Chapter 25
Kai lay back on the pillow, tentacles circling his arms and legs.
Fian lay down next to him, and they adjusted until they were on their sides facing one another.
The fire, flickering in rainbow colors like no normal fire would, was warming, and Kai wished it would burn his memories of the last three years entirely.
He wanted to forget and move on, he wanted everything to be as if that time had never happened.
Maybe dreaming is the best I can do. I wonder if there’s magic here that can help me forget? Maybe I’ll ask Fian about that.
They kissed once more, their bodies pressing close. Kai focused on feeling, feeling himself and Fian, the warmth, the ground, the suckers exploring him. He let his desire in, hoping it would overtake all other thought.
The stimulation Fian could provide made it easy, and before long Kai felt that pebbled cock against his stomach.
It was slick—he’d seen that, some kind of natural lubrication.
The tentacles were carefully probing, one covering one butt cheek but not going any further, another close to the base of Kai’s cock but not really doing anything there either.
Kai was okay with making the first move, and he reached for Fian’s slick cock, admiring the texture with his fingertips.
Fian gasped, pushing himself into Kai’s hand. “Yes, Kai.”
“Don’t you want to touch me too?”
Fian nodded. Then his tentacles got to work.
Eight of them was very unfair, and all Kai could do once Fian got going was try to keep up.
Fian held Kai in his human arms and continued their lazy, sloppy, hungry kisses. At the same time, one or two tentacles wrapped around Kai’s hard cock, so tight that it felt as if Kai were inside of Fian. When their suckers started moving, it was like nothing from this world, and Kai tensed.
He also did his best to relax because another tentacle was trying to push into him. And Kai wanted that, the foreignness of it, the way it was like nothing he had ever felt before.
“Please, I want you inside me,” he whispered against Fian’s lips.
“Yes, relax. I’ll make sure you feel good. Ah, harder.”
So Kai pumped that slick cock with more pressure, focusing as best as he could, focusing despite the way the tentacles made him feel, especially the one that had now also smoothed around his balls.
He ran his thumb over the head of Fian’s cock, feeling something like a slit there, and just when Fian groaned, his tentacle finally slipped inside Kai.
They were tangled and connected now, arms, lips, lust. The haze of it was over too soon. Kai came in a rush, his whole body plunging into the orgasm when the tentacle inside him coiled against his prostate and the one sheathing his cock did something delicious to his cockhead.
He shivered, tensed, and shivered again, and he was being held through all of it, the sense of being constricted only making it better.
“You taste perfect,” Fian whispered.
And Kai was reminded they were still not done; Fian was still hard. “Hold on.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
“I love you, Kai.”
Kai didn’t stop touching. He wanted to see Fian come. He thought, I think I can love you too.
It only took a few more seconds to make Fian’s orgasm explode out of him. He came a lot, and the curious part of Kai that was still there and well even after everything wondered what having that inside of him would feel like.
One day, he was sure, he’d know. One day, he was sure, the things that had been done to him would no longer matter, and he could be carefree again.
Kai woke like he had fallen asleep, tentacle-wrapped and with Fian’s breath slow and warm against his back. He heard the ocean and the gulls, and sunlight was creeping past the curtains.
“Hey, Fian.”
“Hmm. Am up. Five more minutes?”
Kai snuggled back against the demon and carefully peeled a tentacle off his arm to examine it closer. The suckers were big but also delicate, and when he poked them with a finger, they would close around the tip. The whole appendage tried coiling around his arm.
“You won’t give me five more minutes, will you?”
“I was just looking.”
“Such a guppy.”
“Did you just call me a fish?”
Fian’s color shifted, turned lighter before going dark again. “A cute little fish.”
“Uh-huh. We should head back to Salt Harbor. I want to see for myself that they got everyone.”
All of Fian’s tentacles roused. “Are you sure?”
Kai took a few deep breaths, then, “I’m sure.”
“I’ll call ahead though.”
This time around, it wasn’t Zazine who picked them up but a woman who introduced herself as Fangal. She drove a dark blue sedan and told Fian and Kai to get in the back.
On the drive, something cold and clawing built in Kai’s chest. Anxiety or dread? That doesn’t feel right. Nothing there can hurt me anymore. It’ll be fine. I have no reason to be anxious anymore.
Fian next to him was all tentacles again. Kai couldn’t miss the demon frown, and twice he thought Fian was going to say something, but he didn’t. He was just there, in anchor mode once more.
“Agent Mikano is in the town museum,” their driver said.
Kai cocked his head. “There’s a museum here? I never knew that.”
She nodded. “There was one before the witches came here. They made the original inhabitants leave, but the town was dying already. It’s a really small museum.”
She parked outside a building on Main, and the three of them got out of the car.
The museum had dusty windows, but Kai could see people moving inside.
Other people were out and about as well, most of them in dark suits like their driver and Mikano had been.
They were in James’s café and in the bookshop, one talking to a woman who was crying her eyes out in front of the latter.
“That’s Maggie. She and her husband own the bookstore.”
The driver looked that way. “They weren’t married, and she didn’t want to be here either.”
Kai nodded, and Maggie looked up. Their eyes met briefly, but then the demon driver held the door to the museum open, and Fian was nudging Kai forward, so he went.
Inside, the demons seemed to have built something of a headquarters, and a modern one at that. Computer screens and printers had been set up on three tables, and there were a good dozen demons in the small room.
Mikano sat in an old chair that Kai wouldn’t have dared for fear of it breaking under his weight.
“Please, no more. I’m full. Why did Kantra have to be on vacation right now?”
“But it’s just one more witch, sir,” a tall demon standing next to Mikano said.
Both looked up when they saw Fian and Kai.
“Ah, Tickle! And Kai. Everyone, that’s my brother and Kai. Kai, say hi to my team, they are the best. When they don’t force me to overeat.”
“Uh, hello.” Kai looked around at smiling demon faces. His eyes fell on a black and white photograph of a group of what had to be the real villagers, posing in front of a boat, the boathouse in the background. It hung on a wall and had gathered a layer of dust on the frame.
“Well, good of you to come. We aren’t quite done yet, but Tickle said you wanted an update.”
Kai nodded. He was trembling. He reached for Fian’s hand.
Mikano frowned, but he didn’t comment. The other demons walked out, giving them space.
When they were alone in the museum, Mikano stood, stretched. He walked over to the photograph Kai had seen where it was mounted on the wall. “Do you see that young man in the front?”
Kai leaned in. “Yeah.”
“That was Howard Carr-Smith, the mailman. From what we could find out, he found a book. A demonologicon.”
Fian gasped. “But those are not allowed in the human realm.”
“I know, Tickle, I know. But he found one anyway. Maybe someone lost it, and it washed up on shore, I don’t know. I just know he had it.”
“What’s a demonolago—”
“A demonologicon. Basically a book about demon magic,” Mikano said.
“He used that. He networked, I guess you could say, that is he built his coven of like-minded men. You met one of them. They were all like that, sure they deserved whatever and whoever they wanted, and they took it with the help of demon magic, something that has been going on for a good twenty years at this point. We have found several more survivors like yourself and have freed them of the spells that bound them.”
Kai shook his head. “I’m not a…I’m just not.”
Mikano looked at him until Kai looked away.
“Kai,” Fian said.
“Well, anyway. That is the long and short of it. We’re handling the witches.
We’re also obviously going to help those they enchanted, given it was demon magic.
I already knew you wanted to leave this place, and we’ll have people arrange for that.
That’s a different division, but they’ll be here soon.
Until then, we’re putting everyone up at the hotel you’re currently staying at. ”
“I need to go buy clothes,” Kai said.
Mikano nodded. “Fangal can take you.”
Fian cleared his throat. “I’m coming too.”
Fian’s tentacles changed color as if he were stressed, scared he wouldn’t be allowed to come.
“Of course you’re coming. Who else is going to carry all my stuff?”
Mikano sighed. “Please, do make him get a phone if you can.”
Their shopping trip was an easy and quiet affair. They got food too, but mostly because Fian insisted.
Kai was glad that Fian didn’t force conversation on him. He needed some time alone in his head. Twenty years, he would think while buying socks and a pair of shoes. Survivors, he would think, back in that same clothing store where he’d lost his shit.
“Why me?” he asked Fian when they were back at the electronics store to get the demon a phone of his own.
Fian turned to him. “I’m not sure it has anything to do with you. Do you remember what I said about the fish in the net and not struggling?”
Kai nodded.
Fian went on. “The fish was just there, and then some human dropped a net. That’s not the fish’s fault. And even if the fish really wants to know, there is no good answer the fisherman can give him.”
Kai nodded again. “You’re good at this.”
“Fishing metaphors?”
Kai chuckled. “Listening.”
“Thank you. Should we get dinner?”
Kai nodded. “Takeout. Would it be okay if I ate alone in my room? I just want some time to myself.” He tapped the phone Fian had almost decided on. “And I’ll be able to call you.”
“We can even videocall. And I can meet you when you fall asleep? Show you around the Carnival?”
“I’d love that.”
Fian looked like a lost puppy with tentacles when he waved goodbye to Kai from the back of the sedan that would drop him at the ocean so he could go home from there.
Kai already missed the way his demon had been able to hold him, but he needed this time. He just needed time.
On the way to his room, a door in the same hallway opened, and Maggie came out, her eyes red-rimmed.
“Kai.”
He stopped in his tracks. “Maggie. Hi. I saw you…I saw you back in Salt Harbor.”
“Yeah.” Her voice drifted away, and her eyes looked as if they were seeing the past.
“We’ll just have to forget it, you know? I don’t know how it is for you, but I don’t remember all of it. Some, but not all. And I just want to forget about it.”
She looked at him, smiled. “I remember when Nick brought you into town. You have to understand, I couldn’t help. I’d tried that before, and in the years since, they made sure I couldn’t. But I remember you. I thought there was still a spark in your eyes.”
“I…don’t know about that.” Fian had made sure there was enough food in the paper bag in his arms, but Kai didn’t know if he could share it, if he could sit down with Maggie and have dinner together.
“I know. I was there. I saw, and you’re still here. They have food downstairs for all of us, but you don’t want to come, huh?” She looked at his bag.
“Maybe not tonight.”
Maggie nodded. “Another night then. If forgetting doesn’t work, you know we’re here too.”
Kai watched her walk toward the stairs. He stood there for a long while even after she was gone, thinking and not thinking, feeling and not feeling.
When he was in his room, he called Fian, and they talked through the night. In the early hours of the morning, Kai finally fell asleep.
“Hey,” said Fian in his cecaelia form, the ocean dark and blue around him.
“Hey.”
Kai swam toward the demon who had found him and woken him up from the worst of his nightmares. Warm tentacles welcomed him and held him close, and after all the talking they had done, they didn’t need to speak another word between them.
In the depths of a dream ocean where demons roamed, tentacles held Kai safely, and Kai knew that he was anchored in Fian’s many arms, no matter what vicious current tried pulling him out and away.