Sex is a Job Description? Ch. 12

Vendr swung the blacksmith's maul over his head and brought it down with all the strength he could muster, shattering the stonework at his feet. He pulled the head of the massive hammer from the cratered stone and struck it again just as hard, dust and fragments of masonry flying into his face and in all directions.

The demon roared with rage and struck the ground over and over again, cratering stone foundations that had been built to withstand sieges and had done so dozens of times with little more than scratches to show for it. Vendr struck it so hard that it shattered like glass under his intense strength.

Another strike saw the maul's haft snap like a dry twig and the head of it bounced up and snapped Vendr's head back, dazing the demon. He stumbled a few feet, trying to remain on his feet as white lights and dark spots filled his vision. After a moment's pause, he saw red again and threw himself into the stone, fists slamming against the ground like hammers until they were broken and bleeding.

When Vendr heard his knuckles break against the sharp splinters of rock, he heaved a great sigh in frustration and stood up, yelling at the Eternal Sanctum in the sky, shaking his bloodies, broken fists at it as if the gesture would make him feel any less robbed and enraged.

When his voice grew hoarse, the enormous demon slammed his fists into the ground one last time and then collapsed into the powder and dust beneath him, sending a cloud of it into the air.

The demon let what little remained of his boiling rage bleed out of his body, taking a long time to regain control of his senses as he lay in the destruction. It was going to take him a long time to get over this denial, however. Even if his rage was waning, things would not be the same in him until the human was dead and his head mounted on a pike. Vendr let out a groan and ground his teeth together until it made his head hurt.

"Usher Lanos," the demon said scathingly. He pushed himself to his knees and stared at his bloody hands, bones visible through patches where he had no skin left. "Next time...next time there will be no Brohund or Fentin."

Vendr stood, collecting the two halves of the maul from the ground and making his way away from the barracks with a number of former onlookers trying to busy themselves with something other than staring at him. He cared little for all the eyes that had been upon him in his rage.

Upon returning to the smithy, he placed the splintered maul on top of one of the anvils and tapped it with his hand. A blacksmith turned to him and nodded, quickly returning to his work on a blade in the forge. Vendr heaved a sigh and wiped blood from his eye, smearing red streaks across the side of his face in the process.

He left the smithy and returned to his personal quarters, finding two of his slaves filling the enormous bathtub with bucket after bucket of hot, steaming water. He motioned for them to leave and they finished their work, hurrying out of the small tent room without a glance to their master.

Vendr undressed and slipped tiredly into the water, every wound and bruise on his body coming aflame with pain. He took a discarded rag and began to rub the splinters of stone out of his skin, beads of blood rising through the open holes and running like water off his skin. He dipped the rag into the water and wiped his face with it, taking it away almost completely red with his blood.

A slave girl swept the flap of the room open just enough to get her head through, and nodded respectfully to Vendr.

"Would you like company, milord?" she asked, cheeks blushing red when Vendr turned his glare toward her.

"No," he answered, waving her away. After a moment's thought, he said, "Bring me torridroot."

"Torridroot?" the girl asked, eyes curious and confused.

"Nevermind," the large demon said, picking himself up and out of the water. "Refill the tub. And bring a bigger washcloth." Vendr took his tabard and wrapped it around his waist, fastening it securely with a belt of tanned flesh. The slave girl nodded in shame and left to do as he'd commanded.

She didn't know what torridroot was. One of the most widespread numbing agents in the Second Circle and she didn't know! Again, Mefur was giving Fentin and the generals all of the good slaves. Vendr clenched his fists in annoyance and left his quarters, moving through the encampment like a stalking giant.

At just over eight feet, Vendr was an imposing figure even here in Hell. His massive shoulders barely fit in most armor, and his arms were more like tree trunks than limbs. He was the champion of this army, and he looked every bit the part.

The giant admired his knuckles, mostly healed now after being cleaned. The few scars he did have still irked him however, especially the one on his face that Usher Lanos had left nearly three thousand years ago. Vendr had felt the sting of a thousand blades, been shot with every manner of projectile, had bombs thrown at him, been lit on fire. He'd suffered every manner of would one could imagine, and only a handful had even left a scarcely a scratch after it all.

But that human, he had given Vendr a wound he remembered every single time he gazed upon his own image. It devoured Vendr's pride in such a way that the giant felt bloodlust rising to the fore even now.

He nearly tore the flap off the front of the apothecary's quarters as he entered, a flurry of thoughts spinning through his head. Foremost among them was how close he'd been to killing the human earlier, and that oaf Brohund had stopped him only feet from his vengeance. Luckily, Usher Lanos had killed the dimension-spying demon before he could be of any more nuisance than he'd been already.

Now he didn't need to be paid an estate, a fortune, and a horde of slaves. It lessened Vendr's anger to not have his lord pay the demon for his services in the human realm, but only slightly.

"You came for something, milord?" asked one of the apothecary's lackeys, a thin, wiry demon bearing a large tube of dark fluid on his back like a beast of burden.

"Torridroot." After a moment's thought, the demon's frown lightened. "And vanilla scents, Oils, incense, what have you."

"I suppose this falls under the acquisition request from a commanding officer?" the demon replied, wetting the end of a quill with blood from his tongue. A large sheet of parchment unfolded from his long, filthy sleeve.

"Yes," the giant grumbled. He watched the lackey slip away through the cloth doorway and then disappear amongst the various chests and jars and shelves of materials. Vendr waited outside the apothecary's quarters and idly thought about the demon he'd nearly killed earlier.

As strong as she seemed, coming through a human portal had robbed her of her greater powers and left her comparable to a mortal in Vendr's eyes. He'd split her nose and lips with ease, not even using a tenth of his strength to shatter her face and teeth and break most of her ribs. He flexed his fist and almost felt her hair between his fingers, clenched tightly around silken fibers.

It had been a long, long time since he'd struck a woman. It was difficult to imagine how many souls he had slain in his life, but to his credit, not one had been unarmed unless Fentin had ordered him to do it. The thought of striking that woman down in cold blood on orders rubbed him the wrong way. He was almost relieved Fentin hadn't wanted her killed.

"As much as I could find, milord," the lackey said, drawing Vendr from his reverie.

Without looking down at the demon, Vendr took the bag from him and made his way back to his tent, undressing as he entered. He handed the bag of herbs and pleasant-scented items to one of the slaves and swept open the flap before him.

In his bath tub rested a woman he didn't know.

"Hello there," the woman cooed smoothly, nudging her shoulder as the slave girl Vendr had ordered to fill up the tub massaged her shoulders with a look of anxiousness written across her pale features. "Care to join me? There's more than enough room in here for the three of us."

Vendr grunted. "Get out."

The woman slapped the slave girl's hands away and stood up, clearly annoyed.

"And refuse a gift from your lord? I was sent here as compensation for-"

Vendr's hand reached the succubus' throat in an instant, and he placed its partner between her legs, lifting her off her feet. "There is no compensation for denying me vengeance. Leave. Now." Vendr removed his hand from the succubus' neck and she gasped for breath, her glare faltering as he pushed three fingers into her core and lifted her out of the bronze bath tub with one hand.

She attempted to dissuade him by using her powers to enthrall him, but he shook her influence off without much effort. He'd been hardened by thousands of years of war, and his mental facilities were far beyond what the common harlot could hope to enrapture without having incredible focus and strength herself.

Vendr set her down on the ground and removed his fingers from her, opting instead to grab her head in a tight knot and slam her skull against the lip of the tub. It rang like a bell so loud that the slave witnessing the act collapsed to her knees, holding her hands to her ears. Vendr dragged the dazed succubus out of his tent and instructed two slaves to take her back to the succubus harem where Fentin had no doubt gotten her from.

Vendr returned to the bathtub and grabbed it, stilling the remaining vibrations causing it to ring. The slave girl took her hands away from her head and looked up at the giant, as if she were looking upon a god.

"Get up," he ordered. Without question, she stood, trembling with a mix of fear and physical trauma.

"Your will, milord?"

"Bring me the torridroot. I have great need of an escape," he said dryly, getting into the bathtub without looking at the girl. She left the room and quickly returned with a large, misshapen lump of fibrous vegetation in her hands.

"Here you are, milord," she offered, extending her hands toward him with the torridroot resting in her palms. He took it and bit into the disgusting thing, grimacing as he chewed it into pulp and sucked the foul juice from its fibers.

"Take some," he said, holding the root out to her.

"Milord?" she asked.

"Girl, if I did not want you to have it, I would not have offered it. Take some," he explained in a short tone. She nodded and took a small bit of it between her teeth, chewing it slowly. Vendr snapped a large bulb off the root and handed it to the girl. This time, she didn't need to be told to take it, and let him drop it into her palms wordlessly.

Vendr forced a swallow of foul juice and took a deep breath, numbness spreading through his thoughts. torridroot was one of the few things that remained soothing to him. Most other distractions had lost their luster in ages past, but this was a constant, a firm rock that he could always fall back upon for a mirage of tranquility.

The slave girl beside him gagged as she swallowed a bit of the root and tried to keep it from showing as the swollen lump in her throat dragged itself down into her stomach. She looked very sheepish as he eyed her reaction.

"You don't swallow the root, only the nectar."

She nodded. "I apologize for my ignorance, milord. We baphomets have few among us who have heard of things like this."

"A baphomet!" Vendr exclaimed, bracing his hands against the side of the tub to lift himself out of the water. "You're a baphomet? A chanter?"

She flushed bright red and shook her head. "No, milord. Only the most prominent among us are chanters. I am merely a slave."

Vendr extended his hand to the girl. Misunderstanding, she quickly handed him back the bulb of torridroot in her hands. He sighed and set it on a small table beside the tub.

"Come, sing me something." The girl put her hand into his, a tiny and frail thing in his grasp. He pulled her gently toward the tub, and she reluctantly slipped into it with him. She sat at the opposite end of the bronze bathtub and tossed her gaze around nervously, unwilling to look him in the eyes.

"I have not received my voice yet," she said despondently.

Vendr nodded slowly. "Then hum me something. I need only hear the tunes."

The girl opened her mouth to speak, but faltered in her thoughts and slumped against the back of the tub. Her breath caught in her chest and the giant tapped the side of the tub with two fingers.

"I'm sorry-"

"It is not beyond your power to hum me a simple tune. Now," Vendr grunted, waving two fingers back and forth like he was pantomiming something spinning. "Before my patience wears thin."

The demon dislodged the torridroot from his mouth and tossed it on the ground, taking another piece from the chunk in his hand.

The baphomet began to hum softly, slowly, long rhythms rising up her throat and into the still air. Vendr's shoulders relaxed a little as he picked up a familiar tune in her voice. He closed his eyes, thoughts drifting away from the Zuldspire, away from the present, long into the past. Her voice carried him aloft into dreams that woke him at night in a cold sweat and sent shivers up and down his spine.

His mind put a voice to the tune, words drifting to and fro upon the melody that the girl spun around and around on a slow, methodic axis. Vendr's thoughts unwound slowly, at first coming away in little ribbons, and then unfurling like banners until they fluttered about in the calming breeze he had become enraptured with.

"Avana," he breathed almost inaudibly, reaching into his thoughts to stroke the frail, tanned cheek that nuzzled his fingertips warmly.

Soft.

She was always so soft, and his grasp upon her so tender because of it. He always felt like he was going to break her if he did anything more than simply graze her or hold her. A smile passed before his fingers and he tilted his head up as her words began to intermingle with the tune running through his ears.

Her voice picked up upon the tune and curled around each long note, bringing his mind to a place of ease and stillness. He had no fears, no pain, no rage or anger. He found serenity in her voice, the gentle thrum of her thoughts passing through his lifting him above the heavy burdens that kept him in armor nearly every day of his life.

"The Panoply," he said, requesting what she had always loved to sing for him.

"Milord?"

Everything came to a halt and Vendr's eyes snapped open, his thoughts thrown to every corner of the world in an instant. He stared at the baphomet before him for a long moment, pulling his realization of what was going on back together. He looked down and shook his head.

"Nothing," he said, staring at his reflection in the water. He took the torridroot out of his mouth and opted to put the rest of the bulb in his hand into his mouth. He needed relaxation right now, more than anything.

"Should I...?"

"Continue," Vendr said, feeling the slight numbness start to take him slowly.

A moment later, the tune began anew and he closed his eyes. This time, he saw nothing of Avana, and clenched his jaw in disappointment.

------------ Memphis International Airport ------------

The Director ground his teeth together in silence as the plane rose off the runway, a phone to his ear. None of the agents assembled in the cabin said a word to him. Tom's eyes moved from agent to agent, finding nothing on their faces that would indicate that they wanted to make small talk while the Director was in close proximity in the mood he was in.

The plane tilted toward the heavens and began to climb into the sky in earnest, engines roaring. It amazed Tom to no end that thirty minutes ago all the agents on the plane had been at the Holding Center, and now they were on their way to Japan to access a natural rift between earth and Hell.

In the aftermath of the sneak attack on the Holding Center, several security organizations had come to the conclusion that Fentin had opened up a rift between the realms right in front of the one that the Special Divisions had put together and stepped into the basement in what looked like the right portal to the agents.

It was concluded that Brohund had been the mole in the Special Divisions and had been the one who killed the security team that the Director had tried to contact during the attack. So, with intelligence breached, all records had been locked down, sensitive data copied to a private data vault in Idaho, and subsequently expunged from the more "public" access databanks available to the CIA, FBI, and NSA. Tom could only imagine what kind of information couldn't be trusted to any of those three organizations. Possibly world-ending news, but he didn't care enough to delve into deeper thought about it.

Things like angels and demons existed. What could possibly be surprising after that?

In the meantime, the Director had acquisitioned a jet to fly the team going to Hell, now missing Allen, to Japan. Apparently, from what Jehrme had mentioned, the Director had only been able to get the cooperation of the US government and the Japanese government by shooting off top-tier clearance codes like confetti.

So, here they sat on a plane bound for Odate-Noshiro Airport in northern Japan. The Director hung up his phone and redialed a number, putting the device up to his ear with a scowl. It rang for a moment and then someone answered on the other line.

"An English-speaker please," he grunted. There was another pause. "I need access to the Shirakami-Sanchi restricted zone two. Yes I understand who I am talking to; I've been trying to get you on the goddamned phone for ten minutes. Fuck this, clearance code Midway. Yeah, Shin, I know you're listening in. Get this fucking moron off the phone and talk to me."

The Director switched to Japanese and lost Tom completely. The teen, unable to meet the Director's wandering gaze, turned his own eyes elsewhere.

Agents sat in luxury airline chairs and either slept or chatted quietly amongst themselves. Greg and Harvey sat in the furthest back row and looked like they were both asleep with their heads back and legs extended, eyes closed.

The only one who showed any kind of emotion was Veronica, who had, since leaving the Holding Center, been unable to contain herself at all. She lay across three seats with pillows propping her ass in the air and a gas station sack of ice pressed against the junction of her legs. Her wings hung lazily across two rows of seats in either direction, like enormous fleshy "keep out" signs. Her horns ripped the seat cushion her head lay on as she adjusted her position slightly.

A moan escaped her lips as the sack of ice shifted.

"Tom, you stay away from me," she warned, groaning with effort as she turned herself a bit to look at him. "You never take that cock of yours out near me again."

"She's delirious," Jerhme said, trying to hush the demon as she swatted his hands away.

"No. I've never been fucked like that before. My vagina hurts more than the time I got shot in it. You just keep it in your pants and we'll be good."

"Okay..." Tom replied, unsure of what was going on.

Jerhme offered him a little help. "She's come back into her powers in earnest because of you. To put it simply, she's drunk with all the new power she has. She'll come out of it soon."

"Oh shut up, Jerhme," Veronica snapped. "I do not kowtow to any mortal man's cock." She continued a moment later with, "Even if it did make me bloom like a flower."

"I know you don't," Jerhme assured.

Veronica growled at him and bared her fangs. "I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to the human I want inside me." She looked at Tom. "How about it? Care for another one of those encounters? Maybe you can fill me up without breaking my kooch this time."

The plane bumped, causing Veronica's ice sack to shift again. She let out a painful grunt.