by Debra Dunbar
The girl hesitated. “Come back, okay? We need you. Promise you’ll come back.”
The demon woman muttered something under her breath about stupid idiot humans. I ignored her. “Promise.”
“Move, or you’ll be next,” the demon snapped. Mess hesitated a fraction of a second, then stepped aside. The demon woman kicked open the bathroom door and shoved me forward, closing it behind her. She put her hands on the handle and I heard the grind of metal, the smell of something hot, and I realized that she had locked it in some supernatural fashion—locking me in here with her.
I scrambled to my feet, putting my back against the wall and eyeing her. There was nothing at hand I could possibly use as a weapon, and I knew my strength couldn’t match a demon who broke wrists so easily.
“I’m going to have to fix her wrist once I’m done with you, and all the other injuries as well.” Her voice was calm, but those eyes were anything but reassuring. “I am furious with you. First you assault me—not once but twice. You were obviously the one who organized the escape attempt with those other girls. You’ve caused the men to hurt the merchandise—injuries I’ll need to spend energy repairing. You are a problem, and I find myself wondering how much trouble I would be in if I killed you.” She took a step toward me. “It’s an ideal solution. Kill you and throw your battered body out there. All the other girls would fall in line. It would be so enjoyable, torturing you for hours until your flesh could take no more. And just before you died, I’d take your soul and keep it for my own. What fun I could have with your soul for all of eternity.”
I curled my hands into fists. I might get killed. I might die for this. But I was going to die fighting. My only regret was that I would go back on my promise to Mess. I wouldn’t be here to help the other women. Maybe they’d escape without me. It wasn’t like I was all that special. I wasn’t any kind of hero. I was just a junkie from the streets who couldn’t remember more than shadows of her past. A junkie with weird, bright-red hair that didn’t seem to take any kind of dye.
“I’m not allowed to kill you.” The demon’s voice was tinged with regret. “The terms of my summoning don’t allow me to harm any of the guards or the boss, and I can’t kill the merchandise. I can hurt the merchandise, though. As long as I fix it afterward.” Her long claws combed through my hair, her golden-scaled skin catching on the strands. “And fixing will cause you just as much pain as killing you.”
I swung, punching her as hard as I could in the jaw. She laughed, so I did the same with my other fist, then kicked her in the legs. She stepped in to me, maneuvering her body so I was trapped against the wall. I fought like a wild animal, punching and kicking, grabbing her hair and trying to gouge those frightening eyes out. It was like fighting a piece of clay. Every scratch and bruise healed before my eyes. She just stood there in front of me, amused at every blow I landed until I was spent and shaking.
“Are you done, little red bird?” she asked. Then she slapped me and my head rocked to the side. Warm liquid filled my mouth and dripped from my nose. Everything dimmed with a second blow, and I felt myself start to slide down the wall. She caught me, claws digging into the skin over my ribs as she held me upright. Then her mouth met mine. The kiss was a strange mix of passion and pain…and desperation. With her lips on mine, her tongue licking and tasting, I felt her—knew with complete certainty that she was a trapped animal, desperate and lashing out at everything that entered its tiny cage.
The kiss ended and I saw my blood on her lips as she smiled. Her scaled body pressed against mine, holding me in place as her clawed fingers moved from my waist to grip my hair.
“And now the fun begins,” she whispered with a wicked smile.
Something sharp and hot slid through me, through my hair and into my scalp. I gasped and would have dropped to the floor if she hadn’t been pressing me against the wall. It felt like she was stripping layers from my skin, sanding and slicing her way down to the bone.
“Isn’t this enjoyable?” She nuzzled my neck and chuckled as I panted and tried to keep from screaming. Pain and pleasure merged together. Then the feeling of being sliced abruptly stopped. She hesitated, then I felt her push as if she were trying to shove past a blockage.
Nothing. A harder push. Pain bloomed up in me, searing through my mind, but I got the impression it was her pain, not mine.
Her dark eyes peered into mine and she frowned. “Don’t fight me, pretty red bird. It will only hurt worse.”
I thought hurt was what she wanted. Again there was that sensation of her pushing in through my skin, like she was stabbing me with a thousand tiny knives, sanding the layers from me. The pressure increased until I couldn’t breathe, then something snapped. There was a roaring sound. Pain. A scream that tore through me. Everything went white, and when the world swam into focus I realized I was lying in a heap on the cold tile floor, my bright-red hair covering my eyes. I pushed it away with a shaking hand and saw the demon woman clear across the room from me. Her skin no longer had scales. Her claws were back to beautifully manicured nails. Dark human eyes stared at me. She was breathing hard, as if she’d been running for her life. Something like fear flickered in the back of her eyes and I realized that the scream I’d heard hadn’t come from my lips—it had come from hers.
“What…” Her voice trembled and she swallowed hard. “What are you?
Chapter 12
What did she mean? I tried to sit upright and failed, my body cold and trembling. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to curl into a ball and drift into nothingness. Everything hurt and I couldn’t get warm. Was this some kind of delayed detox? This body, this flesh felt like a betrayal, like a horrible weakness that I needed to shed if only I knew how.
“What are you?” she asked again, this time with a hint of firmness. Had I imagined that fear in her eyes? Because it was nowhere to be found right now.
“I—I don’t know.” I wrapped my arms around my knees and held on tight, trying to keep from shaking myself apart. “I don’t remember much of anything. I woke up on the truck with the other women. I had track marks on my arms, so I think I was a junkie they grabbed off the streets.”
She looked at my arms and shook her head. “They beat you, just as they beat the other girls out there, but you are now uninjured. Every bruise has faded and vanished. There’s not a scar on you. Not a mole or a freckle. Not a wrinkle or blemish. Your skin…and your hair…”
I had figured that my flawless skin was why the men had taken me. I doubted a passed-out junkie was their ideal candidate for this sex slave ring. None of the other girls were users, although with the exception of Pistol and Kitten, they were all girls who wouldn’t be missed or whose families would have difficulties in finding and/or rescuing them.
“You fixed your injuries.” Her voice was full of wonder. “The dead man had beaten you. The other two beat you. I’ve done nothing to repair your injuries. You’ve done it yourself. Are you part demon? If so, you must be more than a half-demon hybrid.”
“I don’t know.” I did know that the thought of being part demon made me shiver with revulsion. I couldn’t be a demon, could I? If so, why was my memory gone? If so, then why couldn’t I kill those two guards and whisk us all to safety? It made less sense than Mess’s guardian angel theory.
The woman crawled closer, looking to be in just as much pain as I was. “You are the most stunningly perfect human I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen the most beautiful nature can provide. You resist compulsion. You fight against me with the force and power of a demon hybrid. No matter what I do, I can’t change your red hair. And any pain I inflict on you rebounds to me three-fold. What are you? Was your sire a powerful ancient and your mother a werewolf or Nephilim, perhaps?”
“I don’t know,” I insisted.
The pain she’d tried to inflict on me rebounded three-fold? How could that be? I had no idea how she’d survived it if that was the truth because I never could have made it through three times what she’d just done to me.
“Tell me what you do remember.” She stopped just in front of me, once more eyeing my red hair.
“I like to listen to old-school rap, and I can’t resist French fries with extra salt.” I hesitated, probing my memories. “I love the smell of the earth after a warm summer rain, the feel of dirt sifting through my fingers, the way boulders jut up from the ground up in the mountains, their surface colored with lichen and pitted from thousands of years of rain. I feel…I feel like there are two of me. There’s a part that feels like a book I once read, that’s fading away before my eyes. And there’s a part…a part that I don’t want to remember, that I want to go away.”
Why was I telling this demon these things? She’d hurt my girls. She’d tried to hurt me. She’d threatened to kill me. But in spite of all this, there was a weird feeling of kinship whenever she was around—kinship and an embarrassing attraction.
“You’re mentally ill?” The woman tilted her head and regarded me. “Split personality?”
Maybe. Probably. Heck if I knew. “I think I had a family once.” I frowned in thought, struggling to remember. “I think they died. It was my fault. I should have been stronger, I should have done something. I could have stood by their sides, made a stand. Instead I was a coward, and now I need to atone.”
The demon’s laugh was short and bitter. “Humans and their guilt. Trust me, little red bird, whatever killed your family would have killed you too if you’d made a stand. Better to flee and live than to fight and die.”
“No, it’s not better to flee.” I managed to sit more upright, pushing back a wave of nausea. “Because now I have to live with their loss on my soul. I have to live with the constant remembrance of what I didn’t do. I’d rather have died by their side than live with this.”
She shook her head, scooting herself around to sit beside me against the wall. “Then beat yourself with a birch rod, throw on a hair shirt, and suffer. Isn’t that what you humans do for redemption?”
There. The memory was there, hovering tantalizingly out of reach. “That’s what I’m doing. This is my hair shirt. I need to atone.”
“Well, in my opinion, getting picked up by a group of human traffickers and sold as a sex slave is a bit excessive as a penance. This kind of suffering does your dead family no good. It just wastes your life.” She shrugged. “But it’s too late to back out now. I only hope you die quickly and with as little pain as possible.”
That’s not what she’d wanted a few moments ago. I remembered the sensation when she’d first touched me, the feeling that she was an animal trapped, lashing out in desperation.
“Maybe you should have stayed and helped your family.” Her laugh this time carried actual humor. “If you can hold your own against a demon, you probably could have taken out that gang or whatever killed your people. But then again, I’m not particularly strong compared to other demons. Succubi and incubi have their own special skills, but we’re not the heavyweights of Hel.”
She truly was a demon. I don’t know why, but I’d seemed to accept that without any sort of internal panicking. It felt right to me. Maybe she was right and I was part demon, because sitting next to her like this was like sitting next to a peer, an equal.
“I do believe that you must have a demon or Nephilim parent, because no human should have been able to resist me like that.” Her dark eyes peered at me, and her smile this time was downright charming. “Of course, immunity to my compulsion and fighting me off doesn’t mean you’ll survive whoever buys you at the auction, if you make it that long. Those men are furious. I wouldn’t be surprised if they kill one of you just to prove a point. I recommend you give up your plans of escape until after you are sold. Your chances would be better one-on-one with whoever buys you, especially once he lets his guard down.”
“It’s not me I need to save,” I told her. “The other women—their lives are what’s important. I need to save them, even if I die in the process.”
She shook her head, still smiling. “There’s that silly need for penance again. You think sacrificing yourself for others will buy you forgiveness? Pretty red bird, there is no forgiveness. All that will buy you is death.”
“The forgiveness isn’t in the sacrifice,” I argued. “It’s not being a martyr that will bring me redemption. It’s me being strong and standing up for what’s right, for what I believe to be true. It’s about helping others. And there is forgiveness, but it comes from within, not from outside of me.”
“Humans.” She sighed then extended her hand toward me. “Shall we start again, my red bird? My name is Leethu. I’m a succubus who has been summoned from Hel in the service of these disgusting vermin.”
I shook her hand. What a surreal experience this was. “I don’t know my name. The other girls call me Ariel, like the mermaid. Or Red.”
She peered at me. “No, not a mermaid. You’re a little red bird who sings in a cage and pecks fiercely at whoever reaches in to stroke her feathers.”
How odd for her to say that. “You too. You’re also in a cage, pacing along the bars, slowly losing yourself to madness the longer you’re confined. Soon all that will be left of you is anger and hate, and the driving need to destroy every living thing that comes within your reach. If you can’t get away, you’ll die inside.”
She sucked in a breath and pulled back. “How…?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. When you first touched me, tried to change my hair color, I felt you. I felt your desperation, your prison.”
She laughed and turned her head, but I caught her expression and it surprised me. I didn’t know anything about demons, but she didn’t seem quite the evil being she’d appeared to be when she’d dragged me in here.
“I am trapped. The human who summoned me made sure that there is no way I can escape. I cannot harm him or those who work for him. I cannot seduce them, have sex with them, steal their souls. I must do everything the summoner tells me to do. And the only way I will be released from my prison is if the one who summoned me dies.”
“The boss is your summoner?”
She nodded. “Yes. He has brought me here before to help him with specific tasks, but the last time he summoned me, it was for a different purpose.”
“To fix girls up for sale?” I asked.
“Yes. To aid the others and to provide ambiance at the sale. He wants money. He wants to build a loyal client base, a reputation for getting the best girls and providing a risk-free venue for the purchase. I need to make sure customers can buy without fear of being caught by human authorities, and that the boss does not come under legal scrutiny as well.”
I rolled my eyes. “Turn water into wine, and all that as well? He’s asking a lot from a succubus—a lot that I wouldn’t think would be a specialty of a sex demon.”
“It’s not, but I have to do whatever he commands. I am a succubus, and one of the most respected sex demons in Hel, not a beautician, party planner, and security guard.” There was a hint of pride and scorn in her voice that brought a smile to my face.
“Well, from what I seem to remember, those who live a life of crime tend to not live long,” I commented dryly. “One of his customers or competitors, or one of the guards will take him out sooner or later.”
She shrugged. “Probably. And compared to a demon’s virtual immortality, a human’s normal lifespan is not so long. Even if he lives until ninety, it will only be a moment of my life. Still, it chafes that I must serve him. And the longer he controls me, the more I feel myself slip away. By the time he dies, I worry I will no longer be the Leethu I once was.”
“Help us and we’ll help you,” I offered. “You can escape with us. I’ll find a way to break your contract, or kill this boss or something, if you help get us out of here and to safety.”
She laughed. “I told you yesterday that I can’t help you. I cannot help you escape. It would violate the terms of my summoning to do so. As far as you helping me, I am incredibly doubtful that a group of runaways, prostitutes, and
a junkie can track down the boss and kill him, or negate my summoning vows.”
I went to argue and decided against it. She was right. Most of the women in the other room would run as far away as possible if we got out of here, not try to sneak back and kill a man who, even if he didn’t have guards surrounding him, would be able to easily overcome us. We weren’t trained assassins. Which meant I had nothing to offer Leethu in exchange for either help, or not hindering us in further escape attempts.
And that bothered me. I wanted to help her. I had a horrible twisting feeling deep in my stomach that leaving her behind wasn’t an option.
“What happens if you leave with us? Can we get you somewhere safe? Is there someone who can send you back to Hel?”
Her head tilted and she wrinkled her nose. “It would take someone very powerful to break my summoning. I’m not sure with the way it’s worded even a sorcerer could break it.”
“But when I was in that room, and the one guard died, you were calling to someone. Other demons? Could they maybe break the summoning?”
“Yes, by killing the summoner. But they’d need to find me first. I can’t contact them to ask for help, and it could be decades before they are able to locate me.” She shrugged and gave me a sad smile. “And they are busy. Ni-Ni and Dar…they have their own troubles. I doubt they will be able to devote much time to locating me and setting me free.”
My heart hurt at the loneliness in her voice. She had friends, but no one who put her first, no one that made her a priority. “There must be someone who can help you,” I insisted, thinking of Aladdin rubbing a lamp. “Or maybe…is there a Devil? Satan or someone? I’ll get out of here and contact them, tell them where you are so they can come and rescue you.”
I shivered at the thought of bringing the actual Satan here. He’d probably kill all of us as well as this summoner. I got the impression that if there was a real Satan, he was rather indiscriminate when it came to slaughter.
