Cold Steel and Hot Lead [How the West Was Done 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (20 page)

He sucked that warm, smooth member right down to his tonsils, pleasantly stimulated to discover that it felt gratifying, like a starving man finally given something to eat. Rudy’s clean cock had the scent of the jasmine soap that Alameda preferred, and when Rudy groaned, it reverberated throughout his cock.

Knowing he was giving Rudy pleasure drove Derrick to greater pinnacles of wanton hunger. He gripped Rudy’s bare, flaming hips in his claws, drawing his friend closer. Derrick didn’t even realize he was sucking with such voracity until he heard the greedy slurping coming from somewhere on the other side of the room. He realized it was he who slurped so hungrily, and knowing this aroused Derrick even further. He detached his mouth with a giant sucking sound and buried his face beneath the cock, where he could lap and guzzle the enormous swollen testicles into his eager mouth.

It felt natural to be slathering like a wolf at a kill at another man’s balls like this. Evidently Alameda enjoyed it, too, for she nipped at his ear, wound her tongue all around it, and murmured, “You like that, don’t you? You like giving your friend pleasure like that, I can see.” She humped Derrick more forcefully now, raising her hips so his cock nearly slid out of her then sinking back down on him with erotic grunts.

Rudy was a bit more crude. “You’re a good cocksucker, Derrick,” he grunted. “I knew you would be. You’ve got that hungry, attractive mouth that’s been longing for another man’s cock for years. That’s good—
ah
, that’s good! Take both balls into your mouth, tickle them with the tip of your tongue, just the way you like to be done to you.”

Dear Lord
, was he a good cocksucker? He had just asked for Alameda’s hand in marriage, and here he was, voraciously supping up his best friend’s testicles.

He detached with a loud gurgling sound to gasp some air, torn by two deranged passions simultaneously. He fucked his fiancée back now with enthusiastic lunges of his hips, her abundant breasts bouncing enticingly.

Rudy was impatient. “She gets to fuck you,” he snarled, “but you get to suck on
this
.” And he wrapped his hand around his own tool. Clasping the back of Derrick’s skull in his other palm, Rudy rubbed the bulbous, bursting head of it against Derrick’s wet mouth. Derrick inhaled the entire length of the massive tool so the glans was lodged up against the back of his throat, nearly choking him.

“God, you’re a good cocksucker,” Rudy grunted in a new, gravelly voice. “You like sucking big penises like that, I can tell. You’ve just needed a long, thick cock down your throat for years now. You’ve
—ah
!”

Rudy’s entire body stiffened with an enormous shudder, and Derrick knew to expect the flood of jism that spurted from the glans. He knew from tasting Rudy’s seed on his own fingers before that it would be salty yet creamy but wasn’t prepared for the blast of semen directly down his throat.

He strove to gobble it down. Alameda must have heard him guzzling and choking on the thick tool, for she increased her eager fucking, pistoning Derrick’s cock up her slick channel. Overwhelmed with sensation, Derrick, too, exploded in his beloved’s pussy. As Derrick’s hips jerked and twitched in ecstasy, he struggled to gulp what seemed like endless spurts of jism.

Rudy was the first to pull away, stumbling backward weakly. “Phew,” he exhaled. He navigated like a roostered man to the sideboard, where he grabbed the first decanter his hand reached—he didn’t seem to care which one.

“Oh, ah,” Derrick gasped, sincerely now trying to detach the succubus who still humped his sensitive prick. “My duck. Too much.”

Alameda dismounted with a loud sigh, and the devilish look she cast him was smoldering. She shoved herself to a standing position and pointed grandly at the ceiling.

“Arise, my loving subjects!” she proclaimed.

Rudy choked on his glass of booze, and Derrick could only laugh weakly, one forearm shading his eyes.

Rudy said, “At a time like this, she quotes Stalacta, Queen of the Golden Realm.”

Parading in her nightdress, Alameda continued. “Nay! Let no thought other than joy mingle with this happy time. Let the invisible harmonies of our realm breathe sweet happiness only.” With a chipper smile, she stepped up to Rudy and held out an empty glass for him to fill. “Deluxe Dora must practice her lines, yes?”

“Yes!” agreed Rudy, apparently having swiftly recovered from his monumental orgasm. Rudy stuffed his cock into his drawers and stood there with Alameda, the picture of marital bliss in the lamplight. Their glasses of claret even glittered like rubies in the gleam of the dying fire embers. “If Deluxe Dora is going to help save the Cinnabar Murderer from a necktie party, by all means practice.”

“But if the train leaves tomorrow,” Derrick pointed out, “won’t most of the Great Wilson Circus also pull out of town? Won’t the performance be canceled?”

“No.” Deluxe Dora smiled evilly.

“Why not? Some of their outfits are still in the baggage compartments. Hell,
my
outfits are still in there.”

Alameda traipsed closer to her fiancé. “Because. My father Simon pulled some strings to keep the train in town another night.” She arranged her face into a mask of innocence. “He wants to see
The Black Crook,
too, after all.”

Derrick’s jaw hung low in shock. Rudy recovered first, slapping his thigh in mirth. “Alameda, you glorious spitfire! You had us all afraid Derrick would have to leave tomorrow, before we got a chance to catch Castillo—in the act!”

Alameda seated herself primly next to Derrick. He drew himself up and looked down at his betrothed. He knew he should have felt tricked—tricked into proposing to her!—but he didn’t. She had only sped up his intentions a bit.

So while Rudy guffawed like a jackass, Derrick only felt a surge of love and a new respect for her. He had a feeling this would continue happening for many decades to come.

“If the brazen tongues of time proclaim the appointed hour,” bellowed Castillo, wearing his Arch Fiend’s horns and waving his scepter made of serpents, “and the wail of the fresh soul breaks on the air of hell, let him be summoned!” Castillo had just appeared from the stump of a tree someone had blasted with enough dynamite to make several women in the audience faint. He had covered up the incense burn on his face with thick makeup.

Rudy turned to Derrick. “He’s really a terrible actor. How did he get this part, anyway?”

They watched from the second row, the closest seats Simon’s power with the Oddfellows could obtain. Simon, in fact, sat to Derrick’s other side, his eyes glazed over as though asleep. Demons danced onstage, tossing glitter and crying wildly. Striking gongs and the rattling of sheet metal to imitate thunder didn’t seem to faze Simon. Even when a random skull broke off Zamiel’s throne and flew into Simon’s lap he didn’t budge—indeed, he even seemed to be tilting toward Derrick, and his head would soon be on his future son-in-law’s shoulder.

The girl Temperance, playing the heroine Amina, was being wrenched from her beloved’s arms. “Oh, my Rodolphe, you come suddenly from the darkness of my despair into the sunlight of this newborn hope.”

The guy playing Rodolphe was simply awful, woodenly throwing his arms around Amina. “My dear,” he stated, as if selling her a hat.

Amina sobbed hysterically. “My eyelids close. I cannot look this great joy in the face. I fear to call it mine.”

Rodolphe said blandly, “Fear?”

“Fear that springs from a woman’s love.”

Derrick said to Rudy, “Percy said Castillo would dig his own grave, but the play sounds like it’s almost over. This must be the big finale.”

Rudy agreed. “This is where those vistas of pandemonium and wreaths of flame are supposed to amaze everyone.”

Gnomes and amphibious monsters rose up from the shadows of cardboard scenery, lit by red and blue oil pots. Zamiel loomed over the wooden hero and shrieked, “Yield, audacious miscreant!”

Rodolphe replied as though reciting stock prices, “Never, while life remains.”

Zamiel shouted, “Then upon him, guards, and hew him to pieces!”

Demons grabbed Rodolphe and threw him into the abyss that Castillo had built. The usual flashes of “lightning” obscured that the fellow playing Rodolphe was being whisked away behind the mirror Castillo had installed. Now it was Amina’s turn to be cast into the pit, and fiends surrounded her.

Rudy told Derrick, “I’ve seen a fellow make an elephant disappear using a cabinet such as the one Castillo built, over in St. Louis. His cabinet had an enormous mirror such as Castillo installed, but I still can’t figure out his trick. When he opened the cabinet again, the elephant was obviously truly gone, and I know every mirror trick in the book. That’s bothered me for years, that I couldn’t figure that out.”

Zamiel yelled, “You who have not seen fit to display your feet to me! I will show you what the dark world of flames is truly like!”

As the gong struck twelve, demons grabbed Amina and cast her into the pit after her beloved, the wax figure Rodolphe. Another flash of dynamite created smoke that didn’t even bestir Simon Hudson, but one small detail of the scene prodded at the back of Rudy’s brain.

The detail must have occurred to Derrick at the same time, for they turned to each other with wide eyes.
“Her toenails!”
they both said simultaneously. Just as Temperance was going into the “abyss,” Castillo grabbed her ankles and whipped her slippers off. His eyes gleamed with much more than an Arch Fiend’s zeal when—for just a fraction of a second—Castillo fondled Temperance’s upside-down ankles and even seemed to take a lick from a foot. He was particularly intent on the toenails that were painted vermilion, an unnecessary touch for a costume that didn’t display Amina’s toenails. He must have somehow convinced Temperance to paint her nails previously, or even done it himself.

Rudy grabbed Derrick’s waistcoat as the demons howled and danced. “Temperance is his next victim.”

“I think you’re right. And if you’re right about that abyss cabinet, she’s already vanished into…” Derrick paused. “Into somewhere.” He gripped Rudy’s shoulders before Rudy could attempt to vault one row forward. “We can’t just race up there looking like saps again. This time we have to be absolutely, thoroughly sure and have irrefutable evidence. So far, we don’t even know if Temperance is missing at all.”

So instead of vaulting across the row, the men stood and casually excused themselves down their own row. Derrick had to prop Simon upon the shoulder of the man next to him.

From the side aisle, Rudy saw Castillo vanish into his own abyss. Men shaking sheet metal and setting explosives alight distracted the audience. The group of opera singers was in full voice, riling some audience members to leap to their feet, throw up their arms, and bellow along.

“Is Zamiel supposed to vanish in the play?” Derrick asked.

“Not as I recall. I thought he just stands around exulting until the curtain comes down. But Castillo could be improvising. Let’s get backstage.”

Alameda and Cannonball had been instructed to keep an eye on Castillo. Cannonball was the only one they wished to trust with their suspicions of Castillo, but he was also the ringmaster of the play and had to be a hundred places at once.

“Haven’t seen him,” Cannonball told them before dashing toward a piece of flaming scenery that actually had caught on fire.

The backstage area was so jammed with various gnomes, skeletons, and monsters it took them several long minutes even to find Alameda. She was crushed between two immense and extremely masculine men, a greatcoat covering her flimsy costume. One of the men was so tall and wide, when he leaned his forearms on the wall over Alameda’s head, he gave the distinct impression of getting fresh with Derrick’s fiancée. The other fellow, wearing the most expensive sort of Stetson hat, appeared to be keeping a lookout to protect whatever the brutal fellow was about to do.

In fact, when Derrick approached the brutal fellow with a hand out to peel him from the wall, the Stetson fellow grabbed Derrick’s wrist warningly. Rudy sensed there was about to be a set-to that would delay them in their quest.

“Ah,” Alameda said, her eyes lighting up at the sight of Derrick. “Derrick, this is Marshal Neil Tempest”—she indicated the Stetson fellow—“and this is Captain Harland Park. Captain Park owns the Cactus Club, so I suppose he’s my boss. As for Neil, well, he’s going to do everything he can to help you nail Castillo.”

“Starting with, have you seen him in the past ten minutes?” Derrick distractedly pumped Neil Tempest’s hand.

“Glad you made it here from your ranch,” Rudy added, more politely.

Neil frowned. “Allie pointed him out to us, and no, I haven’t seen him in the past ten minutes. What do you want us to do?”

“Alameda,” Rudy said. “We can’t be sure, but we’ve got a suspicion he may be planning on taking that Temperance gal. Her toenails were painted red as well. Have you seen her in the past ten minutes, since Zamiel threw her into the abyss?”

“No,” said Alameda, her eyes fearful. “We can see his abyss from here, but as usual it was covered in smoke and sheet metal lightning during the finale.”

Neil darted about shaking people’s arms and asking where Eliazar Castillo had gone. Everyone looked about themselves—at the walls, floor, even the ceiling—but no one had seen Castillo since his devilish grand finale. Neil even found the sluggish fellow playing Rodolphe who had been flung into the abyss directly before Temperance. The dull fellow said he hadn’t seen Temperance since her bare foot had jammed his eye when she fell on him in the box.