Chapter Seventeen
Lenora
“That wasn’t necessary.”
The powdery mist that forms him swirls at the foot of my bed. The tendrils collect and sway along the walls and drift lazily across the sheets.
Not touching but creeping just close enough that he could.
“He came in without knocking. I didn’t tell him to interrupt.”
The logic is sound and ridiculous.
“Where is he? Did you hurt him?”
“He’s being cared for. You need not worry about him.”
“And what about you? You were paid already for a job that you didn’t even complete.”
He has no face. No mouth or hands. He’s like that thing you see from the corner of your eye at night.
But I now know the shimmer I mistook for glitter is actually tiny bits of shredded glass and bits of razorblades.
They’re embedded through him, but I know he can choose to tuck them away when touching me. He chooses not to.
“Did you think you would only pay once, pet?” Thick coils rise up the edge of my mattress. “You belong to me and I choose when and how I want you.”
I pull my knees tighter to my chest. The sheets knotted securely around my marked body.
“And when will I get my end of the bargain?”
He pulses and I think he’s about to fade, but he becomes almost solid.
A shifting weight of blackness that dissolves into the wall at the other end of my room.
I don’t understand what he’s doing until I catch glimpses of the darkness, the faint gleam of a lake in the night.
It’s the same density as the mirror in the basement.
My body instinctively leans forward, transfixed as the center ripples and distorts.
“Who do you want to visit first?”
My heart leaps in my chest with the implication.
“Etienne Duval,” I say without hesitation.
Faint light radiates, expands. I watch the shadows drift apart to reveal a room. Lavishly furnished with cream and gold. I have a view of a bed, a ship with wide posts draped in dark silk. It’s a rich oak that shines beneath the delicate glow of dim lights shimmering from above.
I scramble off the bed, body wrapped in my own sheets. My feet barely touch the ground when I’m scooped up and cradled midair. A momentarily terrifying experience before I realized he’s protecting me from the carpet of glass still strewn across my room.
I’m carried by invisible hands to the opening and held up close.
“Are you sure, Lenora?”
I nod, eyes fixed on the outline beneath the sheets. The dark head resting peacefully on the pillow.
“Yes. Do it.”
To my surprise, I’m pulled through the gateway straight into Etienne Duval’s bedroom.
No restriction.
No resistance.
It’s no more than walking through a regular doorway.
I go from my room to sleek, marble floors and a whole wall of glass draped in sheer lace. It’s an impressive expanse of space, lavish in its splendor. Nothing here impresses me.
“New money,” Mom would call it.
Flashy. Everything placed just so to capture attention.
I’m carried to the foot of the sleeping man’s bed and settled in the demon’s lap or whatever part of him has folded itself into a seat.
“How would you like it done?”
I don’t speak. Not yet. I relish in the moment, in the sweet taste of my victory. I’m finally here. I’m feet away from my enemy. I could pad right up to him and slip a blade straight into his throat and he would go on sleeping.
But that’s too good of a death.
“What’s his worst nightmare? The thing that breaks him out in cold sweat?”
The place nestled against my shoulder blades vibrates with his low groan of pleasure.
“As you wish.”
I don’t take my eyes off the figure sleeping peacefully on his stomach, bloated face mashed into his satin pillow. I watch and wait, patient but restless.
A second passes.
Then two.
I begin to think he has no nightmares when I spot it.
It’s faint.
Barely more than a shift, a ripple beneath the sheets. Then another. And another.
I bite my lip as the movement increases rapidly, a coiling and writhing mass.
Etienne shifts in his sleep. His thick eyebrows crease with his confusion. His momentary lapse in understanding.
He moves, attempting to find comfort amongst the sea of motion all around him.
And I smile.
I grin as he gives a grunt and turns over.
Opens his eyes.
“Can he see us?” I ask, never looking away from my prey as he struggles to sit up.
“No.”
“I want him to. I want my face to be the last thing he sees before he dies.”
The demon chuckles in my ear. “Oh, how beautifully twisted you are.”
But I know the moment I materialize before him. His muddy brown eyes bulge, mirroring the unhinging of his jaw as he starts to scream.
“No screaming,” I tell him.
He does, but there is no sound. Only this lump of a man flailing and clawing at his throat and no sound emerging.
Then … then he throws back the sheets and he sees them.
All of them.
The black mass of hundreds of crawling, angry snakes moving and fighting all around him.
Beneath him.
Over him.
And the panic.
The horror.
Etienne Duval turns a white I have never seen and he tries to throw himself off the bed.
But he can’t.
He can’t leave.
I giggle as he thrashes. As he kicks and swats and only manages to tangle himself further in their bodies.
If he could scream, I know it would be horrific. Curdling. It would be a haunting sound of pure terror, and I would love to hear it, but I like that it adds to his fears. To that helplessness in his glassy eyes.
No one can hear him.
No one can save him.
“Are you pleased, my pet?” the demon drawls into my ear, tendrils brushing away the sheets covering me.
I say nothing as I watch Etienne weep. I think he’s hyperventilating. He seems to be having trouble breathing and I shiver. My core pangs with a familiar hunger that has me shifting in the demon’s arms.
“Touch me,” I tell him.
The shadows never hesitate. They find their way over the flushed contours of my body. They curl around my breasts. Tease my nipples. Each flick is deliberate, coaxing without distracting me from the viper that slithers up Etienne’s thick, hairy leg.
Mine part wide for the tendrils that find my wet center.
“Let me hear him.”
He obeys immediately and the room vibrates with the howls and shrieks of a man on the verge of hysteria. Wide eyes stare at the serpent gliding up his thigh.
“No … no, please. No!”
I whine with pleasure as I’m invaded and my clit is stroked. My eyes nearly slip shut, but I force them open in time to watch Etienne make a stupid grab for the creature’s slithering body when it works its head into the hole of Etienne’s boxers.
I know what it’s going for, and I spread my knees wider. I sob when the shadows inside me move and pump. The skin over my pelvis bulges and ripples with the invasion, but I’m so close…
A snake with shiny green scales sinks sharp needle fangs into the back of Etienne’s hand. Stopping him from yanking the viper away from his crotch.
I snicker when he shrieks.
Blood wells from the pinpricks, but it’s the least of his problems when dozens more puncture and tear at his naked arms, his hairy chest.
His neck.
His face.
He’s bleeding and turning a patchy red. His screams are thin wheezes.
But it blooms in a perfect crescendo when the viper finds its mark.
Crimson bruises across the front of his boxers.
Stains across the sheets. Etienne is nearly dead by the time the same viper, stained with red, glides up his chest and delves down the man’s throat.
I cum watching him seize and twitch. Blood and froth foaming at his mouth, dribbling down his chin. I clench around the pulsing tendrils moving inside me. My toes curl with the intensity.
Etienne Duval is a bloody, bloated lump across his ruined sheets. The snakes are all gone, but their tiny bites mar his swollen flesh.
“I want his eyes.”
They are already protruding from their sockets. And he no longer needs them.
“As you wish.”
He doesn’t release me. Doesn’t pull out of my opening. Never stops teasing my nipples. He continues to play with me while the slurp and pop sounds in the distance.
I don’t watch.
Not because the sight might sicken me, but his death was my goal. The eyes are merely a souvenir to show my boys.
“The night is young. Do you wish to get them all tonight?”
That had been the plan when I was set to do it on my own, but this was far better. I want this again. I want this rush. This satisfaction. I want to savor their suffering.
“Tomorrow.”
He doesn’t question my decision. Doesn’t seem to be in any hurry as he makes me cum again. And again, right there with Etienne Duval’s body growing cold a few feet away.
And I don’t want him to stop.
I’m so sensitive, so aware I can’t even if I wanted. For the first time in what feels like forever, the weight has lifted. All the grief and sadness escaped, and I can breathe for just a second. I feel sane and momentarily happy before it all floods back with sharp blades of guilt.
“Shh,” the creature soothes when my pleasure dissolves into tears.
When the pressure becomes agony. The sight of Etienne bloody and broken balms a fraction, but I continue to drift in an endless ocean of such … pain.
“Why isn’t it gone?” I gasp, hand clutching the twisting torment in my chest.
“It will never be gone,” it whispers. “Grief is carved into your soul, hieroglyphs that will stay with you to the end.”
My lungs wheeze with my shredded inhale. “It hurts so much.”
“I know.”
Without another word, I’m bundled in what I assume is his chest and returned through the mirror to my room. To the destruction and darkness. To the faint scent of my boys still haunting the edges.
“I can make you forget a while longer, if you wish?”
Sleep will evade me the moment he sets me down. I know it before he even crosses the ocean of glittering shards of glass. I will lie in my empty bed and think. And remember.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Help me forget.”
His response is my placement on the bed and his tendrils setting straight to work distracting me. Even when I collapse in my first deep sleep in days, I feel him holding his promise.