by R. Lee Smith
“I would guess comfort.”
She laughed. “From him? Jesus, have you even met him?”
He thought of her hand on his cock, that tight, feline smile she’d worn as she squeezed him, and none too gently. To this, Mara skillfully underlaid her own slightly-moist lips, her tongue across her teeth, the subtle shifting of her body. He immediately saw her going to her knees before him in hungry worship.
“I’m not the only student here with a certain understanding,” Mara said. “Are you going to stop us all? Perhaps you’d like to begin with Proteus?”
Horuseps glanced at the books under his arm, then looked back at her. His expression remained wary throughout. “You are the only student who seeks out her Master for such arrangements.”
“He’s not my Master,” Mara countered, stealthily promising pleasures, such pleasures, from deep beneath her hot denial. “He’s just the guy I go to when I want to fuck.”
His gaze sharpened. ‘Want to…?’ he thought, and the thought was a knife of covetous disbelief.
She pretended to misunderstand and laughed again. “Oh dear, I think I’ve shocked you. Do I strike you as the coy kind? Well, I’m not. I want to get some sleep tonight, and after that little field trip—” She shuddered without having to reach too far for the affectation. “—I can think of only one good way to guarantee it.”
Horuseps said nothing. His mind was alive with possibility.
She pierced it, not stealthily now, a touch anyone could feel if he knew how, and took a bold look at what there was—every position in which she bent, every humiliation, every ecstasy—sorting through them as cards before the shuffle. She gave him exactly the crooked smile he was so wont to give others, now as she released him to armor himself in the wake of her invasion. “You should have asked me first,” she said. “But then, I already know you’re male, and anyway, you look like you and Proteus have a lot of reading to catch up on. I guess this is goodn—”
He dropped the books, seized her. She didn’t see his hands move, only had the faintest impression of being snatched by this impassive, alien thing, but her alarm was manufactured. She was calm, always calm, even as she yelped and slapped once at his smooth, steely arms. She hit the wall. One foot struck a book and sent it scraping over the floor. The motion attracted him; he caught that kicking leg by the thigh and wrenched it up around his hip, slamming himself against her.
“And what game is this, child?” Horuseps inquired silkily. His thrust at her in short, sharp rhythm, each movement more painful than the last as his phallus pushed out between them. He didn’t care who saw them now. The hand that did not have her leg closed in an insolent fist between her breasts and began to pull her robe up in handfuls. “Am I to be another piece upon your board? Oh yes,” he said coldly. “I’ve felt you moving me about according to your whims. I allow it for so long as it amuses me, but that, my dear, my Bittersweet, is at an end.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t you? Do you think I fear Kazuul?”
She pushed her chin at him, grabbed his shoulder, and used that leverage to twist her other leg around his hips too, now riding the thrusts he tried to punish her with. “And do you think I’m afraid of you?” she hissed back.
The hem of her robe, gathered at her thighs, rose no further. His erection still pressed solidly against her belly, hot and alive and as weirdly smooth as the rest of him. He didn’t move. His eyes never blinked.
“You fucking pussy!” Mara snarled, and yanked her robe up herself, arching so that her bare pubis rubbed around against his cock. “Take me if you want me! Fuck me now, you coward!”
His wanting leapt, as savage in its own way as any desire of Kazuul’s, but he dropped her. She almost got her feet under her…almost. Her back caught the worst of the wall as she went down, but the pain was in her ankle, flaring bright as it twisted under her. Then she was sprawled at his feet and trying to get back up.
She made it to her knees, decided nothing was broken, then glared up at the demon’s stony face and spat, “I ought to bite you for that!” She took his cock in her fist and squeezed, hard.
Horuseps exhaled in another of those hissing, skittering groans, then snapped his eyes open and backed away.
She refused to let go, instead gave him a wrench to bring him back. “I’m not done with you,” she said, and licked once from his slit all the way up the underside of his cock to the groove at the tip, which she tongued wildly for just a second or two. He tasted awful, acrid and sour as bile. “You’re right, subtlety is wasted on me, but it’s not getting me anywhere with you either. You’ve done more for me than he has. Maybe I’d rather have you.”
His mind was churning now, a haze of sound and color too loud to be identified. He hissed again and slapped her even as his hips twitched.
She fell over, came up with a slap of her own, then began to fist him hard and fast, sucking noisily at his smooth head. His fingers clutched at her hair in another of those spidery lunges. His knees bent as he rocked onto the long balls of his feet. He pumped at her mouth, making sounds in his throat like beetles’ wings, dry and frenetic. He didn’t let go when she pushed, so she hit him with a mindslap to knock him back, then bounced up and turned to the wall, holding her robes high over her hips. “Right now,” she panted. “Don’t make me hurt you!”
His fingers dug at her thigh. That skittering-clicking sound was in her ears, and then he pried her nethercheeks wide and shoved into her ass. She wasn’t expecting that, but it wasn’t as bad as she would have thought. Wet and glass-smooth as he was, there was no resistance, only cramping pain and not even that for very long. His hiss blew hot and broken into her hair and his freakish arms suddenly wrapped her, tight as webbing, pinioning her against his own body and holding her quite immobile while he drove furiously into her over and over.
It was surprisingly good, the way it could be good with Kazuul, the way any sex was good when it was hot and fast and for feeling’s sake alone. Mara went with it, letting her voice mix hideously with his, pretending total oblivion to her surroundings, but always watching from that cool, dark place, always listening to the air and the things that hummed inside it. Horuseps was gone, a drone in his frenzy of fucking, but there were students above and around them, students who had been on their way to dinner for third-bell, now silent and still as they were taught to be while waiting to see if their Master would require another, and there were demons also—Argoth and Letha and others she didn’t know, and soon there was Azkeloth, whose thoughts were made brightest by anger, lust and resentment. Kazuul was not among them, but his name drifted in varying degrees of concern and contempt from mind to alien mind.
Horuseps came with his voice first, shrilling out a burst of sound so piercing it made her ears hurt, not just once but three times, and each time, his arms tightened. At the third, just on the lea-side of a broken rib, she felt him empty into her, a great jet of seed drilling sickly even deeper into her bruised bowels. Horuseps coughed out a huge breath, then grappled violently with her unresisting body before thrusting once more, banging her into the wall with force sufficient to briefly white out her vision. There was a second flooding, this time hot and somehow thicker than before, a vile sensation that made her writhe with painful fullness, which in turn made him fall into a final (and mercifully brief) spate of pistoning thrusts. He let go of her to slash and hammer at the wall with one hand, then threw back his head and shrieked, or at least, made some ghastly whistling noise at very high pitch. The final cumming was explosive, brutal, spilling out of her in torrents as he hammered it to completion.
Then, done. He sagged against her, breathing hard, his grip slackening. Mara glanced down and saw the plates along his hip and thigh flexed outward, spiking off his body like the wings of a beetle, still connected by ropy strands of indefinable wetness. Gradually, they too realigned themselves and lay flat.
Third-bell rang, calling them to dinner. The crowd, such as it was, began to dispers
e.
“You demon,” Horuseps said softly, without raising his head from her shoulder.
Mara smiled and above them, Azkeloth slapped a student heavily out of his way and stalked from the room.
* * *
Kazuul came through the dining room doors without commotion—no throwing them open, no roaring, no crashing things into other things. He walked directly to the Master’s table, bringing a tense silence with him in his wake as more and more students saw him. He didn’t look at Mara when he passed her, but went straight to Horuseps and, with the same silent, easy grace as his stalking step, reached back to one of the long spikes sprouting from his own shoulder and ripped it free in a spray of blood and shards of bone.
Like most of the students in the hall, Mara jumped up. Unlike them, she neither cried out nor bolted from the room, not even when Kazuul stabbed the other demon through the chest, pinning Horuseps to his high-backed chair.
Horuseps didn’t cry out, either. He winced and raised one slender hand to feel at the thing impaling him, and finally cocked an eye up at looming Kazuul. “My,” he said with tight levity. “At least you’re taking it well.”
Kazuul gave the jagged spike a curt twist, seemingly oblivious to the blood pouring down his arm, his chest, his back. He said nothing.
“I am sorry about the whole thing, of course.” Horuseps managed a smile and a strained shrug. “You’ve met her. She has a certain charm. And it was only the smallest offense, I assure you. I did no lasting harm.”
Kazuul wrenched the spike out and stabbed it in again, aiming as for a kidney, if Horuseps had kidneys, and accepting the glut of black fluid his victim coughed into his face without blinking.
The shock of this unexpected assault was obviously wearing thin. One of the other demons at the table, Master Letha, gingerly reached for an ewer and poured herself another cup of wine. Master Malavan took his seat back and leaned out over his claws so that he could see the goings-on for himself. Someone whispered. Someone else tittered in reply.
Horuseps tried several times to speak, and finally raised a hand to cover his whistling chest wound. His voice, what voice there was, bubbled. “Oh, must it always come to violence before forgiveness can be found? Will you not accept my apology, brother?”
Kazuul appeared to consider it. Then he ripped the spike out, yanked Horuseps out of his chair by the throat, and rammed the spike up through the demon’s mock-vagina until his fist slammed into the hard chitin of Horuseps’s outer shell. Horuseps shrieked like a swarm of locusts. Eerily, it was not so very different from the sound he’d made on climax. Kazuul expressionlessly worked the spike back and forth, then pulled it out and dropped it indifferently on the table.
“Apology accepted,” he snarled, releasing Horuseps to a writhing, keening heap on the floor.
Now he looked at Mara, turning his head first, and then all his body to finally face her. His hands flexed, as if longing for another spike in his fist. God knew, he still had plenty. “Thou triest my good humor, woman.”
“Don’t you lay this at my feet,” she snapped, and students scrambled madly away from her. “When did you ever ask faithfulness of me?”
“A fair point,” he conceded, striding toward her in that light, furious way. “Do I strike thee as fair-minded then, truly? Be it so, then I am grossly feebled after these ages of solitude. Thou shouldst know thy place without mine instruction, supplicant!”
Mara turned around. “Have fun with your jealous fit, Kazuul. I’ll be in my room.”
He grabbed her, flung her back to face him, and roared, “Thou art mine!” full into her face. “Mine own! My property! And I’ll have thee back bone by bone if thou dost defy me now!”
“It’s against the law for me to defy a Master of the Scholomance,” Mara hissed, grabbing at his wrist. “Just don’t expect me to obey orders you haven’t given!”
“Now they are given!” he shot back. “On thy knees, woman, and swear to it!”
Letha chuckled and refilled her cup. Malavan crawled onto the table for a better view and was hissed at by someone else. Horuseps, moaning, rolled onto his stomach and pressed his face to the stone floor.
Kazuul seized Mara by the hair and threw her down on her belly, so apparently he did mean it. Tight-lipped, Mara eased herself onto her bruised knees and bent her back to him. His toe-claws dug warningly at the floor before her.
“I swear to be faithful,” she said. Her voice, to her own ears, was unrecognizably hoarsened by anger. If he wanted her to say it nicely, he was shit out of luck.
“Thou art mine.”
One of the demons giggled. Mara started to glare in that direction and Kazuul’s foot came down on her neck, crushing her flat to the floor. “Say it!” he bellowed. “Thou art mine!”
“I…yours…”
He eased up on her, but did not remove his foot entirely. The claws pricked at her through her robe. She could feel the itch of blood dripping down her sides. “Mine own,” he growled.
“Your own.”
“My property.”
She clenched her teeth until her jaws ached. “Your property.”
He took his foot away, but replaced it with his hand, lifting her roughly to drop her back on the bench she had vacated. “I should demand thee submit to me here and now,” he said, glaring at her. “Yet so prettily thou didst bend to me that I give this gift and accept thee at thy word. Do not force me to regret my leniency.” He glared over his shoulder. “Either of thee.”
Horuseps, facedown in his own black blood, raised one hand in a polite wave of dismissal.
Kazuul grunted, eyeing the fallen demon, then turned without another word to Mara and stalked away. Those at the Master’s table picked up their conversations and their cups almost at once. The students, those who hadn’t run, were longer in resettling. Gradually, it penetrated even Mara’s senses that there was fear here that bordered on panic, even still. They didn’t recognize him, didn’t know Kazuul, and to be confronted with a stranger after ten, twenty, or even sixty years had made them all newcomers again.
“Well now,” Letha began, watching over the rim of her cup as Horuseps heaved himself into his chair again. “I do hope that’s an end to it. Squabbling over sweets in the dining room! Shameful!”
“Are you killed?” Zyera asked, toying with strands of his disheveled hair. “I can’t say I’ve never seen him so angry, but it’s been many years.”
Horuseps groaned, but the sound held more theater than pain. The black blood smearing his chest, belly, and thighs certainly looked real enough, but then so did his sly smile. “His years have mellowed him,” he said, wincing. “He let me keep my eyes.”
Zyera tickled his chin. “I dare you to bring the oversight to his attention.”
“Was it worth it?” Malavan inquired, spearing a piece of meat from the platter to take back to his chair. “From what I hear, his vengeance occupied more time than your crime.”
Horuseps gasped laughter, grimaced, and then folded carefully over and pressed both hands to his oozing groin. “Every second. You’ve no idea.” He rolled his head slightly to the left and lifted one corner of his mouth in a smile. “Is it you I have to thank for this hour of humility, dear brother?”
Azkeloth drank his wine.
“I should have known. You never come to the dining hall. Well, if you wished to see me bemoaning my fate and cursing the God that ever put her before me, you’ll never. I would pay, feel free to run and tell him, a hundred times for every sweet and silver thrust I had inside that marvelous Mara. She is, oh, exquisite.”
Demons at the table cast speculative eyes over Mara. Students scattered across the floor level gaped at her in horror or smirked nervous amusement. To leave now would be running; to stay would be performing for them. Her appetite thoroughly crushed, she nevertheless got a grip on her cup. It gave her something to squeeze, anyway.
“Careful,” Letha said, popping a sweetmeat onto her tongue. “Thou art but a word away from the ki
lling wrath of thy well-used seducer.”
“Not half so well-used as I would like. My dear Mara, do forgive me this spot of humor at what must seem to be your expense. It is merely my way of whistling past the proverbial graveyard.” He sketched half a bow, still seated, and winced hugely before straightening up. “You needn’t stay to pay it witness. I would escort you myself, but—”
“He’d only fall on you in passion,” Malavan finished, showing five rows of needle-thin teeth in a nasty grin. “And lose his eyes after all.”
Some of the students joined in the lecherous laughter. Mara got a powerful grip on her cup and said nothing.
“If I were you,” Horuseps said, eyeing her. “I would follow him sooner rather than later. You’ll have to trust me when I say he’s not yet as annoyed as he could be, but it’s no good baiting him.”
“I have no intention of following him,” Mara said tersely.
“No?” Horuseps kept one hand between his thighs, propped his chin playfully atop the other. “The acoustics in this room are quite astounding. I could have sworn witness not five minutes ago that I heard someone with a similar voice declare she was his, his own, his property…words to that effect.”
“I’d swear it to you too, if you ordered me,” Mara countered. “Or to any one of you. It meant nothing to me.”
“Ah.” Horuseps let his strained smile die. He reached up to smooth one of his long eyebrows, smearing it with blood. “Dearest Mara…that is very dangerous.”
“Oh, like I give a damn! Everything is dangerous here!” she spat, shoving her cup away with such force that it fell off the table and shattered. “Attending class is dangerous! Staying in your room is dangerous! Walking the fucking halls is dangerous! This whole mountain is one big coffin full of corpses too stupid to know they’re already dead!”
The laughter stopped, even at the Master’s table.
“Anyone of us could be killed at any time for any reason! So no, Horuseps, I’m not following him. I’m his property, sure, why not? I’m yours, too! And yours, and yours…and you all know where you can find me,” she finished in disgust. Turning on her heel, she stalked from the room, shoving students out of her way if they didn’t move fast enough on their own. She was out quickly, but not before Letha could speak, and though her voice was little more than an intimate murmur, some trick of the acoustics brought her the words:
