“It’s not an excuse! I know your feelings. I can see them!”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. He stopped making sense again, and I just stared at him speechless.
“I can see them,” he repeated emphatically and continued, rushing to explain. “I see all your feelings and emotions in light and colour. I just need to scan inside of you to see what you’re feeling at any given moment. I knew most of human emotions before I even met you, and then I learned all of yours explicitly. Every single one you ever had since I met you, I memorized. Every tint, every shade… I know them all. So I know for sure that I could not have possibly made a mistake with you. When we were… When I was touching you, I was scanning all your emotions relentlessly to learn what you liked, to know how my every touch affected you, to build up your pleasure… I know you felt pleasure. And lust, and affection, and ecstasy… I saw them… It was beautiful.“
“Sytrius.” I exhaled heavily. I could not have remained entirely unaffected by the force of passion and conviction with which he spoke. He was still missing my point on consent, though. Maybe we were destined to view things differently on the matter. He claimed he wasn’t a human after all. Maybe he could never see my experience in captivity for what it was to me. To him, it remained as something beautiful and colourful…
My sadness only increased with the realization that he never said sorry to me. And now he never would, because he didn’t even think that there was anything wrong with what had been done to me.
My head swam with nausea, threatening to empty my stomach from the food I’d just had.
“We obviously have different memories from that room. The point remains, though, that I have never had any say on whether I wanted to be there in the first place. …That said, I would gladly return to this discussion at a later time… The truth is, I’m not feeling very well…”
He got up quickly and rushed to my side of the table.
“No, don’t worry.” I stopped him when he looked like he was going to lift me up and carry me again somewhere. “I’m fine. I just have a strong headache, and I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. I feel like I can crash at any moment here. I need to make sure before I fall asleep again that I know what I would wake up to…”
I paused.
He didn’t go back to his chair. Instead, he leaned with his hip against the edge of the table next to me and folded his arms across his chest. He kept his eyes on me, but he seemed to be focused inwards more than on what I was saying. He still acted confused, if not downright shocked, by my words from earlier. Honestly, though, I had a hard time believing that it had never occurred to him that I might have a problem with the way I got into that cell.
However, I had an immediate concern to address, so I went ahead, anxious to get it over with.
“You said you ‘took’ me from the base. Sytrius, did you take me for your own use? Do you want to keep me and feed off me all by yourself now? Is that why I’m here?”
Still deep in his thought, he either didn’t hear me right away or what I said didn’t immediately register with him.
When it did, he pushed away from the table with so much force that the solid piece of furniture slid five feet away from us with a loud scraping sound along the floor. I managed to grab my water bottle just in time before it would have flown half the way across the room the way the other bottle and my plate did.
He lowered himself into a crouch in front of me, abruptly, and covered both of my knees with his hands.
“No, Alyssa. No.” He shook his head vehemently, and his voice sounded outright pained. “I admit, I didn’t think too far ahead when I took you. All I wanted was to get you out of there, to take you away from them. I had watched them killing other Sources… um… women. I had to bury them afterwards. And I couldn’t bear the thought that next time it could be you… I just needed to keep you safe…” His voice trailed off.
“Why?” My eyes grew wide with his mentioning of dead women.
It was very rarely, but I did catch glimpses of other women either being carried out of the arena before me or waiting to enter it right after me. I also heard distant screams in corridors every now and then. However, I never came close enough to any of them to even take a good look at one, not to mention to talk to them or to get to know any of them. Apparently some of them were dead now. Would I be dead too if Sytrius hadn’t taken me?
“Why me, Sytrius? Why do you want me safe?”
“I… I don’t know. I can’t explain. My thoughts are not very clear at the moment, and my logic is not at the level it could be… Sorry.” He looked like he was searching for words to explain. “Humans are beautiful. Your emotions are like colourful waterfalls, fireworks and northern lights all combined into this ever-changing light show that I learned to read and loved to watch. I loved helping you create it... It’s beautiful…” He repeated. “All this beauty would disappear if you die. I could not see it happen again.”
“Why me, though? Because you spent the most time with me?”
“I spent all the time I could with you. I was your Handler.” He stopped for a moment hesitating but then decided to continue. “In you, I also saw emotions that I had never seen in anyone else. They were created specially for me, and they were exceptional.”
“What do you mean…?”
“Affection. You were always glad to see me. There was the excited anticipation just before I walked in and then the happy relief that I was there. They were positive emotions, and they were created because of me and just for me. Light, colourful and delicious…”
“Did you suck them out of me too?” I asked quietly. I was too exhausted to argue now, with no fight left in me, but the feeling of disgust still brought bile up to my throat.
“Skimmed,” he corrected and then admitted. “Yes, I skimmed them off you. It was supposed to be my payment for being your Handler. Any positive emotions you may have while outside of the meeting room were mine to skim.”
“And inside the meeting room?”
“All sexual energy is to nourish the members of the Council only.”
“Why?”
“The number of Sources… sorry, humans, available to us is limited; we only get a few a year and there are hundreds of incubi. Hunger negatively affects our logic, memory and the ability to process information. We can’t think clearly when we are hungry. With limited supply of nourishment, it was decided that only the members of the Council would be fed the potent sexual energy.” He spoke more smoothly now, as if he had said or heard it more than once before. “They need to stay alert and function at their full mental capacity in the interests of all of us. All humans at the base remain under control of the Council. Some of us are employed by the Council in exchange for a regular access to human emotions. Others are left to starve.”
“They die?”
“No, demons can’t die. We are immortal. We fall into Deep Sleep instead, after the energy runs out. Hunger takes your mental ability first, but the physical strength and agility ultimately go too… I was a Soldier in the Demon Army for as long as I can remember, but I still had periods of time when I had to spend years and decades in Deep Sleep, whenever my services were not needed by the Council. The main reason I became a Handler was to be closer to humans… to be fed regularly. Hunger is its own kind of torture… You can’t kill a demon, but you can make him wish he was dead,” he added somberly. “I’m sorry, Alyssa. I failed to recognize the true reasons of your fear and sadness at the base. I’d learned all of you feelings and emotions, but I still struggle to understand the reasons for them. I can tell what you’re feeling at any moment, but I can’t always tell why you’re feeling it. I can’t change what happened, but I apologize for my part in it. I swear I didn’t take you from them to force you to be my personal Source of some sorts. I promise, I will never touch you in any sexual manner without your explicit permission.”
What do you know? He did apologize after all!
I nodded and tentatively put one of my han
ds on top of his on my knee as an acknowledgment of his apology. I wasn’t sure what to do with it yet and decided to file it away for now, in order to think about it later. Just the process of thinking was literally becoming too painful by the second.
“What’s going to happen now?”
Chapter Fourteen. On The Run.
Sytrius got up to his feet in one fluid motion and went to pick up the dishes thrown to the floor.
“We need to leave. They will start looking for us soon and will come here first.”
His words made me jump off my chair too. Well, made me attempt to jump off the chair. In reality, I managed only to rise slowly a few inches off the chair before collapsing back down again with my head spinning.
Sytrius put the dishes on the table and came up to me again.
“I’ll help you back to the bedroom and then I’ll bring you some clothes to change. I’ll clean up here and put out the fire, meanwhile. We will have to go then.”
“We’ll walk?” I honestly didn’t think I could do it.
“No, we’ll take my truck for now. You can sleep until we stop at a place of an acquaintance of mine. We’ll take his car from there on.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“For now, just as far away from the base and the Council as I can.”
He didn’t even bother with helping me walk this time. He just put one arm around my shoulders and another under my bent knees and lifted me up with ease.
This was what I wanted all this weeks I had known him at the demon base. I wanted his arms around me, surrounded by his warm masculine scent, without the armor, without the concrete of the basement. Just him. Now that it actually happened, it seemed irrelevant.
“Sytrius, just one more thing.” My voice was muffled against his shoulder.
“Yes?” he asked softly with that velvet rumble in his voice.
“If I’m no longer a prisoner, does it mean I could go home?”
“I don’t think you’d be safe at home,” he answered honestly. “They will be looking for you. It would be way too easy for them to take you again from the same place where they took you from the first time.”
He carried me back to the room where I woke up and sat me on the bed. “I’ll be right back.”
I was back in the darkness again and fought to remain upright as the bed called me to fall back into it and sleep for a decade or so. Deep Sleep. I thought I knew what that would feel like.
“Your clothes are here.” Sytrius returned with a few plastic shopping bags in his hands and the lantern. “You can get changed here. Do you need my help?”
“Where are we?” I pointed at the fur-lined hood of a parka jacket sticking out from one of the bags.
“Yukon Territory.”
Yukon. They didn’t even take me out of Canada. I was still in my own country. Yukon was still thousands of miles away from Toronto, though. That explained the long drive they took me on to get here.
“What month is it?”
“End of March”
“March? How long was I… there?”
“A year and almost three months, according to your file.”
“I was way off in my calculations…” I muttered. I missed over two months of my life. The time just slipped by my troubled mind. Actually, I missed the whole year and almost three months of my life in that dungeon… But I couldn’t think about all of it now. I reached for the bags instead.
“I will manage on my own. Thank you.”
He nodded and turned to leave.
“Sytrius,” I called after him. “Do you have a bathroom I could use?” All that water I drank was letting itself be known.
“No, sorry,” he answered.
“Oh.” I should have expected it. ”I guess you don’t need one, being a demon and all…”
“Um, no.” He sounded as if he was smiling under the mask. “I do eat human food, occasionally, and I like to drink water. I use the bathroom at the base most of the time. Here I just,” he shrugged and casually waved his hand possibly in the direction of the exit, “I go outside. Get dressed, I’ll show you the exit.”
“Okay.” I put the bags on the bed and sorted through their contents after he left the room. The large two bags had a purple winter jacket with fur-trimmed hood, a pair of warm boots, a t-shirt, a pair of warm sweatpants, socks, plain cotton underwear, a sports bra and a pink hoodie. Everything was new with tags, and all clothes fit me perfectly. I didn’t feel surprised at all: Sytrius had enough time to look at my naked body to figure out all my sizes. I probably would have done a much worse job shopping for myself, since my current size was still substantially smaller that my normal size used to be.
The smaller bag had some toiletries: shampoo, conditioner, a bar of soap, a small kit for manicure and pedicure, a pack of razors, a small bottle of body lotion, toothpaste, toothbrush, hairspray… The list of items seemed familiar somehow. Through the fog of my headache, I suddenly remembered when I pestered him with demands for “basic necessities” a while back. I realized now that he probably couldn’t get them for me then.
Well, he must have remembered, because he got them all now, every single item that I listed to him then… I couldn’t hold back a smile when I saw that he even got me a bottle of perfume and a curling iron.
I stood outside at the edge of Sytrius’s cave fully dressed in all the clothes he got for me, holding on to the rocky wall. He insisted on carrying me out of the garage door. Yes, he had a wooden garage door installed a hundred or so feet into the opening to the cave. It was the only entrance to his place. His beaten-up, red Dodge RAM truck with a back row of passengers’ seats was parked inside the cave, right behind the door. He had also built a wall between the garage area and the rest of his place, to keep the cold and the gas fumes out of the living space, I imagined.
We didn’t have much time, and I needed to hurry. I stopped just feet away from a sharp drop-off down the mountain, as the view in front of me took my breath away.
The opening of the cave was in the side of a mountain, with a narrow ledge of the single-lane driveway that turned left from the cave then followed closely to the curve of the rock and down between the trees onto the snow-covered road below that curved and twisted along the edge of a frozen lake between the mountains.
The tall, snow-covered rocky peaks crested around me as far as I could see, with dense woods below in the ravines. The snowy valley deep below me looked like a frozen lake between two ridges.
There was a frost in the air and that particular stillness that comes right after a storm. It must have snowed recently. The trees were covered with fresh thick snow. The driveway had been plowed recently, but everywhere else the snow looked like it would be at least waist deep if not deeper. The unusually bright winter sun was trying to make its way through the thin layer of receding storm clouds in the sky.
I thought that the cool steely-blue colour of the winter sky was the exact match to the colour of Sytrius’s eyes under the dim lighting of the basement cell. Then I turned around and saw him inside the garage, watching me through the open door.
I waved at him, signaling to go away or at least to turn around. He had promised me five minutes of privacy before he’d come searching for me. I walked around the rock of the opening to the cave, getting out of his sight but still staying close to the driveway avoiding the deep snow beyond, and hurried back to the cave as soon as I was finished.
The bright light of the sun was beginning to hurt my eyes, even through the clouds. The vast open space in front of me was unnerving, my head swam with dizziness and the food in my stomach turned. The eggs and bacon I ate felt like a heavy rock in my stomach unused to any real food. I walked as fast as I could back to the safety of the dark cave, holding on to the wall with both hands and wondering how much therapy I would need once I got back home.
Sytrius jogged out to me and swept me into his arms again. That was a relief; keeping upright felt like an enormous task at that point, and I sagged in his arm
s.
“Sytrius, I’m so tired. I need to sleep now,” I murmured. “Will you still talk to me when I wake up?” I had more questions than I ever did, because all of his answers raised only more questions for me, but I needed some rest to even begin wrapping my weary head around everything that happened.
“Yes. Sleep now; we’ll talk later.”
“Were you not allowed to talk to me before?”
“No, I was not.” He lowered me into the front passenger’s seat of the truck and reclined it for me. “There are many rules, but I had broken almost all of them with you.”
I could no longer open my eyes as the sleep pulled me under. As if from the distance, I heard the engine start and then felt the truck move. The last thing I remembered was somebody pulling a blanket over my shoulder. It felt nice. It felt as if someone still cared about me in this world…
Chapter Fifteen. The Farmhouse.
I was startled awake, this time suddenly, as if I rose up from the bottom of a deep dark lake and then broke through the water to the surface. For a moment, I almost believed that I just had the weirdest dream and I would find myself back in my parents’ condo, in my own bed. I had the same feeling every time I would wake up on the mattress in the cell for the first months of my imprisonment.
I was not in my bed in Toronto, though, but neither was I in the cell any longer. Everything was dark around me, and I remembered that I was in the truck with Sytrius, and that the weird dream was now my reality. The truck had stopped moving, and the engine was shut off. The lack of noise and movement was probably what woke me up in the first place. The light inside the cab of the truck went on and cut the darkness when Sytrius opened the driver’s door.
“Just give me a second,” he said as he got out. I caught a glimpse of his back covered in a grey hoodie with the hood up over his head. He was not wearing the mask, I noticed, and my heart skipped.
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