The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

1.

They shouldn’t have been here all together. Kendra knew it, as she looked at the women in the back room of the defunct big-box retailer. Her heart sang to see this many of them, civilians, brave enough to come here to stand against the vampires—even as her gut froze to think of them all gathered here in one blood-warm spot. It looked too much like the sort of place vampires brought captives for sorting.

The Life Guard, and the manuals they’d trained her with, said the way to do this was to build a cell network slowly, recruiting in layers to insulate each part of the organization if any of them were captured or enslaved—or went willingly over to the vampires. It took patience, and the faith to accept the Big Picture while never being allowed to see it.

Kendra looked out at them, nervous and furtive, silently marveling that they were here at all. Some of them were marveling, too. It had taken tremendous courage, but they weren’t soldiers, after all. Few of them could sustain the life of a cell member, the suspense of just getting through a day and a night in the world the vampires were close to owning now. The worry when someone missed a rendezvous. The not-quite-irrational fear that the three or four of you in the garage or the crew lounge or that corner of the parking lot were it, that everyone else had been taken and gave up your names in trance, and that this was your last miserable night at liberty before you were swept up too.

They needed to know they were a group, even just this once. Kendra saw their eyes, wide with unfamiliar hope as they saw each other. There were probably less than four dozen of them here, but to most of them it was an army.

“Everyone,” she called, standing on the old desk. The chatter stopped instantly and they looked at her. The wave of hope was nearly palpable enough to knock her off her feet—they’d just learned they were an army, and now they had a general to lead them.

Kendra looked at them with the old fear and the old love. She wondered how she could still be only twenty-eight.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she told them, and they laughed harder than it deserved.

“Seriously. I especially want to thank you all for coming out at night, but this is when the vamps are busy and expect us to be in our beds like good little prey. And we’ve all seen how diligent the slaves and turncoats are in the daytime, our time, when their owners are asleep.

“Anyway, from now on you’ll operate with the ones you were recruited with. It’s still a risk, and you all knew it, and you all took it: if you’re taken, a nosferatu can sift your mind and see everything—everyone—you saw, and know what they mean to you.

“It may just scoop it from your thoughts. It may have put you to sleep and you’ll never know what you gave it. It may fascinate you, and then you’ll want to tell it who we are—maybe to please it, or maybe just to give it a reason to slide into your mind and own it again.”

Kendra looked at them. They’d been living under the vampires for a long time, and they still looked shocked.

“The best thing to hope for,” she said, “is that if they get you, they just make you a bloodcow, and never bother to check your brain before they brainsmooth you.”

“Or that we die?”

It was a fluffy-looking girl in front. She could be a fussy homecoming queen or a well-camouflaged terror, but if she were here someone Kendra knew had spoken for her. Yes—nearby, Chelsea was watching her own recruit. Kendra looked around, finding hers here and there. Noreen was looking smug—the three beside her looked like part of a karate team.

Kendra couldn’t tell if the question were wisdom or bravado. “Dying works,” she replied. “When they drink you dry, your mind just goes dark. Dead humans tell no tales.” She didn’t say anything about what one of them would know, and tell, if she were fed the blood of the one who drained her, and woke as nosferatu.

“Enough levity.” Luckily, they laughed. “Most of you know that I’m with the Life Guard.” She stood a little taller as she said it, and for every skeptical glance there were four that lit up a little.

“We’re spread a little thin lately.” Another laugh, much quieter. Part of Kendra cringed for making light of it—it’d been three months since she’d even heard from anyone else in the Guard, much less met one. But they’d understand, the living and the lost. If it helped humans stand and fight, it was good. “Promotions are, well, a little slow, so I am still a Hunter-Third.

“But I know some things that can help us survive, and then start killing them.“ They liked that, and saying it so matter-of-factly convinced them, as a snarl of “we’ll stake ‘em all!” would not.

“Mostly they’ll come to you through your sections. I’ll give you some major stuff now and—”

At the back, she saw the women she’d put out as sentries coming in. Their weapons were still slung or holstered, and they moved without haste, and for a second her hope let her think Oh it’s OK—

Then she saw their eyes.

Before she could do anything she saw Noreen’s eyes had already glazed over. There was enough time to realize that she’d seen it earlier but hadn’t noticed. Now, seeing the deeply hypnotized sentries, she knew the vampire who controlled Noreen had activated her and used her mind to locate them all. Might have programmed her to join, just for this.

Two of Noreen’s recruits stood still beside her, under the same spell.

“Oh my god,” said someone at the back, noticing the sentries. Heads turned, the hissing wave of wind through a wheatfield about to be reaped.

Someone else cried out, seeing the mindless women marching in. She sounded more sad than afraid.

Kendra reached for both pistols, hoping she didn’t have to waste the one with silversleeve loads on mere humans.

There was a vampire here, now. It had tamed the guards into its tools. They would obediently kill everyone here if it told them to, but Kendra had a sick certainty they wouldn’t be that lucky.

She dropped off the desk, scanning the crowd for any more, like Noreen, who were already their slaves. She thought of strategy, but there was another page of the manual she’d have to tear up.

“Scatter! Run! Move!” she yelled, nearly carried away enough to put a precious bullet into the ceiling for emphasis. She didn’t let herself think about the many—most—who’d never make it out. The others would get away, at least for now.

She wished there were another Guard who could lead them then. She knew she wouldn’t get the chance. She looked at Noreen, but Noreen was already touching a stungun to her third, still-free recruit, and the athletic girl spasmed and dropped. Her friends ignored her as their controller set them to attacking the women around them.

Kendra barely noticed how little screaming there was. Just determined shouting.

Silence from the vampire slaves, and no shooting yet. They wanted live prey . . .

Kendra horrified herself by wishing for a very large bomb, and then focused on fighting. How long she lasted now depended on whether the vampire was alone, and whether it was an elder or just—

Tranquilized.

Suddenly the vampire slaves were the only ones moving. Kendra and every other free woman there were free no longer, and swayed where they stood, willed into trance by the irresistible, inhuman mind outside.

Kendra tried to gather her thoughts but her mind was as numb as her body. It hadn’t even been a command, just a description—and the will behind it was so powerful that Kendra’s whole self had softened under the mind-flattening, sexual need to make it true.

I am tranquilized, Kendra told herself, unable to know whether it was an imposed thought or her first small act of obedience.

Obedience sweet enough to scare her. She was using the resistance techniques they’d drummed into her at the Academy, and they kept her awake, barely. For a second the trance actually helped, as she blinked into awareness of the other women. None of them had Guard training, and the spell had claimed them utterly. Their minds were stilled and they stood dreaming, completely open to suggestion.

you are Mine.

Kendra fought it but she could feel how true it wanted to be. She watched her friends and the women she would have liked to know as it became their truth. Suddenly, like a set of puppets about to perform, they swayed upright. Now they had purpose, as they waited for their new owner’s next truth.

The vampire’s touch brushed Kendra’s sex and she couldn’t hold in the moan, but it vanished in the yearning chorus as the other women called out with her. She wanted to yield to their purpose, join their tranquil obedient sleep.

She bit her tongue, and then let it go before she bled.

Obey Me now.

Kendra felt herself succumbing. Her mind was clouding and even as she knew the vampire elder was coming into the room she was sinking into its trance, becoming another of its passive pets. Her hands hurt and she realized she was gripping her pistols. Some part of her body was still blindly fighting, trying to keep her from the seductive defenseless of everyone else here with a heartbeat.

If she waited for it to come to her . . . it might sense Life Guard thoughts and want to play with her . . . if she could raise her arm and . . .

Kendra stopped thinking that if she waited that long, she’d be in the submissive sleep that owned the others. She thought of facing those eyes. The choice of trying to kill it—

—or kneeling to it and surrendering her weapons, with her soul.

Kendra’s terror raced the arousal for possession of her. She had a gun at her jaw, awake enough to know the mouth was certain where the temple left survivors.

She watched the others, already sleepwalking to where their new owner wanted them. They’d trusted her, and she’d brought them the end of their lives as free women. As anything but living food . . .

They’d get no nine-millimeter way out of slavery.

Kendra couldn’t take hers. The thought of it was like acid in her veins. She didn’t deserve it now. There was no chance she’d ever be awake again, to try to lead at least some of them out of it, but she could go with them.

Or start killing—

She lunged into the loose group of somnambulists, seeing Noreen and the other slaves moving to intercept her. She looked low, trying not to see faces, but she saw the homecoming queen who might have been a tigress, ready to die.

Her eyes were lidded now, as she moved in sleepy lockstep with the others.

Kendra stopped thinking about anything, just pushed past them toward the doors, to where the elder would—

Obey Me now.

She was on her knees and didn’t remember how she’d gotten there. She tried to think and stopped. She mustn’t think. She must only—

Obey Me now.

Kendra stared up into bottomless eyes and surrendered.

2.

There were only three walls, but the room was a perfect cell. Slumped against one wall, Kendra looked at her fellow captives, asleep or paired off in drowsy, oblivious sex, and knew none of them noticed. The vampire had Told them not to, and now they did as they were Told.

There was daylight in the windows, and that was something. She tried to tell how long she’d been asleep.

Kendra lay against another woman she didn’t know. The woman was warm and still, and her heartbeat lulled Kendra, offering her more sleep. She’d slid against Kendra last night when the command had echoed in their minds, and Kendra had lost herself in her for longer than she should have. It was amazing, and scary, how much a gently persistent tongue could paralyze Life Guard resistance training.

But Kendra had resisted, and taken control enough to distract her nameless lover with a careful few fingers. When the woman jolted through climax Kendra had held her and stroked her back until her purring faded and her eyes closed. Kendra cried for a little while onto her shoulder, but when she’d finally closed her eyes, sleep felt like her own idea.

Now it was morning—she hoped. They’d been taken before dawn, and as she put her thoughts back together, she started to think the vampires had just stored them here for later play, rather than rush to beat the sunrise.

She looked over at the door, trying to stay awake herself. There was only one guard, but she stood on the other side of the line that kept Kendra and the rest confined.

The guard was human. She had to be—she was alive and it was daytime. But there was also a softness to her, not so much weakness as a lack of that latent power nosferatu no longer bothered to hide. She was dressed, unlike the captured women, but not much more—a cropped short-sleeved khaki blouse, very brief khaki shorts, calf boots. She looked like she’d been cast as the voluptuous, peril-prone assistant in a softcore video set in the jungle.

On the other hand, she had a gun. Kendra couldn’t see if it were a firearm or a tranq pistol. It was academic now but it might matter later.

The guard looked at them, glancing over Kendra without interest. She looked bored, but not careless: through worship or dread, no servant of the vampires would let herself be careless. Kendra judged this one was a collaborator, not someone the vampires had hypnotized into serving them. She had that frayed look many volunteers seemed to get when they had a while to think about the side they’d chosen, and whether they’d end up any better than the humans they betrayed.

Kendra didn’t feel self-righteous about it this late in the war, if anyone could still call it a war. Maybe the Free Zones were still out there, holding back the undead tide, but not here. Less than a year ago she’d been in a uniform and a unit, and they’d thought they were winning.

Last night she’d been—

Kendra cringed a little against the sleeping woman. Last night she’d actually started to feel it again. Those women were around her now, still in the trance the vampire elder had willed them into.

Then, Kendra felt an almost painful start. She was Life Guard, and the vampires must know it. She’d still been up on the desk when the elder had enslaved the sentries and sent them in to by its eyes—and it already had everything Noreen knew.

So why was Kendra here, with the rest of them? She didn’t mind not being singled out for torture, or kneeling paralyzed while the elder drained her mind, but what were they leaving it for?

When she knew, she put her face to her lover’s neck and wept as quietly as she could. The vampires knew more than she. A Guard captive would only matter if there were still a Guard network out there they could question her about. Or reprogram her to infiltrate it, like poor Noreen.

But she was just another naked human to convert to slavery—if there was no Life Guard left.

It was over. They’d lost. Vampires owned the world, and humanity. And Kendra.

No. There had to be someone, somewhere. The world was huge, and even if this country were lost there were others who’d fight.

Kendra listened to the heart of the blissfully sleeping woman, and knew that didn’t matter, here. Even if someone rolled back the nosferatu someday, it was too late for this woman, and for her. She kissed the woman in silent apology.

She felt the guard’s gaze cross her again, but the woman took her movement for more foreplay. Kendra kept her moves languid. She didn’t know whether the guard would notice a captive acting more aware than vampire-spell should allow, but she didn’t want to deal with it yet.

Another glance around told her that her training really had freed her mind. At least, it let her bob to the surface after the flood of obedience had drowned her. The other women hadn’t had a chance. They still floated in the will of their enslaver. When one awakened, it was only to drift into long slow lovemaking with the next one, and when they parted they fell asleep. There was little need to guard them. Their minds had been hypnotically cleansed of anything but sleep, sex, and obedience, and they would be here when night fell and their mistress returned to alter them permanently.

Kendra looked for Noreen, but she and the sentries weren’t with them. Noreen was already its catspaw, and she was probably somewhere else now doing its bidding. She might not even know she was a slave—Kendra had to believe that the smart, brave comrade she’d known had really thought she was a human freedom fighter. That smile couldn’t have concealed the leer of a witting vampire-worshipper.

Kendra grieved for Noreen, no less than for the next people Noreen would betray.

After it had put Kendra and the others here and bound them into the sleep-and-sex mindtrap, the elder had probably spent the rest of its dwindling night working on the sentries’ minds. By now the women were more of its devoted creatures.

She shivered. It was shamefully erotic to think about being converted that way. She imagined the pleasure, the instantly addictive submission, the erasure of all the memories and duties that would make it painful to submit and obey her species’ worst enemies. There would be no fear or grief—only the mistress’ will and the ecstasy of carrying it out, even unto death. Bad enough to be their food, or their plaything.

But to be their weapon—

Kendra backed away from the perverse excitement. She shouldn’t assume she wouldn’t end up like that anyway. She was fit and trained, and her body could serve well once her mind was leashed. When the elder rose with the twilight and came to sort its hypnotized prisoners at leisure, it could do with any of them whatever it wanted. If Kendra walked out of here glassy-eyed to join Noreen in its service, she wouldn’t even remember this.

Easier to think about that than to face how turned on it made her. The nosferatu’s mind touch had affected her. There was still a residue of the submissive thrill of yielding to its power. She’d been trained, a little, to obey it. Next time she might not hold out as long.

Next time it might make her forget to hold out at all.

She looked at the daylight, suddenly desperate. There couldn’t be a next time. They might own this continent, but it was still up to Kendra if they’d own her.

Until the elder came back with the dark and told her to obey forever, and she knelt and thanked it.

She stopped seeing the room as a captive and looked at it as a Hunter-Third in the Guard, trying for her best score in the survival course.

OK. There were yellow lines painted around each of the windows. There was the yellow line painted across the floor about three meters back from the wall where the door was, and it went up the side walls as far up as a five-foot-eight woman on tiptoe could reach.

Kendra had seen the woman. Naked and collared, her body daubed almost playfully with spattered paint, she’d just completed her work when Kendra and the other spellbound captives had marched in here. She’d come to attention in the elder’s presence, and then walked out blank-eyed with her paintbrush and bucket.

Recalling it now, Kendra realized what she’d seen. It hadn’t been vampire telepathy, which they seldom used with mere humans. The nude painter had been sent away like an automaton with a command her body obeyed. Her mind was a passenger, if they’d left her one.

Kendra was ashamed to recall she’d only been aroused, then, to see her mistress control someone so completely. She’d envied the mindless slave until a new command flooded their minds.

When you pass the yellow line you will know you cannot cross back unless told to. Only one of Us or one who serves Us can command you to.

But you will not think of crossing the line. you will not think.

They’d stepped over the yellow, the smell of fresh paint leaving their awareness as they started to smell each other’s dampness and need. Kendra had given in to it, and well after the elder left them she was as lost in pussy as the others.

Now she was awake, and felt free, and knew she was mindbound to stay here until it was too late.

The command about the lines was still in her mind, and she knew she couldn’t fight it. Just the thought of trying to make herself step across it on the floor made her clit tingle and her eyelids droop. Kendra knew if she tried to concentrate she’d just plunge herself into sextrance and lose any chance she had, never freeing herself—or finding the will to want to—until the elder was smiling down at her and it was too late.

For a moment, she had to resist the sharp urge to do just that.

Kendra hated it for tainting her mind that way. Grasping the hate, she hugged the woman she’d slept with once more and slid away.

Slowly, fending off languid hands and startling lips, she swam stealthily through a pond of nude, aroused girlflesh. A few other women eeled among the sleepers and lovers, seeking more, so she didn’t stand out. It was a constant temptation to pause, to taste this slickly moving cleft, that delicious-looking breast, to slide over those erotically vague eyes and feel the breath beneath them on her own pussy.

She couldn’t even avert her eyes and look up at the guard—she had to seem as fascinated by the bodies she moved through as she very nearly was. She had to move liquidly, like the sex-hypnotized captive she was pretending to be.

It was nearly her undoing. Passing two supine women, Kendra felt like a fish in the softly waving tentacles of a sea anemone. The sessile women, deep in the trance the elder had put them into and utterly subservient to its implanted commands, reached up for her. She imagined being stung and sinking paralyzed into their soft warm grasp.

Kendra needed it. She eased into the dual embrace and kissed a thigh, raising her head almost by accident to see one’s slack, blissful face before she put her own to the woman’s pussy.

It was her friend Chelsea, and by that much Kendra kept her will.

But she was where she wanted to be. There was a line of yellow paint, and the booted feet of a guard. The way out was near enough to keep her awake.

3.

When she thought she could do it without losing herself in it, Kendra turned and kissed a thigh beside her. The guard just walked past. When she turned her head to scope out the guard, she kept her eyes half-closed.

She studied the woman beyond the line. From here, she seemed to have a permanent sneer as she surveyed them. Many turncoats were like that, with more contempt for other humans than even the vampires showed. Kendra could see a vampire duping this one, pretty but insecure, into thinking it valued her. Knowing, nonetheless, that she was kept around to do shitwork like this. Or to be hypnotized into going first, some night, to soak up silver bullets.

Kendra couldn’t feel sorry for her, but she knew what a wretch felt like.

She might be able to handle the guard—the Guard had trained her to do it. And she had to. Kendra could feel the vampire’s demeaning little command bending her will even now. She could not cross that painted line unless the guard told her to. There was no other way out.

But the guard could control her mind, if she wanted. Kendra remembered the vampire’s soft, convincing voice in her mind as she and the others knelt to begin their sleep: they would all obey the guard’s every command. It was how one woman could control forty-five.

If she had the slightest idea what Kendra was up to, she’d only need to tell Kendra to stop, and Kendra would do as she was told. It would be her last mistake. This turncoat would send her back into mindlessness, and she’d never wake up before the vampire came and all hope was gone.

The guard might be cocky and keep Kendra awake, to play with her. But she’d probably tell Kendra to like it, and then Kendra would be happy to obey. She wouldn’t want to try anything against the woman after that.

What time was it? How much was left?

No more than she could spare. Kendra reared up slowly, unthreateningly, to kneel up among the writhing bodies.

Instantly the guard looked at her. Kendra swallowed, but relaxed. It was reflex—just surprise at seeing one of her charges able to keep her eyes focused. The guard’s gun hand didn’t even twitch. Kendra wondered if she’d ever used it.

Kendra’s pose was reassuring. She knelt meekly, pertly, as if already trained for display. Her back was arched but her head was down, and her thighs were quite open.

As their eyes met, Kendra blinked sleepily and swayed a little as she knelt. The guard smirked and held her stare. Kendra stared back as though too weak-willed, after the vampire, to resist even a human’s fixation.

“Who . . . are . . . yyyou?” she whispered, in awe. She let the lust get her, and saw the guard read her nipples and blush and assume Kendra was hot for her.

The woman stepped nearer, and she was attractive enough that it wasn’t entirely feigned. Kendra sensed interest but not arousal, but didn’t despair yet. This woman might not like women for sex, but she probably enjoyed the power of making another woman eat her out.

“What’s your name?” the guard said.

She blinked for a moment and stared up, letting her head move as though following slow silent music. The guard mockingly echoed her expression, encouraging her to think. She beamed gratefully.

“Kennnndra,” she murmured, and watched the guard smile broadly.

She closed her eyes and lost her own smile and then looked blearily up at the woman. “I can’t . . . think. I’m sorry. Just so . . . sleeeeepy . . .”

“And horny?” the guard prompted helpfully.

Kendra winced and moaned and bent over, touching herself. The guard’s laughter echoed off the walls, but now she sounded interested. She’d want to see how else her dazed little victim could behave, and if Kendra kept her entertained she wouldn’t turn off Kendra’s mind.

When she looked up the guard’s eyes were wider and almost friendly. She seemed happy for the diversion, at any rate.

“When I try,” Kendra said, “to think about . . . think . . . about . . .” She closed her eyes and forced them open. “Please.”

The guard’s grin was nasty but not surprising. Kendra worried briefly that the game would turn into “helping” her think, and she’d be hypnotized into submission before she knew she’d screwed up. It scared her that the idea of kneeling here and being toyed with and just smiling and coming was actually making her clit quiver.

“I keep thinking of . . . her . . . those eyes . . . those beautiful beautiful beautiful eyes . . .”

She let her own go unfocused, but she remembered the training and she could still see the guard’s body relax. She matched the other’s breathing. The woman was still alert but she was no longer thinking of Kendra as a potential threat, if she ever had. As far as the guard knew, she was watching a slightly stronger-willed woman helplessly mesmerize herself with the memory of the vampire’s command.

“Staring into her eyes . . . couldn’t help myself . . . so controlled . . . so . . . controlled . . . sleep . . .”

As Kendra narrated, she stroked herself, and the sound of her own voice was making her wet again. Once or twice her eyes cleared and she looked up beseechingly at the guard, for a level check.

The second time she looked up, the woman’s eyes were a little vague and her face was losing expression.

“. . . can’t . . . fight it . . .” Kendra gasp/purred. “. . . must . . . submit . . . obey . . . submit . . .”

Kendra felt a delicious tremor of horror as she felt herself slipping back into the trance. Her own words were seducing her, and she was perilously close to wanting them to. She risked another glance at the guard, and the woman’s gaze was starting to fixate, lost in Kendra’s own.

Kendra was scared now. It had been terribly risky to try hypnotizing someone so soon after being under the spell herself, and she was slipping into a moist dark submission nearly as fast as her victim.

If she broke the cadence that was enthralling both of them, the collaborator would wake up—and spike Kendra’s mind with the last command she’d ever hear.

If she didn’t, the vampire would return to find two deeply hypnotized women staring at each other.

“I must close my eyes now,” she whispered, fighting to disobey her own command. Her struggle to stay awake had made her voice husky, and she sensed that made it more hypnotic for the other woman.

“Must close my eyes,” the guard whispered at last, and it was enough to keep Kendra from sinking into her own trap. Quietly she instructed the guard and deepened her, and she was able to blink out of the only half-pretended trance when the woman could no longer see her.

She stayed on her knees, still whispering, hearing the guard repeat the new commands. They were nothing elaborate, and she’d only wrapped the other woman’s thoughts in bonds of gossamer—the wrong command could snap her awake and Kendra would get no second chance.

“I must open my eyes now but stay relaxed and deeply asleep,” she coaxed, and the guard repeated it as she obeyed. She’d never expected a captive human to be dangerous. She’d had no idea.

Kendra almost cried. Deep in trance now, empty of her cares, the woman resembled the decent person she might have been, before vampires and slavery and all the rest.

But she wasn’t that anymore. Kendra took a breath and went ahead.

“I must order the slave to come out to me,” she said in a low, compelling voice. “When I am told to I must order the slave to cross the line and come to me. Then I must wait, and rest, and sleep.”

The hypnotized guard nodded slowly, accepting it, and stood there patiently, waiting to be told.

“Order the slave out,” Kendra said. Then she opened her mouth to stop her—she’d suddenly realized she didn’t know if the guard would trance her before ordering her across the yellow line. She’d just be standing there, as mindless as the guard, but the guard would snap out of it first—

Too late.

But all the guard did was command her to step across, and then close her eyes. Kendra’s mind stayed on as she felt the compulsion and obeyed. There was even a little pussyflutter to reward her.

She stood next to her tenuously-strung puppet, and tried not to marvel.

She nearly asked the woman for her gun but stopped herself in time. Instead she told her to relax and feel nothing. Then Kendra leaned over and gently, gently slid it out of the holster.

It was a dart gun after all. She wondered whether they didn’t trust the turncoats and only gave real weapons to the ones they’d turned into willing slaves, or whether they just didn’t expect captives to be much trouble.

Kendra looked guiltily at the others, still lost in the sleep and sex that would keep them docile until their time came. She had to get them out.

She was why they were here. She owed them. All of them—she cringed at the thought of giving some a chance, and leaving the rest.

Kendra didn’t even know if she could rouse them. Even with her Guard training, it had been hard even to want to disobey the command to stay tranquil and horny and still.

“I will open my eyes but stay hypnotized,” she told the guard, “and I will obey.”

She licked her lips. The idea she’d just had was either inspired or . . .

“I will instruct the captives to relax and wake up. They must obey my voice and I will awaken them.”

The guard called out the command, and it startled Kendra as it rang across the room. Unlike their whispering it was simply her normal working tone, but Kendra wondered if it would snap the guard out of her flimsy control. The guard was already conditioned to her, though, and just lolled in the contentment of obeying a simple order.

Kendra felt her own mind clearing then. She was still enough under the vampire’s thrall, herself, that she was primed to obey the guard she’d hypnotized.

But she nearly did cry out when the others stopped their long, drowsy orgy and flowed gracefully to their feet.

She thought of a modern dance troupe moving in unison, and also of a bevy of beautiful zombies rising as one at a single bokor’s will. But her heart pounded as she watched awareness, of a sort, return to their eyes.

“I will tell them to obey—” She decided she didn’t like that word, and didn’t explore why it made her so wet.

“I will tell them they must do as Kendra tells them to do.” Now they looked at her.

Kendra told the nearest one to come to her, and the woman complied, ignoring the yellow line.

She looked back at the turncoat, who stood slackly unaware, waiting for her hypnotist’s next suggestion. She had no further utility, and if she woke now she might be able to subdue all of them again just by telling them to submit. She was dangerous.

Kendra felt a slick, treacherous itch to feel the triggers paralyze her and look into those eyes and feel the helplessness as the guard sent them all to their knees.

She didn’t say anything else before she fired a dart into the woman’s thigh, and then another.

4.

She told the women to stay calm, and then tiptoed out into the vestibule that made up the rest of this building. She inched open the outer door and peered out.

The building was part of a compound somewhere outside the city, and Kendra was pretty sure she knew where she was. She tried to recall its layout.

What shocked her was the blue-velvet sky of a sunset in progress. She had no idea she’d spent so much time back in the holding room. They had to move. It would be bad enough to try getting past the mindslaves and collaborators—she cringed at the thought of running into one of her hapless sentries from the meeting, now brainsmoothed into utter loyalty to the undead. But in a very few minutes the vampires would awaken.

She padded back into the room, and found the women subdued but talking. She was happy to see no one had slipped back to the floor. No one seemed weirded out by the sex, either, but from their expressions she could tell that, under the residual tranquility, they knew there was more to worry about.

“Stay calm, everyone.”

They subsided at once and she winced at the power she had. She looked down at the guard, still sprawled where Kendra had let her fall, the darts erect in her flesh.

“What do we do, Kendra?” Chelsea asked it evenly, and made it sound reasonable.

“Guard doctrine,” Kendra said, for want of anything else just then. She pointed at the collaborator. “Any vampire’s servant is her controller’s eyes and ears whenever it wants to use her.” They all looked at the unconscious woman, then back at her. “They usually use their mindslaves that way, but they’ll use ‘free’ lackeys like this as . . . well, periscopes.”

“So if,” said a woman Kendra didn’t know, “some vampire sweeps their minds each night when it wakes up—”

They all looked at the sleeper again.

The alarm might already be out. Mind would speak to mind, and they’d reach silently into their slaves to act until they could rise. The whole place could already be closing in while Kendra’s cadre waited for klaxons.

Kendra looked down at the dart gun she still held. If she tranquilized a slave on the way out, it would just tell the vampires that someone was loose, putting their pets to sleep, and where she was.

“There’s no time to plan a way out,” she told them. “We may already be under stalk.” She looked at their eyes, remembering the awful sight of Noreen enslaved. “They may reach into our minds now, too.

“So we’ll just improvise. I was briefed on this place, and I think I know where the cars are.”

They looked at her, nodding, trusting her. The echo from the doomed meeting almost made her scream.

“OK—we walk out of here, as if we’re all in trance. For now, no one knows we’re awake, so if they see a bunch of naked blank-faced women no one will suspect we’re not really hypnotized.” She took a deep breath. “No one human.”

One of them looked away toward the yellow-rimmed windows. “It’s dark,” she said.

Kendra didn’t know if it was something about her, or just all the commands that were still sedating them, but they didn’t panic to know that vampires were stirring, and only looked at her.

“There’s no way to tell how many vampires are here, but this place—if it’s what it was when the Guard identified it—isn’t . . . recreational. The ones who are here are working. Working on people like us, actually. But it’s not a place a lot of them hang out.

“So mostly what we’ll meet will be real slaves, who probably won’t be programmed to react to us, or else volunteers.” Even in their daze, she saw the hate. “Who usually don’t interfere with slaves, since they don’t know whose property they’d be interfering with.” She thought about the senior slaves, the ones the vampires had brainwashed into active, eager devotion. Those women served them in daylight and held authority over the turncoats, and they might take control of other loose slaves to determine what the vampires willed be done with them.

She looked at them. “I’ll be honest. We’re really fucked if the slightest thing goes wrong. If it does, just scatter. Run like hell. You might make it, or you might keep enough of them busy catching you that someone else makes it.”

It was the worst pep talk she’d ever heard anyone give, but they just nodded. She forged on.

“Some of us may have to do that deliberately.” As she said it Kendra realized she, at least, wasn’t going to get out of here after all. It dizzied her to look at the others and know that she didn’t begrudge it at all. They seemed to sense it.

“We’ll just look out for each other,” Chelsea said, and Kendra no longer saw the slack-lipped woman who’d seemed like a sea anemone. “It’s like that movie,” she went on. “We may not get far but at least we’ll really piss them off.”

Kendra nodded, and bit her tongue to keep her eyes dry. She really would put herself between vampires and these women, and for the first time in hours she wasn’t getting horny to think of being taken. It hurt in a really good way to know they’d do it for her.

But she was Guard. Protecting them had been—was—what Kendra was for.

She looked at the dart gun. Sighing, she squatted down and put it down behind some debris where it would be hard to find. It felt bad to give up a weapon, but she let herself feel a little superior—it wasn’t a firearm, so she wasn’t abandoning a real weapon.

Lesson learned, she said to herself. Large Groups Are Dangerous. “We’ll split up,” she said. She pointed to Chelsea and one other woman who looked levelheaded. “You two, and I.” She pointed, and women moved, and then each of them had a dozen or so behind her.

“This makes things better for all and worse for some,” she said, still spewing candor. It still seemed well-received. “I’ll point you in the right direction, but we’ll move separately. It means if they spot one group as not being real slaves, they won’t have all of us at once. But it means we now have three times the chance of running into someone who can spot us.”

She didn’t add that if one group ran into vampires, their minds would give up that there were others running free. No one asked.

They just nodded, and Kendra saw that even in the eyes that seemed to be clearing from the fog of vampire-spell, there was acceptance. It wasn’t hypnosis, but desperation: they were naked and alone and she had answers. If she told them to fly out, they’d be flapping their arms.

Some of them were going to be reenslaved tonight. She looked away before she started guessing.

“OK, everyone.” She felt like a gym teacher as she stood straight and put her hands by her sides. Dutifully they all mimicked her. So many varied, lovely bodies moving together on command—but she told herself it was something cleaner than slave-lust.

“So, we’re all in trance now—calm and unhurried and not having to think of . . .” She looked at them, afraid she might put someone under for real. Should she do that—hypnotize them all? But she doubted her skill.

Less rationally, if the worst happened and these were their last minutes of freedom, Kendra didn’t want them to be asleep. She wouldn’t want to be.

But trust and need, and recent trance, let them all go placid again. Now Kendra shivered to remember after their capture: this room filled with still, blank-eyed women like this, as she and the others had stood and juiced while the vampire bent their minds.

She could just keep talking to them, relaxing them, and they’d all still be standing here, receptive and malleable, when the vampire came to finish subjugating them. Such a tasty gift to offer as she knelt . . .

Kendra thrust the thought away.

She took Chelsea and the third leader, Deb, to the door. They stood out on the steps of the building as long as they dared as she told them in low tones the routes each one should follow to get her women out, and where there were vehicles.

“We’re near enough to town that we can walk there,” she said softly. All three of them stood at attention, staring across the compound and glancing furtively where she directed. “And people will be scared but not hostile. There may be turncoats, but the nosferatu don’t actively surround their places with such.”

“Because of the stink?” Deb offered, and Chelsea snorted. Kendra stood a step above them and lowered her eyes: voluptuous Chelsea and willowy Deb, both erect and wonderfully undressed, made lovely bookends. She thought of a vampire using them that way, blanking their minds and leaving them to decorate its lair.

She swallowed her gasp and tried to forget how sexy it was.

“Actually,” she managed, “they don’t care what’s around them. They don’t care if the locals are loyal—they don’t need them. There’ll be no fence, either.” In fact, past the buildings, there was no barrier, no wall, no gate. No need for one.

It was a place of vampires in a vampires’ world. No enemies were left who would dare try to get in. And no one kept here against her will would have a will of her own for long.

“Inside, now.” They pivoted like well-tamed slaves and slipped back to the others.

Kendra got a couple of women to confess they knew how to boost cars, and made sure each group had one. She described the clump of trees that would make a good rendezvous and where it was, and everyone pretended—or had tranced themselves into believing—that they’d be there in a half-hour or so. Then it was time.

Her group went first. As the best-versed on the layout, she was taking the most circuitous way, leaving the easier-to-describe ones, which were also shorter, for Deb and Chelsea. She didn’t waste worry on whether her old Guard data was still accurate, since there was no help for it. She just hoped they didn’t find a new trench full of vipers or shooting range when she led them out back.

It was scary to be out in plain view, but Kendra could feel the difference it made to be surrounded by friends, even if they were naked and unarmed. She didn’t worry about the others, counting off before leaving—how the last group would feel, waiting perhaps to be trapped, whether they’d get lost. It was enough to feel the last light leaking from the sky, and the three-quarter moon like an occult spotlight, and focus on getting her own people out.

Barely out the door, they passed a pair of clothed staff, wakeful volunteers who stood out with their individual walks. They seemed less graceful than the floating but mechanical gait that gave away a slave under mind control. They looked human, with the freedom of the species they’d turned against.

One of them stared with open longing at what she thought was a bevy of newly-brainsmoothed zombies. The other averted her eyes, perhaps worried about what might look out of the zombie-women and catch her coveting vampire chattel.

Kendra cornered sharply and her flock stayed with her, and they marched between the buildings toward the open lot behind. She fancied their desperate heartbeats thrumming all around, wafting into opening coffins like coffee and bacon.

Then she saw the slave walking toward them.

5.

Kendra didn’t dare speak, or do anything but keep walking, like the will-stripped pet she impersonated. Could she fool the real thing? She heard her posse keeping pace with her. No one panicked.

The slave, a long-limbed black woman with perky, uptilted breasts, wore sandals laced up to the knee and an elaborate but barely-there silver swimsuit. She strode toward them with the focus of the utterly controlled, and called no greeting. Kendra racked her memory for an idea of what to say, but there was nothing.

No Guard who’d been this close to this many vampire slaves had ever come back to report. And any who were slave-naked and sleepwalking through a place like this were just as truly hypnotized as they seemed.

The slave stopped as Kendra drew abreast of her. Kendra kept her eyes forward.

“What is your task?” the slave asked, in the low, caressing voice of a late-night radio host.

Kendra stopped, still facing ahead, hearing the others stop and assume attention behind her. She rotated her head to regard the slave, frightened for a moment to gaze into her eyes.

“I must bring these slaves to the place implanted in my mind,” she intoned. She didn’t demand not to be delayed. Only a free woman would do that. Obedience was her passport with a fellow slave.

Her eyes wanted to wander to the slave’s crotch, to the camel-toe of tight narrow silver between sleek thighs that seemed to glow in the brightening moonlight. She could walk to the slave and kneel, put her lips to those lips and kiss them through the silver.

Confess everything to this lovely puppet and wait to be taken.

Kendra did nothing, said nothing. She waited, as mindlessly patient as the actual slave.

“Understood,” the slave said, her voice tempting Kendra to stay and listen. Maybe this woman had been on the radio, and some vampire had heard her and decided to own her.

“You may—” The serene pretty face went even blanker.

Oh no.

One of the others knew it too. From the corner of her eye Kendra saw the woman lunge at the slave. She was quick as a snake, but she couldn’t outrun the thoughts that flowed into the slave, as the vampire that owned her woke and gripped her mind. The silver-trimmed pawn couldn’t transmit vampire fascination, but it looked through her.

The escapee froze.

Obey and be still.

Even as she felt it in her mind, Kendra was submitting to it. The submission was familiar and awful and hotter than tongues, and made her want it more. She sensed the others being snared as well. No one had had time to struggle. They all stood quietly again.

you were tamed with a touch. you crave My touch now.

Kendra whined. It was true. Once She touched someone’s mind they were Hers and it was—

“No!” Saying it shocked her and let her say it again. “No! No! Not like this! Fight her!” She heard cries around her, echoing her terror.

Some of them.

Feeling My touch. Mine now.

“No—”

Obey.

Kendra jerked with the orgasm but stayed upright, and there was only pleasure in the fluttering moan that chorused past her.

“No?” someone called weakly, but there was only deep breathing in answer. Kendra could still remember wanting to resist, but some of her dozen were already lost, waiting for the voice in their minds to control them again.

The slave in the glittering swimsuit just looked at them so her mistress could pull it all through her mind. Suddenly Kendra could move, but she was afraid to look at the others. She knew she’d see them tensed, some on tiptoe, quivering with the pleasure of giving up their wills.

She knew she might not fight the need to join them, this time.

Kendra gave in and looked.

It almost seduced her. Then, past the already spellbound, she saw a pair of eyes, frantically aware and staring. A pair of lips that mouthed No. Someone who was trying.

Gravity seemed to drag at her but Kendra forced herself to walk over and take the woman’s arm. She pulled, turned to the trees, and started to run. There was a shout and she heard feet on the grass as some others broke free with them. She didn’t dare look back, didn’t wait for the voice to reach into her and tell her to

Obey. Sleep.

She barely heard the ecstatic groan end in a thump as one of the runners succumbed in mid-stride. She was too locked into the renewed promise of joy if she herself gave in.

A sob broke through and she felt the hand in her hand, again, and kept going.

The vampire was toying with them. It could have summoned them in the old way of drawing victims, and had Kendra and the others sleepwalk to its bier without blinking.

Her mind cleared a little, and she hardly dared to hope. If this vampire played with its food, would it chase after what fell off the table?

They ran.

The trees were close enough to smell their cool leaves. She kept going, waiting to be tranced before she got there. She and the other woman were under the branches and slipping through the next layer of trees before they let themselves believe it.

Then Kendra twisted, and held the other woman as she slowed them both to a halt. The woman didn’t fight her but trembled, and her eyes were wide in the moonlight filtering through the leaves.

Oh no. It got you too. Under the glaze of lust from the vampire’s thralltouch, they were sad and tired.

Kendra leaned in and kissed her. “No, it didn’t.” She held the woman closer, tightly, because she knew she’d be back there with the worshippers if this auburn-haired stranger hadn’t given her something to fight for. She didn’t dare try to thank her.

The woman smiled shyly and looked at her with a bit more confidence.

“We have to be very careful,” Kendra said. “I think it got careless, or bored, and it’s going to . . .”

The other nodded slowly, like a trustful child. If they were really loose, it was because the elder was going to turn the other women into its obedient livestock.

“I’m Kendra. What’s your name?”

“Chloe,” the other whispered.

“OK, Chloe. What we need to be careful of is bleeding. If they really want us they can sense our minds . . . and I may be able to help with that . . .”

“They can smell blood,” Chloe remembered, wide-eyed again. She looked fearfully around at the nighttime world of invisible branch-ends and thorny plants they were together in, without clothes.

“We’ll be all right.” Kendra hugged her again.

Nearly fifty with me and I got one out. Chloe must have seen her face, because now she hugged Kendra.

“We’ll be all right,” she said in turn, and Kendra had to smile.

Hand in hand they made their careful way along. Once their eyes were acclimated, they could see well enough to move without too much risk of a scratch. Kendra was feeling like they were beyond the vampire’s concern now.

Some undead were vindictive, tracking the few who eluded them and never letting anyone escape once in their clutches. But many saw that as contemptible, even human-like needfulness, the huntress in bondage to its prey. It was beneath them to exert themselves chasing women no tastier or more controllable than the willing, fresh slaves they’d just converted.

With luck, the elder they fled was such a sophisticate. If it were a greedy arriviste, they’d never see sunrise.

“Kendra?”

“Yes?” It seemed like a while that they’d walked.

“What did you say you could do? About them sensing our minds, and you could do something.

“Did you mean hypnosis?”

“Yes,” Kendra said, and felt an odd little jolt. What she’d felt and could see of curvy little Chloe in the shadows was pretty, and she knew it would be enticing to put the shorter woman into a trance under the moon. “They trained us in the Guard. We’re all certified.”

She didn’t feel Chloe pull away. If Chloe had heard the stories about the darker aspects of Life Guard mind control, she wasn’t saying, or else she didn’t care, having tasted what real mindfucking was like.

Kendra looked back at her. Chloe had resisted that mindfuck, even though she looked like more like a 1940s pinup girl than a mind-warrior. There was no telling.

“It wouldn’t ‘cloak’ us,” Kendra explained. “But as far as we figured out, it’s something like sharks—the vamps can pick up on distress more easily than calm. It draws them. If you’re in a trance—other than one they put you in—you may slip by as not worth noticing.”

“Oh,” Chloe said. Kendra couldn’t tell how she felt about it.

Past the odd and nasty thrill of having the other woman hypnotized, she knew she actually hoped Chloe wouldn’t want it. Even slowly as they went, it seemed better to keep moving than to pause for however long it took to soothe Chloe into a trance.

Then she realized she’d stopped walking, and her body felt leaden. Turning to look at Chloe took effort, and when she saw Chloe’s eyelids fluttering at half-mast she became aware of how hard it was to keep her own open.

Sleep, just kneeling down and drifting off, was an almost sexual need.

It aroused Kendra almost too much to sense, or care, that the thought was not her own.

Almost.

Watching pretty Chloe yield to the new command nearly made her want it anyway.

What is wrong with me?

“Chloe,” she hissed, and saw the eyes blink, squint, focus. “It’s a vampire. It’s putting us to—”

The need to Go To Them Now pulsed through her and she felt her body respond. Like a phantom massage, her muscles felt and coveted the motions that would bring her to the nosferatu who called to her.

It was a new one, and now Kendra knew the first touch, the voiceless one willing her to sleep, was unfamiliar too. Neither had the soul-stroking throb of an elder’s mind—but it meant there were three vampires out there now who wanted her and Chloe.

And they all knew how their call was sapping her will.

Chloe melted to her knees and Kendra could smell her need now. Chloe might be resisting it—or too overcome to be able to obey it yet.

There were no commands. The new vampires lashed them with needs and hungers. Kendra pictured herself in chains, the toy of a whole coven of beautiful, pitiless undead queens, and she was ready to believe it was her own dream.

The orgasm should have taken her by surprise but as Kendra writhed she recalled every strand it had woven through her pussy as it built. She looked at Chloe’s round, spread thighs and shining shoulders as she knelt and masturbated, and wondered what sweetly deviant submission was dancing through her brain, under that tousled auburn hair.

Chloe arched her back and looked straight up. Her mouth was loose and wet, her eyes wide, her expression stupefied. Kendra saw her throat stretch and for a moment knew why a vampire would covet it.

Kendra was losing. She wanted to be taken and broken, to be kept mindless and climax each time a fanged mouth battened on her lifeblood, to prance and grovel in a silver playsuit and climax at orders that filled the ruins of her will like nightwind, obeying them no matter how evil they were.

She wanted everyone who’d ever loved her to watch her crawl to a vampire’s feet and beg to bring it victims. To see her shudder in orgasm when it said yes.

To scream in despair, when she offered them to it first.

6.

She heard a soft, high snarl and looked down. Chloe’s lips quirked as she hissed upward, bouncing as she frigged herself.

Kendra grinned and panted and put her hand on the auburn hair. If she forced Chloe’s head down just a little she could straddle it and ride that hot little mouth.

Her hand slipped off as she spasmed. A wordless pulse of joy had rewarded her for wanting to make Chloe her tonguepony, and Kendra just stood and moved her hips, thrilled to have been pleasing.

The vampires would be here, soon, and she and Chloe were already helpless to resist.

“We’ll be taken,” Kendra crooned aloud, feeling her mind liquefying. “They’ll drink us. We’ll be their slaves until we die . . .”

She sank to her knees in front of Chloe and savored the other woman’s curves before she leaned in and put her lips and tongue to the soft, soft throat. She kissed and licked where the vampires’ teeth would be. As she settled back Chloe dropped her gaze, and they looked at each other.

Kendra woke up a little, suddenly terrified to see nothing of Chloe in Chloe’s wild eyes.

What did I do? God help me, what did I do to her?

But the dirty heat flared in her mind. She could feel it conditioning her to enjoy Chloe’s corruption. To serve it. She reached for the other woman’s pussy and stroked where Chloe wasn’t stroking. This time, she leaned forward and sucked the silken skin, feeling the carotid pulse through her lips.

She bit, and Chloe shrieked and spasmed onto her hand.

I will be punished. Kendra gloated and dreamed of chains, the sting of discipline for tasting Chloe’s throat before Chloe’s owner. What vampire would scoop the selfhood out of Kendra to make her behave forever?

Orgasm hit her again but it was cold and bright and crystalline now. She was kneeling at rigid attention, watching Chloe’s breasts quiver to stillness as she, too, jerked into posture.

The vampires were here, and had leashed their prey. Chloe sprang up and half-danced away like a marionette under a drunken puppeteer, and Kendra stayed frozen under an undead will.

The nosferatu stepped into her field of view, two young women who laughed aloud to watch her mind float, caught between their tandem fascination. One of them just leered at her, but the other scowled after a moment.

“This was the challenge?” it snapped aloud, crediting her with enough mind to be insulted. It seemed to overestimate how much dignity she had left, though.

“This is the Life Guard escape artist?” Kendra felt the contempt like a boot-tip along her cleft, and a little more dignity seeped down her thigh.

The other vampire licked its lips, enjoying Kendra’s moist passivity, but the speaker seemed angrier the more it heard itself. “This is not a fair test of what I can do!” it shouted.

“No, it’s not.”

The voice behind Kendra was soft, but carried in a way no living one could. “But you’re proving your capabilities anyway.”

“It’s not fair, Denise. You know—” The vampire went silent, angry to have forgotten itself and kept speaking aloud, in front of prey.

“Go now, Gerry.” The new vampire, Denise, stayed behind her, but Kendra could almost feel the frigid gaze passing over her head as it stayed with audible speech, as though Gerry were a human to be commanded. “The test’s still on. Try and finish.”

Gerry glared once at Kendra, who was too lost to know if that scared her or made her wet. Then it was gone in a blur of speed or hypnosis. Its silent companion smiled once more at Kendra and shrugged. Maybe later. It might have been mind-whisper, or imagination. A second later it was gone, too.

Kendra listened to boots walk unhurriedly around, and looked up at her new captrix.

The undead was squatting down more than arms’ length away, as if Kendra were a frightened animal. She thought it was beautiful—a pale pretty face and throat, short black hair, a leather jacket, second-skin jeans on legs that Kendra wanted to explore with her face and mouth.

Its eyes were black, too, luring her with how it would feel to fall into them.

It took Kendra a while to know that her mind was free—still half-melted, but empty of the masochistic frenzy that had possessed her before. This vampire with a name, Denise, wasn’t controlling her. Kendra sensed it wasn’t an elder, either, and so it wasn’t controlling her so well she didn’t know.

She didn’t know how to react as it just waited there on its haunches, looking out of that lovely, unreadable face.

“Fucking newborns,” it said after a while. “They always get it wrong. They always light out for the perimeter looking for you, as if you just run away, and you always end up trying to kluge some way to get everyone out.

“I know I was never that stupid. Of course, I never had training.”

Kendra stared at it. She’d never been this close to a vampire for so long, not awake. It was so surreal and she was so spent that she barely felt anything when it occurred to her that Denise might be playing with her, in a dimension of cruelty beyond what the two—trainees?—could even think of.

But the vampire just watched her.

“I’m going to touch your mind now,” it told her, in slow and graceful cadences. It sounded like a woman she’d known from one of the Carolinas, but it was too weird to think of this predator having a hometown . . .

“I’m freeing a memory. Are you ready?”

Kendra gaped at a vampire that asked. Then she nodded.

Then she fell back onto her elbows, crying with surprise, as she remembered.

This wasn’t her first escape. Not even her fifth. Each time they’d caught her, each time her will had weakened and softened and bent to theirs. Each time she’d stood obediently and let them hypnotize her out of remembering, and into believing what they told her to remember instead.

She was a training aid.

She belonged to this place where they brought the newly-turned to hone their skills at tracking humans and breaking them into pets or food or bondslaves.

“You lasted,” Denise said to her. “They kept a couple of the initial Guard captives. That mindslave that challenged you is what we turned one of the last of them into, after she begged us to.

“But you always resisted. You slept, listened, obeyed, woke up—and kept fighting.”

Kendra was remembering many women now, group after group of others brought in naked and entranced. Sometimes few, sometimes many, but always there, helplessly waiting to be converted into slaves of the undead.

She looked bleakly at the creature that had opened this memory for her. “Did I . . .” It waited. “Did I ever get anyone out?” It came out in a whisper.

Denise looked at her, and she felt the iron certainty that, for some reason, it wouldn’t enjoy telling her she’d failed.

“Yes,” it said, instead. It smiled thinly. “Believe me, or don’t. But when the new trainees figured out that you weren’t just bugging out, they didn’t always quite know what to do with you, and they let some slip through.”

It was odd to watch it sit so still, like a perfect sculpture. It was erotic in a cool way that made Kendra dizzy after so much heat. She thought of belonging to this vampire, that controlled itself so well.

“If one ever doubts that vampires start out human,” Denise said, “one just watches how flat the learning curve can be, on nights like this. Fucking newborns.

“But then—” its attention was on her like a firm, gentle palm “—there are humans like you.”

Kendra shook her head. “I don’t want to resist,” she confessed. Even as she realized what she’d said, the vampire held up a hand.

“I know that wasn’t a come-hither.”

But it was, Kendra nearly answered. With her will finally shattered she found she couldn’t really recall how it had felt.

“I don’t remember you talking with me before,” she murmured instead, still bemused it was happening.

The vampire looked at her. “Before, you recovered from the mind control.”

Kendra shivered. “You mean . . . I’ve finally become a slave.”

It shook its head. “You want to. I can feel it. But you’re fighting it still.” It smiled in a new way, and suddenly Kendra could see how this frighteningly beautiful biker princess could seduce a woman without needing to hypnotize her.

“I want to take you. You’ve been steeped in slaveneed, and that much yearning calls to me. To any of us.”

Its look didn’t change, but Kendra’s clit started singing to her. “So brave. So vulnerable. So needful.

“There are sweeter things than blood that a woman can let me drink.” Denise shrugged and smiled more casually.

“But if you can resist your need, I can resist mine.”

Its low voice grew gentler. “You didn’t get far tonight. You were struggling against your need as much as against Mercy’s spell, and she wasn’t trying too hard, either. You kept picturing your own surrender or betraying the others on command . . .

“Your will’s eroded. Each time you succumbed it conditioned you to want to. It was long, slow brainwashing, but you’ve been mindfucked too often. It’s reshaped you.”

Denise sighed. “You’re useless for this now. Gerry was, as usual, a twit but she was right—you’re as helpless as a child. No challenge at all to find or to enthrall, anymore.”

Kendra knew it. If she woke in that room again, even without the mindwipe, she’d just slip into sex with whatever pretty body she lay against. Or offer her tongue to the guard and mean it.

“What happens to me now?”

The vampire stood, and Kendra forgot Chloe’s rise as she gaped up at the lovely killer. “One of us could finish melting you into a slave. A little more worship, a little less regret, and you’d be ours.” It looked down at her. “Or we could just strip your thoughts completely and make you a bloodcow.

“Or we could turn you.”

Kendra stiffened and barely knew why, and shook her head.

“I didn’t think you would, either. It’s also not simple to turn into a vampire a human who’s been made as deeply submissive as you have.”

Kendra slowly admitted to herself that a food beast, or even a forever-willing harem slave, would at least no longer think. But she was thinking now, and wanted to touch herself. She hated herself, all of a sudden, more than any vampire.

“Or you could do that thing that we can’t.”

She looked up. “What?”

“You can die.”

7.

Kendra stared, realizing what it offered.

It waited.

“Why would you do that for me?”

The vampire stared down at her, and there was still not the least touch of fascination. “Because you are better than a tool. Or a toy.

“Or, truth to tell, than some of my companions.”

“But to risk—”

Denise raised its eyebrow. “I do what I want. We’re not a pack.

“And one human slavegirl more or less won’t mean anyone goes without sex or drink tonight.”

Kendra heard that and didn’t flinch. She knew it wasn’t scorn, not from this being.

“The ones who’d make an issue of it are not vampires worth concern.” Nor was that arrogance.

They were silent for a while.

It was slowly crashing down on Kendra, like a quiet mudslide. She was ready to submit, and let commands and orgasms wash everything away. She’d failed over and over and forgotten and failed again, and now there was little left of her but the slave she wanted to be.

It was a cold, cold, choice but it was more than any of the other women would get. She wondered if any of them were still awake.

She wanted to weep for them, because they’d never know. She didn’t, because she couldn’t let herself, not in the cool onyx gaze of this courtly vampire.

How could she go out so cleanly, how dared she try, while they were all enslaved? There wasn’t even the soothing lie of I’ll come back with help.

But before she’d seen Chloe become something’s playtoy, she’d thought the other woman was the only one she’d gotten out, and one had felt like enough. Better than none.

Kendra counted, whether or not she felt entitled to. If she died here, there’d be one less slave.

“It isn’t a good choice,” the gentle voice above her said. “And I don’t presume cowardice will be behind any decision of yours.

“You have nothing to prove.”

Kendra looked up at it, lonely and reassured at once. She wanted to rest, and she didn’t want to be a slave.

Maybe she was just too weak, now, but she was even ready to accept a vampire’s gift.

Its respect was already past shocking her.

“All right,” she said.

The vampire stepped closer. “Can you stand?”

She blinked, and shivered. Some of her was afraid of dying, and now she wondered how it was going to feel. Would it hit her, with that blurring strength she’d seen take heads off? Snap her neck or—

“Stand?”

“Yes,” the vampire told her. Its dark eyes didn’t flicker. “You’re entitled to die on your feet.”

It reached down, and she gave it her arms. It pulled her upright and she kept her feet, but it held her lightly above the hips.

The vampire—Denise—looked into her eyes, and she looked back, free of its spell. It was keeping everything inside, and she wondered about the stories of vampire lovers, the ones who really did treat their humans as equals.

She wondered if Denise would have offered her that, if she weren’t so perilously ready to become less than herself. It told Kendra finally how damaged she was inside.

“Give me your throat,” it said, and she trembled.

“I will not drink you. I will kill you the way I prefer to kill—but after all this, the last thing you ever do will not be to serve one of us.” The vampire put a hand to her cheek, almost shyly. “There are bloodcows here, and slaves it would thrill to be my drink tonight. I do not need.

“I would love to taste you . . .” It shook its head again. “But I won’t.

“None of us will ever know how sweet you might be.” It smiled, and caressed Kendra again. “You may be sure many will wonder about it.”

Kendra trembled but Denise knew why this time. It put a finger on her lips.

“No,” it said. “But thank you. I will wonder, with the rest.”

It looked at her, and waited.

Kendra looked into its eyes, and relaxed in its hands.

“Yes,” she whispered.

It didn’t fascinate her, but drew her very gently against its body. Even now Kendra felt a slow burn but it felt easy and unhurried. She turned her head and offered it her throat, and felt its lips.

Its fangs.

It waited.

“Denise,” she said. “Thank you.”

It bit her.

The pain was sharp but Kendra came, fucking a taut denim hip, and strong arms held her.

She felt the air on the wound and the blood warmed her. It had taken a vein, not the artery, and the pulse was slower. She wanted to offer it her blood, again, a gift for a gift. But it was too hard, now, to make herself speak. She rested against it.

A hand stroked her back, and she melted into the vampire’s body, too spent now even to cry. There was no heartbeat, but Kendra felt cherished, and no longer astonished to find that here.

She greyed out, and when she came to she knew she hung limp, still on her feet only by grace of the vampire’s unwavering hold.

“Cold,” she whispered.

The hand moved on her back and she closed her eyes.

“Shhh,” came the whisper back.

Kendra embraced the vampire with all the strength she had left, but she didn’t know if she’d even made herself felt. She wished it was in her mind but it respected that, too, and let her be.

“Denise,” she tried once more.

She never knew if there were an answer.