by Jack Porter
It swung a leg out, intending to sweep me off my feet, but I jumped out of the way and delivered a high kick to its thigh. Using the momentum to propel myself into the air, I spread my wings and aimed another kick at its bared teeth.
But the cacodemon grabbed my foot before it connected and twisted it, sending me into a spiral until I hit the ground with another concrete-cracking blow.
That one had hurt, and winded me just a little. I knew I needed to get up, knew I needed to fight back, but I was having trouble catching my breath. The cacodemon stalked over me, gloating. Then, it raised its foot as if to smash my brains in, and I had to move. I even felt Azrael’s fear now. It was palpable.
And contagious.
I wouldn’t have got away in time if the girls hadn’t come to my rescue. With a flutter of bat-like wings and unearthly screams, my succubi flew out of the elevator and into the hallway, attacking at once. Using the opportunity to jump to my feet, I saw that they’d each taken hold of the cacodemon just like they had the soldier demon.
Only this one seemed immune to their efforts to pull it apart. Still, it had stopped laughing, and I joined the fight, stepping in and throwing a solid punch at the creature’s throat. Rachel, Sandy, and Piper were stabbing at him with their claws and with punches. Feeling bolstered by their efforts, I punched him again in the same place in the throat, hoping to break his windpipe if he had one.
But then, in one sweep, the cacodemon threw Rachel to the side as if she were a leaf in the wind. She fell against the wall, creating another crack, and then crumpled to the floor. With a roar that shook the hallway, I grabbed the cacodemon around the throat with one hand and sunk my other hand into his eye socket. My index finger and middle finger, armed with claws as hard as iron, squelched through his eyeball with a splat of blood. The cacodemon screamed with rage, let go of Sandy and Piper, and tried to grab me around the throat. But the girls fought him off, not letting him get a chance to grab hold of me.
While they did that, I took out his other eye, blinding the creature in another spray of blood. It bucked backward, hoping to throw me off, but all we did was end up against the wall. I punched its face again and again, hoping to break its skull open.
But the cacodemon was tough, and even blinding it wasn’t going to get me far, apparently. All I ended up doing was hurt my hand, so instead, I grabbed the cacodemon’s jaw, forced it open, reached in, and tore out its tongue.
Azrael’s satisfaction could have powered the city. And my own wasn’t far behind. But then the cacodemon didn’t need its tongue to roar in pure fury. It managed to get in a good punch to Piper, who fell off him, and then grabbed me, scrabbling blindly to find my throat. I blocked him and was happy to see Piper bounce back up off the floor and come back to the fray.
To my surprise, she was laughing. In her hand, she held one of her explosives, a grenade she’d brought from up top. Then, she motioned to the cacodemon’s jaw.
Understanding, I wrenched the creature’s bloody maw open once more, Piper pulled the pin on the grenade, and then slammed it into the cacodemon’s mouth. I forced the jaw shut and held it. He shook his head, trying to rid itself of the explosive, but between the three of us, we wrestled it to the ground and held it down.
The grenade went off, creating a muffled concussion inside the cacodemon. I had hoped for its head to pop off its neck, but we weren’t quite that lucky. However, the cacodemon did stop struggling, and its body went limp. I continued to hold it down, afraid of a trick.
“Is it dead?” I asked, panting.
“No, but you have damaged it severely. It is not an easy thing to knock unconscious.”
“How long will it stay out?” I asked. But then thought better of it. “You know what? I don’t care. Let’s get this thing out of here and get to Bianca.”
Rachel rushed over to Sandy, who was stirring on the floor, while Piper and I dragged the cacodemon to the abyss beneath the elevator. Before we dumped the body, however, I reached down and plucked a handful of black feathers from one of its wings. As a souvenir.
“Julie,” I called up top. “We need that BDA agent down here.”
It seemed that no one was left to man the murder holes, or I was sure they would have tried to riddle us with bullets. But I didn’t want to give anyone a chance to do anything else to us, either. Best to end this thing quickly. So, Piper and I pushed the cacodemon into the abyss.
I watched it fall until it disappeared, and then turned back to check on Sandy.
With Rachel’s help, she was standing.
In a moment, Julie was lowering the BDA agent down, and by the way he looked at the feathers in my hand, he had probably seen us push the cacodemon’s body into the abyss. I grabbed the agent by his lapels to dangle him over the darkness below for a moment, just because.
He squawked in fear, wriggling his legs as if that would help his cause.
Alas, I couldn’t kill this one, much as I wanted to.
Instead, I marched down the hallway toward the door at the end. Besides the lever, there were three slots in the door, almost like keyholes but shaped weirdly. I didn’t dare touch anything yet, however. “What about that offensive shield?” I asked Azrael. “Think she’s got one?”
“Use the agent,” he said.
I grinned and held the agent up to the door, shifting my grip so that my hands were on his shoulders and digging in with my claws. “Open the door,” I said aloud.
The agent muttered something, and he was shaking in his shoes. I think I even caught a whiff of piss.
“What was that?” I asked, giving him a shake and letting my claws dig deeper. “Didn’t catch it.”
“It will kill me,” he said, more loudly.
So there was another barrier there. “Well, I don’t suppose you mind dying for your cause,” I said speculatively. “However, there has to be a way to disarm it. How?”
“I don’t know.”
I had a deep suspicion that he was lying, and I sensed Azrael’s agreement.
“Tell you what,” I said, grinning. “If you tell me how to do it, I won’t disembowel you. If I do have to resort to such tactics, believe me when I say I won’t kill you just yet. Bianca isn’t the only one who can keep victims alive for months at a time. How is that?”
The threat worked, as I had suspected it would. The man had just seen me throw the cacodemon into the abyss. He didn’t know the creature wasn’t dead, of course, but the display of strength had been enough.
The BDA agent sighed and said, “The amulets. It takes three of them to unlock the bunker.”
“Why would Bianca allow that?”
The agent nodded, but his body was still shaking in fear. “It’s a failsafe, in case someone inside needs help.”
Satisfied, I motioned the girls over and asked for their amulets. Then, with the agent’s direction, slid them into the three slots just above the lever. Nothing momentous happened, no glow of light or anything to make me suspect that it had worked, so I shook the agent again. “Go ahead, open it.”
This time, he touched it without hesitation, putting his hand on the lever and pulling it down.
The door swung open, revealing a comfortable but fairly small bunker. With a cot, a rug, a wall of weapons, and a white-faced Bianca.
37
I entered the inner chamber dragging the BDA agent with me. Bianca faced me, holding her chin high and her hands to her sides. And to her credit, she wasn’t standing there with some other divine weapon. It seemed we had already destroyed or dismantled all her defenses.
I nodded to her, out of a sort of respect. It didn’t have to be this way, but I really couldn’t blame her for holding out. It’s what I would have done.
Bianca nodded back to me.
“Do you have anything to say?” I asked. “Choose wisely. These are your last words.”
The old woman took a deep breath, glared at me, and then said, “Fuck you.”
“No, Bianca,” I said, smiling, “fucking has
been taken off the table. At least for you.”
Then, the old woman moved her hand, and I saw a flash of silver fly toward me. I batted it away with my hand, and instead it hit the BDA agent in the leg. He screamed. When I looked, a six-inch blade was buried deep in his thigh. I shook him a bit and said, “Suck it up. You’re lucky that’s the worst that’s happened to you.”
The man gritted his teeth and closed his eyes, but that wouldn’t do, either. I needed them open. So, I reached down and yanked the dagger out of his muscle. He screamed again, but the relative absence of blood told me that the blade had lodged in the meaty part of his thigh and had missed his artery. He would live, which was good for me, because otherwise I would have had to find another one.
He opened his eyes, sweat pouring down his forehead. Then I handed him to Piper and said, “Keep his eyes open.”
She made a move as if to hold open his eyelids, but the man shook his head and kept them open of his own accord.
When I’d defeated Dario, I thought I would kill him, but I instead chose a different option.
Not so this time.
I strode forward then with Bianca’s dagger in my hand, eager to be done. And in one swift slash, I’d opened a gash in her throat, through her windpipe and jugular vein. She stood a second longer, her eyes wide, and then she sank to the floor as blood pumped out of her neck. Yet even then, she made no move that could be construed as begging for her life.
She was tough, this old woman. As tough as they came.
I listened to her gurgling sounds as blood flooded her lungs, until she stopped moving, stopped struggling to breath.
It took a bit longer than I thought it would.
When it was over, I turned back to the BDA agent, whose eyes flicked from Bianca’s dead body to my own towering form.
“Witness!” I said. “I am in charge. The Syndicate’s demons are mine, and I demand my seat on the hidden council.”
The agent’s eyes flicked to Bianca once more, then back to me. He swallowed, then locked eyes with me and nodded.
“It is yours,” he rasped in pain. “I witness this as an Agent of the Bureau of Divine Affairs.”
I grinned. Mine. The Syndicate was mine. And so was the seat on the hidden council.
“For my first act,” I began, still staring at the man, who was turning pale. “Make it known that the BDA is no longer to go after me and mine. I want this taken to your highest authority. It begins now. Piper,” I said, looking at her. “Staunch that bleeding for now and take him where he needs to go.”
She grinned, nodded, and dragged the agent back out of the chamber and back toward the elevator shaft. In a moment, I heard a whoosh of wings as she took flight with him.
Ignoring Bianca’s body on the floor, I turned to Rachel and Sandy. “We did it,” I said with a grin. “We did it!”
The girls ran over to hug me, and although I knew they wouldn’t be able to maintain their forms much longer, I couldn’t wait to take them right there, in their demon forms.
So that’s exactly what I did, in a mad, frenzied rush of demonic passion.
Shoving Sandy up against the wall, I entered her first, wild at seeing her naked succubus breasts bounce up and down as I thrust into her again and again and again. She met my rhythm move for move, and before long, we were yelling in ecstasy. Collapsing to the floor, Rachel joined us, and soon she had taken Sandy’s place, riding me as I held onto her in a primal wave of pleasure. Then Sandy came back for more. When we’d all come—me two times—we sat up panting on the floor.
I smiled. “Thank you. For everything. I couldn’t have done this without you.”
Sandy smiled. “Seems like you couldn’t have done any of it without us,” she said cheekily.
I laughed and pulled her to me. As much as I wanted to stay there a while longer, with just the two of them—my first two—the girls had to change back to their human forms. Before they did, we got up and flew out of the bunker.
Outside, as the shadows grew long and the light grew red with the sunset, my army was still gathered, still searching the rubble for any agents still living, and tending any wounded. I would need to find out how many of mine were dead or injured, not a task I relished. But for now, it was time to celebrate.
Rachel and Sandy and I were joined by Julie. She ran up to me with a look of glee on her face, holding her phone.
“Simon,” she said excitedly and eyeing the other two naked girls. “You’ve done it. They know. Your illegal status is now in the mid-seventies.”
“Wonder why it’s not higher?” Rachel asked. “Bianca’s was nearly into the nineties, I think.”
“Because although I’m now the Kingpin of the Syndicate,” I said, “I’m unproven. Although, I don’t imagine it will take long for me to change that.”
“So,” Sandy said. “Is this the end, Simon? Where do you go from here?”
I smiled, feeling more powerful than ever, and drew her to me, reveling in her naked body. “What do you say, Azrael?” I asked so everyone could hear me. “Is this the end, or are you up for a trip into Hell?”
My succubi smiled as Azrael answered.
“I am ready to regain my full power,” he said. “If you are ready, then so am I.”
I let myself grin very broadly indeed, but didn’t commit to any course of action on the spot. Instead, I looked to my girls once more, hoping that Piper would come back soon. “The future is looking brighter than ever,” I said. “So how about, before we decide what to do, we take a moment or two to celebrate our success?”
Then I gathered Rachel, Sandy, and Julie into my arms and took off into the glowing red sky.
~End Book 3~
Afterword
Hi there! As always, I hope you enjoyed this story. If you did, would you leave a review for the book on Amazon? They are always appreciated and help me spread the word about my books.
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Jack
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