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I looked around at the nude girls asleep on the couch and the bed, and decided this wouldn’t do, so I sat up.
Mireia was next to the bed, still watching over the last girl I fed on. She looked up in surprise.
“My Lady?”
“I’ve had an awful lot of sleep in the last few days. I’m not tired.”
More accurately, I felt a thousand pounds lighter. I was energized beyond imagining.
“But you’ve been so fatigued…”
“Give me a minute,” I said, then circulated Holy mana, paying close attention to my stamina. No problems so far. I opened my spiritual vessel, expanded my mind, mentally chanted [Healing] and enveloped myself in the spell.
No fatigue. No light-headedness or graying out. What an incredible relief, being able to use magic again!
I used the diagnostic side of Healing magic to conduct a full body scan. I wanted to see whether I really was physically whole.
Although I had received repeated doses of [Healing] over the last two days, the healers had been hindered by my severe lack of pneuma. The body’s self-healing mechanisms must work for [Healing] to function. It enhances and accelerates them. In advanced applications, it can even employ the growth mechanisms to regrow missing organs and limbs. But to use any of the above, it uses the body’s own life force. If a body’s pneuma is too fatigued, [Restoration] can refresh it so that [Healing] will function, but if the pneuma is missing rather than simply worn out, the self-healing and growth mechanisms cannot function properly. All that [Healing] had not necessarily completed the job.
As I feared, I was able to find deficiencies. Many of my once-broken bones were poorly or incompletely mended. I actually still had several internal bruises, not to mention some significant trauma to my liver. I switched to the therapeutic side and began mending myself. I wanted to finish it quickly, so I paid no attention to the burning pain it was causing me.
“My Lady, is everything okay?” Mireia asked, sounding quite concerned.
“It’s fine,” I assured her, then finally let it fade and gave her a smile. I felt like I was whole again at last. I stretched my arms and arched my back, enjoying the sensation of a properly functioning body.
I looked over and saw her watching me, her eyes now wide with awe.
“What?”
“That was an amazing amount of magic you were just using!”
I had suspected this before, so I decided to ask her. “Are you able to see mana, Miss Mireia?”
She humphed. “Is that really so weird?”
“For a fairy, no,” I stated. “But for a mortal, it’s incredibly rare.”
She was quiet for a bit, then said, “My mother– Mireia’s mother– always insists that Mireia’s father was a fairy. Maybe that’s why I have the skill here.”
“Seriously? You’re a fairling?”
With a nod, she added, “That’s what her mother claims. His name was apparently ‘Deloen’, but that’s the name of the patron mountain spirit of Suldor, so nobody believes her.”
Suldor follows the Dorian faith, with patron spirits of the land, with spirits of heaven watching over them, rather than gods. But it sure sounds like Huade’s tutelary immortals like Oranos and his colleagues watching over the Elders below, so it wouldn’t be strange if some of those ‘patron spirits’ were now actually their fairy descendants in practice.
But ‘Deloen’ could easily be the fairy name ‘Dàlon’, which rhymes with ‘Gelon’ and ‘Manlon’, so I worried a little that I did something indecent with a cousin when I fed on her. Although I hadn’t heard of anyone in the family with that name.
I shook my head and stuck to the main subject. “Being a fairling still doesn’t give you that ability. Mortals have to train a long time before they can detect mana, and most are never able to use true Fairy Sight. Fairlings just tend to learn it faster.”
“I think the training was in my previous world,” she explained. “I’m using my Divine vision. I could only see Healing magic and demonic auras originally, but I’ve started to see elemental magic more recently.”
“Wow,” I smiled. “Be proud of that, okay? It’s a rare skill.”
I stretched some more, then slipped to the foot of the bed to get out without disturbing the other sleepers. “As long as you’re still awake, help me out.”
I headed over to a pile of light blankets I had requested Terese to bring in, as I expected to finish the evening’s activities with a bunch of sleeping nudes in the room.
She hesitated. “Um, My Lady… perhaps you should… put something on?”
Oh, yeah. I was still naked. And the room’s lights were still on, illuminating me nicely. But my current state of undress must have set off my fairy side a little. I giggled instead of growing embarrassed and posed like a model.
“It’s just us girls here,” I teased. “Does it bother you?”
“After watching all that,” she answered, averting her eyes, “It does, yes.”
By all that, she meant the feeding, and their enjoyment of it, but she also meant something else.
The original Tiana thought of Elianora as straight, partly because she mostly avoided the subject of homosexuality, and partly because the only lover Elianora had ever told her about was her late husband. I’ve since realized that the reason Tiana avoided thinking about girls sexually was self-denial. She was trying to will herself into the role of a proper young lady molding herself to be a proper wife to a proper husband, the image that had been programmed into her by the palace ladies who raised her. So whenever she felt attraction to a girl, she convinced herself that she was attracted vampirically, and for no other reason. And when her mother gave off obvious clues that she herself enjoyed other women and assumed that Tiana would do the same, being both fairy and vampire, Tiana willfully ignored that, too.
But Elianora is a vampiress. She is a descendant of the Elders, just like fairies, and the immortals purposefully programmed Elders to primarily desire girls. They did so for the very simple reason that they didn’t want us to outbreed the mortals. The few male Elders could only father mortal children (fairlings, technically, but half-Elders were mortals nonetheless.) And the female Elders played mostly with each other and mortal women, only occasionally breeding new Elders through their infrequent contact with mortal men.
It made sense. They were on the planet to help the mortals in the first place, not to outbreed and replace them. With the women being eternally young and beautiful, they could easily have done so.
For that reason, the descendants of the Elders are also slow breeders. The slowest are vampires. Vampire males only create mortal offspring with mortal females, and vampire females create dhampir offspring– who can only reproduce mortal children– with mortal men. Only on the rare occasions that male and female vampires actually engage with each other do baby vampires happen, so vampires are especially rare. Even dhampirs are rare, because…
Like their Elder foremothers, vampiresses are mostly attracted to women.
After Elianora helped me feed on three women, she called a break. It was partially for me, because, although I was absorbing the majority of the physical blood into my bloodstream, the remainder, a solid pint of liquid, had gone into my stomach. That’s a lot of liquid I needed to absorb. And my kidneys were doing overtime trying to get rid of the liquid that was leaving my bloodstream to make room from the incoming blood, in addition to the liquid coming in through my stomach.
I needed a toilet break.
But Elianora’s true reason was her own libido. After making out with three women, she needed relief. While I was emptying my bladder, she was availing herself of the fourth girl. I returned from the bathroom to find wide-eyed Mireia staring with a deep-red flush as Elianora and the courtesan made love on the bed. Elianora had grown her bat-like wings to politely screen her lover while enfolding her, but it was clear enough what she was doing.
It was such a night-and-day difference from the straight-laced, somber and modestly-clad middle-aged woman the original Tiana knew. Elianora had even dropped her Dark magic facial disguise at this point, so her face was matching her youthful figure.
After the fifth girl, she called another break, as I needed another bathroom run, and she again needed relief. I returned to an equally erotic encore.
And the way Mireia was blushing while looking away from my body, she was remembering it again, calling it ‘all that‘.
I picked up a blanket and unfolded it, using it to cover Dana, still sleeping on the couch, while I teased, “What? Is seeing me like this making you think about naughty things?”
She had taken the next blanket and was using it to cover a pair of courtesans on the bed who were snuggled up with each other. Her voice was a little pained as she said, frankly, “Yes, My Lady, it is.”
That caught me off-guard. I switched to a more serious attitude immediately. “Miss Mireia, your spiritual technique is still working, right?”
Mireia’s eyebrows arched and she gave me a troubled smile. I had already picked another blanket. That expression prompted me to wrap it around myself and tuck it in to secure it.
She took the last blanket and brought it to the other side of the bed, to cover Elianora and the last girl who fed me. As she worked, she admitted, “I think… arousal makes it less effective, My Lady. And because you’re the woman involved.”
Now finally embarrassed, I didn’t say anything. I just picked up the last blanket and covered the next girl.
Mireia picked up my chemise from off the floor, where one of the girls had tossed it. She approached me from behind, saying, “My Lady, there’s one more girl to cover, and you’re out of blankets.”
“Oh.” I realized as she handed my clothing to me.
Keeping my back to her, I dropped the blanket and searched for the hem of the chemise, to get my arms into it and shimmy into it. Then I froze as Mireia’s hands slid onto my naked back and then around me. I felt her kissing my shoulder as she pressed into me.
“Could I feed you too, My Lady?” she breathed into my ear.
“Mireia…” I sighed as I felt her hand roaming around. “It’s too soon. You fed me pretty heavily, two days ago. You need longer to recover.”
Her hands wandered around a bit. “Then how about trying the other thing?”
I sighed again, and turned in her arms. Her hands slid up to my bosom. I let her kiss me for just a brief time, then pressed her away.
“Use your technique, Miss Mireia,” I told her firmly. “I insist. Do it now.”
She pouted a little, then closed her eyes. After a bit, I felt a slight difference, that I suspected was our bond becoming restricted. She opened again, big amethyst eyes still regarding me with affection.
“It’s working,” she told me. Then she tipped her head and smiled. “But I’m still somewhat curious.”
“It’s fine to be curious,” I told her, “But I want a platonic relationship with you for the time being. I still have some hopes for you, on another front.”
She didn’t look disappointed, exactly. Perhaps slightly sad. I backed out of her reach and shrugged my way into the chemise. It was the type with magic built-in support cups, which have to be carefully positioned, so I had to wiggle around a bit.
“Wouldn’t it be better for you to keep avoiding the bond with me?” I asked her while working on it. “Rod will be having your slavery annulled. It would be a waste of his efforts if you were to end up as my Servant.”
“So even if I think the technique is working, you think I’m only attracted to you because of the bond,” she sulked, while retrieving my robe for me.
“Pretty much,” I said. “I think it would be best not to give my powers more opportunity to distort your desires. I like the idea of having a mortal friend who is immune to my supernatural nature. Are you not interested in that position?”
“Hm,” she considered. She handed the robe to me and mused, “That’s possible, I suppose.”
As I put the robe on, she retrieved the blanket I had dropped and carried it to the wingback chair where the sixth prostitute was sleeping. While covering her, she decided, “I’ll accept your offer on one condition, My Lady.”
“What is it?” I asked while tying the robe’s belt.
“Stop calling me ‘Miss’. My name is Mireia. Mir is good, too.”
I pursed my lips, then agreed. “Alright. Mireia. You should drop the ‘My Lady’ and call me ‘Tiana’.”
She smiled at me like the old Mireia.
“Then I shall do so, Tiana,” she answered.
