Chained in the Demon's Lair (Hellfire Circus)
Chained in the Demon's Lair (Hellfire Circus)
Midpoint
Also by Crystal De la Cruz:
Hellfire Circus Volume One
Hellfire Circus: Chained in the Demon’s Lair
By
Crystal De la Cruz
Published by The Blue Bouzouki Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 Crystal De la Cruz
Hellfire Circus: Chained in the Demon’s Lair
It was dark and warm, humid even, in the way that the engines of an enormous cargo ship must be be, its labyrinthine passageways filled with the strident hiss of thick steam and the grunts of muscular stevedores shoveling coal. Or so Julie imagined, since she’d never actually been anywhere remotely near the engines of a cargo ship. In fact, she’d never been on any kind of ship at all.
Just eight months ago she’d been a reporter for a small-town Minnesota newspaper, a job that was even less exciting than it sounded and she’d never strayed much further than the county line. Back then she’d never imagined anything much of interest at all could ever happen to her, but now here she was, stripped down to her underwear in some kind of industrial holding cell, with a shiny chrome collar locked tight around her throat, the other end chained to a bolt in the metal wall. She’d been taken here by an elegant femme fatale (a woman she’d scorned by winning the love of her beau) and the handsome, yet irrevocably cruel cowboy, whom all the evidence seemed to suggest, was not even human at all. One thing was for sure, Julie wasn’t in Minnesota anymore.
***
She lifted her chain and dragged it as quietly as possible over to the corner of the small metal room. She was fairly certain that whatever the original purpose of this diminutive room had been, it was likely not intended for housing prisoners. There wasn’t even a bench, let alone a bed. It was probably supposed to be a storage area or something, Julie guessed. Or, judging by the apparent impenetrability of its walls, a safe.
But there was one flaw in the fortress, a tiny air vent in the lower corner of the room which led directly out into a wide open space, a huge chamber that had filled Julie with a mixture of dread and awe the first time she’d seen it. It looked like something out of a James Bond movie. All over the room there was high-tech computer equipment and machinery, all pointing towards a huge computer screen on the far wall. Just who the hell were these people, she wondered?
Well she knew the answer to half that equation at least. The woman who’d brought her at gunpoint to this place (or at least as far as the truck that brought them here. The truck where Julie had been blindfolded and knocked unconscious before presumably being crammed into the trunk like some disorganized traveler’s cheap luggage) was Cassandra, the unofficial second in command of the Hellfire Circus. And the Hellfire Circus was the carnival of sexual expression that had changed Julie’s life and awoken her to pleasures like she’d never dreamed of. Unfortunately, as she was starting to learn, there was a dark side to the circus too…
Julie didn’t know who the other guy was, that steely-eyed and infinitely dark cowboy, who commanded Cassandra’s every move with a gravelly voice that was friendly at the same time as it was contemptuous, all the while brimming with a dark undercurrent of seductive control. Whoever he was, he was almost infinitely powerful and by some of the things that he alluded to, Julie had begun to doubt if he was even a man at all.
But one thing was for certain. The cowboy had some unfinished business with Julie’s lover and personal dom, the Ringmaster of the Hellfire Circus. From what Julie could deduce, the Ringmaster had slighted him sometime long ago, in a way that had irked him enough to make a pledge for tireless vengeance. And now here he was.
As Julie crept over to the vent, bending down on her bare knees to get a closer look, she spied the cowboy striding across the huge command center like some kind of timeless general, with the garb of the civil war on his back and the machinery of the most up-to-date international conflicts at his disposal. Julie suspected that the weaponry available to him in his own arsenal was even more fantastical than anything human science could ever conjure up, even in the modern age.
She froze as the cowboy began to speak.
“Cassandra, you little shit! Where are you hiding?”
His voice was a cool, Southern drawl, always flowing just at its own pace, and in everything he said it was impossible to tell whether he was joking or not.
“I’m here,” Cassandra returned from somewhere out of Julie’s line of sight. “And I wasn’t hiding, I was just trying to fix up a few of these fallen desks. This place is a pigsty.”
The cowboy chuckled. “Well that’d be fine and well if I’d told you to darlin, but since I didn’t you’re in danger of simply getting on my nerves. And you know what happens when people get on my nerves?”
“No sir,” Cassandra replied, a faint tremble in her voice.
“Oh,” the cowboy grinned, and for a second Julie caught a dolorous glimpse of a silver twinkle in his eye, like a cold star at the outer-limits of a godless universe. “All sorts of things…”
He stepped towards the sound of Cassandra’s voice, walking in a slow cowboy strut. “C’mere,” he said, “Soon enough our friend Samuel will arrive and I’ll have to go out and make him dance for me. (and don’t worry sugar, I’ll make sure he knows exactly what you did to him) but first, I want to blow off some steam. Get over here and let me fuck you girl. You know how good I can make you feel.”
Julie clasped a hand over her mouth as she repressed a silent gasp. She watched as Cassandra walked in resignation slowly towards the center of the room, where the amused cowboy waited in the middle of all those fancy computers, a wicked smile on his handsome jaw being the only thing that showed beneath the brim of his ancient Stetson hat. Beneath his dusty black jeans, Julie could see the shape of a bulging cock press out against the confines of the denim. The cowboy might not have been human, but he certainly had all the constituent parts.
***
Julie inched closer to the air vent, the flesh of her bare legs brushing against the smooth cool metal beneath her, as she watched Cassandra come silently to the cowboy’s fore and obey his unspoken command to kneel. Despite her catastrophic circumstances (or perhaps because of them, Julie did glean a distinctive pleasure from bondage and steel after all), she felt that comfortable and familiar sexual heat fill her loins. She peered down into the control room below in open-mouthed wonder.
“That’s it,” the cowboy smiled, “there’s a good girl.” He lifted his hand to Cassandra’s soft scalp and stroked her hair with the loving condescension one might reserve for a favorite pet. With his other hand, he unbuckled the belt fastening his jeans and slowly unsheathed his throbbing member.
Julie couldn’t help but savor the sight of it. Even from up here, his thing was obviously massive. The head was shiny and filled with the blood of powerful, virile masculinity. As he guided it to Cassandra’s mouth, Julie ran a finger down along the crevice of her breasts and against the tight material of her bra. Beneath, her nipples were rigid and standing to full attention.
She watched as Cassandra’s head bobbed down over the cowboy’s cock, the plunging sound of his thing as it pushed deeper into her wet mouth carrying all the way up to Julie’s cell.
“But you’re not a good girl, are you?” the cowboy asked, pressing her head deeper against the root of his dick. “You certainly don’t suck like one anyway. And you don’t act like one neither. Betraying your friends, the one guy on earth who ever truly believed in you…”
Cassandra tried to lift her head back to take a breath but the
cowboy held her firmly in place.
“No,” he sighed, “you’re a bad girl, a bad person. A killer.”
Cassandra began to squirm against his grip as she struggled to catch a breath. The cowboy merely chuckled as he held her.
“Yes indeed, you’re irredeemable.” He pushed her head deeper over him one last time as she called out through her full-mouth, voicing her discomfort, before he finally let her pull back. “You’re a pretty good fuck though,” he said as Cassandra fell back on her haunches and gasped for air.
***
Julie was sopping wet now, she couldn’t help herself. The danger, the chains and the helplessness, and now this down below. It was too much to resist.
“Hey we don’t have all day,” the cowboy barked at Cassandra, “get back over here.” He snapped his fingers punitively as Cassandra crawled back towards him and opened her jaw around his huge thing.
“Mmmm,” the cowboy murmured as she bobbed up and down, sucking his cock with long wet strokes. “This is nice. I’m having a good time. Are you having a good time Cassandra?”
She didn’t answer him, just continued gagging on his massive thing.
“I asked you a question girl, are you having a good time?”
“Uh-huh,” Cassandra grunted through her mouthful of cock. Julie slipped her hand down between her legs and began to massage the wet folds of her aching pussy beneath the material of her underwear. It was already soaking now anyway.
“Sure, it’s nice,” the cowboy continued, “but is that good enough? I mean it’s not like we’re nice, is it? We’re better than nice. We deserve better than nice.”
Julie slipped her fingers into her hot passage, mimicking Cassandra’s rhythm as she bobbed her head up and down on the cowboy’s crotch.
“Why don’t we go up to that cell and fuck that little bitch we have in lock up?” he said, “You hold her down and I’ll rip her right open…”
Julie froze instantly. Her mind went blank.
“What do you say?” the cowboy chuckled, as though he’d just come up with a particularly humorous prank to play on somebody. “I bet that’d really rub Samuel the wrong way, huh?”
In an instant Cassandra pulled back from his cock and looked up at him. “No!” she cried. “What do you need that little slut for? Let me pleasure you. Fuck me master, I will serve you far better than she ever could.”
The cowboy shrugged as Julie looked on in terror. “Is that so?” he said, “well ok then sugar pie, why don’t you prove it to me?” He reached down and with a rough push shoved Cassandra’s shoulders back, knocking her to the ground, her chest heaving as she waited for him to ravage her. Before he did the cowboy looked directly up at Julie’s vent and smiled.
***
She froze. Had he known she was watching them all along? By the way he’d smiled, Julie strongly suspected that to be the case. Already he’d given her cause to think that he might be something beyond human. Now she wondered just how far his powers and abilities truly stretched.
While the cowboy roughly hoisted Cassandra’s legs up and entered her with his huge equine cock, Julie crept back from the vent. Suddenly she no longer felt so aroused. The gravity of the situation was returning to her, the cowboy’s dark threats had made sure of that.
Julie dragged her chain over to the far corner of the small cell and sat down in the dark humidity. As the cries of Cassandra losing herself to a passion that was every bit as otherworldly as the being who incited it in her rang out across the chamber, Julie thought of her own lover. The handsome and loving Ringmaster who had shown her things she had never dreamed existed, who had given her life meaning where before their had only been complacency.
The cowboy intended to do something terrible to him and Julie had no way to warn him, chained up in this tiny humid cell. Did he know what was happening, she wondered? Was he looking for her?
“Where are you?” she whispered into the darkness, dreaming of his beautiful face.
***
The night was dark and still, the clear Texas sky unveiling a tapestry of distant stars and galaxies above the desert plain. Samuel crossed the dusty earth with a purposeful stride, his mouth twisted in determination. What his steely expression did not show was the fear. Fear that he’d already been too late to save them.
“Are you sure this is the place master?”
Samuel looked down at his companion, the dwarf Francois who had been by his side almost as long as the time that had passed since he himself had left the side of Mephistopheles. The being he had once called master. The one who had caused him to vow never to call anyone master ever again.
“Mephistopheles doesn’t make mistakes,” he said, “and neither do I. This is where he told me to meet him. This is where he will appear.”
But even still, the desert around them was as empty as all isolation itself. Nothing but scrub brush and sand stretching out for miles towards the rock formations that stood, jagged and alien against the purple horizon.
“But what if it’s a trap?” Francois protested.
Samuel smiled for the first time since receiving the demon’s letter, although admittedly without much humor.
“Of course it’s a trap,” he said, “everything he does is a trap. Every time he lifts a single finger, each time he coils his tongue against his rotten teeth to sound a word. A trap.”
“Then what do we do?”
“We try to deduce what kind of trap it is,” Samuel said, his eyes surveying the barren horizon in search of any sign of movement. “And we try to cloak all signs of our own.”
***
Samuel fingered the small mechanical box in his breast pocket and then immediately pushed all thought of it from his mind. He wasn’t sure how much of his own cognition would be readable to Mephistopheles after all this time. All he knew was that he himself had grown immensely in power and skill since those days of apprenticeship at the demon’s side, when even his deepest, most ill-formed thoughts were obvious to the monster. Whether that would be enough to keep the demon out, only time would tell.
He took one more step across the dusty wasteland, his boot crunching down on the pebbly scrub, and then the entire sky lit up with flame as fast as the blinking of a devil’s eye. Plumes of thick black smoke shot up all around them like pillars in the palace of the damned, billowing into the sky more pollutant than any chemical ever made by the hands of man. Mephistopheles loved to make his entrance.
“Nice gimmick,” Samuel spoke as he slowly turned to face the being he knew now stood behind him. “I’d give it a neat seven out of ten. Maybe an eight with practice.”
“My dear Samuel,” Mephistopheles smiled. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time. Wondering just where my little friend got to.”
“Unfortunately we’ve already got a pyrotechnics guy at the Circus,” Samuel continued, ignoring the demon’s greeting. “And he’s much more talented than you.”
Mephistopheles twisted his lips in an amused leer. It was almost as if he was still fond of the other man. Almost as if he ever had been.
“Mephistopheles,” Samuel spoke, narrowing his eyes with intense determination. “I believe you have some friends of mine. I’m going to take them from you before I wipe you out of all existence.”
Mephistopheles smiled.
***
A stream of white hot lightning shot from the demon cowboy’s palm and hit Samuel right in the center of his chest. In an instant everything he’d ever known was forgotten, his identity wiped away by the force of a thousand volts, all vision replaced with searing white light. He hit the ground with a convulsion of agony, as the hiss of cognizance slowly returned. Samuel could hear nothing but a loud buzz and it was a struggle just to unlock his jaw. Such a blow would have been enough to kill a normal man ten times over. But Samuel wasn’t a normal man and Mephistopheles didn’t want to kill him. Not yet.
Fighting back the shock, Samuel hoisted himself up on his hands and knees and then shakily stood up. A strea
m of black smoke was billowing from his charred chest. He looked back at his adversary. Fighting back the pain, Samuel spread his lips in a condescending smile.
“Cute little trick,” he said. “I suppose you expect me to counteract.”
“My dear Samuel,” Mephistopheles said, his voice losing its cowboy drawl and momentarily reverting to the aristocratic tone of some yesteryear. “I await it with eager anticipation. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you practice. Show me what you’ve learned.”
Samuel chuckled. “There’s time for that later,” he said, “first you will tell me where Julie and Cassandra are.”
“Will I now?” Mephistopheles asked, raising an intrigued eyebrow.
“I know you wouldn’t have killed them,” Samuel said, “you’d want to taunt me first, give me hope before destroying it completely. As such, I suspect they’re also somewhere nearby, no? No doubt you’d have me see what I could not save before delivering the final blow. So where are they? On top of one of those rock formations perhaps? Buried up to the neck in sand? Why don’t you give in to your pride and boast of your latest cruelties?”
Mephistopheles stared at his erstwhile accomplice for a moment, as though weighing him up. “Well really,” he said, “am I that predictable?”
Samuel offered no reply.
“Fine,” Mephistopheles said, “I’ll tell you where they are, but only because I know it won’t make a difference. And no, I’m not going to let you see them. It’s enough for me to know that you knew how much you’d failed. And by the way, it’s only your latest little cunt I’ll be disposing off. The other one, Cassandra, has made her own arrangement with me and will be living to fight another day. Do you want to know what that arrangement cost her?”
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