Torturous Love - 2. Chapter 2

Zai sat on his haunches and regarded his prey with sharp acid yellow eyes. The moon above them was a perfect half disc, bathing the scene in silver light. The boy was knocked out of his body by pain and partial asphyxiation, his mind gone for the mean time. But Zai though he liked the flavour of this mind. The boy was strong, mentally at least, and had managed to cling on to consciousness when many other were already drooling vegetables. When most humans saw Zai, they painted his faces with whichever of their fears fitted the best. Devil, zombie, rage, stranger, death, but this boy, this pale shredded thing that was displayed before him, had seen him. Actually seen him. That alone was enough to put him high on Zai’s list of things to be interested in.

The lithe cat demon had made an awful recruiter despite his healing powers, and was far too fond of killing his charges. Shindae said he was sick, fucking his still living prey even while killing them again and again, but Zai knew there were worse proclivities than his own. And anyway, none of the demons he lived with knew about the empathy thing. Empathy was not a skill that demons advertised. It was rare and it was looked down upon. Had Zai ever told the palace he was an empathy, he could of expected a job washing dishes. At best.

But Zai’s empathic skill was as twisted as his sexual desires. He didn’t feel exactly what his victims felt, but a dulled down version. So the deeper the pain he caused, the better his resulting ecstasy. The boy before him had turned out to be a resilient soul, and Zai had been brought to ever higher peaks by the wounds he’d wrought into the boy’s skin. And when he’d snapped the boy’s arm, and he hadn’t blacked out. Zai closed his eyes and sucked in his breath to remember that spike of pleasure than ran through him from the back of his skull to his crotch.

The moonlight illuminated the boy. His skin was marked everywhere with welts and puncture marks, blood dripped and pooled in the hollows of his body, collar bone, fingers, crotch. Blood stained the grass and the earth below the boy and he was marked with a dozen scratches and patches of dirt. Zai’s own cum dripped with blood from his cheeks and the boy’s own seed was splattered on his chest and shining in the moonlight. The sight made Zai smile.

Dawn was coming, and Zai, like most demons, was a creature of the night. For a while he set about healing his new toy, lapping at the large slices left by his claws and sucking at the boy’s wrists until bones realigned and set themselves together. He left the small punctures, he enjoyed the little triangular marks left by his claws on the boy’s pale skin. The boy looked little better when healed, blood and sweat and mud and sperm still staining his skin. Zai crouched over the boy and took the opportunity to look at his face.

Sleeping the boy looked almost peaceful. His black hair was a mess, his features slack and ghostly in the moonlight. But he had soft skin, high cheekbones, a good strong jaw, a narrow nose. Zai bent over his prey and kissed the slack unconscious lips, soft against his short fur. He smiled. The boy tasted somewhat of fear and anger, but underlying that was a thick rich current of an almost savoury sweetness, like spiced fruit and red meat. Zai stole a second kiss, just as good as the first.

The sky was getting lighter now, the moon halving jumped across the sky and in the near distance, birds were twittering awake. Zai stood and wrapped his cloak about his shoulders, pulling up the hood. He’ been playing with the Chain of Possession before the boy had arrived. Zai had been carrying it around for a while and wondered if it meant something. Without consciously deciding to do so he wrapped the chain about the boy’s neck where the ends sealed themselves. Zai picked the boy up, his strength belied by his slender frame, and slung him over one shoulder.

He could easily have stolen a house. He did sometimes, where he wanted somewhere to sleep for just the night, killed a family and ran amok in their possessions, but he’d gotten a bit sick of it. So he passed through the thick hedge, away from the road, and started off across a field where the cows were all huddled at one end. One of their number lay dead in the field already, ripped apart by Zai while he was bored. It’s blood soaked the ground black. The boy wasn’t heavy, and Zai moved quickly in the near silence before dawn, across fields and little wooded outcrops to the broken down barn he had settled in for the meantime.

The barn was the only building for miles, derelict, one end still supporting a short hay loft, piled with old straw and bits of sheep wool. At some point someone had made a fire in the lower portion of the barn, teenagers probably, and left blankets behind. All creatures had fled from it, fled from Zai’s presence in the place, and the view through the broken wall of the barn simply showed a bit more empty woodland. The ladder to the hayloft had long since rotted away, but that didn’t bother Zai who climbed the side wall of corrugated steel panels like it was a hotel staircase.

He laid down the sleeping boy and yawned. The sun was starting to throw yellow streaks out over the land, and Zai, not having seen the sun for years, was tired by the light. He wrapped the boy in a blanket, pulled his cloak about himself, draped another blanket over his own form and curled up to sleep. Up on the hayloft, out of sight even if someone had walked right by where they were, demon and boy slept soundly.

Zai woke to a crashing sound and a cut off cry of pain. He removed himself indelicately from his blanket and hissed at the wintery sunlight streaming through the broken roof panels into the hayloft. Zai narrowed his eyes against the light. His head hurt, the sunlight causing an instant headache, and the demon scrambled over the edge of the hayloft. The boy was collapsed on the floor of the barn some twenty feet below, clutching at his ankle, groaning in pain.

Zai yawned and rolled his eyes. He dropped to the floor of the barn next to the boy, landing softly, crouched and cat-like. The boy gasped and tried to scramble away without using his twisted ankle. Zai picked him up nonchalantly by the throat.

“I would normally point out that trying to escape is useless but I’m really tired.” Zai put the boy back over his shoulder and climbed up to the hay loft. “You can go more than fifty feet from me anyway.” Zai dropped the boy back on the blanket and went to his own little nest of hay, “Fucking sleep why don’t ya?”

Zai threw the blanket back over his head and curled up. He hated the sun. Natural light gave him headaches, eyes built to see perfectly in the dark weren’t great at transmitting images to his brain properly. Everything had looked warped, too bright and out of focus. Zai yawned, and made a pillow out of his arms. He wanted to sleep, but the low grumbling of the boy stopped sleep from approaching.

“Oh god please get me out of here…what is this creature, what does he mean I can’t go more than fifty feet? Would I die if I went headfirst?”

Zai threw off his blanket, and growled at the boy. Getting up more than once in the day time made him angry. The boy was sitting near the edge of the hayloft, one hand wrapped around his ankle. Zai growled and grabbed the boy by the back of the neck. He laud the boy over to where he lay.

“What’s your name?”

“T-Toby…”

“Right Toby,” Zai sighed, “I’m not going to kill you now, and you aren’t going to manage to kill yourself by falling off that,” he gestured vaguely to the drop, “So you can sleep or I can knock you out. Your choice.”

The boy seemed frozen, incapable of answering. Zai growled. The boy’s brain obviously couldn’t cope with the situation he was in. Zai gripped his throat and squeezed until the boy’s muscles went slack. He curled up around his prey, dragged the blanket back over his head and went back to sleep.