Sytrius continued kissing my face, and I suddenly realized what the source of my unexpected calmness was. His breath felt like minty-cool breeze against the skin on my temple, leaving subtle chilling sensation like melting snowflakes. He was taking my stress and worry away from me, calming me in the most efficient way he could in the limited time we had.
“Don’t, Sytrius!” I gasped, pulling away from him. “You can’t afford to get sick right now!”
“Don’t worry, Alyssa.” He pulled me back to him, as close as he dared without actually hurting me. “I’m too strong now for any negative emotions to harm me. Besides, none of your feelings could ever hurt me again, anyway; we are one and the same. You and me.”
Chapter Forty Two. Another Feeding.
The incubi base turned out to be a large, white-brick building just a 30-minite drive outside of the city limits. It was kept out of view from the road by a large group of trees forming a small forest around it. Behind the trees, the property was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence with barbed wire coiled on top and what looked like electric wires running through it, making the whole place appear like a military base or a secret research lab from a movie. Cameras and warning signs posted around the fence and at the gate only completed the impression of a fortified facility.
I shivered, pulling my sweater closer to me in the front. Subconsciously, I wore the most concealing clothing for this visit, as if looking for protection even from the way I dressed. I wore a pair of long jeans with laced up shoes and a long-sleeved tunic reaching halfway down my thighs. Despite it being summer, chills run down my back and my arms – maybe from the air-conditioning inside the hotel and the car or maybe from nerves – making me wear a long sweater. My hands were covered by a pair of leather gloves, similar to those worn by incubi, and a silk scarf was wrapped twice around my neck, covering any remaining exposed skin. The only thing that was not covered by my clothing was my face.
The amulet that Sytrius got for me in Toronto was hanging off the leather cord around my neck, hidden underneath my tunic. After wearing it for months, I had become used to the odd thing enough to wear it against my skin now.
I never got to see the western incubi base from outside and could not compare the two. I was not at all surprised, however, when the inside of the eastern base turned out to be of the same dreadful, dark-grey colour like its counterpart in the West.
Zander and Alfarr met us at the entrance, and I let them walk in front of me. I followed them, holding on to Sytrius’s hand and keeping a few inches behind him. Because of the amulet hanging around my neck, I had to make sure that the demons walked through every door first, otherwise, I would have to stop every time to give them each a permission to enter after me.
We walked down a flight of concrete stairs, through yet another door and then along the corridors with cinder block walls and bare light bulbs under the low ceiling. Sytrius squeezed my hand tighter, probably worried how the memories recalled by these surroundings would affect me. The resemblance of these corridors to the ones that I had walked along with him so many times was uncanny. The unpleasant memories were rising inside of me. However, I was too preoccupied with the ultimate reason for our being here to let the memories take over me right now.
Sytrius turned his head to me and whispered, betraying his own train of thought, “If worst comes to worst, get out of here, run into a room… any room, your amulet will prevent anyone from entering, and wait for Andras to come for you.”
“Andras? Not you?”
“If worst comes to worst,” he repeated calmly.
I shook my head vehemently, rejecting the very notion of him not coming for me. He stopped walking and took me by my arms looking into my eyes intently, willing me to understand.
“If they don’t listen… if I’m detained, if Andras is delayed for any reason, you have to run and hide. Promise me,” he said and added, as I still shook my head stubbornly, “Please, Alyssa. You have to stay safe when I… if I can’t be there for you. You and Andras can still work on changing things even after I’m taken. You can still get me back after, but you have to stay safe. Don’t let them catch you.”
His last argument got my attention through the wall of denial. I stopped shaking my head and let his words sink in. Until now, I viewed the event of him being taken away from me as something final and irrevocable. Did he really believe there was a chance for me to free him afterwards or was he saying it now just to ensure my cooperation? He never mentioned this before, but then again I had refused to discuss anything that would happen after the hearing. As far as I was concerned, my life after didn’t matter if he was not in it.
Things changed now, though, more than he knew. It was no longer my life that was at stake, it was also the life of the tiny being inside of me, the little life that I couldn’t ignore even if I was willing to forgo my own safety. The thought of it and the slightest hope of ever setting Sytrius free again during my own lifetime made me nod in agreement now.
“I promise,” I whispered. “I’ll be safe.”
We were the last ones to enter the room. All Council members were already there. I counted thirteen of them. The Devil’s Dozen, my mom would have said. That’s what they called the number thirteen in Belarus; I remembered her telling me that when I was little.
They were seated in two semi-circles on each side of a large table covered by a sheet of blood-red silk. The thirteenth chair was placed between the two semi-circles with the man who must have been Grand Master of Eastern Council sitting in it. Sytrius told me that his name was Ianuarius.
Just then I saw a guard in exactly the same uniform like Sytrius used to wear when he was my Handler. The guard carried another armchair and placed it next to the chair of Grand Master. A figure moved from the far wall; he must have entered the room just a moment before us through the door located behind Grand Master, opposite to the one we used.
He’d traded his white, flowing robe for a royal blue, floor-length tunic with rich embroidery on the sleeves and along the high side slits. I still would have recognized him anywhere even though I only caught a brief glimpse of him the last time.
Raim! The Grand Master from the West, the one who nearly killed me just by touching the side of my face, the one who ordered the hunt on us all through Canada. Was he supposed to be here? Did he make it all the way to Belarus now just to see us caught and punished? Or did he ask for us to be released to him, so he could dish out our punishment himself?
I looked up at Sytrius. His eyes narrowed at his former Grand Master, who lowered himself into the armchair placed for him next to Ianuarius. Raim must have seen us but now avoided looking into our direction, displaying the usual chilly indifference I encountered from the incubi at the western base.
“Did you know he’d be here?” I asked Sytrius quietly.
“No.” He shook his head once. “It changes nothing,” he added resolutely. “Let’s go.” He took my hand and led me to our seats.
The ‘secondary audience,’ with whom we were supposed to be sitting, consisted of about two dozen incubi with signs of various degree of hunger on their faces. They sat on bench seats placed on the balconies that ran along two opposite walls of the Council meeting room.
The balcony seating was elevated from the main floor of the room by about five feet, with different equipment that must be used during the Feedings being stored underneath them. A set of wooden stairs led up to each of the balconies.
As it seemed to be customary in incubi world, no one offered us any greeting or even paid any attention to us whatsoever. Sytrius and I took our seats on the balcony. Andras followed us to the stairs but didn’t come up. Instead he remained standing at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t notice where Alfarr and Zander went, but they were not in the room with us. They must have stayed behind in the corridor, as they probably were not invited to participate in the Feeding tonight.
I looked around the room uneasily, still feeling unnerved by Raim’s presence. Save for th
e balconies that seemed to be a newer addition, the room looked very much like the arena where Sytrius used to take me, maybe just a little larger, with white walls and with thick metal beams at the ceiling. Chains with belts and cuffs attached to them coiled around the beams waiting to be lowered down if needed.
I took another look at the table placed in the centre of the room and realized that there was a woman lying on the padded surface under the silk crimson sheet pulled all the way up to her chin. Her long light brown hair with bright streaks of terracotta cascaded off the edge of the table in soft waves and she had a black, velvet blindfold tied over her eyes. She was as still as a corpse, but I noticed the sheet over her chest rise and fall with her calm steady breathing. She must have been the next “course” of tonight’s Feeding.
I didn’t see anyone close to her who could have been considered her Handler. There were three guards, but they stood all the way by the door, too far away from her, in my opinion, for either of them to be considered her Handler. As far as I remembered, Handlers tended to stay close to their Sources at all times, during the Feeding.
Our arrival must have been noted even if not acknowledged since as soon as Sytrius and I took our seats, two of the three guards separated from the wall and approached the woman on the table.
I wished they would take her blindfold off so I could see her face and understand whether she wanted to be there. I wasn’t sure what I would do if I found out that she was being forced against her will. In my mind, I understood that any protests from me on her behalf would not result in her being freed at this point. If anything, if I made a scene, I would probably only make things worse for her as well as spoil Sytrius’s chances to defend himself during the hearing later. Still, I continued to watch her body language closely for any signs of fear or panic.
One of the guards lifted the lower corners of the silk sheet covering the woman and slowly pulled it off her. The silk glided along the length of her naked body underneath. The woman stirred, and I noticed series of small shudders rippling through her body. She raised her arms and folded them above her head then stretched languidly through her back and legs, like a cat waking from her nap.
The second guard moved closer to the foot end of the table and took one of her feet into his hands, massaging it firmly between his leather-clad hands. He then locked a metal cuff around her ankle and attached the short chain of the cuff to the hook at the corner of the table. The first guard had tossed the silk sheet away, meanwhile, and repeated the same motions with the woman’s other foot.
The second guard grabbed the woman by her hips suddenly and pulled her down the table in one rough movement. She gasped in surprise sliding down, but I wasn’t sure if there was any fear in her voice. Her legs bent, cuffed to the corners of the table, her knees rose, and her thighs spread wide, exposing her to the room.
Both guards went around the opposite sides of the table, each leaving a gloved hand on the side of the woman’s body that was closer to him. The smooth leather of their gloves glided up along her leg towards the raised knee, then down the thigh trembling in anticipation and further along her sides.
I noticed her breathing change. It became more rapid and shallow when the guards’ gloves slid over the top of her breasts. Mimicking each other’s movements, each guard rubbed the nipple of the breast that was closer to him, eliciting a loud gasp from her parted lips at the same time as her back arched and her legs shifted, clanking the chains of her restraints.
The guards let go of her breasts and took hold of her arms. They stretched them straight over her head and locked them in another pair of cuffs at the corners of the head end of the table.
I couldn’t see her sexual energy as a physical entity, the way Sytrius and the rest of the demons in the room did, but I could see it reflecting in the eyes of the Council members when the wave of it hit them, igniting the orange-red glow.
Any other time when I was present in the meeting room during an incubi feeding, I was the one they fed off. I was an unwilling participant, mostly, wishing I could be somewhere else but there. I never had any desire to watch the men feeding off me.
Now I looked at them closely.
They reclined seemingly relaxed in deep, padded armchairs. The Grand Master’s chair in the middle was right across from the head of the table with the woman on it. This fact alone pointed at the true purpose of the Feeding. A woman’s desire originated in her head, being closer to her head meant that her sexual energy had to travel a shorter distance to reach Grand Master. His seat was the true seat of honour in this case. If the point of the session were his own gratification, he would have gotten a much more stimulating view facing the end of the table, right across from the woman’s spread thighs.
Ianuarius, Grand Master of Eastern Council, looked a little older than his counterpart from the West. His hair, the colour of dark walnut, was cut short. He wore a long-sleeved, army-green shirt with breast pockets that reminded me of Russian military uniforms during the Second World War. Well, it very well could have been the actual uniform from that time, considering that Ianuarius would have been in Belarus during the actual war.
The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to his elbows, exposing tanned, muscular forearms that he had folded in front of his broad chest. True to the mix-and-match clothing style that incubi seemed to favor, he also wore a pair of modern-looking jeans and a pair of worn, black, biking boots. His eyes as well as the eyes of all other demons in the room were glued to the woman on the table, who writhed in passion against her restraints.
Her energy must have burst out of her in waves, as the eyes of the demons lit bright orange and red at intervals. I noticed that the eyes of the incubi sitting on the balconies glowed with less intensity and a few moments after the main wave would set the eyes of the Council members aglow, not unlike a blast of thunder would follow a flash of lightning during a storm.
Despite their seemingly relaxed poses, there was a strong underlying tension in all incubi present. As if they froze inside, holding themselves in place with an iron grip of self-control, lest they would leap onto the table and devour the very source of the delicious energy in front of them.
Safe for the moans and whimpers coming from the table, the room was eerily quiet. Nobody had said a word since we came in. The guards stimulating the woman did not seem to communicate with each other at all, yet their performance equaled that of well coordinated dancers or a couple of synchronized swimmers.
One of the guards was now standing at the head of the table. The woman’s long hair was in his hand, wound around his wrist. He pulled his hand back, making her lift her chin and expose her neck to him. His other hand closed around her delicate throat.
He was leaning over her – his mask close to her blindfold – so close, I was wondering if he was whispering to her something that no one else could hear. Something that made her arch off the table and moan even louder.
She bucked her hips towards the second guard, who was massaging her inner thighs, and chanted in Russian under her breath. Because of the distance, I couldn’t hear the words. My basic knowledge of Russian language probably wouldn’t help me understand what she was saying anyway, but judging by the intonations of her voice and her body language, she was pleading for their touch, begging for the release from the pressure mounting inside of her.
They were not in a hurry to grant her wish, though, prolonging her sweet torture, keeping her in a state of intense arousal for as long as possible. Demons were still feeding.
Captivated by the picture in front of me, watching the woman writhing between the two guards, I didn’t even notice that my own heartbeat sped up. A sweet warm feeling spread inside me, and I rubbed my sweaty palms on the fabric of the jeans covering my thighs.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Sytrius reach for me. He pulled me into his lap, and his bare hand slid under the sleeve of my tunic, with his fingers circling my forearm. Then I felt the cool sensation spreading along my skin, dousing my budding excite
ment.
“This is a wrong place to feel this way, my angel,” Sytrius warned me in a whisper. I tore my eyes from the woman on the table and met at least a dozen glowing red eyes turned in my direction now. I leaned closer into him, afraid to think of what could have happened.
“Thank you,” I whispered back.
The sound of a vibrator being turned on brought my attention back to the scene in front of us. I didn’t find the picture any less exciting. Only this time, Sytrius firmly kept his hand on my arm, sipping any sexual emotions from me as soon as they appeared. His eyes finally turned red too, matching the eyes of every other demon in the room.
No, not every demon, I corrected myself, looking at Andras standing by the stairs of the balcony. He was leaning casually onto the railing, watching the proceedings impassively. His eyes maintained their dark amber colour in the artificial light of the room. He promised to be here for us, but true to himself he was not participating in the feeding.
I glanced back at the table in the centre of the room. One of the guards had a slim gold-coloured vibrator in his hand. He pushed the woman’s knees further apart with his other hand and entered her with the vibrator. She panted in ecstasy and pumped her hips forward, matching the rhythm of the guard’s hand driving the vibrator in and out of her. The first guard remained at the head of the table, leaning over her upper body. He kneaded her breasts with force, which she seemed to need at this point, as he pulled and twisted her nipples.
I didn’t notice the small round vibrator held in the other guard’s hand at her hips until he pressed the vibrating orb between her thighs. The woman screamed and lurched in her restraints, making them clunk loudly. Her breathing stopped for a second, and she went completely still. Without realizing it, I also held my breath until she erupted in a series of screams the very next second. Her hips heaved rhythmically, setting off a light show of red sparkling fireworks in the eyes of the demons surrounding her.
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