Chapter 4: Brotherly Betrayal
The cold of the flagstones seeped into Max’s bare back, shocking him from the stupor of his own draining. His vision swam, the world seen through a greasy film. Rough-hewn wood beams swam into focus above him. He was no longer in the bedroom. They’d dragged him to the main room of the cottage, the space dominated by the massive, soot-blackened hearth.
A muffled, frantic sound to his left.
He turned his head, a monumental effort. The movement sent nausea crashing through him.
Dani.
She was propped against the wall near the dead fireplace, wrapped from shoulders to ankles in thick, thorny vines that pulsed with a faint, sickly green light. More vines slithered over her mouth like grotesque gag, their ends twitching. Her eyes, wide and drowning in terror, were fixed on him. Tears cut clean tracks through the grime on her cheeks.
“She’s been such a good audience,” Sarah’s voice, honeyed and close, cooed in his ear.
He hadn’t heard her approach. She knelt beside him on the floor, gloriously nude, her skin flushed with his stolen warmth. She looked down at his limp body, her expression one of possessive delight. Her hand, terrifyingly gentle, stroked his stomach, then curled around his cock. It was soft, spent, a useless thing.
“Shhh, now,” she whispered. “We have to give your sister a proper show. A proper goodbye. Can’t have her thinking her big brother didn’t fight for her.”
Her cold power surged through her fingers, not a compulsion this time, but a command. His flesh responded with a jolt, stiffening painfully fast under her touch, blood forced into it by will that wasn’t his own. A low, broken sound escaped his lips. It was a puppet’s erection, a symbol of his complete surrender.
“That’s it,” she purred. She shifted, turning her back to him, and guided herself onto him, sinking down with a slow, exaggerated sigh. She took him all, her body swallowing him in that impossibly tight, grasping heat. She began to move, not with the frantic hunger of the binding, but with a lazy, taunting rhythm. She rode him backwards, each rise and fall a calculated performance.
Her ass slapped against his thighs with wet, rhythmic claps that echoed obscenely in the stone room. She arched her back, pressing her spine against his chest, letting him feel every ripple of her. She reached back and tangled her fingers in his hair, forcing his head up.
“Look at her, Max,” she breathed, her voice a decadent whisper. “Look at your sweet Dani. See what you’re doing for her.”
His eyes, against every screaming instinct, obeyed. They locked with Dani’s. Her gaze was a universe of horror—disbelief, betrayal, a shattered love. She shook her head, a tiny, desperate movement. A fresh torrent of tears spilled from her eyes.
A sob racked Max’s body, but his hips, traitorous and alive with her magic, pistoned upward, meeting Sarah’s downward thrusts in a perfect, degrading synchronization. The pleasure was a sharp, bright agony, a violation that wired directly into his nerves. He could feel every slick inch of her, the clench of her ancient treasure around his invading flesh, the way she milked him with contemptuous expertise.
“Such a good big brother,” Sarah moaned, loud enough for Dani to hear. “Giving his last… every… fucking… drop… for his sister’s safety.” She punctuated each word with a brutal slam of her body onto his, driving him deeper into the stone floor. “Aren’t you, Max? Tell her. Tell her you’re doing this for her.”
He tried to clamp his mouth shut. The words came anyway, torn from him between gasps. “D-Dani… I…”
“Louder, sweetheart.”
“I’m… sorry…”
Sarah laughed, a sound of pure, silken malice. She ground herself against him in a circular motion, making him gasp. “He’s all mine now, little girl. Every part. And when I’m done drinking him down, he won’t remember who you are.”
In the reeking kitchen alcove, the air thick with the scent of burnt hair and rotting flowers, Winifred Sanderson scowled at a bubbling clay cauldron.
“The adder’s fork is crumbled, Mary, not dumped! You soggy-brained simpkin!”
“I crumbled!” Mary protested, her single eye wide with hurt. She held up a fistful of blackened, paste-like substance. “It’s crumbly now!”
“It’s ruined!” Winifred screeched, snatching the mess and flinging it against the wall. It stuck with a wet slap. “The transference brew must be perfect! Dawn is a whisper away! We fade to nothing without the child’s youth!”
Mary whimpered, poking at a dead newt on the table. “We had his soul-juice. Sarah got it. The hard part’s done.”
“The hard part is not burning the tongue of dog, you mewling quim! That soul is now bound to Sarah, we need his sister’s soul.” Winifred stirred the foul-smelling broth violently. “This potion pulls the life from the child’s body and weaves it into our own! It is delicate work! It requires focus! Not your ham-fisted blundering!”
She snatched a jar of pickled crow’s eyes, unscrewed it, and poured the entire contents into the brew. It hissed and spat a purple vapor. “Where is that blasted Billy? He was to fetch the final ingredient! The breath of a hanged man collected in a bladder!”
As if on cue, the zombie-boy shambled in, holding a small, shriveled, balloon-like object. He gurgled.
“Give it!” Winifred snatched it. She held the bladder over the cauldron, took a pin from her hair, and pricked it. A faint, mournful sigh escaped the pouch and vanished into the steam.
The liquid in the cauldron immediately stilled, turning a deep, luminous crimson. A sweet, cloying smell, like candied apples left in a coffin, filled the alcove.
Winifred’s face split into a grin of blackened teeth. “It’s ready. It’s perfect.”
Sarah’s pace was becoming relentless. Max was a instrument, played to a breaking point. His world had narrowed to two points: the devastating friction of Sarah’s body and the shattered eyes of his sister. He was moaning, a continuous, helpless sound, as the forced pleasure built towards an inevitable, degrading peak.
“You gonna come for her, Max?” Sarah taunted, slamming down onto him. “You gonna fill my witch’s pussy while she watches? Give her that to remember you by?”
“Stop…” he begged, but his body was arching, his balls drawing up tight. The orgasm was a tidal wave of shame, crashing through him. He cried out, a raw, broken sound, as he emptied into her, his hips jerking spastically.
Sarah threw her head back and screamed, a sound of pure, gluttonous triumph. She rode him through every pulse, milking him dry, her internal muscles clenching like a greedy fist.
As the final shudder passed through him, a door banged open somewhere in the cottage.
A frantic, familiar voice cut through the thick air. “What in God’s name—? Dani!”
Alison, Dani’s friend from town, stood frozen in the doorway to the kitchen alcove, her face a mask of horror. Her gaze took in the scene: Dani bound and gagged, Max naked and pinned beneath a gloriously radiant, smirking Sarah, the air reeking of sex and magic.
Her eyes then snapped to the alcove, where Winifred was carefully ladling the luminous red potion into a stone goblet.
“No!” Alison screamed.
She lunged, not towards the horrific tableau in the main room, but into the kitchen. She barreled past a startled Mary and crashed into Winifred.
The stone goblet flew from the witch’s hands. It seemed to hang in the air for a lifetime, spinning, throwing droplets of crimson light.
It shattered on the hearthstone.
The potion erupted. Not with a bang, but with a silent, expanding bloom of absolute decay. The red liquid vaporized, and where its mist touched, reality soured. The wooden table rotted to sludge in a heartbeat. The clay cauldron crumbled to dust. A patch of the stone floor itself pitted and dissolved into nothing.
Winifred’s scream was not of anger, but of primal, existential terror.
“MY LIFE! MY BLOOM! YOU WRETCHED, MEDDLING COW!”
In the main room, Sarah’s satisfied smirk vanished. She went rigid atop Max, her connection to the fading magic of the ruined potion severing like a cut string. The vines holding Dani flickered and grew brittle.
Sarah looked down at Max, her new, gold-flecked eyes wide with a sudden, catastrophic panic. The first true, grey light of dawn began to bleed through the high, cracked window.