Courts and Cabals 2
Page 34
“Yes, Your Honor,” Lilith gave the judge a small bow. She might be a hardass, but she could see through all the bullshit to the clusterfuck this really was.
“Then it’s settled. You will be remanded into the custody of the US Marshalls and transported to the Victorville Federal Correctional Complex at the earliest opportunity; where, you will serve a minimum of ninety days in the special prisoner’s unit.”
“This is fucked up,” Dani muttered under her breath as Gary and Bernie were called back in to escort Lilith away.
“Your Honor, we need to make accommodations for my client’s particular dietary needs,” the lawyer chimed in.
“Coordinate with Victorville for all your needs. They are familiar with, and used to, dealing with particular circumstances,” the judge informed. There was no gavel to bang, but her statement ended with a sense of finality no less visceral to the women in the room.
“I’m going to prison,” Lilith had known it for the last twenty minutes, but having it proclaimed and ordered was something else entirely. It was like a little piece of her died. A little bit of her free will and freedom that wouldn’t live again for three months.
“Miss Underwood, and the other Miss Venitas are free to go,” the judge’s next words helped rekindle a little of Lilith’s spirit.
“I never got to give you your Valentine’s Day gift,” Dani stared after Lilith as she was led toward the door.
Lilith didn’t know Dani had a DVD in her pocket, or that the dwarf had planned out a whole viewing party where they could watch it, eat candy, laugh, joke, and marvel at the boatload of cum Cam dropped on a certain feline shifter. It was supposed to be a celebration for when they won their case. Now . . .
“Drop it in the mail,” Bernie replied without an ounce of compassion.
“You better watch your back or I’ll stuff you in the mail, and not one of those big containers either. I’m talking one of those little P.O. boxes. I’ll fold you up like a little origami swan and stuff your ass in there, Bernard Fuller,” the dwarf was lucky the judge didn’t hear the clear threat in her voice.
Bernie did, and he hustled Lilith out of the room. The succubus waited until they were clear before she chuckled. “I’d watch your back, Bernie. Dani isn’t known for her patience.”
The guard paled a few shades; all his bravado gone.
“That’ll have to do,” Lilith took a mental snapshot, and promised herself to hold on to the flicker of humor for the next few months.
It might be all she had to work with.
Chapter 22
“Why is it that every time I wake up, I feel like a troop of Wisconsin cheeseheads performed the latest rendition of Stomp all over my body?” I gave a mental groan but didn’t open my eyes.
Everything was fuzzy, and I mean everything. Who I was? Where I was? How I’d come to be here? Why I was here? Of course, what I was had been a question for months, so that wasn’t too big of a headscratcher. Since I didn’t want to delve into that big an existential crisis, I decided to give myself a once over.
On top of everything being fuzzy upstairs, everything else hurt. My muscles ached like I’d been through the roughest workout of my life. My bones felt like they needed a good dose of WD-40 to get moving. My teeth ached when I tried to open my jaw. Hell, even my dick felt raw; like I’d jerked off twenty times in a day. On top of all that was exhaustion; pure, unadulterated, and complete exhaustion. Since I’d just been unconscious, that was weird. Plus, I was naked as the day I was born.
“Why does the best, and worst, stuff always happen to me when I’ve lost my clothes,” I bemoaned, but I didn’t have much time to think about it.
A creak echoed from somewhere in front of me. Someone was coming, so I went limp and played dead.
“You’re up,” someone said a few seconds later. “The old I’m-unconscious-so-I’m-not-a-threat bit isn’t going to work.”
“You can’t blame a guy for trying,” I muttered, and opened my eyes . . . or I tried to.
One eye opened, but the vision was blurry, and it didn’t clear. My other eyelid refused to budge at all.
“You don’t heal as fast as we thought you would,” the voice stated.
All I saw was a vaguely humanoid shape standing in front of me. I tried to move, and searing pain radiated through my arms, shoulders, and back. I gasped and nearly blacked out again. “Got it. Movement bad.”
I digested the new information. I was shackled by the wrists and hanging from something above me. My shoulders were definitely fucked up; dislocated, broken, or muscles shredded. I didn’t know. Either way, I wasn’t going anywhere. The top half of my body was out of action.
“Sorry to disappoint,” I answered the dark figure’s question. “Maybe don’t beat my ass next time and we can talk.”
The figure chuckled, and walked to stand next to me. It reached out and placed a hand on my chin. The pain from a moment ago felt like a sunburn compared to the wave of excruciating agony that ran through me. Despite being nearly comatose, I screamed and thrashed. I didn’t know if it was a hex, curse, or whatever else the Fae inflicted on the people on their shit list. Whatever it was, unimaginable cold tried to strangle the life out of me. It was like someone shoved me in a sub-zero freezer and dumped me in an iced-over, Siberian lake; multiplied by a thousand. There was no way in hell anything on earth was this cold. Not possible. So, I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
“Stop,” I cried, as tears formed icicles on my cheeks. The thing took a step back, and the unbelievable cold vanished.
The white fire of my Fae gifts inside me were weaker than a flickering candle, but it steadily grew stronger. Only one thing had that type of nullifying power on my gifts. “Cold iron.”
If this Fae was walking around wearing cold iron, I did not want to fuck with it. It also meant I was in the Faerie Realm, and that meant I was shit out of luck; do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, proceed straight to six feet under, and remember to tip the undertaker.
“Forgive me,” the figure genuinely apologized, “but this usually works better with physical contact.”
I didn’t have time to brace for the deluge of magic that hit me like a sledgehammer between the eyes. This time, I did black out for a second, but when I came to, I could see.
“Let there be light,” I blinked and my vision cleared, which gave me a good view of the creature in front of me.
He was butt ugly with leathery skin covered in cold iron chainmail. Thick tusks protruded from his mouth, which made his facial expressions moderately terrifying. He looked like a wild boar about to gore me to death. Despite his ugliness, whatever he’d done fixed my vision and made me feel less like hammered shit; especially my shoulders. My chances of escape went up a fraction of a percent. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
“I fixed your detached retina, bruising, swelling, popped both of your shoulders back in, and generally tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” he seemed to sag a little after working the magic.
I didn’t know what impressed me more; that he could do that level of healing magic, or that he knew who Humpty Dumpty was. Either way, now would have been the perfect opportunity to try and overwhelm him, but I was still strung up from the ceiling, and my newfound health didn’t fix that.
Instead, I took the time to study my surroundings. The room had not been designed for a human being. Everything was too big; the door, bed, fireplace, even the armoire – which might be made of bone – looked like the architect had multiplied everything by two. The rest of the room was cold, solid stone, and I was momentarily thankful that my feet were dangling a couple inches off the ground. At least until my shoulders started aching again.
“Don’t start thinking I like you,” the creature continued. “But battered and broken is no way to see the Lady. She likes her prey with a little more spunk.”
“I’ve got plenty of spunk,” I shot back, trying, and failing, to intimidate the creature.
“Holy giant, blue Avatar-chick, Batman,” my jaw dropped as the extra-large furnishings suddenly made perfect sense.
It was definitely a she. Her breasts were as big as my entire torso, and were concealed under a bikini top that was barely keeping everything contained. She easily stood a dozen feet tall, with ice-blue skin that didn’t seem to mind the otherworldly chill. White hair was pulled back in a ponytail, while red glyphs danced across her skin at random. She regarded me with cold eyes, so I gulped and looked away. It was Being a Pussy 101 to not look the big bad guy, or gal, in the eye. If she wanted to, she was big enough she could use my head as a dildo to get herself off, and there was nothing I could do to stop her.
Her leg muscles rippled with strength as she strode toward me. A thin strip of leather encircled her waist, while a bit of hanging cloth was carefully positioned to conceal the slit between her legs. They were the type of legs that could crush a man’s head like a ripe watermelon. I nearly pissed myself as she approached, but despite the fear developing in my gut, my dick gave a twinge. She saw my rod pulse and stopped in her tracks. Then she laughed.
I looked like a child next to her, which meant me trying to fuck her would be like throwing a hot dog down a highway. She knew that, I knew that, even the boar-dude knew that; but it was still a hammerfist to my ego for her to point and laugh at my dick.
“Hahaha,” I said after a moment, not able to stop my ego from writing a check my body couldn’t cash.
The giant stopped laughing, and squatted down to look me in the eye. “Hello, Cam.”
I got whiplash from how fast I flinched away from her. I knew that voice. “Aveena?” I now felt deeply ashamed that I’d started to pop some chub.
“This is the real me,” she did a little twirl that lifted the backside of her loincloth and flashed a toned, ice-blue ass.
“No, stop it,” I commanded my dick as it started to get hard, but it had a mind of its own.
She ignored my growing erection as she went to lounge by the fire. “You almost got the best of me,” she admitted as she poked at the logs with a poker that could have been a Greek hoplite’s spear. “To think, I almost lost everything because I couldn’t catch a stupid human like you. I’m ashamed that I ever doubted myself. Once I got my hands on you . . . it was so easy.”
She was fucking with me. I knew it, but that didn’t stop the hits from landing. I wanted to say Lilith was coming for me. That the Venetian Cabal wouldn’t take this shit lying down, but I didn’t know that for sure. Would Venus go to war over little, old me? Judging by the triumph on Aveena’s face, we both knew the truth.
“Is this the part where you monologue and tell me your diabolical plan,” I asked, feigning disinterest.
“No monologue,” she shrugged. “I’m going to take you to my mother, and then I’m going to kill you.”
“I’ve heard that one before,” I rolled my eyes while squeezing my asshole shut so I didn’t shit myself in fear.
“I’m not sure yet how I’m going to do it,” she ignored me. “Simple decapitation is too easy, too clean. I could skin you, but who has the time? Maybe I’ll just rip your head off with my bare hands, but do I really want to get that messy?”
I gulped. “I prefer option one,” I kept the thought to myself. There was no reason to drive her toward a less desirable end.
And that’s the moment I knew I was going to die. Not when I woke up chained to the ceiling, or the boar-dude came close and nearly turned me into a human popsicle. I’d accepted certain death when I admitted which way to die would be the easiest. If I knew anything about Aveena, it was that I could count on it being extra painful.
The noble Fae must have seen the hope extinguished in my eyes, because she laughed long and hard. “It’s like my birthday and Christmas all rolled into one,” she sighed as she wiped away a tear of joy. “And to think, I completely fucked Lilith’s life as well. That’s just the cherry on top of the ice cream sundae that is my life right now.”
I could deal with accepting my own imminent demise, but fucking with my succubus ignited that flame in me. My Fae gifts roared as I tried to break free from my chains. They groaned under the pressure, but held fast; which only made Aveena laugh harder.
“You should have seen her face when she realized I set her up,” Aveena mimed terror and anger. “I made sure she was sent to prison, and would forever have that stigma attached to her.”
“Fuck you,” I spat, but my attempt was just saliva dribbling down my chin.
“It’s not who fucks me you need to worry about,” she smiled viciously. “If Lilith is lucky, she’ll get fingerbanged by Crazy Eyes. If not . . . well . . . federal prisons have a certain reputation,” she laughed as I struggled against the chains, but resistance was futile.
She was still laughing when a knock sounded at the door. The boar-dude went to answer it, and spoke quickly with a less impressive blue giant. This one just had his sizable junk swinging in the wind. Like my ego needed to take any more hits today.
“The Lady will see us now,” boar-dude informed.
“Of course, she ruins all my fun,” Aveena looked peeved, but she reached up and undid the chains locking me to the ceiling. “Thank you, Godric.”
“Stupid bitch!” I roared, pivoted, and drove the heel of my foot toward her temple.
Power surged in me as I channeled everything I had into the single strike. I wouldn’t be able to take boar-dude, but I’d settle for caving in Aveena’s fucking skull.”
My heel made contact a heartbeat later, but not with her skull. She’d moved her arm to block so fast I couldn’t even track it, and even worse, she just rolled her eyes at my attempt. With casual ease, she picked me up, swung me over her head, and smashed me into the ground . . . repeatedly. She went full Hulk, and it didn’t take much imagination to figure out where my other injuries had come from.
It felt like half the bones in my body shattered, and I struggled to do something as simple as breathe. I was able to scream just fine when she wrenched my arms behind my back and up over a metal bar that went under my armpits. My hands ended up chained to the end, crucifix style. To add insult to injury, she put a collar around my neck and gave it a tug as she headed for the door. I took a header into the ground, and was dragged into the hallway before I could get my feet under me.
The boar-dude fell in behind me and glared. I hadn’t even ruffled a hair on Aveena’s head, but he obviously didn’t like that I’d taken a shot at her.
“Ain’t life a bitch,” I lamented as I was led around the stronghold of the Lady of Winter like a fucking dog.
***
“Come on, really,” I growled, as Aveena yanked my leash like I was some ill-trained puppy who’d pissed on the carpet one too many times.
I stumbled, and had to twist to avoid doing a face plant. Despite my Fae gifts operating at one hundred percent, I still felt like I’d stuck my body in an ice bath. I hissed and rolled off the floor; leaving a bit of skin behind in the process. It was fucking cold; the kind of cold that makes your nuts shrivel up and try to hide inside you.
My teeth chattered as I looked up. Aveena and Godric had stopped walking because the path ahead of us was barred by a big-ass door. Door was an understatement. “Great googalamoogala, Tolkien called and wants his shit back,” I gaped.
The door looked like it should be blocking the path into Mordor, not stopping a nobody like me from getting wherever it was I needed to go. It was at least fifty feet tall, and even for a race of giants twice my height, that was just too big. It was the source of the cold, and seemed to radiate ill will along with the perpetual chill that worked its way into my bones. Being naked wasn’t helping, and the shrinkage was reaching an extreme. I was just thankful I’d rolled when I
fell, and didn’t have to reenact A Christmas Story with my dick.
With a yank, Aveena jerked me back to my feet. I gagged as the leash constricted around my throat, coughed, and imagined the bruise I was going to have in the morning.
“I’m not going to have a morning,” I reminded myself, and tried not to let the depression set in. If I was going to die, I’d do it on my feet while flipping Aveena the bird. Anything less was unacceptable.
She turned her head to glare down at me, like she knew what I was thinking. “Don’t embarrass yourself, Cam. Try and die with some dignity.”
“Try and die with some dignity,” I mocked in a high-pitched voice, but it was drowned out by the door opening.
The seemingly impenetrable mass of black and blue parted down the middle and slowly rolled aside. The hustle and bustle of whatever was going on inside abruptly cut off as I straightened my spine, and walked forward before another yank could throw me down. I thought I saw Godric grin, but then I was surrounded.
“So, this is a Fae court,” I gulped as the room resolved into what was unmistakably a throne room build for a species that was far greater than humanity.
If anything I’d learned from history was true, the back of the room, farthest from the throne, was where the courtiers with the least favor stood. I took one look at these creatures and snaped my head forward. I’d seen a thing or two in my day. A big, swinging-dick troll, the sharktopus that tried to kill my ass in New York, hell; I’d even sat across from an honest-to-gods dragon. They looked like the Muppets compared to these ugly-ass, Fae fuckers.
It was also where a lot of guards stood at attention with some wicked-looking weapons. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder along the back wall, and they were interspersed among the crowd of freakazoid sycophants.