Flirting with Sin Ch. 01

"You were supposed to stay there," I sighed. Back to babysitting the fucking bird.

Shuu'Vohsa's blonde feathers, as fine as locks of hair, fell about her body in a heap on the ground. Her talons scraped the street as she picked herself up. Rather than walk around naked like she seemed to prefer, she had covered her shame in a simple white toga that cut off around her thighs--so as not to restrict her long chicken legs, I guessed. It wouldn't do her much good in this rain for long.

"Where did you go? Did you roost in that woman's nest? I did not like her. She smelled like smoke and had scary eyes. She did not hurt you, did she?" Voh flit about, circling around me and tugging at my clothes and my hair.

"I'm fine, Voh."

"That is good, that is good! That place was odd. There was no one else there. I took my bath and washed my hair and I found this garment--you said I should wear clothes, so I thought you would be happy if you saw me in it--but there was no one else. I knocked on every door I could find but no one answered." Voh spoke in a hurry, her words like quick chirps. "And there were so many rooms. But if I could get inside, it was empty. Or it lead to strange places where it was dark and cold and lonely, and you were not there. So I searched and searched. And then I found you."

The song demon hooked her arm around mine and gave me an expectant look.

"So? Shall we go? Back to your nest? It is wet, here. I do not like to be wet," she said pointedly.

I looked to the heavens and silently prayed for the Lord to take me then and there. Was I being tested? Is this a punishment for falling to temptation? Will the heavens part and a holy angel, cloistered in gold and light, come down and sever my head from my neck should I fail to deliver this devil back to the place she belongs?

Voh rubbed her wet feathers against my shoulder, smiling contentedly. It was pissing me off. How harmless she was frustrated me. If only she were a Revenant or a Hell Knight I could just blow her head off and be done with it.

We were some miles away from the city proper. Stretches of pre-church streets, crumbling buildings and mud lay between us and civilization. Off in the distance, unrestrained woodland was reaching out its gnarled roots and retaking the abandoned valleys.

This far away from the city, the streets were silent save for the rain. The decrepit buildings rustled as we passed them, the glow of beady eyes through grimy windows watched our passing. Voh seemed completely oblivious to our bleak surroundings, however.

"Will we be there soon? I did not need a shower, I just had one," she said, before lifting up my robe and tucking her head inside it.

"No."

For the next half-mile or longer, I walked the streets with Voh cooing under my clothes. She kept peeking her eyes out of the collar to see where we were going before ducking back under my arm. I should have been annoyed and pushed her out, but her chicken-leg strides were long enough that walking never became awkward.

The dead streets stretched on and on. I could see the city in the distance, the neon lights of high-rises lining the sky, the cross affixed to the grand cathedral standing tall in the night, its orange glow like a great blaze looming over the black-violet gloom.

Alice could have put me closer to the fucking town.

"Will we... ahm, be there? Soon?" Voh peeped.

The song demon spoke with a sleepy droll. It occurred to me that she probably hadn't slept since before I found her in that alleyway, and who knows how many hours had passed in the hellish pocket we had gone into looking for Alice.

"Yeah, soon," I lied.

She nodded at me through my collar and obediently continued walking, albeit slower and more awkwardly than before. Soon it became a problem and I gently forced her out from under my robes.

"I am sorry, mister Hunter. I just need to... to sit down..."

Shuu'Vohsa collapsed into a heap of white cloth and blonde feathers on the wet concrete. I sighed heavily. For a brief moment I considered just leaving her in the street--come morning she would no doubt find an earthworm to dig up before building herself a nice nest in the trees nearby. She'd be fine, I told myself.

I shook my head and ran a hand down my face. No, no...

"M-mister Hunter?!"

She squawked as I hoisted her up and cradled her in my arms, squirming but too weak to escape. As I took off down the street with her in my grasp she relaxed, laying her head against my bicep.

"I have not ever been carried like this before," she cooed. "When I was small, my mother, she carried me in her claws and dropped me from high above so I would learn to fly. I fell many times before I learned. But, that was a long time ago."

"Your mother?"

The most common way demons are 'born' is that a human soul, damned to burn for eternity in the lake of fire, eventually is molded by the flame. Its humanity is burned away, its reason, its sense of self. Nothing but the sins that weigh them down are left, and it's the sins that fester and manifest themselves physically. Murderers, rapists and lechers are twisted into wretched forms that embody their desires. Floating sacks of flesh and organs that spew balls of flaming hate, or hulking masses of muscle that exist only to destroy. And then there's the common imp, a former liar or thief, as pitiful in his demonic form as he was in life.

There are too fallen angels, those who followed after Lucifer and became his priests, his commanders and his instruments of torture to those damned to his realm. These horrifying abominations defy description--mounds of mutating flesh, ever-shifting to accommodate the fears lurking in their victims heads. Featherless wings beating around dark eyes lined with jagged teeth, settled into clouds of darkness. Slathering maws with legs. Or perhaps a visage of those you care for most, warmly inviting you with loving arms before dragging you down into the deep.

Alice, a lilim, was likely the product of a human man coupling unknowingly with another lilim, and as far as I know lilim are born naturally the same way humans are. They are not like succubi who are born from sinful thoughts manifesting physically or adulterers burning, who reproduce via what I can only describe as 'corruption'--a succubus passing on its DNA to a human woman, forcing her to undergo 'rebirth' not unlike a vampire.

If Shuu'Vohsa had a mother, she was not born from sin.

"Yes... I was in a clutch of seven songstresses. I took the longest to come out of my egg," she said with a weak laugh.

"Did it hurt when you fell?"

"Yes! Yes it did! Very much!" she squawked. "But my mother was patient. Kind. She dropped me over water after I broke my leg. I learned to swim before I learned to fly."

Silently I realized it was no coincidence I had never met a song demon before, if their mothers so disregarded the wellbeing of their young.

"Even if... even if it did hurt. I am grateful to her. It is so wonderful to fly, mister Hunter. To feel the sky around you. To touch the air."

Voh reached out her hand and swept it slowly through the space above her like she was trying to push the air around.

"Have you ever flown?" she asked.

"I haven't."

I'd lived in the city for the better part of my life now and hadn't had any reason to travel very far outside of it--most of the demons, cultists and sinners I'd been assigned to had been within the city limits or were in a pocket hell proxy to the city. Planes were less common than bullet trains and subways these days, at any rate. Even for international trips I had heard on the news that plans for intercontinental subterranean travel were in talks.

"You have to! You have to!" she chirped excitedly at me and tried to sit up, but then fell weakly onto my arm. "... Sometime when I am not so, so tired, I will take you. I will carry you like you are carrying me. And maybe I won't even drop you, mister Hunter!"

Voh's dopey smile was infectious. She was like a little kid I was carrying back home after she'd scraped her knees. Even with the ever-so-subtle smog of demonic corruption about her being, I couldn't help but be swept up into her dimwitted cheer.

"It's Trevor."

"Trevor? Oh, is that your name, mister Hunter? That scary woman called you that, so I guess it is. It is nice, it is nice. It sounds like you. Curt. Kind of tough-sounding. Handsome. Nice-smelling. Do names smell? You smell like a Trevor, mister Trevor-hunter," she chirped, sniffing me.

I probably smelled like sweat, dirt and blood.

Voh went on tweeting at me for a while. She tried to demonstrate how light floating on air makes you feel, but her hair was too wet to fly and she couldn't rise out of my arms. The toga was soaking wet and did very little to shield her from the cold wind or the pelting rain. She clung to me, trying to somehow hide from the rain.

Eventually exhaustion overcame her and she fell asleep. As I neared the edge of the city, not the roar of trains nor the thrum of passing cars could rouse her from slumber. I stopped in a darkened alley and set her down for a moment to strip off my robe, covering her with it when I picked her up again. Though sleeping and harmless, it wouldn't bode well for someone to see me carrying around a feathered woman with claws for feet.

Standing outside my apartment complex was a woman in a white nun's habit, casting troubled looks this way and that. Her hands were clasped around the rosary around her neck. Quietly I approached her and relief washed over her face.

"Trevor! Where have you been? When you didn't come back, I got worried and thought I'd come looking for you. Thank the Lord you're alright..." Alessa's gaze fell to the woman in my arms. "Babysitting, Trevor?"

"I found her lying naked and injured in an alley," I lied. "I thought I would bring her to the Church after feeding her and giving her some clothes. Then I must return to the Hunt."

Alessa drew closer and stared pointedly at me. The rain slid down her wimple and made slick her black hair. In her gaze I saw a quiet judgment, but also gentle acceptance. She didn't believe a word I'd said.

"I--I just didn't want her to freeze to death, so..." I fumbled for excuses.

"Trevor. You can tell me anything. Chances are I already know... You were never good at keeping secrets." The Sister gave a playful wink. "Take care of the girl. I won't tell anyone she is... what she is. I'll be waiting when you decide to come and see me."

"Alessa, it's not what--"

"It's alright, Trevor. I only wanted to make sure you were okay." She reached out her silken gloved hand and touched my cheek. "Remember your promise. And if the demon you're hunting is too much for you, if you get hurt, come straight to me."

The Sister clasped her hands together at her waist and began down the street in the direction of the cathedral, turning around once to smile at me before trotting away with some haste.

My promise? The one I made to...?

It flashed through my perception so quickly I had nearly disregarded it, but the thought would lurk balefully in the back of my mind for hours. It must have been a mistake, I reasoned, or merely the way she'd been holding it. Maybe I was merely tired and saw something that wasn't there. None of these explanations were good enough to put from my mind what I'd seen hanging from Alessa's neck as she touched her hand to my face.

Her rosary's cross was inverted.

Somehow I made it into my apartment. Got past the office, slipped into the door past the young couple and the old lady's places. I laid Voh down on the shabby couch in my living room and switched on the television--a cheap flatscreen some two generations old, didn't even accept holographic signals and still needed to be plugged in, but I hardly ever used the thing so I didn't care.

According to its clock it had been barely twelve hours since I left the paladin's house, and the last three were spent simply walking here. I'd felt like I had been in that pocket of Hell for days--no doubt a form of time dilation meant to stretch out the horror and torture of that realm for its victims as long as psychically possible.

Rain tapped the window, a wet blur of streetlights and neon signs. Voh's nose whistled as she snored--she was trying to suck her feathers up into her nostrils. She was still wearing that soaking toga. I sat her up and pulled it off of her, then wrapped her in a towel from the bathroom. She sniffed me in her sleep and smiled, then curled up, her feathers draped over her body.

I tossed our wet clothes in the dryer and fell against the washroom wall.

She's out there, somewhere. How many more people am I going to let her kill?

No one, aside from Alessa, had tried to find me. There were no messages on my phone. No news story about a cat woman tearing up service houses and clergymen. Maybe she hadn't found the place yet--or maybe her primal instincts had her off chasing mice. Either way, I couldn't just sit here and wait for her to eat more innocent people.

Different robe, different slacks. A rank-and-file like me had a dozen of these things, perfectly ordinary, and that suited me fine--I didn't need some gaudy suit of decorated armor like the paladins wear or a flashy gold robe and hat to paint a target on me for hellspawn.

The man in the mirror greeted me with a thousand yard stare. I could use more sleep--what little I got in the demon smithy's hut wasn't exactly restful--but I knew all I'd find on my mattress was a good view of the ceiling.

The song demon's whistling snores followed me as I turned the knob and stepped one foot out the front door, then they abruptly stopped.

"Wait!"

Voh had crawled out of the towel and grabbed my sleeve. Her talons were digging into the carpet like she meant to hold me there.

"Do not... do not leave me alone again. Please?"

Her voice was soft and sleep-addled and her eyes were wet with grogginess--but she was perfectly naked hanging out of my apartment door. I turned and pressed her back inside, shutting the door behind me.

"Voh, it's alright, I won't be--" I began, but I was cut off by the demon pressing her lips against mine.

Shuu'Vohsa's kiss was slow and timid, placing little pecks against me in a gentle rhythm. Her big dewy eyes stared into me with a silent plea, and she pecked me again.

"Do not go. Stay. Stay here with me. I do not want to be alone again..." she whined. Her hair, like living tendrils, wrapped around me and she clung to me, all four of her limbs clutching desperately. "You were gone so long, and I searched and searched for you. I was so happy when I found you again. Let me stay with you a little longer. Just a little longer. Please?"

A long sigh through my nose. A demon was begging and pleading with me, and it wasn't for its life. It was for my company. I relented, something I was sure to regret, and just nodded at her.

Voh's hair tugged me closer to her, and her gentle pecks became slower, more demanding. Her tongue slipped between my lips and forced its way inside; her hair pressed our bodies tightly together as she sealed the space between our mouths and feverishly stroked my tongue with hers.

Gently I returned her affections, and she whined into my lips, attacking my mouth, short breaths piping through her nose as she focused her lips and tongue on making sure there was absolutely no space between my body and hers. I tried to carry her to the couch, or even just back against the wall, but her body and hair completely blinded me and I ended up tumbling to the carpet with her on top of me.

Shuu'Vohsa sat straddling me, her cheeks flushed, birdlike trills rumbling in her throat as she grew visibly excited. She all but ripped the buttons off my robe to separate it from my flesh, and her hands flew under my undershirt and pushed it up to reveal my chest. Again she began pecking me--little kisses across my abdominals, my chest, and then finally my neck. I could feel her hair stroking me everywhere my skin was exposed, the feathery locks agonizingly ticklish against my stomach and my arms.

Her nimble fingers made their way to my slacks and worked them open, my engorged member flying free and slapping against her thigh. At first she simply wrapped her hands around it, squeezing it hard enough to make me wince, but then she pressed my length against her flushed lips and began to rock her hips back and forth, running me up and down her opening. Slick and hot, she traced up and down the size of me again and again, up and down, working herself into heavy, needy breaths and deep, greedy sighs. Her head fell back as she rubbed herself against me and quickened her pace.

The gentle pleasure was soothing, almost relaxing, and terribly frustrating. Watching Shuu'Vohsa work herself against me, her chest rising and falling, her breaths hot and heavy was torture. Her feathers were floating all around us, like she was getting high on the contact of our bodies and couldn't keep herself grounded. But I wanted more.

I grabbed her soft hips and pulled her toward me, eliciting a shrill, surprised chirp as I pushed myself upward. Holding her light frame in my hands I began toward the bedroom, Voh chirping and pecking at my neck all the while, needy tweets coming from her lips as she pressed herself against me. I didn't make it far--she forced her tongue into my mouth and stole my vision; I fell onto the couch in the living room.

Voh's hair, soft and silky, I found surprisingly strong as she used it to bind my arms together around my back and force me to sit still on the couch. Assaulting my lips with wet, sloppy kisses, she fumbled with my cock, pushing the head painfully close to entering her dripping honeypot, before sliding down the shaft again, running her lips against me. She smiled at the frustration in my brows, the displeased grunts I was making.

"T-Trevor," she said, her voice shaking with excitement. "Do you like this? Does it feel good? Oh, it's not enough, it's not enough. You want to be in... inside me. Not yet. Not yet. No, no, I like the face you're making, Trevor. Make it more. Do it more!"

Strands of Voh's hair fluttered above her; the songstress rose shortly into the air above me, her long locks still restraining me to the couch. She reached down with her talons and curled one of her claws around my shaft, the sharp nail scraping gently, slowly, terrifyingly against my flesh. My tool was merely her plaything, and she would toy with it however she pleased. With a wicked grin she touched the sharp point of it against my tip--adrenaline pounded through my veins as my body tensed and the holy symbols lit up to defend me. She laughed like a cawing raven, and I helplessly pumped desire onto her claws.

"Oh, did you like that? Did you? Naughty Hunter..." she trilled.

The song demon floated above me like a vengeful angel gazing down at a sinful mortal in all his imperfect petulance. Her talon closed on me, a strangling deathgrip, the rough skin harsh and coarse against my pride. Then, resting her chin in her hands and watching me with amused fascination, she began to tug up and down. She held me painfully tight and wrung me back and forth in a steady rhythm, giggling at the conflict on my face. It was more pain than pleasure, more uncomfortable than erotic, and yet before long her talon was wet with my arousal.

"Does it hurt? I'm sorry. Poor boy, poor little boy," she mocked, grinning maliciously. "I will make it better for you. Anything for you, Trevor. Anything, anything."

Voh's grip loosened ever so slightly; she slid up and down my length, the head squeezed roughly between the gap in her talons. My whole body jumped and again I slickened her claws--she rolled her tongue over her lips, her eyes went wide with hunger, and she pumped me faster. The movements were sloppy, relentless, coarse and uncomfortable, yet I couldn't help as waves of ecstasy assaulted me with every stroke. I let my head fall back onto the couch, my eyes rolled into the back of my head; I felt the infernal bliss surging up from below. I couldn't hold it back, my body would surrender to this cruel pleasure--a crushing force squeezed down on my cock and my eyes shot open in pain. She was squeezing me tight with both of her taloned feet and cackling, the wicked harpy, but all I could do was clench my teeth and grunt in agony.