How to Ride a Tikbalang Ch. 09

Their first attempt to drive back to the capital was smooth, with very little traffic once they got out to the SCTEX road connecting the Central Luzon provinces of Pampanga and Zambales to the North Luzon Expressway.

Cocoy was at the wheel and singing along to some of the new songs from Lintik Records' newest rock bands. Kidlat was watching him from the passenger seat with hooded eyes, admiring the bayot's strong jawline as he sang and moving hungry eyes over the rest of the gorgeous man. The bayot's voice was a thing of sublimeness, full of emotion but in complete control of every note and nuance. Just hearing it made Kidlat relax just as much as it turned him on.

It seemed to soothe Sinukuan and Jinx, too, as the women settled into their conversation about Jinx's origins.

"A diwata is born when there is a need for her," Sinukuan began explaining. "In your case the need was to give the US government a reason to leave its bases in Clark Field and Subic Bay. Our gods may be forgotten, but they never forget. You do know you were born just as the long-term lease for these facilities was coming to an end, yes?" The rest of her words were less audible to the two males in the vehicle as Sinukuan broght her head closer to Jinx's.

Kidlat's eyes shifted to the rear-view mirror so he could watch Jinx as she conversed with Sinukuan, her hands flying with a sign language all their own. He loved how expressive those hands were, with their graceful, talented fingers—fingers that played his body the way an accomplished virtuoso would play a Stradivarius violin. So he let his eyes wander between both his lovers, a smug grin crawling across his face in all its lopsided glory as he resisted the urge to take himself in hand and distract his bayot and his diwata. Not time to be the bad boy, Kidlat, you'll get your opportunity soon enough. Think about something else.

You lucky fucker, he mused with a smile ghosting across his lips. Other people would kill to have such gorgeous people in their lives, in their beds. You'd better find a way to thank your grandparents for this.

Kidlat sat back and closed his eyes in fervent thanks to the powers that be, lost in a rare moment of pure bliss—just as Cocoy slammed on the brakes.

"Putangina!" Cocoy yelled as a buzzing black cloud enveloped the SUV. "What the goddamn hell is this?!" Several more invectives bounced about the inside of the vehicle cabin, uttered by everyone in a cacophony of surprise and anger.

Locusts as big as Kidlat's size 14 shoes swarmed the windows of the car, their bugged out eyes and prickly appendages grotesque and ominous.

These were not ordinary locusts. They were just too big and misshapen, with swollen red bellies and overlarge black mandibles. Even with the vehicle at a standstill, the vermin splattered across the windows and windshields, leaving slime-trails of dark ichor to sliding down the glass.

"By the Old Gods, what arcane shitstorm is this?" Kidlat's question came out shaky and loud as he cast a look to the back seat, toward Sinukuan.

"I have one other enemy on the loose," Sinukuan said, her golden skin paling to a sallow tone as she spoke, her tight control on her voice betrayed by the thinned line of her lips. "The mambabarang who worked with Bulalakaw has yet to face us. He's probably the one sending this plague upon us."

Sinukuan was careful to avoid speaking her enemy's name out loud. You only uttered the true name of a mambabarang when you were ready to face him or her and counter every hex the maleficar could throw at you and, with this one, that was a list long enough to rival the phone books of yesteryear. That kind of thing would take time to do, even for her and for Jinx. They would need the help of Cocoy and Kidlat after both males come into their full power. For now, she would bide her time. Better slow and thorough than quick and raw.

"Then let's get you to safety," Jinx said as she squeezed her eyes shut tight. Insects of all sorts made her skin crawl and she couldn't stand them, not even the sight of them. "That maleficar must be sending these things after you."

Cocoy nodded and attempted to inch the SUV forward slowly, praying he didn't rear-end someone in the process, praying no one rammed him, either. The SCTEX was not for slow-moving vehicles and he could hear the passing traffic.

"No." Sinukuan's voice was strident, but clear as a bell, and her dark eyes shone with a hard glitter. "No. We turn back. Those locusts could be headed for the plains near Arayat. There are farms there and the people will starve once those monsters get there and begin stripping their crops of corn and rice."

"Look, respected diwata," Kidlat began to speak, but he was cut off by the rumbling ground beneath the car.

"No, you LOOK," Sinukuan said, the pupils of her eyes glowing red-gold as molten lava, her voice coming in eerie multiple layers of sound and tone as she looked at each of her three companions. "We return to Arayat and destroy those abominations or I will trigger my volcano's eruption to do that job. Either way, the locusts will be gone."

"Whoa, whoa, don't blow your stack, lady," Cocoy muttered. "Letting Mt. Arayat erupt is overkill, isn't it? There is no record of it ever erupting and, if Mt. Pinatubo is any indication..."

"...Mt. Arayat's eruption would be a shitstorm we can't outrun, yeah," Kidlat finished Cocoy's sentence for him. "And we can all still die—well, maybe just the two of us with the dangling participles between our legs."

"Then turn this car around and bring me back to Arayat." Sinukuan's voice brooked no argument and her scarred skin began to glow ominously red as well.

"But won't it be better to seek out the asshole who unleashed those vile things instead?" Jinx's question was partially muffled by the hands she'd brought up to her face and she was shaking uncontrollably in the back seat. Now it was Sinukuan who held her in a comforting hug.

"Shhhhhh, young one," Sinukuan said. "We need to go back. We will find the mambabarang once we thwart this attack. Please, my people are my life—and I don't care how much hurt I've taken from their ancestors. They don't deserve this."

Cocoy looked to Jinx, who pulled her hands from her eyes and nodded reluctantly, and at Kidlat who sighed heavily and nodded, too.

"All right, then. Can someone clear the front windshield, at least?" He turned on the wipers to clear some of the glass in front of him as he looked back at Kidlat, who had begun to lean closer to him. "I have to see where we're going or we won't be going very far before we crash into something."

"Do you see that golden hair just above my right ear?" Kidlat asked Cocoy.

"Now?!"

"Just pull the damn thing you stubborn bayot," Kidlat's exasperation was just not within containment now. "Because you need to pluck it and boost your priestly powers. You're the one who can cast the counter-spell to this—infestation."

"I don't know the counter-spell, bitch!"

"You write songs that rhyme. You can make one as you go, bitch!"

"Okay, boys, I'm pretty sure neither one of you has the proper equipment to be a bitch," Jinx said as calmly as she could. "Cocoy, just do as Kidlat says."

"Amputa naman." Cocoy's cussing was both surrender and impatience. "Fine." He reached out and plucked the golden hair standing out against the rest of Kidlat's red-brown waves, wrapped it around his forefinger, and pulled. "Now what?"

"Now you visualize the most powerful memory you have of protecting someone," Kidlat said. "And let the words flow. Visualize the locusts getting sucked away from the car."

Cocoy closed his eyes and recalled that night he'd realized he was bisexual, when he'd been mulling over it as he was on his usual evening walk around Malate: A boy, no older than 15, was being beaten up by a semicircle of street toughs who were jeering at him and punching him for being a sissy gay.

Cocoy had pulled the bullies off of the youngster and taken him to safety at the nearby Aristocrat restaurant, where he bought the youngling a meal, called the boy's parents to fetch him and waited until they did.

Then the words fell into place in Cocoy's mind, an incantation imbued with the power so many people say words have. And then some. He could feel energy leeching from both Jinx and Kidlat to mesh with his words, though he couldn't for the life of him tell how that was happening. The air in the vehicle cabin and cockpit crackled in the confined space.

Bathala, you've granted me

Eyes with which to see.

Grant me now the power

Of a mighty flame-thrower.

Burn these disgusting things,

Remove all their ichor,

Pull away their wings,

Drain away their vigor.

Open a path for us that they now veil.

Ensure we will not fail.

I am bayot, I hold the power of the male.

I am bayot, I hold the strength of the female.

Hear my prayer, listen to my chant,

Grant me what I ask, fulfill my want.

The golden hair coiled with burning heat around the index finger Cocoy pointed to the windshield and the monster locusts began to drop from a suddenhaze of lightning-laced heat haze, their bodies hewn from their wings. The ichor on the glass was swept away by sheets of sudden rain.

Drawing a deep breath, Cocoy felt the surge of power through the marrow of his bones, radiating outward from his fulcra point, pushing the rest of the dying insects away from the SUV in a bubble of heat and electricity. The pa-pa sounds were just like the mosquito zapping devices he used in his home, but bigger and more disgusting.

"Marshall the surge, bayot," Sinukuan cautioned from the back seat. "You can't use it all up in one go. You still need to drive. You can refill the tanks once we get to Arayat with your lovers."

He didn't need telling twice. Cocoy gunned the motor and made his way to the nearest exit ramp and made his way back to Arayat like hell's hounds were on his heels. Sex at the finish line. He set a goal for himself. Sex, glorious sex. Hey, he was still a guy, bayot status be damned. At least thinking with his other head wasn't going to be a bad thing.

***

Drawing to a stop just inside a small clearing in a semi-cricular copse of trees by the roadside at the foot of Mt. Arayat, the two diwatas, the tikbalang and the bayot alit the SUV and looked up to the darkening sky. Huge swarms of the monstrous locusts began to converge in a massive and sinister cloud of buzzing plague over the rice and corn fields spread out before them.

Sinukuan and Jinx put their heads together, communicating non-verbally. The diwatas' eyes were the color of ash and lava again, their bodies glowing strangely in the shadow of insectile doom. They held hands and spoke in low tones, in a sing-song medley of layered voices and the earth began to rumble and gently shake speaking a tongue neither the bayot nor tikbalang could comprehend.

Cocoy was walking to the females when Kidlat put a hand on his shoulder.

"Stay back, 'Coy," Kidlat warned. "Let the diwatas do their thing. You made sure they got back here, so let's wait for them to ask us if they need anything, okay?"

"Then what?"

"Well, for starters, this," Kidlat turned Cocoy around and laid a wet, hot kiss with lots of tongue involved right on Cocoy's open mouth. He ground his hips and groin right against Cocoy's, not stopping when he drew his lips away. Hard tarugos were engaged in the mother of all dry humps. "We've started our own ritual, man. There will be payment after this and we'd better get a head start on it." Emphasis on head, Cocoy noticed.

"You tell me this now?"

"Well, that's how the cards fell."

"This is so not the time to be horny, tikbalang."

"Tell that to the marines, bayot mine. This is the time when we actually NEED to be horny. The diwatas will draw power from us, just like vibrators draw power from batteries."

"Motherfucker. You had to make that comparison, didn't you."

"Yup. Mother-fucker, no. Lover-fucker, yes, you hot prime-cut of man-flesh you. Did I forget to say we need to be horny for this shit to work? We need to be horny."

Cocoy made an exasperated eye-roll, all the better to downplay the uncomfortable tightness in his pants. "There better be a good ending to this. Later tonight."

"Oh, I am sure we'll get a happy ending, don't worry. Sooner rather than later" Cocoy wished right then and there he could clobber Kidlat's grin off that handsome tikbalang's GQ-model face. Then the maddening creature just had to nip his earlobe and suck on that sensitive spot right above his collarbone that made his knees turn to water.

Kidlat caught Cocoy and righted him. Then they both adjusted themselves with impatient hands and returned their focus to the diwatas who were busy calling clouds of hot ash to the impending infestation of abominable locusts blotting out the sun.

***

"Focus, my dearest," Sinukuan was saying to Jinx as she stood with legs apart and arms up in the air, where her long hair floated and crackled with electricity. "You only want enough heat and ash to kill the pests. We don't want to scorch the crops. It is too close to the harvest for the people to replant those fields."

"Trying..." Jinx said, assuming the same position. Both diwatas had their eyes on the locusts, which began to drop from the sky like heavy rain. She drew in even breaths and slitted her eyes. Wherever Jinx looked, the ash-clouds she summoned went, killing insects as it passed.

The females were at this for an hour before they made a sizeable dent in the locust cloud. They continued until every last huge-mandibled monster was downed and the ground was covered ankle-deep in their carcasses.

Jinx looked to the space where Cocoy had parked the SUV and saw that the men had gotten in—or at least she saw Cocoy in the cockpit, his head thrown back and his face scrunched up in pleasure or in pain. Maybe both. The sweat on both of them told its own tale. The tikbalang and the bayot were teasing each other mercilessly, stroking, licking and stimulating erogenous zones without coming. Their balls must be so blue by now.

"Your men are doing what they should be doing. The sexual tension and energy boosted our own power and gave you the control you still need to learn to command," Sinukuan told her gently, looking in the direction of Jinx's gaze. "Let me check on my people while you check on your men, hmmm? I will be back in two shakes of a cat's tail. But signal me with an ash cloud—you will one to form in your hand and toss it up to the sky—if you need more time and I'll wait an hour more before I return."

With a cocked eyebrow and a benevolent smile, the scarred diwata made the most tactful exit stage left she could, waving her clenched left fist in three concentric circles and vanishing into thin air, presumably to check the nearest farm.

Jinx knotted her brow, puzzled how Sinukuan did that, then shrugged. I'll learn that soon enough. For now she was more concerned about Cocoy and Kidlat so she strode over to them.

"...Fuck, Kid, yes, tang-ina, yes... Sweet Mother Mary, when will you let me come, you filthy bastard?"

It could have sounded convincingly tortured, Cocoy's sultry voice, but for the moan of undeniable pleasure it carried. There was a roughness to it that matched the tight grip his hand held Kidlat's hair in as the tikbalang prince leaned in through the open driver's side door to lick and bite at Cocoy's nipples and up and down his undulating torso.

Jinx saw that Kidlat also had Cocoy's dark curls gripped tight in his right hand, his left shoulder working in a way that told her the bayot in the driver's seat was getting a very rough (and very pleasurable) hand job: His hips and ass lifted up off the driver's seat and back down again, working in a frantic but futile rhythm.

She stood back, unwilling to interrupt the free show in front of her, letting her kipay soak her panties, uncaring if she also soaked the jeans she'd unconsciously been opening at the fly. So she burned the unfolding man-loving into her brain, a memory she'd probably touch herself to ever after. They looked so gorgeous and graceful despite their desperation—and hot as her lava and ash.

Cocoy was out of his mind with arousal, the slight pain in his scalp and the bite of Kidlat's teeth on his neck, nipples and chest redlining his desire. "Pump me harder, Kidlat, make me come."

"Not so fast, amigo," Kidlat said on a husky laugh as he bit on Cocoy's earlobe, then licked a hot line from there to the bayot's bellybutton. "I like watching you like this. You aren't in charge now. I am. I want to come, too, but not until we have Jinx between us. Yield and I will let you come eventually, you delicious bayot, you."

Kidlat's tongue laved the crown and glans of Cocoy's weeping ari and Cocoy went cross-eyed, his words converted into frantic gibberish that drew light, gravelly laughter from Kidlat's husky throat. A lick across the slit of Cocoy's tarugo had the bayot melting and groaning all over again in incoherent desperation.

"Ay!" Jinx's feet slid on the slime of dead locusts and Kidlat turned his head in her direction without losing the rhythm of the hand he was still using to pump Cocoy's angry erection.

"Come over here, diwata of ours," Kidlat beckoned. "Come and join in the fun, sweet goddess. Suck me while I make Cocoy go insane. This is such wonderful fun."

"Fuck you."

"Eventually. Patience is a virtue." All Cocoy could answer were Kidlat were growls and grunts. Maybe the names of saints.

Kidlat was standing in space that was free of the ugly insects, and Jinx had absolutely no problem getting to her knees and extracting the tikbalang's huge cock from his pants as she straddled his thigh, the heat from her puki searing him through two layers of heavy denim as she slowly humped his leg.

Jinx spat into her palms, rubbed them and took him in a two-handed grip, twisting her hands in opposite directions as she worked them up and down, her eyes locked with Kidlat's as she rubbed her hot little kipay all over his thigh.

"Mmmmm... fuck, yes, Jinx, screw me like that, babe." Kidlat released Cocoy's hair and, with that now-free hand, sought a soft breast to caress and squeeze a hard nipple.

Kidlat resumed licking the head of Cocoy's aching cock, offering it to Jinx for a lick or two while their bayot banged his head against the headrest of the cockpit seat and thrashed in desperation for the orgasm Kidlat wasn't letting him have yet. Heaven and hell in his groin, and Cocoy couldn't for the life of him choose to end the sensual torment or beg for more.

"Motherfucker, I need to come you son of a bitch, fucking suck that cock or jack it off but stop goddamn teasing me, you two, fuuuuuuuck..."

Cocoy's hand searched for and found Jinx's other breast and he began to tug and roll the nipple that popped up between his fingers. He needed a distraction, or a connection. His brain was short-circuiting.

This, just as Kidlat began to suck him down past the back of his throat and swallow successively, moaning as well because Jinx was now on her knees beside the vehicle giving him the same treatment. She reached between both men to fondle their ball sacks with deft fingers while frigging her clit against Kidlat's shin, groaning around his shaft as she did this.

The trio was suspended in this elongated moment of shared ecstasy where space and time ceased to exist as they came within seconds of each other. Kidlat felt something like tendrils of energy wrapping around his heart—two distinct energies that took hold like creeper vines and dug in as they clung to each other in their bliss.

***

Cocoy, Jinx, Kidlat and Sinukuan resumed their journey in the dark, making it to Balintawak in Quezon City just as the rush hour ebbed to a dull throb of red taillights on the most congested highway in the country. Traffic was slow, but it was moving.