Free Blood Sacrifice by By Rick R. Reed

Elise closes her eyes, panting as shudders and waves of pleasure claim intellect and body. She yearns for more, yearns for him to be inside her. She would pay
him
. Please, she thinks, please, now…
    Suddenly, he withdraws, and she cries out, synapses tingling, craving, yearning. Mute, she watches as he undresses, the leather and chains falling to her filthy floor in a heap, clinking and thudding, becoming a burrowing animal in the shadows. His naked body reminds her of Michelangelo’s
David
, and it reinforces her knowledge of what the sculptor was expressing, something about the perfection of the human form, about rising above the physical and approaching the ethereal. Elise reaches out, fingertips tingling, wanting to cry out, “Come to me,” but unable to form words with her thick tongue.
    And then he is moving across the room.
    And then the room is flooded with yellow light.
    Elise closes her eyes, something from underneath a rock exposed suddenly, cruelly. All her work. “No,” she whimpers. She is unable to move, unable to do anything more than just lie there, a vessel waiting to be filled. She hates herself. But her brain is clouded, the drug and desire twisting inside her, creatures that have taken on lives of their own, overpowering her.
    Jealous. His lover’s gaze is no longer on her, but on her creations, boring into them, penetrating them instead of her.
    She watches, mute and paralyzed, as he takes in her drawings and paintings, one by one, opening them with his eyes, seeing everything Elise has said in the last few years with her dark vision. She tries to get up, but slumps back down, wishing for once she could gather up all of her art and destroy it. She would trade it all for just a few moments in his arms, their bodies joined like one organism.
    His cock is stiff, jerking as he absorbs the art. Elise crumples to the floor. What he has paid her is not enough. In the midst of her lust-filled delirium are the stirrings of rage and betrayal. No matter if she didn’t feel ready to share her art with the world, it was still
her
, her essence, maybe even her soul. How dare he?
    “You’re a genius.” The words filter down as if played at slow speed, heard through a tunnel. What need has she for praise? Angrily, she watches him devour her art, stealing it. He touches the paper upon which she has drawn with reverence, touching himself with the other hand.
    “You see. You really see,” he whispers, and turns to gaze down at her.
    And then he is gone. Wind rushes in through the open door, lifting her drawings, the paper rattling in the breeze. And Elise lies alone, naked and betrayed on the floor, where a cockroach, sensing her heat, skitters across her thigh.
    *
    Terence blazes through the night, Harley roaring between his legs, wind whipping his hair behind him. His teeth are clenched as he tries to sort out the emotions caroming through him, crashing like cymbals. Is it rage he feels? He grips the throttle so tightly it’s as if his knuckles will burst through the skin. The world whizzing by is a blur, incomprehensible.
    All he can see is Midnight’s art. He remembers leaning against her peeling, colorless walls, finishing the pipe, letting the THC do its work: sharpening his focus, bringing her art to life. What horrifying vision. Terence swears the art has let him see the woman’s soul, dark, her own, no way to possess it. The bleak drawings, black and gray, layers of shadows, speak of the void in which she lives: the animal lusts, the chains confining her, earthbound…her need for survival. The woman speaks with a knowledge he had thought no human possessed.
    And the woman herself: reddish-brown hair, fright in her eyes as he stood above her, blood heat pulsing through her veins. He remembers it all, even in the lightless void of her apartment. The temptation to devour it then was nearly unbearable, filling every fiber of his being with need so intense it virtually erased his reality. By devouring