Churchyard Lilies

No real woman, no lady would have laquered nails so sharp, lips as scarlet as that, glossed and wet. The three of them to have overtaken him… the shame of defeat blazes in his cheek, and only the way his face is wrenched to the bedsheets can disguise it. There’s the foreign, grating sound of cloth tearing, and Jonathan is dimly aware of cold on his skin, buttons coming free and their talons digging in on flesh; a perfect trio of Furies. One of them, the fair one, presses her lips to his, and he can taste blood in the sweetness of her breath, clinging about her white skin like a perfume.

She rises from him, voice a delicate prickle of sensation on his nerves. Something flowing, faintly poisonous. For a moment he is still caught in the thrall of ecstasy, or paralyzing horror, but his eyelids flutter, eyes refuse to open. Her voice is not a purr, but a reply to a command, cold and ringing. Another of these women– the Devil’s concubines– presses herself to him as if for protection, and he can feel the lacing on her dress digging into his skin. Her cold breasts, in a shift too filmy for modesty, tauntingly indecent; that he does not need to see to realize. Surely she– this creature, an it, not even in that way like his Mina, or Lucy–

Black wells up in his field of vision. More sounds of cloth and odd sensations and the sheets are pulled from him and he’s undeniably exposed, even as consciousness floods out of him. Faintly, he is aware of another’s laughter, more movement, the shift of bodies.

Then, it is no woman at all who kisses him, rank with blood and heedless of his exposure. After this, Harker knows no more.