Unknown Ch 03

Hi everyone,

This is an extremely short chapter, but on the plus side there is a sex scene. As short as it may be. We're starting to get into the meat of the story so stay tuned!

Best

-Rosi

***

Escape.

The thought pokes and prods at me every second of every hour of every uncountable day here. There's a clock racing against me I can't see, it's hands spinning with nauseating speed. I can't anticipate the second, minute, and hour it would ultimately land on. Even worse I fear what that time will bring: my death or everyone's.

"You're scratching again," Asmody murmurs from the chaise across me.

The demon's become my shadow, appearing at my door one day with a sardonic smile and directive from Luci to "help me" with anything I need.

Get out!

My fingers spasm against my wrist where they'd been trying to dig a hole to my veins. Where others have eye ticks or throat clearings, my nervous habits lend to self harm. "Asmody?" I force my fingers to the arms of my plush chair, clutching, the only betrayal of my emotions in an otherwise lax appearance. "How are demons..." I search for the right word.

Destroyed?

His lips twitch. "Created?"

Rookie mistake. One that could have seen me in much worse condition than in a wingback chair reading Hell's history with an amused demon.

Jaw locked, I feel my nail break and imbed itself into the chair's cushioning. The bath seems so long ago, too long without any action. No search party sent to find the portal, no more interrogations. The anti-clamaticness of the situation is driving me crazy. Guilt suffocating me, because I

do

care what happened. I refuse to be the drowning sailor trying to take everyone with me.

"Are you created?" The concept of demons is another thing that's been plaguing me. If demons aren't tied to religion, do they evolve like human? Crawl from some primordial soup with unfathomable power and hunger and settle here? Or are they an experiment gone wrong and shunned? Gone

right

and locked up waiting for someone to push the proverbial big red button and release them?

"Perhaps we were turned."

"Like vampires?"

"As in an incurable virus," he corrects, laying the book he'd been reading on the arm of the chaise and focusing his gaze on me. "That is what some think. Others believe we are aliens from another planet or system. Similar to humans, we have theories supported by evidence."

"What kind of evidence?"

"Bones primarily. Some creatures very similar to humans but with mutations, some creatures vastly different from what we are now. More recently in our evolution, however, demons experience reproduction through en-ha."

"En-ha?"

"It's short for energy-hatching." Asmody lifts a brow. "Why are you so interested in demons now, Laverna?"

I recoil, forcing my spine into the back of the arm chair. If I ask a question of a demon and they supply the answer there's no issue, no trap to fall in. But if it is reversed...?

Destroyed or created. Didn't matter. This trap sprung before I'd even opened my mouth.

My fingers twitch against the arm, nails scratching the velvet even as I try to keep my face impassive. I can still feel Luci's fingers at my throat, her bones grinding into mine, nails cutting into my flesh.

"No reason."

His smile holds death and something else, something worse. "Laverna," he says softly and everything in me clenches.

There's nothing soft in Asmody. If sin has a poster child it's this demon.

Fluid as water through a stream, Asmody rises and takes two steps to tower over me, wings extending to the walls and curling around me to rest at the back of my chair.

A cocoon.

"You smell delicious."

Hope flutters in my chest. Luci's never told me what scent clings to me and I have a feeling it's more for her benefit than mine, as if I could use that knowledge against her.

"What do I smell like?"

He leans down, inhaling, fangs on my throat.

It's the first time he's touched me since he carried me to Hell. In fact, Asmody's only the second person to touch me here. For other demons I'm off the menu: I'm the exclusive meal of Luci.

"If you're not going to kill me move," I grit, angry at myself. Even if it was a thought, I still had it. Still contemplated for a moment that I was food, a meal, something to have and dispose of easily with no remorse or consequence. Less than human.

"Not everything is life and death, Laverna." His fangs glide across my neck, bleeding me. A tongue snakes out and licks a line of fire across the cut.

I remain still, trying to project deer-in-the-headlights while mentally channeling a snake-ready-to-bite. Seconds are marked by inhales and exhales.

"Energy-Hatching is when a new demon is created by being forcibly moved through the six energy channels and emerging from their maker's crown," Asmody whispers against my neck. "Unlike humans, Demons are made through energy, either the host's or another demon the host consumes."

Crouching low in front of me, Asmody trails feather-light fingers from the tips of my toes up my body. "Humans call them chakras. Our energy is dispersed in seven points across the body. Starting here." He cups my sex, making jump. Fingers stroke deftly, causally, before moving up and explaining the remaining six. I don't hear them, mind frozen on the fact that I'd just been assaulted.

"Apologize."

"Hmm?" Asmondy bends lower, fingers moving from the roots of my hair to the ends.

I shake the strands out of his grasp. "You have no right to touch me. Apologize."

"No."

"

Now

."

"You forget yourself, Mira," he purrs, venom in the words. "If I want you, I take you. Always."

"My name isn't Mira."

It takes a moment for my words to register but when they do he recoils as if visibly struck. There's a wooden quality to his movements as he pulls back, rises, and moves to sit on the chaise again. Book poised between three fingers, Asmody reminds me of myself, trying vehemently to look unruffled in the face of something core-shocking.

"Who is Mira?"

The demon is quiet a heartbeat. "You were never quizative before, Laverna," he stresses my name, both warning and affirmation. "I quite admired that trait."

"And look where that's gotten me."

"Yes." His sunrise gaze—almost violently yellow and red—captures mine. "

Look

where that's gotten you."

I feel his point to the marrow of my bones. It's punctuated by a blood curdling scream echoing from somewhere in the manse.

"Point made and taken."

***

I think I'm becoming less. Less myself. Less whole. Less human.

Escape is a pipe dream.

It's not that I don't try; it's that my attempts are anticipated. Asmody's words slap me in the face with every scene played out in front of me. Hell deals in all torture but has perfected the phycological, the one keeping me trapped physically and mentally.

Breaking point.

It doesn't manifest itself in escape but consumption, gorging on violence with the appetite of a bottomless pit. Fear doesn't frighten me; it exhilarates me. That heart-palpitating high, the jaw-clenching anxiety. Chafing turns to burning and that burn is warm liquid fire, feeling better than anything else.

Stumbling down a hallway away from a dinner featuring a demon spread-eagle on the table as diners slice off his flesh, it takes everything in me not to go back and join. A soul-deep craving infects me and I want to know, desperately, what flavour resides in his flesh—what scent clings to him.

Slipping on a pool of blood, I crash to my hands and knees. I writhe on the floor. Torture is simple, gruesome. The outcome is always the same and routine is comfortable.

"Laverna," Asmody rumbles above me.

Turning, I catch his gaze. Smoldering with his lips curled back, cheeks flush. My eyes drop to his pants, the tightly stretched fabric low over his waist. A groan slips from my throat as I twist, pitching myself forward even as my hands dig into the bloody stone and hold for dear life. Asmody flinches hard, eyes slitting, fangs descending, body help rigid and ready.

Apathy was a living breathing thing in Sharica. As cold or hot as it was, I remained resilient, steadfast, empty. There was no life and no death, only a constant, desolate, eternal existence. Lexiss kept me sane, but I'd continued to draw into myself, away from him. Closed.

Hell is wide open. Den of debauchery. And I feel

too

much here.

Rough fingers and nails-like-claws drag the demon to me, over me. Spread wide, body soaked with blood, I attack his mouth and run my tongue over his fangs. Cut myself. Bleed myself.

His wings extend to cocoon again. I welcome the shelter. I'm unraveling faster than I can feel and my transformation isn't for an audience. It's not even for Asmody, but seeing as he's the catalyst there's little I can do.

My clothes fall away in shreds; his not much better. Thick and heavily veined, his cock juts from between his thighs, the angry red head gleaming. I lick my palm and messily stroke him as he thrusts two fingers inside me and thumbs my clit. Claws rake from my hip to my ankle, repositioning me. He takes his cock in hand, growling savagely as I squirm under him.

I scream as he slams into me, too fast, too deep. Neck straining with my fingers buried in the hair at his nape, I leverage myself up and move under him. We're a sloppy, bloody mess rutting in a dirty hallway, biting, scratching, devouring each other.

My hips crash into his, bruised and sore. I'm riding the edge, eyes locked on Asmody's. His breath is mine and mine his. I know he's close when his eyes fall, skin darkening, rhythm faltering. There's something inside Asmody I want. He was an angel to me before he was ever a demon. He was my savior, a dream I wanted to be reality.

I see it inside him, the potential for him to be

everything

to me. It glows heavy and round, bright, blinding and blue. The color sucks me in, something like a sea trapped in a glass. I reach toward—

"You overstep, Asmody," Luci hisses as something heavy, wet, and hot falls between my breasts knocking the air out of me. My eyes catch on a thick braid threaded with ligaments and blood, on ivory bone and torn skin around his neck.

The scream erupts before I can swallow it as I scramble away from the decapitated demon. Luci doesn't spare me a glance, reaching through the neck-hole and down to the blue orb. She pulls it from his body with a sickening sound that turns my stomach. Tendrils sprout from the orb, knitting impossibly fast into what looks like muscle. She pulls them away, throwing them against the stone and pops the light into her mouth with all the care of a child with a marshmallow. Swallow. Smile.

"Laverna," he voice is butter soft and low as she steps over Asmody's quickly decomposing body to me.

I don't think; I just run.