by E J Frost
He shifts and his erection pokes me in the stomach.
Didn’t you come? I ask, puzzled, because I know he’s a demon and all, but there’s a speedy recovery and then there’s this.
Nope. He guides my hand down. I don’t.
I close my hand around him, stroke him slowly. But you were close. I felt it.
Yeah. You brought me closer than I’ve been in a long time. Gonna have to watch that.
I slide up onto my elbow to look into his face, shiver as the covers slide off my shoulder. “You mean you don’t ever come?”
“Not with humans.” His hand covers mine and slows my strokes even further. “Mmm, just like that.”
“But I thought . . .”
“What?”
“Well, you’ve been having sex with all those people . . .”
“One whole person.”
I frown at him. “What about that girl? In the miniskirt? And Peter? You said . . .”
The demon chuckles darkly and his penis swells in my hand. “You believed me.”
I yank my hand away. “You lied to me?!”
Hey, don’t do that. He catches my wrist and guides me back. “Actually, I told you the truth about the girl. She did suck like she was drinkin’ medicine. It wasn’t doin’ anything for me, so I ditched her. Thought I was comin’ back here for ice cream. Until I caught a whiff of what was sittin’ in your dining room.”
I hunch down under the covers and let him guide my hand back into a slow rhythm over the heated smoothness of his shaft.
“And Peter?” I ask sourly.
“The dead bitch gave him to me for one of her rituals. A month or two back. I did fuck him then and he didn’t like it. Even glamored to the eyeballs. I don’t do torture.”
Which makes Rowena and all the others who have entrapped and tortured him the real monsters. “So you didn’t . . . do anything to him today?”
“Didn’t need to. He went into hysterics when I answered the front door. I had to yank out his soul just to shut him up.”
I sigh heavily. “Repressed memories.” Ro must have altered Peter’s memory, just the way I did. No wonder my charm went awry and he self-hypnotized. He already had a whole set of false memories implanted.
Maybe that makes me one of the monsters, too.
Not a monster, the demon thinks. Just a little darker than you’d like to be.
“That’s not comforting, coming from you.”
He shrugs and tucks me closer to his side. “How ‘bout you rub those breasts against me? Haven’t gotten much action off them yet.”
I roll my eyes, but when he releases my hand and reaches for my breast, I rub my nipple against his palm.
“Mmm.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. His hand closes on my breast, squeezing in time to my stroking of his shaft.
“What?”
“If you don’t come, why have sex?”
“’Cause it feels really fuckin’ good.”
I can’t argue with that. “But isn’t it frustrating for you?”
Some. Not enough to stop.
“But why? Why don’t you come? I know you were close before.”
Yeah, I was. What’s with the twenty questions? I thought we were going to fuck.
We probably are. His hand on my breast and his heat under my hand are making me ache again. Power’s beginning to coil in my belly and it won’t be long before I want him inside me more than anything else.
“I still want to know.”
“Fine,” he grunts. “Orgasm’s a kind of rapture. Rapture’s not good for demons. Fucks with our heads. Makes us lose our sense of self . . . like amnesia.”
“Amnesia?”
“Yeah. Now can we drop this? I really want your mouth on my balls before I get too caught up in it again.”
The thought makes my stomach contract crazily. “Um, okay.”
The demon’s wicked chuckle fills the cold night air, making it steam.
Chapter 21
I wake to a brush of power over my skin. A hot, whispery kiss of energy that makes me shiver.
I open my eyes to a hole in the world.
Blue flame outlines a whirling pit of blackness that hangs suspended a few feet above my bed. Not just darkness, but the total absence of light. And without knowing how, I know I’m looking at a door into Hell.
Keep your head down, the demon thinks. His hand settles in my hair, tucking my head against his shoulder. He blows out a breath and power brushes by me again, flickering into the visible range for a second as a ball of blue and orange fire that shoots down the Hellhole. It illuminates something in the center of that perfect blackness. A familiar serpentine shape that opens its mouth and swallows the ball of eldritch flame.
That’s enough for you, Giz. Let the others have a turn. I catch the demon’s thought even though it’s not directed at me.
He blows another ball of energy into the Hellhole. This time the salamander that swallows it is white with blue spots.
That’s not Izzy, I think.
Nope, Izzy’s downstairs. He seems to like the top of your fridge. That’s Blizzard.
Blizzard? I blink sleepily as the demon blows another fireball to the frost salamander.
Izzy’s sister. Gizzard and Wizard are his brothers.
Izzy, Blizzard, Gizzard and Wizard? I’m too groggy to figure out what, but there’s something wrong with that sequence.
Izzard, Blizzard, Gizzard and Wizard, the Lizards. Get with the program.
I bury my face in his shoulder. That’s cruel. That must be cruel even among demons.
He chuckles into my mind. You got no idea what’s cruel among demons. That’s it, Bliz, let your little brother have the last one.
He blows a final fireball to a tiny salamander that’s streaked cream and gold.
Oh, he’s beautiful. I’ve never seen one like that before.
Like him? He’s a lightning salamander. Very fucking rare. He might be good for you, since we know you like to call lightning . . .
Only when you’re threatening to cut me in half. I yawn and stretch. My skin sticks to his. I unglue my thigh and rub my legs along his while I stretch.
Don’t distract me. I gotta close this up or it’ll eat your world.
Comforting. I lie very still while the air in my bedroom grows thick and the circle of blue fire gets smaller and smaller. It finally disappears in a curl of smoke. The heaviness in the air dissipates with a pop and the acrid whiff of brimstone.
The demon relaxes back into the pillows and pulls me on top of him.
“Now, when you fell asleep on me, weren’t we about here?”
“You mean after the third time?” I rest my face against his neck, drinking in his scent and the warmth of his skin. I’m too tired to have sex again. I’m going to need to brew some strength potions if he wants to do it this often.
His deep, wicked chuckle fills the room. “Humans. No stamina.”
He feeds me pancakes in the morning. A thick stack of them, drowning in real maple syrup. With a steaming cup of rich, slightly bitter Dark Roast on the side. He sits across the kitchen table from me, wearing only a pair of loose black pajama bottoms that make his skin glow gold. He radiates heat, which insulates me against the chilly breeze blowing in from the broken windows. Despite the lure of the food in front of me, I’m having trouble taking my eyes off him. He looks delicious, all that golden skin and heavy muscle. His dreadlocks are long and loose this morning, spilling down over his shoulders and back, brilliant crimson in the morning sunlight. He flicks them aside to steal forkfuls of pancake off my plate, despite the huge stack sitting in front of him.
“What’s wrong with your food?” I ask mildly, after his fourth or fifth foray.
“Yours tastes better,” he says, grinning around a stolen mouthful. “So, what’re we doing today?”
Repairing the damage to my house, making the mother of all memory charms, creating a doppelganger, sending him back to Hell. I shrug. “What do
you want to do?”
“You’re askin’ me?” He smiles, a real smile, flashing white teeth that I’ve felt on my skin. I’m probably still wearing an imprint or two. I shiver and try to focus on my pancakes. No such luck. My eyes are glued to him. “How ‘bout you show me ‘round your town. Last time I was here, they were hangin’ witches in the Common.”
I raise my eyebrows in surprise. “You were here during the Witch Trials?” How long ago was that? Three hundred years? Four hundred? I don’t think I’ll ever get used to how old he is.
“Yeah. Got trapped here by that fucking ring for a couple of years.” His smile stretches into a chillingly wicked grin. “Started an orgy in a little town called Danvers. Can’t be all that far from here.”
I know where it is. And I can imagine the fall-out from an orgy in Puritan New England. “How many people were hung because of that?”
He shrugs. “Dunnow. But none of ‘em were waitin’ for me when I got home, so they weren’t innocents anyway.”
“Do they haunt you? The people you’ve killed?”
“Nope. You?”
I grimace. I haven’t killed anyone. Just crippled poor Freddy Weiss. But I have plenty of ghosts in my life. “Those are family ghosts.”
The demon arches a black eyebrow. “Really? The way they fuck with your head, I’da never guessed.”
“Mmm.” I take a sip of the coffee. Delicious. “Do you have family?”
“Father.” The demon steals another forkful off my plate. “Couple thousand siblings.”
“A couple thousand?”
“Yup. Old man’s got a basic inability to keep it in his pants.”
“Oh . . .” I pause because I’m not really sure I want to know. Then I ask anyway, curiosity getting the better of me. “Do you have any children?”
“Not yet.” The shark’s leer surfaces.
I ignore the leer. One thing I’m safe from is having is his little demons. Then it hits me. “That’s why you don’t come.”
The leer stretches into a grin. “You may be clueless, sweet meat, but you ain’t stupid.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“No, I told you, it gives me amnesia. Too dangerous topside. ‘Specially since I know what you’re plannin’ to do to me.”
I can’t keep the shock off my face. “H-how do you know?”
He steals my coffee-cup and turns it around until he can drink out of the same spot. My mouth tingles warmly, like he’s just kissed me. “Did a little bedtime reading while I was eatin’ last night.”
The books. Spread over my dining room table. And all over the floor after his battle with Wen and the nethancs.
“It wouldn’t have hurt you,” I say.
The demon scratches his chin with the handle of his fork. “You got a loose definition of hurt.”
“Sending you back with a double wouldn’t do you any harm—!”
I break off at his dark chuckle. He steals another mouthful of pancake and chews it with gusto.
“You didn’t know,” I grit. “You could see I was researching something but you couldn’t tell what it was so you baited me—”
“And it worked like a fuckin’ charm.”
“You shit,” I spit at him.
His eyes glitter with that hard neon light. “Don’t fuck with me, sweet meat. I’m here. I’m not going back. Not any time soon, and not without you. So accept the inevitable and stop trying to double-cross me.”
“Double-cross you! I’m just trying to get rid of you! How is that a double-cross?!”
He shrugs one huge, golden shoulder. “Whatever you want to call it. I’m here for the duration.”
I stab the pile of pancakes, wishing vehemently that I was stabbing something else. “I’m not giving you my soul.”
“Have I said anythin’ about that recently?” He holds his hands up innocently. His leer ruins the effect.
“No, you haven’t, as a matter of fact,” I say. “Why is that?”
“Maybe I got other things in mind.”
“Are you going to tell me what they are?” I stab the pancakes again.
“Nope. If you’re not gonna eat those, stop shreddin’ ‘em. They don’t taste as good when they’re mushy. So where are you takin’ me?”
I stop mutilating the pancakes. They’re too good to waste. “Do you really want to see Boston?”
“Do you really want to show it to me?” he counters.
I frown. There are places in Boston that I love, but haven’t been to in what feels like forever, because they’re magical places, and I haven’t been with anyone who could appreciate them. But showing them to a demon? “Have you ever been up the Pru?”
“Is that like going down on your pussy?”
I nearly spit pancake all over him. “No.”
He lets a few of his dreadlocks fall over his face and looks at me through them. It’s a calculated look, and it has exactly the intended effect, even though I know he’s manipulating me, damn it. “We haven’t done that yet,” he says.
I feel myself blush hotly. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Oh, yeah, you said you liked givin’ but not gettin’.”
I cover my eyes with my hand. “Anything else.”
“Sure. Let’s talk about that.” He nods at the shards of bowl sitting on the kitchen counter.
I glance at what’s left of the Squire’s bowl. I have some vague hope of fixing it, although I’m not really sure what to use as magical super-glue. “What about it?”
“Why’s a fairy giving you presents?”
I blink at him in disbelief. “What possible business is it of yours?”
“You’re my business now. Or did you think we were just gonna fuck and be done with it?”
“I really didn’t think about it at all,” I say. He makes a low sound in his throat. An oh-I-thought-so sort of sound. It makes me want to smack him. “But if I had thought this far ahead,” I continue. “I still would have said that it’s none of your business. The Squire’s been part of my life for . . . well, almost two years now. If he wants to give me something, that’s nothing to do with you.”
“Think so? Here’s how I see it. Whatever’s been going on between you and the airy-fairy for the last two years—”
“Nothing has been going on between me and the Squire.”
“Maybe that’s what they want you to think, but the twittering throng don’t go handing out scrying bowls to every pretty human that comes along. He wants somethin’ from you, and I got a good idea of what it is, and I’m tellin’ you that I don’t share.”
A possessive demon. Great.
“And I’m telling you that you’re wrong,” I retort. “Nothing’s been going on between me and the Squire. He protects me when I go gathering, and I’m sworn to help the fae if they ever call on me. Which they haven’t. So keep your dirty mind out of it.”
“Dirty?” The leer re-surfaces. “You ain’t seen dirty yet, sweet meat.”
“I don’t want to, thank you very much. And while we’re on the subject, it’s okay for you to screw anything that offers you a drink, but I get a gift from a friend and you’re jumping down my throat?”
“We haven’t done that yet, either.” The leer widens. “Think you could deep-throat me?”
I roll my eyes. “No.” Particularly not given how big he can get.
“How ‘bout we see if I can teach you to like oral sex an’ you repay me by swallowin’ me all the way down?” He drawls the last words, his voice dropping to a black-furred whisper.
No one should be able to make four words sound so filthy. “How about we talk about something other than sex?”
He chews a mouthful of stolen pancake meditatively, eyes glinting. “Why?” he asks finally.
“Why what?”
“Why don’t you want to talk about sex?”
I stab the pancakes. I can’t help it. It’s that or stab him.
“C’mon, sweet meat. Why so shy?”
“I’m not shy. I
’m . . . private.”
He snorts. “You’re wound up tighter than a clock spring.”
“Screw you,” I mutter.
“It got anything to do with bein’ raised by that old woman?”
“Look!” I throw my fork down. “You leave my Dala out of this. I’ve put up with you invading my house and my life, but I did not sign up for demon psychoanalysis. So back off.”
He shrugs. “Okay.”
I eye him warily. “Okay?”
“Yeah, okay. Somethin’ I’ve learned over the last millennium? Almost nothin’ has to happen right now. You need some time to adjust? Take your time.”
I’m so shocked that I simply sit and stare at him open-mouthed.
“What’s wrong, sweet meat?”
“You-you’ve been so pushy—”
He chuckles. “Yeah, well, the one thing that couldn’t wait was gettin’ in your pants. Now that we got that outta the way, everythin’ else’ll come in its own time.”
I shake my head. “Do you even know how smug you sound?”
He steals a final forkful of pancake. “Not nearly as smug as I feel.” He puts his fork down and stretches, flexing the huge muscles of his chest and shoulders. “Let’s go sight-seein’.”
My house is so heavily warded that I could leave all the doors open, as well as all the windows broken, and be confident that my TV and DVD-player would still be there when I got back. My new salamander-cum-guard-dog is an added deterrent to any would-be burglar. But without any glass in the windows, the house is damn cold, and seeing Izzy shivering decides me.
I hold my hands out to the lizard, who jumps down from the top of the fridge and promptly rolls onto his back so I can scratch his tummy. “You are such a slut,” I tell him. He wiggles his legs ecstatically.
“Bet you want me to fix the windows before I go.” After some belly-scratching, I drape him around my shoulders while I dig out my great-grandmother’s handbooks and look up the mending charm. It’s not a hard charm, but fire’s one of the ingredients and since I can’t summon fire myself, the salamander can help me with that, so I keep him around my shoulders as I head outside.
I pick up a pouch of fairy dust on the way and blow a glamor over the salamander so that all anyone watching will see is a jacket with a crimson fake-fur collar. Then I hunt around in the grass until I find a large piece of broken glass.
