Showing posts with label fan fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fan fiction. Show all posts

Thursday, June 7, 2012

And the winners are...

All during May, I ran a contest where my readers could win one of four autographed copies of The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head, and now we know who the winners are!

When I first brought the idea to my publisher, they didn't see the point. All the readers who would be entering the contest would have already purchased the book, so what was my angle? To be honest, I didn't really have a nefarious money-making motive for doing it. It sounded like a fun thing to do, and it was. So I just did it on my own out of my own pocket. I'm still not super sure what the total cost is going to end up being. I get copies of my books for the gross price since I already gave away all my freebies to friends and family, so that wasn't too expensive. What I hadn't counted on was the international readership I apparently have. It turns out, half the winners are not from the U.S.--there's a Canadian and an Australian in the mix and so I'm going to get to see what it costs to ship books internationally. To be honest, I'm more curious than anything else.

As for a reiteration of the rules and all that. There were two winners for the trivia part of the contest and two winners for the fan-art part of the contest. The trivia winners were picked simply by which two people got the highest scores, no partial credit. I was a little worried about this part when I gave both sets of trivia questions to my girlfriend before I launched the contest and she didn't do so well. Of course, this fear was immediately allayed when the first trivia entry came in the day the contest opened, and she got 100%, incidentally one of the winners. The fan-art part wasn't judged by me. I took the names off the submissions, not that my girlfriend would know who they were anyway, and let her pick her two favorites.

Now, I will post the answers to the trivia questions since they don't have any real spoilers to them anyway (If you want to try your hand at the contest, follow the link to the contest above and then check your answers to see how you would have done):

Congratulations to:
Courtney for getting a 100% on the day the contest opened
and
Mike who only missed one
Raven Ladies Trivia:
 What color is Slark blood? -- Green
 Where was Fiona Bishop born? -- Tombstone, Arizona (Remember, it's BORN, not where did she live most of her life, which would have been Los Angeles)
 What is Veronica’s real first name? -- Tanner
 What did Fiona name her horse? -- Tyra (There's a not-too-subtle joke running through the book about why)
 How many Slark heads need to be collected for a week’s worth of fuel? -- Six
 How many dirigibles did the Ravens build to attack the refineries? -- 3
 What does Fiona call her crazy moments? -- Chaos tics
 Who promises to kill Yahweh Hawkins in Fiona’s name? -- Claudia (who is the protagonist in the second book in the series The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges)
 What catalogue did Fiona model for before the Slark invasion? -- Victoria's Secret
 Why did Gieo program Ramen to lie sometimes? -- To see if she could

The other set of questions, which very few people even took a crack at, was spread across almost all my other books:
General Cassandra Duffy Literature Trivia:
Demons of Paradise:
 In “An Archeologist’s Dream” name one thing Nitocris asked Holly to bring her. -- perfume/pomegranate/panties (also gave it to someone who answered Ford Mustang, because technically that was true too)
 In “An Eternal Night of Overtime” what did Brooke want to be before she turned to the fashion industry? -- Professional surfer
 In “Answered Prayers” what scent follows Jada’s guardian angel? -- Peppermint
Astral Liaisons:
 In “The Flesh Menagerie” what do the Ice-Niners want Sonali and Claire to do? -- Procreate
 In “Of Pirates and Politicians” what letter do the Saladins resemble? -- F
 In “Escaping the Colony of Hot and Cold” the colonists of Martini are divided into two classifications, olives and…? -- Onions
The Vampires of Vigil’s Sorrow:
 Which college does Debbie want to go to? -- Barnard
 Grace’s father, Henry, served in World War II in which branch of the military? -- Navy
The Grift Girls Series:
 In “The Last Best Tip” what business do Lucy and Sasha want to start with their grifted money? -- Lesbian sports bar
 In “An Undead Grift for Christmas” Lucy, Sasha, and Lara are attacked by a gang of…? -- Department store Santa Clauses

Now for the fan-art part of the contest:
Congratulations to Felicia!
The picture can also be found on her website along with her other work.
And Bunny!
I have a theory that my girlfriend picked this picture because it very closely resembles how she sees Ramen
The whole contest thing was supposed to coincide with the release of the second book in the series, but it ended up coming out a few days early on some platforms and the contest was in my procrastinating hands, so the announcing of the winners and the release of "The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges" kinda missed each other by a little more than a week--partially my bad, partially my publisher's.

For shits and giggles, here is the cover of the 2nd book in the series (The Steam-Powered Sniper...), available now, and the third book in the series, which should be out in December (The Gunfighter's Gambit): 



Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Autographed Book Contest!

In celebration of paperback editions of The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head finally hitting bookstores and Amazon, I will be holding a signed edition contest!

I'll be autographing and personalizing a few copies so I decided I should devise at least a couple ways to win them.

Way to Enter #1:
As you may know from following my twitter or keeping up with my web page, I'm a big fan of fan fiction. More than that, I'm a big fan of any fan created content. If you're artistically or creatively inclined, you can enter any stories, drawings, paintings, pictures, or poems you've created that were inspired by The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head. Submit your entries to my usual gmail account: LizDarkling@Gmail.Com

The winner for this option will be selected by my girlfriend as I probably won't be able to pick just one or two that I like.

Way to Enter #2:
I can hear so many readers now saying, "Cassandra, you're so creative and well-dressed, but what about those of us who are just well-dressed?" First off, thank you for noticing and never underestimate how important being stylish can be. Secondly, I've got you covered...

If you're not into fan fiction/art/poetry contest, you can also enter to win an autographed copy by answering trivia questions about the book! Just copy the list below into the body of an email, answer them with one or two words, and send them to the usual email address (LizDarkling@Gmail.Com)


Raven Ladies Trivia:
 What color is Slark blood?
 Where was Fiona Bishop born?
 What is Veronica’s real first name?
 What did Fiona name her horse?
 How many Slark heads need to be collected for a week’s worth of fuel?
 How many dirigibles did the Ravens build to attack the refineries?
 What does Fiona call her crazy moments?
 Who promises to kill Yahweh Hawkins in Fiona’s name?
 What catalogue did Fiona model for before the Slark invasion?
 Why did Gieo program Ramen to lie sometimes?

Way to Win #3:
Let's say you're a reader of mine, but you're still waiting to read The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head until you can read a personalized, autographed copy of your very own. I totally understand how special of an experience that would be since I have an entire shelf in my office devoted to autographed books from my favorite authors and they are by far my favorites to read. If you're up to the challenge, you can also enter to win an autographed copy by answering questions about my short story collections, novella series, and vampire novel! Again, just copy and paste the questions into an email to me, answer them with one or two words, and send!
General Cassandra Duffy Literature Trivia:

Demons of Paradise:
 In “An Archeologist’s Dream” name one thing Nitocris asked Holly to bring her.
 In “An Eternal Night of Overtime” what did Brooke want to be before she turned to the fashion industry?
 In “Answered Prayers” what scent follows Jada’s guardian angel?
 
Astral Liaisons:
 In “The Flesh Menagerie” what do the Ice-Niners want Sonali and Claire to do?
 In “Of Pirates and Politicians” what letter do the Saladins resemble?
 In “Escaping the Colony of Hot and Cold” the colonists of Martini are divided into two classifications, olives and…?
 
The Vampires of Vigil’s Sorrow:
 Which college does Debbie want to go to?
 Grace’s father, Henry, served in World War II in which branch of the military?
 
The Grift Girls Series:
 In “The Last Best Tip” what business do Lucy and Sasha want to start with their grifted money?
 In “An Undead Grift for Christmas” Lucy, Sasha, and Lara are attacked by a gang of…?

Contest Rules
Now for the rules, because we've got to have rules in this world.

1.) If you feel so inclined, and want to drastically improve your chances of winning, you CAN enter all three ways with three different submissions. Just make sure to send them in three separate emails so I don't get them all mixed up.
2.) I'll be giving away four autographed copies. One for each way of winning and then a fourth honorable mention copy for whatever entry tickles my individual fancy.
3.) The contest will run from May 1st to May 31st, which means you have some time to be really creative and/or be really detail oriented in your research. I'll be keeping people reminded via twitter and facebook.
4.) Once the winners have been chosen, I'll notify them by email and if you're lucky enough to have won, you can specify at that point who you would like the autograph personalized to and where you would like it sent. If you want to sell it later, just tell me to make it out to eBay, but I can't promise the book will appreciate in value.
5.) I'll ship the books to the winners hopefully at some point in June at my own personal expense (so expect the cheapest and thus slowest shipping option the US Postal Service has to offer).
6.) If I don't receive enough submissions to give away all the signed copies, I'll probably feel like a loser for several days, so let's not have that happen, and then I'll probably just and up giving the autographed copies to the local women's bookstore or library.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Shameless Self-Promotion Part 2


This is what we're calling vampires these days?

I'm not here to Twilight bash (okay a little I am). Let's just say I have written English Lit papers for genuine English Lit classes that deconstructed Twilight as blatant Mormon propaganda, and I did get A's on them. There are books out there, sadly written by women, that try very very very hard to keep women in subservient roles, sexualize what would be considered creepy behavior by guys in real life, and cram traditional gender roles down younger generations' throats with shitty writing. The only way out of this vicious cycle of bad "literature" (sorry, I just can't refer to Twilight as that without the quotations marks) reinforcing harmful stereotypes and behaviors is to STOP FUCKING BUYING IT!

Lesbians, honest to goodness rainbow flag wearing, Melissa Ethridge listening, After-Ellen trending, dykes can be found reading heterosexual vampire romance because...I don't know why. Modern, enlightened, feminist women, same thing, reading Twilight and rambling on about how they know it's bad, but it's just so dreamy/delicious/drain bramaging. My initial reaction to this was to say, "There's good stuff out there! You just need to look a little harder." Then I looked a little harder, and I was, for the most part, completely wrong--I hate being wrong, by the way, it really screws with the image I'm trying to create for myself of always being right. Lesbians especially had two choices, bad "lesbian vampire fiction" written by straight men, or hunting down the few, fairly poorly written indie options actually penned by lesbians, but not actually even up to Twilight quality control standards, if you can believe that. That was, until the indie publisher revolution that is ongoing. Sure, you might have to wade through some bad stuff, but suddenly, the market isn't dictated entirely by old, straight, white men at the Big Four (mentioned in the last shameless self-promotion blog).
Being a little ashamed of what was out there, and feeling like I could do better, I went ahead and put my money where my mouth was and wrote a book of paranormal romance. Demons of Paradise, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, is a collection of eight short stories, my usual amount per collection, all in the paranormal romance genre. I only included one vampire story, but, don't worry, I have a complete collection (of 8 stories again) dedicated entirely to fanged ladies coming out in the not too distant future.

Something I felt was missing in the vast majority of other similar fiction out there, especially the stuff written by straight guys, is the emotional context of sexuality and sexual encounters. Maybe this is just the soft and gushy, pink-n-frilly femme in me, but what's the point of sex if you don't have any emotional context? Twilight may have got this right...sort of...the theory of emotional context was there, but the emotions were shallow, pedantic, unrealistic, and spoken at the level of your average 13-year-old. What Twilight, and a good deal of erotica/romance out there fails to do, is come up with a story worth reading. Take out the romance, take out the sex, take out the weird scene where the vampire "family" plays baseball, and the story is...oh, right, there really isn't one at that point. Stories should be felt, experienced through all five senses (real writers realize things smell and sound like stuff), and follow a plot line FFS! I built my stories, from the ground up, to be stories, and then added sex, romance, and emotional context. Without knowing the basics of creating fiction, writers can really waste your time and money.

The most sexually active organ on the female body is the mind; this is true across nationality, sexual orientation, and age. Tickling the mind works far better than tickling the clit (although you should probably do both just to be safe). In Demons of Paradise, I'm going for my reader's mind, sense of humor, and heart--more or less in that order. I want entertainment value to go hand in hand with wet arousal.

It looks a little like this in my head.

So if writing stories that are actually stories is goal numero uno, and writing stories that appeal to women on the intellectual and emotional level and not just on the arousal level is goal the second, then the third and final goal is to give a bunch of page time to things that don't normally get page time in paranormal romance.

Like I said, I do have a vampire story with the vampire basically being an undead (redundant?) version of Rachel Zoe. I feel like enough people own the book now that I can let that little secret slip. Aside from setting up a continuation story in my all vampire collection, this story was also to show a different side of vampires that didn't involve sparkling in the daylight and chasing after high school girls.

Mummies, werewolves, ghosts, changelings, witches, angels, and demons round out the rest of the cast. There's a certain level of variety lacking in paranormal romance these days. Witches and werewolves often take supporting roles to vampires in a lot of fiction, but this in no way fully fleshes out the genre. I really felt like this was an opportunity a lot of writers were just skipping over. I love ancient Egyptian stuff, and think mummies can be really sexy, so I introduced one that was the star of her own story without any vampires to muddy up the Nile.
See? Isn't this a sexy alternative to vampires?

I get that vampires are the in right now, I really do, and I have a novel in the works that is almost entirely vampire romance and a collection that is entirely dedicated to our fanged friends, but for Demons of Paradise, I wanted the mosaic of paranormal romance to be on display in stories that were stories first and smut second. Be entertained, be aroused, be made to giggle while you read.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Haunted House on Top

I'm going to link a little fan fiction here. It's a lovely free sample that I can't legally sell because, as fan fiction, these characters aren't mine. I still think it's a fun story from back when I was a slash fan-fic writing fiend!

Haunted House on Top

Cami, who had been having fewer and fewer crazy episodes as of late, felt optimistic about Halloween despite the possible catastrophic mixing of schizophrenia and costumes. It was her first Halloween with her long distance girlfriend, Brianna, who would be driving down from New York for the occasion, as Cami had driven up for most other holidays to that point; being the only vampire in the relationship, it did only seem fitting that Cami be the one to decide on how they celebrated all hallows eve. Her Atrociously Gay Best Friend Forever, a.k.a. AGBFF, Lewis said he knew of a haunted house in old Alexandria that might be fun. He wasn't going until much later, a hot date of his own, as he'd put it, but he'd sent the directions to her along with the password they would need to get in.

Lewis had also been the one to go costume shopping with her. Being a Napoleonic era vampire, with tastes in clothing toward the flamboyant, Lewis knew all of the best costume shops that were period accurate and open after dark. To his great disappointment, Cami had selected a Wonder Woman costume. Putting the costume on at home, alone, on Halloween night, Cami began to see the source of Lewis's many complaints with the plan. She was thin, far too thin for her modest breasts to fill out the top of the one piece costume, and, while her legs did look smashing in the knee-high boots, the star-spangled backside of the costume seemed to have designs on finding its way up her behind. He said she would spend the evening picking patriotic wedgies, but she hadn't quite followed what he meant by it.

"Double-sided tape," Melvin said from her perch on the edge of the bathtub. She was Cami's second demon companion, a squat, round frog, covered in spikes, roughly the size of a basketball with an old woman's voice that didn't sound too dissimilar from Betty White.

"No, I'm Wonder Woman," Cami replied, admiring the way the shiny material clung to her lithe curves. When she turned to examine the back, she had to grasp the blue fabric to pull it away from the center it was inching toward.

"She means for you to tape your costume to your ass, dummy," Barry said from his higher perch on the tank of the toilet. He was her original demon, a product of her psychotic break, looking like the unholy spawn of a Chihuahua and a goat that was then dressed in footy pajamas and dipped in road tar.

Cami took the advice, and tape, from Melvin successfully anchoring the backside of her costume to her own backside. With her golden bracers in place, her lasso on her hip, and headband holding back her shoulder-length black hair, she felt as ready as she could. Without a reflection in the mirror, she couldn't be sure if she looked properly wondrous, but her two demons said she looked like a slutty American flag, which was precisely what she was going for. Cami finished applying her blood-red lipstick when the doorbell rang.

With a quick jog down the stairs, she flung the front door open to find Brianna on the steps dressed in what looked like a highly-impractical leather, armored dress. Brianna, who had been buxom before college, had put on just enough weight in her first year of college to be lusciously curvy in exciting new ways. Her long, thick Latina hair had been straightened to fall around her shoulders, although Cami's attention gravitated toward the copious mounds of tan cleavage pushing out the top of the dress.

"That's such a great...um...what are you?" Cami asked.

"Xena, Warrior Princess." Brianna held up the little metal ring (which was actually plastic) on the side of her belt as if that would make it all clear. "From the TV show?"

"I've been dead and crazy for most of the last hundred years without access to a TV until very recently," Cami said by way of explanation, "but if this is what a warrior princess looks like, I need to start watching."

"The costume fit better in high school."

"I like the way it fits now."

They shared a knowing smile.

The drive, which was only a few blocks from Cami's inherited estate, took a little longer than expected as Cami kept having to restrain herself from crawling across the Range Rover's center console to sit on Brianna's lap. When Brianna finally pointed out that Cami could survive a car accident that would likely kill her human girlfriend, Cami remained on her side of the car, with only her left hand making teasing trips over to stroke Brianna's luscious thighs.

Once parked in front of the haunted house, which looked remarkably like any other house in the row of old colonials in the Tudor style, Cami unclipped her seatbelt and hopped across onto Brianna's lap, straddling her in a fairly athletic maneuver. Cradling Brianna's face between her hands, Cami kissed her, her lips cold and urgent against Brianna's until her mouth opened far enough for Cami's tongue to seek out Brianna's tongue ring. Brianna's hands found their way to Cami's thinly clothed ass, caressing it gently until she heard the crinkle of the tape. Letting Cami slide back a little out of her grasp, Brianna ended up honking the horn with Cami's butt. They both had to break the kiss to giggle.

"Do you have tape on your ass?" Brianna asked.

"It's intentional and necessary, I assure," Cami replied.

"Is there tape anywhere else I should know about?"

Cami feigned a pondering pose and shook her head. "Not that I'm aware of, but I'm beginning to think I should have used some on my chest as well." She shifted a little, re-adjusting the front of the Wonder Woman costume to make sure it concealed her breasts.

With the moment ruined by double-sided tape crinkles and ass-on-horn honking, they decided to head up to the house, linking arms as they walked up the front steps of the house, which was clearly labeled haunted house by the large banner above the door, but had none of the campy trappings they were expecting. Nobody waited to take their tickets, no costumed thrill seekers milled around the front, and, aside from the porch light, the entire house seemed to be dark.

"This doesn't look right," Brianna said. "Are you sure we have the right address?"

"It was your GPS that brought us here, you tell me?" Cami held back from knocking on the door when she realized Brianna had taken several steps back. "Don't worry; you have an immortal creature of the night with some sort of golden rope thing here to protect you." Cami held out the lasso to show Brianna how on top of the situation she was.

"That's a lasso."

"What does it do?" Cami asked.

"Supposedly makes people tell the truth."

Cami inspected the lasso, which looked like ordinary rope spray-painted gold. Exotic things could come in ordinary looking packages, she supposed. Taking Brianna by the hand, she knocked on the door with a resounding echo following as if she'd banged on an entirely empty drum. A small, wooden slat in the door slid open.

"Password?" a disembodied voice on the other side of the door asked.

"Carbuncle," Cami and Brianna said in unison.

The door opened on an empty hallway. They both took a few tentative steps into the house, far enough to look around behind the opened door, expecting to find their greeter hiding, but the space was as empty as the rest of the tastefully appointed house from what they could tell. Before they could even give each other a concerned glance, the door slammed behind them.

"Is this vampire stuff?" Brianna asked, clinging to Cami's side.

"It might be," Cami said. "I'm not really aware of what all stuff we can do."

Loud, thrumming, dance music beckoned them away from the dimly lit entryway deeper into the darkness of the house, down a hall draped with black sheets hanging on the wall, into a crowded dance club replete with flashing strobes, bass-driven beats, and close to a hundred shadowy figures dancing to the rave music. The normalcy of the scene set them both at ease, and Brianna practically dragged Cami into the throng to dance. Pushing deep into the crush of bodies, they found a spot open enough to dance so long as they did so nearly in each other's shoes. Cami removed the lasso from her belt and slung it around Brianna's waist, holding her close as they writhed against each other in time with the music.

The scent of lemon poppy-seed muffins rose to Cami's nose when she nuzzled in closer to Brianna. It was the scent of her blood, her desire, the part of Cami's predatory, vampire attraction that drew her to Brianna in the first place. With Brianna's ample breasts brushing up against hers with every shift and move to the music, Cami felt an undeniable lust rising not just between her legs, but in her fangs as well.

"Do you have to tell me the truth now?" Cami whispered into Brianna's ear, nuzzling ever closer into her thick, brown hair.

"Whatever you want to ask," Brianna replied breathlessly.

"Do you want me to bite you, right here, right now?" Cami whispered even closer to Brianna's neck, letting her slowly extending fangs brush against the soft skin just below Brianna's ear.

"Yes, and I don't care who sees," Brianna practically purred in response.

Cami cradled the back of Brianna's head and let her teeth sink in slowly, thrilling at the immediate splash of hot blood across her tongue. Brianna stiffened for a split second before curling into Cami's embrace. She wrapped one arm around her vampire lover's shoulder for stability, but let the other roam up and down Cami's side for a moment, moving past the playful petting stage to cup one of her breasts, caressing the firm mound eagerly through the top of her Wonder Woman costume.

With her bloodlust satiated, at least, in part, and her more provincial lust building from Brianna's caresses, Cami broke away from the bite, gasping, although she didn't actually need to draw breath, immediately looking for a place they might go for some much-needed privacy. Instead, what she found was that they were embracing on an entirely empty dance floor. The strobe lights shut off, the music faded, and the room, which they once had thought a vibrant rave scene, actually appeared to be a Victorian sitting room dimly lit with a smattering of oil lamps and candles.

"Um..." Cami said, feeling a little stupid for not thinking of something better to say.

Brianna opened her eyes and jumped, twisting in Cami's arms, not to escape, but to perhaps burrow in closer. "What the fuck?"

Cami could kick herself for not thinking to say what Brianna had just said—it so perfectly described the situation.

"We should probably go back out the way we came." Cami turned in a slow circle to try to remember which way they'd come in, but found the room didn't actually seem to have any doors or windows, just larger paintings where one might reasonably assume a door or window should go. "That's odd. I could have sworn we came in through a door."

"What the fuck?"

"You said that already."

"I thought it bore repeating."

Cami slipped from Brianna's reluctant grasp, leaving her, for the moment, to stand in the middle of the room, while Cami made her way to one of the paintings of a doorway to give it closer inspection. "I could have sworn we came in through here," Cami said.

"Your sense of direction is shit," Barry said from the location Cami was almost entirely certain she'd left Brianna.

She whirled around to find the foot-tall rat dog/goat/road tar demon standing in Brianna's spot and the Latina Warrior Princess nowhere in sight. "What are you doing here?" she demanded.

"Fuck if I know," Barry threw up two exasperated claw hands. "It's not like I teleported here on purpose. You're not frightened, are you?"

"Of course not," Cami said dismissively. "I'm a badass, undead bitch."

"You're also the moron who just lost your girlfriend."

"That too."

"There's good news though," Barry said with a little hop.

"Which is...?"

"There's a door behind you now."

Cami turned to find the painting of a door had indeed materialized into an actual door. When she turned to thank Barry, she found the spot completely empty. When she turned back to the door, she nearly jumped out of her skin coming face to face with an upside down, dangling rat dog/goat/road tar demon who had secured himself to the top of the door's molding by his spiked tail.

"Scared you!" Barry chortled.

"Did not." Cami brushed passed him into the hallway putting a sternness to her step that might hide how much he'd startled her. The hallway looked to go on for miles with no end in sight. The more she walked, the further it stretched, until she turned to head back to the room and found it too had been replaced with just more hallway. The same handful of pictures on the walls, the same antique wall-hugging tables, and the same oil lamps repeated again and again for as long as she could see in either direction.

"Barry? Brianna?" Cami called down the hallway. When no answer came, she tried, "Carbuncle?"

When no answer came, she decided to inspect one of the paintings, which, in her slightly muddled logic, might have been what caused Barry to appear in the first place. The three pictures next to the table were portraits of three fairly ugly, moderately obese, and unhappy looking women, who, by the set of their eyes, dimple in their chin, and slope of their nose, were likely sisters.

"Oh my God, I'm so happy to see you." Brianna immediately pressed into Cami's back, wrapping her hands around her waist, and nearly knocking Cami face-first into the wall.

"The pictures do work!" Cami exclaimed.

"What?"

"Nothing," she said shyly, "I'm happy to see you too."

Cami reached her hands down to place them over Brianna's around her waist, but her girlfriend move them away first, taking Cami's hands and positioning them with palms flat against the wall. Before Cami could protest, she felt Brianna's hot breath along her bare shoulders and neck, followed closely by pillowy lips. Cami murmured a half-hearted protest, but didn't move for fear it might be heeded. Brianna's hands made their way up Cami's sides, across to her stomach, and cupped both her breasts with firm, eager fingers. She ventured a glance over her shoulder, Brianna's lips came away to meet hers in a soft kiss, sweet enough to distract Cami from the hands slowly pulling down the front of her costume to liberate her perky, alabaster breasts. When Brianna's fingers pinched lightly over her nipples, dragging them to stiff attention, Cami broke the kiss to let out a little "eep" of pleasure. A little more teasing, and some meaningful pressing of Brianna's heaving breasts into her back, drew the apparently desired result from Cami of arching her back; Brianna's hands immediately moved from her breasts, to intertwine fingers through the hair at the back of Cami's head, pulling back every so slight to hold her firmly in the arched pose.

The question of tops and bottoms flashed through Cami's mind. To that point, there really hadn't been a whole lot of either taking charge, which had left their sex-life a little vanilla in places Cami might have hoped for kink and a little less defined than she had come to know from previous lovers. If she were to be honest, and it was kind of hard not to be with her head pulled back by her hair, she really wanted to be topped; this desire, against her wishes, poured out from her mouth in a long, wet, "yessssss."

Brianna, standing directly behind her now, apparently took the utterance for complete submission to the act. Cami could feel Brianna's thumb running flat along her back, caressing the space between her cheeks until the silky material of her costume pressed ever so slightly between them, with her hand making its way down to the thin material barely covering Cami's now fully interested soft lips. Brianna's soft fingers caressed her through the costume with her thumb held back to make slow passes along the same line it had been traveling in the crevice of Cami's behind. Each stroke brought Cami's already taut body to more acute arousal until Brianna could apparently feel the hard little bead she'd been searching for.

When her fingers played across it, even through the material, Cami groaned in the unabashed way only true pleasure could conjure. Brianna pushed her forward against the wall, letting Cami rest her forehead on the scant space between the portraits of the three sisters. She could feel the paintings watch them, their eyes straining to the center to look down Cami's back to what was being done to her, and she didn't care; moreover, part of her wanted to give the stuffy old women in the pictures a show, so she leaned into it, or, more precisely, leaned back into Brianna's hand.

Slowly at first, Brianna put her hand into a riding motion with Cami moving her hips in time, the hand in her hair acting as the reins. The desire for a gallop rose in her until she was eagerly pushing herself against the familiar hand, struggling against the rider's pull on her hair, and bucking herself toward the hot, tingly finish line. Brianna responded with control, slowing her pace, to create a teasing longing that drove Cami to squirm. The delicious agony of being drawn back from the brink of climax didn't go without a few pained whimpers from Cami, which seemed to thrill her lover even more. Cami could hear Brianna breathing heavier, feel the warmth of her body flooding across the short distance between them, and smell the overpowering scent of lemon poppy-seed muffins with an undeniable undertone of Brianna's own growing wetness.

When Cami had calmed just enough to feel an iota of control over herself again, Brianna's fingers pushed aside the bottom of Cami's costume to the soft, eager pussy below. With Brianna's fore and middle finger on opposite sides of Cami's clit, like a little cigarette, any move Cami made back and forth stroked her closer and closer to the climax she'd already been denied once. On her second attempt, moving her hips in the most pleasing rhythm she could find, Brianna seemed more eager than her for things to build toward a sticky, satisfying conclusion. She tugged lightly on Cami's hair, giving her a meaningful bump of her hips against Cami's behind, until they settled into an every-growing rocking motion, pushing closer and closer to the edge.

Cami couldn't tell if she threw her head back or if Brianna pulled it, but she found herself arched at the point of climax to let out a long, loud scream of primal pleasure, her green eyes opened to narrow slits, just enough to spot lewd smiles spreading across the lips of the three sisters in the paintings. When her head fell forward in the slow tremors of aftershock orgasms, as she'd come to call them, she felt the full warmth of Brianna's body press up against her back and the hot, eager breath of her lover cascading across her shoulder and neck, setting a few strands of her black hair to flutter.

To their right, Cami heard a door panel slide open, and someone ask for a password. "Carbuncle," a voice on the other side of the door said, and the front door flew open on them with Lewis and half-a-dozen other costumed vampires standing on the porch looking in.

Cami pulled up the front of her costume, not before accidentally giving a brief flash of white breasts to the crowd while Brianna pulled the bottom of Cami's costume back into place although there was little doubt, from the obvious wet spot and wrinkles, what had been going on.

"We can come back in an hour," Lewis said, "if you two still need more time."

Cami gave Brianna a worried look. Her girlfriend flushed red from exertion simply blushed and shrugged. "We were just leaving," Cami said. She ventured a glance over her shoulder on the way out to the portraits of the three sisters; one of them winked to her.