by Iona Nixon
His mind kept racing for a good while longer but at some point exhaustion caught up with him and he drifted off to one of the best and most contented nights of sleep in his life. In that moment, life was good.
* * *
The cold roused Sarah sometime in the middle of the night, the sweat from her body having chilled as she lay naked, her body draped over Stephen's. His breathing was slow and rhythmic, comforting her and bringing a smile to her face. She thought of all they had done that day and she realized with pleasure that she was happy.
Quietly she reached for the cover crumpled at the foot of the bed and pulled it over both of them, inching closer to him until she could feel her naked clit pressing against his thigh and her nipples being tickled by his chest hairs. "I love you," she whispered in his ear and she lay her head back down to sleep.
The End.
Dance in the Rain
I walked out of the office into the rain. It was both a relief and a pain for it to be raining. A relief because hopefully it would help to quell the fires up in Bastrop, but a pain because I had to walk three blocks to where I had parked my truck. By the time I reached it, my waist-length black hair was hanging in limp strands and my makeup was ruined. Good thing I didn't have a date or anything to worry about tonight. I looked horrendous when I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear view. My hair clung to my face and my clothes stuck to me as I sat down in the seat.
Driving with wet jeans on was only slightly less difficult than any other movement would have been in wet denim. Happy that I didn't have a standard transmission anymore, I pulled out of the lot and headed home. My colleagues made fun of me for living in the country, but I loved it and made fun of them for living in the city. They would never understand. How could they? They had grown up with the sirens and lights and the noise of it all. I, however, relished the silence of a backwoods night. The rain would be ticking off the roof of my house, not against the windows of some tiny apartment. There was a real chance that if it rained enough I wouldn't be able to get out of my driveway in the morning. It had happened before. All it would take was a good three to four inches of rain and I would need a boat to leave my house. It was wonderful.
My house was a good half-hour outside of the city limits if there was no traffic. Once I got past F.M.1604, where the road went down to two lanes and straightened out for the most part, there wasn't another car on the road. I let my foot press down on the accelerator, feeling as though my truck was floating over the rain-slick highway. No one would ride with me in a carpool, though there were several people living on my way to work that I could have saved some gas money. Doing eighty miles an hour in the pouring rain might have been one of the factors keeping them away. I didn't care. It meant I had a quiet vehicle except for the radio and didn't have to wait for anyone to come out of the office after me or worry about being late because someone forgot their briefcase.
I pulled into my driveway just as the rain began to let up. It had been falling steadily for the better part of an hour, but the fact that it was already letting up was not good. I was far enough north of the city that I could smell the smoke from the brush fires when the wind was right. Most of the hill country had been evacuated or had been warned to expect it. They needed the rain, bad. All those thoughts left my mind when I saw the faint flash of taillights as my headlights swept my house. Dorian was here and I felt a tingle run down my spine the moment when I knew he had heard the tires popping on the gravel. The old imp would have used his magic to get into the house by now. For some reason, he preferred to use my house to practice what the demonologists taught at the local community college. Maybe he didn't want the demons seeing a certain painting he had hidden in his house.
He wasn't the Dorian Gray of fiction who never aged, but he did have a painting of a very old man hanging on his office wall, and he liked to keep up appearances. In truth he was just a human who made a deal with the wrong demon and lost his soul, changing him into an imp. He was damned to wander the world and try to gather souls for his master. When I met him, I thought this meant he knew what he was doing. The fact of it was he didn't have any more of a clue now than he'd had when he lost his soul in the first place. He hadn't used a circle on that demon, either.
There wasn't a single light on in the house that I could see, but I guess the imp wouldn't need it with his vision. Wondering what he could possibly want, I walked in through the kitchen door and dropped my keys on the counter. Several of my hurricane lamps were glowing in the office, and I sighed. I could feel the magic building as he prepped a spell, and the faint whiff of lilac as his aura snapped a circle in place. I knew before I went in that there would be a molecule thick layer of his purple-shaded aura between the two of us and whatever he had just called into my office. The idiot insisted on calling things outside of a circle instead of trapping them inside it, and one of these days I was going to kill him for it. The demons got a kick out of it, though because it meant they weren't trapped in a four-foot-wide circle, forced to stoop if the one doing the summing couldn't make it tall enough for them to stand.
I opened the door to the office just as a man appeared sitting behind the desk. He had on a plain suit and tie and tossed his feet up to get more comfortable. Black eyes looked out at both of us, narrowing when they landed on me. Maybe he could taste the taint he had put on my aura.
"Dorian Lucien Gray," he said to the imp, then he turned back to me. "Ah, it's so good to see you again, Emerald. Do come sit down."
He patted his lap suggestively, and I took the chair across the desk from him as he frowned.
"You're not here because of me, Azazel," I said and then turned my attention to the imp who was stupidly sitting in the middle of the floor, staring at us. "Get this over with, Dorian. I'm tired and I need to go to bed."
"Your little friend here needs to learn more respect for your property, lover." The demon behind the desk smiled when I glared at the word. "Calling a demon in the middle of your house and not even putting him in a circle. Tsk, tsk. Whatever shall I do to him?"
"You can't do anything to me, demon," Dorian finally spoke up. "I summoned you, so I control you." That same attitude lost him his soul the first time. With no soul to lose, it would just get him killed now. If he was lucky. If he wasn't, well...
Azazel's smile faded as he looked at the imp, "Is that what they taught you in Demons 101? It doesn't work that way. I would think you learned this when you made that unfortunate deal with Sitri. Should have made that deal with me, you know. I might have just kept you as a slave instead of holding your soul in a bottle on a shelf."
Paling a bit, Dorian's hands moved in a complex curse that I didn't recognize. Azazel only smiled wider, showing even white teeth. "You are bound by the laws of summoning."
Turning to me, the demon said, "Explain to him how the laws of summoning really work, honey."
Dorian stared at me. He he was starting to look scared, but what did he really have to lose?
"The laws of summoning they teach you about in school don't exist. At all," I said.
He should know this by now. Maybe it was because the only school that would take him was a community college and not a certified demon university that taught true satanic magic, or maybe he had short term memory loss and couldn't remember the reason he needed to be more careful. I didn't know, but he had to stop summoning these demons into my office.
"Demons are summoned into circles for a reason, Dorian," I continued. "When they're in a circle, they will do just about anything to get out of it, as long as there is a profit in it for them. If you call them and they are outside the circle, there is nothing keeping them from walking right out the door to cause mischief."
Azazel laughed at the last comment, but Dorian paled further. Apparently he had finally realized what he was doing wrong.
"I thought that calling him without the circle would make it nicer than calling him into one," he said. "The professor said they are compelled to answer our questions when we sum
mon them."
"Did you use any kind of compulsion spell when you cast the summoning spell?" I asked, knowing he hadn't before he could even answer. He went so pale I thought he was going to faint.
Too bad he was so stupid in the ways of demonology. Of course, he had lost his soul in a deal with a demon so why did I have such high expectations? If he had really known anything, he would have known that a compulsion spell needed something from the person being compelled. Hair, blood, an article of clothing, it didn't matter. Though body parts helped to make the compulsion stronger.
I turned to Azazel. "If I let you hang around until sunrise, can he leave without you hurting him?"
Maybe knowing he wouldn't be banished would keep this from going south. I didn't want to have to redecorate my office if Azazel got mad.
Azazel eyed the imp, who was cowering into himself more than sitting now. "I suppose. Are you going to entertain me in the meantime?"
I shrugged, "Sure, yeah, whatever. Just don't get any blood on my hardwood."
Turning back to the imp, the demon waved his hand and said, "Leave. Before I change my mind and eat you. Soulless ones are so distasteful, but I'm sure Emerald has some salt or something."
Dorian gathered his books and herbs and walked through his circle, the touch of his aura making it disintegrate. He left quickly and didn't even look at me as he walked past, just leaving me there with the demon and probably hoping I would show up to work tomorrow. I seriously had to change my locks to something an imp couldn't get past. Turning back to the demon, I smiled.
"That was very bad of you, filling his head with those hints of the 'laws of summoning'," Azazel said as he stood and stepped toward me. His clothing changed as he walked, small wisps of a black fog puffing from him. Soon he was no longer in the suit and tie, instead choosing to wear jeans and a black t-shirt. It was utterly sexy and he knew it.
"I couldn't help it," I said, slumping into the chair. "It's like he didn't learn anything from his deal with Sitri. The 'professors' are hacks who know just enough magic to get a position at the local community college. I'm surprised none of them have gotten anyone killed."
"Maybe I should show up there sometime, teach them something new," he said as he pulled me from the chair and out of the office, not bothering to turn on a light as we went through the kitchen and into the living room. "Or maybe I could just teach you something new."
He led me out onto the back porch and stood there, holding my hand. Sometimes I thought he just needed a companion, and other times I thought he needed his ass kicked. Fireflies sparked at the treeline and the air smelled of rain and sulfur. The acrid scent of him made my nose wrinkle for a moment, but I was almost used to it. At least three times a week he was summoned by someone who couldn't hold him, and just as often he was able to break their circles. Some poor sods bedroom wold get smashed around, but I had made a deal with him long ago that as long as he didn't kill anyone he could come out here and stay until the sun rose. He would be pulled back to his hell dimension then by default and not banished back, which apparently hurt. And we wondered why demons were so grumpy all the time.
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He had taught me a lot of things, more than half of which had left a taint on my aura visible to anyone who knew what to look for. "What would this new thing cost me? Another mark? I already have one of those, thank you very much."
I held my arm up where a scar in the shape of a flame adorned my wrist. I had to wear wide bracelets to cover it most of the time, though I sometimes forgot.
"No," he said, turning to the sky. His short black hair was blowing in the wind that had kicked back up. "I want to teach you how to dance in the rain. It's been years since I was able to dance in the rain."
"Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but I think you just missed the last rain we're going to have for a while," I said.
This shower had been the first rain we'd seen in months. We weren't likely to get anymore for a while, and I would be surprised if we got any before December. It was an unusually dry year for us, and it didn't help that the countryside had suddenly caught fire. I had wondered more than once if Azazel had had a hand in those fires.
"I didn't start the fires, but I didn't really try to stop the ones who did," he said, reading my mind easily. "Nature has its needs, you know."
"And I suppose that half the state had to be burned to the ground?" I asked.
"Half the state is not on fire, only a very large chunk," he replied. "And just watch, it will rain again." The fires had been a major case of unease in Texas. A lot of people wondered why nothing had been done to help the citizens of the state. California burns down every year, and the country grieves. Some of the worst fires in Texas happen and it's only mentioned on local news and Facebook.
I looked at him as if he'd gone nuts. His eyes had gone white and his hair was an odd mix of white, silver, and blue. It was a drastic difference from the black eyes and hair he'd had a minute ago. He smiled and there was a flash of lightning, thunder rolling almost immediately. The rain started again first as a light drizzle, and then as a full downpour. Without warning, he pulled me off the porch and into the deluge. He was too strong to resist, so I just squealed and went with him instead of being dragged.
"I told you it would rain again. Now, dance with me." He looked to the sky and I could feel the slick sensation of his power washing over me. The bastard could make it rain. Maybe I should pin him in a circle in the middle of the fires until he helped get them contained.
Under normal circumstances, it was ridiculously stupid to be dancing in the rain when there was lightning, too, but since that first flash there hadn't been anymore. It was strange because when lightning was so close that the thunder followed it immediately, it didn't just disappear. Azazel spun me around but kept my hand in his so he could pull me back to his chest. I laughed in spite of myself at the image we must make. The scent of sulfur was unmistakable, and Azazel's clothes disappeared in a puff of black hell-smoke. I stopped moving and the smile slid from my face as I watched a pair of large black wings spread from his back and saw a tail appear behind his legs.
When he looked back at me his eyes were glowing a slight green, no longer the bottomless black they had been every other time I saw him. His hair now fell below his shoulders and when he held his hand up I could see that the fingers had elongated. I couldn't see his feet in the dark, but I was sure there would be talons at the ends of his ankles.
"It's been a long time since I have taken my true form in front of anybody other than another demon," his voice was now so low it almost hurt to hear it. "What do you think? And be honest, don't let your fear talk for you."
Swallowing my immediate reaction, I looked at him. His shoulders were strong and his arms were well muscled. He had abs that would make any body builder cry out in envy. I skipped over the important bits with some difficulty and admired his thighs. It was too dark to see below his knees, though. His skin had gone from an almost normal tan to a shimmering gold as though he had been attacked by a glitter-wielding fairy. The green glow of his eyes made the vertical slits of his pupils evident even at this distance and in the dark. His hair was thick and wavy, the black shot through with strands of spun gold. There was no hair on his chest, but a thin line started just below his navel and continued downward, drawing my eyes lower.
"You're beautiful," I said, raising my gaze to meet his. "Truly breathtaking."
"I did not get attacked by a fairy with glitter," he said, teasing.
Even as he joked he stepped closer, and the closer to me he got the happier he was to be there. I could see his smile as I was obviously distracted by his nudity. Rain water ran down his body and dripped off the hand he held out to me.
"I still want to dance in the rain."
He pulled me close to him, his wings rising over his head and blocking some of the rain. The glow dimmed in his eyes as he held me and I could feel the heat rising from his skin. It was hotter than normal body
heat, but I guess if you're standing naked in the rain it helps to have an internal heater.
The hand on my waist slowly began to rise up, bringing my shirt with it. When I tried to protest, he said, "You have to be naked to feel the real magic in a summer rain, Emerald Lee Frees. Besides, it's not as much fun if I'm the only one."
He pulled my shirt up again and this time got it over my head. My bra brought a goofy look to his face as though it were alien to him, but he got it off in the first try, throwing it away as though it was distasteful. I remembered then that demons didn't like synthetic materials, and the spandex mix of the bra had probably made his hands itch. The button fly of my jeans came undone easy enough, but it's always a bitch to get wet denim to separate itself from the body. He managed and left them in a pile at my feet. Kneeling, he looked up at me and smiled.
"And you said I was beautiful."
My panties came off then and he rose to look down at me again.
I stood in front of him with my hands on his chest and my legs closed as tightly as they could be and leave me standing. Slowly he bent and kissed me, his hands on my shoulders. At the first touch, I gasped. His lips were as soft as silk against mine. When his tongue started to explore, I finally opened up and kissed him back. I felt the heat rising from his skin, and suddenly I just wanted to touch him. To feel him inside me.
He slid his hands down my back, the motion made all the more erotic standing in the rain. With one mighty motion, he pulled me into the air with his hands around my waist, forcing me to put my arms and legs around him or fall to the ground. It was muddy, so I clung to him. Smiling at my clutching hands, he kissed me again.
I could feel him throbbing and hard between our bodies, but there was something else playing along my pussy and I remembered he had a tail at the same time that it slid smoothly into me. The tip of it was smooth, but it had to be thick enough that I wouldn't be able to touch my fingers around it. Moaning into his mouth, I arched against him trying to give him a deeper angle. As his tail moved in me, I cried out softly and I could feel his shoulders flexing and his wings begin to move. Before I could even think about what he was doing, we were flying about a foot off the ground toward the porch.