Starblood (The Starblood Trilogy) (2 page)

The fingers no longer squirm inside her. The man withdraws them, lifting them to his face. Snorting the scent of her, he trembles. He sighs then, with a slurp, he sucks his fingers like a hungry baby. His ragged breath in her ears, she raises her left arm and touches the fist in which his knife is clasped. He seems frightened by her icy fingers and pulls away. She spins around on her stiletto heels to face him. He is a small man, with greasy, greying hair, smoothed over his misshapen skull. His arms and legs are brittle twigs, his blue eyes weak and moist.

‘You’re going to die. I’m going to fuck you in every hole I gouge out of you,’ he stammers.

He sees her smile and shrinks away. Clutching his knife in his right hand, and still holding the fingers of the other to his nose, he watches her. Taking a step towards him, she towers above his pock marked face. She lifts her arms and places a hand on either side of his jaw, lifting his feet from the ground. He lets his left hand fall back to his side and stares at her in terrified silence. Holding his clammy face between her palms she thrusts her tongue into his mouth, squeezing his skull just enough to let him taste her strength. She doesn’t want him to lose consciousness. Then she releases him and grabs the knife from his hand.

Watching him, she toys with the knife. It is a good knife, a heavy knife. Lunging, she slices the air between them. Realising how frightened he is, her smile broadens. She reaches for the sweat-soaked cotton of his shirt and slashes through it, revealing his chest. She places her fingers over his stammering heart.

Watching tears flow freely down the man’s cheeks, she places the knife handle between her thighs, squeezing with her powerful muscles. Her steel phallus bobs eagerly.

‘Suck my cock,’ she orders.

He resists and Lilith has to force him down onto his knees amongst the rubble and glass. She wraps her fingers around his hair and pushes his face into position. He gurgles. Blood coats the blade.

Falling backwards on to the floor, he pleads with her to show mercy. His broken tongue spits promises he will not keep. She ignores his words and roughly spreads his legs, then plunges through the denim sheath around his crotch. Exquisite screams of agony echo through the alleyway, as she makes her virgin hole and fucks him until he stops twitching.

Chapter 3

Listening to the silence, Satori crouches in a sea of magical symbols. His sweat has made the marks run into each other, both across his body and beneath it. He looks like a creature rising from a pool of tar.

Working his stiff muscles, he stands and crosses the room to his bed. Dozens of faces stare up at him. Their expressions are confused, hurt and blank: Star, the woman who left him six weeks before. Gathering the photos one by one, he presses his lips to each sweet mouth. Tears form as he whispers apology after apology.

I am a fool. What did I hope for?
The anger he felt when she told him she was leaving still crouches in his chest ready to pounce. Tears blur his vision as he sinks back on his duvet and loses consciousness amid the worn and battered images of his ex-girlfriend.

After a fitful sleep Satori wakes to his nightmare. He grabs all his magical books, modern paperbacks and older cloth-bound volumes, forty-two in total. Paying no attention to size or age, he fans them out into a wide circle. The jumbled works become a mystical ring and he sits among them in the centre of his room. Energy surrounds him, a zodiac of arcane knowledge, but which will he need? He retrieves the discarded dagger from a corner. Holding it in his hand, he closes his eyes to dowse for the right book. He tries to focus on the question
how can I stop her
? His mind is full of the demon.

When he closes his eyes he sees her body bound by that magical outfit, and her hair moving around her face. Those eyes burn like fireflies and her pointed tongue licks soft, full lips. His mouth feels dry, his jaw aches. Lilith arouses him and he hates himself for it.
It’s just been a long time
, he tells himself, shaking her image from his mind.
A long time
.

A seed of hope, the tiniest thought that he might win Star back, was all Satori had needed. That hope is what brought him here, to receive her love again or at least an answer to his constant question, w
hy did you leave?
For two weeks after she left him he hid outside her home watching her, following her. She never met another man. There is no one else, only her and him.
Why then?

Star, you are my world. The others before you are dust.
He wishes he could do the same with his memories of her, tear the thoughts from his mind. She had called him schizophrenic. Laughing at the word, he surveys the chaos of his room.
Schizo-fucking-phrenic? If only
.

The jewelled hilt of the knife in his hand refracts daylight across the bedroom walls as he twists the blade through the air. He holds out his other hand and watches the colours play across his pale skin. Inside him, his heart continues to pump, but the blood flowing to and from it burns him like acid.
Will I ever be free of this?

He tosses the blade away again and picks up the first book. The dust jacket is black and a green tree dominates the front cover. He scans each page, willing an answer to appear. Four, five, six books read and thrown behind him. Hours pass and Satori’s desperation grows as does the cairn shaped mound. So many ceremonies but only one to dismiss a demon and that requires Lilith’s presence in his magical space. He doubts his ability to trick or force her to return to this room. He must think harder.
There must be a way. There is always a way.

‘This is my will,’ he says, mocking himself.

He hears the telephone ring four times then silence. Footsteps approach his room. He runs towards his door, barring it.

‘Phone call for you, Steve,’ his mother calls through the wooden barrier. ‘Sarah.’

Star? What does she want? Why now?
His body tingles in response to her name. ‘Okay, I’ll take it up here,’ he shouts. ‘Star,’ he says as he lifts the receiver.

‘Hi Steve,’ she answers. ‘How are you?’

The melody of her voice fills his head. He presses his hand against the wall and closes his eyes. ‘Fine thanks. What do you want?’

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have … ’ her voice drifts into silence.

Satori replies before she can put the phone down again. ‘It’s okay. I’m just surprised to hear from you. You kinda made it obvious you didn’t want to see me again.’ A tear tickles his cheek and he brushes it away, but he keeps his voice steady.

‘I had a vision, about you,’ she tells him. ‘That’s why I phoned. I was worried. However you’re fine, so I’ll go now.’

‘No! Wait!’ he says. ‘Please come over.’

Chapter 4

‘Steve, what have you done?’ Sarah sits on Steve’s bed. Her eyes scan the room once more.

He hasn’t bothered opening his curtains, but even in the gloom she can see his frantic work. Half marvelling at the intricacy of many of the designs and the sheer dedication shown, she despairs at this new evidence of his deranged mind. At her feet she sees a crumpled photo. She bends to pick it up, but Steve is too fast and snatches it away before she can turn it over. She frowns at him. There is no point in fighting him for the picture. She already knows whose face fills its glossy surface.

Last night, sitting in her living room with Raven and Donna, she had felt a sudden coldness creep over her. Instead of her flat she was here in this room. Steve had been naked and there had been all these markings …

He does not meet her stare. Instead he gazes at his feet as he scuffs out charcoal marks with the heel of his shoe.

‘Please, call me Satori,’ he asks.

Sarah laughs.
Satori, you always were a pretentious bastard, weren’t you?
She wonders why she came here, why she keeps allowing him to draw her back.
If only I wasn’t so drawn to these people – Steve and Raven – they pull me under. Why am I so attracted to them? Fuck it! I’m not your Star any longer. I’m Sarah: practical, logical, sane Sarah.

That is why the vision is so cruel. Not only because, once again, she is faced with his image, but because she knows where it comes from, that hidden part, that secret part – the vortex deep inside her mind that she has struggled to cage for so many years.

‘Names are important,’ Steve replies, looking at her now. ‘Satori is a powerful name, and I need all the power I can muster right now.’

‘Okay, okay,’ she says, shaking her head. She is shocked by the weariness of his eyes, always so bright and alert when they were together. The instinct to embrace him rises inside her. She stops herself just in time. ‘What have you done? In my dream, I-I saw a knife and a girl … no a woman. Now I see all this chaos. What I saw was real, wasn’t it?’

‘I made a terrible mistake,’ he admits. ‘I thought … I thought I could control it, but it’s gone.’

‘I don’t understand. You’re always talking in riddles. Just tell me. What was it? What did I see?’
And how did I see it?
Weariness and confusion move in waves across her mind. She knows how, but she will continue to deny it, even to herself.

‘I wanted to invoke a demon, just a lesser one, and channel some of its power. Maybe I could … well … change things … you know. It shouldn’t be like this.’ Pausing, his eyes search hers for a clue. When he speaks again he tries a different approach. ‘I followed all the instructions. These marks you keep staring at, they’re just for protection. It should have worked. I don’t know what went wrong.’

Without a word she stands up and tramples across his magic, desperate to reach the door, and escape his madness before she loses herself in it again. Her hand hovers at the door-handle. She relents and turns to face him.

‘Okay, so you’re weirder than I thought.’ She sees the pain curl his mouth. For the briefest moment his pain gives her pleasure but then the guilt bullies its way back in. ‘No, I’m sorry Steve … Satori. Fuck! So you tried a spell, a big one and it went wrong, right?’ She cannot believe she is having this conversation and yet the words keep pouring out of her.

He nods. ‘Something else came through. The woman. Well demon really - more powerful than I was expecting. She was beautiful and terrible. I couldn’t contain her.’

‘What, you mean there’s a demon in the city?’ she asks, coughing. Her body is shaking now. She doesn’t know how much longer she can stand here listening to this. The vortex inside bubbles and hisses. Shaking her head, her hand reaches behind her and touches the cold metal of the door-handle.

He nods.

She sighs, more madness.
He should really see someone. This conversation is just feeding his psychosis
, and yet a deeply buried part of her is intrigued: that evil, unclean cocoon in the core of her mind. The part she always tries to suppress, the part which had the vision. She almost had it under control, until last night. Chewing her knuckles, she thinks.
Why do I keep seeing it: the tear and the darkness beyond it; it keeps calling to me. Why can’t I ignore it like the others? Why is it pushing me here?
‘And what does that mean, precisely?’

‘I don’t know. She terrifies me. I have to find some way to stop her. These books … they’re useless.’

‘So we need to find better books,’ Sarah says, not willing to let fear take over when she has logic to combat it, however skewed that logic might feel at this moment.

‘We?’ He shrugs then brightens a little. ‘Okay,’ he agrees. ‘We’ll find better books and we’ll stop her … together.’

We? Did I really say that?
She bites her lip.
There must be a way out of this.
She notices his sudden transformation and is wary. Even covered in black smudges Steve is beautiful. At twenty-four he is the perfect Goth archetype. His body is so slender it is difficult to imagine him eating. He wears androgyny as though it were a style he created, his skin white even without makeup, and his hair - black and straight - shines like raven feathers as it falls around his narrow shoulders. And yet he is strong, very strong. Her thighs feel hot and weak. She grips the door-handle tightly and pushes it down until she hears it click.

He looks up at her from the bed and she feels herself melting.
Why am I doing this? Is he the perfect boyfriend? Sure, he’s clever and sensitive and he loves with an all-consuming fire, but he is so obsessive and weird, even for a Goth, and when I’m with him … I’m weird too.

They stare at each other in silence. The graffiti-filled room gapes between them like a wound.
One, two, three
… the silence starts to shred Sarah’s nerves.
I have to say something, but what? Goodbye seems too cold, too final.

‘Any idea where we should start?’ she asks. In that moment, silence’s spell is broken, and she plunges into a strange and unwelcome adventure.

‘Paul,’ he replies. ‘I’ll get my coat.’

‘If you’re coming outside with me you’ll shower first,’ she insists. ‘You look terrible.’

She wants to remind him that this doesn’t mean they are back together. But he leaves the room before she can form the right words. She digs her thumb and fingernail into the fleshy part of her forearm, pinching hard. A broken circle of purple and red marks her skin.

They walk together towards the bus stop. The pair of them march side by side, their long black coats flapping in the chill October breeze, their winkle-picker boots tapping out their beat in unison, and their pale faces set into looks of intelligent determination. She realises how much she has missed being with him. That he could love her, want to be with her, makes her feel extraordinary. Everything seems harder without him. Work is more tedious when she isn’t replaying their time together in her head, and she can barely tolerate Raven’s self-involved chatter any longer. The desire to leave, to run away to another town where no one knows her sits uncomfortably beside her desire to lose herself in Steve’s arms again. She wants to walk closer to him, link her arm with his, and feel the power of their conjoined bodies. She wants to share his heat, but she shakes these feelings away.