by John Everson
She looked at the creature above her and quailed. This was what she had spent years searching for. But she had imagined it would be different. That the demons would be beholden to her as they came through the door she had opened. As she gave them their desires.
Now, in this situation, she was not going to be thanked, but instead, enslaved and abused.
Elotan’s hands ran across her midriff and sides, tracing the lines of her ribs and feeling the ridges of her pelvis. His fingers prodded and stretched her like she was meat at the butcher’s. The demon smiled and nodded.
“I’ve waited for you for a long, long time,” he said. “They talk about what it is like to take a human woman.”
Ariana reached up to put her hands on the demon’s chest; his skin was crossed with knots and scars, yet still felt silk-smooth. “You’ve been hurt,” she said, tracing a long line beneath his left breast.
Elotan chuckled. “Hurt is the heat of life.” He reached between her thighs and shoved her legs apart. “And I’m going to make you feel fire.”
“Please,” Ariana said. She herself wasn’t sure even as she said the word what exactly she was asking for. To let her go? Or to take her?
Elotan pressed against her and she felt herself stretch, unnaturally wide. But that slick skin helped her accommodate the demon easily, and then his whole body engulfed her. The demon moaned as he entered, and she saw his lips part in an evil joy. She felt a heat spark inside her, and she slipped her arms around the demon’s back. She hated him and wanted him at the same time. Deep inside, she knew that as much as she’d longed to be the queen and hold the whip and laugh, she’d longed to be taken.
By someone who could truly own her.
By a demon.
Her fingers slid down his long back to hold the smooth steel of his ass as he pressed deep inside her. That monstrous weapon was pushing against her inside in places nobody had ever been. Places dangerously close to ripping. “Yes,” she found herself whispering.
The demon’s own breathing increased, and he laughed at her acquiescence. Elotan bit down on her shoulder and then whispered in her ear. “That was foreplay,” he said.
And then he pulled himself most of the way out of her, and Ariana felt as if a molten fork had just raked the core of her vagina. She let out an ear-shattering scream and tried to push him away, but Elotan only laughed and shoved that silken razor barb inside her again. Deep inside. And then pulled back, rough and fast.
Ariana moaned and screamed with every devilish thrust.
CHAPTER 13
ONCE INSIDE THE old mission, Joe snapped on the flashlight. He moved quickly through the chapel; nothing had changed there. He paused at the stairwell leading to the lookout, but decided not to go up; he didn’t know how much time he had. He knew what was up there. Nothing really. But the man had brought bags inside; where had he gone?
Joe walked down the back hall and peered into a couple empty rooms. The flash flared, reflecting painfully off the small windows inside. There was a kitchen area at the end of the hall, and what probably had once been a dining or banquet room next to it. He found a padlocked door next to the kitchen. Joe raised an eyebrow at that. Nothing else inside was locked. He canvassed another hallway that led to a couple more empty rooms before returning to the padlocked door. Lock picking was not one of his skills, nor had he come equipped with a toolkit. He fingered the lock and pulled on it a couple times, testing. It wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t budging either. Joe walked back to the kitchen. He opened a couple drawers, but there was nothing inside.
For a moment, he was stumped. What could he use to try to pick a lock? Then he opened a pantry, and nodded. There was a pile of construction debris inside. Old piping and strips of wood. He picked up a thin strip of wood and shrugged. It was worth a try.
He took the strip to the door and shimmed it through the spot where the clasp passed across the door jam. The wood dipped in there, and the metal wasn’t snug against it. Then he pulled on the wood strip. Poor man’s crowbar.
The clasp moved a bit, but then his makeshift crowbar snapped. Joe slipped another segment behind the lock and continued rocking it. The metal clasp bent outwards before his crowbar snapped again.
He went and got a thicker hunk of board. He wasn’t worried about someone finding that their hidey hole had been compromised. Whoever had installed the lock probably wasn’t supposed to be here anymore than he was.
The new piece of wood didn’t want to slide in the small gap at first, but he forced it in. Holding the flash in the crook of his arm, he wiggled the piece back and forth. After a minute, he saw one of the holding screws of the clasp pulling out of the old wood. He rocked it harder and the other screw moved. He slipped in another piece of wood then, wedging it, and gave it a hard pull.
The clasp popped out of the wood with a snap. Joe grinned, and tossed the makeshift crowbar aside. Holding the flashlight in front of him, he opened the door and peered inside. His eyes registered a stretch of stairs that led down before he saw something flash in front of him. Something came out of the dark at his head.
He tried to dodge, but it caught him above the ear and instead of taking a step forward, he fell backwards into the hallway. His eyes fireworked white pain and he crab-crawled backwards to protect himself from whatever he’d let out of the basement.
But he didn’t escape.
Before he could recover, a naked woman knelt astride him. She lifted a chain and some hunk of metal over her head. She clearly intended to brain him.
“Whoa!” he yelled and threw himself to the side in a roll. Her legs didn’t let him escape. Joe still gripped the flashlight and brought it up to shine on her face. “Wait!” he yelled again.
The woman paused. She still held the hunk of metal over her head, ready to bring it down on him, but she looked confused. “Who are you?” she said.
“My name is Joe,” he said, and quickly added. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“Then what are you here for?” she said. Her voice shook. He could see her body shaking.
“I was looking for demons,” he said without thinking.
The woman frowned. “You’re not helping him?”
“Who’s him?” Joe asked. “The guy with the lunch bags?”
“You know him!”
“I saw him come inside with a bunch of bags, and leave a few minutes later without them.”
“That’s him,” she said. “That was our dinner.”
“Who’s our?” Joe asked.
“I’m not the only one he had in a cage down there. He’s been kidnapping women and chaining them up in the rooms downstairs.”
“Sacrifices,” Joe murmured.
“What?” The woman’s eyes went wide.
“The guy who chained you up was probably collecting women to sacrifice. In a ritual to invoke demons,” Joe said.
“There you go about demons again.”
“I’ve seen it before,” Joe answered. “A long way away from here.”
She clenched the metal rod that held the chain in her hand tighter. “So you know him.”
Joe shook his head quickly. “No, I’ve never met him.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I need to talk to the demons if he actually manages to call them. I heard in town that there’s a group that meets here and sometimes, they do ceremonies to open the door between worlds.”
“Do you know how fucking crazy that sounds?” she asked. Before he could answer, she added, “So you were going to watch him kill me?” Her voice was bitter and her fingers gripped the chain tighter. Her eyes narrowed.
Joe hesitated. He hadn’t really thought about the fact that there might be victims in whatever ceremony was going to happen here. Not all demon invocations involved human sacrifices. Though, certainly those involving the Curburide seemed to call for it.
> “No,” he said. “I didn’t want to see anyone hurt. But I need to talk to one. I’m trying to reach a friend.”
“Ever hear of the telephone?”
Joe snorted. “My friend is in the world of the demons now.”
“Your friend is dead?” she said. “Hold a séance!”
“I don’t think she’s dead,” Joe answered. “I can’t believe that. But I saw her and the bitch who opened the door between worlds disappear into the void, right in front of my eyes.”
“Then what do you need a demon to…”
The woman’s question was interrupted by a noise. A creaking door opening on the other side of the mission.
“Shhhh,” Joe put a finger to his lips. Then he whispered. “We need to move. Now!”
She hesitated a moment, and then the sound of voices reached them. A new threat. Joe put his hand on her thigh and pressed her to let him up. She looked at him, hard. Her eyes were dark and deadly; her mouth pursed in a line of distrust. Then she lifted her leg and he rolled over to his hands and knees, and used one hand on the hallway wall to help him stand. With the other, he covered the light of the flash, dimming its reach.
Joe grabbed and slowly closed the basement door. They didn’t need to telegraph the evidence that something was awry. Once it was closed, he pressed the screws in the latch back into the holes he’d ripped in the wood. They slid back, far enough that it might not be immediately obvious that the latch was no longer keeping anyone locked in tight downstairs.
He tapped the screws with his finger, and nodded when they didn’t immediately slip back out. Then he motioned for her to follow.
Joe led the way down the hall back towards the chapel. Ahead of them, somebody laughed. Footsteps echoed. They heard the sounds of people dropping bags and other things. The sounds of people setting up for the night.
He hugged the wall as they reached the end. Joe peered into the chapel from his vantage at the left side of the altar. There were a half dozen of them. Four men, and two women. They were doing something at the altar, just out of his range of vision. But they walked back and forth from the few remaining pews to the front, grabbing things from their bags. Two of the men were American Indian. They were younger, late teens or early twenties. The other men were white and a little older. One of them was thin; a runner’s physique. Jutting chin, beak nose, pointed elbows. The other was his opposite; the flesh hung over his wide belt, dragging the striped shirt off his waist in rolls. One of the women was also Indian; brown-skinned and black hair. Smooth perfect complexion. Maybe twenty or twenty-five, Joe thought. The other was an older woman. Older than all of them. She had lines on her face, and her greying hair kinked long and uncombed across her shoulders. One of the men called her by name. Sienna. The fat man asked her a question that Joe couldn’t hear. But he did hear the answer.
“Put it in the kitchen for now,” the old woman said.
Joe’s eyes widened, as he watched the fat guy go back to a pew and pick up a bag.
Joe turned and grabbed the hand of the woman who’d almost brained him and squeezed. Then he pulled her back the way they’d come. Instead of returning to the dungeon, he yanked her into the stairwell that led up to the lookout turret.
They were barely up five stairs when Joe heard the steps of the man pass them in the hall. He didn’t stop, but instead wound all the way around and up to the top.
When they stepped out into the small room at the top, Joe took off his jacket.
“Here, put this on,” he offered. Her nakedness had been painfully obvious to him, and aside from needing to curb his prurient interest, he could see the goosebumps standing out on her arms from the night air.
“We should be safe for now up here,” he said. “I don’t think they’d need to come up here for what they’re doing.”
She didn’t take the jacket immediately, but he continued holding it out.
“Look,” he said. “I think we’re going to be up here awhile. So you can freeze your butt off or you can trust me.”
Her lips pursed for a moment, and then she leaned over and dropped the chain and its anchor to the ground. One clasp still connected it to her right wrist. She accepted the jacket from Joe then, and quickly slipped her left arm into it. Then she pushed her right through, dragging the chain with it. Once she zipped it all the way up, leaving no cleavage, she looked at Joe again, and hugged her arms tight to her chest.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Cheyenne,” she said. “I’m a waitress at the El Gordo Americana restaurant. I was walking home from work the other night when this asshole pulled over and forced me into his car. I’ve got a brother and a mother but I’ve never been married or had a kid so I’m not ready to die yet.”
She said it all in a rush and Joe couldn’t help but smile. “I think we can work on that.”
Cheyenne shot him a look of distrust. “I don’t need your help to have a kid or get married,” she said. She pulled his jacket tighter to cover the naked delta of her thighs.
Joe grinned again, wider this time. “Thanks for the clarification, but don’t worry about it. I came here to try to rescue a woman, but you weren’t the one I was aiming for.”
“So I’m not good enough, is that what you’re saying?” Cheyenne looked at him with wide eyes.
Joe didn’t take the bait. “So which is it?” he said staring right back at her. “You want me to help you have a kid or not?”
Cheyenne smiled and slipped down to sit on the ground. Relaxing a little. “I like you, Joe. But… not. It never seems to work out with guys who rescue me from being chained up in basements.”
Joe could see the goosebumps on her legs. A jacket in the evening breeze was not enough. He sat down and slid close to her. She flinched as his arm slid around her shoulders.
“I’m not making a move on you,” he explained. “But we’re going to be here awhile so we should keep warm,” he said.
“Is that what they call it these days?”
Joe snorted. “It’s going to be a long night, isn’t it?”
“Not as long as the one I spent chained to a basement wall,” she said.
“Always good to have a frame of reference.”
CHAPTER 14
ALEX CLOSED HER EYES in the dark.
“Malachai,” she called silently.
“Present.”
“Can you help me get out of here?” She could almost feel him shake his invisible head.
“There’s nothing I can do,” he said. “If I use any of my power, he will feel it instantly. And I’d probably lose my hold on your body. You’d be paralyzed, and I’d be exposed and discovered. There’s nothing I can do. We’re both safest here for now.”
“Safe for now,” Alex said. She could hear the frequent moans of Ariana from somewhere above. “When he’s done with her, it will be my turn next.”
Malachai didn’t answer immediately. When he did, his voice was flat. “When it does, I can help,” he promised.
“I’d rather if you did something now,” she said. “Get us out of here.”
He didn’t answer.
Alex wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter. She took a deep breath, and reached out farther with her mind. In the way a ghost had once taught her, back when she was just a lost teen in Nebraska.
“Gertrude?” she called. “Gertrude, can you hear me?”
Malachai was suddenly back in her head like a cold wind. “Stop that!” he yelled inside her mind. “You’ll get us discovered.”
“You can’t help, and I’m not just going to sit here waiting for my turn to be tortured.”
“They can hear you! All hatheyve to do is listen.”
“Gertrude, Matthew, Sarah?” Alex called. The ghosts of her friends. Or rather, her friends, the ghosts. The friends who had set her free from her father’s pris
on.
“They won’t answer you anyway,” Malachai whispered. “Not after the way you used the power they gave you.”
“You mean the way you used it,” Alex said. She remembered the way Malachai had encouraged her to use the power not only to escape, but to sacrifice the people who had locked her up in the first place. Her parents.
“I just helped you release the anger, and do what you’d always wanted to.”
Alex shook her head violently in the dark. “I hated them,” she said. “But I would never have used an axe. That was you.”
“Believe what you want about that, but your friends will not come. I don’t know if they even can reach here.”
Alex willed her inner voice to be strong and called again. And again.
“Alex,” a male whisper finally came.
She recognized his voice instantly and smiled. “Matthew!”
“You really fucked up this time, huh?” He did not sound happy to see her. Or to be called.
“I didn’t really choose to be here,” she said. “But I could sure use some help getting out.”
“Looks that way,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”
“Please Matthew,” she begged. In her mind, she was kneeling. “I’d do anything to pay you back. Ask Gertrude and Sarah and…”
“Gertrude won’t come. I can tell you that. Not after the last time,” Matthew said. “And I can barely reach you, where you’re at. I have no power really there.”
“But if you could bring help, all of you together…”
“After what you did with the power we brought you last time, I don’t think…”
“I just need to undo the lock on the door,” Alex said. “Just a simple latch. Please.”
“You know I always liked you,” Matthew said. “I’ll see what I can do. But I can’t promise anything. I might not be able to come back.”
“Hurry,” Alex pleaded.
“You are going to bring them all down on us,” Malachai said.