden to my aerie, all in a moment. And now there's another door right here beside you. Would you dare stand so close without it? If so, then do it. Show me how 'innocent' you are.'

He shook his head. 'That was then,' he said. 'As for now: whatever I might wish to be, I can only be Wamphyri! Precious little of innocence in me now… about as much as there is in you? Yes, the thing within advised me to conjure a door, for my protection. Or for its protection? But the man which I still am tells me I don't need this safeguard, that it makes anything I might say to you — the things I want to say to you — a mockery. And while I live, the man in me has the upper hand. So be it!'

He threw caution to the wind, collapsed the Mobius door and opened his mind wide to her. In a few moments she read or scanned all that was written there, for he kept nothing hidden. But in telepathy, to read is often to feel, and most of all she felt his pain: as great and greater than her own. And his loss — all of his losses — whose total was so much more. And she saw how lonely and empty he was, which brought her own loneliness and emptiness into proper perspective.

But… she was a woman and remembered certain things. As his right hand closed in the curve of her waist at first gently, then possessively, so she bent her elbow at his side until her open gauntlet leaned loosely against his back and upper-left arm. And she said, 'Do you recall the time I told you how I'd lusted after you? In how many ways I lusted after you? Like a woman, perhaps — but certainly like a vampire! And do you remember when you trapped me in my room, how I tried to lure you? I went naked, writhing, panting, thrusting at you — and you ignored me. It was as if your flesh was iron and your blood ice.'

'No,' he husked in her ear, drinking in the natural musk of her body, drawing her to him and bending down his head to her. 'My body was flesh and my blood was fire. But I had set myself a course and must run it. Now… it's run.'

She felt his need swelling to match, to intensify, her own — so much need — and was aware of his heartbeat like a hammer against her breast. 'You… you're a fool, Harry Keogh!' she whispered, as he crushed her even tighter. And every nerve of her body thrilled as Wamphyri instinct demanded that she scoop her gauntlet into the flesh and bone of his back and spoon it out, then reach inside and slice his heart to a crimson-pumping geyser. Thrilled, yes, and thrilled again — in astonishment — when she relaxed her hand so that the weapon fell from her fluttering fingers, fell loose to the ground!

'Even as great a fool as I am,' she moaned then, sinking red-painted razor-sharp nails through cloth and skin and shivering flesh into his back and neck, as he in turn wrenched her sheath dress apart, and clutched her bruisingly wherever his hands would reach, and bit her face and mouth until the blood flowed. 'Which is to say,' she panted, when finally they held each other burning at bay, 'a very great fool indeed!'

They flew to her aerie.

Mounted behind her in the ornate saddle at the base of the flyer's neck where its manta wings sprouted, Harry must cling to Karen or risk falling — in which case he would conjure a door and fall through it into the Mobius Continuum. But he would not fall while he fondled her straining breasts, whose nipples were nuggets under her ruined sheath. And he would not fall while his manhood strained in the crevice of her delicious behind, surging there as if to lift her out of her seat.

'Wait!' she had told him back there in the garden, at the wall, where with his new-found Wamphyri passions he would have taken her immediately and ploughed her like a field of yielding flesh. And: 'Wait!' she'd repeated twice during the flight, when he'd moaned louder than the wind in her ear and bitten the back of her neck, and she had felt his metamorphic flesh flowing to enfold her while his hands enlarged and flattened as if to touch all of her at once.

And yet again, 'Wait! Oh, wait! she had pleaded with him, when the flyer set them down in a launching-landing bay some levels lower than her topmost apartments, and she had almost to flee before his lust across the cartilage causeways and up stairways of fretted bone to her rooms. But at last he caught her in her bedroom and knew that the waiting was over, for both of them.

Harry had made love so very recently, yet now it was all forgotten and perhaps not surprisingly. For if space and time are so linked as to be inextricable (to any ordinary man), just how long ago was it since he had known Penny? A dimension ago? An entire universe? And as a universe is huge almost to infinity, how then the time-gap between universes? Time is relative, as the Necroscope knew only too well. But in any case, that earlier phase now seemed fuzzy as a dream, while 'now' was the only reality. Penny had been a mirage, a dream-creature, a waif light as thistledown, enthralled and drawn into his dream with him, and at last destroyed by it. But Karen was… Woman. She was substantial, compelling, consuming; a magnet, with gravity of her own great as a small planet, so that she held him like a moon to light her flesh and lust after it. For Harry she was the embodiment of all earthly (unearthly?) desire; greater than a mere planet, she was his own personal black hole, which might suck him in in his entirety. Indeed, Karen was all of this and more. Karen was Wamphyri!

Upon her bed they twined and tangled, panted, grunted and groaned, and in all truth Harry no longer knew what was real and what was fantasy. He had not previously explored his metamorphism; he didn't know the extent of fleshly flexibility; he was 'innocent' in respect of his own passion's potential. And Karen, too, innocent. Or very nearly so.

'You have kept yourself to yourself?' the Necroscope gaspingly inquired of his vampire love while extending a hand and its fingers within her to examine and caress all of her innermost organs and places, and while she moistened with spittle the shining fist which was his glans and taunted its throbbing with the slither of her forked tongue.

'No,' she groaned truthfully. Twice I flew to Sunside at sundown to seek me out a lover. But how may one seduce a terrified man? Anyway, I brought one back here. In a little while he overcame something of his fear and crept into my bed. Ah, I was a yawning chasm, an aching gorge… into which he dropped a pebble! He could not fill me. I milked him dry and wanted more, but all he had left was blood. I knew that I could grind him down, turn him to pulp, murder him within the heart of my womanhood and devour him into myself as easily as eating him. But… I took him back to Sunside. Since when I've kept me to myself, yes. Just as men and women are for each other, so we Wamphyri may only cleave unto Wamphyri flesh. For there's no pleasure in beasts, and when Wamphyri blood is up humanity is frail.'

'All true,' gurgled the Necroscope, feeling her left nipple extend into his throat like a tongue, while his scrotum swelled to bursting from the pressure of his juices. 'A woman would die in agony from what I have done to you!'

'Likewise a man from these caresses of mine,' she replied, shuddering. 'But of pleasure, however monstrous!' And she drew out his great, soft, spidercrab hand from her body, folded his legs at the knees and fed them into herself; until finally he was drawn in to his navel, and she experienced the geysering of his cold semen laving her palpitating innards.

'And yet the Old Lords in their time took Traveller women for themselves,' Harry panted in his delirium. She was full of him now, her pale belly round and shining, grotesquely bloated where his arms and hands encircled it; and her body had so gorged on him that he looked half-born. She coiled herself forward to kiss him, and their teeth clashed as the flesh of their faces melted into one face.

A moment later she extruded him in a huge contraction; but just as quickly he entered her again, head-first this time, so that she must speak to him telepathically to answer his query. Those women died screaming, she said. I've heard it said that following a raid, Lesk the Glut would take ten or more in a night, bursting them like bladders with his sex! Ah, that was violation! But the so-called 'Lords' weren't all alike; if a girl was beautiful, then she might survive. Brought on by degrees, she