Chapter 163 - Life Among the Tanti part 9

I took the long way around the village, hoping to avoid the boisterous crowd. I really was weary to the bones, and the daylight was making my head ache, despite the overcast sky. Behind one of the huts, a mangy-looking mongrel was scrounging through castoffs. He looked so skinny and forlorn, I instantly took pity on the animal. "Here, boy," I called, kneeling down. The mongrel jumped in surprise at the sound of my voice and pelted away down the alley, tail tucked between his legs, scraps forgotten.

I rose with a faint frown, looking after the animal for a moment or two, then continued to my hut.

The dark inside was a relief to my stinging eyes. I felt the tension drain out of my neck and shoulders. At last-- rest! I built up the fire in my hearth until my little lodge was hot enough to roast meat, and then I undressed and slipped into the soft embrace of my sleeping furs, rolling up in them, wiggling around until I'd found the most comfortable spot in which to lie. My own flesh felt cold and foreign to me. And heavy. So heavy.

Listening to the drums banging outside in the avenue, the laughter and loud conversations of the celebrants, the trilling of the flutes, I closed my eyes and gave up the mortal world.

It was like skidding down a dark passage.

I had two dreams that afternoon.

In the first, I was standing at the edge of an icy crevasse, the whole world stretched out around me-- the mountains of my native land, the vast flat plains beyond, caught in winter's white teeth. Bitter gales buffeted my body, whipping my clothes, making my hair billow like the tentacles of a sea creature. I was staring into the jagged maw of the creaking abyss, thinking, This will end it, surely. Please, ancestors, let this end it! I cannot stand this loneliness anymore. Everyone I love is dead and gone.

As I stared into that dark maw, squinting in the blasting wind, I realized there was someone standing beside me.

I knew who it was before I even looked up.

Brulde--!

We faced one another, two fleas perched upon the back of an icy leviathan. My lifelong companion. Brulde regarded me with pitiless eyes, silent and grim. His curling blond hair lifted and fell. His beard had frosted over, icicles depending from his scruffy chin. A lifetime of memories streaked across the dark walls of my mind-- the boy, the father, the old man. I wanted to reach out to him, but I held back, fearful, though I could not articulate the reason why I should feel that way. Suddenly, his lips split open, a leering grin, revealing a pair of curving, wolf-like fangs. "Jump!" he snarled, and I came awake in my lodge, biting back a cry.

A dream! Just a dream.

I closed my eyes and drifted off again.

In the second dream, I was in some unfamiliar forest. It was night. Pale moonlight filtered through a lattice of bare tree limbs.

I was not alone.

Something smooth and cold caressed my upper arms. Fingers, delicate and thin. The palm of a hand. I felt breasts-- small, round, firm—press against the middle of my back. And then a woman's voice, purring with amusement… or perhaps contempt.

"Surrender to me, beautiful one," the unseen woman murmured, and I wanted to obey her. With all my soul, I wanted to submit to her. To that husky, purring voice. "Surrender," she said, "and I will let him live…"

I awoke, the touch of my dream seductress lingering on my flesh. I was staring at the roof of my hut, watching the shadows twitch between the beams of the roof in the low red light of the hearth. The village was silent, the flash of the sun absent now from all the little chinks in the roof and walls. Night had come. All the day's celebrants had retired to their beds in exhaustion.

I rose, my belly clamoring for sustenance.

To the hunt.

"Well, hello there!" I said, looking down with a bemused expression.

My cock stood out rigidly from the fuzz of my lower abdomen, a pale and turgid cucumber.

"What's aroused you from hibernation?"

When I was a mortal man, my organ had always awakened before I. It had every morning I can recall from the day that I became a man. So dependable was it, in fact, my mates had nicknamed it "the daily prod". Not so once I became a cold-blooded immortal, but don't think the male organ merely ornamental after a man is made into a vampire. Even the undead can be enflamed by passionate feelings. Still, it was uncommon to awake in such a state now, and I wondered at the dream that had stirred the sleeping beast.

It was easy enough to recall the dream's particulars. I always remembered my dreams. The husky purr of the unseen temptress. The soft press of her breasts against my back. My recollection was so vivid that my cock stiffened even further.

This was certainly strange!

Because I was alone, I gave the proboscis a experimental clout. It bobbed up and down a couple times as if sniffing at the air, and a tingle of pleasure rippled throughout my body.

"Just a dream, my friend. We have no lover in whose embrace we may retreat." Not without a twinge of disappointment.

Leave it alone and it will go away, I counseled myself. It is time to feed.

I did not dress. I did not want my garments to get bloodied or torn. Besides, it was not nearly cold enough outside to be bothersome to me.

Slipping out my door into the darkness, I considered entreating Ilio to join me in the hunt, but I was reluctant to disturb him on his first night as a married man. Besides, this damned erection still had not subsided! I could not summon Ilio from his home in such a state. What would the boy think of me?

Chuckling under my breath, I hopped to the thatch roof of my hut. With my penis pointing the way, I ran lightly across the roof and leapt to a nearby tree.