The castle vanished, and the circle of candles returned. The black beetle crawled over his hand, twitching over his ring finger, where the red ring of his burn was glowing with as much strength as it had four hours ago.
“Miles!” Katie was standing at the edge of the circle, staring at him, her face pale. She had a small sword in her hand. “Miles, what did you do?”
Miles blinked again. He felt dizzy, and his body felt heavy. “I don’t know. You were chanting, and then—” The image of Terris flashed again, and Miles closed his eyes, sliding back into position with hardly any effort at all.
Another tickle, another flash, and he was back again.
“Miles!” Katie cried.
Miles’s head was killing him. He displaced the beetle as he pressed his hand up against the side of his head as if to hold back the pain. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, “but I don’t like it. I want to get out of here.”
“I think that’s a good idea.” Katie came forward with her hands raised. “Just hold still, and I’ll undo the circle.”
But when Katie started to chant again, the candles flared angrily. Miles watched the beetle pacing out the edge of the circle, lumbering determinedly over the ring of salt. When Katie frowned and began to chant again, the whole circle shuddered: the salt began to dance, bouncing against the floor as if there were an earthquake.
The beetle turned to Miles and twitched its antennae at him.
It swelled, suddenly growing as tall as Miles, and for a single second, Miles thought he saw a ghostly, silver-hued man smiling wryly at him. But only for a single second.
In the next second, the man burst into flame.
Miles cried out as the flames spread along the salt as if it were gunpowder, enclosing him inside its ring and licking at his skin, threatening to scorch him. He drew himself into a ball, but there wasn’t much space for escape.
“Stop it, Katie!” he shouted. But Katie was shaking her head, wide-eyed, holding up her hands.
“I can’t!” she shouted back. “I’m not doing anything! Miles, what the fuck have you been playing with?”
“A flute.” Miles was beginning to sweat, both from the heat and from sheer panic at the realization that he was about to be burned alive. “That’s all.”
“It must be an enchanted flute,” Katie said, eyeing the flames nervously.
“That’s what I was thinking.” Miles felt sick as he saw that the candles had melted away and now the flames were heading toward him, consuming the floor as they went. “Can’t you throw something on this?”
“I’m afraid of making it worse,” Katie confessed.
“Can I jump out of it?”
Katie bit her lip, then shrugged. “If it kills you, it will kill you faster, I suppose.”
Miles rose unsteadily to his feet. He didn’t even bother with the towel—at this point it almost seemed ridiculous. He made an attempt to smother part of the fire with it, but the towel went up as if it were made of paper. He didn’t see what was going to keep the fire from burning him too.
Then he had a thought. “Katie, do you have those rose petals I found on my clothes?”
She broke the outside circle, crossed the room, then hurried back with them in her hand. “What do you want me to do with them?”
Miles had no idea. He rubbed his jaw and stared at the fire. “Throw them on the flames.”
Katie tossed the petals into the air, and they both watched the white bits of flower drift down before crackling briefly.
Nothing happened.
Then, with a soft pop, the fire died. It disappeared completely, going out as if someone had flipped a switch. The room went dark, too, but Miles didn’t give a damn.
“It worked!” He laughed in nervous relief. “Katie, it worked!”
No one answered.
Miles turned around in the darkness, still inside the circle. “Katie?”
His voice sounded funny. It was echoing in a way that didn’t fit the small workshop space.
Oh shit.
“Katie?”
A veil seemed to drop, invisible, but with it went the last illusion that Miles was still in southern Minnesota in a bossy and condescending Wiccan’s workspace. He smelled damp and rot and dirt, and cold crept up around him like heavy fog.
Across the room a match flared, and Miles froze and watched, helpless, holding a candle aloft as the beast from the forest came forward, the clop-clop of his hooves echoing through the dungeon.
MILES STARTED TO back away, but the beast immediately stopped advancing and held up a hand.
“Stay,” he said, his voice gruff. “You’re safe where you are. I can’t vouch for that if you leave the circle.”
Miles looked down. There was indeed a circle around him: a blackened ring that looked the same as the scorch marks on Katie’s floor, except that now it had a silver sheen to it, like dust. He looked back up at the beast, a thousand questions on his tongue, but fear held them all at bay.
“I won’t hurt you,” the beast said. “Not if you stay where you are.”
Miles rubbed his arms, then lowered them quickly to his groin as he realized he was naked. Of course, so was the beast.
“Can you read my mind too?” he asked.
The beast gave a wry smile. “No. Just your face.”
Miles studied the creature before him. He seemed less of an animal and more of a very hairy man who happened to have hooves for feet. It was the horns that grabbed Miles’s attention. They were huge, fat things that started at the sides of his skull and curled back around his ears, the points curving up near either side of his jaw. They were the same brown as the hair that covered his body: hair on his head, his chin, his neck, his chest, shoulders, arms. It was less pronounced on his upper body, occurring more in patches and tufts, but once it hit his midsection, it was practically a pelt. It covered his waist, his legs—everything but his cock and his hooves, the latter which, Miles noted with some unease, were cloven.
The cock, too, was as big as it had been when it had flapped against the beast’s leg as he chased after Miles, eager to rape him. Miles drew instinctively back.
“I’m not a devil,” the beast said. “And I’m not your enemy.”
“But you’ll attack me if I leave the circle,” Miles finished, not quite certain this was fact yet, but it was confirmed when the beast nodded.
“Your spell has made a sort of a loophole to my enchantment,” the beast said. “I am more man than beast while you remain inside that protective space.” He gestured wryly at his body. “If you leave, you are subject to the same jurisdiction as me. The beast will take over, and at best, I’ll be able to apologize as I tear you apart.”
Miles shifted uneasily. “So you’ll kill me?”
The beast looked shamefaced. “Not kill you precisely, though. I’d probably…take you by force, though. The beast would, anyway. I’m sorry.”
Okay then. Miles wanted to shift, to scratch his arms and move to dislodge some of this nervous energy, but there was some strange psychological comfort to covering his genitals.
He cleared his throat instead. “So you’re a homosexual beast.”
The beast considered a moment, as if processing an unfamiliar word. He seemed to understand it but stumbled over speaking it. “No. I am a—” He paused, as if prepping his mouth. “—homo-sexual man. Or, I was. That’s how I came here, of course.”
“Oh?” Miles said, enticed by this new bit of information.
“Didn’t you realize? You called to Him, in the forest, and he came to you. The Lord of Dreams. You were miserable, and you declared—from your heart—that you would do anything to escape your situation. And you are a man who desires men. You were like a perfect flower in a patch of weeds to him, and he plucked you.”
“You mean Terris?” Miles asked, a hollow sense of loss expanding inside him. But the beast’s face shuttered, and he shook his head.
“You must not speak of him to me.”
That was what Terris had told him too. Which meant there was something important in that connection, and it also meant Miles had no way to explore it.
Yet.
“How did you come here?” Miles asked instead.
The beast shrugged. “I don’t remember anymore. I don’t think my home world even exists any longer. If it did, I wouldn’t recognize it. I don’t even know who or what I was before I was a beast.” He rubbed at his chin with a hairy, clawed hand. “For a time I thought I had been a king, but very well this could be a fancy. I went mad long, long ago. There is very little man left, whoever he began as.”
“You don’t sound mad now,” Miles pointed out.
“The loophole,” the beast reminded him.
“Yes, but that doesn’t explain how you got your sanity back.”
The beast looked thoughtful. “That’s true. I wonder how this is happening. A pity it won’t be permanent.”
“How do you know it won’t?”
He tapped his horns, though Miles suspected he meant to simply indicate his head. “I can feel your circle pushing my enchantment back. When the circle is gone, I will return to my normal state, I’m sure.” He frowned. “But you make a fair point. How am I affected by your circle when I stand without? I can only assume it is your magic.”
Miles wanted to protest that he didn’t have any magic, then decided it might be best to keep that information private. “What’s your name?” Miles asked instead.
The beast laughed. “Oh, that’s long, long lost.”
That thought pained Miles somehow more than did hearing the beast couldn’t remember his life. “But what should I call you?”
The beast shrugged. “It hardly matters. One way or another, we’ll be lost to one another soon. You may select a name for me, if you wish.”
Miles didn’t wish, but he was distracted now by the rest of that statement. “Why will we be lost? What do you mean, one way or another?”
“You have been marked by the Lord of Dreams,” the beast said patiently. “You will either succumb to Him and be consumed, or you will be outcast like me. Or you will waffle and become consumed by one of my kind. One way or another, this interview will be brief.”
Miles didn’t like the sound of any of this. “So you refused this Lord of Dreams?”
The beast looked uncomfortable. “I cannot speak of that.”
“Why not? How much worse can it possibly get for you?”
The beast averted his eyes. “He could start it all over. He could grant me back my sanity so that I could lose it again, only this time make it leave more slowly. He could give me to the other beasts, ones who are older and wilder.” His hooves scuffed impotently at the floor. “It could be much, much worse.”
“But I thought you refused him.”
“There is no refusing the Lord of Dreams. There is only the surrender to His infinite pleasure, or there is the external pain that comes with clinging to one’s own will.”
Miles did not like any of this. “So I’m already doomed? That’s what you’re saying?”
The beast hesitated. “I haven’t before seen anyone cast a circle and commune with an outcast.” But his tone suggested this at best would only delay matters.
“I’m not gone yet,” Miles said, a little desperately. “I suppose that was what Ter—that was what was going on at the castle, a seduction. But I wasn’t seduced.” He paused. “Wait—wait, that’s it, isn’t it? There was that part with the flower, where I forgot, but then he whispered something at the end, and I came—”
“Stop!” the beast whispered, alarmed.
Miles ignored him. “—and he said something. I couldn’t come until he said some word. But it wasn’t one I knew.”
“Sir, you must stop!”
Miles looked out at the beast’s panicked face. “Seolfor.”
The circle shuddered, and the blackened circle around Miles burst into high flame again. The beast stepped back, but Miles stayed where he was and watched as the fire rose, then faded away again. The ring was brighter now. And when Miles looked closer still, he saw something lying inside it.
The flute.
He bent down and touched it tentatively, but it was cool to the touch. He picked it up and held it in his hand. Then he looked at the beast, questioning. But the beast wasn’t looking at the flute, or even at Miles’s face. He was looking at Miles’s cock.
Miles started to cover himself again, then stopped as he got a better look at the beast’s face. No one had ever looked at him like that. It was sexual, but the word seemed grossly understated. Carnal. Yearning. Aching, needing. He’d had men tell him they were going to worship his cock, but it had always been clearly a figure of speech. The beast was looking at him as the Biblical Adam must have looked at his Eve.
Or, in this case, his Steve.
Miles was flattered, but nervous too. “I suppose I could see how I could get drawn here. I haven’t been very happy. I don’t much like my life.”
“Yes. That was much the way it was for me, this I do remember.” The beast gave Miles a sad smile. “Trust me when I tell you that whatever your life is, it is better than what awaits you here.”
Miles blushed, feeling foolish. “Why does it feel so good, if it’s so bad?”
“Because He uses the echo of your dreams to lure you. He reaches into the dark parts of your heart, to the places where, like a child, you wish for what is not good for you to have.”
Now Miles was angry. “Why is it so wrong to want happiness? Why can’t I have good things in my life? Why does it have to be this?”
It sounded even more childish coming out of his mouth than it had echoing in his head, but that only served to frustrate Miles further. Naked, self-conscious, and confused, Miles waited for the beast to answer.
For a long time the beast only regarded Miles with his yellowed eyes, his countenance a mixture of terror and empathetic wisdom. Eventually he sighed.
“I couldn’t have him,” the beast whispered. “The man I wanted, I could not have him.” He kept his eyes on Miles’s cock as he spoke, softly, his voice aching with emotion. “I remember that much, as I look at you. I loved a man, but I could not have him. I don’t know why anymore, but I remember that it made me ache. We frequently stood naked together for some reason, and it was then that I admired him, let my heart yearn. He was so beautiful. His shaft was unsheathed, like yours, and it was the first such I had ever seen. And I yearned for him with an intensity that I thought would kill me.”
His lips parted, and he licked them so that they glistened, pale pink against the ruddy brown of his hair and rough skin. His eyes burned. “One night he was drunk, and he touched himself, and I watched. It was the most beautiful moment of my life, and I nearly died at the pleasure just of watching. In my delirium I called out that I would do anything, give anything, endure anything to have him. And that was how the Lord of Dreams came to me.”
The beast fell silent, but there were particular details here Miles felt he had to know. “He came as the man you desired?”
“No.” His reply was curt. “He came through my desire. It was another who came to me as the man I loved. But I cannot speak of that.”
The intensity of the beast’s gaze made Miles tremble and go soft all at once.
“Would you—would you touch yourself for me?” the beast asked.
Had he asked some other way—had he demanded, or asked politely, or tried to seduce him—anything else Miles was sure he would have refused or declined. But this was the ache he’d seen from Terris’s sleigh. This was a soul-deep yearning.
This was a pain Miles knew intimately.
Miles reached down and took his soft penis tentatively in his hand. The beast shuddered, then growled, but he settled back on his hooves, watching. His eyes turned silver. He wanted this very much. He wanted this as much as he’d wanted that lover, Miles realized.
And something in Miles, something dark and cold and calculating whispered that this was an opportu
nity that would not readily come again.
Miles stroked himself, watched the silver sparkle, and asked, “What does the flute do?”
The beast’s gaze did not leave Miles’s cock. “It is his enemy. The flute is the Lord’s enemy. We are not to speak of it. He will punish any who speak its name.”
Miles paused. “He’ll punish you now, just for that?” The beast nodded, and Miles took his hand away guiltily. This might be an opportunity, but he hadn’t sunk so low as to punish someone who had clearly suffered more than his share of pain already.
The beast cried out. His eyes flickered as he shook his head. “Please—please, it will be worth it, to see you touch yourself for me. I will tell you anything if you continue.”
“I don’t want you to get hurt!”
“Some pleasure is worth great pain.”
Miles began to stroke himself again, tentatively, but he was light-years away from arousal now. He couldn’t make the beast tell him about the flute, not if it was going to hurt him. But if he didn’t learn some answers, his goose was as cooked as the beast’s.
Maybe you can save him, too, if you figure this out.
Surely that was wishful thinking. The whole thing might be.
But if he didn’t risk this, what else was there to do? Katie was no help, and Julie had already said this was over her head. If Patty couldn’t shoot it or shout at it, she was lost. Even if there were someone in his world who could come to his aid, Miles didn’t know how to find them, and he suspected he wouldn’t have time. This beast was it.
“I’m going to try to fight this,” Miles said. “And if I can, I’ll try to help you too.”
The beast smiled sadly. “You cannot help me. But it is kind of you to offer.”
Miles nodded, trying not to feel sick. “Then I’ll alleviate your suffering as much as I can. Even if it’s to give you pleasure. So that’s the bargain. I’ll ask you questions, and then I will give you whatever pleasure you ask for. Obviously I can’t leave the circle, but whatever I can give you from here, I will.”
The beast looked up at Miles’s face. His eyes were completely silver now, flickering like a banked fire. “Whatever I ask?”
What a horrible existence, Miles thought, that he would endure endless suffering just to see someone jack off. He nodded. “Anything. For as long as you like.”
Miles and the Magic Flute Page 8
