The Devil's Pact Pt. 43

* * *

Mark Glassner

Much, much later, the party in our room had ended. Alison and Desiree, their children, and grandchild, retired to the sluts' bedroom to continue their celebration. I lay in bed with my wife pressed on one side, my mother on the other. Mary's hand idly played with my chest hair.

"How are things between you and Betty?" Mary asked my mom.

I could feel Mom tense for a moment and then sigh. For the last few months, I heard there was some friction between my mom and her wife. It was noticeable that Betty hadn't accompanied my mom to the celebration.

"Getting better," Mom answered after a moment. "She's almost forgiven me my indiscretion."

"It was only one village girl," Mary said dismissively. "Hardly worth her getting upset over. And those Latin women can be quite... feisty."

"Betty isn't as comfortable with an open relationship," my mom answered. "She doesn't mind if it's within the family, but she made it clear to me years ago that anything else is cheating." I saw hurt, self-loathing, and disgust flicker across my mom's face. "Maybe I'm just not cut out for monogamy. I cheated on your dad, and Maria was hardly the first village girl who found her way into my bed. I get weak sometimes, especially when I'm apart from Betty."

"She knows that you love her, right?" I asked my mom.

"Of course she does," Mom sighed. "It'll sort itself out." She shifted, then casually asked, "And how is Chase doing?"

It was Mary's turn to stiffen.

"Well. She spent some time in a village on the Jordan in what used to be Israel, but her relationship with a local boy seems to have fallen apart. She walked south into Saudi Arabia, following the coast," I answered. "Quatch is keeping tabs on her since she's in his territory."

"Like that fat friend of yours is good for anything," Mary muttered just loud enough for me to hear her.

"What was that, Mare?" I asked.

"Hmm?" She had a look of innocence on her face. "I didn't say anything, hun."

"Right, you--"

A force reached into my soul and seized the golden power, the Gift, buried deep inside me for these last forty years. It seized the Gift and ripped it out of my spirit. I screamed in pain at the sudden loss, writhing on my bed as the power left a bleeding hole in my spirit. Mary's anguished cry barely penetrated the fog of pain.

I collapsed back onto the bed, awash in the pain that suffused my entire being. For an eternity that lasted a heartbeat, my existence became agony. Torture. I could almost feel the hellfire burning across my being.

Then it ended. My Gift was stolen.

My breath came in ragged gasps. I felt drained and sluggish. I didn't feel as strong as I should. My body didn't feel as graceful. My enhanced strength, reflexes, and stamina provided by that golden power were gone.

What just happened?

"Chereb!" I shouted, holding out my hand, expecting my Celestial blade to appear.

Nothing came.

"What's wrong?" Mom gasped, staring at the two of us.

* * *

Mary Glassner

"What just happened, Mark?" I demanded, my heart pumping, my body trembling from the pain ripped from my soul.

Mark shook his head, his body outlined in a faint... red. The shock slapped me. I concentrated and his aura sprang up red. Not the bronze of a Shaman, but the red of a Warlock. His blue eyes widened as he stared back at me. My body trembled in realization. Emotion swirled through me, squeezing my throat, shaking my body.

"It's gone, Mark!" I sobbed. "Someone stole our Gift!"

"What does this mean?" Mark asked me, his arms engulfing my trembling body.

"I am completely baffled, sir," Sam replied an hour later as our inner circle met in the Matmown in the mansion's basement. It reeked of musk; the air was thick with dust. We hadn't needed to use the shielded room since the Demon Wars ended. "I didn't think it was possible for the Gift to be stolen outside of the Ganubath ritual. And that didn't happen, right?"

"Definitely not," I snapped. After the shock passed, anger filled me. I felt violated. My soul was raped by some entity. "Someone's attacked us!"

"Maybe we should reactivate the Legion, mi Rey," suggested Desiree, our Secretary of War.

"They've been disbanded for twenty-five years," Mark said and sighed. "They're all in their fifties and sixties. The only combat-ready troops we have are the Bodyguards. And there's only three hundred of them."

Thirty years of world peace had negated the need for soldiers or even police officers. Everyone on the planet was under our command. Mark and I had ordered them to be good, to love each other, to never commit a crime.

"We should warn the Districts," 51, Chief of the Guard, said. "I'll start recruiting more to the bodyguard. We do have a class of fifty in training every year in case we have any losses from accidents. We could easily do six classes a year. I'll have the guard doubled by this time next year."

"Do it," I said.

"Let's reactivate the Legion," Alison added. "We can use them to train fresh soldiers."

"How are we going to arm them?" Jacob, Secretary of the Treasury, asked.

Rachel, one of his wives, sat next to him and nodded her support. "We mothballed most military hardware decades ago, letting the materials be used for the restoration. There's, what, a plant that manufactures small arms for the bodyguards? That's it."

"And there's the matter of transporting so many troops," Leah--Jacob's second wife, and our Secretary of Transportation--said. "Our fleet of airplanes is not large enough to mobilize entire armies. And Boeing only has one manufacturing line any longer. It would take years to ramp up production to build more than a few airplanes a year."

"There are boats," Mark's son Silas, Assistant Secretary of Transportation, pointed out. "We have plenty of freighters."

"Those are slow," Leah countered. "If we need to move troops rapidly, that will not be good enough."

"Master can make Portals," Lillian, Secretary of Energy, stated. "And so can Mistress. We used them during the Demon Wars."

"For small troop movements," Mark said. "It takes too much time to move more than a battalion through Portals."

"We're forgetting one thing, Mark," I said, my voice growing tight. "The Gift. You can't use the Ragily prayer any longer. Do you even have the Legion's loyalty any longer?"

I could see the realization crossing my husband's face. He said, "Mary's right. We can't afford to arm anyone not bound by the Zimmah ritual. Anyone else could be turned by a nun."

"Then we must be vigilant, Master," Violet, Secretary of Agriculture, declared after a moment of silence. "We should let the clergy be our eyes and ears. There is a church with a priest or priestess in every community. We should rely on them to inform us if anything unusual happens. Otherwise, we may be jumping at smoke."

Violet's wife, Cindy, nodded in agreement.

"She's correct, Master," Jessica added. "We have the entire world on our side. Even untrained, that is a lot of manpower we could hurl at the situation. A nun can't get that many of them."

"That's a little cold, Jessica," Korina, Secretary of Education, objected. "We can't just throw defenseless men and women at the problem."

"No, we can't," I said, tone firm.

In an emergency? Mark asked me telepathically. We strove never to contradict each other's commands in public. In the first few years of our marriage, that had caused a small amount of friction.

I glanced at him, not liking this one bit, but... Perhaps in an emergency.

"We'll do it only as a last resort," Mark stated.

I gave an agreeing nod.

"Maybe we should summon Karen?" Sam suggested.

"It will have to be the old way," Mark said. "Without the Gift, I can't summon all the ghosts to fight for me."

A grimace flickered across Sam's face. "Maybe you should do it, sir. You are stronger than us. Last time I did it..." She shuddered; Candy patted her hand.

Unfortunately, when I summoned Karen, she was equally baffled. All she could say was, "My sight has been obscured in this matter. Heavenly forces move once more, Master."

Chapter Five

I loved my parents. But I could not be complicit in their acts. I could not benefit while mankind labored beneath their yoke. For a year I preached, I spread the word, I gathered those freed into an army to destroy my parents' Theocracy. Every day I hoped, I prayed, I yearned for another way. "Maybe," I would tell myself, "I can talk to them. Maybe this time they would understand."

--excerpt from 'The Tyrants' Daughter: An Autobiography' by Saint Chasity Alberta Glassner

June 6th, 2054 - Mark Glassner

It was after midnight when I stepped through the portal into the mansion. I had just left Paris, where my little sister, Antsy, administered Europe with Via, her wife. They had captured a few agitators. The last few weeks, a strain had cracked across the Theocracy. People were snapping out of our control, questioning our authority, and trying to lure people to gatherings.

It was worrisome. It seemed in the year since Mary and I lost our gifts, a few Nuns had begun roaming the world and freeing Thralls. Though 51 had delivered on her promise, doubling the bodyguard, it wasn't enough. We couldn't police the world with six hundred. They were spread thin as it was, a unit protecting my Governors as well as the local Bishops who shepherded the faithful in the fourteen Administration Districts. Twenty-eight different places to guard, in addition to our Mansion and the Cathedral, the ecclesiastical center of the Church. It stretched 51's forces to their limits.

"My Lord," Pearl bowed as I entered the mansion.

Pearl had served as our Chief Maid since I founded them forty years ago. Her charges curtsied as they welcomed me home. One took my jacket, damp with rain, while a second handed me a warm cup of tea. I admired all my maids' practically exposed breasts beneath their transparent blouses, and fondled a pair as I drank my tea. It warmed me up. Paris had been miserable, a fierce thunderstorm drenching the city.

"Where's my wife?"

"Your bedroom, my Lord," Pearl answered. "She was still up the last I knew."

I handed the cup to Pearl and strode through the mansion. The bodyguards who'd accompanied me to Paris all headed off to their barracks. One of them kissed a maid, her wife, with some passion, pulling the maid along with her.

A pair of bodyguards stood at attention flanking the doors to my suite. They saluted; I gave them each a grope, bringing a smile to their faces, then went inside. A pair of maids leaped to their feet from chairs and curtsied.

"My Lord," they both said as they stripped me out of my wet clothes. I gave each a kiss and squeezed their naked asses before opening the door to my bedroom.

"I thought you'd be asleep, Mare," I said when I found her reading a book; one of the Twilight novels. I never understood how she could read that insipid trash over and over.

"I couldn't sleep after returning from Honolulu." Mary sighed and closed her book. "While I was meeting with Alice and her husband, the bodyguards found ten of these... agitators. A Nun has definitely gotten her hands on them."

I crawled into bed with Mary. I still had mixed feelings about Alice, even if it wasn't entirely her fault for shooting me over forty years ago. That aside, she had tried to get Mary to break up with me. Well, I didn't have to like my wife's friends, even if one of them ruled Oceania for us.

I gave my wife a kiss. She snuggled up against me, her naked breast and hard nipple pressing against my muscular chest. I enjoyed the feel of her as she got comfortable, her auburn hair brushing my shoulder.

"There's definitely more than one Nun," I said after a few moments enjoying the silence with her, the feel of her against me. "The three agitators my sister caught were all exorcised from our control. Worse, I couldn't reassert my power over them. They resisted my commands. Some new prayer is protecting them from my wish."

Mary sighed. "The same in Honolulu. So at least two nuns are out there. And that's assuming one of them is Tina. Maybe Doug gave his Gift to a woman?"

I hadn't thought of Doug and Tina Allard in years. Once, Doug worked for us. We sent him to Europe to kill an old enemy, and the nuns got a hold of them. He and his wife, Tina, received the last two Gifts. A single Nun and Monk. For forty years, we'd never found them. I thought they must have died trying to kill a warlock or perished in the chaos of the Demon Wars.

Forty years...

"I doubt Doug would let a woman murder him just to add one more nun into the world," I pointed out.

"Right," Mary nodded. "That stupid 'forgive your killer' clause the monks have. That still doesn't make sense to me."

When a Monk was killed, he could choose to give his Gift to his killer. It was the only way they could pass on their powers. It seemed ridiculous; how could you forgive your killer? It felt like the hardest thing to do in the universe.

"Anyway, I think I know what happened last year," I told her. "The Gift was returned and then given to new people. I mean, there was once a time when no one had a Gift. There has to be a way to spread it anew. Something Doug and Tina spent forty years preparing."

"Have you been talking to Sam?" Mary asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

"Nope. I came up with this all on my own."

"Sure," she nodded.

"I did," I protested.

"Fine. You figured this out all on your own. I believe you." She giggled, girlish playfulness animating her face for only a moment. Then the cares of the world crushed it. She sighed. "Well, that would explain where these nuns are coming from. But how did they do it?"

"Well, Doug and Tina have the original copy of the Magicks of the Witch of Endor, right?"

"I believe that's what Maryām told me. It has been forty years, but I think that's what she said." Mary shifted. "That would mean there's, what, one-hundred and forty-four new Monks and Nuns out there."

"So why did they choose now to come crawling out of the rocks?" I groused. "What happened last year to change the status quo?"

Mary gave me a kiss, rubbing her body against me. "We can worry about that tomorrow. You do remember what today is?"

"What?" I asked, struggling to think. The days had all bled together.

"Why am I not surprised?" Mary rolled her eyes. "Just like a man to forget an important date. We met forty-one years ago, today. You made your Pact, then walked into the coffee shop and swept me off my feet."

"Technically, I met you the night before on my way to making a Pact. Then I came in and swept you off your feet the next morning." I smiled, drifting back to those simpler times. "You were so beautiful as you stood trembling before me. Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened if I had never read that book I found in the library. Would we even have met?"

"Yes," Mary declared. "We're soulmates. I talked to Azrael about that, years and years ago. Surely I told you?"

It was my turn to shake my head.

She gave me a look. "Are you getting senile in your old age? I'm sure I told you."

"Sorry."

"Well, it was during the Baal-zebub campaign," she shrugged. "I seem to recall that was pretty hectic."

That was an understatement. Baal-zebub had retreated from his stronghold in Austria to Switzerland. It had been such a mess to break through those passes into the Alps. I could still remember leading troops through Gotthard Pass and the bloodbath at the Devil's Bridge. Alison had broken the tide that day, leading her commandos up the cliff face without any climbing gear.

"Anyway, Azrael told me that Lucifer nudged you into summoning him, and that caused you to meet me a few weeks earlier. Apparently, I was going to catch my boyfriend cheating on me, and then I'd bump into you, and it all would have fallen into place." She sighed. "I bet Chase wouldn't have walked away if we were just normal people."

Mary was right; if we were normal, Chase would never have run off. Too late for that now. We were in too deep. If we freed the world, they would be howling for our blood. Mary and I had worked too long and too hard to escape Hell; we weren't about to lose it all now. Sure, I was immortal, but Mary could still be killed. She was only young and healthy for as long as I lived, but that wouldn't save her from getting shot in the head.

"I miss her, Mark," Mary said, her eyes beading with tears. "How long will she hate us? It can't be forever, right?"

"No," I said, my stomach clenching. I missed our daughter so much. I cupped my wife's face, pulling her to me.

I kissed her and shared my grief. I pulled her atop me, holding her. That grief transformed inside of me into a desperate, longing ache. Something visceral and vital. That need to share my life, to feel that most primal of sensations, the most necessary of acts.

Her lithe body writhed atop me as our kiss grew hotter and hotter. Her lips were so sweet. So teasing. So hot on mine. Her perky breasts rubbed against my muscular chest. My hands slid down her supple back to her plump ass. I gave her cheeks each a squeeze, loving the feel of her rump. She moaned into the kiss, wiggling atop me. My cock, iron-hard, throbbed, pinned between our stomachs.

Our kiss grew more and more passionate. Her tongue dove into my mouth. I kneaded her ass as she whimpered. My fingers caressed her flawless skin, delving into the divide between her plump butt-cheeks, caressing her hot flesh.

She broke the kiss, staring down at me with dewy, green eyes.

"Forty-one years," I groaned, stroking her auburn hair, "and you still excite me."

She gave me a wicked grin that dimpled her cheeks. "Mmm, feel how wet I am for you."

My fingers exploring her crack reached farther down. I brushed past her asshole and her taint to the shaved lips of her vulva. I rubbed across her pussy. She drenched my hand in her sweet, spicy juices.

Her hands went exploring, too. She found my hard cock, stroking it as she kissed me again. I fingered her pussy while she pumped up and down my dick between us, holding herself up just enough to fist my shaft.

My fingers nuzzled into her pussy as I groaned. Her tongue danced with mine as we shared our passion. Our love. The pleasure spilled down my shaft while her pussy clenched down on my dick. Her eyes squeezed shut as she whimpered.

Then she broke the kiss and lifted her hips. She brought my cock to her pussy. I ripped my fingers out of my way. I wanted to feel her passion with a different part of my body. She rubbed my cock up and down her silky vulva until she found the entrance.

"Mare!" I groaned as she engulfed me.

I trembled as she slid her pussy down my cock. It was the place I loved to be. The best place in the world: inside my love. Her snatch clenched down hard on me as she groaned, her back arching, her round breasts swaying just above my body.

I cupped her left tit, enjoying the perky firmness as she slowly rose up my cock. I thumbed her nipples as she worked her pussy up and down my dick. A soft sigh escaped her lips. Her liquid passion bathed my shaft.

"My horny stallion," she whispered, pressing her forehead against mine; her green eyes stared down with such love.

"My naughty filly," I whispered back, lost to her depths. My soul could drown in them while my body drowned in the passion of her pussy working up and down my cock.

I grasped an auburn lock, pulled her lips to mine, and kissed her tenderly as she slowly made love to me. I let go of the stress of today, the uncertainty of our new foe, and the questions that churned inside of me. I let it all go until only my wife, and our fervent embrace, remained.

I caressed her body, stoking her passions, while her pussy built mine. I stroked her spine, tracing up and down it, making her shiver and moan. She broke the kiss, rising up on her arms, her tits swaying and jiggling.