Redemption (Covenant Book 3)

by John Everson

  “Are there specific words I need?”

  “Spells and chants are only about driving your mind to focus,” Malachai said. “Pure, concentrated focus is what you need. That, and the energy of a sacrifice.”

  Alex’s eyes didn’t leave Ariana’s placid face. “I have that,” she said. “Now I just need to be in the right place with her.”

  “That and a weapon,” he answered. “Unless you’ll be using your bare hands.”

  Alex thought of her night in bed with Ariana and Elotan. At one point, the bitch had sat on her face as she and the demon laughed.

  “I might,” Alex hissed at the dark spot in her brain where Malachai hid. “I just might.”

  “I always liked you,” he whispered.

  “Just help me find the place,” she said.

  “He’s proud,” Malachai said. “He’ll want to parade his new harem around so others will see how rich he has become. You’ll need to be ready if he takes you near a place where the world is thin. I will keep watch.”

  “I want to go home,” Alex said. Her silent voice trembled.

  “Sleep now,” Malachai whispered. “The Redemption is nearly upon us, and when you wake, you’ll be whole again.”

  Alex pressed her eyelids closed, and tried to force the foul images of Elotan and Ariana’s intertwined bodies to leave her inner sight. She didn’t think she would ever be whole again, not really.

  “Sleep.”

  CHAPTER 59

  “OH MY GOD, what did you do to me?” Joe cried, holding his hands over what once had been his manhood. Blood streamed out between his fingers. He looked down and saw a growing dark spot on the couch. “Shit, shit, shit,” he whispered. “I’m going to bleed to death.”

  Helone stretched her arms over her head, a lazy cat motion. And then she drew them back and stood.

  “You’re not going to bleed to death, but you are going to ruin my upholstery.”

  She crossed the room and yanked down a veil from the ceiling. There were hundreds of the things hanging there it seemed; like a closet of silk. She returned with a knife and a towel.

  “You are a bleeder, aren’t you?”

  Helone mopped the blood off of her couch with the towel and then dabbed it at the mess on his thighs.

  “Move your hands,” she said. He was holding his bleeding cock tight, trying to staunch the flow.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’ll bleed more.”

  “Move your hands,” she commanded. The power in her voice was undeniable. He obeyed, and instantly the blood began to flow faster. He felt it oozing down his testicles, and tears flowed freely from his eyes. He’d been weak. He’d always been weak when it came to women. They tempted him, and he always took the bait, but now… here was payback. He’d never have the chance to be weak again, because it was gone. He looked down at the raw gristle that had once defined him, driven him, and felt all of the fight simply drain from him. He felt faint.

  Nauseous.

  Helone cut a piece of the veil and with one finger held it in place at the base of his groin before twisting it around and around what was left of his manhood as if she were wrapping a bare wire in electrical tape.

  And it worked. After she double wrapped and tied it off, the flow of blood down his leg ceased. Helone wiped up all of the visible blood, and then held out what was left of his glass of wine.

  “Drink this,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “You’ll feel better,” she promised. “Trust me.”

  “Are you kidding me? Trust you?” Joe said. “Your cunt just chewed my dick off!”

  Helone smiled sadly. “I didn’t think you’d have gone along with it if I’d warned you,” she said. “Sorry. It’s just… that’s the way our parts work. Demon men don’t mind it so much.”

  “I mind it very much,” Joe said, snuffling and wiping the tears from his face. “You’ve made me a eunuch.”

  “Drink,” she implored, and Joe took the glass. He didn’t sip it this time; he needed a blast.

  And a blast is what he got. The liquid hit him like a forty-foot wave, and smashed his nerves to the coral reef below. Knives raked his back and a spear of ice stabbed his anus. He could feel it freeze his heart before it emerged from his throat. His lips locked in frozen surprise. His whole body stiffened.

  “I told you to sip it,” Helone said. She took the glass back from his palsied hand, and rubbed her fingers across his forehead. To Joe, it felt as if someone was shifting sandpaper across his eyeball.

  “The bloodwine doesn’t always bring pleasure,” she explained. “But it will pass. Just as your wound will heal. I would never damage you so that you couldn’t pleasure me again. What good would that do me?”

  “Heal?” Joe cried. “There’s nothing left to heal!”

  “You’ll see,” she said. Helone stood up and stopped torturing him with her touch. “I’ll get you a blanket,” she said. “You probably don’t want to move right now. But in the morning, you’ll be good as new. And maybe we can take it a little slower then.”

  She winked at that, and walked out of the room.

  Joe shivered in the light of the fire. There was something like an orgasm growing in the nerves of his feet, while his fingers felt as if they were being held down on the orange grates of an electric stove. He was torn in a hideous, heavenly crash of conflicting sensations.

  He would have screamed, but his mouth refused to move.

  CHAPTER 60

  SHE WOKE IN DARKNESS, but Cheyenne could still see. At first she was disoriented, staring through the blackness to see grey outlines of things undefined. It was a dreamscape; nothing seemed solid. Dark was not black, solid things appeared ghostly.

  But then, as she tried to figure out where she was, exactly, she remembered the statue falling, and the pop of her arm just before that pain came. And it all came back. “Oh shit,” she whispered as she relived the most horrible moment of her life. Instinctually, she tried to move the place where that arm would have been, had it not been ripped off.

  The pale ghosts of fingers suddenly clutched and spread, just in front of her face. Pain shot through her shoulder as it moved but, she realized with ecstatic relief that she still had an arm. The fingers were not ghosts.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Cheyenne whispered. She opened and closed her fingers in front of her face, fanning them as if she’d never seen fingers before. “It’s a miracle,” she whispered.

  Something moved near her feet, and she heard a low laugh.

  “No miracle,” a voice said. “Just the Redemption. It happens every night. Wasn’t sure if that arm was going to make it with you but, you lucked out. Or maybe you’ll see it another way, once we decide what to do with you.”

  Cheyenne sat up and suddenly the room seemed to swim into focus. A tall, black-skinned man stood before her, hands on naked hips. Or not a man. A demon. No man looked like that. She had to avert her eyes when she saw what hung at her eye level. She’d seen horses that weren’t hung that well. Holy shit.

  “Where is Joe?” she asked.

  The demon shrugged. “Helone said to bring you to her if you woke up.”

  “If?” Cheyenne said.

  “Sometimes Redemption doesn’t come.” The demon stepped closer, eyeing her with obvious interest. “And sometimes, even if it does, other things happen.”

  Cheyenne flipped her legs off of the bed and stood, not wanting to give the demon time to think of what those “other things” might be. “I’m ready to go,” she said. “Where is Helone waiting?”

  Joe groaned as he rolled over. His dreams had been filled with horrible images. He blinked them away, until the room became clear. His vision felt hazy, but as he opened his eyes, he realized that he remained on the couch where Helone had taken his manhood. And not in a good way. He lifted the blanket t
hat covered him, and looked down, afraid to see, but yet needing to look. It couldn’t be as bad as he thought, could it? He couldn’t have fallen asleep if it had! And at the moment, he felt no pain.

  His cock hung slack against his thigh, still wrapped in the veil that Helone had used to staunch the flow of his blood the night before. But there was no trace of blood now. He reached down and pulled at the edge, carefully unraveling it to see if the wounds were seeping.

  There were no wounds.

  He yanked the last of the tissue-thin stuff from him, and shook his head. He had not imagined all that, he couldn’t have. And the couch seemed to agree. There was a dark spot between his legs.

  Joe rose from the couch and pulled the blanket around his shoulders. For the first time since arriving in the world of the Curburide, he actually had the time to truly look around. In some ways, the room was like the study or den from a rich mansion. The space was rectangular and long; an ornate Oriental patterned carpet covered the dark wooden floor in the center. The rug was bordered by plush, antique-looking couches, with ornate carvings decorating the wooden borders above the cushion backs. A dark wood bar hugged one wall, which Helone had served him from the night before, and a fireplace took up most of another wall. A low orange blaze still flickered above the glowing embers in the hearth. Above it, a heavy wood mantel held an array of statues and trinkets and candles. Along the other wall, veils hung from a hundred hooks.

  Joe fingered a couple of the things on the mantel – there was an ancient-looking gold pocket watch there, that could have been from the 1600s, and a locket with a sepia picture that clearly had been taken in the early 1900s. But he passed the mantel to look instead at the hangings along the long wall of the room.

  From a few feet away, they’d looked like flesh-colored veils. But as he drew closer, he realized they were much more than veils. He could make out fingers hanging at the end of some of the skeins, and near the hooks, when he looked closer, he realized that he could see noses, and mouths and eye-holes.

  Joe took the fingers of one and pulled it towards him, like pulling a shirt from a closet. And as it moved, he could see it for what it was. These were not veils of silk, they were skins.

  He let go of the fingers of the dead man, and looked again at the row of skins. They didn’t immediately jump out to the eye as human skins, because on the hooks they sagged and hung limp and wrinkled. Hence his initial thought that they were veils. But he went down the line and pulled on the arm tubes that hung limp, drawing the skins out, and one by one he saw that there were fat men and old women and young girls all hanging like deflated ghosts. He walked behind the couch and all the way down the row of skins to the end, marveling at the number and variety.

  So many people hung here.

  How had they been skinned so perfectly? You could have stepped in to some of them and worn their skins, the form remained so complete.

  Joe suddenly grimaced as he remembered what Helone had done last night; one of these bodies had “lost a limb” to patch his shredded genitals. He had worn someone else’s skin. On his dick no less. The thought made him shiver.

  But then he reached the end of the line, and did more than feel a little creeped out.

  Because the last skin that he pulled out to see, was not just the ghost of a stranger.

  Even without eyes or flesh, he recognized this skin. It couldn’t be a mistake.

  “Alex,” Joe breathed.

  The skin shifted in his fingers.

  “You came,” her voice whispered in the air.

  Joe jumped backwards. Alex’s skin moved of its own accord, her arms lifting and reaching out for him.

  “Why did it take so long?” Alex said. She sounded so incredibly sad. “I waited. I hoped. But I could not wait forever.”

  Joe felt a lump grow in his throat. It hurt as he tried to talk. “I tried, Alex. I looked for a way through for so long.”

  “Now it’s too late,” Alex said. The pale, see-through skin of her arm lifted and brushed her face, as if she were wiping a tear. But she had no eyes to cry.

  “I am so sorry,” Joe said. Tears rolled down his cheeks like rain. “I wanted to bring you back.”

  “You failed,” Alex said. With that, her translucent arms dropped to her sides.

  Joe felt the wind kicked out of him with those words.

  “No!” he cried out, and fell to his knees. He reached out and touched the limp skin of Alex’s legs. He had dedicated himself to finding a way to reach her. To bring her back. And now he had found her. Had crossed the invisible divide between worlds to reach her.

  Only to find he could not bring her home?

  She was gone. Now she was only a spirit and a disembodied skin.

  Joe’s breath hitched in painful sobs and he hung his head in shame and pain. He had done everything he could, and it hadn’t been enough.

  “You failed,” kept playing over and over again in his head.

  He ran one hand up the limp hip of skin that hung from Helone’s ceiling and begged, “Come back, Alex. Please.”

  But her empty skin did not move or speak again.

  CHAPTER 61

  THE WORLD SHOOK beneath her feet.

  Ariana stumbled, and grabbed onto Elotan’s arm to stop from falling flat on her face. Alex dropped to her knees beside her.

  “That was bad,” Ariana said.

  Elotan nodded. He had not fallen, but he was clearly unsteady after the shake. “It was,” he agreed. But he said no more.

  “Should we be worried?” Ariana asked. Part of her wondered if she had finally gotten to “the other side” only to have the whole damn dimension shake apart into cosmic dust.

  Elotan shrugged. “As long as the door to earth remains open, it will probably get worse. The doors should not be open so long. It’s unnatural.”

  “Is it dangerous?” Ariana asked.

  “That depends on who you’re talking about,” Elotan admitted. “It’s said that if the door stays open, the world of the Curburide will eat your world.”

  “And if they’re wrong?” Adriana asked.

  The back of Elotan’s hand slapped Adriana’s cheek. She asked no more questions.

  “Where are we going?” Alex asked. The chain around her neck clinked as she spoke. Two tall demons on the other side of the street stopped and clearly looked at them.

  “We are walking,” Elotan said. His voice was low and stern.

  “But where?” Alex pressed.

  Suddenly the chain around her neck grew tight.

  “Where I feel like walking,” he said. Clearly, he was not going to answer the question. If there was an answer.

  “We’re bait,” Ariana said quietly. “And you’re… jailbait.”

  “Bait for what?” Alex asked.

  “Demon dreams,” she said. “Our master needs to score some bloodwine. How many demons do you think have had a chance to bed an underage human?”

  “Me?” Alex said. She quailed. Elotan had made both her and Adriana pull on sheer, see-through silken coverings before they’d gone out, with nothing on beneath. Even to a demon, apparently, the “tease factor” was as important as seeing the skin. She had tried to resist, but a few well-placed slaps had convinced her that near-nudity was better than pain. He’d since been parading both of them down the street and had several leering, black-skinned demons stop and look. But so far, none had come closer.

  The reason may have been ahead. A crowd of demons gathered a couple blocks down the street, surrounding the doorway of a small building. There was a symbol above the door that struck Alex instantly. “That’s one of the doorways,” she said, not meaning to voice her excitement out loud.

  Elotan answered. “Yes. And you can see it’s also our problem. Nobody is interested in you when they can wait for a new consort from the doorway. They all think they can take
a human home for their own tonight.”

  “How many are coming through the doorway?” Ariana asked.

  Elotan shook his head. “More than ever before.”

  As he said it, the ground shook again, and this time, even the demon fell to his feet. Ahead of them, the crowd suddenly dispersed, some from falling and some from running. Clearly the Curburide were not used to their world moving.

  Ariana grabbed Elotan’s arm again, but this time he pushed her aside. “Stand up and look alive.”

  CHAPTER 62

  “WOULD YOU CRY about me like that?”

  Joe looked up from where he knelt on the floor to see Helone leaning casually against the doorframe. Her hair seemed even more lustrous than last night. A pale yellow silk sash hung loosely across her body; it hid little of the dark curves beneath. She was exotic and sexy and stunning. A sadistic succubus.

  Joe hated her with all his heart.

  “You bitch!” he screamed, and leapt to his feet. “You killed her, didn’t you? You lied to me about everything.” He started across the room and had just begun to raise a fist when his body froze.

  Helone’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “Stay,” she said.

  She pushed off the wall and walked around him. With one finger she pushed the blanket off his shoulders. Then she ran a black palm down his chest until her fingers arrived at his pelvis. She ran fingernails through the thickening hair there, and then cupped the flesh that was already betraying him.

  “No harm done here, I see,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you not to worry?” Then she put one hand on his shoulder and said simply, “Heel.”

  Joe felt his muscles weaken and give out, and suddenly he was on his knees.

  “Learn proper respect, or the pain you felt last night will seem like the respite of heaven,” she warned.

  “You told me Alex was alive, but she’s not,” Joe said. “You killed her. Damnit, you skinned her!”