The Golden Read Free Page B

something does indeed exist beyond life, but you
should derive no comfort from it. There are terrors more profound
than that of mere extinction.”
    “What are
they?”
    “That I am
sworn not to reveal.”
    “Please!
I—”
    “I cannot!
Someday you may learn the Mysteries for yourself, but until then, you
must accept on faith all I’ve told you.”
    She lowered her
head so that the mass of her hair shrouded his face, her brow resting
against his chest, and murmured an endearment. Beheim felt remorse at
having used her so, at having removed her from a natural life and
seeded in her a desire for things she might never attain.
    “I wish
you had begged to enter my service,” he said. “I wish you
had willingly accepted all the attendant risks and hardships.”
    “I accept
them now.”
    “Yes, but
you did not know what would happen in the beginning. If you had,
perhaps I could reconcile my affections with the peril in which I
have placed you.”
    “Lord—”
she began.
    “I am not
a lord! Far from it.”
    “You are my lord,” she said. “I cannot recall who it was fled from
you that night in the streets of Montparnasse, but it was not I. That
woman hated you, feared you. But she is dead, and I, the living, can
only adore you.”
    These words
stung Beheim more painfully than had her entreaties, and he held her
tightly, caressing her hair, her waist and flanks. Before long,
though this had not been his intent, she responded to his attentions
with caresses of her own. She put her lips to his ear and whispered,
“I need you tonight, Michel!”
    It was neither
her eagerness nor the ripeness of her body that inspired him to make
love to her, but rather his desire to do the human thing, to keep
alive that measure of humanity remaining to him. And once she was
naked, once his own clothes had been tossed to the floor, the old
compulsions came into play. Braced above her, looking down at her
lovely face, serene with expectancy, at perfect breasts with areola
the color of dried blood, he knew a man’s desperate urgency,
and on sinking into her, feeling her hips tilt and lift in sweet
compliance, he knew as well a lover’s portion of mastery and
fulfillment. Her lips shaped a breathless vowel as he went deep, her
hands fluttered about his shoulders. All this familiar, redolent of
human loves and dynasties of lust. But as they rocked and tangled in
the black silk bottom of desire, another sensibility claimed him. His
eyes, until that instant squeezed shut with pleasure, blinked open
with the abruptness of the reanimated. With her sweaty breasts, her
fevered tossing, she appeared now of a lower and indelicate order, a
convulsed thing into which he had poked a hot stick, a steamy
girl-shaped muscle clever in its movements, yet witless and dull in
all else. He stared at her, trying to penetrate her as palpably with
that stare as he had with his member. Her eyelids fluttered open, her
eyes widened, and her lips drew back from her teeth as if she were
going to scream, horrified by what she saw in his face. Galvanized by
fear, she thrashed and heaved, trying—it seemed—to unseat
him, but succeeded only in bringing his arousal to a peak. With his
left hand, he clutched her throat, stilling her, and with the right,
he clamped her buttocks, grinding her against him. Fear did not empty
from her face, but rather mingled with the dazed symptoms of a
gentler emotion, as if love and fear were old friends who often met
inside her. Her gasps came rapidly, and her movements, though yet
abandoned, grew less desperate, less involved with escape. Completion
and terror glazed her eyes. Her legs locked about his waist, her
fingernails raked his back, and Beheim, himself driven by a complex
of emotions, none of them gentle, cried out in fulminant rage and joy
at being overwhelmed once again by this most poignantly mortal of
delights, then went rigid with a molten wattage of pleasure and hung
motionless above her, his fangs inches from the pale