by Cameron Dane
“There’s still time you know,” a voice spoke to her from the shadows. The body came into the muted light. One she knew well. Caleb. “I can tell you what you need to do to make him human, if you’d like to hear it.”
Cassie raised a sardonic eyebrow his way. “I believe I already got the gist of that, thank you.” She was still quite a bit pissed off at this man, and his other brother, too, for lying to her for all of this time. “I believe it went something like ‘I am to drink his seed and he will become human.’ Am I remembering that right?”
“Yes.” Caleb nodded. He leaned his shoulder against the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. “It has to be done under a full Halloween moon.”
“Right.” Cassie rolled her eyes. “I suppose it wouldn’t be a proper demon ritual if it wasn’t.”
“Fair enough. You have a right to your sarcasm and righteous anger,” Caleb conceded. “But while you are feeling it, did you pause to consider how rarely we get this opportunity? Did you stop and think about how often we get a full moon on Halloween?”
Cassie’s heart seized in her chest with sudden fear. “How often?”
“Once roughly every twenty years. Before tonight, though, it has been over forty five years since the last.”
Cassie’s legs went out from under her, and she landed on the step with a thud. “Oh, God.”
“Yes,” Caleb agreed. “Oh, God is right. Not very often, is it? To be lucky enough to discover that you are newly in love during one of these cycles; well, that is even rarer still. To have a man like Connor -- and he is a man, for that is what he has always wanted to be -- sacrifice that rather than lose you, that is the rarest thing in a demon of all. For in truth, he doesn’t have to be in love with the woman for it to work. She just has to be desperately in love with him.”
“You’re saying that most of you would not think twice about using a woman to get you this humanity that you desire?”
“Not many demons want to be human. But of those that do, not many would care.”
“Not even you?”
Caleb shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know that I would deliberately deceive a woman, but if it came to a cycle, and I was dating a woman whom I knew with just a little extra push would become besotted with me, I’d have to think real hard about not doing it.”
“I want to believe in him,” Cassie confessed. She dropped the weight of her head into her hands. “I want to believe that these years we’ve spent becoming such good friends weren’t a lie.”
“They weren’t,” Caleb assured her, “but before you decide whether or not you can do this, you should know a few more things.”
Cassie rolled her head until she was looking at Caleb through a space between her widespread fingers. “What else can there be?”
“If you are going to perform this ritual, then you’d better be damn sure you love him with every fiber of your being. Because what Connor didn’t tell you -- what he would never tell you -- is that he only gets one shot at this. If you take his seed, and you are merely infatuated with him, then his chance of becoming human ceases to exist. There is no second chance in twenty years, or forty years, if a woman who really loves him happens to come along and wants to make a life with him. He is putting everything in his faith of what you feel for him. Another thing --”
“Another thing?” Cassie shrieked. “What else can there be?”
“If you want a life with him -- a family,” Caleb clarified, “then this is the only way. He cannot give you a child while he is a demon. He must be human, or you must be demon, that is the only way.”
“Right. I’m not a demon.”
“No.” Caleb’s smile faded completely. “And trust me; it is much harder and incredibly more degrading for you to do what it takes to become a demon than it is for him to become human. You don’t even want to know what the first entails. Not that it matters; Connor wouldn’t be able to let go of the possessiveness he feels for you in order to do it.”
Caleb suddenly leaned down and pecked Cassie’s cheek gently. “So, Cassie girl, now you have all the information. It is up to you to decide. See you later.” Caleb sauntered off just as easily as he’d arrived.
Well, great. There was nothing like the fear of holding another person’s very life in one’s hands to render one paralyzed. If she were wrong about her feelings for Connor, then she wiped out the one dream he’d apparently had since his inception. The very idea of hurting him in that way pressed on Cassie’s chest and made it difficult to breathe.
The fact that she was so terrified of taking away this chance for him to become human must mean that her love for him was real. Didn’t it? There was also the fact that learning he was a demon had barely registered on the scale of things she’d thought twice about. His demon-ness wasn’t the thing she’d overheard that had crushed her earlier tonight. What had attacked her entire being like a debilitating disease was learning that Connor had hidden a vital part of himself from her, and that perhaps everything special she’d always believed existed between them had been fabricated for a selfish end. That had been what had heated her anger back in the kitchen.
Only he had chased her down and made passionate love to her. Again. Then he’d opened up his heart and told her that he loved her. And probably the most compelling of all, the thing that made Cassie sit up straight because she’d only just realized it, was that Connor had never once asked her to perform this act that would make him human. She’d overheard his brothers trying to convince him to do it, but he’d not once ever mentioned it to her himself. Had, in fact, told her not to speak to him again unless she had complete faith that his love for her was real.
That was not a man -- or a demon, she supposed -- who had sinister plans to lull a naïve young woman into making him human. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.
Cassandra gained her feet quickly, suddenly without any doubts about what she had to do. The question now became: where was her demon hiding, and could she find him in time?
Chapter Nine
11:35 p.m.
Cassie didn’t end up having to go very far. She stepped out the front door and found Connor sitting in a chair on the porch.
She drank him in with her eyes, so stoic and chiseled that he stole her breath away and left her too tongue-tied to speak her heart. She walked over, paused at his side, and reached out to touch his stubbled jaw with the tips of her fingers. She did it in place of the words that seemed trapped in her throat. He jerked at her touch and pulled away, turning to look up at her. The uncertainty that filled his black eyes erased just about every fear Cassie had. He loved her, and for however long he had successfully hidden it from her, those days were gone.
She slid her hand down his arm and entwined her fingers in his.
“Come.” She tugged him out of his seat. “We have very little time left. Let’s do this.”
“Cassandra.” Connor’s feet dragged as they made their way across the porch and down into the moonlit yard. “You do not have to do this.”
“Yes, I do.” She looked up at him with what she hoped was a gentling smile. She pulled at the snaps on his shirt and pushed it off his arms. His chest was magnificently sculpted from daily ranch work, and she allowed herself to touch him, to feel the hard muscles under his heated flesh, as she’d always wanted to do. She leaned in and planted a soft kiss over his heart, smiling against his skin when she felt the rapid staccato of it beating against her lips. “I have to, Connor. I have to, for us.” She slid across the plane of his chest to his nipple and darted her tongue to touch the very tip, and his breath hissed out from above her.
His hands pushed through her hair until he was cupping her neck. He moved her a step back until there was a measure of distance between them. “You have never done this before, sweetheart.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “How do you know I haven’t?”
Connor’s hands curled into fists against her nape. “Please do not tell me that you have, for then I will have to kill this
individual in the most painful of ways.”
“Relax.” Cassie closed the distance between them pecked his cheek. “I haven’t.”
“Good.” He took her mouth in a deep, carnal kiss that left her unsteady on her feet. Then he had the audacity to smile and kiss her nose. “I was not in the mood to go killing tonight.”
“No,” she agreed. Her hands went to the snap on his jeans and popped it open, and then she pushed the zipper down past the bulge she could already feel pushing to get free. “You are in the mood to have your cock sucked by me until it is drained of your seed.” She rubbed him through his underwear, could feel the dampness of pre-cum already dotting the fabric. “Even if you are too stubborn to say so yourself.”
“Not stubborn,” he corrected as she dropped to her knees to help him take off his boots.
He didn’t have to be naked for this, but they’d already done it twice without getting out of their clothes first, and Cassie was ready to see Connor in his full glory. She’d been dreaming about it for so long that her hands shook.
Connor lifted his foot and aided her in his disrobing, even as he continued to lecture her. “It is just that you are not prepared, Cassandra. A demon releases a large amount of seed when he ejaculates, and you have never even taken the small amount that a human male produces.”
“I can handle it.” Fear of the unknown sat like a sickness in Cassie’s stomach, though. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she could do it, but she didn’t want to merely do it; she wanted to do it well. She wanted to please Connor with her mouth, not just milk his seed in a clinical way to produce the desired results. “I am stronger than you think I am.”
“I do not doubt your strength,” he told her. All of his clothing except for his underwear was on the ground now, but his hand snaked out and grabbed her wrist before Cassie could push that final piece of fabric down his legs to join the rest. “It is an obscene amount of seed, Cassandra, and due to the volume of meat I must eat to keep my demon body strong; it makes my semen very bitter.” His tone was so sober that Cassie paused to listen. “It will burn your throat like acid, and when you do not think you can take anymore, it will continue to come. You are required to drink it all in order for this to be successful.”
“Wait a minute.” She looked up at him from her position on her knees. “How do you know what demon seed tastes like?”
She couldn’t believe it, but Connor’s cheeks flamed red with heat above her.
“Sometimes…there will be times… Damn it, there will be times when I taste you more than once, and you taste me more than once before we’ve washed, and we will taste each other in our mouths, on our flesh, in our bodies. That is how I know how I taste.”
That gave her pause. “Is my taste still on your cock?”
He nodded. His hand slid through her tresses and caressed the back of her head. “I did not want to wash you from my body. I wanted your scent with me for as long as possible in case I never got the chance to know you again.”
The vulnerability of that nearly broke Cassie’s heart. “How can you say something so beautiful to me and still think that I wouldn’t want to do this for you?”
Connor’s jaw started ticking and his eyelids slid to half-mast. “I just don’t want you to regret it.”
“Do you want a life with me, Connor?” Cassie twisted her wrist out of his hold and pushed his underwear down his legs, freeing his enormous, jutting cock from its prison. It stood erect and proud, only inches from her face, and she’d never been so scared, yet completely certain of her course, in her life. “Do you want a life that includes marriage, and children, and growing old together?”
The body in front of her shuddered, and the hand buried in her hair twisted and pulled, stinging her skull. “It is the only thing I’ve ever prayed for in my life. I have had dreams of you round with my child, and have awoken to sheets sticky with my seed because of them. That is how much I want a life with you.”
Cassie blinked back tears before they could fall. She lifted her hand to Connor’s cock and encircled it with her fingers, testing the velvety hardness with a gentle touch. “Then let me do what I must so that we can have it,” she told him, and then licked the pearly bead of wetness from the head of his rearing penis with the flat of her tongue.
“Good Christ.” Connor’s haunches flexed as she opened her lips and took the bulbous head of his cock into her mouth, twirling her tongue around it. “Your mouth is heaven on my flesh. Oh, Cassandra.” He groaned, and his hand fisted in her hair when she widened her jaw and took more of his salty, smooth penis into the wetness of her mouth. “I am too excited by your touch. I feel him coming…I’m sorry…”
Cassie looked up and watched the pain flash in Connor’s dark gaze as his face altered before her very eyes, and the demon appeared. He seemed to hate it so much, be ashamed of it even. So much so that he looked off to the side in the direction of a paddock instead of down on her.
Cassie reached around behind Connor and felt the ridge of his mountainous spine where it protruded from the base of his back. She flitted her fingers over the spiky flesh there. His entire body jerked, and she pulled back, letting his penis slide from between her lips with a wet little pop as she looked up at his forlorn profile.
“Look at me.” Cassie must have sounded sufficiently in charge because Connor immediately complied. The shame she saw in his features broke her heart. “I am not afraid of you,” she told him in no uncertain terms. “I am not afraid to touch you when you are in demon form.” She settled for trailing her fingers along his spine again to prove this, simply because his face was too far away. His cock jumped in front of her, and his hips jutted forward. Cassie suddenly realized that every inch of him was acutely sensitive to her touch.
She caressed him again, and then leaned in to lick the drop of pre-ejaculate that immediately seeped out of his tiny slit.
“I am not afraid of the passion that lives inside the demon. You have already shown him to me twice. I would walk to town proudly on the arm of this demon that you are now, if not for a fear of your safety. I am not ashamed to love a demon, as I am not ashamed to love you. I would accept you -- like this -- if not for the fact that with our differences we can’t have babies and grow old together.”
Cassie almost swore she saw the moonlight reflecting off the brightness of tears shining in Connor’s eyes. “Let yourself go, Connor.” Cassie knew that was the only way this was going to work. “Trust that I will still love you when we come out on the other end, just as I trusted that you never meant to hurt me by withholding half of what you are.”
The demon finally looked down at her, truly looked down at her, and she could see the real Connor clearly as he lived behind the primal passion, front and center on the demon’s face and in his blazing gaze.
“Take me in your mouth,” Connor said, his voice guttural and uncensored. He wrapped his own hand around his root and guided himself between her lips, pausing only long enough to hiss before pushing forward, until his knob reached the back of her throat. He pulled back before she could gag, and then pushed the smooth-as-silk length of his rod back in again. “I want to fuck your tight cunt again.” His tone changed as he took her advice and let himself be free. “But the hot, wet cave of your mouth is what I need to ravish tonight, and you are doing such a good job that I have no doubt my cock will be residing there often in the future.”
He tangled his hands in her hair and took charge, guiding his hips back and forth, back and forth, as he filled her mouth with the thick length of his cock, so hot with passion that it pulsed and throbbed as if it had its own heart. Cassie licked and sucked every time he pushed in, and swirled her tongue around the tip, licking away the little deposit that built up there between each stroke. He was excited. She could tell by the way his entire body vibrated, and in the deep, low-grade hum he chanted under his breath as he fucked her mouth without fear of rejection.
“Suck it, Cassandra.” Connor’s thrusting started to change an
d grow more erratic. “Take it as deep as you can, sweetheart…Oh, good Christ, I’m so close.” He untangled his hand from her hair and grabbed her hand. “Squeeze my balls.” He shoved her fingers between his legs and wrapped them around the heavy, furry weight of his testicles, showing her what he wanted. She caught on quickly, emboldened by the rapid increase in his heavy breathing. “That’s it…that’s it. Oh, Christ, your little hands are perfect. Don’t stop sucking my cock.” His words trailed off as she sucked in her cheeks and gave him as much suction as he could handle.
That was all Connor needed. His testicles drew up tight, pulling out of her hands. His cock seemed to grow immeasurably bigger in her mouth, almost stretching her jaw beyond bearing.
“Ready yourself, Cassandra.” Connor’s body reared backward. He growled like an animal, “I’m coming…I’m coming!”
Almost immediately, steaming hot jets of semen assaulted the back of Cassie’s throat, setting the sensitive flesh on fire. She swallowed the bitter, acrid ropes of seed as quickly as they came, but before she could take a breath, another shot of it was filling her mouth, each stream more bitter tasting and longer lasting than the previous one. Cassie had to grab onto Connor’s hips and hold on tight, lest her instincts to pull away overtake her and break the bond she needed to maintain.
“Oh…oh…Christ,” Connor grunted as he thrust his hips up, shoving his cock even deeper into Cassie’s mouth as another long spurt of cum emptied from his penis straight down her throat. “There’s more…there’s more.” Another shot singed her mouth, and Cassie tried to relax her throat and let it slide down. “Never this much before…” He moaned deep in his throat as he held her head, helping her stay connected. “Can’t…” He almost seemed to loose his legs as a particularly hard jerk wracked his body and released more seed. “…make it stop.”
