“I talked to Dao, and we’ve both decided that we want to keep you.”
“Oh. As a pet.”
Her tail pressed down against his belly button. “Got a problem with that?”
“Nope. Nope.”
“And, talking to Dao, she made me realize something, I guess. It’s… because Dao and I were really happy, when Leos was with us.”
David tensed. Leos, the incubus Diogo had killed. He’d been avoiding the topic, halfly because Jes was the sort of person — demon — who’d hit him for asking. He didn’t need Mia to warn him the gargoyle had a volatile personality.
After a heavy sigh, Dao leaned back, and combed her claws through his hair. Judging from the sound, she was reminiscing about her old friend.
“We want things to go back to the way they were. We want to just enjoy our little slice of Hell, be with each other, and have our little plaything between us.” Again, Jes poked him with her tail, this time in the chin. “And… And maybe I do want to see what happens.”
“What happens?”
“What happens. You know shit’s going to happen. All the stuff that’s unusual about you. That invisible thing. The rider showing up. Something’s going to happen.”
“I thought you wanted to avoid all that stuff.”
The gargoyle nodded. “I did, but… I talked with Caera, too.” Again, the tiger lady made one of those tiny chuckle snorts that sounded more natural on a real tiger than a demon, but she didn’t interrupt. “She convinced me. I want to see what happens. Ideally we’ll keep you alive, and when the crazy shit comes and goes, we can go back to living happy little lives, the way it’d been when we had Leos with us. And hey, who knows, maybe something special will happen and we’ll all benefit? I wouldn’t mind being rich.” She laughed at her joke. Hell had no money.
Dao clicked a few times as she tilted her head back down, and gently scratched David’s chest with one hand, her other still combing his hair. He’d fall asleep if it weren’t already day. His afterlife body didn’t care for naps.
“I mean, that does sound pretty awesome,” he said. “What about Mia?”
“Hey, if we can get your sister, she can join us. I bet she’ll be a great fuck, too.”
“What? No no no no, no no. No.”
Laughing, Jes teased her tail down his abs. “Fine fine. Maybe we can find another group of demons for her to fuck? Or you know, maybe we could all join a big group? The Damall might take us in. In fact, I bet they’d love to get their hands on you and Mia.”
Right, the Damall. Troublemakers. A group of demons that purposefully caused problems for the spires.
“Can we trust them?”
“No idea. Caera?”
Caera shrugged, and kept facing the entrance. “The Damall might be a good option. I don’t think the crazy shit coming David’s way is just going to stop, and maybe they’ll have answers. But…”
“But?” David asked.
“But, they have their own goals. They’re not just going to let us join them for asylum. We’d be joining guerrilla fighters, who are all determined to cause chaos.”
“That does get in the way of what I want to do,” Jes said. “Fuck me, I just want to do be left alone, me and my lover and her pet boy toy. Is that so much to fucking ask?” Grumbling, she traced a claw down his chest, next to Dao’s claws. “But… I mean, I do still kinda want to see what’s gonna happen, too.” After a few quiet seconds, she looked away, and a small smile snuck onto her lips. “Dao wants to keep her pet alive, no matter what we do. So I guess I’m gonna stick around.”
He was tempted to eye her suspiciously, maybe remark he thought maybe there was something else going on in her head. Maybe she actually liked him? Maybe–
“You just want him for the sex,” Caera said, prowling over to them.
Dao chirped a few times before she smiled down at him, huge breasts hanging over his head. They were dark red, firm, not aroused, but that was the smile she used when she had sexy thoughts on the mind.
“Dao’s right,” Jes said. “Dude has the dick of a tetrad and the aura of an incubus. It’d be a shame to not indulge.” More than Dao with sexy thoughts, then.
Caera chuckled as she lay on the ground beside David, leaned in, and rested her chin on his shoulder.
“Well, until the patrols die down, we got nothing to do but hide out in here. We should go hunting again soon, but for now, I’m forced to agree. It’d be a shame to not indulge.”
David gulped, and looked at the beautiful tiger lady’s face only inches from his, before he looked up at Dao. Right before his eyes, her enormous breasts softened again, more than they’d been moments before with Jes, until the giant pillows brushed against the tip of his nose. His aura hadn’t awoken yet, either.
“What if I say no?” he asked. It took a mountain of effort to not stare up at the glorious boobs a literal inch above his face.
Dao clicked a few times, shook her head, and frowned down at him. Without eyes or eyebrows, frowning consisted of scrunching up her nose. It was adorable.
Jes laughed, slipped out from under his legs, and straddled his waist. Her body had softened, too.
“Look, I know you’re the type to think about shit until it kills you. You need to get out of your head more, fresh meat. Shit happens. Apparently even really crazy shit happens, like invisible monsters and the fucker riding showing up.” Oh god she was giving him the ‘roll with it, adapt’ speech.
Caera laughed, leaned in, and kissed him. “If demons sat around, thinking about shit a tenth as much as you do, David, none of us would make it out of the hatching pit.”
Right, the hatching pit. No wonder demons were able to keep going, keep moving, and not let shit bog them down. Unlike him. He wanted to curl up in a corner, brood, and think about all the shit happening to him and his sister that wasn’t fair. The random deaths, getting kicked out of Heaven, and now being the target of a bunch of people, for who knew what reason. He wanted to disappear into a hole, duck and cover, wait for things to calm down. But he had to get Mia safe, first.
Much as his inner voice screamed at him to figure out what was happening to him, to solve the puzzle, another voice screamed at him to not do anything stupid, and to stay alive. His eternal duality, forever tearing him apart. Solve the puzzle, figure out why, or just walk away before his obsessive need to figure shit out got him killed. In the past, ‘get him killed’ was really just whether he should annoy the school bully, or see what happened if he did some fun science experiments with gasoline. Now, it was really about life or death… in the afterlife.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
They waited for twilight. Why they called it twilight, he didn’t know, but they couldn’t really call it sunrise or sunset, dusk or dawn. The sky of fire, a maelstrom of swirling flame during the day, died down to glowing embers at night, and the amber veins in the ground and rocks softened, too.
Demons didn’t like the twilight hours. Supposedly the hellbeasts were more active during that time. Why hellbeasts weren’t their most active in the middle of night, he didn’t know, but Hell was a strange place with strange rules.
Ideally, their little group would have stayed in the cave until night, but demons did go out at night sometimes. Common hunting time for demons, on the prowl for souls to eat. Twilight hours were dark enough for demons to sneak around though if they were willing to risk it, and avoid detection by other demons and humans, and hellbeasts too. The problem was, according to the girls, moving during twilight was a gamble. One mistake and you were a hellbeast’s meal.
Demons hated hellbeasts for one very specific reason: you couldn’t eat them. No resonance to eat. Hellbeasts, on the other hand, loved to eat demons, and humans too. It was a weird food chain.