Wicked Boy - 10. Chapter 10

“Come.” Nassau stood and beckoned to him. “Their game will take hours, and this will be easier if we are alone.”

“But-”

Trust me. Jeremiah blinked, because it was as though the Prince had whispered in his ear without moving his lips. He won’t mind.

He followed Nassau from his chambers. They took a different set of stairs which twisted around and came out in a much narrower grey stone hallway.

“This is the part where you sneak me away and kill me isn’t it?” Jeremiah looked sideways at his companion. It was hard to imagine Nassau being capable of killing anyone, he seemed so… young

“Being beautiful is a great defence in your world.” Nassau smiled. “No, I’m not going to kill you. But I don’t have to be an empath to work out what you’re thinking either.”

“Sorry.”

“You do not have to apologise to me when we are alone. The palace does not listen, and there are no appearances to uphold.”

“Is that why we are alone?”

“Yes.” Nassau did not smile. “You’re going to want to hit me rather hard I expect.”

Jeremiah blinked. His mind ran through the possibilities without him, lightning fast, and he couldn’t come up with anything Nassau would say which would make him want to hit the shorter demon with the big bronze wings.

“When you said it was about what you had done to him. What did you mean?”

“Kiaza is not a demon.” While Jeremiah was still beginning to be confused, Nassau ploughed on. “And for all that he is now, with all of his insecurities, that was my doing.” The Prince of hell took a deep shuddering sort of breath. “He was young and innocent, and I corrupted him. I’m a demon. It’s just what we do.”

“So… everything he thinks about driving people insane through sex being his only skill…”

“I taught him to do that.”

Jeremiah snarled, formed a fist, and socked Nassau hard in the jaw. Oddly, he felt much better afterwards.

“It was a very long time ago.” Nassau was recovered, and the badly matched pair sat on a decorative day bed in a long gallery filled with paintings. Jeremiah recognised some of them, old masters and what he assumed were reproductions, though after two minutes further wondering, he was less sure. “It was so long enough ago that most demons, even most major demons in hell, do not remember it. They weren’t alive then. The ones that do, people like Zai, don’t care. None of the minor demons know, because to them how Kiaza came to be here is a non-event. Like me, he has always been here.”

“Skip to the bit which made me hit you.” Jeremiah rubbed his knuckles. Nassau’s jaw was apparently made of super dense stone.

“It would be better to tell you everything, and better still to show you.”

“Show me?”

Nassau nodded.

“With pictures rather than words, it’s not painful, and it doesn’t take as long.” The Prince flexed the fingers of his left hand. “You want to try?”

“This seems to be my week for doing new and bizarre shit. Why not?” Jeremiah shrugged, but then retreated as Nassau reached for him. “Whoa! Do I need to do anything?”

“Just breathe.” Nassau sounded serious. “It usually helps if you close your eyes.”

“OK.” Jeremiah shut his eyes, opened one, just to check that Nassau hadn’t summoned a dragon or anything, and then took a deep breath. “Ready.”

The transition happened without warning. One half of the breath, Jeremiah was sitting on the cloth of the gold and velvet upholstered day-bed in the paintings gallery, and then he was picked up by the collar and yanked sideways. Images came in and out of his vision like blinking, some lasting mere seconds, others long enough for a person to speak.

*

Nassau and Kiorl, running through what he assumed was another part of hell, chasing each other, clearly playing. It wasn’t that they looked younger, but Jeremiah instantly knew they were, that he was looking at a past so far back there was no record of it.

*

There was a world of flame, walls of fire and Jeremiah could feel the heat on his skin. He shuddered. Nassau’s voice whispered in his ear.

This was his world. Nothing but fire and salamanders. We brought them back too. They got a little out of control. We found him.

An image of a child, a little boy with green scales, arms wrapped around his knees, bare feet dug into the burning earth. He looked miserable.

There was no one for him. They thought him a freak, a snake without a tail. We thought he would be fun, so we brought him home.

*

Like two little boys with a new puppy, Kiorl and Nassau played in a room with Kiaza, showing him magic tricks while the boy sat beside and often in the fire. Kiaza didn’t look that different, perhaps a few inches shorter, slightly skinnier, but he was younger nonetheless, wide eyed and innocent as he watched Nassau drawing glowing patterns in the air. Excited, he reached forwards, but couldn’t catch the shimmering force.

*

“Teach me!” Kiaza was petulant, dressed in a plain cotton robe, stamping his foot on the cold stone floor.

“No.” Nassau looked angry.

I’d been fighting with Nathaniel. Nassau’s whisper explained. He was my brother. We did not get on.

“Teach me magic!” Littler Kiaza was insistent in his demands. “Why won’t you teach me?”

“You can’t do it!”

“I can!” Kiaza pushed his friend, and some unseen force hurled Nassau across the room. “Oh no!” The little snake ran to his friend. “Nas! I’m sorry.” He stared at himself in wonder. “I can do magic.”

*

So we trained him. He was powerful, fantastic natural energy. His world must have been a place of magic, we just never knew. We taught him everything we knew, found others to teach him the stuff we couldn’t. And he taught himself too.

“Look Nas!” Kiaza burst into the room holding, floating above his hands, a perfect, moving, living replica of a horse. His face fell. “What are you guys doing?”

Kiorl grinned, but Nassau pulled a sheet across them and pushed his friend away.

“Grown up stuff.” He extracted himself from the bed. “That’s pretty.”

“Look!” Kiaza was back to being excited. He’d discarded his living toy, and now smiled as he shifted. He shook out fur as a perfect replica of Kiorl. “Isn’t it cool?”

*

Kiaza sat at the foot of some unknown staircase. He sniffed and rubbed his little flat nose with the back of one hand.

“But it’s lonely here.”

“I have a room here too Kia.” Kiorl smiled. “There’ll be other demons coming.”

“Nassau doesn’t want me living at the palace?”

“You’re all grown up now. You need other friends than just us. You’re a major demon Kiaza. You don’t have to be scared of anyone.”

“But-!”

“See you tomorrow kiddo.”

*

“Nas please!”

“Kia… don’t ask me again.” Nassau’s brows drew low. “I said I can’t.”

“Just once? Nas please. I don’t trust anyone else like I trust you and Kiorl.” Kiaza blushed under his scales. “Just so I know what it’s like.”

“Kiaza…”

The snake dropped to his knees, quick fingers searching through Nassau’s clothes.

“I’ve seen Kiorl do it. Please Nas.”

“No!” Nassau pulled the scaly demon up by his wrists. “Not like that.”

“But…” Kiaza’s words were stilled by Nassau’s thumb on his lip. They moved closer, kissed in slow motion as Nassau laid the boy back on the bed, worked down his body to find his eager virgin cock. “Ohh!”

*

“How?” Kiaza frowned across the table. “How do you get a soul without killing it?”

“You make them kill themselves.” Kiorl shrugged and ripped apart whatever large shank of meat he was holding. “Though I prefer to get messy.”

“Driven insane is always good.” Nassau nodded. “Just find a way to do that.”

*

The three of them were fucking. Kiaza was in the centre, kissing Kiorl while Nassau worked behind him, the big panther screwing the snake with his cock and the Prince with his tail. Kiaza whimpered in between kisses and thrusts, the combined force of lust and heat in the room magnifying every grunt and groan.

“Ready…” Kiorl breathed deep. “Oh yeah…”

“Ungh!” Nassau was clearly on the verge of orgasm. “Oh shit…”

“Come on babe.” Kiorl had his hand wrapped around Kiaza’s dick. “C’mon…”

They rocked against each other, a collected writhing mass of pleasure.

“No. Keep going.” Kiaza hissed in pleasure. “It’s good.”

“I’m gonna come.” Nassau half growled a warning.

“No. Keep going.” Kiaza commanded, pushing himself down onto the combined girth of his lover’s more forcefully. “Ah! Yes!”

“AH!” Kiorl snarled, his tail suddenly thrashing from side to side. Nassau was frozen, his hands still on Kiaza's hips. “FUCK!”

“Yessss…” Kiaza hissed as he came, and like the tension in a tow rope the other two suddenly snapped back into violent pleasure.

They broke apart, Nassau face dark, Kiorl practically spitting with rage.

“KIAZA!”

“What the fuck did you just do?”

“Huh?” Kiaza whimpered. “But, I didn’t mean to…”

*

There was some nameless human boy. He was lust drunk or drugged or something, because he lay on the bed with a hard on without resisting while the three demons stood over him, discussing what to do.

“Huh?”

“To practice on.” Kiorl grinned. “I don’t think there’s a better way to drive someone insane than that.”

“But…” Kiaza looked distraught. “I don’t know him.”

Nassau smiled softly.

“Kiorl, you’d best go.”

“Better you than me bud.” The panther kissed both his friends in a way that anyone else would have considered highly intimate. “See you boys at dinner.”

“Nas?”

Nassau took the slender demon’s wrist and stroked he scaly palm down the chest of the human sacrifice.

“Sex isn’t always about emotion Kia. It’s a tool. You can get the pleasure you want from him, and you can drive him insane, make him mad. Mad enough that he would destroy himself, and his soul would be ours.”

“But I don’t know how I did it.”

“That’s why it’s called practice.”

“I don’t wanna do it with him.” Kiaza whimpered.

“It’s OK.” Nassau kissed the little snake. “I’ll be here. You’ll get used to it.”

Nassau took Kiaza’s bicep and led him closer. The little snake knelt on the bed, small hands soft and uncertain as he touched the human.

“I have to?”

“Yes. Go on Kia.”

Kiaza swung his leg over the sacrifice, settling on his hips.

“Please, Nas.”

The Prince kissed him, and Kiaza allowed the nameless human to begin fucking him through the coma of his pleasure. Nassau smiled, and held Kiaza’s gaze as the little snake’s body began to shudder.

“Good boy.”

*

It was a shock to be returned to his own body, to be looking at Nassau’s swirly storm grey eyes in the long gallery. Jeremiah got up, staggered, half fell against the wall.

“I think I wanna be sick.” He retched dryly, gulped, and then coughed until his throat was raw. “He… you… fuck…”

“Better than I was expecting.” Nassau sighed. “You can hit me again if it’ll make you feel any better.”

“No thanks.” Jeremiah turned to put his back against the wall, and sank slowly to the floor. “You’re a lot more fucked up than I thought.”

“That gets some people.” Nassau shrugged, casting his eyes down at his perfect body. “At least with Nathaniel you could tell he was an evil shit just by looking.”

“Kiaza wasn’t screwed up before you guys met him, was he?”

“No.” Nassau sat down on the floor across from him, huge wings curling away from the floor in an awkward manner. “I do not know if he still has the capacity to be loving and faithful. He’s been the way he is a very long time. But he is not truly a demon. Darkness is not built into his soul like it is in ours.”

“But… Vruuaska, and Zai… They’re demons, and they’re loyal.”

“Vruuaska has a temper you would not wish to behold. As for Zai, he is evil in some very special ways. I suggest you ask Tobias how he got his scars.” Nassau plucked a feather from his wing and twirled it around in his fingers. “My question is: what do you want?”

Jeremiah looked across at the Prince of hell. Sitting cross legged on the stone floor, he looked like a slightly mopey teenager, if you discounted the wings and the unfairly perfect hair.

“I want to love him for as long as I can. I want a life.”

“And what benefit will you be to us?” Nassau sounded very suddenly like the ruler he was. “What can you offer to hell in trade for your stay, your home? You are not a demon, you cannot recruit. You cannot go back and forth upstairs. What will you do?”

“Like a job?” Jeremiah smiled. “I worked in marketing and advertising for a club and bar management company, but before that, I was a barman. I always liked the idea of having my own place.”

“We do not have a bar.” Nassau frowned.

“Hell doesn’t have a bar? Oh man, you’re missing a trick there. Trust me.”

“Well then, shall we go and see what your beloved has to say about it? I think they should be done by now.”

*

“Ha!”

“AGAIN? You fucker!” Kiorl overturned the board with a flick of his tail. “How are you so good at that?”

“I’m gifted.” Kiaza wriggled in a way that made Jeremiah instantly hard. The snake turned to look at them. “Sorry babe, have we been boring?”

“No, not at all.” Jeremiah smiled. Nassau’s memories planted themselves over the top of his vision and he shook his head to clear them. When Kiaza smiled like that, Jeremiah could see the boy he had been, soft and innocent before he’d been trained so well. The young man crossed the room to his lover and bent over the back of Kiaza’s chair to kiss his cheek. He whispered against Kiaza’s scales, knowing they were probably overheard. “I’m thinking about you naked.”

“Jem…” Kiaza was smiling.

“Kiaza.” Nassau coughed politely. “Court resumes session tomorrow. I expect to see you there.”

“Nas?”

“There will be witnesses.”

“Oh. Right.” Apparently this meant something to the snake, and he nodded happily. “Yes then, highness.” He stood, taking Jeremiah’s hand. “Come on you. Night Kiorl.”

“Night…” Kiorl was smirking, his eyes bright.

Jeremiah waited until they were clear of the palace before he opened his mouth to ask what was going on.

“Nassau is holding court tomorrow, which means that petitions can be heard.”

Jeremiah scooped up the boy he adored and kissed him hard. Kiaza was panting when they parted, his slitted pupils unnaturally wide.

“And what in hell does that mean?”

“Means I can ask for consideration.” Kiaza sucked on his finger and dragged the slim digit down over Jeremiah’s lips, licking his own with his forked tongue. “Means Nassau is OK with us. He’s forgiven me, and you get to stay forever.”

“Forever? Like Tobias and Jahke and Atoki?”

“Yes. But I don’t want him changing you. You’re perfect the way you are,” Kiaza paused, “Unless you wanna be different? I just want you to be happy.”

Jeremiah laughed.

“You’re so cute. Come on Kia, you were playing that bloody board game for hours, and missing you is hard.” He ground his crotch against Kiaza’s abdomen to get his point across in a firmer manner. “Bed.”

“Pushy.”

“You like it.”

Kiaza’s green eyes glittered.

“I’ll do whatever you want, if you can catch me.” He vanished.

“No fair Kia!” Jeremiah shouted, before breaking in a dead run. “Magic is cheating.”