Los and Regret

Returning Characters from the series.

Los: A demon of pain and sex from Hell. Summoned through the Lexicon Desirium, a book of Hell, Los fulfills the desires of those who call upon him, but always at a price.

Emily: Once a victim herself, Emily was forcibly bound inside a statue with three enormous metal pig phalluses. She died sealed in gold in Amor Patrius, only to be resurrected by Hell as a gold-skinned demon in Los and Amor.

The house had been empty long enough that the squatters had given up on it. Paint peeled off the parlor walls in long dirty tongues. The ceiling sagged.

Quinn sat on the floorboards with the book in her lap. It had taken most of the night to make sense of it, reading forward and doubling back until passages that had seemed meaningless began to fit together.

The final page held a single question.

WHAT DO YOU DESIRE?

“Justice.”

The air ripped open over the ruined rug.

Chains came first. They did not search. They knew the room.

Los stepped through after them. Black leather hanging in long panels. Old blades at the waist. Bald head. Skin the color of paper left in a drawer. Ritual cuts mapped across the face. Eyes with no bottom to them. Behind the skull, a dark iron ring held in place by spikes driven inward. Emily came with him. Cracked gold over her face, blood dried in the seams, spikes holding the fractures down her throat and chest. The torn mouth hole made her breath sound wrong.

Quinn shoved back on her heels so hard she hit the wall. The book clattered to the floor.

“What the fuck.”

Los looked at her without hurry.

“We are Los,” he said. ”We answer the call of the Lexicon Desirium.”

Quinn’s mouth opened and closed. She had wanted a result. She had not wanted this. The cuts. The ring of iron. The woman in gold who did not look like a woman anymore.

“The call,” she said. Her voice went thin. “So I can get what I want. You will do it.”

"The Lexicon asks. Say it,” Los said.

It took her a second. Fear had knocked the speech loose. Then it came back too fast.

“They killed my sister. Four of them. Everyone knows they did it. The school did nothing. The cops couldn't prove it. They're still walking around like it was a joke.” Her hands shook around the book. “I want them to pay. I want them hurt. That is what I want.”

Los regarded her the way he regarded a contract that had already been placed on the table, not yet signed.

"The four are not in the room,” he said.

"Say it where they can hear it.”

Quinn nodded. The nod was terror and hunger in the same jerk.

“Yes. Yes. That is what I want.”

“Then that is the answer we will collect.”

The tear opened behind them again. He turned toward it.

Emily stopped in the dark that was not a doorway. The jagged mask turned toward Quinn.

“I’m sorry,” Emily said.

Quinn’s throat worked. She heard the thing she expected. Pity for lost family. Pity for a girl on a dirty floor with a weird book.

“It’s not your fault,” Quinn said. “You did not do it. They did.”

Emily did not correct her.

She followed Los into the dark. The air knit shut. The book sat in Quinn’s hands, quiet, finished, waiting to be finished again.

Quinn let out a breath that sounded like relief because she needed it to. She thought the hard part was already over. She thought sorry had been about the past.

Quinn got them into the house the way a person gets dogs through a gate. Beer. A story about a squat with liquor still in it. Two of them laughed when the porch sagged. One said the place smelled like piss. The fourth hung back until the others were inside, then followed because he did not like being the one outside.

She had the book under her jacket until they were in the parlor. Then she sat on the filthy rug like she had the first time and put it in her lap.

“The fuck is that,” one of them said. “You gonna read us a bedtime story?”

The guys all laughed.

“Something like that,” Quinn said. Her hands were already turning through the pages. “Watch.”

They watched because they thought she was performing for them. They had that look. The look from the weeks after her sister died, when none of their faces changed.

It went much faster this time. She knew where to double back now, which passages only made sense after the ones that came later.

“I want revenge.”

The air ripped open over the rug.

Los and Emily came through the rift like the room had been waiting for them.

The four men broke at the same time. One of them screamed what the fuck is that. Another bolted for the parlor door. Chains snapped out of the dark and barred the way, hooks already open. He hit them full speed and the metal opened his palms and forearms before he even understood he was cut. He yanked back howling. More chains dropped across the windows and the hall and the ruined porch exit until there was no way out that did not cost skin.

Quinn stood with the book still in her hands.

“I want them to pay,” she said.

Los did not move. He watched her the way he had watched her the first time, like the words were already written and he was only waiting for her mouth to catch up.

Quinn swallowed. The hunger was still there. So was the fear.

“I want them hurt.”

“Yes,” Los said.

Emily smiled through the torn hole in the gold. She crossed the rug in two strides and took the nearest one by the throat and the belt. Her weight hit him like a dropped engine. Gold and iron and spike drove him into the floorboards hard enough that the wood gave. He tried to twist. She did not let him. She pinned his hips with one knee and tore his jeans open with the other hand like the fabric had insulted her.

Quinn watched.

The first sound out of her was not a protest. It was a thin, ugly little breath that wanted to be a smile. Dark satisfaction. They had walked her sister into the ground and laughed after. This was supposed to be the answer.

Emily did not rush the killing. She used him. The cracked gold face lowered. The ragged mouth hole found him while the spikes along her throat and chest scraped and caught. He screamed into it. She worked him with a brutal, practiced rhythm that had nothing to do with mercy and everything to do with taking. Chains slithered in from the sides and found the other three. Hooks bit thigh, shoulder, cheek, groin. They hauled two of them off their feet and held the last one spread against the peeling wall. Wet sounds started. Flesh testing. Metal through meat.

Quinn’s smile held for three more seconds.

Then it started to slip.

The man under Emily bucked and made a noise that was not language. Emily’s hips kept moving. Blood from the spikes mixed with everything else on the dirty rug. One of the hanging men tried to talk, to bargain, to say they had not meant it like that. A chain answered him through the soft place under the jaw and the words turned into a gargle. Another chain took the fourth man low and lifted until only his toes scraped paint chips.

Quinn’s hands had gone numb around the book.

Quietly, almost to herself: “No. Stop.”

Nobody stopped.

Emily finished the first one with a twist of her spiked torso that made something inside him tear. She left him on the floor, still twitching, and rose toward the next without looking at Quinn. Los had not taken a single step. He stood in the ruin of the parlor and watched the collection the way a man watches a scale tip.

The sound of chains through air and wet flesh got louder. Hooks found new places. One man lost the use of an arm in a single wet pull. Another folded when a hook came up between his legs and did not come out clean. Emily took the one against the wall next. She did not speak. She put the broken gold mouth on him and used her weight and the spikes and the chains that already held him open. His screaming went high and then broke.

Quinn’s eyes had gone wide and wet.

“Stop it.” Louder now. “It’s too much.”

They did not freeze on the first word. They finished what had already been started. When the last chain went slack there was nothing left on the rug and the wall and the hooks that looked like four men. Torn flesh. Broken bone. Pieces that had been used until they stopped being useful. The parlor smelled like iron and shit and sex.

Then it stopped.

The chains hung. Emily stood over what remained, chest working through the spikes, gold face turned slightly toward the floor as if she were listening for a pulse that was no longer there.

Quinn kept mumbling it, the same two sentences, over and over, like if she said them enough the room would rewind.

“What did I do. What did I do.”

Los looked at her.

“It is done,” he said. “Now you come with us.”

“No.” Quinn’s voice cracked on it. She shook her head hard enough that her hair stuck to her mouth. “No. That’s not right.”

Emily looked at him. “Can’t she be ascended like us?”

“She did not desire that,” Los said. “She got what she desired. Now we take the rest.”

Emily looked at Quinn.

Quinn saw it in the broken gold. Pity. Real and useless and late. The same pity from the first night, the one Quinn had mistaken for an apology about her sister.

Los looked at Emily. “Receive the flesh.”

Emily hesitated. The spikes along her throat caught the rotten parlor light.

Then she turned toward Quinn.

Emily came at her slow.

Quinn could not make her legs work. Fear had locked her in place on the filthy rug with the book still stupid in her hands. Emily’s cracked gold face tipped, studying her like a thing that had already been priced. A spike along Emily’s wrist kissed the front of Quinn’s jacket, then split the zipper and the shirt under it in one long, almost careful drag. Fabric fell. The next pass opened the jeans. Emily did not rush the rest. She peeled Quinn down to skin, and when Quinn tried to cover herself the gold wrist knocked her hands aside and left them there, useless, on the dirty wool.

The cracked gold edge of her cheek tracked Quinn’s collarbone, then the underside of a breast, then the soft give of her stomach. A spike laid flat, not cutting, and drew down until it rested on Quinn’s clit and stayed there. Quinn’s breath broke. She still could not move. Emily’s fingers opened her just enough to feel the heat and the shake of her body.

Heat came off the cracked torso in a sheet. Quinn felt it before she was touched.

Emily put Quinn on her back.

Hot gray slop came out of the torn gold mouth and hit Quinn’s wrists first, then her ankles, then a band across her hips. It was concrete, wet and burning, and it grabbed the floorboards like it had been waiting for wood. Quinn jerked. It held. The heat soaked in. She could turn her head and that was all.

The men were still there. What was left of them. Torn meat and snapped bone and the dark wet places Emily had used.

Emily took Quinn’s jaw with two fingers and turned her face toward the mess.

“Say what you wanted.”

Quinn’s mouth shook. “No.”

“Say it.”

“I wanted them to pay.” It came out wrecked. “I wanted them hurt. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want this.”

“This is the kind part,” Emily said.

She put two fingers into the torn hole of her own mouth like she was calling a dog. The tear over the rug twitched. Chains went into it and came back with weight.

What hit the floorboards had been a pig once, if a pig was the size of a horse and cast in dirty metal. The head was gone. Most of the shoulders were gone. What was left was the barrel of the body, split down one flank, a haunch, and the cock, still standing because that was the part the years had cared about. Fist-thick. Blunt. Dark iron polished to a sick shine where a body had been made to take it and take it and take it. Old concrete clung in the seams of the haunch the way blood clings in a nail bed.

Emily set a gold hand on the snoutless wreck like it was a friend that had waited in the hall.

“He’s not so bad,” she said. The torn hole made it almost fond. “You get used to him. He kinda doesn’t give you a choice.”

She looked at Quinn. The spikes along her throat caught the light again.

“I had three.”

Quinn understood too late. The sound she made was small.

Emily dragged the remnant in between Quinn’s bound knees. The metal cock laid on her belly first, heavy enough that Quinn felt the weight in her spine, cold where Emily was hot. Emily spit through the torn mouth onto the blunt head. The spit steamed. She added a smear of the same gray slop that held Quinn to the floor, working it down the iron with two fingers like she was priming a tool she still dreamed about.

Then she put him where he belonged.

The head was too much. Fist-sized meant she had to give before it could take him, and it did, a bright ugly stretch that made Quinn’s mouth open on a sound with no word in it. Emily fed him in the way the statues had fed themselves, no rush and no mercy, a steady shove that taught the cunt the old measurement an inch at a time. Quinn’s body tried to crawl up the rug. The concrete at her hips said no. Halfway in she started crying for real, ugly, the kind that had nothing to do with the four men anymore.

“I know,” Emily said. She did not stop. “The going in can be scary. After that he just is.”

It buried itself in her. The blunt head punched deep and stayed, a plug with a pig still attached to it, the split metal haunch resting heavy on Quinn’s thigh. Quinn was full in a way that made breathing a problem. The iron did not give. It did not warm unless Emily warmed it, and Emily put her cracked gold over the wreck and bled kiln heat down the shaft until the metal inside Quinn was not cold anymore. The warmth turned to heat.

Emily straddled Quinn’s belly. Her own cunt came down on the ridge of the pig’s cock, gold plate grinding on old iron and Quinn’s pussy, and she used both of them. Short strokes shoved the metal cock deeper on every pass. The unarmored strip of skin at her hip dragged Quinn’s belly. A spike at her ribs scored a shallow line under Quinn’s breast when she leaned, and she corrected the angle instead of leaning harder. She needed the flesh to answer the way hers once had.

Quinn made a sound she did not want. Emily took it with a gold palm over her mouth and let the pig keep working into her, kept grinding herself on the girl, until her own breath went ugly through the torn hole. She came first. Quiet. A clench that ran through the cracked metal and down into the iron like the statue had been waiting for her to finish on it the way she used to.

Then she slid off the wreck and down Quinn’s body.

Not to feed. To open the way around what was already in her.

The torn mouth covered Quinn only long enough to find the stretched rim and the iron sitting in it. The tongue that came through the hole was hot, and it licked once around the metal, a tool checking that there was still room for what came next. Quinn clenched on pig and tongue together. Traitor muscle.

“I had this in me,” Emily said against her. “It is how I lived.”

Quinn tried to say stop again and only got the first letter out.

Hot concrete erupted from Emily’s mouth around the shaft and straight into her.

It filled what the pig had not already taken, a thick scalding push that packed the walls against the iron and left no room and no air, a sudden wrongness with weight on top of weight. Quinn came on it anyway. Hard. Ugly. Her whole body seized against the bonds and the orgasm tore through the fear and the wish and the sight of the four men and left her shaking and sobbing and clenched around stone and a fist of old metal that did not move when she did. It was not pretty. It was her finishing the file with her cunt because her mouth had already signed it.

The concrete on her wrists and ankles let go at once. The pig did not. The chains took the remnant with her, iron still seated, haunch knocking against her thigh as they hauled.

Wrists. Throat. The meat of her thighs. The rift was already open over the ruined rug. There was no speech and no second chance and no ascension. They pulled her through, leaving what remained of the four men on the floor behind her. Then Quinn was gone.