by John Everson
“Good, so we’re agreed,” Cheyenne whispered. “No basement.”
Joe shook his head. “I didn’t say that.”
She glared at him.
“C’mon,” he urged, and stepped forward.
The chapel was full of townies. There was an old woman wearing a long faded sundress covered in blue and purple flowers, and younger men wearing faded blue-jeans and sweaty black T-shirts. There were girls in jeans shorts and Día de los Muertos tattoos and young guys wearing fat jeans shorts that rode down their backs as if they’d lost a hundred pounds since buying them.
They all looked wildly different but there was one thing they shared.
They were all being herded forward by someone else. Someone who held a knife or gun or steel club to their heads.
They were all being pushed into the circle drawn on the chapel floor.
Into the circle of last night’s Calling.
Joe pressed himself against the wall and peered out at what was going on in the room beyond. In his ear, Cheyenne whispered. “They shouldn’t go inside the circle, right?”
He shook his head no. But he didn’t speak. Instead, he pressed a finger to his lips and looked back at her. One accidental word could jeopardize what they were doing here.
She leaned her chin on his shoulder and watched as a young, black-haired guy was pushed forward into the circle. His captor held an outstretched knife that prevented the man from stepping back inside the barrier. So he moved forward.
A few seconds later, his body visibly stiffened. His arm stretched to the sky. He seemed to freeze that way. When he finally turned… his eyes were not his own. Joe’s heart froze when he saw the black of the man’s eyes.
They weren’t human.
But they were definitely alive. And looking for something.
Joe vowed, silently, to remain unseen.
That’s when Cheyenne, leaning over his shoulder trying to see, found it impossible not to sneeze.
The people in the chapel froze.
Joe’s eyes widened.
Two of the men herding people pushed their captives to someone else and began to walk swiftly across the chapel towards Joe and Cheyenne.
“What do we do?” Cheyenne whispered.
Joe stepped back from the entryway and pointed down the hall.
“Run!”
CHAPTER 44
“THAT HURTS!” Ariana complained. She tried to pull it away from her neck, but Elotan only yanked harder on the strap behind her. She gasped as spikes dug into her skin. “Why do I have to wear this?” she complained.
Elotan grabbed her by the hair and yanked her face up to see the glare of his eyes. “When we leave this house, you will always wear this. It shows that you are mine.”
“I didn’t wear it to the club last night.”
“I didn’t own it then,” he said. His voice dropped in pitch. “Now you’ll be safer.”
He let go of her hair and her chin dropped. The pointed barbs on the inside of the collar dug into her neck. Ariana winced.
“It hurts,” she said.
Elotan nodded. “As it should. Every time you are in pain, you feed my hunger. As a good slave should.”
“I like feeding you the other way.”
“And how is that?”
“In your bed.” Ariana lifted a come-hither eyebrow at him. “I don’t think I want to go out anymore.”
Elotan slapped her across the face. “We will go out when I say. And once we find our little runaway, I may never take you out again. Unless you misbehave.”
He yanked the leather cord that trailed behind the collar and she couldn’t help but follow him out the door.
The sky was piss-yellow and ominous as they walked out onto the street. It thronged with Curburide, all seemingly in a hurry to get somewhere. Elotan received several greetings, but it was Ariana who turned heads. No surprise there, really. In addition to the collar, he had dressed her in next to nothing; high black leather boots, a six-inch wide belt that hung low across her pelvis. A silky smooth thong strapped to the belt snugly between her legs to connect to the back of the belt above her ass.
It was the kind of outfit Ariana wished she could have worn to the clubs back at home, but it was the hard shape in the middle of the thong that intrigued Ariana. It appeared to be a smooth black stone, but it was more than that. When Elotan first strapped the thin material tightly against her skin, the stone had felt cold and wet, but now it seemed to burn with its own heat. As she walked, the stone moved against her like a wet tongue; that heat massaged her and the sensations jolting from her aroused clit to the back of her spine kept making her draw unexpected breaths.
The rest of her “walking outfit” consisted of two wide belts that crisscrossed from the waist to form an X across her chest covering the foremost jut of her breasts. The belts met at her neck, and latched onto the collar. The end result was that, as she walked, she was constantly receiving stimulation from the stone and prickly pain from the collar as it was pulled by both Elotan and her own movement.
Her nerves were in constant conflict between pain and pleasure. She barely could focus on where they were walking, or at the leering she was receiving from female and male demons alike. The outfit kept her mind focused on her inner world.
Ariana barely noticed when Elotan stopped to talk with demons he knew on the street. But she was vaguely aware that he was having short conversations periodically as they walked. One of them reached out to run a silken finger down her back to the crack of her ass, but Elotan slapped him away. Ariana only shivered at the tease of the touch.
“Mine,” Elotan pronounced eloquently. “And I need to find what’s become of my other one before she’s lost to the likes of you!”
The other demon laughed. “I did hear that someone new was brought into the skin factory the other night. But they get someone new every week. Takes a strong one to survive that place for very long.”
“Thanks,” Elotan said. “That’s worth a look at least. I haven’t heard any other ideas today.”
“Good luck with that,” the demon said. “If she’s there, she won’t be leaving with you.”
“We’ll see,” Elotan said. The other demon smirked and walked away.
Ariana didn’t like the sound of that. “What is the skin factory?” she asked.
Elotan shook his head. “Not where you want to end up.”
“But you’re going to take me there?”
The demon yanked on the leash and Ariana yelped as the spikes bit into her neck. “I’ll take you where I want and you won’t question me.”
She pouted and reached out a tentative finger to stroke the edge of his jaw. “I just asked what it was,” she said. “I will go wherever you take me.”
Elotan nodded. He turned and put two silken steel hands on her shoulders. She shivered at the sensation as he let his fingers slide down her body. His touch was amazing.
“They take people’s skins off.”
Ariana grimaced. “How? Why?”
“With knives. Slowly.”
“More food?” she asked.
“Partly,” he said. “But they take the skins to sell. They’re a popular room decoration. And hard to come by. We don’t have a lot of corporeal humans here.”
“So if Alex was taken there, she may be dead already?”
He shook his head. “Not necessarily. She could wake up regenerated again and again. But many don’t survive the pain of separation.”
“Jesus,” Ariana said.
“Not here.”
Ariana had a vision of of the bratty teen being flensed. She imagined a demon cutting a slice across Alex’s forehead and yanking the skin back to pull off her hair like a wig, exposing the red flesh beneath. The image made her shiver involuntarily. While she had no love lost for the girl – it was he
r fault that they were here after all – she still had some vestige of humanity left. And skinning was just too… horrible.
Elotan yanked her chain and Ariana stumbled after him. The pain of the barbs melded oddly with the heat in her groin. The rock ground tighter against her sex with each step, and waves of pleasure made her legs weak. She blinked and gasped and struggled to keep up with him. The grey buildings and yellow sky turned to a watercolor blur.
And then they arrived somewhere. He pulled her through a huge, heavy wooden door, and they were inside a dark foyer. The walls were papered with a weird tapestry of dragons and Greek symbols and roses and birds and skulls. The paper looked oddly folded and ridged in places. Then it occurred to her. The walls were not decorated with wallpaper, but with people. These were skins that had been taken off people in the rooms beyond.
“Whoa,” Ariana said softly, staring at the tattoos and the different complexions of body skin that hugged the walls.
Elotan dragged her through an archway into an oval room where skins hung on hooks from the ceiling. They looked like ghastly mobiles, empty bodies floating silent above their heads. Elotan didn’t pause to admire the goods for sale; he marched up to a large, burly demon who appeared to be dozing in a human skin-upholstered chair at the far side of the room. His head leaned back, lolling on the chair back. One armrest had a heart with barbed wire crisscrossed around it and the word Sherry drawn in the middle. The other armrest had a similar tattooed heart, only this one looked slimmer and said Frank. Ariana realized that the demon was resting on the skins of lovers.
The demon looked up from its nap and fastened black eyes on Ariana. “Oh yes,” he said, instantly coming alert. “Where did you find her?”
Elotan shook his head. “She’s not for sale.”
“I could get you a very good price,” the shop demon offered. He slid off his chair to kneel at Ariana’s feet. With his hands he encircled her left calf and slid his fingers up across her knee and higher. His hands were so large, his fingers never broke apart as they travelled up her thigh. The stone burned with sudden electricity and Ariana let out a moan as the demon’s seductive fingers hit the top of her inner thigh.
Elotan pushed the other demon away. “Enough, she’s not on the auction block today.”
“Just one night?” the other growled. He didn’t sound ready to take no for an answer. His hands left her skin and as he stood, Ariana realized how large he really was. She’d thought Elotan was big, but this demon stood a full head taller. And his chest could have crushed two of her to him, and still had room for another.
He dwarfed Elotan, and suddenly Ariana felt a pang of worry. What if Elotan wasn’t strong enough to keep her?
“I’d like to see what you have on the racks right now,” Elotan said, ignoring the request.
“You’re not a regular customer,” the larger demon said, folding tree trunk arms across his chest.
“I may become one,” Elotan retorted. “What do you have coming soon?”
The demon pointed at the skins hanging overhead. “Those are our most recent,” he said. A trip to the back room did not seem forthcoming.
“I want her to see the girl whose skin she may sleep upon,” Elotan said. “I want her to see the eyes before the skin comes off.”
The other demon grinned. “Now I understand.” He stepped towards one of the room’s walls and pushed a bunch of skins aside. There was a hallway beyond. Ariana hadn’t realized that there was an entryway there. A hidden passage.
“Follow me,” the shop demon said, and walked through the skins. Elotan followed closely.
They moved down a short hallway that seemed black as pitch. Walls, floor, ceiling – everything was black. It felt as if they were being sucked into the void when the skins closed behind them. The floor shone like polished obsidian. Though there was barely any light to reflect, it still glimmered with each step.
But her eyes hadn’t even adjusted to the void when they turned a corner and stepped out into a long, open room. While the floors and walls remained black, this place had a glass ceiling. The roiling sulphur clouds overhead cast a sickly shadow across the room.
“We have two in right now,” the shop demon announced. With one arm he pointed to a cross a few yards away. “Both are women, so you’ll enjoy the softest of silky skin from either.”
He led the way to the first cross and gestured at the form that hung there, Christ-like. Her head hung down and chestnut hair lay in loose curls across the top of her naked breasts. She appeared to be unconscious, but Ariana could see she was still breathing. It wasn’t Alex.
The demon ran a thick finger down the slope of one breast, across the faint curve of her belly and down into the thatch of brown hair between her legs. “She’s given us some great skins already, and I’m sure we’ll have another from her tonight. Top quality. Go ahead and feel.”
Elotan reached out and put one hand on the still woman’s belly. He pulled on Ariana’s tether and nodded. “Touch her,” he demanded.
Ariana reached a hand out to touch the side of the woman’s thigh. The woman’s skin was warm and soft, and Ariana felt a moistening between her legs as Elotan pressed her wrist to move to the inside of the woman’s thighs. With his own hand he then took the other thigh and forced the legs apart.
He nodded, and pulled Ariana away, just as the rock between her thighs began to burn in that eye-defocusing way. “Very nice,” Elotan said. “You have another choice?”
The other demon nodded. “Just came in last night. Good timing, since we lost one last night too.” He pointed to another cross at the far end of the long room and began to walk towards it. Ariana took a deep breath to clear her head, and then the collar bit into her neck as Elotan moved ahead of her.
She hurried to keep up, and take the bite out of her skin, but when she rounded the side of the cross to see the figure hanging on the front, she stopped.
The girl was naked. Young. Her head hung slackly down, chin to chest, and black hair covered much of her face. But even without seeing her eyes, there was no mistaking. It was definitely Alex, the little bitch girl.
“That’s…” Ariana started to speak but then gasped as the collar choked her.
Elotan looked angry. “No, I don’t think so,” he said to the shop demon. “Too small for what I need.” He shook his head and pulled Ariana’s chain again.
“But,” she gasped. She was rewarded with a hard yank.
“We have every size and shape out front,” the shop demon growled from behind them. “I showed you that.”
Elotan shook his head and kept walking. “I need to see the creature while the skin is on. These won’t do. I’ll come back another time.”
He put his hand up and then used it to push through the skins that hid the front shop from the “factory” beyond. A moment later they were on the street. Elotan dragged her quickly away from the place and passed several buildings before he allowed them to stop.
“But that was her,” Ariana finally gasped, after holding the collar away from her neck for a moment and catching her breath.
Elotan nodded. “And did you think we were just going to say, hey, she’s ours, and walk out with her?”
“Then why did we go there at all?”
“I was hoping to cross that possibility off the list. I was hoping she wouldn’t be there.”
“You could have tried to get her, at least.”
“If he had realized why we were really there and I had gotten into an argument with him, I would not only have lost the argument, I likely would have lost you.”
“So, what is the plan now? Do we come back at night and try to go in a back door or something?”
Elotan laughed. “No.”
“But they’ll peel her skin off tonight!”
He nodded. “Just as they did last night. Would you rather it be hers or yours?”
<
br /> “Hers.”
“You drew the tall straw. You just have to work for me at the club.”
“Not every night though, right?”
“That depends on how you behave. And at the moment, your conduct is bordering on insolence.”
Ariana opened her mouth and then thought better of it. Instead she sealed her lips tight, and followed Elotan down the winding street home.
CHAPTER 45
THERE WERE VOICES nearby. A woman. A man. Familiar cadence. A face flashed in her memory, long black hair, a patrician nose. Hard desire in the gleam of her eyes. Cruelty.
Ariana. She heard the voice of Ariana. And the demon. Were they here to rescue her? But what was left of her to take?
Alex remembered the blade and the blood and the skin of her forehead suddenly flipping to hang like a wet towel over her nose. She was afraid to open her eyes. But then she realized that the pain was gone.
Maybe that was because she was dead.
Alex forced herself to open her eyes and look.
She was hanging from a cross, in the room that she remembered from last night. Skins decorated the wall in front of her, arms and legs stretched out like garish X’s, fingers grasping to the ceiling for help. Faces stretched long and strange, the mouths open in distorted screams. Alex looked away just in time to see Ariana and the demon leaving the room at the far end.
“Wait!” she cried, but it was already too late. They were gone.
Her vision blurred and Alex blinked several times. A tear trickled down her cheek. And then another. She wasn’t dead. She was trapped here alive, for eternity.
“No, probably not that long,” a voice growled in her ear. “Usually skin givers don’t last for more than a couple weeks. That’s what makes their skin so valuable.” Alex’s eyes shot open and she turned to see the vicious yellow teeth of a huge demon standing at her side. Despite the fact that her feet were not touching the ground, the demon was still taller than her. His breath burned her forehead.
“Why did you want them to wait?” the demon asked. His voice was low. Dangerous. Alex’s skin crawled.
