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Authors: Jeffrey Thomas

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BOOK: Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades

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He took her body up in his arms, carried her to the bed she shared with her husband, and lay her on it. And without hesitation, he was on and in her and already plunging, pumping, making the bed dip like a boat on a storm-tossed sea, and her breasts jounced and she threw back her head and moaned deeply.

His wings opened fully above them like a black canopy.

Distantly, Xaphan heard the crack of a rifle shot echo across the desert flatness. Somewhere, a Damned had probably just died. But he or she would resurrect. Being already dead, a Damned or an Angel could not be killed a second time. In this way, the Demons were more like the mortals had once been than the mortals were themselves. Though their powers of regeneration were great, a Demon could be killed. And so the gunshot made Xaphan tense up a little. What if the husband should return and find them this way? Would he allow his wife this entertainment, see it as nothing more than a dip in the spring-fed pool? No more than his own entertainment hunting the Damned? Or…

But his mind drifted from the gunshot, as Teresa took his head in her hands and pulled it down to her breasts. He lost himself in their white softness, as if they filled all creation…all life and afterlife. Xaphan had never seen the Creator—not even Angels had seen Him—so he could blasphemously imagine that He was a She. An embodiment of fertility, like this woman. He imagined all life pouring forth from the hole he was now stirring (like an alchemist’s pestle in a mortar), and all life feeding at the orbs he himself suckled at avidly.

Yes, she was a goddess…and he worshipped…

««—»»

The bathing pool below Castle Urian, fed by hot springs that made steam curl from its surface, was enclosed by a circular wall carved out of solid rock as red as muscle. Into this curving wall, small curtained nooks had been incised so that visitors could change in and out of their clothes. The pool itself was currently empty—no Demon would dare use it while Angel visitors were staying here—but one of these small changing niches was currently occupied by the Demon Xaphan and Teresa Colombo.

She had bent over a stone bench carved into the wall, her palms spread on it, while Xaphan gripped her waist and took her from behind. When they were finished, she sank down onto her knees, her breasts and elbows resting against this rock ledge—Xaphan sinking with her, still embracing her, gently wilting inside her. On impulse, he pushed aside some of the thick black hair that was stuck to the expanse of her back with sweat, and he kissed her on her damp shoulder.

"Sweet," she whispered, in almost a little laugh, reaching up to cup his cheek for a moment. She lay her head down on one arm and sighed heavily. "Well—that was rather nice, wasn’t it, my Demondingo?"

"Demondingo?"

"It’s a joke. Mandingo? Demondingo? Never mind.
Mmm
…keep doing that."

Xaphan was running his hand across her back, spreading the spilled ink of her hair, feeling the bony plates of her shoulders like unsprouted wings beneath her taut skin. "I hated you when I first saw you," he muttered, more to himself than to her.

She lifted her cheek off her forearm a little, seeming amused by his confession. "You did? Why?"

"I’m sorry…"

"No, tell me. Why?"

"Because you are valued by the Creator. And we are nothing more to Him than inanimate things. And sometimes, we don’t see the difference between us. We can’t understand what it is He values in you."

"Well, perhaps if you could understand that, then you
would
be the same as us." After a moment, Teresa twisted around to look up at him, no longer smiling. "Sorry, X. No…I don’t suppose there is much difference, is there? I was going to point out the horrible things your kind do to the Damned. But right now, my hubby is out in the desert hunting some teenage boys that he saw and liked in your bloody kennels down here." She snorted, lowered her head again. "I don’t want to know why they aroused his interest, in particular. Aroused perhaps being the key word."

Still rubbing her skin, as if contemplating it, as if expecting to at last discern something about it that would distinguish its illusory substance from her mortal skin, wherever that lay moldering right now, he asked, "How did you and your husband die?"

"In a plane crash. Private plane. We were going skiing, in Colorado. We met on a skiing trip in Aspen, actually. I’d moved to the States a few years earlier, and…"

"Did you have children?" Xaphan interrupted.

"Two. Ten and seven. They’re still alive." A few empty beats. "I don’t want to talk about them, X."

He changed the subject, his voice retaining the quality of a sleepwalker. "Your flesh is so different from Vjeshitza’s," he murmured.

"Whose?" A look up at him again.

Tensing up a little, Xaphan let his hand go motionless upon her.

"A mate?"

"A lover," he admitted solemnly. "We don’t need to mate."

"But you fuck." A carnal smile. Was there a hint of jealousy in her dark eyes, or was it merely flirtation that pretended jealousy? He hoped she was jealous. It would cause him pain if she wasn’t, he realized.

He was jealous of her husband, he realized…

"Yes," he whispered.

"I’m different from her, am I? I won’t ask who you like to fuck more. It’s apples and oranges, isn’t it? A bright morning sky is lovely. And so is the black night sky with stars."

Xaphan grunted derisively. "Your theologian Swedenborg said, ‘corporeal loves appear gross, dusky, black and misshapen, while those that are heavenly loves appear fresh, bright, fair, and beautiful.’"

"That must bother you, to have troubled to memorize it."

"It bothers me," Xaphan admitted.

She took the hand that didn’t lay upon her skin, brought it to her lips and kissed it. "Don’t worry—you’re a beautiful midnight sky, aren’t you, my love?"

"Don’t say that."

"Say what?"

"Love. I’m not your love. You don’t love me."

"Why are you…" she began to chuckle.

"Don’t mock me!" he hissed.

"I’m not mocking you, X! It’s an expression, isn’t it? I didn’t realize love was such a touchy subject for Demons. I didn’t even know whether you can feel it." A moment. "Well…can you?"

"I’m not sure I understand it," he grumbled evasively.

"Well I guess we’re not so different after all. I don’t understand it either. I mean, I know I loved my mother, and my children…there’s no ambiguity there." She veered the conversation, again, away from the children who had survived her. "I used to have a neighbor, who told me that he and his wife had once taken in a stray cat. They had it for about ten years, I suppose. My neighbor was an older man, very gruff, an old war vet. And he told me his cat was hit by a car in front of their house one day. He said to me, in his very gruff way, ‘I don’t know why we ever got that damn cat.’" Teresa smiled. "That was the greatest avowal of love I’ve ever heard…"

"Terry?" a voice called out, echoing in the circular, domed cavern beyond.

"Shit," Teresa whispered, getting to her feet as Xaphan let go of her. She grabbed up her balled robe from the stone bench, and began slipping into it. In so doing, her elbow struck the deep red velvet of the cubicle’s curtain, causing it to sway.

"Terry?" The voice had turned in their direction. "You there?"

Pushing Xaphan back against the wall with one hand, Teresa parted the curtain with the other and slid out into the humid air of the bathhouse. "I was just going to take a dip, darling," she said. "Want to join me?"

Xaphan peeked out through the slit in the soft curtain. He saw James Colombo’s loathsome face. Could he not smell the sex on his wife’s sweat-moist body? The film of slickness spread across her inner thighs? With his superior sense of smell, Xaphan himself could clearly detect the musk of his own lifeless sperm, nestled inside her in a miniature version of this secret closet he lurked in.

"Mm." Colombo reached his hands around and cupped Teresa’s full bottom, pulling her against him, kissing her on the mouth. Open mouth. Xaphan felt an animal growl rumble in his guts, fought to keep it contained. Breaking free of their embrace, Colombo groaned, "I’m beat…maybe after supper."

"How was your horrible little fox hunt?"

"I got one kid. The other got away. But the one I hit, I got with a clean shot right through the eye." He jutted a finger toward his own eye, and sniggered.

"I suppose I didn’t really want the particulars," Teresa said, turning and walking back toward the row of cubbyholes. But, she was moving toward the one directly to the left of the one Xaphan was hiding in.

"They don’t die, you know!" Colombo reminded her. "They regenerate…"

"Whatever. I’ll join you for dinner. I still want to have my dip."

"You should," Colombo teased, turning away, "you smell sweaty."

"Thanks, James. Ever the romantic."

"Hey, you love me for my honesty," called his diminishing voice.

"Do I?" she called back. "And do you love me for
my
honesty?"

"That and your tasty ass," his voice echoed.

A moment later, Teresa ducked back into the closet with Xaphan. She curled her fingers into his nipple rings, drew him into her arms. "Mm," she moaned, as her husband had done while embracing her, running her hands around his shoulders and across the sleek feathers of his folded wings. "Thank God he’s gone. I don’t know why I married him, X, I really don’t understand it…"

Xaphan was not moved by her statement, whether it was an honest sentiment or meant only to reassure him. He said nothing, looked over the top of her head at the dark red curtain. Its featureless smoothness soothed him a little, as her skin had done a minute or so earlier. Now that skin, bending with oppressive pleasure against his own, only confused him. What a curse, the skin. There was no escaping it, even in Hell.

««—»»

As had been the case over the past several days, Vjeshitza was one of the Demons who accompanied the visiting Angels on their hunt. Because of this, Xaphan relented when Teresa insisted he take her to his own tiny room, with its red tapestry bearing the symbol for Castle Urian and the matching red sheets on its narrow bed.

Teresa sat astride him, his hands gripping her breasts, claws extended just far enough to indent their soft flesh. Rolling her ample hips in a slow, circular rhythm, Teresa husked, "I think we’re leaving tomorrow." She said it without lead-in, without segue. Its unexpectedness shocked Xaphan, although the information itself should not have shocked him.

"Your husband bores so soon?"

"I suppose so."

"And you?"

"Me? I’m not bored, X. But what am I to do?"

"What are you to
do?
" Xaphan repeated hotly. He calmed his tone, but stammered with a raw discomfort that made him bitter, "Will you return, then? Or am I never to see you again?"

"Ohh…darling," Teresa purred, cupping the side of his face. "I will come back to see you again, I promise. We’re both immortal, aren’t we? We have all of eternity to see each other again…"

"You’re immortal. I’m not."

"You won’t age. And you won’t die, unless you’re killed. So don’t get killed, all right?" She smiled down at him. "What is it with me? I’ve always been drawn to either bullies or brooders."

She slid off him, left his cock suspended naked and vulnerable in the air. She rolled onto her belly and raised her rump a bit. "Here," she whispered. He got up over her, lay atop her, began to ease into her again. But she took his shaft in hand, and nuzzled its tip a little higher up. "No—here."

Lubricated with her juices and with the inner mucus of this orifice, he pressed gradually inside her. She winced, gripped the sheet in her fists, tensed up hard beneath him. A little alarmed, Xaphan said, "Do you want me to stop?"

"No," she breathed. "All the way."

"It’s hurting you."

BOOK: Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades

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