Only Human (2 page)

The second creature stepped out, and he looked almost exactly like the one I’d killed, though his horns seemed thicker and heavier. This was my excuse to scream, and I did. Long and loud. These guys not only looked terrifying, but I’d seen how well the other fought, so the fear in my screams wasn’t an act.

I heard Nathan running towards us this time, but only because he intended for us to hear. The shock value of watching an eight hundred pound lion running towards you is enough to make anyone freeze, and I stepped out of the way as Nathan pounced on the more goat-like of the creatures. The other one ran, and I saw Aaron take him to the ground just before they rounded a corner.

Nathan had a paw on the goatman’s chest, and his scary lion teeth pressed into the goatman’s throat enough for a small trickle of blood.

“He wants to know where the women are,” I told the goatman. “I’d advise you to start talking. He’s tasted blood and he can’t always pull himself back.”

This was a lie. Nathan had perfect control, but I wanted to be sure the goatman was sufficiently terrorized.

“He should just go ahead and kill me, then,” the goatman said from the ground, his voice strained.

“Oh, no. He likes to play with his food before he kills it. Sometimes creatures are more than half eaten before they finally die. He knows which parts of the body he can eat without getting into an artery, and he bites around the spots that would let you bleed out. When they’re gone, he opens the stomach and eats the liver while his victim watches. I’ve never managed to stick around for much of it, the screams are horrid.”

He’d actually only done this around me once, but I wasn’t lying about having to leave because of the screams.

The goat creature actually laughed as he said, “He won’t eat me. I taste awful and will make him sick.” His English was good, but he had a chopped, guttural accent, and I had the feeling it was his second language.

Aaron showed up with the other creature tossed over his shoulder, and as he flung him to the ground I saw silver laced zip-ties around the creature’s wrists and ankles. I smelled burning flesh, but it was worse than usual.

Good to know these creatures had an allergy to silver, but I took shallow breaths to keep from gagging. Burning goat flesh smells even worse than burning human flesh.

Aaron wore a backpack, which I assumed contained Nathan’s clothes, which meant my guns should be in it, but now wasn’t the time to ask for them. Instead, I asked, “Can I have the roll of silver twine, please?”

The twine wasn’t all silver or it wouldn’t have worked to tie creatures up. There were silver threads woven into the outer casing, and it was quite painful to most shapeshifters. Silver didn’t bother Aaron, but would burn Nathan, which meant either Aaron or I would need to restrain the second guy.

He tossed me the roll, and I deftly caught it and stepped to the goatman restrained under Nathan’s paw. I made short work of binding his goat ankles together — he was completely furry and wasn’t wearing clothes, so I tied the twine tight enough to burrow into his fur and touch skin. I heard the sizzle and smelled the burn, and finished the knot as quickly as possible while holding my breath.

Now he was thrashing under Nathan, but the huge paw on his chest kept him from moving too much.

No stranger to the human version of CBT, I reached into the fur at the goatman’s crotch, found his genitals, and wound the rope around his nuts first, then his cock. I would’ve paid someone ten thousand dollars for a pair of gloves in that moment, but didn’t let the goatman know how skeeved I was — he needed to think this was just a normal day for me.

Nathan had his mouth off the man’s neck now, but still held him down with his massive paw, and I saw the claws dig in when the man moved around too much.

“Please,
Azazel below
, please save me from this torment!”

Most people beg God or Jesus when tortured, but this was the first I’d ever heard someone beg one of the lesser known demons of hell.

“Doesn’t look like your demon’s listening,” I told him. “Where are the women?”

“Lucifer, Belial, Mephistopheles, Asmodeus!” he called. “Someone! I need help!”

I looked at Aaron as gears starting turning in my head. Azazel was somehow related to goats and was a demon, and the other beings he called were also demons or devils. Asmodeus is supposedly tied to lust somehow, but I wasn’t clear on how or why, or how powerful he may or may not be.

“They’re half-demons,” Aaron said, his face a mask so I had no idea whether this was a bad thing, or a terrible thing.

I must’ve looked confused, because he further explained, “He’s calling demons because he’s related, though probably pretty distantly. However, he’s right about the lion not eating them — they’ll taste horrid.”

“How do they survive here? Do they have a more human looking form?”

Aaron shook his head. “Just as some beings of faery can come into our realm and have sexual relations with women, so can the lowest of the demons. Most of the inhabitants of the hell realm can’t get into our world through a normal gateway, but a few without much power can. You’re looking at their offspring.” He looked in the direction of the cave, though we were too far away to see it, and added, “My guess is they can pass through gateways with ease, which means they probably live in the hell realm and only come here when on an assignment.”

Nathan gave a pissed-off cat grumble, and Aaron looked at him a few seconds before shifting his gaze back at me. “I’ll try to get information from them, but the odds are we’ll need to hand this off to someone else. This isn’t my forte.”

I looked at the goatman and noted a change in his entire demeanor. He was hurting, but he was getting off on it now. I looked to his groin and saw his erect penis poking up through his fur.

Aaron might be right, but I wasn’t ready to toss in the towel just yet, so I told him, “If you’ll bind this one so I can play with him without needing the lion to hold him in place, then maybe you can take the more human of the two and let me have a go at this one?” Nathan wouldn’t want us to name him to enemies while he was in lion form, so we didn’t.

Aaron realized I had a better chance of getting somewhere with the half-demon who was sexualizing pain, so he nodded.

Three minutes later the grotesque goatman was strung with silver-laced rope between two trees, his erection still peeking out of his long fur, and the smell of burning goat-meat permeating the air.

I pulled my knife from my pocket and grabbed his cock, but instead of fear I heard a guttural moan of pleasure. I needed to see what I was working with, so I did a rough job of shaving around his cock and over his balls before I grabbed his nuts and squeezed.

I’m a masochist and a sexual submissive, but I’ve seen enough Dommes work over their male submissives to know a thing or two about how to torture a man’s genitals. I squeezed until the sounds of pleasure turned to screams of pain, and then held it for a count of fifteen. When I let go, it was only to let him get two breaths before I squeezed again.

Nathan walked up behind me and startled me again, and I turned to see him in human form and fully dressed. He handed my gun over, and I let go of the goatman’s nuts long enough to holster my firearm and magazines before I returned my attention to the prisoner. I’m not a sadist or a Dom, but I found I wasn’t disgusted by hurting this man. He had something to do with the women who’d been abducted, and I needed to know where they were and how to get them back.

“I’ve only just begun,” I told him as I held his creepy-as-shit gaze. “I can hurt you in ways you can’t turn into pleasure.” I methodically unwrapped the twine from his cock and then his balls, and didn’t slow my progress when I saw it was stuck to his skin and I was pulling flesh away with the twine.

He was going soft, which was what I wanted, so I quickly unwound the rest of the rope, and let it fall to the ground. I grabbed the foreskin, gathered it in my fist, and settled my knife in position to give him the beginnings of a very rough circumcision. I let the knife slide into his skin about a quarter inch and looked into his disturbing eyes, my face an emotionless mask. “Where are the women?”

“Gone,” he said, his voice even. I’d scared him into talking, but he wasn’t going to give me the pleasure of seeing his fear. “The cave is a gateway for
us
, but will just be a cave for you. The women are beyond your reach.” Ah, so it did no harm to tell me. He was only verifying what we’d already guessed.

Or, maybe it could mean something to us, if I knew the right questions to ask.

I considered what I knew and asked, “You have to take them in some sort of cart, to get them through the gateway?”

He nodded, but Nathan said, “Don’t even think about it. It’s a gateway to hell, which is another realm, just as Faerie is another realm.” He looked to Aaron and then back to me. “It’s different, though. Where the Summerlands are mostly neutral and appear to only be concerned with what is fair, the land in Hades is hateful, as are the residents. There is no good there, Kirsten. We aren’t going.” I’d been into The Summerlands once, for about five minutes, and would be thrilled to never go back. If Hades was evil where Faerie was supposedly just a bunch of Fae having a good time doing things humans considered socially unacceptable, I’d do everything in my power to stay away.

Still, I couldn’t just walk away from this, knowing over a dozen women who’d gone missing had likely been taken there. “Then how will we rescue the women?” I asked, not ready to give up.

“We’ll hand the problem over to someone better qualified,” Aaron told me as he walked to us. He nodded to my prisoner and added, “You’ve done an impressive job with this one, but since we know we can’t mount a rescue today, we need to move before something else comes out of the cave and tries to rescue them.”

I saw the wisdom in his statement, and as much as it pained me to not find the cart and charge off on a rescue mission, I knew I’d do the women no favors by getting myself caught right alongside them.

I looked at the prisoners and then to Aaron. “We’re done with them, then?”

He shook his head. “We’re about a mile from a road outside the park. Someone will meet us there and take them off our hands, and one of our lookouts is moving our vehicle down there. Nathan and I will carry the prisoners to the rendezvous, and then you and I can return to headquarters while Nathan waits for our contact to arrive and collect them.”

So many questions, but I’d learned from experience Aaron would only tell me what he intended me to know, so it would likely be a waste of time to ask who was going to come get the prisoners, and what qualified him to hunt half-demons.

Aaron had contacts all over the world, from the highest levels of the U.S. Defense Department, to royalty living in palaces around the planet. The politicians in Washington hired Drake Security to do the things they couldn’t legally ask our military to do, and Aaron held a top level clearance, which was super impressive for a man with fake birth and school records. However, I had a feeling this time he’d called in some high level supernatural Aaron would just as soon keep me in the dark about.

I sighed. “This is another of those cases where there are supernaturals I don’t know about, and you figure I’m safer if we keep it that way, right?”

Chapter Two

Two nights later, I unlocked my office, turned the lights on, and set out bottled water for my new patients. The husband had insisted the couple needed an evening appointment, and had offered to pay five times my normal rate if I would agree to see them at nine o’clock in the evening.

It wasn’t the money so much as...something I couldn’t put a finger on. However, I’d gone to school to be a therapist so I could help people, and I had a feeling I was capable of helping this couple.

Also, I was curious as to why they’d wanted me and no one else. I’ve acquired the unadvertised reputation for helping people in the BDSM lifestyle without getting hung up on their kink, but this gentleman had said nothing to make me think he and his wife were a part of the lifestyle. Still, I had the impression this would be an interesting session.

My office looked different at night, and my normal lighting wasn’t enough without the sunlight spilling in from the windows. I lease space in one of those towers that invariably get built near hospitals, and I’m on the fifth floor so no one can look in the windows and invade my patients’ privacy. It isn’t a huge suite of offices — just the lobby where my assistant Eileen sits, my office, a bathroom, and a tiny break room. The waiting area is typical with chairs and a fish tank, but I’ve worked to decorate my inner office more like a home, as I want to put people at ease.

Kieran and Gwen Dixon arrived about five minutes early. They were both stunningly beautiful, and dressed well enough to have just come from a magazine photo shoot. They fit well in proportion to each other, but as they approached me I realized they were both short. I’m five foot two inches tall, and Gwen was a few inches shorter than me. Kieran was perhaps four inches taller than me, but next to other men he’d be quite short. Maybe it was the cut of the clothes, but I only noted their height in relation to me and hadn’t noticed it until they were close enough to shake hands.

I welcomed them in and offered them a seat. I’d situated two of the chairs together, with a small table between. Close enough they could hold hands if they wanted, but far enough away to give distance.

I once again regretted the need for the harsh overhead lighting. During the day, with sunlight spilling in, a few table lamps gave enough additional light. Without daylight, I’d been forced to use the overhead fluorescents, and they interfered with the cozy, warm atmosphere I’d worked so hard to achieve.

“Did you bring the questionnaire I emailed?” I asked them.

“Apologies,” Kieran said, “but we seem to have walked out and forgotten it.”

This was unfortunate, as it meant I’d have to spend five to ten minutes asking questions instead of thirty seconds skimming the answers.