The Children of the Sun (14 page)

“What are you doing?” Amun Sa asked, perplexed, and she stood up on tiptoes to whisper into his ear.

“If we went and stood in that alley, there, we would be deep in the shadows, and no one would see.”

“My darling …” Amun Sa murmured, his tone slightly nervous as he glanced around, looking for any others who might be out sharing the evening cool with them.

“I don’t want to wait. I can lean against the wall, with you behind me, and you could cup my breasts with your hands while you fill the part of me that is empty.” She longed to feel his arms around her, his fingers pinching at her nipples, his teeth at her neck.

“Are you sure?” Amun Sa whispered back, and Ashayt felt something wild and animalistic open up within her, a ravenous desire that seemed impossible to deny.

“Take me there,” she snarled into his ear. “Take me there and press me up against the wall and … and
fuck
me. Hard and fast, like a beast. Like a brigand in the night. I am not yet your wife; for another five days, I am only your woman, and I wish you to lay claim to me.”

Amun Sa, visibly aroused now underneath his tunic, seemed to need no further encouragement. He led her quickly to the alleyway, away from the torches that lined the main thoroughfare they had been traversing, until all she could see of him was an inky, purple silhouette, and then he turned and pressed his lips to hers. Ashayt could feel his member against her. She made a growling noise of desire and lifted the linen fabric up, exposing him and taking him into her hands.

Amun Sa made a noise of desperate need as she stroked him, and in only a moment more he took her by the shoulders and spun her around, pulling at the sash that bound her dress at her shoulder. Ashayt felt the cool night air caress her body for a moment as her dress slipped to the ground, and then Amun Sa stepped up behind her, his hands coming up to cup her heavy breasts, and she pressed her arms up against the wall of sandstone blocks.

“Take me,” she whispered, and bent a little at the waist, and she felt him encircle her belly with one arm and pull backward even as he thrust forward. Then he was inside of her, and the force of his entry caused her buttocks to slap against his belly with a noise that Ashayt felt sure must have been heard by every living thing in this great city, but she no longer cared. She felt him withdraw and thrust again, and again came the noise, and Ashayt followed it with a long, low moan of pleasure.

Amun Sa, lips at her ear, now whispered, “Someone will hear.”

“Let them,” she hissed back, and pushed against him. “Let the whole world hear and know that I am yours.”

Amun Sa seemed to acquiesce to this, at least temporarily, and for a time there was only the sound of their coupling accompanied by rough panting and the occasional gasp of pleasure. Then he leaned in to her again and seemed to make one last, ridiculous attempt at propriety.

“We must be quiet,” he said, and Ashayt felt a sort of mad rage streak through her. Quiet? They were animals, animals like lions on the plains that mated where they pleased and when it suited them. She pulled herself from him and spun, barely registering the surprise in his eyes, and with a single shove, startling in its strength, she sent him stumbling backwards. He lost his footing and landed in the sand with a thud, and he might have voiced some protest if Ashayt had not knelt immediately astride him and stopped his words with a kiss.

She found his manhood again, hard and hot and slippery, and slid it easily back inside of her, and by the time she had finished kissing him, Amun Sa seemed no longer interested in keeping silent. He was making harsh, high grunts, his hands wrapped again around her breasts, squeezing her dark nipples with each thrust of his hips. Ashayt knew he would soon finish, wanted him to finish, wanted him to feel that pleasure.

She leaned down and in, kissing him, kissing his lips and his chin and his cheeks and his neck. She stayed there at his neck and felt a curious warmth in her upper gums, accompanied by just the slightest hint of pain, but it was distant and could not compare to the pleasure between her thighs and the unnamed, ravenous need that seemed now to fill her entire body.

“Darling …” Amun Sa said in a strangled voice, his last living word, and when he pumped again with his hips and she felt him loose his seed within her, she bit deeply into his neck, and drank his blood, and so at last satisfied the thirst that had raged within her now for so many hours.

* * *

It was only after the death of her lover, the only man whom she had ever known as a woman and the only man whom she would ever love for all her long, strange life, that Ashayt pulled away from Amun Sa’s neck and realized what she had done. Feeling slow and disoriented, drugged, she touched her fingers to her lips and held them before her, slicked red with blood. How was it, she wondered, that she could see them so clearly in this dark alley?

Below her thighs, which shook still in pleasure, her lover was no longer thrusting his hips. His chest no longer rose and fell with breath. His eyes stared up and out into the night, vacant and expressionless, and if his face betrayed anything at all of the violence that had been done to him, it was nothing more than the slightest hint of confusion, as if he searched for answers among the stars and found there nothing satisfactory.

Ashayt took in a breath to scream. There was nothing else she could think to do – she had murdered her lover in a dark alleyway in the throes of passion. She was going to scream and scream until her voice died and her lungs burst, until she wept blood, until the Gods themselves relented and, begging her to cease, saw fit to bring Amun Sa back from the land of the dead.

She was going to scream, but the chuckle she heard locked the breath in her chest and brought her up short. It was just a single, brief laugh, grimly amused and dark, but in that moment all of her memories flooded back into her mind, and Ashayt recalled every second of her encounter with the thing that stood now behind her.

I will make you mine, and when next he sees you, he will not know the woman who stands before him,
the thing had said, and surely this had been proven true. Amun Sa had gone into the alley not to lie with the girl from the desert, who he thought was going to marry him in six days’ time. He had gone instead to his death at the hands of some new and awful creature that had taken her place.

“I could not have hoped for better,” the thing said in its murky, disgusting voice. “The harlot and her lover, absconding into the night for one last, fatal embrace. Tell me, my dear, do you think he understood what you’ve become, when you bit him? Do you think he understood that his death was at hand, and had time to regret ever meeting this filthy, black-skinned orphan bitch now sucking his very life away?”

Ashayt was up on her feet and turning, fingers hooked into claws, before she even had time to realize she meant to attack. With a howling cry of despair, and rage, and hate, she threw herself at the man-thing that had done this to her, meaning to claw its eyes from their sockets and chew its foul tongue from its mouth.

The creature reached out with its right hand and slapped her, the force of it hard enough that Ashayt was thrown bodily against the sandstone wall, her face mashing into the rough surface and tearing open in a dozen places. The blow should have killed her. It should have killed her – and there were many times in the long years hence that she wished it had – but it did not, and instead she fell backward to the ground and lay there, hands covering her battered face, writhing in miserable agony.

“You’ll not lay a hand on me, whore,” it said, its voice filled with grim mirth, and it took a step forward and into a shaft of moonlight. Ashayt had taken her hands away at the sound of his footstep, and she saw now for the first time its ghastly visage. The creature’s face was a mass of scars, as if its flesh had been chewed on by rats for some extended period and then left to heal. It possessed neither hair nor eyebrows, and where its nose should have been there were only two grotesque slits, malformed and damp with mucus. One eye had gone milky and dead. The other glittered out at her with horrid, malicious glee.

Ashayt again drew in breath to scream, this time in terror, and the thing made a sort of hissing noise, slashing its hand through the air, and her throat locked tight again. What came out instead was a wheezing sound that was barely audible.

“Already you have made too much noise,” it told her, crouching down to look at her better as she lay, naked and battered, on her side in the dust. “It is a miracle that none have yet come to investigate and found you here with your dead lover. Now there will be no more. Now you will listen.”

And so the thing began to speak. It told her of the six centuries it had lived since first its master had brought it into the world under the moon, a thing to be caged and tortured, experimented upon, burnt by the sun and blinded by acids. Disfigured. Always, the blood would bring it back from the brink of death, but even the blood could do only so much, and so the thing now was forced forever to skulk at the periphery of the human world.

“I killed him, of course. My master. It took more than one hundred years – a century of torture – but at last came a moment of weakness. A moment of distraction. I put a shiv into his eye that I had made with a bone from my own finger. A small sacrifice for one’s freedom, don’t you think? As he screamed and cursed, I shoved him into a vat of viscous, oily pitch and set it alight. I stood and watched as he burned alive, and each time he struggled to free himself from the sticky, flaming mess, I shoved him back in with his own staff.

“His shrieks were like the sweetest song played by the most talented of musicians, and I savored every one of them. When at last the flames guttered to a stop, I carried the entire trough out and cast it into the merciless sea. I can think of no more fitting a burial, no better a casket. I do hope the fishes there enjoyed his remains.”

In the years that followed, the creature told her, it went north and lived for a time in the lush, green forests of that land, populated only by wild humans who had not yet formed the great cities and kingdoms of Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. At last, bored and possessed with the urge to pass on its gifts, the thing had returned to the land of its birth, and had stumbled upon Ashayt and Amun Sa one night as they had met for one of their many trysts.

“I knew in a moment that you were to be mine,” the creature told her. “I knew it, because I could see that you loved him, and that he loved you. There could be nothing in this world more delicious than taking such love and breaking it, shattering it forever and leaving only a dead man in an alley and a whore on the ground, naked and stinking of sweat and blood and seed.”

“You are a monster,” Ashayt told him. She could feel her body already healing from the assault, could feel new strength coursing through her, Amun Sa’s last gift. Soon she would attack again, and this time she would not be stopped so easily. She would kill this thing, or force it to kill her.

The creature laughed. “Yes, a monster is what I am, and now so are you. A thing which hunts men and drinks their blood. Tell me, my dear, was it good? Did you enjoy it?”

“It was beautiful,” Ashayt growled up at him from the dirt. “It was the most wonderful, magical experience that I have ever known, and you know that it was, may the Gods damn you. May the Gods damn you and me
both
for it, that I might spend the rest of eternity watching you suffer.”

The creature snorted out surprised laughter at this, its single good eye gleaming in the moonlight. Ashayt could feel her limbs tensing, preparing to propel her again to her feet.

“Are you about to try to kill me again, whore?” it asked.

“Yes,” Ashayt said, and bared her new, sharp fangs. “And if you call me a whore again, when I am done bathing in your blood I will … I will shit on your corpse and leave it here for the guards to find.”

The thing favored her with a wild grin. “Oh, very good. What an enjoyable night this is turning out to be. Do you not understand how this works? It took me one hundred years of planning to kill my master, and even then it was due to luck and timing, not any sort of physical advantage. My blood is ages older than yours. I could slap you again, girl, and your head would part from your shoulders and go bouncing down the alley. I could do this, and were you not now a vessel for my blood, I would do so gladly. By all means, though, please feel free to try.”

Ashayt looked up at him, muscles still tense, and saw the truth of it reflected in his one good eye. There was no fighting this creature, not here, not naked and weaponless in an alleyway. She felt her muscles relaxing, giving in to shaky acceptance of what was and could not be undone, and she began to weep.

“He was the only thing I ever had or wanted to have, and you took him from me,” she said to the thing that had made her a monster. “I loved him. I
loved
him! I would have died in his stead! I would die now, if it would bring him back.”

“I took nothing from you but your blood, and I returned that in like amount. I did not choose your victim for you, Ashayt-from-the-desert. Do not seek to place that blame on me. What you did, you did all by yourself.”

“I didn’t know!” she shrieked. “I didn’t—”

Again the thing held its hand out, silencing her as if with a thought.

“You
must
have known,” it hissed. “Just as I knew, when first I became what we are. Truly, I am amazed that you resisted the blood thirst for as long as you did. I expected you would wake that very next night and dig yourself out from the earth and feast upon the first human you encountered.”