“Is somebody home?” she called. “Is someone there?”
No answer.
She listened, intently, but all she could hear was the racing of her heart and the heaviness of her breath. Wait, was that her breath? It seemed to be coming from behind her. Oh god, she could feel it on her shoulder, a cold hiss to counteract the house’s humid heat. Her skin erupted in goosebumps, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. The world felt like a different place, all of a sudden. Like if she moved the wrong way, she’d fall off the edge of eternity and tumble into nothingness.
“Get away from me!” Artemis screamed, turning around so fast her hair whipped the wall.
Nobody there. Nobody. Nothing. Even the cold air had dispersed.
“Goddamn.” Letting out a relieved chuckle, Artemis hopped quickly up the stairs. “Now my mind’s playing tricks on me. That’s just what I need.”
She was still laughing at herself when her hand met the brass knob on the bedroom door. Strange that Budd had closed it. Stranger still that it felt so brutally hot she let go the moment she heard the little latch click.
That being-watched feeling came back full force when she stepped inside the room that ought to be her refuge. Standing close to the door, she looked around. How had moving in with Budd gone so wrong? It wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t hers, either. Something didn’t want her here… or, rather, it wanted her too much.
How long had Budd owned this bed? Did he get a new one after Vincent’s mother left? Or had the décor of this master suite remained unchanged in all those years? It was everything Artemis ever wanted, and now she was leaving it, abandoning house and home. Just look at that blocked fireplace: attractive, but functionally useless, a lot like her. And those knick-knacks on the mantle, motorcycle trinkets and memorabilia, then the strange wooden box with words carved all around the sides.
Artemis felt weirdly drawn to it. As she laid a suitcase on the bed and started packing her clothes, she felt this odd impulse to steal the box. She wasn’t that kind of person. She wasn’t a thief. But as she packed, she kept glancing past the bed, and up at the mantle. It had a hold on her. She couldn’t explain it. The box wasn’t attractive. It probably wasn’t worth much. But she wanted it. Wanted it bad.
“So take it,” a familiar voice whispered.
Artemis froze. “Go away. I’m leaving. You’ll never hurt me again.”
“Hurt you?” The monster seemed offended that she would offer such a suggestion. “I would never hurt you, darling.”
His hands found her arms. She could feel those hot, sweaty fingers down her skin, leaving invisible traces of nothing. Her flesh rose into prickly peaks where he touched her. Didn’t matter that she couldn’t see him. She knew he was right there, touching her.
She swatted the air. “Get off me. I mean it.”
His laughter rang through the room, resounding in the hallway and down the stairs. She couldn’t feel his presence anymore. Had she really driven him away? So easily? Seemed too good to be true.
When she’d hastily filled one suitcase with clothes, she pulled another out of the closet. After this one, she’d have to move on to tote bags. Luckily, she hadn’t been living in Budd’s house long enough to fully unpack in the first place. All her winter clothes were still bundled in a duffel bag.
Just as she tossed her second load of zipped-up luggage on the floor, the door creaked behind her.
“I told you to stay the fuck away!” she called to the demon, but when she turned, she was faced with monster of a different colour. Artemis screamed and jumped onto the bed as Vincent’s prized python slithered into the room. “No, no, no…”
If the monster was scary, a loose python was terrifying. But Artemis had a sinking feeling this encounter would be worse than anything she could imagine.
“How did you get up here?” she asked the snake.
She wasn’t the least bit surprised when it cocked its serpentine head, like it understood, and whipped the air with its forked tongue.
“Go away.” She threw a pillow at it, but missed. “Get! Go!”
A familiar laugh rang out from the walls, everywhere at once, and that’s when she knew she’d never escape unscathed.
“No,” she said, more to the demon than to the snake. “I’ve had it with you. Just leave me alone. Let me pack my stuff and go.”
The snake shook its head. “Without saying goodbye?”
Its eyes flashed red, and she said, “Goodbye! There. Good enough?”
“Don’t I get a kiss?” The serpent rose from the floor, and Artemis fell back on the bed while it grew, as Dafoe’s dog had done. It grew until its head was as big as a man’s, grew until arms sprouted from its sides and legs from further along its body.
And between those newly-formed legs? Oh god, it couldn’t be. His tail became a cross between a soft cock and a slick tentacle.
He towered at the foot of her bed, his body tall, erect and motionless but for the slick sway of his cock-tail. It slid across the floor, from behind his snakeskin feet to in front. Then it rose off the ground like a fakir’s levitation. Artemis remained mesmerized as it slapped her ankle, then wound itself around her lower leg.
The snake man yanked her down the bed, and she squealed, but she didn’t fight. She couldn’t. She was hypnotized by the slick shimmer of his skin. And, in truth, the farther his cock-tail rode up her leg, the more arousal mixed with intense fear.
Her heart raced. “What are you doing?”
“Call it a parting gift,” the monster hissed.
That tongue… god, was it ever long.
Artemis swallowed hard as his tail wove itself around her waist. That smooth-as-silk snakeskin made her gasp. Why had she always been so afraid of snakes?
The monster laughed. It obviously heard her thought, because it said, “I’ll show you fear, my dear.”
The curtains snapped shut. The door slammed. When the master suite went dark, the ceiling changed texture. It wasn’t plaster anymore. It looked like swirling lava. Felt like it, too. The heat of that molten substance blazed against Artemis’s cheeks. Suddenly, she was sweating all over, and tearing at the scraps of clothing the snake hadn’t already ripped off.
“Who are you?” she begged. “Why can’t you tell me?”
When she looked into the snake’s amorphous face, it flashed into different forms: a skull, a swamp creature, a vampire, a wolf, Budd. In a hissing voice, he said, “I can be anything.”
“But what are you?” Artemis asked.
That question seemed to upset the creature. A desert wind picked up, sweeping the bedcovers against her feet. She kicked at them, and the snake man reacted intensely. His whole body propelled toward her, his arms reverting to snake-like tails, which wrapped tightly around her naked top.
“I don’t like this,” she said, though she wasn’t sure if that was strictly true.
“Yesss, you do!”
Her heart hammered. She’d never been so afraid in all her life, and yet her pussy pumped enough juice to soak her thighs. Her clit throbbed as the snake man’s slick body landed on top of her. She didn’t know what she wanted, and the hot, howling winds consuming the master bedroom weren’t exactly helping.
“Stop squirming,” the snake said.
She hadn’t realized she was squirming, but she stopped on a dime when the creature’s legs wrapped around her thighs. No, wait, his legs weren’t legs anymore. They were tails, or tentacles, just like his arms. Just like his cock.
His arm-tails encircled Artemis’s thighs, indenting her flesh. The monster yanked them apart, so hard her hipbones made popping noises. She shrieked, trying her damnedest to roll off the edge of the bed. The snake man pressed his body harder against hers, keeping her flat on the mattress. While his legs held hers in place and his arm tails held her torso down, his thick cock unwrapped itself from around her middle.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “Are you letting me go?”
Its laughter rang through he
r body like a bell. She felt it everywhere. And then she felt the tip of that tail pressing between her legs, finding her pussy wet and ready, and plunging inside.
Despite everything she’d been through since moving into this house, Artemis had never experienced a sensation like this. The creature’s snakeskin cock opened and filled her pussy in one continuous move. Once inside, that strange tentacle wagged, shaking like a child’s rattle. He found every forgotten place, explored the deep terrain of her cunt. It felt so strange to be infiltrated in this way. She could barely breathe.
And then another tail slid down the crack of her ass until it found her second vulnerable aperture. The slick, satiny snake tail plugged her up, shoved itself inside, filled her. Two tails, two holes, no waiting.
“How do you like that?” the snake hissed in her ear.
She couldn’t think. She couldn’t speak.
“Tell me the truth, my darling: won’t you miss me when you’re gone?”
Artemis panted harder as the snake’s tentacle tails undulated in her pussy and her ass. “No, I… I can’t live like this, with you watching me all the time, attacking me…”
“You love it.” The snake thrashed her neck with that whip-like tongue, and a bead of blood dripped from the slit in her skin. “You love being taken by a beast you can’t see, a beast you’ll never know.”
“No.” Her voice shivered and shook. She had no control over it, no control over anything. “I love Budd. I tolerated you because I didn’t want to hurt him.”
“But you’re willing to hurt him now?” the beast cackled. “You’re full of it, darling.”
“I’m not.” She struggled against him, suppressing the glowing pleasure inside her body while clutching the fear and revulsion she ought to feel. “I don’t want to hurt Budd, or Vincent, but I can’t take this anymore!”
As she struggled against the snake, the whole house shook. It felt like an earthquake, a huge one, when voices rang out beyond the bedroom door: “Artemis? What’s going on in there? Let us in!”
“Budd?”
The sound of his voice in the hallway gave Artemis enough strength to arch up from the mattress, though that was probably the stupidest thing she could do. When she sat, the motion drove the snake’s leg-tail deeper inside her ass. The tentacle in her pussy responded by ramming her harder, building pressure in her pelvis. How was it possible to be this full and not explode? Explosive: that’s how she felt, as the snake hurled her down on the bed.
The doorknob jiggled relentlessly. “Open up!” Vincent’s voice, this time. He was there, too.
“I can’t!” Artemis cried. “The beast has got me. Help! Please help!”
Lava swirled in the heavens on the ceiling while the boys banged against the bedroom door. “We’re coming for you.”
The creature’s tentacles slid across her skin as he whipped her nipples with his terrible tongue. Her flesh sizzled. The more he lashed her, the more she bled, until the pain of those razor-like incisions superseded the pleasure of being stretched to her limits.
“Stop it!” Artemis tried raising her hands enough to push the creature away, but his arm-tails grew longer. He wrapped them around her wrists. “Stop! You’re hurting me.”
His arm tentacles lengthened yet more, winding up her shoulders and around her neck.
“Oh god,” she gasped, choking on her words. Red storm clouds swirled above her head as she struggled for breath. “Stop it. You’re killing me!”
“Quiet.” The snake tightened its hold on her neck, and there was nothing she could do about it. “Do you know how many women have left me? No more, my darling. You will not leave.”
“Artie?” Budd called as he banged against the door. “Are you okay in there?”
“No!” She tried to scream, but it came out like a wheeze. “Help. Budd, Vince, help me!”
“Hold tight,” a woman’s voice said from the hallway.
Artemis recognized that voice… who was it?
“He’s strangling me,” Artemis sputtered, trying her hardest to fight off the snake.
As she bled quite badly from her chest, she didn’t get nearly enough air into her lungs. And all the while, the snake’s tails pulsed relentlessly in her pussy and her ass. He didn’t stop fucking her just because he was killing her. No way.
“Help,” she gasped. She didn’t have the power to scream. Her head was spinning. The lava above her constricted as the blackness of death circled around it. Her eyes fluttered closed just as the bedroom door burst open.
“Oh, god!” a woman screamed. Nora, from the rally. That’s where she knew that voice from. “This is much worse than I thought.”
Artemis could feel the men, her men, grabbing at the demonic snake. He just whipped them away. If she’d not been so battered she would have had the strength to slip out of its death grasp. Instead, she rocked with the motion while Budd and his son struggled to free her from the creature between her legs.
Vincent pulled at the snake, getting his arm wrapped tight in the process. “King! It was you all along? How could you?”
“Don’t blame the snake,” Nora said, from across the room. “He’s possessed by a demon.”
“What demon?” Budd pulled at the snake with all his might. The possessed King wove its tentacle tails around Budd’s big body, too.
Nora picked up that strange wooden box from mantle. “Budd, where did you get this thing?”
“Is this really the time?” Vincent panted.
But Budd responded, “It came with the house. A lot of this stuff was here when we moved in. The last owner left in a hurry, seemed like.”
The snake’s two tails surged in Artemis’s pussy and ass. Nora approached with the box in one hand and the lid in the other. “This is where your demon lives. We’ve found its little home.”
“Well, make him go back there!” Vincent shouted as the multi-tailed snake fought to push the men away.
“Okay. Everybody hold on tight. This is going to be a bumpy ride.” Lifting the box over her head, Nora began reading the strange words carved on it.
“Dad, what is she saying?” Vincent asked.
Budd shrugged. “Sounds like Latin, to me. Maybe a prayer.”
“Make it stop,” Artemis begged as the snake burrowed into her open orifices, like it could escape its coffin by living in her. “Budd, it hurts. Help me, it hurts!”
The snake’s thickness and largeness opened her wider than she ever thought possible. It didn’t help that she was wet as hell, and snakeskin smoothed an easy path inside.
The lava skies thundered above them as Budd grabbed one cock-tail and Vincent took the other. Nora raised her voice, reciting the words on the box even louder than before. When Artemis looked up into the red sky, bolts of lightning crossed it, and thunder vibrated the room with deep bass harmonics. She wondered if that was hell… or if hell was loving someone as great as Budd and choosing to leave because his house wasn’t safe.
Nora’s voice grew louder. It thundered over the smothering rumble, commanding the demon to return home.
“This isn’t working,” Artemis said. “It’s killing me…”
“We won’t let that happen,” Budd assured her while Nora read on. He tugged at the snake’s writhing tentacle, but when it didn’t budge, a fierce love-driven strength crossed his face. Doubling his effort, Budd untwisted King’s tail from around his huge arm and stormed across the bed.
Artemis rolled toward him as the mattress sank under his muscular weight. He stopped her motion by pressing her shoulders down on the bed.
“What are you doing?” she asked, breathlessly.
All he said was, “This,” before bowing to her lips and kissing her with such passion and tenderness he became her whole world. All she could feel was the pulse of his tongue against hers. All she could hear was the hammering of his heartbeat. Nora’s voice faded into the background as Artemis derived strength from the man who loved her… from the man she loved.
His kiss
faded the hell that surrounded them. His kiss drew goodness forward and warded off the evil. His kiss sent the demon spiralling out of Vincent’s snake. When its tails left her body, she felt at once abandoned and elated.
Thunder roared overhead while Nora’s words drew the beast into its small wooden cage. She clapped the lid on tight, and the lava cleared from the white plaster ceiling. The winds stopped howling. All went suddenly quiet. The only thing Artemis could hear, beyond Budd’s heartbeat, was the racing breaths of everyone in the room. Then, through the closed and draped window, came the refreshing sound of the sparrows singing in the trees.
Nora opened the curtains and sunshine gleamed in through the window. Budd traced a calloused finger down her chest and asked, “He did this to you?”
She reached for a sheet, for something to cover her naked body. “It’s okay, Budd. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
“No you’re not,” Vincent cut in. His python was balled up around his arm, and he held the fearful creature lovingly against his chest. “Dad, she’s not okay. She’s been through so much since she moved in, and she needs to tell you about it. She needs to know you’ll always be there for her, no matter what.”
“Well, of course I will.” Budd lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it gently. “I love you, kitten. I’d do anything for you.”
Tears filled her eyes as she nodded. “I know you would. You already have. You’ve--”
The wooden box cut her off by flying out of Nora’s hands and landing on the floor like it had legs. They all watched in horror as it shivered and shook, trying to rattle off its top.
Nora wasn’t having it. She dove on top of the box, smothering it with her chest.
“The monster wants out,” Vincent said. “What do we do?”
She cradled the box the way Vincent clung to his snake. “Vince, take me to the kitchen. Get me some string or twine, and some salt. We need to bathe the box and the twine in salt water, then tie it up. That’ll secure it until we can do something more permanent.”
They left the room in an instant, leaving Budd in bed beside Artemis. He held her hand and gazed into her eyes, showing her he’d always be there.
Shifters, Beasts, and Monsters Page 47