by Noah Harris
A shot from upstairs told them where at least one of their friends was. Tyrone led them to the foot of the stairs.
“Who’s up there?” Richard asked in a loud whisper.
“It’s me, darling,” Steve said. “I’ve ruined my manicure with all these powder burns. Oh, there’s someone dying up here named Cliff who wants to curse your descendants to the thirteenth generation.”
“It’s a good thing I don’t want kids, then. Where are the others?”
“Not sure where the others are, but I just saw two of those nasty cultists sneaking across the lawn. Sorry I couldn’t hit them with this ghetto gun.”
A creak of a floorboard made them spin around. Two figures loomed out of the darkness.
“Shit!” Alison raised her knife.
“Don’t kill the only straight man here, pretty lady!” Georgios said.
“Two of them are about to come back into the house, the most dangerous two,” Richard told them.
“Damn, they could come in anywhere,” Adam said. “There’s a front door, a back door, a garage door, a cellar door, and all the windows are open because of the heat.”
Tyrone went to the bottom of the stairs and whispered up. “Steve, peek out the windows on all sides of the house and see if you can see them.”
“Shall we split up and look for them?” Adam asked.
“No, we stick together,” Georgios said. “We got more fighters than them. My grandfather always say you keep more numbers than the enemy if you can.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Richard said.
A gunshot rang out from the front of the house and some glass broke upstairs.
“Steve, are you OK?” Adam called out.
“They’re coming in through the living room window!” he called down.
Richard headed back to the kitchen, which opened up onto the living room.
“I got the best gun,” Adam said, cutting in front of him.
As they entered the kitchen, they ducked low behind a counter that ran down the middle of the room. Richard cut right to where he remembered the knife rack stood. He grabbed a butcher knife and squatted, using the center counter as cover. He peeked around the corner…
…just in time to see cultists coming in not only through the window to his left, but the garage door right in front of him.
Adam rose up and took out the first cultist coming through the garage door. The man toppled backwards, leaving Tyrone an open shot at the one directly behind the first.
His zip gun barked. The man spun and tumbled down the two steps leading back down to the garage.
A shot came from the window, the flare revealing David’s snarling face. Adam cried out and fell.
“No!” Richard shouted, and threw his knife.
David threw himself back out the window to get out of the way and the knife hit the man next to him.
“You piece of shit!” the figure shouted. Richard recognized Sam’s voice.
The two cultists disappeared behind the windowsill.
They heard Sam’s voice again, this time a whisper. “Son, help me.”
They heard the sound of running.
Georgios rushed to the window, ducked back as a shot chewed up the frame, and then fired his zip gun at a target on the front lawn.
“They’re getting away!” he shouted.
Richard and Tyrone were too concerned about Adam to give chase. He lay on the kitchen floor clutching his abdomen, a pool of blood spreading like a dark shadow on the linoleum around him.
“Adam! Is it bad?” Richard asked “Steve, get down here!”
Tyrone grabbed some washcloths and pressed it against the wound. Adam cried out in pain.
“Steve?” he said in a faint voice.
Adam’s husband burst into the room. Despite the poor light, he immediately saw what had happened.
“Oh my God!”
He didn’t run to Adam yet, though. He fired his zip gun, the bullet crashing through the window behind them. Someone screamed outside and they heard a loud thud on the porch.
Steve rushed to his lover’s side.
“Oh no! Adam, can you hear me?”
Georgios pushed everyone aside. “I know how to do field dressing. My grandfather teach me. I save him. The rest of you go get the Devil worshippers.”
Steve wouldn’t budge from Adam’s side, but the rest armed themselves and rushed outside. In the distance, a car sped away down the country road, turning a corner and disappearing. Cursing their luck, they scoured the house and surrounding woods. It only took a few minutes to see that David and Sam had gotten away, but all of the other cultists were dead. Steve had gotten the one lurking on the porch right between the eyes.
By the time they made it back, Georgios had ripped up a tablecloth and bandaged Adam. Steve knelt by his boyfriend, weeping and holding his hand.
“He be OK for now, but we need hospital,” Georgios said.
“We left your pickup on another road through those back woods,” Tyrone told Richard. “It ain’t far.”
“Carry him back there,” Richard told him. “I got to finish up here. I’ll catch up.”
“Want me to stay?” Tyrone asked.
“No. I need to do this alone.”
As his friends gently raised Adam and carried him onto the back porch and across the lawn, Richard went to the garage. As he hoped, he found a large plastic container of gasoline sitting next to the lawn mower. He hefted it and found it was full, perhaps ten gallons.
First, he went down to the summoning and binding room. It felt cold, empty, and powerless. Finding a chisel in a toolbox in the cellar, he scraped at both the triangle and the pentagram. Next, he splashed a bit of gasoline around. Making his way back upstairs, he splashed more gasoline on the shag carpet of the living room. Then he went upstairs, turning on the stairway light so he could see.
He found Cliff sprawled on the floor of his study. Floor to ceiling teak bookshelves were packed with leather bound volumes. At first he thought Cliff was dead, but then he listlessly turned his head and stared at Richard through unfocused eyes.
“We could have had the world,” he whispered.
“I already have it,” Richard replied, and doused Cliff with gasoline.
He splashed some more onto the books, soaking spines that bore titles in a dozen different languages. Walking backwards out the door, he left a trail of gasoline behind him on the carpet of the hallway and down the steps.
He ran out of gasoline a little before the bottom. Richard went back into the living room, grabbed a cushion, and pressed it into the gasoline-soaked carpet until it was good and wet. Then, he went back to the stairs.
Cliff started chanting upstairs. Richard didn’t recognize the language and he didn’t care to.
Pulling a lighter out of his pocket, he lit up the cushion. Flames shot up.
He tossed the flaming cushion onto the stairs.
The gasoline lit up with a whoosh as a fiery trail rushed up the stairs.
A second later, Cliff stopped chanting and started screaming.
Richard walked out onto the back porch, lighting another cushion on his way and tossing it back into the house and onto the shag carpet.
By the time he made it to the tree line, the house was fully alight. He stood and watched for a moment. As the flames rose higher, he thought he glimpsed a hooded figure beckoning to him from the cellar window.
Richard shook his head.
“I’m done with you. I’m done with all of this.”
Then he went to rejoin his friends, as the first sirens wailed in the distance.
“The Hooded One has been put back in his place,” Richard said. He could not keep the heavy note out of his voice. He caught Tyrone looking at him and met his boyfriend’s eye. “We’re free of him. Forever.”
They sat in the back room of Laszlo’s bookshop. Steve was at Adam’s side in the hospital, where the doctors had told him that while he had lost a lot of blood, he would be fine. The bullet had
missed all the major organs and the doctors said he would make a full recovery. Adam had spun the cops a story about being mugged. The police didn’t ask too many questions. It was common enough in New York.
“And the cult?” Laszlo asked.
“Most of them are dead. Anton Black got sucked into the other side by the demon he had summoned to guard the breach. Cliff’s summoning room has been completely destroyed and him with it.”
“That’s excellent news! And I have some good news for you,” Laszlo said. “I spent the day evaluating the books and items you took from Anton Black’s house. Some of the pieces were quite rare. I haven’t even held a copy of some of the scarcer tomes before. He had quite the collection.”
Richard thought of the even greater collection at Cliff’s house. All of that was gone now. He decided not to share that information with Laszlo as it would probably upset him.
“I’m not interested in keeping any of that stuff,” Richard said.
Laszlo nodded and pulled out a notepad. “I anticipated as much, so I tallied up the value and what I can offer all of you.”
Richard blinked. “Offer us?”
“This will greatly add to my stock. The store will flourish for months to come. I already know several wealthy collectors who will leap at the chance to own some of these items.”
Richard hesitated. “While that’s tempting, Laszlo, I’m worried about the content of some of those books.”
Laszlo’s lip curled. He picked up a metal wastepaper basket and showed it to them. It was filled to the brim with ashes.
“This is all that remains of four of the most valuable books in the collection, each of them worth enough to buy a house. But they were not fit to exist on this Earth. I’d rather burn them than have the biggest mansion in New York. Never fear, Richard. The tomes that remain are all general knowledge, knowledge that can be used for good or ill. I’d like to give you a fair price for them.”
“We could all use the bread,” Tyrone said.
Laszlo smiled again. “This will buy considerably more than bread, young man. I’m willing to offer the six of you $18,000.”
Silence.
“Eighteen grand?” Tyrone said. “Damn, that’s $3,000 each!”
Laszlo raised a hand. “No, young man. I mean $18,000 each. Some of those volumes date back to the sixteenth century.”
More silence. This time Richard broke it.
“Th-that’s a year’s wages at a good job.”
Laszlo inclined his head. “As I said, some of these books are all but priceless. The various mystical objects you found are also of considerable rarity.”
“I’m off the corner,” Tyrone declared.
Richard took his hand. “And it looks like your mother is going to get that air conditioning.”
“She’s getting a hell of a lot more than that. What are you gonna do with the bread, Country?”
“I’m not sure yet, but we’re going to find an apartment of our own and I’m quitting modeling.”
Tyrone planted a kiss on his lips. “Glad to hear it. I want you all to myself.”
Richard looked into his deep brown eyes. “You mean that?”
“Hell yeah. Well, we can go to the saunas together sometimes.”
“And sneak back into the dark room at The Hole in One,” Richard added, giving him another kiss.
“But no toilets,” Tyrone said.
“Definitely no toilets.”
They laughed and embraced. After a minute, Richard turned to Georgios and Alison to ask what they’d do with their share, only to find them in a huddle, whispering eagerly to one another.
“What are you guys whispering about over there?” Richard asked.
Alison smiled at him. “You’ll see. I’m so glad it’s all over!”
Richard shook his head grimly. “Not for me it isn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I still have to pay off a debt.”
The next evening, he stood naked in the summoning room in his apartment. He had lubed up his ass with Crisco and done his best to loosen his hole for the onslaught to come, but he knew nothing would truly prepare him for this.
He took a deep breath, and in a voice he tried and failed to keep steady, he said, “I’m ready.”
A hot wind blew, and the white walls of the summoning room fell away to reveal the bare plain of the demon realm. Before him stood the Taurus demon, his long penis already half erect in anticipation of the revelries to come.
Richard glanced at his bull’s head and looked down at his feet.
“Make yourself look more human. I prefer it that way.”
“Your preferences mean nothing today, slave!”
The Taurus demon plucked Richard off his feet, tucked him under his arm, and ran off across the plain.
“You will know agonies and ecstasies like you never imagined, mortal. But first, I wish to show you the results of your handiwork.”
In the distance appeared the yawning maw of a slave pit. Winged figures wheeled above it like buzzards over a kill. Other shapes—hunched, bloated, reptilian—stood all around the edge. All looked down at what went on within.
Even from a distance, Richard could hear the screams. The Taurus demon’s long legs ate up the ground and within a few moments, they stopped at the edge of the slave pit.
What Richard saw there almost blasted his sanity into a thousand pieces.
Anton Black rode naked atop a closely packed crowd of inhuman forms, held aloft by a myriad of paws, hands and tentacles. Every orifice was brutally penetrated. Burning cum scorched his skin. He was thrown high in the air, and the crowd parted for a huge demon who held his spiked cock upright. Anton’s limbs gyrated as he flew high enough to reach eye level with Richard and the Taurus demon. For a moment, their eyes met.
Anton shouted something Richard didn’t catch. It sounded desperate, pleading.
The former cult leader plunged down onto the thorny penis, letting out a howl of agony. The crowd roared with laughter and dove onto him, each taking him by the front or back in rapid succession. Lines formed in front of him and behind him, stretching for miles.
Finally, the Taurus demon led him away.
“Do you pity him?” the Taurus demon asked.
Richard thought of the human sacrifice. He thought of the cult leader’s twisted face when he had tried to kill him, and of the terrors of this pit if they had been unleashed on New York City.
“No,” he said at last.
The Taurus demon laughed, the deep sound painful to Richard’s ear as it was pressed against the demon’s side.
“I thought not. He has angered many in the demon realm and will be made to suffer. But what do you think of our hospitality? Does it look pleasing to you, mortal? Would you like to spend all eternity like that?”
Richard looked away. “No.”
“This is the worst of the slave pits. He will suffer torment like you cannot imagine. Do not worry, you are going to a much more congenial pit. But you will be put through your paces. Oh my, yes, you will know what it is like to be a slave.”
The Taurus demon turned and ran with Richard across the plain once again. Anton Black’s cries faded in the distance.
As Richard was carried across the barren plain, his body yearned for what was in store. His cock was stiff and hard, and while he trembled at what the next twenty-four hours might bring, at the same time he relished the feeling, knowing it would be the most intense sexual experience of his life.
The Taurus demon came to the edge of another pit. It was smaller than the one where Anton Black would suffer an eternity being ravished, but it was no less full of demons.
They looked up at his naked mortal flesh with hunger in their eyes. Suddenly Richard felt very small, very vulnerable, and very alone.
And very turned on.
The Taurus demon lifted him up so the demons could get a better look at him. They roared their approval.
Then, he plunged Richard down on that lon
g, thick member with the flared head.
Richard cried out at the suddenness and completeness of the penetration. At the sound of his pain, the demons cheered again.
The Taurus demon lifted Richard up, the stiff cock pulling out of his ass. Richard breathed a sigh of relief, only to cry out again as the Taurus demon plunged back inside him.
The demon kept at it, lifting him off and pulling him down, so that each thrust was a full penetration from the head to the base. The demons gazed up at them with glowing eyes, licking their lips with forked tongues, waiting for their turn.
Richard had no doubt that they would all get their turn. Millennia of unsatiated desire was going to be unleashed on him this day.
The Taurus demon’s treatment of him seemed to take forever. At last, with one final slamming down of Richard’s body onto that thick prong, he felt a great gout of sizzling cum shoot deep inside him.
Before Richard had time to recover or even take a deep breath, the Taurus demon cried out, “He is yours!” and flung him into the pit.
Eager hands grabbed him and broke his fall.
He was turned around and before he could do anything a fat, knobbed cock pushed into his ass and another shoved down his throat.
Richard began to gyrate his ass and bob his head, sucking the demon cock for all it was worth. If he was going to be their plaything for a day, he was going to show them just what he was capable of.
The demons chuckled with pleasure. Within a minute, both had shot their seed into him.
Without a moment’s break, they turned him over. A creature that looked like a satyr from Greek mythology held him up by the waist, entered him, and gave him a rapid pounding, its hide scratching the inside of his thighs. A hairy paw pulled his head back and a musty cock slid deep down his throat. He could not see the creature it belonged to, its fur covered Richard’s face. He decided that was probably for the best. The creature’s dick tasted strange, and seemed to twist and turn in his mouth of its own volition. His groping hands soon found themselves jacking off another pair of demons.
The satyr came quickly, replaced by a creature equally eager. The hairy thing deep throating him took longer, enjoying the feel of his teenage mouth around whatever blasphemy hung between its legs. Those he was jacking off shot ribbons of hot cum that lashed all over his body.