Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories by Susie Bright

Author:Susie Bright [Bright, Susie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Erotica, Paranormal, Suspense, Short Stories & Anthologies, Anthologies, United States, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense, Romance, Gothic, Vampires, Romantic Erotica, Short Stories, Collections & Anthologies
ISBN: 0811864251
Amazon: B002Q1YE0I
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2010-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

THE ROOKERY

Jess Wells

THE BIRDS IN THE ROOKERY know when royal sex is being had. They puff out their chests, molt violently, and dig their talons into the perch posts. The dust and mites fill the air to choking. Even when hooded, if there’s sex going on, the hawks are agitated. The falcons burst into screeching—not a sound you want to hear indoors ringing off stone walls.

Unless you’re my father, Grand Falconer. The head of the hunt team and an honored man in the Duke’s employ, he revels in the screeching and mayhem as clues to a puzzle he is determined to crack. He sits at the right hand of the Duke, on par with his Secretary of State and his chief diplomat. My father’s leather is imported from Spain, and he owns four pairs of boots. But since my mother’s death decades ago, he paces like the birds, drinking mead, standing hours into the night with his hands folded over the head of a walking stick that is pressed into the side of his balls. He surveys his birds and imagines wet cunt and sweat. The servants sweep up the feathers in the morning.

You can’t blame him or the rest of us on the hunt team for trying to make sense of the sexual mayhem. The birds are our plow horses, our arrows. We are hunters for the Duke’s lodge, and our job is to tend the hawks and falcons—no easy task—and it’s much like being devoted to the fine dance of pampering and mastery that is sex with women. The birds are temperamental, fragile, ferocious, required. If we feed them too much, they will not hunt—so their hunger must be orchestrated. We have brothers across the hall who tend the hunting dogs, close companions to the bird. You send the dog out to find the game; the dog goes on point, you unleash the bird, it hovers in a triangle above the dog—and on your command, the dog flushes, the game rises, the hawk dives down to snatch the prey. There’s no mercy. Your part is to intercept the bird before it devours too much of what it has caught and leaves none for the table. You feed it bits of rabbit to distract it. And the hunter, for his part, returns with blood on his glove, a sated bird, proud dog, vanquished game. You look powerful, but it’s the hunger of the bird, the nose of the dog.

When the Duke is here, the birds even hunt differently. They soar higher and dive as if performing. They overshoot the target and then loop back as if teasing. When they land on their prey, you have to run harder than any other day because the birds are relentless to satisfy themselves.

My father and I were the only ones who knew of the connection between the birds and the women. The falconry team believed it was just general chaos when the Duke and his entourage arrived four times a year for the hunt.

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