Harry had made love so very recently, yet now it was all forgotten and perhaps not surprisingly. For if space and time are so linked as to be inextricable (to any ordinary man), just how long ago was it since he had known Penny? A dimension ago? An entire universe? And as a universe is huge almost to infinity, how then the time-gap between universes? Time is relative, as the Necroscope knew only too well. But in any case, that earlier phase now seemed fuzzy as a dream, while 'now' was the only reality. Penny had been a mirage, a dream-creature, a waif light as thistledown, enthralled and drawn into his dream with him, and at last destroyed by it. But Karen was… Woman. She was substantial, compelling, consuming; a magnet, with gravity of her own great as a small planet, so that she held him like a moon to light her flesh and lust after it. For Harry she was the embodiment of all earthly (unearthly?) desire; greater than a mere planet, she was his own personal black hole, which might suck him in in his entirety. Indeed, Karen was all of this and more. Karen was Wamphyri!
Upon her bed they twined and tangled, panted, grunted and groaned, and in all truth Harry no longer knew what was real and what was fantasy. He had not previously explored his metamorphism; he didn't know the extent of fleshly flexibility; he was 'innocent' in respect of his own passion's potential. And Karen, too, innocent. Or very nearly so.
'You have kept yourself to yourself?' the Necroscope gaspingly inquired of his vampire love while extending a hand and its fingers within her to examine and caress all of her innermost organs and places, and while she moistened with spittle the shining fist which was his glans and taunted its throbbing with the slither of her forked tongue.
'No,' she groaned truthfully. Twice I flew to Sunside at sundown to seek me out a lover. But how may one seduce a terrified man? Anyway, I brought one back here. In a little while he overcame something of his fear and crept into my bed. Ah, I was a yawning chasm, an aching gorge… into which he dropped a pebble! He could not fill me. I milked him dry and wanted more, but all he had left was blood. I knew that I could grind him down, turn him to pulp, murder him within the heart of my womanhood and devour him into myself as easily as eating him. But… I took him back to Sunside. Since when I've kept me to myself, yes. Just as men and women are for each other, so we Wamphyri may only cleave unto Wamphyri flesh. For there's no pleasure in beasts, and when Wamphyri blood is up humanity is frail.'
'All true,' gurgled the Necroscope, feeling her left nipple extend into his throat like a tongue, while his scrotum swelled to bursting from the pressure of his juices. 'A woman would die in agony from what I have done to you!'
'Likewise a man from these caresses of mine,' she replied, shuddering. 'But of pleasure, however monstrous!' And she drew out his great, soft, spidercrab hand from her body, folded his legs at the knees and fed them into herself; until finally he was drawn in to his navel, and she experienced the geysering of his cold semen laving her palpitating innards.
'And yet the Old Lords in their time took Traveller women for themselves,' Harry panted in his delirium. She was full of him now, her pale belly round and shining, grotesquely bloated where his arms and hands encircled it; and her body had so gorged on him that he looked half-born. She coiled herself forward to kiss him, and their teeth clashed as the flesh of their faces melted into one face.
A moment later she extruded him in a huge contraction; but just as quickly he entered her again, head-first this time, so that she must speak to him telepathically to answer his query. Those women died screaming, she said. I've heard it said that following a raid, Lesk the Glut would take ten or more in a night, bursting them like bladders with his sex! Ah, that was violation! But the so-called 'Lords' weren't all alike; if a girl was beautiful, then she might survive. Brought on by degrees, she would be vampirized, and as her metamorphosis progressed so her satyr Lord would instruct her. The Lord Magula fashioned himself a huge mound of a woman, and slept within her when their excesses exhausted him.
She expanded herself convulsively to let him out, then fell on him and grasped at his slick body with exploratory hands of her own. The Wamphyri equivalent of 'talking dirty' had incensed them… what orifices could be entered (of each of them) were entered; their kisses fetched blood; their juices drenched the bed and dripped from it on to the floor all around. They themselves flopped damply from the bed, slipping and sliding in their own liquids. Harry's system endlessly manufactured semen, which was endlessly sucked from him by Karen's various lips. They let their vampires run rampant. Scythe teeth nibbled (but never so deep as the bone), and nails like claws of Tyrannosaur pulled and gouged (but only to bruise, never to break).
They reduced the bedclothes to drenched rags, the slate bed itself to rubble, the huge room to a shambles. Their lovemaking (lustmaking?) grew frantic and impossible to follow in its contortions and convolutions. Their cries became primal as their bodies shared totally; they knew sex as no merely human beings had ever known it; the Necroscope's greatest climax of many was when Karen entered him.
For fifteen hours they spent themselves, vented, tormented and demented themselves. So that in the end they didn't merely sleep but fell unconscious in each other's coils…
When Harry came out of it, Karen was washing him. 'Don't,' he said, feebly trying to push her away. 'A waste of time. I want you again, now, while you're still here.'
'Still here?' She took his member in her hand to cool its bruises with water, and watched it grow there like a club.
'It's a dream, Karen, a dream!' he gasped, his hand seeking her softness. 'Like everything gone before. Dreams of a madman. I know it now for sure, for I saw you lying dead. Yet here, now… you live! Unless… is there a necromancer in Starside?'
She shook her head, drawing back from him a little where his hands began to pull with some insistence at her once more entirely human breasts. And: 'It were best if you listened to me, Harry,' she said. 'I wasn't dead that time. It wasn't me you saw lying there, broken in the bony scree.'
'Not you? Then who?'
'Do you remember when you starved me?' Karen stared hard, earnestly, even accusingly at him. 'Do you remember how you lured my vampire out of my body with a trail of pig's blood? Ah, but I was Wamphyri and crafty! The mother creature Inside me was crafty! More so than any other. She — it — left an egg in me. The tenacity of the vampire, Harry.'
'You… you were still Wamphyri?' His mouth had fallen half-open. 'Even after I burned your vampire and its eggs?'
'You burned all but one!' she insisted, 'which remained in me. The thing would grow again, yes. But I knew that if you suspected as much, then that you'd try again. And then that I would die! Oh, and the thought of that terrified me.'
'I remember how I slept.' Harry licked dry, almost desiccated lips. 'I was even more exhausted than now: by what I'd seen and done.'
'Yes.' She nodded. 'You fell asleep in a chair, which was when I was saved. For while you slept one of mine returned to the aerie.'
'One of yours? A creature?' Harry frowned. 'But they were all destroyed or sent away.'
'Sent away, yes,' she answered. 'You had set this one free out of the "goodness" of your heart… sent her away to die!'
'Her?'
'A trog, a handmaiden, a creature who performed menial tasks within the aerie and in my personal chambers. But she had been born here and understood no other existence, and eventually she returned to the only home she'd ever known. I knew it the moment she set foot on the bottom step of the nethermost stairwell; she heard my mind-call and came as fast as she could; but she was starved from her wandering in the cold wilderness of Starside, and wearied unto death by her climb through all the aerie's levels. Even unto death, aye.'