Chapter 1

"What does it do?" Frank asked, looking at the ancient piece of pewter. It was about six inches long and an inch in diameter, shaped like a small rocket ship; the kind he used to play with as a child. It had even had a narrow slot in its top similar to the slots he was looking at. But this device had four long, narrow slots, one every quarter turn. On the flat end, there was a lever. He moved it back and forth. The first time he moved it, there was a 'click', but nothing happened. He had no idea why this would be part of the collection of torture devices from the Spanish Inquisition.

"It has to be warm first," the smooth-talking, bearded proprietor told him. "Here – let me show you. I've already demonstrated this to several people today, so I am prepared."

It was his job to interest potential clientele in these superfluous ancient artifacts in order to get the best price for the museum. He enjoyed his work.

Other museum relics, actually functional, were set up behind him on a table. An old-fashioned Bunsen burner was heating an old tin pan of water. The placard on the table described the gold rush of the 1840's and how these devices played their modest roles in feeding the miners. But, there was another, darker reason for the display of these simple, mundane utensils.

"You've already triggered this insidious device," the proprietor was explaining, "so let me demonstrate what happens when it reaches body temperature."

He placed it into the pan of warm water and stood back, waiting. It was longer than the pan, so only one end was underwater.

In less than a minute, the device jumped and rattled around the pan for a second. Frank flinched slightly at the sudden, unexpected motion. The proprietor picked the device out of the water and held it up. Four, narrow, rusted blades had sprung out, one from each of the long, narrow slots. Each blade was razor sharp and double-edged.

Frank held the instrument at the base and, gently placing a thumb and finger on the flat side of one of the blades, moved it back and forth. It was hinged, spring-loaded to trigger when the restraining ring inside the tube expanded due to body heat.

The proprietor took it from Frank, moved the lever on the flat end back to its original position and twisted the base. The slotted end turned with the base and the tiny blades disappeared back into the slots. Frank tried to imagine the action that would occur as the blades were released.

'It spins around at the same time it releases the blades! Jeez! Cunt meat sushi!'

"The brownish residue covering the blades isn't rust, as you may think," the proprietor said, sounding smug, "but is instead the blood of its last victim."

He smiled as Frank blanched, sickened by the realization of how this insidious device was actually used to butcher women during the Great Inquisition. 'Holy Shit! Wouldn't Tanya just love a cunt-shredder like this!'

Frank ended up donating an enormous amount to the museum for that and a wicked breastplate from a different period that was also designed for exquisite torture. At the simple movement of a lever in the side of the breastplate, a dozen tiny needles would suddenly pierce the tender flesh of whomever was unfortunate enough to be wearing the device at the time. A matching chastity belt set him back another twenty-five thousand credits.

'I'm beginning to believe I support this museum! I know this gentleman thinks I do!' But, the breastplate and chastity belt set would be the perfect Halloween costume for Tanya. 'I'll give her the little rocket-shaped shredder tonight!'

He could hardly wait to get her into bed, to be holding her tightly in his arms, embracing and kissing her passionately when that insidious little device goes off and twirls around inside her.

Tanya was in the kitchen, looking for something to do. Her body was super-energized with sexual need, and had been ever since the vampire Beth had shown her how to control pain. She could hear Boris Karloff's voice speak in her mind from a hundred years earlier; "I've created a monsta..."

Tanya grinned at the irony of it all. She'd always been obsessed with fire and pain, and in her early teenage and adult years burned herself thousands of times with matches and Fourth of July Sparklers.

Then, when Béla had saved her life by injecting some of her vampiric blood into her veins, she found that she could be very seriously injured or wounded, and not die. In fact, her body could heal in an hour what would normally require months of enforced bed rest.

But, there was still the problem of pain. Getting injured or wounded hurt. Tanya didn't really care to get hurt, although since she was, for all practical purposes, immortal, now, she was a lot more careless when she and Frank were on a field assignment, and had managed to get herself shot several times over the years.

Béla's blood didn't reduce the trauma of having a bullet rip into your body at all. Tanya discovered that getting shot was just as painful after her 'immunization' as it was the first time. But each time it happened, she was grateful for her ability to heal quickly. That meant the pain went away more quickly, too.

That morning when Tanya had kissed Frank goodbye, she knew he would be going to the museum auction on his way home. She had seen the ads on the Tri-d about the 'Chamber of Horrors' that was going to be displayed there. She hoped he would find something that would give her hours and hours of pure, exquisite torture.

She felt her body tense and her belly tighten as she remembered it was time to burn off her excess body hair, again. Every Friday she was going to depilate her body in the flame shower, then rinse the burnt hair off with scalding hot water.

She had wanted to masturbate with scalding water ever since Béla had done it that very first day they'd met, but found she couldn't stand the agony of scalding her cunt. Now that she was addicted to pain, though, she tortured herself as often as she could, in as many different ways as she could imagine.

She walked down the hallway to her special room. The sign on the door, put there by Frank as a lighthearted jest, read, 'Tanya's Sanctuary'. The second line read, 'No Clothing Allowed'. Tanya smiled as she entered the soundproofed room, remembering a third line that she had suggested, but Frank had declined to include on the sign: 'All Horny Naked Vampires Welcome!'

She stepped into her shower and spoke to the unit. "Shower on."

A single, double-jointed arm detached itself from the wall it had been folded against and began clicking. Tanya always flinched when that metal arm started to move. She didn't know why. It was just an instinctive reaction. Her doctor/son – Frank Jr. – had explained that she was unnerved by 'sentient' contrivances because she had grown up in an era where inanimate objects didn't move by themselves. His explanation didn't help. The damned thing still spooked her.

After a few seconds, a small yellow flame burst out from the showerhead.

"Wide spray," Tanya said. A blossom of yellow flame erupted from a dozen tiny holes where one might normally expect water to come out.

"Legs," she told it. She had programmed it to be able to concentrate its 'spray' on one area of her body at a time if she wished. Otherwise, the 'showerhead', when it was on 'single' flame, would simply twirl around, leaving a swirling trail of happily scorched flesh as it moved up and down her body.

She spread her legs and tightened her muscles against the delightful, crisp sensation as the showerhead swirled around only an inch away from her legs, burning away the few hairs that had dared to show themselves since last week. She hissed as the showerhead lingered an instant too long in one spot before continuing its swirling, scorching journey up and down her long, smooth legs.

"Upper," she commanded. As the showerhead swirled its way up the outside of her thigh, it continued on up the side of her body, changing its area of motion to include her torso, breasts and shoulders. She flipped her hair back behind her and held her head tilted to the right so that her hair wouldn't catch fire as the flaming showerhead delicately scorched the tiny hairs off her stomach and swirled its way around to her right side.

She tilted her head to the left, getting her hair out of the way, again, then reached behind her and flipped her mass of hair over her left shoulder as the showerhead continued around her right side and began caressing her back. After it had completed its swirling journey completely around her torso, she took hold of the spinning nozzle and directed it under each arm for a few seconds, making sure it depilated her there, too.

Burning off the hair between her legs was a little trickier. She had to stand, bent backward with one leg in the air, while the flaming showerhead, in 'single' flame mode, scorched the hair off her pussy, then bend forward, half out of the shower, holding her butt cheeks apart while it moved up and down the crack of her ass.

Now it was time to play for a while. This was the good part. Tanya positioned the showerhead a ways off the floor so that it was slightly above her knees, pointing almost straight up and into the shower stall.

"Hard spray," she told it.

The soft yellow blossom of fire she'd used to depilate her body turned into a single, four-inch-long flame coming out of the center of the showerhead. Lifting one leg and resting her foot on the tile bench, Tanya positioned herself so that the heat from the flame was concentrated between her legs. She breathed softly through clenched teeth as she moved her pelvis back and forth through the invisible gases above the flame, learning to enjoy the sensation of scorching her clitoris.

She moved back and forth, letting the heated gasses lick her ass, pussy lips and clitoris; back and forth, back and forth, getting more aroused with every passing second. 'I'm fucking a penis made of fire ... No ... it's a tongue made of fire. That's it! A fiery tongue that licks me clean and renews my flesh ... Oh, fuck! That feels sooo good... '

Giving her lower half a break from the scorching heat, Tanya raised the showerhead up level with her breasts and swayed back and forth, letting the fiery little tongue lick, kiss and blacken her hard nipples for a few moments. The more aroused she became, the easier it was to hold her sensitive nipples directly in the flame for a second or two.

"Whole body," she commanded the device, finding it difficult to control her voice enough so that the VR system would obey her command.

The showerhead began spinning around again and moving up and down the length of her body as she swayed back and forth, the 'hard spray' caressing and scorching her tender flesh as it traveled. The only thing she really had to watch out for was keeping her hair out of the flame. So far, she'd been lucky and had yet to burn off or even discolor any of her gorgeous blond hair.

After about ten minutes of letting the little flame lick up and down her body, she stopped, and began fucking it again as she had before. By now, she was so deeply aroused that she could move her pussy directly into the flame, letting it blacken her clitoris and the flesh between her legs. She cried out as she came, her powerful orgasm worth the burning, scorching agony.

She leaned back against the shower wall and sank down onto the narrow footrest, her legs cramping from the tension of forcing her body to hold still while she had scorched herself crispy. A side benefit she remembered from the first time she'd done this, last week, was that her skin down there would be a lot more sensitive to Frank's touch when he came home. Also, Frank absolutely loved her new, bare look. He hadn't seen it for many years.

'I wonder if he'd like to watch me burn it off next time ... Maybe he'd like to burn it off me, himself ... I could get him a hand-held blowtorch... ' She smiled as she thought of things he could do to her with a blowtorch...

Her legs still wobbly from her orgasm, Tanya staggered out of the flame shower and rinsed off in her regular shower. She discovered that she'd scorched herself so badly that the warmest she could tolerate the water was ninety-seven degrees. Warmer than that was simply too discomforting.

After a few moments in her normal shower, she stepped out and delicately toweled herself, patting dry her delicate, newly regenerated skin, rather than just rubbing the water off with the towel like she usually did.

Then she lay down on her massage table in the middle of the sunlit room. Attached to one side of the table was a motorized arm with a huge, thick magnifying glass about 11 inches across attached to it.

Tanya estimated that she had about an hour before the sun shining through the glass panels of the sunroof was no longer shining on her massage table. The magnifying glass' movement was controlled with a hand-held remote, unlike the voice-activated flame shower. She had already programmed a few motion patterns into the controller so that she could have a concentrated beam of scorching sunlight to play with.

Pressing 'one' drew little concentric circles around her nipples. Program two would draw a crosshatch of lines up and down on her torso, making her skin supersensitive to even the slightest breath of air. Program three simply concentrated an intense beam of sunlight down around her crotch for her to masturbate with by wriggling back and forth, moving her body around so that the heat of the sun wouldn't burn a hole into her tender flesh down there while she fucked herself with it.