Unnamed weird gay D/s blood magic thing: an (SFW) excerpt!

At the end of last year, I was trying to make it to my goal of three books written in 2019, and for the final attempt I decided to go ahead and dive into full-on Id and not worry about whether or not I’ll be able to sell. The result was very weird and very intense—and very filthy, although I don’t think I’d actually categorize it as straight up smut.

I’ve been talking about it on Twitter a bit, and low and behold, there seems to be some interest in it. I’m making an initial editing pass right now, and I still have no idea whether or not it’s something I could sell to a publisher, but I’ve decided that if it turns out I can’t, I’m (probably) going to self-publish. Because hey, people say they want to read it. 

I like the prose. That’s one thing I’m sure of. 

Figured I’d share a bit of the beginning of it. I may share more. Will probably steer clear of the naughty bits for the most part but we’ll see. I want to stress that this is from a very rough draft, and it may and will likely change between now and whenever it’s available to read. But yeah. 

This excerpt is free to read, others will be locked to supporters. Hope you enjoy. ❤️

(art by William Etty)

0

This is what you wanted, says the voice. This has always been what you wanted. Look. 

He looks. He can't see. He can't see anything; the darkness is a solid thing. He blinks and struggles to adjust, but he senses somehow that adjustment is something he's already achieved in every possible way and there's nowhere else to go. If it was possible for him to see, he would be seeing. 

Exactly. 

Hands. On his face, his bare shoulders, his bare chest. There is pain, not sharp but deep like the rumble of an earthquake, like thunder in his bones. It's familiar, this pain. It is in its own way a comfortable thing. The hands travel over him, flaring the pain wherever they touch him, and the hands are also familiar, and they're more than comfortable; he realizes that he aches for them with a pain wholly separate from the one surging slowly along the pathways of his nerves. 

Hard cold beneath his feet. Beneath his knees. He's walking. He's crawling. Fingers through his hair and a puff of breath against his ear, and the breath is cool like a breeze easing through a shallow cave, and without any discernible scent. 

You came back to me. I knew you would. 

In the way of dreams, he asks for no clarification. 

Those fingers return to his face. He moves his lips when the tips of the fingers press against them and that movement becomes a kiss and the breath becomes a sigh. Will you stay? You don't have to stay, you know. Except what he knows is that this may not be true. The voice is not quite lying. It's not that simple. 

God, touch me. Please keep touching me, he whispers, please. 

God. Yes. Laugh. All right, then. The floor turns over and vanishes and he tumbles. Solidity under his feet again even through the spin. Blinking as the light strokes over his eyes the way the fingertips traced the seam of his mouth. He licks his lips and tastes salt. The light is from the street outside; the blinds are open. He's standing and he turns and walks, naked, into the hallway toward the kitchen, and he thinks that he's been naked for a long time and this too is comfortable, only the comfort has vanished with the pain and he misses both.

He is not afraid. This is also novel. 

The kitchen gleams. The light is different and it makes him think of polished bones. The tile, the stainless steel and chrome, the knives in the drainer blade-up; he always places them that way and always, always, murmur the shadows, you imagine what it would be like to trip and fall and feel the point of one enter your throat and scrape against your spine on the way out the other side. 

A shadow sitting at the breakfast table. It turns as he enters, only it was always facing him. In the darkness of it, something else gleams. It extends a hand and he drops to his knees and the knife is in his grip. 

You don't need that. You don't need to be afraid of it anymore. You know this. Will you stay? 

The knife skitters across the floor. He bows his head. The hands close over him like a blessing. The bone light bleeds away. 

Will you stay? 

Is there somewhere else to go?

1

“No names,” says the dark-haired man over his water glass. 

The man seated across from him toys with his own glass, running his fingertips through the condensation. It occurs to him, as he watches the other man’s strong throat work through the swallows, that this probably looks like a date, which he isn't as uncomfortable with as he might have expected. This isn't an especially romantic dinner spot, a casual and vaguely Italian establishment filling up with the early dinner crowd. Was the waiter looking at the two of them that way? In his experience waitstaff affect a carefully neutral attitude where this kind of thing is concerned but he also knows that you look at people on a date in a different way from other couples who appear to merely be friends. 

He should address what's just been said, because it's strange, although it's a repetition of what the email listed, among a few other conditions and a physical description. He focuses and cocks his head. Stop staring at him, you're making this look even more like what it already looks like. 

“I was meaning to ask you about that. Why no names?”

“Because,” says the man, setting his glass down. His eyes are both large and sharp, and also very black. He appears to be missing his irises. It's perhaps not as unsettling as it should be. “They don't matter. Where we’ll go, they'll matter even less.” The corner of his thin mouth curls. “It'll be only you and me. Why would we need names?”

“Why can't we use them until then?”

“It's less for you to forget. You'll have to shed enough as it is. Anyway, it's better if I don't know either.”

This is strange, he thinks, but given what he asked for in the ad, he shouldn't really expect anything else. Although he's not certain what he did expect. A cape? Some kind of goth getup? This man is not in any respect extra. He's simple and plain in a neat pair of black slacks and an equally neat gray tee. He wears no rings etched with occult symbols. He wears no jewelry at all. There is nothing about him that signals shaman or spiritualist or any of the other terms that might have applied. 

He smiles. It's a cautious smile. He must be obviously bemused. Just then the wine arrives and he finds that he welcomes the distraction as the glasses are filled with a red the specific variety of which he can't remember. The waiter assures them that their appetizers are on the way and vanishes. He stares into the depths of the red. 

“So that's part of the ritual, then?”

The man across from him pauses in the act of lifting his glass to his mouth. “Are we beginning?”

“I don't know, I'm not sure I've decided.”

“Yes, you have. You wouldn't have agreed to meet if you hadn't.”

He frowns slightly. “Do you think making assumptions is attractive?”

The man shrugs. “Tell me no, then. Dismiss me.”

Of course he doesn't dismiss him. He drinks wine in silence for a moment or two and then tells himself to slow down. He should be as sober for this as possible. Perhaps he shouldn't have ordered the wine. 

Did he order the wine? Was it the other man? He genuinely can't recall. 

“Why do you want to do this?”

He blinks, faintly startled. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. It's a pretty basic question, wouldn't you say? For this kind of ask?” The man raises a single long finger from the others curled around the bowl of his glass and points it. “What I'm going to be putting you through… You should know why you're doing it.”

“I do know why.”

The man arches an eyebrow. “Do you, now?”

Impatience. Why isn't he dismissing him? Does he really want to expose himself to this kind of arrogance for however long the process will take? “What, you want me to tell you?”

“I don't need to know. You do, though.”

His jaw clenches. “I know why I want to do it.”

“Well.” The man takes another swallow of wine. “We’ll see. Won't we?”

“So we really can't use names?”

“I told you, we don't need them.” The man sets his glass down, points again. “You're the seeker.” Points at himself. “I'm the guide. The roles are what matter. What we do matters. The reason behind what you're doing, they can remain your own. But there will come a point, maybe not very far in, where your reason will be all you have to hold onto, and in that moment you'll need to remember it and you'll need it to be clear. Do you understand?”

No. He nods. 

“Good.” 

The appetizers arrive. He pokes at his—fried calamari. The breading flakes away just a bit too easily. 

“So it's going to be unpleasant?”

“Extremely,” the man says around a mouthful of portobello mushroom. “Mystics, yogis, ascetics of all kinds since the beginning of asceticism, they go through ordeals to achieve what they have. What you're asking for is even more than that.” His black eyes seem to flicker. “Isn't it.”

Not a question. Fair. 

“Will it be dangerous?”

The man gives him a look that implies this is a very stupid question. “You want to travel alive to where most people only go when they're dead, of course it will.” He pauses, his gaze unwavering. “You have until the end of this meal to tell me no.”

Huff. “You're a pushy asshole, you know that?”

“I do. I'm going to have to be. You don't do what I'm going to have to do if you're a nice person, if you’re concerned for the feelings of others.” 

“So what exactly are you going to have to do?”

What the man’s face does might or might not be a smile; in either case it's unsettling. 

“I'm going to destroy you.”

2

The seeker spends a long time trying to decide who he should tell. If there's anyone to tell. 

He is not an unreasonable man. Nor is he an uncautious one as a rule. He understands perfectly well how stupid, on paper, what he intends to do must be. You're supposed to tell someone where you'll be going, who you'll be with, how long you’ll be gone, at what point one should assume a bad if not worst case scenario and accordingly contact the appropriate authorities. 

He's seen a movie or two. This is the setup for a situation where he ends up hanging from a meathook by his Achilles tendons. 

But he wanders around his apartment for a while, restless and uncertain what to do with his body. With his hands. Uncertainty is emotion which is embodied; it doesn't remain confined to the interior but invades the nerves and muscles. He's overwhelmed by the sense that he should be doing something to prepare for this in a manner that involves someone else. 

He wanders around the small part of the world he's designated for himself and in which he lives alone, surveying sparse furnishings, blankly unadorned walls. For the first time he perceives the impersonal nature of the place. It’s neat and not unattractive but that's precisely the problem; it feels as if it's been assembled for a catalog or a showroom, not for human occupancy. This troubles him. He's lived here for almost five years. There should be some mark of himself, some expression of his mind and personality on the objects he's accumulated and arranged, but all he can find is an unmade bed, a towel hanging up to dry in the bathroom, dishes in the drainer and a couple of dirty ones in the sink. There are clothes in the closet and dresser but he feels no particular attachment even to them. They're as nondescript as anything else here. 

This feeling of disassociation is new to him and he doesn't like it.

He stops wandering the apartment and wanders his social media profiles instead. Every account he has is used only every other day or so, he doesn't have many followers and he doesn't know them well, the ones he knows at all. A few friends from school but he doubts he could properly call them friends anymore. 

His parents don’t exist. He has no siblings. Somewhere in another closet he probably has pictures of his minimal extended family but if asked by a police sketch artist to describe any of them he's not sure he could summon up enough detailed recollection to be useful. 

Should he tell someone? What about how long this nameless faceless person should wait before they sent someone else looking for him? In his discussion with the guide, no specific timeframe was ever settled on. The guide waved away his attempts to nail one down. 

Work does know, after a fashion. He has nearly a month of leave accumulated. He's taken it. Surely this won't last for more than that. If it turns out that it does, he can contact them and let them know that he'll unavoidably be out of town for a bit longer. No one is likely to care. 

No one is likely to care. 

He packs. What to bring for an unspecified length of time, for a process he knows nothing about other than that he can expect it to be unpleasant? Pack light, he was told. Clothes? You won't need many. A couple of days’ worth. Whatever. Toiletries? A toothbrush. A razor if you like. Don't worry about anything else. 

Phone? The guide smiled at that. Well, I won't tell you not to bring it. 

He elects to leave the phone.

He puts these things into an overnight bag, along with a travel set of shampoo and soap. He puzzles over what he might be forgetting. There must be something else. It can't be this simple. He's taken trips before. Not many, for various reasons, and none in a long time, but he knows he packed more than this, even for a couple of days. 

He can't think of anything else. 

Gathering up his toothbrush and razor, he pauses and stares at his reflection in the mirror over the sink. He stares for a while. He is beginning to feel like a stranger in his own home; now he looks at his straight nose and his high brow and his short straw-blond hair and his full lips and his mildly defined cheekbones and none of those pieces seem to entirely fit together as a whole. His face is disjointed, disharmonious. Something is wrong. 

It's evening and the bathroom light is dim. The shadows in the corners are creeping up the walls. 

Who are you? he thinks. 

Just who the fuck are you, anyway?