by Eva Brandt
Two more slaps followed in close succession and my world started to blur around the edges. My juices trickled down my thighs. I tried to spread my legs in an instinctive attempt to get him to touch my needy cunt, but he had other ideas.
“None of that, naughty pet,” he said, clicking his tongue. “This is a punishment, remember? Then again, you are enjoying it a little more than would be preferable. Hmm. Perhaps a change in approach is required.”
As he spoke, he delivered two more slaps to my already burning ass. By now, I was already so close to coming that the simplest touch to my clit could have triggered my orgasm.
But Mephistopheles was literally a demon, so instead of giving me a hand, he snapped his fingers. Shadowy figures manifested from the corners of the room, snatching me from his arms. “Why don’t you just wait there and think about what you’ve done?” he told me with a crooked grin.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I gasped out.
I ended up in the clutches of the creatures with my legs spread as the odd demons moved around me like one being. They somewhat reminded me of the demonic entity I’d seen fucking Lilith, and they had everything a regular male did, including cocks. “Your lust looks delicious,” one of them said as he analyzed my dripping pussy with interest. “I think I’ll have a taste.”
A black, split tongue emerged from the shadowy mouth and he licked over my nether lips. When the creature made contact with my clit, a jolt of magic erupted through me.
All semblance of composure was thrown out the window and I screeched. “Please, Sir. Please. I need to come. I have to come.”
The other creatures rushed to touch me. Two of them removed my shoes and decided to nibble on my toes. A few others lowered my gown and exposed my breasts, then started sucking on my nipples. Three more rubbed their cocks against my hair or abdomen. Meanwhile, the one between my legs continued to tease me with his tongue and even thrust a finger inside my pussy. “Please,” I cried out again. “Oh, God, please.”
Mephistopheles finally took pity on me. He waved his hand and the shadowy figures pulled away. He leaned over me, his wings extended. “Go ahead, pet. Come for me.”
He crushed our mouths together and just like that, orgasm exploded over me, shaking me to the very core. I was still immobilized by his magic, and I squirted my juices all over his pristine floor. Nobody seemed to mind. In fact, several of the shadowy creatures bent over to lick the liquid, groaning in pleasure at the taste.
Mephistopheles ignored them. He released me from my awkward, exposed position, and helped me stand properly. With strikingly gentle hands, he put my clothes back in order, covering my naked breasts and putting my shoes back on.
It would’ve been almost parental if I hadn’t seen the tent still in his pants. He didn’t try to do anything about it, though, and when I’d recovered a little, he ushered me off.
“Now, I believe you’ve learned your lesson. Next time, I won’t be nearly as kind. You’ll take my cock up every hole you have, and you’ll beg for it, no matter how much loyalty you might have toward your lovers.”
I didn’t reply. With my face burning as much as my ass was, I fled Mephistopheles’s office. This was a complete and utter disaster and I had no idea what to do next. What was I supposed to tell Mikael, Callum, and Stefan now?
Battle of the Watchers
“This is hilarious. I thought you said there was nothing going on between you and Dean Mephistopheles, Lyssa.”
“I didn’t exactly intend it. I’m so confused, Mikael. What am I doing with my life?”
The two of us were making our way to one of the smaller towers for what would undoubtedly be one of my more interesting classes this year, Necromancy. After the whole thing with the dean, I’d missed my second class, but that had been Demonology, and Mikael had dropped by and explained the situation to Ammit. Now, I had to handle facing yet another new teacher, and my humanoid familiar on top of that.
I’d been unable to keep my mouth shut about what had happened in the office. Fortunately, Mikael took the whole thing well, far better than I had expected. “You’re doing something awesome,” he replied, winking.
I shot him a look of disbelief, and his expression sobered. “Listen, Lyssa, if I’ll ever argue with you about something, it certainly won’t be because you sleep with other men. I’m a jealous person, yes, but envy and jealousy aren’t about sex, not here.
“Sex is simple. It’s just an exchange of pleasure. For many of us, it’s food. We don’t consider it that big of a deal. It’s attachments and bonds that we value above all else.”
Come to think of it, Gemma had mentioned in the past that demons ‘fed on one another’ and used Pornhub when that wasn’t a possibility. I’d assumed my lovers had been bickering because of their inability to adjust to sharing me when we were having sex, but things were obviously not that simple.
“You’ve been pissed at Stefan and Callum in the past,” I pointed out, eager to get to the bottom of this.
“Well, yes, because I felt they might get between the two of us,” Mikael replied, “but I realized then that I was being stupid. I admit that earlier today, I also got a little jealous because I knew about the attraction between you and Mephistopheles. Shiro reminded me it didn’t matter. There’s no way anyone can ever separate us.”
Shiro had said that? Wow.
My familiar tugged on my dress with his fangs, having obviously sensed my curiosity. “He is your true male, isn’t he? Your bonded. He takes precedence over the other idiot males.”
It was very rare for me to hear such a long string of sentences from Shiro, so I was momentarily rendered mute by the comment. When I remembered how to speak, I hesitantly managed to say, “Err… I don’t really know. I… guess?”
TB hissed, and while I couldn’t understand her words, Shiro was kind enough to translate. “Of course he is. You underwent the ritual and accepted my Mikael. That means he is your male. And so, there is no reason for concern.”
“You are a prized female, so it stands to reason there will be more than one male interested in you,” Shiro added. “It is only fair for you to have options. It doesn’t change anything about your relationship with your previously chosen male.”
It was unclear how much Mikael understood from our exchange, but it must’ve been quite a bit, because he scratched Shiro’s ear and shot me a crooked grin. “I know it’s a bit unfair of me to have this kind of advantage over the rest of them, but I’m not a very fair person. I don’t care who you sleep with, Lyssa, as long as your heart belongs to me.”
Oh. Oh, shit.
I was not ready to have this conversation with him. Sex was difficult enough, but emotions? I couldn’t get into that. Mikael, Stefan, and Callum still confused me so much. If I’d ended up having sex with them, it was because I’d been so attracted to them from the very beginning. I cared about them, of course. I liked them, was grateful to them, and maybe even admired them. But love? I wasn’t sure about that.
“Is that too much, too quickly?” Mikael asked.
“A little bit,” I admitted. “I’m still… processing.”
“It’s fine,” he replied, taking my hand. “There’s no need to rush. Just don’t worry about a thing, okay? Like I said, it’d take far more than having sex with someone else to make me mad at a lover—and especially at you.”
We didn’t have time to talk about the issue further, as our destination was straight ahead. The tower was one of those constructions that defied gravity. Shaped like a scythe, it wasn’t stationary at all. Its edges were sharp and from time to time, it would flash through the air, as if in an actual motion of soul reaping.
“Well, that’s not ominous at all,” I mumbled under my breath.
“Look at it on the bright side,” Mikael said. “If Professor Grim had wanted to kill us, he’d have done it when he discovered the truth about me.”
Technically speaking, the Grim Reaper—or Professor Grim, as Mikael called him—had known a
bout Mikael’s true identity all along, so the fact that he hadn’t intervened during the incident with Shiro wasn’t that relevant. Still, I hoped Mikael was right. I already had enough problems without making the avatar of death angry with me.
When we arrived at the tower, we found the rest of my current year already waiting. Everybody turned to stare at us, and they seemed even more hostile than before.
I ignored them all and took up position a good distance away from them, flanked by my companions. With Mikael next to me and TB and Shiro keeping an eye out, the other students would have to be resourceful in order to hurt me.
As it turned out, they didn’t have anything like that in mind. None of them made any aggressive move. They almost seemed… afraid? But why?
Samuel Byte walked up to me and extended his hand in greeting. “Alyssa, I think we got off on the wrong foot earlier. We didn’t mean to offend you and your familiar.”
I stared at him in disbelief and didn’t take his hand. Mentally, I struggled to come up with a reply that wouldn’t earn me another detention. Gemma stepped in before I could do so.
“Yes, you did,” she piped up, from somewhere behind Samuel. “Don’t bother lying. She might be human and a Sacrifice, but she knows better than to accept nonsense like that.”
That was almost… nice, by Gemma’s standards at least. Was I ever going to understand her, or this fucked up school? So far, it didn’t seem very likely.
Once again, I was reminded by the warning Gemma had given me when I’d first arrived at the academy. She’d said that people here were never kind without a reason, and I believed her. Cruelty had seemed more honest and reliable than friendship.
Either way, I didn’t intend to have any kind of relationship with Samuel, not one of friends, enemies, or even casual acquaintances. As far as I was concerned, it would be for the best if I just pretended ninety-nine percent of the school didn’t exist.
“Did you want something?” I asked at last.
“Actually, yes.” To his credit, Samuel didn’t press me and withdrew his hand, but that was where his tact ended. “We were wondering if you would consider joining The House of Gluttony. We’d be more than happy to welcome you and your familiars.”
I gaped at him in shock. I hadn’t even known it was possible for someone to change houses on request. But even if I’d wanted to do that, why the fuck would I be interested in moving to The House of Gluttony?
Leaving aside the fact that I was the head of my own house this year—which most of the school didn’t know yet—I had no friends in Gluttony and my only experience with them had been their absolute rejection of me. Where was this coming from?
Before I could point out the absurdity of the offer, TB launched herself at Samuel. With an infuriated hiss, she flew straight at him and landed on his face, her fangs dripping with black venom.
Her wings were far larger than they’d been when she’d attacked me in my first year. Should I stop her from hurting him? Probably. I didn’t want her to get in trouble because she accidentally killed him or something.
He was a vampire, so it was unlikely that she could do lethal damage to him. Then again, she was a magical familiar, and nothing was out of the question in this literally God-forsaken place.
Mikael must’ve had the same idea, because he stopped TB before I could. “TB, that won’t be necessary. I’m the one who should handle trash like this.”
Okay, maybe his train of thought had been different. Right. He’d just said that he was okay with most things as long as someone didn’t try to threaten our bond. Apparently, offering me a spot in another house qualified for that category. What the hell was I supposed to do now?
Thankfully, my luck took a turn for the better. Before either TB or Mikael could sink their fangs into a certain vampire’s throat, the scythe-like tower stopped spinning. Maybe our teacher preferred to do the reaping himself instead of allowing his students to do it.
TB flew back toward us and landed on Shiro, as she often seemed to, these days. Meanwhile, Gemma helped Samuel to his feet and ushered him to the door of the tower. I couldn’t hope to interpret the look in her eyes, but for some reason it reminded me of the chapter on familiar bonds I hadn’t gotten to read yet and the comment Leviathan had made.
It was a stupid thing to focus on right now, so I shook my head, banishing the recollection to the back of my mind. We all shuffled into the tower, with Mikael, Shiro, TB and me staying at the back of the pack.
I didn’t know what I’d expected of the Grim Reaper’s lair, but it certainly wasn’t something that looked torn out of the pages of My Little Pony. The inside of the tower wasn’t a room at all. When I looked up, I couldn’t see any ceiling, but a rainbow-colored sky. A shower of glittering confetti drifted over us from above, and butterflies flew through the air, their wings leaving behind trails of multicolored dust.
The academy had always been surprising in that it didn’t have the infernal ‘fire-and-brimstone’ look I’d been taught to expect. Since my arrival here, I’d learned to see past that, past appearances. Still, this was a little much.
I must’ve made some kind of noise of surprise, because Mikael gripped my elbow to draw my attention. “Grim is a scholar of forms of strange and unusual torture,” he whispered. “He likes to expose his students to such things, to test out his theories.”
So it was a social experiment? Did My Little Pony count as torture for demonic souls?
It must have, because at least ten of the students present started to look nauseated mere seconds after they entered the room. They would’ve undoubtedly tried to made their escape had Grim himself not popped up in front of us.
His appearance was almost anticlimactic. There was no spatial distortion or anomaly. I blinked, and he was just suddenly there, manifesting out of nowhere with the ease only a primordial force could employ. He was dressed in the same plain black robes he’d worn the day I’d first seen him, but the hood was down and his scythe was missing. The eyes of the skull-like face zeroed in on us, burning with a flame hotter and more intense than hellfire.
“Welcome to Necromancy,” he started. “As students of The Academy of the Devil, you’ve already become familiar with death. However, most, if not all of you, might not truly understand its meaning. Our first goal in this class is to challenge these misconceptions.
“Death isn’t an end. It is a beginning. It is a gift, one granted to people who’ve either fulfilled the tasks they wanted to accomplish in life or haven’t had the best luck and need to start over.
“In that sense, necromancy is a perversion of the natural course of things. But before embarking on any kind of necromantic ritual, you need to understand a very important thing. Ninety-nine percent of the time, creatures that are brought back through the necromantic arts have nothing to do with the people they originally were.
“The body is just a shell, and in death, it becomes open territory for any soul to inhabit. There are occasions when no soul is willing to join the ritual and accommodate the necromancer. If that happens, the construct must be sustained by the mage’s own energies, which is dangerous and can lead to the depletion of one’s magical core.
“It is considered almost impossible for the original soul to return to the body it once inhabited.”
Lilith had said something similar when Mikael and the others had decided to help Shiro. Divine resurrection magic clearly surpassed the limitations of necromancy. I wondered why it was different and made a mental note to ask Professor Grim at one point in the future.
“For our first class, we will have a brief field trip, in order to give you a better understanding of the concept of death. Those of you with familiars, please hold onto them.”
The only ones with familiars were me and Mikael, and I appreciated the head’s up, more so since it made it clear that Grim wouldn’t be among those annoying teachers who’d discriminate against Mikael because he was a nephilim.
Also, a field trip would be a nice change. I h
adn’t left the island since my arrival here, and Satan only knew I needed the break.
Mikael didn’t seem as optimistic. “No matter what you do, don’t leave my side.” He wrapped his arm around my waist, and his hold on me was so tight it was almost painful. “I have a feeling this won’t be pleasant.”
TB curled around his neck, perhaps uncertain that her position on top of Shiro would provide her with enough security. Shiro couldn’t do that, so he pressed his body to mine and I put on his leash, just in case.
The tower started spinning again and it was a minor miracle I wasn’t immediately thrown around like a rag doll. If not for Mikael’s steadying magic, I’d have had a very unpleasant meeting with the walls. Several other students weren’t so lucky and were tossed through the room, almost like we were inside a My Little Pony-themed pinball machine.
The weird analogy stopped being accurate the moment we reached our destination. The cheerful decor vanished, replaced by a battle field.
My breath caught as I took in the two opposing forces. On one side stood the angels, the armies of Heaven lined up to face the threat of The Infernal Realm. Most of them didn’t look humanoid. Up to a point, they could even be called monstrous. A lot of them had multiple faces, some of which were beast-like in nature. This wasn’t a surprise to me, as my studies in ADA had already prepared me for the fact that angels looked nothing like I’d expected. But even so, there was a strange balance even in that, in their surreal, inhuman looks.
Some were flying in the air, their transparent, glowing wings easily holding them aloft. Others were simply standing there, their feet firmly planted in the ground, as if they planned to create an unbreakable barrier.
The demons were on the other side, and they were a mixed, chaotic bunch. Some were demonic, twisted creatures that reminded me of Morrigan’s blob. Others were shape-shifted in animal forms. Others were undead or their necromantic constructs.