Gabrielle and the Devil

 

She crouched perfectly still, staring down at the hard cracked earth, remembering nothing yet somehow knowing all. Far above and beyond her, horrific otherworldly screams vied with bellows of warlike rage. She was bruised and defeated―still whole, but laid low as in some cataclysmic struggle. And she was naked. The garments of which she had been stripped in battle were straggling across the wind-blown earth in the periphery of her vision, a ruin of sundered white cloth. All that shielded her bared flesh from the roaring creatures wheeling high above her was a great feathered canopy, a canopy fused in bone to her shoulder-blades.

She raised her head, folding the dense appendages close over her exposed back and buttocks, and gazed across the vast fire-scorched plain. Far off she could see other crumpled forms, wings struggling feebly in final attempts to ward off their standing attackers. Further beyond, the glowering red sun was split by the horizon as it sank for the final time on Earth. The turbulent sky was darkening into brooding umber, though she could still pick out the dread sight of further great-winged monsters circling the carnage and roaring out their victory. Hope was dead. All left for the survivors was their dark fate.

This was not the foretold end. This was not what the Scriptures had promised. To be left crushed and deserted on this desolate dried-up field…

She heard it first, a base animal snorting that resonated all about her. Then the shadow fell across her face, all but casting her into night. Slightly turning her head she saw them, a pair of great cloven hooves, one grinding into the dust. She knew with the same surety by which she understood all else that it was Him. And among the horror was a faint, sinful glimmer of pride that he had come for her in person. She looked up and up―she could do no other―taking in his brute form. All his beautiful angelic disguise was dispelled in this, his moment of lustful, vainglorious conquest.

Her conqueror. Giant above her, towering nine feet, less a minotaur in aspect, more a terrifying cross-bred fusion of man and bull. The bulging haunches, the massively muscled chest, the rope-like sinews on his neck―all straining beneath a hide like thick dark-red leather. Great black horns curled outwards from his forehead and his eyes burned out of his cruel, swarthy face as if fuelled from some interior furnace.

Her conqueror―but not utterly if she resisted him. He could overwhelm her physically, but inside herself she must not succumb to him, to the mastery of his hellish presence. To the focal point of her rising, fascinated horror―the great phallus which rose from his loins like a sabre. Her eyes fixated on its mighty, thick-veined curve as it swayed in front of her face, more terrible and awe-inspiring than any weapon he might have used to subdue her in the air. His balls hung down between his massive thighs like huge granite eggs. She could almost smell the sulphurous brew within them.

He threw back his head and uttered a long, guttural roar, his forked, serpentine tongue thrashing the air. Then with the same whip-like motion, the long thick muscle lashed downwards, its twin tendrils lighting on her sternum. She gasped sharply and held back the air in her lungs, as his tongue slithered upwards between her breasts over the extended curve of her neck to her chin’s tip. It flickered briefly, sickeningly at her lips, before retracting like reverse-lightening all the way inside his mouth.

Then he reached out a mighty taloned hand and drew her tiny face up and towards him, her hair fluttering in the hot breeze as he guided her. Resistance crumbled within. She could not hold back, could not even require him to force her.

But she spirited up the last of her fading courage and sealed her mouth tight against his intrusion. She remained resolute though trembling, as the obscenely glistening head of his great shaft smeared its vile mucus on her lips.

“WORSHIP ME.” His words were a long distorted growl, torn from his throat. It reverberated around her and she shuddered. She shut her eyes and braced her whole being against him. But her nipples were beaded hard in the blasphemy of his presence. There was a betraying, melting sensation in her loins―unsought and inevitable. He was waiting, she knew, waiting for her to submit. Waiting for her lips to part through her own volition, so he could impale her near to her throat and pump his boiling, demonic seed into her stomach as though she welcomed it. She must not let him, she must not allow him that satisfaction. Take her body though he might, she must steel her soul against His…

“WORRSHHHIIP MEEEEE!!!”

~~~~

“And then?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it? Gabby, you can’t pull ‘and then I woke up’ on me now. Not after the erectile demon and all the post-apocalyptic foreplay. There’s nothing else?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Dora. I can see you’d like to hear about me being ravished by Beelzebub. You’re quite the sick puppy, you know that?”

“But he wanted you to submit all of your own accord. That’s so frickin’ sexy!”

“Sexy? It was a nightmare. I couldn’t get to sleep again after.”

“I’ll bet you couldn’t. Give me that kinda nightmare, I wouldn’t bother dating anymore.”

Gabrielle’s reaction was a comedy of open-mouthed outrage. “Oh - oh - right, so I’ve just described your perfect guy―strong and silent type, horns, crappy attitude, with a penchant for world domination and damning all mankind.”

“Horns I could cope with, the third one in particular.” Pandora grinned, swilling the dregs of her rosé before draining the glass. “Seems a reasonable trade-off for the hooves and the tail.”

“No tail,” Gabrielle corrected, sipping from her own glass. “He was a kind of composite of various Devil mythologies.”

“If you say so.” Pandora rolled her eyes, refilled her glass and reclined back into the beanbag.

“He was,” Gabrielle insisted. “The satyr was a creature from Greek myth, but in the Christian tradition it became viewed as demonic, what with it having a perpetual erection and all. So the whole Fallen Angel idea got combined with the horny goat. Only in my dream he was a bit more… bullish than goaty.”

“So in other words,” Pandora said knowingly, “you took all your favorite bits and made the whole thing over with a few hot touches of your own. You created your perfect demon.”She chuckled at the exasperated look on her friend’s face. “And cast yourself in the role of glamorous overthrown angel, made to submit to his every bestial desire. Yum.”

“That’s the other odd thing.” Gabrielle frowned. “Traditionally angels are seen as either male or androgynous. It’s only in Nativity plays that they’re feminized. If you read Paradise Lost, you’ll…”

“Never going to happen,” Pandora assured her. “Look, Gabby, stop being an English teacher. Get your head out of your books. When you woke up, did you touch yourself?”

“What?”

“Don’t get defensive with me, Miss Deangelo. When you were lying there with your head full of your big scary demon, did - you - masturbate?”

“Dora!”

“Did you?”

“Well―alright, yes.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What was the orgasm like? I can tell by your face right now you had one.”

“It was… It was…” Pandora was nodding salacious encouragement, but though the word ‘spectacular’ occurred to Gabrielle, she refused to provide her friend with that much satisfaction. “It was good,” she finished lamely, but there was a tremor in her voice and her nipples hardened as she said it.

“Ha!” Pandora took delight in her victory. “That dream means one thing―you need to get laid. Properly. By someone who knows what he’s doing.” She talked right over the semi-scandalized Gabriella’s attempts to protest, waving a pontificating finger. “And you told meabout the dream because you wanted somebody to say as much.”

“But Dora, I…”

“Look at you―you’re one of the most attractive women I know and you sit in, night after night in sweats and a baggy sweater, watching Bridget Jones and eating ice-cream―that Cookies ’n’ Cream was delicious by the way, I’m not saying it wasn’t―when you should be out meeting guys. Come on, Gab, you’re gorgeous. Trim and smooth and long-legged…Christ, if I was a guy I’d do you in a heartbeat.” That one caused Gabrielle to grin and blush. “How long’s it been?” Pandora persisted. “Three months? Come on, is Simon really worth that much mourning?”

“Well it’s… he’s… I’d been with him over a year.” Gabrielle sensed the lack of conviction in her own reaction. Her resistance was giving way much as it had done in the dream.

“And you want to tell me exactly what was so great?” Pandora was pursuing relentlessly now, her tone good-humored yet quietly scathing. “All those wonderful romantic gestures he never quite got around to making? The football games he shared with you? His scintillating wit?’ This time Gabrielle laughed aloud. She couldn’t help herself. ‘Oh yes, and remind me what the sex was like.”

Gabrielle gave a rueful grimace. “Okay, okay, I know I told you. It wasn’t great. Not that I’ve got much to compare it with.”

“That’s what comes of being a good girl and going to church all these years,” Pandora chided.

“Unfair!” Gabrielle’s protest was stronger this time. “You know my faith’s important to me. And St Ambrose is very progressive. It’s not like they sent me on those summer camps where we all sit around with hot boys and talk about our chastity. I’ve been unlucky with the guys I’ve met, that’s all.”

“Then it’s time to set that right. When your freaky nightmares promise better sex than you’ve had in real life, action needs to be taken.”

The truth of Pandora’s words weighed on Gabrielle, but it wasn’t as easy as her friend made out. Her relationship with Simon hadn’t been incendiary, that was for sure, but she had felt comfortable in it. She’d tried to make it work. So his assertion three months prior that “the chemistry isn’t there for me”, after all his hang-ups and guilt over sex―that had been crushing. Maybe Pandora was right. Maybe that was what you got for dating a guy from church.

“I simply don’t know if I’m ready to go looking for another relationship yet,” she moaned.

“Hello? Did I even mention the R-word? I’m talking about short-term, high-intensity fun-for-fun’s-sake.”

Gabrielle stared at her fellow-teacher helplessly. It was easy for her to speak, Miss Fox (what fun the male students had with that surname), perched there on Gabrielle’s soft furnishings like a cute, buxom pixie, a satin sheen to her dark hair. Out every Saturday night, a whirlwind of flirtation and tease and wit. Sex on toast, though admittedly choosy about who she let spread her. Gabrielle disapproved of her some and envied her more. “Look,” she said, a touch despairingly, “I’m no good at finding that sort of fun.”

“That’s why you’ve got me,” Pandora chirped, her eyes sparkling among the T-lights of the English teacher’s bed-sitting-room. “It’s time for you to be reintroduced to society, my girl, and I know just the event.”

“You do?” Gabrielle was wary of Pandora’s zealous tone. Her friend had clearly been waiting to spring this all evening.

“Oh God yes. I’ve told you about my cousin Stella? The one who married Mackenzie Hartland the venture capitalist and moved from San Fran to Santa Barbara? Well their annual Halloween party is coming up. And guess who’s been invited a second year running. And,guess who’s been granted a second ticket for her hot friend who’s in need of a fabulous night out.”

Gabrielle stared for a moment and knocked back a particularly large gulp of wine. “Select,” Pandora confided, like the room might be bugged. “Lavish.” She curled her tongue around the word with relish and followed up with a gleeful alliteration for her English-graduate friend. “And lascivious.”

“Yeah,” a concerned Gabrielle said, her heart-rate stepping up. “A swingers party, the way you told it last year.”

“Not officially.” Pandora grinned. “But it has acquired quite a reputation. I went as a cute little vampire and before the night was out, Van Helsing impaled me in the…”

“Thank you, Dora, you’ve told me that story!” Gabrielle quelled the confession, but laughed in her outrage all the same. “You seriously don’t expect me to go.”

“I totally expect it, and I’m going to slap you around your pretty head if you don’t. Do you know how exclusive these tickets are, how much persuading I had to do to get you in? You need to go out and live some. God and the church aren’t going to be pissed if you have one night’s fun.”

“It’s not that,” Gabrielle protested. Part of her wanted to be convinced. “It’s―well―I’m not exactly brimming with self-confidence right now. After the Simon thing.”

“Unreal,” Pandora said, shaking her head. “You’re a fucking goddess, Gabby, with a major self-image problem, that’s all. We’ve got three weeks till Halloween. You, girl, are my project.” She gazed over Gabrielle appraisingly. The riveting blue of those unaccountably uncertain eyes, not quite obscured by her tousled, dirty-blonde hair. The limber, pilates-toned body, not quite concealed by her sloppy casual-wear. So pretty, yet so vulnerable right now, so unconvinced of her own sex-appeal.

“Oh my God, yes.” Inspiration flashed so strikingly across Pandora’s face, that Gabrielle leaned in to listen. “Your dream! It’s so perfect.” She met her friend’s bemused stare squarely. “An angel―a sexy-ass angel surrounded by the Creatures of the Night. You willrock the joint.”

Gabrielle struggled for speech. She was flattered and felt a rush of affection for her clearly deranged friend. She could even sense crazy, scary, guilty excitement bubbling up in her stomach. But this was all total madness. “I - I can’t - I wouldn’t even know how to start with a costume.”

“Gabby, I’m an Art and Design teacher,” Pandora spelt out patiently. “And there are places called shops.” She took Gabrielle by the hands and beamed at her. “You shall go to the ball. And once you get there, balling is optional.”

“Pandora…” Gabrielle blushed to her roots and glared back in mock-fury.

“Honestly.” Pandora’s eyes rolled white. “You regale me with stories of foot-long demon-cock, and then you get all coy about a sexy party. What am I going to do with you?”

~~~~~

What indeed? Getting Gabrielle to the party would not be the problem; their girly tête-a-tête had clearly got the blonde hooked. Bypassing the usual Gabby-reaction once they’d arrived, that was the challenge; making sure she didn’t revert to her default polite-but-reserved routine once interested males came sniffing.

Five years together on the staff of San Francisco’s Willowfield High, five years’ worth of weekends on the town had established the pattern all too well, Pandora thought wryly. Gabrielle’s faltering confidence always masqueraded as stand-offishness. What a waste of that pretty body and that sexy imagination, the one that rose to the surface once a few drinks had gone south on girls’ nights in. And, it transpired, in her nocturnal imaginings too, when that clearly freaky subconscious got a chance to take over. God, Gabby needed unharnessing from her inhibitions. Then maybe she could experience one truly hot night. Maybe she’d acquire a taste for them.

Pandora probably would have refrained from what she did, had it not been for that one tequila-soaked evening. She stumbled into her apartment at the end of it, the idea burning wicked in her mind. It was an outrageous liberty to take with hers and Gabrielle’s friendship, she knew, but in her inebriate state it seemed too inspired a notion to ignore. She picked up the phone and made two calls.

The first was to her cousin Stella, who on that Friday night was as alcoholically merry as Pandora. “He’d fit in perfectly at the party―suave, successful and hot as hell,” Pandora insisted. “He’s outgoing, daring―you’d love him, although hands off. I’m kind of trying to set him up with someone else.”

Stella’s tipsiness certainly played a role in her agreeing to provide another ticket. Pandora signed off the conversation with a thrill of success and made her second call.

She and Lucius Dammrich had been friends since childhood, the Foxes and the Dammrichs living as close neighbors. Lucius had grown up and done well in real estate and with women. A charming, devil-may-care hunk of masculinity, that was her guy-pal. Pandora figured she’d managed to stay such good friends with him because she firmly refused to go there. She’d chide him laughingly over his indiscretions and tell him frequently to stop being such a damned dog.

The morning after her call, no doubt, she’d have hung-over reservations about her actions and their possible consequences, but that night he struck her as Gabrielle’s Mr Right-now. Precisely what the girl needed. Besides, he was clever and well-read. He would get her. Who knew? Gabby might be the one to reform him…

Ha! Get real, girl. That’s not going to happen. But at least he could work some Halloween magic and give the sexually reticent blonde a holiday to remember. He answered his cellphone and after the de rigeur drunken banter―some months had passed since last they spoke―Pandora cheerfully moved to engage him in her plot.

“You’ll love this party, I know you. It’ll be swarming with hot women―but look, there’s one I want you to pay special attention to. No, you’ll like her. Really like her. And she’s a challenge. I know you love that. You want me to email a photo? I’ll do it right now. Look, Lucius, you owe me! We had a weekend lined up, and you swanned off to San Diego to hook up with some little fuck-buddy of yours, remember? This will not be a chore, trust me. But I want you to be nice to her. And don’t tell her we had this conversation. Costume? Well yeah, I did have something in mind for you. I thought if I gave you a theme, you could use your imagination and run with it. Let me explain…”

* * * *

Over three weeks Gabrielle allowed herself to be swept along by Pandora’s boundless enthusiasm. It was easy to go with that flow once she got past her initial reservations, in fact it was a source of stomach-tightening excitement. Letting herself be costumed for a party of dubious reputation felt deliciously transgressive, to the extent that it caused her qualms during her regular act of Sunday worship. She tried to brush off her doubts. It was nothing more, she told herself firmly, than an anthropological excursion involving a bit of dress-up. And yet every suggested piece of couture seemed to shock her more than the one before.

“I could never wear that!” her refrain went, yet most every time she knew she wanted to. Wanted the nerve to carry off something that outrageous in public. And she never shied from trying it on―no silky, lacy, clingy excuse for an outfit remained unmodeled. Pandora stood beside her at the full-length mirror each time, admiring how the scanty scraps barely succeeded in covering her svelte, gracefully curved body. Her well-intentioned friend, she was perfectly aware, had more in mind than a voyeuristic stroll amongst Santa Barbara’s wealthy at play. She was being kitted out, she knew, in preparation for a raunchy escapade all her own.

This was never more apparent, the experience never more innately erotic, than the day Pandora took her for a final fitting at Victoria’s Secret. There were three of them in the changing area, Pandora sitting in as Gabrielle hesitantly stripped for the assistant and had her bust-line and hips measured for the designated costume.

“What, that one? Are you kidding?”

Yet the ensemble was so dainty, so exquisitely sexy, that she knew she was going to wear it to the party. It was a thrilling, scary thought. The tape-measure was stretched taut across her naked breasts, squeezing cold on her nipples, and a knowing smile hovered on Pandora’s lips.

“What was her dumb-ass ex thinking?” the dark-haired Fox mused aloud. “Doesn’t she look fabulous?” The pretty young assistant could only agree. Fitting complete, adjustments to the garment began.

There were other appointments, the afternoon at the hairdresser’s being key. “Can’t I wear a wig for the evening?” Gabrielle inquired, but Pandora would not hear of it.

“Properly or not at all, girlfriend,” Gabrielle was told, prior to their joint salon visit. So an ash-blonde rinse it was.

She met the same insistence over her first ever bikini wax. There was an undeniable naughty thrill―Pandora squeezing her hand every time a strip was torn away by the beautician from her delicately virginal pubic zone and laughing with her in the heat of the ensuing rush. Remembering the reason for the treatment made her moist, regardless of the pain and the attendant’s proximity. She wondered what was overcoming her and if the beautician caught a scent of her arousal.

At home Pandora surrounded herself with her craftwork and devised some touches of her own. Together she and Gabrielle upped their gym sessions, each one helping tighten and tone. The end of October loomed. It was all Gabrielle could do to keep her concentration when teaching class.

English literature had always absorbed her, but now her focus was shot. And discussing Milton’s angelic and diabolical imagery from Paradise Lost with her seniors―that had never been quite the same since dream-night. The bizarre nightmare kept burning in the forefront of her mind, due at least partially to Pandora’s costume inspiration. At night her sleep was troubled. And during the day she fixated ever more on the forthcoming party. It felt like a particularly naughty date with destiny and the thought made her shudder.

Pandora drove them down to Santa Barbara the day before the grand event. Stella and her husband had arranged for the girls to stay in a guest bedroom to avoid any rush and let them relax into the festive occasion. Just a party, Gabrielle repeated to herself, but as the car wound its path into Santa Barbara Heights, she could not shake the sense that she was embarking on some great illicit adventure. She gasped at the immense wrought-iron gates outside Hartland Lodge and at the high spiked fencing which seemed to surround the house’s acres. There would be no easy gate-crashing at this party. Pandora having been granted the security code, the gates swung apart and they rolled up the curving gravel drive between immaculately clipped lawns interspersed with a variety of topiary creatures. “She really didmarry money,” Gabrielle said in awe.

“They have a maze out back,” Pandora informed her. “For real.”

The Lodge itself did not disappoint. It was a two-level brownstone manor with a quartet of great white Corinthian columns propping up the porch and elaborate keystone arches spanning each of the massive windows. “Straight out of The Great Gatsby,” Gabrielle marveled. “Maybe that’s what gave them the idea for the decadent parties.”

They were greeted immediately, as they crunched to a halt, by Stella Hartland, an elegant, dark-haired woman in her late thirties. “Delighted,” the hostess said coolly, on Pandora’s introduction. The polite reserve of the welcome made Gabrielle feel something of an interloper.

“It’s okay,” Pandora would reassure her later, “they normally only invite people they know. These events are a well-kept secret. She’ll be fine once she gets to know you.”

Mac Hartland, Gabrielle observed, was much more profuse in his greeting. A handsome and robust forty-something with silvering hair, he seemed delighted by the arrival of his cousin-by-marriage and her attractive friend for the forthcoming frivolities. Ostentatiously he ushered them inside his luxurious abode, then plied them with drinks, as Gabrielle absorbed the Neo-classical design with its intricate friezes and its cherub-laden ceiling murals. An angel, it occurred to her, might grace this place better than the ghouls and witches.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” she trilled excitedly to Pandora that night, while they sipped champagne in their room at their two-girl pyjama party. “I was expecting something―well―tacky. I can’t imagine what tomorrow night’ll be like!”

“I know you can’t,” Pandora said with cheerful wickedness. “Gabby girl, this will be one Halloween you’ll never forget.”

There was something in her tone and in the way she eyed Gabrielle over her champagne flute that alerted the English grad to danger. “Dora, you are telling me everything here, right? You’ve got me spooked already and it’s still October 30th.”

Pandora’s innocence seemed rather too assumed. “Absolutely, Gab, I don’t know what you’re thinking. You’re going to one totally insane party, that’s all. Hang on, gotta take a call.” Gabrielle eyed Pandora’s retreat to the ensuite bathroom and wondered who was on the other end of that vibrating iPhone. She knew her friend too well and wondered what schemes might be afoot.

Suspicion had settled to the back of Gabrielle’s mind by the time she and Pandora were breakfasting with the Hartlands next morning. Their hostess had thawed somewhat in her attitude toward the newcomer, while not entirely shedding her upwardly-mobile hauteur.

After breakfast Pandora provided her with a guided tour of the Lodge’s extensive grounds, including a brief interlude in the outskirts of the maze. Its thick yew-tree hedges towered above them imposingly. Even at noon it succeeded in blotting out much of the daylight. “Damn…This is ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’,” Gabrielle commented, “or something from ‘Harry Potter’.” The hedging seemed to lower down upon her a touch grimly. “Halloween night this place is going to be seriously spooky.” She shivered right to her toes.

Pandora smirked. “Halloween night, there’s going to be all kinds of fun and games going in here. None of it spooky, believe me. You want to keep away from the maze, Gab, if you want to hold onto your halo.”

Gabrielle smiled weakly at her friend’s innuendo. A figurative shadow had fallen across her, to match that cast by the hedge. It was a sensation she couldn’t shake. “Let’s go,” she told her friend hastily. “Time to see the town.”

The whole afternoon was taken up with light lunching and window-shopping along the palm-lined streets of Santa Barbara, while the house’s elaborated party preparations were carried out. At six the pair returned to the house, to find huge jack-o-lanterns already strewn across the porch, ready to be lit. Inside, the hallway and adjacent rooms were strewn with Stella’s tasteful Halloween decorations―further pumpkins and Fall flowers, carefully placed broomsticks and black-gauze webs with jewel-eyed hand-crafted spiders. Thick church candles were set in sturdy holders about the walls. Whatever the party’s reputation, Gabrielle could not fault her hostess on creating ambience. Having soaked it all in, she and Pandora retired to their suite to prepare―for what her friend was referring to as ‘a grand entrance’.

“We start from the bottom up,” Pandora said in a sprightly tone. She slapped her lissome friend jauntily on the ass as she said it. “Hit the shower, girl.”

It was a regimen on which Pandora had insisted. Having soaped and rinsed before surrendering the shower stall to her friend, Gabrielle moisturized every inch of her skin’s surface. She applied a clear lacquer to her nails and sat robed at the armoire, curling her eye-lashes. It provided a curious erotic charge, knowing that her partner in this enterprise was sponging down her saucy body next door, as though they were co-adventurers about to embark on some sexy mission. It’s a fancy-dress party, that’s all, she told herself with ever-waning conviction.

She was still preening her lashes when Pandora burst into the room from the shower, chattering and butt naked, her breasts bouncing freely on her neat, curvy frame. Even now Gabrielle was embarrassed by and envious of how freely the girl could put herself on display. Exactly how would Gabrielle cope in front of a houseful of strangers?

“Go on, Gabby, put the costume on,” Pandora said eagerly, jumping on to the bed and perching her nude self cross-legged. Gabrielle glanced at her meaningfully in the mirror. “I won’t peek,” the dark-haired girl lied, dropping her eyes, but stealing covert glances throughout. She watched in admiration as her friend arose and slid the robe from off her slim shoulders, letting it puddle around her feet. Gabrielle’s smooth, limber body had a rich honey tone to it. Some six inches taller than Pandora, she had the graceful curves of a gymnast and rose-nippled breasts like swollen teardrops. And she doesn’t think the guys are interested? God, if I could sprout a length for a day…

Pandora observed, quietly avid, as Gabrielle padded across to the chair where lay her costume.

The English teacher hesitated, before tentatively picking up the first item. She stepped her feet nervously inside the pantyhose as a bather into ice-cold shallows. Pandora watched as the white fishnets glided up over Gabrielle’s taut calves and thighs, then expanded around the firm ovals of her ass. The remaining pubic strip, dyed cheekily the same ash-blonde as her shoulder-length locks, peeked through the netting. Damn, a thorough job had been done in primping―‘pimping’? ―this girl out.

Now Gabrielle was climbing inside the teddy, the sequined ivory one which followed the plunging line of her hips to where it fastened cunningly, secretly, at her crotch. The teddy with the corseted bra, which thrust her bosom upwards, resulting in an expanse of deliciously soft cleavage.

She slid her feet inside the white-leather pumps Pandora had helped her pick out and donned the sheer white peignoir robe, which flowed nearly the length of her body, emphasizing rather than disguising her contours. God, Pandora thought, eyes feasting discretely on the result, if you’re not speared on some devil’s big dick before the evening’s out, then I’ve failed in my work. Tonight’s the night, girl.

“This does not constitute ‘dressed’,” Gabrielle moaned, staring at herself in the mirror.

“I know. It’s fun, isn’t it? Give me a moment and I’ll finish you.” Pandora bounced jauntily off the bed to slip into her own costume, the one Gabrielle had monikered Little Red Riding Slut. “I want to pick me up a wolf this year.”

The brunette had positively salivated on assembling her outfit. The lacy white bra with its matching panties raised and squeezed, accentuating the fullness of the petite girl’s tits. Atop this went a transparent white blouse and micro-skirt in red, flesh peeping out between the hem of the latter and the tops of her black, lace-up, thigh-high boots; the heels propped her up a few additional inches. The red gabardine cape and hood, tied around her neck with satin ribbon, was the only real concession to tradition. “There. Think I’ll make it into the woods and back intact? Don’t answer that. Here, let me fix you.”

She helped blow-dry and brush Gabrielle’s hair, then used the tongs to tease out loose curls. Mascara was applied―“to make the most of those angelic baby-blues”―along with a touch of pale-pink lipstick. Pandora perfected her own look―hair bobbed around her shoulders, crimson lipstick matching the cape. Then to her friend she added the results of her own late-night labors, wings and a halo. The wings were gauze stretched over wire, adorned with myriad crepe feathers and the whole thing tied at her shoulders with white-satin ribbons, the halo a disc of silver-white silk clipped into her hair so that it stood up behind as in a medieval artwork.

“Perfect.” Pandora surveyed her work, an adorable picture of eroticized innocence. “They won’t be able to get enough of you, girl.” Gabrielle looked terrified. Somehow it increased the effect. “Check us out, Gab,” Pandora said as they stared at their joint, impressively sexy reflection in the mirror. “Naughty and nice. Maybe you can keep Little Red on the path of virtue.”

Gabrielle knew that Pandora was endeavoring to lead her off that particular thoroughfare. She was also aware of her own pangs of erotic excitement. But she resolved, suddenly, not to stray. There was fun to be had, music and dancing and a whole new social mileau through which to wander. She could flirt with it all and then float with her angel wings high above it―not succumbing to the world, the flesh and the… Well anyway, it would take more than a suggestive costume and her friend’s best efforts to lure her away from the practice and beliefs of a lifetime.

“Come on,” Pandora said with a sparkle-eyed smile. “Our public awaits.”

Away from the safety of their room, however, Gabrielle’s anxieties rioted within her. The music from the downstairs ballroom thrummed along with her drumming heartbeat. On nearing the grand mahogany stairway to the lower floor she heard the babble of party-going voices and the inadequacy of what she was wearing made her tremble. Angel? She was about to parade herself at something akin to an up-market bordello. But her progress with Pandora was inexorable. She was gliding down the sweeping stairs into the Manor’s candle-lit entrance hall, crowded as it was with guests.

And what guests they were. An attractive professional crowd, certainly, but transformed into a ghoulishly sexy carnival. The women were felines in curve-clinging cat suits and whiskers, corpse brides with tracts of flesh showing between what patches of material clung miraculously to their bodies and sultry vampires in velvet or latex, luring unsuspecting males with red-painted talons and extravagant cleavage. The men meanwhile had decked themselves as cinematic blood-suckers and serial killers, as well as ghost pirates, ghouls and at least one shambling, Romero-style zombie. A trim red-haired girl appeared to have arrived in nothing more than a few scraps of mummifying white linen, which looked likely to unravel at any moment; her muscular boyfriend wore the elaborate golden collar and skirt of a young Pharaoh. The two were laughing and stroking each other’s exposed areas like they might fuck at the merest prompting on the nearest available surface. It seemed, thought an awestruck Gabrielle, to encapsulate the mood of the whole unfolding party.

She stared at the outrageous, dazzling scene and wondered who else among the negligibly-clad felt as exposed as she did. None, she suspected, either guests or staff. On reaching the bottom of the stairs she and Pandora were immediately plied with glasses of smoking punch by a voluptuous and smiling young witch, whose ample bosom threatened to burst out of her front-fastened corset. About the hall other such comely serving-witches were carrying similar trays of drinks, as were stripped-to-the-waist tight-breeched satyrs with bulging crotches. All seemed perfectly comfortable regarding their state of semi-undress.

“Remind you of your dream?” Pandora inquired playfully, pointing to one of the satyrs.

“Nothing like.” The male serving-staff were certainly eye-candy, but they didn’t approach the raw, scary sexuality of her night-demon. There was enough in this very real setting, however, to unnerve her, not least the pairs of eyes―largely but not exclusively male―which had fixed on her as she descended. She accepted the proffered drink and downed half of it at a shot. The fiercely alcoholic beverage nearly choked her as it hit the back of her throat. When she recovered she saw a druid ogling her like she was next on the altar and knocked back the rest.

Pandora was guiding her through the fantastical mob, all but dragging her into the great ballroom with its thumping dance music and swirl of dry-ice fog. The period grandeur of the room was steeped in fluorescent lighting, throwing both their costumes, but especially Gabrielle’s, into luminous relief. In the central dance area a glowing phantasmagoria of Halloween characters was writhing sensually together around a grotesque Tim Burtonesque tree. Among them Gabrielle spotted their host and hostess for the weekend. Mac was made over impressively as Nosferatu, from Murnau’s classic silent movie, complete with convincing bald wig and curling talons, while Stella played the young, ringletted, nightdress-clad wife the vampire had so terrifyingly menaced.

“They don’t do things by halves, do they?” Pandora grinned, snatching two glasses of champagne from a passing tray and handing one to her friend. Gabrielle continued to stare with trepid wonder at the mass of exhibitionism and flirtation going on around her. She found herself emptying this glass even more quickly than the first.

“There goes one sexy angel,” the ghost of a blood-spattered Spartan warrior commented, as they progressed. Gabrielle quailed at the lasciviousness in his tone. By putting herself on display like this, she could hardly expect less, could she?

“Not the most original come-on you’re likely to have all evening,” her friend assured her. Pandora was looking freely about, absorbing all the attention that was thrown their way. “I imagine it’ll get much better.” There it was again, the brunette’s casually knowing tone. Exactly what did that imply?

“Dora…” But before she could call Red Riding Hood on her meaning, her distracted friend was shoving her champagne flute into Gabrielle’s grasp.

“Hey Gab, give me a moment. I think I’ve spotted my wolfman.”

With those words Pandora was gone, sucked by instinct into the dance-floor throng, leaving Gabrielle abandoned. The ash-blonde angel sipped further champagne for the sheer protection of the glass before her lips.

The fear she had experienced on so many nights out with her friend was upon her again, only magnified among this extravagantly sexy whirl of half-naked humanity. Part of her wanted to embrace the madness, but that familiar panic was taking over. There were no corners in this room to which she could safely escape; even the shadows might contain creatures with wicked designs upon a pretty angel. As for the ultra-violet, it made her shine like a beacon―not to ward off evil, but to damn well attract it. Her hair, she realized, was a dazzling shock in the darkness. Her fishnets were a strikingly defined criss-cross from hip to ankle and as for her teddy, it was a plunging white arrow-head, pointing dramatically to her crotch.

The sudden influx of alcohol was taking startling effect. Gabrielle had turned to avoid the overtures of a psychotic blood-stained clown and now the floor was lurching beneath her. Why hadn’t she hunted out the dining-room buffet before entering here and downing more glassfuls? Everything was moving into a slow spin. The leering faces and hot bodies were merging into an orgy of flesh and she was a part of it, or in danger of becoming so, eyed brazenly each way she looked by men and women alike. They wanted to draw her in, absorb her in their fleshly pursuits, make her one of them.

She was suffocating, she had to get out. But when she turned to look for the entrance, her way was blocked by the green-hued Living Dead from the hallway. He was grinning at her drunkenly―or was that part of his zombie routine?―explaining how it wasn’t her brains he wanted to eat. Of all the prospective seducers, she did not want to be monopolized by this guy. She tried to move past him politely, but he took her arm and attempted to draw her towards the dance area, muttering something about showing her his Thriller moves.

“Please, I really need to take some air.” But he was having none of it, still dragging her insistently to the heart of the room.

Then someone massive was at her shoulder, looming over the undead shambler, so that it backed away. “She’s with me,” a voice said. It positively rumbled with authority.

Before Gabrielle could even look at him, the imposing stranger placed a hand lightly on the small of her back and guided her away. Somehow it required only the merest pressure on her body to direct and move her. Without another word he turned her about and propelled her all the way through the ballroom, out into the hallway. The other guests parted easily to facilitate their progress. She was breathing relief, strangely secure in the gentlemanly presence of her mystery savior. Only when they had negotiated the chattering groups in the lobby and come to rest in the light of bracketed candles on the other side, only when she went to thank him for his act of rescue, did her eyes take him in properly.

The sight made her gasp.

Gabrielle gasped and let out an almost hysterical laugh. Towering above her at some inches over six feet, the breadth of his chest substantially outsizing that of her svelte torso, was a demon. A demon dressed in an immaculately tailored tuxedo, it had to be said, with a scarlet cummerbund wrapped around his tight middle and a matching bowtie. His tar-black hair was slicked away from granite-etched facial features and penetrating blue eyes. And he was red.

Deep red from forehead to neck and possibly beyond. Whatever body paint or food dye he had used, it was damned effective. And how the Hell did those curling, eight-inch horns stay attached to his forehead?

Gabrielle put a hand to her startled mouth before, then grasped for words. “Ehhh―haven’t we met before?” She was trying not to giggle as she said it. For a moment she almost believed they had.

“What, you mean before I was cast from celestial bliss into the fiery depths?” he asked nonchalantly. “Or maybe it was a more combative setting.”

Gabrielle blinked, startled. She could almost hear the choral theme from The Omen swelling up around them. Then it occurred to her. Pandora―the tale-telling minx. This is a set-up! Not only had her best friend arranged this encounter in advance, she’d spilled the details of that oh-so-private dream confession to a complete stranger. That’s what she’d been acting so weird about all those weeks. Had this guy been told everything?

Gabrielle’s face burned at the thought and at the accompanying sense of betrayal. She made to swing heel and walk, but the costume demon's gaze held her. He seemed so calm, so debonair. So completely focused on her. Perhaps she owed him the benefit of the doubt, whoever he was. Pandora, she could deal with later.

“Well seeing as we haven’t reached the End of Days, that particular combat’s still to happen,” she answered reservedly. “And don’t make any presumptions about the result.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said with no hint of irony. He whisked two glasses of punch off a passing tray and had one in her hand before she’d considered accepting. His impressive size was matched with an agility that surprised her. “Go on, have another.”

Another? So he’d been watching her since her arrival had he? She felt toyed with and manipulated. And undeniably flattered. She was having heart palpitations and there was a churning in her lower belly, but the ability to flee his imposing presence had seemingly abandoned her. So she stood her ground and bantered.

“Sounds like you’re tempting me,” she said, the glass hovering shy of her lips. “I’m not Eve you know.”

“That doesn’t stop me imagining you in her costume.”

Gabrielle mastered the twin urges to laugh and to reach up and slap him. “I’m a Seraphim,” she said with assumed dignity. “And I got to watch while you were kicked out the gates of Heaven, so show some respect.” She met his level stare and drank, to emphasize the point.

“Well maybe that’s why I’m here,” he said genially. “Maybe I’m hoping you can help me find a way back into the Almighty’s good graces.”

“Not going to happen, buster,” she said, adopting a light-hearted air at odds with her inner tremors. “You’re as damned as damned can be, that’s what the Book says. More likely you’d try to drag me down―which isn’t going to happen.”

“No?” The candlelight flickered and blazed in his eyes, startling her. “That’s a very stern theology you’re clinging to. If we’re light and darkness, then shouldn’t I vanish at your very appearance? Yet here we are, having a perfectly pleasant conversation.” He was standing casually even as he loomed over her, one arm crossing his stomach, so that the other elbow rested on it as he sipped his drink.

Size apart, there was nothing to intimidate her physically, yet inwardly she quailed. She felt so slight in front of him. “You should try being a little more…Eastern in your thinking,” he was telling her coolly. “We’re not polar opposites, we’re yin and yang. Naturally drawn to each other.” The eyes in his relaxed face burned into her with a soul-searing intensity. “Because we know we fit.”

Gabrielle’s hand shook at the final word, so much that she spilled minute drops of the glass’s dark-purple liquid on to her neck and cleavage. Her diabolical companion reacted instantly.

“I’m so sorry, let me get that.” He leaned in close and his long tongue lashed out of his mouth, snaking up the cleft between her breasts to catch the stray drops, then lightly flicking her collar-bone for the rest. She gasped aloud, like the figure-defining teddy had tightened into a whale-bone corset. “Don’t want to stain that divine costume, now do we?” he said. She swayed slightly where she stood, as though the punch was going to her head again. Then he held out his hand. “You look a bit peaky. Perhaps some fresh air?”

Gabrielle’s head was addled. The witty badinage of moments ago had deserted her. A stranger dressed as Lucifer had just licked her tits, for Heaven’s sake, quite a liberty even for the Prince of Darkness. All she had to do was walk away. So exactly why was she accepting his hand, allowing him to lead her down through the hallway, beyond the staircase, out the back doors of the house? Well, the barely functioning intellectual part of her brain said, your liquefying loins are all the answer you need to that one, girlfriend.

It must have been the mildest Fall Santa Barbara had seen in a decade. The gently sloping lawns behind Hartland Manor, floodlit from high on the walls of the building, were populated by numerous guests. Most were in couples―some talking and laughing animatedly, others chasing amongst the topiary, at least two pairs kissing in heat regardless of all other company.

One of these was a cross-genre pairing of the Joker with a female Freddy Kreuger, his make-up smeared all over her mouth and neck, one hand urgently accentuating the slashes in her red-and-black-striped sweater. The other was a latex spider-girl, offering up her throat recklessly to Sweeney Todd, before going for a bite on his. It all registered in Gabrielle’s mind, only emphasizing what her hellishly handsome suitor surely had in mind.

His steady momentum was carrying her across the lawn, to where she had no idea, and yet he wasn’t dragging her. Every step, she thought, was of her own volition. She was allowing this. Not even thinking it through, simply going with some impulse she had never before allowed to take control. No, no, I mustn’t. Her conscience was flickering feebly, but could not get a hold. Admittedly he was doing no more than taking her for a walk in the beautiful grounds of the Lodge. There was no sense of him on the verge of flinging her down to ravish her on the grass. He even stopped, allowing her to steady herself, to breathe deeply of the scented night air.

“Feeling better?” The concern in his voice was undermined by the memory of his tongue sliding wetly over her cleavage.

“Where are you taking me?” she panted, still dizzy.

“You’re a messenger of God. Who am I to take you anywhere?” The same suave tone. She wanted to tell him to cut it out, enough with the angel/devil bullshit. They could role-play all he liked, it was still no more than a tawdry attempted seduction at a pretentious party and in such a bloody absurd costume. Who was he to take her anywhere? She was going to put an end to this now―return to the house and find Pandora. Tell her that her elaborate ruse had failed…

“Anywhere you’re going, Gabrielle, you go there because you want to.”

She shuddered at the truth of it, or maybe that hypnotic quality in his voice made it her truth. He knew her name from whatever conversations he’d had with Pandora, but she had no idea what to call him. She felt his solid bulk against her, his hands on the small of her back and crook of her arm moving her off again, subtly compelling her across the lawn towards a dark grove of sprawling beech trees. Manipulating her mind more than her body… but that was the drink, right? She had to get a grip. She had to stop this.

The grass was taller and more luscious here, like it had been neglected by the gardener. Gabrielle could feel the dew soaking into her soft leather shoes. She stopped and looked down to see, lifting a foot for inspection, and in an instant, her great tuxedoed devil-man was dropping down to aid her. “Allow me.”

Placing one mighty hand beneath her peignoir and on her tightly-netted hip, he plucked the shoe from her foot. He waited for her to change position, proffer him the other ankle. His palm lightly gripped the as-good-as-naked curve of her ass and the sensation shuddered her to the core.

His scarlet face was inches from her crotch, those cleverly faked horns almost brushing her stomach as he leaned in to remove the second shoe. Then he had risen and placed her footwear in her hands. He stripped off his own shoes and socks and then he was leading her on, drawing her into the grove. She was scared and stumbling, and within the snug-fitting V of her teddy, she felt as lusciously wet as the grass beneath her feet.

Among the moonlight-dappled shade of the trees, the vegetation was a thick verdant tangle, like Eden gone to seed. Through the thump of blood in her ears, Gabrielle had become aware of another urgent, repetitive sound and here, with a shock to the heart, she discovered its source. On the other side of the grove, visible through the gloom, a girl on hands and knees was being rutted by an enthusiastic lover.

Gabrielle continued forward with an unaccountable urge to play voyeur. She kept going till she recognized the young witch-waitress who had served her at the bottom of the stairs. The girl’s corset had popped open so that her breasts tumbled forth; they were currently being mauled by the pirate-king who was boning her so heartily from behind. Then the exuberant seafarer exhibited a desire to be in touch with the land, ripping the corset free of the girl’s back and tearing his own ruffled shirt from his torso, so they could fuck naked in a riot of grass.

Gabrielle recalled her classes on Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve’s tender love-making of the poem’s early sections had been transformed into hungry lust by Satan’s nifty work with an apple, so that they ravished each other selfishly in Book Nine. And here was such a pair―hot bodies slamming together in the despoiled garden, each using the other for the sheer gratification of hard anonymous sex.

The Devil’s grip tightened on her and she had a terrifying, nipple-hardening notion. Damning mankind was not enough for this Infernal Being. Now that he was in the Garden he wanted to take down a righteous angel too―seduce her, ruin her and whisk her off to Hell with him for perpetual ravishment.

Adam looked up and saw her staring. On realizing he had an audience he grinned, grabbed a firm hold of his dark-haired busty Eve by the shoulder and fucked her even harder. His loins impacted on the girl’s ass with an impressive smack at every stroke, so that her voice cried out rhythmically and her tits bounced.

Gabrielle was transfixed by the sight and he was letting her watch, letting that sense of unhinged desire bubble up inside her from the wellspring she had denied was even there, until it filled her being. She wanted this too, what the beautiful hot couple had―liberation from all moral and social restraints. Sex in all its pure, filthy deliciousness. And if love came with it some other day, that would be a bonus.

Right now, as the horned, suited stranger turned her slender body about to face him, as he drew the knuckles of one hand softly across her cheek, down her throat and over the soft divide of her bodice-encased breasts, she’d settle for sex. Her shoes slipped from her hand and she barely noticed.

“So pure,” the painted demon said, his beautifully sculpted face staring down into hers. “So… ripe.”

“I’m not a virgin, if that’s what you think,” she told him. Even in her enhancement, she was irritated by his devil-act overkill.

“You’ll feel like you were when I’m done with you,” he said, his voice just loud enough above the nearby coupling to be heard. Her breath caught in her throat and she felt she might swoon like an eighteenth-century literary heroine. He leaned down, raising her chin with a single finger, and touched his lips to hers. “Now why don’t you find out what you want to know?” he asked, having broken marginally away.

“And what do I want to know?” she inquired hoarsely.

“Whether the rest of me is the same color.”

Gabrielle burst into laughter―at his playfully wicked words, at the preposterousness of her situation, at bloody Pandora for landing her in all this. Then she stopped as he raised a hand to his throat and swiftly beat him to the move, grabbing his bowtie and ripping it undone. Tentatively, as though led by a will other than her own, she undid the jacket and, reaching way up, slid it away from his massively broad shoulders. She went to catch it as it slipped, but he shrugged it free and let it fall to the grass.

She began to unbutton his shirt, working all the way down without parting the pleated white, before plucking uncertainly at his cummerbund. He aided her, reaching behind to untie it, so that it pulled away in her hands. Then, heart racing, she tugged the shirttails free of his trousers, struggling mightily to ignore the colossal protrusion from within the dark fabric.

In hesitant awe she parted the shirt, uncovering the thick, arched trapezius muscles of his shoulders, the massive bulging expanse of his pectorals, the ribbed hardness of his stomach―all smooth as basalt, all, she knew even in the gloom, the same dark shade of red as his face. She let out an ecstatic moan and reached out with her fingertips, running them lightly over the hard, masculine surface.

Some short distance away, outpourings of anguished female bliss were being met with ecstatic male profanities, as Adam presumably spurted deep inside his Eve. Wet to her center, with a daring she had never known in herself before, Gabrielle reached out her tongue and let it flicker on each of the nipples before her. She wondered vaguely if food coloring would come away as she licked. She wondered too what happened when an angel teased the Devil.

Her answer to the latter question arrived when he gripped her by the waist, lifted her off her feet like she was a doll and carried her in reverse, planting her hard against the bifurcated limbs of a beech tree. She could feel her angel wings crushing behind her, beautiful peignoir robe squelching against the saturated moss on the trunk. But all thought of that was obliterated as her demon-lover pressed into her, pinning her with one hand against the tree and seizing her head with the other, so that he could kiss her hard. She could almost smell sulphur along with his aftershave, as his hard mouth took possession of her lips and his serpentine tongue writhed to the back of her throat.

Gabrielle felt crushed along with her wings and half-suffocated. It felt like this great bulk of manliness was sucking the life from her. Her fingers felt the smooth skin of his arms, stretched taut over great flexed biceps that could have snapped her like a dry twig. His mighty chest was bearing down against her imprisoned tits. And his pelvis was grinding into hers so she could feel his - his - ohhh fuck, this man was truly a monster.

When his mouth finally relinquished hers, she could only stare into his stone-carved features and pant for breath. “I think - I think you’ve ruined my costume,” she managed eventually.

“I’ll get you another,” he said simply, and kissed her again, softer this time, but no less probing. His mouth left hers and progressed to her throat and neck, caressing and then biting just enough, she was sure, to leave a light indentation. Her head rolled back, eyes flickering, mind and body given up to him and whatever the hell he might do.

She glimpsed it over his shoulder in the half-light and even in her state of advanced arousal, the sight was sufficiently arresting to shock her awake. Whether Adam and Eve were still there she did not know, but on the outskirts of the beech grove, she spied a carnally entwined trio. Stella Hartland, Gabrielle’s hostess for the weekend, appeared to have commandeered the young couple from Ancient Egypt.

Gone now were all that woman’s society pretensions. She had pressed the Pharaoh up against a tree trunk and was on her knees before him, her dress lying down round her waist so that her breasts stood out proudly while she vigorously sucked his cock. His neck was arched back against the tree, face a picture of aching delight, his pleasure enhanced by the fact that Stella had hitched her silk panties around the base of his prick and was lovingly massaging his balls with them as she sucked.

Her other hand was gripping the hot mummified redhead by the hair. The girl was prone on the ground beneath her, most of the bandaging stripped free of her body, her face held tight to Stella’s grinding cunt. The party was well enough established, it seemed, for guests to cut through formalities quickly.

The sight of this erotic tangle was too much for Gabrielle. Suddenly she felt just one more body in an outrageous costumed orgy and she moaned in protest, trying to ease back the gently gnawing maw of her demonic suitor. “No - No, please - not here…”

He withdrew his mouth and looked at her with an unimpeachably earnest expression. “Somewhere private?”

If Gabrielle had been looking for a get-out clause, she let the moment slip. She simply nodded in response.

He guided her across the lawns, past a fountain full of frolicking near-nude vampires and a statue against which a cute fairy was offering up her ass to a pumpkin-headed scarecrow sporting a large erection. She knew where Lucifer was leading her before they got there and her heart jolted at the realization. It was like her chill that morning had been a premonition. The thick, hedged walls of the maze rose high above her once more, though not far above her paramour’s imposing curled horns. They entered and the walls of yew-tree plunged her into dark shadow.

He took her far into the network of passageways, never pausing to consider his direction, somehow never mistaking a turn―until they were enclosed on all sides by yew save for one exit. The center of the maze―with its stillness and its scent of damp grass. They stood facing each other, he in semi-darkness, she illumined by beams of moonlight. Her wings dangled brokenly from her back and her robe was stained and sodden from the tree bark. Her hair was disheveled and she realized that she had left her shoes over by the grove. There was no chill in the air and she fancied it might have been dispelled by the furnace of this man’s lust.

“My angel.” He walked out into the light, shrugging off his dress shirt, so that he was clad only in his bespoke pants. They bulged menacingly at the buttoned flies and Gabrielle wondered, staring helplessly at the fabric that strained until it almost creaked, if she were back in her nightmare. He reached to the hem, then simply unclipped and unbuttoned.

The Devil, it transpired, went Commando. It sprung forth, huge and hard―a colossal red-painted fuck-sword, terrifying and perfect. Much too large, Gabrielle was sure, for the modest dimensions of her pussy. From his pants, he stepped calmly free. Then he advanced on her slowly, with his height so imposing and his musculature so superbly developed and so beautifully defined and with that great weapon swaying before him, glistening at its extremity.

He stopped short of her, their only point of contact the tip of his extensive cock against her satin-clad stomach. Gabrielle waited for his next move and, when it did not happen, realized that something was expected of her. Breaking out of her petrifaction she reached forward to his loins with both hands and touched him, her heart thumping at how his sex twitched and pulsed in response.

She drew her fingertips lightly from the base of his thick column, teasing her way up all those sturdy inches, staring into his stony face the whole time. Inside she felt a giddy tremor at her own recklessness, a further liquefying of her pussy. Shouldn’t she beware what would happen if she cock-teased the Devil? What the hell kind of crazy game was she playing?

“Ohhh my.” Her moan was fearful as she finally arrived at the swollen dome of his massive endowment. “Oh - my God…”

“I am your God,” he said quietly. “Now get down on your knees and worship me.”

Gabrielle’s whole body gave a start. Her dream rushed back vividly and she let go that iron cock. The words had shocked her, angered her with their arrogance, their self-important blasphemy. Who the hell did he think he was? What right had Pandora had to tell him all Gabrielle’s intimate thoughts, so he could use them against her?

“I can’t do this,” she snapped, her bubble of illusion burst. “I don’t do this.” She stared at him, one great hulking tower of arrogance, and realized she fully expected him to throw her down anyway and rape her on the ground. “Please,” she said, imposing what dignity she could on her shaking voice and trembling body. “I’m sorry, but I want to go.”

There was a pause as long as eternity. There they stood, like characters in an ancient ecclesiastical frieze. “Then go,” he said calmly. “If that’s what you want.”

His response took her aback. She could not believe he would simply let her leave. “Yes,” she rallied. “It is.” The cock before her had not even wilted. It might have been made of stone. Its owner looked like a figure in an obscene Medieval woodcut. She forced out a final, “Goodbye.”

Gabrielle hardly knew what she was doing, as she turned about and left the heart of the maze. She did not know whether it was strength or stupidity, leaving behind her scary nameless stranger, her great edifice of masculinity and his―well―great edifice of masculinity. But to say what he did, to disrespect her as he had, to fly in the face of everything she believed, everything that defined her as a… a…

She walked rapidly, foolish in her ruined angelic outfit, taking any turn she came to without thinking, choking back tears. She was a church-goer, a believer, she taught Sunday School, for Heaven’s sake. She’d worked the sex thing out her own way―it was fine in a committed relationship, married or otherwise. Just as long as it was part of something greater. Not quite the orthodox line, but it was the idea to which she clung. What she didn’t do was go to hedonistic parties and have cheap sex with strangers. With stupid, arrogant strangers. Stupid, arrogant strangers with great slavering tongues and huge hard-ons and… Shit, he was following her…Was he? Following her?

She looked back over her shoulder, convinced she could hear a pursuer’s heavy feet thumping on the grassy floor. Suddenly terrified, she broke into a barefoot run. She ducked left, right, right again, the fact finally dawning that she had no idea how to escape from the maze. She twisted around another turn, one shattered wing raking against the hedge, her ridiculous halo flapping as she ran. God, he was after her, she could almost hear the bullish snorting.

How much had she drunk earlier on? Damn, maybe he’d have sprouted wings by now to carry him all the quicker. Or could he simply manifest in front of her once he’d got bored with his toying? However she tried, she could not shake those diabolical images from her head.

She raced around another corner and screamed on finding her way blocked. But it was merely two other revelers―a blood-spattered bride and one of the waiters, both semi-stripped, laughing and spouting mouthfuls of champagne over each other’s face. She turned back, tried another route. Any route. Any path that might lead her out of that dreadful labyrinth. Maybe there was someone who could help her, who knew the maze as well as he had.

Possibly not the crazed, horror-harlequin who stumbled past her drunkenly when she took another turn, dragging an equally inebriated Snow White behind him. Gabrielle yelped and kept going, the sky reeling above her, the maze starting to lurch like a hurdy-gurdy, as she vainly sought an exit. She spun around a bend and found her path barred once more, this time by a full-on ground-level coupling.

Gabrielle stifled a squeal.

Pandora was straddling Mac Hartland, frantically riding his cock. Apparently she had not felt limited by her wolf-fetish. All her Little Red garments were torn off and strewn about her, save the thigh-highs and her pulled-aside panties. Her adulterous partner was seated in the grass, half-stripped of his vampiric vestments, hands talon-free, so he could tightly grip his lover’s taut bum cheeks.

He eyed the nubile form with close-up relish, those globed tits bouncing before him in all their unconfined glory. With one arm hooked around his neck, Pandora thrashed on him wildly, her pussy milking his length for all the pleasure it could give. Her head was thrown back, bobbed hair draping around her bare shoulders, and her pretty mouth uttered a stream of moans interspersed with fevered fuck-talk.

“Oh God, Mac, we so shouldn’t be doing this… I’ve wanted your cock for so long. Ohhh, shit, fuck, you feel so good, you feel so fucking good… Does Stella still do you like this?” She braced herself on him and slammed down, repeatedly and hard, determined to take him as deep as she possibly could.

Gabrielle watched in dismay. Had the world gone crazy? She tried to turn away, but was riveted by the sight of her best friend in the world fornicating wildly with the girl’s cousin’s husband. The fact that said cousin was in the middle of a demented three-way across the lawn hardly made it right. Then in the middle of her frenzied humping, Pandora noticed Gabrielle transfixed stare. Her pelvis slowed on Mac’s deep-thrust erection and she registered first embarrassment, then concern at her friend’s disarrayed state.

“Gabby?” she panted, still fucking proactively it had to be said. “Gabby, are you okay?”

Mac looked back over his shoulder. The Nosferatu bridgework had been removed from his mouth, presumably to make for a sexier encounter. “Gabrielle,” he gasped hoarsely, apparently still desirous to play the polite host. “Hi. You want to watch? Or maybe join us? Whichever you prefer.”

Gabrielle stared in a horror at least part of which was due to her increased wetness. Everyone… Everyone fucking apart from her. Goddamn you, Pandora, for bringing me here! She turned and fled, leaving Little Red riding hard.

She ran hectically down one yew corridor to another, crashing into hedges as she took corners, stumbling and righting herself and keeping going. The peignoir snagged and she abandoned it to the clutching branch. Hair flailing about her, clad in only her lingerie, she ran and searched and finally flung herself through a familiar privet gateway… to find herself back at the dead center of the maze.

She stopped as abruptly as if she had run into an invisible barrier, her heart thumping. Forlorn, she gazed about at the empty yew-walled courtyard, hands rested on her hips, lungs sucking in whoops of air. So much for her quick escape. All that running, and now to start over with no idea of the route, no idea where her blasphemous seducer was. She took a further moment to recover, then turned to leave.

He was filling the doorway, blocking her escape, everything about him as proud and erect as she remembered. She was frozen helpless before him, heart thumping and pussy spasming all over again, exhaustion dispelled by a fresh rush of adrenalin.

“I knew you’d come back.”

“I - I got lost…” Her voice was a childish whimper.

His was low and held a conviction that was total. “You’re here, Gabrielle, because you choose to be.”

“It’s… I… I couldn’t find…”

“Then tell me, do you want to depart again?” He stood aside, leaving the way clear for her. Even his cock was not huge enough to bar it. She stared at the path ahead and then at him in all his quiet arrogance. In his monumental, priapic maleness. The word was a mere whisper in her throat, but she knew that he heard it.

“No.”

She stood before him simply, hands hanging limply by her sides. Once more he strode towards her, only this time he passed in a half-circle, palming her stomach as he progressed to her rear. His hand slid down to her barely covered mound and the other arm encircled her torso, so that it rested across her breasts.

His great cock brushed against her ass-cleft and his breath was hot on her neck. Was it her imagination, or could she hear a low bullish snort underlying that breath? Her head drooped back and she gave herself up to him, physically and spiritually, as she now knew she had wanted to with her dream-demon.

His touch upon her was tender―exquisite because it spoke of leashed-in power, terrifying because she knew beyond all doubt that the power would be unleashed. The hand on her soft mound moved down and under, to where her thighs were slick with her honey, and undid the secret clasp below her pussy-hole. He let the teddy spring apart and strummed the netting of her pantyhose, fingertips sliding over the silky cunt-lips imprisoned beneath. Then one thick finger slipped through and entered her, making her knees give way, her whole body crumple. He held her drooping form and probed his finger deeper into her oozing channel, so that she gave way completely.

“Lie down,” he told her, but it was more a matter of him laying her there in the grass. Then he was down with her, expansive chest close above, darkly handsome face suffused with infernal intent. One hand slid beneath her back and unsnapped the corseted section of her teddy. The other delved slowly down her cleavage and ripped the garment down her body, exposing the soft pillows of her hard-nippled breasts.

She gasped at the sudden uncovering, then cried aloud as his face descended and he sucked one nipple into his mouth. Sucked and licked and bit, teeth tugging briefly though hard on her teat, stretching it and making her cry in shocked anguish. When he let go and transferred his mouth to her other breast, she held her breath in trepidation, knowing he would repeat the action. Knowing all the time he suckled her, all the time his tongue-tip circled and flickered over her areola, that those teeth would claim her. And when they did, when they bit sharply and plucked and teased her roughly, she yelled out in terrified ecstasy.

He kissed her lips, then each sore nipple, washing with rotating curls of his long tongue, and her body rose to him from the soft ground. Then he slid his torso down her body and parted her already loosened thighs. She could feel the threads of her hose stretched tightly across her engorged lips. His breath warmed the cunt she knew was glistening-wet for him, then suddenly his tongue squirmed inside her, as far as it could through the hose. Frustrated by the garment, he grabbed it in his teeth and began to chew and rip his way through it. She cried out again in fearful excitement as threads snapped, as he tore the netted crotch asunder, leaving wide access to her dripping hole.

His tongue thrust deep and he feasted on her. Gabrielle’s body arched in response to the thick fleshy muscle that writhed within her, scooping up and drinking her dew. Her hands clutched desperately at clumps of grass, tearing them from the ground, as his tongue stretched to its limit, fucking deeper than she’d have believed possible, circling around her cunt’s hyper-sensitized walls as it tunneled. Then it slithered out, lapping all around her swollen gateway and ending on her clit, where it flickered heatedly. He filled his hands with her ass cheeks and clutched her hard. Her pelvis humped his face involuntarily, as he ate her.

Now he was kissing her hot engorged button, nibbling, biting―ohhhh, sweet fuck―and now his lips were on hers again. Satan was making out with her pussy (the thought almost made her laugh), surging into her with another crazy-delicious tongue-kiss.

Gabrielle was entering delirium, as her near-cannibalistic lover savored all her most intimate parts. She could smell her own fragrance mingling with those of the grass and the night air, could feel herself blossoming into orgasm. Before she could fully flower, however, he rose up from the soaked junction of her legs, all but growling in his lust.

Drawing his body towards her, he simultaneously drew his great palms all the way from her buttocks over her thighs to below her knee joints. Then in a fluid, rising movement he splayed her legs high over her head like scissors, raising her pelvis right off the ground. She emitted a shrill “Oh God!!!” and it occurred to her, bizarrely, So this is what all that pilates has been for! She was split open before him, all the beauty of her wet garden on display for his devilish delight.

Then she raised her head and saw it once again, rearing up against his stomach as he knelt―that gargantuan cunt-slayer. In her semi-delusional state, it seemed as big as the one from her dream. And it was gliding inexorably towards her vulnerable, stretched hole.

What exactly had God been thinking, chucking this guy from Heaven and letting him roam the Cosmos with an attachment that huge? She was utterly aroused, utterly terrified. Oh, sweet Jesus, he’s going to run me through!

Prayers availed her nothing now. Gabrielle had already made her choice. Hooking one fishnetted foot around his neck, he prized his great masculinity down from his stomach and fitted the head inside her. She moaned, nearly cried, at the broad, stretching intrusion and its promise.

“Look at me,” his bass voice rumbled, and when she did, she saw him grin a diabolical grin. Then gripping high and tight on her thighs, with one hellish thrust he speared her.

Gabrielle Deangelo screamed to the heavens, as she was crammed with iron Devil-cock. She came instantly, explosively, gushing like a river all over the impaling monster. Her body blazed with a near-consuming fire as her possessor ploughed her cunt with demonic force. At twenty-eight, seven years on from the loss of her virginity, she had never come close to an experience like this. It was doubtful even Pandora had.

The sense of being pounded, stretched out and filled to capacity. The undiluted, unrestrained lust that fuelled that pounding and stretching and filling. The combustible, all-consuming nature of her orgasm. She was sure the entire maze would ignite from the heat that seared her fucked body, her fucked soul.

Even when the shattering climax left her, his cock did not. Her upper half was sprawled on the grass, the lower still hauled upwards to meet his searching thrusts. Her screams had subsided into a series of long, sub-human moans, punctuated by each hammering impact inside her. Then he let go his hold on her legs, allowing her feet to find the grassy carpet, and climbed down onto her, still pumping like a stud bull in its prime.

Her teddy he wrenched right down to her waist, so that his barrel chest could bear down onto her naked stomach and tits. It threatened to crush her. Then his mighty arms enfolded her like a vice and she was trapped, as in a great iron machine, the one moving part of which continued to piston rapidly in and out of her pussy in a tight well-greased motion. It gradually slowed, as with a long releasing of the power, till he was moving softly on her and her moans ebbed to a whisper.

“Look at meeeeee.” His words were quiet and soft and they drew from her complete obedience. She opened her eyes and saw his face inches from hers, torso perfectly still, loins doing all the work required. He was smiling―a wicked, mocking smile that expressed all his godless delight in screwing her to her core, and that she had consented to him doing it. “You’re mine, Gabby,” he said. “You cunt is mine and you are mine.”

His thrusting grew in momentum, cock retreating further on each backstroke and surging in harder, eyes locked on hers, mouth hovering as if to suck up her renewed moans. “Your cunt is mine and you are mine.” He drove into her, fierce and unrelenting, brutalizing her with gleeful relish, eyes blazing with fire from the nethermost depths of Hell. “Your cunt is mine and you are mine.”

He withdrew from her in a slick, sucking motion and rose mercurially to his feet. She was hauled with him her by her ash-blonde hair into a kneeling position before his rigid, wetly-shining cock.

“Now worship.”

This time she did, with the fervency of a true believer. She worked him over like she had never done to a man before, did things she had only read about or imagined, tasting herself on him all the time. She lavished her tongue from the thick base, all the way up the endless inches of his strident column, like she was giving it another coating of paint.

She curled her attentions around the head, teasing under the rim of that bulged crown, then skating to the gleaming eye and working in her tongue’s tip, before pursing her lips and sucking up the thick, salty fluid it leaked, precursor to his main inundation. She slithered back down his thick-veined undershaft, slurped his great balls one after the other into her mouth and sucked on them with all the deliciousness she could muster.

Now she flickered her tongue all over his end, staring up at him in thrall. Look at me. Look how good I am. Look how I know my duty. She shaped her breasts around him, let saliva spill from her tongue all down his length and massaged him with the firm pliancy of her bosom, her spit bubbling all around the shaft. Then she tugged that massive lever down and wrapped her mouth wide around the head.

He did not touch her―she knew he was letting her do it, letting her prove herself. She forced herself onto him, filled up her mouth and throat with him till she gagged, then came off him, gulping down the urge to wretch. Ashamed, she gazed up to his stony face, eyes pleading that he be not displeased with her.

Gently he stroked her face. Then applying a finger to her chin, he raised her off her knees. She rose as if by compelled by some unseen force to stand before him, awaiting his next implicit command. He seized her slim waist, hands almost encircling her, and with what seemed like supernatural ease lifted her off the ground. He was lowering his hips, providing a seat for her, from which there would be no easy rising.

Her eyes not flicking from his face even for an instant, she wrapped her legs compliantly around his muscled ass, the tip of his vertical shaft teasing her lips. She could picture him stretching up beneath her, as though the spikes of his trident had been reforged into one mighty prong. Slowly, tenderly, he lowered her onto him, her lubricated channel molding itself around him to create a tighter fit than she had thought possible.

Gabrielle cooed in pained ecstasy. She linked her arms around his broad neck and clutched with her ankles, as she descended slowly to his base and took her fill. Then as he gripped her thighs to support her, she tautened every muscle and began to move herself on him, sliding up and down his galvanized pole. She felt liberated and wildly sexy in that moment, yet her euphoria was fused with a terrible shame. She was giving away something essential within her, as she fucked herself obediently on him. This was beyond any mere sex-act. It was as if she had clambered on to some enormous, cast-iron monument to male lust, so she could carry out a symbolic act of self-impalement.

She clung on desperately, gazed into his coldly savage face, yearning for signs of his satisfaction as she slithered all over that Satan cock like the Devil-bitch she was. She was seeking his approval, desperate to draw out the full force of his desire and with it his boiling seed. A distant-seeming voice was calling her―trying to draw her to reason, to goodness, to the light. “Gabby? Gabby, where are you? Come back! Are you okay?” But it was too late for all that.

See me, see what a good servant-whore I am. See what I’ve become for you. Better to rut in Hell than mope in Heaven, right? A sick distortion of all she had ever been taught or had ever believed, but she could not resist the notion and its dark allure. Take me there, my demon-lover. Take me there and fuck me forever.

His eyes blazed like he had read her thoughts. Then his stony features cracked into a grimace, one which betrayed the full extent of his craving. He plucked her from his long cock in one easy move and dumped her flailing on to the ground. In an instant he was down with her, putting her on her hands and knees and mounting her from behind, ramming her full and fucking her in a rage of infernal lust that propelled her towards orgasm once more.

He dragged her up with, fingers clutching to the roots of her hair, and grappled her into his possession. One hand was on her throat, the other on her waist, as his staggering assault continued. It was in that moment that Pandora arrived panting at the entrance to the hedged enclosure. Gabrielle stared through a fucked haze, vaguely aware of the hastily reassembled Little Red costume and the expression of fraught concern on her companion’s face.

Drawn by Gabrielle’s screams, Pandora had clearly been scared that her friend was being brutalized against her will. But Gabrielle fixed her with a stare that conveyed her pleasure at being taken so hard. Then she reached down to frig herself all the way to her final damnation. She did not care that Pandora was seeing her like this, in truth, it excited her to be on such wanton display. You thought you knew me, Dora? Did you? Well, take a good look, because this is who I truly am.

For a moment Pandora stared in rank astonishment, then she subsided against the hedge, face flushed, plucking up her skirt. Clearly loving the show, she plunged a hand into her panties and started rubbing one out on her own clit.

Gabrielle came, tits thrust out and body jolting, as He slammed her halfway to oblivion, as her closest friend in the world watched it all and masturbated herself into an accompanying frenzy. Her devilish defiler let her fall forward and she collapsed to the grass, sobbing her anguished bliss.

Then her lover was ratcheting up his pace to a hard-smacking crescendo, he was pulling out of her against her cunt’s sucking resistance, he was dragging her to him and thrusting his pulsing, sparking weapon into her surprised mouth. Her lips locked automatically, welcomingly around him, sealing off all leakage as with a raging howl he unleashed a long, fiery torrent down her throat. ‘The cistern of my lust’ - Gabrielle recalled the phrase from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. His cistern was brim-full and its contents spewed forth, emptying as a deluge into her belly. She drank deep from him, then fell away with drooling lips, sated with satanic spunk.

Her senses seemed to cloud utterly, until she drowned in darkness.

~~~~

There were flashes of consciousness… of clothes being rehooked and adjusted… of being carried, clinging to a huge bulk as the stars wheeled overhead… leaning on someone smaller this time, tottering over grass and stone…

Gabrielle found herself sitting on the rear steps on Hartland Manor in the wreckage of her costume, the drunken detritus of the party floating around her. Pandora was by her side, both of them staring vacantly into space. It was like she had emerged from some hallucinogenic trip and might have passed it off as such had it not been for the throb in her cunt and her body’s incidental bruising.

“What a crazy night, Gab. What a crazy fucking night.” Pandora sounded almost as shell-shocked as Gabrielle felt. “What a crazy night’s fucking.” The brunette giggled nervously. She was a mess of run-and-dried mascara. “Of all the people I could have… Oh - dear Christ, what was I thinking?” They sat in silence until Pandora gave voice to the other question hanging in the air. “And who the hell did you get with?”

Gabrielle raised a heavy, aching head and stared at her friend in weary amazement. “Come on, Dora, drop it. Tell me who he was. You were the matchmaker, we both know that.”

Pandora looked back at her, seemingly rumbled. “Well okay, I did have a set-up in mind, Gabby, I kind of figured you suspected. But it didn’t quite come off.” Gabrielle looked at her inquiringly. Pandora shared, with a touch of guilt. “I called up a guy who I thought you might hit it off with. Lucius, you’ve heard me talk about him? He seemed keen, he was even going to dress as a devil to match your angel… but he called me last night and said he couldn’t make it. Symptoms of appendicitis, what are the chances? I was disappointed, but I still figured you’d get lucky in that costume.” Gabrielle searched Pandora’s face and found complete earnestness.

“That wasn’t him, Gab,” her friend insisted. “I’ve no idea who you were with, although you seemed to be…” ―she seemed uncharacteristically flustered at the memory― “…getting along just fine. Fucking amazing costume. Fucking amazing guy―please tell me you got his number. God, Gabby, you’ve no idea how hot you two looked. I mean insanely hot. I couldn’t help myself… well, y’know.”

Gabrielle’s muddled brain had difficulty processing this information. So who exactly had her role-play partner been? The one with whom she had… played so hard. Wait, how had he known about the dream, if Pandora hadn’t been involved? Had she misinterpreted his words? And had he overheard her name? Dora, are you fucking with me? Somehow she didn’t dare ask the question aloud. It would have chilled her to hear her friend’s denial.

“I don’t know who he was. Some guy.” Some horny devil who’d fucked her like she’d never believed would happen in this life. The sort of fuck for which a girl might sell her soul. “Dora,” she said, massaging her throbbing temples, “the sooner you get us out of here the better.”

Thankfully her friend didn’t disagree. One short sleep later, they crept out of the still sleeping Hartland Manor in Pandora’s car and departed with no fuss for San Francisco and home. Of red-skinned mysterious seducers, there was no further sign.

Gabrielle asked no troubling questions on the journey and dismissed all those asked by Pandora. Neither did she call her friend two days later, when she received the package at her apartment. The one containing an angel costume all but identical to that destroyed at the party―wings included, missing only the halo. The one with the anonymous card written in ornate black script.

To my precious angel, for whom I will one day return. You know my name.

“Dora, Dora, Dora…” Gabrielle shook her head in bafflement at her friend’s eccentric behavior. “Enough with the games. I’m done playing them. Halloween night was… an exception.” An exquisite exception which she could not chase from her mind, day or night, however hard she tried.

It occurred to her that she had not been to church once since the night of the party…

~~~~

Epilogue

The plain was silent this time, all noise of battle extinguished across its vast surface. The last of the vanquished army had been divorced from the frail rattles of their breath. She alone remained. Darkness had fallen, yet a bloody moon was casting its sullied light upon her. Upon her and the monstrous giant, who without moving, without speaking a word, demanded her allegiance.

She stood before him, once more utterly naked. Her wings remained folded behind. She made no attempt to provide herself with cover. He towered over her, his bestial countenance terrible in its presumption, his body obscene in its over-developed might, his loin-sword prodigious and menacing.

She looked on his face and this time she knew him. He had let her live. Out of everyone he had chosen her.

Slowly she turned her about and knelt. It was the most natural thing in the world to do. Her wings parted to reveal her back, haunches and legs. She bent low, arching her spine, thrusting her hindquarters into the air. Deliberately she reached back with her hands and parted her buttocks, stretching them wide to display all she had. At the sound of his snorting breath and scraping hoof, her consciousness swam slightly, but she remained firm. She raised her head, eyes closed, bathing in his mighty presence.

“Your Majesty,” she said quietly, and waited.

 The End…?

(c) JakeMalden 2021. All rights reserved.