The Wicca-Man: Tongue-Tied Read online

  THE WICCA-MAN:

  TONGUE-TIED

  Emily Veinglory

  ®

  www.loose-id.com

  Warning

  This e-book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language and may be considered offensive to some readers. Loose Id® e-books are for sale to adults ONLY, as defined by the laws of the country in which you made your purchase. Please store your files wisely, where they cannot be accessed by under-aged readers.

  * * * * *

  This book contains explicit sexual content, graphic language, and situations that some readers may find objectionable (homoerotic sex).

  The Wicca-Man: Tongue-Tied

  Emily Veinglory

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by

  Loose Id LLC

  1802 N Carson Street, Suite 212-2924

  Carson City NV 89701-1215

  www.loose-id.com

  Copyright © April 2007 by Emily Veinglory

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced or shared in any form, including, but not limited to printing, photocopying, faxing, or emailing without prior written permission from Loose Id LLC.

  ISBN 978-1-59632-445-9

  Available in Adobe PDF, HTML, MobiPocket, and MS Reader

  Printed in the United States of America

  Editor: Raven McKnight

  Cover Artist: Croco Designs

  Dedication

  To M.J. Pearson, a real trail blazer.

  Chapter One

  Sean walked home, late as usual, long after giving the last lecture of the day. The Woollington city skyline was a deep purple behind the university buildings as he ambled down towards town and the harbor, indifferent to the familiar beauty of the view. The streetlights were blinking into life as wintry dusk began to fall. It was that strange time of day, the lull between coming home and going out casting a hush over the empty streets. There was a feeling of foreboding in the air.

  As he shuffled down the hill from the university towards the rat-run of lanes and paths that led to his inner-city apartment, his thoughts were taken up by his teaching assistant, Rhea. Every time he had to walk through the narrowest part of their shared office, made narrower by two steel filing cabinets, she was in there with him. There really seemed to be no way to get through from the open area where he spoke to students, to the corner his workstation occupied, without rubbing his groin against the -- objectively speaking, rather ample and delicious -- ass of Rhea Colecheck. Very few men would find that a cause for complaint.

  Sean was a psychologist; he knew these things happened. He was around Rhea day after day, a figure of some minor authority (until she finally worked out that an untenured professor is the academic equivalent of a disposable minion). She had developed what might, rather too aptly, be called a “crush” on him. He could tell her to cut it out, of course. He could just come out himself, but Sean knew damn well he wasn’t going to do anything so overt and utterly embarrassing. First thing tomorrow he was going to rupture the meager fibers that passed for his abdominals moving those overstuffed damned filing cabinets out of the way, in the hope that removing the bottleneck would be enough of a hint for a bright girl like Rhea. Sunk in thought, he took a wrong turn towards the esplanade and was most of the way down the block before he realized his mistake.

  Suddenly Sean noticed how dark it had become and that he had strayed into one of the few truly dangerous parts of town. He tried to look nonchalant as he retraced his path, but in his old grey suit (noticeably worn at the ass and elbows) and square gold spectacles, he was never going to pass as anything other than a stray sheep in these parts. His worst fears were realized when he walked straight into a dark, solid figure; a tall man was blocking his retreat. A rather muscular and handsome one, he noted reflexively.

  “Sorry,” Sean muttered as he stumbled back. But then he felt it -- this man was a vampire.

  Sean was uniquely positioned to know when a man wasn’t quite what he seemed. He was a witch in full standing, with finely tuned occult senses -- when he wasn’t daydreaming and losing his way. Not that that so-called ‘vampires’ were magical beings; it was simply a name the media had attached to a medical condition that had arisen a couple of decades ago. But it was apt enough, given the propensity its sufferers had for mayhem and blood-motivated muggings. Nor did it help that a practitioner’s blood was considered a particular delicacy. If offered the choice of a selection of toothsome, absentminded wandering idiots, any self-respecting vampire would go for the witch every time.

  “Fee, fie, fo, fum ...” the swarthy vampire whispered. “I smell the blood of a Wiccan man.” He reached out and grabbed Sean’s arm with a casual but vicelike grip.

  The vampire’s eyes glowed like coals in the darkness, and the street was empty all around them. Sean had given very little thought to what he would do in a situation like this. On the rare occasions that he worked magic, it was the type that required extensive preparation and a few tangible props as well. His life was starting to flash before his eyes, and what a dismal parade of lost opportunities it was, from the time Johnny Briggs tried to grope him behind the changing sheds at school, to the first time he met his current boss, Dean McIntyre, and managed to inadvertently insult his mother, his God, and his favorite footy team within the space of a single evening. In gape-mouthed panic, he found a fluid string of words did manage to force themselves from between his dry lips.

  “Heed me, hide me. Always bide with me. None may harm me, sheltered in your love.” Belatedly he recognized what he had incanted. A unique and powerful binding spell passed down to him by Granny Lou -- the blackest sheep in the family. The Drull binding.

  The look in the vampire’s eyes faded from wicked hunger to dull adoration. It transformed his creased and predatory features into a smooth visage that would be more fitting for an ancient Greek statue than an urban predator. Dim light from the distant streetlamp limned his noble nose, glinted in his glassy eyes, and made a halo of his glossy hair. Damn, he may be a monster, but he is certainly a handsome one.

  Sean had a whole new problem -- a tall, dark, handsome vampire who was now hopelessly spellbound in love with him. He looked up and down the empty street and straightened his jacket. “What the hell do I do now?” he muttered.

  “Whatever you want, my love,” the vampire replied with a foolish smile.

  * * * * *

  So of course Sean took the vampire home.

  His apartment didn’t really have much space, not enough for a guest room, not even for a guest coffin. But there wasn’t much else he could do because the vampire had to bide with him so long as the spell was in force -- and the moment Sean released him, the vampire’s rage at being enthralled was likely to be murderous. The mysterious disease that caused the transformation seemed to drive the vampires to band together and fall under the influence of the most violent and paranoid of their number. Vampires were always trouble, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to get rid of this one.

  The vampire -- Thane -- strolled in and dropped his heavy leather jacket over the back of the couch. He surveyed the small space, every surface cluttered with papers, dirty dishes, and other ephemera, before turning his arresting gold-flecked brown eyes back on Sean with an ingratiating smile that looked very out of place on his handsome features.

  “You realize yo
u feel this way only because of a spell?” Sean said. A moment later he wished he hadn’t; it wasn’t really something he wanted the buff monster to have an epiphany about. It was widely rumored in the occult subculture that witches had created the vampire race twenty-odd years ago for some obscure reason that even the conspiracy nuts had trouble inventing. Even if this was true, Sean didn’t know why it pissed the vamps off so much -- super-senses and strength and the theoretical possibility of immortality didn’t seem like such a bad deal to him. If it was the impulse control problem that bothered them so much, their intermittent witch hunts seemed a peculiar sort of protest.

  Thane shrugged blithely and continued to gaze at Sean with increasingly nuanced fascination. It was obvious that the binding didn’t blunt his intellect even if it did enslave his emotions. Sean perched on his old armchair, and Thane lounged on the sofa opposite. It was like paying court to a tiger -- it isn’t that tigers aren’t beautiful, but would you ever want one in your living room? Sean looked the vampire up and down, chewing on his thumbnail.

  On closer examination, there was a drawn look on Thane’s face and a blend of attractions in his eyes. Sean had little doubt as to what that meant. He sighed. Having let Thane follow him home, he supposed it was also his responsibility to feed him.

  “How much blood do you need?” Sean asked.

  Thane seemed to take that as permission. “A small amount only,” he said as he knelt before Sean. Reluctantly, Sean leaned forward, every muscle of his body tense. From this distance he could read the tiny lettering on the front of Thane’s shirt: ‘Vampires give killer hickeys’. Given how close you had to be to read it, it must be meant more as an advisory than a joke. It also suggested a flippancy on the matter that only the most merciless of his kind would display. Vampires had a lot of quirks, and total obedience to a clan leader was one of them. Given that their leaders leaned more towards Manson than Bambi, on the whole the results were unpleasant, to say the least.

  “You have to do whatever I say,” Sean said with a quavering voice that still failed to convey the depths of his anxiety. “So I command you to take no more than you need ...”

  It was ironic really that in trying to avoid this situation, he was obliged to submit to it. The best he could hope for was that this way he would probably survive the indignity. Thane put one hand on Sean’s thigh, firmly. Sean stiffened. A moment later, the touch of Thane’s lips upon the skin of his neck was like ... well, there was nothing like it. It felt like a sting at first, and he flinched. Sean’s flesh, gently pinioned by small, curved fangs, ached -- but then the ache began to change. His groin pulsed as pleasure diffused through him. He gasped and pushed Thane back, but clutched at him at the same time with curled, convulsed fingers.

  Thane allowed himself to be repelled, although there was no doubt he had the strength to resist. As his fangs slid free, Sean suffered a strange sense of loss; a tremor shook his whole body. In his confusion, he could not even discern which emotion racked his body: fear? desire? One part of his body was anything but confused; Sean blushed to feel his cock grow hard and push up against his thigh.

  “Is it always like that?” Sean asked.

  “Always,” Thane replied with an enigmatic smile. “Was it your first time?”

  Sean stood abruptly and turned his back in embarrassment. Vampiric necking was one area where he wasn’t a virgin anymore, at least. He staggered into his bedroom. At least he had the consolation that every test showed vampirism wasn’t infective on a person-to-person basis. Which was less than reassuring; nobody could explain exactly what the vector was, or how the condition was contracted.

  The bedside mirror reflected his rumpled appearance mercilessly under the bare, swinging bulb. The reflection of the living room behind him showed Thane still sitting there wearing the benign but insolent expression of the cat that truly got the cream and then moved in with the cow. Sean closed the door firmly between them. The fear was a lump in his guts, but his cock was also a persistent lump distorting the front of his old slacks. He looked down at it accusingly, but received only the groin’s equivalent of a shrug in reply.

  Beneath his conservative suits, Sean was young -- well, short of forty anyway -- healthy, and not entirely heterosexual, although he’d never put those desires into practice. There was nothing inexplicable about the force of the simple physical desire that was running through him, but he refused to give in to it. Or perhaps there was something in the vampire’s spit that coerced his lust; he’d never taken much interest in the condition. It didn’t matter; even unmixed with fear and doubt, it was an impulse he had no interest in indulging, let alone with a spell-bridled beast.

  He toyed with the notion of calling on his spirit animal guardian, but frankly, Rat would be most likely to tell him to head back in there to get consummated rather than just consumed. Rat was of the opinion that his main goal was to get Sean to ‘lighten up’ and ‘get a life’ -- not exactly the kind of ethereal wise man Sean had been hoping for when he’d conducted his summoning ritual a few years back, and it had been months since he’d even tried to make something useful from the connection. Rat was less like a sage and more like marijuana, and he was the last thing Sean felt he could face right now.

  He heard the springs creak as Thane settled down on the sofa in the living room. Every part of Sean from the chin down was in agreement with Rat’s presumptive advice; he should go back out there and take advantage of having a gorgeous man as his absolute slave. Sean took off his glasses and laid them on the desk beside his dog-eared diary, then turned to look at his wrinkled single bed. He sighed and prepared to sleep alone in it, as usual. But as his hand worked his restive cock, it was Thane he thought of.

  The way his leather motorbike jacket sat on his shoulders emphasized their masculine breadth, but his worn jeans sat so loosely around his narrow waist. The button above the fly even turned out a little, as if waiting for someone to reach forward and oh-so-casually release him. The short zipper would drop down, and beneath it no undergarments to stand in the way.

  He could imagine Thane, so calm -- and altogether literally sanguine -- emerging eagerly from the denim confines, flushed with freshly taken blood. Stepping out of his jeans, he would push Sean down on the couch, stiff cock insistent between them, silk thighs straddling him. Leather jacket thick and cold under Sean’s hands as Thane spread Sean’s thighs with blithe confidence that he would not be denied. With a hasty smear of thick saliva, his cock ...

  With a stifled sigh, Sean came perfunctorily, a muted climax that brought him back to the cold comfort of unvarnished reality. His face flushed as he turned on his side and cowered down beneath his covers. If what they said about vampiric senses was right, nothing he’d done would have gone unnoticed by his undead guest.

  * * * * *

  After three years as a “temporary” assistant professor at Elizabeth University, Sean was so set in his morning routine that he hardly thought about the vampire on the sofa as he went through his ablutions. He got himself washed and dressed without really waking up, let alone thinking about his situation. Thane didn’t move as Sean bustled out past him, late as usual. Sean supposed later, however, that the matter was still in the back of his mind, as he left hurriedly, without his appointment diary.

  He got through the morning lecture, Statistics for Social Scientists, mostly on autopilot and made up the hour before lunch looking through some of his favorite journals down at the library. A few ideas for grant proposals flitted through his head, but nothing gelled. Probably because, under the thin ice of his usual routine and concerns, a whirlpool of panic was boiling away -- but he just didn’t know how to face it. Finally, he went down the old stairway into the library stacks, mainly because it was the closest he could come to digging a hole and hiding in it. And if he went back to his office, Rhea and the file cabinets would be there awaiting their next inevitable conjunction. He’d planned to get in early and move the damned things, but a restive night and distracted mind had
put pay to those plans.

  He sat in the basement, looking blankly at a dusty terminal screen. The computerized book catalogue’s cursor blinked. On, off, on, off, next to the single old-fashioned green ASCII text: SEARCH? It was absolutely quiet except for an occasional moan from the pipes in the walls. Nobody came down to stacks anymore. Most people just used the online journals, and those with a vestigial notion of printed materials tended to stick to stuff published well after the 1970 threshold. Anything older came down here, to stagnate. Which was entirely too apt, that being the year of Sean’s birth.

  He was in the right sort of company, all right. Did the old bound-up journals worry like he did, about being taken off the shelf? Oh, no, will he crack my binding, tear my pages, find errors in my text? As long as my covers are closed, I can assume they are filled with wisdom. But if they were ever opened ... Not that he was seriously considering taking advantage of Thane. No, really. Imagining it, yes. Fantasizing about it, sure. But not really considering actually doing it, oh, no. The Drull binding would make it the occult equivalent of statutory rape, no matter what the lascivious vampire, and Sean’s own idiotic id, might prefer.

  As a responsible thrall-owner, even short term, he supposed he should look into vampirism -- the care and feeding, et cetera. The scientific community was well aware of this new condition, which had arisen in the late eighties and been slowly spreading ever since, although sufferers still numbered no more than a few thousand. An early court ruling prevented anyone from holding a vampire against their will, and very few chose to allow themselves to be studied, so research proceeded only very slowly. People just woke up with no memory of their previous lives and with drastic changes in their personalities and tastes. In conditions of near darkness, signs of aging halted, and strength and the acuity of all senses were enhanced; but UV light precipitously reversed these effects. Their hearts no longer beat, their body temperatures were barely above ambient, and the erratic readings medical equipment could detect were more a source of confusion than elucidation. The blood still circulated in their bodies, but nobody was quite sure how. By any pre-existing definition, they were dead, medically if not legally. But vampires were still counted as persons.