Chapter 3
CHAPTER
THREE
KRAX
We stood outside a door that looked pretty unremarkable—beige, scuffed, and boring—but when Romanus knocked, it was opened by a face I knew all too well.
“Ukobach? What the hell are you doing here?”
Ukobach was an inferior demon, and as far as demons went, he was the best of a shitty bunch.
Each one had a specialty and an attitude to match.
Word had gotten around that Ukobach had been summoned from Hell, and Romanus and Rella had gone up and dragged him back down.
I’d seen him when he returned, looking sad and defeated.
I’d just assumed he’d been thrown into the great abyss with the rest of his brethren, waiting to be respawned once more.
My surprise was mirrored on the face of the inferior demon of fried food and fireworks.
That was why he was my favorite. You just knew a demon whose abilities involved bacon grease and explosives was going to be a good time. “Krax? What are you doing here?” His eyes dropped to where Hecto should have been, and his eyebrows rose. “Oh. Again?”
Nodding, I tried to keep my exhaustion from my face. “Yeah. The hunters are giving me a couple of days to find it before I get my ass flayed.”
Uko looked good. Being earthside had definitely given him some color, and if his marks were anything to go by, he was really happy.
Inferior demons, the good ones anyway, let their bodies become hosts to imps.
They were little more than glowing squiggles in the skin, feeding off the feelings of the host, but not unduly affecting them.
They weren’t really symbiotic, but they didn’t do anything negative to Ukobach.
If anything, they made him look like a badass.
“Well, fuck. Come in. I’ll get you some coffee. I have to brew it though. Elsie says you can’t eat it straight out of the bag.”
“Elsie?” I queried, but Romanus interrupted.
“You owe Rella, and you can return the good deed by helping Krax find his penis.” He turned and left.
I finally let out the breath I’d been holding. There was always a chance they’d decide I was too much hard work and kill me. Without me, Hecto would die too. It would have been a neat solution.
“Uko, who was at the door?” someone called from the back of the apartment.
“Just Romanus. We have to help someone find their penis!” Ukobach shouted back to her.
A woman appeared, frowning in confusion. She was very pretty, with dramatic curves, a soft face, and full, pouty lips. Hecto would have loved her. “Did you say we had to help someone find their penis?” she repeated back, and it did sound kind of preposterous.
Ukobach strode over to the tiny woman and picked her up in his arms, kissing her like being away from her for the five minutes it had taken him to answer the door had been way too much.
“I did,” he replied, putting her down on her feet, leaving her all flushed and pink.
“Elsie, this is Krax. He’s from Hell. He’s a krakubus. ”
She squinted at me. “A krakubus?”
I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “Half kraken, half incubus.”
“An octopus sex demon with no dick?”
Sighing, I pointed to the couch. “May I sit?”
“Of course,” she replied, waving me down onto a floral sofa.
Ukobach grinned. “Just so you know, we fornicated on the couch quite recently.”
“Uko!” Elsie screeched, flushing again.
Shrugging, he gave us both a grin. “He’s half incubus, he’d enjoy knowing.”
The truly annoying thing was that he was right.
My incubus side did enjoy knowing that they’d both reached climax on the very space I occupied.
I nodded but went back to her original question.
“I have a penis. It’s just sentient and a little disgruntled with me, and it decided it could handle itself better without me. ”
She looked at me and then at the space on the couch beside me.
She slumped down. “I don’t know why I’m still surprised by this.
I’m dating a demon, for fuck’s sake.” She rolled her eyes at me, and for the first time since Hecto slithered through that crack in the damn gates of Hell, I felt like smiling.
“Okay, so your, uh, penis has gone AWOL,” she continued.
“It can think. I mean, can it have a conversation? Should we be looking for people who’ve seen a talking snake or something? ”
My second tentacle, Nym, reached toward Elsie, wrapping itself around her leg. Gripping it firmly, I tugged it back. “Sorry, sorry! They are all sentient. This one is Nym. It’s a bit of a lover and obviously doesn’t appreciate the finer points of personal space,” I stated, chastising my tentacle.
Ukobach laughed, dragging Elsie up before sitting down and settling her on his lap.
“Nym is definitely the favorite, except maybe Hecto.” He winked at me, and I felt myself flush.
Ukobach had been at an orgy or two down in Hell before he got summoned up to the mortal realm.
He’d probably seen Hecto and me at our finest.
Elsie stared at my tentacle, the tip waving softly like it was trying to prove how harmless it was.
Honestly, the human was taking this well.
“Okay, stand up,” she told me firmly, and I did what I was told.
“If they are thinking creatures, then they should be introduced properly. Uh, by thinking, how smart are we talking here?”
I frowned. It was hard to judge sentience in Hell. My tentacles were more sentient than Uko’s squiggle imps, but not as sentient as a wraith, which had no body and barely any logic, but a hell of a lot of rage.
It was Ukobach who answered. “Like a cat. Each has its own personality.”
I pointed at him. He wasn’t glamoured in any way for Elsie.
He was just there, tall and covered in glowing imps, his horns sitting on top of his head, and the human didn’t even blink.
“Yes, like cats. Maybe a little smarter? They have wants, desires, and needs, and they can understand my general instructions. They can also choose to ignore them completely. I am the host, but they aren’t subject to my whims. Only Hecto can detach though.
These guys are stuck with me forever.” Moric, the sweetest of my tentacles, wrapped itself around my waist like a hug.
I stroked it gently, appreciating the support.
You were never alone if you had five friends permanently attached to you—well, six if you counted Hecto, but it was still on my shit list.
Elsie looked back at Ukobach, and he shrugged at her, smiling happily. “It isn’t even the weirdest thing you’d see in Hell. Not by a long shot.”
Shaking her head, she looked at me. “Well, I guess you better introduce us to them then.”
Nym took that as permission and leapt toward her, wrapping itself around both Elsie and Ukobach’s wrists.
“Well, that’s Nym. It’s a lover, as I said.
Generally pretty agreeable, if prone to being a little too affectionate.
” I tapped Moric, still twined around my waist. “This is Moric. I’d say Moric would be the most even tempered of them all.
If I lose control of the other tentacles, I can depend on Moric to help get them back in line. ”
Moric slithered toward them, gently stroking across Elsie’s wrist, and then up Ukobach’s arm. It was tasting them and would know their essence now, even if I was incapacitated.
Elsie stroked both of the tentacles, and I held back a moan. Perhaps I should have told her that they were still attached to me, and that my tentacles were an erogenous zone, but I didn’t because I was a selfish fuck, and it had been so long since anyone had touched me.
Clearing my throat, I looked at Azmus. Azmus was the reason that I wondered if my tentacles had once been the souls of other demons.
It was smarter than the rest of my tentacles combined, and it gave me advice in a roundabout way.
Azmus tasted the tips of their fingers with his suckers then pulled back, being very respectful.
“Okay, wait. I want to be able to tell them apart,” Elsie interjected.
“Moric has the little sun-shaped splodge here,” she said, dusting her fingers over my tentacle in a way that made pleasure pulse through my body.
I was such a fucking creep. “Nym has three little purple spots in the shape of a triangle.” Nym crawled up toward her face, and I stuck a hand out to grab it and drag it back to a respectable distance before Ukobach rightfully tore it off.
Behave, I demanded, but I doubted they’d listen.
“And Azmus has the blue tip,” Elsie said, speaking more to herself than to me. “How are we going to find your dick if you’re bright maroon anyway?” She lifted a hand. “No, wait. We’ll come back to that. First, I want to meet the last of your tentacles.”
I winced, because Korvus and Verrik were perhaps my least palatable tentacles. “Uh, this one is Verrik, and it is very… protective.”
“I once saw it punch a hellhound for fun,” Ukobach whispered in Elsie’s ear.
Verrik had a short fuse on its temper, and it didn’t give a damn that the rest of us would also suffer for it.
Korvus was behind me, and I turned a little so she could see.
Korvus didn’t approach or try to get a taste.
It just sat back there, sullen and annoyed.
“That’s Korvus. It’s not much of a people tentacle. ”
“Understandable. Nice to meet you, Korvus. You’re the one that’s so dark, you’re nearly black. Very pretty though.” A jolt of pride coursed through it before it went back to being a sullen pain in my ass. Well, a pain above my ass.
Verrik reached out and wrapped itself around Elsie’s arm.
It clung on tightly, and I held my breath, but it seemed content to smooth its way up her skin and under the hem of her shirt.
“That’s enough, Verrik,” I said out loud, and the tentacle pulled back a little.
Hmm, it seemed to like the human too. We were almost all in agreement, which never happened.
I pulled them back to me and slid farther away so they couldn’t slither their way back to her and Ukobach. “That’s the crew, except Hecto.”
“Horny Hecto,” Ukobach said with a chuckle, and I couldn’t disagree.
We were silent for a bit, and I could tell Elsie was thinking. “Can you change forms? It’s going to be hard to search with you looking like that.” She indicated my tentacles and my deep red skin.
I shifted to a paler, almost pink color, which wasn’t quite human colored but enough to pass. I also drew the tentacles in until they were only six inches long. “This is the best I can do. They don’t like being small for super long periods though.”
Korvus was already starting to bitch in the back of my brain.
She looked down at my legs. “You have legs? Not to sound like The Little Mermaid, but I thought we were going to have to make a deal with the sea witch for a bit.” She slapped a hand over her mouth.
“Although maybe that would be offensive to your people?”
“My people?”
She shook her head, her cheeks bright red again, redder than my skin was right now.
“Never mind, we can make this work.” She smiled at me, and it was like the sun coming up after a year of darkness.
How did Ukobach stand it? “Let’s have some coffee and work out a plan.
Maybe we can walk around the thin space between Hell and Earth.
” She raised an eyebrow at my tentacles.
“I mean, how far could a dick really get?”