by N. P. Martin
“Expensive,” Frank says before sampling the whiskey, then he nods. “Very nice indeed.”
Lucas smiles at Frank, unsure of what to make of the Watcher. On the surface, Frank seems the abrasive type, used to rubbing people up the wrong way, no doubt. Lucas imagines Frank gets into a lot of arguments with people, but he also can see how others would take Frank the wrong way. Underneath the blunt antisocial behavior, there seems to be a decent man. Time will tell, Lucas thinks, and joins Frank by the window.
“This a nice set-up you have here,” Frank says. “Who’d you kill to get it, the guy whose meat suit you’re wearing?”
Lucas shakes his head at Frank’s bluntness. “You certainly live up to your reputation, Frank.”
“Yeah, what reputation would that be?”
“Of a man who cuts through the crap, who gets the job done.” Lucas focuses on Frank. “I’m hoping you live up to that second one.”
“You’re hoping I can sort out this ‘demon problem’ you’re having, you mean.”
“Indeed I am.”
“Let me ask you this. If you have a demon problem, why can’t you sort it out yourself? I mean, you’re a demon after all.”
“It’s not that simple. I can’t really be seen interfering with the work of other demons.”
Frank laughs to himself. “Why not?”
“You might find this hard to believe, but I call this world home now. I spent long enough in Hell to know I’d rather be here.” Might as well be honest with the man. Frank doesn’t strike Lucas as the type to tolerate bullshit.
“So what, you expect me to help protect your cushy number, is that it? No thanks.” Frank downs the rest of his drink, is about to put his glass on the desk when Lucas steps in his way. Frank stares at Lucas and Lucas can see the violent intent build in his eyes.
Lucas does not want to antagonize the Watcher. He can’t afford to, especially since he can’t just reach into the man’s mind and gently persuade him to do his bidding. Watchers tend to be immune to that sort of thing, unless you go hard on them, risking brain damage, which would kind of defeat the point of bringing him here in the first place. So Lucas raises his hands and gives Frank a slight smile. “Relax. This isn’t just about me. The problem I have concerns the safety of the whole city. Why do you think I called you?”
Frank walks around the demon and pours himself another drink before planting himself down on the couch. “Okay. You have my full attention. Tell me what’s going on.”
Lucas nods, puts his hands in his pants pockets while he stands over by the window, surveying the busy club below. “There’s a gang of demons running around the city at the moment, deliberately causing havoc, taking over businesses, killing people.”
“What’s new? Isn’t that what you demons do anyway?”
“Not exactly, Frank. You know as well as I do that we mostly influence. Anything beyond that and your kind—Nephilim—step in. Most of the demons on Earth stick to that rule.”
“Well, it sure doesn’t seem like it sometimes,” Frank says. “We’re never done trying to keep the monsters here in line.”
“Nonetheless, the gang that I’m talking about is dangerous. They’re only just getting started on their mission to upset the balance. Someone is leading them, organizing them. I’d like for you to find out who that is, Frank.”
“So you want me to hunt down the leader of this gang, is that it?”
“Yes.”
“And then what? I send whoever it is back to Hell?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your real interest in this? And don’t give me that Earth is great crap you gave me a minute ago.”
A tight smile crosses Lucas’ face. “I wasn’t lying about that, you know. You ever been to Hell, Frank?”
Frank goes quiet for a minute, then says, “No.”
“Well, if you had, you’d know where I’m coming from. Being a demon in Hell doesn’t make it much easier either.”
Frank just nods, drinks his whiskey.
“I know about your Watcher friend,” Lucas says. “The woman. Rachel, is it?” Lucas got his information from another demon. It is his understanding that no one else knows of what happened, since Lucas never heard the incident mentioned by anyone else. The demon he spoke to only knew because the woman in question was as well known as Frank. People thought she had been murdered, or just disappeared after the body of her husband had been found dead in their home, the husband who was also Frank’s brother. Frank and this Rachel had something of a relationship going on, until Frank got himself killed and this Rachel sold her soul to bring him back. It is a tangled web that humans weave sometimes. Not that Lucas intends to mention any of this to Frank. He can see the Watcher is wound up enough by the mere mention of his former lover’s name. Indeed, Frank has jumped to his feet, looking like he is about to attack Lucas, which would be a mistake, but Lucas has a feeling Frank doesn’t care.
After a tense few seconds, Lucas raises his hands. “Listen, I only bring that up because these demons I’ve been talking about are going around stealing souls. There are people walking around out there with no soul, and they don’t even know it. When they die they’ll go straight to Hell, Frank.”
Frank shakes his head and sits back down, seemingly calm again. “How long has this been going on? How many souls have they stolen?”
“It’s not that easy to steal a soul. Only top level demons can do it without a ritual first. These demons are using the ritual. My sources tell me they’ve only done it a few times so far, mainly because the ritual itself is fairly complicated and requires some very specific items to work. Getting those items can take a while, but now the gang has apparently found a way to quicken the process. The amount of souls they steal will increase exponentially.”
“What exactly happens to a person when they lose their soul like that?”
“They lose their humanity, of course. Turn into unfeeling, selfish, not to mention dangerous beings. It’s easy to do bad things when you have no soul, Frank.”
Frank gives Lucas a tight smile. “So what’s the purpose here with these guys? They steal the souls. Then what?”
Lucas steps towards Frank. “Maybe I wasn’t clear. A person with no soul is a ticking time bomb. Enough people out there like that and this city will implode. Imagine the death and destruction just one determined individual could do. That’s their plan, Frank, to make this city self-destruct so they can come in and rule over it.”
“You seem to know a lot about this.”
“I just know how demons think. So should you, by now.”
Frank smirks and nods. “You’re so right.” He gets up to refill his glass. “Where’d you even get my number?”
“I have resources,” Lucas says. “Although I have to say you really don’t like being found, do you? I’m told you live in a cabin in the mountains, is that right?”
“Yeah.” Frank walks back to the couch, his glass full once more. “I’m not really a people person as you might be able to tell.”
Lucas refrains from smiling too much at that and sits down at his desk. “I’m glad I called you and no one else.”
“That’s very sweet of you.”
Lucas laughs. He is beginning to like Frank, even if Frank is a Watcher. “So what do you say, Frank? You want to help me redress the power balance in this city?”
Frank sits in silence for a few moments while he drinks his whiskey. Lucas watches him, almost seeing the gears grind in the Watcher’s head. Despite Frank’s hesitation, Lucas knows he has him. “Alright,” Frank says after his glass is empty again. “Tell me everything you know.”
Lucas smiles, then begins to tell Frank everything he knows about the demon gang currently terrorizing the city, neglecting to to mention the real reason he called Frank in the first place.
Time enough for that, he thinks.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After Lucas was banished from the palace of his father, King Rameses II, and after he was give
n the Book Of Universal Darkness by Eppa Ho Tepp, Lucas took himself off into one of the mountain ranges that ran alongside the mighty Nile river. In the mountains he found himself a cave, and there he stayed for the next few months, spending nearly all of his time there studying the great book of dark magic in his possession. He barely ate except for whatever animal he remembered to hunt down in the mountains, which was usually a rabbit or whatever bird was unlucky enough to land around the entrance to his cave.
Those meals were few and far between however. Lucas was just too focused on learning the secrets contained within the Book Of Universal Darkness to worry about eating. He collected rain water, what there was of it, inside a hollowed stone that he left outside the cave. He gathered enough to keep his system functioning.
His brain was much too occupied to even notice the thirst and hunger anyway. A different kind of thirst and hunger had overtaken him, the thirst for knowledge and the hunger for power.
Ho Tepp had been right. The book did contain Lucas’ heart’s desire. More than anything, he wanted power and control, over himself and over his environment and the people in it. That’s what spawned his fascination with the dark arts, he realized. They were just a way to achieve what he wanted.
Being the youngest of ten brothers, the other nine of whom were overachieving born leaders who could do no wrong in the eyes of their father, the great King Rameses II, leader and ruler of the greatest civilization on Earth, Lucas always found himself neglected in comparison. The brothers had a great inspiration, and a great teacher, when their father could devote the time to his sons. However, he rarely devoted any of that precious time to Lucas, his youngest son. It often vexed Lucas as to why this was. Why did his father insist on putting his other sons above Lucas?
Lucas could never come up with a satisfactory answer to that question. He would have asked his mother, but she died giving birth to him. Maybe that was why his father couldn’t bring himself to truly count Lucas as one of his precious sons. He seemed to respect his many mistresses more than he did Lucas.
After some years, Lucas learned to bury his resentment and live with the fact that he would never be accepted as much as his other brothers. So Lucas turned to other things, like books and the quest for knowledge and power. If he couldn’t earn his father’s respect in the normal ways, he would do so by rising up so high that his father would be forced to stop and look, to acknowledge the son he had so callously disregarded as being the person who killed his beloved wife and queen, even though his father had taken many other wives since.
As Lucas dwelled in his cave, practicing the magic in the book over and over and over until it felt like he owned it--until it felt like the magic itself was a part of him--it eventually came to be that he no longer needed that old resentment towards his family to drive him.
The power he was teaching himself to wield with expert skill was reason enough for him to continue with his self-transformation. The power itself was delicious, an elixir for everything that once ailed him. It allowed him to transcend who he once was, and become who he needed to be.
When he finally walked out of that cave and headed back to the city again, Lucas did so feeling like Prometheus walking out of the ashes.
Lucas’ rise to power over the next several years was rapid and undeniable. He created an empire within an empire, his empire existing below the surface of the one his father, the king, ruled over. Thanks to his newfound power gained through the dark secrets of the Book Of Universal Darkness, Lucas’ influence spread everywhere, spanning nearly the entire Continent. He created a giant spider web, with himself at the center, the secretive and very dangerous spider, ruling over a network of puppets that he controlled in one way or another. Lucas had people in every political, financial and military institution in ancient Egypt.
And yet, hardly any of those people knew who they were really working for.
Lucas kept everything need to know. He ruled his empire from the shadows. At one time, he would have thought this unthinkable, to have so much power and influence and to not flaunt it to high heaven, rubbing his father’s and brothers’ noses in it. Too childish though. Lucas went into that cave in the mountains as a resentful, vindictive boy, and emerged as a man who now had a completely different mission in life.
That mission, as it turned out, was to simply use and multiply the power that he had inside him now. Nothing else mattered except to grow his power and influence, which he did, with a guile and brilliance that even he never predicted was possible.
It was inevitable that Eppa Ho Tepp would return to speak with Lucas after their second meeting in the alley, when Ho Tepp had set Lucas off in his journey by giving him the book.
“You have shown a great aptitude for the dark arts,” Ho Tepp said as he stood at the foot of Lucas’ bed one night. “You wield your power with skill, and without much ego, it seems.”
Lucas sat up in bed and stared at the hooded figure at the foot of his bed. The girl in bed with him never stirred as he spoke quietly. “I have you to thank,” he said. “You saw something in me. What? What did you see, Ho Tepp?” It was a question that burned Lucas’ brain from time to time after Ho Tepp had first given him the book. Eventually, Lucas just assumed that the master had recognized a fellow seeker in the dark, that perhaps the old master had felt some sort of kinship with Lucas. As it turned out, the reason Ho Tepp had taken an interest in Lucas had nothing to do with those things.
“It was Isis,” Ho Tepp told him. “She asked me to steer you on to the right path.”
Lucas frowned and sat up in bed. “Isis? What interest would a god like Isis have in me?”
“That is for you to find out.”
“She told you nothing?”
“She has been known to take an interest in some mortals. You should feel privileged that such a god would look upon you.”
Lucas did feel privileged, and confused and excited and a whole host of other emotions that he could barely process. Isis was one of the great goddesses of Egypt. She was the wife of Osiris himself. What possible interest could she have had in Lucas?
Lucas was about to ask that question of Ho Tepp, but when he next looked, Ho Tepp was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lucas is in his suite, on the big king-sized bed with the red silk sheets, his head in between the legs of Janice, his now club manager. Janice is lying on her back on the bed, naked, her tanned body writhing in ecstasy while she makes low moaning sounds from the back of her throat, a sound that never fails to excite Lucas as he pushes his tongue deep inside her, fluid running back into his mouth, of which he loves the taste.
In general, humans tend to disgust most demons. The smell of a human most of all will usually sicken a demon and make them want to destroy the human just to kill the smell, a smell which is made up of mostly fear. Humans don’t even realize how much fear they omit from moment to moment, even the ones who look fearless. But no human is fearless. That’s how they were made, to be slaves to their emotions, and right from their inception, fear became the dominant emotion.
This is partly due to the influence of the Great Adversary, the very source of all evil in the universe, and with whom only the King of Hell has a direct connection. It was Lucifer, a long time ago, who infected Adam and Eve with the darkness of the Adversary, and that influence has spread and corrupted ever since, to the point where every human on planet Earth is effected by it, and always will be.
Demons have no such fear, nor any real emotions either, which is why they tend to find them so abhorrent on humans. Emotions only serve to remind demons of who humans really are--sickening creatures at the bottom of the universal food chain.
Lucas once thought the same after he escaped from Hell to Earth. He instinctively despised them as he did the damned souls who resided in Hell.
But then he started fucking the human women. After that, his perceptions of humans began to change. There was something about being conjoined with a human woman that was not only pleasurable (r
eal pleasure, unlike the painful and torturous kind of pleasure to be found in Hell), but also heavenly in a way. Every time he fucks a human woman, Lucas feels a light of sorts penetrate into him. If he still had a soul, he would say the light touches his soul, but since he doesn’t have a soul anymore, he knows that is not possible. Yet that is what it feels like to him. A light, illuminating the core of his being, reminding him of who he once was, of how human he used to be himself. It makes despising the humans harder, because like or not, he has come to understand and even sympathize with them. Some, he even admires and respects, though those are few and far between.
He feels the light now as he continues to work his tongue inside of Janice’s glorious pussy, a pussy he finds to be simply sublime in its taste and feel, its softness, its silkiness. He could taste it forever and never be bored by it.
“Fuck me,” Janice says, pulling his head up from in between her legs, almost snarling as her whiskey brown eyes, full of pure animal lust, bore into him. She is gone, completely taken over by the feelings that grip her. Possessed you might say.
Lucas has fucked thousands of human women, and that was while he was human himself and still living in ancient Egypt. His desire for the pleasures of the flesh started early, when he was just a kid. It had always been a weakness of his, and later in life, just another way to get what he wanted, although he still reveled in the act itself. When he became a master of the dark arts, so too did he become a master of the flesh arts. The power he gained from his ceaseless studies allows him to pleasure women in ways that those women could not even conceive of until he shows them.
Like Janice. Since fucking her for the first time, she has come to him several times a day since, like an addict showing up for her fix. It is useful to have such an affect on people. It makes them easier to control, to manipulate. Even men. Lucas never shied away from using his skills on the same sex if it meant getting what he wanted from the other person. If anything, the men are usually more pliable afterwards than the women. It is the men who are the weaker sex, at least their minds anyway.
