“What if I write something that’s gothic horror AND eldritch horror at the same time?” I asked myself in my hubris. “How hard could that possibly be?”
Oh man this has changed so much from the early or even the (15 or so *cough*) middle drafts. I feel like sharing the intro paragraphs even though they might still go through some changes, just because I’m FINALLY starting to feel satisfied with the way this thing is pulling together.
Ezra is my sweet trans murder-boy. He’s so good and also so angry.
This bit isn’t NSFW yet, but the story’s intended to be horror erotica. Managing THAT also accounted for several rewrites.
***
There was no escaping Covenant at his own masquerade ball. He invaded people; began seeping into you from the moment you entered his house. From the moment Ezra entered the house, the phantom touch of his presence crawled through him—through his mind, beneath his clothes, under his mask to caress at his tongue, his eyes, his nose till his every sense was alight and ready to be stimulated.
Covenant seduced his guests that way. Teased and coaxed them to the edge of their need. That was how he liked them: under his sway and ready to give him anything if he would only fulfill their deepest desires.
Ezra didn’t like it, to say the least. He wrapped his arms around himself, trying to contain the dual forces of that sensual onslaught and the memories that haunting pressure sent washing over him.
The rot, spreading its foulness across town day by day from one person to another, while the rest of them, not touched by it yet, watched in horror and awful, deepening exhaustion. Putrid, gangrenous liquid soaking into the linens beneath his mother and father where they clung to one another in the bed they’d slept in for thirty years, while the flesh of their bodies turned black and melted from their living bones.
His older brother Amos, who barricaded himself away upstairs to keep it from his family. It got his wife anyway. Ezra, dropping everything to look after his nephews—because what the fuck was the point of running a tailor’s shop when everyone was dying?—but with nothing to do but watch while it ate little Leahy alive. It’d started from the place where his hip had broken when he was a toddler, when his parents had gone to beg Covenant for a favor.
Some people came to Covenant to ask for their deepest desire. Others came for their deepest need. Ezra couldn’t be the only one walking around the ball shaking under the seductive touches of the memory of his worst nightmare. He was sure he could see it in some of them. The way the wine they held glittered in the candlelight as the liquid shivered in their trembling hands, the way their paths wavered as they wound between the groups of dancers and gossipers.
He wanted Covenant dead. That was why he was here. He’d sneaked in through the gardens, but it wasn’t enough to escape that feeling that wrapped around him. As if Covenant filled the entire house, his spindly invisible fingers reaching out from the walls or down from the ceiling to embrace and muffle and pluck at him till the sleek cut of his hunter’s costume felt bindingly clinging and the physical want and the hate together made it almost impossible to think.
Fuck, he wanted a drink. They were easy enough to come by; wines of every type, brandy and champagne, liquors he didn’t even know the names for being ferried helpfully past by servers for anyone to enjoy. But his stomach rolled at the idea of taking anything Covenant offered.