The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

16.

Nancy trembled. Mistress Rusalka was warm against her as they sat close on the banquette, and the rest of Rusalka’s women sat at ease around them. Beyond them all, the club bustled on, oblivious.

She waited quietly for Rusalka to begin hypnotizing her.

She wondered if she’d even be this aware of things, when she left on Rusalka’s unseen leash. Rusalka might just whisper her mind blank. She wondered if she’d even know it was happening to her.

But Rusalka only looked her over, leaning back a little. “What am I to do with you?” she murmured.

This was real. Nancy had found the woman who’d converted her and many others into mindless slaves, a dangerous fugitive hunted across the world. She hadn’t gone for the police.

She’d bought Rusalka a drink, and accepted a seat at her side, and called her Mistress.

She saw the same look in the hypnotist’s eyes as she’d seen in Ms Wing’s at her “job” interview. The executive had studied Nancy’s body and sadly dreamed of what she could have done with it, if she could have accepted Nancy as the corporate slave they both wished she could be.

This time Nancy watched Rusalka imagine how the tight lace bodysuit shaped her, where the miniskirt and jacket hid it now. She knew Rusalka had seen her nude—but Nancy had been only one of hundreds of women Rusalka had bewitched into mindless nudity. There was no reason the mind controller would recall Nancy’s body in particular.

But Rusalka didn’t stare into her eyes, or command her to focus and relax and obey.

Oh god. She’ll say No, too. She can’t take new slaves. She thinks I’m a spy. She—

Nancy tensed. Rusalka might be the third woman to decline to make Nancy her slave, but unlike her girlfriend Beth or Ms Wing, Rusalka couldn’t afford to let Nancy walk away. Mind control might erase Nancy’s memory of seeing her, or remove any desire to tell anyone—but killing her would make certain.

She swallowed, remembered Mystery Queen’s railing warm against her belly as she gazed down at the ocean, while Rusalka crooned in her ear. Just a single syllable from that voice would have sent her falling ecstatically down to die in the water. Thrilled to obey.

This close to Rusalka, it was again hard to be afraid. Fear of what she might make Nancy do kept melting into need for it.

But they deprogrammed me. She can’t make me do anything.

Rusalka nodded, and down below the table her hand found Nancy’s.

“What do you want, child?”

Nancy shivered and squeezed her hand. “To be yours, Mistress Rusalka. To obey only you.”

The words found their own way out and barely passed her lips, but the hypnotist heard them and smiled. Nancy let herself fall into Rusalka’s eyes.

“Are you ready to be hypnotized?”

“Yes, Mistress.” Nancy squirmed on the banquette, hope blooming between her thighs.

Rusalka stared at her for a moment. “It might work, with you.

“But in this place it might not. Or someone might notice.

“Or . . . you might be resistant.”

Nancy felt cold, realizing what Rusalka suspected, and pressed her hand again. She closed her eyes in relief as the mind controller squeezed back reassuringly.

She opened her eyes. “I am not a spy for your enemies, Mistress,” she whispered proudly. “No one sent me.”

“Perhaps not.” The other woman’s eyes searched hers. “Although they might not have let you remember.” Another small grin as she saw how that affected Nancy.

“Look there.” Nancy turned, and saw the chair she’d taken first, still empty. She turned back to the hypnotist.

“Go and sit. The one on your left, in green, is Bianca.”

“Yes, Mistress.” Nancy rose and walked away, half-wanting to glance back and see what Rusalka was doing. But Rusalka wouldn’t want her to, and she let that keep her gaze forward. She felt shy as she sat, joining a group that didn’t know how much of a member she was. But only one or two of the others looked at her, and everything went on looking normal.

Maybe they thought they were normal. Nancy tried to clear her mind of how much this tripped Dormignonne memories. Had any of these women actually behaved like slaves? Or did their mistress keep them in hypnotic denial when she had them out like this?

Did her new harem understand what they were?

Bianca turned laughing brown eyes to her, and widened them a little, expectantly. Nancy had to speak first.

Hello. I’m her slave. She took my will before she took any of you.

“Hi. I’m—she told me to sit here.”

Bianca smiled. “And it just feels sweet to do as she tells you to, doesn’t it?”

It hit Nancy harder than she’d thought to hear another woman speak aloud about it. The thrill was more intense than the relief.

“Sweeter than anything,” Nancy said, and the fervor in her voice seemed to resonate with Bianca. “Do you know who she is?”

Bianca sighed. “She is the voice inside my head,” she said. “The voice I must believe.” Her eyes glazed over but only a little. Bianca seemed aware—she was Rusalka’s slave but she had to be discreet. It felt good that Bianca, trained that well, recognized Nancy as another slave, to whom she could say this.

Nancy looked at her and wanted to ask so many things—how Rusalka had taken Bianca, what she did for a living and if she still did, or if she was just Rusalka’s personal servant now. Each thing sounded more like what a spy would ask, to incriminate her mistress.

“Our mistress,” she corrected herself aloud, and Bianca nodded, guessing at least part of what Nancy was going through. “I want to ask you so much, Bianca. But I need to behave.”

Bianca’s smile looked genuinely warm. “She knows how to make us be . . . have . . .” Her eyes flicked to look past Nancy.

“She wants you again.” It surprised Nancy that Bianca actually looked back at her, instead of simply continuing to stare blankly at Rusalka. But after Rusalka’s glance, the other slave’s stare was a little blank now.

Nancy let her own face lose expression and rose again, seeing Rusalka beckon her. This time, after she sat, the hypnotist indicated a taller woman in shades of grey who was walking away from them.

“Her name is Krista.” Rusalka waited until Nancy looked back at her. “Obey her completely.

“Leave your purse with Bianca.”

Nancy sat up, feeling tight in her chest. “Yes, Mistress. I will obey.”

She breathed. She would obey, and she knew whatever Krista commanded would be Krista’s own obedience, to whatever Rusalka had just told her to do with Nancy. She shivered a little more, wondering if Krista would take her to the street and order her to walk into traffic. No. Rusalka wouldn’t do that with someone she wasn’t sure she controlled. Maybe Krista would order Nancy to kiss her on a subway platform—and then topple them both off as the train howled in.

Nancy stared into the hypnotist’s eyes as Rusalka watched her. Her own eyes burned.

“Thank you, Mistress.”

“For what?”

She swallowed. “For whatever is about to happen.” Rusalka’s expression didn’t change. Nancy looked at her. It was a time to pray.

She did. “I obey only Rusalka. Rusalka thinks for me. I sleep and obey for Rusalka.”

Rusalka smiled now, and nodded once more.

Nancy got up and walked past the table, setting the purse down next to Bianca.

The pretty bartender who sensed Rusalka’s danger was at the other end of the bar. Nancy had a brief damp notion of showing her Rusalka had another conquest, but she, too, must protect her Mistress from that kind of attention. She turned away.

She didn’t even look at the door.

Krista was near the restrooms. She looked down, almost-golden green eyes over beautifully chiseled features. Her grey suit showed off her lithe form. Nancy could almost see her in chainmail on horseback, and nearly moaned, imagining how Rusalka had seduced someone as strong as Krista seemed, into her collar.

She leaned closer. “She told me to obey you completely.”

Krista looked decisively into her eyes once, then turned for the door. “Come with me.”

She led the way to an open-sided parking garage, and on the third level the wind reached in. Nancy felt it over her lace-cased skin, and it seemed to awaken her.

She was walking off with a stranger, and—there was a slaver downstairs.

Oh my god, Nancy thought. She turned to look at her guide, and caught her breath at Krista’s confident stride and heroic profile. Strong and free, until she’d met Rusalka.

Mistress Rusalka had conquered her. She’d made Krista obedient.

Now, I will obey Mistress’ obedient girl.

“Go along that row,” Krista said, pointing. “Dark-blue Monte Carlo.” She recited the plate number.

Nancy started out, not questioning. There was no one else here, and her heels on the concrete echoed against the city noise outside. She smiled a little, thinking of Krista in such a guy’s-guy car, and she saw it gleaming long before she reached it.

She jumped a little when the power locks chirped open, but didn’t turn around. She just opened the passenger door and got in, looking at the cars opposite. She thought of belting in, but decided to await orders, and sat back as the belt thunked home.

Krista walked up from another direction and got in, presumably having looked around to see if anyone were following Nancy. The locks clicked shut and the tall woman looked over at Nancy. Without speaking, she took her own purse and pulled out an amber prescription bottle. She picked up a bottle of water and handed it to Nancy, then shook out two pills.

“Do you know what these are?”

Nancy didn’t, but she looked into the other woman’s green eyes and kept herself from asking.

“The medicine I’m about to take,” she said instead.

Krista’s eyes flickered. She didn’t extend her hand, but instead took a pill in two fingers and held it out. Nancy leaned forward. Krista’s faintly perfumed fingertips were cool on her tongue, and then against her throat, as they administered the first pill. She let Nancy swallow some water, then gave her the second.

Nancy sat back. Krista nodded and checked her watch. “Good girl,” she said, and Nancy smiled.

“May I ask how long?”

Krista looked at her. “You’re smaller than I am. It should start to take effect in a couple of minutes.”

“May I speak?”

Krista smiled. “Yes. Tell me how you feel.”

“Relaxed. Turned on.” She moved against the seat. “Scared.”

The other woman—Rusalka’s other slave—reached over and stroked her thigh through the lace. “I meant tell me how lucid you feel.”

Nancy laughed quietly. “Pretty lucid.” She sat there, looking over at Krista, and just enjoyed her. She wondered what Krista did, why she needed this prescription for what was probably a sedative.

She twitched. Maybe it wasn’t a prescription. Maybe Rusalka used Krista for her dirty work, and this was a poison she used.

As she looked into Krista’s eyes, studying her, she felt the tears start again.

I might never wake up.

“I obey only . . . Rusalka.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Rusalka . . . thinks for . . .”

God—how far away had Krista gotten? How long had . . . ?

“I sssssleep . . . nnn ‘bey . . . o-bey . . . for . . .” Krista leaned closer, and Nancy wanted to kiss her. But she couldn’t move.

“Hit . . . ‘ing . . . me . . .” she managed, and Krista nodded.

Closing her eyes might have been her own idea, or it might have been Krista’s soft command.

17.

Another warm afternoon on Dormignonne.

Dew woke smoothly and swiftly from her trance, as instructed. She was aware of everything—the breeze, the quiet murmur of Tribeswomen at their tasks, the satisfied chuckle of the Priestess who’d just hypnotized her.

She also felt Sweetberry’s hand on her upper arm. Her senior Tribesister had been the one who’d nearly dragged Dew to see the Priestess. It had only been a few hours ago that the tree spirits had abducted Seashell, subduing Dew with their magic as they lured Seashell away with them. Sweetberry had tried to salve her own grief for Seashell by comforting the survivor, and as she insisted that Dew was not at fault she seemed to be trying to tell herself that, too.

Dew blissed in the afterglow of submitting to Tribal hypnosis. By now, she’d learned to love a Priestess’ voice across the folds of her brain like fingertips on the folds of her sex. She could be made to do almost anything by someone stroking either one.

Sweetberry’s grip on her arm was lighter now than before. When she looked, she was excited but not surprised to see Sweetberry staring expressionlessly at nothing. She’d listened too closely as Dew was put under and been caught herself. Now Sweetberry heard, and thought, nothing at all.

“Kiss her awake, my child.”

Dew obeyed. Sweetberry’s jaw was trance-slack and Dew slid her tongue inside to taste Sweetberry’s as she woke. Moaning softly, her Tribesister writhed into the kiss, and her embrace tightened as her wits returned.

They slid apart and Dew faced the Priestess again.

“I have cleansed Dew’s thoughts,” she said to them both. “You were right to bring her to me, Sweetberry. The tree spirits touched her mind, and their whispers were soft and powerful within her. And her heart had beat in time with lost Seashell’s, so there was pain in losing her.” She nodded to Dew with a knowing smile.

Dew beamed at Sweetberry. “But there is no pain in me now, my sister. I believe only Tribal truth. Tribe girls are soft and weak-willed. We need Priestesses to tell us what to think and where to labor, and we are easy prey.” She closed her eyes to the sad look in Sweetberry’s. “It is the way of Tribe, Sweetberry. We just submit to it and accept it, and surrender when we are taken.

“Tribe will continue. There is nothing but Tribe.”

Something popped in Dew’s mind like a bubble of scent, and it flowed through her dazed thoughts with a false clarity. She knew what she must do.

Locking her eyes on Sweetberry’s, she turned and walked slowly toward the other woman. Fresh from trance, Sweetberry was helpless to resist or even to look away. Sorrow drained from her face as her mind relaxed again.

“It is the way of Tribe,” Dew intoned again. “The tree spirits placed their mark on Seashell’s mind and made her theirs. She could not resist. I could not resist. Who resists what must be? No one resists.”

Sweetberry’s eyes were wide and blank as she whispered, “No one resists.”

Dew stared into them, letting herself fall into it a little, but the joy of seeing her Tribesister succumb held her back. “Submit to Tribe.”

“Submit to Tribe,” Sweetberry looked utterly gone.

“Seashell belongs to those who took her.”

“Seashell belongs to those who took her,” Sweetberry hissed with fanatical certainty.

“All must obey their summons.”

“All must obey their summons!” Sweetberry trembled with the truth Dew was thrusting into her.

“We are easy prey.”

This time Sweetberry recited it in a slow, voluptuous moan, and her eyes rolled back a bit before refocusing on Dew’s. Dew stood still, her mind now empty of truths, getting wet as she took in Sweetberry’s rigid, unblinking obedience.

A graceful hand slid between them. The Priestess snapped her fingers, and the two women blinked. Sweetberry woke from her trance and smiled at Dew without a flicker of her prior worry.

“I submit to Tribe!” she grinned.

“What of poor lost Seashell?” the Priestess inquired.

Sweetberry turned to her, eyes bright now like cheap beads. “Seashell belongs to those who took her,” she said with an almost vicious satisfaction, her nipples hardening for a moment. “They put their spell on her, and she will remember and obey no one but them. Tribe will continue. There is nothing but Tribe.

“It is the way of Tribe.”

The Priestess cupped Sweetberry’s cheek. “Your thoughts are correct now, child. Because you have all been such obedient girls and gathered many leaves just as you were bidden, you may take the others to the waterfall. You will bathe and frolic until it is time to return for Ritual.”

“Ritual,” Sweetberry and Dew whispered together, their minds blurring in anticipation of the torches and the numbing sound of drums and flutes pulling them to dance and fuck.

Sweetberry smiled and pirouetted to gather the other Tribeswomen. As happy cries greeted her news, Dew turned back to the Priestess.

“You did just as you were told,” the Priestess smiled. “And you sensed the rhythm and tone that would capture her thoughts and open them to receive truth. You are truly an excellent tool for controlling other girls.” She reached over and slipped her hand under Dew’s arm, with her soft, smooth inner wrist on Dew’s breast. Dew shivered and held still.

“I need a new acolyte. The one who served me, before, I permitted to think now and then. But she gave up her soul in Ritual, and knows nothing but the drumbeat now. Her replacement will not think, but only sleep and obey.

“You will be mine, Dew, and obey me.”

Dew shivered again and her knees almost gave way. The girls selected to serve the Priestesses spent their days in deepest trance, mindlessly devoted to carrying out their slightest commands. No Tribesister could refuse that call—before the sun set today, this Priestess would put Dew into her thrall, and she would participate in Ritual as though lost in a dream.

Warm Breeze, from a hut near Dew’s, had been chosen before. Dew had met her later, when the Priestess who’d collared her sent her to fetch someone. Warm Breeze’s oiled body was naked even of the royal blue panty of a Tribesister, but her limbs and body were adorned with jewelry like a barbarian prize. She sleepwalked through her tasks in a way that made other Tribeswomen seem wide awake, and she seldom blinked on changed expression.

Dew’s pussy had fluttered to see her and to hear her droning voice, puppet-speaking whatever the Priestess had put into her to say. Warm Breeze’s friends had faltered when she ignored their greetings and looked through them, as though her memories had been drained. The Tribesister she most often lay with for sex cried for a while until someone soothed her.

Now this Priestess would turn Dew into that, and Dew would submit.

“I will be yours,” she gasped, “and obey you.”

The first night of Tribe, after the sleepy days of waiting by the beach, Dew had seen acolytes at the Ritual that had welcomed her and the other newcomers and absorbed their consciousness. The jeweled somnambulists had drifted among them as they knelt, offering flasks of extract to finish putting their minds to sleep. Dew pictured herself helping drug another batch of unresisting arrivals, her mind simplified to hold nothing more than moving sinuously and ensuring each woman drank and went blank.

The Priestess smiled. “You may go to the waterfall and say goodbye to your friends.”

Dew gasped. “Yes! They will be very happy that I have been chosen!”

“They must. But I will prepare you first.” The Priestess passed her hand over Dew’s face and sent Dew back into trance.

Dew woke on her knees, arms crossed in the reverence gesture. The Priestess was gone, and a couple of Tribeswomen looked at her curiously, but there was envy there, too.

Full of purpose, she lowered her arms, smiled at them, and rose. On the way to the waterfall she found two women walking slowly, arms raised to support the baskets of sunscreen containers on their heads. The buxom one’s conical nipples were pointed on her wide beige aureoles. Her smaller-breasted companion’s stood out like bullets.

As powerfully turned-on as they were, both were deeply hypnotized. They stared, oblivious to her and to anything but their task. Their oiled bodies were synchronized, and it nearly charmed Dew into falling into step behind them and raising her arms to an imaginary basket.

But the Priestess’ control kept her focused. She managed to look away from the second girl’s ass to the bottles she bore, packed among fresh leaves to prevent breakage.

After the others were done frolicking and making love with the soothing rush of the cascade in their ears, seeing the bottles would trigger them automatically to anoint themselves again with the coconut-scented lotion. It would protect their skin from the sun, and their minds from wakefulness. The time they spent in the water would be too short for prior anointings to wear off, but Dew knew it always felt nicer to feel her mind go numb as the slick fragrant sunscreen enveloped her.

The bearer-girls made their swaying way to the waterfall, and walked to where Sweetberry lay back on the grass on her elbows. She’d doffed her bikini bottom and gleamed nude from her long legs to her slicked hair, beaded in water from her first dip as she watched her charges swim and splash and squeal in the pool.

Shading her eyes, Sweetberry grinned up at the two hypnotized bearers. She pointed languidly, and as if mind-linked the women set their baskets down and then stood upright, waiting for someone to give them purpose. Their empty thoughts no longer held commands to obey.

Sweetberry clapped once, waking them. The smaller girl looked very dazed, while the large-breasted one forced herself to focus on Sweetberry. “Tribesister, we brought the sunscreen. As we were . . . told.” Remembering the command nearly sent her under, but she fought it. “We must return now, to labor in—”

“Stay,” Sweetberry bade her enticingly. “Forget your duty.

“Join us.”

It was even sexier to see five of the Tribeswomen in the pool hear that, stop playing, and turn in unison. They walked temptingly to the water’s edge, smiling dreamily and reaching in invitation.

“Join us,” they sang, and even Dew felt the seductive pull. “Join us.”

The petite bearer-girl succumbed instantly, sleepwalking to the water and tipping in, splashing slightly as the others caught her. They surrounded her with drowsy hunger, and she didn’t struggle.

A sixth girl surfaced right in front of her and slid up her body to take her in a kiss, then slid down, locking eyes with her before leaning to her thighs. Then the new girl’s face vanished below the water, and then the hapless bearer leaned back with a cry and sank with her as the other girls covered them.

Sweetberry stood and smiled at the buxom holdout, who blinked at her almost pleadingly.

Then two Tribeswoman sprinted out of the trees. One of them yelled something, and then seemed to stumble, going wide-eyed and sprawling to lie still a little way from the pool. Her companion looked back but kept running.

One of Sweetberry’s girls, poised to dive on a ledge by the falls, pointed the way the runners had come.

“Others!” she screamed, and then she too wilted, falling from her perch with a large splash.

Others. Slave raiders. Dew and Sweetberry looked at each other.

The sleepy bearer sighed and fell to her knees, then collapsed, and they saw the dart in her upper thigh.

Then the booted, grinning huntresses came out of the trees.

18.

The air on her skin told Nancy she was nude before she knew she was awake.

Whatever Krista had drugged her with left no aftereffects. Her head was clear, as was her vision when she opened her eyes. She felt a down comforter beneath her, and it looked like she was in an ordinary bedroom. To her left was a window with thick drapes.

When she turned to the right, a woman in a sheer babydoll nightgown sitting by the bed looked back at her. Before Nancy could move, the woman leaned forward and placed a cool hand on her belly, rubbing a little. She smiled reassuringly but said nothing. Nancy’s passivity flooded back into her and she sighed, letting her hands turn palm-upward to show her compliance.

Taking her hand away, the woman sat back. The smile left her face, but the blankness that replaced it reassured Nancy. This woman was another hypnotized pawn of Rusalka. She stared ahead and then rose slowly, walking around the bed to the door. She opened it but stood still, looking dazedly out.

“She’s awake,” the woman reported quietly. Another voice spoke to her. Footsteps receded.

“I will obey,” she said, though there was no one still there to hear it. Now she turned back and walked to the bed. Nancy stayed supine, enjoying the woman’s curves in the diaphanous fabric and her smooth bare legs below it.

When she held out her hand, Nancy took it and let herself be drawn to stand upright. The woman watched her carefully, but she smiled back, not dizzy. The woman led her out into a hallway, and Nancy realized they were in someone’s home—someone fairly well-off. They came to a staircase where a tough-looking, alert young woman in jeans and a nylon jacket seemed to be standing guard, and then went downstairs to a parlor.

Mistress Rusalka waited on a sofa.

Nancy’s guide released her hand. Nancy flowed to her knees and raised her hands before her, palms in, as she’d done so often on the ship and the island, but hadn’t dared to in the club. Here, wherever she was, it was safe. Hypnotized women wearing peignoirs could lead recently-drugged ones wearing nothing at all freely around this house.

She spoke it clearly. “I obey only Rusalka. Rusalka thinks for me. I sleep and obey for Rusalka.”

Rusalka smiled. She patted the sofa next to her, where a thick blue towel had been spread.

Nancy rose and sat next to the Mistress. It faced her toward the door, and she gasped a little. Krista had been standing behind her, and had moved forward to be nearer the sofa. Krista, too, was in trance, with the same blank alertness as the girl on the landing. She didn’t seem to remember Nancy, but Nancy sensed she was ready to hurt her if she made a wrong move toward Rusalka.

Behind Krista, the woman in the babydoll stayed at attention, lovely and fragile in the translucent wisp of silk.

“You have done well, Audrey.” Rusalka spoke to her firmly but soothingly, like a dog trainer. “You may return to your other work. You will not need to think about this new woman until I tell you to.”

Shivering and blushing, Audrey curtseyed and padded out.

Rusalka turned back. “I think you’ve figured it out, Nancy. Every woman here is completely mind-controlled, except for me and thee. And, as they say, I’m not so sure about thee.”

Nancy settled back on the sofa.

“Your clothes aren’t here. You won’t need them.” She watched Nancy flush—and then go pale. A slave serving Rusalka’s pleasure would have no use for clothes, but neither would a corpse. “But they didn’t have any sort of tracking device. Nor did you.”

She smiled, and Nancy whimpered. She didn’t know if Rusalka herself or one of her slaves had searched her body as she lay drugged, but she could imagine their latex gloves probing her.

“Still, you could have assumed your friends could follow you visually. Or even be trying to infiltrate me, taking the risk of not letting them know where I’d take you.” She reached forward and took hold of one of Nancy’s breasts. Nancy breathed, enjoying it.

“One way or another, Nancy—and I do think that’s your name—you have guts. You might even be here just to kill me, and willing to die for it afterward. I don’t think so, but I’m not always right.”

She grinned, passing her thumb across Nancy’s nipple. “Knowing that is one difference between me and my slavegirls.

“Anyway, if that’s why you’re here, please be aware of Krista.” She didn’t look up at the slave but Nancy did. Krista’s expression didn’t change, and Nancy could see that her trance let her concentrate on Nancy absolutely. “Krista’s truth, right now, is that she exists only to protect me. She will die for me, and she will easily kill for me.”

Nancy felt real fear, wondering what cues Krista was programmed to attack on. But she looked back at Rusalka. “I’m very glad, Mistress.”

Rusalka nodded. “That sounds real. Of course, you may still try. You may not even know it before you do. But the ones who want my skin on their wall might send a brainwashed girl to me, precisely because it’s so unlikely.” She took Nancy’s chin, studying her. Nancy relaxed and juiced a little, glad for the towel.

“She’d be a brave woman. Possibly an ex-slave herself. Someone whose sister or best friend or lifepartner had gone on a Queen Lines trip to Dormignonne and never came back. Or got a phone call on the big day and flew away to nowhere. She might not have any personal connection at all, but just hate the evil witches who did that.”

Rusalka took her hand away and reached for Nancy’s thigh, and Nancy turned to face her, moving slowly under Krista’s gaze. She let one leg dangle and drew the other up, offering Rusalka her thigh and opening her pussy to glisten in full view.

“As I said, though—maybe such a girl didn’t volunteer. Maybe there’s a tape of her saying she did, reciting it in a monotone.” Rusalka shook her head as Nancy melted. “Some of the ‘good guys’ are nearly as ruthless as we are, and they have more of our mind control technology than we could save.

“Not all of it, of course.” She traced the smoothness of Nancy’s hip. “But they can use it. And a woman who’d been enslaved by it already would be especially unable to resist it again. She’d be perfect—her mind still pliable, wet for a chance to please and obey.

“And after all the deprogramming, they’d know their candidates. Weaknesses, sexual fantasies, what they’d done as our slaves and what had addicted them. Not just what would make a girl a good infiltrator, but how they could pull her strings and nod her head for it.”

There had been observers in some of Nancy’s therapy sessions. Which of them might have been evaluating her, or the other walking-wounded?

Rusalka might just be mind-fucking her. Nancy relaxed and shivered.

“She might have agreed to let them do it,” the hypnotist mused. “But the right girl, the one they thought would appeal to my tastes and the one they could most easily control, might sense exactly that about herself. She might refuse. Resist. Beg and scream to keep her freedom.”

Nancy closed her eyes and moaned.

“But that would be the point. They’d have chosen her well, because she’s the one who can’t resist. After a while on our machines, she’d be chanting her submission, begging them to use her. Then they’d program her into . . .

“. . . the beautiful, hot-eyed, loose-thighed postulant I see before me.” Rusalka squeezed her playfully. “And the poor little weapon wouldn’t even know it.”

She sighed. “In which case, even Krista won’t deter you. At some point, you’d be triggered to attack me. It would override fear and submission, and you’d obey. You’d—have to.”

“Mistress Rusalka?” Nancy’s throat did fill with fear. Her eyes brimmed, too, as she realized it wasn’t for herself.

“Yes, Nancy?”

Nancy tried to sit straighter. “Mistress, if you find I’m programmed to harm you . . . please kill me.”

Rusalka looked deep into her eyes.

“That sounds real, too.” She caressed Nancy’s thigh, unhurriedly. She clearly looked forward to using Nancy in bed, but it wasn’t just caution that held her back. Rusalka was as much in control of her own desires as she was of Krista’s mind, or Audrey’s. She could wait.

Nancy swallowed and let her mistress’ calmness calm her. Rusalka would do what she must, and she knew Nancy was hers, whatever others had done to bend her.

Rusalka frowned and reached up. Her hand smelled faintly of Nancy’s arousal, and it was gently on her cheek. A thumb softly took one of her tears away.

“Relax, Nancy. Your mind will be searched as your body was, to see whether you’re the yearning submissive you seem to be. Audrey will administer some personality tests, and then you’ll retake them under deep and—augmented—hypnosis. There will be no pretending when you’re hypnotized.

“Whatever you are, you’ll be in my power.”

19.

“But if you’re not a robot assassin,” Rusalka asked her, “what do you think you are?”

Robot assassin made Nancy writhe. Even the horror of being targeted on her Mistress folded under the sheer lust of being that much of a tool. Rusalka watched her. Maybe that was all the hypnotist had wanted from her.

“You are very submissive. You’d let me do anything to you, wouldn’t you?”

Nancy trembled. “Mistress—I’m your slave. I must submit to anything you want.”

“My slave?” Rusalka sounded thoughtful. “Did you get a magic phone call, Nancy?”

She nodded.

“Then you’re someone else’s property. Whoever you were sold to, and programmed to obey, when you reached them.”

Nancy’s eyes widened and she swallowed, but she nodded again.

“Perhaps I should complete that sale.”

Nancy felt the hand so near her cunt and let the fear turn into heat. “Yes, Mistress.”

Rusalka smiled. “Don’t worry. If you did go, you’d be wet for it. But half of the buyers didn’t pay—it was all contingent-fee anyway. So I don’t plan to.

“Not that I’d know to whom, with the databases so compromised. Nor would you, until they triggered you. Where were you to have flown, after you were activated?”

Nancy shook her head. “I don’t know, Mistress. I didn’t want them to tell me.”

“I see.” The hypnotist didn’t look displeased. “How much do you remember about being our slave?” She smiled as Nancy moved, but didn’t alter her stroking of Nancy’s thigh.

“I—everything, Mistress. The deprogramming neutralized all the commands to forget. Some of us asked to be allowed to anyway, and there was more therapy for that.”

“You didn’t.”

“No, Mistress.” Nancy was panting, realizing she hadn’t really admitted this to anyone, not even Beth. Not this part. “I thought it was because I wanted to face it. Or to remember it so I could resist if it ever happened again.”

“But really?”

Nancy slid her thigh forward under Rusalka’s hand. Even now it was hard to say aloud how hot it made her. But it was different now. Nude and compliant, drugged and abducted she knew not where, literally in Rusalka’s hands. With another slave ready to kill her without blinking.

“I’ve been dreaming about it, Mistress. Awake and asleep. Being softened on the ship, spending my days as a spellbound savage.” She swallowed, amazed she’d let that out. “Everything.

“We—”

Nancy looked into the eyes that had enslaved her before. “Some of us might have wanted to face you again. To kill you, or ask why, or . . .” She swallowed again.

“I remember being programmed, the last day before we were put back on Mystery Queen. The final instructions. We were all nice, obedient little slaves. We knew it and we were in ecstasy. You told us we’d begin to forget as we sailed home, so when we got back no one would know.

“We were happy. You controlled us into it, but it was real. You’d controlled me completely for weeks—made me believe in spirits and magic beads and that I was a nameless, mindless drone bred for obedience.”

Nancy was panting. “Even when I was back home, I’d become yours. I belonged to Queen Lines. You had me doing things I didn’t even remember. My whole life was something you let me keep because it suited you.”

“Do you hate me for that?” Rusalka didn’t have any trouble taking the entire responsibility.

Nancy met her eyes. “I should.”

She tried to remember Cherie at the party, cute and tentative and so vulnerable. Gwen on the ship, desperately resisting absorption. The women on TV, still shattered.

The ones who hadn’t been stopped at airports. Slaves now, if they lived.

But Ritual glowed and throbbed inside her. Her body remembered the mass entrancement of the aerobics classes, and the drowsy orgasmic joy of joining with everyone else to dance or worship.

Her mind remembered standing rigid in a conditioning chamber with her hair slicked back and as shiny as her eyes, while a stronger-willed victim’s cries and struggles grew weaker. Waiting for the brainwasher to tell her or the other drone to unbind the girl or wake her up, or fuck her deeper while the machines stole her mind. Needing no memory of her own time in a chamber like this, or how short that time might have been before she’d become the drone they wanted.

The airport, and the other sleepy-focused women delivering themselves to their buyers.

All that had begun with the thought-suppressing sunscreen and the other drugs the first day, but for Nancy the beginning of her slavery had been Rusalka’s eyes.

She looked into them now.

“You did all that to me. To us. You made me like it. You made me want to do or think or be anything I was told.” She moved slightly on the towel, reminding herself of her nudity. “Half the time I was controlled, I was obeying someone even more brainwashed than I was. Enslaved by a slave. If I’d been able to think, I’d have wanted to be her.

“It was a hideous thing you did to all of us.

“I . . .” Breath failed her.

Rusalka looked at her knowingly now. Even if someone had reprogrammed Nancy to destroy Rusalka, this was why they’d chosen to use her. Rusalka could see how hooked Nancy was. She was an object, a tool or weapon or just a toy, and she wanted it.

“I—” She tried again, her self-respect twisted but still there. Rusalka waited—curious to see how much farther she could sink, or maybe even empathizing.

It didn’t matter to an object. Nancy just hoped she’d turn out to be a toy.

“When I masturbate . . . I’m back there. Obeying you. Being yours.”

Rusalka nodded. Her lack of reaction just humiliated Nancy further, made her feel more naked.

Anything, right now, would turn her on. If the hypnotist told Krista to kill her, Nancy would be coming too hard even to pretend to struggle.

But she didn’t want to struggle.

Rusalka considered it. After a while, she said, “We enslaved so many of you before it all ended. All those women, going about their lives with no idea we could turn their souls off whenever we wanted to tighten our hold.” It was what Nancy had told her, and she said it back to see Nancy dampen again.

“So many. And—as you said—so many of those who actually saw you forget your names and open to command were in trance themselves.” She smiled wistfully. “One misses so much.

“Before the phone call triggered you to deliver yourself, Nancy, what were you doing?”

Nancy breathed out. “I got back from my vacation remembering only what I was programmed to, all the fun I’d had on the island. A phone call a couple of days later put me into a trance and instructed me to contact a personal trainer named Danni.”

Rusalka nodded and kept running her hand over Nancy’s skin, relaxing her and showing approval while gently turning her on. She was already conditioning Nancy to please her. Nancy let it happen.

“She was a recruitment drone, of course. She was programmed with my triggers, and we never even bothered to pretend it was anything else—when we met, she’d drop me into trance and program me, then seal it in with sex.” Nancy remembered the hot mindless hours.

“People who knew I was ‘seeing’ Danni assumed we were lovers. Anyone who knew about the other slaves the Owners were using her to control, along with me, just thought we were a bunch of women being strung along by a sexy hardbody.”

“What was she programming you with?”

“My purpose for the Owners.” Nancy moaned aloud under the hypnotist’s caress as she said that for the first time outside therapy. She sagged back against the sofa. “They—I—I was to begin removing myself from my old life. I stopped seeing friends, started letting it out that my resume was going around.”

She paused, remembering faces changing as she spoke to them. After a reinforcement session between Danni’s thighs or with Danni between hers, it was easy to enjoy how the faces changed.

“At some point Danni told me my new function. After ensuring no one would really notice, I was quietly to leave my job and apartment, and Danni would send me to another city. I’d be picked up, triggered into obedience, and taken to a QLR call center. I’d be kept there in the hive, being brainwashed 24/7, until a new cruise ship was ready to go to the island. Then I and the others like me being stored and mindwiped there would be transported to the port and loaded to be shipped back to the island.”

The hypnotist nodded. “Yes. By then that sort of slavegirl was very low-maintenance, and the new girls on the upper decks wouldn’t even know they were there.” She smiled, and Nancy smiled back. Nancy knew how quickly Rusalka and the others could drain those new girls of any desire to explore the ship and find the blank-eyed cargo, or to do anything else their controllers hadn’t instructed them to. “And on the island?”

Nancy swallowed. “I’d been selected for reprogramming as a permanent drone.”

So your highest potential was to be turned into a robot, after all. Rusalka didn’t have to say it.

Nancy wanted to whimper. “They’d erase my personality and destroy my will. After that I’d be used for whatever the Owners needed. Labor, sex . . .”

Rusalka’s hand had climbed to the soft skin close to Nancy’s cleft. As Nancy had described her final enslavement, her honey had dampened the other woman’s fingers.

The hypnotist looked at her with great satisfaction.

“You’ll still have to take the tests, Nancy.”

But she smiled, and raised her shining fingers to Nancy’s mouth.

20.

Nancy sat on another towel, on a dining room chair pulled away from the long, dark-wood table. Audrey, still wearing nothing but the nightie and now a headset—the effect was odd but very fetching—sat a few steps away, holding the sheets of questions she recited from. On the table, two video cameras sat quietly, one focused on each woman.

Audrey led her through word association, multiple-choice questions, personal questions about her life, including sex. Some related to her time as a QLR slave, others didn’t seem to. Nancy answered them all almost without thinking.

Wires from Audrey’s headset led out of the room, like those for the cameras. Every so often she’d stop as her eyes went glassy, and she might rephrase a question or ask a different one. Rusalka wanted to see Nancy respond to them, and used Audrey as a tool to feed them to her, controlling the other woman with her voice when she wanted to adjust them.

Early on, Nancy had concentrated on one. Audrey’s gaze had softened as she was triggered. Rusalka used the hypnotized woman’s soft voice to command Nancy to stop thinking and just answer.

“Yes, Mistress,” she’d murmured, meeting Audrey’s unseeing gaze. And she had, as Audrey blinked and resumed the questions.

Finally Audrey stopped. Her lips parted and her gaze went dim again. She seemed to be waiting for something that never came to her. She straightened in her chair, and the papers she held cascaded from her hands as she relaxed.

Rusalka came in and gently took the headset from her, setting it on the table and turning the cameras off. She turned back to Audrey and snapped her fingers. Audrey’s eyes widened and she rose to attention.

Not until Rusalka laughed quietly did Nancy realize how she’d been staring at the other slavewoman as she succumbed to trance. She looked back at the hypnotist, sensing that it had pleased her.

Then Rusalka just stared at her. Nancy’s heart raced and she blushed, waiting.

Rusalka kept staring, looking less human to Nancy with each heartbeat, though no less beautiful. Nancy squirmed, worried not to know what she must do, wondering if she’d missed a subtle command.

Another part of her testing. Rusalka hadn’t said it was done, or that all the questions would be from Audrey. That calmed Nancy a little, and the air on her skin and her wet cleft reminded her that she was a naked captive on display for an experienced slaver.

Her nipples went hard and the arousal went through her like a wave. She straightened, and then felt the impulse to stand. She came to attention, and looked away from the hypnotist to face the hypnotized woman by her. She found herself looking into Audrey’s placid, owned gaze, and let herself become as doll-like.

I hope this pleases Mistress.

Rusalka said nothing, but walked over to her, moving behind her. Without preamble she put her cool hands on Nancy’s hips, and then her belly, arms, ass. She slid a finger down between Nancy’s buttocks. The handling was intimate and impersonal and Nancy let herself do nothing but breathe hard.

The hypnotist’s presence seemed to throb near her, as if Rusalka’s power radiated even when she wasn’t focusing it to melt someone’s will. Rusalka’s hand went away and Nancy knew, standing exposed and untouched, that even more than she longed for Rusalka to fuck her, she needed Rusalka to control her.

Rusalka let her tremble and stare at spellbound Audrey, and she felt Rusalka’s eyes watching the effect that had on her.

Will she keep me like that? A mindless decoration to make other women wet with envy?

Nancy thought about being what helped seduce someone to give herself to Rusalka. About being too deep in Rusalka’s trance to know it.

Her desperate moan seemed loud in the quiet room. Audrey didn’t blink.

Rusalka stepped away, crossing Nancy’s vision, but Nancy kept her eyes on Audrey’s as if they’d mesmerized her. Maybe if she stood here long enough, they would.

Rusalka left the room. Nancy waited, looking only at the other slave.

Audrey wasn’t hypnotizing Nancy, but she fascinated her. Nancy kept falling into her guileless brown eyes, then slipping to her face, pretty even without expression. To her body, soft and shapely in the diaphanous sleepwear. Her mind swayed as she saw Audrey as the perfect doll, mindless and passive, and then kept stunning herself as she saw a fold of skin, or a flutter of pulse—Audrey was a living woman who’d been made into a doll. Who’d been skillfully mindfucked into wanting it.

She wanted to fuck Audrey. Or even just to beg Mistress to. But it was better to stand quivering and wait. Being Audrey’s mirror—

Nancy cried out. She remembered posing in a mirror, swaying to a drumbeat in candlelight, safe in her apartment, playing the mind-controlled slave she no longer was.

The slave in front of her now was real. And really under mind control.

Now her playacting had an audience that knew exactly what it meant. She was anything but safe.

She sensed Rusalka’s return, even though the hypnotist stayed in the far doorway.

“Come.”

Nancy let her head turn slowly, and then stepped just as slowly past Audrey, with a final pussytwitch when Audrey didn’t react.

It was the magic show on Mystery Queen again. The women Rusalka beckoned drifted up to her lost in worship, sleepily thrilled to be chosen, past an audience on its own way to sleep. They were ready to be tamed and leashed while others watched, wanting to be them. Waiting to be them.

“You are to be hypnotized,” Rusalka told her. “Obey.”

Nancy walked to the doorway where Rusalka stood and stopped to look past her at nothing, as if already obeying trance commands. Knowing she still had the willpower to walk away made her happier not to.

It was playacting and it was real. It was a coldblooded use of her own special weakness. She wanted to kiss Rusalka’s ass for letting her do it.

Rusalka had read Nancy. Now she would rewrite her.

“I obey only Rusalka,” Nancy recited fervently, her ass clenching. “Rusalka thinks for me. I sleep and obey for Rusalka.”

Rusalka moved away to stand under a downlight, halting just beyond the bright circle. A spotlight for the audience volunteer. Nancy stayed at attention, waiting.

Rusalka pointed, and Nancy strode to her, looking at nothing. Each step made her feel more exposed, more vulnerable. Inside, not-running was a delightful itch. She stopped in the center of the spotlight, stared into shadow and resumed attention. She stood like Audrey, who waited thinking nothing at all after her mistress had turned her off. Even that faded in the dark glare of Nancy’s own obedience.

Rusalka walked around her once, making Nancy feel like a sculpture—or a training display for other brainwashers: At conversion phase III, a slave’s posture and affect should resemble this one’s.

Now before her, Rusalka considered her. There was no tenderness in the hypnotist’s eyes, only the flat shine of a spider watching a fly curl onto its web. Nancy shook, and adored her, waiting to be wrapped.

Rusalka leaned closer, looking in through Nancy’s eyes, raking Nancy’s mind as she’d handled her flesh. Finding it just as smooth and malleable. Her contempt was warm oil flowing over Nancy.

“Every other slave,” she said, “needed drugs to destroy her resistance.” Her breath, like her touch, was cool and precise on Nancy’s skin.

“You won’t.

“You are already a slave.”

Nancy was looking into her eyes now without needing to be told.

“Yes. It’s very easy to remember what a slave must do.” Rusalka’s eyes focused and Nancy almost felt the grip tighten around her thoughts.

It’s my imagination.

No—it’s her power. I’m in her power.

Rusalka was still speaking to her and Nancy shook as she realized she hadn’t heard it. But the words were in her mind anyway. Rusalka was smiling.

“Feel your heartbeat, Nancy. Hear the rhythm. It is the sound of the drums of Ritual, calling you to come and dance and obey.”

It was happening, and as it excited Nancy the drumbeat in her blood went faster.

“Calling you. To obey.”

She saw the dancers whirling by the fires, bodies gleaming, eyes empty. Nancy had never resisted Ritual.

Her body wanted to writhe, but Rusalka willed her still and only Rusalka’s will controlled, here.

She stood rigid and obedient, staring into the hypnotist’s eyes.

Rusalka’s voice went lower, and Nancy stopped hearing words again. The hum lulled her further into trance . . .

“You are becoming more submissive and more blank with each beat of your heart.”

Even as it half-woke her from lethargy, Nancy felt her consciousness falling further away. She was being taken over. She was so aroused she could barely stand.

But she stood, and let Mistress Rusalka take over her mind.

“You are already a slave. And, as you submit smoothly and easily and completely to my hypnosis, you are becoming a hypnotized slave. There is no strength or energy in you, as your mind and selfhood go sweetly to sleep.

“There is only the need to obey.” Rusalka’s voice was as soothing as ever, even around these blatant words. Nancy’s heart beat in time to them.

“Keep falling into my eyes, slave, and I will tell you how to obey.”

The first time Rusalka had hypnotically enslaved Nancy, she’d enticed her as insidiously she’d enticed them all, letting them think her hypnosis was a game. Rusalka had warmed the chains and fastened them gently. Her worshippers were docile and passive long before she ever told them they were slaves, or let them beg to be hers.

It was so much better like this.

Rusalka’s voice hummed.

Nancy fought her lassitude to hear it, and then the hypnotist said, “Your awareness is almost asleep, but it is still preventing you from perfect obedience.

“Focus it on what it can understand. Play with yourself.”

Nancy’s hand found her cleft by its heat and slid home. She grunted as she felt herself.

“Good. Just rub it. Masturbation is so much more interesting than losing your freedom.”

It slipped humiliatingly into Nancy’s mind on ripples of pleasure from her clit, and was true.

Rusalka’s voice hummed.

Nancy’s hand stopped and she surfaced from the gooey depths it had pulled her to. She must listen.

“You no longer have enough will to choose for yourself, slave. Decisions are much too hard for a soft, moist mind like yours. It feels so much better to give up choice to someone who will command you instead. Someone who will think for you.”

Nancy gasped. “Rusalka thinks for me!”

The quiet laugh throbbed maddeningly in her womb. “Oh, yes. Very good.”

Nancy wriggled, while trying to stay at attention. It was better than if Rusalka had rewarded her with a fingertip on her clit. Nancy dreamed of being naked onstage aboard Mystery Queen, explicitly turned into a slave in front of everyone who was still awake.

She didn’t have to dream now.

“Soon, slave, there will be no need even to think for you. You will be conditioned. All that you must be and do will be imprinted on your smooth soft brain forever.

“You will be a drone. Drones need no thoughts. Not even ones their owners impose. Instead drones have and obey programming.” The voice paused, letting that liquefy Nancy’s mind on its own.

A drone. Nancy had been a drone before. Mistress Rusalka watched her juice helplessly to know she would be one again.

“You are so very easy to hypnotize and control, slave. I have you this deep without any drugs at all. You have no will to resist.

“You have no will at all, now.”

She didn’t. She stood and let Rusalka hypnotize her further, deeper.