by John Everson
“Yeah, what now?” Malachai said inside her mind.
“Ha, so you are there,” Alex said. “What’s with the disappearing act?”
“If Helone had found out I was with you, we would both be in a lot of pain right now. I gave you strength, as you asked. But I had to stay hidden.”
“Thanks,” Alex said. “But why would she be so angry? Did you do something to her?”
“Not to her.”
“Then what? Who is Helone anyway, and why should she care about whatever you did a hundred years ago?”
There was no reply.
“Malachai, talk to me. Whatever trouble you are in here now impacts me; I deserve to know what it is.”
“I’m a deserter.” Malachai said, finally. “You have your draft dodgers. They are reviled and chased down. Here, we have those who escape into your world illegally, and don’t return. That’s what I did. And once I was in your world, during a night when the doors were open, I used covenants with humans to gain me more and more time away from here. They provided my anchor, allowing me to stay.
“Without a covenant, I would have been dragged back through the doorways. That’s the physical law we are bound by. We can visit your world, but without something to hold us there, we are quickly dragged back. Instead, I made new deals to protect me. I didn’t want to go home… and I definitely don’t want to be here now. Helone is one of those who guard the doorways. If she knew I was here again, and connected with you… it would not have gone well for either of us.”
“I don’t know how I feel about being helped by a demon who is a criminal. I always thought you were an upstanding demon,” Alex said.
Suddenly her legs turned to water, and her spine evaporated. Alex fell to the steps in front of her, a helpless cripple who could not move her arms or her legs.
“Malachai stop it, come back!” she begged.
“Be careful about what you say,” Malachai warned.
Alex lay with her cheek on the third step. Her head hurt from the fall, and one of her ribs had caught the edge of a step.
She could feel the pain, but she couldn’t move a muscle. All she could see was the wall of the stairwell a couple feet away.
“Okay,” she said. “Point taken. I need you. But you need me too, at least until we get back to earth.”
Nothing happened. Alex continued to lay paralyzed on the stairs. She wondered if her head was bleeding. It really hurt. And felt hot where it touched the stair.
“Malachai, do you really want to lay here and let Helone drag us back inside?”
“She’s not there,” he said. “If she was, we would never have gotten out. She is ancient, cunning and strong.”
“Maybe she is just asleep.”
“Curburide do not sleep.”
“Then where is she?”
“Last night was a night of open doors. She is probably out checking on how things went.”
“I thought she never left her house.”
“She is the Queen of the Doors. That’s why her home is filled with the skins of those who have come through.”
“So she would kill you if she found you,” Alex said.
Suddenly the strength returned to her limbs.
“Where should we go?” Alex asked. “Can you find one of the doors?”
“They’ll be closed by now, but still guarded.”
“Can we find one that is not guarded, so we are ready the next time it opens?”
“We can look. But it’s not likely. Curburide thirst for human suffering. They know where all of the cracks between the worlds are.”
“Then how am I going to get home?”
Malachai didn’t respond immediately. When he did, Alex felt her heart sink.
“Ariana may have had the right idea. You may need to open a door on your own, rather than waiting for one to be opened for you. But to do that, you will need to perform a blood sacrifice.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
“Find Ariana.
And kill her first.”
CHAPTER 33
THE CITY GREW brighter. That’s the only way Ariana could describe it. Elotan led her through winding streets, bound to him by a leather cord. At first, the buildings had all seemed drab, run-down. Windows were boarded, foundations cracked. Sometimes the places seemed hazy, lost in the dingy yellow light. But when she focused, she could see that the sidewalks were broken and the weeds grew sickly and tall around them.
But that was changing. The doorways of the buildings looked cleaner now. Some decorated in skulls or symbols. The yards were neat and the pavement unbroken. There were lights in the windows, not cracks.
“Is it much farther?” she asked.
Elotan shook his head. He pointed at a building just a couple blocks down the street. A blue light shone from beside the door. “It’s just ahead.”
They crossed a street and she could finally read the sign that decorated the brick above the door. It was a simple black rectangle that stretched across the lintel. The letters were made of bleached bones. They spelled BLEEDING BAR.
As they reached the front, Ariana could see the same title repeated in red lettering on one large window to the right of the door. The steady beat of a drum pounded from within. Inside, she could see more than a dozen Curburide seated at small tables. Their eyes were focused on a small stage in the front of the room. Something was moving across it. She could see the bare legs of a dancer…
“Come on,” Elotan yanked her tether as he pulled open the front door. “Time to show you off.”
He pulled her inside. They stood in the entryway of what appeared to be a small cabaret. Demons lounged around small square tables as a pale human woman danced for them on a stage with a pole. Danced might be overstating the case, Ariana quickly realized.
The woman was staggering, and used the pole as support to hold her up while she circled it. She was dark-haired and large-breasted. The roll of her belly jiggled as she moved. But that wasn’t what drew Ariana’s eye. It was the blood that spilled down from the cuts that covered the front of her body. They began at her shoulder and stretched horizontally across her body like a gruesome set of window blinds. Straight red lines that bled fast and steady.
“Elotan,” a large demon called from one of the tables. He sat with legs spread and an enormous erection visible between his legs. A female demon lounged beside him, her head cradled in the crook of his arm.
“Hello Portis,” Elotan answered. “It’s been a long time.”
The demon waved at the stage. “We’ve been entertaining ourselves without you. This one’s strong.”
“How long has she been here?” Elotan asked.
Portis shrugged. “Three months? Six? When did we see you here last? It’s been a long run. Ricandis went too far one night and nearly ended it, but since then… she’s been amazing.”
Elotan stepped over to the bartender and said a couple words. Then he ushered Ariana to an empty table. A moment later, the bartender came by with two glasses. Clear goblets filled with something ruby red.
“What is this?” Ariana asked.
“Bloodwine,” Elotan said. “Distilled from the passion and anguish of that woman on stage.”
Ariana gently pushed the glass back away from her. “I’ll pass.”
Elotan shook his head. “Taste it before you refuse. This is the wine of life. There is nothing sweeter or more bitter. It will sustain you through the hardest days. You wanted to know the Curburide, then know us.”
Ariana met his gaze. Was this just another veiled torture? Would this poison her, gag her? But Elotan looked completely earnest now, if you could gauge his heart by that dark face and piercing eyes. When he smiled, it was like a starburst against a moody sky.
Elotan drank, and sighed with pleasure.
Ariana picked
up the goblet, and put her lips to the glass. She was terribly thirsty, and hungry. Elotan had not fed her today.
A drop of the liquid touched her lips, and Ariana’s eyes widened.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
The elixir was heaven. And hell.
Sacred and desecration combined.
She drank a full mouthful, and then had to set the glass down. Tears began to stream from her eyes and her body trembled uncontrollably. Ariana grabbed the edge of the table to anchor herself, and closed her eyes to immerse herself in the sensation. Her mouth bloomed with honey but her belly felt on fire. There was a dirty bitterness to it at the same time, impossible conflicting sensations that drove her tongue mad and sent orgasmic tingles and painful electrocutions through each of her limbs. Her thighs moistened and she stifled the urge to slip a hand between her legs. Her skin felt completely strange, as if someone else’s had been draped over her body. Where the yellow silk covering touched her was like the irritating scratch of sackcloth. But when Elotan took his eyes from the stage and reached over to hold her neck, she flashed with pleasure. As his hand squeezed, she moaned.
The demon laughed. “I told you,” he said. “Take it very slow. That’s a glass to last all night.”
When the fog finally cleared from her mind and her body stopped trembling so that Ariana could sit without clutching the table, she began to take closer stock of the demons in the room. Several were there in pairs, and some in groups. All were naked as Elotan was, and she could see that the males, like Portis, sported unashamed erections. In a couple instances, female demons idly stroked their partners, while both watched the stage. At one table in the corner, a female demon stretched back in her chair with her head against the wall. She had jet black hair that hung to the floor, and round breasts that were knobbed with small gumdrop nipples. They were clearly erect and surrounded with what looked like thorns. Their sexual organs were barbed, just like the men’s. The demoness had propped her legs wide apart, heels touching opposite legs of the table, as a male lapped between her thighs. At one point, maybe after feeling her gaze on him, the demon looked up from his service, and met Ariana’s gaze. His eyes shone bright and feral, and he stuck his tongue out at her. It was torn and dripped with dark blood.
Ariana looked away, and realized that one of the tables in the front row had emptied. Three male demons and one female all now joined the human woman on the stage. They circled the woman and the pole and held hands, preventing the bleeding woman from escape. She didn’t even try, though the terror in her eyes was clear. She shook her head again and again as tears rolled down her bloody cheeks. “Please no, not tonight,” she begged.
One of the males slipped his black arms beneath her pits and raked his nails across the gashes on her chest. The woman cried out. The other men sank to the ground and grabbed her calves. With long tongues they licked her flesh, moving steadily upwards. Meanwhile, the female demon pressed her hips to the dancer’s body, shaking and rubbing herself against the captive woman. She sucked at the woman’s crying mouth and then licked a long pink tongue lower, to trace the wide nipples of both breasts. When she stepped back, one of the demons on the floor had claimed the middle spot between the dancer’s legs; his mouth completely covered her sex. The other male joined the female and both took turns sucking on the woman’s breasts as the demon that held the woman captive bent her backwards and took her in an endless kiss.
Ariana realized she was holding her breath.
Elotan was holding his erection.
The attention of the entire room was riveted on the stage. The corner couple had stopped their own play to watch as the demons on stage kissed, caressed, and stroked the bleeding woman to an extremely audible orgasm. Her cries came in hitching, growing bleats of unbridled pleasure. But as she reached her peak, filling the room with sexual screams, she began to punctuate each wave with a word.
“No!”
Again and again the woman thrust her hips into the male’s face that drove her pleasure, as her mouth cried out “No, no, no, NO!”
Ariana wondered at that, but only for a moment.
At the pinnacle of her passion, the demons changed their strategy. As the woman let out a room-shaking cry of orgasm, the demon who held her from behind bent down to kiss her once more. When he came up for air, the woman let out a wet shriek. Her body suddenly shook hard, an epileptic’s seizure of spasming. The kissing demon spit something thick and red to the ground. At the same time, the demons at her breasts pulled away, their mouths slicked in red. The female demon chewed and grinned, making a show of her enjoyment for the audience before swallowing.
Ariana saw the human woman’s nipples were gone. Dark blood rushed down her torso and someone in the room shouted, “More!”
The cunnilingus demon stood and spit blood and flesh to the floor and then grinned wide at the bar patrons, his white teeth flecked with red.
“Strip her,” someone called. Ariana frowned at that; the woman was already naked. Strip what? But the meaning became quickly clear. The three men held her by arms and legs as the demoness stood beside her trembling body. With one finger, she slipped her long nail beneath the gash at the top of the woman’s collarbone, until it slipped out on the other side and protruded from the gash a half inch lower. And then she pressed her thumb to the middle and pulled. The skin separated from the dancer’s flesh like wet, well-soaked wallpaper. It clung at first, but then with a sticky, sucking resistance, lifted. When the demoness reached the other shoulder with a single solid strip of peeled skin, she ripped it off and held it up for the room to see. The thin strip dangled there, wet and glistening, and the room exploded with cheers.
“Holy shit,” Ariana whispered.
Elotan slipped an arm across her shoulder. “You wanted to be the human queen of the Curburide,” he said. “I don’t think you could handle it. This is just a teaser.”
Ariana took a sip from the goblet of bloodwine, and as the liquid pain and pleasure mixed like fireworks in her blood, she leaned into Elotan’s embrace and settled in to watch as the demoness on stage pulled another strip of skin free. The screams were constant now, but noise now came from the entire room, as the demons moaned and cheered and feasted on the pain reverberating in the air.
“Yes,” Ariana said, spreading her legs and indulging in the decadence of it all. She had always found a savage enjoyment in watching the men she had sacrificed writhe and die in front of her on the floor. “Yes, I think I can.”
Ariana had always found most other people to be stupid sheep. Maybe that was why she’d had so little remorse after the first one she’d slaughtered. People were simply animals, and animals were meant to be slaughtered and consumed. She took another sip of the bloodwine and let her eyes roll back in her head. If this was what the demons could derive from what she saw now on the stage, then she had been right all along to try to bring them to earth.
She slipped two fingers inside herself, and arched her back at the resulting wet spasm. She was more turned on right now than she had been since the first time one of her intended victims, Jeremy, had tied her up, turned the tables and beaten her before fucking her. She’d given it all back to him on the sacrificial altar, but that unexpected violent sex had made her feel a little like this. Trapped yet unrestrained. Completely open to whatever pain and pleasure would follow. She opened her eyes from the memories and looked again at the bloody stage.
The dancer’s breasts looked strange when stripped of their skin and “caps.” They hung like meaty raw melons on her torso, as the demoness continued to slice the last strips of skin from the dancer’s belly. Her screams had dulled now. They were more whimpers than terror. She’d given in to the pain. At a certain point, the pain was so extreme, you couldn’t feel anything more. Maybe that’s why the demons suddenly changed their tactics.
The male who had been attending to her sex with his mouth lay down on the stage,
and the others gently laid her on top of him. Her body shook and jolted with tremors as the demon caressed her back with six dark fingers. His nails raked across her bare, creamy shoulders with tenderness, rather than violence. And then he pressed his black lips to hers, and her body stiffened. The trembling ended, and Ariana smiled. Elotan had taught her the impact of a demon’s kiss. It was not as heady as bloodwine, but it did electrify your nerves and open the floodgates below.
She made an unconscious moan herself as she watched the demon’s hips begin to move underneath the dancer. She knew that the dancer’s pain was now being changed, transmuted by the demon’s tongue and cock to pure, heavenly pleasure. She found herself jealous of the sensation, despite knowing the horrible pain that would follow when he pulled out. There was no heaven without hell.
Elotan’s eyes were suddenly two inches from her own. They bored into her with a humor and curiosity. “You are not like most of them,” he said.
She opened her mouth and licked her upper lip beneath his gaze. “No,” she whispered. “I’m not.”
The demon’s mouth covered hers, and as his tongue filled her mouth, his hand grabbed her wrist and dragged it to his lap. She knew what to do. His prick was like wood stripped of its bark in her fingers; hard and unyielding, yet smooth as silk to slip across. He did not feel wet, yet her hand glided up and down in his lap as if he were covered in a sheen of oil. She felt the wicked barbs that lay hidden around the head of his cock begin to engorge and rise from where they had lain tight to his skin.
So that’s how they worked. They waited until the demon was fully aroused (and presumably inside) his mate before they extended and latched on to the inside, ensuring that the coupling could not end until he was done.
Elotan let out a throaty moan as her hand tightened and quickened. Then his arms suddenly encircled her, and raised her up from her chair. The demon flipped her around like a doll, and brought her down to sit on his knee.
“Not yet,” he growled, and pulled her back in his lap until her shoulders rested on his chest. One of his arms wrapped around her belly, holding her in place, as the other slipped beneath her silk covering and explored her chest. His hand moved down between her thighs, palming the stickiness of her arousal as his other hand squeezed a nipple between thumb and forefinger. She felt the needles of his penis drawing blood where they pressed into her back. But Ariana didn’t care. She opened her legs to his fingers and lolled her head back, exposing her neck to him.