He pulls out, resting his cockhead against my entrance. The sudden emptiness is an ache.
“Use me, sir. Hard, please, sir. I can take it.” Muttering into his hand, I flex my ass cheeks, grinding back against him.
“So reluctant to be ridden, now so eager to be used? If you insist.” Marcus thrusts, quick and hard, shoving his entire length up inside me. I wince, gasping against the tight gag of his hand. A steady pounding begins. Cuffed, silver-weak, I lie there entirely helpless, impaled by bliss, deep grunts—“Huhh, huhhhh, huhhhh, huhh!”—forced out of me by the rhythmic hammering of his hips. Marcus’s growl is as steady as my grunts are staccato.
He’s off me before I know it. Again I’m aching and empty. Not for long, I sense. Seizing my bushy goatee, Marcus drags me across the grass to a broken column lying on the ground. He heaves me across it, bends me over. My face and knees are sunk in dead grass, my ass cocked in the air. He fang-nips both cheeks, spreads them, roughly shoves up inside me and begins pummeling me anew.
I’ve no sooner started a new series of rapturous, stuffed-f-to-the-brim grunts than his right hand’s again clamped over my mouth. His left hand finds my left pec. He manhandles the thick flesh, tugs painfully at the chest pelt. “A better angle, is it not?” Marcus pants into my tangled hair. “And a small price for all of Rome?”
What ecstasy it is to be completely vulnerable and completely owned, thoroughly plowed. I had almost forgotten. Nodding, I close my eyes, spread my thighs, push back onto him, and grip him from inside, as if I were squeezing the handle of a sword. “Ah, yes. Very nice. You are skilled for a dirty savage,” Marcus says, increasing the speed of his thrusts. “You have learned well beneath my predecessors.”
Smiling beneath his palm, I squeeze and relax, squeeze and relax. He rides for a bit, sighing with delight, letting the sweat build up between us, before he says, “I will hurt you now, boy. Yes?” Marcus pants into my ear. “You are ready to suffer for me? I may mark you?”
I grunt an affirmation, nodding against his firm grip. Immediately his fingernails sink deep into my nipple. I clench my teeth as he brings blood, twists and tugs the tiny nub of flesh, cuts deeper still.
Keeping one hand over my mouth, with the other he rakes my torso, my nipples, and my back with his sharp fingernails, leaving long, deep wounds. Blood wells up, trickling into my chest hair, down my spine. “And now, I think…” He shifts the position of his loins just a fraction, pulls back, shoves forward hard. My eyes roll, my fangs gnash my tongue, my own blood tinges my mouth.
“Here, I think, is the bodily seat of your submission, yes? This spot here?” Marcus chuckles. “Am I right, forest trash? Wild one so sweetly tamed?”
Yes, deep inside me he has found what few men have ever found, the point that makes me shake with the greatest pleasure. I go wild, bucking and writhing in his arms, crying out against his hand, trying to pull him into me even deeper. Giving my chest one last savage clawing, he locks his arm around my head and sinks his teeth into my neck.
The sucking begins—an irresistible gravity, a riptide more and more intense—hard and steady to match the pounding below. Within a minute, I’m immobile, sprawled limply across the column that once bore the weight of an empire, rocking helplessly inside his thrusts. I hear him hissing against my split skin, feel him stiffening atop me, pumping my depths. Then Marcus’s bloody hands grip my shoulders, his fangs slip from my flesh. He gives a shout, a final thrust, gushes into me, and collapses.
Blood tickles my neck. The column’s marble is cold against my belly; my master’s weight is great upon my back; my hole’s a throbbing circlet of fire. The grass before my eyes smears, a brittle gold. That grades to red, then unbroken black.
I wake cradled in his lap. He is rocking me in his arms, gazing down at me, blond hair curtaining his face. Again that faint smile. He bends over me, caressing the blood-ooze claw trails his nails cut into my chest. I try to embrace him, only to find myself still weak, still cuffed. His lips meet mine. I can smell and taste my own blood in his kiss.
“You will be scarred for a time,” Marcus says. “My nails leave welts even undead bodies have difficulty healing.” He runs a finger along my chest, daubs up some blood, laps it off. “But you are even more beautiful scarred, no? And these scars will mark you as mine during your stay in Rome.”
From the seat of a ruined altar, he rises, holding me in his arms. “The temple of Cybele once,” he says, wistfully. “You should have seen it as it was.” Enervate, I lean against him, wrists throbbing in the tight cuffs. Birds are singing somewhere. “Almost dawn, yes,” he says, carrying me through aromas of pine, crunching of needles, then beneath an arch and down a long underground tunnel. “You may use this nest in future, if you please,” Marcus says. He shifts me with ease from his arms to his shoulder, then edges aside a flat rock. Here, a grave large enough for the both of us. He lowers me gently onto my side, climbs in after me, pulls the rock in over us. “I have hidden our clothes nearby. We will spend the day together here, my bound barbarian,” Marcus says, gripping my cuffed hands and pulling me against him. We kiss, lengthily and deeply, before he presses his hairless chest against my mouth and says, “I can feel your famine. Drink, boy.”
“Thank you, sir,” I whisper. “Gladly.” My tongue finds his nipple. I tease it into hardness, then slip my fangs into him. He sighs, running his fingers through my hair and along the gashes on my back. His semen oozes from my ass and trickles down my inner thigh. The sun must be nearing dawn, for sudden drowsiness washes over me. I fall asleep suckling Marcus’s breast, feeling the old blood glow and shimmer inside.
III.
“We should have killed them all. What trouble those beasts have caused.”
Marcus and I are strolling through what remains of the Colosseum. He’s dressed in a dove-gray suit, crimson tie, and leather loafers, I in camo pants, black work boots, and a black tank top that allows Marcus to savor the sight of both my tattoos and my fresh scars. At his request, my hair’s unbound. It’s approaching midnight of our second night together. The great broken bowl of the stadium is empty of tourists. We walk along the corridors, under the barrel vaults, and take seats where emperors once did. Only a few feral cats are our companions tonight, and the moon, nearly full. Before us is the cross erected by a long-dead pope to commemorate the Christians who died here.
“Are they as troublesome in your land, my highlander? The Christians?”
“Oh, fuck yes!” I snarl. “They’re a plague. They run through my mountains like a virus. They befoul the air!”
Marcus wraps an arm around me. “You are passionate about this, I see.”
I flush and nod. “I do hate them. The hard-core kind, at least. They’ve caused me and mine much grief. Still, forgive the language, sir. We ‘forest trash,’ as I believe you called me during that fine pounding…I’m still a little sore, by the way. Not that I’m complaining.” I rub my butt and grin. “We forest trash do tend to be dirty-mouthed. I don’t mean to be vulgar. I suspect a sophisticated man like you is used to fairer-spoken friends.”
Marcus pulls me against him. I lean my head against his chest. It is a great relief, to relinquish strength and control for a change. “But you
are
vulgar. And I love it. I grow weary of refinement sometimes. Yes, we should have fattened our lions more efficiently. And speaking of flashing fangs and vigorous devouring, are you ready for your gift? You took little blood from me before you slept; your hair and goatee are still silvery. It’s time to remedy that.”
“Yes, I’m ready. What have you been up to?” Marcus has shown me several sights tonight—the Forum, the Capitoline, the Arch of Constantine—but before that tour, he’d left me silver-cuffed for several hours in our Palatine tomb while he “attended to business.”
“Come with me.” Marcus rises and takes my hand. “It’s five minutes from here, down Via San Giovanni de Laterano.”
Leaving the ancient stadium, we make our way past well-lit cafés, noisy, fragrant restaurants. We hold hands, the sleek aristocrat and the undead redneck. God help the homophobic human who might object. But we meet with no objections, just a few stares, and soon we are swathed in shadow again, slipping down a narrow street and then inside the colonnaded courtyard of a church.
“San Clemente,” Marcus says, pulling open the broad wooden door and ushering me inside. “I worship here.”
“A Christian church?”
“No, no. Come, come.” Marcus takes my hand. He’s moving fast through the dimness, leading me past columns, mosaics, and choir screens—Christian irrelevancies—then through a swinging door and down broad stone steps. Here is a lower floor. I can make out bare stone walls, a distant flicker of candlelight; I can smell earth and human sweat, hear a faint, very human moaning. “Here?” I say. My fangs throb and lengthen.
“Not yet, young one, eager one. First you must pay homage.”
Down another flight of steps, a deeper level yet. The sound of rushing water.
“Beneath the floor. The Cloaca Maxima, ancient Rome’s sewer. That is what you hear.” Marcus pulls me down a corridor to a doorway in the rough wall. “Here, here is where we need to be. The Mythraeum.” Behind a locked grate is a low-ceilinged cave, a white marble altar flanked by stone benches. Marcus fetches a key from his pocket; the padlock snaps open; we enter the shrine.
“The Lord Mithras. He is the god of soldiers.” Marcus runs his hands along the low reliefs. “Here, see, he sacrifices the bull. He cuts its great throat. And here, here are the dog and serpent. They drink the blood.” He grips my shoulder. “On your knees,
rusticus
.”
I do what I’m told, kneeling beside him. Closing his eyes, Marcus mouths a few words I can’t make out. Bowing my head, I give thanks to this foreign warrior god—for the splendid man by my side, for his beauty, ruthlessness, and strength, for his marble-white, marble-hard muscles, for his sharp golden desire.
Marcus tugs my beard. I jerk with surprise, then rise. His arms enwrap me, hugging me hard. “The god gives his approval. Now for your gift.”
Back along the corridor and up one flight of steps. “This was a fourth-century church,” says Marcus. “It also makes a fine feast hall for my coven.” There’s a distant sound of sobbing. We follow it, turning several corners before coming into the low nave. I stare down the rows of double columns and flickering candelabra, to the stone canopy of the baldacchino at the far end, the high rectangular altar beneath it, and, most especially, what lies atop that altar. I growl deep in my throat. I run my tongue over my fangs.
“You are pleased? You said you doted on Christs.”
“Oh, fuck. Oh, yes!” My lip curls up; I snuffle the rich air, heavy with terror and sweat.
Bound belly-down upon the altar is a young man. He’s naked. His limbs are spread, wrists and ankles shackled and chained to the posts of the canopy. He stares at us with black, long-lashed eyes before breaking into soft fear-sobs again.
I cross the yards between us in a heartbeat. I wrap my fingers in his long black hair and pull his head back. Thick chain has been threaded between his teeth twice and padlocked behind his head, filling his mouth, muffling his cries. I study his handsome face, his tear-stained, half-crazed eyes. His weeping grows more violent still. He squints against his tears, then, unable to hold my gaze, clenches his eyes shut.
“His name is Francesco,” Marcus says, somewhere behind me. “He’s twenty-one. He speaks English fairly well. He lives with his old mother in the ghetto south of Rome. He uses his good looks to hustle tourists on the Spanish Steps. No one will miss him save her. He is yours now. To drain, enslave, keep, or kill.”
The mention of murder evokes in Francesco a fresh bout of sobs, a few weak words his gag makes unintelligible. His white teeth grit the chain. He thrashes in his bonds. The steel links rattle and clink.
“
Aiuto
.
Per favore
. He’s crying for help. So delicious.” Marcus stands beside me now, fingering the spit-shiny chain between our prisoner’s plump lips. “The boy’s half starved. But he gave us a fierce fight, like a wild animal. Rather than damage him badly, we drugged him. He’s been kept bound down here for hours, watched over by some helpful minions of mine. He has little strength left. So he will do?”
“Ohhhh, yes,” I hiss. “He’s fucking
fine
. Thank you, Marcus!”
Francesco’s face is thin, with prominent cheekbones and an aquiline nose. His shoulder-length hair is ink-black, as is his neatly trimmed goatee. He’s very lean, rib-staves and hipbones ridging dirty skin. He’s shiny with sweat; he smells of the street, of urine and long hot days without a bath. Other than the whiteness of his buttocks, his skin’s an olive hue. Here and there are bruises, the result, I’m guessing, of the struggles he put up during his capture. I circle him now, stroking his long, thickly hairy legs, the muscles’ straining definition. I caress the wet hair-nests of his armpits, the hair dusting his belly and chest. When I touch his buttocks, hard curves covered with fine black fur, he starts and shudders, shakes his head violently, cries out more chain-hampered words I can’t make out. His fear’s a liqueur, black and sweet. I laugh low, running a fingertip along his ass crack. So moist, so warm, so aromatic.
“Oh, yes, he can guess what’s coming next. Do what you please, barbarian. Use him as I used you.” Marcus fetches two glasses and a bottle from the floor. Black Sambuca again. He pours out the liqueur, hands me a glass, clicks his glass against mine. I take a sip, lick the sugary anise off my lips, rest the glass on the corner of the altar, and strip.