“Karen?” Logan gathered her gently into his arms.”Karen, can you hear me?”
Her dark eyes fluttered open. “I don’t feel right,” she whispered. “Hurts.”
“You’re going to be fine.” He pressed a wad of bandage against the bullet wound in her belly. There was, of course, no blood to soak up. Mist continued to seep out around the edges. Did first aid even work on damned souls? He had no clue.
“You can’t die, my girl. You know why?”
“Why?” she offered a faint smile.
“Because you are already dead, silly.” Logan forced a smile onto his lips. “Nowhere to go now but up. So, you just tell me what you need to start getting better, ok?”
“Cold,” Karen mumbled. Her eyes drifted shut.
“Stay awake, Karen!” Logan barked at her. “Stay with me!”
Her eyes opened, slower than the last time. Logan could see the color and vitality draining out of her complexion, like a modern television show slowly bleeding to black and white. Karen smiled up at man and Succubus.
“I love you both.”
“No.” Logan watched, helpless, as the last of the color drained away. Karen’s shape wavered. Mist poured from her mouth and, quite suddenly, she was gone. Logan was holding only empty clothes in his arms. “No!”
“Her punishment, and her damnation, are at an end. Take some comfort in that.”
Logan turned to stare at the Hellhound that had, somehow, spoken in his head. Beauty was facing off with the beast, claws out and snarling in anticipation of a bloody fight. “What the fuck are you?”
“There is no need to speak out loud.” The echo in his skull said as the beast sat and began to scratch behind one ear with a hindfoot. "In fact, it is best that you say nothing aloud about our ability to communicate at all. Especially in front of the Succubus. For your safety and mine."
“Can you understand me?” Logan thought at the Hellhound.
“Yes, but your thought projection is weak. It will improve with practice.”
“Good,” Logan replied with his thoughts. "Then piss off so I can mourn the loss of my friend.”
“Of course.” The beast rose and ambled away toward the cavern entrance to the outside world. “I will be outside whenever you wish to speak further.”
Beauty watched the beast turn and leave. She looked at her lover with confusion in her golden eyes. “Logan… weird. Fucking weird.”
He offered only a weary nod in response. It could wait. It could all wait. Nothing mattered to him now except the empty clothes laying crumpled on the cavern floor. Beauty knelt beside him and plucked at the shirt. “Karen gone?”
He nodded. “Yes. Karen is… She is gone.” He raised the shirt to his face but the shirt was too new to even carry her scent on it. That too was forever gone. A small piece of metal fell out of the shirt to the floor.
“How?”” the Succubus asked. “Beauty not… I do not understand.”
Silently, Logan picked up the bullet that had taken Karen from them and showed it to her. This is on me. I failed her. Failed to keep her safe.
The adrenalin began to wear off, leaving him shaky and weak. Every cut and wound began to pulse and scream across his battered body. Blood still spattered on the ground from his many wounds. He did not remember falling.
*****
Logan woke to pain from countless wounds. His eyes were slow to focus as he opened them to look down at Beauty’s wealth of white hair and feel the soft, warm touch of her tongue licking one of his wounds. He was naked except for yards of bandage wrapped around his many wounds.
His first thought was Beauty must be hungry again but it was clear that this wasn’t about feeding. There was nothing about her behavior that indicated such a need. In truth, Logan had never seen her behave this way before. He looked around to ask Karen for an explanation.
Oh my God… Karen. Memory returned like a punch to the balls. Her loss was a fresh wound no bandage could mend. One that would be a long time healing, if ever it did. Grief lay heavy on his chest, weighing against his every breath.
“She is giving back some of the Essence she receives from feeding on you,” the Hell Hound voice echoed in his head. “To speed your healing.”
“Get out of my head,” Logan snarled in his mind. “Now is not the time.”
“Actually while your demon lover is distracted is the perfect time for you and I to talk.”
“Beauty is not the enemy here. If anyone is, it’s you.”
“I never claimed that she was the enemy, but allow me to offer a word of warning. Long ago, humans could not accept responsibility for the evil they did to each other. It must be, they decided, the fault of outside forces. Thus, demons came to exist to represent the many evils humans were, and continue to be, tempted and driven to commit to each other, to the planet, and even to yourselves.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
The Hound paused to let that sink in.
“Of the many temptations that plague humans, none are stronger than sex, and all that comes with it including affection, validation of self through another, procreation… and even love. No emotion is more dangerous for your kind. Thus, no demon is more dangerous than the Succubus. Not for the harm she would do to you, but because of the harm you would do to yourself in the name of love.”
“That’s not… I don’t…” Beauty look up at him with concern. Logan smiled and struggled to control his breathing, and his rising anger.
“I am not saying she is out to get you.” The Hell Hound prodded. "Only that she is a demon and this is Hell. In other words, proceed with caution, Cousin."
“Why do you keep calling me Cousin? Who or what are you?”
“Grandfather Bear was worried about you but the big lug is anything but subtle. He could never sneak into this realm to find you without alerting every demon across all nine levels of Hell. He needed someone a little more… sly.”
It all clicked into place for Logan. All his grandfather’s tribal stories and legends came rushing back. "You are the Coyote spirit, the trickster."
“The one and only,” Logan could “hear” the mischievous grin in his head. "And that little secret needs to stay just between the two of us, Cousin. I am way deep into enemy territory here, so I’m relying on you to keep my true nature a secret."
“Alright, I will,” Logan promised. “For now.”
“Good enough,” the Coyote/Hell Hound replied. “For now. When you are done frolicking with your demon and have looted the bodies of our enemies, I will drag the fallen out for the wildlife to feed on.”
“You do that,” Logan thought back.
“But know one more thing before I leave you. You did well to hide in this cavern for as long as you did. Even I could not find you. When I overheard a rumor about demons vanishing in the waste, I suspected it might be your doing, so I replaced the Hell Hound in a hunting party. We found you, and if we did, eventually others will as well. The enemy knows a threat now lurks in the wastelands. Sooner or later, more will come for you.”
“Just… go away and leave us alone. Please.” Logan refused to think about more blood and violence as he felt Coyote’s presence fade from his mind. He would have to eventually, but it could. For the moment, it was only him and Beauty.
Karen’s absence was a painful reminder of what they had lost; a friend and a lover. Once again, it was just the two of them, alone against a hostile world. Whatever happened next, he had only that one truth, that one comfort to cling to. He had her and she had him. Come what may, they would face it together.
Logan gathered her into his arms and buried his face in her hair. She rested her cheek against his shoulder with a weary sigh. They lay together in the deep silence of shared grief for a long time.
*****
Logan and Beauty sat around the fire. She watched him holding the bolt action rifle in his hands, examining the mechanism. The bullets lay in a small pile at his feet. He unscrewed a brass cylinder out of the shoulder stock and stared at it. Logan picked up one of the bullets and peered closely at it.
“Just a slug. No casing. No propellant. No gunpowder of any kind.”
He held up the cylinder. “I noticed when the pistol fired that the sound was… well, wrong. Now I know why. The bullets are ejected using compressed air pressure. How strange. Gunpowder would be much more effective.”
He picked up one of the pistols. It used a similar propellant tank but, due to the smaller design, only held a single shot. The design was very similar to the flintlock pistols used on Earth in earlier centuries, before the invention of smokeless powder and modern firearms.
“Huge improvement over a blade,” Logan shrugged. “But a long way from a nice, solid Glock semi-automatic.”
He glanced at her and offered a faint smile. “You know, with all the craziness going on, I didn’t even notice before.” He tapped at his skull. “Your horns have grown larger.”
Beauty reached up and explored the curling, black horns protruding from her mane of white hair. Her lips quirked into a semblance of a smile. “Beauty has gotten hornier, yes?”
He chuckled. “I suppose you have at that. Not good news for me. I can barely keep up with you as it is.”
Beauty waved his concerns away. “Logan is all Beauty needs.”
A deep silence settled between them.
“Not your fault.”
“No, Beauty. Karen’s fate is entirely my goddamned fault!”
He set the rifle down very carefully, fighting the nearly overwhelming urge to smash it against a rock, again and again, into tiny, unrecognizable fragments. If not the gun, then his own wounded flesh until the pain outside was enough to drown out the agony clawing at his soul. Or to scream like an animal. Or just…
But none of that would bring her back. Nothing would change the reality that Karen was gone.
“She trusted me to keep her safe. That’s the whole point of this “Harem” tradition, is it not? Karen did everything she was supposed to. She made our lives better just by her presence. My part of the arrangement was to protect her! She is gone and that is on me! I failed her!
Beauty reached for him. Logan surged to his feet, unwilling to be comforted. He didn’t deserve to feel better about it.
He looked over at the pile of loot they had gathered. What had started out as sticks and rat hides was now a large assortment of coins, clothes, armor, equipment, and an impressive stockpile of weapons and ammunition. They now had soft bedrolls to sleep on, sturdy outdoor tents for shelter against the Hellwind, and a handful of specialty, survival tools that could make their lives infinitely easier. More than he had ever dared to hope for since being dumped into this nightmare.
And he didn’t give a good damn about any of it.
“I can’t fix this,” Logan sighed and shook his head. He smiled at her but the anger boiling in his gut made a lie of it. “Nothing I do will bring her back, but I can do something about it. We can, you and I.”
Beauty looked up at him. “Tell me. What Logan wants, Beauty wants too.”
“I’m tired of hiding,” he snarled. “I won’t find a way to escape from Hell huddled in this cavern and I won’t sit around and wait for the next attack. It’s time we took the fight to the enemy. What they did to Karen… someone has to pay for that.”
“That someone would be the Baroness Graveek,” Coyote spoke into his head from where he prowled about outside. "It was she that sent her servant, a human by the name of De Sade, to Gomorrah and to a demon Master in the business of offering hunters for hire. Karl Denke was that hired hunter. It is his rifle that you now hold.”
“Her again,” Logan fumed.
An intense wave of rage stole his breath away, just as it had the day he had encountered the two Incubi. And like that day, his pain suddenly had a focus. Someone to blame. A target for his retribution. Baroness Graveek. In the deepest corner of his mind, Logan tasted the poison of her name as something primal and ugly woke beneath the turbulent waters of his soul.
“You have proven yourself to be a threat that she cannot ignore, Cousin. Hiding is no longer an option. All that remains is the choice to flee or fight.”
Logan nodded. “Take a wild guess which option I am going to choose.”
“Beauty, have you ever heard of a Baroness Graveek?”
The Succubus perked up at mention of the name. “Big talk in city. Bought old, strong soul for her harem at castle. Warrior. Soul make good ally.”
He thought about Karen. Pain squeezed at his heart. “I don’t know that I want to drag anyone else into my personal crusade.”
“Logan strong.” She poked him in the chest.” “Not strong enough to fight alone. Beauty not strong enough to protect Logan alone. Need allies that can fight.”
“Who is this man you heard rumors about?” he asked.
The Succubus quirked an eyebrow at him. “Is woman. Great warrior. Great queen in before time. Her name Boudica.”
He shook his head. “Never heard of her.”
“No matter.” Beauty replied. “Old soul. Great warrior. Good ally. We get, yes?.”
“Maybe,” Logan replied. “But there is the small matter of a castle and an Elder demon between her and us. I think it’s time we saw this place for ourselves.” He grunted in pain. “After a few days of rest and recuperation. Then, we bring the pain.”