Demon's Fire (2 page)

Sex rode the air in Bhamjran as thickly as the scent of coffee or sand or spice. Not for nothing did humans call this the “city of laissez-faire.” Whatever your erotic wish, however twisted or exotic, you could satisfy it here.

Or you could if you weren’t a solitary demon royal. Prince Pahndir, former captive and teaching tool at the Purple Crane, had discovered—to his intense physical dismay—that for him, satisfaction was elusive at any price.

He leaned back in his gaudy, gilded booth in Bhamjran’s busy market square. It was the height of the desert city’s morning rush, with shoppers seeking everything from fruit to chickens to new brass pots. It was a challenge to compete with the color and flair of the locals’ stalls, but the eye-catching wooden structure beneath which he sat—his calling card, as it were—had been carved into a lacework of creatively copulating statuettes; ironic, considering his own long-standing sexual predicament.

The acid humor he experienced at the reminder showed itself as no more than a deepening of the shadows around his mouth. He was resigned to living in exile among the humans, even to profiting from them. But smile as they did? Demonstrate that his control over his emotions was as poor as theirs?

He tutted silently in his head.

That, despite two years of hope denied, he still had too much pride to do.

He wouldn’t have been in this
chowk
at all if it weren’t for pride, hawking other people’s flesh to keep from having to sell his own. Oh, he could have let Prince Cor continue to support him. Deep as his pockets were, the Midarri prince wouldn’t have complained. But Pahndir couldn’t tolerate taking charity from a man who’d married the one woman he’d…connected with since his own wife’s death.

He nodded slightly to himself beneath his yellow awning’s shade.
Connected
was a word he could allow himself. He didn’t love Buttercup—or
Xishi
, as he forced himself to call her now that she was no longer a pillow girl. He wouldn’t love her—couldn’t—despite his body’s prompting to the contrary. Xishi was Cor’s mate, physically bound to him by the tyranny of her genes, just as Pahndir had been bound to Thallah. For that matter, Xishi’s love for Cor would have been enough to keep Pahndir at a distance. Her happiness was everything.

Or so Pahndir told himself.

He shifted in his low folding leather seat, the mere thought of Xishi enough to thicken his male organ. What he wouldn’t have given for another true release from her. Or from anyone, for that matter. He wasn’t even near his heat. His last bout of torture had ended a week ago. This time, he hadn’t given in to the temptation to seek a partner; that particular brand of disappointment was exhausting him. Nonetheless, the idea of ejaculating, of emptying his seed without a Yamish doctor’s aid, was an obsession he could not shake.

In a way, that obsession had led him to his current occupation as the owner of The Prince’s Flame. In his quest to find a human who could do for him what Xishi had, he’d visited every brothel the city had, most of them more than once. Sexual longing, and the lengths to which a person would go to gratify it, was a phenomenon he understood extremely well.

That being so, why shouldn’t he be the first man in Bhamjran to run a bawdy house?

Never mind this was a matriarchal city. Never mind many of the local males were expected to keep to the
zenana
and be cosseted. Bhamjran was an Ohramese possession now, and the Ohramese were used to men running things. More important, thanks to their prissy virgin queen Victoria, the Ohramese weren’t as comfortable with their desires as their Bhamjrishi subjects. They didn’t want to explain their supposedly inappropriate cravings to a human madam. Explaining them to a demon like himself, a being they considered too depraved to be capable of judging them, was easier.

Add to that the fact that no human would ever best his kind in business, and it was no wonder The Prince’s Flame was quietly becoming a commercial force.

A shadow fell across Pahndir’s feet where he had stretched his pointed slippers into the sun. He shook himself from his musings and looked up.

His shills for the day, a pretty human girl named Alia and an even prettier human boy named Tomas, stood side by side before him on the dusty ground, their expressions wavering between caution and sulkiness. They worked for Pahndir because he gave them a larger cut than his rivals, and because he more readily allowed them to draw the line of what they would not do. His house was cleaner than the ancient city’s other brothels, and safer, too. He supplied his workers with finer clothing, more varied food, and all the Yamish amenities Prince Cor’s connections had enabled him to install: electric lights and running water, to name two.

Considering how much more advanced Yama were, they had to be careful what technology they allowed into human hands, but all the necessities of health and civility Pahndir’s house supplied.

Despite these advantages, his employees hadn’t lost their fear of him. Pahndir was forever Other to the humans, a member of a race they’d called “demon” since discovering them accidentally forty years ago. Now Pahndir’s alabaster skin, his ink-black hair, his height, his rim-to-rim silver eyes declared his alien nature. He didn’t even have to maintain his trademark Yamish stoniness; no matter how kind he thought himself, these young humans wouldn’t warm up to their master.

A sensation he didn’t choose to name constricted his vocal cords. His employees’ affection couldn’t have mattered less to him. In a country whose lower class was as large and poor as Bhamjran’s, there would always be those who wanted or needed to sell themselves. Feared or loved, Pahndir’s more favorable fiscal arrangements ensured that The Prince’s Flame would always get the cream of the crop.

In spite of which, Pahndir preferred not to institute a rule of terror.

“What is it?” he asked as gently as he could—though for all he knew his voice sounded as cool as ever to their human ears.

“We’re tired,” Alia announced. “We worked all last night.”

Less bold than his companion, Tomas nodded shyly in agreement. Both their shoulders were drooping.

“It’s your turn in the market,” Pahndir reminded them. “You being here, embodying what The Prince’s Flame has to offer, drums up business for everyone.”

“But we’re
really
tired,” Alia blurted. “No one wants to take our cards this early in the day.”

This was patently untrue. Pahndir could see she held no more than half the stack he’d given her to pass out, and Tomas held less than a third. Alia bit her lip and flushed when she saw his gaze had fallen to her hand. Pahndir almost smiled but caught himself. Humans were so easy to read sometimes that he truly couldn’t help but be amused.

“Beauty such as yours will always stir interest,” he assured them, “no matter what the hour. But perhaps you would benefit from a coffee break.” He dropped a clinking rain of silver
denars
into Tomas’s palm, a show of favor that had the young man flushing as deeply as his companion. Bhamjrishi males weren’t often trusted with money.

“Thank you, sir,” the boy whispered. “We’ll bring back the change.”

“A black espresso will be good enough.”

Tomas jerked his head in agreement, and the pair ran off with the exuberance of prisoners freed from hard labor.

Once he’d shrugged off the unflattering eagerness of their departure, it was not unpleasant to be left alone. Pahndir didn’t mind the blazing summer heat the way humans did. Millennia of genetic manipulation had given his kind the ability to adjust to extremes. Now, with his body slouched in the chair and his limbs relaxed, he felt very much the snake basking in the sun that so many humans would have seen.

Nor was his ease the heat’s doing alone. The square held such a crowd of humans, all jostling and striving and
feeling
the way humans did, that it was impossible not to imbibe a bit of their etheric force, even without touching them. The unavoidable transfer of energy went to his head like brandy spiked with caffeine. His world, frustrations notwithstanding, took on a golden glow. Maybe he should come to the
chowk
every morning, instead of his usual once-a-week visit. Live with the edges blurred for a while. Let himself pretend he was at peace.

Lacing his hands across his flat, hard belly, he narrowed his eyes in search of potential customers.

A low, bushy palm tree obscured his leftward view, but to the right, where Shiva’s Way fed into the square beneath a sandstone arch, Pahndir’s gaze encompassed all. A handsome lady of her house in a sapphire tunic, her arms agleam with gold bangles, seemed worth sending Tomas after when he returned. Sadly, at the moment, the rest of the crowd appeared too poor for his rates.

And then he saw them: a man and a woman walking shoulder to shoulder past a line of citrus stalls. They were human, Ohramese by their dress, smiling with enjoyment for the young, new day. The woman wore a crisp white shirtwaist with a long navy skirt, the man a close-cut suit in sand-colored cloth. Neither looked far into their twenties, and both were tall for their race—the man a hair over six feet and the woman a shade below.

They weren’t aristocrats; their clothes weren’t fine enough for that, but neither were they poor. Upper working class, Pahndir deduced. Flush enough to holiday in Bhamjran, but not much more. Definitely not flush enough for The Prince’s Flame, and still he couldn’t look away. Something about them caught his attention: some intensity within them, some repressed passion.

As Pahndir watched, the woman picked up an orange and held it to her nose, closing her eyes as she breathed in the scent. Her cheeks were sun browned, her hair a gleaming fall of chestnut caught in a simple tail. Her lush, full lips were dark as cinnamon. When she wet the upper, Pahndir’s heart jolted in his chest, his nerves quickening to a degree he couldn’t remember feeling for some time. The fans of her lashes lifted as the hand that held the orange fell. Clear across the market, Pahndir saw her eyes were honey-gold.

Oblivious to his attention, she elbowed her companion in a friendly way, a gesture that shook her breasts behind the white shirtwaist.

Pahndir cursed softly to himself. She couldn’t have known how the sun shone through that starched white cotton, how it turned every curve of her lithe, young torso to a clear shadow. She wore no corset, and he could see the slightly swollen peaks of her nipples, the high, conelike projection of her small, firm breasts. She was built like a gazelle, all racing lines and smooth, hard strength.

Generally speaking, Pahndir preferred more plumpness in a human female—most likely because his own kind was lean—but her looks were just different enough to call to him. His body tightened as he imagined her naked beneath him: her struggle against his strength, his inexorable penetration, the taste of salt on her human skin…

Barely aware that he was doing it, his tongue came out to wet his mouth, just as hers had moments earlier. Unlike her, in him the gesture bared a dark forked marking, a natural coloration that had once terrified her kind. Seeing it, the vendor in the next stall over turned away nervously.

Demon
he was then, a demon who longed to ravish and plunder.

The woman’s companion bent to her to say something—some human tease, apparently, because she threw back her head and laughed. To Pahndir’s secret delight, the sound was no ladylike tinkle, but a true guffaw.

“Charles!” Pahndir heard her humorous outrage ring out. “You’re impossible!”

The woman shoved his arm as she said it, as if she were a boy herself and he her schoolmate.

They’re not lovers then,
Pahndir thought, without stopping to worry that the idea flooded him with hot relief.

Her companion laughed more quietly back at her, tossed a coin to the vendor, and began peeling her orange. Pahndir could feel the pair’s high spirits as they continued to stroll in his direction around the square: two healthy young Ohramese come to shop with the natives. They’d take this story back with them when they went home—how quaint and foreign everything was, how deliciously risqué. The man tossed bits of orange pith at his friend, causing her to laugh again. Her eyes were glowing, her color high. Within her narrow-waisted skirt, her long, sure strides swung like a man’s.

Tomboy,
Pahndir thought, retrieving the human word.

The trait didn’t squelch his fascination. She looked alive laughing with the man; carefree and innocent. With an odd little ache pinching in his chest, Pahndir realized only a human could wear a look like that. Among his own kind, with their byzantine sophistication and endless scheming, innocence was stamped out young.

Just then, as the male fed an orange section into the woman’s laughing mouth, a long-tailed desert falcon wheeled overhead. The bird screamed a challenge, perhaps offended by the noise below. In unison, the humans turned their eyes to the sky.

Pahndir’s first clear sight of the man’s face was his second gut-punch of the morning.

The male was fair in every sense of the word, his hair a straight silvery blond, his eyes a dreamy seaswept blue. His features were so exquisitely cut and balanced they could have belonged to one of Pahndir’s race. Oh, the human’s coloring would have been unusual for a Yama but not impossible. His was a beauty that transcended genes, a throat-squeezing, breath-stealing symmetry. The yearning he betrayed as he watched that hawk circling overhead only heightened his appeal.

Anyone who saw his expression, whatever their culture, would know he hungered for freedom.

Freedom from what, Pahndir could not guess. The man turned from the hawk before the woman did. As luck would have it, his gaze clicked precisely into Pahndir’s. A prickle swept Pahndir’s nape, lifting the little hairs that grew there, but he didn’t lower his eyes. The man’s look of yearning had blown away with the hot, dry wind. In its place, Pahndir read a flash of recognition, followed by a sardonic self-consciousness.

This man, stranger though he was to Pahndir, knew who he was. This man knew what he was hawking from his golden stall.