Lights, Camera, Blood: Ch. 06 Devil

Authors' Note: This is the eighth part of a chain story by a sextet of Literotica authors: @Tio_Narratore, @StillStunned, @pink_silk_glove, @Erozetta, @AlinaX and @Omenainen. You will be able to find all the chapters eventually in this list: Vampire Chain Story.

6.1 Fiction

How long had it been, Mina wondered, since that fateful night. The wine had been good, and Mina had as so often been entertaining secret fantasies of penetrating her blonde friend's armour of correctness. "You know," she had said, thinking only of the mischief she could cause, "you should go for that job."

Lucy was trapped. Anyone could see it - except Lucy herself. On paper, her boyfriend Richard was a good choice. Or a sensible choice. A safe choice. Financially stable, educated, good looking. But where was the passion? Richard treated Lucy like a possession, a well behaved and very unadventurous possession, and the bright spirited Lucy that Mina loved was lost under all that expectation.

Almost lost. The one spark of independence Richard had been unable to stamp out was Lucy's love of movies. Not merely watching, but taking them to pieces and analysing almost to death. Blockbusters, on the whole, bored her, while independent arthouse productions made on a shoestring budget could make her scream with excitement.

A monthly binge-watch of recent horror releases was one way Lucy and Mina kept their friendship fresh and alive. "Are you sure you're not a lesbian?" Mina would tease her sometimes.

Lucy was straight. There was no questioning that, but perhaps... Perhaps.

"Of course I'm not!" Lucy's usual answer. "I've got a boyfriend."

Hah! That was no answer. It was part of the armour, the denial that Mina had longed to strip away. And now that it had been stripped away - by Adamir, by Mircalla - it felt like Lucy had been stolen away from her. That the victory that should have been Mina's now mocked her instead.

With the cameras rolling, recording the event for future millions to watch, Lucy had yielded to a passion she had never admitted before. Mina doubted that Mircalla, no stranger to cinematic porn, had ever embodied eroticism with such utter conviction as Lucy had in that earthshaking moment.

And now Lucy was up at the castle, alone with Adamir, triumphant and determined, barely recognisable as Mina's reserved friend. Between that and all the ominous disappearances they had uncovered, this adventure they had embarked on together with such enthusiasm no longer seemed quite so sweet.

"Be careful, Lucy," she whispered to the night, and headed out into the dark.

*

"Are you accusing me of harming people involved in my productions?" Adamir demanded.

"Accusing? No." Keeping the tone light but professional was a definite challenge for Lucy. She was sitting on a table, quite naked, conducting the first serious interview of her new career - and quite possibly the last also - with a world-famous director of erotic horror films. Perhaps she was accusing him of being a monster in real life, or at least in being complicit in covering up what was potentially a chain of gruesome deaths. "Just find it an odd coincidence that in thirteen different filming locations, there have been disappearances of locals or tourists at eleven of them within a month of wrapping up filming. And given you like to 'see women squirm'" - certainly he'd enjoyed making her squirm - "and enjoy filming them dying because they evoke strong emotions from an audience, I'm sure you can see why my curiosity might be piqued."

Lucy was feeling really quite proud of herself. She'd done the research, had prepared the questions, and, well, everything Adamir had put her through in recent days had taught her to be fearless in his presence and unashamed to bare herself like this. The old Lucy, for whom even a risqué photograph was daring in the extreme, would not have recognised the woman she had become.

"I don't go looking for people disappearing from my sets," Adamir was saying. "What made... Vladan?"

Vladan and Valeska, the newlyweds whose car had broken down outside the Danica, had been seduced by Adamir into playing a role in his film. They had swapped a honeymoon of sunshine and sand for dark nights and brittle cold, for eroticism and adventure, for cruelty and betrayal. In one startling scene, Vladan had exceeded the script and made love to Mircalla's Bathory while the cameras rolled and his captive wife watched helplessly.

And afterwards, consumed with shame, he had fled the hotel. "He still hasn't been found, right?"

They had all been watching the final scene together, in a makeshift cinema in the hotel. "He wandered off," Adamir said, but there had been more to it than that. Vladan had looked quite ill, and really someone should have followed him out. "We were all there."

No one had seen him since. Once Mina and Lucy started looking seriously into the disappearances, inevitably it led them to ask if maybe Vladan had not merely got lost or gone into hiding. Perhaps someone had actually followed Vladan and... well, something terrible. "Wolf wasn't." Mina and Lucy were both pretty sure about that. "He's been your lead cameraman since The Office, right?" Now that was perhaps a wild accusation, but there was other evidence - circumstantial, but compelling. "The disappearances started right after that."

"No," Adamir whispered. "I don't believe it. It's a coincidence and nothing more."

His reactions confused her. Adamir was shocked, not defensive. Lucy stopped the recording, and listened as he revealed more than she could have hoped for about his early years with Anna and Josh, Adamir's closest friend and his original cameraman.

"You loved him?" she prompted at one point.

"And her. The three of us. It was always just the three of us early on."

The fire was neglected while they talked, and chill night air crept in, making her shiver. That, as much as anything, stirred Adamir into action. He reached for his phone.

"What are you doing?" Lucy asked.

"Checking on Wolf."

"Isn't he at the hotel?"

"Yeah. I'm texting Anna. She should know if he's there."

*

Anna was a rare creature, and one that had fascinated Mina from the start. Not merely Adamir's chauffeur, she was the line producer, a camera operator, and also the principal editor. Often the first of the crew to be seen in the evenings, and quite often the last to retire, she stayed not in the hotel but in the large van that acted as the video editing studio. Anyone who was awake at four o'clock in the morning and was curious about the footage shot during the night could knock on her door.

Mina had taken to doing it regularly. She told herself it was for the job, gathering what little information and gossip she could to add a complementary depth to Lucy's eventual article, but in truth it was a fascination with Anna herself.

"Ah, Mina, come in, sit! Krushka?"

Krushka was a home-brewed pear brandy that Mina had learned to enjoy. "Please."

Not that Anna waited for a reply. She had two shot glasses ready and was pouring the clear liquid, kept chilled in a small fridge that contained nothing but more bottles of various spirits, while Mina thought through the impossibility of saying no. It was good stuff, though. "Živeli," she said, and sipped carefully.

Anna grinned, and echoed the sentiment. "Živeli."

Her attention, though, was quickly back on the multiple screens showing the digital editing software and multiple streams and stills from the evening before. Lucy, perched on the edge of the bath tub, her legs wide open to allow Mircalla to shave her. The camera capturing perfectly the moment the razor sharp blade drew blood. Real blood. Not stage blood. Lucy's blood. The sight of it seemed to transfix Mircalla, or perhaps it was an act. Mina was never sure where Mircalla ended and the bloodthirsty Countess began.

In another video stream, the camera lingered on Lucy's face and chest. To Mina who knew Lucy well, her expression hinted at fatigue and anxiety and her lips looked unnaturally swollen, but the flush of arousal and the gleam of sweat suggested a woman lost in pleasure. Her vampiric lover poured warm honey over her breasts, and bent to capture a nipple that was swollen with desire.

Mina scowled at the displays and sat back, sipping the krushka and looking instead at Anna's inked shoulders and arms. Bats. Skilfully drawn, artistic, but ugly and sinister at the same time. She had the potential to be a beautiful woman, tall and slender with grey-blue eyes and long red hair, kept tied back in twin braids that reached almost to her waist.

She had the pale skin of one who prefers stars to sun, which served to emphasise the dusting of freckles on her face, her shoulders, her arms. Her breasts. The green vest that Anna usually wore seemed designed almost to reveal as much skin as possible, to show off those seductive freckles and disturbing tattoos.

Anna set the computer to rendering and swivelled round to face Mina. "Your friend," she said, "is a natural. She has a virgin's air of innocence coupled with a yearning hunger. Whenever she forgets about the camera, that is."

Mina had observed as much herself. Under Mircalla's spell, Lucy transformed from a shy, straight Englishwoman into a fantasy of lesbian submissiveness, and Mina wasn't convinced it was entirely an act.

But she didn't want to think about Lucy. "What do you really think of all this nonsense?" she asked, with a nod of her head towards a still of Mircalla's Bathory, fangs bared.

Anna chuckled, and refilled Mina's glass and her own. "Živeli," they chorused. Literally, "Let's live!" - an irony amidst scenes of dying and undeath.

"Nonsense? Do you mean vampires? Or Bathory in particular?"

"Both," Mina replied. "But let's start with Bathory. The real Countess was nothing like this. She was a murderer who tortured hundreds of young girls - to their death. The stories of her bathing in blood to remain young and beautiful were invented hundreds of years later."

"Someone's been doing their homework," Anna murmured with a glint of amusement in her eyes. For someone who couldn't have been much older than Mina, twenty-five at a guess, there was a depth of experience in those eyes and more than a hint of patronising indulgence. "Some people say the accusations were false, manufactured as a way to strip a powerful woman of all her wealth and weaken the influence of the Transylvanian Bathory family. Much the way your queens - Numbers Two and Five, yes? - were accused of terrible things before having their heads chopped off."

"I don't think that's quite the same," Mina said uncertainly, but between the lateness of the hour, the fuzziness from the alcohol and the distraction of the red-haired beauty in front of her, Mina quite forgot what it was she had wanted to say.

Anna shrugged. "Or perhaps you're right. Perhaps the Countess made girls stand naked in the river midwinter, pushed pins into their fingers and thrust red hot pokers into their vaginas, but who wants to believe such cruelty is possible? Who would ever watch a movie with such horror in it? But a vampire? Beautiful and terrifying, seductive and cruel, victims whipped until lost in pleasure as much as pain? So what if it's not real.

"People don't want real. They want stories. Four hundred years have passed and there's no one alive who knows the truth." Anna grinned with sudden mischief. "Except vampires, and technically they aren't alive either."

The grin was infectious and Mina couldn't help smiling back - until Anna stood and held out a hand in invitation. And despite all her misgivings, all her suspicions, Mina's hesitation was brief. She allowed herself to be brought to her feet, a small part of her mind registering a startling coldness in the fingers that entwined with her own; but perhaps it was Mina herself who was on fire, because there was electricity in that touch, the kind that ignites a fierce desire within.

Her eyes were drawn, as often, to the constellations of freckles. They marred the perfection of Anna's skin but highlighted the simple beauty of the underlying features. This distraction was brief also, Anna's cool lips pressing against Mina's, and she melted into the kiss.

And what a kiss. Anna's lips were soft yet firm, playful and explorative, neither too wet nor too dry. Mina half feared to encounter fangs with her tongue, and was oddly disappointed not to.

"Wow," she breathed after, her heart hammering, and shook with a sudden laughter of happiness. Mina hadn't come to Anna's crazy lair in hope or expectation of being seduced like this. Almost of their own will, her fingers traced the outline of the ugly creature inked just below Anna's left shoulder. "Why," she started to ask, why disfigure yourself like this, then kicked herself into silence.

Anna smiled in recognition of the question, but did not answer. "Come," she said instead and retreated into the interior through a web of cables to a cot scarcely big enough for one person to sleep in; and stripped out of her vest with a sinuous ease, despite the cramped and awkward space, to reveal further macabre designs in flight across her bare skin.

"Is there space?" Mina asked, her hesitation less out of concern for space, more a last desperate questioning of the sense in taking this step. Sleeping with a woman she hardly knew in the back of a van in the middle of nowhere. A woman who seemed to worship bats, of all things. A woman who could, in the perverse corners of Mina's imagination, yet be a real life vampire.

"I'm not a vampire," Anna said, as if reading Mina's mind. "In ancient Greece, they believed people with red hair were vampires. It's understandable, I guess. We have pale skin and burn easily in the sun. We're often left-handed too. When you're visibly different to ninety-nine percent of the population, people do tend to fear you."

Mina felt the heat of embarrassment in her cheeks, but since Anna did not look in the least offended she chose to laugh it off. "Ninety-nine point nine in your case."

Anna grinned. "You might need a few more nines on that."

Mina reached a decision and dared to step forward, through the web and into the lair. "Nine," she said with each careful step. "Nine, nine, nine."

And then perhaps it was too late as she was caught in her vampire seductress's embrace, surrendering willingly to demanding lips that kissed her with possessive hunger as Mina's hands caressed tattooed skin and soft, perfect breasts.

She cried out softly as Anna's demanding lips kissed her ear, kissed her neck; then more loudly, "Ah!" as she felt teeth and sharp pain. "No biting!"

Mina pushed her away in sudden fear, touching her fingertips to her neck in a sudden certainty that there would be blood - but there was no blood, only laughter from Anna as she bent to unlace her army boots.

No blood, but Mina had no doubt there would be a love bite visible for Lucy and the others to see. She scowled at Anna, but her irritation gave way to astonishment. As Anna slid her trousers and underwear down her toned, muscular thighs, a cock sprang out, semi swollen and already impressive in length.

"You're trans?" Mina asked, as if the answer wasn't right there in front of her.

Anna shrugged. "If you want to put a label on it. That a problem for you?"

Mina shook her head slowly, unable to tear her gaze away from the jutting member. "No," she said. "Just... unexpected." Putting it mildly.

"Well, then," Anna murmured, stepping close to Mina and kissing her, soft and romantic this time, no teeth. "Let's get these clothes off."

And Mina was only too happy to help.

*

There was a video feed on Adamir's phone. The resolution was bad and the image kept freezing, but it looked like the lobby of the Danica. "What's that?" demanded Lucy.

Adamir explained about the security cameras he'd installed in the hotel. "Not in all of the rooms," he hastened to add. Not in the room Lucy shared with Mina. Not in the suite reserved for Mircalla. "I'm not that much of a pervert." There was a camera in Wolf's room, but the room was dimly lit and little could be seen in the grainy image on Adamir's phone.

They swapped phones. "Watch the cameras," he instructed her. "I'm going to go to Wolf's room.

Lucy, meanwhile, had hurriedly dressed herself. She grabbed his arm. "Best case scenario, this is all a strange coincidence. Worst case is you hired a serial killer who may have killed your friend to get the job. Maybe you shouldn't go looking or let him know you're onto him?"

"I'm the director," Adamir said, his tone reassuring. "I have reason to go to his room and it's not unusual for me to do so." Lucy was reminded of the night of the car crash. It had been Adamir who reacted instantly, striding out of the hotel into the darkness to see if aid was needed. "Besides," he added with a smile, "I'm not going to confront him, I still have some scenes I need to film..."

Lucy was far from convinced by this performance. Adamir was someone who thrived on being in control - a born director - but the script for this story was not his to write. Wolf could be anywhere, and Anna was yet to reply to Adamir's text. And what of Mina? Adamir had said that Mina was with Mircalla, but Lucy thought that unlikely.

"Between you and me," Mircalla had whispered to Lucy earlier, "I'm shattered. I'm going to have a long, hot bath and crawl into bed - and God help anyone who tries to stop me." There was something quite bewitching about the Hungarian. Neither Mircalla nor Lucy were lesbians, and yet they had shared a profound and passionate intimacy beyond anything Lucy had ever before experienced.

Lucy stumbled in the dark as she followed Adamir down the hill from the castle. The sky was clear and the stars were bright. The Moon, low in the sky, was almost full, but still the path was shadowy and treacherous - and slippery with patches of ice. The air was bitterly cold and soon set her teeth to chattering.

In the far-off distance a lone wolf howled... but no answer came.

*

Ignoring the muffled sounds of normal daytime in the world outside the dark seclusion of the van, Mina and Anna lay together on the cot that had proved robust, though at times precariously narrow. Anna was big spoon, her arm coiled protectively about Mina, her well used cock nudging against Mina's thighs.

"What did you learn about Anna Darvolja?"

The question startled Mina to full alertness. Such questions did not sit well in the zone of contentedness that her mind had been adrift in. "Bathory's torturer," she said quietly. "The Croatian devil. Died the year before Bathory's arrest."

"Yes, but not a devil, and not Croatian either. Like me, she was a Serb. Red hair too, red like the rivers of the town she came from. When the Turks settled nearby, they named their village Djake, which means blood, because of the rivers of Đavolja Varoš. Not Anna Darvolja, but Anna from Đavolja, Devil's Town."

Mina shivered as her imagination conjured up an image of the woman who had just made love to her, whose arm still held her tight, wielding a bloody whip against a legion of young servant girls. "That can't be real," she insisted.

"Oh it is. Popular tourist destination these days. It's said the Devil persuaded a brother and sister there to become lovers, even to get married. When none of the wedding guests objected to the union, the fairies of Devil's Town were enraged and turned all gathered there to stone. They stand there still now, weathered by centuries of rain, and to this day their screams can be heard in the wind."