CH 6 - Pleasure and Pain

Logan and Beauty sat cross-legged around the fire, as Logan ate the animal she had caught and presented to him. It was, in his humble opinion, a great improvement from rat meat. He took a sip of flat, bitter-tasting, beer, and offered the water skin to his new companion. She declined with a smile and a shake of her snow-white hair, just as she had at the offer of meat.

By contrast, her hunger for his own brand of protein shake seemed insatiable. Not that he was complaining, but that seemed a curious thing.

Succubus. The word popped into Logan’s mind out of nowhere. Another fragment of his broken memory re-surfacing. A female demon that supposedly fed off the sexual energy of her victims. Male version, Incubus.

Well, he didn’t feel like a victim, but the rest made sense. If so, then her behavior wasn’t for pleasure at all, or at least not just for pleasure. It was, quite literally, a food source for her kind. That would certainly explain her obsession with consuming his sexual fluids.

Was that what drove her to find me again after our first encounter? If so, why me in particular? If this truly was Hell, then there should be no shortage of damned souls wandering about to feed on.

Logan filed that one away for later. One more unanswered mystery to figure out. The demon girl noticed him watching her and smiled.

He blinked at her in surprise. That was also going to take some getting used to. But then again, all of this was new. He and Beauty, as he had named her, were in uncharted territory. Only a week ago, she had tried to kill him. Now they were...

Logan didn’t know what they were. Allies? Friends with benefits? Something more?

“Beauty.” He held up the water skin. “Can you show me where you got this?”

She frowned, then nodded.

“Good. Thank you.” Logan sighed and looked around the small alcove he had claimed for shelter almost a week ago. “Shelter” was a generous description. It was a deep cut into a cliff that provided a break from the dust and wind, room enough for a small fire, and sleeping space for one. Two people was one too many. No matter how they positioned themselves, he and Beauty were always touching in the tight space around them. Logan didn’t mind that part so much.

Further crowding them was Logan’s inventory of “equipment”, if you could call it that. He had a stone knife he had chipped down to a ragged, serrated edge, a long stick with a sharpened, fire-hardened tip that could almost be called a spear, and a small pile of poorly cured rat furs. All of that had taken most of a week to gather. Your average caveman would be better armed than he was, but considering the Faerie Queen Maeve had dumped him, quite suddenly, into this hell with only the clothes on his back, it could have been worse.

Still, it could damn sure be better. Logan examined the water skin Beauty had given him. It represented so much more than just leather and a source of hydration. Someone had crafted it from cured hides and woven thread. Someone had brewed the beer inside the skin. Crafting meant skills and trade, and that required some degree of civilization. Which meant this nightmare realm was not all empty, wind-blasted wasteland.

It would seem that even in Hell, the wheels of commerce still turned. Logan desperately wanted some of that. A real bed and real food would be a dream come true. And a bath! he thought. Dear God, I would kill for a hot shower.

Ironically, he didn’t have to suffer any of this caveman shit. The option was always there. All he supposedly had to do was call the name of Queen Maeve, and she would yank him right out of Hell, just like when she had put him here in the first place. Of course, there was still the matter of the debt she owed to him. She didn’t like that. Neither did Logan, but that obligation was the only thing keeping her from enslaving him as her boy toy once it that debt was paid. Unfortunately, it was also the reason he was here.

“Motivation” she had called it, the bitch.

He scratched at his week-old beard. Being half Irish and half Apache, he knew it must be a sad, scraggly looking thing, but there was no help for it. His “knife” could barely cut meat. A razor was an unimaginable luxury. Might as well wish for a lightsaber or the fountain of youth.

Logan finished eating and smiled at her. “That was the finest meal I have had since arriving more than a week ago. Thank you, Beauty. You are amazing.” He leaned over to give her hand an affectionate squeeze. Beauty blinked, looked down at their joined hands and tilted her head at him.

“Now then.” Logan let go and stood. “Time to get to work.” He picked up his spear and slung the water skin over one shoulder. “Let’s go take a tour of Hell. Show me where you got that beer.”

Logan decided the terrain in Hell was the evil twin of Badlands National Park in South Dakota. Jagged mountains of naked, rust-colored stone ripped the landscape into a patchwork of sheer cliffs and winding valleys. Vegetation was sparse and sickly looking. Twisted, black trees grew in solitude, roots coiling and twisting into the dry earth. Hot, sandpaper winds crawled through the valleys, one moment a scratching whisper against exposed skin, and the next moment howling and tearing at his flesh like the teeth and claws of a wild beast. Above it all, boiling clouds of black and scarlet hid the sky and painted everything in shadow. It was, in other words, a miserable place to travel.

The only positive aspect of the journey was his guide. Beauty moved with a quiet confidence that was both reassuring and distracting, given that her perfect body was entirely naked. Claws on her hands and feet, powered by a lithe body of coiled muscle, made climbing jagged rock look easy. Logan struggled to keep up. He also struggled not to stare at her lovely, bare ass constantly swaying in front of his eyes.

Focus idiot, he reminded himself, yet again. Not paying attention could get them both killed. More than once, they had jumped behind cover when a winged demon had flown overhead. Danger was never very far away in the place.

Her hand against his chest stopped Logan in his tracks. She pointed at the ground, at a blood-colored scorpion-like creature crawling over rock and dirt. Tentacles writhed around its mouth, each tipped with a sharp spur of bone. Beauty made a gesture, as if being bitten, then something coursing up her arm and onward to her heart.

“Venom?” Logan asked and took a wary step away from the creature.

From somewhere nearby, pebbles clattered and rolled as something moved. They both crouched behind cover and waited. A moment later, a human male stumbled into view.

He looked to be a Hispanic male around fifty years old, nude, and in ragged condition. The shape of his bones could be seen moving beneath nearly colorless skin. Even his tangled, dark hair looked washed out and gray. The man’s expression could only be described as haunted. Lines of exhaustion and grief were carved onto his face. Worst of all were his eyes! Wide and wild, and barely human, they were the eyes of someone who existed without hope, for whom joy was not even a distant memory.

Logan remembered that look, and for once, wished he could forget again as another memory surfaced.

The battle was all but over. The crack and chatter of gunfire can still be heard, but it is a distant echo on the hot, still air. I hardly notice the stench of burnt gunpowder and the sickly sweet reek of death in my nose from the enemy bodies still laying in the streets as my squad sweeps for enemy stragglers.

Up ahead, a boy not old enough to grow his first chin hair sits on a smoking pile of shattered stone and wood. Dried blood paints the side of his face black and red. In his arms, he holds a little girl’s broken, bloody doll. He looks in my direction but does not see me. He breathes but is not alive. His eyes are dead. It is not a doll the boy holds in his arms.

Logan snapped out of the memory and rose from hiding, driven by a need to do something for the poor bastard. He held his hands up in a gesture of peace. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The man’s eyes bugged out with terror. He fell hard, then scrambled to his feet and ran as if every demon in Hell was howling at his heels. Logan just watched him flee in panic, knowing there was nothing he could do or say that would matter. This reaction was also familiar to him, and it weighed on his heart like a stone. Hope was a fragile thing, and some things, once broken, could not be made whole again.

Logan lowered himself to sit on the rocks and just focus on breathing. What he had just seen was human suffering in its purest form. The real Hell was in that man’s eyes.

Beauty knelt beside and touched him on the shoulder. He looked up at her, at the expression of confusion on her lovely face. Logan shook his head.

She doesn’t understand. How could she? She is a demon and that man was a soul damned to eternal punishment. To her, this is all normal. Just another Tuesday in Hell.

But was that true, he wondered? Being a demon should mean that Beauty was the very definition of evil, at least according to every story or legend he had ever heard on Earth. Yet, nothing about her behavior suggested anything like that, including their first encounter. A tiger will attack to feed. That didn’t make it evil.

So no, he didn’t think of her as evil but he did remind himself that the tiger analogy was an accurate comparison. One that Logan would be well advised to remember. Any wild animal could be kept in captivity for a lifetime and still turn on its keeper in a heartbeat. Despite her incredible allure, Beauty was still a predator. If she ever turned on him, Logan suspected he would never even see it coming.

She is a demon and you damn well better not forget that, he warned himself. As he did at least once a day ever since his reunion with Beauty. As charming and sensuous as she was, it was so easy to forget!

There was so much Logan needed to learn about his new companion and this nightmare world. Ignorance could only get him killed. So many questions remained unanswered.

One thing at a time, Logan. Don’t get overwhelmed. Control what you can. You can’t help that man. Keep moving soldier.

Putting things into a sense of perspective and priority helped him stayed grounded. Feeling a little better and purely on impulse, he leaned in toward the kneeling demon and gave her a quick kiss on the lips. He chuckled as she pulled back, even more confused, and touched her lips. Logan stood, brushed himself off, and tapped the water skin. “Come on then, gorgeous. Let’s get back to it.”