I felt a twinge at the thought that Guthrie sure as hell hadn’t asked for a pair of fangs, either. “Yeah,” I echoed. “Here we all are.”
* * *
The surroundings at the informal SL2 get-together were way less impressive than the giant mansion the group had leased when they were running as a formal membership organization. This was just someone’s house, way out in bum-fuck North County where there were fewer prying eyes getting up in everyone’s business.
There were only about twenty people, but they seemed nice. I thought I could detect a bit of a cloud hanging over the gathering, as though many of them still weren’t quite over the ugliness of the episode with Myrial’s goons. I could sympathize. The fetish club had clearly been an escape for most of its members—a safe place to let their barriers drop and truly be themselves.
When that kind of violence intruded on a place that you relied on as a haven... well. It was a special kind of traumatic.
Still, there was a sort of determination among the people around us not to dwell on it. They were here, they were kinksters, and they were damned well going to do their thing. I supposed it was almost admirable, in its own weird way.
On a more personal front, I’d decided soon after taking the plunge that getting naked in front of a bunch of strangers was... kinda strange. It definitely triggered that odd dichotomy I’d been noticing in myself these past weeks—the one where my human side was busy trying to spontaneously combust from the power of my nervousness, even as my succubus side purred and waited happily for all eyes to fall on me and stay there.
Between the two impulses, I mostly just thanked the universe’s unseen forces that I’d thought to grab a razor at Guthrie’s place and do some strategic landscaping earlier.
“Damn, girl,” Len muttered, taking in the way the general focus of the room swung my way. He was blushing a bit as he measured out rope by the arm’s length, wrapping it around me with a practiced hand.
While I’d been tied up on a handful of occasions with Rans—quite memorably, in fact—this particular kind of bondage was something else again. Those previous occasions had been solely to intensify the experience of sexual pleasure. What Len was doing felt more like some kind of bizarre performance art.
Which wasn’t to say that it was a game, exactly... I’d been rendered completely helpless on a physical level before Len was halfway done with me. In fact, I’d been rendered so helpless that I had to briefly wrestle down a flutter of panic, before realizing that my most powerful defensive capabilities weren’t affected in any way by my inability to move.
I could still pull animus from other people, and that had always been my most effective means of protecting myself when the shit truly hit the fan. If anything, my appearance of total sexual vulnerability within the ropes enhanced that defense, rather than reducing it.
Besides, I’d been keeping an eye on the crowd since we arrived, and no one here was giving me the sort of weird vibes I tended to get when there was danger lurking. Unlike the fateful night at the club, this really did seem to be nothing more sinister than a bunch of fetish buddies getting together to let their collective hair down.
Well... a bunch of fetish buddies, and the succubus hybrid who intended to sneakily drain their life force. In truth, I was the closest thing to ‘sinister’ in this house tonight.
Which was a bit of a sobering thought.
I was already feeding from the crowd when Len gathered the loose spirals of my hair into a ponytail. A moment later, a smooth pull against my scalp drew my head back, my neck arching lightly. A faint tug indicated a final knot being tied, and he was done. There were several murmurs of appreciation.
The position I was bound in could only be held comfortably for a short time, but it would be more than enough to get what I needed.
What Len had done to me was almost suspension bondage, but not quite. Taking advantage of my flexibility from years of yoga combined with my strength from the recent weeks of training with Rans, Len had put me in a modified natarajasana pose —a position reminiscent of a ballet or figure-skating movement. Most of my weight was balanced on the ball of my right foot, and my right arm was strapped across my chest, woven into the regular, diamond-shaped web of rope running along the length of my torso.
However, I was also attached by my left wrist and ankle to a heavy ring overhead like something you might use to mount a chandelier. My left leg was stretched behind me and up toward the ceiling, bent at the knee into the shape of a scorpion’s tail. My left hand grasped the arch of my foot behind and slightly above my head—that grip, along with the ropes, keeping my limbs and spine arched into a taut teardrop shape. The rope tied to my hair turned my face upward, giving me a view of the far corner of the ceiling and very little else. My breasts and ass jutted out, crisscrossed with the regular pattern of ropes.
I had a sneaking suspicion that the overall picture looked pretty damned impressive. The strong trails of animus drifting my way supported that assumption, and my inner succubus preened.
“Want me to snap a photo for Bela before I take you down?” Len asked quietly, as though he’d read my mind.
“Sure,” I said, my voice a bit breathless from the strained position. “Just use my phone and send it to the last number.”
I’d handed Len my new burner cell for safekeeping, and Rans was the only number on it. I heard him moving around to find the best angle, and then the click of a virtual lens snapping open and shut.
“Oy.
