Once again, as with last time, very little smoking, and I think the sexual content might be a bit less, too. Next chapter will have smoking and much more lascivious action, I guarantee (because it’s already written, and I know). Last chapter should also be smoky and at least as sexual and kinky. For those of you not digging this series, my apologies, but I’m on a roll, and would like to keep as much momentum as possible. For the other installments in the series, click here.
Veils of ViceBy Smokedawg
Chapter 4: Gambling With Disaster
At the far end of the chamber of mud, they watched bubbles pop at the surface of the pool, and felt strange powers recede and gather and coalesce somewhere deep. They were safe, but there hadn’t been any victory here; only loss.
It was a long time before anyone could speak. Kurt couldn’t bear to look at Megan or Donald. He was sick with shame. At his weakness and his failure. All the more so because he sensed Donald wouldn’t judge him for his weakness; wouldn’t condemn him for dooming the woman he so clearly desired—for pushing her deeper as he himself escaped. All Kurt could do was hope Rachel would be preserved in her prison, and not dead, so that they could free her on their return this way when they were done—if they survived.
Megan broke the silence. Someone had to. Their enemies wouldn’t let them wait here forever. “I think I see a pattern here: Sexual temptation and carnal corruption. At least we know these Avatars’ preferred method of attack. That might help. Help us to be more prepared, that is. We’ve been expecting to do combat all this time, and they distract us with desire so that the battle can be avoided and we defeat ourselves.”
“Then let’s go see who will fuck with us next,” Donald said savagely. “Pun entirely intentional.”
But there was no humor in his tone.
With no other place to direct his anger, he took a black stylus from his kit and drew a sigil that meant “apocalypse” on the next veil, which swirled with notes of gold, copper and silver. The veil seemed to scream like a living thing and tore into shreds as it was sucked into a tiny vortex and off to another realm.
He stepped through without hesitation and his two companions followed quickly.
They went through a short passage that ended at a simple and thoroughly normal wooden door, which Kurt opened after a brief magical perusal. Before them was a small and simple room. Walls of iron, slightly oxidized, and another veil at the end of it, glowing a dull red. Between them and the next veil stood a muscular, aged bald man in drab robes. Before him sat a wheel with many markings, made of what looked like tarnished copper.
“So, which one of us are you going to try to screw, Mr. Clean?” Donald demanded.
“I would not deign to touch any one of you putrid humans,” the demon said. “I am the Chance-Father, and the vice I oversee is anything but sexual. I am the Gambler King and the Keeper of the Wheel of Trials. Try to kill me if you will; none have succeeded and none can as long I observe the protocols. You hold no power over me unless I engage you. But I will not fight you, will not invite my own doom. But even so, you cannot pass me without facing three spins each of my wheel. If you are strong—or lucky—you may pass unharmed. Each must face his or fates alone. Each spin will bring either pleasure or pain, but both can be traps for the unwary.”
The strategy of the Avatars of Hedon had been so decidedly sexual in nature so far that no one spoke for many moments. The Paragons had expected to be plied with a vice, but gambling? And for what stakes? Megan led the way once more; she sensed a trap, and needed to test its power. She knew she was the strongest in her party, so she stepped forward.
“You will test me first.”
“Any order you please is fine with me, Vixen Mage. You are a trickster and deceiver, but the power of the Fox Renart will not serve you here. Neither Coyote nor Anansi the Spider. You twist words and wring power from them more effectively than any demon I know, but words will not prevail. You also call the angry wasps and hornets of the air among your animal totems, along with that trickster the raven. But neither will any wings carry you past me, even if you could sprout them from your shoulders. Behold the first spin!”
The massive, copper-colored wheel squealed a low, evil sound as it spun, then settled on some arcane symbol.
“Pain of Loss,” the Chance-Father declared, and touched the symbol. Megan felt the world fall away from her as the wheel created a sort of transient Hedge world; a temporary reality. She hadn’t left her spot, but she might as well have been hundreds of miles from her companions.
She was at the bedside of her dying mother. So many tubes and sensors attached to the emaciated woman. Megan could smell death on her; could sense how thin and how taut the line between her spirit and her body was. Any minute now, it would be over.
And I had so hoped to be able to be here for the end, Megan realized. I had feared she might die alone. And even if not alone, I didn’t want to be absent for her end.
“Megan,” he mother croaked feebly. “Give up the Art. It has brought nothing but pain to our family for generations. Give it up, stay with me, and live your life unburdened by things of Hell or Heaven.”
Megan bent over her mother, touched her forehead to that of the elder woman’s, and said, “But so many evils need to be addressed. So many questions need to be answered.”
“By someone else, Megan. By someone else. Don’t throw away your life. Just stay with me.”
Just stay with me.
Megan stiffened, pulled away, and snarled. Her mother was long dead. Years ago. And Megan had been absent, fighting God knows what or searching for Lord knows what, and her mother had died without her daughter by her side. Megan realized she didn’t even know who had been there, if anyone, and that shamed her more than anything. Had burdened her heart ever since.
My mother might have urged me to abandon the Art. Perhaps. But I’ve been lulled into this phantasm. In this sliver of a Hedge, Megan realized. I would stay for a death that would never come, until my enemies bound me or perhaps this phantom mother truly died, and dragged me with her.
Megan grabbed as many tubes as she could in one hand, and yanked them. Pulled out everything she could until the fake thing in the bed next to her flatlined.
“Weak, Chance-Father. Very weak,” Megan said, seeing that the wheel was already spinning for her second trial.
The Chance-Father said nothing in response to her taunt, but when the wheel stopped, he said “Joy of Achievement.”
Joy. Fortunate that the wheel is random, as joy seems a poor tool to take me down, Megan considered.
And then she was caught in this newest Hedge, separated from reality once more, Megan stood over a mage who lay prone on the floor. A practitioner of the blackest arts who had tried to pin a series of crimes on Megan. Someone who had tried to overpower Megan magically. A wicked and pitiful fool who had fallen. Megan’s 16-year-old heart sang with confidence and happiness.
I’m safe. I’m powerful. I can hold my own.
Something nagged at her, and she hovered in confusion, full of pride and joyous feelings of success, but realizing something was wrong. Realizing, in slow increments, that she wasn’t 16. That was long past, and this was an echo from her earlier days.
Something to be proud of though.
And once again, she was suffused with confidence and the pleasure of having overcome. Having defeated an enemy. Being strong and capable. Invulner…
She stopped short, dragged herself out of such thoughts. Trap. Pride and joy. But not like being someone’s “pride and joy.” Instead, a combination that would fill her up with herself, and nothing else, and crowd out thoughts of her comrades, the ones with her now in reality, and the other one they had lost.
It was hard to remember who she really was, but she did.
I’m cocky. I’m arrogant. I’m prideful. But I am not invincible. And I will retain that tiny shred of humility and vulnerability, no matter how galling, to remind myself of that. I will not lose myself in myself.
And then she stood before the wheel, watching the third and final spin, and hearing the words “Consuming passion” from the Chance-Father’s lips as her mind and spirit were swept up again.
Swept up into the arms of her first love; the first man to make her feel wanted and respected. The smell of a just smoked cigar was thick in the air and on his tongue, as they wrestle half naked across the bed. Such a masculine smell, along with his sweat and cologne. They kissed fiercely, and her nipples pressed into his own chest. This was the first time they had made love since he had declared his love for her, and it was the best sex she had ever enjoyed. Passion surrounded her, and filled her—and her mind remembered.
Three times. Third time. Last trial.
The temptation to stay here was strong. To repeat this sexual experience and this flood of love over and over. It was everything she had ever wanted a relationship and sex to be.
But I’ve had better sex since then, and people who loved me more—some of whom died for that love. But this lover—this first love—let me down in the end.
He had failed her over and over again. So much talk, and so little follow-through in the end.
Reality swam back into play for Megan, and she was near the veil now, past the Chance-Father, and her companions were next.
* * *
“I’ll face you next,” Donald said, as soon as he saw Megan on the other side. “Get it started.”
The Chance-Father smiled a truly evil grin, and spun the wheel, and Donald felt his confidence slip a bit, before he took a deep breath, straightened his spine, and reminded himself that he was no pushover.
“Sense of Failure,” the Chance-Father intoned, and Donald was in his apartment, recalling how he had left his brother’s hospital room in anger. How he had left his own kin with harsh words and ire. And then the call from his mother that Carl was dead.
I never had a chance to apologize. He wasn’t critical. He shouldn’t have died so suddenly. I needed time to reconcile. I would have done it tomorrow. I’ve failed my family. Does my mother know how I left Carl? Does she know how shameful I was?
Sadness tugged at him, and yawning chasm of regret lay open at the base of his mind, but Donald came up short. Refused to give in.
I’m human. I make mistakes. Time isn’t promised to us, and my brother knows my heart in the end, wherever his soul resides. I’ve given my love to many, platonically and otherwise. I’ve forgiven so many people. I have to believe that my brother forgave me, as I forgave him, and I will seek out successes, not dwell on failures.
Donald wasn’t surprised to see the wheel before him again, and then heard the words, “Pain of Loss” as Megan had on her first spin, and he was at the grave of his mother, feeling her absence keenly, and wondering at what things he had left unsaid—and undone—that he should have with her, rather than fight monsters and spirits.
He shook it off quickly, so close this was chronologically to the earlier trial of the wheel, and so close it was in theme. It was virtually a repeat, with emotions in different proportions but nearly the same flavor, and he said, “Give me a break. Life goes on and we remember our loved ones and continue,” and he was before the wheel again, looking at the Chance-Father scornfully.
“You need to work on your delivery,” he told the demon, as his foe looked down at the wheel, finishing its final spin.
“Agony of betrayal,” the fiend said, and Donald was caught in a new Hedge-world.
“If you were a better man, you wouldn’t have lost her to me,” Harry said, smugly.
Donald tried to recall how this man before him had ever been his best friend. He tried not to think how nice it would be to harm him with magic, openly now or secretly later. He tried to remember that he was losing his wife in part because he was gone so much, and so secretive. He had tried to keep her, like all his friends and family, free of the knowledge of the shadowy world in which he roamed.
But that had made her lonely, and his so-called best friend had comforted her.
And with a stack of divorce papers on a nearby table, delivered by the man who had stolen his wife, Donald was filled with anger. But worse, he was filled with pain. He’d lost two people dear to him in one fell swoop. He’d lost confidence and love and companionship. He’d earned himself a lopsided court settlement and lost much of what he owned, for the pleasure of risking his life against the Dark. Which was no pleasure at all.
Pain. He saw it everywhere, and now it consumed his own life, and it was a twin act of betrayal that had done that. Could he trust anyone now? Even himself?
Can I trust Megan?
The thought was random, and strange, and had nothing to do with the conversation he was having. Who was Megan?
“Just go, Harry, before I do something I’ll regret.”
“As if you were capable of it, Don,” he sneered as he left.
Having stolen his wife, now Harry stole his manhood. Betrayed any last shred of friendship. Offered neither apology nor support. He tried to take the last of what Donald was, to raze his life.
Alone now, Donald slumped, and wondered if he might simply be better off dead.
That would disappoint Megan.
The second time the name had popped into his head, and he began to drag himself back to his own mind, and current time. He had been a poor husband in some ways, but Diane had been a worse wife. She was rarely supportive. And Harry had been a user in the end; someone who was friendly when convenient. They’d both spared him greater pains later by severing themselves from him.
Donald lifted his head, opened his eyes, and looked into Megan’s face. Now only Kurt remained, and both he and Megan smiled. The Chance-Father wasn’t nearly as potent as he had made himself out to be, and they would be three strong against the next foe.
* * *
Kurt smiled, too, and said, “Well, let us finish this up.”
“Certainly. One thing you should always understand about gambling, though,” the Chance-Father said, glaring at the two victorious mages near the blood-red veil, and then turning his gaze back on Kurt, “is that the odds always favor the house. When they don’t, either the players are cheating, or the house is playing its own game.”
Megan felt a chill run through her. They had been played and she hadn’t seen the trap. The demon wanted to ensure that he got one of them, so he let two pass by, and now he had something up his sleeve for the last of them—not weak but the weakest of them in terms of power. The most flawed, perhaps.
The Chance-Father had guessed that at least one of the most powerful would be the first to go, Megan realized, and probably guessed that the two most powerful of the group would go first to give the last as much information to act on as possible. And in the end, that left the weakest behind, to face a game that was stacked against him.
Megan tried to move against the Chance-Father, but the magic of this place kept them from crossing back over to aid Kurt or get him away from the place. She hurled pneuma and death-words toward the demon, but her power dissolved into nothing before it reached him. That was when she realized the source of his protection; recognized what lay under the gambling wheel’s sigils and symbols from sketches in her family’s dusty old grimoires in the great library. Now that she’d had some time to examine it, she understood.
The gambling wheel wasn’t just a wheel. It was forged from a huge shield that had been carried by one of the giant Nephilim in the days of old. A magical artifact from a man-creature 30 feet high, born of the union of a Fallen One and a virgin priestess.
The Chance-Father didn’t even seem to notice her attempts to attack him, nor the attacks that Donald added to her own; the demon was intent on Kurt.
“Of course, gambling isn’t truly gambling, either,” the Chance-Father continued, his mouth widening into a huge grin, “when the house has fixed the wheel.”
Kurt paled visibly.
“I control where the wheel stops.”
Megan hung her head in shame.
“I control the strength of each trial.”
Donald simply crossed himself like any good child of a Catholic home, and prayed for Kurt.
“What are curses but an organized and directed form of bad luck, eh?” the Chance-Father taunted. “You’ve never personally been a victim of the ill fortune following like a plague behind you. That is about to change.”
Kurt shuddered, but looked the Chance-Father straight in the eye, defiant to the end.
“Time to pay the house what it is due, Pariah,” the demon declared.
* * *
Like Donald before him had with Megan, Kurt had pressed forth his mystical senses as both his comrades faced their trials. He knew they had faced events from their past that were intended to weaken and trap them.
The details were fuzzy, but he had sensed enough to know that much.
So when the wheel finished its first spin, and the Chance-Father said, “Consuming Passion,” Kurt expected that perhaps his late wife, or perhaps his first love, would visit him in his own little slice of Hedge reality.
No matter that you chose that result, demon, I can still overcome as my comrades have. You can make the trial stronger than you did with the others, but the Old Laws prevent you from making it impossible to defeat.
But Kurt realized that he was not being shunted into some fringe reality. His perceptions were unaltered. His position unchanged. But the air before him shimmered and swirled. Seemed to become smoke, like some translucent cloud. A form appeared there, shapely and alluring. A naked woman.
A naked demon.
A succubus was stepping forth, and Kurt readied a curse to attack her, but he had already met her eyes, so warm and loving. His focus became sloppy, and she pinched her turgid nipples, smiled a wanton smile, and licked her full and kissable lips with a wet, long tongue. Filmy, flimsy wings at her back fluttered, sending a breeze toward him that smelled of lavender and vanilla and a woman’s sex.
He reeled, and she embraced him. She stripped him naked, slowly, licking his throat and murmuring her appreciation of his body. She kissed her way down his naked body, and promised him all possible pleasures if he would simply become her slave.
Kurt kissed her back. He held back a bit, but couldn’t resist. Her hand cupped his balls gently and then her mouth worked his cock, and the other hand teased his nipples to hardness.
Moaning, Kurt lay back, and writhed as the succubus pleasured him and urged him to surrender. She told him again, to simply give himself. To tell her to whom he belonged. To belong to her.
Then Kurt saw Megan and Donald, and remembered Rachel. He recalled how passion had snared her, and how he had helped doom her to that. Revulsion began to rise in his throat, and he poured forth his senses to perceive all the spiritual foulness that the beautiful body on top of him hid, and he looked at the succubus, long and hard.
Her touch and smell were still wondrous. She remained gorgeous physically. But his mind reeled at the hellish things she truly intended and the depths to which she would sink to doom any mortal. And to her, he wasn’t some worthy adversary; just another mortal to destroy.
“Suffer,” he said as he kissed her deeply, feeling bile in his throat and sending forth a curse.
She writhed in pain, but was more insistent and determined that he had guessed. Pain and nausea wracked her and sores broke out on her skin, but she continued to kiss him and then tell him how sweet and desirable he was, even though the pain, while she stroked him tenderly and lasciviously. Her voice was still honey, as she felt agonies across her flesh and throughout her body. She slipped her cunt onto his cock, still stubbornly erect, and rode him slowly and wetly.
Kurt poured more pain into her, feeling guilty at doing so and wanting to please her, and then shook off his confusion, poured everything he had into another curse, and the succubus pulled away, shrieking, and scuttled back through her portal.
Gasping and wheezing, Kurt looked at the Chance-Father and said, “I am not weak. I will not fall before you.”
“No, perhaps not before me, Pariah,” the demon answered. “But you will fall. And you will fall here. He moved the wheel with his hand, rather than spinning it, and set it upon his goal, and said, “Horrific Monotony.”
This time, Kurt’s mind was swept aside, but into a Hedge that held not stolen memories but a seemingly endless expanse of darkness so dark he couldn’t even see himself. There was nothing to feel here; nothing to touch. There were no sounds and no scents. No tastes. Kurt tried to clap his hands, and felt nothing and heard nothing. He could neither feel nor taste his skin with his tongue.
Kurt doubted more than a few minutes had passed, but it already seemed like years. He despaired over the centuries and millennia of boredom and madness that lay before him. Total sensory depravation.
He panicked, and wanted to thrash around, but couldn’t even feel if he were doing do. He couldn’t scream, or if he did, he neither felt his vocal cords work nor heard himself. He couldn’t even tell if he were breathing.
Kurt struggled, but then paused and struggled deeper into himself instead, deep into his mind. He remembered was sensation felt like, and painstakingly created, piece by piece, a room in him mind, furnished and full of scents and sounds. Clothes and sensations. A meal to eat. He forced himself to make a world in this empty Hedge, all the way down to remembering what food felt like going down his throat, and what satiation felt like. Then the voiding of his bladder, which he did on his imaginary floor.
Kurt imagined sensations and actions that he would never consider in real life, and overloaded his imaginary world with recalled sensations, some of them that didn’t even make sense together, until the Hedge crumbled around him.
Shivering and sweating, naked and worn, Kurt looked up at the Chance-Father, and lifted himself up off the floor.
“This time, at least pretend to spin the wheel, you boorish piece of dung,” Kurt said, grimacing.
“Why not?” the Chance-Father said, and spun it hard and fast, letting it spin for several minutes and gloating over Kurt’s weakened state. When the wheel stopped, the Chance-Father didn’t look down. He simply smiled, because he knew where it had landed, and Kurt closed his eyes in dismay, having seen where it did. Knowing that the Chance-Father had done precisely what Kurt feared he would after depriving him of sensation and satisfaction.
“Oh, look, it landed there again, so soon. Imagine that,” the Chance-Father said. “Consuming passion.”
Kurt had expected a succubus again, but what he saw instead was a veil of cloaking dissipate to reveal a female form that had apparently been here all along, ready and waiting for him. A Winter Wife. She looked every bit like a woman, except for her pale skin, and ice-blue eyes, and hair like silky silvery tinsel. Lips argent and shimmering.
A Winter Wife could not leave the immediate vicinity of the place she was, unless she could find a mate. But she was like a vampire in a sense, drawing the heat and life out of any man she loved and tried to claim. He might last minutes, or even hours, but he would die, and she would be trapped again, in the vicinity of the place he had died. And there, Kurt saw, the bones behind her and underneath her, as she rose up and approached him.
Hungrily.
Possessively.
Kurt tried to raise a curse, but she was exuding a kind of sexual rapacity and overwhelming emotional need that the succubus hadn’t. He felt such a strong desire to woo her and win her. To ease her pain. To give her the companionship she needed. Part of him rebelled and struggled, but he was already so weak, and she was so potent.
She was before him before he could shape his attack, and her hand was on his cheek, cold and shocking, and then her lips on his. She kissed him and he shivered, but not just with cold. There was such strong desire there, too.
Touching her was uncomfortable, but also so rewarding. Being kissed and held by her was filling his heart and mind with love, and his cock swelled, and he slid into her frigid sex. Pain and such exquisite pleasure all at once.
He was cold, but some of the heat seemed to be driven deep inside him, even as he felt most of it drained away. His magic was flowing deep to preserve his life, and he felt the Winter Wife laughing in his mouth as she kissed him. A laugh that held mocking in it, but more than that, joy and satisfaction. She was happy with this choice of mate, even as she was gleefully willing to subvert his will and steal his life.
Kurt’s cock slid deep inside her, and his balls contracted and throbbed, and her mouth owned his and the scent of pine and fresh snowfall filled his nostrils. Her sex smelled of sap and moss, but it exerted no less pull on him for being so. It enflamed his passions more than any woman he had known. She was already his wife more than his previous one had been. She owned his heart—beating slower now—and his soul—bound more and more to hers, and hardly even his own at all now.
He continued to penetrate her—in and out gently and lovingly, but with a powerful and underlying passion—his penis as hard with arousal as it was with being half-frozen.
His skin pallid, now, his lips tinged blue, and his eyes with a milky sheen, almost like glaucoma. But he could still move, and feel, and see. But all of his senses were for his cold and loving wife.
Chilling arms, soft yet also unyielding, wrapped him in a frozen embrace. Her body was a tundra that he must traverse, sliding his skin against it, crawling through a world both fertile and frozen. Ripe and heady, but stark and cruel, too.
Kurt felt his heart stop, and his lungs as well, and his blood was something cold and sluggish, no longer human, in his veins. His magic had been turned inward toward him, to change him. Even as his life was taken—his warmth and his humanity—a new kind of pseudo-life was given back, in a way that couldn’t have happened with a normal human. But in a human with proficiency in the Art, suffused with sorcery, and living under a constant curse anyway, what more perfect thing to turn into a being not quite alive and not quite dead, and cursed and blessed to be forever loved by the Winter Wife?
A tongue like a sheet of ice filled Kurt’s mouth, and scratched at him as cold lips pressed against him and frigid fingers kneaded his firm and chilly flesh. He came, a fluid slushy and thick bursting from him and filling his wife’s cunt with something like half-frozen gel, spilling forth, covering her thighs and his crotch in frosty, sticky, iridescent globules.
She broke their kiss and laughed out loud, “I’m free! I’m mated! My forever-love, forever-slave! Free!”
And what horrified Megan and Donald the most, even more so than how arousing both had found the whole shocking affair, was the brittle, frozen laugh that issued forth from the mouth of what was once Kurt DeLaCroix—the Pariah—so totally in synchronicity with the Winter Wife. So totally in league with her goals.
Leading her new husband by the hand—one who looked to have a very long existence ahead of him—the Winter Wife went down a side passage into deep darkness. Free. To wander. To drain lives. To work vileness. And with a mystically powered man trapped in undeath, and bound to her, to help her work it.
* * *
The air was chill, and not just with the presence and passion and passage of the Winter Wife and her first true mate in millennia.
It was also cold with fury.
Both Megan and Donald were angry, at themselves as much as the demon. But Megan was most angry of the two. She hadn’t loved Kurt, but they had shared enough intimate moments for her to mourn his passing, and while he had always been a self-obsessed bastard, he had always watched her back in a fight. He hadn’t deserved this, and the Infernal Ones here didn’t deserve to have his power at their disposal, controlled by a now-unfettered Winter Wife.
The games were done, and the two remaining Paragons had beat them fair and square, rigged though they had been. Even with his control of the wheel, the Chance-Father would have been hard-pressed now to overcome her, or even Donald. But that had never been his goal, and probably still wasn’t.
With Kurt beaten and the game over, she could sense the subtle shift in the protections shielding the demon man. Their part was fulfilled, they were no longer bound so tightly against harming their foe. Megan bit her tongue, hard, and tasted blood. Spit, breath and blood were a potent combination for a pneumatist, and she spat out her power toward the Chance-Father’s wards with a bitter cry of “Yield!” and her blood and spittle, along with her words, struck home like an armor piercing bullet.
The magical barriers shattered, not with sound but with spirit-wrenching vibrations that caught Donald unprepared, since he hadn’t even anticipated Megan’s attack against the demon so quickly. He stumbled against a wall and tried to gather himself to help, but Megan wasn’t waiting.
“Yield!” she shouted again at the Chance-Father. Her breath was streaming out of her like smoke. It was tinged red with anger and blood. Her words carried power. The demon before her didn’t kneel, but his legs visibly shook before he righted himself. But Megan’s anger was only growing with her fury, and she gathered every bit of it into her attack.
“Yield!” she repeated, and then shouted, “Kneel!” Her words and breath visibly buffeted the demon, and he stumbled to the ground. It wasn’t lost on her that he seemed not to be defending himself at all anymore, but she had no time to ponder that. Donald noticed it, too, and wondered why. Megan was clearly building toward a kill, yet the demon raised no real defenses now.
The Chance-Father’s robes opened a bit as he kneeled before Megan, revealing his crotch…where both the Paragons noticed the ruin where his penis once was. The testicles mostly remained, but only the barest scarred stub of his manhood was visible.
An old memory rose up in Megan. Instead of hurling death at the demon, Megan shifted gears at the last moment, and hissed “Grovel, dog!” forcing the Chance-Father almost on his back, only the wall behind him and a last shred of his own fierce dignity keeping him from rolling over and cowering before his attacker.
“My father…” Megan said.
“Yes,” the demon responded.
“…did that to you,” she finished, in a tone that suggested a very personal reason, an enduring pain and grudge she left unspoken in the air. “New job, eh” she sneered. “Never were able to grow back your cock to rape children you lured to the Between-Realms? Got reassigned to being a casino dealer for Hell after losing the job of Dream-Thief when my father bested you?”
There seemed to be no more fight left in the Chance-Father. “Your sire cursed that part of me mightily before he burned it away and left me to suffer. Not only will it not grow it back, I cannot even manufacture desire from control or fear or anything else. Nothing arouses me. No more babes for me to ravish, no more satisfaction from taking innocence from the young. I don’t even gain any emotional satisfaction from what I’ve done to you here today with the wheel. I’m empty and have been for a long time.”
“Do you expect pity, fucker?” Donald spat.
“No,” Megan answered for the demon. “He wants death. He won’t admit it; he dare not. But I sense it, now. Tricky fucking wanker. He wants us to kill him. No doubt he’s been promised restoration in Hell and all sorts of wicked rewards for doing his part here to lead us along the next step in this trap. But killing himself would be a sign of weakness. Hell would never reward a sniveling coward. But to be killed in battle, oh that would end his suffering well and quickly and let him go on to his rewards, wouldn’t it?”
“So you’re going to let him live,” Donald said. The Chance-Father’s eyes widened, and fear began to gather there.
Power still surrounded Megan in a cocoon both visible and unseen, both airy and palpable. Pulsing with power yet unleashed.
“If you call it life,” she muttered, gathering breath. The Chance-Father looked ready to put up a fight again, knowing his ruse had been revealed, but he was too weak now; too slow, and Megan said four words with such conviction that they affected not just the demon but the world around her, leaving Donald physically unable to move for several moments and slowing time itself a fraction for the next few minutes.
The Chance-Father began to gasp as he heard those words, not having been prepared for this kind of attack. For Megan said simply, “Be Bound, and Exist” and as those words carried her intent upon him like a wave, he fell back and flowed into the dingy walls, trapped utterly. Half intact, half melted. Completely aware. Completely sealed. Unable to die. And for his weakness in the end, for having let Megan overcome him and outwit him like this, it was unlikely any of his comrades would give the release of death, the Vixen Mage realized—and that was precisely the reason she had done this.
“Now you have no job at all, bastard,” she said to the ruined thing before her, tongue fused to the wall and only one lazy eye exposed to look upon her. “No children to harm, no wheels to spin. No real life. No duty. Except to suffer alone with nothing, until the world ends.”
Both she and Donald looked around for Kurt, but the Winter Wife had already quickly led him away. If they were to find and save him, or Rachel for that matter, they needed to defeat their remaining enemies.
Almost as an afterthought, as a final taunt to the demon trapped in the room, Donald wrote a short, glowing memorial on the wall across from the fiend so that he could read it for the rest of his life: Here Lies the Dream-Thief Turned Chance-Father. Not So Much a Fiend as a Failure and a Coward to the End. The demon’s one remaining eye shifted toward Donald with malice, but it was a completely impotent gesture, and only made him look more pitiful.
Knowing that a trap lay ahead, but not knowing what, and too committed to turn back now, the remaining two Paragons rent open the red veil of power, and stepped into another passage, one long enough to give them time to recover some of their energy, but also long enough to let them consider how much they had miscalculated. How much they had already lost.
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