At the Fetish Parasite

“Wake up,” the voice shouted. It floated through the haze, past the auricle, into the ear canal, past the cochlea and slammed headlong against the brain. Whoever was speaking was insistent and panicked; there was no choice in getting up, because the strength and the energy merely weren’t there.

“Please, I beg you, I’m sorry,” now the contrite quality forced my eyes open. Dominic was standing over my bed, and he was weeping. Why? I couldn’t quite remember, but it didn’t shock me to see him. I raised my hand and stroked back his hair, which on this occasion wasn’t spiked up into the Mohawk but hanged limply against the shaved sides of his head. At my touch, he raised his head and grabbed my hand. He was moaning through his choked sobs and covered the flesh of my palm with wet kisses and wetter tears.

“I didn’t know. I had no idea about Claire, and you were so taciturn about the whole mess. I didn’t think to scry your mind for the truth, but as I was draining you, I understood. It was self-defense and you aren’t a spy. Moreover, you have what we need to defeat them. We need you.”

He thrust the pewter cup tolipslips and I took a draught off of it. He held my head tenderly in his hands and begged me to forgive him.

“The war can go further now, I have seen the passage you know about, I saw into your mind. There is a way we can launch a sneak attack and then we will destroy them. Even though my members won’t believe me at first I will convince them…” he rambled on and on. I really couldn’t care less about whatever he was talking about.

I was angry, possibly with him, though I was more pissed at the fact, that once again I had been cheated.

As soon as I found my voice, I spoke my rage to him, “Why dt yot you kill me? I want to die, I have nothing to live for.”

“I just saved you,” he looked so hurt, “I wasn’t able to kill you once I learned the truth. Also, you were stronger than I thought. Your heart wouldn’t yield to me, though I could have persisted but now I want you to live.”

“You failed. None of your coven will understand why you spared me, and you have failed me. Nigel is dead. I couldn’t save him, and now you have wounded me far more by leaving me in a world without him.” I could hear the sound of my own voice and I sounded so melodramatic, which brought up another surge of self-pity, like bile at the back of my throat. I knew that I didn’t care for Nigel that much, after all I had just met him, but he was a symbol to me. He was my chance at a somewhat normal life, and instead, he had been wrenched away from me.

“Maybe he isn’t dead yet. You know of the underground passage into the Succubi, I plan on launching an attack and we need your help. You have a massive skill for telepathy, and the synapses that have connected in your brain to cause this, need to be studied. I too have this skill, but it took centuries to mature, and you seemed to have gleaned this skill immediately.

“We will break in, and with your help, there wont be much of a resistance. We can save your human friend and then we will be victorious!”

“He is dead, Dominic, like I should be. No, I don’t want help your cause. This war has nothing to do with me. I know the passageway, but its no secret. Underneath their house, a garbage chute leads from the lowest level to the abandoned Metrolink train. Just follow it up and be done with it.”

“We need you,” he pleaded with me, “We can do it without your help, but it would be so much easier with you. Do this for me, please, Donella.”

“For you, Dominic? Everything is for you. You are at the center of your own universe here; you have hundreds of people who worship you like some god. They are so sycophantic that they were willing to kill me because I seemed like a threat to your affections. You sided with them, not because you thought that they were right so much, as you were peeved that I wouldn’t submit to being another slave. If I would have came out and told you what happened, you would have convinced them, just like you are planning on doing now. I wont let you use me, so if you want to kill me, then I won’t try to stop you.”

“How dare you say that about me! I gave you this gift! You are my star pupil, together we can make the Fetish Parasite the most formidable coven in the West, we will destroy the Succubi and assert our dominance!”

“Yeah, and I don’t care. You can do that without me. I will not go quietly along and let you manipulate me to your will. You have no choice than to kill me.”

“I won’t.”

“Then let me leave, we are at an impasse here.”

“Where will you go?”

“Anywhere else, far away probably,” I told him in flat tones. “I don’t care about your war. In fact, both sides have taken so much from me that I don’t even care whns. ns. I need to end my life or restart it.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way about me,” he said. It was obvious that he was more than a little hurt. “I will help you leave here, without being detected, and then you are free to go. Although I want you to know that with the information you have given us, we will attack the Succubi tomorrow and if you choose to help us, it will be greatly appreciated.”

He told me that I was still too weak to leave at this moment, and if I wanted, I could rest here until I was stronger. I wanted to leave more than anything, there were too many thoughts in my mind to be left in peace but he was right, I was too weak. I agreed that I would spend one more night here, and I would leave after the coven went on the attack. That also seemed like a good plan because then there would be few vampires who would see me exit. He promised that he would tell the coven that he had killed me but that I had given him info on how to siege the Succubi. That would insure that they would all want to leave the premises and make their way across town.

I drifted off into a very deep sleep where I dreamed that I was not only dead but I was Death itself. I hovered across Earth collecting lives of people, like a farmer picks fruit. I had voluminous pockets in my black robe in which I stored the souls of the people I harvested. I was neither good nor evil, but a necessity, cleansing the world of old life to make way for the new—still humans hated me. I was scorned everywhere I went and people were fearful of me. I was alone, and lonely, but then I grew angry. I didn’t want to be death; I wanted to have a normal life!

I saw a group of children playing on a playground, and they were so happy, so unlike me in my childhood. They played and laughed, and the more I saw, the more envious I became. Not only could I never be that happy, I would also never have a child like one of these. I glided over to the chain link fence that separated the playground from the street, and placed my hands on the metal of the gate leading inside.

I closed my eyes and waves of energy passed out of me, destroying all of the children, freezing them where they stood. I reopened my eyes and walked around like I was playing Duck-Duck-Goose. Each child I touched died in my hands, they were burned horribly and melted into what looked like a pool of wax. I stopped so I could see the carnage that I had left, but there was only one body left in the yard. I walked over the remaining body, and saw that it was Nigel.

He wasn’t burned and looked completely unscathed. I was surprised to see him and I reached out to touch him, out of tenderness this time. My fingertips brushed his cheek and he woke up screaming, as my fingers sucked out his life force. I knew I was hurting him, killing him in fact. I panicked and tried to hold him closer to me but that only killed him faster.

I awoke with his fresh screams ringing in my ears.



A few kilometers to the east, Nigel awoke from a haunting dream.

He had been in a playground, like one that was near his childhood home in England. A beautiful woman had been watching all the children playing, and then she had set off some type of electromagnetic pulse that vapourised everyone there, except him. She wasn’t happy that he had been left alive so she walked over to him and burned him. Her fingertips were made out of leeches and as she touched his face, his life drained out of him, and into her hands. He screamed in pain, and awoke to see Elizabeth standing over him.

His cheek was smarting horribly and he raised his hand to feel his face. What had once been smooth skin, was now melted and stinging.

“Don’t touch it, or it wont heal right,” she smiled at his look of confusion. “You have just been branded, that is your mark of this coven, you are now one of us. Oh, and you can’t feed all day now that you have the brand.”

“What did you do to me?” Nigel gasped at her. This crazy tart burned his face! He was outraged just as much as he was frightened. She said that he would live forever, but now he realised that he would have to do too many things to pay her back for this “gift” she had given him. He would be virtually her slave for a few years until she felt that he was ready to be assimilated into their society. They were vampires, although Nigel wasn’t sure if they had meant that word actually or figuratively. They were some sort of cult, but the only thing that was certain, was that they needed him to kill Donella.

“You, my pet, will be my most prized possession. As you have seen, there are no males in this coven. Lethian Devilspike started it, a long time ago so he could be surrounded by lots of beautiful women. He was content to just sit back and roll through his existence; he had no sense of power. Therefore, I had to step up to the plate.

“Everyone still believes that he is still alive, they all think that he is just playing coy because he is shy. No, in fact, I killed him decades ago and kept that a secret.”

“If, it’s a secret, why are you telling me?”

“I am telling you because that will be your new role. I have managed to kill off everyone who had known the former Mr. Devilspike, so no one here has actually seen him. These women here will feel betrayed to know that they have been lied to for almost a century, and just recently there had been some stir why he is never seen.”

“I have the feeling that when you talk about decades and centuries, you mean it truthfully. Do you mean to tell me that you are really vampires? And more importantly, I am supposed to be the leader of this whacked out cult?” Nigel asked incredulously.

“You are going to be the titular leader only. You will be my nice little puppet and you will just say whatever I tell you to.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Then you will die, and it wont be a pleasant death either. Which reminds me: remember the two luscious women who seduced you by the bathtub?”

Nigel nodded. How could he forget? That was the most intense experience of his life, and what made it worse was that he wasn’t really consenting. He body had betrayed him and he wanted nothing more than to have the orgasmic release but he was denied that until he played by their rules.

“Well, since they knew who you were, they have been disposed of, I want you to take a walk with me.”

She got up and walked toward the door. Nigel sat up, and the blood rushed to his new burn on his face causing a new throbbing pain to fester there. He nevertheless followed her to the door. They walked down a deserted hallway to a flight of stairs that led downward into the bowels of the building. She opened a door that looked like a torture chamber with iron rings and tools for torture on a nearby table. There he saw the girls, Gabrielle and Brooke, holding each other in an embrace. They were desiccated and drained of all their blood, which was pooled around their bodies. They were dead, but not fettered to the walls. Nigel wasn’t sure that they weren’t placed in this position after they had died, but it was grotesque no matter what.

“What did you do to them?” He asked her.

“What do you think? I killed them, silly boy! If you mean how exactly I killed them, you are about to find out.”

Nigel panicked, he didn’t want to die, and he wanted to be away from this psycho bird as soon as he could. She was going to kill him and he knew it. She placed her hand on his shoulder and he jumped at her touch. He was just a few moments away from pleading for his life, but he thought that it wouldn’t do much good. If she had sensed any sort of weakness in him, she might draw it out slower. He steeled his courage and tried to act as calm as he could.

“I have a question, Elizabeth,” he was thankful that his voice didn’t quiver as much as he thought it would. “If you kill off so many of your clan members, how do you still have enough to function?”

“Good question, Nigel! You see you will go far in this business. You see, every night, I send my girls out to hunt for their food. They are told not to kill any females they find, but they are to capture them. They can eat all the men they want, but the women are kept here until they see our way of thinking, then they want to become one of us.”

“What if they don’t want to become one of you?”

“One of ‘us’, love. If they don’t wont to become one of us, we kill them,” she said as she walked past Nigel to another door across the hall. She was so chilling in her emotionless responses.

“You see Nigel, Brooke and Gabrielle weren’t the only ones who saw you, remember? There was also Aine, and she will be your first task that I wish for you to complete for me.”

She opened the door to reveal Aine, as naked as ad lad last seen her, although she didn’t look like she had been treated as well. Her ginger hair was tangled and hanged from her bruised head in a rat’s nest that was clotted with blood. Her eyes were closed and there was crusted blood that had dried around one of her nostrils. Her head was tilted to the side and more blood had drained from the side of her mouth that was closest to her shoulder. Her thin arms had been bound up above her head, and were clamped into thick iron shackles that were bolted to the wall. Her feet had also been spread about a half a metre apart and were clamped to other shackles against the wall.

“How long has she been in here? And is she alive?” Nigel asked at the horrific sight of this beautiful woman.

“Yes she is still alive. She has been here only a day or two; I dragged her here after she had met you that night. She thought that she was going to finally meet Lethian Devilspike, and now she will,” she grinned at him with her very sharp teeth.

She walked over to a short wooden bench that was against one side of the wall and she sat down. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Nigel watched her, how casual she was, when she was talking about this poor girl, as if she was nothing more than just a toy.

“She trusted you Elizabeth, and this is how you treat her?”

She grinned again and blew a plume of smoke through her nostrils making her look like a mythical Chinese dragon.

“They don’t have to trust me, I’m not in charge here. However, you ‘Mr. Devilspike’, they will trust you. Whether you trust me or not is really irrelevant.”

He tore his eyes away from Elizabeth and realized that he couldn’t bring himself to look at Aine either. Instead, he noticed that there was a table in this room too, complete with various tools for torture. There was a rusty spanner, a dagger with a serrated edge and a sjambok, which really intrigued Nigel. He had seen these before because his grandfather had been a policeman from South Africa, and told Nigel how he used his to kill snakes and how useful it was for non-lethal crowd control. It was lead weighted and made out of rhinoceros hide. This one on the other hand had a rounded tip so it was probably used more for BDSM than for beating the shit out of some poor apartheid protestors.

“Now, Nigel, this is what I want from you: you need to learn to be a callous as I am. You need to kill this girl you see in front of you.”

“You mean put her out of her misery? Yeah, I can do that, I can’t stand to see people suffer.”

“Oh, no you wont,” she snorted derisively, “You aren’t going to kill her until I say you can, or you will take her place against that wall. I can always find another man to take your place, and torturing you will be just as fun. The first thing I want you to do is to clean her up. It will be more fun if I can see fresh blood gushing from her wounds.”

Nigel glanced down to see a bucket of water and a sponge. He could clean her, that way in his mind he could in some way be helping her. Possibly, he could even manage to kill her without Elizabeth noticing. That seemed the only compassionate thing he could do in this situation.

He wrung out the sponge and brought it over to the unconscious Aines sos soon as the chilly water touched the fair skin of her side, her eyes fluttered open and looked into his. Elizabeth saw her awake and moved over to her. When Aine saw her she tried to shrink away, but the bonds and the stone wall restricted any movement. Her muscles tensed under Nigel’s hands and he could feel her fear.

“Aine, my dear,” Elizabeth purred, “I want you to meet Lethian Devilspike. We have come here to play with you for a bit, I hope you don’t mind too much.”

Nigel mopped the sponge over her wounds, cleaning the crusty blood from her skin gently and swabbed around her bruises. He tried to be as careful as he could, but Elizabeth’s scrutiny was making him nervous.

“You are such a girl’s blouse Nigel, or are you trying to be gentle to make it more cruel when you torture her later?”

He was disgusted by her observations and his hands started shaking. He knew that he couldn’t possibly go against her will or he would be as good as dead. When he got her satisfactorily clean, he walked back to the table and dropped the sponge into the bucket. Elizabeth turned and watched him, waiting for him to start the mutilation of the prisoner.

“Nigel, now it’s time to really have fun,” Elizabeth grinned, “Look at this beautiful creature here. She is bound, so helpless, and you are free to do anything you want to her.” She ran her hand down Aine’s creamy cheek, causing her to start to weep. Elizabeth brushed the upper part of Aine’s breast with the backside of her hand, dragging her nails across the goose bumped flesh.

“I think that I would even agree to release her from her shackles if you want to molest her in other way you can think of.” She pinched Aine’s nipple hard, causing the ginger haired girl to shriek and try to twist away. Nigel felt sick to his stomach, and hatred glared in his eyes for Elizabeth, but she knew this, and it just made her enjoy this escapade even more.

“I know what we can do,” Elizabeth grinned, and started unlocking the bonds that held the prone girl to the wall. “I want her still bound, but facing the wall. I want to watch you, as you rape her. I want to see you violate her from behind. I want to hear her scream as you slam her against the wall, maybe the rough texture will scrape against her pretty face.” She let Aine’s hands drop free of the bonds, but the girl was so weak that she collapsed to the floor. Elizabeth kicked the prone girl, and grew increasingly excited as she was plotting out this plan. With each passing second her breath was getting more jagged and, without even touching herself, Nigel thought that she must be close to making herself cum. What a fucking sick sadist!

“Nigel,” Elizabeth panted, “I want you to fuck her so hard she bleeds, I want you to hurt her.” She paused in the unlocking process and leaned against the wall, snaking her hands up and into the waistband of her low slung pants.

Nigel picked up the sjambok and wielded it in his right hand and the rusty spanner in his left. Elizabeth’s eyes were closed and never saw the combination whip and rod bash into her skull. The leather thong at the end of the weapon tore a bloodied gash across her left cheek and she opened her eyes in surprise. Unfortunately, for her, she didn’t have time to react before the spanner slammed into her right temple, next to her eye. Her head was hurled into the wall and Elizabeth spiraled down into blackness. The keys dropped from her hand and were snapped up by Nigel.



Yvahn made her way a few blocks over to the closest abandoned Metrolink train station. Nearby, in some bushes she saw the corpse of a woman. She looked like a prostitute and there was a huge knife jutting out of her breastbone. The stupid fuck that stabbed this chick actually left the evidence in the body—what idiots live in the city!

Yvahn pulled the blade out of the corpse, but it took a small bit of effort. It was long and rusted, and she realized that this was a bayonet of some sort. How the hell did someone managed to be running around the streets of downtown LA, wielding a bayonet and no one managed to neither notice nor care? She imagined that the whore’s pimp, or whoever stabbed her, must have been too weak to extricate the blade, and took off. Yvahn wiped the dried blood on the whore’s skirt, and handled it like a sword. It seemed an improbable but a fun weapon nevertheless and she planned on making use of it the first opportunity she had.

The entrance to the station had been boarded up but some bums had torn the boards down to gain access to the underground debarking area. The stale stench of urine wafted upm thm the depths and pitch darkness made the stairwell seem like a foreboding abyss. Nevertheless, she pushed her way down and made a silent thankful prayer that she had superior night vision. Halfway down to the bottom of the steps she saw shapes move across the charred tiled platform approaching her. They obviously thought that they had the advantage over her because she was silhouetted against the orangey glow of the streetlights, while they were plunged in darkness. In addition, she was walking with a slight limp and these hobos probably thought that she would be very easy to rob, rape and kill.

How little they knew.

Even if she couldn’t see these men, there were three of them, she could smell them from as soon as they moved. She closed the gap between them and was ready to strike holding the huge blade between her and the stinky men. The one closest to her, who was the largest one of the group, tripped on the first step of the stairs and came crashing down. Yvahn dexterously side-stepped his falling body and stabbed the sword down in a high arc into the back of his neck, impaling him deep into the back of his head. He screamed like a girl as his blood poured out of his severed brain stem. Yvahn released her grip and followed it with a kick driving it further into his head until it hit the step underneath him, then the screaming stopped.

The other men slowed in their approach, not sure what happened to the third of their party. Yvahn tried to pull the blade out of the guy’s head but it was stuck firmly to the steps.

Great, she thought, that’s my karma for laughing at the poor loser who left this lodged in the whore.

With a great tug, she managed to pull it free from the floor just in time for the second man to rush up the stairs toward her. Unfortunately, the body wouldn’t come free as easily. Yvahn managed to pull the impaled body in front of her like a shield to intercept the second attacker, but it was so heavy, especially because the weight dragged the body down in front of her. The drunken man faltered at the sight of his dead friend hovering a few feet off the steps and paused long enough for Yvahn to lunge at him. She hit him in the chest with the tip of the sword but it wasn’t deep enough to penetrate too deep into him. The lunge made her lose her balance, and all three bodies came tumbling down the stairs. When they hit the bottom, the man with the chest wound fell away from the sword but landed hard on the tiles floor, making his pin prick wound flow with more velocity, causing a sucking noise when he tried to breathe. Luckily, the corpse had broken Yvahn’s falnd snd she was able to rer qer quickly. She got up and saw the last man was stalking toward her, in an over-confident way. Yvahn planted her feet on the corpse and pulled the bayonet out of the man’s head, but she didn’t see the flash of the gun until after the bullet ripped into she shoulder, knocking the weapon out of her hand.

She fell to the ground, right next to the dead body, as the bayonet clanged to the floor; blood flowed in a freshet in her right arm, and it was totally numb. The bullet had passed all the way through, just a whe where Donella had previously cut her arm off. The man leveled the gun again but Yvahn pulled the corpse on top of her catching the bullets before they managed to pierce her body again. The corpse smelled like body odor, piss, and heavy liquor. She had no idea what kind of booze this man drank but it smelled louder than gasoline. The light in here was so low, that the man probably saw the form on the floor, and believed that he had killed her. She waited quietly as he walked closer to her. He leaned down and examined the bodies closely flicking open a Zippo lighter to illuminate the situation. As soon as the flame erupted from the lighter, Yvahn heaved the corpse up, with all of her might and her remaining arm, at the man. The man had the gun knocked out of his hand as he defensively tried to block the attack.

The flame caught the clothing of the dead guy, which had been soaked in cheap liquor vomit, and it pinned the last man to the ground with over two hundred pounds of conflagration. As the flamed licked past the outer clothing, it caught the fat man’s grease and buried both of them in immolation. The last attacker burned slowly, screaming the whole time.

Yvahn scrambled to her feet, to make sure that the guy couldn’t get back up from under the smoldering corpse. Her arm was cold to the touch and she couldn’t manage to move her fingers at all. She left them to burn and turned her attention to the man with the sucking wound in his chest. Just above the roar of the fire, she could hear his labored breathing. She stumbled over to him and bit open his neck draining him. She wasn’t even hungry, but she needed to heal her arm.

When she was done, and the wound had healed well enough so she could move her arm, she picked up her trusty bayonet and took a practice swing. This weapon was probably cursed; in their short relationship, it had been stuck into two different corpses unyieldingly. She cast it to the side then she continued her path onto the abandoned rails.

This had been one fucked up night, and it was still early. She knew that there was even more fun to be had once she reached her destination.