The House of Flame Lilies

Chapter Seven: House of Worship

I'm alive! You wouldn't think it, given how long it's been. Life has been very... life... this 2021, and I really wanted to give this part of the story time. For all of you still here, my undying appreciation, it honestly means so much! I wish you all Yuletide blessings and hope this double update does something to help you enjoy the darkness. See you in the new year!

For my cub.

Full work summary: Cast out of his village and freezing to death in the snow, Sparrow finds himself rescued by a mysterious and beautiful woman, living in a grand house in the mountains. As he falls under the spell of his strange host, he finds himself brought into a dark world that presents a destiny he never could have imagined. Submission to a vampire is only the beginning.

Previously: Having discovered her monstrous thirst for blood, Sparrow spent the day processing his new knowledge of his lover's nature, giving pleasure to her prisoner and contemplating his life in the manor. As night fell, he went to Vestalia's room to confront her. Sandu, a captain in an order hunting supernatural beasts, visited the manor demanding the return of captured men, then investigated Sparrow's village. She learned that he had been blamed for the murder and resurrection of a girl as a ghastly puppet, but his guardian believed it was committed by the priest and headman in sacrifice to a Pagan patron.

Chapter summary: Sandu's investigations in the village continue. Sparrow and Vestalia talk and seal a new bond as Dominant and submissive with a long and sensual ceremony.

"Come on, Lazy Bones, get up."

"Hmmph. I don't want to."

"You have to. It's church."

"I don't like church."

"I know, I know. Children don't. But one day you'll grow up and then you'll want to have learned how to worship."

"Why?"

"Because you'll find faith."

"How?"

"Something will inspire you."

"And how will I know it's the right thing?"

"You just will, Little Bird. Faith feels like coming home."

*

She was wearing blue. Sparrow had not seen her in blue before. The deep sapphire gown was the same colour as the crisp sky outside, cleansed of rain. It swirled down her body in loose layers, her collar adorned with starry diamonds that dwindled in the luminescence of her skin. The dark colour made her moonstone glow bright, but softer than when she wore stark black. She shone against the firelight, dimming the red flare with her angelic presence.

Sparrow stared at her longingly from where he stood across her bedroom hearth rug, his heart racing. He balled his fists with determination and took a slow, steadying breath that pushed out his words. "You kill."

"I do." Her expression didn't change. She answered him with complete calm, as if she was telling him the weather. The fire snickered and snapped. She stood with one hand rested on the back of her armchair, the other on her hip, proud and at ease. "You're waiting for me to explain myself. To give you excuses. To tell you I regret it. That I wish I were not what I am."

Sparrow blushed and hunched his shoulders. He kept his eyes on her warily. "And what are you?"

"You grew up in the mountains, you know what I am." Her curved fang winked from her mouth as she tilted her head. The eerie echo of her voice magnified. "Everything you've been afraid of since you were a child. The whispered warning. The recurring nightmare. The fascinating evil you never admitted you loved the thought of meeting."

A sweet shudder went down the lower half of his spine. He stared at her. She looked different now, her regal beauty a jewelled box with an evil spirit inside. Every time a shadow caught her face or the firelight sprang under her prominent chin, he was back on that rooftop, pinned and devoured by a ruthless, ravenous monster. He didn't dislike it. A small, bashful smile escaped his tight lips. "I never imagined it like this."

She caught his smile and returned it. The electric connection between them flickered to life.

He bit his lip, containing himself. He blinked hard and grounded himself in the prickle of his nails in his palms. "Are you going to kill me?"

She sobered. "No."

"Then why kill him?"

She exhaled steadily through her nose and looked at her hand on the chair. She drummed her nails. "You kill for food, yes?"

Sparrow winced. "Yes."

"But you don't eat everything."

"No."

She opened her hand as if to say "There you have it."

His stomach thunked, his face heated. "So, people are animals to you?"

She pouted sternly. "Food is food to me. You are not."

"Why not?"

"You are special."

He warmed. The lulling heat of the hearth rolled down his body and settled in his core. He gazed into her glittering eyes. He stamped out the kindling flames in his abdomen and coldly fought to keep his senses. "He was from an order that hunts the creatures of darkness."

"He was."

Sparrow's pitch heightened with urgent hope. "So, you had to kill him? To protect yourself?"

Vestalia shrugged lazily. "Possibly."

He craned forward. "Possibly?"

Her tone stayed flat. "If that story comforts you, it's not untrue. He was a potential threat to me. He no longer is." She met his eye with something between strictness and sympathy, a look that weakened his knees. Flame flashed across her sharp cheeks. "But he wasn't when I killed him, and I didn't have to make it slow, and I didn't have to make his comrade watch."

He wilted, looking at her imploringly. Where were they? The lyrical lessons that would heal the wounds of what he'd seen? She didn't seem to want to save him this time, didn't want to nestle him into a daydream. He felt vulnerable, a chick tumbling from the nest and waiting for the wind to catch him.

More stern sympathy. "I'm telling you what you'll realise later. Don't play with what you saw, Passer, it will only infect the wound. It needs to be cauterised, utterly closed off from your mind, or kept open and made clean."

"Made clean?" His insides rocked, he glared incredulously. "I went to the prison today. That man doesn't know who he is anymore."

His temper seemed to affect her about as much as a buzzing fly. She swished leisurely out of her stance and wandered to behind the armchair to drape her forearms on its back. She leaned forward like a panther on a branch. "He never did. I taught him."

"You taught him to want to die?"

Her eyes hurt to look at, piercingly red and refracting, but more than that, dauntless, remorseless. Her full, satin mouth began to move around her words like it moved around flesh. "I taught him to want. Really want. In the way humanity has told itself it shouldn't so often it's forgotten how to. I reminded him of his heart and body, when some God had made him think he was nothing but a trapped, ethereal soul."

Sparrow's tongue tingled. He swallowed purposefully. "You killed his friend and he doesn't care."

"Then that is what he's like when he wants."

Sparrow shut his mouth. He eyed her suspiciously, weighing her words, the dangerous way they made their own sort of sense. His middle went concave, voice shrinking. "Is... Is that what you're going to do to me? Make me not care about anything but... but coming?"

Her lips twisted in a mocking smirk. She trailed her pointed fingernails distractingly over the clementine-kissed rise of her breasts bunched on the chair back. "What else do you have to care about?"

Pain darted through his chest. It emboldened him. He lurched forward and hurried to her side, his eyes springing hot. She turned smoothly to face him as he wheeled around the chair to her and yelped hoarsely, "Everything!" He gulped. He could taste her on the air, he hadn't planned to stand this close and it seized his body all too quickly. "This place. The sky. The hothouse. The smell of fire. The taste of food." His voice fissured. "Missing my guardian and the herd and my friends, and yet seeing all this world I never knew existed and wanting to know more." He gazed at her, eyes round and shining and dark. "And you. I could happily never come again if you would read to me and tell me about your adventures and let me watch you eat, if you would dress me and hold me and make me laugh and give me this feeling like there's a forge in the pit of my stomach. You have given me so much pleasure, but it's in every part of myself, not just my cock!" He took a shuddering breath, glaring fiercely into her eyes with all his courage as she watched him, like a statue in a shrine. "I gave myself to you because you were a miracle to me, not in some trade for release! I thought when I saw what I saw that my greatest fear was that you might kill me, but I realise now that it isn't." He laughed a little hysterically, croaking and shrill. "I've finally found something that scares me more than death! It's you thinking so little of my wonder at you, that you would reduce it to something I could do with my own hand!"

His final half-screech pinged off the marble and marquetry. Her mausoleum silence engulfed him. He stared helplessly at her, breathless and strung tighter than a harpsichord, waiting for her to speak. No, to twitch, to snort, to shift her gaze, anything to say she had heard him and cared just a little.

Vestalia slowly pressed her lips together. Sparrow clung to the motion. She released them and said, quieter than the bubbles in champagne, "You truly gave yourself to me? All of yourself?"

The frantic edge to his voice evaporated. His shoulders drooped and he flexed his fingers, pulling himself painfully back from the urge to throw his arms around her. "You know I did. I called you Mistress. I fell, I..." The pearl and amber glow blurred as tears welled suddenly. "I think I'm still falling." The tears spilled. He caught them hastily on the heel of his hand and looked away.

Vestalia shifted her weight a fraction.

Sparrow heard and it took all his strength not to collapse into her arms. He began to shake, the tears splashing down his body again like the morning rain. He stopped trying to contain them, he forgot his planned speeches and questions. She'd become the person he came to for comfort and now he couldn't train his body out of showing his need for it. "Is that wicked of me?" He wept and the words poured out of him like water. "I stand here and say I'm angry or upset that you killed that man, but what right do I have? I'm just as bad. If I'm being honest with myself, I saw you torment a man to madness then drink his blood and throw him dead onto the stone floor, and it doesn't stop me wanting you. It doesn't stop me being in some small way jealous of anyone who gets to hold you, even if it means their final breath. He was a person and I should hate you for him. But I don't. I don't." He kept saying it, making himself hear the horror of it. His cheeks scorched, there was salt on his tongue. "I'm as cold and twisted as they said I was. They were right to cast me out."

"Oh, Passer..." She tutted gently and shifted closer again. She cautiously reached out, as if to a bleeding fox cub. When he didn't flinch, she closed the distance and ran her finger along his cheekbone to sweep away the sparkling tears. "You are not." Her voice was like lavender balm. "That you still feel for me after all this shows how warm you are."

Sparrow tried to lean away from her touch. He couldn't. He turned his face down into it.

She cupped his cheek and brushed the droplets from his lips with her thumb. "Keep talking to me, Passer."

Sparrow rooted himself to the floor, grounded by her softness, a shore in the sea of tears. He took several steadying breaths, a honeyed feeling under the strife of it all that he could take as long as he needed to speak and she would wait. He raised his eyes to her face and finally confessed the core of the tornado that had been raging around his mind all day. "I want to be yours. But I don't want to be wicked."

She gave him a clever, secretive smile, nudging his cheek with her knuckle. "What's wicked?"

He laughed weakly and rolled his eyes hopelessly away.

She took his chin between finger and thumb and tipped him back. "I'm serious. You said it yourself, this is a new world. What is wicked in your village is not so in my manor."

"But that isn't fair." He winced at his own childish whine.

Her pinch hardened a little. "Fair is for people who can be judged the same. Tell me, Sparrow, would you ever throw a man into the mouth of a whale if he didn't agree to serve you?"

"No."

"God did. Is God wicked?"

He blinked and frowned. "God is..." He trailed off.

"Eternal? Powerful? Knowing?" she finished. "Kept alive by human devotion? By human death?"

"Yes."

"So am I."

Sparrow's heart thumped. He took a stumbling step back, pulling free of her fingertips. "That's blasphemy."

She snorted deridingly, blowing a lock of black hair on her temple. "Doctrine is the least of our worries, I would argue."

He hesitated.

She stood straight and put her hands on her hips, shadows coiling on her round arms. "Alright then, let me ask you something else. What does it matter if you're wicked?"

Sparrow faltered. He opened and closed his mouth, like a fish. "It... Um..."

She waited with a cool kink in her eyebrow.

Sweat beaded on the back of his neck. "I don't want to hurt people."

"You wouldn't."

"But I would know! And not stop it!"

Again, his temper bounced off her, like a flicked seed. She spread her arms, opening her broad torso. "So, stop me."

Sparrow looked at her. Her intoxicating power had flowed through him as she'd fucked him, but after last night, there was so much of it visible to him now, signs he couldn't believe he hadn't seen before. Her inhuman strength and swiftness and precision, her prevailing, unfathomable appetite were moulded into her body like the thumbprints of a sculptor. It was in every fibrous movement, every subtle curve, every suck on her cranberry lips. He should have known long before last night. She could treat him like a paper doll.

"You don't even know where to begin," she stated coolly.

He lowered his face.

She continued on in an almost governess tone. "Your doctrine says that people go to Hell for one of two things, sins towards others and submitting to the Devil. The first is what hurts people, you wound or deprive or mistreat. The second is just admiring the unconventional, as it continues to rule its own domain. A domain that exists with or without you. A domain that can't be redeemed, even if it wanted that."

"Do you want that?" he blurted, heart rising.

Vestalia's eyes flashed with an echo of the wild flight's rage. Her face set severely, but her tone remained patient, melodic. She folded her hands elegantly over her belly. "I need you to understand something, Sparrow. I am not a tragic figure. I do not war with my dark nature. I do not hate it. I am not repulsed by it. I do not resist it."

Sparrow felt thrilling ice steal up his spine. He clenched his core and wet his lip.

She went on and her voice rolled like thunder and swept like meadow winds. "I take and I eat and I am nourished. I have my place in the world, as do humankind, who also take and eat in their own way. I am not simply living into great old age." She spread her arms in a grand gesture that brightened the candles on the opulence of the room, glimmering on painted grapes and mangos in a vast, overflowing still life on the wall. Her voice rose, chiming like celebration bells. "This is my afterlife. This is my promised paradise, with all the delights set out in scripture. I am in Eden and no fruit is forbidden to me." Her hands fell like snowflakes and landed on the front of his shirt, not quite pressing through to skin. " I do not seek your forgiveness. I seek one thing from you, and it is your conviction that you are safe with me. I want to protect you. I want to make you happy. I want to expand your existence. You can flourish with me. You can find deeper pleasure and knowledge than anything in your life before me ever offered." Her fingers tightened, a hiss on her tongue. "Submit to me, as I am, and you can have all your heart desires, and all it has not yet learned it desires. Tonight, at this moment, I am giving you a chance to accept me."

Sparrow was stock still.

"If you leave now, I will not chase you again."

Sparrow stayed frozen as her words snaked around him and bound him like a boa. He'd come to confront her so he could hear her guilt, her pain, so he could understand the strictures of her condition that caged her in necessary violence, mourned by her better self. He had not prepared himself for this, least of all for how he would feel hearing it.

Joy.

Complete joy.

He knew it was terrible, he knew he should take this chance to escape now and run from this monster and her black heart and her hungry belly full of human blood. But she was right. Sorin was right. She wasn't human. She was a goddess. She was a wolf. She was a fire burning in the night. And this was Eden. This was paradise. And it was sin. And it was devourment. And she stood tall and proud and fierce and beautiful. What madness had he been in to ever think he wanted to hear her apologise for what she was? She was high and he was flying just by looking at her - flying like he had last night, equal terror and elation.

He felt a tug in his chest, pulling him to close the thin gap between them and kiss her, to feel her mouth, to be consumed by her. The urge pricked him with fear. He dug his heels into the rug and took a deep breath. Oh, he could smell her. Charred petals sweetening his tongue and making it wet. He grit his teeth and held in a weak shudder. He timidly laid his hands over hers playing on Cyrus' oversized shirt. They were warm from the hearth, heated porcelain. He looked with all his courage into her unwavering eyes. "I have conditions."

Vestalia smiled radiantly. She hooked his hands and led him around the chair to stand before her as she lowered herself into the cushions. The ripples of sapphire blue foamed around her as she settled with her elbow on the arm. Sparrow kept hold of her hands and knelt at her feet. He looked up into her face, open and patient, blushing sunset in the hearth light. The fire warmed his back and sizzled a little on the lingering mist from the bath on his skin.

"Tell me," she said.

Sparrow's stomach fluttered. His tongue felt like there was a coin compressing it. This moment had weight. He purposefully smoothed his shoulders and raised his chin. He took his hands from hers and folded them demurely in his lap. He spoke in a clear, rehearsed tone, only slightly crinkled with summoned courage. "When you take prisoners, I want them to be put in my care. Do what you will, but afterwards, let me tend to them." He thought of his hand slipping over Sorin, of the waves of curiosity and cleansing and relief. "I have rites to perform. I need them."

Vestalia gave him an intrigued look. A log broke and hissed in the fire. She interlaced her fingers in her lap and nodded.

Sparrow's stomach bobbed, a bubble of encouragement behind his sternum. He cleared his throat. "And I want new clothes, my own clothes. I don't want to wear things left by dead men."

She beamed. "I would love to give you that, Passer."

He grinned. The heat on his back tingled. He recovered himself. "And I would like to stop eating meat."

She smirked with a crease at the top of her nose. "Are you trying to mark yourself out as different to this wicked woman?" She tipped forward and whispered mischievously. "Or is it that you're now too aware of how it feels to be eaten?"

He narrowed his eyes at her playfully, then sucked on his lip and thought sincerely. He looked at his hands and the freckles on his forearms. "I think I need something to ground me in who I am. I can't control that I need to be with you, and I can't control what you do. And I wouldn't want to. But I can make my choices. I never liked eating meat, but in my village there was too little to pick and choose food. But here, there is the hothouse and all your riches. Here I can choose not to take lives for myself. I'm not angry with you, that's how you live, it's what you are. But I am what I am too. I don't need bloodshed, and I would like to know that I chose a cleaner path where I had choice."