I notice that their chanting has stopped again.
I wonder why they aren’t all running away in horror.
“Jesus,” Myles mutters, and I can hear him stand from his squatted position and move away. He and Rainey talk in soft voices, but Maddox stays in position watching. He hasn’t asked for the binoculars once, and I wonder if being a demi-god gives him better eyesight. It would make sense if it did because he has superhuman strength, so why not senses?
Kymaris is covered in black daemon blood, and the dagger disappears into thin air. She resumes her position laying back on the table, arms serenely by her side, legs stretched and pressed together once again.
And then another daemon moves from his position.
Makes his way to the end of the steps and drops his robes.
He, too, is erect and ready.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” I gasp.
“She’s going to do that to them all,” Maddox murmurs in awe.
“But why? And why are they letting her?”
“Maybe she has them under some type of thrall,” he suggests. “But I guess this is a ritual that will gain her something at the end. Eight daemons will fuck her, then she’ll kill them. That is some dark, twisted shit right there.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Which means we have to wait until the end to see what happens?”
“’Fraid so,” he replies reluctantly.
For the next half hour, Kymaris takes each daemon into her body.
Myles and Rainey keep their distance and their backs turned. Maddox paces back and forth as he watches. He doesn’t look disgusted, but I imagine he’s seen things far worse over his lifetime.
But he does look very worried.
I don’t look through the binoculars again, but sit cross-legged on the ground, braiding pine straws. Occasionally, I glance up to see how many daemons are left standing. Unfortunately, it means I glimpse other horrid stuff too.
Some daemons she drives the dagger through their brain to kill them.
Some she cuts while they’re fornicating, so more blood pours on her in black streams.
Once, she takes two of the daemons into her body at the same time, causing Maddox to mutter, “Kinky bitch, that one is.”
When the last daemon falls dead to the ground, Maddox murmurs, “It’s over.”
I bring the binoculars back to my face and watch as Kymaris stretches luxuriously on the table. She just had sex with eight different daemons—and may I say some were grossly over-endowed in size—and she looks like the cat that just got done drinking the last of the cream from the bowl. Her smile flashes through the blood spattered over her face, and she sits up, swinging her legs over the edge before sliding off.
She’s facing the windows, naked and saturated in black fluid from her head to her toes. I can’t even bear to think of the fluids that are seeping out of her from all that sex, nor the fact that a pile of bodies surrounds her.
But it is with fascination as I watch her take the dagger in one hand and raise it high into the air, tip pointed to the ceiling. She starts talking in a language I don’t recognize, and I look up to Maddox to see if he can hear it.
He glances down. “That must be a language developed in the Underworld.”
We both look back and watch.
At first, nothing happens, and then the daemon bodies start to turn black and lift away in streams of smoke, just as I’d seen happen before when Dark Fae died.
But rather than floating away on bits of smoke and ash, as the body disappears, the smoke seems to coalesce and form into some sort of upright creature.
The black smoke swirls upward where each daemon died on the floor, and it becomes clear that it’s forming back into a humanoid-shaped body.
I focus on one as a head, arms, torso, and legs all start to appear as the smoke wafts away.
When the air finally clears, I’m staring at eight beings—fully clothed—who look shocked to be standing there. I reach out with my senses, feel the dark vibes coming from them, and know they are Dark Fae.
Exceptionally beautiful Dark Fae—some of the male persuasion and some of the female. In my experience in Faere, the more stunning the fae, the more royal they were—including some original fallen angels.
I wonder if these fae were called from the Underworld, but I doubt it. Kymaris doesn’t have a stone—or at least she didn’t use one for this ritual. Besides that, they’re wearing modern clothing, so my bet is they’ve been in the Earth realm somewhere and have been pulled to this basement sex-death room.
The Dark Fae look around at each other and the blood-soaked silk on the table.
They are clearly astonished to see Kymaris.
They all know who she is.
Gliding past two of the newly arrived Dark Fae, Kymaris moves back to the steps at the end of the table and climbs back up. She stands in the middle, a dagger held in one hand at her side.