Torturous Love : Version 3 - 1. Torturous Love V3: Chapter 1

The Inn had been rammed all evening, and patrons who had been eager to order at the bar every opportunity they got had tempered their drunkenness with frequent calls for more and more food. Tobias had been run off his feet for hours moving between the ovens and the fire pit, calling for more plates and platters, cursing the staff behind the bar for their lack of ability to clear tables in anything like a timely manner, and growling under his breath between orders that the head cook hadn’t turned up for the evening. He should have known better, because Tobias was well aware the head cook suffered with a monthly affliction which manifested as being incredibly hungover right after they got handed their wages. It was a good thing Tobias had been arriving early, staying late, and learning everything he could about food from the Inn’s elderly owner.

The last of the rowdy, drunken crowd had been kicked out a half hour previously, and Tobias had cleared and cleaned the kitchen with the help of an apprentice whose name he hadn’t had time to learn. Now he stood by the counter, whipping egg whites with a reed whisk and adding sugar with the other hand. It had taken him half the week to get set up to make Forgotten Cookies; grinding the hard cone of sugar – not great quality but the best he could afford – in between shifts, hand sewing a clean canvas piping bag, and getting his friend – who was apprentice to the smith – to cut and press him a star shaped nozzle from a piece of scrap sheet metal. Tobias finished his mixture and began to follow the instructions the owner had written down for him. Her letters were clear and strong, but Tobias had to trace the shapes with one finger, trying out the letters as he half-read, half-remembered what to do. Eventually the young man stowed the tray of star shaped, white sweets in the oven where the fire had burnt down to nothing but embers at the back, shut the door and sealed it with a rope of new clay, like he did when they baked bread in the mornings, and shut up the kitchen looking forward to the sweets he would be able to sneak in to fetch before church the next morning.

“You’re still here?” Tobias stopped in shock at the barman’s words, spoken from the half dark of dying fire and the low candles. “I thought I was the only one left.”

“Me too.” Tobias glanced at his feet, unable to hold the barman’s dark gaze. “I was… baking.”

“I don’t understand all this new-fangled food stuff you do. Just give me a hunk of bread and a charred steak. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.”

“N-n-no. Of course not!” Tobias cursed himself for stuttering, again. He only did it in front of Richard Fletcher, and he knew that if the burly man had any idea what was going on in Tobias’s head, there would be no more baking, and probably no more living, in the little town he called home.

It’s not like it’s going to ever happen anyway, his mind told him. You know exactly what he thinks about. And she’s got long hair and a bodice laced up way too tight.

Tobias smiled nervously, made some half hearted attempt at a goodnight, and saw himself out into the night thick with stars. He hadn’t needed to be in the main room of the Inn to know that Richard Fletcher was lusting over Prudence, a girl who had been rather seriously misnamed for she could stick her nose into other people’s business like no one Tobias had ever met. That information had wandered into his head without his permission the first time Richard had ever been in the kitchen, his mind clearly not on the message he was passing on. Tobias had nearly choked on his ale – it had been a while since anyone in his immediate vicinity had broadcast their thoughts so clearly – but it hadn’t been a total surprise.

Tobias sighed as he walked, taking the well worn cart track which lead out of town and through the coppiced woodland to the farm where his father and two brothers had spent the day hard at work in tree and field. His little sister, he was sure, would wake early to sit with him and regale him with the goings-on of the day, and show him the progress she had made on her needlework. Tobias wished he’d been able to stay in school long enough to learn his letters well enough to be able to teach them to his little sister, but at least she could write her own name in a carefully practised manner. His sister had a wonderfully flavoured mind, each one of her thoughts darting like little silver fish across his inner vision, and the feelings conjured when she spoke always made him smile with their clarity and purity. Tobias knew, in abstract, that one day she would no longer be so little, or so innocent, but he hoped that future was a long way off.

As he entered under the tunnel of oak branches, fallen acorns crunching underfoot, he thought of the Forgotten Cookies sat baking gently in the cooling oven back at the Inn, and hoped that no one else disturbed the kitchen first thing in the morning. There shouldn’t be anyone to bother him if he got there early enough. The Inn baked all its own bread, and the head cook should have recovered from his self induced illness by the morning to get up and get the dough Tobias had already made, shaped and in the oven so as to be ready and cool for the afternoon.

Thinking about the bread turned Tobias’s mind back to the previous summer, when a well to do nobleman and his staff had been required to stop in their town by emergency repairs needed on one of their carriages. In the middle of the day, the Inn didn’t have as many staff, and Tobias had delivered the food, then gone back out to clear up. A short while later, the nobleman’s chief of staff had appeared in the kitchen, and Tobias’s heart had leapt up into his throat and directed all his blood to either end of his torso when the suave, polite, courteous, gorgeous man had begun to praise his evident skills as a cook. Tobias had always wanted to go and work somewhere where food was more than something to mop up beer with. When the offer came, nothing made him hesitate, right up until the moment when he stood near the nobleman himself, and shivered with the feelings that eked from the richly dressed figure. Tobias knew he could not work for a man like that, for someone who viewed people as his property and valued the prowess of his stallion far more than the happiness of his own wife who had failed to bear him a son. Shaking, Tobias had turned down the chance to grow his skills, and run home in tears of mixed relief and anguish. Never again had he created the fancy braided loaves he made for the nobleman. His sister had taught him to braid, and he hated to think of that sweet skill sullied by its association in his mind with such a terrible man.

Tobias shivered. He was nearly home, but it was cold, the night air chill now that autumn was approaching fast, and the moon through the trees cast weird shadows over the ground. When he’d first started at the Inn, his father had worried, and sent one of his brothers to walk home with him, but invariably they had shown up early and flirted with the girls, and Tobias had pretty much always ended up walking alone anyway. He was rounding the last bend in the path when he heard a voice on the breeze: a soft, clear tenor, a bard’s voice surely, singing to a tune that arrived in his mind without instrumental accompaniment.

“Never yet have I known one,

Lovelier on earth.

Blow, Northern wind!

Send me my sweetling,

Blow Northern wind! Blow… Blow...”

Tobias reached out for the flavour of the mind which had sung so sweetly, and recoiled sharply at the darkness which had… reached back. The voice in his head, usually so snarky and confident, told him to run, but his curiosity was stronger. Tobias took another three steps, and saw the figure which leant against the thick trunk of an oak older than the town which Tobias’s called home. He saw the cloak wrapped around the narrow frame, saw the moonlight shine brightly off something which glittered in the figure’s hands, saw the relaxed, casual way the person stood, as though it was perfectly normal to be abroad in the woods in the darkness. But his mind saw differently: there was darkness, another presence like himself, looking back at him and observing the flavour of his own self. In the darkness there was desire, hot and twisted like a piece of metal in the forge, and Tobias suddenly realised he should have believed their pastor when the man had tried to impart upon them as children the knowledge that demons walked the land.

Tobias froze, and the figure moved. The moment the young man saw the demon’s eyes, he knew, deep down in the pit of himself where he whispered his most secret thoughts, that already, it was too late. His fate had been sealed by those unnatural yellow eyes, their vertical pupils locked on his own, and when the demon smiled, the moonlight had nothing to do with how bright or sharp its teeth were.

“Blow, Northern Wind,” the demon intoned without melody, “and bring me my sweetling.”

The full horror of what Tobias was seeing hit him like a slap around the face, but he didn’t waste time screaming: he’d been taught better than that. He turned and ran, moving as quickly as he could, his mind already racing away with the possibility of where he could hide. He’d been playing in these woods his whole life, he knew the terrain like the back of his hand, but in the space of five breathes he’d felt the dark mind brush against him again.

There’s no escaping this. You’ve heard the pastor’s sermons. Once you’ve let the devil in…

No! Though Tobias fiercely to himself, reaching out to push a soft branch out of his way as he left the path. I will not!

And then there was pain.

The demon had laid a hand on his shoulder, claws like knives digging through wool and suede, and slicing deep into his flesh. Tobias bit back a yell, but demon’s hand tightened, and Tobias’s stomach lurched as claws scraped against bone. He tried to pull away, but he was caught fast, and in one swift bout of pain, the demon span him round to look in his eyes.

Tobias felt, more clearly than he’d ever sensed another’s emotion, the images crisper than any he’d yet seen, the hunger and desire of the yellow eyed demon. He knew, suddenly, what the demon wanted to do to him, taking his most private imaginings and twisting them about until Tobias barely recognised the inside of his own mind. The demon smiled at him, claws carving the muscle of his shoulder, and Tobias screamed.

“Oh sweetling, you make such lovely music for me.”

“Please. Don’t. Let me go.”

“Not tonight, dear one.”

Tobias’s eyes widened as the full horror of what the demon was about to do to him sunk in. He was pulled to the ground, twigs and stones digging into his back, he could feel his blood running over his skin and seeping into his clothes. His shoulder was on fire, his hand was going numb, but as the demon hovered over him, Tobias clenched his jaw, kicked out at the thing which had hurt him, turned and scrambled for purchase in the leafy undergrowth. He’d barely made it half a length before pain blossomed up his leg. His ankle was in tatters, the bone wrenched from it’s socket as the demon pulled him back and flipped him over with a snarl.

“I knew you were a fighter. I love being right.” The demon’s voice was rich and deep and rumbled in his chest. Tobias wanted to shut out the flood of warmth in his belly, because a voice like that made his knees weak despite himself. “I’m going to have fun enjoying you.”

The demon swarmed up him and gripped his jaw with a firm hand. His claws drew blood on Tobias’s cheek, but he brushed the red beads with a soft ash-grey furred finger, and Tobias watched with mounting horror as the demon licked his blood. The demon smiled, a twisted gesture on such a feral face, and kissed him.

Of all the first kisses I thought I might have, this was not what I imagined.

Sweetling, the demon’s voice, soft and warm, arrived in his head without bypassing his ears, reality is always better than imagination.

Tobias realised the demon’s long tongue was in his mouth, lips on his own, and he bit him. A moment later he realised his mistake, because the demon had fangs like a mountain lion, and he bit back.

“Don’t test me, boy,” the demon snarled. He gripped Tobias’s jaw so hard that the young man screwed shut his eyes it an attempt to block the pain which spread through him, and then he felt the demon’s hot breath on his ear as the rough tongue dragged over his ruined skin.

The strangest sensation followed, like the prickling one felt in a limb that was too slow to wake, and Tobias saw the vision of himself through the demon’s yellow eyes as his torn lip began to heal. It was like a miracle, but only angels and saints could perform miracles…

“And I ain’t either of those.” The demon finished for him. “That’s better, beauty restored.”

“W-w-what? W-w-why?”

“Shhh...” The demon rubbed a soft-furred thumb over his lips. “Don’t ask so many questions.”

It can’t hurt to ask.

“Let me go?”

The demon grinned, and slashed his leg open from hip to knee. Tobias screamed.

I was wrong.

His clothes were in tatters, and the demon ripped the rest away without any care whatsoever, his sharp claws pricking and scratching his skin as he was laid bare. Tobias knew he couldn’t get away, but when the demon wrapped a hand around his privates he wriggled uselessly, his dislocated foot making him want to scream. The demon fondled him gently, the expression in his eyes almost kind, and then he smiled evilly, dipped his fingers in the blood which pooled in the deep wound in Tobias’s thigh, and pushed his himself into the young man’s intimate opening.

“NO!”

“My, my, how… new.”

The demon’s fingers moved within him, unyielding, and Tobias was distracted from the pain of his wounds by the hot ball of shame that clogged his throat as he was touched. He could barely believe what was happening, and tried to think of anything other than all the thousands of undesired moments when he’d been privy to the images of sex in other people’s lives. But they played out like a reel, every salacious drooling look, every stray hand up a skirt, every pair of lips wrapped around another’s stiffened girth, every moment when the only images being shown to him were of men fucking their wives, or their neighbours wives, or daughters, or sons. Every sinful secret in the town weighed upon him as the demon touched him. Tobias looked into the face of the monster, and realised that now he was seeing all those things too.

“Poor little Tobias. Watching everyone else having fun, not getting any himself.” The demon frowned softly. “No, that’s not it, is it?”

It makes you scared, wanting something which is a sin. Oh sweetling.

NO! Tobias squirmed as the demon moved inside him, wanting to be rid of the feeling of the beast in his body and in his mind. Please, just kill me.

“Please!” he begged, his voice hoarse, “please kill me.”

“No. You’re too much fun alive.”

The demon pulled his hand away, and Tobias wanted to cry with thanks, but a moment later the demon was holding his palm between his own, rubbing one thumb in small circles, pressing gently on the bones underneath the skin.

The last thing I did was make Forgotten Cookies with that hand. It was a weird thought to have, watching himself through his memory, whisking the eggs whites and piping the little stars of sweet delight. He could feel the darkness in his mind, and then he knew what the demon was going to do.

“NO! No no no no. Please. I beg you, don’t...”

But the demon grinned evilly, pressed hard, and Tobias screamed in pain as the bones in his hand snapped like twigs. The pain was too much, he couldn’t hold onto it, he knew it would overwhelm him. He hoped death would come quickly. Tobias blinked, then again very slowly, and then he could bear it no longer, and passed out.

He opened his eyes to find the moon had moved a hands breadth in the sky. For the smallest heartbeat, Tobias thought he was alone in the dark woods, with his blood staining the leaves and rough ground, but then he felt the warm physical presence of the demon, and he knew there was no escaping this damnation.

This is what I get for not liking church.

“Hahahaha!” The demon’s laugh was, like his voice, rich, deep, and powerful. Why a creature of darkness had been given such a musical voice Tobias couldn’t begin to guess. The beast was using one hand to draw whorls and patterns over his abdomen in blood and some shiny, sticky substance he didn’t immediately recognise. Then his eyes adjusted to the dark, and he realised the demon was just as naked as he was. Noticing his observation, the demon smirked. “You feel everything so strongly. I couldn’t help myself. I expect your body will be even more delightful.”

“No!”

The horror of the demon’s suggestion made Tobias suddenly strong. He forgot his wounds, feeling had returned to his unbroken hand, and he tried to push the monster away. His hand gripped a short, pointed horn, like that of a goat, but his attempt to throw the creature from him was halted, because the demon took his other palm, and ground the broken bones together with his fingers.

“AHHHHH!”

“Oh sweet glory….” the demon hissed between his fangs.

Under the pain, Tobias felt something else, and his mind grasped for it before he’d even thought about what such an action might mean. A thick rope of pleasure, rich and sweet like new honey straight from the hive, oozed across him, and suddenly he was panting and flushed, unable to control the feelings which surfaced through the sticky ribbon of bliss. He gripped the demon’s horn, and pulled the monster down to his mouth once more. The beast kissed him like a man who was drowning, groaned against him, and flayed the skin of his chest with one sharp hand. Tobias couldn’t scream, but the pain walloped him around the skull and he shook with tension. Then the flood of pleasure was deeper, stronger, and Tobias saw it in his mind’s eye, how all the pain he was feeling delighted the creature atop him, and how that pleasure flowed back through into Tobias as well. He wanted to pull away, tried to pull away, the horror of what he understood making him wish he could claw out his own eyes, but he was trapped by the weight and strength of the beast.

We couldn’t do that, the demon’s voice in his head was such a sweet counterpoint to the dark pleasure he was feeling that Tobias heard himself whimper, You have such pretty eyes.

“W-why are you doing this to me?”

The demon smiled at him, all sharp teeth and bright, sun-yellow eyes.

“Because it feels so good.” He stressed his words by pressing his claws into Tobias’s newest chest wound, making the young man cough and whine in pain. A dart of the demon’s pleasure spiked in his mind, and Tobias wished he couldn’t feel how much pleasure the pain was giving the beast.

Then he blinked, and the monster was turning him over, dead leaves and mud getting into his wounds-

At least you’re not going to survive long enough to get flesh-rot, his hind brain said.

-and Tobias felt the chill breeze blow across skin he’d hoped the demon had forgotten about. He shivered violently, and tried to pull away, but a hand one on thigh held him fast.

“Don’t!”

“I do so love new flesh,” the demon purred. “There is something special about being the first.”

Tobias had been far too young to know what the feelings other people had broadcasted had meant when images had started arriving with some of them, and though he’d known what mating was – because no child grew up on a farm not knowing – he’d been much too young to be shown such intimate and sometimes disturbing views of what people did to each other without their clothes on. And whilst he might have enjoyed watching Richard Fletcher pour drinks with his broad, bare arms, or dreamt about the farrier’s lad who came out to visit the cart horses with his hammers and rasps and curly blond locks, he’d never wanted to be like all those sweaty, rough, immoral people who had unwittingly shown him things he had been too young to learn about. He hadn’t wanted them before that night, and he didn’t want them now. But the demon wanted them, and Tobias couldn’t stop him.

“Please don’t.” He squeezed shut his eyes, hoping the creature might kill him before it defiled his body further. “I beg you.”

“The night is young.” The demon’s hands parted his flesh, literally and intimately, as he spoke, and Tobias wailed with fresh pain once again. “And you’re so beautiful.”

Tobias cried when the demon entered him, his pain and misery blanketed by the growing delight of the demon, each sensation feeding the other until Tobias’s mind could bear it no more. He roamed over his own body, no one sensation holding him as he examined the pain which radiated from his many wounds; the amount of dark blood spilled over the ground; the way his broken hand was dark in the centre, lumpy and wrong; the jarring of his foot and ankle, in time with the hard, ruthless pounding of the demon’s stiff member inside his body. The beast thrust into him, a beam of pure, unbridled enjoyment lancing from him directly into Tobias’s mind, and the young man wept, because he knew it would never be over. There was a fullness inside his body which he hadn’t ever known could be there, and another mess of shame as he realised that his own blood was making his passage slippery for the demon’s thrusts. Tobias wished fervently for the stillness death would bring, the freedom from all he felt, but there was the darkness of the demon inside his head, and Tobias knew that death was not going to be kind.

Kindness does not bring us to such dizzying heights.

Tobias had no answer for the beast. His mind was wrapped up in feeling every sensation his body had to offer: the pain; the itchiness of scabs trying to form over wounds still being shaken open by the demon’s fucking; the heat building within him, like he was a furnace being banked; the way the muscles of his entrance tried to grip weakly and hold the demon’s hardness, or keep it out, but could do neither.

The demon raked claws across his back, then bent to lapping him almost as quickly, sealing the skin once more. Again and again he spilt the young man’s blood, until Tobias was shaking in a manner that had nothing to do with how cold he was. He had to try and get away.

The snap of a rib bone sounded like the smack of the smith’s hammer on his anvil, and Tobias screamed, then coughed. He tried to balance on his hands, his arms, but he couldn’t. He slipped to the ground, his body trying to turn itself inside out through his mouth, and then the demon’s furred, clawed hand closed around his throat as the hard member within him swelled. Tobias knew what was coming, he’d seen and felt it in other people’s heads so many times before, and the demon lost his self control along with his seed, and squeezed the young man’s throat.

Tobias felt the nothingness racing up to meet him, finally, and he gave thanks without words that death was coming to claim him at last. Even the hot spurt of his own pleasure could not break through the smother of his shame at the sin he had allowed to be committed with his body, and Tobias sank gratefully into oblivion.