Scarlet Dusk

by Megan J. Parker

  If she were but to stumble or waver…

  Should just one drop of the chalice’s contents breach the rim…

  Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband would surely let none of them live.

  None, of course, but Arezoo.

  No, she and she alone held privileges that her master offered to none other. Few knew of just where Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband had found his most coveted of concubines—what grand reaches of the world their master had dredged this strange creature from—and even fewer knew why she, over so many other young, nubile girls that just as eagerly lived to serve his every lustful whim, should be his favorite. And while the mysteries of Arezoo’s birthplace or the name she’d carried before Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband had stripped her of all identity but the title of his cherished one were a mystery that none would dare press to be solved, it was certain that, at that moment, she held all of their lives in her hands…

  And she was laughing!

  Violent, enraged thoughts teemed in the minds of all witnessing the spectacle, but none dared make a move upon her. While the chalice and its contents were most certainly a prevalent demand at that moment, Arezoo took precedent in Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband’s eyes before all else. Any harm that could possibly befall her would be returned a hundred-thousand times over on the heads of not just her attackers, but all within the palace and the lands beyond.

  There was no question that, were Arezoo to meet an end, all of Egypt would see a wrath from Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband that would put the plagues of the Testament to shame.

  Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband would leave no survivors, and, in creating so much death, his powers would be enough to vanquish any of the gods: old and new.

  And so, while the arrogant creature might have been audacious enough to laugh with the fate of so many at stake, neither slave nor fellow concubine made a move or protest to correct her.

  They already knew there was no getting through to Arezoo.

  Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband was halfway into another tremendous bellow in the old language—still refusing to let the dialect of the Tajiks sully his home—when his eyes fell upon the glorious sight of Arezoo’s ample bosom rolling about her chest as she sprinted down the hall towards his chamber, his chalice held proudly over her head as she exclaimed again and again that she came to her master with both of his treasures.

  The broad, arrogant grin that birthed across their master’s face then brought a sigh of relief that traveled throughout the entire palace; the angry hum within the walls fading into a nothingness that held promise that the new day’s sun would be a spectacle for all eyes to see.

  Arezoo’s laughter doubled in triumph as she neared the doors, and she paused but only a moment to admire the massive, gaping hole that occupied the wall; letting what it symbolized send a tremor of excitement up her back before finally crossing the threshold.

  Once she was through, the chamber doors slammed shut behind Arezoo, and Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband shifted himself within his seat to prepare for his consort. Seeing this, Arezoo smirked and leapt—still gripping his teeming chalice—into his lap. The scarlet contents sloshed and rolled, and Arezoo offered nothing more than a giggle as a portion of her master’s drink slipped over the rim and splashed across her breasts.

  Were any of the other servants to bear witness to this, they’d surely have dropped dead.

  A deep, low growl emanated from deep within Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband’s body—his intense gaze honing on the spilled liquid as his lip curled; on the opposite side of the palace, one of the walls quaked with activity from within—and the master’s body began to shake.

  Arezoo smirked and cocked her head as her deep, intense purple gaze—one of the unique traits that had brought her master’s attention to her all those years ago—shimmered; a sound not unlike the cooing of a dove issuing from her partially opened mouth.

  Swelling her chest and letting the liquid adorning it trail further down her cleavage, she silently willed her master to act.

  Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband’s hands found either side of Arezoo’s hips and yanked her forward with enough force to make her yelp. His parched mouth found purchase, and he quickly began to lap at the myriad of scarlet trails that had begun to descend towards her abdomen, starting from their freshest point and working back to their source before starting again on another.

  And Arezoo bathed in the attention; relished in the power that the two of them recognized as hers.

  Though their union was, in the eyes of all others in the palace, nothing more than that of Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband’s typical activity with any of his concubines—albeit his undeniable favorite—there was an intense passion shared between the two behind closed doors and safe from prying eyes.

  Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband was a man of great power and strength—at least, he had been a man before his mortal body had perished so many years ago—and, with all of his power, there was little that he couldn’t obtain. He’d lavished the halls of his palace with all shapes and shades of feminine flesh, sending his most prestigious of buyers far and wide to procure the best specimens from all around the globe. Each and every one of his concubines was well-versed, well-trained, and well-rewarded; never a fear of want or of worry creasing their perfect brows…

  So long as they obeyed.

  But it was in their relentless obedience that Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband was cursed with boredom.

  Arezoo was not only content in her lifestyle, but outright flourished within it; her body knowing the carnal demands of both sexes long before her chest bore fruit or her loins were graced by the hair of adulthood. All manners of pleasure and the demands she was expected to fulfill had been introduced to her long ago, and it was through not only her acceptance of these pleasures but also her manipulation of them that she discovered just how lucrative they could be.

  With but a warm, wet orifice and a few simple noises, she could claim anything she’d ever wanted.

  Especially power!

  And, in the chamber of Meleilzsi Shaykh Naqshband, she had not only power, but security, as well.

  ~Present day~

  Flashes of his old life, visions of power or of faces that seemed so dreamlike now, were coming to him more often. He still couldn’t remember his name, only the title he’d been “reborn” inside Zane with:

  Maledictus.

  “Cursed one.”

  He laughed at that as he gazed into the barely reflective surface of the aged mirror; if it could be called such a thing. The building he’d taken—a crumbling, graffiti-covered mess that was absolutely teeming with the twisted, angry energies of misery and pain; a long-since abandoned mental asylum—was a prime location for him for any number of reasons, not the least of which being its ambiguity and a means to keep his soon-to-be bride locked-up and…

  “LET ME OUT OF HERE, MOTHERFUCKER!”

  The neighboring room went into delicious chaos as Serena began throwing one of her increasingly predictable fits; the barrier spell he’d put up, however, was just as predictable and contained the outburst. She was no-doubt using her aura to create the racket—there wasn’t enough length on the enchanted chain he’d tethered her with to build up that much momentum with her body—and that meant that the counter-spell would be activating right about…

  “AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  Silence.

  He chuckled and shook his head. “You’re not exactly the learning type, are you?” he mumbled to himself, not expecting an answer from Serena.

  Just like every other time she’d tried using her aura within the enchanted space, the counter-spell he’d put up as a precaution against the powerful-and-brash she-vamp reacted when her auric activity reached a potentially dangerous level. When the auric levels reached a critical point, the spell was awakened from its dormant state and shifted the charge in the ions within the room, delivering a crippling shock that, each and every time, knocked the sparky blonde unconscious.

  Sparky.

  He chuckled to himself and ret
urned to the mirror; his irritation at the warped and rusty metal sheet that offered little-to-no reflection rising once again.

  “Fucking pussies!” he griped, finding enough of his reflection to resume the process of picking the looser scales from his face. “If the batshit crazy bastards you bolted down in this shit-shack were demented enough to take their lives with glass mirrors then you should’ve just let them!” He growled as he once again lost his reflection in the tarnished surface and drove a fist into it, sneering at the sight of the twisted sheet of metal he was rewarded with.

  Nowhere near as satisfying as broken glass.

  “Fucking pussies!” he muttered again.

  Abandoning the hope of using sight to aid him in his cosmetic efforts, he began to simply rake his talons across his face. As more and more scales popped free—some needing more passes with the clawed hands than others—the small, stained sink became increasingly filled with the product of his efforts. The greenish-brown flakes looked like a pile of festering toenails, and the fresh layer of blood-covered bits reinforced the illusion of some sort of torture scene.

  But he—he sighed in resignation at his stubbornness and finally just accepted the title he’d been wearing for so long: Maledictus—had never felt better.

  At least he didn’t remember feeling better.

  Though there was something—some ghost of a memory haunting the back of his mind—that made him certain that Serena, that spunky, resilient, and delightfully defiant purple-eyed blonde, would somehow make things even better.

  Finally, Maledictus’ claws had “shaved” the last of the scales from his face—and more than a fair share of his flesh, as well—and he went to work with the incessant itches that crowned the top of his head. As he began to work the area of his forehead, he discovered three hardened spots that had risen slightly under the skin of his brow, and he went to work picking around the myriad of tears he’d earned in his previous task. A memory that he’d vicariously acquired through Zane—a moment from his human childhood—picked up on his subconscious, and the chiding words of young-Zane’s mother echoed on his lips.

  “Don’t pick at it. It’ll never heal.”

  Maledictus cackled.

  Healing?

  Healing?

  There was no growth in healing from something; there was no strength to be found in letting something knit and rest. To grow a muscle, it had to first be worked and torn; tortured to a point of realizing that it must either perish or push to thrive.

  Push to rise above all else.

  Continuing to pick and tear away at the flaps of skin on his head, Maledictus finally was rewarded. Tossing a chunk of bloodied meat into the sink, he yanked the warped hunk of mirror-metal from the wall and worked to angle it so that he could look upon…

  A horn?

  He beamed at this.

  For the past few days he’d been pushing his new body to shift; the lizard-like exterior, though entertaining at times, simply not offering him the personal aesthetic he demanded. Granted, it was a definite improvement on the weak and simple humanoid form he’d been locked within, but when he’d been condemned to occupy Zane’s body there had at least been the transformation; the process by which he could twist and break past the simple pink flesh and become something more powerful and fear-inducing.

  After taking the abandoned mental asylum and locking away his future wife, he’d taken a tour of the establishment. While relishing in the lingering traces of suffering that had caked themselves into every nook and cranny the building had to offer, he saw any number of messages—desperate and futile calls to sympathetic passersby—that had been left by the patients. Messages that were carved into the walls with crude tools or—judging from the bits of yellowed fingernails littered about the site or embedded within the surfaces themselves—with the scribers’ bare hands; messages written in blood, feces, and, less frequent, pen or marker.

  HELP ME! I AM IN HELL!

  BEELZEBUB MADE ME DO IT

  I AM HIS VESSEL. LORD SATAN RIDES WITHIN.

  THE DEMONS DEMAND MORE CORNBREAD!

  ABASHED THE DEVIL STOOD…

  Everywhere that he’d looked, there had been references to whatever name the mad men and women had attributed to evil. This devil—whether it was referenced by some religious title or, his personal favorite, simply referred to as “he”; as though the walking embodiment of evil could be anything but a woman—seemed to be an ongoing theme for all that pain and suffering; the very pain and suffering that had led him there in the first place.

  So, naturally, he decided that this devil, no matter what others thought it to be, would be the role he’d assume now that he was free to walk the streets within his own body.

  Horns?

  Talons and a tail?

  Viciously inhuman?

  None of these descriptors were outside his reach. True, a great deal of the references demanded a red devil, and his brownish-green scales were certainly far from that, but, seeing the sinewy and bloody mess he’d made of his face in excavating the first horn he’d birthed from his forehead—feeling at least five more beneath the surface of the skin around his head—he was certain that, with time, even his hue would follow.

  After all, he’d gotten this far on willpower alone.

  With nothing more than his hope, he’d willed his body to begin changing into his vision of the humans’ “devil.”

  A pained tickle in his mouth made him flinch, interrupting his glee as he poked at the still-small hunk of curved yellow bone that protruded from just above his left eye. Reaching into the back of his mouth, he poked about. A screaming pain as the flesh-and-blood coated claw met one of the teeth along the top row of his jaw gave away the culprit, and, getting a firm grip on the offending tooth, he yanked it free of his face. A brief moment was spared as he admired the jagged, reptilian thing, contemplating what his body would birth in its place, before tossing it into the fetid pile of waste within the sink.

  “Look at you, you magnificent motherfucker!” he swooned over his partial reflection. “There’s no way that stupid bitch will be able to resist you much longer.”

  At that moment, as Maledictus playfully batted his freshly-grown and still crusty eyelids at himself, his left eye—which had been growing increasingly pale and been itching with an ongoing set of twitches—ruptured in its socket and began to leak out into the sink.

  He couldn’t help but laugh at his own body’s timing.

  “No-fucking-sir!” he whistled, “No chance of resisting this!”

  THE SAME BAR.

  Zane shouldn’t have been as surprised as he was when he found himself walking into the same bar he had before he met Serena. The same bar that always seemed to be the place he showed up when he was troubled. Stepping forward, he made his way down to the bar and placed a seat right in front of the SAME German bartender who looked at him with both an annoyed and frightened gaze.

  “Same as usual, Fuhrer!”

  “Haven’t seen you here in a while,” the bartender sneered, “but I guess nothing truly does change.”

  “You have no fucking idea,” Zane snarled, reaching forward and grabbed the bartender’s collar, pulling him closer. “Now, I’m not here for chat, or trouble, but if you don’t just make with the drink and keep your Nazi mouth shut—I am not against making some.”

  “R-right,” the bartender quickly pulled back as Zane let him go and he watched as he scurried off to make his drink.

  Sighing, Zane allowed himself to calm down again as he pulled out the small bottle that was nearly empty. He sneered, remembering how much he relied on the mythos drug before and shook up the bottle as he waited for his drink. The bartender quickly handed him a bottle and made his way to the other side of the bar.

  Good. Zane thought as he pressed the smaller mythos potion to the bottle and began to pour it down. He sighed, pressing the bottle to his lips and allowed himself a good swig as the effects of the potion began to set. He grinned, allowing the haziness to enve
lop him as the numbing started.

  Serena…

  He glowered, realizing his fists were clenched and he quickly placed the bottle down as to not start a scene, any more than he already had. He found himself smirking as he thought of what she’d say about his present state. She’d most likely go on about how he was being a little bitch-boy and he had to grow a pair.

  Grinning at the sudden fond memory of his snarky lover, he allowed that moment to sit in him as he chugged another sip of the potion beer.

  He narrowed his eyes, catching something, someone, familiar out of the corner of his eye. He turned and the warmth he had previously been feeling grew cold. Walking towards him was a piece of his past thought destroyed and as she made her way closer, he felt his nerves begin to grow and the haziness dissipated.

  “C-Celine…” he whispered, “w-was it you? I thought I saw you…just the other day when I was with…was i-it you?”

  “It was me…” Celine chewed her lip for a moment, “I couldn’t tell if it was you or not but when I saw you walk into this bar, I had to follow.”

  “H-how? You’re, I mean, you were…” he shook his head, “I thought you were dead,” Zane stammered, stunned at the sudden events as he stared at his fiancé.

  He shook his head again; ex-fiancé.

  “I… I’d been following you for a bit,” she shrugged nervously. “What with all the rumors of the Maledictus curse and your finally getting rid him, I… I had to know the truth, to see it for myself,” she whispered as she took a seat next to him and he could still hear a faint trace of her Scottish accent.

  He frowned at her closeness but chose not to say anything as he gazed forward at nothing.

  “I guess I should start the beginning,” she coughed at his silence. “When Maledictus had… well, when he’d showed himself, he had targeted me. Luckily, I was able to get away… barely. Afterward, I was taken in by some nearby friends of my family.”

  “They told me not go after you again; that the curse you had would kill me and I chose to wait. I hoped that you’d be able to find a cure, and I had to wait in hopes that you’d find a way.”