Victoria's Demon Lover (11 page)

     She looked down and his face
was blurred from her tears.  “This is horrible.  This is disgusting and
revolting and repulsive…”  She would need a thesaurus to continue.    She
couldn’t even back out and return to the tree.  She was in the center of the
battlefield.  Every direction was a bad direction.

     Jasper agreed.  “Then find him
and quit whining.  He is here for a reason.”  He gave her a sly look.  “As are
you.”

     She forced herself to look
into another ruined face.  And another.  Jasper handed her a piece of a snapped
spear and she used it to turn bodies over and move battered helmets so she
could see faces.  Glassy open eyes stared unseeing at her.  Closed eyes hid
their colors from her.  Broken teeth and missing jaws gaped at her.  She spit
bile on the ground and continued, man after man after man.  Her spear poked and
pushed and lifted torn clothing.  Her legs to her knees were covered in blood
and bits of flesh and still she kept going, man to man to man with Jasper on
her heels.

     And then she found him.  When
she turned this body over, the helmet rolled away and there he was.  Marcus. 
The Roman. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear.  If it had healed it
would have left a thick white scar.  But this wound would never heal.  The
blood that had poured from this wound colored his chest and the ground at her
knees.

     She knelt in the gore beside
him and turned his face to her.

     “Yep.  That’s him.”  Jasper
confirmed.

     She stroked the stubble on his
jaw.  He was warm.

     “Warmth of Hell,” Jasper
reminded her.

     “How do I bring him back to
life?” she asked him.

     Jasper shrugged.  “How is it
always done?”

     “With a kiss?”

     She stared at the dead face
and chapped lips.  He looked like he had been marching for days.  The lines
around his closed eyes, though relaxed in death, could be seen clearly.  He
squinted as he marched, and the sun tanned his face all over but where the
wrinkles were.  Thin white lines radiated from the corners of his eyes now that
his face was slack in death.  The sight of this small bit of realism in a land
of the surreal tightened her throat.  She took his hand.  It was calloused and
rough.  The fingers were thick and the thumb muscle was wide and bulged with
strength.  This man had carried a sword for years.  He worked hard day after
day, year after year.  His body bore testament to his labors.

     Was he the right one?  Only
his eyes would tell.  She remembered his eyes as both the expressive brown ones
and the searing yellow ones.  In death he was just a man like many lying here
on the battlefield.

     “He’s the one.  No one else
has a slit throat like that.  None of the others were killed that way.  You are
making excuses.”  Jasper shifted his weight from one foot to the other.  He
wanted his shoes.  “Kiss him.”

     She bent over the bloodied
lips.  As she pressed hers against his, she realized that in all her demon encounters,
not once had he ever kissed her. 
Kissing is for lovers
, she thought. 
She pressed harder, and she there was no response from the corpse, she smoothed
his short hair from his brow and cupped his cheek tenderly.  Even if he was a
demon now, this man deserved a bit of tenderness.  In the touch of his lips she
felt his years of loneliness.   The endless marching, the rough weather, the
constant orders and incessant movement of the legion.  She felt his love for
his comrades and saw flashes of their games, the dice, the wrestling and the stories
of adventures in far lands told across a campfire between mugs of ale and wine
and beer and mead.

     She also saw him killing, and
raping and burning.  She saw the terror in the eyes of young women as he threw
them to the ground ripped at their clothing,  He saw the hatred in the eyes of
the warriors he killed and the hopelessness in the eyes of the old men and
women he roped together to sell as slaves.

     She saw all this as she kissed
his lips.

     She sat up in bed and looked
at the clock.  Eight in the morning.  The sun shone through the window.  The
tree outside was cheerful with the sounds of morning birds waiting their turn
at the feeder.  She could see her closet where the harpy had messed up her line
of shoes, and she could see that the silver pumps were gone.  The chalk circle
on her wood floor was smeared into streaks and the alarm on her clock was going
off with a pounding rhythm.   She leaned over, picked it up and threw it across
the room.

Sharon arrived later with the two
boys and the first wave of unloading and unpacking began.  Victoria moved
through the chores without enthusiasm.  She smiled at the boys and sent them
outside with peanut butter sandwiches to play in the yard.  She helped Sharon
assemble bed frames and carry dressers and suitcases over her threshold.  By
the end of the day she lay on her back on her bed, sweaty and dirty, staring at
the ceiling, too tired to get in the shower.  She did anyway.  Water ran down
her face and over her breasts and down the drain.  It started out brown and grey
and soapy, but ran clear after a while and long after she was clean.  Victoria
sighed.  All week she had tried to forget him.  Each of him.  She dismissed the
blacksmith, erased the Norseman, and tried to crumple the Roman like a piece of
paper and toss him in the wastebasket.

     Her body was warm and moist
from the shower, and the memory of each of her men moistened her inside.  She
grumbled a little that she missed the sex. But why not? 
It’s not like I am
getting any in real life.
None of her so-called relationships had lasted
more than a few months.  None had been satisfying.  As soon as she had a man,
she wanted to get rid of him.  Each had been flawed in a way that she could not
overcome.  One was obsessed with video games, another with sports.  One could
not leave his work at the office when he came to her and was always on his
phone talking to clients instead of to her.  In the middle of sex he would
answer his phone talking into the little glowing device in short puffs as he
fucked her.  That pissed her off.  The one thing they all had in common was how
self-centered and shallow they were. 
My books are better company
.

    
She moved to her bed
and threw the coverlets aside so only the bare sheets lay spread out before
her.  She opened the drawer in the lamp table and took out her dildo. 
And
my dildo is a better lover.
  She tested the battery.  Good.  The low hum
reminded her cleft what was to come and another wave of moisture slicked her. 
She lay back on her pillows and bent one knee.  One arm was behind her head in
her wet hair.  She touched the humming tip of the dildo to her clit and
wriggled her buttocks into the mattress.  Not too much too soon.

     She imagined the Roman first.
Marcus.  She imagined him in his battle gear, then little by little she took
off each bit of leather.  As she removed his breastplate she touched herself,
then each leather strap of his sandals, another touch.  She squirmed.  She slid
the leather skirt thing over his thighs and a word popped into her head.
Pteruges. 
She stopped. 
How did I know
that?
Her clit called out to her so she made a note to follow up with some
research.  Right now she had to attend to something.  She touched the tip of
the dildo to the inner lips of her vagina and waited for the familiar tingling
welcome.  In her mind her Roman was naked now.  She raised his cock in her
imagination like the legion’s standard until it was thick and ready.  She
imagined him kneeling and leaning over her, then imagined the hard cock
touching the outside of her cleft exactly where she positioned the dildo.  She
brought her other hand down from the pillow and stroked the edge of her breast
as her demon sometimes did, as Jack stroked Maggie’s.  Her hips twitched and
she pushed the dildo in a little further then used her thumb to flip the switch
to a higher vibration.  The hum of the dildo grew louder, which was annoying
but it couldn’t be helped.  If a man’s penis hummed, it would be easier to
fantasize, but the only thing that hummed with a real cock inside her was her
spine.

     She arched her
back and pretended that Marcus was pushing that thick cock inside.  She pushed
the dildo and tilted it so the hum would reach her clit.  It did and she
gasped.  Her vagina gripped the dildo with waves of contractions and the
electric tingle in her clit ran up and down her spine, down her legs until even
her scalp tingled with the orgasm.  She did not want to stop, but the intensity
became painful.  Honest orgasms with real fleshy cocks did not feel that way. 
Only the electric orgasms sometimes hurt with too much pleasure.  The Roman
faded.  She flipped the switch on her dildo and the hum faded.  Her glittering
orgasm faded.  The light outside the window faded, and she felt like her whole
life was fading away.

     She tossed the
dildo and it bounced once on her blankets and lay there looking silly like a
cock without a man attached.  She sighed.  She wanted the man.  Not the cock. 
It wasn’t just the sex.

     This thought wasn’t
any more comforting.  She realized she wanted a dead man.  Impossible.  She
knew a few widows.  Like Michael Brand’s wife. She remembered her from the
office parties.  And her mother’s friend Martha who lost her husband to
cancer.  Those men were not coming home to their wives.

     But the wives
weren’t going to the Netherworld to see them either.  Victoria sat up
.  I
found him once. I can do it again.  I have to figure out how to stay there.
 She
didn’t know why she left the Roman at the moment she was supposed to be
reviving him.  She glanced at the clock.  “Albert Magnus” she said loudly and
looked at her phone.

     Sure enough, it
buzzed and vibrated on the little table top.

     “Mr. Magnus!”
she said.  “Don’t hang up until I have asked you everything!”

     She heard a soft
laugh from her phone.  “Is that possible?  To be asked everything?”

     “Yes. 
Everything for now, anyway.”  She told him about the harpy and about Jasper. 
She told him about the battle and about Marcus.  “How can I make sure I don’t
get whisked back to my bed before I am ready?”  There was silence on the other
end.  “Mr. Magnus?”

     “I am here.  I
am thinking of how to answer you.  Did you say that Jasper told you to kiss
him?”

     “Yes.”

     “And you did.”

     “Yes, but then I
was back in my bed.”

     “Don’t kiss him
next time.”

     Victoria
grimaced.  “Well.”

     “Listen, it was
not the kiss
per se
.  He didn’t want you to be there.  He is the one who
sent you back.”

     That had not
occurred to her.  It had never occurred to her that he didn’t want her
anymore.  Not once did that thought cross her mind.  After all, he was the one
who started this whole thing.  Tears dripped down her nose.  Even a dead man
didn’t want her.  She broke into sobs; the phone fell to her lap.  She coughed
and choked and cried and made terrible noises in her throat.  She played all
the old boyfriends in her mind and all the failed relationships.  She flogged
herself with every pound she gained and every bad hair day at the office.  She
made up reasons why she did not have a man and replayed all the times her
mother had asked when there would be a husband and children and grandchildren.
She had been replacing men with books and a humming dildo.

     Vaguely she
could hear Mr. Magnus’s tinny voice coming from her phone’s speaker. 
“Victoria?  Victoria?”

     She sniffed and
picked up the phone.  “Never mind,” she croaked and pushed the
end
button.  A dead lover was
breaking up with her
by sending her back to
Earth from Hell.  She started to laugh hysterically but it wasn’t funny.

     Her phone rang. 
She sniffed again and picked it up.

     “Victoria?”

     “Yes, I am
fine,” she lied.  “I am just so confused.”

     Mr. Magnus
sounded concerned.  “I am in Nebraska or I would meet you for coffee.  Listen
to me, Victoria.  You can go back.  You must go back.  But you can’t let him
push you around.  You have to find your courage, Victoria.”

     She sniffed.

     “Once you can
stand on your own, he can’t control you anymore.  He loves you.  He needs you. 
You have to help him.”

     Victoria wadded
up her tissue and frowned.  “How do you know he loves me?”

     “Jasper told
me.”  Then the light blinked and his call was gone.

     Victoria lit
another candle.  This time she was wearing her thick leather boots and jeans. 
She had on one of her long sleeved cotton blouses and her sheepskin vest.  Just
in case.  It seems Hell can be both hot and cold.  She pointed at her fresh
chalk circle and at the moment her digital clock flashed 12:00 she said,
“Jasper!”

     He seemed glad
to see her.  “Victoria.”  His little demon eyes glanced at her closet.  She had
cleverly left the door open and lined up her most outrageous shoes.   In front were
the red pumps with the faux fur bows and the pink stilettos with the genuine
cubic zirconia accents on the heels.  Jasper’s eyes glittered.

     “I want you to
take me back to him.”