When it reached my back, it struck—an open-handed slap across my ass that made me cry out. Before I could draw breath, its hand closed around my throat, pulling me back against its body. I felt its member pulsing and prodding at my back and arched desperately against it.
It moaned into my ear, and the force of my arousal nearly buckled my knees. The ache of it made me dizzy. This dance was killing me.
“Please,” I gasped, though whether I begged for answers or release, I could not say.
“I hesitate,” Asmodeus said at last. And there—yes, thereit was. I heard it. An admission of imperfection. A fault line beneath its power. “Because what comes next,” it murmured, “I have not done before. Not in all my long dominion.”
My skin prickled. I felt as though I had been laid bare beneath the sun, every secret exposed.
“What… what comes next?” I whispered.
Silence answered first. And then, slowly, deliberately, Asmodeus licked a forked tongue over my ear. I shivered against it, malleable as damp clay, and knew I would do whatever it asked of me til the end of time.
“I will bring you before the Court of Kings.”
My heart stopped.
The Court.
I had never heard of it, yet years of religious schooling conjured the shape of it in my mind. The Court of Kings. Surely it was a place of judgment and spectacle, where the ancient Kings of Hell gathered to weigh and to witness.
The Kings of Hell being, of course, those crowned among the Seventy-Two, sovereign in their domains, their thrones set deep in the various levels and architecture of the Pit itself.
Lucifer, the Morning Star, the Lightbringer.
Beelzebub, Lord of Flies, glutted on pestilence and pride.
Astaroth, great Duke and counsellor, his tongue forked with ancient lies.
Belial, the Worthless One, father of corruption and root of all perversion.
Asmodeus, my Lord, King of Lust, the furnace of flesh and hunger.
Paimon, crowned with gold, Master of infernal knowledge and dark arts.
Baal, first among Kings, whose voices speak in a chorus of three.
I had known their names once only as warnings, ancient threats in my catechisms, spoken with trembling reverence ordisdain. Yet now, they burned bright in my mind, no longer myth, but real, and I would soon stand before them. And if Asmodeus was to be believed–which, as my Lord, it was–then no mortal had stood in that place before. Nor any half-mortal, if that is what I now was.
My mouth opened, but no words came. The air caught in my throat.
Asmodeus’ smile deepened in my periphery, slow and knowing. “They will see you,” it said. “They will know what I intend.”
My voice broke free at last, rough and small. “And what... what do you intend?”
The pause before it spoke felt vast as the gulf between Heaven and this place. I craned toward it, eager.
And it said, lips pressed against the flesh of my neck, “To make you mine.”
I thought inevitably of our first encounter. I had summoned Asmodeus out of a feral desperation, willing to forego my immortal soul for a piece of pleasure. It had seen through me to my basest instincts, and the Prince of Lust had said,“I do not want to kill you. I want to fuck you. I want to use you. Until you can’t take it anymore. For eternity. Isn’t that what you want? To be mine? Mine to use? Mine to keep?”
“As your toy,” I whispered, though a question hung in my tone. A shudder ran through me, sharp as a blade drawn against the spine.
Asmodeus then said the thing I feared most.
“No.”
I spun toward it. All deference vanished as fear thrummed through me–not fear that it would send me away now, but fear that something was changing. Something beyond my human comprehension.
