“You are a woman."
Josua Cambridge

---

Saturday night, 12 March 2016, PM

Celia: Jackson Square covers a decent amount of land. Jade has been here before many times, both with her Jade face and her Celia face, and with other faces besides. Ordinarily she’s content to people watch, to listen in on snippets of conversation and enjoy a leisurely stroll through the square.

Tonight, though, tonight she hunts. Not for blood. No, not that. Not for her next meal. But for information. For the Ravnos fortune teller that haunts these parts, another piece of the puzzle that she gets to put together.

She keeps her gait slow, just another tourist on a stroll, her eyes peeled for the lick known as Yellow Sidra.

GM: Jackson Square is relatively safe until 10 or 11 PM (or at least, the police presence tries to make it feel safe), and it’s past that hour now. The ghost tours are over and even the crowds of visitors that gather around the back fence of St. Anthony’s Garden to take pictures of the giant shadow cast by the “Touchdown Jesus” statue are all gone. The square’s iron gate is closed and locked so that homeless people don’t sleep inside. Instead they sleep outside, with all of their dogs. Or they don’t sleep. They piss, shit, vomit, fuck, and shoot up. Jade is immediately accosted by several disheveled and foul-smelling men who get extremely close to her face as they scream for money. A few others just lick their lips, eyeing her like she’s a piece of meat as their fellows surround her. One wrinkled-faced man pulls down his pants and starts furiously masturbating in front of her.

Celia: Charming.

This is why she pays the boys, though, for nights like tonight when she has to put in an appearance in an otherwise unsavory part of the Quarter. They’ll need to have a chat about meeting her at her car rather than in the middle of… this. Screaming, dirty, masturbatory kine. The kind of juice bags she’d maybe feed on as a last resort. And this is what Dani has to look forward to if Roderick succeeds in sending her to Houston, without even the gifts of a clan to back her up.

Or a renfield. Two of them, actually, just beyond the men that gather around the not-so-helpless not-woman in their midst. What a sight for sore eyes.

She can help, at least. Can call on her deity-of-choice-given abilities to pull her out of this before things get ugly. Uglier, anyway. She’s pretty sure that guy in front of her won’t win any pageants anytime soon. She sends it out from her in a cresting wave, the impression that she isn’t some doe-eyed bambi that needs rescued. Celia, maybe. But Jade? Oh no. Jade is the heinous bitch with claws and fangs and a smile that’ll persist while she shreds right through a body with a quick swipe of those nails.

GM: The brothers yell and shove and get aggressive, like primates in a dominance contest. Somehow that feels like all this amounts to. The panhandlers grouse and spit obscenities, decreasing in volume as Jade’s presence washes over them, as they back off.

“Fucking homeless…” swears Randy.

Celia: It’s a contest they win, though, and handily.

That’s why she pays them the big bucks.

Well, one of many reasons.

She’s happy to see them in any case, despite the fact that they made her wait longer than normal, and she moves into the circle of their protection quickly enough. And isn’t that a thought, a vampire being protected by a pair of ghouls. Maybe if somebody stopped throwing her around to fuck and focused on the fighting she wouldn’t get jumpy about being surrounded by a bunch of kine. What had he said to her? “You’re a badass vampire now.”

Right.

She’s got a pair of badasses with her now, anyway.

GM: A thin, dirty figure makes their way up to Jade, or at least as close as the brothers let them. They’re small and slight, dressed in an oversized dirty hoodie with a raggedy-edged blanket wrapped around their frail shoulders. Their facial structure looks male, but they have breasts and long hair, matted and unkempt. Their dark skin is worn and splotchy, dotted with acne scarring. Jade thinks they’re a ghoul at first, from the smell, but when they lick their lip Jade sees a chipped fang.

Just one fang.

“Hey, hey lady, lady lick, what you doin’ here…?”

Celia: She’s glad Dani avoided that fate, at least. One fang. How to they manage? She imagines it’s like drinking through a pinched straw. Or maybe they bite twice.

Curiosity overpowers her disgust. She doesn’t recognize this one. She puts a hand on Randy’s arm to prevent him from doing anything like shoving it away, letting the ragged half-breed through. Close enough to smell the stink of its body rather than its blood. Close enough to see that chipped fang. She smiles politely all the same, just like she would for a real vampire.

Maybe she’ll bring Roderick down here so he can get a glimpse of what fate awaits Dani if he sends her out of the city to a place where she doesn’t have friendly backers willing to share their very lush domain with the best feeding in the city.

“Evenin’,” Jade says back to it, gesturing it forward. Boy or girl? She can’t tell. Neither, technically. “I’m looking for someone who hangs out around here. Think you can point me in the right direction?”

GM: Randy and Reggie both regard the thin-blood warily. Or at least disgustedly. They remain protectively close to Jade. Close enough to block their arms between her and the sorry creature.

The thin-blood nods up and down.

“Oh, you bet, lady, they here, I know… who you lookin’ for?”

Celia: Lucky boys to get such a good-looking, true-blooded domitor, aren’t they?

“The fortune teller,” she tells the thin-blood.

GM: "There lotta fortune tellers, lady, lotta fortune tellers… " says the thin-blood. “But you mean that one… yeah… I know… I know… need some green, first… help me rem’ber…”

A thin, scabbed-over hand materializes from the hoodie.

Celia: Jade slides a bill into the outstretched hand. Where it came from is anyone’s guess; she’s not so silly as to carry a purse or wallet with her this late at night.

GM: Reggie removes the bill from Celia’s hand and drops it to the ground. The thin-blood bends to pick it up, seemingly unconcerned.

Celia: Rude.

GM: “Oh, that good… that good… yeah, my mem’ry’s comin’ back…” nods the thin-blood. The bill disappears into the hoodie. “She ain’ here, this hour… she leaves, when the tourists do… mmm… lil’ more green, maybe I rem’ber where she be…”

Celia: Jade pulls free another bill, giving Reggie a look.

GM: “Hey, you might catch something,” he says, moving to pluck the bill from her hands.

Celia: “You don’t need to be rude.”

GM: “Unless it’s from sticking my dick somewhere, I’m not going to catch something either.”

Celia: He better not catch something from that, either, or he won’t get to stick it in her ever again.

GM: He’ll be just like his brother then.

“Maybe just place it on a bench,” Randy offers helpfully.

Celia: She gives the hands another look, though, in case there’s something to be done about it. She hasn’t seen this many scabs since… the monkey’s master.

The ugly one.

Not that that narrows it down.

GM: The hands are small like a woman’s and look dirty and unwashed. Some of the partly-healed scabs are a yellowish brown.

“Hey, leave the money where you like, I don’ give a shit… s’long as I get it…” says the thin-blood.

Celia: Wherever Reggie ends up putting it, then.

She really should bring Roderick down here, show him how the thin-bloods exist. Easy to imagine Dani’s unwashed face and hands, cuts oozing from lack of treatment, being pushed around by ghouls and licks and kine, even.

“The location?” she prompts the thin-blood.

GM: Reggie drops it on the ground.

The half-vampire picks it up.

Celia: She’ll reprimand him later for it. Maybe with a paddle.

GM: “Okay… she be at… seein’ a customer, guy who wants his fortune… mm…. can’t rem’ber who, just yet….”

The hand stays outstretched.

Celia: Another two bills to speed the process along.

GM: Reggie’s fingers brush against his concealed carry, as if asking whether Jade is tired of throwing away money.

Celia: She gives a small shake of her head. She’s happy to pay for information so long as it pans out.

GM: Reggie drops those bills on the ground too.

They both disappear into the hoodie.

“Okay… okay… it comin’ back, now…”

Celia: Her smile tightens, but she waits, expectant.

GM: “Marigny… that be where…”

“I can’t rem’ber where in Marigny… maybe if…”

Celia: “Marigny is a large place.”

GM: “You already got two bills,” Reggie says flatly.

“Oh… guess I did… heh heh…”

Celia: She’s starting to doubt that the thin-blood even has the information.

She will be very unhappy if she has to come back.

GM: “The Midnight Bayou… that be where…”

“Hey… say… can I have some money, lady…?”

“You just got eighty fuckin’ dollars,” says Randy.

The thin-blood shrugs.

Celia: “If she’s where you say she is,” Jade tells it. She turns to go.

GM: “Always fun hitting up low-lifes,” Randy mutters as the trio leave.

Celia: “I should have expected it. No reason to peddle her trade once the gates close.” She’d spent more time with her family than she’d realized.

GM: “So that’s one of those other scary vampires,” says Reggie.

Celia: She glances at Reggie.

“No. That’s a half-breed. Diluted blood.”

GM: “Pretty sad,” answers Reggie.

Celia: “It is. They’re stuck between worlds.”

GM: “You guys all gonna turn into that someday?”

Celia: “No. It’s like breeding dogs, though. The problems get worse the further the line goes.”

GM: “Kinder just to put ’em down, maybe.”

Celia: “A lot of people agree with you.”

“The gifts that you have because of my blood? They don’t.”

GM: “So, what, they’re just… blood drinkers? Ordinary people with a special diet?”

Celia: “Sort of. They have some gifts, but they follow different rules. Sun doesn’t hurt them. No Beast.” Both of them have been warned about that, at least. “They can learn the tricks, but it’s different.”

“They’ll never be as strong. Their distance from the original prevents it.”

“If I were to turn you right now, as a day old, you’d be stronger than someone like that who has been around for years.”

GM: “So why make them?” asks Reggie.

“Why does anyone do dumb shit?” shrugs Randy.

Celia: Randy has a point.

“The man on the bottom will always look to put someone else beneath him.”

“Control. Power. Loneliness. Accident.”

GM: “I just wonder who the fuck took a look at that and decided, ‘Hey, let’s make a discount vampire,’” says Reggie.

“Maybe an accident,” says Randy.

Celia: “They only recently started popping up,” Jade tells him. “Most of the powers-that-be exterminate them when they’re found. Not a lot is known about them.”

GM: “Seems like the right idea,” says Reggie.

Celia: “There are some benefits,” Jade says with a shrug. “The sun and Beast thing. They can eat. Fuck.”

“Nothing worth the drawbacks, though.”

GM: Sucks to be Dani.

Celia: It really does.

---

Saturday night, 12 March 2016, PM

GM: Clubbers shoot jealous looks as bouncers usher Jade into the Midnight Bayou ahead of the line. The club is much the same as Beach on Bourbon was: a dimly-lit space where dozens of tightly-packed sweating bodies writhe and undulate to ear-rupturingly loud music. Flickering red lights bathe the shouting, dancing, crowd in a blood-like sheen. There’s barely enough room to move one’s arms at times. The admixed smells of sweat, cigarette smoke, alcohol, perfumes, and cologne clings to everything. The music is omnipresent, thumping and pounding in one’s ears louder than any beating heart. It’s enough to make the dead feel alive, if ever so briefly. Jade doesn’t hear any Love & Liars in the DJs’ mix, this time, but the lyrics are much the same, and speak to the same disaffected youth. They scream what shit the world is and the pointlessness of living by the book.

Jade spots a number of Kindred eyeing or dancing alongside the club-goers, then luring them off to private bathroom trysts. It’s not unlike lions watching herd animals at the watering hole, then going after ones foolish enough to separate themselves from safety in numbers.

The Toreador is swiftly shown upstairs past sliding glass doors to the VIP lounge. It’s a more subdued than downstairs, though it’s done in the same dark color scheme. Better-dressed patrons lounge about on comfortable leather chairs and sofas, quietly conversing and sipping expensive drinks. A large glass window stares down on the club’s first floor, so that patrons might watch the revelry from a quiet distance and perhaps even decide which revelers catch their fancy. Revealingly-clad smiling waitresses glide across the floor, relaying orders between customers and the bartender expertly mixing drinks in the back.

Celia: She still doesn’t know how Sundown does it: how he determines who is who and tells his bouncers to let them in accordingly. She can’t imagine that it’s something as mundane as making them memorize photos. Still, it’s the sort of treatment she has come to expect from the clubs in Marigny, and the jealous looks and whispers from the line of juicebags only makes her smile.

Music assaults her once she passes the threshold. It thrums through her body, urging her to dance. She wants to find a partner and let them twirl her around the floor. To lose herself among the press of bodies. For far too many years now she has had her weekend evenings taken up by Elysia; and whose idea was that to schedule it the same night the kine come out in droves? Easiest feeding of the week. Just grab a vessel, sink in, and pull.

Jade resists the temptation, sweet though it is.

She moves up the stairs to the VIP lounge, content to let her eyes sweep the space for a brief moment.

GM: Jade instinctively senses that a number of the patrons are like she is. She can make out Esther Sue Parker, Abraham Garcia, Camilla Doriocourt, Harlequin, Lidia Kendall, Joshua Pacuad, and Emerson Newhouse Hearst, as well as the club’s proprietor himself, who is currently engaged with Harlequin. The gathered Kindred converse among themselves, murmur sweet nothings to vessels in their arms, watch the dancing crowds below, or watch one another. Whatever cause and elder one may pledge support to, Marigny is neutral ground.

Celia: Neutral it may be, but she calls none of those assembled “friend.” Loose, occasional ally. Partner. Guildmate. But none of Savoy’s partisans. None of the friendly faces she knows from his court.

And not the lick she has come to see. Perhaps the thin-blood had lied to her. Perhaps it will learn what happens when her time is wasted.

Far be it from her to waste this opportunity to mingle. Pacuad, Hearst, and Garcia all catch a smile from the pretty Toreador in their midst, the latter a wink. She can’t help the way her attention strays to Doriocourt, though. Not an enemy. Not a friend. Just a contender for her sire’s attention.

GM: Most of Savoy’s people are likely there at the French Quarter lord’s court tonight.

But such is the balancing act which Marigny’s regent must maintain, to court all factions and show favor to none.

Pacuad doesn’t smile back, though Hearst and Garcia both do. Doriocourt, who’s speaking to Garcia, pays Jade barely more than a glance.

Their sire’s attention.

The pretty Toreador is swiftly approached by Sundown’s smiling herald Kaia, a beautiful and slim-figured Vietnamese-American ghoul with smooth pale skin, rich black hair, and beckoning dark eyes. She asks if there’s anything the regent might do tonight to make her stay more pleasant.


Celia: Her. Her sire. He’s hers.

Jade checks the time. She’s due at Savoy’s court soon enough herself, though she’s not late. She has time.

Perhaps everyone else just takes longer to make themselves half so pretty as Jade.

Jade shakes her head at Kaia’s approach, murmuring only that she was looking for someone who doesn’t appear to be here.

GM: “Perhaps they are, ma’am. We can’t always see everything in plain sight,” offers the ghoul.

Celia: Jade accepts the point with a dip of her head. As much as she’d like to stay and chat—really, she would—she does have other business in the city this evening.

So she asks, hoping the ghoul can point her toward the fortune teller.

GM: The ghoul replies that she and Josua finished upstairs just a little while ago, but are down hunting on the first floor. If they’ve snagged a vessel, Jade can probably find them in the bathrooms.

Celia: Cambridge?

Convenient.

She could stay. Mingle. Chat.

Maybe she should. Finish that conversation with Garcia. Speak with Hearst about transport to LA; she can’t imagine she’d be too put out on the back of his bike for an evening or two. Planes are faster, but what a rush that would be. Find out how Pacuad’s project is coming, charm him into giving her one of the smiles he flashes when he thinks she can’t see. Hasn’t been the same since the split, really. At least prior he’d tolerated her. Politics, ugh.

Maybe she would, if Doriocourt weren’t here. Sisters have never been anything but trouble for her. Even Emily is getting uppity, interfering in things that have nothing to do with her.

Ah, that’s unkind. Diana is her mom too.

Still, two licks at once is a better deal than she’d hoped for. And she doesn’t quite trust her mouth to not run away with her this evening. Not with everything she’s recently learned.

Jade thanks Kaia with a smile and a polite word, asking her to pass her greetings along to her domitor and citing an excuse about not wanting to interrupt the two regents. She’s sure she’ll be back with Andi soon, no doubt the rock star will be pleased to see the club’s proprietor again.

She casts a long, lingering look at Garcia as she goes. Flirting with trouble, as usual.

GM: There’s at least Dani, her should-have-been sister.

Then again, the thin-blood is her own brand of trouble too.

Celia: Doesn’t she know it.

Big fucking headache on that end, too.

Why can’t I come to the cool parties, Celia?

Well Dani, do you like being half-alive?

Even if she wanted to be friendly with Doriocourt she couldn’t. It would draw too much attention.

GM: Maybe not, when she really learns what that entails.

Garcia doesn’t look away from Camilla, but makes a suggestive gesture behind his back.

Kaia replies she’ll be more than happy to pass along Jade’s greetings.

“And can I say you look Flawless as always, ma’am,” the ghoul smiles.

Celia: The motion she makes following that gesture might even be a nod.

Jade beams at the ghoul.

“You are very sweet, thank you.”

Then it’s back down the stairs for her, through the crush of bodies, and into the bathroom.

GM: The bathrooms are spacious and relatively clean, at least by a nightclub’s usual filthy standards. Sounds of fornication go up from the stalls. Jade can’t tell at a glance which one might have two licks in it.

But the coppery smell emanating from one is unmistakable to the vampire’s so-sensitive nose.

Celia: Seems rude to interrupt a meal. Jade busies herself by fixing her makeup in the mirror. Not that there’s much to fix. Mostly she just admires her own reflection.

GM: There’s a lot to admire.

She abruptly feels something small, furry, and squirming press against her vagina and try to crawl inside.

Celia: How the fuck had it gotten inside her panties? What the fuck is crawling on her?

Jade doesn’t have a problem with things inside of her vagina. It’s when they’re small and furry and squirm that she takes umbrage.

She bolts into an open stall, slams the door, and gets it out.

GM: She spots a hairless tail wriggling back and forth out of her womanhood like a tampon string. Cat-quick, she plucks it out and produces a squeaking, flailing mouse.

Celia: Jade scowls down at the mouse clutched in her grip. She sniffs at it, looking for a trace of the blood.

GM: She smells none, but phlegmy laughter rings in her ears.

“What’s the matter, barbie, don’t like your new vibrator?” leers Gerald Abellard as he fades into view.

He’s still a walking, one-man freak show. His face is a blasted wasteland of every type of acne in Jade’s not-inconsiderable vocabulary. Every inch of the dark, leathery skin is ravaged by pustules, papules, whiteheads, blackheads, nodules, cysts, and residual scars. Some are big, some are little. Some are whole, some look freshly popped. Rancid-smelling white pus freely dribbles down flabby cheeks and a squashed nose like water from someone who’s just stepped out of the shower.

Celia: Disgusting.

“Easier ways to get in my panties, you know.”

GM: “Oh I don’t doubt, but I was all out of dollar bills.”

The mouse squeaks and struggles in Jade’s grip.

Celia: “For you, I’d have done it for a smile.”

Jade considers the mouse, then the rat to whom it belongs. She holds it out to him.

GM: The Nosferatu cackles, then holds out Jade’s panties for her to deposit the rodent in.

Celia: “Souvenir?” She puts the mouse into the scraps of cloth provided.

GM: The shrieking mouse finally calms as it leaves the vampire’s grip. Gerald stretches out the panties over his hands and lets the mouse crawl over them.

“Maybe nest material for this little guy. There’s probably enough diseases he’ll feel right at home.”

Celia: “Mmm,” Jade says absently, “would you believe me if I told you that I died a virgin and am sadly lacking in diseases?”

“But if you need more nesting material for him…” She trails off with a shrug.

“Happy to supply.”

GM: Gerald hacks with laughter at her question, making the pus from his face seem to ooze faster.

“No.”

Celia: She flashes him a smile.

“I didn’t think so.”

There’s a brief moment of hesitation before Jade reaches out, touching a hand to his cloth-covered arm. Her face softens, voice dropping to a low murmur.

“How’s Malo?”

GM: That cloth is better than touching the sewer rat’s greasy skin, but not by much. The long-sleeved t-shirt doesn’t look (or smell) like it’s been washed in years. Jade can’t even begin to guess where some of those stains might be from.

Gerald twirls the panties in his wart-dotted fingers as the mouse climbs across them.

“Oh he really misses you. Think he can get a blowjob, next time you meet?”

Celia: “Was hoping a handjob, actually.” Jade arches one brow at him.

GM: “It’s a date,” the sewer rat leers. “Expect him sometime soon, monkey dick primed and ready for your so-practiced hand.”

“He’s pretty greedy, though. He might make you give him a blowjob too.”

Celia: “Saving my lips for you, sweetheart.”

GM: “When it comes to your assorted holes, barbie, I think the thing you’re best at is ‘filling’ more than ‘saving,’” the sewer rat says with another leer.

“Well, this was fun. Mwah.”

He blows her a literally wet kiss, dripping with puss freshly wiped from his lips, then vanishes into the air with the mouse and panties. A squelching sound half like a huge fart, half like someone throwing up, heralds the Nosferatu’s departure. A stench not unlike ripe shit fills Jade’s nostrils.

Celia: “…oh, bye,” she says to the empty air.

She misses him already.

---

Saturday night, 12 March 2016, PM

Celia: She’s glad that she doesn’t need to breathe and takes a moment to wipe away anything that had gotten on her outfit or face. Should have expected a Nosferatu at Sundown’s place, really.

Now pantyless—the second time in two nights, what’re the odds?—Jade exits the stall, hoping that her mark is still around.

GM: The smell on Jade’s palms lingers and requires thorough washing. The coppery smell from the other stall has reduced, but hasn’t completely faded.

Two other women touching up their makeup remark to one another on a technique one of them picked up from Celia Flores’ MeVid channel.

Celia: Jade scrubs until the stink fades. She chimes in that Celia just released a new video and it’s ultra fab, have they seen it? Upload went live, like, two hours ago.

GM: “Oh no, I hadn’t!” says one of the girls, pulling out her phone. Celia’s tiny voice floats up from the device.

Celia: “Best one yet,” Jade tells the pair. She glances at the stall door. How long does feeding really take?

Maybe it had only seemed like ages she’d been wrapped up with Gerald because of the way he makes her heart go pitter-patter.

…nah.

GM: The pair nod and comment on the video, but it’s not overlong before the stall door opens and three people come out.

The first one draws immediate attention.

He’s beautiful. There aren’t many men who are beautiful, but he is, and handsome too. He has a boyishly winsome face, tousled ‘I woke up like this’ brown hair that has to be deliberate from how perfect it is. A bit of stubble gives his face some extra definition, but just light enough not to seem unkempt. Soulful green eyes frame his firm nose and invitingly kissable lips. He’s dressed in a white button-up with the top several buttons undone, giving a peek at his chest, a tan blazer, dark jeans, and brown leather dress shoes. His shirt and jeans are tight, amply showing off his smooth chest, trim but not too buff arms, and firm posterior. This Kindred’s body is a temple and it’s evident he worships it reverently. The other women in the bathroom immediately start staring and making comments, and he just flashes them a pearly white smile.


The female Kindred is dusky of skin and could be either Latina, Roma, or some typically New Orleans mix of races. She looks in her early or mid 20s and dressed in somewhat out of place fashions for a nightclub: purple gypsy skirt, a low-cut black and white-striped shirt, and a top hat threaded with red and purple scarves in place of a band. Gold glints from her ears and fingers. Her inky black hair is a wild and untamed forest that plays home to a ghouled monkey wearing a purple vest and miniature top hat of its own. The tiny animal scampers across her shoulders and uses her hoop earrings as swings while remarkably shuffling a tiny deck of tarot cards.

The women don’t spare her a glance. Or the droopy-eyed girl in club attire the two vampires are half-carrying between them.

The male newcomer spares the women a few laughing remarks, but he has eyes only for the fairest face among them.

“It’s Jade, isn’t it?”

He places his hands on her shoulders like they’ve known one another for years. His gaze drinks in the Toreador’s form like chocolate wine as he purrs softly,

“You are a woman.”

It sounds almost sacred how he pronounces the word.

Celia: Oh.

Oh my.

This is Josua. She has seen him before, she’s sure, around. But not this close. Not this in her space. Not this… this.

Her eyes drink him in. Some distant part of her mind registers the lick she’s been looking for came out of the stall with him, that she has business with her, but for the (un?)life of her she can’t remember why she’d want to talk to her when this is in front of her, looking at her, touching her. He’s the golden prize at the end of the quest. The reward for getting through the thin-blood, the VIP lounge, the rat and his mouse. Sidra who?

He knows her name.

It’s a giddy sort of lightness that bubbles from the center of her chest outward. He knows who she is. Her Beast brushes against the inside of her ribs, purring; even it wants a piece.

Is he prettier than her?

Her lips part just slightly, gazing up at him from beneath long lashes. Slowly, she blinks, and finally she gives a tiny nod. She is a woman. And never before has that sounded so sweet. She finds her voice.

“Josua.”

GM: She knows what it sounds like when it’s not. She remembers one time her parents were ‘fighting’ (insofar as there can be a fight with just one person dishing it out) when they thought she couldn’t overhear, because Maxen never swore around his children. “You stupid fucking woman,” he’d snarled at her mother, as though the last of those words was somehow the most insulting.

Celia: And the way their kind reacts, too, to the very idea that they had once been gendered beings.

GM: “Jade,” repeats Josua. His smile spreads across his face. “Our names even start with the same letter. That’s so pretty.”

His hands start to massage her shoulders, the motion at once intimate and reverent.

“I’d like to paint you,” he says. “Your beauty should be immortalized on a canvas. Your beauty should be copied and replicated in as many places as possible. The more places there are for people to admire your beauty, the better. The world will be a better place, if it has more Jade in it.”

Celia: It’s been years since someone has touched her like that. Since someone has offered her a massage and just gotten right to it, brushing the stresses of her Requiem away with the simple press of his fingers. She melts.

Paint her. He wants to paint her. She wants to be painted. She wants to be immortalized on canvas. She’ll hang it above her bed so it can be the first thing she sees in the evening when she wakes, the last thing she sees before daysleep claims her. Everyone should get a copy. The entire city. They should all see how beautiful she is, how hard she’s worked on her body, her face, sculpting it to be the epitome of perfection, the prettiest lick in the city—the world, even. To be flawless.

Her eyes shine at the words.

“Yes,” she agrees. She’d wanted photos from Garcia, but what are photos compared to an artist’s rendering? What is a headshot compared to her soul on canvas? She’ll sit for him, pose for him, model for him.

She deserves it.

The world deserves it.

“Paint me,” she says, with another nod of her head, hanging onto the images that he evokes with word and touch. She blinks again, trying to summon additional words to convey her sentiments. She’s normally so much more eloquent than this.

GM: Josua just nods, his eyes seemingly all-too understanding at her brevity. He takes her by the hand, and soon the two Toreador are leaving the club, Sidra quite forgotten. Josua hails a Ryde from his phone. His massages work their way up and down Jade’s shoulders as they wait. His touch isn’t a masseur’s, but what it lacks in training it makes up for in reverence and sheer ardor. Josua’s eyes shine as though he’s running his hands along a statue made from solid gold.

“You’ve put so much work into your beauty. I can tell. It isn’t easy, to be as beautiful as you are. It takes so much work. So much time. So much pain. You’re so dedicated. I want you to know that I don’t just see your beauty, I see the work and dedication behind it, and that makes you even more beautiful.”

Celia: Oh. He means now. She’s supposed to be doing something now, isn’t she? Talking to someone. Multiple someones. Wasn’t there a monkey…?

The thoughts fade away. It doesn’t matter. He’s going to paint her. He understands her. He knows what it’s like, the work she puts into it; she bets he wouldn’t laugh at her closet space or her piles of makeup or discredit her occupation for being frivolous because it isn’t intellectual. It’s art. It’s all art. She, herself, she’s art, and she’ll be immortalized, and that…

That is beautiful. Just like her. Like him. Like them.

They could be a them. They should be a them.

Does he want to be a them?

Shining, golden statues. How the heads would turn. How they’d whisper.

Outside the club, Jade presses against him. She lets the words he whispers in her ear travel through her, just like his hands move up and down her body. He’s good at that, the touch. But she’s better, and she wants to share too, to tell him with her hands what she struggles to put into words. She shows him how good she is at it, arms sliding around his body, untucking his shirt, palms pressing flat against his back once she moves the material out of her way. Up, higher, across the lats, the obliques, the fascia around his lower spine.

Like this, that touch says.

GM: Josua’s skin is smooth and firm, free of any fat and blemishes. He doesn’t even have any back hairs. Jade could rub his back forever, especially with the way he melts under her touch. He gasps and exhales with pleasure, his rapture evident with every second under his clanmate’s practiced ministrations. He doesn’t try to massage her back, as if realizing his efforts would be wholly inadequate before hers. But his hands still trace and travel the contours of her body, wordlessly praising the Toreador’s perfect form.

At some point they wind up in the cab. Jade isn’t sure when. All she notices is that the position of their bodies change.

Celia: She ends up on his lap. She always ends up on their laps. And this is a lap that deserves someone as beautiful as her on it. She’s happy to oblige.

GM: He presses his face to her breasts and nuzzles against them as though he’s an infant returned to his own mother’s. His hands explore her rear, too. There’s lust in them, but there’s more than lust, too. There’s appreciation for what she is, for the perfection she represents.

“You’re so good at this… oh, Jade, you make me feel so good… you’re a feast for the eyes… a feast for the mind… a feast on my skin… you touch me on every level…”

“You make everything better… you make everything beautiful… that’s why you need a painting, so you never leave, so you make things beautiful forever…”

Celia: It’s different when he does it, the way he touches her; others want to use, to claim. He wants to admire. She lets him. She basks in it, revels in it. She is perfect. She’s always been perfect. Flawless. Her work. All her work, all her time, energy, devotion, it has always gone into this.

Her fingers move across his back. Touching, stroking, teasing. His body is her playground.

Beautiful forever. She is. She will be. She won’t leave. She nods along, murmuring the same thing to him, that she won’t leave, of course she’ll never leave; where will he put her when he’s done? Where will he hang the painting?

GM: “Heaven,” he whispers, rapturously. “I’ll send it to Heaven. So the angels can admire it, and be jealous, too, of how they’ll never be as beautiful as you…”

At some point their ride steps. Josua pulls Jade out, by the hand, then hugs her close against his side, as if he can’t bear to be parted from her. He wraps both his arms around her as they walk, keeping her as close as possible as he nuzzles his face against her hair. He says how he’ll die if has to leave her, if he has to stop touching her. He has seen perfection.

He has felt perfection.

He has basked in perfection.

Celia: Heaven. With angels. Not the demons here on earth. No darkness will touch her there. No shadows will mark her days. She will be… ascendant. Transcendent.

Is that possible? She asks how it’s possible as he pulls her from the cab, tucking herself against his side. She wants to hang in Heaven. Tell me, she pleads, tell me how it’s possible.

Her eyes, full of him, only briefly turn away to take in her surroundings.

GM: They’re outside a riverboat. Then they’re walking inside.


Celia: She falters for the first time.

She’s not supposed to be here. She doesn’t have permission to be here.

GM: “By being so beautiful they have no choice but to lift you up…. that they’d be committing sacrilege, if they didn’t…” Josua whispers. His voice is ecstatic as he drinks her in, his every glance and touch brimming with worship for her body and the perfection she represents.

“My cabin’s just inside… I’ll paint you, and we can do anything else we want… I’ll worship you, Jade, worship you like you deserve to be…”

Celia: Twice in one week. She’ll be caught twice in one week where she shouldn’t be. And it’s only luck that kept Riverbend’s people from finding her.

But she’s already here. And his cabin is close, he said.

He’s unreleased. It isn’t his territory. It’s Marcel’s. She’s supposed to be courting him, not his toy, not…

Worship. The word sends shivers down her spine. She takes a step, then falters again. It’s wrong. Someone had beaten that into her.

“Ask,” she tells him, “ask him, if I can…” Jade gestures to the boat, the proverbial line in the sand that marks his personal territory. She takes his hand, pleading with her eyes. “I shouldn’t have to hide.” Perfection shouldn’t hide. Everyone should see. Call, ask, and they all can. The two of them.

GM: Josua presses a finger to Jade’s lips, then hugs her close against his chest as he strokes her hair, as though comforting a frightened child.

“Don’t worry… he’s fine with me bringing guests… just so long as we don’t do it in his bed…”

Celia: Oh. Oh. She likes this. Being held like a child, small and dainty and fragile. Jade presses her face against his chest, her arms moving around him. She really likes this. She nods her head while he strokes her hair.

GM: He plants a tender kiss on her head.

“Come…”

---

Saturday night, 12 March 2016, PM

GM: The walk to Josua’s cabin passes in a blur. There’s sounds and people, but none of the matter with his arms wrapped around her. The interior sumptuous-looking space with an amply large ovular-shaped shaped bed with silky red sheet. A TV hangs from one of the walls. There’s a phone and tablet on the bedside table. The rest of the space is taken up by a painter’s easel, canvases, and assorted brushes, paint tubes, and other artist’s supplies. It’s a relatively cramped room.

Josua falls into bed with her. Literally. He hugs her close against his chest, her back to his head with his arms encircling her waist, then simply falls backwards. They land with a soft oomph. He rolls to the side with her, then turns her around. His tongue hungrily and expertly explores the contours of her mouth as they kiss. His hands start to remove her clothing.

“I have a question…” he murmurs.

Celia: The lights, sounds, and smells of the casino disappear. It doesn’t matter. They don’t matter, the people around them, nothing but the sensation of arms around her, his body against her. She thinks they fall, but that doesn’t matter either, not when his lips press against hers, when the clothing starts to come off. Less than there would have been if she’s run into him first, before the other, but even that doesn’t matter.

She almost doesn’t hear his words. She’s doesn’t even cease the progress of her fingers down the buttons of his shirt, continuing to remove them one by one.

“Hm?”

GM: “Who you want on top.”

He throws her down suddenly, interrupting her progress on his shirt. One hand presses over her heart, keeping her down, while the other encircles the back of her head, as if to say he’s got this, and she can let go with him in charge.

“It could be me… I’ll use you, maybe roughly, maybe gently, but you’ll be mine to use as I see fit, and you’ll be my little girl, surrendered and helpless….”

Then he slides down, off the bed and onto the floor. His hands reverently stroke the smooth skin of her legs, then work their way down to a shoe-less foot. He cradles it in his hands as though handling a holy relic, and places it upon his face. He bows underneath the foot, prostate and submissive. He kisses it too, reverently, like he’s receiving the greatest privilege on earth.

“Or it could be you… your body is a temple and I am your acolyte, hoping only for the privilege of pleasing the goddess, however she sees fit…”

He smiles and pokes his head up.

“I don’t mind being top or bottom… I want to experience you, Jade… I want to experience the very best you, whichever you you feel like being…”

Celia: Little girl.

Her eyes close. The words send shivers down her spine, unconscious tiny little movements that betray her thoughts on the matter. Her body reacts like the girl she had once been; she doesn’t hide it from him, the stiffening of her nipples, the liquid heat that pools between her thighs.

Surrendered and helpless.

That one. That one, she wants that one. She wants to let go, to let someone else take control, to stop worrying about everything and just experience. Gently, roughly, it doesn’t matter. She wants to submit.

She half-rises onto her elbows as he works his way to the floor, watching with half-lidded eyes the attention he pays her body, the way he offers to worship. Only when he looks up again does she crook a finger at him, pulling him toward her by the shirt still half-buttoned on his frame.

“You,” she gets out, “you top.” That’s her best self. When they make her bend.

GM: Just like that, he’s gone from the floor. His hand clamps down over her throat, holding her down and cutting off her speech as he dextrously pulls off what’s left of her clothes. When she tries to take off his shirt, he slaps her hands down.

“You don’t get that privilege, yet. You haven’t earned it. You haven’t shown me you’re a good girl.”

His hands move from her throat to her wrists, pinning her down as he inspects her naked body, ascertaining whether it is good enough.

“What’s this?” he asks critically, staring down at her womanhood. He touches a finger to it and sniffs.

“How dirty. How perverted. You’re such a bad girl. Bad girls get punished until they can be good girls.”

He flips her naked body over his lap, still clothed in his dark jeans, and delivers a sharp smack to her buttocks.

“Say you’re sorry, you bad girl.”

His hand comes down on her rear again with another sharp smack. It doesn’t hurt as much as Maxen’s spanks did, and Jade’s body doesn’t bruise as easily. But her Beast does. Its pride bruises. It instinctively rebels against this rough treatment, snarls its protest. A sense of debasement surges through her blood, for she is a predator and chooses now to submit like prey.

Celia: Shame, hot and heavy, floods her cheeks. She could have hidden it. Should have hidden it. She’d thought, slut that he is, he’d understand. Instead he bends her over his knee and—

Oh.

It hasn’t faded. Not one bit.

Each smack sends tingles through the rest of her body. It stings but doesn’t hurt, doesn’t bruise, doesn’t leave behind handprints; it’s just the sharp smack of flesh on flesh, the humiliation of being bent over, the inherent shift in dynamic with him clothed and her not. Each smack summons forth a sound from her—a snarl first, until she tells the Beast to fuck off because right now she just wants to be a girl, not an undead abomination, then a whimper, a stifled yelp, and finally a broken, breathy moan. Even the thing inside her chest understands that.

She’s not a good girl. Good girls don’t get wet. They don’t become aroused when someone bends them over their knee. They don’t get off on the humiliation, the feeling of being exposed. They don’t fuck anything and everything they want to fuck for the sheer joy of it.

She’s not a good girl.

And she has nothing to apologize for.

GM: “Oh? Can’t get that out?” he asks. Smack, goes the open hand against her ass. Smack, smack, smack, like she’s a naked toddler over her daddy’s knee.

“I guess we’ll have to try something else, you bad, dirty girl. Such a disappointment to your daddy. You have so much to be sorry for.”

He yanks her off by her hair and throws her back down on the bed. There’s a blur of motion, and then there’s handcuffs around her wrists. He snaps each one around a corner of the bed, leaving her spread-eagled and exposed. He makes do with sheets to tie down her legs, then retrieves a paintbrush.

He runs it along her belly. The hairs are rough and ticklish. It descends steadily, steadily lower.

“I bet you want that over your clit, don’t you, you dirty pervert, for me to paint your clit until you’re wet as a sponge?”

Celia: She’s already wet. Soaked, even. The spanking had seen to that. Legs spread as they are, he can see it too.

Jade tugs at the cuffs around her wrists, testing their hold, then does the same to the sheets around her legs. Both hold firm. Surrendered and helpless, just like he’d said. She squirms as the brush trails down her skin, back arching, teeth sinking into her lip to keep herself silent, watching the movement of the brush with wide eyes.

Finally, she nods.

GM: The paintbrush descends teasingly close, stroking the folds of her outer lips.

“Such a dirty pervert. Beg for it, you dirty pervert. Beg me for it.”

Celia: She doesn’t need to breathe. She knows that. He knows that. But it hitches anyway when he draws the brush closer to where she wants it.

“Please,” she whispers, starting small.

GM: The brush snakes its way closer to her inner lips, then retreats back.

“I can’t hear you.”

Celia: Her hips lift, attempting to make him touch her where she wants.

“Please,” she tries again, and this time her voice is colored by clear desperation, “please, there, don’t tease…”

GM: The brush ‘paints’ over her inner lips for a second, then passes over her clitoris… and over it, without once touching.

“You don’t sound desperate enough. You don’t sound like you’re really begging. Swallow your pride.”

Celia: Her eyes close to shut out the beautiful, smirking face. Her eyes close because he’s right, she’s not desperate enough, she still has too much pride. She’s Jade, and Jade is never not in control. So her eyes close, and her tongue flicks across her lips, and Jade retreats to make room for the girl inside, the eighteen-year-old who has never been touched, the delicate flower that can’t even think the word ‘sex’ without turning red. Not Jade, not Star or Neveah or Violet. Not even Celia. Leilani. No physical change takes place but her face softens, her lips part, and her eyes… her eyes lock onto his when she opens them again, uncertainty and shyness shining out at him.

She becomes what he wants her to be. Surrendered.

“Please.” Whisper-soft, hesitant… but trusting. Helpless. “Please, touch me, show me, let me c…” Her cheeks burn. She can’t even say the word. She looks away, then back at him. Little girl. “Please, Daddy.”

GM: Josua pats her head like a child who’s done well.

“That’s better.”

The brush starts to ‘paint’ her clit. It’s not like a tongue feels. It’s dry and light, and ticklish, too. It reminds her of Pietro’s touch. It dances back and forth in Josua’s nimble hands, sometimes stroking other parts of her, but always finding its way back to her sweet little nub.

“There’s something my little girl still has to do, though. Does she remember what?”

Celia: She turns her face to press a cheek against the hand that pats her, seeking comfort in the touch. Her breath comes in quick, short puffs of air, chest rising and falling with the effort. Extraneous, all of it, but it sucks her into the role.

Something left. What’s left? She can’t think with the brush on her body, and every time she opens her mouth to answer he takes it back to that spot between her legs that makes her see stars. Her body trembles beneath his touch.

Apologize. It hits her all at once when he takes the brush away again, teasing her by denying what she wants. Only good girls get rewarded. She takes a breath she doesn’t need.

“I’m—I’m sorry I was bad.” A short pause, eyes closing, back arching off the bed when those bristles touch and flit away again. “I’ll be a good girl.”

GM: The hand finds her face again. It pats her head and remains nearby for her to nuzzle her face against it, then pats her cheek too. Josua smiles down at her.

“That’s a good girl. That’s a very good girl.”

The paintbrush doesn’t return, but another one does. It’s a smaller brush, lighter, and definitely softer. It tickles a lot more, too. Josua ‘paints’ it in steady clockwise patterns around her clit, bringing her closer and closer to release.

“My little girl is still a pervert, though. It’s one thing to be sorry, but you need to make up for what you’ve done, too.”

“So. If you’re enjoying this, then we’re just going to have to take it to its full conclusion. Are you prepared to do that?”

Celia: Jade—Leilani—strains against her bindings, pulling at them with every jerk and quiver that thrums through her. Make up for it. Full conclusion. She doesn’t know what he plans to do to her, how she’ll have to make up for being a pervert when she’s tied to the bed, but she doesn’t care. She wants it. Needs it. She nods over and over again, voice cutting her response to a quick and quiet yes, please.

GM: Josua nods, withdraws the brush, then leaves the room. He closes and locks the door behind him.

Celia: Oh.

That wasn’t…

“Um.”

Unsatisfied, still too close to the edge to think straight, still caught by the blessing of her clan, she stares at the door. She waits, nerves starting to get the best of her.

GM: Her nerves have enough time to do more than start before the door opens again. Josua walks back in, along with three men in suits, ties, and security badges. The first one, who smells like a ghoul, unbuckles his pants and forces his penis into Jade’s mouth without so much as a hello. The second man, a breather, unbuckles his pants and takes her in her womanhood. The third man, another breather, patiently waits his turn, hands clasped in front of him in a security professional’s stance. There’s no room for him to simultaneously take her third hole when she’s tied down, after all.

Celia: Betrayal stings, a sharp slap across the face. Trusted him. She had trusted him, had let him bring her here, had let him talk her into this, tie her down, had shown him secret parts of herself that no one else gets to see. She yanks at the cuffs, the ties around her legs, but they’re on her in seconds, filling her, holding her down. She bucks, arching off the bed, but the bodies over her are heavy. Wide, fearful eyes seek him out.

GM: He sits down on the bed and rubs a palm over her naked belly.

“This is how my little girl wants it. We both know it is.”

The ghoul slaps her face when she doesn’t start sucking. His erect member presses against her tongue. The other man’s balls smack against her thighs as he humps back and forth.

Celia: The slap across the face turns her head to the side, cheek smarting where the ghoul struck her. Her Beast snarls in response, demanding to be let out, to tear the hand from the mortal that had dare slap it. Pain, humiliation, degradation—she is not some kine to simply lie back and take it like this. She is not Celia, brought to her knees by stronger, more powerful people, helpless to do anything but scream the way they want her to and cry bitter tears while they take from her. She thrashes against her bindings.

But then he’s beside her, stroking a hand against her belly, reminding her that it’s just a game, reminding her that she had asked for this when she’d told him to take top. His touch keeps her claws from coming out, keeps the fangs tucked away, soothes the ragged, frayed nerves of the Beast who only sees the insult. Little girl, he calls her, summoning her forth. She’s not Celia, the survivor. She’s something… else. Different. More pure, more willing to submit, more… innocent. She’s Leilani again. His little girl. He knows best. He’s in charge. He coaxes her forward with the gentle stroking across her belly, telling her that it will be okay, that he has her, that he’ll be there the whole time. Watching. Guiding. Like daddies should for their little girls.

She craves his touch. Needs it to keep the rest of them at bay, to focus on the soft and gentle. This is her gift. Her reward and punishment both. Because she’s a good girl and she apologized for being bad, but she still has to make amends and this is how he has decided she will do it. Her lips finally close around the cock in her mouth. She sucks.

She pulls again at the cuffs, then at the sheets. Not trying to get free, but to shift, to give the third man the space that he needs so he, too, can fill her. Now, not later. Now, while Josua holds her and tells her that this is what she wants, while he touches and strokes and takes control so she can submit.

GM: Jade’s Beast rages and tries to break free at this latest humiliation. It would burst its bonds, rip out the men’s throats, and paint the bedroom in gore. But Jade’s—Leila’s—Celia’s—who even is she?—submissive instinct runs strong, and what is there to be angry about when there’s a fat cock in her mouth? That’s what she is made for. To suck fat cocks. “Yeah, you’ve done this a lot, you little cocksucker,” leers the ghoul, making a fist in her hair and yanking it forward to push his penis even deeper. It takes some effort for the third man to position himself, but he’s able to slip underneath Jade and fill her ass with his cock. He holds her shoulders as he thrusts back and forth. All three men vigorously pump her holes. Josua is there the whole time, to rub her belly, plant it with delicate kisses, and murmur sweet words. He rubs her belly a lot, and scratches it too, like she’s a pet who should take just as much pleasure in that as the actual intercourse. The men take turns alternating between Jade’s holes, giving her a taste of them in each part of her, but they all finish in her mouth. Or at least from her mouth. The first man pulls out and blows his load over Jade’s face. The second man pulls out and blows his load over her tits. The third man cums inside her mouth and tells her to swallow. “Swallow like the dirty little cocksucker you are.”

Her Beast instinctively rebels at this last demand. Cum tastes better than Diana’s cooking, but only because there’s less of it. She can let the cum sit there in her mouth, until whenever Josua lets her off the bed (only a very bad girl would spit it out), or she can expend precious blood purely to swallow this breather’s seed.

“Go on, little girl,” Josua nods encouragingly. “Swallow for Daddy. I’ll be very nice to my little girl, if she can just swallow for Daddy.”

“I know she can do it. I’ll be very proud of her.”

Celia: It washes over her: pleasure. Pleasure like she has never known, to have all of her holes filled at the same time, to have another whispering sweet, tender words of encouragement in her ear, his hands stroking her body. It’s that touch that keeps her grounded, that touch that prevents her from spiraling downward, that touch that tells her everything is okay. She can enjoy it. Lay back and let herself simply feel. She has never been taken like this before, submitting so fully to someone else, letting their whims dictate the terms of play. This is how she wants it, he’d said, and he’s right. They don’t hurt her. They don’t smack or spank or hit her. They just fill, and touch, and taste—one of them kisses her neck while he fucks her from behind, another flicks his thumbs across her nipples, and the last cradles her head while he thrusts inside her mouth. And Josua. Holding her. Touching her. Whispering to her how she’s such a good little girl to take it like this.

It’s overwhelming, an onslaught from all fronts, and were it not for daddy’s hands on her she might feel used; but he’s there for her and that makes it sweet instead of ugly, and when she wants to lose control he’s right there to bring her back. Punishment and humiliation, but exactly what she wants. It’s not mean or cruel, not meant to ruin her. It’s just what she wants and he’s making sure she gets it. She surrenders, losing herself to the movements, sucking, licking, trembling when they find those spots that make her toes curl and her breath catch and her whole body tighten. But they never send her over. He knows, or they know, or someone knows, and no matter how she pleads around the flesh in her mouth they keep her riding that edge until she’s a panting, quivering mess.

One by one they finish, denying her further when they don’t immediately start to fuck again, and she mourns the loss with a quiet whimper, a whispered plea, until another takes her mouth to silence her.

Now this. The finale. All she has to do is swallow. Good girls swallow, don’t they? And he said he’d be proud. She can make him proud of his little girl. There’s no hesitation when he puts it like that. When this final man blows his load in her mouth she swallows what’s left of her pride along with the cum.

She wants him to be proud.

Fitting, that the Beast finally rebels at her treatment of it. She had fucked last night without feeding. Fucked again this evening without even biting. Swallowed human swill and it had not complained, sated by thick, warm Brujah blood. But this? This takes it too far. This humiliation goes beyond what it will endure. The girl retains control, but the Beast takes from her, raking its claws inside her chest and stealing the blood that it wants to slake its hunger. It snarls inside her chest, leaving her with precious little.

But she swallows. And she keeps it down. And finally, finally, she turns to Josua, eyes wide in expectation.

GM: Josua smiles at her and pats her head approvingly.

“Thank the man for his cum, too.”

“Good girls say please and thanks.”

Celia: It’s an effort to look away from Josua, but tears her gaze away to find the man’s eyes.

“Thank you for letting me swallow your cum.” Jade’s voice, but… softer. No hesitation, though. No sign of insincerity. She looks at the other two, thanking them as well for their contribution. Good girls are polite, and she’s a good girl.

GM: “You’re welcome, cum dumpster,” grins the first man as he re-buckles his pants. The others do too. They walk out of the room without a glance back, except to close the door.

Josua moves over on the bed. He doesn’t untie her arms or legs, but he sits cross-legged and places her head upon his lap. Her smiles down at her as he strokes her hair.

“I’m so proud of my little girl.”

“She knows her place. She knows how to submit. She’s happy to submit to her daddy. That makes Daddy very, very happy.”

One hand steadily pets her hair as he tilts her head against his lap to stare up at his smile.

“I’m so proud of you. My pretty little girl. My happy little girl. My good little girl. Such a good girl.”

Celia: Cum dumpster.

Someone that might be Jade snarls at the words. She’s quickly beaten down when her head winds up on his lap, fingers in her hair. She basks in the attention and adoration he lavishes upon her, smiling up at him. Happy, pretty, good. She’s all those things. And she’s pleased. Pleased that he’s happy with her, that he’s proud of her, that he’d do this for her. Her head turns, cheek rubbing against his lap, his hands, whatever she can reach to stay in contact, to make him continue saying such sweet things.

It reminds her… no, those aren’t her memories…

GM: His hands tenderly stroke the sides of her face as Josua leans down to nuzzle her nose.

“Give me a big smile, little girl. Give Daddy the biggest, happiest smile you can. I want to see your soul shining through that smile.”

Celia: She smiles for him. A happy smile, a proud smile, a pleased, sated, satisfied smile. And no matter what face she wears or who controls the reins, it’s never anything less than a beautiful smile.

GM: Josua strokes her hair.

“Try harder, baby girl. Make it an earnest smile. It’s not a desperate smile, but you aren’t satisfied just yet, because you haven’t pleased Daddy yet. You want to please Daddy, because he wants a smile. He wants a big smile. He wants the biggest, happiest, eagerest smile his little girl has in her. She isn’t really tied down. Her smile is how she’ll hug Daddy, because it’ll be so big and happy and eager that he’ll feel it from here, and he’ll hug her back, and hold her close, and she’ll be safe in his arms as they snuggle. That’s what she’ll get, if she can smile for Daddy. All the snuggle times in the world.”

He pats her cheek.

“Smile for me, baby girl. Smile as big and wide as you can. You don’t need to talk. Daddy will do all the talking. Daddy will take care of the hard things. All you need to do is smile.”

“I know my little girl can do it. She’s such a good girl.”

Celia: The smile fades from her lips at his words.

It’s not enough. It’s never enough. She is never enough.

Her eyes close. She inhales air she doesn’t need, lungs expanding to lift her chest, all of it a waste of movement. A waste of energy. A waste of space.

Cum dumpster. Whore. Stupid.

They twist together in her head, dancing before her closed eyes, their voices taunting, cold and cruel. Snippets of conversation press against her, demanding to be let in, demanding that she remember, that she feel. She’s not Leilani. She’s not Jade. She’s not even Celia anymore.

She’s lost.

But Daddy’s there for her. He has always been there for her. He calls to her, coaxing her toward the safety of his arms. He’ll protect her. Take her away from the accident at the end of the hall. Dry her tears after her neighbor forces her to her knees. Hold her hand through the ordeal of being fucked, then tell her how proud he is, how happy she makes him. He’ll tell her how proud he is. How she’s special. His little girl. She is his little girl. His special baby girl. She tries so hard. And he’s proud of her.

Her eyes open, uncertain, as if expecting him to disappear in the seconds they had been closed. But there he is, waiting for her. Like he’s always waiting for her. Because he’ll always be there for her.

Her lips move without a command from her, lifting at the corners, curling upwards to give him the smile that he wants. It’s her. All of her. Broken, bent, raw. But shining. Like the flawless diamond that she is.

GM: He’s there. Waiting. So very patiently.

Leilani. Jade. Celia. They’re just names.

She doesn’t need to be anyone. Just so long as she has Daddy.

Daddy starts to smile, then holds up a finger.

“Hold that, baby girl. Freeze that smile on your face.”

An easy thing, without face muscles that get tired.

Celia: She doesn’t question him. The smile freezes.

GM: “Good girl.”

“I’ll have an extra special treat for you, if you can hold that smile long enough.”

Josua sits down by his painter’s easel. In a blur of motion, it’s turned around, paint tubes are out, and Josua’s brush is racing around the canvas like a fast forwarding video.

Celia: She doesn’t get tired. She doesn’t need to breathe or blink or shift positions. She doesn’t move, doesn’t stir from the spot where he placed her. None of her muscles twitch. She stays, frozen, exactly how he left her. The smile never dims.

GM: The paintbrush continues to blur across the canvas. Time passes. The brush eventually stops moving.

“There. All done. Does my little girl think she’s been really patient? Should she get a treat?”

He smiles at her.

“No talking or moving her head. I haven’t said she can stop smiling yet.”

Celia: Her eyes flick toward the clock on his wall. Her head stays in place, smile never slipping.

GM: “Mmm, what’s that? Is my little girl trying to say something?”

“If only she could stop smiling, that would make things do much easier.”

Celia: She doesn’t want to stop smiling. But she does want to know how long she has been here, tied to the bed, waiting so very patiently for her reward.

She’s not the only one in her mind. Hers aren’t the only thoughts that swirl, and with each passing moment the other one gets stronger, chipping away at her control. She has to be somewhere. She has to be somewhere that she’s not, somewhere that isn’t here. But here is important too. If only she could check to make sure that the other one will still make it. She needs to know. She has to know, or it all comes crumbling down around her, and something like the Beast but less hostile paces in her chest, spiraling outward toward her limbs. She doesn’t move, but it swells beneath the surface of her skin, a bubble of anxiety that she can’t stifle because she needs to know.

GM: Josua walks over to the bed and sits down. He tilts Jade’s face up towards his and runs his hands along er cheeks.

“My silent beauty. Such a pretty little girl.”

“It’s okay, pretty girl. You don’t need to talk.”

“All you need to do is smile. It makes Daddy so happy to see his little girl smile.”

Celia: But she is smiling. She has been smiling. Even now, tied to the bed, anxious that she’s supposed to be somewhere else, she smiles for him.

Finally, she blinks. It’s as clear as she can make it, that blink. No muscles but those controlling her lids move, a quick flip down then up. Her smile stays in place. Her head doesn’t do so much as twitch. None of the rest of her body dares move either; like someone’s doll, she lays where he had put her, and only the eyes give the answer he’s looking for from his earlier question: yes.

GM: Josua gives a velvety laugh.

“I think my little girl is trying to say something. I think she does think she’s been patient. Well, okay, baby girl. I think you’ve earned it, with that pretty smile. So Daddy’s going to give you a very special treat.”

He unbuckles his pants and pricks his penis with an ornamental penknife from the bedside table. The heady smell of Kindred vitae suffuses the air. He daintily opens her mouth, as though he needs to do it for her, and guides his bleeding member inside.

It’s a small prick, at the head of his penis. Jade will need to suck really hard to get more than a trickle of vitae out.

Josua seems to concentrate for a moment, then his member grows firm and stiff in her mouth.

Celia: She’d thought that maybe, given his reputation, they were the same. That he, too, still got off the breather way.

But it’s just her. The pervert. Alone in her deviance.

The blood touches her tongue, though, and she doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter that he has to force it, or that he’d had to have someone else fuck her because he couldn’t. He’d done it for her. She knows that. He’d done it for her, and now he’s doing this for her, because it’s what she wants. Her lips close around him, sucking at the tiny knife wound to bring that precious vitae forth even as he stiffens in her mouth. The smell and taste grow her fangs but she keeps them tucked away, taking what he gives, how he gives. Submitting even now like the little girl she is to what her daddy wants.

GM: “Such a good girl…” he whispers, cupping the back of her head with his hands. He thrusts his hips back and forth, pressing his crotch against her face.

Josua’s vitae is sweet like candy. There’s almost no other flavor, it’s so sweet, but there’s the faintest undercurrent of sour underneath, like a few grains of salt at the bottom of a sugar-coated gummy.

“There’s nowhere on earth that my little girl is happier than with a cock in her mouth, is there?

Celia: Even with his cock in her mouth she manages a tiny shake of her head. No, there’s nowhere else she’d rather be. She belongs on her back or her knees or bent over a lap; wherever he wants her, that’s where he can put her, and she’ll be pleased all the same.

The flavor is so sweet it’s almost cloying, but she swallows it down obediently, even eagerly, happy to have it. And even though it doesn’t do anything for him, even though he doesn’t get off the same way, she gives him the same treatment she’d given his friends earlier just to show him how much she appreciates it.

GM: Josua’s sweetness, for all its strength, is a good kind of sweetness, like the natural sugar found in a succulent fruit. It isn’t the cheap kind instilled by star mode, that tastes so much like sugar dumped over already prepared food. Pietro always did say it’s “worth getting them in the mood.” Jade can taste her clanmate’s lust for her, but it’s a curious sort of lust. It’s more than lust. There’s enrapturement with her beauty on an aesthetic and intellectual level, beyond merely sexual attraction, although there’s a great deal of that too. She feels as if he worships her with the totality of his being. His sweetness fills and speaks to her on every level. But there’s a sour and salty undercurrent to it, too, the more she drinks. Anger and melancholy. All is not well in paradise.

It’s easy to see why Alana wants to do this with her, though. Jade is hard-pressed to think of many blowjobs that actively pleasure her like sucking blood straight from a cock does.

Celia: Her hands, bound as they are, hang uselessly from the cuffs. She wants to touch him. To let her fingers find the source of his trouble and fix it for him. That’s what she’s good at. Fixing. Making people feel better on a physical level. And if she can do that for him why wouldn’t she? She strains against the cuffs but they hold her fast. She can only drink what he offers. And drink she does, swallowing mouthful after mouthful of the sweet, hot red stuff. It wipes the cum from her palate, rids her tongue of the salty taste of kine. This is what she wants, what she has wanted the whole time. He rewards her for being a good girl and she can’t get enough of it.

GM: “Such a good girl… she doesn’t need to move her hands… she’s right where she needs to be, Dady’s cock in her mouth…. my little girl’s so good at sucking cock, and Daddy is so, so proud of her…” Josua whispers, stroking Jade’s cheeks as she rapturously sucks.

“Such a good girl…”

Celia: Is she? Does he like it, when she moves her lips like this, when she draws her tongue along the bottom like that? Does it turn him on the way it would for someone who could still feel pleasure like that? She stops pulling at the bonds, lets her hands hang limp, content to let him retain control. He’s Daddy and he’s in charge, and his little girl will take what he offers.

GM: Josua presses his groin up against her face. Her cups his hands around the back of her head, pushing her closer. She doesn’t need to breathe. She doesn’t need to see. All there is his cock in her mouth and his blood running down her throat. The moment could last forever, until he says, “All right, baby girl, I’m going to pull out soon… get in some good last sucks…”

Eventually, he does. He undoes the sheets around her feet, then the cuffs around her wrists. He sits down at the edge of the bed and pulls her onto his lap. He’s fully clothed, with his jacket on and his shirt buttoned up, and she’s still naked as the day she was born. He adjusts her legs, keeping them on the bed and folded against his body, making her as small as possible. He hugs her close and cradles her head low against his chest, such that she can hide underneath his arms. It’s like the way he held her earlier, like someone would hold a child, but it feels more like he’s holding an infant now. She feels so small and vulnerable and exposed. But Daddy is there, his arms around her. He strokes her hair and slowly rocks her back and forth against his chest.

“That’s my little girl…”

“I know it’s hard for her, losing Daddy’s cock… but she did very well tonight, and Daddy is so, so, proud of her… she’s the most special little girl in the whole wide world…”

Celia: She makes a sound when he pulls back. A quiet whimper of mourning that he has taken the source of such enjoyment away from her. She doesn’t mean to; it just comes out, followed by a soft sigh. The disappointment fades as soon as he draws her onto his lap. She snuggles against him, cheek against his chest. Naked, vulnerable in her nudity, but safe in the cocoon of his arms around her. She nods her head as he speaks, a gentle smile pulling at her lips. He’s proud of her. She made him proud. She’s pleased with herself, with him, with their time together this evening. A feeling like bliss settles over her. She’s a good girl.

GM: “Such a good girl…” he whispers, and then his fangs pierce her neck. Physical bliss washes over her, comingling with the mental bliss.

She’s doing Daddy proud. She’s making him feel good. She’s making him feel so, so good, giving of her life to sustain his. There’s no truer expression of intimacy, than feeding. To give of yourself, to sustain another. To trust them that intimately, that profoundly, to take as much as they choose.

In those moments of feeding, two lives become as one.

Celia: Her lips part in a silent sigh when his fangs pierce her neck. Her eyes close as it washes over her, entire body caught by the shiver of desire and need and something softer, something that might be trust or affection. Something sweet that flavors her blood, deeper than lust, stronger than the charm their clan so often employs.

Something beautiful, like her, the little girl on Daddy’s lap.

GM: The moment of bliss and beauty feels like it could last forever, but like all things, it must come to an end. Josua finally pulls out and affectionately rubs her cheek with his hand.

“All right, baby girl… Daddy’s going to step outside for a bit, okay? That’ll be so she can get changed into being Jade the badass bitch again.”

“Tonight was very special. Daddy loves his little girl very, very much.”

Celia: She gives a slow nod at his words. She doesn’t want it to end, but the mention of Jade… there’s something there, something she’s forgetting. She clings to him a moment longer, nuzzling at his neck with her lips. Shyly, before he goes, she tells him that tonight was special for her too, and that she loves her daddy. There’s a moment of hesitation where she wants to tell him who she is, but she’s worried that once he’s had her he won’t want to see her again. She finally looks up at him.

GM: He smiles down at her, eyes full of warmth and understanding. He runs his hands up and down her cheeks and the sides of her head in petting-like motions, then finally tilts her head up so she meets his gaze. She doesn’t need to do that herself. Daddy will do it for her.

“My little girl can tell her daddy anything.”

Celia: “Leilani,” she tells him, voice as soft as the silken sheets beneath them. It’s the first time she’s ever admitted aloud that she exists. For a brief moment she’s afraid he won’t understand. But he’s her daddy, and she’s his little girl, and he has to understand. She says it again, quiet but sure, that she’s Leilani and she wants him to know.

GM: “Leilani. What a pretty name for what a pretty girl,” Josua smiles, hugging Leila against his chest again. His rubs his hands up and down her back, stroking her hair.

“I’m very pleased to have met you, Lani.”

“You’re a very special little girl. You’re very lucky to have a tough big sister like Jade keeping you safe.”

Celia: She is lucky. She nods her head in agreement. Jade takes care of all the mean people so she can be soft and sweet and nice and let daddy spoil her with friends and blood and pon—

No. Leilani has never had one of those.

“And a daddy,” she tells him, snuggled against him once more. “To be happy.” There’s the briefest of pauses. A moment of hesitation. She remembers the taste of his blood on her tongue, the salty, sour emotions beneath the sweet. Good girls care about their daddies, don’t they? They should. She does.

She asks if he’s happy, too.

GM: Josua’s smile dims a bit.

“Daddy’s Requiem isn’t perfect, baby girl. Nobody’s is.”

He squeezes her shoulder. “Except Lani’s.”

Celia: “Jade can beat someone up for you,” Leilani offers with all the assurance of a little girl who thinks her “big sister” hung the moon.

GM: Josua laughs. “Maybe I’ll ask her. But that’s grown-up talk, little Lani, for the grown-ups to worry about. You don’t need to worry about anything when you’re with Daddy.”

Celia: And just like that, she’s forgotten it. The grown-ups can handle it, and she’ll be safe and warm and happy on his lap. She nods her head in agreement.

GM: He hugs her close for a while longer. Little Lani is right where she belongs in Daddy’s arms, without so much as a worrisome thought to worry her pretty little head.

“All right, Lani,” he finally says. “After I leave, it’s going to be time for Jade to come back out, okay?”

Celia: “Okay,” she agrees with another nod. Jade can come out and play again, and Leila can go back inside. Leilani says a final goodbye to him, a chaste kiss on his cheek before he goes.

GM: He plants a kiss on her brow, gives her hair a last tousle, then places Jade’s clothes on the bed before closing the door behind him.

Celia: There’s no physical change. Nothing to signify that one mask comes off and another takes its place, nothing to tell the world that Leilani has gone to bed and Jade is once more in control. One moment she is daddy’s little girl, the next she’s the childe of a harpy, cold and cruel and conniving.

Her stomach rebels as soon as the the swap occurs, and Jade comes to with her face inches away from a trashcan while she hurls up the jizz she had been made to swallow earlier. At least no one is present to witness the undignified way it slides back up her throat and splatters in the bottom of the wastebasket. Rancid, foul, but over quickly enough. She wipes at her mouth, tongue slicing against her own long fangs as if that will chase away the taste.

Her eyes sweep the room. Cramped, but a door to one side opens into a bathroom and Jade helps herself to his shower. A quick rinse to rid herself of the smell of kine: sweat and cum and other rank odors. Three minutes, in and out, scraping the gunk from her skin with a soapy rag, focused on her face, chest, and between her legs. Perhaps she should have asked him to join her. Leilani would no doubt appreciate bath time. Extra bubbles for daddy’s little princess, and they can play at being mermaids and she can paint his face with beard-bubbles and show him her dolls. Jade smiles at the thought; next time, she tells the little girl, next time she’ll ask. She does not bother to wash her hair, and when she steps out to look in the mirror she see is pleased to see that no traces of the kine remain. Her fingers blur across her skin in routine sweeps, touching up her makeup in half the amount of usual time. She dries with a towel and finds her clothing waiting on the bed. Quick movements put it all back where it belongs, sans stolen panties. It takes less than ten minutes before she is truly Jade again, once more ready to be seen in polite society.

She glances at her phone to check the time, then reaches for the door.

GM: It’s been about 2.5 hours since she ran into Josua at the nightclub. She’s likely missed the ‘court’ part of Savoy’s weekly court, and a decent chunk of the party, though it probably still has some time before it wraps up.

She finds Josua outside, playing on his phone. He smiles and tucks it away at her appearance.

“Would you like to see your portrait?”

Celia: Awkward. Now she’ll never know if opening her mouth last night did anything or if it had all been wasted breath. At least her meeting with him is after the party. Small blessings and all that.

“I would,” she tells him. “I assumed you didn’t want me peeking, so I refrained.”

GM: “Very thoughtful. You looked radiant with your clothes off, by the way, but you look radiant with them back on.”

Celia: “Careful, there, I might think you’re trying to get me out of them again.”

GM: He smiles again. “I think we were ‘under the influence’ most of these past few hours. Clan blessing and all. It’s nice to meet you.”

Celia: Clan blessing indeed. She’s glad she’s dead, that no flush gives her away.

“You too.” She can’t help but laugh. “We’ve done it all backwards.”

“I suppose I should introduce myself now that we’ve already gotten to know each other. Miss Jade Kalani,” she offers with a wry smile.

GM: “Josua Cambridge. I find introductions are usually less awkward this way. Or at least more fun.”

“You were every bit as amazing in bed as I thought you’d be.”

Celia: One brow lifts.

“Do you think about me in bed often?”

GM: “When we met, definitely, though I think about what everyone would be like in bed.”

Celia: “I suppose we have that in common.”

GM: “I wonder what Vidal would be like.”

Celia: “Rigid.”

GM: “I can say from experience, Ventrue can be really hot.”

Celia: “Perhaps we should ask his lover, then, and see if we can take a turn with him.”

“Hard to refuse two gorgeous licks like us.”

GM: Josua laughs. “If you’re serious, I wouldn’t mind screwing the seneschal either. I really wouldn’t. I’m curious what a real elder would be like.”

Celia: “Yours doesn’t do it for you anymore?”

GM: “Oh no, Marcel’s great in bed. But why have one when you could have two?”

He looks her over appraisingly. “Marcel would definitely like to bang you, though he prefers them less submissive than Lani was.”

Celia: Jade laughs. “I’ve no doubt. Get me a date with him, then, and I’ll show you both the other side.”

GM: “Now that I’d be very interested to see. I figured you’d be more like your sire.”

Celia: “Mm, truth be told Leila hasn’t come out like that before.”

GM: “Really? I feel special.”

Celia: “You should. She’d like to see you again, but I’ll let her down easy if you’re not interested.”

GM: “Mmm, maybe later. I’d like to see this other side to Jade, first. I’m not usually that dominant.”

Celia: “No?” Jade eyes him up and down. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

GM: “Oh, no. The lick I fuck the most these days is Marcel, and I’m never on top with him. He likes me as a boytoy.” Josua grins. “Sucking blood from a cock was something he showed me.”

Celia: “Now that,” she says with a matching grin, “was wickedly delicious.”

“But the breather way doesn’t do it for you.” A question more than a statement; she assumes the answer already.

Celia: “If you want another elder,” Jade offers after a moment, “you could come to the Evergreen with me sometime.”

GM: Josua shakes his head at her question.

“That’s really tempting. I bet he’s great in bed. I don’t think Marcel would be happy to share me with him, though.”

Celia: She doesn’t seem terribly upset. It’s the answer she expected.

A quick step closes the distance between them; one hand flattens against his chest to push him against the wall, lips at his neck, while the other hand drifts upwards so that her fingers curl through his hair.

“Disappointing,” she purrs. “I imagine you’d be quite a hit at the party next week, and I’d have loved to show you off even if we didn’t end up in Antoine’s hot tub…” She nips at his neck. “I suppose I’ll content myself with flipping the script from tonight and letting you present me to Marcel.”

GM: Josua grins at the aggressive motion, showing his now-protruding fangs. His hands encircle Jade’s body, lovingly caressing her back as they slowly work down to knead her rear. It’s not unlike how Roderick would do it, but there’s a feeling of reverence in his Josua’s hands distinct from the affection (and lust) in her Brujah lover’s. It’s a feeling of profound regard, like he’s getting to handle a holy relic, and getting a huge boner from doing so. His fangs brush against her cheek, letting her feel their sharpness and the softness of his lips, but stopping just short of drawing blood.

“Maybe we could sneak me in as a girl… Marcel likes to have me dress as one, sometimes… we prefer me as a man, but I make a very pretty girl, too…”

Celia: No wonder his count is as high as it is if this is how he treats all his lovers. She’d positively swoon if she were physically capable of doing so.

“I’m a magician with a makeup brush,” she tells him, “though if you ever really want to be a girl…” She trails off, her eyes raking his body. “I’m sure I could make it happen for a night. Ask nicely and I might even let you raid my closet.”

GM: “Oh, yes please, mistress,” he purrs, pulling Jade close and pressing her breasts against his chest. He closes his eyes for a moment, seeming to bask in the sensation of their physical proximity. He breathes his next words in to Jade’s ear like he’s sharing an intimate secret, his tongue lapping against her earlobe. “But I would never raid your closet. I would supplicate myself before you. I would pray that I was worthy of the honor and privilege of wearing clothes that had once touched the godhead, the divine feminine. I would tell you I felt as if I was carrying part of you with me, when I wore your clothes. I would tell you I felt safe and comforted to have some piece of you, not adorning me, but exalting me. I would approach your closet as though it were a temple and pray to receive of its blessings.”

Celia: Oh yes. She can definitely get used to this.

A shiver travels down her spine at the words, eyes widening when she lifts her head to look up at him once more. The very tips of her fangs peek out from behind her lips, though she keeps them to herself for now.

“Careful, pet,” she warns him, voice thick, “or I’ll steal you away from him and keep you for myself, and you’ll never get up off your knees again.”

GM: “But what if I don’t want to get off my knees,” he murmurs, sinking down to them. He presses his face against Jade’s crotch, like a child at its mother’s breasts, and hugs his arms around her legs.

“There’s no place I’d rather be than a woman’s knees. Than your knees. I love a woman’s knees. I love everything about women. There’s so much to love about women. I love the richness and fullness to their hair, how I can just run my hands through it forever. I love women with long hair. I love the softness and curvaceousness to their faces. I love how puberty doesn’t make them hard, how every woman still has a little girl’s face, how every woman is still a child at heart. I love the firmness and softness to their breasts, and how they nourish innocent young life with those perky, milky orbs. I love to suck on women’s breasts, but I didn’t with Lani, you know, because she didn’t feel aware she had breasts, innocent child that she was. I love the supple curves to women’s bodies, how symmetrical they are. I love how just the outline of a woman’s form is a work of art in of itself. I love the delicate, mincing steps women take in heeled shoes, how it makes their hips delightfully sway back and forth. I love the softness to their smooth, hairless legs. I could run my hands along a woman’s legs forever. I love the rosiness to their cheeks and lips. I love the wide, trusting nature of their eyes. I love the dainty smallness of their hands.”

Josua isn’t still as he talks. His hands lovingly caress up and down her legs the entire time. He plants tender kisses along her thighs, then her knees, working steadily downwards to her feet.

“I love women. I love fucking women, and I love admiring women. I love everything about women. That’s why what you do is so important, Jade. Because women aren’t beautiful on their own. Being a woman, really being a woman, is an art. It takes work and pain and dedication. Women must suffer to be women. They must bleed. They must know pain.”

“Art demands no less.”

He plants a loving kiss on Jade’s right foot. A blissful shudder runs through his body as he closes his eyes, then rubs his cheek against her foot as though to ‘seal in’ the kiss.

“And you… are an artist.”

Celia: It’s the sort of speech that makes a woman lose herself. The sort of thing that makes her eyes shine, her breath catch, her toes curl. His words do more for her than the clumsy, fumbling movements of so many men who try and fail to replicate what he says without thinking, and the touch on her legs, the kiss on her foot, the pure adoration that he lavishes upon her…

She breathes it in. Breathes it in with long, shaking breaths that she doesn’t need, but she doesn’t care because that, too, is art; looking human is art, breathing and forcing her heart to beat and letting her body react the way it wants to is art, art that she created through blood and time and tears because being a woman is art and she is its master.

Jade uses the foot he’d kissed to nudge him aside, putting him onto his back with his belly and throat exposed like the submissive toy that he is. She traces the tips of her fangs with her tongue, then drops. Her thighs spread to either side of his waist, dress hiked up around her hips to give her the freedom of movement. Her knees hit the floor hard, hands flashing out to catch his wrists and pin them above his head.

“Trouble,” she tells him, nipping once more at his throat, “you’re trouble, with a tongue like that.” She aches to break his skin, to sink her teeth in, but she holds off.

GM: “Oh, yes… I’m in so much trouble with you, mistress…” Josua purrs, his eyes lighting up as she spreads her thighs around him. He doesn’t fight her grip, but he wriggles his hips, grinding his crotch against hers. He pushes up and down from the floor as though trying to reach heaven. He mouths her breasts through the fabric of her dress, running his tongue across them in clockwise motions even as he contently suckles at the covered nipples. It’s a curious sensation, to receive such pleasure through a cloth barrier, but it’s far from unpleasant.

“You’re….” Josua murmurs, “a calamity, if I’m trouble… an apocalypse… I’m in completely over my head… what have I gotten myself into… once Jade is on the scene, all bets are off… all will be as the goddess wills, and mere man can never know her will…”

Celia: Less curious than he might think; she’s always been a sucker for teasing over the clothes before finally tearing them off, and her Embrace had only heightened those senses. She makes a sound deep in her throat, eyes closing when his hips move upward to rub against her. She presses down, not evening pretending anymore that this hasn’t turned into round two, that she isn’t slick and ready to go again. Even her Beast is ready to pounce and tear into this delectable young thing beneath her.

“Insatiable,” she murmurs, shifting to hold his wrists with one hand—it’s a loose grip at best—so she can drag her nails down his chest. “But you’re right,” she breathes into his ear, “that you don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into; I’m going to leave you wanting and begging and panting for more, and all you’re going to think about these next few nights is how badly you want me to come back and finish what I started.”

Her lips press against the underside of his jaw, just over the pulse point on a mortal, and the tips of her fangs drag against his skin. Then she’s gone, pulling up and off of him, rising to her feet in a fluid motion and peering down at him with eyes that smolder in their intensity.

GM: “Oh, yes… I don’t know, mistress… I thought I saw you, with Lani, but you’re her wicked twin sister…” Josua murmurs. He rises, but not to his feet. He wraps his arm around Jade’s leg and presses his cheek against the skin, rapturously, like a freezing man clinging to a vertical space heater, or an ecstatic Indian to a sacred totem.

“There are so many sides to you… just when I think I have you figured out, you show me I don’t know anything… you’re an eternal mystery, try though I might to understand you… man cannot understand the goddess, only try to please her…”

Josua smoothly slides down from her thigh to her foot in a bowing-look motion. His hands to start to caress the sides of her shoe as he kisses its front, then licks the underside to polish it clean.

“You do torture me, mistress, and it hurts so bad, to be deprived of your touch… but it’s a privilege to be tortured by you… to know that my pain pleases the goddess, and that she sees fit to listen to my begging… it’s enough to help me through my pain, but to leave me on the brink of madness, wanting more, wanting so much more… but my wants don’t matter, only her pleasure…”

He fits the heel of Jade’s shoe into his mouth and begins to rapturously suck it, like he would a man’s cock. His lips move up and down the heel as his tongue laps across each side. He makes the same noises he would with a cock, too. Slowly savored “mmm… mmm…” ones in between each suck and inhalation. His eyes close contently.

Celia: She leaves him to it for a moment, amused by the sight of him on his knees in front of her, aroused by the way he clearly worships the entirety of her being. Were it any other night she might even keep him there; her mind runs wild with the fantasy of putting him on a leash, making him crawl after her, turning him into her very own pet.

But it isn’t any other night, and she does, unfortunately, have places to be and people decidedly less attractive to speak to, and despite his assurance that Marcel doesn’t mind sharing or guests she still doesn’t want to be caught where she shouldn’t be. Nothing like being forced to explain why she got caught trespassing to kill her boner. They’re not even in his room, she can’t help but note, but still outside of it where anyone could walk by.

She moves her foot, removing it from his mouth and settling the sole of it against his chest. Another nudge lays him out once more, denying him the satisfaction of touching her.

“Enough.”

GM: He quavers underneath her foot, but simultaneously presses his chest against the shoe, as though it’s his last and only chance to get as close to her as possible. He loves the sensation of her sole, that much is plain.

“Yes, mistress,” he whimpers.

Celia: “Show me what you created. Your painting. The art. Show me me.” She turns, pulling her foot off of him, and strides toward the door. A snap of her fingers summons him after her.

GM: He swiftly rises behind her. “Yes, mistress. Right away.”

They walk back into the cabin. Josua turns the easel so that she can see.

It’s her.

The painting depicts her lying back-down on the bed, her arms spread. Josua hasn’t painted the handcuffs, but it’s a vulnerable and exposed-feeling position. She’s lying right there for the viewer to claim, everything from head to her belly. She’s a helpless prize to be won. There’s a rosy hue to her cheeks and the tips of her breasts that feels simultaneously innocent and suggestive. Indeed, the whole piece feels that way. One could appreciate it for its aesthetic merits or masturbate to it as pornography. An appreciative enough viewer might even be able to do both. Jade feels like Josua could do both.

But the crown jewel is the smile.

Everything shines through in that smile. Part of her looks happy. Her eyes glow with happiness. She looks eager to please, too. Her expression makes Jade think of all those times people told Celia to smile, and how Emily says it’s sexist. But the girl in the portrait smiles anyway. Part of it does feel a little sexist, the weight of patriarchy bearing down on her slim shoulders, and she can’t do other than go along. But she also feels like she’s smiling because it’s her. Really and truly her. It’s an innocent smile, fragile and broken. It lights up the world and shows all of its cracks. Jade can see the pain in the girl’s eyes. It’s a soft pain, long accustomed, that she meekly accepts as part of herself, yet perhaps yearns to break of and knows she can’t, because it’s not her place. She shares it all with the viewer. She’s smiling directly at them, sharing something innocent and fragile and trusting. She trusts you with her true self, in all its innocent fragility. The smile is just for you.

Trust. That’s a big part of what shines through. Jade may think back to Josua saying she couldn’t talk. She didn’t need to talk. She could place her trust entirely in another person’s hands. It makes her think of subspace, that state of mind Alana sometimes gets into. The ghoul becomes completely pliant and willing, aglow with pleasure at letting someone else totally control her and make all the decisions, because that person loves her enough to make all the right ones. It’s a position of total trust. The girl in the portrait doesn’t look fully in subspace; there’s no lust in the smile. But she looks like she’s familiar with what subspace is.

It looks like the kind of smile a girl would show her daddy. Or her lover. It’s the kind of smile that doesn’t exist between sisters, or between mothers and daughters. It makes Celia think about her family. Emily, who always will be her equal and peer. Diana, who’s brimming with affection, but who’s never been the one to protect and keep her safe. This smile is the look a girl reserves for her daddy. A dominant man who can make her his little princess. The pictures makes Jade wonder what life would have been like with Maxen as her loving father. In that smile, she sees a mirrored longing. A girl who’s close enough to see the daddy she’s always wanted, but too far away to touch. He’s missing from the picture. There’s just her.

A beautiful girl with a beautiful smile.

Celia: She takes a breath.

And then another.

Useless, those breaths. They do nothing to stem the tide of emotion that threatens to take her in its grasp and strangle her. The corners of her eyes burn as she stares, silently, upon what Josua has created.

Her.

It’s her.

Every empty, aching, twisted part of her resides within that smile. Every word that has ever been flung her way, every negative thought, every everything that makes her her. Not Jade, not Leilani, not Star or Lily or Violet, not the whore or the sinner or the bitch, not the harpy’s slut or the sheriff’s childe or Savoy’s pet neonate or Roderick’s girlfriend or Alana’s mistress.

Just her. Just Celia.

The girl without a dad who desperately wants one. The girl with four paternal figures who are too busy or too distant or too important to want to have anything to do with her.

It’s beautiful. And it’s devastating. And for long moments she can only stare at herself, at this fractured, fragile thing in front of her, at her complete and utter willingness to trust in someone else to take care of everything, and wonder where it all went wrong.

Canvas is not her medium. She can’t speak to brush strokes and dimension and proportions, can’t judge the color or the composition. She doesn’t try. She only stares, and wonders, and feels.

She doesn’t know when she took his hand, only that she reached for something to anchor her and there he was, and her fingers feel small in his grip and maybe that’s okay, maybe that’s what she needs right now, maybe just for tonight the mask slips and she’s not Jade anymore, she’s not Leilani, she’s just Celia.

A beautiful girl with a beautiful smile.

At last, she finds her voice.

“It’s me.” Quiet words, hardly louder than a breath of air. Her tongue flicks across her lips.

“It’s me,” she says again. She turns to face him, cheeks stained red. She points, as if she needs to, as if there is anything else she could speak of.

“It’s me.”

It’s truth. It’s beauty. It’s both. There’s no need to decide between the pair with each at home on the canvas.

GM: Josua squeezes her hand and guides her to a seat on the bed, pulling her up against him, back to his chest as they sit and look at the painting’s smiling sibject. His hands slowly work and caress her shoulders.

“It’s you,” he echoes.

“Art doesn’t lie.”

Celia: It can lie. Makeup lies. It makes the ugly look beautiful, the old look young, the barely adequate divine. It can change the shape of the face or hide deformities, smooth uneven complexions and whittle away too-broad surfaces.

But this doesn’t lie. This portrait, her, it doesn’t lie.

She nestles against him, eyes drawn back to the work of art. She can’t look away, even as his fingers work her flesh, even as her muscles tense, hold, and finally release beneath the pressure.

GM: “Where are you going to keep it?” he asks, continuing to attentively knead her shoulders. He’s no professional like she is, but the sentiment is there.

Celia: Her haven, she thinks, but she doesn’t know how she’ll explain it to her partner, or what his reaction will be if she tells him that she sat for it. Even without the sex, posing nude is… well, he’s not an artist, he doesn’t understand.

“I don’t know,” she admits.

With the dolls, maybe, the other little pieces of her soul, but this… this deserves a prominent location. Private, but prominent.

GM: “You could give it to someone else, too. But it’s a very intimate look at you.”

Celia: She can only think of one person she’d let see her like this. Even so, if he were ever to lose control of his rage and destroy it… well, she thinks she’d have to destroy him, then. She shakes her head.

“I don’t want to share it. I want to keep it. To… remind me.”

GM: “Hmm. Maybe there’s a lot to remind yourself about. Lani is so submissive. Not at all like Jade.”

Celia: “No,” she agrees. “But that isn’t Lani. Or Jade.”

GM: “You’re right. She is different. It all comes out on the canvas.”

“It’s interesting how we take new names.”

“I almost wish I had, before everyone knew who I was.”

“Everyone loves having a mystery. Being a mystery.”

Celia: “There’s beauty in honesty. In not losing sight of who you were, who you are.”

“That’s more important than we like to give credit.”

GM: “True. But we’re not who we once were, either. New names reflect that.”

“Maybe they’re more honest, in their own way.”

“Or maybe there’s a lie either way.”

Celia: “There’s a line about names and roses from Shakespeare.” Jade lifts a shoulder. “Sometimes the masks get heavy, too.”

GM: “We can take off masks.” He looks thoughtful. “Maybe. There is that quote, too, about masks ceasing to be masks.”

Celia: “Can you take off the mask? I haven’t been honest with anyone since the night I died.” She nods toward the painting. “That’s the most real thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

GM: “I think you can. It’s just a question of how much it’ll hurt, isn’t it?”

“There is hurt in her eyes.”

“Hurt and a lot of other things.”

“Either way, if you’re going to disguise me as a girl, I should take a new name anyway. There’s something fun about slipping on new masks. It’s why we played dress-up as kids. Getting to decide who we are.”

Celia: She accepts the change of subject with something that might be a sad smile. Turned away from him like she is, she doesn’t think he sees, and her shot at raw honesty fades into the night.

“What name would you pick for your feminine self?”

GM: “I think we should wait until we see how she looks.”

Celia: “She’ll be beautiful,” Jade tells him, “like you are. But we can wait and see.”

GM: “I know she will, in your hands. There’s something pure in that, in beauty. It can hide things, but beauty is always honest about itself.”

“I think you’ve probably been more honest than you give yourself credit for.”

“Jade and Lani are both honest. They’re both beautiful.”

Celia: What does that make Celia?

GM: “The world is worse if there’s just one of them. Instead of me sucking your heels, and you sucking my dick, there’d have to be just one of those.”

Celia: “Perish the thought. I wouldn’t deprive the world that way.”

GM: “Which one would you take? Are you a top or a bottom, or does the truth depend on the mask?”

Celia: “I’m a switch. I change to be what’s needed.”

GM: “I think I’m a bottom at heart. But I can switch.”

Celia: “Sometimes it’s nice to give up control.”

GM: “It’s an expression of trust. If someone can hurt you and they don’t.”

Celia: Jade twists in his arms, lifting her face to look up at him.

“Does he?”

GM: Josua grins. “Only in fun ways. So I guess not really.”

“Everyone says Ventrue have sticks up their asses, but he’s very laid back.”

“He’s helping me when he doesn’t have to.”

Celia: “Everyone has a reason they do things, even if they’re not readily apparent.” She pauses just long enough. “Personally I think it’s because you’re adorable.”

GM: He gives a velvety laugh. “Of course. My good looks.”

“They got me almost everywhere in life, I guess the Requiem shouldn’t be any different.”

Celia: “You don’t sound very enthused about that idea.”

GM: He pauses. “I wonder, sometimes, if they’re why my sire turned me.”

“Maybe I’d be happier if I’d been just a little less handsome.”

He smiles. “But not too much less. Only a little.”

Celia: “One of those famous writers once said that the most important days of our lives are the day we were born and the day we find out why. I think the same can be said of anyone who was turned without a choice.”

GM: “She turned me and just… disappeared. I still have no idea why.”

Celia: “You could let it consume you, let that question turn you into a bitter shrew. Obsess over it. Wonder why you were abandoned, why she didn’t stick around, wonder if it’s because you somehow didn’t measure up, like you weren’t good enough, like it’s acceptable to just pull someone from their life and ruin it and ditch them, like maybe you were a mistake all along, or a moment of passion that turned into regret.”

“And that’s fine. Plenty of licks do that. Plenty of people, too.”

“Or…” She turns fully, perched on his lap once more, knees bent with her arms around his neck. “You can accept that sometimes… sometimes there isn’t a grand plan. Sometimes things don’t happen for a reason. Sometimes you get a shitty sire and someone else cares enough about you to take you in.”

GM: “You are right there,” he grants. “I could’ve been Embraced as a thin-blood. Or been found by a thin-blood.”

Celia: “My breather family,” she says at length. “My sister was adopted. Her bio mom didn’t care enough about her to lay off the bottle, and she had a rough go of it. Bounced around foster care. We met and hit it off, and my mom brought her into the family, and they’ve been happy. No blood binds them, but they’ve got a better relationship than most people I knew.”

GM: “That’s a happy ending for them both.”

“Is she hot?”

“Your sister and all.”

Celia: “Oooh, yeah, not gonna happen.”

GM: “Ah, well. You’re hotter anyways, I bet.”

Celia: “I am.”

GM: “She must be happy, though. My dad was a douchebag too. For a long time, all I wanted was to fill that hole. Not many people get to.”

Celia: Jade makes a sound that might be choked laughter.

“Yeah,” she says, “I know that feeling.”

GM: “Douche dad too?”

Celia: “Abusive.”

GM: “That’s just a travesty. Like defacing the Sistine Chapel.”

Celia: It almost comes out then. The whole story about dinner, the apology, wanting to make amends.

But that’s a truth she isn’t ready to talk about, and it’s not just her unlife on the line.

“Yours too, sounds like.”

GM: “He wasn’t abusive. He just walked out and never paid child support.”

“One of my sisters still has some serious self-esteem and abandonment issues from it.”

Celia: “Sometimes it’s easier to cut someone out when you realize they’re toxic than coping with their absence.”

GM: “Easier said than done for a lot of people.”

“But this is getting glum.”

Celia: “What, you’re not turned on by emotional pain?”

She tsks at him.

GM: He laughs. “I’ve seen some weird fetishes, but never that one.”

“But you have a beautiful man with his arms around you. I have a beautiful woman on my lap.” He plants a kiss against her neck.

Celia: “Oh, no, no,” she murmurs, shaking her head. “I know how this goes. You tell me how pretty I am, I let you seduce me, we fuck again, I miss the rest of the party I’m supposed to be at…” She makes no move to get off his lap despite her protests.

GM: His hands start to massage her breasts as he plants kisses along her cheek.

“The party is wherever you are.”

Celia: Oh.

Well.

That’s certainly true.

GM: “It’s their fault if they didn’t get the memo where it was at.”

Celia: “How selfish of me to deny them my presence.”

“But logistically,” she murmurs, arching her back to lean into his touch, “they wouldn’t all fit in your room, and even if I were inclined to skip it and take you again, there’s the issue that I’d lose all control and rip your pretty throat out, and then you’d never let me turn you into a girl so we can tag-team Marcel.”

“And that, Josua, would be a travesty.”

GM: “I suppose you’re right,” he says wistfully. “When do you want to do that?”

Celia: “Mmm… sometime this week? I can make myself available.” She offers Tuesday or Wednesday.

GM: “Hmm, Wednesday’s better,” says Josua. “I’ll check things with Marcel.”

Celia: “Let me know. In the meantime, I don’t suppose I could talk you into smuggling me out of here and giving me a lift back to the Quarter?”

GM: Josua laughs. “You wouldn’t rather stay for round two? Are you sure?”

Celia: “I’d like to. I’d really, really like to.”

GM: “I know you would. You’re a switch. You’ve only seen half of all I can be…”

Celia: “Hard to say no when you put things like that…” Her fingers slide through his, halting the movement of the hands on her body before the rest of her self-control can slip away. Even if she didn’t have to go she couldn’t stay, not when it means poaching to avoid a bigger mess. Another twist and her lips find the corner of his mouth. “But I need to go. We’ll save it for next time when I turn you into my pretty little girl. Come, though, be a good boy and I might even let you worship me on the way back.”

GM: Josua sinks rapturously into the kiss, his tongue hungrily seeking out hers.

“Oh, but it’ll be a whole new way for us to fuck once I’m a girl… a whole new way of worshiping you… there are so many ways you can be worshiped, mistress, and so many you deserve to be worshiped… none of them enough… but mere men must try…”

He doesn’t try to remove his hands from Celia’s, but lowers them and casually hikes up the hem of her dress.

“Tonight we can still do it without protection… there’s only two nights we can do that… let me show you something, mistress, I think you’ll like it…”

Still holding Celia’s hands, as though because she hasn’t given him permission to let go, Josua bows his head and nimbly snakes it under her dress. He starts to lick her in her sweetest spot, just like Roderick does. But Roderick never did it with such an air of pure pleasure, pure joy, from pleasuring her.

Then, also unlike Roderick, Josua sinks his fangs into the flesh just above her clit. Celia feels the ecstasy of the kiss take immediate hold, shuddering up her loins like an electric current as her clanmate sucks her blood. His tongue simultaneously laps around her little nub in long, soft, counterlockwise circles. Pleasing the Man (the Woman) and the Beast at once.

He finally lets go of her hands. His fingers slowly and softly find their way towards her g-spot, then stroke it in steady rhythmic motions.

Celia: Words themselves lose all meaning. Thoughts dissolve into fragmented snippets of sensation: falling, drowning, and an overwhelming ember that starts a fire in her core. It burns. She burns. “Stah—” she thinks she might say, but without the pop of her lips to form the P it’s just more noise percolating through the atmosphere. Currents of electricity buzz through her body. Her back arches, the girl made marionette through tongue and teeth and fingertip.

Her protest dies before it has a chance to live. She succumbs.

GM: Josua brings her over the edge. She’s not even sure how many times he does so; it all blurs together under the ceaseless ecstasy of the kiss, gasm after gasm that turn her thighs to jelly. At some point he switches positions, 69ing with her so that she can suck the blood he’s taken back out of his (erect) cock. The fire in her core burns and burns and consumes him too, until they’re both guttered out and smoldering in one another’s arms.

“Bet they wouldn’t have worshiped you at that silly party,” Josua purrs, his tongue idly tracing a path across her labia.

The clock, however, tells another story. If she doesn’t hurry, the party may be almost over.

Celia: The mention of the party is enough to clear the fog from her mind. She sits up suddenly, breath hissing from between her teeth. Josua finds himself quickly displaced when she rises to her feet.

“Shit,” she says, pulling her dress down.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she says, reaching for her purse.

“Shit,” she says, glaring at the door where beyond waits guards and licks and ghouls and who knows what else that will try to keep her from making it back in time to do… anything.

“Come on,” she says to him, reaching for his hand. “Show me the way out.”

GM: There’s also the window, if she cares to take a swim.

Celia: She has wings, she doesn’t need to swim.

GM: “That’s not usually what a partner likes to hear after sex,” Josua replies amusedly, but pulls on his pants. “All right, though. Follow me.”

Celia: Unless he’s going to take her all the way to the border… maybe the window is the better bet. She eyes it. Then asks.

GM: “We don’t really keep any cars on board here, but I can hail a Ryde to take you to your party.”

Celia: “No,” she says finally, “we’ll pretend we’re in high school, only the roles are reversed.” Jade crosses to the window and shoves it open. “Keep my painting safe for me. I’ll be back to collect it.”

She takes a step back, then launches herself through the open window. Her body twists and she disappears with a flap of wings.