by Alexa Black
It was a good sign. Apparently, not everyone here hated her after all.
Just most people.
The bustling marketplace, it seemed, had an end, and the Rings narrowed as they reached it. The noise and the bright lights faded, and the play of wing shadows gave way to harsh lights.
They stopped in front of a plain door, big and wide, sized for an Outcast but big even then. Glyphs decorated it, glowing green. Kara pressed a clawed hand to a panel and stared into a scanner, and they flared a brighter green.
Kara intoned something. Sue suspected it was less about opening the door and more for Sue to hear it. She hadn’t learned many of the untranslatable words, but she thought she heard something about loyalty or perseverance.
“Welcome,” said Kara, and gave what Sue suspected was an ironic little bow.
They stepped into a dim room, purple-tinted lights glowing from panels on the walls. A large screen filled one wall, almost like in the little room she’d come to consider hers, and a long sofa sat in front of it.
Upholstered with cloth, no less. Kara must have been someone important. Sue rushed toward it. It would feel so good to sit—or even to lie down!—on something soft.
“Eager, are you?” Kara teased her. Sue ignored her and flopped down onto the sofa.
After so long on her little cot, it felt like heaven.
“You like that?” Kara said. “Then come into the bedroom.”
Sue grinned. Don’t mind if I do. But she was tired of following Kara around like a lost puppy, and besides, she’d started all of this with an adventure. Might as well see what a demon’s apartment looked like.
Luxurious one-bedroom, overlooking hell.
Off to one side Sue could see what she suspected was the equivalent of a kitchen, with a small table and some cabinets above it, bearing bowls and bottles of various sizes and shapes. Most looked empty, but dim light winked from a few.
I guess some ambrosia keeps. Sue chuckled. But beside the cabinet stood something mounted on the floor that might have been the alien equivalent of a refrigerator.
She made up her mind to raid it even as she followed Kara into the bedroom.
* * *
The room turned out to be plain, dimly lit like the living quarters. Like them, it was lit by strips in the walls, glowing red and pink and purple.
The bed was big and looked comfortable, though to Sue’s disappointment it was thin like the cot she’d lain on. Oh well. Kara was a soldier, after all.
At least it had sheets, or the equivalent, dyed dark colors but patterned with bold streaks of red and gold. Sue looked from the bed to Kara, whose scars glowed in the dim light.
It suited her, Sue decided.
Kara lay down on the bed and beckoned to Sue with one crooked claw. “Come here, pet.”
Sue peeled off her clothes, but stayed put. “You like this too much.”
“And you want to come and lie down with me.”
“Well, yes.”
“Then come.” Kara drew back the sheet.
Sue climbed in and nestled against her. Her body was warm, her skin a strange but inviting texture.
“Let me touch you,” Sue said. “I played your game all day. Now let me.”
“Aren’t you tired?”
“Yeah. But I want you.”
“I want you too, human. Those hands of yours are soft, strange as they are.”
Sue grinned. So I did get through to you. She slipped an arm around Kara, who shifted under her hand, obviously enjoying the touch.
“I would like to rest. Tomorrow.”
Sue rolled her eyes, but didn’t argue. Kara’s warmth was already tugging her toward sleep. She wrapped her arm tighter around Kara’s stomach and closed her eyes.
Chapter Thirteen
Sue stirred in her sleep. Images burst through her mind, violent as a sudden spray of blood.
First, a boy lying inert on the pavement of her colony at home. His hair was black, his eyebrows thick, his skin a shade darker than Sue’s. Blood ran from his nose and over his cheeks, and his body jerked as someone kicked him. Jeers and laughs of encouragement rang out. Pins on his jacket glowed and flickered, but otherwise he didn’t move.
Sue slipped forward as best she could. In the strange twisted time that came with dreams, she could still hear his cries even though he had stopped speaking, the lilt of another colony’s accent in his pleading voice.
Now she rushed forward. She didn’t have anything perfect to say, just “Stop!” “No!” “What do you think you’re doing?” But she knew exactly how she wanted to say them: in the ringing tones of a soldier, a pilot, a woman with the authority to stop the mob in its tracks and turn away and find some other sport.
Only the words wouldn’t come out. They stayed jammed tight inside her throat and choked her. She tried to speak, to spew them out, but they wouldn’t come. She gaped instead. Like a fish. Like a person trying to breathe.
A person who would never speak at all.
One of the gang turned to her, a reveler’s grin on his face. His lip twisted into a snarl as he stared at her, and he reached out pale hands.
She didn’t stay. She didn’t fight. She turned and ran.
Her bad leg was a dead weight behind her. Her heart hammered in her chest. She’d never make it. Never get away. She hadn’t saved the boy, hadn’t even tried. And now she’d never save herself.
She willed herself to run. She’d have to run faster than she ever had before, if she wanted to live. Red sand misted her vision and winds swirled around her, grit cutting at the skin of her face and neck. But the hands reaching for her from behind were gone, at least.
She wrapped her ruined jacket around her like a cloak from some old story, trying to protect herself from the bitter winds. They cut at her anyway, making her close her eyes.
People passed by, their heads down, their bodies wrapped in frayed clothes that could never protect them from the elements here. But they stood about as tall as Sue or only a little taller, and they had hair on their heads and no halo of shadow around them or bright cracks in their skin.
Humans!
“Hey!” Sue called out to one of them, a man. He lifted a weary head, cragged with wrinkles, and shook his head.
“Hey!” Sue tried again.
But his response was a mournful note, too deep for any man to make. Flames rose around him, fed by the winds. Close to him, too close, too close.
This is hell. This guy isn’t a live human. He’s a damned one.
And I’m here too, because I didn’t save the boy. I’m here too, because I deserve to be.
As if in answer to her thoughts, Outcasts rose out of the mists, their bodies massive. Shadows swirled all around them, light blazing from the cracks in their stony flesh. They carried whips, glowing with the same energy as their bodies and their scars, and when they crashed down with them the winds followed, flame rising on their heels.
Like they weren’t weather at all, but something made by the whips. One more thing to torture the damned souls.
Sue knew she should run. But her bad leg didn’t want to move, emergency or no, and the glowing eyes of the Outcasts froze her where she stood. She stared at them, fixed in place, looking for anyone she knew, Kara or Saja or even Dehek, the angry child who’d taunted her so eagerly before.
Instead, a massive Outcast rose from the sands in front of her, his flint-gray torso spanning half the horizon, his horns spearing the roiling sky. His eyes and scars blazed orange, and the shadows that curled around him turned the red stormy sky black. One of his hands reached out for the humans, his claws the size of Sue’s forearms. He clenched his fist around them and they disappeared. They faded, a gray mist torn asunder by his curling fingers.
Sue’s ears filled with their wailing, with the winds that carried them away, and with the sounds of their dissolution.
Of course. They were dead. She was alive, and they were dead, and this was—
The Enemy. The real one, not t
he one the Outcasts gave that name.
Terror froze Sue in her place. The Lord of the Outcasts.
He raised his other arm, a fiery scourge held in his hand. The tails swung and winds came with them, knocking Sue to the ground. She clutched at the sand beneath her and stared up at him. His eyes blazed back, and Sue couldn’t tell if he was looking at her or looking through her, looking past her, looking at the kinds of things only a fallen angel could see.
But he raised his whip, and it blazed with the fires of this strange new hell she’d found and brought it crashing down.
Sue thought of the boy. Had he lived? Had he died? Had they killed him once she’d left? She closed her eyes, his face still filling her mind’s eye, and hoped she’d have enough strength not to scream.
* * *
She awoke lying beside something warm, half like stone and half like flesh. The warmth felt good. She burrowed closer to it, hoping it might ease the hammering of her heart.
Her eyes were closed, but still she could see the boy’s bloody face. She took deep breaths and opened her eyes.
Shadow curled around her, but in the midst of it, golden light blazed. Light and warmth and—
Kara.
I’m with Kara.
I’m safe here.
She wrapped an arm around Kara’s body and clutched at her, willing herself to calm down.
Kara stirred beside her, the shadows moving. “Sue? What is it?”
“A dream,” Sue said. “I had a dream. A bad one. Some memories. Memories I can’t quite leave behind.”
Kara stirred beside her. Sue pulled away just enough to let her turn and face her. Like her scars, her eyes were gold and bright.
“Some memories are difficult,” Kara said after a long moment. She reached up to touch Sue’s hair. “And the difficult ones are the ones that don’t leave us.”
Chapter Fourteen
“You fought a war,” Sue said.
“And lost it,” Kara said. She waved a hand. “And became this.”
“What were you fighting for?”
Kara gave a guttural growl and shook her head. “We had always been favored. Always been honored above the other angels. We were the warriors. The defenders. The protectors of a world of light.”
“Heaven.” Sue closed her eyes and imagined it. A place filled with the souls of the dead, laughing and singing. A plain under an endless sunny sky.
The souls of the good dead, anyway. The boy’s image burst across the backs of her eyelids again. Would she be one of those good dead? She didn’t even know if he’d lived or died. She thought of the hand, in her dream, raising its fiery whip.
She almost felt like she deserved it.
“Heaven,” Kara repeated, tasting the word.
Sue opened her eyes to banish the vision. To replace the terrifying Outcast in her mind with Kara, the one who made her feel good.
“Our stories say it’s where the dead go. A place in the skies, as wide as space.”
Kara’s eyes widened. “Wide as space? It’s just a world, like this one.”
“Where the dead go.”
“Nowadays, yes. Some human souls go there. But when we lived there, it was for us.”
“Is that why you rebelled?”
Kara chuckled. “It’s why some of us did. That was an age ago.”
“I won’t be offended.” Sue grinned. “Well, not very. I don’t like many humans either.”
Kara’s shadows settled around her. “Maybe that was part of it, for me. But that world was where we lived as we liked, and served only one.”
“The one you rebelled against.”
“Yes.”
“We call him God. Or some of us do, anyway.”
“He has great power, yes. Great enough to make worlds. Great enough to do this.”
She sat up and stretched. The scars torn through her chest glowed in the dim light. Then she turned, twisting her body to expose the thick scars on her back. They glowed too, a sick malignancy, and Sue felt bile rise to the back of her throat. She swallowed it down, Kara’s wing shadows swelling around her.
She couldn’t help herself. She reached out and splayed her fingertips against the scar.
Kara growled a warning, but Sue didn’t move her hand. She slid her fingers over the raised, textured skin, let her fingertips curl inward toward the glowing hollow in its center.
“You didn’t deserve this,” Sue whispered.
“What if I did?” Kara answered, still under Sue’s hands. “I was a soldier. A rebel. A killer. And a traitor to the only empire I ever knew.”
“No.” Sue ran her hands over the scars again, slipped them over the rough stone of Kara’s back. “No.”
“I am a destroyer.”
“You’re more than that. Much more than that.”
Kara said nothing.
“Turn around,” Sue said. “So I can look at you. Not just at your scar.”
Kara did. Sue looked her over, the tall horns curving from her head, the sculpted shape of her body, the bright fissures in her skin, the smooth delta between her legs.
Sue reached out and touched her shoulder, pressing her fingertips over one of the cracks. Sue closed her eyes and let it warm her. Let Kara feel her fingers, splayed against the stone of her skin. Then she slipped her hand down over Kara’s breasts and moved them over the gray pebbles of her nipples.
Kara’s eyes flickered and she let out a reverberating moan. Her fanged mouth parted and her throat was filled with fire. Sue’s sex pulsed at the sight. She’d done that. She’d caused that. She’d made an Outcast feel that. She pressed her legs together, wanting the friction.
But this wasn’t just about her. She moved her hand down over Kara’s stomach, firm with something like muscle, even though there was only heat and energy beneath her skin.
Strength. Strength that even the Fall couldn’t take away. She slid her hand over Kara’s hip, the flesh under her hand hot with inner fire or lust or both.
She’d take either. “Lie down.”
Kara tilted her head. “Now you’re giving me orders?”
Sue just stared, willing herself to look commanding, like the soldier she’d always hoped to be.
Kara lay on her back and looked up at Sue with a comfortable, lazy smile. Sue slid her fingers down. Kara bucked to meet them.
Her labia were polished channels of worn stone. And they were warm under Sue’s hands, too warm. But this was Kara, and Kara wouldn’t hurt her.
She took a deep breath. The shock of heat became a steady hum under her fingertips.
It felt amazing.
She slid her fingers over the stony flesh for a long moment. Kara had called her hands soft, and she wanted Kara to feel that softness. To know just who and what was touching her.
Kara’s eyes were glittering slits. She let Kara watch and wait a moment longer and then slipped her fingers over the nub of Kara’s clit.
Kara’s eyes opened and so did her mouth, a bright fanged grin. Sue moved her fingers, reverently at first. Then she sped up. Kara might be an immortal, but right now she was a woman, too. Someone to touch, to feel, to watch, to hear.
Kara panted and tilted her hips again. Sue slid her fingers down to Kara’s entrance. There was wetness, a slow drip of thick fluid, a warm honeyed molasses.
Not like this, Kara had said. That was an understatement.
Like Kara’s skin, her entrance was warm. Too warm for foolish and curious humans.
Sue didn’t hesitate. She plunged her fingers in.
A ripple of heat shot through Sue’s nerves, through her fingers, her palm, her wrist. For a moment, all she knew was that warmth, and she fell still, forgetting completely what she meant to do. But a growl of encouragement brought her back to herself.
Kara reached for her shoulders, her back, kneading lightly with clawed fingers. Sue grinned at the biting encouragement and began to move.
The warm core around her wasn’t quite like a human’s. Not as soft, not as flexi
ble. But it pulsed around her, and she could lose herself in it just as easily. She moved her fingers again, thrusting in a steady rhythm. Kara trembled around her again and she sped up.
Kara threw back her head and moaned. She clutched at Sue’s back, digging in. It stung, but Sue didn’t mind. Kara had always touched her like she was something delicate. She could let go now.
Sue moved her thumb over Kara’s clit, a wave of sympathetic desire building in her own sex when Kara bucked again, moving to her rhythm.
Come on. Come on. Be with me.
She leaned down over Kara and pressed her body to Kara’s, skin to strange and burning skin. She pushed into Kara hard, thrilled her thumb against her clit as she pressed closer.
Kara wrapped a hand around the back of Sue’s head and drew her into a fierce kiss. Her fangs worried Sue’s lip, then bit, sending another little shock through Sue’s nerves. Like the scratches, it felt good, a bright spike of intensity.
Kara took Sue’s lip in her mouth and sucked at the wound. Sue moaned into her mouth and pushed into Kara harder.
Kara stopped, trembling under her hands. Sue pulled away from the kiss and laughed. You’re supposed to be the succubus.
What would a succubus do? She pushed into Kara, teasingly at first, and then sped up. Kara roared, and tilted her hips again to match Sue’s rhythm.
Sue moved her thumb again. Then she pulled her fingers out, leaving only her fingertips inside.
Kara growled something. Sue couldn’t tell what. Maybe Sue’s name. Maybe something in the language of demons. It didn’t matter which. Sue drove her fingers in.
Kara opened her mouth and cried out. The hot core around Sue’s fingers roiled, a little earthquake around her hand.
Sue pressed against Kara, feeling the solidness of her body beneath her and the warmth rising from her cracks, and slid her fingers free.
Kara slid her hands over Sue’s back again, wrapped them around her, and tightened her grip.
* * *
“Thank you,” Sue said, still nestled against Kara.