Chapter 87 - The Country of the Ground Scratchers part 5

Nonplussed, I moved to put my clothing back on. I dressed quickly and sat to slide my feet in my shoes, thinking all the while. Should we stay a little longer? Should we leave immediately? What secrets did the Elders possess, and what did they want from us?

I determined we should leave this place as soon as possible, but I was still mightily intrigued with the mystery of my vampire brethren. From what the slave girl said, they called themselves the T'sukuru, and portrayed themselves to be divine creatures. I wanted to know more. Perhaps she would return soon so I could question her further on the subject of those enigmatic blood drinkers. I did not trust to put many questions to the Elders. Their eyes were too greedy. I knew they sought advantage.

And what of Ilio?

I'd awakened to a strange and dangerous world. I had to educate myself if I were to secure my adopted son a prosperous new life. If this country was not suitable for the boy, then where should we settle?

Yes, I must know more.

The Neirie returned a short time later with food and drink for Ilio. At the sight of the women, the boy bolted upright. He was so anxious I feared my young companion would burst inside his breeches. The chamber already stank of his arousal. The boy's hormonal response to the women was stifling my ruminations, the scent overpowering all other smells in our lodging, but I knew there was little I could do to distract him. He was just of that age, the cusp of manhood. I shook my head, annoyed and amused.

This whole situation was exasperating.

What was I thinking, following the wishes of a horny young teenager? He knew nothing of the Oombai, only that his uncle had enthused about their women… and I, out of guilt, had capitulated to his wanderlust.

The Neirie plied the lad with food and drink. The smell of the liquid they served him was tart and somewhat rancid, like spoiled fruit. Face red, he gulped down the drink they poured for him, then with glistening chin, gestured greedily for more.

The eldest of the sisters returned to my side. She kneeled quietly, awaiting my desires. She had a different air about her, as if she'd come to some new opinion of me, or decided on a different course of action. I smelled no fear coming from her now, though she was still tense.

"Tell me more about these other Blood Drinkers," I said to her.

She looked at me with a puzzled expression, meeting my eyes for the first time. "Do you know nothing of your own kind?" she asked.

I decided to be truthful. "I am from a faraway land and, in all honesty, I've never met another of my kind, aside from the one who made me what I am."

She searched my eyes before finally answering. "That is a dangerous ignorance, stranger, but what is there to tell?" She glanced toward her sisters, who were feeding Ilio by hand, laughing. "Their flesh is cold and hard as stone, just like yours. They come to the Oombai in the springtime, sometimes in the autumn, riding on the backs of great brutal animals. They come and they demand sacrifice, and the old fools give it to them. The Elders bow down and lick their feet, yet who can refuse them? The smallest of their number has the strength of ten men."

"How many are there, these Blood Drinkers, when they come?" I asked.

"Five, sometimes six. Their chieftain is a female with skin like volcanic glass. She's very beautiful, but cruel and full of spite. She calls herself Zenzele, and claims to be the goddess of death."

"And they take sacrifice?"

The woman nodded. "Sometimes three or four apiece before their wicked hunger is satisfied, then they move on to another village. The old men feed the Neirie to them. Never their own people."

"You were not born here?"

She scoffed. "You truly know nothing! No, I wasn't born here. Neirie is the Oombai word for 'taken'. I was stolen from my tribe when I was a young girl. My sisters and I were abducted as we played upon the shore of the lake our village sits beside. The Oombai send out parties each moon to steal the children of the other settlements, and no one is brave enough to oppose them because they are favored by the T'sukuru. If you declare war on the Oombai, you declare war on the Blood Drinkers they serve."

Across the room, Ilio was kissing the two serving girls passionately. Their ardor, I saw, was no less heated. He was uncharacteristically jolly. He was behaving, in fact, like someone drunk on merje, the psychotropic herb my people once used in fertility rituals and festivals.

"I think your… boy… has drank his fill," my Neirie companion said, a faint smile on her lips.

"I believe you're right," I nodded, laughing gently.

The Neirie turned to me then, a strange look in her eyes.

"I know you take refreshment of another sort, T'sukuru," she murmured. I met her gaze—she was a frail beauty, with large blue eyes—and I felt a sudden stirring for her, a powerful desire, not for her blood, but for her body… the desire a living man might feel. I was suddenly very confused, anxious even, as if I were feeling these stirrings for the first time. Well, it had been seven thousand years since I'd been intimate with a woman. You have to cut me a little slack here!

"My name is Aioa. You may sup of my blood, if it pleases you." As she spoke, she held out her delicate wrist.

"My name is Thest," I replied, and I even swallowed in nervousness, again as a living man might do.

She nodded, moving closer to me. "Have you made love to a woman since becoming T'sukuru?" she asked.

I shook my head no.

Her wrist, I saw, was heavily scarred. The scars crisscrossed her flesh, extending halfway up her arm to her elbow. Was she accustomed to feeding her blood to others of my kind? Her wounds would seem to confirm that, but the idea offended me. I'm a predator, not some filthy leech!

The smell of her body confused me. She was frightened, yes, but also aroused. I could smell the moistness between her thighs. Her nipples were erect. Yet her heart was racing in her breast, and not from lust. She knew what she offered me was dangerous for her, so why then did she do it? Did she seek to make an alliance with me? Did she think I could be swayed?

She peeked at me beneath her eyebrows and murmured, "Please, be gentle with me, Thest."

"Do you want me to drink your blood, or do you want to mate with me?" I asked. I was horrified by the former… but mightily tempted to try the latter. Far too tempted for this woman's safety.

"Aren't you thirsty?" she inquired.

I pushed her arm down. "I'm sorry, little one. I have no control of my predatory instincts. I fear I would do more than sip."

I saw her eyes flash, alarmed by my words, then she gathered her courage and said, "I don't believe you will hurt me. You are not like the other ones."

I peeked at her proffered wrist again. All those scars.

"You… you have offered yourself to others of my kind? Allowed them to drink from your veins?"

"A couple times, when the Elders demanded it of me."

"And have the Elders demanded it of you this day?"

She smiled. "No. They don't know yet what to make of you."

I glanced toward Ilio, who was guzzling down more of the rancid fruit juice as the Nierie women stroked his chest and tugged the shoes off his feet. He was certainly offering them no resistance!

My resolve weakened and I took her wrist and brought it to my lips. I bared my fangs so that she could see them, gave her a moment to withdraw, but instead of changing her mind, her eyes narrowed, and the muscles in her face grew tense, as if with lust. I could smell the chemicals of her sexual arousal, a musky mélange, and the last of my restraint dissolved. She yelped as I bit into her flesh and then her blood was on my lips, spurting across my tongue. Pleasure shot through me in hot, pulsing bolts. Aioa gasped and shivered as I swallowed, then I drew another mouthful from her wrist.

"Oh! Not so hard!" she pleaded.

No creature in this world, neither man nor beast, had ever offered me their willing blood … or took such pleasure in my feeding from them, but this Neirie, this fragile beauty named Aioa, twisted her body and gasped in pleasure as I drank from her.

Her hot, salty blood throbbed in my mouth. The smell and taste of it struck every nerve in my maw like a bolt of lightning, her heart a drum beat in my ears, the smell of her in my nostrils, the finest fragrance in the world right then. It seemed the flickering torchlight in the hut turned red and began to throb as I sucked her lifeblood inside me.

Ilio moaned in pleasure and I turned my eyes, my lips still latched to Aioa's wrist, to see him mating with the other two Neirie. At last, my son becomes a man! I would have laughed were my mouth not full of blood.

"My blood gives rise to your manhood," Aioa murmured, eyeing the bulge in the front of my trousers. "Would you let me please you in both matters at once?"

Grinning, I loosened the laces of my breeches and wriggled half out of them.

Aioa threw her thighs across mine and settled onto my manhood. I felt my cock pierce her, slide moistly in her heat. Her mouth gaped as I penetrated her. I opened my legs and she wriggled me deeper inside. Her blood overspilled my mouth and ran, hot and wet, down my neck and chest.

She pulled her wrist away to press her breasts together in pleasure, smearing blood all over them. She yelped as I stabbed my organ up in her, as I pulled her to me and licked the blood from her swollen nipples.

Some vampires will claim that sex pales in comparison to the pleasure of drinking blood, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the ones who do so have never had intercourse after their transformation. Though I've not often enjoyed the act of lovemaking throughout the millennia—it is so very, very dangerous for the human partner-- I have always considered both acts equally fine. Yet, I've encountered no other earthly pleasure the equal of the thing I've come to call the Blood Orgasm. That day, in the village of the Oombai, I experienced my first Blood Orgasm, and so it stands out in my memories, singular in its power to move me to lust.

Aioa put the tender flesh of her wrist back to my lips and I sucked, thrusting hard into the damp cleft between her thighs. I sucked her blood and thrust into her, over and over, until the pleasure of tongue and cock reached its inevitable climax. I howled as my manhood pumped vampiric cum inside her cunt, as her blood spurted in my mouth. Her pussy clenched down as tight as a fist and then it began to quiver around me, her bloody tits pressed to my cheeks, her fingers in my hair, pulling hard. I don't know how she survived, how I managed not to kill her, only that pleasure must have tempered my savagery, that I was too enraptured in the ecstasy pulsing through my body to incline from lust to violence. Perhaps her frailty spoke to the gentler man inside me, the one who always fights against the hunger.

"Whahudd!" Aioa cried, and she pushed herself away from me, out of my lap and off my manhood. She fell on her back weakly, sprawling between my open thighs, her head lolling, her breasts heaving. Blood pattered on the furs beneath her, still gouting from her wounded wrist, but weaker now—I'd drained so much of it.

Her Neirie sisters moved to attend her (Ilio having spent himself quickly with them) and they dipped their fingers into her sex, taking my black, sterile seed and dabbing it onto the gashes in her wrist.

I watched in mute amazement as my undead ejaculate sealed the wound in her wrist, stitching it closed almost instantly. The flesh around the injury swelled—appearing for an instant as if it were a badly infected injury-- and then rapidly the swelling subsided and the edges of the bites melted together until the wound my teeth had sliced into her flesh was just another winding scar.

I looked to Ilio, and he returned my dumbfounded gaze.

Panting, Aioa sat up. She brushed aside her sisters and smiled at me. "Never have I felt such pleasure," she declared breathlessly, shaking her head to clear it. She cut her eyes toward the doorway then, and leaned forward to confide, "I would be killed for telling you this, T'sukuru. Be mindful of the life I entrust in your care. The chieftain Bhulloch sent me to you as an enticement. It has been too long since your brethren have visited the Oombai. The Elders need the ebu potashu or the years they have cheated will catch up with them. If you do not give it to them, they will try to take it by force. I overheard the Chief Elder commanding his warriors. He told them you and your boy are not to leave the village." She grinned wickedly and finished her betrayal in a whisper, speaking fast lest she be overheard. "They're cruel masters, T'sukuru. I say let them die. Let them die and rot in Hal'eh'far!"

I shook my head. I was having trouble following her. Too many of her words were foreign to me. "What is this 'ebu potashu'?"

"The blood!" Aioa hissed. "The black blood! I've seen your kind spit it up for the Elders. The old pigs lick it up like dogs who eat their own vomit. It makes them live when they should be food for worms! You truly are an outcast, aren't you?"

I found myself hypnotized by this woman, so beautiful and fragile, yet so secretly full of passion. Her fury reminded of my second wife Nyala. My head swam with the old memories, and the afterglow of our heated lovemaking. I felt swayed by her allure, my black heart tugged by the female staring fiercely into my eyes, tugged as the moon tugs the seas, the invisible but powerful tides of attraction.

I did not fear the old man Bhulloch. I could slaughter the whole village on a whim. My only real vulnerability was Ilio.

"I will leave then," I said, pulling up my pants and tucking my flaccid cock away. "I will leave them to their natural dissolution, and come back with the night to take you with me, if that is something that you wish."

"Not now!" she hissed. "There are too many guards. They surround this lodge at his commands, and are spread throughout the village, too. Bhulloch has instructed them to kill you if you try to escape, or kill the boy in failing that. Wait until it is night and their warriors are blinded by the dark."

She did not know my strength, obviously. I had survived the maw of a glacier, a mountain of grinding ice. Yet, I worried for Ilio, who was mortal. I could not move at full speed with him in my arms. The force would kill him, and all it would take was one lucky spear or arrow to end his life.

Perhaps… perhaps a trade. The three Neirie women and a peaceful departure in exchange for a bit of my immortal spittle.

It seemed like a fair bargain, one the Elders would leap at.

"Why do you tell me these things?" I asked. It was my final suspicion. "You risk your life for us, yet we are strangers to you."

The woman named Aioa drew herself up. "I was not born a slave, Blood Drinker," she said haughtily. "If I had the strength of your kind, I would kill those old men and end the rule of the wicked Oombai, once and for all."

Then she seemed to fear she'd said too much. She motioned curtly to her sisters and they rose. Heads down, the three of them departed.