Ursula could smell the stench of hypocrisy on Lord Lister as he leered over her. Or maybe it was just the standard stink of the lower aristocracy nearing their weekly bathing day.“Don’t you wash before important occasions?” she asked him, as he pulled the rope tighter, securing her to the stake. He grunted, giving it another tug so it bit painfully into her arm flesh, but she denied him the satisfaction of a gasp or whimper.“Does that make you feel manly, being the one tying the knots for a change?” she mocked. “If that was all you wanted, we could have changed our little arrangement to accommodate your ego a bit more.”“Shut your trap, witch-whore!” he growled. “I’m not under your spell now.”“Under my spell?” Ursula burst out laughing — not the evil cackle they all wanted but the familiar, good-natured laugh that filled the villagers with gnawing guilt. “If I could enchant people into my bed I would choose far better than you. Why are you doing the dirty work, anyway? Last chance to ogle my tits, or does someone else have you by the balls?”His fist thudded into the post by her head, but she didn’t even blink. Then he shrugged. “I’m going to enjoy hearing you die, Ursula. You were a good fuck, but a total bitch.” With that, he turned and descended the steps from the platform, nodding to the witchfinder, who then signalled for a torch.“Ursula Redferne, you have been found guilty of practicing witchcraft, consorting with demons, corrupting the young—” Ursula’s eyes darted to the figure of Anna at that accusation. “—and making a pact with Satan against your superiors. For this heresy and treason, combined with your belligerent lack of shame” —he meant her readiness to confess and thereby deny him the excuse to torture her— “you are to be burned to death without the usual mercy of a preliminary hanging.” Thank fuck — I wouldn’t stand a chance otherwise.Kindling ignited below her feet, making her heart jolt, despite herself. She attempted to send Anna a silent message of comfort, but she was staring resolutely down, unable to witness her lover being executed. Smoke began to billow up from below her feet as more inflammable material caught. Ursula narrowed her eyes, trying to stop them watering as she sought out the witchfinder. At least he could meet her gaze, the hatred therein matched only by that in hers.“Be gone into hell with Satan, your master, witch!” he called to her.“Fuck you, Jesus-fucker!” she retorted, thinking, May as well get some good insults in.The roar of the fire drowned out his response, but she didn’t care. She began to chant in a mixture of Latin, Pig Latin and the Old Cornish of her mother, although the words were irrelevant. In her mind, she pulled herself in and focused. Where are you, Lucy? Her feet were Ankara bayan escort becoming uncomfortably hot as flames licked the plank she stood on, and she shifted, drawing them back to the thick post she was bound to. Where the fuck are you?“I am here,” a voice crackled in her ear, singeing her hair.“Typical bloody man, waiting until the last moment,” she admonished, irritation replacing fear.“I am fire. I have no sex.”“You had plenty of sex the last five times.”“I enjoy stimulating you that way. It makes you burn bright like—”“Ow!” the witch interrupted. “Stop blathering, you stupid daemon, and fix the flames!”“My apologies.” The heat immediately dropped from near blistering to just bearable, although only Ursula, the witch they were supposed to destroy, would know, for they continued to grow, feeding on the fuel piled beneath her smouldering platform and starting to play along the hem of her skirt.“That’s better,” she told her.I should stop teasing Lucy, she thought. She had saved her life five times now, for no real gain of her own she could fathom. The daemon was not male, she knew. Nor was “she” female — “Lucy” was just a name Ursula had bestowed on her for something to anchor her thoughts to, but it had stuck.“Will you devour me one day?” she asked now, watching the flames dance, unsure whether they really did appear more alive or if her knowledge of the daemon’s presence made her pay attention to particular patterns more than others.“When your soul asks for it,” came the reply. “Not today. Your soul is offering me others. Many others. This place has caused you much pain.”“Bunch of ingrates, the lot of them,” she agreed. “Except one. You will spare her?”“One or a thousand, it is all the same to me.”Lucy smiled by turning brilliant yellow and leapt onto her skirt. Even with her previous experience, Ursula jumped, jerking against her bonds when her dress caught alight, so the scream she gave was not merely for the benefit of her audience craving her death.“Gets you every time, doesn’t it?” the fire laughed as she engulfed her body, incinerated clothes collapsing and falling like blossoms at the end of Spring. She winced as a blast of heat like opening an oven hit her full-on, though it left no marks but the ashes of her disintegrating bodice. Her eyes smarted from the smoke and she coughed, but the currents of hot air changed, siphoning the filth away from her lungs so she could breathe. A twitching, fiery curtain rose from the burning logs, giving the bloodthirsty villagers only the occasional flash of her fire-lit tits. With a stamp of her feet, the remnants of her sturdy leather boots fell away into the inferno, and she flicked her sweaty hair off her face.“The ropes?” she prompted. Flames ran up her arms, Escort bayan Ankara strong and tanned from the years of lugging her belongings from town to village and back to peddle her various herbal remedies, but had left her bonds intact.“Not yet. You look… enticing.”Ursula raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you’re not male?”A whoomph of fiery laughter came in answer.“I watch you even when you are not being offered to me, you know.”“I didn’t know. Then you have seen that I like to be the one doing the restraining.”“Maybe, deep down, you don’t always want to be that one. Let’s try.”Ursula glared at the flames, but they just parted, exposing her naked, voluptuous curves to the mob’s lascivious stares. She instinctively moved to cover the triangle of curls between her legs, but with hands restrained, she could only cross her legs awkwardly, squishing her pussy lips together and in turn discovering just how aroused being on show for them was making her. Her audience disappeared before she could grin, so she cackled defiantly instead, hoping that would confuse them.“You are growing larger,” Lucy informed her.“Er, this area has a lot of dairy farms. I can’t resist the cream.”“No need to apologise. You are as beautiful as ever.”Heat brushed her toes and momentarily encircled her body, then receded just as quick. Streams of sweat poured down her chest, tickling her nipples and sides, while a different wetness coated her lower lips, and she planted her feet apart again, abandoning the false modesty. The flames engulfed her again, crawling over her skin and then vanishing to appear in another spot, the heat flashing to the point of pain then receding before it could do damage. So many times, she had tried to get her lovers to approximate this sensation with feathers, switches, and even those nine-lashed whips sailors used at sea, but nothing came close to the delicate caress of sentient fire on her nipples, followed by the sharp sting of the burn, sometimes a pinpoint, sometimes a searing slash from head to foot.She whimpered, then moaned, and finally begged for release as the delicate torture danced over the length of her body but never touched her sex, no matter how hard she thrust her hips. The being had learned from previous times, drawing this out. Perhaps that is the satisfaction she gets from this, she thought, the stoking of a different kind of fire in a body too wet to burn without being destroyed first.Sweat began to evaporate from her body. In vain, she searched for something humanoid, a face, a shape, but there was only incandescence, blurring her vision. The planks of the platform gave way and she slid down, landing with a crunch and shower of sparks in the debris at the base of the pole. Lucy wicked the heat Bayan escort Ankara from the smouldering timber away from her skin, and flames wrapped around her legs, pulling them apart and then crawling up her thighs.“Yes!” she cried. “Please, burn the fuck out of me!”She jerked and writhed as her pussy hair disappeared in a flash. However, the daemon refused to remain there, making her buck her hips in frustration.“What are you waiting for? Fuck me!”“No.”“No?!” A shiver of fear ran through her. Should I have listened to Mother’s lectures about playing with fire after all?“Patience, insatiable one. I want to meet this mortal that consumes your soul.”The roar that followed made her think of her grandmother’s dirty laugh, but then a narrow tunnel formed leading directly to the astonished nineteen-year-old peasant with tear-stained cheeks.Anna had listened in horror as the flames rose around the woman who had helped her avoid the child she was not ready to bear and introduced her to the secret joys of sapphic sensuality. Now, she stared open-mouthed at her older lover, still bound to the stake and slumped in the midst of an inferno, but clearly very much alive, and calling out to her.Fearfully, she glanced at her parents and her husband behind her but they were gleefully listening for more evidence of the witch’s torment, oblivious to this vision. Their grip on her had relaxed once the torches had been thrown on, believing it was cleansing the sin from their daughter.A sudden rage filled her. Though she knew the vision could not be real, she vowed to avenge herself on them with her life, and jumped into the fire. They sealed behind her, drowning out the sounds of panic that erupted. Her clothes caught immediately in the intense heat, and she shut her eyes, awaiting searing pain.It never came.Anna opened her eyes, expecting heaven or hell, but nothing had changed, other than her disintegrating dress flaking from her untouched skin. Ursula was still seated, legs splayed wantonly, while fire danced impossibly across her homely features, framed by locks dishevelled and singed but miraculously intact. She stepped towards her lover, white-hot coals crumbling like silk-dust under her toes. Savouring the moment of looking down rather than up at her tutor, she drank in the sight, finding that the lines of wisdom and laughter around her usually confident eyes suddenly unveiled a hidden vulnerability when looking up.“That prick of a witch-pricker caught a genuine witch,” Ursula said, smiling. “I’ll be sure to congratulate him before Lucy sends him to Hell.”Anna stared at her open-mouthed. A thousand questions raced through her mind, but the first to fall out was, “Who’s Lucy?”“She means me.” A fierce column formed before her and then melted away.“Oh. Um, what are you?”“People call me by many names. In the East, I am ifrit. Here, a daemon.”“A daemon called Lucy?”“It is not my real name.”“What is your real name?” A complex roaring and crackling surrounded her. “Oh. That is hard to pronounce.”