Black Briar

• Blurb
  
• Reader’s Advisory
  
• Welcome to New Gotham
  
• Black Briar
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Epilogue
  
• New Gotham’s Grimoire: A Glossary for Readers
  
• Author’s Note
  
• Preview of ‘Twas the Darkest Night, A New Gotham Fairy Tale
  
• Other Books by Sophie Avett
  
• About the Author
  
• Dedication and Acknowledgements
  
• Did you find a typo?
  
• Copyright
  

This is a dark, erotic fantasy short story.
You will not find rampant sex in this short story, but the sex that does take place is served ala leather. If BDSM doesn’t do it for you, this might not be the sexy snack for tea time.
Also, when Sophie says “dark,” she means dark. Expect graphic descriptions of violence, all manner of mischief, and a handful of disturbing images served with cake and chocolate. Enjoy!

There is a place where vampires roam free and the cake and libraries are plentiful. A place where our favorite storybook characters come back from the dead in a re-animated world where books are mere records of all that has come and all that will be.

A fictitious city near the shores of modern-day
New York
, New Gotham is a noir mixture of
Manhattan
and a few small metropolitan cities like DC Comic's Gotham, Modern London, South Boston, or
Pittsburgh
. Small, big, and sinister. Stark skylights ripping into the twilight with a haunting raven crest. A melting pot for the wicked.

Founded in the late sixties, New Gotham's charter was drafted as an entire city grid dedicated as a place for paranormal creatures to live "in the open." It is one of the many cities scattered across the globe, operating under the statutes of the United Nation's International Dante Act. Each city is governed on a regional level by a small republic composed of leading members from each of the four factions: the Pack, the Court, the Coven, and the Clan.

Whether it's to learn about the paranormal creatures stalking its cracked and cobbled streets, or to pick up that love charm, there's a vice for every wicked heart in New Gotham. But beware, for you are welcome in, but you might not make it out…alive.

A. Potts, the Storymaven

“Hope is a waking dream.”

–Aristotle

The brick-faced, two story Richardsonian Romanesque edifice, waiting for the end on the corner of Perrault and Grendel, was unique. It was mostly constructed from stone and heavy black brick,
 
and it was overly large, almost an estate’s manor without the surrounding rolling grounds. Like it had been originally built as large public building, and then, later converted into a small castle right on the edge of
Main Street
.
 

A smattering of quicksilver
katanas
and dream crystal
wakizashis
leaned against just about every scandalous wall. The walls were papered with majestic and sprawling tapestries spinning disturbing and suggestive images of angels warring with demons, many of them succumbing to desire themselves. Bloodied and entwined in Hell. Otherwise, the rooms were all mostly bare and dusty from disuse. All of them save one.

Sybille Prince had been greeted by a skeleton-maid draped in fine, ginger orange geisha silks. She led the spindle witch, swallowed in a vintage Neverwinter cloak, up and up the Victorian spiral staircase, apologizing for the erotic and grotesque art, and the random weapons lying about. When they finally breached the master bedroom, the skeletal maid added with a chatter of her teeth that she wasn’t allowed to touch the lonely decadent desk poised at the witch’s back. Heavy with unmarked books and scrolls, idols and other symbols of pagan, holy, and hellish faith, it groaned and creaked beneath the burden.

The art, the weapons, the skeleton maid—all were tame. Ordinary in a place like New Gotham. And yet…

Leather, straps, and silver studs.

Sybille Prince tilted her head from side to side, as she examined the apparatus suspended over the center of the large king-sized bed. On the rare occasions she’d actually seen a sex swing, thanks to a few of the more creative window displays in her best friend Astrid’s favorite naughty boutique, Serpentine Ties, they’d all been freestanding devices—the kind a witch could put together herself with a pink daisy screw-driver and a set of directions. Though the directions were probably less than helpful given they were mostly written in goblin gibberish and something that looked like Korean.

Indeed, deciphering instruction manuals was tedium even for the monsters stalking New Gotham’s timeworn and tempest streets. NATO’s International Dante Act had awarded their kind cities where lawless legends could live out in the open, and for the first time in recent recorded history, every manner of badass had crawled from the crack in the crypt.

But seriously…

A sex swing? Just…you know…out there for everyone to see?

The apparatus was a silent omen, probably rescued from the wicked depths of a medieval dungeon and bolted into the bungalow’s fractured plaster ceilings. It hung from a spring she assumed would give to accommodate the weight of its users. Aside from that, it had a convenient—if she could say so herself—cast iron support bar and she counted five straps among the throng of hanging leather: a pair of back straps, butt support, and two leg straps.

If the ceilings hadn’t been so high, it would’ve been impossible to glimpse anything behind bed poster’s pulled curtains, but the ceilings were high. Very high. And the top canvas was holed in the middle like a skylight, allowing full access and view to the polished steel, iron, and leather, an effective means to tie up and spread…anything. Such a blatant promise of erotic pleasure and punishment to come.

“Cute.” Sybille nibbled on her chipped black nail polish. The flakes of enamel spotting her pink tongue were bitter, acrid. “Real cute.”

To think, when she’d first been escorted through the tall heavy teak doors, she’d thought this particular home mild compared to the homes she’d visited throughout her career in mystic medicine. Her life’s work was cryptozoology. Rare trolls, legendary monsters, obscure mythical creatures—she was pretty much a self-taught general physician with a particular fascination with surgical procedures. And really, skill was about her sole redeeming feature.

Drusilla, her twin sister, was the alchemist and beast tamer, and the hayfield blond was worth her weight in philosopher stones. Together, they’d made
Enid
’s shop, Black Briar Alchemy, a popular fixture in the city. They sold poisons, edible curses, the adventure’s variety of elixirs, but they also doubled as one of the few shops that catered to the medical needs of the real obscure in New Gotham.

Most of the monsters they normally treated lived in extravagant gothic castles, fairy burrows and sithens, dens and hovels, and the very occasional tea kettle. Those who lived in a regular houses, apartments, and high-rises, usually sought public health care facilities, like the general hospital, for their procession of butterfly stitches, anti-depressants, cancer cures and superficial Band-Aids.

“Hell and Creation!” Socrates’ wide wings were silent as he flew into the room through one of its tall, barred windows, “What manner of abomination looms over the bed?”

It had been nearly a millennia since the sprite had taken the form of a New Gotham dire great-horned owl. Cryptic plumage and a white and black facemask, long and corkscrew ear-tuffs, and bloody orange irises gave him a menacing appearance, but he was still just an imp. Darkling, to be exact. Demonic. Fiendish and smart, but diminutive when compared to the likes of a
cheshire
or
true
imp.

Like all imps, he was a being incapable of maintaining a corporal presence in the mundane realm without a witch’s mercy and patronage—and frankly, she was starting to wonder why she kept him around at all. The fucking thing never shut up. Not ever.

“Monsters have no shame anymore. No principles.” The owl perched on the ornamented canopy’s sterling silver curtain rods hanging from the ceiling. He swerved his half-dome head one hundred and eighty degrees, peering at the swing, and hooted with unholy outrage. “How are demon supposed to complete?!”

Sybille opened her mouth to speak, and the bird snapped its beak with outrage, “Speaking of no morals,
Enid
demands something be done about the squalor that has befallen your loft! Bloody hell, Sybille, she’s blind! Do you know how bad your room has to smell for her to notice? She kept me up half the day squalling about it!”

A keepsake from the tales of old, Enid the Hag was Briar Alchemy’s owner and New Gotham’s leading expert on poisons, elixirs, and cures. She was rumored to have been a human midwife in a past life, but the tale was too old to know for sure. The blind, craggy old fey had never mentioned the tales circulating about her past, but that probably had more to do with the fact that she was always aching-hip deep in mischief.

With the exception of her twin sister, the crone was the spindle witch’s only family in the world. Probably, the only person besides her sister and the imp to actually give a real damn about whether she ever did manage to conquer her inner demons and free herself from the terrible tower. Unfortunately, Sybille wasn’t the type who wanted help. From anyone. She wasn’t lost and she wasn’t broken.