This chapter comes from a book I started at the end of 2006. The characters came from my first novel (unpublished…way too long) and finishing that novel (“Heart of the Maze”) I didn’t want to end these characters. I had grown attached and this was damn stupid. So I came up with another book, first called “Another Story” then “Devil’s Revenge”. It’s a tale of magic, demons, cosmic travel and nothing like that ponderous first book. I learned a lot from writing this book, but again, too long by far. It was the first time I used time-warping in a story. And magic.
Garrett Cortelyou is a demon, well, half human and half demon. There is a whole parade of demons in this book and it took me out of my usual comfort zone in the research. Bess is a writer, who finds herself plucked out of the 21st century to 1832. Garrett can be a chauvinist and a brute, but he has a lot of energy….
Why do we write such things, and why do we create such characters? Every writer has an answer for this…I’m still trying to figure out mine.
Lady Nyo
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“DEVIL’S REVENGE”
Chapter 5
I had no way of telling time or sequence or anything that relates to the passage of time. I think of my society, where we grew up around various clocks: mantel clocks, hall clocks, electric clocks in the kitchen, the battery run clocks by our bedsides, and our wristwatches. In the dimension I was visiting, or found myself, there were few clocks. No one so far wore watches. Perhaps there were pocket watches, but I saw few people and couldn’t tell.
So I didn’t know what time it was of the morning, though I saw the sun had not risen. The room was colored by the timid light creeping into dawn, a blending of gray shadows. The fire had burned low during the night, and cast no glare. There before the fireplace was the Demon. He slouched in his chair, one booted foot upon the other, staring into the embers. He smoked a white, clay pipe, something I recognized as a “Dutch pipe.” He didn’t stir from his chair as I called his name, but blowing out a mouthful of smoke, he turned his face towards the bed.
“You’re finally awake.” He grinned around the stem of his pipe, his large white teeth gleaming in the dim light of the room.
“It is too early to wake, Garrett. Aren’t you cold at the fire?” I snuggled back into my pillow.
“’Ah, an invitation to your bed this early? Would do, but there is a litter of puppies around your breast.”
I opened the covers, and there under the blankets, were his four pups. Little two month old water spaniels, three boys and the girl, the runt, Sophie, snuggled between my breasts.
“Did you do this, Demon?” I laughed, for I had no memory of putting them there. The smell of puppies this close is a bit high, like sour milk.
“The fire was low when I entered the room and you looked warm enough to comfort them.”
“Have you thought what you are going to do with them, yet?”
“I aim to keep them right here, and you, my darling woman, will be nursing them for me.”
“Ah, Garrett, had you ever thought that perhaps I might be a bit too busy to care for your dogs? I am trying to finish this novel, my friend, and perhaps it would have been nicer for you to ask me first.”
“Perhaps, yes…but it still doesn’t change the outcome.” He grinned and his eyes snapped in the firelight. “The rules of the engagement are simple. You do what I want.”
“You are such an arrogant Demon! What makes you think that I will do as you demand? Have you ever heard of free will?”
“Highly overrated and doesn’t apply here.” He continued to puff and draw on his pipe and filled the room with his horrible smoke. Brimstone I believe.
“No so.” He continues to read my thoughts at will…his idea of free will, I suppose. He packed down his ‘tobacco’ with his thumb. “It’s a nice cherry and spice blend I brought from the islands… Perhaps you would prefer a pipe of opium?”
“I have never done such a thing, thank you very much.”
He turned a half-opened eye at me, and said lazily. “Perhaps before you dismiss it, you should at least try it once.”
“And why would I do such a thing? It seems a half-death to me.”
My Demon continued to puff on his pipe, the lazy whiffs of smoke spreading across the room. When I first smelled the acrid smoke, I had thought fleetingly of the pot that I used to smoke on occasion. I thought, ‘fleetingly’, but that was enough for my demon to pick up. Suddenly, the smoke was not of tobacco, but of a sweet smelling herb I recognized though I had not smelled for years.
“You bastard demon!” I laughed at him, this conjuring trick a minor one in his bag. “Do you know how hard it is to quit that stuff? That is the last thing I need to smell this morning. Way too early!”
All this ruckus awakened the dogs in my bed. They were rolling over each other, and jumping at the pink ribbons of my mobcap. Little Sophie between my breasts grunted and stretched.
“You have awoken your dogs, Garrett, now you better find something to feed them.”
He snapped his fingers and a bowl appeared on the floor in front of the fire. I handed each one from the bed to him, and he placed them around the bowl. Whatever it was, they ate with growls and snarls, stepping over each other.
“What is it you’re feeding them?” Even my runt Sophie was not shying from the food.
“Deer meat was handy.”
Well, at least he was sensible enough not to put down a dish of milk. Those pups would be runny within an hour.
“Oh, I thought about you nursing them but your nipples would give out in a day. Though it would be amusing to see your milk spout when they started to howl.”
Oh, he was a nasty demon this morning!
“Well, I’m glad you decided on deer meat instead.” What a devil he was, to think of these ways of tormenting me. His temper was like mercury, and he took offense easily. Perhaps it was part of the demon culture, for he certainly was a touchy devil.
“You should know, you thought me up.”
“Oh, Demon, I think you have had a long life before you ever came to thought.”
“It used to be Demon Lover, and now it is ‘friend’? I think we go backwards.”
Opening the covers, I smiled at him sweetly, and decided to take my chances this morning. He was an entertaining fellow, and carefully handled, could be amusing.
He put down his pipe on the table, and moved to the bed, slipping in bedside me. He placed my head upon his shoulder as he was wont to do, and settled next to me.
“You know, Garrett, I have a lot of writing to do today. I am behind with the book and want to finish before the years out.”
“You can write when I’m through with you, on the morrow…I want to show you things today. First I want to show John Thomas between us a seashell of delights.”
He was amorous in the morning. Actually, he was usually ready for a romp any time of the day or night.
“Besides, you avoided me in Chapter 4 and I mean to make up for that.” He had a scent about him that enchanting, a combination of musk and sweat and probably brimstone.
“It’s the scent of an aroused man, who is about to release a lot of little demons from his loins.” I laughed at his clumsy wit, and blushed in his arms. “You modern women wash too much. You have forgotten the scent of sex and its purpose. It draws the bees to the honey.”
Perfume and soap was such a part of my life that I didn’t realize my body produced its own scent of desire. Since he had bedded me my thinking on this had changed. After our lovemaking, we lay in a nest scented with the smell of flowers, old flowers, ashes and wood.
.
“Lie still, my darling woman, and indulge my mood here.”
When my demon demanded a thing, it was wise for me to listen. He had a way of bending me to his will, and I was learning, slowly, that sometimes there was an innate wisdom in what he did. Sometimes.
I lay in his arms. He touched my forehead, on both temples with one hand extended. He passed his hand slowly down to my eyes, and as he did, they closed. I barely felt his hand descend to my midriff, where he stopped and pressed down hard. That is where I seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep, or at least a trance. Then, with something like a slow electrical shock, from the ends of my fingers and toes, I felt a gathering of energy, something warm and concentrating, moving down the passageway of my limbs to the center of my body, where he had pressed on my stomach. It seemed that all my nerve endings were coming alive, and centering in my stomach. My pelvis was flooded with a warmth that moved back and forth across my hip bones. An exquisite feeling of tingling took hold of my face, my breast, my entire body. Suddenly, it all rushed upwards, out of my body, like a current of many colored ribbons, opening upward and outward, bursting from my body like waves of liquid and spinning off like a million stars above me. I was lifted from all gravity and hurled through space like a ragdoll. I was transformed into pure energy, or something of that nature, for I had no words to describe what was happening to me. All I knew that it was an extreme pleasure, beyond anything I could imagine, and something that I didn’t want to stop. It dissolved my body into a stream of light, flowing through and around any obstacle, any fear. I felt like I was turned inside out, and my sex had blossomed like a giant orchid. My whole body, or what was left of it, pulsated with a spent desire. Slowly, I seem to have fallen to earth, to this bedroom, to this bed, and in the arms of a man who was lying there unconscious. I looked at him, and he was naked next to me, the bedclothes on the floor. The room was over heated, though the fire was still low. I felt a wetness on my side, and looking down, saw that he was bleeding from his left side, below his heart.
“Garrett!”, I called to him in a panic. “Wake up!. Oh my God! You are bleeding, you have injured yourself.” I shook him, trying to arouse him.
He came slowly out of his trance, for it seemed that he was as spent as I was. “I am fine. It’s just a little sacrifice for this pleasure.” He passed his hand over his small wound, and it disappeared. My face was contorted with alarm, my hands on his shoulders.
“What did you do? What happened to us?”
He smiled a weak smile and cleared his throat. “There are many things in this world and out of it. That is just one. It’s pretty spectacular, but there are even better things to come.” He burped loudly. “Right now, I’m starving, and am weakened with expending that energy.” Turning over, he said with a grin. “Pretty good, no?”
I stared up at the ceiling, too weak to sit up. “Pretty good, yes.”
I lay there, silent, thinking of what had just happened. . My body felt like velvet, with no structure or nerves. I was empty of everything, completely undone.
“But why do you bleed?”
“Bess, you ask too many questions. Just think of Adam’s rib and the creation of Eve.”
He grinned at his words, and sat upright. Snapping his fingers, a tray of breakfast appeared on the table. He put on his long, linen shirt, and sat himself heavily in a chair.
I didn’t think that I could rise from the bed, much less walk to the other chair. My body was without bones.
“Oh, forgive me. I forget. That first experience usually knocks the wind out of your sails. You’ll find ways around that.”
He pushed himself out of his chair, and helped me to sit up on the side of the bed, and led me to the chair. I sat there, not dizzy, but confused as to what had happened to me. Was this what is called Tantric sex?
“Nope,” I heard him mumble as he stuffed his mouth with bread and butter. “Far beyond that earthy delight, but we can play with it next if you want. Bit of a bore, though.” He drank a swallow from his tankard of ale, as he preferred this drink instead of my tea in the morning.
I could not imagine doing anything else that day or the next! He grinned at me, the lustful devil, and pushed some bread my way. He extended his hand across the table and looked at me tenderly, and I placed my hand in his. There was a little of that current still present in the air, and it melted my hand into his.
Ah, Devil, I thought to myself. You are a dangerous man or demon, whatever you be. I wondered, when I fell back to earth, if all the atoms fell back in place. I knew I had given something to him, far beyond my heart and sex, and it seemed to involve my trust. Perhaps that was the key to his heart.
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2008-2013
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