Pharon's Demon (4 page)

She moved carefully into the thick darkness
of the tunnel. The air here was even hotter, waves of heat
shimmering off the walls and floor. When she lit her small
handlight, thick veins of topazes sparkled vividly, the raw stones
embedded deep in the supporting walls. Should she use her laser to
cut a few free? Why not?

She moved further into the tunnel, until she
judged that she was well out of eyeshot of the entrance point.

Now or never.

She shrugged and aimed the blue beam at the
wall.

The stones slipped free from their stony
prison—and, as they fell into her palm, a low hissing sound filled
the air.

Bennu froze. The snakes. Damn it. She’d hoped
that that part of the tribesman’s story had been just that—a story.
Apparently not. Her love of getting caught did not extend to
reptiles.

She turned slowly around, palming the stones
and slipping them into her leather holdall. Dozens of slim, black
bodies poured down from the ceiling, forming a boiling sea of
writhing, reptilian bodies. Flat black eyes met her panicked
gaze.

Think. What would her brothers do? There was
always a way out. She just had to find it.

Unfortunately, hot sex wouldn’t save the day
this time.

***

Mkhai swam up through layers of heavy sleep
and realized that Bennu had slipped way. Damn. He’d known that his
taming of his passionate little
femi
was at best temporary—a
game they’d played and enjoyed together—but he had hoped she’d
shared his intrigue. That she had wanted more of this unfamiliar
passion flaring between them and that she would explore it.
With
him. Instead, the summer mating heat had overwhelmed
him, blazing through his veins at the crucial moment. And he had
slept.

He tugged a rough hand over his face. Gods.
He was Pharon’s demon, the protector of the mines—and he had slept
like a virgin after her first fuck. He could only hope that the
other demons had not realized his slip.

“I will come for you,” he said softly. Had
she not known this? He was bred, after all, to hold onto that which
was his. Letting go was an act he had never learned.

The demon world was brutal, pitting each
demon against the others. Brute strength and magics won the day and
Mkhai was one of the strongest demons. That much worked to his
advantage. His brothers would be hesitant to anger him since his
revenge would be swift and violent; it was, after all, how Pharon
culled his demon ranks lest they threaten to overwhelm his
kingdom.

Still, fighting did not appeal at the
moment.

A delicious lassitude still gripped his limbs
and the air was warm and soft.

He would call a small Finding spell to locate
Bennu. Yes, that would work.

He worked the magic smoothly, building the
ball of cobalt-colored light in the palm of his hand. It revealed
Bennu, moving steadily through the tunnels until she reached an
intersection that he knew all too well: it contained one of several
of the mine’s more vicious pit traps. Not all of Pharon’s defenses
were demonic. His pit traps were well-stocked with snakes: dark
black and gold bodies that coiled in the darkness, waiting for the
sensual warmth of human bodies—bodies that had no business
whatsoever being in the tunnels. The snakes did not accept excuses;
being barely sentient, they simply attacked whatever appeared in
their tunnels.

His Bennu had just walked into a very ugly
trap.

Bennu backed up. The topaz-studded stone face
appeared to be the only snake-free area of the tunnel. If she’d
been quicker, she might have been able to run up the corridor
before the serpents had finished their slithering descent from the
ceiling. But somehow she doubted it. Whoever had designed this trap
had intended for it to close as soon as she had cut the stones
free. The stones—and her possession of them—were the trigger.
Simply dropping the stones would hardly solve her problem.

“OK,” she whispered. She could activate the
rescue beacon embedded underneath her skin—but it would be hours,
at the earliest, before her brothers made their swashbuckling way
halfway across the galaxy and forced their way inside the mines.
What their chances were against Pharon’s demons, she did not know,
but she suspected that the fight would be more equal than she—or
her brothers—would prefer.

Were there other options?

She slid the blaster free of her belt. The
snakes paused—never a good sign—and massed. They’d blocked her exit
from the tunnel—her only choice now was to either stand her ground
or allow the snakes to drive her further back into the dark tunnel.
She didn’t want to know what else lay waiting for her in the
oppressive darkness.

The first snake uncoiled and flew through the
air. She fried it before it crossed the line she had mentally
scratched in the sand. One down—she gave up counting how many more
were left.

After all, the number of snakes probably
exceeded the number of minutes that she had left to live.

***

As the snakes launch themselves in full-scale
attack, Mkhai materialized out of the darkness behind her. Harsh,
sibilant words poured from his lips and air pushed out around them,
hardening into a sphere. The snakes suddenly stopped their advance,
sliding off the orb of air and light he had woven.

“Nice trick.” She stared at the orb. “Care to
teach me that one?”

He shook his head. “You should not have left,
my
femi
.”

It was a moot point now. The cat was well out
of that bag. He could save his dark, self-righteous wrath for
someone else. His eyes did that trick again, glowing with golden
color as heat poured off his skin.

“Do not leave me,” he demanded. “Was our
sexplay not enough for you?”

The snakes writhed over the orb, seeking
entrance, but he seemed unconcerned.

“They cannot penetrate,” he said, but
suddenly she no longer gave a damn about the snakes. Mkhai clearly
would be more than a match for them.
If
he wanted to be. The
question, of course, was: did he?

“The sex was great.” Did he need reassurance?
Wasn’t he an all-powerful demon guardian in the middle of some sort
of summer rutting heat? He should
know
that he had been
insatiable. And that she had enjoyed every blasted moment of his
possession. Of course—she rolled her eyes—females appeared to be in
rather short supply down in the mines. Perhaps he lacked practice.
Perhaps he mistook her reluctance to collapse in ecstatic gratitude
at his muttered declaration that he was in search of a mate. Or
not.

“Then why did you slip away—like a thief in
the night?”

She lost her temper. “Because, damn it, I
am
a thief, Mkhai. That’s what I do.” His eyes flickered and
the orb dissolved for a second. She shrieked as snakes rained down
around them. With a snap of his fingers and a muttered word, the
snakes fell at their feet and disintegrated.

“You were a thief,” he said coldly,
rebuilding the orb. “Are you one still?”

She calculated the odds of appealing to him
with the truth. “It’s a job, Mkhai. It’s not personal. I was sent
here to retrieve a certain number of topazes. It’s what I have to
do or I’m unemployed. You guard; it’s what you do. What happens if
you
fail?”

“I never fail,” he said stiffly. “Pharon’s
demons do not fail. It is unacceptable.”

“Never?”

“No.”

So much for finding common ground. She’d
hoped they could discuss the salutary lessons taught by said
failures and agree that he could only grow from his failure to hold
her. It had been a nice thought. She dismissed it regretfully.

“Demons who fail are tossed back into the
vortex from which we were called.” His eyes darkened. “It is most
unpleasant and quite fatal. No demon goes willingly.”

The vortex was an endless swirling, empty
space. It pulled a demon’s essence in so many directions
simultaneously that the demon was literally shredded. Although
those shreds then reknit into new, darker beings— the demon himself
was gone. The agonizing pain of stretching and pulling was
unforgettable, even if life before the vortex was. Pharon’s
magicians had discovered the secret of knitting demons together out
of the vortex and had put their knowledge to work when Pharon had
demanded invincible guards for his mines.

Mkhai possessed no distinct memories of those
moments before his body had been assembled from the vortex’s
swirling darknesses, but he did remember the sharp pain that cut
like a knife. He had no desire to relive it.

Ever.

And yet if he failed to discipline his
femi
, if he did not exact the punishment that Pharon
demanded of his thieves, then that was where he would go. And the
last memory that he took with him would be of her glorious face
shuddering beneath him in orgasm.

Would it be worth it?

He slipped his hand into her pouch and pulled
out the handful of stones that she had cut from the wall.

“You had to take them?” he asked grimly.

“Thief? Remember?” She prompted him.

“How could I forget?” He examined the raw
wound in the wall where she had cut the stones free. “This is no
ordinary mine,
femi
.”

“Believe me, I had noticed,” she
muttered.

“These walls are living, breathing entities.”
He stroked a hand over the stone and she saw the same hot, golden
pulse building between his skin and the raw stone. “You cannot
simply cut the stones away. You must ask. You do not take.”

“Right.” She’d never
asked
for
anything before. The Agency took. She explained this misconception
to him. “Piracy means never having to ask, Mkhai.”

He looked unimpressed. “Start asking.
Particularly if you want to leave this mine alive.”

“I’ve seen your discipline, Mkhai.” The
smoothly seductive tone of her voice sent a shiver down him. He
felt his cock stirring. “I believe I could handle more of it.”

And she was going to get more, he thought
grimly. “When you cut the stones from the wall, you triggered
alarms.”

“The snakes. Yes, yes, I get it. An avalanche
of nasty reptilians aiming for all of my soft, warm spots.” He
arched an eyebrow. She had warm spots that he would like to explore
himself: he thought of licking that pink sex and was pleased to see
that she squirmed.

“Aroused, femi?” he asked.

“Bastard,” she hissed.

He shrugged. Maybe he was, but he was the
bastard who had decided that she needed to leave the mines alive.
She might not appreciate his decisions now, but she would—later,
when she had returned to this ship and this Agency of hers.

“Not just snakes,” he admitted.

Her head whipped around. “There are more
traps?”

“Of course.” He had mentioned, had he not,
that Pharon’s demons never failed? Ever. “Many of the demons will
move to blocks the exits from the mines.” She nodded, fiddling with
her handheld. He doubted that the device could magically pinpoint
for her all of the mine’s many entrances and exits, but perhaps her
technology was greater than he believed.

Without taking her eyes from the device, she
swore. “Damn.”

He nodded grimly. “The remainder of the
demons will, of course, be headed here.” His eyes held hers calmly.
“This time, there will be no games. This time, my brothers will
consider you to have been warned by your previous encounter with
our kind.”

“And?” Her voice sounded abnormally loud in
the silence of the tunnel.

He pulled her up against his hard chest. One
large hand stroked the curve of her throat with soft menace.

“The summer heat drives all our kind
strongly. Since their orders will be to kill you and since their
blood will be heated unbearably,” he shrugged, “I imagine that they
will either fuck you until they kill you, or they will devise
sadistic pleasures of their own that will ease their heated
blood—and still see you dead by morning light.”

Fine. She’d been warned. But why?

“Convince me,” he said, leaning back against
the rock wall.

Apparently she was going to have an
opportunity to practice what her brothers preached: a little sexual
roguery in the interests of a clean escape and total getaway.
“What,” she asked, her voice sinking to a low rasp, “would I have
to do to
convince
you?”

Her eyes flicked to the enormous bulge in his
black loincloth. The small scrap of material wrapped snugly around
his hips, leaving little to the imagination. The heavy crest of his
cock strained above the fabric; the dark plum-colored tip with its
small drop of clear liquid beading the tip fascinated her with his
obvious need. For
her.

“Everything. You would have to do everything.
Would you have sex with a demon again, my Bennu?”

He stroked his hand down her arm, massaging
the muscles and tugging gently on her fingertips, releasing a small
sting of pleasure. Relaxing and arousing her. She wanted him to
repeat that same stroke until he buried his fingers in her sex,
petting and pinching until she exploded around him.

“You can ask me.” He stared at her, noting
her interest. “And I will give you pleasure. You are my chosen
mate. It is my duty. My pleasure.”

Yes, he would.

He had.

“You have three minutes before the other
demons arrive. You must make a choice. Three minutes.” His hand
shaped her breast, parting the blacksuit until it fell back around
her waist. Teasing the nipple, building the heat in her. “I can
pleasure you. Or,” he pinched her nipple in a sweet burst of pain,
“you can pleasure me. Make the right choice, my Bennu, and maybe I
will not abandon you to their less than tender mercies.”