Victoria's Demon Lover (19 page)

     “Kick my little doe.  Kick and
buck.  The hounds will bring you down.”  He made a baying sound like a beagle
and laughed again.  He lay on top of her and bit her neck.  Victoria
struggled.  She was able to get her hand on the headboard and used it as a
fulcrum to twist her body against him.  She rolled out from under him and fell
to the floor.

     She was able to get to her
feet before he did and ran in a helpless circle.  There was nowhere to go. 
Nothing to grab and threaten him with.  He sat there on the bed, his dick in
his hand now.  His face was flushed with exertion and she could see how
thoroughly he was enjoying himself watching her panic.  His eyes glittered and
his lips were wet and parted.  The dick in his hand glistened with its
readiness.  He smeared the lubricant that oozed from the tip around the head
and pushed the wrinkles of his foreskin back.  “Come little doe.  The stag is
in rut and will not be denied.”  He stood and came after her.

     She darted under his arm and
made to duck low and roll under the bed, but he was correct.  She could not
escape him. He had her by the ankle.  He lifted her easily under her arms and
bent her face down over the edge of the bed, buttocks high in the air.   He
slapped her round mounds twice and then she felt his cock ram itself up inside
her folds.  He grunted like an animal and she heard the sharp slaps of his
thighs against her buttocks as he thrust again and again.  He roared like a
bear and snorted like a stag.  He panted like a dog and blew hard through his
nose like a stallion.  Her face was pushed over and over into the mattress. 
She turned her head to clear her nose and mouth from the bedding so she could
breathe.

     Her arms and hands were free,
but in this position all she could do with them was flail them on the bed.  He
was enjoying her desperate struggles and she realized she was crying and
gasping.  Her own voice sounded like the cry of a prey animal being ripped
apart and eaten.  His thrusts had started to hurt and the edge of the bed
pressed into her belly with every jerk of his hips.

     He was panting now, forcing
himself in and out quickly, faster and faster.  She heard him mutter under his
breath, “oh, oh, oh” with each plunge. He gurgled and groaned.  She cringed and
dug at the bedclothes, praying for it to end soon.

     “Ha! Little doe!”  he cried,
and his big hand came down to slap her hard on her thigh like he was riding his
horse.  He did it again.  The bed began to side on the floor with the force of
his pounding stabs.  He increased the tempo and his cries of pleasure became
shrill.  She felt him come as his hands closed on her shoulders with a painful
squeeze.  He drove himself far up inside her and the pain made her gasp with
every forceful thrust.  He roared with every spurt and his fingers tore at her
skin.  He finished with a wheezing moan.  She felt him bend over and bite her
between the shoulders as a stallion bites a mare when he mounts her.

     “Ah, God, that was good,” he
panted as he withdrew.

     Victoria was too sore to move
right away.  She had felt his soft dick slide out of her and the familiar
drooling of cum down her inner thigh.  She stayed bent over the bed, afraid to
move, feeling the sore spots where he had grabbed her and hit her and bit her
and pinched her.  She would be bruised all over.  Jack would see this abuse and
be furious.  Lord Brigayne’s cum continued to dribble down her thigh.

     He murmured, “Oh.  Well then.
Oh shit.”

     He must have had a lot of cum,
she thought, for now her ankle was wet with it. Too wet.  With great effort she
used her arms to push herself up from the bed.  She heard him putting the robe
on behind her.  She heard him unlock the door and heard it close behind him. 
She staggered to her feet, holding the bed’s footpost for balance.  That is
when the cramping started and she felt the gush of warm blood flow down her
thigh and her calf and her ankle and soak her left foot.

     She didn’t have to fall asleep
this time.  This time she fell from the ceiling.  She landed with a bounce on
her bed in the lake house.  It was broad daylight and the sounds below told her
that Sharon and the boys had finished lunch and were getting ready to go to the
park.  She knew this because Richard was screaming “Park now! Park now!” and
Sharon’s calm voice replied, “We will get in the car when Eric’s shoes are
tied.”

     She looked down at her body
half expecting to see the homespun wool dress and a wide apron.  But no.  She
was dressed as she had been what seemed months ago:  jeans and a tee shirt and
sandals.  She heard doors slamming and then Sharon’s minivan start and back out
of the driveway, but still she was afraid to move.  She put a hand tentatively
over her belly.

     “Oh my fucking God,” she
breathed.  Little chill bumps raised up and down her arms and the hairs on the
back of her neck stood up.  Her whole scalp tingled.  She blinked several
times.  She didn’t have to be in a long ago century to imagine what would
happen next.  She swung her legs over the side of the bed and put her head in
her hands.

     Jack would be furious that she
had been taken.  He would be sickened and hurt that Lord Brigayne had used her
like his whore.  But when he discovered that she had lost the baby…Victoria
felt dizzy.  This was when Jack had earned his scar.  She put her hand to her
throat and she knew he had confronted Lord Brigayne.  She knew he had killed
him.  She knew it had not even been a dual, but a fierce pummeling fist fight. 
She saw it in her mind, for she had not been there when it happened.  She had
been lying back in their cottage, bleeding on their bed and weeping, weeping
for days.  She saw this.  And she saw Jack hanging from a gibbet.  Executed for
murder.

     “Do you want to see it now?” 
She looked up.  Jasper stood by the bed looking up at her with sad eyes.  “I
need to take you back.  You brought yourself back too soon.  It wasn’t over
yet.  Once you start you have to finish.  I warned you not to start.  But now…”

     “Fuck, Jasper.  Damn. Why
would I want to see it?”  She reached for the tissues and blew her nose.  “I
can see it all now in my head.”

     Jasper put a tiny monkey hand
on her knee.  “But you are getting the wrong idea, and you are making it worse.”

     “Making it worse?”  She slid
form the bed and towered over the little monkey demon.  “How can it get any
fucking worse? It seems that I am responsible for the deaths of three good
men.  The only men I have ever loved…and I killed him.  Three times.”  She
picked up the whole box of tissues and headed for the bathroom.

     “Don’t take the sedative,
Victoria.”  Jasper leaped ahead of her and blocked the door to the bathroom. 
“It will make you lose control. You will not be able to think clearly and will
be at the mercy of your imagination.  You don’t need that right now.”

     She stopped mid-kick and put
her foot back on the floor.  “Why do you even care, demon?  Isn’t it your job
to torment the living?  No wonder you want to take me back to watch him die. 
Bastard.”  She reached for the doorknob.

     “Don’t do it, Victoria.”

     She kicked at him again and he
darted away from her foot to stand by the window.  She went into the bathroom
and with shaking hands opened the medicine cabinet and fumbled through the
prescription bottles for the Valium.  She wanted to sleep.  To sleep with no
dreams, no nothing.  She shook out two of them and swallowed them without water
and then set the bottle on the sink while she drew a bath.  She could still
feel the blood and cum dripping down her thighs and only hot water and bubbles
could take that away.  Bubbles and sedatives.

     Jasper’s little face peeked
around the doorway.  “Victoria.  You need to go back.”

     “Go to Hell, monkey demon.  Go
back to Hell and leave me alone.”

     He disappeared and she was
glad.  The warm fuzzies started to take the edge off the pain in her mind.  The
warm water would ease the pain in her arms and legs, but nothing could ease the
pain in her heart.  She had killed him.  She had killed him as if she had
thrust a sword through his heart or squeezed the life from his throat.  And
Marcus.  She blinked the vision of her dark lover from two thousand years ago. 
He had earned a little farm as retirement bonus for surviving twenty years of
marching for Rome.  Marcus grinned as he chucked her chin and kissed her ear as
he told her about it.  He was ready to take up farming.  He would grow grapes
and olives and spend his last years basking in the kind of peace he had never
known in his life.

     Then she saw the door open. 
She saw the faces silhouetted in the opening.  Marcus withdrew his cock from
her body and turned to look over his shoulder.  She saw the look on his face
when he turned back to her, and on the faces of the servants at the door.  Two
of the intruders fled immediately, and Victoria knew they were running to tell Cestius
that his favorite concubine was being fucked by one of his men.

     She and Marcus locked eyes. 
There were no words.  She knew she would never see him again.  His eyes told
her that.  Her eyes told him how her heart was lost and she was now dead
inside.  Victoria sobbed in her bath.  He had been ordered to Gaul and died
there a month later, his throat slit ear to ear.  She had seen it.  She knew. 
There would be no farm for him, no bower of grape vines or arching olive trees.
He would die as he had lived, in blood and gore.  Victoria wiped her nose.

     And Torgal.  He also had died
for her.  She wished the sedative would work faster.  She splashed the bath
water in her face and used the end of a towel to dry her eyes and her nose. 
Those chains were there because he had been found in the straw with her the day
before her wedding to another man.  Her espoused husband and his brothers had
taken Torgal and bound him in a neighbor’s remote farmstead until his family
could pay restitution for her virginity.  Her wedding day had been more like a
funeral.  Her husband had shut her in her room and not come to her that night
to consummate the marriage.

     He had married her for her
beauty and for her dowry, but now she disgusted him.  Not disgusted enough to
give up the rich farmland that came with her hand, but enough to keep him from
touching her.  When pressured by the law weeks later, he had held her down and
fucked her with his brothers and uncles in the room as witnesses.  She had
screamed.  It had hurt.  She remembered the cheers from the drunken men on the
other side of the door.  They had made a party of it.  Her husband had beat her
afterwards, but never touched her or spoke to her again.

     She had lived that life in
shame and desolate loneliness, dying years later of some pulmonary disease in
the dead of winter with no children or friends or family to mourn her.  She saw
this.  And she saw that it was her love for Torgal that had precipitated this
disaster.  She had arranged for him to meet her, she had thrust herself into
his arms.  A young girl’s selfish foolishness and a belief in true love had
ruined the lives of three people.

     Victoria dunked her head in
the soapy and water and rubbed her face with the towel again.  She still did
not feel clean.  She took great gulps of the steamy air and blew them out like
she had learned to do in yoga class.  It did not help.  She felt as filthy and
disgusting as a sewer bubbling up from broken pipes.  Michael Brand, from Legal
entered her mind and she let out a great long groan.  Here was another man, an
innocent man, not even a lover, and he was dead because of her.  His children
had no father, his wife no husband in her bed at night.  All because of her. 
And she was supposed to be glad with the money from the settlement.  Blood
money.

     She slid under the water and
put her feet up on the spigot.  She wondered if it hurt to drown.

     “Victoria!  Stop this!”  A
hand grabbed her by the hair and brought her face back into the air.  “There is
nothing more disgusting than self-pity.  Do you understand me?”

     She opened her eyes and her sedative-dulled
mind struggled to recognize Albert Magnus.  She sputtered a drugged greeting.

     “Jasper told me you were
sliding down that path again.  We are trying to help you, Victoria.  Why won’t
you take the sandwich?”

     She blinked.  It had sounded
like he was offering her a sandwich.  She shook her head, but it did not
clear.  She still felt like a brick in the bottom of a tub of water.  She
couldn’t eat.  She may never eat again.  Her stomach twisted and agreed with
her.  Something was lifting her from the water and wrapping her in a towel. 
Someone was speaking, but it seemed like a foreign language.  She sniffed. 
Soap got in her nose and her eyes burned.  Strong hands rubbed a rough towel
over her face.

     “You are going to fall asleep,
Victoria.  There is nothing we can do to stop it.”  She understood those
words.  “You should not have taken the sedative.  Now you will sleep and the
dreams you dream will not be your own, but the wild images of your emotions. 
You have made it worse.  You cannot hide from the truth.  You cannot drown your
sorrows or erase your pain by deflecting or ignoring it.  You have to face
them, Victoria.  You have to look them in the eye and conquer them.”

     “No, I don’t,” she slurred.

     She heard him sigh.  “Yes. 
You are right about that.  And you have not for many centuries, yes.  You are
right,” he agreed again sadly, “but he is here, he has come to you in this time
and he is trying to save you, Victoria.  He is trying to save you from yourself
but you will not let him.”

     She rolled to one and realized
she was now in her bed.  Mr. Magnus had her hand and was patting it.  She tried
to squeeze it to let him know she was listening, but her muscles refused to
obey any direct orders from her brain.  It was foggy and warm and soft fluffy
blankets and litters of mewling kittens surrounded her.  She smiled. 
This
is nice.