Lucas: Origins Of A Demon (8 page)

“Oh fuck!” Janice is gasping while Lucas lies on his side next to her, pleased that he could be of service. He has learned the curious pleasure to be gained from giving of oneself to others. He doesn’t make a habit of it under normal circumstances, but when it comes to sex, he gives of himself freely.

“You are a beautiful woman,” Lucas says, admiring Janice’s curvaceous form.

Janice rolls on to her side and puts a warm hand to his face. “And you, Lucas Rameses, are a beautiful man.”

If only you knew, Lucas thinks.

“Sorry to be a spoil sport,” he says, getting up. “But we have a club to run.”

Janice sighs, but doesn’t move from the bed. “You’re right.”

“You might want to get up then.”

“You’re a real slave driver, you know that?” There is a lazy smile on her face when she says it.

“Believe me,” Lucas says, buttoning up his shirt. “I have known plenty of slave drivers in my time, and I am not one of them.”

“Of course not honey.” Janice gets up and begins to get dressed into her black skirt suit. “But in your time? Really? You couldn’t be more than twenty-five. You make me feel like a cradle snatcher.”

Lucas smiles. “You’re not even forty years old yet. You are still a young woman.”

Janice’s almost dopey smile broadens. “You really know how to flatter a girl, don’t you?”

“I try my best.”

“Well,” Janice says, beside him now, rubbing his still semi-erect cock through his pants. “Your best is good enough for me.”

Not long after Janice has left his suite to go back to work in the club, Lucas gets a disturbing phone call from one of his newly made demon contacts in the city, a low level demon who works in one of the city’s blood dens, a place where demons could go to get high on a mixture of human blood and various drugs. “You asked me to call if I heard anything,” the demon contact says, whose name if Lucas remembers correctly, is Wade.

“Go on,” Lucas says, sitting down at his desk, fully dressed now in a tailored dark gray suit without a tie.

“A couple of demons came sniffing around the blood den,” Wade says, his voice low like he is somewhere he doesn’t want to be overheard. “Weird guys. Hairless, both looked exactly the same. Like twins.”

Or clones, Lucas thinks as he tenses up slightly and stares straight ahead at the wall. This isn’t a phone call he was expecting to get for another while yet. “What did they say?”

“Asked about a demon called Lucas.”

“What did you say?” Lucas is trying to keep his voice level, but the thoughts of having to run again so soon deeply unsettles him.

“Not a thing. They spoke to my boss, not to me. My boss says he never heard of you.”

“Then what?”

“They tortured him. He didn’t know nothing, though.”

Lucas is only half relieved. Leonard’s lackeys did not know his exact location yet, but they still somehow know that he is in the city somewhere. “Alright. Let me know if you learn anything more.”

“Sure. My fee just doubled though.”

Lucas squeezes the phone tighter. “Just keep me informed.”

CHAPTER NINE

After his visit from Ho Tepp that night, Lucas never saw the dark master again. In fact, there was word of Ho Tepp’s death not long after, although Lucas knew instantly the news of Ho Tepp’s death was untrue. Such a master practitioner of the dark arts can never die, at least not that soon. For whatever reason, Ho Tepp must have wanted to disappear for a while, perhaps become someone else. Who knew?

Lucas was too busy to care anyway. He was too busy tending to the massive intelligence network that he had built, a network that stretched to every corner of the known world at that time. Lucas was feared by the leaders of the world, even though those leaders did not know who he really was. They feared the persona of a secretive and dangerous man that Lucas had carefully leaked to the world. It would have been too dangerous for him to take direct credit for everything he had built. It would only be a matter of time before he became the worlds most hunted man. He would either end up dead, or in the forced employ of some unscrupulous and despicable leader. His own father was actively searching for the man behind all the power, anxious to recruit the cult figure known as the Dark Gatherer. King Rameses II wanted such a powerful figure at his side, perhaps to replace Ho Tepp. Though even if Ho Tepp still served the King, the King would still want the other most powerful man in the kingdom. Lucas’ father was greedy like that.

Lucas vowed never to end up by his father’s side though, not in any capacity, and certainly not as his father’s son. It was enough for Lucas to know that he now had the power to topple empires if he so wished, including that of King Rameses II. Lucas had no interest in bringing any empire to its knees, not unless he had to anyway. Sure, he used his power to influence all the time, but only to keep things balanced. If he thought a certain powerful individual or organization was over stepping their mark, disrupting the delicate balance of things, Lucas would set things in motion to have that individual or organization warned to stand down. If the warning was ignored, those in question would be quietly removed from their positions of power and replaced by someone or something that Lucas had better control over. Sometimes the offending person or persons were paid off. Most took the bribes to walk away. Those who didn’t were blackmailed into walking away, which was easy as Lucas knew every dirty little secret there was to know. On the rare occasion that blackmail didn’t work, threats of force were made, usually to the person’s family. It was a rare occasion when Lucas was forced to kill anyone, but he had done so. For the greater good, and to keep the grand scheme of things in balance, however precarious that balance often was.

Lucas was not a particularly moral man back then. His real interest in having so much power was in the machinations of power itself. He loved to work and control the delicate machine he had built. Loved to effect change whenever change was needed. In a way, he was as powerful as any god.

Which is why an actual god paid him a visit one night while he slept in his modest home in the center of Memphes.

The same god who urged Ho Tepp to pass along the Book of Universal Darkness to Lucas almost ten years before.

Isis.

At first he thought he was dreaming when he awoke and saw such a vision of loveliness standing over him as he lay naked in his bed. Standing there was a woman of such incredible beauty, his heart almost stopped when he laid eyes on her. The woman had bright green eyes that seemed to sparkle even in the gloomy light of the room, eyes that were fixed firmly on Lucas. She wore the uraeus on her head, the symbol of the cobra in the center of the headdress completely in keeping with the lithe, snake-like curves of the woman herself. Indeed, if the woman was who Lucas thought she was, she was responsible for bringing the cobra itself into being in the first place, conjured purely from magic.

Lucas shook his head. “It cannot be…”

The woman smiled. “It seems my initial faith in you was not misplaced,” she said, her voice not much higher than a whisper, but clear as day to Lucas’ ears. “You have done well for yourself, Lucas.”

“Isis?”

The woman nodded once. “I thought it time to visit upon you in person, Lucas Rameses.”

Lucas crawled forward on the bed to his knees and bowed his head to the goddess before him. “Never did I think the Queen of Magic herself would be standing before me.”

“Raise your head. You have no need to bow to me. It is I who should be bowing to you, given the power you have managed to conjure from nothing. Even Osirus has taken notice of you.”

“Osirus? But I am just a deceiver of men, Goddess. Nothing more. Osirus was a great leader.”

Isis smiled and came around to sit on the bed beside Lucas. Up close, her beauty was almost too much to bear. Lucas felt his insides melt as he couldn’t help gazing upon her. “Yes, you are a deceiver of men,” she said. “But you can be so much more, Lucas. Why do you think I had Ho Tepp give you that book?”

“I just wanted to learn the arts,” Lucas said. “For my own selfish reasons. I am not deserving of your interest in me.”

“You are too hard on yourself. Even a leader like Osirus had his flaws.”

“But I am not a leader.”

“Not yet.”

Lucas shook his head. “The throne was never my concern. Power was. I have no wish to rule these lands or any other.”

“Yet rule them you shall.” Her face was close to his. He could smell her sweet scent. It was intoxicating and he wanted so badly to taste her. “I can show you how to become King, Lucas. Your skills are too great to be wielded just in the shadows. You could be the greatest leader Egypt has ever known.”

Lucas had dismissed the notion of being King up to that moment. Hearing the words come out of her luscious mouth though, he became instantly convinced that she was right. He
should
be King. “How can I do it?” he asked.

Her face was only an inch from his as she swayed provocatively like a cobra on the bed, moonlight from the window over the bed glinting on the uraeus on her head. “As much power as you have,” she said, gently kissing him on the neck. “It is not enough.” Her raven black hair brushed against him, sending chills up him as she moved her head to kiss the other side of his neck. “All great Kings must give something up before they can claim the throne as their own.”

Lucas’ cock began to stiffen as Isis continued to plant small kisses on his shoulders, down his chest. “And what is that?” he gasped.

She pushed him back on the bed and kissed him more firmly on the stomach, moving down further with each kiss towards his now stiff cock. She ran her tongue over it before looking up at him and smiling. “Your soul,” she said, just before engulfing his cock in her mouth like a snake swallowing its prey.

CHAPTER TEN

When Lucas goes to see Dimitri, he finds the Russian-accented demon in the center of the warehouse he calls home. Dimitri is standing in front of a naked man who is suspended upside down from a rope tied to the ceiling. The man’s body is covered in cuts from the knife Dimitri is holding, which Lucas recognizes immediately as a Watcher knife, a blade made for killing demons. “Now where would you get a knife like that?” Lucas asks Dimitri.

Dimitri runs the edge of the blade across the suspended demon’s chest, causing bright orange light to seep from the wound along with the blood of the human body the demon has possessed. “Where do you think?” he says. “Some time ago, I killed one of those Watcher bastards and stole his knife. It has come in handy since.”

“I can see that,” Lucas says, looking at the demon hanging upside down. “What did this guy do to offend you?”

Dimitri shakes his head. “Motherfucker tried to sell me out to a couple of bounty hunters from the Kill or Capture Sect.”

The Kill or Capture Sect is an organization that Lucas knows well, as he availed of their services on numerous occasions during his forced residency in Hell. As the name suggests, the sect chases down rouge demons for a price. Captures cost more than killings, though most often the sects clients want their target dead, or at least destroyed and sent to the Body Shop. For a demon like Dimitri, who is on the run from Hell, the sect would be under orders from the King of Hell himself to capture Dimitri and bring him back for punishment. When it comes to deserters, no other outcome will do.

“Okay,” Lucas says. “Any chance you can just put this guy on the down elevator so we can talk?”

Dimitri gives Lucas a look. “Are you crazy? I’m only just getting started with this sludgecock. By the time I’m finished with this piece of shit, he will be begging me to send him back to Hell.”

“Can you at least take a break then?”

“We can talk here. It’s not like I have much of a crew left after you destroyed most of them.”

Lucas looks around the space inside the warehouse, sees only a couple of demons sitting in a sparsely furnished area watching porn on a large screen TV. “I’m sure you will build your crew up again. I’m counting on it in fact.”

After Dimitri cuts the suspended demon again--a long, torturous slice on the demon’s inner thigh, causing the helpless demon to scream so hard Lucas winces at the sound--he says, “Counting on it? Why is that?”

“I have some trouble coming my way soon,” Lucas says. “Mercenaries.”

“Mercenaries? Working for whom?”

If Lucas tells Dimitri the truth, that he is being hunted by Grand Duke Leonard’s personal guards, Dimitri will want nothing to do with Lucas, which would be a wise decision on his part. Leonard is one of the most powerful demons in all of Hell. Crossing the old snake would not be the smartest thing to do, even though that’s exactly what Lucas did. “I made a few enemies in Hell. One of them wants revenge.”

Dimitri nods. “Which one?”

“No one you would know.”

“Try me.” Dimitri approaches Lucas, the Watcher knife in his hand dripping with blood.

“Feroxis.”

“Never heard the name.”