Sadie's possession ~ by DarkTalons
The sign on the gate said RESTRICTED – SPECIAL COLLECTIONS – AUTHORIZED STAFF ONLY, and Sadie Kerr read it twice before she slipped under the chain anyway.
It was 11:40 on a Thursday night in late October, and the Crane Memorial Library at Ashcombe University was basically a tomb. Sub-level B2 was the oldest part of the building, three floors below the study carrels and the vending machines, down a stairwell that smelled like wet stone and old glue. Motion-sensor lights clicked on one row at a time as she walked, buzzing and flickering, throwing long shadows between the iron shelving.
She was nineteen, a sophomore history major with a research paper due at nine a.m. on witch trials in early colonial New England, and she was screwed. Every decent primary source was down here, behind a gate, and the archivist only took appointments on Tuesdays. So: crimes.
"Okay, okay, okay," she whispered, half to herself and half to her AirPods, where a lo-fi playlist was trying very hard to keep her calm. "In and out. Find the Crane papers. Take pics. Leave. Nobody has to know."
She was cute in the way tired college girls are cute at midnight: messy light-brown bun, oversized grey Ashcombe hoodie, black leggings, white sneakers gone beige at the toes. Big hazel eyes behind wire glasses. Her nails were the one thing she'd made an effort on that week: her own natural nails, grown out medium-long and filed into neat almonds, freshly painted a soft milky pink.
She found the Crane family donation at the end of the last row, in a locked glass case. Most of it was what she expected: sermons, ledgers, a court record bound in cracked leather. But on the bottom shelf, set apart from everything else on a little velvet stand, was a book wrapped in iron.
Not decorated with iron. Wrapped. Three thick black bands riveted around it, top, middle, bottom, sealing it shut. The leather between them was so old it had gone almost black. A small brass placard underneath read:
UNKNOWN. RECOVERED FROM THE ESTATE OF REV. MATTHIAS CRANE, 1611. NOT TO BE OPENED BY ORDER OF THE CRANE TRUST.
"Not to be opened," Sadie muttered. "Bro, that's literally the most interesting thing down here."
The case was locked. The lock was also, she discovered when she tugged on it, about two hundred years old and rusted half through. It came apart in her hand.
She didn't mean to open the book. She just wanted a picture of the bands for her paper. She set it on the long oak reading table in the middle of the aisle, under the hanging lamp, and lifted her phone. But when her fingertip brushed the middle iron band, it was warm. Body-warm. Like skin.
And the band moved.
It shifted under her nail with a dry, gritty grinding sound, rust flaking off onto the table. The rivet in the center popped out and rolled across the oak, tick, tick, tick, and dropped off the edge onto the floor.
The lights in the row went out.
Sadie's lo-fi playlist cut off mid-beat. In the sudden silence of her AirPods, something breathed. A long, slow breath, very close, like someone had leaned right up against her ear and inhaled her.
"Oh," said a woman's voice, inside her head, delighted. "Oh, finally. Hello, little scholar."
The other two bands snapped. Not broke: snapped, like rubber bands, flying off the book and clanging off the shelves. The cover flew open. The pages inside weren't paper. They were black, solid black, and the blackness poured up off them like smoke and went straight for Sadie's open mouth.
She didn't even have time to scream.
It took about four seconds.
The thing in the book went down her throat like cold honey and spread out behind her ribs, and Sadie felt herself... not pushed out. Shelved. Like a book slid back into its slot. Everything she was, her memories, her face, her mom's voice, her favorite Taylor Swift album, her chem final, her crush on the TA, her best friend Jess, all of it was still there. It was just that someone else was reading it now. Turning the pages. Browsing.
Her body straightened up. Her shoulders rolled back. She blinked, slowly, and when her eyes opened they weren't hazel anymore. They were green. Bright, poisonous, bottle-glass green.
"Ah," said Isolde Wraithe, with Sadie's mouth, in a voice that was Sadie's voice dragged through four hundred years of dark. "Air."
She breathed in. Breathed out. The lamp over the table swung gently on its chain, though there was no draft.
The last time she'd had lungs, it had been the autumn of 1611, and she'd been standing in a muddy field in Essex with her wrists bound in iron and a witch-finder named Matthias Crane reading Latin at her while six of his men held her down. She'd cursed him. She'd cursed his sons and his sons' sons. And he'd laughed and shut her into that book with three bands of cold-forged iron, and that had been the last time she'd felt anything at all.
Now she had a body again. A young, soft, warm one.
She looked down at it.
"What," she said slowly, "in the name of every devil in hell, is this garment."
She plucked at the hoodie. Grey. Shapeless. Enormous. It said ASHCOMBE on it in big block letters. She went digging through Sadie's memories for the word and found it. Hoodie. Comfy. She pulled at the leggings, black and stretchy and clinging to Sadie's thighs like paint, and found the word for those too. Leggings. Lulu. Fifty dollars on sale. The sneakers were a mystery she decided not to solve.
A small white thing was screwed into each of her ears. She pulled one out and stared at it, and a tiny tinny voice inside it said something about a podcast sponsored by a mattress company.
"Unbelievable," Isolde said, and crushed it between two fingers. Then the other one.
She found Sadie's phone on the table, still lit up, still in camera mode. She picked it up and looked at the screen, and her own face looked back at her. Sadie's face, really. Round cheeks, freckles, a tired little smile gone wrong. The green eyes were the only part that was hers.
Through Sadie's memories, she learned what the phone was. A looking-glass. A letter-writer. A library. A town crier. Every song ever sung, every map ever drawn, and girls used it to look at pictures of other girls' breakfast.
Isolde laughed so hard she had to sit down on the edge of the reading table.
"Four hundred years," she wheezed, wiping a tear with a pink nail. "Four hundred years, and they've made glass that speaks, and lamps without fire, and carriages without horses, and they still haven't figured out how to dress a woman."
She set the phone down. She stood up. And she decided to fix that first.
She started with the hoodie.
She didn't touch it. She just looked at it, and it unraveled. The grey cotton came apart stitch by stitch, threads pulling loose and drifting up off her body like dandelion fluff, floating away into the dark between the shelves. Underneath was a plain white sports bra and Sadie's bare stomach. She looked at the bra with a frown and it went too, dissolving into a little puff of white lint.
Sadie's tits were small and perky, a modest handful each. Isolde cupped them in her palms and considered them like a merchant weighing fruit.
"Sweet," she decided. "But I was always a little more... generous."
She squeezed.
Warmth flowed out of her palms and into the soft flesh, and her tits swelled. Slowly, deliciously, filling her hands and then overflowing them, growing fuller and heavier and rounder, the skin tightening, the nipples darkening from pink to a deep dusky rose and stiffening into hard points. When she let go, they stayed, big and high and proud, bouncing a little when she breathed.
"Better," she purred. "Much better."
She ran her hands down her sides and her waist cinched in under her palms, an inch narrower. She slid them over her hips and her hips flared wider. She reached behind her and grabbed two big handfuls of Sadie's little ass, still in those leggings, and squeezed, and felt it round out and lift and fill her palms until it was thick and heavy and tight, the leggings straining to hold it in.
The leggings gave up. They split up the back seam with a long ripping sigh and peeled away from her legs like snakeskin, and the sneakers went with them, the laces unthreading themselves and the canvas just crumbling apart. Sadie's cotton panties lasted about one more second.
Isolde stood naked under the swinging lamp in the restricted stacks of the Crane Memorial Library, in a body that was now about thirty percent more dangerous than it had been a minute ago, and smiled.
"Now," she said. "Something to wear."
She drew a slow line in the air with one finger, from her ankle to her thigh, and black mesh spun itself into being around her leg. Fishnet. A thigh-high stocking, wide diamonds of black net stretched tight over her calf and knee and thigh, ending in a thick band of black lace. The other leg. Then boots, growing up over the stockings like ink spilling upward: black leather, glossy, laced up the back, all the way to mid-thigh, with sharp spike heels that lifted her five inches off the cold stone floor.
A black lace bodysuit wove itself over her torso, sheer enough to show the dark rose of her nipples through the flowers in the lace, long-sleeved, high-cut on the hips, closing between her legs with a row of tiny hooks. Over it, wrapped low around her hips, a black leather micro-skirt barely long enough to deserve the name.
She pulled the pins out of Sadie's messy bun and shook her hair loose, and it fell, and kept falling. It grew as she shook it, down past her shoulders, down to the small of her back, and darkened from light brown to a deep glossy raven-black, with one single streak of silver at her left temple.
She took off Sadie's wire glasses, looked at them, and folded them neatly and set them on the table. She wouldn't need them.
Then she held her hands up in front of her face.
Sadie's nails were cute. Milky pink almonds. Isolde smiled at them the way you'd smile at a child's drawing, and then she made a slow fist, and opened it.
Her nails grew.
They slid out of the nail beds with a soft, rising creak, like a violin string being tightened, half an inch, an inch, two inches, three, lengthening into long tapered points, curving just slightly at the tips. The milky pink deepened and darkened as they grew, through rose, through plum, into a wet, glossy emerald-black, like a beetle's shell, like deep water under a forest. She tapped them together and they made a hard, clean click, click, click. She dragged them down the oak table, and they cut four pale grooves into the wood with a long, shrieking scrape that echoed down the whole row.
"Hello, my darlings," she whispered to them. "I missed you most of all."
She hadn't come in four hundred years.
She realized it all at once, standing there in her new boots under the lamp, running her nails down over the lace of her new body. The thought hit her like a bucket of hot water. Four hundred years. In the dark. In the iron. Not one touch.
She sat down on the reading table. She spread her legs.
With a flick of her wrist, the old iron candelabra on the archivist's desk at the end of the row floated over, its seven stubs of ancient wax bursting into flame one after another as it came, and hung in the air beside her, throwing warm orange light over her skin. The books on the shelves nearest her slid out halfway, all on their own, like a crowd leaning in for a better look.
Isolde leaned back on one hand and slid the other down between her thighs.
The tiny hooks on her bodysuit popped open one by one before her fingers even reached them, the lace springing apart. She was already wet. Sadie's body, her body now, was soaked and swollen and aching, and when the tips of her nails grazed her pussy lips she gasped so loudly that a few pages on the nearest shelf rustled.
She traced herself. Slowly. Just the very tips of her nails, those long emerald-black points, drawing thin cool lines up and down her slit, circling her clit without quite touching it. The sensation was unbearable. Sharp and cold and dangerous and so exactly right. She did it again, a little harder, the points scratching lightly over sensitive skin, and her hips jerked up off the oak.
"Oh, you clever girl," she breathed, to the body, to Sadie, to nobody. "Look what you can feel."
She pressed two fingers inside, carefully, her long nails curving up, the backs of them stroking her inner walls while the pads of her fingers found the spot that made her thighs clamp. She worked herself. Her other hand came up and squeezed one of her new heavy tits through the lace, rolling her nipple between two nails, pinching just hard enough to sting.
The candles flared. The whole row of shelves trembled. Somewhere down the aisle a book fell off a shelf and flapped its pages wildly on the floor like a bird with a broken wing.
She magicked herself, too, because why not. She sent a warm invisible pressure down between her legs, a ghost of a tongue, pressing flat against her clit and lapping, steady and slow, while her own fingers fucked her from inside. Two sensations at once. Then three, when she sent another little ghost touch to circle her other nipple. She threw her head back, her long black hair spilling over the oak, her boot heels scraping grooves into the table edge.
"Four hundred years," she moaned, rocking against her own hand. "Four hundred years, four hundred years..."
She came with a shout that rattled every iron shelf in B2.
Her thighs snapped shut around her own wrist. Her back arched off the table. The seven candle flames shot up into tall white spears, and frost spidered across the glass of every display case in the room, crackling as it spread. Her pussy squeezed her fingers in long, hard pulses, and she rode it out, gasping, laughing, her emerald-black nails glistening wet in the candlelight.
When it was finally over, she lay on the reading table panting, her chest heaving, her new tits rising and falling in the open lace.
"Mm," she sighed. "That's the first thing I'm doing every day from now on."
And then, from up the stairwell, a heavy door banged open, and a man's voice called down:
"Hello? Who the hell's down there?"
Earl Pruitt had been the overnight security guard at the Crane Memorial Library for nineteen years, and he hated every single one of them.
He hated the kids who fell asleep in the carrels and drooled on the books. He hated the kids who had sex in the bathrooms on the third floor, which happened more often than you'd think. He hated the motion-sensor lights, the radiators, the vending machine that ate dollars, and most of all he hated sub-level B2, because it was cold and it was creepy and something down there always sounded like it was whispering.
He was fifty-six, broad and heavy-shouldered, with a beer gut that strained the buttons of his navy uniform shirt, a grey buzz cut, and a jaw like a cinder block. His black cargo pants were cinched with a duty belt: radio, keys, a big black Maglite he'd never once used on anything but a raccoon.
He came down the stairs swinging the flashlight. "Library closed at eleven. This is a restricted area. If I have to file another incident report because some sorority girl wanted a creepy selfie, I swear to God..."
He came around the end of the last row and stopped.
There was a woman sitting on the reading table.
The candles were the first weird thing. Seven of them, lit, in a big black iron candelabra that was just hanging there. In the air. Next to her. Not on a string. Just floating.
The woman was the second weird thing. Black hair down to her ass. Boots up to her thighs. Fishnets. Lace. Her legs were crossed and her tits were spilling out the top of something black and see-through, and her nails, long and pointed and dark green-black, were tapping slowly against the edge of the table.
"Well," she said. "A guard. How nostalgic."
Earl's flashlight beam wobbled. "Ma'am. You need to... you need to get dressed and come upstairs. Right now."
"I am dressed," she said, offended. "Have you seen what they wear these days? Grey sacks. With words on them."
Earl reached for his radio.
It flew off his belt before his fingers touched it. Just ripped off its clip and sailed through the air to her, and she caught it and held it up and looked at it with mild curiosity. It squawked.
"Ah. A speaking box. Like the girl's glass." She closed her fist. The plastic crunched. Little bits of circuit board pattered onto the floor. "No. I don't think we'll be needing help, Earl."
"How the fuck do you know my name?"
"It's on your shirt, darling."
It was. On a little brass bar over his pocket. He felt stupid for one second before he felt very, very scared.
He took a step back. His boots wouldn't come off the floor.
He looked down. Nothing was holding them. They were just stuck, like the stone had gone soft and swallowed his soles. He pulled. Nothing. The Maglite in his hand twisted out of his grip by itself and rose up and hung beside his head, its beam turned around to shine right into his eyes.
"Grumpy," Isolde said, uncrossing her legs and sliding off the table. Her boot heels clicked on the stone as she walked toward him, slow, hips swinging under the leather skirt. "Sour. Fat. Lonely. Tired. You hate this place. You hate the students. You hate yourself a little, too, I think." She stopped in front of him. Even in her five-inch heels, she was a head shorter than him. It didn't matter at all. "But you've got something I need, Earl."
"I don't... I don't have any money..."
She laughed, low and throaty. "Money. God, no. Keep your little coins." She reached up and set one nail under his double chin and lifted his face, the point pressing into the soft skin there, sharp enough to make him go very still. "I need what's in you. All of it. And I'm going to take it the nicest way I know how."
His shirt went first.
She hooked one nail into the collar and pulled down, and the buttons didn't pop, they just fell off, one after another, the threads that held them dissolving under her touch, plink, plink, plink on the stone floor. The navy fabric slid off his shoulders and floated away. Underneath was a sweat-stained white undershirt. She slashed it up the middle with one lazy flick of her nail, cotton parting like it had been cut with a razor, and peeled it open over his big hairy chest and his gut.
"Hm. Not exactly a prince," she remarked. "But I've had worse. I was locked up with a bishop's ghost for the first thirty years. Believe me. You're a feast."
She dragged all ten nails slowly down his chest, through the grey hair, over his heavy pecs, down the curve of his gut. They left ten thin white lines that turned pink a second later. Earl hissed through his teeth.
The duty belt unbuckled itself. The heavy leather slithered out of his belt loops like a snake leaving a hole, the keys jangling, and it rose into the air and coiled and wrapped itself around his wrists, which had been yanked together behind his back by nothing at all. It cinched tight. The buckle fastened itself with a click.
"What the fuck," Earl panted. "What the fuck, what the fuck, lady..."
"Isolde," she corrected him. "Say it."
"Isolde," he said. His mouth said it. He hadn't decided to.
Her green eyes held his. There was something moving in them, deep down, like weeds swaying at the bottom of a river. Earl felt it get into his head. It didn't hurt. It felt like warm water filling a cold bath, rising, rising, filling him up until there was no room left for the fear.
"You want me," she told him softly.
"I want you," he said. And he did. God help him, he did. His cock was already straining against his cargo pants, harder than it had been in ten years.
"You want to be on your knees."
He dropped to his knees. His boots came unstuck from the floor just long enough to let him, then stuck again. His shins hit the cold stone and he didn't even feel it.
Isolde stood over him, her fishnet thighs right at the height of his face. She put one boot up on his shoulder, the spike heel digging into his collarbone, and leaned on it. The pressure made him groan.
"Before I take what I need," she said, "you're going to earn it. Taste me, Earl. I've been waiting four hundred years for a man to kneel."
The hooks of her bodysuit were still open from earlier. She pulled the lace aside with two nails. Her pussy was right there, glistening in the candlelight, still swollen and wet. She grabbed the back of his buzz-cut head and shoved his face into it.
He licked her. He licked her like he was dying of thirst, because her magic told him he was. His tongue lapped up and down her slit, flicked over her clit, pushed inside her, and she held him there by the back of the head with her nails digging into his scalp, grinding her hips against his face, using his mouth like a toy.
"There, yes, that's it, you grumpy old dog," she moaned. "Look at you. Nineteen years of scowling at children and now you're down here on your knees with your hands tied, eating a witch's cunt in the dark."
Her boot slid off his shoulder and she planted it on the floor, spreading wider, and the floating Maglite turned around to shine on them, lighting up her soaked pussy and his wet red face.
She came again, fast and hard, all over his face, her nails clawing through his hair and leaving little scratches across his scalp. The candles flared. He gagged and gasped and she held him there through all of it, grinding, until she was done.
Then she shoved him away with one hand on his forehead, and he fell back onto his ass on the stone, his hands still bound behind him, his face dripping.
"Good," she breathed. "Now. Your turn."
His cargo pants unbuttoned themselves. The zipper slid down. The pants and his boxers yanked themselves down his legs to his ankles in one rough tug, where they bunched around his stuck boots. His cock sprang free. Thick, flushed purple, leaking.
"Oh, that's quite nice," Isolde said, genuinely pleased. "Earl. You've been hiding that under all this grumpiness?"
She didn't get down on the floor. That wasn't where she wanted him.
She lifted her hand, and Earl went up.
His whole heavy body rose off the stone like it weighed nothing, and the stuck boots came free with a sucking sound, and he floated backward through the air until his bare back slammed against the iron shelving at the end of the row. Books toppled off the top shelf and thudded down around him. He hung there, pinned, his arms still bound behind him with his own belt, his pants tangled around his ankles, his feet dangling a foot off the floor.
Isolde walked up to him and stood there, between his hanging knees, and looked up at him.
"I'm going to fuck you now," she told him. "And you're going to hold very still."
He couldn't do anything else.
She stepped up. Not onto anything. Into the air. She simply rose off the floor and floated up to meet him, her boots dangling, until her hips were level with his. She wrapped her fishnet legs around his waist, crossed her boots behind his back, and reached down between them and grabbed his cock in her fist, her long nails curling around the shaft.
She guided him in. Slowly. She sank down onto him in midair, both of them floating, held up by nothing but her will, and she took every inch of him until she was sitting flush against him.
Earl let out a sound like a man being stabbed.
She started to fuck him.
She rolled her hips, slow and deep at first, her arms looped around his neck, her nails resting on the back of his skull. Then faster. Harder. Her whole body slamming against his, her heavy tits crushed against his chest, the shelf behind him rattling with every thrust, books raining down off it and bouncing off the floor below them. The candelabra circled them slowly in the air like a moon, painting them in shifting orange light.
"Tell me," she panted into his ear. "Tell me how long."
"How long... what..."
"How long since a woman touched you like this."
"Never," he gasped. "Nobody... nobody ever... not like this..."
"Of course not." She laughed, breathless, and raked her nails down his back, ten long red lines from his shoulders to his ass, deep enough to bead with blood. He screamed. She bit his ear. "Nobody has ever been like me. Nobody ever will be."
She held him at the edge. For a long, long time. Every time he got close, she felt it, and she squeezed her nails into his throat right over his pulse and whispered no, and the climax just backed off, like a dog called to heel. He was crying by the third time. Begging by the fifth.
"Please... please... I can't..."
"You can," she said. "And when you do, you'll do it for me. Not in me. For me."
She lifted off him. Just like that, in midair, she slid up and off his cock, and he moaned at the loss, and then she drifted down until she was floating at the level of his hips, her face right in front of his twitching, soaked cock.
She opened her mouth.
She took him in, not all the way, just the head, her lips sealing around it, her green eyes looking up at him. Then she wrapped her hand around his shaft and stroked him, fast and tight, her nails running up and down his length, and her other hand cupped his balls and squeezed, those emerald-black points pressing in.
"Now," she said around his cock. "Give it to me."
He came so hard his whole body convulsed against the shelf. He shot into her mouth in thick, hot spurts, and she drank it. Every drop. She swallowed and swallowed, stroking him, coaxing every pulse into her mouth with her nails dragging along his shaft, not letting a single drop escape.
And with every swallow, something happened inside her.
The power came up like a fire in a dry field.
She'd been strong when she woke up. Strong enough to rip apart iron, to remake a body, to float a fat man off the floor. But that had been a trickle. A sip. What was waking up now was everything. The full ocean of what she'd been in 1611, the thing that had taken six men and a witch-finder to hold down, and even then only barely. The cum was the key. Life, fresh and hot and raw, poured into a body that knew exactly what to do with it.
Her eyes went from green to a blazing, solid emerald, no whites, no pupils, just light.
Every single book on every single shelf in sub-level B2 flew open at once. Thousands of them. The pages riffled in a roaring wind that came from nowhere, a sound like a waterfall, and the candle flames turned green. The frost on the display cases cracked and the glass webbed in long white lines. The heavy iron shelving groaned. The stone floor under them hummed.
Isolde pulled off his cock with a slow, wet pop and floated back a little, licking the last drop off her lips. She was shaking all over. Not with fear. With joy.
"Oh," she whispered. "Oh, there I am."
Earl hung against the shelf, still pinned, gasping, his cock softening, his whole body sagging with exhaustion and relief.
"Thank you," she told him, and she meant it. "Truly. You've done me a very great service."
"You're... you're gonna let me go?" he whispered.
She tilted her head, and gave him a look that was almost kind.
"No, Earl."
She laid her hand flat on his chest. Her five long nails spread over his heart like the legs of a spider.
And she drank the rest.
Not his blood. His years. Everything left in him. She pulled it out through her fingertips like thread off a spool, and he felt it go. His grey buzz cut turned white. His skin loosened and wrinkled and spotted. His big shoulders sagged and caved in. His eyes went cloudy. He tried to speak and the sound came out thin and cracked, an old, old man's whisper, and then not even that. He shrank on the shelf, his body folding in on itself, collapsing, drying, until there was nothing left but a grey, papery husk that crumbled into fine dust the moment she let go. It drifted down in a soft grey cloud and settled on the stone floor in a little heap, half-buried in the navy cloth and the belt and the keys.
Isolde floated down to the floor and landed on her spike heels with a soft click. She closed the hooks of her bodysuit with a wave of her hand. She took a long breath through her nose. She felt fantastic. She felt young. She felt like she could reach up and pull the moon down.
"Mm," she said, looking down at the dust. "Grumpy to the end."
She picked up Sadie's phone off the table. Sadie's memories told her the code. She found the picture of the girl with the dark curls and the big laugh, the one that was set as the lock screen, the two of them squashed into a selfie at a frat party with their tongues out.
Jess.
"Well," Isolde murmured, "let's go home."
She tucked the phone into the top of her boot, snug against the fishnet, and climbed the stairs out of the dark.
Ashcombe at night was almost pretty. Old brick buildings with ivy, iron streetlamps throwing gold circles on the paths, dry leaves skittering over the quad in the wind. It was cold. Isolde didn't feel it. She walked up the main path toward the dorms in her boots and fishnets and lace like it was a summer evening, heels clicking loud and sure on the brick, hips rolling.
The world had changed so much. There were glowing signs everywhere. Lights in every window. Somewhere a car was playing music so loud the bass thudded in her chest. A girl rode past on a little two-wheeled cart that hummed and had no pedals. Isolde turned and watched her go, fascinated. Sadie's memories supplied the word: scooter. Electric. Twenty-five cents a minute.
"Witchcraft," Isolde said approvingly.
Outside the student union, a guy was leaning against a bike rack, vaping. Mid-twenties maybe, grad student or perma-senior, flat-brimmed cap, puffer vest, sweatpants. When he saw her coming down the path his eyes went wide and his mouth fell open and a big cloud of mango-scented vapor drifted out of it.
"Yo," he said. "Yooo. Damn, shawty. That's a whole costume. You lost? Halloween's next week, but I'm not complaining. Lemme get your snap."
Isolde stopped walking.
She looked at him. She ran through Sadie's memories for what he'd said. Shawty. Snap. She got it.
"No," she said.
"Aw, come on, don't be like that..."
She raised one finger and touched the tip of her nail to the air in front of her, about six feet from his face, as if she was pressing a button on an invisible door.
He froze. Mid-sentence. Mouth open, vape halfway to his lips, eyes locked on her.
She walked over to him, slow. Circled him once. Leaned in very close to his ear. And she whispered something, just three words, in a language that hadn't been spoken in England since before the Normans.
Then she drew the tip of one emerald-black nail very, very lightly down the front of his throat, from his chin to his collarbone.
He came in his sweatpants. Instantly. Standing there frozen against the bike rack, he came so hard his whole body shuddered, a long, helpless moan leaking out of his frozen mouth, a dark wet spot spreading slowly down the front of his grey sweats in the lamplight. And then again. And again. Every time the wind blew across the quad, it rippled over his skin, and every ripple pushed him over the edge one more time.
"That'll wear off," Isolde told him kindly, "in about an hour. Probably."
She patted his cheek, the points of her nails pricking his skin, and walked on toward the dorms.
Behind her, the guy made a sound like a balloon slowly losing air.
Hartwell Hall, room 312. Sadie's memories walked her right to it: up the stairwell that smelled like microwave popcorn, past the bulletin board covered in flyers for a cappella auditions, down the hall with the flickering light. The door had two paper name tags taped on it, decorated in glitter gel pen. SADIE. JESS.
The door was locked. Isolde looked at the lock and it clicked open. She stepped inside.
The room was small and warm and cluttered and smelled like vanilla candle and dry shampoo. Two beds against opposite walls, both shoved under lofted shelves. A string of warm-white fairy lights running around the ceiling. Posters. Plants that were mostly dead. A mini fridge with a pizza box on top.
On the left bed, cross-legged on top of the comforter with a laptop open and a sheet mask on her face, was Jess Navarro.
She was twenty, a sophomore like Sadie after a gap year spent waitressing, and Sadie had known her since freshman orientation, when they'd gotten lost together on the way to a mandatory sexual-harassment seminar and ended up getting tacos instead. She was all curves: wide hips, a soft thick body, big natural tits straining against an oversized faded band T-shirt with a cartoon skull on it, and short little grey sleep shorts that her thighs were winning a war against. She had dark curly hair piled on top of her head in a claw clip, tan skin, warm brown eyes, and fuzzy pink socks. Her own nails were long too, square-shaped, glossy cherry-red. Sadie had always been jealous of them.
"Oh my God, there you are," Jess said without looking up from her laptop. "Did you find the... the..."
She looked up.
The sheet mask slid halfway off her face.
"Sadie?"
"Hey, babe," said Isolde, in Sadie's voice, with Sadie's casual little wave. She'd been practicing on the walk. It came out almost perfect.
Jess's mouth opened and closed. She peeled the sheet mask off the rest of the way and dropped it on the comforter. Her eyes went up and down. The boots. The fishnets. The lace. The tits, which were absolutely not Sadie's tits. The hair, which was very much not Sadie's hair.
"What," Jess said, "the actual fuck. Did you go to a party? Did you get extensions? Are those... where did you get those boots? Babe, your tits. What happened to your tits? It's been like three hours."
"I found something in the library," Isolde said, kicking the door shut behind her with her heel. It swung shut and the lock clicked back into place on its own.
Jess stared at the door. Then at her.
"Okay, that was weird," she said slowly. "Sadie. Your eyes are green."
Isolde smiled.
Jess had a whole speech coming. Isolde could see it building up behind her face: questions, worry, a little panic, maybe a threat to call Sadie's mom. But Isolde didn't let it come out. She just looked into Jess's warm brown eyes, and let the river-weeds in her own green eyes sway.
"Shh," she said. "Don't be scared, Jess. You know me."
Jess blinked. Her shoulders came down a little.
"You've always wondered what I'd look like this way," Isolde murmured. She walked closer. Slowly. Her boot heels sank into the cheap shaggy rug. "Haven't you? You've thought about it. When we shared a bed that night freshman year because the heater broke. When you watched me change. When you said 'no homo' and laughed after you told me I had a cute butt."
Jess's face went red.
"That's... that was a joke," she whispered.
"Was it?"
She found it in Sadie's memories, and she found it in Jess's head too, now that she was looking. A little locked drawer of thoughts that Jess had never let herself open all the way. Late-night stuff. Sadie's laugh. Sadie's legs. Sadie asleep in the other bed, and Jess lying awake listening to her breathe.
Isolde didn't have to put anything in Jess's head. She just took that little drawer and pulled it open, all the way, and turned it upside down.
Jess made a soft, helpless noise.
"There," Isolde whispered. "Now we can finally be honest with each other."
She sat down on the edge of Jess's bed. The mattress dipped under her. The laptop slid itself shut and floated up off the comforter and set itself gently on the desk across the room. Jess watched it go with wide eyes, but she didn't scream. She didn't do anything. She just looked back at Isolde, and her breathing got faster.
"What are you?" she whispered.
"Hungry," Isolde said, and kissed her.
Jess froze for a second. Then she kissed back. Hard. Like she'd been waiting over a year for permission, which she had. Her lips were soft and tasted like cherry lip balm. Isolde slid her hand up into Jess's curls and plucked the claw clip out of her hair, and the dark curls tumbled down around both of them, and she held the back of Jess's head with her long emerald-black nails and kissed her deeper, slow and wet, her tongue sliding into Jess's mouth.
The fairy lights brightened. A dead plant on the windowsill quietly bloomed, a burst of tiny white flowers opening along its brown stems.
Isolde pushed Jess down onto the bed on her back and climbed on top of her, her boots on either side of Jess's hips, her fishnet knees pressing into the comforter. She trailed her nails down the side of Jess's face, her jaw, her throat. Jess shivered. She dragged them lower, over the cartoon skull on the T-shirt, and the shirt simply let go of her. It split down the middle, the fabric parting under the tips of her nails like wet paper, and slid off Jess's shoulders.
Jess wasn't wearing a bra. Her tits spilled out, big and soft and heavy, tan with dark brown nipples already stiff in the cool air.
"Oh, look at you," Isolde breathed. "Sadie was right to be jealous."
She bent and took one of Jess's nipples in her mouth and sucked, and Jess's back arched up off the bed. Isolde squeezed the other one in her hand, her long nails sinking into the soft flesh, circling the nipple with the very tip of one point, round and round, until Jess was squirming.
"Oh my God," Jess gasped. "Oh my God, Sadie. Sadie..."
"Isolde," Isolde murmured against her skin. "But you can call me whatever you like tonight, pet."
The sleep shorts were next. She hooked two nails into the waistband and pulled, and the shorts and the panties underneath slid down Jess's thick thighs on their own, all the way past her ankles, and the fuzzy pink socks went too, and the whole pile of clothes floated up and dropped neatly onto the other bed. Jess was naked under her now, lying back on her own comforter, curly hair spread out on her pillow, all that soft tan skin glowing gold under the fairy lights.
Isolde kissed her way down. Jess's soft stomach. Her hips. The insides of her thick thighs. She dragged her nails down Jess's legs as she went, ten long, light scratches, and Jess hissed and spread her legs wider without being told.
"That's it," Isolde purred. "Show me."
Jess's pussy was dark and soft and already shining wet. Isolde parted her with two fingertips, and then pressed her tongue flat against her and licked, slow, from the bottom all the way up to her clit.
Jess grabbed the comforter in both fists and moaned so loud someone in the next room banged on the wall.
Isolde didn't even look up. She just flicked one hand at the wall, and the room went quiet. Not the sound in the room. The sound outside it. Like a bubble had closed around them.
She ate Jess out slowly, deliberately, the way a person eats something they've been looking forward to for a long time. Long flat licks. Little teasing flicks over her clit. Her tongue pushing inside her. And then, because she could, she added more. Ghost-touches. One invisible mouth sucking on Jess's left nipple. Another on her right. Invisible fingers stroking her inner thighs. Jess was being touched in six places at once, and she was losing her mind.
"I can't, I can't, oh my God, what is that, what are you doing, oh fuck, oh fuck..."
Isolde slid two fingers inside her and curled them, her long nails pressing against Jess's inner walls, the hard backs of them stroking just the right spot, and Jess came with a scream, her thighs clamping around Isolde's head, her hips bucking up off the bed. The fairy lights flared bright white. Every pen on the desk stood up on its end.
Isolde held her down by the hips and kept licking until Jess was shaking and begging her to stop. Then she kept going a little longer, because she liked hearing it.
Finally Isolde sat up between Jess's spread legs, licking her lips, her green eyes glowing.
Jess lay there limp and gasping, her chest heaving, her face flushed and sweaty, her curls a wild mess on the pillow.
"Holy shit," she whispered. "Holy shit, holy shit..."
"Oh, darling," Isolde said. "We're not finished."
She stood up on the bed. Her spike heels sank into the mattress. She towered over Jess, one boot on either side of her hips, her fishnets and lace and leather glowing in the fairy lights. She unhooked her leather skirt with a flick of her fingers and let it fall off the end of the bed. Then she popped the hooks of her bodysuit open again, all of them, and peeled the lace up and over her head, and tossed it aside. She stood there in nothing but her fishnet thigh-highs and her thigh-high boots, her big new tits bare, her black hair falling around her body like a cloak.
"Do you know," she said conversationally, "that in my day, the witch-finders claimed we lay with the devil? They said he gave us gifts. They said we could take whatever shape we wanted."
She put her hand between her legs, over her pussy.
"They were wrong about the devil," she said. "But they were right about the shape."
Jess watched, frozen, as something began to grow between Isolde's fingers.
It came out of her slowly. A hot, aching pressure where her clit was, swelling, lengthening, pushing outward against her palm. Isolde moaned and threw her head back and wrapped her hand around it as it grew. Thicker. Longer. Pushing out between her fingers inch by inch, smooth and hard and flushed, until she was holding a cock in her fist. A big one. Eight, nine inches, thick as Jess's wrist, veined, the head swollen and dark and already wet at the tip. Below it, her pussy was still there, still slick, untouched.
She stroked it once, slowly, base to tip, her long emerald-black nails trailing along the underside, and shivered at how it felt.
"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, that's sensitive. Oh, I see why men are such idiots now."
Jess stared at it. "That's... that's not... you can't..."
"I can do anything," Isolde said simply. "Come here."
Jess came. She sat up and crawled forward on her hands and knees, her heavy tits swaying, and knelt in front of Isolde on the mattress. Isolde's cock was right at the level of her face. She looked up at Isolde, her brown eyes huge and dazed and hungry, and licked her lips.
"Go on," Isolde said. "Taste what you've been thinking about."
Jess wrapped her hand around it. Her long cherry-red nails looked so pretty against it, Isolde thought. Then Jess leaned in and took the head into her mouth.
Isolde groaned. It was nothing like her own fingers. It was hot and wet and soft and Jess's tongue was swirling around the head, and Isolde grabbed a fistful of those dark curls and pushed, slowly, feeding Jess more of her cock, inch after inch, until Jess's lips were stretched around the thick shaft and her eyes were watering.
"That's it," Isolde panted. "That's it. Deeper, pet. Relax your throat."
Jess's throat relaxed. Isolde told it to. Jess took her all the way down, gagging softly, her nose pressed against Isolde's skin, and Isolde held her there, both hands buried in her curls, and rocked her hips, fucking Jess's mouth slow and deep.
She could feel the pressure building already. She didn't let it. She pulled out of Jess's mouth with a long, wet sound, a string of spit connecting them, and Jess gasped for air.
"Lie down," Isolde said. "On your stomach."
Jess flipped over. She lay face-down on her bed, her cheek on her pillow, her curls spilling everywhere, her big round ass up in the air. Isolde knelt behind her and grabbed those soft, thick cheeks in both hands, digging her nails in, spreading her open, and Jess whimpered into the pillow.
Isolde lifted one hand off Jess's ass and lifted Jess's hands with it, without touching them. Both of Jess's wrists rose off the comforter and floated up over her head and slammed down on the pillow, crossed, pinned there under an invisible weight. Her ankles spread apart and pinned to the corners of the bed. Jess was spread out face-down, completely held, unable to move anything but her hips.
"Isolde," Jess whispered, her voice muffled by the pillow. "Isolde, please."
"Please what?"
"Please fuck me."
"Mm. Correct."
Isolde lined herself up. She rubbed the swollen head of her cock up and down Jess's soaked pussy, teasing, getting it wet, and then she pushed inside. Slowly. All the way.
Jess screamed into the pillow. Isolde moaned out loud. The fairy lights pulsed. Outside, against the window, every dead leaf on the oak tree in the courtyard lifted off the branches at once and swirled up past the glass in a whirling cloud.
It was so tight. So hot. Isolde had never felt anything like it in four hundred years, never felt anything like it at all. She pulled out, slow, and pushed back in, and nearly came right there. She had to grit her teeth and use her magic on herself to hold it back.
Then she started to fuck her.
She went slow at first, long deep strokes, pulling almost all the way out and then sliding back in, her hands gripping Jess's hips, her nails sinking into the soft flesh. Then faster. Harder. Her hips slapped against Jess's ass, the soft flesh rippling, the bed creaking under them, the headboard knocking against the wall. Isolde's own pussy, still there beneath the cock, dripped down her thighs onto her fishnets.
"Fuck," Jess sobbed into the pillow. "Fuck, you're so big, you're so deep, oh God, oh God..."
Isolde leaned forward over her, pressing her big tits against Jess's back, and put her mouth right against Jess's ear.
"Do you know what you are now?" she whispered.
"What...?"
"Mine."
She raised one hand and dragged her nails slowly down Jess's spine, from the back of her neck to the small of her back. Not hard enough to cut. Hard enough to leave five long pink lines. And where her nails passed, the lines glowed, faint green, for a second, before fading into the skin.
Isolde fucked her harder. Then she added more. She sent one ghost hand down under Jess's hips to rub her clit in tight little circles while she pounded her from behind. She sent two more to squeeze and pinch Jess's tits where they were pressed into the mattress. And she lifted the whole bed. Just a few inches. The mattress and frame and pillows and all of it rose off the floor and hung there in the air, rocking gently with every thrust, the fairy lights swinging and blinking above them.
Jess came again. Isolde felt her pussy clamp down and pulse around her cock, and she didn't stop. She kept fucking her through it, and Jess came again, and again, sobbing and shaking, her pinned hands clenching into fists on the pillow.
"Turn your face to me," Isolde said, and Jess's head turned on the pillow on its own, so her flushed, wet face was turned toward her. "I want to see your face when I fill you up."
She grabbed Jess's hips, pulled her back onto her cock as hard as she could, and came.
It was nothing like coming with her pussy. It started deep in her belly, low and molten, and shot up through her cock like lightning. She came deep inside Jess with a long, raw scream, her hips grinding, her cock throbbing and pulsing and pumping hot cum into her over and over. Her eyes went full emerald again. The bed dropped back to the floor with a thud. Every window in the room fogged up at once, and on the inside of the glass, drawn in the fog by no hand at all, a symbol appeared: a circle with three lines through it.
Jess came one last time just from the feeling of it, her whole body shuddering, her eyes rolling back.
Then silence.
Afterward, Isolde lay on her back on Jess's bed, her boots still on, her fishnets torn at one knee, her cock slowly shrinking back down between her legs until it was gone and she was just herself again.
Jess was curled up against her side, naked, her head on Isolde's big bare tits, her curls fanned out over Isolde's chest. Her eyes were half-closed, glazed and dreamy and completely content.
On Jess's left hip, right over the bone, was a mark. Small. Three thin lines inside a circle. It hadn't been there an hour ago. Isolde had drawn it with the tip of her nail while Jess was coming, a gentle little scratch that had healed instantly into something like a tattoo, the faintest glimmer of green under the tan skin.
Isolde traced it lazily with one emerald-black nail. Jess sighed and nuzzled closer.
"What does it mean?" Jess murmured, half asleep.
"It means you're mine," Isolde said. "It means nothing can touch you unless I say so. It means you'll come when I call, and you'll be happy to. It means you'll be by my side for what's coming." She stroked Jess's curls. "Is that all right with you, pet?"
"Mm-hmm." Jess smiled into her skin. "Whatever you want."
"Good girl."
Isolde looked out the window. Through the fog on the glass, past the symbol, she could see the campus spread out in the dark. The old brick buildings. The ivy. The iron lamps. And rising over all of it, at the center of the quad, the big stone clock tower on top of the administration building, lit up gold, with a name carved in stone above the clock face in tall Roman letters:
CRANE HALL.
She'd gone through Sadie's memories carefully on the walk over. Sadie had been a good little history student. She knew things. She knew that the Crane family had come over from England in the 1630s with money and a very old book. She knew they'd founded this whole university. She knew there was still a Crane on the board of trustees, and another one in the president's office right now, Dr. Elliot Crane, who gave a speech every fall about "the founders' vision" and "protecting our heritage." She knew there was something called the Crane Trust, which was very old and very private and which nobody really understood.
They'd kept her. Four hundred years. In a glass case, in a basement, under their own library, with their own name on it. Like a trophy.
Isolde smiled.
"Your family," she murmured to the clock tower, "should have burned me while they had the chance."
She'd cursed Matthias Crane's sons, and his sons' sons. She'd meant it. She had a new body, a full well of power, a pet at her side, and all the time in the world. And this time there would be no field, no iron, no Latin, no book. Never again. She'd make sure of that first. Every scrap of their old knowledge. Every last one of them who remembered how it was done.
Jess shifted against her, and Isolde felt her hand slide down, slowly, sleepily, over Isolde's stomach, toward her thighs. Her long cherry-red nails dragged lightly through the fishnet.
"Again?" Jess whispered.
Isolde laughed, low and wicked, and the fairy lights warmed. Her own nails clicked softly together as she closed her hand over Jess's and guided it lower.
"Darling," she said, "I've got four hundred years to make up for."
