Chapter Text
It began, as so many of my adventures did, with my having been magnificent.
The Boston audience had adored me. Naturally. They had screamed themselves hoarse, thrown flowers, thrown underwear, thrown things I had no intention of identifying, and by the time I came offstage I was still vibrating with the particular pleasure that comes from being adored by a rabid crowd of beautifully unwell. There are worse ways to spend an evening, although at present I could think of several.
Backstage, I was considering my options.
A small crowd had gathered beyond the dressing-room door, all of them hoping to be chosen for the privilege of spending the night with me. They were beautiful in that peculiar modern way, all sharp cheekbones and smudged eyeliner and expressions suggesting they had recently discovered both death and poetry. One had been crying. Another had been staring at me without blinking for several minutes. There was a young man in a leather jacket who looked as though he had never once been told no in his life and a woman with red hair who looked as though she intended to be the one to tell him.
I looked them over with the solemnity the occasion deserved.
And then I saw her.
She was wearing a tie-dyed skirt, three, perhaps four bandanas, and enough crystals around her neck to have brought down a small chandelier. Her hair was enormous. Her earrings were enormous. Her conviction that she was connected to some mysterious force of the universe was, I suspected, enormous as well.
How novel. I pointed at her.
Her face lit up.
Around her, the others groaned.
I understood their disappointment. I felt it myself. Still, one must occasionally make an inspired choice.
The security guards immediately began herding them toward the exit.
“Off you go, sluts!”
Vulgar. But not untrue.
The woman was walking towards me with a small hop in her step. I appreciated the enthusiasm. It was one of the few things about her I would appreciate that evening.
“Come, Mon petit délice ,” I said, walking backwards into my dressing room.
She smiled as though I had just invited her into a sacred temple.
We had barely settled into the room before she took my hand between both of hers and looked deeply into my eyes.
“I feel so connected to you,” she said.
Hmm. Not the strangest way an evening in my company has begun, certainly, but unusual enough to make me wonder where this was going
“And your energy,” she continued, “is incredibly powerful.”
At this point I decided to stop paying attention to the odd words coming out of her mouth and started focusing on how I could get underneath the two—no, wait, three—bandanas she had knotted around her torso instead of a shirt.
“Is it?” I asked, feigning interest.
I began inspecting the knots. They appeared to have been arranged according to some private system known only to her and perhaps the spirits of several particularly vindictive craft stores.
“Oh, yes.”
“How fortunate.” There was nothing for it. I would simply have to rip the bandanas off. I could give her a tea towel or whatever to replace them once I kicked her out.
Actually, no I wouldn't bother. I would just drain her, keep it simple.
“I think I could use your aura for our next spell circle.”
My thought process stopped dead.
My hand, which had been reaching toward the nearest bandana, stopped in midair. I slowly withdrew it.
“Could you repeat that?”
“Our spell circle.”
Mon Dieu. I hadn't misheard her. Somehow, in the space of three words, my perfectly agreeable evening had become considerably less agreeable.
“Are you a witch?” I asked, hoping my tone conveyed the exact amount of contempt I felt.
She seemed genuinely surprised by the question.
“Obviously. I mean, look at me.”
I did.
I looked at the tie-dyed skirt. The bandanas. The crystals. The enormous hair. The expression of spiritual certainty.
Then I looked back at her wide, earnest eyes.
“Yes,” I said slowly. “I see the problem.”
She frowned.
“I assumed anyone dressed quite so determinedly like a witch could not possibly be an actual witch.”
Her mouth fell open.
I wasn’t finished. “What actual self-respecting witch dresses like this?”
“This is how I connect to the earth. To my feminine energy.”
“Your feminine energy.”
She nodded firmly.
I glanced down at the skirt.
“Is it in there?”
“It is everywhere.”
“Then perhaps you should take some of it with you when you leave.”
She looked offended.
I had stopped caring at this point, There were still people outside the stage door, presumably. There had to be. A man does not deliver a performance as orgasmic as I have tonight and suddenly find himself without alternatives because one woman has arrived wearing enough crystals to open a geological museum.
I wondered whether the red-haired woman was still there. She had looked promising. The young man in the leather jacket had too, now that I thought of it. There was no reason to choose, really. I had had an excellent evening. Why should I spoil it by becoming selective now?
“You may leave now.” I gestured toward the door, mind already off the woman and on to the next diversion of the night.
She folded her arms.
“Just like that? What about our connection?”
“Mmm.” I considered this. “Many people feel connected with me. It is a result of my great beauty and powerful magnetism. But nonetheless, my rule is no witches.”
Not even witches with about as much magical presence as a scented candle.
“I never wanted to sleep with you anyway.” She huffed.
“Excellent. We have achieved something together.”
I thought this was an excellent conclusion to the evening. We had established that she did not want me, I did not want her, and neither of us had to endure the other any longer. A triumph of modern communication.
Unfortunately, she was not finished.
“But you should still come to my spell circle.”
I stared at her.
Why?
Why would I do this?
Was this woman under the impression that I had spent centuries cultivating myself into Lestat de Lioncourt so that one evening in Boston I might wander into a basement with twelve women named Moonbeam and hold hands around a candle?
“I should do no such thing.”
“It could transform you.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“As a vampire, you are so disconnected from nature,” she said earnestly. “We could connect you with the earth and the divine feminine once more.”
I actually laughed. “I have already been transformed more times than you can possibly imagine.”
“Take your spells and your feminine energy elsewhere.”
Her expression hardened.
“You don't understand what I'm offering.”
“I assure you, I understand perfectly well what you're offering.”
“You can't just dismiss me!”
“I can. I've just done it.”
“You don't understand the power I'm offering.”
I rolled my eyes “I understand the power of leaving a room when I'm no longer wanted,” I said. “Perhaps you should learn that power as well.”
She frowned harder, if that was even possible “You'll regret this.”
I laughed. “Oh, I'm sure I will. Run along now Rainbow Swallows. Go run naked in the moonlight somewhere out of my sight.”
She raised one hand. For one ridiculous moment I thought she might slap me, and I remember thinking that would at least be comprehensible.
Instead she began to chant. It may have been Latin. It may have been Sanskrit. It may have been something she had invented five minutes earlier while standing in a health-food shop. Whatever it was, she delivered it with tremendous conviction.
And then I realised what it was. A curse.
Of all the absurd things that had happened to me in my long and eventful existence, this was somehow the one that offended me most.
I had been threatened by priests, assassins, madmen and several women with excellent reasons to kill me. I had never, until that moment, been cursed by someone wearing three bandanas.
Before my outrage could properly develop, the pain struck.
It seized me low in the stomach so suddenly that I doubled over.
“What did you do to me?”
She was already backing toward the door, a wicked smile on her face. She then gestured triumphantly toward the excessive number of crystal necklaces hanging from her throat.
“You idiot!” she exclaimed, “You never should have offended a witch with this many charged crystals”
And then she ran out the door cackling.
Not laughing.
Cackling.
I remained bent over, one hand clutching my stomach, staring after her.
How had I gotten here? I had performed magnificently. I had selected a beautiful woman from a crowd of beautiful people. I had brought her to my dressing room with every reasonable expectation that the evening would proceed in a manner agreeable to both of us.
And now I was being cursed by a woman who had fled my dressing room cackling like the villain in a children's story.
I could hear her disappearing footsteps.
Then silence.
I straightened as much as I could.
“Oh, this is humiliating.”
Another wave of pain struck.
I folded in half again.
“Very well.”
I waited. It passed.
I took a breath. Then another.
To distract myself I thought, almost nostalgically, of New Orleans. At least the witches there had gravitas. They understood presentation.
If one of them had cursed me, I could have respected it. There would have been a darkened room, perhaps some skulls, certainly candles. It would have all been very ominous. There might even have been some blood-letting involved.
But this?
A Boston witch in three bandanas cackling about crystals.
I laughed again.
Then the pain shot downward.
I stopped laughing.
It moved from my stomach toward my groin with an alarming determination, and I found myself gripping the edge of the dressing table as the sensation changed, becoming stranger and stranger until, quite suddenly, it felt as though something had -for want of better word - opened up.
Something between my considerable considerables and my derrière.
Well, that was new.
The pain had slunk away, replaced by an eerie, ticklish stillness. I hesitated only long enough to be sure I wasn’t about to pass out, then I reached, very slowly, down the front of my trousers.
Immediately, I realized something was off. My cock was there, thank God, but the rest of the arrangement felt… unfamiliar. My balls, usually so assertively present, felt lighter, almost diminished. Behind them was something soft, an indentation where none had been before. I pressed my fingers to it, and it gave, warm and yielding, the way no part of me ever had.
My brain short-circuited. I had known a great many women, in a biblical sense and otherwise. I knew exactly what that soft, slippery seam was, and it was, without a doubt, what I thought it was. I stroked it, once, shuddered with a strange, electric pleasure, and then pressed in. The sensation was uncanny—both alien and instantly, intimately familiar.
The witch. The bandanaed, crystal-draped witch. She had given me a pussy.
I nearly doubled over with excitement, then I truly did, laughing so hard I had to brace myself against the dressing table. The ridiculousness, the sheer audacity of the curse. Out in the city, somewhere, a woman in tie-dye was congratulating herself on having outmaneuvered the infamous Lestat.
She had no idea what she had unleashed.
I checked again, just to be sure. Yes. Absolutely.
A slow, wolfish grin spread over my face.
Oh, I was going to have so much fun with this.