by Mark Eller
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Mercktos pulled his cloak tight about himself and stepped deeper into the shadows. He hoped Tessla was too preoccupied to see him. He scowled. Tessla had changed since her time in Hell. He didn’t know if the change had made her weak or strong. A great deal of his plans and the plans of others depended on the answer. Even when she had resided in Hell as a spawn, she had been formidable. Now that she was free of Hell, Mercktos doubted few hellborn were her equal. After pulling her spawn body from the deep pits, Trelsar had designed Tessla’s new form specifically to battle hellborn in non-traditional ways. No hellborn knew exactly of what she was capable, and he found this scary. Of late, her abilities seemed to have morphed. Scarier yet. If her changes had gone further than most believed, Zorce and Athos could be in danger.
Mercktos cursed. He needed to get back to Grace and warn his god of Trelsar taking an active hand. If Tessla protected the escaped spawn, as he suspected, then Sulya would also need to know. Not that he cared whether the damned similian succeeded, but if she failed Zorce would punish him for not warning her.
Allowing his eyes to roam Tessla’s spare body while she walked away, his scowl grew deeper at the sight of her confidence. He had once owned the bitch when she was fully spawn. Even then, she had been strange. For reasons not yet understood, her spawn body had refused to remain as it was created. Within weeks of its inhabitation by her soul, she became beautiful and smart and graceful, unlike any other spawn he had ever seen. Intrigued, he fought another for her ownership, winning it in a bout of blood and death. Triumphant, he stood before her, expecting her to kneel to his might.
She would not kneel.
Angered by her refusal to cringe, he tortured her almost nightly and attempted to rape her, but she refused to be raped. Instead, she joined herself to him willingly, giving herself with passion, accepting pain and blood, reveling in the joy of sadistic sex. Her giving jerked emotions out of him he hadn’t felt since long before his fall. Soon, he found himself less willing to hurt her, less willing to hate. Before long, their sex became so gentle she hardly ever bled. He found himself thinking of love and realized Tessla had laid an insidious trap. Hellborn did not love.
Except he wasn’t hellborn, not truly. He was a greater devil fallen from Anothosia’s grace, one of the original colonists who had helped nano curse this world by unknowingly carrying Zorce’s creation to it. At one time he had known gentler emotions. Since his fall those gentle emotions had been foreign to him until Zorce, on a whim, stole half his strength by sticking a damned stolen heart in his chest, something Mercktos still didn’t understand.
In the distance, Tessla turned a corner and disappeared. Mercktos pulled his cloak tighter and stepped out of the shadows. Maybe, if he followed her long enough, she would lead him to the spawn.
