by Matthew Pridham
PART ONE
One evening, beneath a new moon, a man in a robe embroidered with odd symbols finished chanting a song of desire and power. Candlelight lent only a fluttering glow to the room around him and when he looked up, he had to squint to see a clock in the corner. Almost time.
The ritual finished, he pulled the heavy robe from his body and crawled into bed. His heart beat hard, a wrongly imprisoned pump, rattling its tin cup against his ribs. Mouth dry from anticipation, he thought: maybe another swig of that pomegranate juice, but he only managed to look in the direction of the bottle when something stirred in his mirror. Breath catching, he stared into the glass, only to realize he’d just seen the curtain to the side of the bed shiver in the wind. He’d bought this mirror, a real monstrosity (seven feet tall, walnut frame with legs carved into the shapes of clawed hands), at an antique store last week. In the flickering candlelight, it looked like something out of one of those old Italian Gothic movies, something starring Barbara Steele. As per the instructions of all the occult experts, he’d stood the thing at the foot of his bed. With his head propped up on two pillows, he felt like he was staring down the longest bed he’d ever lain in, a good twenty feet of sheets and blankets, his reduplicated body a blur in the distance.
His cock, which had drowsed on one thigh throughout the ritual, twitched at the thought of Steele and her hypnotic eyes. Idly, he reached toward it and then another movement in the mirror caught his eye. The candles staged so artfully around the room all went out at once, as if the wind outside had slipped in, blown them all out in one breath. His reflection gaped back at him from down that length of sheets, behind it, the darkness of his apartment. And then a shadow detached itself from this formless black, a lithe shape bearing two violet eyes burning in the dark. In the mirror this form pulled itself onto the bed, crawled over his reflected body. Ferocity coupled with the sinuous grace of a serpent in its scramble toward the glass separating them. When it reached the foot of that mirrored bed, it paused a moment, caught between two pairs of his feet. Then, with the faintest of sounds (something like a splash, like breaking glass), it pulled itself through the mirror and was now, finally, in the room with him.
He could not have moved had he wanted to. His limbs went limp the moment she slid through the glass. Not so his cock, which sprang up with such energy the loss of blood to his other, lesser head made him dizzy. He’d stopped breathing too, not that he noticed this.
She snickered and reared back, squatting on her haunches on either side of his feet. Her nose wrinkled and she took in his body with that burning gaze. “What do we have here,” she said in an amused tone. Her features were just visible in the moonless dark of his room. Her skin, a green the color of dark moss, shimmering ever so slightly, as if the same inner fire that lit her eyes struggled to escape her pores as well. A mass of black hair spilled over her shoulders, obscuring one breast. The other was tipped with an areola pierced by a dark ring. Her face: something the coupling of a snake and a fox might have yielded, her mouth so wide its corners rested below her ear-lobes. The snarl on those lips exposed what looked to be a thousand tiny daggers. Ears like those of some giant cat’s poked out from the tangle of hair. She raised one eyebrow and growled softly. “Had a good look?”
His tongue slack in his mouth, he could only give her vowels.
She sneered and stretched her arms wide, as if welcoming another presence to his bedroom. “Beast,” she said, staring down the length of her aquiline nose at his naked body, “I am Eliora Vav, daughter of Vourspax the Terrible, sentry of the new moon. I am a sprig of the Fenixim, a walker between domains. I ride the verge of the Chaotika, herding mad gods and holy abominations to their rest and, beast, I have very little time for nonsense.” She dropped to all fours again, six-fingered hands gripping the sheets on either side of his body.
She had yet to touch him.
He could now see down the length of her back, see the tail that grew from just above her ass. That tail, at least two feet long, scaled and crowned with a furred tip, switched lazily back and forth in the air. With that same sinuous force, she crawled over him, careful not to touch his flesh. The tips of her hair, though, grazed his legs, setting off a shudder he could hardly control. She eased up his body (arching at the last second so that her breasts avoided sliding over his cock) until her eyes were burning down into his own.
Only then did their flesh meet, as she wrapped one of those hands around his neck. “I have come, beast” she said, “for sustenance.” The pressure on his throat was just light enough to let him breath easily, just strong enough to let him know it could get much tighter. “Do you know this word?” She rattled his head with each word. She leaned close to his face, her breath hot in his ear. “I have come for a snack.”
He tried speaking, his mouth still uncooperative.
“Quiet, beast,” she said, squeezing a little harder. “Do not tax your tongue with inanities. I have better uses for it.” Vav smelled his breath, nodded, then delicately licked the side of his face, the sensation sudden, wet, a little rough. “You’ll do,” she said and released his throat. She laughed at the look in his eyes, a rolling, hiccupping laugh she interrupted by slapping him lightly on the cheek. “I am here to feed on your—do you say ‘libi-dough’?” She lowered her hip onto his, a wet warmth grinding against his helpless erection. “Yes, that. You will entertain me for three nights, the nights of the dark moon, the nights in which I can walk this world in my true, most beauteous form.” Vav paused and tilted her head, a cold gleam in those eyes. “Entertain me, let me absorb your energy, and that will be the limits of my snacking.”
He swallowed audibly, nodded.
She splayed her hands on his chest, tapping claws against his sides which could easily have opened his ribcage, and crawled further forward. “Tonight, little manimal,” she said as her neck, breasts, belly swept across and over his face, “you will use that tongue of yours.” A patch of fur pushed against his nose and she was straddling his face, her thighs pressing either side of his head. She settled over his mouth, filling him with the smell of spice, skin, pussy, and a faint taste like that of cherry jellybeans. He’d barely begun to quest after it when her clitoris met his tongue. He licked it, twirled around it. He spelled his name, then spelled the alphabet, then started on the numbers. His hands, suddenly under his control again, rose to squeeze her buttocks. Her skin was ever-so-lightly rough beneath his fingertips, covered in silken scales too tiny to make out in the dark.
Vav moaned above him, pushed her hands against his head, thrust down. She was chanting something, but her thighs obscured the words. Leaving her pointy clit, he pushed his tongue as far as he could into her cunt. He’d been lapping at her in a daze, all sense of time lost, when her body shuddered above him and her thrusts took on a new urgency. From deep inside her, something slick reached out to graze his straining mouth, a vaginal tongue striving to spell its own words on his lips.
His cock, forgotten for the moment, had begun to sag when he felt it being rubbed, tugged. He ran his fingers across her ass and found her tail stretched taut. Vav had wrapped it around his erection, the feeling something between that of a hand and a warm mouth, and was slowly jerking him off. His tongue met that of her womb, the touch of those tips sparking the tiniest shock, and then he was back at her clitoris and she rode his face hard until she went rigid above him and let loose a howl even her thighs couldn’t muffle, a howl he was sure everyone on the block could hear, and the movement of her tail quickened and he came with a blinding flash of light.
Vav shoved her pussy once more against his face, as if to mark her territory, then clambered back down his body to the foot of the bed. Orgasm had sapped some of that alien grace, left her a little clumsy. Her tail smacked against his reading lamp, leaving a trace of his cum across it and almost knocking it to the floor. She hissed in annoyance, perched herself at the foot of the bed and cleaned her tail with three quick flicks of her tongue. “This should suffice,” she said, as she swallowed the last of his semen, “but you really should eat more fruit.” Her reflection was conspicuously absent from the glass she sat before. “Get your sleep, manimal,” she told him and stuck one arm through the mirror, “I will require more from you tomorrow.” Then she was through the looking glass, sliding over his doppelganger, loping into the dark.
Matthew Pridham writes horror fiction. He is a student in CU Boulder’s MFA program and also has a Master’s Degree in English. His novella Renovations was featured in Weird Tales (issue #348), his essays on strange films have found their way onto Weird Fiction Review, and he’s written an essay on polyamory for The Thought Erotic. He is currently working on a mystery novel in which Eliora Vav will return.
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