Gabrielle and the Devil

"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.