ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
They took Kruinh’s car, and David’s, and they drove to the little airport outside of Glencastle where a private plane awaited, and they climbed on board something like a very comfortable house with wings. Sunny had to stop himself from touching everything, and Kruinh grinned with pleasure at his lover’s surprise. But Dan had no shame, and he kept saying, “Look at this!” and “Look at that!” closing and opening pantry and refrigerator doors. As the plane rose, Sunny reflected that, while he had not thought Kruinh was poor, he had not, until now, understood just how wealthy he was.
It had been some time since Sunny had flown, and he wasn’t entirely sure where they were going. He didn’t ask. He’d never been that kind of person. He preferred to sail above the indifferent cloudscape, and he wondered if the pilot was a Drinker or if he, like David, had fallen in with these strange people Sunny now belonged to. When the plane touched down on an airfield, and they all transported to two long limousines, Sunny looked around the land beyond the airfield and it was Kruinh who said, “We are in France.”
The world was still green. Winter had not settled in. He had, for some reason, never associated France with forests, with these high trees and wild spaces of rivers, waterfalls, herds of leaping deer. He realized that up until now France had been a square shaped country on a map, a little bigger than a walnut, with an Eiffel Tower and a Notre Dame squeezed into it. He could not imagine so much land, so much road, so many lonely spaces with towns squatting in the distance off the road.
At last the trees gave way to a castle out of fairy tales. It was tall and white and many turreted with a blue tiled roof, and three bridges like iced sugar extending from one end to the other, over a wide, placid river, amber colored in the closing light of this autumn afternoon. Even as they passed through the bustling town beneath the place, warm lights winked down from the windows of the castle, and when the cars came through the gates and stopped at a hooded entry before the driveway, Sunny said, “This cannot be Visastruta.”
Visastruta did not sound like it was in France, and Kruinh and Tanitha—whose accents sounded perfectly American—did not have French names. This great white palace, easily the size of luxury hotel, reminded Sunny of the time his racist grandmother had them stay at the Biltmore and bragged about that family and things she should never have bragged about.
“It isn’t,” Chris said. “This is Chaperon.”
“This is Christopher’s home,” Kruinh explained.
“What?”
Shooing servants away, Chris picked up his own bags, more than could have comfortably been carried by a human of his size.
“It is my home sometimes,” he said. He turned to walk inside of the palace, greeting the servants, and passing them.
“He never comes here,” Dan said in a low voice.
“Once,” Tanitha said, offhandedly as she could, “Christopher loved a man, but he died as is the human way, and Christopher did not. They possessed this castle together for years, in great happiness, and when that man died, Christopher turned his back on it.”
“We shouldn’t have come, then,” Sunny said.
“We had to land somewhere,” Tanitha said. “This is one of our holdings, and we have traveled across the Atlantic. We… are used to sorrow. You cannot live for a long time and not be filled with it. If Christopher did not want us here, he would have said so.”
However old the castle was, and Sunny suspected the answer was “very”, it had been outfitted with modern conveniences so that it possessed the quality of a very fancy hotel. The rooms had thick velvet carpeting and were well heated, the windows double plated and secure against cold. Lifts led to the apartments where they would be staying, and the rooms where Sunny stayed with Kruinh were wide and low ceilinged, which Sunny realized made things warmer, and had two bathrooms in them, great windows on both sides, each looking over the river, for the castle seemed to be built on a sort of island, and as dusk fell, deer rolled over the hills.
Kruinh and Sunny stripped immediately, Sunny feeling the warmth of the carper between his toes, In the shower they wash the day away and made love a little, kissed a little, retired to the bed to stretch out and dry in the heat of the room.
“I want you,” Kruinh said after a while, his voice full of lust.
Seeing his penis risen, curved like a dark fruit, Sunny felt himself just as aroused. Outside the moon rose and he said, “Do you feel like I feel?”
Kruinh turned over, kissing him, wrapping his legs around Sunny and pressing his strong chest against him while Sunny ran his hands over Kruinh’s body. But they did not fuck. Erect, excited, they linked hands, and left the bed. The new old fashioned windows, they climbed from. They leapt into the night, their senses high for the kill. This was their land. They had to go a bit afield. They had to go into the city, wrapped in darkness. A couple importing North Africans as slaves fell under their jaws. A man waiting in the bushes to rape a woman walking through the park was next. As they crouched, naked, aroused in the night, mouths covered in blood, Sunny’s nostril’s widened. His hair stood up.
“There are more out here. More for the taking.”
Kruinh, greedily feasting from the neck of the rapist, did not speak at once, and when he did he looked as one sated, his mouth red, his white teeth pronounced against his firm, dark lips.
“And we are not the only ones who must eat,” he reminded Sunny.
Sunny nodded. He was not chided. He came to Kruinh, excited by the lust they’d held at bay, excited by his penis, thick and risen over firm thighs from the black bush of hair, excited by the blood smeared across Kruinh’s face, all over his brown body, and by the scent of blood Sunny smelled on himself. They came together, kissing, biting, locked in savage fucking, making no noise until some time later when they lay face to face, heaving in the darkness, the dead body only a few feet from them.
From the high balcony, David Lawry looked out over the night.
“I had no idea,” he murmured. “All of this…. Is yours?”
“Well, it’s Christopher’s,” Tanitha said. “He is lord of this and three other domains. Lawrence has his own, and I suppose I do too. And there are others, other holdings. But none of them is Visistruta, the homeland, the original holding.”
“I guess over… time… you might end up with a lot of things, places… castles.”
“You mean over centuries,” Tanitha corrected him,
“Yes,” David said. “I supposed I did.”
“Once,” she said, “it was like any kingdom. We held Visastruta and the lands around it. We were lords like any lords of the land. Princes. But time went on, and things changed. Firstly very few wanted to be ruled by deathless drinkers of blood, for in old times we were a protection against enemies, and then in time, fewer people wanted to be ruled by any lords. So rather than try to hold onto that land, we spread out, a network, a town here, a holding there, a duchy somewhere else. The kingdom became a web, in old times connected by ancient roads, roads that only certain people could follow.”
“Certain people?” David said. “Drinkers.”
“Witches, sorcerers, shapechangers.”
“Shapechangers.”
“Mostly werewolves.”
David blinked at her.
“Why so surprised? Did you think out of all the things you’d heard about, we were the only one that was real?”
When David did not answer, Tanitha said, “This very castle once belonged to a family of bisclavret—werewolves. But they gave it to us, a gift, long ago.”
“And all of these towns and castles are part of your kingdom?”
“Yes.”
“Mortals too.”
“Yes.”
“And are there many Drinkers?”
“Not as many as there were,” Tanitha said, “but more than you would probably think.”
“Then… there must be other kingdoms.”
“Yes,” Tanitha said. “In the same way that Visastruta’s kingdom spread out like a net, went underground, became quiet and hid behind companies and businesses, the other great kingdoms of the time did the same. And then there were human kingdoms which, in their way, had what you might call shadow kingdoms under drinker lords, and when the human kingdoms disappeared, the Drinker ones remained. Dealing with mortals powers, we present as businesses and have corporate representatives. But with the drinker kingdoms we still have royal visits, ambassadors.”
David went inside. He was no Drinker, and the cold did matter. He went to the wine, and the little snacks on the table. Tanitha followed.
“That day when we found Dan—dead—and brought him to the morgue, and then he disappeared, and then I found him alive again and I lost my mind, I was terrified. I didn’t even think I would pursue it.”
Tanitha sat down beside him on the bed.
“I thought… to look into such things would lead to madness and… devils, and now, at the end of it, here I am in a French castle, with a beautiful woman who is a princess of an invisible kingdom.”
Tanitha kissed him, and she squeezed his hand, but what she said to David, “The thing about life, and the thing about life with us, is that you may find more than enough room for madness and devils before long.”
It had been some time since Sunny had flown, and he wasn’t entirely sure where they were going. He didn’t ask. He’d never been that kind of person. He preferred to sail above the indifferent cloudscape, and he wondered if the pilot was a Drinker or if he, like David, had fallen in with these strange people Sunny now belonged to. When the plane touched down on an airfield, and they all transported to two long limousines, Sunny looked around the land beyond the airfield and it was Kruinh who said, “We are in France.”
The world was still green. Winter had not settled in. He had, for some reason, never associated France with forests, with these high trees and wild spaces of rivers, waterfalls, herds of leaping deer. He realized that up until now France had been a square shaped country on a map, a little bigger than a walnut, with an Eiffel Tower and a Notre Dame squeezed into it. He could not imagine so much land, so much road, so many lonely spaces with towns squatting in the distance off the road.
At last the trees gave way to a castle out of fairy tales. It was tall and white and many turreted with a blue tiled roof, and three bridges like iced sugar extending from one end to the other, over a wide, placid river, amber colored in the closing light of this autumn afternoon. Even as they passed through the bustling town beneath the place, warm lights winked down from the windows of the castle, and when the cars came through the gates and stopped at a hooded entry before the driveway, Sunny said, “This cannot be Visastruta.”
Visastruta did not sound like it was in France, and Kruinh and Tanitha—whose accents sounded perfectly American—did not have French names. This great white palace, easily the size of luxury hotel, reminded Sunny of the time his racist grandmother had them stay at the Biltmore and bragged about that family and things she should never have bragged about.
“It isn’t,” Chris said. “This is Chaperon.”
“This is Christopher’s home,” Kruinh explained.
“What?”
Shooing servants away, Chris picked up his own bags, more than could have comfortably been carried by a human of his size.
“It is my home sometimes,” he said. He turned to walk inside of the palace, greeting the servants, and passing them.
“He never comes here,” Dan said in a low voice.
“Once,” Tanitha said, offhandedly as she could, “Christopher loved a man, but he died as is the human way, and Christopher did not. They possessed this castle together for years, in great happiness, and when that man died, Christopher turned his back on it.”
“We shouldn’t have come, then,” Sunny said.
“We had to land somewhere,” Tanitha said. “This is one of our holdings, and we have traveled across the Atlantic. We… are used to sorrow. You cannot live for a long time and not be filled with it. If Christopher did not want us here, he would have said so.”
However old the castle was, and Sunny suspected the answer was “very”, it had been outfitted with modern conveniences so that it possessed the quality of a very fancy hotel. The rooms had thick velvet carpeting and were well heated, the windows double plated and secure against cold. Lifts led to the apartments where they would be staying, and the rooms where Sunny stayed with Kruinh were wide and low ceilinged, which Sunny realized made things warmer, and had two bathrooms in them, great windows on both sides, each looking over the river, for the castle seemed to be built on a sort of island, and as dusk fell, deer rolled over the hills.
Kruinh and Sunny stripped immediately, Sunny feeling the warmth of the carper between his toes, In the shower they wash the day away and made love a little, kissed a little, retired to the bed to stretch out and dry in the heat of the room.
“I want you,” Kruinh said after a while, his voice full of lust.
Seeing his penis risen, curved like a dark fruit, Sunny felt himself just as aroused. Outside the moon rose and he said, “Do you feel like I feel?”
Kruinh turned over, kissing him, wrapping his legs around Sunny and pressing his strong chest against him while Sunny ran his hands over Kruinh’s body. But they did not fuck. Erect, excited, they linked hands, and left the bed. The new old fashioned windows, they climbed from. They leapt into the night, their senses high for the kill. This was their land. They had to go a bit afield. They had to go into the city, wrapped in darkness. A couple importing North Africans as slaves fell under their jaws. A man waiting in the bushes to rape a woman walking through the park was next. As they crouched, naked, aroused in the night, mouths covered in blood, Sunny’s nostril’s widened. His hair stood up.
“There are more out here. More for the taking.”
Kruinh, greedily feasting from the neck of the rapist, did not speak at once, and when he did he looked as one sated, his mouth red, his white teeth pronounced against his firm, dark lips.
“And we are not the only ones who must eat,” he reminded Sunny.
Sunny nodded. He was not chided. He came to Kruinh, excited by the lust they’d held at bay, excited by his penis, thick and risen over firm thighs from the black bush of hair, excited by the blood smeared across Kruinh’s face, all over his brown body, and by the scent of blood Sunny smelled on himself. They came together, kissing, biting, locked in savage fucking, making no noise until some time later when they lay face to face, heaving in the darkness, the dead body only a few feet from them.
From the high balcony, David Lawry looked out over the night.
“I had no idea,” he murmured. “All of this…. Is yours?”
“Well, it’s Christopher’s,” Tanitha said. “He is lord of this and three other domains. Lawrence has his own, and I suppose I do too. And there are others, other holdings. But none of them is Visistruta, the homeland, the original holding.”
“I guess over… time… you might end up with a lot of things, places… castles.”
“You mean over centuries,” Tanitha corrected him,
“Yes,” David said. “I supposed I did.”
“Once,” she said, “it was like any kingdom. We held Visastruta and the lands around it. We were lords like any lords of the land. Princes. But time went on, and things changed. Firstly very few wanted to be ruled by deathless drinkers of blood, for in old times we were a protection against enemies, and then in time, fewer people wanted to be ruled by any lords. So rather than try to hold onto that land, we spread out, a network, a town here, a holding there, a duchy somewhere else. The kingdom became a web, in old times connected by ancient roads, roads that only certain people could follow.”
“Certain people?” David said. “Drinkers.”
“Witches, sorcerers, shapechangers.”
“Shapechangers.”
“Mostly werewolves.”
David blinked at her.
“Why so surprised? Did you think out of all the things you’d heard about, we were the only one that was real?”
When David did not answer, Tanitha said, “This very castle once belonged to a family of bisclavret—werewolves. But they gave it to us, a gift, long ago.”
“And all of these towns and castles are part of your kingdom?”
“Yes.”
“Mortals too.”
“Yes.”
“And are there many Drinkers?”
“Not as many as there were,” Tanitha said, “but more than you would probably think.”
“Then… there must be other kingdoms.”
“Yes,” Tanitha said. “In the same way that Visastruta’s kingdom spread out like a net, went underground, became quiet and hid behind companies and businesses, the other great kingdoms of the time did the same. And then there were human kingdoms which, in their way, had what you might call shadow kingdoms under drinker lords, and when the human kingdoms disappeared, the Drinker ones remained. Dealing with mortals powers, we present as businesses and have corporate representatives. But with the drinker kingdoms we still have royal visits, ambassadors.”
David went inside. He was no Drinker, and the cold did matter. He went to the wine, and the little snacks on the table. Tanitha followed.
“That day when we found Dan—dead—and brought him to the morgue, and then he disappeared, and then I found him alive again and I lost my mind, I was terrified. I didn’t even think I would pursue it.”
Tanitha sat down beside him on the bed.
“I thought… to look into such things would lead to madness and… devils, and now, at the end of it, here I am in a French castle, with a beautiful woman who is a princess of an invisible kingdom.”
Tanitha kissed him, and she squeezed his hand, but what she said to David, “The thing about life, and the thing about life with us, is that you may find more than enough room for madness and devils before long.”
