The Devil Dances, page 7
part #2 of Nick Englebrecht Series
I breathed in and I breathed out my raw power. I raised my hand a few inches and Sarah’s entire body jerked upward like a puppet on short strings.
“Fuck you, Mammon. Fuck you, Devil, Prince of this World…”
“Why Sarah?” I asked as calmly as I could. I knew if the house were wired with electricity every appliance would be overloading about now. Power and rage poured off Sarah like heat off a desert deadpan, more than any single little girl could possibly have. I thought it was possible that there was more than one of the fallen inside her. There might be a legion, for all I knew… or cared, really. One demon or a million, they were all going the way of Elvis. “Why go into Sarah? What do you want from her?”
The thing inside Sarah glared at me like a snake. It smiled with bestial lust. “She welcomed it. She spread her pussy for him like the good little slut she was. She welcomed him into her body!”
The creature’s answer confused me. I didn’t understand who “he” was. I didn’t understand what it was talking about, but I was sure it was linked to Sarah’s possession somehow. Usually, when you open one door, many things come through. That was the reason the demonic host could not usually affect the young and the innocent. All I could figure was that Sarah was not as innocent as she had first seemed… yet she was not yet old enough for her own Rumspringa…
“Who are you and how did you get into Sarah?” I demanded to know.
A new sound came out of Sarah’s throat, a tiny mewling noise I recognized as belonging to a young girl. Sarah. Finally, Sarah was in distress. A wave seemed to pass over her face, and for a moment all the tension and worldliness left it and I was looking down into the sweating, terrified face of a young girl trapped in her own version of hell. “Mama…” she said, and then the wave passed and the demon was back again.
I realized this couldn’t go on. I couldn’t keep interrogating the demon without hurting little Sarah. I squeezed my fist and the demon screamed in agony, over and over like a siren, and thrashed its head back and forth while Sarah’s body bowed like there was a rope tied around her middle, arching her slender frame up at an almost unnatural angle.
Time to end this circus—even if I couldn’t get answers. I took a deep breath. “I, the World’s Inheritor, drive you from us, whoever you may be, unclean spirits, all satanic powers, all infernal invaders, all wicked legions, assemblies and sects. In the name of Ha-Satan, and by the power of my father’s house, I command thee to leave this servant of Christ and to dwell in the darkness of the everlasting pit. As I will it, so mote it be.”
I drew the symbol of my father’s house over her face, not the pentacle or pentagram that was so popular in horror fiction and occult movies—that sign was actually pagan, not satanic—but the older symbol, the Morning Star, the real one that only some of the most dedicated scholars and priests on earth knew.
Sarah erupted into new screams and her hands flashed out, catching me at the sides of my face, scratching my cheeks with her fingernails as the unclean spirits were wrenched from her and flung into darkness. The scratches hurt, but I didn’t mind so much if it meant I was freeing little Sarah from her tormentors. I’d had worse done to me, much, much worse. It lasted only a few seconds, then her eyes cleared and she slowly and peacefully fell back onto her pillows as the room filled with the perfume of roses and hyacinth.
She let out a kitten-like cry and covered her face. She had dislodged the handmade quilt in her struggles, and it was only then that I spotted her small, but still very noticeable baby bump. Seconds later, her mother and father were there, comforting her and speaking lowly in Pennsylvania Dutch.
I stood up, stood back, even as Sarah’s mother drew the quilt up over her daughter in modesty. I realized my work here was done. I stepped outside the room, and old Mrs. Knapp escorted me down the stairs. We walked in silence with the unanswered question hanging between us
Eventually, Mrs. Knapp, sensing my unease, said, “She is not the first. There are others like this.”
“Pregnant girls? Pregnant little girls?” I swallowed against the knot in my throat. “How many? How many girls are like this?”
“There were eight. Sarah is the ninth.”
We stopped in the kitchen. I’d found it too warm for my liking when we’d first arrived, but now it was just right to chase away my bone chills. The scratches on my faces were starting to hurt, and Mrs. Knapp instinctively went to retrieve some astringent from the cupboards. I went to the kitchen window over the sink and looked out at the growing darkness and the clouds scuttling across the distant Lehigh Mountains. “Have you considered that someone in the community is responsible?”
“That was our first fear,” Mrs. Knapp said, returning and asking me to sit at the table so she could doctor my wounds. “The men were interviewed. The boys, too. But when the first children were born, we knew it was no one in the colony.”
“How do you mean?”
“They weren’t right, like. Not… correct. Deformed.”
“How?” I was almost too afraid to ask.
She closed her eyes tight. “The little ones had hooves. And other terrible things.” She swallowed hard. “Most died, but some survived…”
“What happened to the survivors?”
“The parents… well, they took care of them.” Mrs. Knapp lowered her head as if she was praying, or as if the burden of her life had become too much. “Nicholas, we don’t believe this is the work of any earthly power.”
“You think some unseen satanic power is impregnating your children?”
She went over my face with the cotton ball, slowly swabbing at my scratches. “I don’t know what to think.” When she was done, she went back to nervously playing with the ties on her cap once more. After a moment she seemed to realize what she was doing. Rising, she moved around the kitchen, fixing and rearranging things, busy work. “Can they do such things? Do you know?”
“This?” I indicated the stairs leading up. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
“But demons do tarry with humans, yah?” She looked me up and down as if to question my very existence.
I bit my lip. “Demons and humans can mate, yes. Obviously. But the circumstances have to be right, and it doesn’t happen like this.” I snorted air through my nostrils as I sought the proper answer. I was supposed to be the expert on these things, after all. “For one thing, the demon needs to take on some form of corporal existence. And the woman must not be an innocent. She must be of child-bearing age, and be a willing consort. It’s a consensual act of will between the woman and the demon. Demons don’t have carte blanche to do just whatever the hell they want, or else the world would be hip-deep in daemons.”
Mrs. Knapp nodded. “My Sarah is a good girl, a righteous girl.” There were tears in her eyes. “She reads books and rides horses. She helps me make schnitz pies. She helps her father in the fields. She would not consent to this. Before this, she did not even understand the ways between men and woman.”
“When did she get pregnant?”
She grabbed up the kitchen broom as she spoke. “Three months past. We found her wandering in the grove behind the house, delirious and in a state of half-sleep. She was not the first. They say the grove is haunted, that it does things to the children.”
I nodded as I stood and reached for my coat. “Let me do some research on this. If I can figure out what’s going on, maybe I can find a way of stopping it.”
“Please,” she said. “Stay with us a while. Do not leave this farm, no matter what becomes of me.”
I stopped and looked at her.
Mrs. Knapp stopped lifelessly sweeping the perfectly clean floor and set the broom aside. She came to me then, the way she had in the beginning. Fearlessly. She looked up at me from her bent angle and said, “I know who you are, Son of Ha-Satan. We have prayed to God for an answer, and He has seen fit to send you to us. We don’t question His will.”
I didn’t have it in me to explain that God was on a permanent vacation.
She struggled to her knees and clutched my hand. I started telling her to get up, but she interrupted me. She kissed my hand like a pious devout, and said, “If you will find out what has become of our colony and root out this evil which is plaguing our children, I promise I will give you my soul, Prince Nicholas. I will be your everlasting servant on earth as well as in Hell.”
“I don’t want your soul, Mrs. Knapp,” I said, pulling her up. “I do want to know what the hell’s going on here.”
t was three in the morning by the time I made it back to Merry and Frank’s place. I found the key hidden under the garden gnome, where Merry said it would be, and let myself in, trying to climb the stairs without waking the whole house.
My thoughts were spinning, and I was feeling the bolster on my power, a kind of nervous energy coursing through my limbs and making my hands shake where I clutched the handrail. I was all “leveled up,” so to speak, and I knew I would soon need a way to safely dissipate my power or it would drive me crazy. I’d done dozens of exorcisms back in Blackwater—it was, in fact, part of the services that Morgana and I regularly provided our clients—but it always left me edgy until something, or someone, siphoned off my excess power. Usually, that someone was Morgana, but she was back in Blackwater. I thought about taking a long walk, doing some push-ups, something, but I knew it wouldn’t help much. It wasn’t a physical release I needed, but a spiritual one. Or, in lieu of that, a sexual one.
I let myself inside the guest bedroom, not really expecting to find Vivian there, but hopeful nonetheless. I thought for sure she’d be sleeping the sleep of the exhausted and sexually fulfilled between Merry and Frank and that the bed would be disappointingly cold and empty, but I was in luck. There was a lump under our almost-marriage quilt, and it stirred as I began to undress in the dark.
“Nick, you back?” Vivian said sleepily.
“Yeah, baby, I am.” I sat down on the edge of the bed with my shirt open, groaning a little while my whole body hummed with unspent energy, and started untying my Skechers.
Vivian sat up in bed. She was wearing a delightfully brief satin babydoll nightie in black, trimmed with red lace. It emphasized, rather than hid, her curves. The bodice barely contained her big, soft breasts, and when she shifted on the bed, I realized she wasn’t wearing any panties, not even a G-string.
When I couldn’t get the knot out of my shoelaces because my hands were shaking too much, she climbed off the bed and went to her knees on the floor to untie my shoes for me. I knew some guys who would have gotten off on that, but something about the gesture offended me on a primal level, Vivian on her knees. I thought again of Mrs. Knapp offering me her soul and servitude in exchange for my services. But when I started to protest, Vivian stopped me. “Don’t. I want to.” She gave me a sweet and sexy smile. “It’s the least I can do for the man who owns my soul.”
“You gave me your soul,” I reminded her. “I wouldn’t have taken it otherwise.”
“I gave it to you because I trust you, Nick. I want to serve you. Let me.”
I let her get my shoes and socks off. She tucked my socks into my shoes. Unlike most college folks, Vivian was a neat freak, everything in order. Anytime I messed up her place, she yelled at me. Soon she ardently went to work on my jeans.
“What happened to your face?” she asked when she saw my half-healed injuries. My mojo had been working overtime, so I knew the scratches were almost healed—noticeable, but mostly healed.
I told her what had happened at the Knapp farm, what Mrs. Knapp had told me, about little Sarah, and about the exorcism. She didn’t say anything at first, and I knew I had probably pissed her off. “It’s important I get to the bottom of this,” I said. “Would you stand idly by and let something like this happen?”
“But this was supposed to be about us, Nick.”
“It can still be about us.” I sighed and decided to change the subject by saying, “Did you have fun with Merry and Frank?”
“It was really informative,” she said. “I watched, but I didn’t participate in their scene.”
“Really?” That surprised me.
She shrugged, her luscious red hair raining all over her shoulders. “I like them, Nick, but I decided I wanted to save myself for when you got home.” Having gotten my jeans open, she pushed me back on the bed and climbed over the edge, using her hands and her weight to pin me to the mattress. “This is our almost-honeymoon. I want us to be together. Just you and me tonight.”
She licked my lips and then kissed me while her hands snaked inside my jeans, found me, stroked me to full attention. I groaned against her mouth, shocked and delighted by how quickly she always got me up. “Jesus,” she whispered as she struggled to hold me down, “you feel like a livewire. Like you’re conducting a current.”
“Capacitor.”
“What?”
“Anytime I use my power I turn into a giant magickal capacitor. Morgana usually drains the excess off so I can sleep, but maybe you can do me tonight.”
“Nick,” she blinked in the dark, a devious little smile on her pretty face, “I’ll be happy to drain you.”
We cuddled and cooed and stroked each other as we stripped away various pieces of clothing. As I lay there, her body soaked up a little bit of my power and I slowly felt myself beginning to relax. After so many months of mentoring Vivian in the Craft, I found we could exchange our power fairly easily now. Touching was good. Sex was better.
I sat against a nest of pillows while she licked a path from my lips, down the center part of my body, to my lap. I nested my hands in her hair as she worked me up, telling her how beautiful she was, how hot she made me, how much I loved her. She giggled, and her giggle against my sweet spot just made me want her more. “Would you think I was beautiful if I was Amish?” she asked unexpectedly.
“You’d be beautiful no matter what you were, Viv.”
“Maybe I’ll dress up like a hot Amish girl for you. Would you like that?”
“Those prayer kapps. Those black stockings …”
She giggled again and sat up, resting her hands on my shoulders and giving me what I had come to think of as her “sex kitten” look. “Scene with me?”
In that moment, I didn’t care what she was—human or demon, saint or sinner. I didn’t care if she was the fabled Whore of Babylon. I wanted her so much it actually hurt. I was willing to do almost anything she asked. I gathered up great handfuls of her hair and kissed it. “What did you have in mind?”
She told me in explicit detail what she wanted—what she needed—to get off. She knew as long as it wasn’t too kinky and couldn’t actually hurt her, I was down with it. “You’re bad,” I told her.
“You love it.”
I commanded her to go to the Queen Anne desk in the corner of the room and bend over it, keeping her hands flat atop the polished surface. She obeyed me while giving me a less-than-innocent come-hither look over one shoulder. I stood behind her while we worked out our safewords and I asked her for her full consent.
“Come on, Nick. Hurry up!” she complained, rubbing her bare ass against the front of my body.
“A little patience would do you good, missy,” I told her as I started massaging her bare ass cheeks to get the blood flowing into her skin. That way, there would be less bruising in the morning, and less pain for Vivian to deal with.
“Fuck patience,” she growled. “And fuck you!”
I slapped her ass, hard. The sting of it made her squeal but she didn’t use our safewords to stop our scene. “Watch your mouth. Don’t speak, don’t come, and don’t move your hands.” I talked to her in a low, whispery warning growl, and she answered me with a grunt.
She tried to be patient, to listen to me, to obey me, but after I had molded myself against her back, cupped her breasts and started pinching her nipples hard through the lace of her teddy, she cursed and moved her hands. I gave her a half dozen spankings for speaking and another half dozen for moving her hands, until her ass was red and she was begging me to use the belt on her. She liked the belt, I knew. Vivian could be a real pain slut sometimes. But my foster father had beat me with a belt. I didn’t enjoy using it on her even when she begged me to.
Instead, I worked on teasing every inch of her with my hands, my lips, my teeth. Near the end, she sagged almost bonelessly against me and I pinned her to the top of the desk as I took her. Soon she was growling and clawing the polished surface of the wood and calling me all manner of names, cursing me, egging me on, begging me to give it to her hard and rough, the way she liked it.
I pleasured her and I pleasured myself. I emptied my power and passion inside her body. After we’d both been satisfied, I carried her back to bed and sat holding her in my lap while she snuggled against me and we kissed and made out like a couple of enthusiastic high school kids on their first date. I liked this part best, this closeness, with the sex and violence out of the way and nothing but our two bodies pressed together, hearts flitting rapidly against one another, mouths consuming, fingers grappling. In these moments, I didn’t feel so alone.
Finally, warm and sated, I felt myself starting to drift off. I could feel Vivian’s power flowing over and through me as she rested her cheek against my chest. I knew she was still feeding off my power. We pressed our hands together, clenched our fingers, and the witches’ marks we each had on our wrists matched exactly. Once, I’d meant to mark Vivian, to have her soul so I could protect it, so the angels couldn’t steal it away, but somehow we’d managed to mark each other in the process. I liked to think we belonged to each other and always would.
“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine,” I said. But Vivian had fallen asleep, and I didn’t think she’d heard me.
The following morning, while Merry and Frank were in the kitchen preparing bacon and eggs, I told Vivian about my plans to return to the Knapp farm, to stay there for a few days. I explained that Merry and Frank would take excellent care of Vivian while I was gone, that they were even willing to give her some lessons in lifestyling.
