~~Mia~~

The buzz didn’t go away. Adron and Hannah eventually left, leaving Mia with Kas, and the buzz continued. Whatever had been in the demon’s heart, it settled her hunger and made her feel alive. It made her want to get more. It made her want to sink her teeth into more meat, more flesh, and this time drink down the blood.

“Can you feel that?” she asked. She sat on the giant table on the raised half of her bedroom, legs dangling off the side, and faced toward the other half of the room. Kas crouched on the floor below, beside her pile of leather blankets. Up here, she could look down at him, a vantage point she’d never really enjoyed before.

Kas pointed his eyeless shark head up at her, clicked once in his throat, a hard cluck sort of sound, and nodded.

“What’s it feel like?”

After a few seconds pause, the shark dinosaur tapped a claw on the floor.

“Your aura is telling me to…” He paused again, and looked down. Embarrassed? “I don’t know. I feel… energy.” Okay not embarrassed, just confused, same as her.

“That’s what I’m feeling, yeah. I feel like I could go run a mile, climb a tree, do a slam dunk, and do some parkour.” And go a few rounds in the ring, sex or fighting.

Kas didn’t respond.

“You don’t watch scrying pools a lot like the others, do you?”

He slowly shook his head and clucked once in his throat.

That was it. Or at least, part of it, why he felt so different to Adron. Much as Adron was an eight-foot-tall demon, he talked a lot like a human. Did they have scrying pools down in the hatching pit? Probably, considering how smoothly he talked in human terms.

Kas wasn’t like that. Kas was a demon, the kind stories about demons painted in her head, or at least one of the kinds. Violent, angry, full of rage. Maybe someone she could practice her psych skills on?

“Kas,” she said. “I… noticed you don’t really talk to the other demons, or hang out with them. The ones in the dens seemed to know you, but they were all scared of you.” Awesome as it’d been seeing a bunch of demons afraid of her bodyguard, it also meant Kas didn’t have many friends. Did demons even want friends? A good reason for the conversation, to learn more about demons, and her bodyguard.

“They are afraid of me.”

“Oh. Because you’re one of Zel’s enforcers?”

He slowly nodded, and aimed his head toward her closed door. But he didn’t say anything else. Getting him to open up about even the tiniest thing was going to be like pulling teeth.

Maybe it didn’t have to be? Some therapists used soothing background music, specific colors for their walls, decor like plants, and even scents and incense, to create an environment where patients could open up. Therapy was always tough on the patient. It was like visiting a dentist and asking them to poke the painful cavity, with the eventual goal of fixing the cavity so they could chew food again. But dentists had local anesthetic to make that less painful. Therapists had nothing but the environment and their words.

She was different. She had this weird crazy aura thing. Not only that, Zel told her to practice it, too.

How to do this how to do this. The strange, tiny vibration in her heart almost felt like… like… a vibrating string? Or a vibrating instrument? She couldn’t grab and force it to do what she wanted, like the demons did with their sin auras. So, run with the instrument analogy, then.

She visualized the strange sensation in her heart, and tried plucking it like a string, or blowing on it like a wind instrument. Nothing. But, maybe… if she could feel what she wanted to do, and not just visualize…

She wanted to create an aura of openness. She wanted Kas to not be on guard all the time. She wanted him to relax.

She remembered an acting class she took in high school, about feeling emotions. She pictured the emotion, visualized it. Felt it. She moved her fingers, touched air, and found… it.

Bingo. It was there, in the emotion. She had to hunt it, find it, and pull it up out of herself. Like, playing an instrument, except the instrument was herself?

Kas visibly changed. His crouching position settled, and instead he sat in a classic cat pose, on his butt with arms straight down in front of him between his knees.

She smiled. “How’d you become an enforcer, Kas?” Okay so this was a little manipulative. But it was important.

He said nothing for a few seconds, but eventually pointed his head up at her.

“I killed a lot of demons, in the hatching pit. I killed a lot of demons outside the hatching pit.”

“A lot? I thought demons killing demons was a normal thing.”

“It is. I killed more.”

Yeesh. A chill ran up her spine, along with the memory of Kas holding out his hand up high, and cracking the neck of a vrat, while a dead tiger lady hung off one of his horns. She banished the sensation and emotion quickly. If this weird aura of hers required her to control her emotions and play them like an instrument, she had to get good at ignoring other emotions.

Physically moving one of her fingers, she plucked an invisible string while envisioning them as best she could. It resonated, and the vibration flowed out of her. It wasn’t so much that her emotion controlled the aura, but… something… close… It was almost like there was something around her, something she needed to be in the right state of mind to touch, to feel, to hear. The demon heart had jolted her awareness of it, and the more she felt for the vibration, the more it felt like instead of being controlled by her emotions, the weird vibration ran parallel to them.

It wasn’t exactly coming out of her, but… was localized around her? She’d never been one for writing in a diary, but now was definitely the kind of situation that needed it. Drifting through fog in search of some mysterious magical force she could sense but couldn’t smell, touch, taste, hear, or see, was frustrating. Yoda would have had trouble with this.

She took a deep breath.

“I wanted to ask about something, Kas. And don’t answer if you don’t want to. But, when you confronted Darrilius, it seemed… kind of personal.”

He growled, low and deep, like a singing crocodile.

“He was scum.”

“Scum?”

“A murdering bastard who deserved far better than I gave him.”

“I mean, I get that he was pretty horrible, but… Don’t take offense, but I kinda got the impression a lot of demons were like that? And I mean, it makes sense, with the way you were born and raised, and the way your food source is all horrible people.” Just saying it made her wince. Hannah was in Hell, too, but she’d changed. Surely other people had, too? Then again, how many didn’t change, and were just horrible people through and through, and those were the only people by far and large demons interacted with?

She’d been in Hell one week. She’d need to live here a year or more to come to any sort of accurate conclusion, at least. Ha, one week and she was already back in university mode, putting together a paper for her psych class.

“Yes. A lot of demons are like him. Most.”

“Oh.” She climbed down the giant table onto one of the giant bone chairs, hopped off, and sat on the edge of the raised section of her bedroom. Like a little mini cliff, maybe five feet high. “You… don’t like that?”

He growled again, louder this time. “Demons are scum. They deserve death.”

Oh. Oh shit. Mia climbed down the mini cliff and walked up to her bodyguard.

“You don’t like demons… in general?”

Another grumble made her take a step back, but he didn’t follow it up with anything. This was like trying to convince a wild animal she wasn’t a threat.

“Demons are bloodthirsty, and suicidally violent. They are mindless. They give into their urges willingly, and…” He tucked into the corner of her room near the door, faced the door, pulled his tail around in front of him, and gently swept it her way. She tried to stand her ground, but his tail alone weighed more than she did, and the giant thing nudged her further back.

“Kas?”

“Leave me be.”

Yeap, she’d pushed too hard, too far, too fast. It was nice to know there was more to her bodyguard than a quiet mountain of meat obeying orders, but she wasn’t sure learning he was full of hate for his own race was much better. He was dangerous in a way she hadn’t really considered.

“Just, one more question. Humans. What do you think of humans? And not the humans down here in Hell. I mean, you must have seen a scrying pool before, right? What do you think of most humans?”

If he noticed she was basically asking what he thought about her, he didn’t say.

“Humans are…” Lowering his head, he let out a long sigh. “Stop it.”

“I—”

“The aura. Stop it.”

She winced and took another step back. “Sorry! Sorry. I… just wanted to get to know you, that’s all.”

“Why?”

She tilted her head to the side. “Why?”

He nodded.

She didn’t see this coming. Why did she want to know about him? How could she not want to know about him? Didn’t everyone want to know at least a little about the people they were around all the time? Humans did, anyway. Humans, even hyper introverted types, had at least a small desire to socialize a tiny bit, even only limited to the people in their immediate vicinity they had to interact with on a frequent, daily basis. Kas and Mia fit that mold.

She found the strings inside her, and muted them. The aura quieted, the vibration of the strings died, and it stopped flowing out of her into the world around her. Kas visibly tightened up again, muscles flexing lightly, posture hunkering back and down like an animal ready to pounce. His usual body posture, the ‘I’m ready to stab anyone with my horns like I did that bitch tregeera’ posture.

“I wanted to… get to you know, that’s all.”

He rumbled, a little louder than was probably good, but after a few deadly moments of silence, he clucked in his throat.

“I asked, why?”

“Because! Because we’re around each other all the time, and far as I know, it’s going to stay that way for a while. I bet Zel has other demons watching me and protecting me, more than you and Adron, but you’re the only who has to be around me twenty-four-seven. And you… you have sex with me. Adron too, but he’s happy to talk. You’re not. And I… I demand to know something about the demon who’s been fucking my ass!” She ended the increasingly loud rant with a hearty stomp of her foot.

More silence followed, until the strangest thing happened, a unique noise she’d accepted she’d never hear. Kas laughed. A rumbling, deep sound, that almost sounded like a dolphin clicking except played a hundred times slower. It lasted a whole two seconds, and left Mia staring in amazement.

“No demon would ask to learn more about another.”

“They wouldn’t?”

“No.”

“Not even Adron?”

Kas shook his head. “Don’t misunderstand the vratorin. He enjoys interacting with humans. That’s it.”

“But… not you?”

He shrugged. “We trust each other. Mostly.”

She matched his apathy by folding her arms across her chest. Unfortunately, she knew herself well enough to know apathy was an emotional state she could never achieve, and she probably had a big frown on. And somehow, Kas and his dragon snout mouth managed a small smile.

“Trusting each other,” she said, “is enough to feel comfortable fucking the same girl, at the same time?”

“More than enough.” He licked some of his teeth. “Trust is hard to come by between demons.”

She scrunched up her nose, but slowly relented. “I guess… that means a lot to demons, doesn’t it?”

“It does. Zel trusts no one. Not Saldavin, not me or Adron, and not Gorlus, wherever he’s gone.”

“Zel doesn’t trust you? But she…” She did more than pick Kas to be her bodyguard. She joined him, and Adron, the first time they’d fucked Mia. Forever the oddly beautiful, alien-like queen of Death’s Grip would be in Mia’s memories, her hands on Mia’s body, as Adron and Kas stretched her for the first time. And Zel didn’t trust either of those men? “I suppose… demons sleep with a knife under their pillow, don’t they?”

“I’ve heard that expression before. What does it mean?”

“It means you never feel safe.”

He clicked once and nodded.

“So,” she said, “are you willing to tell me anything about yourself? I can tell you about me.”

He snorted. “If it will shut you up.”

She couldn’t tell if he was serious, or was being a playful jerk, like Adron would. Either way, progress, even without her aura.

“I was a university student when I died. I’m nineteen years old. I—”

“Young.”

“Yes! Young! Remember that next time you do things to me, asshole.” She kicked the giant tail sitting on the floor in front of her. Barefoot as she was, and Kas’s tail being as big as her entire body, heavier than her entire body, and skin almost solid black, she might as well have kicked the tires of a bulldozer. “I like reading. I like psychology. I write a little, but I know I have a habit of falling into stupid romance tropes, so I always throw away what I write and try again. Guilty pleasure, I know. I… have a large sex drive, as you and Adron noticed.” Not to mention everyone else in Hell. “And I fell over randomly died eating breakfast. Like, dead dead, almost instantly. Me and… yeah, died.” Shit, all this talk about trust and now she felt guilty not telling him about David. “Lots of pain for ten seconds, and then I was gone. The doctors couldn’t figure out what happened, either.”

Kas slowly tilted his head from one side to the other. Actually, he rotated it, like a confused dog.

“Boring.”

“Ha, yeah, it was. I mean, I liked it, my simple little life.” With her crazy monster dildos and vibrators with extra attachments. Mental note: remember to check out a scrying pool and see if the university students ever found out about her toy collection, because a girl’s life just wasn’t complete without a daily dose of embarrassment and neuroticism. “I wanted to become a psychologist.”

Kas waited, and said nothing. No reason to not continue, then.

“A uh, psychologist, is someone who helps people, in here.” She tapped her temple. “Because, you know, people can be pretty fucked in the head, right? Maybe they’ve had a traumatic experience as a child that’s left them unable to be around dogs, or walk across bridges. Or maybe they had a physically abusive dad, or emotionally abusive mother, sometimes even vice versa, and that’s left a lot of mental scars they need help identifying and overcoming. Maybe… maybe I’m speaking an alien language and you don’t understand what I’m saying.”

The shark dinosaur rumbled quietly. “I understand, but they are not problems demons have.”

“Really?” She eyed him, and nudged his tail again. “You seem to have some issues with your fellow demons.”

That may have been a bit too much. Without the aura, poking the bear was dangerous. Sure enough, Kas let out a slow, deep rumble, and she took a step back again. Ground lost.

“Explain.”

Oh thank god, actual communication. Ground gained.

“Well, I mean, with humans we have this problem where our pasts affect our ability to make rational decisions. They color our ability to see reality in certain situations. Our objectivity goes out the window.”

Kas rumbled again, deeper and louder. Yeap, he was back in the dentist chair and she was poking a cavity.

“Are you saying demons are not what I warn you they are?”

“No! No, I get that. I’ve seen enough shit to believe you. But it’s important to keep an open mind and examine new information whenever we can. Maybe not all demons are horrible? Maybe… not everyone has to sleep with a knife under their pillow all the time? A little trust, spread around? Could go a long way.”

And of course, he laughed again, though this time it was a short snort of disbelief.

“I—” He shut up and looked to the door. It opened a second later.

“Mia,” Zel said, dressed in some red silks but none of her chains. She didn’t look happy. “How goes your tests of your aura?”

“I uh… umm, I think I’ve gotten better? I can do stuff, but it’s still very weird.”

“Wonderful. And the runes in your mind?”

The runes, oh shit. She’d been so distracted with all the sex and the heart eating and Vinicius, she hadn’t even thought about the runes.

“I—”

“She’s been busy,” Kas said. “I fed her. There’s been progress with her aura.”

“Is that so?” Zel eyed the shark dinosaur for a moment, before gesturing to Mia. “Come with me.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Back in the dungeon deep in the spire, under the surface of Hell. Mia did a better job this time, not looking at the other prisoners or their skeletons, and even managed to cover her ears and block out some of the noise. This was the sort of stuff she was trying to talk to Kas about, the sort of stuff that would give any human some nasty PTSD and lead to weird behaviors. The fact it was Hell and the humans, and probably the demons too, did maybe kinda sorta deserve maybe some, a little bit, a pinch of the torture they received, did lessen the horribleness of it. A bit.

Zel had them in the deep cell with Vinicius once again, with Kas waiting outside. Like before, Vinicius was still chained, a dozen giant chains holding his colossal mass to a metal wall. Four arms, raptor feet, a big tail with spikes along the back, and big horns on his dragon head. Big black spikes came out of his joints, and the chains hooked over them, too. If the creature tried to move too much, he might break a spike, or maybe rip one out of a joint.

Worst of all, a chain wrapped around his snout. Being bound and gagged was horrible, but Adron told her this beast, this child of the Old Ones, was a savage brute who relished in violence. A berserker, who thrived on spreading death and destruction. Seeing him tied up didn’t feel so bad anymore.

Well, she did still feed bad, but she knew she was dumb and had a soft spot for shit like this.

“Hello, old friend,” Zel said, and she stood tall in front of the beast. But no matter how high the giant woman stood, she still seemed petite compared to the imprisoned titan. “Did you enjoy our last visit?”

Mia, standing a few feet behind Zel, peeked around the woman’s leg and up at the child of Belial. Vinicius looked at her, and his red demon eyes struck her still. There was life in those eyes, awareness, something more than just a mindless brute. Or, that was her stupid empathetic brain lying to her. Draw a smiley face on a rock and she could empathize with it.

“S-Sorry…” Mia said.

Zel looked down to her. “Sorry?”

“I… I uh… I was…”

“Mia, my pet, do not apologize for obeying my orders. Vinicius understands if you disobey me, I will torture you within an inch of your life.” Nodding, Zel pressed her chest and silks up against his chest again, but considering how tall the beast was, they mostly pressed against his upper abs. “Isn’t that right, old friend?”

Old friend? Mia blinked up at Vinicius, and the monster held her gaze for a moment before turning it to Zel. Rage built up in his eyes, and a heavy earthquake rumble vibrated out from his chest.

“Come now Vinicius, don’t be like that. If only you would obey, I could make your life here so much more enjoyable.” She gestured down to Mia. “I would share my pet with you.”

“W-What?”

Zel giggled and smiled down at her. “Come now. You know you’d like to see if you could fit this delicious creature inside your body.”

Mia held out her hands, indicating size, length, and girth, the same as she had Hannah, which of course only made Zel laugh

“Pretty sure it’d kill me.”

“Nonsense. We would take our time, stretch you slowly, and only sink you as deep as you could handle. Nice, and slow… at first.” With a wicked grin, Zel traced a claw down the bound monster’s absurd abs. “Adron has told me more about your sexual bouts, Mia. He insists there is something special about your body.”

“Special?”

“Mhmm. I thought it mere weakness at first, that he could not last long when fucking you. But he insists your insides feel different, and that your body is quite ready to take his length quickly each time. He tells me it took Hannah many months to achieve that.”

Mia squirmed. “He uh… he said that?” Knowing Adron, Zel was being more elegant than what that asshole had said. The bastard had probably said something like ‘she has the tightest, most amazing pussy’. Though, based on the exact words Zel used, he also implied Mia could stretch to fit him easily? Now she wasn’t sure if to be complimented or insulted.

“I bet, with time, we could fit Vinicius inside you.” She licked her lips, pressed her back and side into the nook of Vinicius’s arms and his chest, and made a deliberate showing of running her two closer hands and their claws down his stomach some more. “Very slowly spread you open, further and further apart, until you’re near to bursting. Only then would his girth fit into you. And then I would push you down onto him, nice and slow, until you are whimpering for mercy, your belly bulges, and you struggle to breathe, insides full, quivering with bliss.”

Mia gulped. If she was Zel’s pet, and Zel was fantasizing about this, it was pretty much guaranteed Zel would make the attempt. And sure, Mia’s sex drive was going a little crazy right now, what with that demon heart sending a buzz through her, and very much liked the idea of Zel using her as a sex toy and turning her into a fleshlight for Vinicius. But the small part of her brain that still managed to work was a little more concerned about her exploding like an overblown balloon.

“But—”

“But, that is not the goal tonight,” Zel said. Oh thank god. “Trouble brews, and I cannot gamble upon the runes we discovered having any value to me. Tonight, we will try something else. Or rather, you shall.” Zel stepped back. “Craft for me an aura.”

“Craft one?”

“Adron has mentioned your abilities grow, and Kasimiro confirmed. So, you shall test your ability to craft a nuanced aura.”

“But, what if I can’t?”

“I believe you can.” Zel stepped back from the beast, and walked away. With a graceful flare, she leaned back against the wall on the opposite side of the square room, folded her four arms across her chest, and smiled. “There are stories, fresh meat. Ancient stories, about the auras found on the battlefield in the first war. Demons today can only craft auras of violence and lust. With the power of the spire, I can craft auras that guide a horde toward a goal, but even that aura, more nuanced as it is, is still an aura of violence. But the old tales mention the auras of old, of the strange sensations demons felt in the presence of the Old Ones, and even Lucifer themself.”

“They had… different auras?”

“Indeed. The tales also mention the auras of Heaven, though not in detail.”

“The auras of Heaven. Like… Like I felt on the stairway, in front of the gate of Heaven. I felt calm, and happy. I felt good, and I knew it wasn’t coming from me.”

Zel’s smile grew. “We know little of the powers of our ancient kin, only that they waged war on a scale grand and beyond our appreciation. The angels that pester my skies are but insects compared to the angels of the First War. The Old Ones, Lucifer, the greater angels, and perhaps even Lucifer’s true kin, used auras to influence the world around them.” Smile gone, now replaced with a wicked grin, Zel gestured to Mia. “It makes me wonder what you truly are, one who can read the ancient language.”

Mia gulped again, but couldn’t get rid of the boulder in her throat.

“I… don’t know.”

“Neither do I, my pet. We will find out together. For now, attempt to craft an aura of control.”

“But you’re in the room. Won’t it affect you?”

“Perhaps. But I am well fed, and free. Vinicius is bound and drained.” Zel licked a fang as she set her playful eyes on Mia. “If you can break me, then by all means little soul, try.”

Say one thing for Zel, she was confident and perfectly willing to do things with her own two—er, four hands. Admirable, if she wasn’t also a power hungry, dangerous person.

Mia nodded, and did her best to banish the sexy mental image Zel had put in her a minute ago. Not easy. Zel was hot, and huge. Vinicius was hot, and utterly gigantic. Little Mia, getting used by Zel like a toy on one of the bound beast’s cocks? Even if it couldn’t work physically, it was still a hot image, and tiny tingles of lust crept up Mia’s thoughts. But that wasn’t what they were here for, and Mia squeezed her eyes shut tight as she forced herself to think about the goal.

They were going to control this brute, this berserker, this creature who’d spent who knew how many decades ripping and tearing other demons and humans into piles of meat. It wasn’t hard to piece together something was wrong in Death’s Grip, and Zel needed Mia to figure out if this goal of hers was possible asap. Gorlus was missing, and supposedly so were a few others. Danger was on the horizon, and whatever it was, it was going to be a problem.

Mia was pretty good under pressure, at university. She didn’t panic. She buckled down and got things done.

Now she was panicking.

“I uh… I don’t know if I can.”

“Kasimiro says you’ve made progress.”

“I have! I know I have. But it’s… it’s like trying to play an instrument, I guess, except how I’m feeling affects the instrument. And the instrument isn’t really… in me, I think. My fingers plucking the strings are, but the thing I’m plucking isn’t?” Her shoulders slumped and she stared at the floor. “I don’t know if I can get… authoritative, I guess?”

Zel tapped her chin a few times before she sauntered over to Mia, gently moved her to stand in front of Vinicius, and squatted down behind her. Even squatting, she was still taller than Mia, and she set her two higher hands on Mia’s shoulders.

“Picture this, then, little soul. You, sitting upon a throne, with a host of demons at your beck and call. A crown sits upon you brow. A princess of sorts. Your servants bring you silks from the Scar province. Succubi and incubi try them on for you. Devorjin and tregeera guard you, ready to die for you. This beast, yours to control and bound by a leash”— she gestured to the leash she had hanging on a hook behind them—“kneels beside you, ready to kill at your command.”

“A princess?” Ah shit, she said the magic word. A world flashed before Mia’s eyes, her wearing a pretty dress and sitting on a fancy throne in a big castle. The castle could be old stone, or Gothic architecture, or even a fancy giant cottage of wood, but she would be beautiful and doted on. People from other kingdoms would come to talk with her father or mother, or her, people who wanted to make deals for land or money or goods. Soldiers everywhere, in armor or fancy tattoos or nice suits, all there to protect her. A giant beast under her command. Dangerous. Sexy.

And of course she would have bigger tits, because why the fuck not.

“Hold onto that image,” Zelandariel said, “and do what it is you do.”

Deep breaths, deep breaths, find the strings, the vibration. She closed her eyes and went digging, the same way she had with Kas earlier. If she plucked the strings, and pressed on them in the right spot to change the tone, she could make them vibrate emotion, whatever emotion or mental state she was feeling. The feeling of being in control. The feeling of being adored. The feeling of knowing other people would die for her if she ordered them to.

It might not have been the cold, harsh, cruel authority Zel probably wanted, but Zel mentioned the princess idea for a reason. Mia couldn’t be a cold, harsh, cruel person, but she could definitely be a princess, and to turn that into an air of authority, of control, of respect and servitude, was possible.

Sure enough, she plucked the strings, and whatever it was she was touching, it resonated. The new tone vibrated out through the area, starting from her, and it poured out into the air, the metal beneath her feet, the metal walls, all of it.

Obey me. You want to serve me. You want to do what I say, because you love me. I am your princess.

Zel stood up. Mia almost dropped the feeling, half expecting Zel to hit her or something, for daring to emit the aura over her, too. But the giant, four-armed demon walked back over to Vinicius, and stood beside him, half facing him half facing Mia.

“She is a strange thing, isn’t she?” Zel said. “Even now, I can feel this odd… presence, flowing from her. It asks me to take care of her. Protect her. Serve her.” Her grin was gone. Instead of flirting with Vinicius, and pressing her breasts into him like usual, she folded her arms across her chest, both of them, and nodded slowly. Her attitude had changed. Was she trying to resist Mia?

Vinicius rumbled, but it was a quiet thing, soft, and… submissive? Zel had said he was always half starved of resonance, which might have left him easily affected.

“What do you think, young soul?” Zel motioned her closer, and after another slow breath, Mia joined her, now only a few feet away from the titan. “Is he bound to your will?”

“No.”

“You can tell?”

Mia shrugged. “No, but I… I know I’m not doing the aura thing as strong as I do when I’m… you know…”

“Aroused?” Zel’s smile returned, but only slightly. “Agreed. When you are delirious with need, it is as if the air itself burns with hunger. I have but to be near you when you crave sex, and soon it is all I can do to not find the nearest demon or soul and indulge myself.” Despite the sex talk, she spoke with a solid tone. Mia’s aura was definitely affecting her. “Now you must achieve the same strength for other mental states.”

“I don’t know if I can… get the aura to do that.” She was horny girl, always had been. The moment puberty hit, bam, her internet history became a minefield and she indulged herself in a thousand kinks, always hungry for new things. Stories about ladies getting into scary situations with giant sexy monsters who ultimately ravaged the lady, only for the lady to then ‘fix’ them, and then bloom a romance, were her guilty pleasure. Really fucked up stuff, psychologically speaking, but a guilty indulgence she — and as far as the internet showed, a lot of young girls — loved. Of course Mia would have an easy time creating a powerful sex aura with her new magical super powers.

Auras for other mental states? Not so much.

Zel tapped her glowing horn, kinda like someone tapping their chin in thought.

“Stay here. Focus. Practice your aura. I will return.” The enormous demon woman walked away, hooves quietly clacking on the metal floor with each step. She closed the door behind her.

Which left Mia alone with Vinicius, in a large metal room, with dangling skull braziers lighting the space in its flickering, living light.

Mia looked up at the dragon. The four-armed titan looked back down at her. She squirmed and looked down. Okay, eye contact was a little too intense with the demon, like trying to look into the eyes of some sort alien, unknowable intelligence. He wasn’t that, though. He was a demon, and far as Mia could tell, demons were pretty simple, even smart ones like Zel. They wanted to fight and fuck, to eat and survive, and mostly just enjoy their lives. For some of them, that meant being crafty, ruling a kingdom, and striving to spread their influence. For others, like the one in front of her, that meant wanton slaughter.

“I’m… sorry,” she said. “About, uh, the… fellatio, before. I forced that on you, didn’t I? With the aura, I mean.” And because she couldn’t fucking help it, the first thing she did to the giant deadly murdering monster beast once she was alone with him, was apologize. Even her princess ‘obey me’ aura disappeared.

Vinicius said nothing, not even one of those tongue clucks. Just because his mouth was bound didn’t mean he couldn’t do that weird clicky language some demons like Kas and Acelina liked to use. Zel probably had his snout wrapped with chain for a different reason.

“I… I don’t know why I’m talking to you, honestly. Far as I know, you’re a big bad demon, and it’d probably be a good thing if I learn to control you.” She took a step closer, and forced herself to look up at the juggernaut. Why did he have to be so huge? Twelve feet tall to her five? She could literally walk underneath him and her hair would only graze his crotch. “I guess I’m talking to you, because… I want some kind of proof you deserve it?”

The beast said nothing. He did rumble though, a quiet thing, and unless she was going crazy, he managed a small shrug.

“Well, Zel isn’t here, and I don’t think Hell has monitoring devices. So… if I ask you a question, will you answer me?”

Another quiet rumble, but after a few seconds, the beast nodded, chains barely allowing the movement. Oh thank god, he could communicate. Or maybe that was a bad thing? If it turned out he wasn’t some horrible monster, doing her best to break him and make him obey her would be a lot harder.

But if he was willing to communicate, she had to. Just like all those times David would obsess over something, Mia knew she’d obsess over this, too. She had to know about this creature she was supposed to subdue.

“Your name is Vinicius? Zel hasn’t been lying?”

Nothing for a moment, as if the dragon was considering communicating after all. But a second later, he nodded.

She smiled, and did her best to not start bouncing in place. As the excitement surged through her, her heart or whatever plucked at the strings, and sure enough, the aura changed into one of excitement. Not good. She grabbed hold of her heart, her inner fingers, whatever it was plucking the strings, and did her best to stop them.

She managed. Like palm muting a guitar, or putting her fingers over the exit hole of a wind instrument, she quietened the way her heart affected the waves of whatever it was around her she touched. Okay okay, learning learning, maybe not learning what Zel wanted, but learning to hide the weird aura thing was still a very valuable skill. Somehow she doubted she’d be able to do if… when aroused, but still.

“Um… Did you really try to kill Zel, a long time ago?”

Another nod.

“Decades ago?”

He tilted his head to the side. Damn those were big horns, and a lot of them.

“… centuries ago?”

A nod.

“You’ve been locked down here for centuries?”

A nod.

Fucking hell.

“Okay, um…” Time for tough questions. “I heard you were a killer. You killed a lot of people, a lot lot, more than needed. You… went around, fighting for violence’s sake, and… I suppose if I was going to say it like Zel would say it, with a hefty coating of bombastic language, you ‘reaped a harvest of death and slaughter’. Is that right?”

Another pause, but eventually he nodded. Either he knew he had no choice but to tell the truth, or he was the honest type.

“And you probably want to kill Zel, right?” A dumb question. She knew the answer.

A nod.

“Do you want to kill me?”

He shook his head. Mia squinted up at him, forced herself to make eye contact, and came closer.

“Even after what I did to you? You’ve been resisting Zel for years, centuries, and I came along and undid some of that in minutes. You don’t want revenge?”

He shook his head again, and followed it with a quiet rumble. She’d have an easier time reading the mind of a literal lizard than trying to figure out if the ragarin demon was lying. But because she was a stupid, overly empathetic person, no matter how many times it bit her in the ass, she wanted to believe him anyway.

“Do… you think you deserve to be locked up like this?”

No answer. He did tilt his head to the side a bit, but nothing else.

“Do… you think you’d try and take back this spire, if you got out?”

He nodded. Okay, that was definitely a bean on the truth side of the truths-or-lies scale. Maybe she should ask some questions that weren’t directly about him?

“Do you think Zel will… hurt me if I don’t do what she wants?”

He nodded.

“And worse…”

It wasn’t a question, but he nodded anyway.

Sighing, she paced back and forth in front of the titan, a few feet away from his legs.

“Do you have any idea about me? Why I’m unmarked, and can make auras and read the ancient language? Have you seen any other unmarked souls before?”

He shook his head. It’d been a long shot, but it was nice to put another bean on the truth side of the scale. He could have lied so she’d find a way to release him.

Sighing, she ran her fingers through her red hair as she stared at her bare feet.

“You have to understand, okay? Just a few weeks ago I was a regular human, living on the surface, doing my own thing. I was nobody, nothing important, nothing. I spent over two weeks hanging around as a ghost, doing absolutely nothing. Then I went to Heaven, and Hell scooped me up, right out from under me, right at the Gates of Heaven! Dropped me off here in Hell, me and… I almost died the first five seconds after I landed here! But some demons noticed I was unmarked, so they took me to Diogo, then he took me to Zel, and the whole time I had this weird aura thing affecting people and demons and I can’t control it and apparently I can read the ancient language that Lucifer him… themself used to write with, and… and…” She threw up her hands, stomped around a few more times, and marched up to Vinicius, right up to him so she had to look almost straight up to keep eye contact. “You’re a child of Belial, one of the Old Ones! You’re centuries old! Multiple! You have to know at least something!”

Silence. A heavy rumble. A slow shake of his head.

Sighing even louder, she pressed her right hand against his left leg. Yeap, that was borderline steel. His skin wasn’t quite as dark as Diogo’s, but nearly, and the titan was twice as thick as the brute.

And, wow, she was really close. It didn’t dawn on her just how close, until she looked at where her hand pressed against his leg, halfway up his quadriceps. After a heavy gulp, she forced herself to look away from the giant leg literally bigger than her entire body, and back up at the bound colossus.

“You don’t know anything?” she asked, her hand still on his leg.

Another head shake, and another quiet rumble. But something else, too. As he stared down at her, something changed, something in his skin. It got a little redder, and just a little softer under her touch.

She took a step back. “Um… I…” What the fuck, she hadn’t been putting out a sex aura! Had she? No, no she hadn’t. For the first time in days, she’d stopped thinking about sex and thought about something else, something she absolutely loved: trying to figure a person out, figure out how they worked, figure out what made them tick.

But the colossal demon in front of her felt differently. His skin was getting redder, and his eyes were locked on her.

“No no! No. Nope. We’re not doing that.” She turned around and hugged her silk tighter to her body. There was no way she could be horny. She’d been getting fucked quite thoroughly lately, and living some pretty ridiculous, extreme fantasies. She was the opposite of pent up. She was sexually drained. Or at least, she should have been sexually drained, exhausted, depleted, dried up and done.

But she wasn’t. How much of that was because of her sex drive, or because of the demon heart she’d eaten, she didn’t know.

She groaned and rubbed her face with her hands. A succubus. She was a succubus! Except, she wasn’t. She’d seen succubi, and she was not that. And yet here she was, picturing it, picturing what it’d be like to be picked up by the bound monster, and used like a toy. Maybe Kas and Adron would join him, and she’d have to pleasure them all at the same time. Maybe—

The door opened. Mia jumped back and did her best to look casual. She failed.

Zel stood there, a smile on her face, with three large, metal rod things in her grip. She had more than enough hands to wield them.

“Little soul, have you…” Slowly, Zel’s smile faded, and she tilted her head to the side as she glared down at her. “I told you to work on breaking the beast, not seducing him.”

“I uh… I tried, but…”

“Your ability to arouse demons is of little use to me. Your potential is in your ability to control and manipulate.” She took a step toward Mia, and aimed one of the metal rods at her. Her face had changed. “Do not misunderstand me, little soul. I did not give you a request. I gave you a command. If you do not obey, I will see if I can force you to obey.” With her free hand, she gestured to one of the black rods. An amber stone sat on the end between sharp prongs, glowing with light, and radiating heat.

“Sorry! I’m sorry, I just… I got distracted, and—”

Zel walked up to Mia, hips swaying, each step emphasized by her hooves. Slowly, she crouched down in front of Mia, and gestured she come to her.

Mia hesitated. Mistake. Zel snapped out her free hand, grabbed Mia’s wrist, and yanked her forward. The look in the beautiful demon’s mask-like, smooth face shifted from calm, to icy, and stabbed a dozen holes through Mia’s guts. She raised one of the amber-tipped rods, and brought it within an inch of Mia’s face. Hot hot hot.

“These are tools of the spire. This one, I can use to seal the call of the horde, or other desires I summon from the spire, should I need the spire’s aura to last for some time within my soldiers. This one”—she brought up another rod, tipped with amber again, but larger, no sharp prongs—“can summon the power of the spire’s desire in a small area. This one”—she waved the other one, a shorter rod covered in spikes and tipped with jagged blades—“is something the previous queen crafted. Valzanal.”

“Valzanal?”

“Indeed. One of the most powerful fujara tetrad. She held Death’s Grip for thousands of years before her death in the Spires War. She was an avid fan of torture, as well. She hung people upside down and let them drown in their blood, and she danced in the dripping crimson. She raped men using her sin, often to death, and she ripped women in half from the crotch up. She…” With an almost happy sigh, Zel tapped one of the metal rods against her hip. She liked what she was describing, or at least liked the idea of a woman in charge doing that sort of stuff. “If you explore the tunnels around and beneath Death’s Grip, you will find the monuments Hell grew in her honor.”

“Wait, what? Hell grew monuments?”

Zel grinned, but it wasn’t the flirtatious, playful kind, not anymore. A part of her seemed to be happy with the memory of her predecessor. Another part of her seemed to dance on the precipice of getting angry with Mia.

“Hell listens, young soul. She listens, and on the waves of her existence, the vibration of her music, she plays her song. The flesh, the stone, the blood, the bone, the metal, the sky and fire and the incinerating heat of her embrace, they bend to the song.”

“I… don’t hear any song.” Mia gulped. Vibrations. Music. Maybe she did hear a song?

Her words definitely earned a frown from Zel, though. Maybe she’d been hoping Mia could.

“Not a literal song, soul.” Oh, never mind. “But yes, Hell adapts to the things she hears and feels. Monuments to Valzanal show her statue, and include the remains of slaughter and pain. Skeletons, some real, some grown by Hell, litter the tunnels and speak of the pain she wrought. The cries of her victims scarred the flesh and memory of Hell for thousands, and perhaps for the next hundred thousand years or more.”

“Scary.”

With an increasingly wicked, angry smile, Zel pointed the rod with the sharp tip toward Mia’s face.

“The demons and souls I have skewered upon the spikes at my door are but a small taste of the respect I pay Valzanal. And there is one thing, one thing specifically, that draws my ire and asks me to bring Death’s Grip back to the days of the Third War, and the pain Valzanal brought.”

Uh oh.

“I—”

“To be ignored!” Zel stood up quick, and Mia jumped back with a squeak as Zel swung the weapon. Mia covered her head, but managed to see Zel turn from underneath her arm. With a shriek of rage, Zel stabbed the weapon into Vinicius’s gut.

The leash Zel had used yesterday on Vinicius seemed like the worst torture Mia could imagine. She was a moron. Vinicius tried to outright scream, an animal, alien sound, but the chain wrapped around his snout stopped him from opening his mouth. The half roar half scream muffled between pinned teeth, the chains rattled as every limb fought for freedom, and his muscles bulged with futility. His tail shook, his wide eyes stared to the ceiling with blind agony, and his spikes and horns rubbed against the metal wall behind him hard enough to leave deep scratches.

Zel yanked the rod out of the beast’s gut. It dripped with blood, and a hole the size of its tip remained in Vinicius’s stomach, oozing red that boiled, not burning but somehow sizzling. With a snarl and death stare, she pointed the drenched tool toward Mia, and the blood on its amber tip steamed.

“If you do not take my orders, every one of them, as if they are a matter of life and death from now on, I will teach you what this tool of Valzanal’s feels like, little soul, and you will wish for death each and every day until I am satisfied! Understood?”

Mia lowered her hands, forced her eyes away from the tool, back up to Zel’s face, and swallowed down the barbed rock in her throat.

“Understood.”

Happy smile returning, Zel nodded, and gestured to the bleeding beast.

“Now, let us try again. These tools will help.” Her voice had changed, too. From rage and hate, back to fun and almost flirtatious.

“Are… Are they all torture tools?”

Zel waved around one of the other tools. “This one is unique. It will force the will of the spire, my will, my order, upon his mind, and it will torture his mind to do it. I will use it, and you will use your aura. Now.”

After a heavy nod, Mia reached into herself, and looked for the aura she’d found earlier.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~Day 25~~

~~David~~

“They were here,” Caera said. She dragged her claw on the ground hard enough to make a scratch. “Near Adam’s Back. Renato might still be there, spending his days and nights doing nothing but fucking.”

“How’s he keep everyone fed?” David asked. He sat beside her, the two of them in their armor and drawing a really shitty map in the stone using the tiger lady’s claws. A shitty map was better than no map.

“Lots of humans getting dumped into Hell regularly. We’ll probably see another portal open up soon. At least one has already, nearby. They come and go pretty quick.”

He nodded. The portal that’d eaten him and his sister had shown up pretty damn fast, and it’d lasted in the sky, what, a few minutes? Then it’d vanished.

“I wonder how many times it drops humans off in Hell as a whole. Over fifty million people die every year, and—”

“Fifty million?” Caera asked, raising a black eyebrow. Not really an eyebrow, so much as a darker patch of skin that looked like an eyebrow, but it fit the part. “How do you know that?”

“I looked it up once.”

“Why?”

He blinked at her. “Why not?”

She blinked back at him, before laughing and shaking her head.

“Okay, so, fifty million a year. How many of those people you think deserve to go to Hell, to die here, and then spend dozens, hundreds of cycles being tormented and killed over and over as a remnant?”

“I don’t know. Maybe one in twenty?”

Caera laughed again, but it had a darker sound this time.

“You think one out of every twenty people go to Hell, and the other nineteen people go to Heaven?”

“I mean, yeah?”

Jes sat nearby, wings pulled around in front of her so she could clean them with her claws. And of course, she paused her grooming routine to laugh at him, complete with a pointing of the tip of her tail.

“You really overestimate how good people are, David. So many humans, so fucking many, are absolute shits. And I don’t mean jerks who are just apathetic or mean. I mean real, absolute shits who would let you drown for five bucks.”

He returned her laugh with a sad frown. “Come on, humanity isn’t that bad.”

“We don’t have information to prove it,” Caera said, “but, down here, the idea is it’s… a lot higher than one in twenty.”

“Yeah but you’re in Hell,” he said. “More humans coming to Hell means more food, so I imagine most demons like to think humans are coming down here in droves, right? Pretty biased.”

“Sure. But you don’t think you’re being naive, too?”

“I don’t know.”

She tried to smile, but it faded into a tired sigh.

“Remind me to show you in the scrying pools.”

“What, they can show how many people are going to Hell?”

“No, but if you ask something like ‘show me someone in this area committing murder or rape or torture’, it’ll show you. You won’t like what you find.”

He winced. “No… No I guess I wouldn’t.”

The room grew silent. A peek over his shoulder showed Jes and Dao looking his way, listening, and while Jes had her usual ‘yeah the surface sucks too, get used to it’ face, Dao’s softened into a sad frown. She crawled over to him, sat behind him, spread her legs around him so she could snuggle into his back, and hugged him. She wore no armor, but wasn’t aroused either. Firm breasts pressed to his back, borderline hard, but the skin was soft enough they reminded him of a well worn, comfortable leather couch made of real leather. A strange feeling, not exactly sexy, but a sports bra wouldn’t cut it considering how much jumping around and fighting demons had to do. Firm, nearly black skin worked better.

“For the love of Lucifer,” Jes said, “stop babying him! He gets sad for one second and you’re mother henning him.”

“You know…” He laughed, shaking his head. “How much scrying pool do you watch to know what mother henning is?”

“I dunno. Human speech kinda bleeds over into Hell ‘cause of them, and all the demons watching them, and… shut up.”

Rolling her eyes, Caera pointed back at the ground, and drew some scratch marks indicating the inner and outer shore of Hell, this time more toward clockwise. She drew some mountains and valleys, too.

“This is where we fell.” She tapped a claw between some lines. “Here’s the Gorzen Eye. Here’s Adam’s Back.” Her claw slowly moved further clockwise. “Here’s where Renato was hiding, last I met him. If we need somewhere to hide, after we kill Diogo and get Mia, he might be able to help us.” She tapped on the opposite side of her map. “Here’s the border between Death’s Grip and the Black Valley.” She tapped on the other side of the map again, closer to Renato’s hiding spot. “Here’s where Kia, Marquez, and I were ambushed.”

“If this is to scale, that’ll take a couple weeks of solid trekking to reach. But the border with Black Valley is closer, maybe half that distance.” And it was on the Black Valley border they expected to find the Damall. The two goals were in opposite directions.

The tregeera nodded. “We’ll have to make a choice on which to do first.”

David held his two hands in front of him, palm up. “On one hand, we might learn more about what’s trying to kill me, and all the crazy shit going on, if we go look for the Damall. On the other hand, I owe you my life. I said I’d help you and I will.”

After a strange deep purr, almost like a crocodile rumble, Caera slipped her big tail up onto his lap, and left it there. So of course he did the only reasonable thing. He put his hands on it, and worked his fingers between the spikes that lined its top.

“I’ve been looking for a way to kill those Cainites for years, David. I can wait a few extra weeks.”

“You sure? That doesn’t sound like very demon behavior.”

She hit him in the stomach with the tail he was doing his best to massage.

“Plenty of demons out there who’d prove you right. Be happy I’m not one of them.”

“I am I am!” He rubbed his belly. If she’d turned her tail to do that, she’d have skewered him.

Dao, with her chin on his shoulder, rubbed a horn into the side of his head as she rubbed his belly, too. She chirped and clicked a few times, and whatever she said earned a hearty laugh out of Caera.

“We,” Jes said as she moved onto the next wing to prune, “are nice demons.”

Dao clicked into David’s ear. No need for a translator. Jes wasn’t very nice. He struggled to keep from laughing.

“I don’t know what other demons are like,” he said, “except for what you three have told me. But, you three have been a huge surprise. I keep getting confused, because you got me terrified of other demons, like those imps and grems I met on my first day here. They looked ready to rip out my heart and dance in the blood.”

Caera grinned at him, and poked him in the chest with a claw. “And you’d take three of those demons to Heaven with you?”

“Well, I mean, you three aren’t like that. You’ve been… well… I mean, you know.”

“I knew your sister for less than a day,” Caera said, “but I could tell she was a lot better at talking than you. What happened there?”

Sighing, he looked down and managed a slow, weak shrug. “If we didn’t look so much alike, I’d figure we weren’t related.”

“You’re definitely related. You’re both stupid nice in your own weird little way.”

“We are?”

The tiger lady nodded, leaned in, and set a quick kiss on his lips.

“Yeah. You are.”

The satyr still hugging him from behind chirped and clicked, nodded and rubbed her chin on his shoulder, and rubbed her horn against the side of his head. After kissing his cheek, her arms slipped around him, and undid the knots holding his half breastplate.

“Hey.”

With a mischievous grin, Dao pulled on his shoulders, turned him, pushed him onto his back, and chirped. Before he could so much as agree to the inevitable, she straddled his legs, pulled off his leather skirt, and left him naked.

He barely noticed when the girls were casually naked anymore, their skin usually dark red or black, and super firm like leather, with vaginas closed and nipples flat. After being around that so much, his brain started treating their black and dark red skin as clothes. He, on the other hand, had no such skin. Humans were soft, and now that he was naked, he felt very exposed. Just a week ago, Jes and Dao hadn’t let him wear clothes at all, but now he was used to them again.

Smiling down at him, the satyr lowered herself onto him, and lay on him. Her breasts, firm and hard, grew softer and softer by the moment as she touched noses with him. Nose touch turned into a quick kiss, and a tiny lip lick, too. All he could see of her from this close was the flat, black bone of her forehead and the two giant black ram horns coming out of it, joining the two horns coming out of the higher parts of her skull.

“Dao, just because he apologized and explained doesn’t mean you should throw yourself at him,” Jes said. She crawled over and sat down beside him. “Yes, I know. The pipsqueak is nice, but that’s no reason to pamper him so much, you slut.”

“I don’t know,” Caera said. “I never thought an unmarked soul would be so enjoyable to be around.” Nodding, Caera sat down on his other side, and grinned down at him as she licked her big teeth, usually hidden inside her mouth. Normally her mouth looked perfectly human, if maybe a bit cat-ish on her very short snout, but sometimes she opened it wide, and exposed how big it really was, and how sharp her teeth really were.

“Enjoyable?” David asked.

“Humans are fucking assholes,” Jes said. “We told you that.”

“I get that, but—”

“We’re used to being on our guard around humans.” Jes gestured to Caera. “For obvious reasons. Most of the time they’re just as bad as the worst demons. Sometimes they’re not, but even then, they’re not… They wouldn’t have apologized like you did.” Laughing, Jes lay beside him, and pressed into his side. She was getting redder and softer too, and far as David could tell, his aura wasn’t doing anything at the moment. “Or, you know, admit to being a dumbass.”

“I uh… I’m not very good at the… words thing.”

Laughing, Caera took a minute to undo the straps of her armor. Naked, the huge tiger lady did the same as Jes, and lay next to him, opposite the gargoyle.

“I think I got a good analogy from the surface. Most humans down here are like coyotes. Assholes that will bite you in the ass and steal your food if they can get away with it. Sure, sometimes you can coexist, but you always have to be prepared for when they try and fuck you over, run away, or whatever. You’re more like a dog. Maybe a golden retriever.”

He blinked at the tiger as she leaned in and nudged her nose with his, literal inches from Daoka’s face.

“I’m a dog?”

“A nice, cuddly dog,” Jes said.

Dao clicked a few times, chirped a few more, and slid down his body a ways before lying down again. She set her cheek on his chest, and sighed happily as she rubbed the side of her curling ram horn against his pectoral. Either she was listening to him breathe or his heart beat.

“Not sure I like being compared to a golden retriever,” he said. “Especially with all the sex.”

Jes laughed, louder than she probably should have, and gently headbutt his shoulder with her forehead.

“Dude, the scrying pool shows the internet, too. Catgirls are all the rage everywhere.”

“That… is not the same. I think. And I don’t think that was an accurate description of coyotes either, Caera. You—”

Caera kissed him. She kept her eyes open, grinned at him as she kissed him, and her giant tail slithered over and rested on his legs. It wasn’t long before a second tail joined it, and the two warm, heavy limbs gently wagged back and forth over his shins and knees.

“I—”

“In Hell,” Jes said, “it’s pretty normal for demons to fuck their pets. Pets being betrayers. But you, you fucking stupid little moron, are opposite of one of them. I can cozy up to you, and… relax.” With a softening smile, Jes put a claw to his chin, pulled him away from Caera, and kissed him.

He didn’t say a thing. Were demons just… starved for some positivity in their lives? Or at least, not negativity? Was that the reason demons were all so violent? Christ, where was Mia when he needed her?

Dao came in again, kissed him again, and slid lower. And lower. And lower. The girls had to move their tails as the satyr slipped between David’s legs, got on her stomach between them, and guided his dick up and onto his abs.

~~♥♥♥~~

With a satisfied nod, Dao got comfortable. She snuggled in between his thighs, her arms up and over his legs and near his hips, and her breasts squashed down around the base of his increasing length.

“I uh, didn’t think my aura—”

“You weren’t using it,” Caera said. “Not like demons — or humans — need an aura to get horny, right?”

“I mean, I guess. But—”

Jes kissed him again, chuckling as she did, before she lifted her head and tilted it enough to hit him on the skull with the side of one of her horns.

“Demons love humans, fresh meat. The succubi and incubi wish they looked even more human than they do.” She traced a claw down his chest, and set her palm on his glans. “You’re a hot little thing, you know? Even without the tetrad dick you have for some reason, and the aura, we’d still want to fuck you.”

He blinked at her a few times. Demons liked humans that much?

Caera leaned back in, and dragged her long tongue along his throat. “I think you’re hotter than a lot of souls. You died in great shape.”

“Thanks… I think.” The compliments made him blush more than the sensation of his thickening cock in Jes’s grip and between Dao’s enormous breasts.

“All demons want,” Caera said with a raised claw, “is for a kind, tender, caring man to love them and take care of them.” She couldn’t say it with a straight face.

“Somehow I doubt that,” he said, at the same time Jes laughed and shook her head.

“I’ll take giant cocks and deep, hard fucking instead,” the gargoyle said.

Shrugging, Caera snuggled into his side harder, and leaned over him a bit to make sure both her huge breasts squashed against his chest. And then she slid down, the same way Dao had. Soon she was mostly snuggled into the side of his leg, but her massive body let her easily keep her breasts pressed against his abs. Dao’s breasts were already there though, and both sets fought for space on his body.

Jes jumped on the wagon without hesitation. She let go of his glans, slid down, and pressed her large breasts into Dao’s from the other side. The two ladies shared a kiss, before Dao slid up a ways, and pressed her breasts down directly over his abs, pinning his now absurdly long, absurdly thick cock’s tip against his sternum.

All he could do was freeze, and watch the ladies cuddle into him, into each other, and bury his length in three sets of breasts. Dao leaned down and ran her tongue along the only exposed part of his cock: the last few inches, most of which was his swollen, ripe, exposed glans. Instant pleasure shocks shot through him, and the tingling vibration of his aura poured out in response. The girls all moaned.

“I think later, I want to try some of that rough sex,” Jes said. “See what your puny little soul muscles can do.”

“Hey…”

Giggling, Dao clicked a few times and nodded to Jes.

The gargoyle sighed, but nodded back. “But for now, Dao wants to cuddle.”

“Cuddle? We’re uh… doing a little more than cuddling.”

“Seems like cuddling to me,” Caera said. Her tail, out of sight, slithered over his leg between her and Dao, and then over his leg between Dao and Jes. Another, much thinner tail joined once again.

David was seriously starting to wonder if this aura thing of his was like a drug, addicting, and all this was just an act to try and get more out of him. But, no, the three ladies were genuinely interested in him for some reason he couldn’t fathom. And—And maybe he should stop thinking about it, and just enjoy it.

He did something he almost never did. He lifted his hands, reached down, and touched their boobs.

Jes rolled her eyes, licked a fang, and smiled at him. Caera didn’t bother with the eye roll, but she did lick her bigger fangs like a hungry mountain lion.

“You know,” Jes said, “if it weren’t for this aura, I’d tie you up and punish you.”

He yanked his hands back. “Sorry.”

Another eye roll. “Of course you are. Dude, they’re tits. Feel ‘em, squeeze ‘em, massage ‘em.” To demonstrate, she reached out with her closer hand, slipped it under Caera’s closer breast, and gently bounced the huge thing in her palm. It rippled, almost like a water balloon. Apparently his facial expression was funny, because she laughed some more, grabbed his palm, and placed it under Caera’s breast instead.

So heavy. So warm. So soft. He shivered as he squeezed gently, traced his fingers around and underneath it, and slid his thumb up and touched her swollen nipple. When he got a little braver, he pushed the huge pillow toward his cock, and melted into the feeling of the softness molding to its shape.

With a playful chuckle, Caera leaned in, and absolutely squashed both breasts against his cock, pushing it toward Jes. The gargoyle had to back up to avoid accidentally kissing the tiger.

“Hey,” Jes said. “Running out of room, here. I—”

Dao reached out, slipped a hand behind Jes’s head, and pushed her toward Caera, even as she leaned in forward herself to get her head between them.

“Hey, wa—” Jes’s lips met Dao’s, and she shut up as the two ladies fought for room on top of his cock. Caera tried to back up this time, but Dao her had other hand on her back, and she pushed Caera in, too.

David froze solid, breath stopped, heart rate skyrocketed, and his hands fell to the ground underneath the ladies. The three of them shifted about as they fought for space, but Dao made sure Jes and Caera couldn’t pull away. She also made sure their lips interlocked, and she lifted her head so she could look over them down at David as she made the two ladies kiss. After a few cheerful chirps, she leaned in between them, nudged a horn against one of Caera’s horns, and put a kiss on the tiger’s cheek.

“Horny bitch,” Jes said, “making me kiss other women, just to get your pet off?” Smiling, she leaned in and kissed Dao’s cheek and chin. The satyr turned toward her lover, kissed her some more, and lowered herself further so she could kiss his cock, too.

There simply wasn’t enough room on his torso for the three of them. Even with only their breasts and heads fighting for space, they overwhelmed him, and breasts slid off and squished against his sides and ribs. He didn’t mind, considering Jes and Caera both leaned down, and also set their lips onto the head of his cock, right next to Dao’s.

Three sets of lips, kissing, suckling, and three tongues bathing his cock in massaging strokes, was enough to send sudden pulses of tingling bliss up his length.

“H-Hey, wait,” he said, earning surprised looks from the two ladies with eyes. “I uh… can we… go back to breasts only? That was making it take longer, and I don’t want to cum just yet.” And he really wanted to watch them kiss again.

Dao giggled, clicked and chirped a couple times, and lifted her head up and out of the way. With how heavy and huge her breasts were, she managed to lift her chest quite a bit with her breasts still able to hang beneath her and reach his cock. It did allow a little more room too, and Jes and Caera both took advantage.

“So,” Jes said, “after this, I’m expecting your tongue on my clit for a good long while, David. Fingers inside me, too. And then I expect a rough, hard fuck up to the lungs. Alright?”

He managed a gulp and nod, but barely processed what she said. The way Dao’s breasts, now hanging underneath her and only gently brushing against the underside of his cock, was hypnotizing. It only got better when Caera and Jes both leaned back in again, squashed their breasts against her, and once again all three women squished their breasts over his abs and chest. His cock disappeared underneath the sea of soft, warm flesh, only his glans sticking out from between it all, and a couple drops of precum oozed from its tip onto his sternum.

“And you,” Jes continued, cheek half pressed against Caera’s with how close they were. “You make sure to take good care of Dao while I’m fucking her pet.”

The tiger laughed, an oddly joyful sound she didn’t make often.

“David’s her pet, not yours. Shouldn’t she be the one fucking him?”

“We’ve had him for a week and I’ve yet to get a hard fuck! I am sick and tired of waiting.” Complete with an angry frown, Jes nudged her nose into Caera’s, and kissed her. “Unless the pipsqueak isn’t strong enough to fuck me hard, then you can help him out.”

“Oh I get it. That’s what you really want. For me to give you a really hard fucking, using David’s cock.”

“Ha, yeah, that does sound pretty perfect. You got muscles.”

Nodding and chuckling, the tiger lady leaned forward even more, slipped her head past Jes on David’s side, and put kisses on the gargoyle’s shoulder while grinning at David. With Jes’s head out of David’s eye line, the gargoyle turned her head enough for the satyr to kiss her, but it wasn’t long before Dao slipped her hands onto the back of the necks of Jes and Caera again, and guided them to each other.

She liked making them kiss, and according to Jes, she liked doing it because David liked watching it. And holy fuck yes he did. They were all so damn beautiful, and watching them trade off on who kissed who, while their six breasts squished together and pinned and rubbed over his cock, had him boiling. Pleasure waves tingled up and down his length, and another drop of precum leaked from his swollen glans. A small groan escaped him, and he slipped his hands underneath Jes and Caera’s closest breast.

All three girls slid closer to him a few inches, and his glans disappeared underneath them. Jes and Caera grinned down at him, faced each other, and locked lips again, eyes half closed. Each time he fondled them, squeezed them, and pushed their breasts harder against his cock, they smiled into their kiss.

The first gush of cum squirted hard against their breasts, their soft skin the only thing that kept it from shooting him in the chin. It poured out of him with each flex of his inner muscles, thick, hot cum that came in pulses up his length before pouring into the crevice between Jes and Caera’s breasts. He wanted to press their breasts against him tighter, but the position didn’t allow it, not with their breasts already flattened against his chest and spilling over his ribs. But they knew. They broke their kiss, and Jes grinned at him as she leaned into Caera’s neck, closer to David. Like this, they had the space to completely press their weight against his chest, and bury the top half of his length in their breasts as he came. His glans was covered and blocked by a sea of softness.

Thick, white cum oozed out from between the soft red pillows, and all three ladies made quiet little moans. They were playing with him, moans made for his benefit. They worked. He shivered as he watched them press their weight and breasts to him, and gently grind on his body as he came. His cum pooled between their breasts along his cock, out of view but he could feel the heavy, hot waves of it fill the crevices between their flesh before flowing down his sides. More, and more.

“Fucking christ,” Jes said, and she set her closer hand on his shoulder. “Dude, you can stop cumming any time now.”

“Sorry, just—” He shivered again. The waves of bliss the friction of their breasts on his aching glans sent down through his length had his inner muscles flexing in more spurts, until more cum came flowing out of him. It wasn’t long until he felt it leaking down between his legs, despite six breasts pressed to his cock and blocking the path.

It came to a stop eventually though, and the three ladies all sat up. Dao straddled his legs just below his cock, while Caera and Jes got on their knees beside him. They all looked down at themselves, and the thick globs of heavy, white cum trickling down their breasts. Their tits were drenched, and lines of white ran down their stomachs as big drops of the fluid dripped from the underside of their breasts onto their thighs.

Dao clicked a few times before she erupted into some playful giggles, gesturing to herself and her soaked chest.

“Sorry! Sorry,” he said. “I just… really got a thing for boobs.”

Whatever he said, it made Dao happy, and she leaned forward with full intent to climb onto him. But she didn’t get far. Jes pushed her off him, literally, earning some surprised clicks that bordered on squeaks as her lover climbed onto him.

“Enough of this gentle stuff! Here’s what we’re going to do.” Jes grinned down at him with fire in her eyes, and ran her hands down her soaked breasts, down her tiny waist and flat, hard stomach, and her tail wagged back and forth between his legs behind her. “You’re going to eat me out, then you’re going to finger me, then you’re going to fuck me as hard as you can. So dial up that aura, change it from this silly cuddly stuff, to full-on rough fast pounding sex.”

“I—”

“I know you’re a weak little pip squeak soul. Don’t worry, Caera will do the heavy lifting, like that night you fucked Dao’s ass.” Jes winked at him. “And then you can fuck her ass again, too. Nice. And hard.”

“Sounds like I’ll be the one doing the fucking,” Caera said, rolling her eyes as she wiped the cum off her breasts and flicked it aside. There was a lot of it, but Hell would suck it all up in an hour or three.

Dao did no such thing. She crawled back around so she could take Jes’s original spot, knelt beside David, and smiled at him as she squeezed her breasts. Squeezing turned into massaging, and he watched, mesmerized, as his cum overflowed between her fingers.

“Dao and me will help him fuck you after,” Jes said, “but I want some power behind those thrusts, okay? And—”

~~♥♥♥~~

The girls stopped. Jes and Caera both blinked a few times, and all three ladies slowly turned their heads to face toward the cave exit, just slightly out of view around the curved stone wall.

“Uh…” He shut up as a quiet vibration filled the cave, so subtle he thought it was him and his aura. It wasn’t.

No one moved. No one said a thing. No one breathed. The vibration grew louder, harsher, and he slowly sat up. Vibration turned into a more consistent, thudding pattern, quiet and distant, but something that came and went with the cadence of a slow heart beat, or a marching war drum. Louder, and heavier, something deep and bassy that rumbled through the mountains, like a distant avalanche. But, it couldn’t be an avalanche, not unless an avalanche could play a beat.

The girls got up, took two seconds to wipe themselves off as best they could, grabbed their armor, and got dressed, skin darkening and hardening in seconds. His dick abandoned ship and shriveled down to its pre-death size, and now able to walk again without tripping over his third leg, David scrambled for his armor, too. Because he was an idiot, it didn’t cross his mind to at least wipe some of the cum off, and he put the skirt back on over the mess. And because he was an idiot, he got his broken, worthless sword, too.

“The fuck is that?” he asked. With the way they armored up quick, they had to know.

“No idea,” Jes said. So much for that.

Dao clicked a few times, shaking her head.

“It doesn’t sound normal,” Caera said. “Sounds like—”

“Oh shit.” David threw up his hands. “That invisible monster again?”

“Could be.”

Fuck. Double fuck.

“We sure we want to go investigating?”

Jes and Dao paused and looked to Caera. Caera paused at the cave entrance, looked down in thought, and looked to him.

“If it were just me, I’d say we need to investigate because this is our province, our hunting territory,” she said. “But, this thing is chasing you. What do you want to do?”

“I…” Shit, what did he want to? He wanted to know what the invisible monster was, so damn bad. He wanted to know what was out there making what was now obviously some kind of lumbering, heavy walking crunching thudding sort of sound. He also wanted to live, and not get crushed into pulp, or eaten, or who the fuck knew what would happen if the invisible monster managed to touch him?

But, it hadn’t managed to touch him. It hadn’t even been able to pick up a rock without it crumbling. If it was the invisible monster, maybe he was safe from it? Kinda?

“I guess… let’s go?”

“Listen to the conviction in that voice,” Jes said, rolling her eyes.

Caera grinned at him, and prowled out of the cave toward the weird sound.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Well, at least it wasn’t the invisible monster.

“That,” Caera whispered, “is not good.”

They stayed low. It was day time and the fire sky burned bright. Demons roamed the mountains, plenty of gliders, and plenty of others, too, but none of them were a threat. Every single one of them was either running back to the spire, or climbing the mountains to see what was making the noise from a safe vantage point.

If it weren’t for the whole ‘everything in the whole fucking universe was coming to kill David and Mia’ situation, he’d have opted for staying in their little cave. It had no remnants and no visitors. A perfect place to lay low, and have three amazing women with amazing bodies pamper the ever living shit out of him. But, nope, they were outside, lurking around in ravines, ditches, crevices, and every shadow they could find, as they headed toward the very loud noise.

There were plenty of giant boulders around, many pressed against each other with crevices underneath them, a perfect place to get under and into, if you were willing to risk giant rocks crushing you to death for a peek. They were. Each one of them found a rock, a shadow, something to stick their head around and look across the canyon.

It was a dragon. No, that wasn’t right. It didn’t have wings. But it wasn’t the wurm they saw before, either. It was bigger, and it walked on four legs. Jesus fucking christ it might as well have been a dragon considering how big it was, big enough each time one of its hands or feet landed, it made the ground rumble. Not Godzilla big, but big enough his brain struggled to accept the size of what he was looking at. Big as a blue whale? Maybe a little bigger? It was like someone had given an iguana enough drugs and radiation to mutate it to blue whale size, and cover it in the same sort of black spikes his girls had.

Those horns were big enough to rip a building apart in a single swipe.

“What the fuck,” he whispered. The girls managed quick glances at him, long enough to nod before looking back at the creature. They didn’t know what it was, either.

The creature moved at a leisurely pace, as if trying to stay quiet, but even its breathing was loud, like the quiet rumble of an ending volcano. Its belly was lower to the ground than he thought at first, making it look a little closer to a big lizard than an actual dragon. Its colossal tail dragged along the rock and stone behind it, but its belly never quite touched the ground. Its head almost looked like a classic Western dragon’s, but it had five eyes. Two on the side he could see, two probably on the other side, and one facing ahead. Snake eyes, with red irises so wide they hid any sclera, and a gigantic black vertical slit for pupils.

The beast wasn’t alone. A bunch of demons stood on its back, shoulders, and haunches. No imps or grems, but he spotted at least three gargoyles, a satyr, one tiger, a few vrats, a few brutes, a few breeds David didn’t recognize, and one tetrad. A woman, four arms, walking on raptor feet and with a tail. That meant a fujara tetrad.

A couple dozen demons, and each one of them wore gold and bronze armor, with hints of red. Not as much armor as the rider, but more than Jes, Dao, or Caera’s black armor, and they’d assured him aera armor was a lot tougher than meera armor. Caera had also said the only place you could really get it anymore was False Gate.

David grabbed Caera’s wrist, and nodded toward the head of the dragon beast. She nodded, her eyes already staring up at the figure who rode it, clutching reins between its titanic horns.

“The rider,” she said. “What the fuck.”

That was the rider, the man who’d killed a tetrad and his goons in a matter of moments. He wore his gold armor, full plate, with a skull-like helmet that hid his face. And even from so far away, David could feel the edges of his aura, the hunger for violence, the need for destruction. The demons near the rider had to be feeling it too, their faces locked in permanent rage, all eyes looking forward toward their distant target.

David ground his teeth until his jaw clicked.

“They’re heading toward the spire.”