Chapter 1: The Rite of the Blood Moon
The parchment arrived at the hotel that morning, carried by no owl and no hand. It lay on the carpet outside their door when Hermione woke, smelling of myrrh and old smoke, the seal a dollop of green wax pressed with a crescent moon.
She read it three times before the coffee finished dripping.
"An invitation," she said, sliding it across the breakfast table to Iris. "A formal one. The New Orleans coven is holding a fertility rite at the full moon, and we're invited to witness it. Witness only." Her finger tapped the line of careful copperplate. "Clothed observers, the text promises. This is unprecedented. I've been trying to get an interview with this coven for two weeks and they wouldn't even return my letters."
Iris peered at it over a mouthful of beignets, powdered sugar on her nose, then grinned. "So we're going."
"We're absolutely going. Do you know what this means? Primary source material. Ritual practice that predates modern Wicca by centuries, possibly unbroken tradition, and they're letting outsiders in." Hermione took the parchment back and smoothed it flat with both hands, unable to stop the smile. "It's in the bayou. A car is being sent for us at dusk."
"Creepy." Iris licked sugar off her thumb. "Creepy and exciting. These are my favourite combinations. We're going."
Hermione dressed with scholarly intent, a blouse and a linen jacket, her notebook already organized into questions. Iris wore a sundress and boots, the smallest shorts underneath because she never planned more than one layer past the next fun thing. The car came at dusk, a long black thing with a silent driver, and carried them out past the city lights until the road turned to gravel and the gravel turned to mud and the trees closed overhead like a crowd leaning in.
The clearing opened around them like a held breath. Ancient oaks stood in a rough circle, their beards of Spanish moss gone silver in the moonlight, torches fixed to their trunks and burning low and blue. The air was thick with wet earth and jasmine and something underneath both, something animal and old that made the back of Hermione's neck prickle. Black water gleamed between cypress knees at the clearing's edge. A flat stone altar stood at the centre, wide as a table, strewn with moss and garlands of white flowers.
Figures moved in the torchlight. Men and women in loose white robes, faces hidden behind lacquered half-masks, drifting like they were part of the smoke. A dozen of them. More.
"Iris," Hermione whispered, "this is bigger than I expected."
"Better than I expected," Iris said, bouncing on her toes. "Look at the altar. Look at the moss. Hermione, that moss has probably been used for a hundred rituals. Do you think they'd let me touch it?"
"I don't think you should touch anything."
A woman came toward them through the smoke, and the torches seemed to lean after her. She was tall and dark-haired, beautiful in a way that felt less like genetics and more like weather, wearing a mask of braided gold and a robe that hung open at the throat. Her smile was warm and her eyes were not warm at all.
"Miss Granger. Miss Potter." Her voice wrapped around the names like smoke. "I am Celeste. The coven bids you welcome. We are honoured that the famous Girl Who Lived chose to grace our humble rite."
"How do you know about," Iris began.
"Everyone knows about you, little one." Celeste smiled wider. "This is New Orleans. Nothing here stays secret for long." She lifted two goblets from a tray carried by a masked attendant, honey-coloured liquid catching the torchlight. "Honeyed wine. It is tradition. Guests of the rite drink with us before the ceremony begins, or the ceremony begins without them."
Hermione's scholarly instincts whispered that accepting strange drink from strangers in a strange place was poor method, but the invitation had promised a night's hospitality and refusing might close this door forever. She took a goblet. Iris was already drinking, wrinkling her nose, then smacking her lips.
"Sweet," Iris said. "Really sweet. Is there more?"
Celeste laughed. "Drink it all, then. Tonight you'll want it."
Hermione sipped. The wine was warm going down, thicker than wine had any right to be, and the sweetness clung to her tongue like honey and heat combined. It pooled in her stomach and then, unsettlingly, did not stay there. Warmth spread outward. Across her chest, down her arms, into her thighs. Her skin prickled as though every pore had been woken up at once.
She finished the goblet without deciding to. Celeste took it from her fingers and set it aside.
"The rite will begin soon," Celeste said. "Enjoy the wine's gifts. It opens what is closed."
Hermione turned to say something clever and scholarly and did not manage it, because her body was doing something she had no vocabulary for in her notes. Her nipples had hardened to points against her blouse and she could feel every fibre of the fabric moving across them. Between her thighs, a slow, insistent throb had started, deep and hollow, and it pulsed in time with her heartbeat. She pressed her legs together and the throb answered by getting worse. Better. Worse.
"Celeste," she managed, "what exactly is in this wine?"
"Tradition," Celeste said serenely, and drifted away toward the altar.
Iris grabbed Hermione's sleeve. "Hermione. Hermione, I feel weird. Good-weird. Weird-weird. My skin feels like it's three sizes too small and my bits are," she squirmed, "very awake. Is that the wine? That's the wine, isn't it. What's in the wine?"
"I don't know. I should have tested it. I'm sorry, I should have tested it." Hermione's own voice had gone husky without her permission and her notebook hand kept twitching toward her wand and stopping, because her wand hand had started trembling for a different reason entirely. The warmth had reached the place where her thighs met and it was not warmth anymore. It was need, blunt and chemical, and every breath pulled more jasmine scent in and made it worse.
Torches flared in unison. The masked figures began to move, forming a circle around the altar, and a low chanted syllable rose from them, one sound repeated like a slow heartbeat.
"Guests of the rite," Celeste called out, and her voice carried without seeming raised, "tonight the coven honours the moon and the oldest bargain of our blood. Tonight we give thanks for abundance."
Iris tugged Hermione's arm. "That sounds lovely. Can we sit? I can't stand still. Standing still is getting difficult."
"We are the abundance," Celeste said, and turned to face them, and her smile was entirely different now, patient and hungry at once. "You are our offerings, little ones. Chosen, written, and delivered. The wine has opened what was closed. The rite will do the rest."
The chanting stopped. Every masked face turned toward them.
Hermione's hand went into her jacket for her wand and found nothing but trembling fingers, and in the same moment four robed figures were already moving, two on Iris and two on her, quick and silent as the smoke they'd come from, and the wine's heat had soaked into her muscles so thoroughly that her scream came out as a gasp and her grab came out as a stumble and then hands, many hands, were on her shoulders and her waist and the buttons of her blouse, and the mask above her was white lacquered wood and the eyes behind it were dark and wet and gleaming.
"No," she said, and her voice broke in the middle of it. "No, this isn't. Celeste. Celeste, you said witness. You said clothed observers."
"I said nothing," Celeste said from somewhere near the altar, her voice smooth as poured oil. "The parchment said it. Read your invitation again, scholar. Every word."
Hermione's mind clawed back to the copperplate, the line she had skimmed in her excitement. The rite receives what the moon requires. She had read it as ceremony. She had read it as poetry.
Six hands worked her blouse open. Buttons scattered into the moss. The night air hit her bare stomach and her skin burned everywhere it touched, hypersensitive, and she hated that her body answered it, hated the way her nipples stood stiff and aching in the cool air while her mind said no, no, not this, not like this. Her skirt's zipper went down with one tug and the linen pooled around her ankles and someone lifted her out of it like she weighed nothing.
They carried her toward the altar. She kicked and one of them laughed, low and unbothered, and her foot connected with a rib and did nothing at all. Across the clearing Iris was fighting too, twisting in three sets of arms, her little fists hammering at masked shoulders, her sundress already over her head and gone.
"You picked the wrong girls," Iris snarled, and there was real heat in it, magic crackling off her in green threads that fizzled against the robed bodies and sank into them and died, dampened by something laid over the whole clearing. "Let go of me, you mossy fuckers, I will end every one of, oh. Oh, no. Oh, that's the wine getting worse."
Her threat collapsed into a shudder. Whatever the aphrodisiac was doing to Hermione, it was drowning Iris faster, her knees buckling, her cheeks flushed dark, her whole small body arching against the hands holding her up instead of away from them.
They set Hermione down on the altar. The moss was soft and cool against her bare back and her thighs were pushed apart before she could close them and held there, spread wide, one masked figure at each ankle, the night air moving over the most private part of her while the whole circle watched. She was wet. She was horrifyingly, unmistakably wet, her folds swollen and glistening in the torchlight, her entrance clenching around nothing, and Celeste looked down at her with an expression of frank, professional approval.
"Beautiful," Celeste said. "The wine has prepared her perfectly. The first of the moon's blessings to the newest of the offerings."
"Please," Hermione said, and her voice came out cracked and small. "Please don't. I've never. I've never done this."
"Then tonight is a night of firsts." Celeste knelt beside her and stroked her hair back from her forehead, almost gentle. "You came seeking the definitive record, Miss Granger. There is no better way to know a rite than from within it."
A robed figure moved between her spread thighs. The mask came off, a man's face beneath, handsome and blank, and he was undoing his robe, and he was thick and hard and already dragging the head of his cock slowly up and down her slick slit while she pulled at the wrists holding her arms above her head. The pressure of him against her opening made her hips twitch, treacherous, and he smiled.
"Wait," she said. "Wait, wait."
He didn't wait. He pushed in, slow and steady and relentless, and her virgin cunt stretched around him inch by burning inch, a stretch that edged into a sting and then into a fullness so total she couldn't breathe through it. She cried out. The sound didn't stop him. It seemed to spur him. He sank in until his hips met hers and her body had taken all of him, stuffed completely full, trembling around a cock for the first time in her life, and the wine turned every nerve of it into pleasure even as her mind shrieked. He drew back and thrust in again and she sobbed at the drag of it, the friction, the obscene wet sound her body made taking him.
"There," Celeste murmured, watching her face. "There it is."
Across the clearing, Iris had stopped fighting and started begging in a very different tone. They had her bent over the flat side of a fallen oak, her delicate pale body folded forward, and a first cock had just pushed into her soaked cunt from behind, punching a wail out of her that echoed off the oaks. A second man knelt in front of her face, his cock fat and flushed, tapping it against her lips while her hands were gathered and held at the small of her back.
"Open up, little offering," he said. "The rite takes all three, and you're the greediest little thing we've had in years."
"I can't," Iris gasped, high and thready, even as her hips shoved back against the cock splitting her open, even as her cunt clenched and gushed around it. "I can't, it's too, mmmph."
It was too much, exactly, and that was precisely what her mouth opened for. He fed his cock past her lips and into her throat in one long slide, and she gagged, drooled around him, and took it, her eyes watering up at his maskless face while the man behind her set a hard fast rhythm that rocked her whole small frame forward onto the cock stuffing her throat. Spit ran down her chin. Her ass, slick with oil someone had poured between her cheeks while she was distracted, gleamed in the torchlight, and a third man positioned himself behind the first, thumbing her tiny puckered hole, working a finger in, then two, while she whined and mewled around the cock in her mouth.
"Oh, she's ready," the third said. "Loose and greedy. Moon-blessed little slut."
He pressed in. The blunt head of his cock spread her asshole open wider than the fingers had, a slow inexorable burn that made Iris squeal and jerk, and then he was sinking into her tight clutching heat alongside the cock already buried in her cunt, the two of them separated by nothing but a thin wall of flesh, and the double fullness made her go rigid and then go liquid, her whole body shaking, stuffed airtight, her whimpers turning into a broken continuous moan around the cock plunging into her throat.
Hermione heard all of it. She heard Iris's muffled screams and the wet slap of flesh and the chanting starting again, low, rhythmic, timed to the thrusts now, and she heard her own voice pleading as the man inside her picked up speed and her stretched virgin channel began, horribly, to answer him, her hips tilting up to meet each drive, her breath coming in pants.
"No," she whispered, even as her inner muscles squeezed down around him, "no, please, don't let me, I don't want to."
"Your body disagrees," the man said, and drove in hard, and his thumb found her clit.
The touch detonated her. Hermione came on his cock with a scream she didn't recognize as her own, her first orgasm ever, ripped out of her around a stranger's thickness, her cunt clamping and fluttering and flooding, her back bowing off the moss, and the coven murmured approval and Celeste laughed softly and the man groaned at the grip of her and fucked her straight through it, faster, deeper, using her clenching soaked pussy while it spasmed around him.
The man in Iris's throat pulled out at the edge, letting her gasp and slurp air, and she used the breath to plead.
"Please," Iris babbled, wrecked and shaking, impaled in two holes while a third man's cock pressed slick and huge against her rim, "please, oh god, it's too much, I'm going to come apart, please don't stop, don't stop, fuck my little ass, wreck me, wreck all of me."
"Lovely," Celeste said. "The wine always brings out their true voices."
The third man surged into Iris's ass to the hilt. Her scream cracked into a moan into a giggle, that mad bright edge only Iris had, and both cocks began to move in her in a rough alternating rhythm, her cunt and her asshole stuffed and pounded in tandem, her tiny body rocking between them like a toy, and Hermione, held down on the altar and being fucked through her second climax, could only watch through blurred eyes as her best friend came screaming on two strangers' cocks, and feel the next man in the circle step up between her own spread thighs, hard again, ready, the night nowhere near done with either of them.