Redemption (Covenant Book 3)

by John Everson

  From somewhere far away, she could just make out the sounds of cheers and then there was something else touching her. Something that spread her thighs roughly apart. Something that thrust into the ready and open channel that led to her core. Something that hurt when it slid in, but hurt way, way more when it slipped part of the way out.

  Ariana cocked her head between the strong thighs of the demoness and saw the demon who had pinched her nipple now pressed himself inside her. He kissed his mate, or girlfriend, as he used Ariana.

  Ariana responded, gripping the giant thing inside her, and bucking her hips to move it, accept it, warm it. She wanted to show this demon a good fuck, and as long as she could keep her lips where they were, she thought she could just about do anything.

  But that, unfortunately, was where the fun ended.

  Hands grabbed at her feet, and suddenly the demon yanked himself out of her. It felt as if someone had just pulled a knot of fishing lures through her vagina. Ariana screamed out involuntarily, though her pain was muffled by the thick, slick lips of the demon’s sex.

  The demoness suddenly stood up from her crouch, and moved from using Ariana’s mouth to kissing her boyfriend. As the two of them abandoned her and slipped into an erotic embrace, Ariana suddenly was dragged away and across the stage to where a group of male patrons stood waiting. There were a half dozen of them, and their grins widened as she drew close. Ariana knew that the fun part of the night – for her – was absolutely over.

  Their erections were all in full bloom, ready to impale, with the spines that normally lay flat at their cockheads already raised up from the flesh. Ready to grip and cut inside of whatever they speared.

  A hand gripped her by the hair and yanked her to her knees. She was suddenly face to face with an nine-inch tube of demon meat that had a single focused eye and a crown of deadly thorns. She knew what was expected.

  “Kiss me,” the owner demanded, and Ariana raised one eyebrow in irritation, though she struggled not to show it. “Really?” she whispered, mostly to herself. But opening her mouth was a mistake, because it was instantly filled. And while it tasted like warmth and spice and the delicious thrill of sin, it also promised blood and pain far worse than any dentist’s drill.

  Fingernails raked across her breasts, as one of the demon’s horny friends grabbed her from behind and thrust his personal weapon between her legs. And he was using it like a weapon. She could feel the blood already dripping down the inside of her thighs from the last invasion. As he used that lubrication to make his own path easier, Ariana closed her eyes. Her mouth was filled to bursting with a fucking porcupine dick that promised to rip her lips apart if he pulled it out and her pussy felt much the same. She could feel the heat and pain with every slight push the demon made; it was hideous and marvelous at the same time because it wasn’t only pain, it was ecstasy when he moved inside her.

  Then another spear of pain sliced upwards and inside, ripping open that place she had never wanted to let any man inside. She stiffened and wanted to scream, but her mouth wouldn’t open any farther. For a moment, she panicked, until she forced herself to breathe through her nose.

  “Just sex,” she told herself over and over. She had to ignore the horrible searing pain that happened every time one of the demons pulled back. But the pushing in, almost made up for the pain. It was as if they were shooting her up with morphine when their cocks hit the farthest penetration inside her.

  And then the knife-edged pain as they retreated.

  “Just sex,” she thought to herself, again and again. “I can do this.”

  Someone in the audience called out the words that made her suddenly doubt that she could.

  “More holes,” the demon demanded. “We need more holes.”

  Something speared her in the side, and her whole body jerked and clenched. A moment later, she felt a pole open the fresh wound wide as it pressed itself into her middle.

  Then another stab from the other side. Barbed tongues licked at her ears as two demon men fucked the holes stabbed in the flesh of her sides while one lay beneath her and ripped her uterus out, while still another stood behind her and effectively performed a colonoscopy. And through it all, she still had a barbed dick in her mouth, shredding her tongue and the top of her palate with every movement.

  Ariana felt high with the mix of pain and blood. She wanted to scream louder than she’d ever screamed in her life.

  And at the same time, she felt the drug of the demon’s need. Instead of trying to pull away, she gave her body up to them, moving with all of their thrusts to accept, push back, accept, swivel around. The pain became transcendent.

  She moved and cried and closed her eyes as the stars rained over and through her brain.

  From somewhere far away she heard clapping.

  And that was right about the time she felt liquid fire pour into her mouth as well as her sides and the world went white with heat and hideous sound before it turned silent.

  And black.

  CHAPTER 37

  THE TAXI DROPPED THEM off at the Santa Fe Police Department on Cerillos Road. Cheyenne paid the cabbie with some money she’d had stashed away – literally – in her mattress. (“You never know when someone’s going to come looking in your cookie jar,” she’d explained.)

  “The town looks a little different down here,” Joe observed. They stood in the parking lot of police station and he looked off towards a strip mall and a sign that read Valdes Business Park.

  “How do you mean?” she asked.

  “Not so much adobe,” he said. “Or art galleries or the whole Old West look.”

  Cheyenne shrugged. “It’s like any other town,” she said. “Old Town and the Plaza are for tourists. And weekends.”

  Joe smiled and they began to walk towards the front door. “So, to sum up, ‘life is a strip mall?’”

  “Or a strip joint,” she said. “Really depends on the day and what you need.”

  He didn’t have an answer to that.

  Cheyenne led the way inside. Joe tried to walk quieter; he wore a pair of her beach flip flops and even though they were tight and too small for him, they still slapped at the ground as they approached the front desk.

  He looked down and grimaced. The Day-Glo pink didn’t help either.

  “What’s the problem?” the on duty sergeant said. He didn’t look terribly interested in the answer.

  “I was kidnapped and robbed,” Cheyenne said. She pointed at Joe and added, “He helped me get away, but they still have our clothes and wallets and everything.”

  The sergeant looked at Joe and raised a thick black eyebrow, sizing him up. Joe suddenly felt very conscious of the V-neck cut of the T-shirt he wore. Just add another line to his list of “things I never thought would happen to me” – go to the police wearing a woman’s clothes.

  “Hang on,” the cop said, and disappeared from the desk for a minute. When he came back, he pointed at a door. “Lieutenant Mistral will take down your story,” he said.

  The door opened, as if on cue, and the desk clerk looked back to his magazine. A thin, young cop with short blonde hair and glasses stood in the doorway and motioned to them. They followed him into a small conference room. He offered them Dixie cups of water from a water cooler and then sat across from them at a small, well-used table. There were gouges and half-drawn letters carved into the fake paper woodgrain that covered the pressboard. Who carved graffiti while inside a police station? Joe mused.

  “I understand you were kidnapped and robbed,” Mistral said. “Why don’t you start at the very beginning and tell me what happened?”

  Joe nodded. “We weren’t actually together at…”

  Cheyenne cut him off.

  “I was walking home from work and this asshole pulled up and offered me a ride. I said no thanks and he left, but then he made a U-turn, came back and shot me wi
th a tranquilizer dart.”

  “And this was, when, exactly?”

  Joe sat back as Cheyenne told the cop her story, up to the point when Joe opened the door to the basement and let her out.

  Mistral nodded and put a hand up to stop her. He looked directly at Joe then, and asked, “And you were in the old mission, why?”

  Joe opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again to consider his words. “I was there looking for devil worshippers so I could latch on to their occult ceremony and talk to a demon,” didn’t sound like the right response under the florescent lights of a police station interrogation room. But, it was the truth…

  “I had heard there was going to be a ceremony that night because of the eclipse,” he said. “I was curious about it.”

  “What sort of ceremony?” Mistral said. His face was unreadable, but Joe knew what he had to be thinking.

  “I heard that they were going to be trying to call spirits there that night.”

  “So you’re a follower of the occult?”

  Joe shook his head. He wasn’t sure what to say, but Cheyenne solved that problem.

  “He wanted to crash their party and talk to a demon so that he could save his friend who’s on the other side.”

  Mistral’s poker face slipped for a moment at that, but the mask was back when he turned to Joe.

  “So you were hoping for a séance?”

  “Sort of,” Joe said. “But instead I found Cheyenne.”

  The cop wrote something on his notepad and then looked at Cheyenne. “So this guy lets you out of the basement where you’ve been chained up. What happened next?”

  Cheyenne recounted the events of the past several hours. Mistral raised an eyebrow when she reached the point about the women’s throats being cut, but otherwise, said nothing. Joe also kept quiet. He could tell the man didn’t trust him.

  When she finished, Mistral kept writing on his pad for several minutes. The silence grew uncomfortable. When he finished, the cop looked up at both of them.

  “What I’d like to do, is take another officer out to the Birchmir and look around,” Mistral said. “See if the victims you describe are still there. If we find your clothes, we’ll grab them for you. What I’d like you to do, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, is to stay here until we get back. I’ll likely have some questions for you once we walk around the place. Is that okay with you?”

  Joe nodded.

  Cheyenne shrugged. “I should be to work by six, if they haven’t fired me. Speaking of which, can I use your phone?”

  Mistral pointed to the door. “There’s one in the hall. Just dial nine to get out.” He stood up and moved towards the door himself. “There’s also coffee and a snack machine just down the hall here. Make yourselves at home. I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

  He disappeared out into the hall and closed the door behind him.

  “So now we sit,” Joe said. He settled back in the plastic seat of the chair, but there wasn’t a comfortable way to lounge. These seats weren’t made for relaxing.

  “We could play a game,” Cheyenne suggested.

  Joe made a face. “With what?”

  “How about Truth or Dare?”

  He laughed. “I think I’ve had just about enough dares for one day.”

  “Perfect,” she said. “Then you can choose Truth.”

  “I thought you had to call someone?”

  “You’re right,” she said. “I should let work know I’m alive. Be right back.”

  Cheyenne disappeared out the door and Joe took a deep breath and stared hard at the white blank wall in front of him.

  No cracks in that wall for demons to slip through. Joe snorted to himself. That’s what his life had come to. Looking at walls to see if there were cracks that might let monsters in. A far cry from looking into conspiracies and corruption in city government for the Chicago Tribune. Where he’d had a pretty promising career going just a year ago.

  For a short time, he and Alex had driven across the country, and stopped in hotel after hotel to find the places where Ariana had sacrificed men to the Curburide demons. There was always a crack where the demons had slipped through. And for a while, they were always just a step behind her in the race to stop her ritual before it reached its disastrous conclusion. If Ariana had had things her way, she would have set the Curburide free to rape and torture everyone on Earth.

  “So, it looks like I’m not fired,” Cheyenne announced, breezing back into the room. “And they already have someone to cover my shift tonight, since we might be here awhile.”

  “That’s good,” Joe said.

  “Do you have anyone you should call?” she asked.

  Joe looked at the table, not meeting her eye.

  “No,” he said.

  “Well, then I guess we can start our game!”

  CHAPTER 38

  SEAN MISTRAL had not spent years training for the force to chase down devil-worshippers. He had decided to become a cop when he was a teen – not because he loved uniforms and badges, but because he wanted to help people and to stop idiots from hurting the innocent. But “to serve and protect” seemed to encompass more weirdness than he’d ever imagined. This was not the first time the police had been called to deal with occult rituals out at the Birchmir. In fact, there had already been two other instances in the short time Mistral had been on the Santa Fe force. And he knew that the history went way back.

  This had to be one of the strangest stories he’d heard from the old mission, though. He stopped at the chief’s office and relayed the gist. The chief – an old white-haired veteran who’d come out here from Vegas ten years ago to slide quietly toward retirement – nodded when Mistral finished his story.

  “They’re like mice in a basement,” the chief said. “You can poison them and trap them to your heart’s content, but they always come back. Take Barela and check it out.”

  Sam Barela was a third-year rookie whose family still kept an original, true adobe home up on the Taos Pueblo an hour and a half north of Santa Fe. He’d grown up on the reservation, unlike many of the Native Americans who populated Santa Fe. He was an encyclopedia of local tradition and culture. He was usually paired up as Mistral’s partner, when the job required it. Which wasn’t often; typically he was on traffic patrol on his own. But this one was, obviously, different. The young cop was pouring a cup of coffee in the break room when Mistral found him.

  “Afternoon caffeine, to keep you mean,” Barela announced, holding up his styrofoam cup in a toast. The young cop stood a couple inches shorter than Mistral, but he was more powerful. His shoulders were broad and his handshake left you flexing your fingers afterwards. His hair had that thick lustrous black sheen that only Indians seemed to have, and even when it was short, it somehow looked long. When he smiled, his brown eyes always seemed to reflect a deeper humor than his lips allowed.

  “Looks like you’re going to need to put a lid on it,” Mistral grinned.

  Five minutes later, they were in the patrol car and headed to the old mission. Mistral briefed him on the story en route while Barela sipped his coffee. When they pulled off the main road and down the drive leading to the Birchmir, the sun was high in the sky and the grounds around the old structure were empty.

  “No cars,” Mistral observed.

  “Hmmm,” Sam replied.

  They parked and got out of the car. Sam finished the last drop of his coffee and tossed the cup to the floor of the cruiser. Together, they walked the perimeter of the structure. Sam spotted the broken window first and gestured at it with his thumb.

  Mistral nodded. They remained silent, not wanting anyone inside to hear them, if there was anyone left inside. After a short walk around the other half of the building, they returned to the front. Sam tried the handle on the front door, and surprisingly, it opened. The devil-worshippers hadn’t b
othered to cover their tracks and lock up when they left. Or maybe they hadn’t all left.

  They stepped inside and held the door from making noise as it closed behind them. They were in a chapel, which on the surface, appeared empty. They split up, walking the perimeter of the room on opposite sides, looking between the remaining pews for anyone who might be hiding there. They met again by the altar.

  Sam pointed at the star drawn within the circle on the open floor between the pews and the altar. The border of the circle was a dusky red, while the inner stripes that made up the star were white. Though they, too, were smeared with what appeared to be bloodstains.

  Mistral knelt at the edge of the circle and pressed a finger to an area that still glistened, faintly. His fingertip came back bloody. He stood and nodded at the entryway to the hall behind the chapel, and together they walked back. They found the stairway leading up and quickly ascended that to stare out at the quiet plains around the old building. Their patrol car was the only car in sight.

  “This is where they supposedly hid some of the night while the ceremony was going on,” Mistral said.

  Sam nodded. “Good lookout spot,” he said. “Poor choice for an exit.”

  Mistral grinned, and they headed back down.

  The kitchen turned out to also be empty, though there were some pots and bowls that had obviously been used recently, and not cleaned up. Whoever had been here had obviously left somewhat quickly – they hadn’t locked up or taken their things with them.

  After a quick survey of the other rooms, they used the basement door and descended to the chambers where Cheyenne said she’d been held prisoner.