Caught in the Devils' Hand

by Ruby Duvall

  “But I don’t love him,” she whispered, moving her hand down to cover her mouth as the words left her lips. She stared into nothingness, her gaze directed at the bed.

  “I do,” he said quietly. She looked at him then, somehow moved to do so. There was sadness on his face, and desperation. She didn’t want him to look like that, and if she let Rosuke die because she wouldn’t share herself, it would kill something in Vallen.

  “Would you be there with me?” she asked, very tentative. The hope rose on his face.

  “I’d prefer it, to tell the truth. We still share our sexualities thanks to the Binding, and I would also like to be there to keep you calm, should you get too nervous, but Rosuke is kind. He’ll be gentle with you, I promise,” he swore, stepping a few more paces closer to her.

  “What would my mother think?” she whispered, looking down at her body. “Not only have I given myself to a sex demon and professed my love for him, but I would be having sex with two at once,” she softly bemoaned, closing her eyes.

  “You are saving the life of someone cursed,” he reassured her.

  “Saving a life?” she repeated, opening her eyes again. She thought of the villagers she had left behind, most of whom had died, and she hadn’t been able to save any of them.

  Here was someone she could save.

  She raised her head slowly, wiping the tears from her eyes with the sleeves of her dress, and tried her best to pretend that her spine was made of Stone Oak.

  “All right…I’ll do it,” she said, feeling a new rush of adrenaline as she realized what she had just gotten herself into, or rather, who she had just gotten into herself.

  She winced for thinking something so crude.

  Vallen let out a relieved breath, a smile rushing to his face. He pulled her to his chest, wrapping his arms around her for a hug, and a flurry of thanks fell from his lips.

  “Thank you, Shumei. To have one person I love save another person I also love…it’s a gift I can never repay,” he whispered.

  “You can spend the rest of your life trying,” she whispered back, earning a surprised laugh.

  He pulled back then, and she made to follow him as he turned toward the door, but he stopped and turned back.

  “No, just wait here. The least we can do is come to you, rather than have you come to him,” he said, pushing her back to sit down on the bed.

  “O-Oka,” she said, blushing bright red. He paused a bit, blinking as he thought silently to himself, and then nodded.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said, leaving the room then.

  She was definitely going to Oblivion for this, she thought ruefully.

  Vallen stopped by the sitting room, peeking his head in and looking at a very nervous-looking Oka.

  “What’s going on? Who’s that red-haired guy?” Oka said, standing.

  “I guess I haven’t told you about Rosuke. He was also cursed the night I became a demon and I’ve known him for a very, very long time. He’s…injured though, and I need Shumei’s help to fix him. There might be…screaming so—”

  “Screaming?” Oka said, with wide eyes. “Do you have to set his leg or something?” Vallen jumped upon this chance.

  “Yes, something like that. Your sister would rather that you not hear it, so I’d like you to play in the apple orchard for a couple of hours and practice that sword move you had trouble with,” he instructed, picking up the boy’s wooden sword from where it sat on the table and putting it into his hand. Oka nodded slowly, sensing the lie, but knew it was better not to ask. If they didn’t want him to hear something, then chances were that he really didn’t want to hear it. He closed the door to the outside behind him, and Vallen listened carefully as the boy walked off in the direction of the orchard.

  He then made his way back to Oka’s room where his friend was hopefully still awake. Looking through the open door, he saw that Rosuke had actually sat up, his eyes on the painting of a tiny maple sapling trying to survive its first year.

  “Rosuke?” he called, and the other man raised his head a bit, acknowledging that he had heard him.

  “She said ‘no’, didn’t she,” he said, making his question more like a statement.

  “She agreed,” he corrected, watching the way his friend turned in surprise. “I don’t think I’ll ever love her more than I love her now,” he then said, his eyes serious. Rosuke slowly nodded, understanding the undertone, and took a deep breath as he made to stand on his own.

  Vallen almost rushed forward to help him, but as it was with sex demons nearly at their limit and presented with an opportunity to harvest sexual energy, Rosuke seemed to have gotten his second wind.

  “The little one?” Rosuke asked, walking slowly but steadily to the door. Vallen backed away from the doorway and down the hall a bit, watching the other man to see if he would make it.

  “He has been sent off to practice his sword swings in the orchard. We probably have a couple of hours, but let’s make it one hour, just in case the boy misjudges the passage of time,” he explained. His friend nodded. Once he was sure that Rosuke would make it down the long stretch of hall, he turned and walked slowly toward Shumei’s bedroom, feeling her heartbeat in his chest. It quickened as their footsteps neared her door.

  Her hands felt clammy and stiff and as the heavy shuffle of two pairs of feet became louder and louder, she wondered with dismay why she had ever agreed. She was about to get very intimate with a total stranger and was somehow supposed to achieve orgasm at the end of the ordeal.

  She couldn’t do it.

  “She’s nervous, Rosuke. Very nervous,” he warned his friend, feeling how fast her heart was now racing. He took comfort knowing that her racing heart had to be some sort of symptom of arousal, or else he wouldn’t feel it so strongly, but a pang of guilt stabbed at him that he was giving her such an anxiety attack. There was nothing for it now though. He and Rosuke would just have to be the ones to…reassure her.

  “Nervous about two sex demons? I wonder why,” his friend softly replied, making him smile.

  Her head whipped up as a shape appeared in the doorway, but she breathed a sigh of relief to see Vallen entering first. She gripped her hands together, tightly squeezing her thighs together, and swallowed around the lump of anxiety in her throat.

  He stood to the side of the door, not entering farther than five or six steps from where she sat. Then the tall, lean frame of the red-haired sex demon entered her bedroom. She wondered again why his hair was red, but then he slowly brought his eyes up to meet hers.

  Rosuke’s lips fell ajar just slightly, his throat convulsed as he abruptly swallowed and his eyes glazed over with lust. Everything about his face said that he wanted her, and she felt her heart leap up to her throat. Automatically, her arms wrapped themselves around her torso and she squeezed her legs as tightly together as she could.

  “Rosuke, calm down,” Vallen whispered, his own breathing abnormal. Though Shumei looked overwhelmed and frightened, she was quickly becoming very sexually excited, and he couldn’t stop the stiffening of his own sex within the confines of his leather pants.

  “I’m trying,” Rosuke whispered back, wondering how any other woman could ever look as delicious as the girl in front of him. She looked at him with trepidation, but her breathing was fast, almost the same way a virgin pants for air, lying wet, open and ready beneath the first man to take her.

  “Perhaps we should sit and talk for a bit,” Vallen announced in a louder voice. “We’re all getting a bit too excited.”

  “Isn’t that the point?” Rosuke purred, taking a step forward.

  “I believe Shumei is more anxious than excited,” Vallen explained, also walking forward.

  She watched as they slowly approached and noticed that Rosuke’s walk was more animal-like than Vallen’s, as if his hip joints were loose, but her lover’s stride held more determination and confidence. Rosuke’s stride was teasing.

  Sitting on the end of the bed, directly in the middle,
she felt the need to pull her shoulders into her body as she was wont to do in intense situations, especially since she was about to be surrounded on both sides by two demons with sex on their minds. She fought it but didn’t quite win and felt her arms squeeze in as her shoulders curled down.

  “It’s all right, love,” Vallen quietly assured her, sitting close to her and pressing his chest and leg against her body. He refrained from hugging her and nodded to Rosuke, who sat down next to her without touching her at all.

  “What are we supposed to talk about?” she asked, her voice quiet but clear.

  “Anything you wish,” Rosuke answered. He loved her voice already. She was still nervous, judging by her tone, but he could already imagine her delicate throat screaming with pleasure. By the gods, he wanted her so badly. He knew that some of his sexual excitement was coming from the fact that his body was latching onto this chance to survive, but there was something more than that. Something about her was simply bewitching and she seemed to draw his gaze like a thirsty man spotting a freshwater stream in his path.

  She stared at the back of her hands, which held a death grip on the skirt of her dress. She frantically searched her mind for something to discuss while the two men on either side waited to flip open her dress and have their way with her. Nothing seemed to come to mind except raunchy images of her between their bodies.

  Rosuke shifted slightly next to her, obviously as antsy as she was, and a long lock of his wavy red hair caught her eye.

  “Why is your hair red? Why is it not white, like Vallen’s?” she asked abruptly, happy to have found a question that didn’t involve sex.

  “That’s kind of a long story…” Rosuke said slowly, not wanting to waste too much time in the telling of it.

  “The woman who cursed us made a mistake in the ritual, resulting in Rosuke’s hair color,” Vallen began, ignoring Rosuke’s attempt to dodge the question.

  “Why did you not suspect anything?” she asked, still fidgeting with her hands.

  “One of the steps during the ritual is collecting semen from the man to be cursed and we had all been drinking heavily that night,” he explained. She felt the tips of her ears start to turn red with embarrassment and already wished she hadn’t asked her question. “I was nearly passed out while the woman was pleasuring Rosuke and didn’t notice that she had been collecting our semen into a cup. She had already taken mine and Yosuke’s, but she spilled some of Rosuke’s by accident. So only part of his magic was ripped out. His magic still died, but his hair bled to that color and remained red from that night on.”

  “I…I see,” she answered, softly clearing her throat. Her face burned with discomfort. Rosuke shifted again, and she suddenly realized that it was because he was trying to hide the arousal making a large bulge in his pants. She shyly looked at his lap, the direction of her gaze hidden by her mass of hair and her thick, long lashes, and she wondered how he would feel inside of her.

  “H-have you two shared a woman before?” she asked unsteadily, needing an answer even though the question embarrassed her to no end. She felt Rosuke sidle a bit closer.

  “Yes, on occasion. Mostly, those women were widows looking for men like us, rather than the other way around,” Rosuke explained. Vallen wanted to add that many had also been the village whore, who was being paid for a night’s work with her customers, no matter if they were demons or not, but to suggest that she was doing anything at all immoral was not a good idea right then.

  “Then how does that…um, how does that position work…exactly?” she softly queried, feeling stiffness leave her spine. Rosuke hadn’t moved any closer.

  “There are…variations, actually…” Vallen said slowly, his voice dying out. His mind immediately produced an image of Shumei on all fours, her body rocking back and forth as two men thrust into her. Her hair would hang down like a curtain of leaves off a Black Willow tree, her breasts would be massaged by the man beneath her, and her back would flex and bow with pleasure as the man behind her held her hips in a tight grip. Then half a dozen more possibilities flooded his mind with images, and the sudden rush of blood to his cock nearly had him groping his lover’s thigh with need.

  “V-Vallen?” she said with a shaky voice, looking over her shoulder at his flushed face. He had become much more aroused, making her sex drip as she sat there sandwiched between them, and it was suddenly incredibly hard to breathe.

  “Vallen?” Rosuke asked, his eyebrows cocked with a bit of suspicion and confusion as he looked over at his friend.

  “What is it?” she asked, looking at Rosuke now, and she nearly gasped with surprise. It was the first time she had seen his face this closely and the glorious shade of his eyes, plus the vibrant color of his red hair, made his face look almost womanly. There was absolutely no mistaking his gender, for his jaw was a bit too square and his brow ridge a bit too sharp, but his physical beauty was astonishing. How she felt when looking at him was like how she had felt when seeing Vallen for the first time—she knew she looked upon something gorgeous.

  “Yes, I invoked the Binding upon Shumei,” Vallen gruffly said as he groped her knee. She started only a little when Vallen touched her, but the look of utter hunger that came over Rosuke’s face triggered a big dose of adrenaline.

  “So…when I make love to her, I’ll be making love to you too,” Rosuke growled, shifting much closer to her as his eyes found hers again. She leaned back by instinct, directly into Vallen’s chest, pulling her clutched hands tightly against her torso just under the weight of her breasts. His hand had massaged halfway up her thigh, and she moved a bit restlessly under the pressure of his fingers.

  “Rosuke?” she asked on a sigh, wondering why he had reacted so and letting her question show in her eyes.

  “I have always loved a woman’s body…even after being what I am for so long, and I have never hungered for a man’s body, save for one,” he hinted, his eyes darting to the man now rubbing both her thigh and her waist. Her eyes widened in surprise.

  “I had always thought that there would be a chance to have him at the end of dry months when only one of us had been able to claim a woman’s sexual energy, but something always saved him or me before we could try sharing the harvest,” he explained, leaning forward slowly, his hand inching toward her other knee.

  “Then…” she began, gasping shakily when his fingers confidently found and held her knee, starting the same process of massaging up her thigh.

  “The thought of making love to him through you, on top of having the privilege to lie between your thighs, makes my hands shake with desire,” he vehemently declared right before he ducked his head down and took her lips in a kiss. His tongue delved deep and his mouth caressed hers with aggression, leaving her lips wet and swollen after only a few seconds.

  Vallen gasped behind her, his hand on her thigh jumping up to eagerly fondle her breasts, and she felt the hurried movements of his other hand tugging at the knot of her belt. When Rosuke lifted his mouth away, she hurriedly sucked in a needed breath of air, her face already flushed and her body feeling hot and heavy.

  It was going too fast. She still had questions that needed to be answered before any clothes were removed, and they hadn’t even answered her earlier question.

  She abruptly stood up and took the remaining step in front of her, stumbling a couple paces away as both men’s hands trailed after her to keep her with them.

  “Shumei?” Vallen called softly, the confusion in his voice obvious, along with a touch of guilt. She turned around, her chest rising and falling quickly as she panted with fright and arousal, a strange combination that confused her mind as much as her body. Rosuke remained silent, his arousal now obvious even against his black pants. His hands were now fisted on his thighs, his jaw tight but open as he too panted for air.

  “You didn’t answer me. How does that position work?” she repeated, having had a few seconds to catch her breath. She was feeling more confident now that she was the one standing over them, he
r back to the door, and it showed in her voice. Vallen and Rosuke glanced at each other briefly, as if speaking telepathically, and Rosuke nodded. They both looked over at her again, but Vallen began to speak.

  “The most…pleasurable position is not possible right now. You and I have not made love in that way, and you would be…too new to be able to take two men within you at the same time,” Vallen said, pausing in thought occasionally. His speaking was also stilted as the image of such a position continued to flash inside his mind. She felt a small roll of arousal between her thighs and suppressed the sound she might have made.

  “I don’t understand. There’s…only one place for a man d-down there,” she tried to assert, a bit too embarrassed to get her sentence out smoothly.

  “One in front, madam, this is true,” Rosuke answered this time. He sorely desired to use his usual colorful words, but with her, he thought it would be prudent to be delicate. “But men and women alike have another ‘place’ behind.”

  “Behind?” she repeated. “But that’s…that must be much too small to…to—”

  “It stretches, madam,” he averred. “And once it has been gently molded for the act of sex, it is quite pleasurable, I have heard,” he said. “Those women who were already well used to such a position, or had the night to get prepared, enjoyed it just as much as anything else we did to them.”

  “Wouldn’t it be crowded? I mean…legs and—and all that,” she stuttered out. Her small hands fisted as she tried to get a hold of herself. Her face was blushing like mad, and she felt like the most naïve fool.

  “There are many ways to make it work. However, we have a time limit,” Vallen said, looking a bit disappointed.

  “Is there another position then?” she asked.

  “Yes, but it requires more concentration from you than I’m sure you could give. If Rosuke were making love to your body, I would be making love to your mouth, and with the Binding, it might be too much for you,” he answered, ruling out another delicious image in his mind.

  She suddenly remembered the first time she had taken Vallen into her mouth, and the memory had her pressing her knees together as well as licking her lips.