by Ruby Duvall
“You wonder if Rosuke is one of the human-born demons recruited for the raids, don’t you?” she asked. Her voice was small and shaky as she took in the news of her village’s massacre, and she could barely get out her question before a sob stole her voice from her.
“Of course,” he said just as softly, his head hung low as he braced his arm on his knee.
“What are we going to do?” she choked out, feeling the tears rise up again. So many of the people whom she had grown up with had just died. Whereas the epidemic had stolen many people’s lives, it hadn’t been as sudden or as violent as having them murdered by evil incarnate. Her fellows had not been kind to her, or at least most of them hadn’t, but she had helped birth many children, had healed the wounds of dozens and had reversed many fevers. In their own way, many people had expressed their thanks, whether it had been a grateful look, or a soft word, or a sigh of relief with a glance at her face.
It was as if they all wanted to be nice but were forced by tradition, by some sort of mob effect, to be cruel. The worst sort of peer pressure.
Now all except for a few had died. She wondered if the leader and his wife had survived, if Ikuro and her many children had escaped, and if Master Takebe and his wife had been able to run away with his wife’s leg still so tender.
Vallen pulled her into his arms again, letting her cry against his neck, and shushed her with comforting words, saying that everything would turn out all right in the end.
She remembered her dream from last night then, recalling how his face had not been among the group greeting her as she returned to the estate, and she wondered if her lover’s comforting words would ring false or true…
Chapter Twenty-Five
A couple of days passed and every day was spent as efficiently as possible. Vallen spent a couple of hours over breakfast teaching her the basics of Mahou and he offered a translation of the counter-ritual to unmake his curse.
She watched intently as he scanned the Devil’s Hand for the cure and his eyebrows would shoot up in surprise every couple of pages. Translating as he went, he found some spells amongst those uneven pages that were powerfully destructive, cruel, sadistic and even sickening.
One ritual was powerful enough to pull a tsunami of any height and destroy the coastal cities. Another would curse someone to never find love, which could be augmented by forcing that person to experience rape at the hands of whomever the spell caster saw fit, including the victim’s own family members or even animals.
Shumei shuddered to think of it.
He found the ritual Majo had used to suck the youth from Akki. When active, Majo stayed young, or looked even younger, while Akki’s body aged twice as fast. When deactivated, Akki’s body would return to its normal age, but the life stolen from her would be taken from her remaining years. Vallen suspected that Akki would therefore die about three years earlier than usual, if she wasn’t dead already.
He also found potion instructions that made vain enhancements, such as longer hair, larger breasts, bigger penises and even different eye colors. It seemed that Majo had been missing one of her ingredients when she had tricked Shumei into drinking the potion for larger breasts. Thankfully, the only side effect had been morning sickness.
The most well-worn page, however, was near the back of the book and Vallen gripped the book tightly between his fingers as his eyes darted across the page. It was a shocking discovery to find that Majo hadn’t actually summoned one of the demon generals, but the Damned One himself. Shumei asked him what that meant exactly, but he wouldn’t tell her.
Now she spent a great deal of her time practicing the steps for Vallen’s counter-ritual in her head, even acting them out without the spell components. Her magic would sit up and watch every time, like a dog looking out the window at a rabbit hopping by.
She had blushed fiercely to learn that she would have to bring him to climax with her mouth for one of the steps and every time she acted out the spell for the demon to check her memorization, she simply knelt in front of one of the tables in the sitting room to symbolize that all-important step and her cheeks were never anything paler than bright red, amusing her lover to no end.
The most difficult part of the ritual, however, was the complicated circle to be drawn around the altar. It had to be done within an hour, with absolutely no mistakes, and it was as artistic as it was complex. She spent countless hours trying to memorize the steps of drawing the circle, and fell asleep for two nights straight at their favorite table in the sitting room, leaving Vallen to carry her to her bed.
During the daytime hours when Vallen wasn’t instructing his lover in the basics of magic, he and Oka cleaned the estate. The boy protested at first, saying that he’d rather learn sword techniques, but Vallen coerced him into helping by saying that he had to build up his strength first, even though a faster method of building up one’s strength for sword-fighting was…well, to fight with swords all day.
They scrubbed the outer porch and the porch columns and replaced all the paper in the doors, chores that took two whole days to finish since there were many doors and a lot of porch to clean. Oka had praised his teacher during dinner both nights for the strength training because the boy said he felt sore all over, which made Vallen feel better since at least his words were holding true.
After Oka had fallen into an exhausted sleep on the third night, Vallen checked her wound, hopeful that he could finally have her naked and moaning beneath him again without hurting her shoulder. However, seeing that it still needed one more day, he held her until she fell asleep.
His ache for her was one he could live with for a bit longer, but he sorely wished to rip off her dress, shove her thighs apart and ride her dew-drenched flower all night long, enjoying the sounds of her shuddering cries. His only distraction was to spend the nighttime hours spying on the events outside their walls and bring back reports in the morning.
After several days without word on Majo, a midnight conversation with a demon had produced results. Of course, he had to pierce the demon six times with his serrated sword and hold it by its hairy neck against the ground to get answers, but the demon confessed a bit of information as it died there in the dirt.
It seemed the witch was relentless in her pursuit of the young girl who had stolen her prized spell book. She terrorized any remaining villages untouched by the demon raids, searching for available information on Shumei’s whereabouts. Unfortunately for her, no one knew anything since the witch’s target was hidden somewhere no human and practically no demon would even know to look. There were reports too that in revenge for receiving no information from those humans she interrogated, she would steal a woman from the village to sacrifice to the demon lord inside of her, leaving the poor woman’s ravaged body in the woods to be found later.
Vallen decided to keep this last bit of information to himself for now, seeing how disturbed Shumei had been to learn that her village had been ransacked. To know that her act had inadvertently brought about such an intense search would only make her feel even guiltier.
On the fourth morning after coming to the estate, Oka had managed to coax Vallen into some actual sword practice before they started to clean the interior rooms of the estate and they were parrying in the small bit of open space just in front of the sitting room. Shumei sat inside with the spell book on the table, trying to draw the circle from memory on a piece of paper. It was slow work and the urge to look at the book for a hint was strong, but she resisted and finished the circle, having taken nearly an hour and a half to draw it.
She looked up to see Oka trying his hardest to land a hit on Vallen and failing miserably, but her little brother seemed to be enjoying the effort. She smiled at the look of excitement on his face and then looked to her circle to see how well it matched the one in the book.
After a quick count, she found that she had made around twenty mistakes. Sighing in disappointment, she began to study the mistakes to make sure she didn’t make them again, but a shout outsid
e made her head whip up.
“Rosuke!” Vallen hollered, his eyes on something approaching from the side of the house closest to the entrance. Oka stood there transfixed, his wooden sword barely held in his hand, and she banged her knee on the table as she rushed to stand up.
Vallen ran out of her line of sight, shouting his friend’s name. She was too flustered to make any real thought form in her head, but she limped toward the door, her knee throbbing with pain. When she came out onto the porch, she still couldn’t see Vallen and assumed that he was around the corner. She glanced over to Oka who was looking uncertainly at her.
“Come inside, Oka…sit quietly, okay?” she instructed him, shuffling down the porch to round the corner. Oka nodded and, given something to do, hopped onto the porch, leaving his shoes on a stone block on the ground below the porch.
The corner of the building was actually farther than she had ever realized, but she desperately needed to catch up to Vallen and find out what was going on. When she finally came around the corner of the building, breathless from the rush of adrenaline, she stopped dead in her tracks at the sight that greeted her.
What she assumed was Rosuke’s horse was standing just a few yards behind the two men on the ground, dancing uncertainly as if it were scared or concerned. Vallen knelt on the ground, holding a very fatigued but very handsome man against his chest.
She had always expected Rosuke’s hair to be white, like Vallen’s, but unexpectedly, and confusingly, it was a flaming red color. She had never ever seen red hair, and she stared at it as if looking at a two-headed horse. His clothes were torn, shredded and completely filthy, but she could tell that he was wearing traditional clothing. His pants were black and his shirt was dark blue. If there was a pattern to the white embroidery on his shirt, she could no longer tell.
His face was indeed prettier than Vallen’s, but no more breathtaking than the man who shared her bed now. Rosuke was looking at Vallen’s face with such relief and happiness that she knew he had missed Vallen as much as Vallen had missed him.
“What happened, Rosuke?” he asked, his voice loud enough for her to hear. She, for some reason, didn’t dare step any closer.
“I was in Houfu the night the Evil One’s army descended upon the city. I hadn’t had a woman for over a fortnight, so I ducked under the barrier charms to find one and barely survived the night. Many died…” he whispered, swallowing as he closed his eyes briefly before reopening them.
Even from this distance, she could see that his eyes were most certainly the darker blue of a deep body of water. There was a lake not too far from here, halfway between her village and the nearest neighboring village to the north, to which she had traveled once as a child when her father was still alive. Oka hadn’t even been born yet. She remembered the noises of wonder she had made as they passed by the lake.
“Then…Rosuke, have you not had a woman for over three weeks?!” Vallen violently whispered. His friend nodded, looking as if he would fall asleep right there.
“My time limit will be up tomorrow morning. I could find no woman between Houfu and here…all the villages are deserted, full of corpses or too paranoid for me to safely approach. I knew I would die this time and wanted to die here,” he softly said, and she had to take a few steps forward to hear him as his voice softened near the end.
She felt her throat start to close up as she saw the pain pass over Vallen’s face. He smoothed a bit of Rosuke’s flaming red hair away from his face.
“We’ve been together so long, Rosuke. Don’t give up yet, please?” he whispered. Shuemei took another step forward, and the soft sweep of her foot on the wood made enough noise to alert the two men to her presence. Rosuke’s deep blue eyes settled on her and she watched the surprise come over his face. Vallen looked at her as well, his eyes begging her silently.
She immediately felt insulted.
“Who is she?” Rosuke asked, his mouth ajar as he stared at the girl standing on the porch.
“Her name is Shumei,” Vallen said quietly, his face still turned toward her. Vallen begged her with his eyes, knowing that the favor for which he asked was a horrible thing to request, especially from someone who had confessed her love to you only a few days before.
She walked away and he could tell that she was upset by the way her eyebrows came together and lifted up. He watched her until she disappeared around the corner, and then looked back at Rosuke.
“You love her, don’t you?” Rosuke asked. His face was unreadable. Vallen nodded. “Then I shall not ask it of you. Just be with me when the time comes,” his friend whispered, looking as if he would take a nap right there.
“Don’t you fall asleep yet,” he said, shaking the man in his arms until he opened his eyes again. “I’ll take you inside the house. We’ll see from there.”
“Don’t sweep me up like a woman though. I’d rather just come walking in with an arm over your shoulder, if that’s all right,” Rosuke joked. Vallen tried to smile and laugh at the joke, but the heavy press of sadness made it difficult to even breathe.
After all this time, Rosuke had returned, only to die at his feet.
When he and an exhausted Rosuke entered the sitting room a couple of minutes later, he was greeted with the eyes of a shocked Oka, sitting quietly at the table where Shumei had been studying. She was nowhere to be seen.
“Did your sister come through here?” Vallen asked, looking at Oka. The boy nodded wordlessly, pointing at the doors to the inner hallway. He took Rosuke farther in, and his friend studied the blond boy with just as much surprise as the boy showed him.
“Her brother is a blondie?” he asked a bit breathlessly as they exited the room and turned right. Vallen headed toward Oka’s room, planning to let Rosuke lie there for a bit while he spoke with Shumei. They still had time. It was only midday, and he still had time to convince her.
The guilt prodding him was intense.
“Yes. Her mother had black hair, and it amazed their village no end that the woman birthed a blond son ten years after bearing a black-haired daughter,” he explained, helping his friend lie down on the bed.
“Ah, by the gods…I haven’t slept somewhere so comfortable for nearly four months,” he sighed, his bright red hair spread across the white pillow like freshly spilt blood.
“Stay here and try to stay awake. I shall talk to her,” Vallen said. His friend’s clothing was badly tattered, most likely from the battle he’d had to survive in Houfu. He made a mental note to give him a set of clothes should he survive the next twenty-four hours.
He left the room then and began to walk down what felt like the longest stretch of hallway in the world. He didn’t look into the sitting room where Oka sat, most likely as still as he had been before and no doubt according to Shumei’s request. Instead he continued on to the bedroom where he knew she would be.
She was standing in front of the mirror above the dressing table when he appeared in the doorway, looking at herself quite seriously. Her eyes moved slowly as if she was studying her face, and he wondered what she was looking at. Finally, she looked away from her reflection, turning toward him without moving from her spot.
“I know you love him. He’s the brother you never had, a friend who gave you the will to live when you had none and the companion who kept you company for most of the three hundred years you’ve spent walking the continent as a demon,” she began, her voice even and soft, though an undercurrent of hurt was there.
He realized that she was jealous and his heart hurt even more.
“I love you as well, Shumei. You are the woman who saved my life more than once with the gift of her body. You risked yourself to get a cure for my curse and loved me despite what I am. Just say that you won’t do it and I’ll obey. I leave the decision to you,” he said, walking a few steps toward her.
“How can you say that?” she asked, her eyes tearing up. His eyebrows slanted up at her tears, and his jaw tightened with emotion. “It would kill you to lose him and you pl
ace that decision in my hands?”
“It is not I who can save him! I cannot have that decision in the first place and so it is yours,” he replied.
“Sex demons cannot share energy amongst themselves then?” she asked, letting out a breath as if trying to keep calm.
“It’s not known for certain, but it would completely defeat the motivation of a sex demon,” he explained.
“Does it have to be all-out sex?” she asked, her hands fisting.
“Yes…it’s required to receive sexual energy.”
There was a long silence then, and he waited as patiently as he could, knowing that she was trying to correctly word her next question.
“The spell I’m studying to cure you…would it be able to cure Rosuke too if I were to perform it on both of you at the same time?”
“Yes. Could you perform it correctly tonight?” he asked, more hopeful now, even though it meant that she would be performing a lesser sexual act upon Rosuke then as well. Shumei made a frustrated noise.
“No, not tonight. I tried to make the circle earlier on paper and made nearly twenty mistakes on top of taking too long. I couldn’t do it tonight,” she said.
“Then it has to be sex tonight or…” he stopped there, not wanting to pressure her to do it and yet desperately hopeful that she would.
“Gods,” she said with a tremor in her voice, sounding as if she would weep. “I don’t know him at all…how could I spread my legs for a stranger?” she asked herself as she covered her eyes. He winced at her choice of words.
“But you do know him. I’ve told you about him on several occasions. You know him to be the one to make jokes, who lost a precious younger brother to the same curse he suffers from. You know him, Shumei.”