Buffy was acutely aware that she wasn't wearing very much. Her captor had stripped off her sweater and skirt, leaving only a purple satin bra and matching thong panties. It was Victoria's Secret lingerie; Buffy had been planning on having sex later, but now she deeply regretted her choice of underwear. It left her feeling vulnerable, naked and exposed, although her genitals were still covered.

Her captor stood over her, staring down at her helpless body with calm, ageless eyes. He was thin, Chinese, dressed in black silk from head to toe. He could have been twenty years old, or two hundred. Buffy cursed herself for falling into his trap. She had acted like a novice instead of an accomplished vampire slayer. She had ignored her instincts, and now she would pay for that error with her life, or perhaps with her immortal soul.

"I hope you plan to kill me," Buffy said, trying to keep her voice hard and defiant. "Because I have no desire to join the wretched ranks of the undead." Could he hear the fear behind her brave words? She spat the syllables out, and prayed.

The vampire smiled. "In the West you have such quaint ideas about us. I assure you, the Brotherhood of Night is far too exclusive to consider membership for a murderous bitch such as you. Why should I bless you with eternal life, when you have made a career out of massacring my brethren? No, you shall certainly die, but only after death has become your fragile body's only option."

The creature produced an old-fashioned straight razor. She had seen one like it before, in the barber shop where her grandfather still got his hair cut. "Are you familiar with the Ling-Che?" the vampire asked. He knew she was; it was useless to pretend otherwise. She nodded. "The 'Death of a Thousand Cuts,'" she said, her voice soft and sad.

"It is almost a lost art in China today," he said, and now it was his turn to be sad. "It is still practiced, of course, but the Communists lack the patience to do it properly. They rarely achieve more than five hundred cuts before the victim dies. They lack true artistry."

"I assume you've had the opportunity, over the centuries, to hone your skills in this regard?" she said, hoping that her voice was still coldly professional.

He bowed slightly. "I promise you an evening and a night of the greatest pain imaginable," he said. "I trust you understand why I must do this thing to you."

"Just get on with it," she said. The words took the last of her courage. She closed her eyes tight.

The first cut was so small, so slight, that she barely even felt it. It was on her breast, a tiny nick in the naked upper half of her soft, sweet flesh sphere. She whimpered softly but did not open her eyes. The next cut was a millimeter lower, and slightly deeper. She found herself worrying about the scars these wounds would leave on her beautiful breasts--ridiculous, since she was going to die. Still, what woman wouldn't panic as her greatest sexual assets were slowly destroyed?

She squirmed helplessly on the table, moaning gently as he inscribed an intricate scalloped pattern across her breast. Each cut was slightly deeper than the last; the blood welled up inside her and spilled out into the purple satin of her bra. Still, none of the cuts did much more than break the surface of her skin, and none was longer than an inch. His restraint was incredible. She understood why he was so good at this: his mind was unclouded by desire. A mortal man would have been distracted, would have wanted to rape her: the vampire could focus exclusively on her pain.

He worked slowly, turning her other breast into a mirror image of the first. The pain began to build within her body. It was subtly overwhelming: each cut added only slightly to her total agony, but there were so very many...the tiny slices covered the entire exposed area of her breasts. Her tits--the huge, round Hollywood tits of which she was so proud--began to feel like chopped meat. On the vampire's table, Buffy writhed and gasped, arching her blonde brows and praying for an end which she knew would be very long in coming.

The vampire moved down to her flat, smooth belly. This proved to be a perfect canvas for his art. He began with a long, shallow cut from sternum to g-string, drawing the razor all the way down the center of her torso. Then he started to trace her ribs, running the razor along each bone with uncanny accuracy. She wondered if these longer cuts counted in the same way as the shorter ones. How close was she to a thousand? Or was that just a metaphor, an estimate? One thing she knew for sure: the vampire intended to keep her alive for as long as inhumanly possible.

The razor found her thighs, and she danced on the table as it dug into her tender flesh. The vampire wrote on her skin with fluid ease, tracing intricate spirals of blood and pain along the insides of her legs in response to some unspeakable undead artistic vision. Buffy noticed that she was screaming now, and wondered how long that had been going on. It was only natural, of course. The pain was building quickly now, towards some unforeseen detonation.

No inch of her body was spared, apart from the privileged places beneath her lingerie. Hips and calves, arms and neck, shoulders and navel--all felt the blade. She risked a glance down at her torso and immediately regretted it. Her slender, big breasted body was a bloody mosaic, the flesh opened in a way which was brutal but frighteningly beautiful. The worst part of it all was that she understood this: he really was turning her body into a work of art. She had no doubt at all that she was in the hands of a true Ling-Che master.

At last he came to her face. "You are very beautiful," he said to her, pressing the blade against her cheek, "...for a barbarian, that is." And then he went to work on her sweet visage, drawing a series of parallel lines that began at her nose and continued diagonally down her cheeks. Buffy began to cry. "Oh, please, no, not my face," she begged. "Oh, please, without my face I'm nothing...oh, God, just kill me, please..."

"That's the first time you've begged for death," he observed. "And we are well over halfway through the Ling-Che. You are a woman of exceptional character and strength."

Halfway? "Please," she sobbed, "I can't take any more..."

"But of course you can," he said, slicing her upper lip. "You should be grateful that I have chosen to limit myself to the front of your body. If I were to perform a full Ling-Che on you, I would just now be starting on your back, your buttocks."

"It's monstrous," she whispered.

"Of course," the monster agreed. "But it is also magnificent: slow vivisection, made into an art. Nothing less would do for a vampire hunting bitch such as yourself." The razor sliced through the straps of her bra, and at last Buffy's bare breasts were revealed. They stood out pert and proud, puffy pink nipples erect. Their unspoiled lower halves stood in stark contrast to the ruin of their upper hemispheres. The vampire pressed the blade against her firm round tit and began to draw a spiral pattern, pulling the razor up and around, cutting deeper as he went, until at last he reached her hard nipple. A fountain of red gushed forth as the blade went through the nipple, and Buffy howled. Her other breast, of course, soon experienced the exact same.

There was only one part of her still untouched. She had been trying to deny it, to force it out of her mind, but that was impossible now. The blade moved down, found her g-string. She whimpered as he cut the fabric away to reveal her cunt. There were the pink lips, lightly dusted with a fur the same hue as her straight blonde mane. Now began the final sequence: the orderly, precise line of cuts, beginning at her thigh and marching inexorably inwards, until at last the razor found her lips, and then cutting, oh Jesus, cutting lengthwise, and then a hard, deep sideways slash across her clit, castrating her, and another fountain of blood now, and her body convulsing on the table, back arched, bloody breasts thrust up and out as Buffy tried to die.