How To Ride A Tikbalang Ch 11

Kidlat could finally think of food, though he wasn't up to cooking yet, so Jinx fetched him food from Aristocrat, the restaurant near Cocoy's apartment.

Her tikbalang had wanted practically everything on the menu but the

dinuguan at puto

. The waiters must have thought she was having a party.

The things mortals didn't know

, she shook her head as she navigated through the traffic, stalled here and there by jeepney drivers, pedicabs and tricycles.

They're better off not knowing

. And that was why she didn't broil them where they sat as they cut her off or went the wrong way on a one-way street.

Cocoy had just parked his SUV in the driveway when Jinx brought her car in with a bang (the engine backfired as she turned the ignition off) and he watched her shove the driver's side door twice before it finally opened, flip her bangs out of her eyes and reach for the nearest boxes and wrapped up

bilao

of food.

The magic hour was ebbing to sunset and the reds and oranges in the dying light picked up the blue highlights in his diwata's hair as she smiled at him.

"Are you hungry? I picked up some food for Kidlat. He ordered practically everything." Jinx's gentle smile kicked Cocoy out of his enthralled staring.

"Hand some of the boxes over," Cocoy said as he moved toward Jinx's car (the car he was going to get towed and decommissioned, somehow, someday, he promised himself). "Let's get some food into our tikbalang."

Once inside the house, diwata and bayot worked quietly and in sync: They set the food boxes on Jinx's dining table, then Jinx set the table and Cocoy transferred the boxed food onto serving platters, put serving utensils out, and set the

bilao

of

pancit bam-i

in the center of the arrangement of platters. Thank goodness Jinx was a practical diwata and had shown Kidlat and Cocoy where to find the everyday things, like cutlery and plates.

"I smell food. Feed me!" Kidlat's hunger was a demanding roar from the master bedroom.

"Let me go get Kid," Cocoy chuckled, his eyes lit up as they settled on Jinx's face. "I am going to enjoy taming that brat."

Jinx shook her head, a bit of levity lifting her soul somewhat from the dumps Kidlat's poisoning had dropped her in. She'd never, ever in her wildest dreams thought she'd find someone to love—let alone two geothermally hot men.

Time to feed my army of two, then

.

"What do you mean I can't eat in bed? I am weak!" Jinx's eyebrows shot up at that yell from her bedroom.

"You were poisoned, but you are not weak," came Cocoy's steady voice. "Now, get out of bed and get to the dining room. You are not eating in here, you big baby. I saw you walk out of the bathroom. So you can walk to the dining room before the food gets cold, thank you very much."

One of Kidlat's black leather shoes flew out the open door, obviously missing Cocoy, followed shortly by a very temperamental tikbalang shuffling out after it, and on to the dining room. The thunderclouds on Kidlat's face were replaced by gustatory anticipation. He'd been able to hold down some saltine crackers since his 'The Exorcist' redux, so he was looking forward to the feast he'd asked Jinx to order for them.

Kidlat reached for the chicken barbecue and java rice with greedy hands and was about to shove the food into his mouth when Cocoy blocked the route between the tikbalang's hand and mouth.

"Ah, ah, ah. What do we do before stuffing face?"

"Bathala is great, Bathala is good, and we thank Bathala for our food." Kidlat's hurriedly muttered version of grace before meals was muffled on the last four words by a mouth stuffed full of rice and chicken.

Cocoy shook his head, rolled his eyes heavenward and took a deep breath, making a silent prayer of thanks and for patience as he reached for the

pancit

in front of him.

Jinx shook her head, wondering how both her men could still look sexy acting like schoolmarm and bratty student, but, there it was: Two sexy males who were more appetizing than the piping hot

lechon kawali

dipped in chili and vinegar that sat on her plate in appetizing bite-size pieces.

The color returned to Kidlat's face (and the rest of him) as he scarfed down enough food to feed a small army at a boodle fight. He could feel his strength and good cheer returning with each bite of rice and viand, or saucy noodles and their toppings of chopped cabbage, carrots, slivers of liver and roast chicken.

Cocoy and Jinx were watching their tikbalang carefully as they ate. Jinx had a bucket set under the table, just in case, but Kidlat seemed to be holding the food down well—more than well.

"So," Cocoy said as the meal wound down and Kidlat wasn't attacking the food like a shark at a feeding frenzy anymore. "I found our

kilkig

. Do you want to deal with him, first, or get immortal before we face him?"

"How about you let me sleep first?" Kidlat was rubbing his belly with a sated hand and a relaxed look on his face. "That meal needs digesting. Besides, I need to heal a bit more."

***

Kidlat slept, dreaming of maps. Meanwhile, Jinx was on her phone talking to Bulan and Tala in a conference call while furiously scribbling notes on a ledger.

The ritual taming of a tikbalang was only ever outlined for couples, not threesomes, so they needed to compose a whole new set of actions suited to their parameters. This was terra incognita and could blow up in all their faces, but it was better than nothing.

If the kilkig was as powerful as they suspected, they'd need to be sure Kidlat would survive the confrontation with him. What better way than to make him immortal? Sure, he'd be sick until they got to the kilkig, but at least he wouldn't die.

"Restraints, check," Jinx said over the speakerphone. "How do I get those Adarna feathers you mentioned again? Oh. Okay. The trunk in Kidlat's bedroom? Got it. What do you mean, draw blood? Seriously? Fine."

"I thought that, too," Tala said with a small laugh. "Boo said his body would simply 'make more,' so there you go. And he's alive to tell the tale and connive with this little one I'm carrying to keep me up all night, so I don't think drawing blood hurts them much. The Batumbakals are tough stock."

"I must register my misgivings about this." Jinx frowned into her notes.

"They are duly registered and I'll say this to you the way I told Tala the very same thing about the very same son: Don't kill my son if you don't have to. I only have three of them," Bulan's words were not, in any way, reassuring—and she's Kidlat's mom—but she was, at least, brutally honest. "You have to make sure all three of you are bound to each other. This is eternity we're talking about here, child. There are no annulments or divorces where we come from."

"Lovely," Jinx ground out through gritted teeth. "Tell me more."

***

Cocoy made the drive to Kidlat's Grammercy Place penthouse to pick up the necessary items. He found an old duffel bag in dun gray atop the carved ironwood and brass trunk at the foot of the tikbalang's bed, barely sparing the mother-of-pearl inlays a cursory look.

Wait

, he looked back at the top of the chest,

what is that? A volcano, with a woman on its slope. She has a man—male—on either side of her. Hmmmm

. Cocoy took a closer look at the chest, an antique by the way the patina had seeped into the deep brown wood, as if it had been polished hundreds of times over many, many decades.

The intricate carvings and inlays showed several representations of threesomes, with volcanoes dotting the lid and all four sides of the chest. There were threesomes with the female between two men who were obviously both in her, front and back; scenes where the one of the males was in the middle, with the woman's legs around both males' hips, her head thrown back in ecstasy as her lovers kissed.

I can so see myself in that kind of Kidlat and Jinx sandwich

, Cocoy thought to himself, and his blood warmed at the idea of replicating the scene where one male held a

tapis

open, exposing his

ari

to another visibly aroused male on his knees and half of that long cock in the kneeling male's mouth. The woman behind the standing male would stroke the remainder of his turgid member, her breasts and face pressed against his back.

He also found the depiction of a half-clothed woman taking one man into her mouth and another from behind, with her back beautifully arched to present her shapely behind while she knelt in a bower of flowering vines appealing as well.

Several of the small, closely-detailed scenes showed one male in bondage, repeatedly, and two females—wait, only one of the figures in female

tapis

and beads had breasts. He winced at that particular set of carvings.

Enough ancient porn. Time to get the things I came here for.

He unlatched and popped the trunk lid open and looked in: There were writhing plants, vines with buds of some sort, in there, as well as what looked like heavy manacles forged from some sort of black metal.

Cocoy took those, as well as a long, shimmery feather of very changeable colors that zapped his fingers and stuck to them until he held the thing over the mouth of the duffle bag. There were large black and red pillar candles as well, and something made of a cool, cloudlike substance that also zapped his fingers.

"Dammit. Ow.

Putris naman, e.

" Cocoy cussed at the things as he dropped them into the bag. "This had better be worth all the literal shocks.

Leche

." Some other interesting things, including an evil-looking black straight-edge blade with a fixed and ornate handle in silver and sheathed in what looked and felt heavy like gold went into the bag, too.

***

Kidlat's dream zoomed out like a Google Earth map until he could see the entire Philippine archipelago, including the bald spots where rainforests should stand.

He could feel the wind in his mane and ears as he zoomed in lower, close to the nap, as pilots put it. This must be what his little brother, Habagat, saw when he was on his training flights to qualify for the OV-10 helicopter he was learning to pilot. Thank goodness that kid finally discovered something he liked better than wanking his wang.

His hooves hit the ground silently as he descended on an old goat track at the edge of Masbate island. The trail led him from a seashore he could only hear and smell to a dilapidated hut in the middle of whatever forest remained.

Kidlat willed himself back to human form. Bare feet would make less sound than hooves. He walked as quickly and quietly as he could to stand in the shadows cast by a large old narra tree and a

buta-buta

shrub with large, glossy green leaves, delicate white flowers and small, mango-like fruit that belie the deadly poison of the tall shrub.

The hut's woven palm-frond walls were patched with worn cloth in places, covering holes, he supposed. There was a dim light inside, and Kidlat could hear the very obvious sounds of two people fucking: The slap of sweaty skins increasing in tempo to match badly-suppressed moans and grunts and, finally, the muffled shriek of a woman and the cursing of a man that were dampened, perhaps by slick breasts or a craned neck.

The sound of hard-drawn breaths and an infant's wail gave way to speech, as Kidlat stood stock-still by a tree just three feet from the hut. The woman and man were speaking in some form of Visayan, their voices low and punctuated by the creak of rope being pushed back and forth gently. A

duyan

, a crib hung from the hut posts, was being rocked. The wailing quieted to whimpers.

She was telling the man they shouldn't wake the baby. The man's reply was to curse crisply and say: "Well, you should have let your mother take him, then. That little brat is poisoning you against me. You're the one who wanted a child, not me."

"Please, he's just a baby. Don't hate him."

"Woman, you push me too far. We can barely feed ourselves, and yet you have to go and get pregnant and have him. Go to sleep."

Kidlat heard shuffling sounds, then snoring. The baby didn't even wake. Then he heard footsteps on creaking stairs as the woman slowly walked out of the hut. He pressed himself against the old narra tree he'd stood beside, hoping she wouldn't see him in the dark.

The woman brushed her long hair out of her eyes with her right hand before picking up the skirt of her long nightdress, which might once have been white. She looked back over her shoulder once, then walked to the side of the tree behind which Kidlat hid. She took a flat rock just scant inches from Kidlat's toes.

Using the rock as a makeshift trowel, the woman dug a hole between the large, intertwined roots of the poisonous

buta-buta

shrub and the narra tree, then dropped a cloth caked with dried blood into the hole.

She uttered a small prayer, asking for protection for her boy, Emilio, offering the placenta and umbilical cord of her child to the spirit dwelling in the tree. "Keep my boy safe. Keep my Emilio alive. At whatever cost. Even at the cost of my life."

***

The diwata, bayot and tikbalang were up and putting baggage into Cocoy's SUV, including the gray duffle bag full of otherworldly paraphernalia. Bulan had warned them that the ritual for taming Kidlat would have to take place in an area with little to no people, so they called Mariang Makiling and asked if they could go to her mystic mountain.

The summit would be people-free, since so many hikers kept getting lost there and were found, days later, dehydrated and nattering senselessly on about

nuno sa punso

and other denizens of the Other World misleading them and 'playing' with them.

Not that anyone truly believed those hikers, so, that was as good a place as any. The province of Laguna, where Makiling rises, was quickly urbanizing, and the population there has been growing denser, mostly because several schools, including the University of the Philippines Los Baños and the Philippine High School for the Arts, make their home there.

There are still some very remote areas where a threesome could have complete privacy across many, many kilometers. "Plus my mountain won't be blowing up anytime soon," Makiling had told Jinx cheerfully over the phone. "I've got a good handle on that. Just be careful of the lightning storms. We get a lot of those. Oh, and don't worry about food. I've got caches of the stuff behind a cute little waterfall."

Following the GPS directions Makiling sent to Jinx, the trio walked beyond the treeline outside the perimeter of the PHSA guest house and function hall until they came to a barely-there trail that led into a thick copse of trees, and on past that into humid triple canopy where there a flat patch of clear land would be rarer than feathers on a razorback boar. A kilometer or so up the winding trail, the land leveled off into a small clearing large enough for a tent, a fire, a small waterfall and the crystal-clear pool beneath it.

"We have a campsite, lady and gent," Kidlat said, nodding at his woman and his man. "So, what do you want to do?"

"Let's take a quick dip in the waterfall and pool," Jinx said, already shucking her clothes and walking briskly to the water before turning to her men with a hungry grin and hot desire in her eyes. "And some pool sex wouldn't hurt any."

Cocoy hurried out of his clothes and into the pool, where Jinx was splashing him with the cool water. Still amazed at how gorgeous his bayot and diwata were, Kidlat sat on a rock, watching the play of muscle under Cocoy's skin, how his gluteus maximus would tighten and flex as he walked, and how the Jinx's translucent skin caught the midmorning light the way the finest marble would: Grasping the light for the barest second before releasing it.

He watched his two lovers cavorting in the shallows of the pool, glistening and wet, with his

tarugo

straining against his pants and popping up over the waistband of his jeans. Ignoring the stabs of pain in several random areas of his body, the tikbalang stripped off his clothes to join his lovers in the pool. Orgasms released endorphins, which were as good a painkiller as any you could buy over the counter in a drugstore. Hell, they were his drug of choice, any day.

Kidlat walked into the welcome embrace of his bayot and the diwata who was slowly heating the pool up, her fire glowing under her skin, her light brown eyes back to their ash gray, this time with silver flecks that glimmered like the drops of water on her face. He licked the trail of a running droplet back up Jinx's neck while Cocoy kissed her slowly and thoroughly, then took Jinx's mouth with his as Cocoy nibbled on his earlobe and neck, and Kidlat groaned into Jinx's hot mouth, his tongue flicking against hers in wordless flirtation.

Cocoy knelt so the water was up to his nipples, tracing the sensitive nubbins with icy waves while he grasped Kidlat's cock firmly in his hand and pressed a hot, licking kiss to Jinx's perfect navel. Kidlat pulled one of Jinx's legs up, holding it at waist height with his arm.

"Open up for Cocoy, sweetheart. He's a hungry boy. Don't deny him this sweet

puki

," Kidlat's voice was a rasp of desire. "Look at me while he eats that sweet

kiki

. Yum."

Jinx hung on to Kidlat's neck with one arm, and balanced herself by threading her other hand into Cocoy's wet curls. Her back arched in pleasure as Cocoy licked curlicues and acute angles all over her mound, making a meandering path over her labia, teasing her hard clit with little flicks of his tongue that had her throwing her head back to moan her pleasure. Cocoy kept up the slow, firm caresses to Kidlat's

"Look at me while he fucks you with his tongue, sweetness, let me see what he's doing to you." Kidlat took firm grasp of Jinx's pixie cut-hair at the nape. "Watch what he's doing to me, fucking me with that fist." His hips were moving faster now, more urgently, but Cocoy kept his slow, hard jacking pace, not giving the tikbalang the stimulation he craved while began finger-fucking Jinx to orgasm as he sucked on her clit.

Jinx's world began to explode and she barely registered Cocoy rising in the water to impale her on his turgid shaft, going in to the very hilt, his balls slapping against her orgasm-sensitive flesh. He'd taken her from Kidlat's arms and begun to drill into her mercilessly until she was right at the edge of another, bigger climax.

She found herself lifted yet again, and laid gently on her back over a large, warm rock, her legs spread so wide all of her wet, feminine bits were on display, pulsing and swollen from arousal.

"Get in her, tikbalang mine," Cocoy's voice was rough as he put a hand right over Jinx's mound, spreading the lips with his index and ring fingers while his middle finger rubbed maddeningly slow circles around her clit. "Fuck our diwata."

"Do it!" Jinx was amazed that she'd already come twice, but wanted more. The words came out in several layers of sound, her eyes almost completely ash-gray now. "Ride me hard."

Kidlat didn't need any further encouragement. He steadied Jinx's hips and plunged in, gasping for air as she gripped him in a hot, wet cock-in-pussy embrace that felt like home. He paused for a breath and took one of her hard nipples in his mouth, sucking and licking like a man starved. Then he began to grind against Jinx's pubis, drawing small screams from her shaking body as she gripped his head.

She was looking right over Kidlat's head at Cocoy, whe bent to give her a hard kiss on the mouth before pulling away, stroking his cock slowly. Cocoy slowly wedged his Jinx-slicked erection into the crack of Kidlat's ass and pushed slowly past the tikbalang's sphincter, easing in until he was fully seated and Kidlat's hips bucked hard, forward, then back.

"We're taking this nice and slow, Kid," Cocoy said as he set up a rhythm that saw his cock rubbing insistently and very slowly against the tikbalang's prostate. "Fuck our diwata deep, just like I'm fucking you."