Redemption (Covenant Book 3)

by John Everson

  On the stage, the dancer had looked up from the demon she lay upon to take another long demon cock into her mouth. Her head matched the rhythm set by the demon inside her as she worked his friend with bloody lips. Somehow the ecstasy of their touch had raised her from the haze of pain, and she appeared to not simply be being used; she was actively, anxiously participating.

  And then the other male moved between her legs and pressed the large globes of her ass apart before guiding himself into her other entry. Ariana grimaced at the thought of what would happen when two demon dicks pulled out of that woman at once. Would she be left with simply one large hole between her thighs?

  She was perversely fascinated to find out. The demoness on stage moved from one male to the next, coaxing and kissing as the rhythm of the four bodies grew dangerously fast. Cries of passion came from the stage and the audience. The air was thick with the scent of sex and iron and a darker spicy bitterness that Ariana could not identify, but found she craved. She inhaled it like perfume, drawing it in and holding her breath as Elotan massaged the trigger inside her.

  She felt the energy rise and she now moved greedily against his hand, but then without warning, he withdrew.

  “Not yet,” he said again and raised her up from his chest to sit straight.

  On the stage, the demon who had been getting head was now taking the demoness against the back wall. The woman’s mouth was open in a perpetual O as she cried out with each thrust inside her. The moment was coming, Ariana knew, as the cries grew faster and louder. The demons both beneath and on top of the woman growled out something guttural and loud. And then suddenly their group grinding stiffened and ended in a hideous scream.

  The demon behind her pushed one hand against the woman’s back and ripped himself free as he stood. The stage went silent as her scream turned to a silent rictus of pain. The dancer’s face was frozen, her eyes bugging out. And then the demon beneath her grabbed her by the two raw meaty shoulders and lifted her up and off of him, dropping her to the ground on her back. He got up and stood next to the other. Their drooping phalluses dripped blood on the stage, as they clasped hands and bowed to the audience. Behind them, the woman’s eyes remained open, staring sightlessly at the crowd while her body shivered uncontrollably. She had clearly been pushed beyond.

  One of the members of the crowd stood up and walked to the stage. He was smiling as he bent down to lift the woman up. He threw her over his shoulder like a sack and then turned to the bartender at the side of the room. “She might need a couple days after this one,” he said. Then he turned to the other demons still on stage.

  “Nicely done,” he said. Then he nodded and walked off with her to a door at the back of the club.

  Elotan’s hands gripped Ariana by the waist and lifted her to her feet. He stood up beside her with a grin.

  “Okay,” he said, taking her by the hand and pulling her towards the stage.

  “Now it’s time.”

  CHAPTER 34

  CHIVALRY WENT OUT the window when the car slowed down and pulled towards them on the curb. Joe didn’t want to step in front of Cheyenne, he wanted to step behind her. He wasn’t exactly the nudist type.

  Feelings aside, he wasn’t a complete coward. Joe stifled the urge to hide and stood beside her until the car pulled up in front of them and stopped. The driver was a short, squat American Indian woman. She rolled down the passenger window and leaned towards them. “You look like you need a ride somewhere,” she said. Her voice was musical, high-pitched and soothing. And full of questions.

  “We do,” Cheyenne answered immediately. “We were robbed; could you drop us at my house? It’s just a couple miles from here.”

  The locks on the car door snapped, and the woman nodded. “Sure.”

  Joe opened the back door and Cheyenne slid across the vinyl seat first. As he sat, grimacing at the cold kiss of the material on his back and butt, she was already giving the driver directions to her house.

  The sun was now on the horizon and it seemed as if they’d been walking for a couple hours. Joe’s feet felt swollen and hot. The rest of him though, was chilled with the quiet breeze of the desert dawn.

  “So what happened to you then?” the woman asked, as the car pulled back onto the highway. Joe opened his mouth to speak, but Cheyenne took the lead again.

  “Couple of muggers out near the old Birchmir Mission,” she said. “Took our money, our clothes and our bike and left us there.”

  “That’s a long walk from here,” the woman said, glancing back at them in her rear view mirror.

  Hope you’re enjoying the view, Joe thought sourly.

  “Make a right here,” Cheyenne announced at a turnoff that barely even looked like a road. Just a trail of gravel and dust where some cars might have slid off the asphalt. But as they made the turn and slipped down and around a hill, Joe saw the small street sign atop a bent metal pole jutting from the midst of a sagebrush bush. The main road to Santa Fe disappeared behind them and a moment later, they were in the driveway to a one-story adobe house that overlooked a deep, brown valley. The place looked small, just a square hut really, with a door and one wide front window. There were others farther down the street, all spaced well apart.

  “Can you get in?” the woman asked. “You don’t have your keys.”

  “I keep a spare hidden,” Cheyenne said. “But thanks.”

  They both got out and Joe bent over at the driver’s window and also thanked the woman for stopping and helping them. Then they walked quickly to the front door of the house. Cheyenne held one hand across her crotch in a pointless display of modesty and waved with the other. She waited until the car pulled out of the driveway before she stepped to the left of the stoop and lifted the top half of what appeared to be an ornamental plastic rooster. When she turned back to Joe, she held a gold key in her hand.

  “Always helps to have a pet cock,” she said.

  Joe felt himself blush and Cheyenne didn’t miss it. With a raised eyebrow, she looked from his waist to his face and then clarified. “It’s a male chicken,” she said. “What were you thinking?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she slipped the key into the lock and pushed open the pale green door. Once inside, she flipped on the lights to a small living room, and motioned at the couch. “Make yourself at home. I’ll be right back.”

  He walked her ass disappear around the doorway that led to a small kitchen and hall. Joe sat on the edge of the couch, leaning forward to obscure his privates, a fairly silly exercise after exposing them to Cheyenne and the world for the past three hours. But inside her home, his nakedness felt more visible. This whole situation was completely ridiculous.

  Something soft hit his thigh, and Joe grabbed for a pair of grey sweat shorts as they dropped to the tan carpet. A New Mexico State T-shirt followed. “You should be able to get those on,” Cheyenne said. “I like to wear baggy stuff at home, so they’re large.”

  She hadn’t put anything on herself yet, and somehow Joe found that more embarrassing here inside her home than he had walking on the side of the road. Context.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Cheyenne said. “Then we can call a cab and go to the police?”

  Joe nodded. “Sounds right,” he said.

  “I’ll be quick,” she promised and then disappeared around the doorframe. Her hand hadn’t quite left the doorframe, when her head and one shoulder popped back into view.

  “Hey,” she said. Her voice was softer.

  Joe was already slipping one leg into her shorts. He stopped, and turned, still exposed, to face her.

  “I just wanted to say thanks for getting me out of there,” she said. “I’m glad I wasn’t one of those girls on the floor. And I’m sorry you didn’t get to help or talk to your friend.”

  Joe nodded. “It’s okay,” he said. “I never wanted anyone to die just so I could find out
if Alex was still alive somewhere. I just wish I knew where she was right now. I wish I could do something to help her.”

  “Maybe you still can,” Cheyenne said. She gave him a quick, hopeful smile, and disappeared down the hall.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE NONDESCRIPT grey buildings were subtly changing. They looked… older now. There were more cracks in the stone faces, and the spots on the bricks darkened. The architecture, too, looked older, more ornate with stone gargoyles and carved insets. Alex focused on moving forward. If she didn’t, if she just studied a building, her feet moved, but she didn’t get anywhere. It was like being in a bad dream where you were stuck in place without logic. Walking, while nothing moved.

  “Why is that?” she asked Malachai.

  “You’re not moving through a physical world, as you know it,” he answered. His voice was a low whisper in the back of her mind. “Everything you see here is… an approximation of what you expect it to be. Your mind is giving certain things shape and form in a way that it can understand. But that isn’t necessarily the way it looks or behaves for a Curburide.”

  “So it really is all a dream?”

  Malachai gave a low chuckle. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s very real. What you experience here is no dream. If they decided to crush your soul here instead of just torturing you, you will not only be dead, you will cease to exist.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “No,” he said.

  When he didn’t elaborate, Alex asked, “What’s the difference?”

  “If you don’t start moving, we might both find out,” Malachai said. His voice was no longer calm. Alex paused and focused on seeing with her inner sight. The world around her suddenly looked more like a radar overlay than a street with buildings. And she could see a handful of bright lights on the horizon. They were all coming from different directions, but they looked to be converging, right where she was.

  Alex ran. She passed several buildings and saw a couple demons in the distance who appeared unaware of her, though one peered her way in apparent confusion when she passed.

  “Get out of the street,” Malachai said.

  Alex turned towards a corner building. It looked like a factory, long and squat, with hundreds of small, evenly spaced windows. She pulled on the curved handle of the front door, and it opened easily. She slipped inside.

  “Now what?” she thought.

  She stood in an empty hallway, but there were lights ahead. And nearby she could hear the steady oscillation of something mechanical. She moved towards the sound and as she did, heard something else. It didn’t follow the steady rhythm of the machine. It grew and moaned like a wind through an old drafty eave. A whisper. A whistle. A scream. It was many sounds in one, and none of them were steady or machine.

  “What is that?” Alex whispered.

  “Shhhhhhh,” came Malachai’s unhelpful response.

  She turned down a hallway and saw three demons walking away from her; they’d just come from another side corridor. Alex waited until they had turned into another hall before she continued walking.

  “Where should I go?” Alex whispered in her head to Malachai. This time she got no response at all. Okay. He was petrified of being discovered right now. She was on her own. Part of her was wishing she’d never left Helone’s. At least that demon had spoken to her and been friendly to an extent. Maybe it was all to juice her up for the “squeeze,” but it was better than being caught and thrown in a hole to wait for the execution. She wondered how Ariana was faring there. The vindictive part of her hoped that Elotan was being brutal.

  Be careful what you wish for, her conscience warned. Cuz karma’s a bitch and you’re tromping through her backyard!

  Alex walked down a long corridor with no doors or windows. It was all simply grey. Dingy floors, dingy walls, dingy ceiling. The material had no seams or cracks, however. And no easy escape route, she noted, once she’d walked for a few minutes. Alex stepped up her pace and focused hard on the pale light that shone from the end of the hall. After another minute of walking, she finally reached the exit. She turned a corner and found herself in a wide open football stadium of a room. Here, everything was different.

  Overhead, the ceiling was a lattice of windows to a smoky, piss-yellow sky. Beneath that ominous light, Alex saw what looked to be a factory, only this wasn’t a place making widgets, this was a factory of pain.

  There were rows of wooden racks from one side of the huge room to the other; she counted fourteen. Each rack stood a few feet apart, and a tangle of thin pink tubes hung from what looked like a grapevine trellis built across the top of each row.

  The tubes snaked to connect to the arms and legs of the pale figures bound to each of the racks that she could see down the long rows.

  “What the hell?” she whispered to herself. Hell, indeed.

  There appeared to be no demons in the room at the moment, and Alex tiptoed into the huge chamber. The noise that she had heard down the hallways earlier came from here. The oscillation of pumps colored the air, and the moans of anguish broke the rhythm every few seconds. The voices came from all around the stadium-size room. All of these people were alive… and clearly in pain.

  Alex had no idea what the tubes were doing to them, but it couldn’t be good. She crept along the side wall and came up behind one of the racks. They didn’t really appear to be made of wood, she saw, now that she was closer. They were tan in color, and lightly veined, but there was a trace of pink amid the lines. And purple. Almost as if the structures themselves were made of flesh. Living torture beds. And the tubes that came from the ceiling lattice, they separated when they reached the bodies into a hundred thinner arms, each one attached to the victim on the bed.

  At first glance, Alex had thought the victims were human, but now that she stood next to one, she realized she wasn’t sure. The rack was at an angle, so the creature appeared to be both reclining and half-standing with its head lying three or four feet higher than its toes. It was naked and had the basic features of a man, two arms, two legs. But its skin was like marble. White and pasty, mottled in grey. She could see the ribs beneath its flesh, and the scars of many wounds across its thighs and belly. It was the eyes that really made her wonder though. They were large, yet saturnine. They opened as she stood next to the upright bed, and widened as they took in her presence. They eyes made the creature look alien.

  There were tubes connected to its forehead and cheeks, shoulders and neck, chest and groin and thighs. There was even one attached to the end of its tubelike penis; the effect was to make the thing look endless, as its thick stalk tapered into a pink flesh tube that stretched up and away from the bed.

  The thing’s belly was strangely clear of the tubes, however. And covered in marbled scars.

  “Who are you?” the man whispered. His words sounded like the hiss of sandpaper.

  “My name is Alex,” she answered. She kept her voice low so that nobody in the other beds would hear. From somewhere down the line, she heard a scream.

  “How… are... you… free?” he asked. Each word seemed to come slowly. With a painful effort.

  “I escaped,” she whispered.

  The man’s eyes widened even more than before. “If… they find… you here… they will eat… you alive.”

  “Who are you?” Alex whispered. “And what is this place?”

  Another scream erupted from somewhere down the row of racks.

  “I… am Meldut. This… is… the winery,” he answered.

  “Are you… were you… human?” she asked.

  Meldut made a sound that might have been laughter. “I am… Sildren,” he said. “You would… call us… The Hunted.”

  “The Hunted?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Curburide can’t… survive… by… feeding only on… humankind,” Meldut said. “Not enough… doors.
”

  A new scream. Closer this time. Alex looked down the line of tubed prisoners and saw the reason. Something was moving down the line of racks on the top of the “grapevine” trellis that all the fleshtubes extended from. It looked almost like a small mining cart, only it was high in the air. When she spotted it, the thing was withdrawing a tube from the bed it hovered over.

  “So where do you come from?” she asked, now keeping an eye on the travelling cart. It was moving closer to them.

  “The Sildren… share this place.”

  “So you are demons too,” Alex said.

  “We are… the Hunted,” Meldut said again. “You are… hunted now, too.”

  “I need to find a way home,” she said. “They can’t hunt me there. I’m looking for a door.”

  “Not here,” Meldut said. “This is… the winery.

  “Winery?” Alex asked.

  “Bloodwine,” Meldut said. “It comes from… Sildren.”

  Alex looked down the row of bodies and grimaced. This wasn’t simply a torture chamber, but a milking factory. Somehow that made it even worse. She had a vision of a dairy farm where all the cows were tubed and tortured, while outside a mob of boisterous people stood around drinking glasses of milk and laughing. She shook the image away.

  “Where do I go to find a door?” she asked.

  “Look for the… star.”

  “What star?” Alex said. “You can never see the stars here… the sky is nothing but cloud.”

  Meldut shook his head faintly. “The star symbol. It is marked on… buildings where there is… a door. There are many… here… nearby.”