***This is a sidebar to another work of mine (Love as a Form of Binding) and it's needed as a precursor to the ending of that tale when this is ended. The end of this will feed into Chapter 21 of that one, or if I find that it reads better, the result will be the third story. Simple, no? ROFL.
It's not too long, and the coupling in it is a little varied, since I just felt like it as I wrote it.
It opens a few years before LAAFOB (just wanted to get that in to see how it looked :)) and somewhere in here, some familiar characters make cameo appearances.
In this, a lord tries to save someone who is loved, but the main purpose is to reveal the main players in the core 'family', if you want to call it that.
For this one, there's some male-male toward the end as well as hetero incest, though neither attribute is an overriding theme through the story. If the reader is familiar with my works, I do tend to move around a little. Kinda like conducting an orchestra while wearing rollerblades.
So, ... the names of the characters mean little historically on either side of the plane divider. The rest of the names and places mean even less, since it's pure fiction. 0_o
***
Mojave Desert, early evening
Abi slowly opened his eyes and noted the color of the light coming from the cab in front of the sleeper where he was. As expected, it was dimming slowly, due to the passing of the day and the setting of the desert sun.
Not expected, were the strange flickering nuances which seemed to come with it to change the way that the reflected light lit the ceiling.
He rose to a sitting position with his legs hanging off the bed to try for a better look. It bought him nothing of any value. He leaned forward and looking a little to the left through the window; he thought that he might see a plausible cause for the phenomenon.
They weren't aware of the effect that they caused in the light, but it was the scurrying of many of the nasty little fucks from out of the depths of some little-known backwater of Hell which must have grown too close to the surface somehow and allowed a spillover to have happened.
He crawled forward to sit in the driver's seat as he twisted off the top of a bottle of water and drained it in one long slow go as he thought about what ought to be done about it.
Ordinarily, he couldn't have cared less, but there were almost always repercussions to these things and quite often the true extent was never seen at first. That was why it was always considered prudent to just deal with the little turds if one could whenever they popped up.
He smirked a little at the thought.
"Fine," he said to no one in particular as he opened the door to climb down, "I just hope that I'm up for it."
He fastened the cartridge belts across his chest in the copper-flavored gleam to everything from the light of the approaching sundown and he raised the 10-guage scattergun to begin loading it with shells suited for the eradication of the more parasitic forms of lower demons.
There were sounds in the hot wind that he noticed then.
They'd escaped his awareness until now. Again, he didn't really care, but for the first time, he heard the tortured screams. It took him a second to place them with regard to their origins.
They were human voices.
He looked over across the landscape in the direction of origin and he thought of repercussions and ramifications. He didn't want to be at this all night.
Maybe if he had a little help, he thought.
It certainly wouldn't be anywhere near as much enjoyment, but it would end this stupid shit a lot quicker.
He looked down and made an arcane and infernal motion with one hand.
A demon appeared before him and he nodded in recognition.
"There is a tear in the wall of the plane here someplace nearby. Take no more than one-quarter of one of my legions and seal it.
Before that. send those little things back where they belong and use them as living visual aids to indicate what will happen to any who do not heed the warnings in the future.
There are humans being harmed here. Do not make it worse. I wish that this incident is dealt with before it is noticed by anyone else. Understood?"
"Yes, Lord," the demon bowed again and was gone.
Abi walked off across the road and into the dust, listening to the rising cacophony as imps were rounded up and dragged off by demons who were more suited to warring with other demons of some size.
He wanted to groan when he saw the car - or what was left of it. A single touch would have told him all of it precisely, but he didn't need to know that badly. It was all here to be read.
A group of teenaged friends out doing something irresponsible late on a Friday afternoon, by the look of it. They'd pulled off the road here, where they shared a bottle of ... uh, ... Jack, he smiled, seeing the empty now. They were unwittingly parked within sight of a tear in the wall between the planes.
Even that shouldn't have brought them harm, but he supposed that they were seen by these cretins and that had been the start.
He sighed, doubting that there were any humans living now. His sense told him that there had been four humans at the beginning. The mess in the vehicle said that two had gotten out.
He walked on a little and found three imps trying to copulate into the same human -- who was alive at least enough to be still struggling feebly. There was a rather small hellion, a female, who was more intent on gnawing off a piece of flesh to eat it.
He raised his hand and everything stopped.
He stepped closer and saw the human's anguished eyes and he shook his head.
First, he removed the gnawing female's contribution by springing her jaw open by force with a loud crack. Then he removed the jaw by just tearing it off quickly. Her body went slack, but he pulled it from the girl's body and flung it down onto the ground in front of him. The shotgun's song deleted what was left of the thing.
One after another, he disengaged the males in much the same manner before he looked at the victim, who was at that point aware that the horror of the attack had at least been suspended.
