((NOW STOP NAGGING ME SAPPH!))

Ryan looked up at her, and gave a cool smile.

“Do your worst,” He challenged, his green eyes challenging.

She gave a low laugh, leaning over him, her hand closing over his throat and forcing his head up and back as she ran a thumb over his jugular vein.

“Believe me, I plan to.”

Regina’s red eyes burned into Ryan’s green ones as her long black thumbnail slipped, a razor sharp kiss to his skin, spilling liquid rubies onto the pillow. Ryan, despite himself, gave a slight hiss of pain, snarling as she ran a black forked tongue along the edge of the nail, tasting him.

“For such an acidic creature, you taste so sweet,” She murmured. “Like burnt sugar…”

She placed her hands on his chest, running them over his skin, the very tips of her nails dragging over his skin, grazing him, teasing him with the slight pain, but not quite breaking the skin. Ryan rolled his eyes, wrapping his hands around the silk ropes holding him in place.

“Oh come on,” he rolled his eyes. “Do you really think that you’re scaring me?” He settled back. “Please excuse me while I take a nap – let me know when you’re done poncing around, will you?”

Regina’s eyes flashed brilliant red, then narrowed. With the slightest change in pressure her nails gouged deep into his perfect skin. Ryan contorted under her hands, biting his lip slightly to prevent himself making a noise. Regina laughed, lowering herself down kiss his hip, then dragged her tongue along the longest cut, running diagonally from his hip to his shoulder. Her tongue felt as rough as sandpaper and Ryan gritted his teeth, his long pointed teeth extending as he gave her a feral snarl, a snarl that turned into a low growl as she sank her teeth into his shoulder. She straightened up with a low laugh, revealing a mouth as full of teeth as a shark’s.

“You’re not the only one with teeth darling.”

Regina leant over and slammed her mouth against his, kissing him with such violence it drove his head back into the pillow. Pissed now, he sank his teeth into her black tongue, drawing blood, but Regina’s tongue didn’t retract from his mouth. A bitter, acrid taste filled his mouth, burning like he’d bitten into a ghost chilli, sending pain flaming through his mouth and down his throat, his eyes watering. Regina straightened up, flicking back her long black hair, curling her tongue in her mouth, the slightest trace of black blood rolling from the corner of her mouth.

“Awh, does kitty need a saucer of milk?” she cooed, seeing Ryan’s plight with her pitiless eyes.

“Fuck you,” Ryan snarled, his voice slightly hoarse, his mouth still burning.

“Patience darling, we’ll get there,” Regina leant forward and licked the very tip of his left nipple, her burning eyes laughing at him.

The moment her bleeding tongue touched his skin, it felt like it was on fire. Ryan hissed, and unsheathed his claws. He managed to slice through the rope on his right wrist, but then her hand braceletted around his wrist, clamping it to the mattress more securely than a shackle, her iron-hard muscles clamping him to the bed.

“Where on earth do you think that you’re going?” She breathed. “Only when I’m done with you do you have my permission to leave.”

“I’m a cat, bitch. We have no owners.”

He brought his head up and slammed it against hers. Regina blinked. Not in pain, but in surprise, then tilted her head slightly to one side.

“Admirable sentiment, but darling, you’re taking on a creature with horns. Did you really think you were going to come off better by nutting her?” She demanded, cruelly amused. “Allow me to demonstrate how it should be done.”

She smacked her head against his, and Ryan saw stars, momentarily going limp in her grasp, and that was all the time she needed. Regina snapped the silk ropes with ease and lifted him, the ropes reforming and stretching to attach his wrists to the bottom corners of the four poster bed, the ones around his ankles attaching to the legs of the bed, holding him in an X shape at the bottom of the bed. At a click of her talons the ropes tightened, stretching him as far as his lithe body could take.

“You know,” Regina said conversationally, reclining on the bed behind him as Ryan shook his head to clear it. “If you’d been a little less of a knob, I would just have screwed your brains out, then kicked you to the curb with some interesting bite-marks and some scorching hot memories. Being as you’ve been a complete and utter tosspot however, I feel I have a reputation to uphold.” She slithered out of the bed and stalked around to face him. “You might be the Prince of Darkness darling, but I’m the Queen. In no world can you ever be allowed to be more evil than me.”

Ryan raised an eyebrow with a smug smile.

“I must be Hornball, because you seem to feel that you have something to prove,” He grinned, to reveal those pointed canines. “You don’t put this much of a show on for a minion.”

Her eyes pulsed an angry red, then she tossed her head back, laughing.

“Oh, I do like you,” she purred. “I am so tempted to keep you as my palace pet, but I’m afraid I’d get nothing done if you were always around.”

“Correction – I’d be forever making you look bad,” Ryan spat at her. “Face it, you’re nothing.”

Regina looked down at where his spit had landed on her chest and wiped it carefully away with a fingertip. For a moment he thought that he’d stunned her into silence, but she just tilted her head to one side, watching him with an emotionless expression that seemed to terrify him more than her anger. He gripped the ropes and waited for the explosion.

“Thank you,” She said after a moment.

Ryan’s jaw dropped.

“What?”

“Thank you, that’s the nicest compliment I think any-one’s ever given me,” she said with a sly smile.

Ryan frowned, taken off balance, on the back foot and not sure where this was going.

“You see, there’s nothing quite as terrifying as nothing,” She told him quietly, stalking slowly towards him. “Nothing quite as scary as an empty street in the dead of night, or the blackness at the end of the cave… in the hidden corners of your own mind. Nothing holds so much evil promise, because it’s where your mind is the most dangerous, where you are the most vulnerable. Nowhere is where your nightmares live and I am nothing, the Queen of Nowhere, and I am everything.”

She vanished, right before his eyes. He froze, ears pricked up, his heartbeat suddenly picking up as it pounded desperately in his chest. He looked around the apparently empty room, and felt an inexplicable terror. Nothing was there.

“Bored of the game already?” He yelled defiantly

Only for a hand to burst through his chest from behind in an explosion of blood and gristle, showering the wall in front of him in gore as her hand showed him his own bloody, still beating heart as she sank her long talons into it…

He cried out in wordless horror, and then the shadows shifted in the room, the hand vanished and Regina was stood back in front of him. Her one arm was covered in blood to the elbow and she was giving him the most diabolical, crazed smile, her eyes wide and black – empty sinister pits seething with madness. He looked down at his chest to see that it was whole and unharmed, and when he looked back up Regina winked, waving her suddenly bloodless arm.

And the shadows shifted again. Ryan cried out in shock as her talons raked across his thigh opening fresh wounds, only for her to vanish again, cartwheeling through nothing for foot to slam into his back while the tip of her dagger-like tail slashed his face… it was like being caught in a whirlwind – she was there for a split second, then gone again, raining strikes down on him from all different directions, some real, some illusionary, all of them painful. One second she’d have punched her tail straight through his arm, the next moment the wound was gone, but the long gashes she’d just raked across his face were still there. Now his chest had been cracked open, then next it was whole again, but his trousers had been ripped away, leaving him utterly naked and at her mercy as her strikes kept coming. Nowhere and everywhere in the same instant.

Ryan sagged in the ropes, barely able to keep upright under the barrage, his head hanging slightly… then felt a hand close around his chin, pulling his head back up.

A beautiful dark-haired girl stood there, surveying him through her glasses as she toyed with the collar around her neck, silver and sapphires.

“Sa-Saph?” he demanded uncertainly.

“Hello Ryan,” she patted his cheek. “Need a hand?”

He tried to recoil from her grip.

“Go to hell,” he snarled at her.

Sapphira laughed, a horrific mix of Regina’s evil chuckle and Sapphira’s soft laugh, their voices overlapping in a sinister chorus.

“Been there, done that…”

The image of Sapphira burst into flames, into a whirling person-shaped inferno, branding his face with a hand shape. Regina reformed from the flames, laughing, a pair of wings made from living flame arching from her back, crackling and dancing, spitting sparks at Ryan. Regina removed the silver collar from her neck, admiring it.

“Sapphires,” She remarked. “Brilliant for insomnia… And allegedly from rescuing us from psychic suffering, promoting wisdom and a fuller understanding of the self…” She snorted, then snapped the collar around Ryan’s neck, the whole thing reforming into a seamless whole without lock or hinge. “Let’s see if it works, shall we?”

She slammed her hand into his chest, snapping the ropes, sending him crashing to the mattress as she sprang ontop of him, pinning him down. He opened his mouth to yell something defiant, but she blew him a kiss, a kiss sparkling with ice crystals and snowflakes. A ball of solid ice filled his still burning mouth, expanding to fill every part of it, welding his mouth shut behind his lips, sending spikes of frozen pain into his brain. As he whimpered in pain despite himself, she pressed her searing hot lips against his frozen ones, sending fresh waves of agony through him.

“I know people say that you only gag people when you’re scared of what they’re going to say,” Regina remarked, checking her nails absently. “But I’ve had enough of you killing the mood.”

She caught both of his wrists in one of her hands, pinning it above his head as she pressed a hand against his chest. Her hand started off glacially cold, getting rapidly warmer, and beneath it, he felt his blood boil, his heart speed up, his chest heave for breath as waves of pain and pleasure coursed through him, sparking and crackling like electricity. He groaned despite himself, writhing against her, trying to pull his hands back, not to fight her off now, but to touch himself, to ride the dark feeling soaring through him. The cerebral part of him, right back at his mind hated his body’s response to her dark magic… the other part of him didn’t care, contorting with pleasure and desperate for more.

“Here’s something you can’t do darling,” She breathed. “I can make any-one in this world want me, whether they want to or not. Neat trick, huh?” She released his wrists. “Worship me, bitch.”

And his hands were all over her rough skin, clutching at her, his sealed mouth nuzzling against her and she laughed, a brilliant, elated laugh, sending her bright red eyes to a satisfied rich crimson. She threw a leg over him, straddling him, sinking torturously slowly onto him as she gazed imperiously down at him, then began to slowly rock her hips, driving him on, riding him hard, all the time transfixing him with those eyes the colour of blood and sin.

Ryan shuddered beneath her and gave a wordless cry as he orgasmed underneath her and she grinned, tilting her head back and closed her eyes as she felt waves of power course through her, heady intoxicating power that made her wings flame brighter like an infernal torch. She gave a deep, satisfied sigh and slid to one side, sat on the bed next to him.

“Well, that was fun,” She said brightly. “I’ll have to look you up the next time I’m in town.”

“When hell freezes over,” Ryan snarled, mildly surprised when he heard the words.

“That could be arranged,” She remarked accommodatingly.

He sat up and looked around. There was absolutely no evidence that anything had happened in the room. There was no blood on the walls or bed, the sheets were perfectly intact and Regina…

Was human again. Just like that. Sat on the edge of the bed as the strikingly beautiful woman that had caught his eye in the bar earlier, wearing her white wrap dress and giving him a serene smile. Ryan looked down at himself. True, his shirt was unbuttoned, but he was dressed again, and seemingly unharmed… barring a long white scar, running from his right shoulder, all the way down to his left hip that had not been there before he’d walked into the room. He looked uncertainly up at Regina, who blew him a kiss.

“How much of that was real?” He demanded.

“All of it,” Regina straightened her dress casually and did a delicate twirl, getting up. “And none of it, depending on your viewpoint.”

“So all of that was an illusion?” He demanded.

“We’re all illusions,” Regina stated with a light laugh. “Control, love, hate, pain, pleasure… they’re all illusions. I thought you of all people would know that.” She stepped closer and leant over the bed, kissing him gently on the lips, a chaste brush of the lips that none the less sent an electric thrill down his spine. “See you soon puss-cat.”

Regina straightened up… and dissolved into a cloud of dense grey smoke that slowly dissipated into nothing. Ryan stared at the place where she’d vanished for a moment with his brilliant green eyes, then smiled despite himself, a crooked half-smile.

He went to rub his neck, then froze, the smile lost… and sprang off the bed to look in the mirror on the bedstand. There, clamped firmly around his neck was the sapphire and silver collar…

And it had a fucking tinkly bell on it.