5 comments/ 13145 views/ 4 favorites Patteran Ch. 01 By: fcdc Patteran (1 of 3): The Black Comely The three Marys had been dead for decades, and Sara was the only one left from that small group in the south of France. She had floated down the Agiqua on her skirt, and had spent the last fifty years at the foot of Bays Mountain, feeding on the animals and a stray tourist or three. The scientists were a tricky enemy to defeat. They took the animals before she could forage them, and they drained them of blood and dried them out for the sake of academic preservation. They were more vampires than she was, she thought occasionally as she nestled amidst the trees and feasting on bits of rabbit, stringing their bones as a bracelet. She could not win against them. They had forced her out with their experiments and greed, and she would have to go in search of more prey. The forests were disappearing, and she would have to move further west. The river promised safe passage, and so she slipped free of the mountains, leaving only a scrap of ribbon from her hair, tied around a bundle of leaves. The People would surely find it and know what it was, but the scientists would miss it entirely in their zeal for small woodland mammals. There should have been a ghost nearby for her to ride, but nobody had died at that particular ridge of Bays Mountain recently enough. She found only bones and dust, but no spirits, and so she walked. Her feet were tough enough that she needed no shoes, and she felt little pain, anyway. Thousands of years ago, she would have been aware of every particular pebble, especially the sharp ones that jabbed into her soles, making travel difficult. Now, she floated well enough without need of a ghost. The pebbles may as well have been sand. The banks of the Agiqua were a guide, and Sara stayed clear of civilization. At night, when she curled up to sleep in small forests, she could barely see the stars for all the lights of the gas stations and all-day supermarkets a scant few miles away. When she had traveled to Calais, she had been able to track individual stars as she moved northward. This country did not appreciate stars wandering through heaven, and did not care for wanderers on the earth, either. She drew a sharp-nailed finger down the belly of a squirrel, and tried to read its entrails, but it was twitching too much for her to get a good sign, and as she pressed the creature to her lips, she decided that she needed a champion for the daylight hours. She needed someone to move about when the stars were as invisible to her as they were to the rest of the county. She knew just what sort of acolyte she wanted. She wanted a man with some spirit to him, someone who posed a challenge. The last boy, a blond skateboarder from Atlanta, had been disappointing despite how much he had mouthed off to her. He hadn't lasted until the morning light, before she had seized a limb in each of her true, four hands and pulled. His screams had not been heard in the dark, thick void of the Georgia woods, and she had replaced one of the oldest of the fifty-one heads on her garlands with the skateboarder's skull. The squirrel convulsed against her lips, severed veins and arteries spraying blood, and she laughed. Her laughter could be heard miles away, but to most, it would sound simply like the cackling of a bird, or a lunatic noise easily dismissed as the natural weirdness of being in the middle of nowhere near the center of a busy country. There was someone in the area who could understand, and he would come to her. He would be her servant. She would be able to command obedience, because of the reverence the People had for her. She had a brief vision of one of them baring his neck for her, his chin tilted up, his eyes begging her to sink her teeth into his neck and to share the knowledge of death and impermanence. It was a pleasant vision. They would do anything for her. They would destroy themselves for her. They would reduce themselves to empty husks in their quest for understanding and worship. It was better when they wanted to do it. Sara tossed the squirrel away, watching it thud against a tree and then slither down in a pile of guts and miasma. It was no good for either blood or bones. She would look for a cattle farm tomorrow, if the People did not bring her food instead. She thought she saw a star twinkling above, but the way the sky started to light up was sign enough. She reached for the cover of branches she'd scrapped together, and draped it over herself, breathing in pine bark and shutting her eyes. She sank into inertia, and went cold just as the nearly invisible sunlight started to sizzle against her face. # The entire bar was uncomfortable with him. Joe could tell. He could see it in the way one of the rednecks seated behind him shuffled his feet, and the supposedly sly looks the guy in the trucker cap was sending his way. He knew he had found the boondocks when his mere looks drew attention. In Memphis or in Atlanta, nobody had cared enough to bother him, but in a place where people were scant and usually on the paler side of white, he stuck out. He drew comments among his own people, too, if for the opposite reason. His mother's mother had not been full-blooded, and so he was not pure. That showed itself in brown hair instead of black, and in the small features of a WASP, mixed with the Romani blood that predominated and gave him olive skin, deep brown eyes, long fingers, and a sharp jaw and brow. He looked native to neither group. Among his people, the European influences he showed drew comments. Here in the bar, they saw him only as a minority, and a dangerous one at that. The bartender set down the booze he'd ordered, and leaned in from the heels to deliver a warning. "Steal anything, and I'll call the cops." Joe couldn't look at the man, or he might have thrown a punch. His shoulders tensed anyway, and his jaw tightened, and then he grinned as the absurdity of such a threat came to him. There was nothing to steal in this shack. Even if there had been, calling the county cops would have taken several miles. He would have been in the next town over by the time any theft was reported. He was not desperate enough to steal even a single piece of silverware -- not real silver -- from a low-down bar. So let them take offense at his presence. They weren't worth getting angry about. Joe sipped the beer, and paused to taste the quality. It wasn't quality at all. That's what he got for not calling his brand, the cheapest stuff in the place. He managed to drink it down, but without much enjoyment. He'd left the company looking for something he couldn't have exactly defined at the time. Now he could define it, but he wasn't going to find it in this bar. He wanted a change. He wanted to feel alive. He could not feel alive in the company, already thirty and expected to have been married for ten years. Those old-fashioned rules weren't for him, and he had lost the ability to pretend to follow them. They hadn't cast him out. He had left on his own. However, if they had known what he was doing, a week after he took off, drunk in a gadje bar and surrounded by rednecks, they'd have had reason to call him unclean and send him away for good. They would never find out, though. He'd promised himself that. He'd gone a state away from the Ocracoke camp to make sure that his family would not find him in this state. Down the bar a little, a guy was staring at him. Trucker cap, flannel shirt, jeans, and a sloppy patch of beard on his chin. The sallow color of his skin gleamed yellow in the harsh, sparse lighting, and a beer gut distended the fabric of his wife-beater. Joe knew a threat when he saw one, and he turned a bit, adjusting his shoulders and tensing his legs so that he could spring off the barstool and throw a quick uppercut to the jaw if he needed to. The bearded guy didn't move. He wasn't spoiling for a fight. He wanted to say something instead, and he recognized Joe. Joe felt a chill run down his spine, like a finger running down it. He set the lousy beer down, letting the coldness jolt down from his shoulders, over his curve of his back, ending at his tailbone. He'd made it this far west without getting in trouble, but he knew that was at an end. It wasn't a flash of the future, like his youngest aunt claimed to receive every other day, but a dead, still certainty. The evening news had started on the television, and Joe dimly heard the anchors commenting on the fire that had started at the base camp of one of the mountains around here. It had spread to the nature park, burning up the preservation station. The wolves were safe, but singed. The scientists weren't. The bodies had been pulled out of the fire, burnt and somehow bloodless. The chill tracked over his back again. Somewhere, a woman was laughing. She was probably laughing at him. He wouldn't have been surprised, for sitting and shivering at nothing deserved plenty of mockery. Joe tipped his beer up and finished it off. He couldn't taste it. It tasted better that way. The news went onto other subjects, but the man in the trucker cap still hadn't looked away. Now the stranger spoke. "She wants to see you." Joe stopped short, set the glass down, and stared at the guy. "What?" His voice sounded hollow. The man shrugged. "She hitched a ride with me into town. Black girl, dark, nice-looking. She said she wanted to see you. She paid me fifty bucks to tell you. You're Joe Lowell, aren't you? She said you wouldn't be hard to find." He grinned, showing fewer teeth than spaces of blackness. "She said she wouldn't be hard to find, too." He heard the laughter again, and he knew. He knew. The woman was here for him. His aunt, the seer, had warned him about this, but he hadn't listened, and now he was in Eastern Tennessee, at the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, with nothing familiar to him except the girl that the trucker had unwittingly helped. He wanted to ask the man questions -- was she wearing a skirt or a necklace? Did she call herself Callie or Sara? She wouldn't have told the trucker anything, though. The trucker wasn't worth telling secret names to, and he wouldn't have noticed the girl's clothing. Another stranger stood decisively, and Joe could hear the floorboards creak as the fellow rose to his shitkicker-booted feet. He could feel the man starting to loom over him. Time to leave. He pulled out a few wrinkled bills, washed with his clothes in the local laundromat, and started for the door. Something was breathing on his neck enough to make his heartbeat pulse in his throat, and he headed for the door, feeling the bright summer sun envelop him in hazy, sickly warmth. # The gypsy she had tracked, Joe Lowell, left the bar like a drunk, but Sara knew he hadn't had enough beer to lose his senses. The trucker must have given him the information, because the man looked around expectantly, waiting a moment. She did not show herself. That would have been too easy for him, and she wanted to test him, to see how he would handle the situation. She lay in the earth, her bones turned to twigs, and her blood became fine dust. Her eyes, she put in a pair of stones that sat on the edge of the sidewalk across from the bar. She waited. Moments passed while he stared at the ramshackle town as if waiting for her to materialize. He laughed then, the sort of laugh that comes when someone feels foolish, and turned back towards the bar. He didn't go in, though. His arms extended, and she saw the glint of metal on his fifth and second fingers on one hand. He did not turn around towards her, but he was speaking to her. His voice rang with silver, like his rings. He was reckless, but he was brave. He had left his family, and he had found her. "I know you, Sara-la-Kali. I know you've come for me. I will meet you, but I will not serve you. I serve no one but myself." His command of Romani was not as good as his ancestors might have had many years ago. It was fluent enough, though, and fluid; the liquid nature of his voice made it sound better than it actually was. He was confident, and she appreciated that. Slowly she unearthed herself, gathered the twigs together for her bones, and rolled her eyes into her head. She could not show herself entirely, or he would have died from fright. She knew what he expected, and so she showed herself exactly as he wanted to see her. Her garland molded into a necklace. The diaphanous wrappings around her twined themselves into a skirt, long enough for respectability. Her skin was almost as dark as the leather on his jacket, but it was a rich, deep brown, not the colorless sheen of night. Her hair flowed around her, and she appreciated the slight breeze that made it flow and flutter where her long skirt could not. Her face was flawless, with high cheekbones, a strong nose, and eyes like burning coals. Her voice flowed as smoothly as his had, but where his voice was like water or mercury, hers was dark and earthen, crackling every so often with a thrust of fire. "You will serve me in time, Camlo. You have wanted to serve me since you were a child, and you sought me from the ocean to these woods. Did you expect me to float towards you, so near a gadje lighthouse? I thought you were not a fool, but that was a foolish dream indeed." The man recognized the name she used, and his jaw dropped for a moment. He was startled first at the use of his proper Romani name, she figured, and then stunned at the sight of her. His knees buckled, and he knelt involuntarily. They always did, and although Sara appreciated the respect, she was disappointed that this young man had given in so easily. She floated towards him, and saw him still looking at her. He did not have the rapt fascination and idiot's grin that so many had upon catching a glimpse of her, though. His senses were still sharp, and he was staring at her out of curiosity, not devotion. Her hand lifted his chin, and she knelt down, slipping out her long tongue to trace the curve of his jaw. The Atlanta skateboarder had tasted like lemons, his fear sour and acid. Joe tasted like the forest she'd lived in before she had been forced to burn it down, like bitter roots and sweet pine needles, without a single trace of unpleasant sourness. Her tongue was long, and she traced it towards his ear, before curving it under his chin to taste the hollow, sensitive spot where his throat began. She longed to unleash her fangs to the man. She dreamed of piercing his olive skin and drink her fill of him, like she had drank of the demon Raktajiba, consuming him, his children, his grandchildren, and all the descendants of his blood. Sara wanted to taste his life flowing into her, and she wanted to have it all. She drew him to his feet, and he stood, wavering unsteadily for a moment before wrapping a hand around her waist and drawing her close. He thrust himself against her, and she could feel him press up against her, his cock hard and his eyes like flint chips. He lifted his face up further, letting her tongue and teeth graze his throat again before they settled against his mouth. Heat passed between them, and she pressed her tongue against his lips, letting her sharp nails rake the back of his neck. His lips parted, and she slipped in. His mouth was cool to the taste, the beer he'd consumed making his teeth slick and his breath intoxicating. She could not have him all, not outside the bar, not with people coming out. She embraced him for a moment before pulling away, and she saw confusion cross his face. Her voice issued forth again, bubbling like lava. "We need a better place." She wanted a battleground, littered with corpses, where the sight of fucking would be as natural as death to anyone that stopped by. There were no battlegrounds in Tennessee anymore, though. She'd come a century and a half too late. Joe smiled at her. His eyes were dark and luminous, and he was drunk with her presence as much as he was drunk on alcohol. "I will go anywhere with you -- but I will not serve you. You will not turn me." He dropped his hand from her waist, trailing it over the curve of her backside. His words were serious, with all the childish self-assurance she had come to expect at first from her best worshippers. "I know who I am, and I know what I am. You won't change that." Sara only smiled. She did not plan to change him. She only planned to help him realize exactly what he was. She had known since she'd become aware of his presence, and soon enough, he would know too. That revelation had been what had broken the skateboarder, showing him what a wretch he was, and making him crawl for her. She only hoped that this man would be able to stand a little more. He had challenged her, and she intended to test the limits of that challenge. He wanted to know his limits, and she would show them to him. "Come," she said. He followed without complaint, his gait sure and steady. If he noticed the command, he did not comment upon it. # His aunt had said that he would die in trouble, and if this was how he was going to die, Joe resolved to make the best of it. Sara-la-Kali, Black Sara, Black Kali, had taken him as a follower. She had been watching him, and she wanted him. He was already unfit to return to his tribe, and he would not have been able to face them. He would become this mullo woman's servant, the vampire's consort. She had stripped him of his clothes with the impossibly sharp knife she always carried, and her wrappings had slipped to the ground and become grass. She had lain down atop a gravestone, and he had followed, forgetful of the taboo against dishonoring bodies. He remembered his morals when she had stroked his shaft, her palm rough but pleasantly so, only bringing him more sensitivity. That pleasure had come mixed with the horror of what he was doing, and he had almost screamed. Her hand over his mouth had muffled any cries, and her smile, knowing and gentle, had calmed his fears for the night. She suckled on him, her right hand below reaching for his testicles, tracing lines of fire up the inside of his thighs. He could feel his skin burn, but it didn't hurt at all. She traced designs on the inside of his thighs, old sigils that even he did not know and could not describe. Her mouth toyed with the tip of his cock as the left hand held his foreskin away from the head, index finger trailing over the flap of skin in smooth, confident motions. Her tongue, as long as a gentleman's tie, snaked out towards him, wrapping around the shaft. No human woman could have done that, Joe knew, and he thought for a moment of pushing her off, but the slight corkscrewing motion of her tongue presented a far more enjoyable alternative. She closed her lips around him, and then let go, but she could not breathe and the effect was one of mere suction. She hummed a song he had known when he was a child, and he was so caught up in trying to figure out the melody and lyrics that he did not notice she had drawn blood until he felt her lips streaking it across his length. The cut still did not hurt, and he began to thrust, his rhythm that of a drumbeat, and his heart beginning to pound in time with each stroke. # Sara could hear his breath begin to settle into that familiar sound, whispering like dead leaves. It had been pounding before, but his orgasm had made him skip a beat and he had lost the rhythm. His semen was alkaline and slightly bitter from the beer he had drank, but it was palatable, and more importantly, it was his. She had tasted a part of him, and now she needed to have all of him. She could bring him into ecstasy again and destroy him so easily, but he had nearly begged for a challenge. She would give him one. Slipping her lips from between his legs, she trailed her mouth up, leaving cuts where her fangs broke skin. One foot found its way to his thigh and the other rested upon his chest, and she thought of how she had stood on Shiva the same way, many years ago. Patteran Ch. 01 Sara thought of how she had floated across the waters from France to warn the saints, and how Lazarus, who had risen from the dead, had shared his secret with her, had taught her how to cheat death through drinking blood. It was just like the sacrament, he had sworn. She would share this sacrament with Joe Lowell. He would be only the fourth one in the last century, and she figured that he might be with her a while. She leaned over him. She did not want to con him into following her. It had to be his decision. She had not given the skateboarder that same choice, but he was not one of her People. This man was, and deserved at least the respect of an honest choice. She spoke quickly. Her words were low, their tone serious, each word designed to bring him to his senses. "I am saying this to you now because I want you to make the decision on your own. I want you to be mine, but I will not insist on it. That would not be a fair choice. I leave the decision up to you." She ran a hand over his cock, and he shivered in response to her touch. His eyes had dulled their spark a long time ago, and he looked at her with twin black pools of nothingness, his mouth forming a silent plea for her to continue. "If you choose to become mine," she said, her black form swaying above him, naked and angular, "I will treat you as a consort should be treated. You will not have to run anymore. You will not have to worry about your company, because I will take care of them. The only thing you will have to worry about is pleasing me, and letting me partake of you whenever I want. In return, I will show you more ecstasy than you've ever known." He was the first one of very, very many to show doubt. His mouth twisted up curiously, although his eyes were still fixed upon her. His body tensed, and he shook his head. "Ni baxt," he responded, and then repeated the same in English, as if she did not understand his own language. "No good." She felt angry at first. How dare he condemn her and turn her away? In his world, she was venerated as a saint, and he was little more than a cast-off, unclean wretch from one of the lesser families. He had already condemned his soul by dishonoring a gravesite, even if it was a graveyard of the outsiders. Now, he was deigning to think her unworthy of his obedience, and she would show him otherwise. He was not afraid. His shoulders did not shake. His eyes did not blink. Then she realized he was only doing as he had promised earlier, and admiration replaced anger. The man was not easily fooled. She would have to go about the process another way. She would have to make him lose control, and lose enough of it to agree to the bargain, and she knew precisely how to go about it. She raked his mind for previous experiences that stuck in his memory. He had a surprising variety. There was a girl in Florida who had been summery, young, and fresh as a peach, and when he wintered in Gibtown with the carnival, he had spent many long nights on the beach with her. She had been a virgin, but she had not been foolish, and they had been tender with one another, like any good teenage romance. A college student up north, in one of the hallowed, vine-covered halls, who had been looking for adventure and for exotic appeal. He had played his part to the hilt. He had written poetry for her. Their affair had been just as poetic, and just as full of sharp melodrama. She had broken things off with him when a professor caught her eye, but she had used him in one of her poems, and he had read it in a coffee shop a few towns away. Other similar romances were intertwined with quicker, needier affairs. A quick exchange at a motel off the interstate in some nameless Midwestern state, with the only thing separating it from prostitution the fact that no money was exchanged. Most were female, but there were a few men in there too, more for curiosity and thrill than out of any actual connection. He was not selective for any prejudice, but he was particular, and all of his partners were good-looking, as he was. Why was that? She wondered, as she stared down at him, why he was so meticulous about others' looks. Could he not bear to look at the ugliness around him every day? Was that where he was weak? He had stood up so well to her, and so defiantly, and she had imagined, for a moment or two, that perhaps he really had no weakness. He was afraid of half of humanity. She had not expected that. She wanted him to realize his shortcomings now, rather than later, when he had a lesser version of her powers. She knew exactly where to send him. He would need her to save him, and she would be there when he needed. She turned back to Joe, her hair streaming out behind her, and let him see the starkness of the rabbit-bone bracelet. He was not ready for the sight of the skulls, she knew. She knelt above him, her body contorted, her posture weird. She saw the change in his face as he realized the unnatural position she had taken. Staring, he swallowed hard but only gulped air. She let her expression grow hard and sharp, and her fangs gleamed white through the darkness of her face, traces of his blood on her lower lip. Her nails sharpened to claws, and she drew a long diagonal slash down his front. It scarred over instantly, and it did not hurt him. She did not mean to hurt him. She only meant it as a sign of possession for him to bear to others who knew the mark. She suspected, from the dry little smile that he gave her, that he already knew the meaning. She waited, her eyes on him, and then he nodded acceptance. "For now," he said quietly, and she saw a warning in his eyes, and knew that he meant it. She would let him choose his own path now, but she would always be able to find him, and she would always know where he was. He was not meant to be a consort, but he was meant to be more than a servant. He would leave her soon enough, probably in a few days, and he would come back to her when he was ready. She would make him more than a consort when he was ready. She would make him the same as her. He would have to find his way there, though, and she wanted to see how far he could go without her help, and how far he would go. # During the sixth time that they slept together, he knew that something had to be done. They had spent the last three days in an orgy of fucking, consuming one another's bodies with a passion deeper than lust. Somehow, he suspected she did not feel love. She was removed from the encounter, and although he had not expected a vampire godling to yell his name, her strange response to him had been a challenge at first. It had been hard to slip inside her initially, but he had slicked himself down and entered her, and she was warm, if dry. Her breath was fitful, occurring only when she remembered that he liked to see her breathe, and she had drawn blood from him along with semen each time they'd had sex. Much to his relief, they had moved away from the graveyard and onto the comfort of a decent hotel bed. She had dressed herself in the long skirt again, and had wiped the blood off herself enough to check into the Holiday Inn over in Knoxville. The seventh time was starting now, though, and the gorgeous black woman above him was riding him hard and fast. Neither of them was much for foreplay, and she was going about this latest fuck with a grim determination. He watched the curve of her breasts and the fierce expression that always came over her face when they had sex. Sara-la-Kali wanted him for her own use, Joe knew, but he would not give himself wholly to her. She rode him hard enough that, if he'd been a few years younger, he would have come simply from the sharp, swift strokes. Her hands held him steady, and her body was smooth and solid as she moved atop him. He thrust back, and the sparring made her clutch him tighter inside herself. She grabbed him by the shoulders to steady herself. Her gaze was steady. Her body pistoned atop him even as he felt himself start to shake. Her movements slowed, and she traced over the scars that she had left on his neck. He flinched a little, but let her scratch open a new channel of blood. She had not tried to turn him into one of her people, but he suspected that it would not be long now. He would have to get out of the -- Any thoughts Joe might have had disappeared in a rush as she lifted upwards, pulling on him a little. He was clay to her, supple and malleable. His cock jumped, and he felt the shaky, unsteady rush as he ejaculated, his body driving against her in a final stroke. He let himself go inside her, and she squeezed against him, blood that was not her own causing sparks in her body too. She hovered over him, leaning in and pressing her lips to the wound that she had opened up. She drank deeply of him, murmurs and suckling sounds issuing from her, her long black body bending over him with that same remarkable, gymnastic ease. Her lips burned his skin, and he whimpered with the twin intense feelings of orgasm and pain surging through him. Her body stiffened around his, trapping him there as she drank and he grew lightheaded, his mouth going dry. She was going to use him all, he realized as his vision started to blur. If it didn't happen today, it would happen another time. She would kill him. He would die unseen by anyone else, and he would become a mullo as well. "You're free," Sara whispered in his ear. "You'll come back in a year and a day, though." Joe didn't hear her at first. His blood was trickling down his neck and he was still deep inside her warmth, and he was not quite in his right mind. When she pulled away from his neck, and then eased him out of her, he stared, uncomprehending, unhappy that he had been turned down. Why was she leaving him alone? Why wasn't she killing him or claiming him? What did she gain from letting him go? His insides still churned with confusion and chaos, and he saw blood begin to glisten from its track down his neck and onto his collarbone. He did not need to be asked twice, though. He rolled himself off the bed, picked up his clothes, and pulled the shirt over his head, breathing heavily. His head spun with all the questions he had for her, but he knew that they were the type of questions that you don't ask someone who has just spared your life for three hundred and sixty-six days. When he could see again, the fabric of his shirt pulled over his head, she was gone. He stood alone, scarred, bleeding, having given his essence to her, but, as she had promised, free. He was alive, and he started to head for the door, nearly collapsing as his hand touched the steel door handle. It sizzled to the touch, and when he pulled his hand away, it was red with a burn. He realized what she had done to him, and sprung away as if the door had stung him, leaving the hotel room in disarray, sheets stripped off the bed and blood staining the mattress slightly. He had everywhere in the known world to go, and it stretched out before him, as fierce as Black Sara had been. Joe Camlo, a member of the dark and comely Lowell tribe, started for the interstate with a wounded neck, a curse on him, and a vampire saint still watching him from somewhere just ahead of his awareness. ### Author's note: Based on the traditional Romani Sara-la-Kali belief of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, but with considerable liberty given to the belief and an acceptance of the merging of Sara-la-Kali and the Hindu goddess Kali. Many theologians say that Sara is a cover for goddess worship of Kali, and as the Roma are from India, I decided to use the theory, as well as certain gnostic beliefs that will figure in the second part. If you liked this, please comment and look for the upcoming, more explicit parts. This part was more about sensuality than sex; hopefully I achieved that.