It'd looked like a usual haunting, until they'd found the portal to hell. That had been fifteen minutes ago, by his phone, and he'd spent most of that running for his life from the alarmingly corporeal demon that'd pulled itself through the portal by its shining obsidian claws. That was most of the reason he was hiding in a tiny, dark, _musty_ closet, listening to the demon scrabbling through the room on the other side. Ghost hunting had sounded so appealing when he'd started, too, and this was how it was gonna end: getting his soul eaten by some freakish demon. Super. Calvin closed his eyes, but that didn't help. The auras around him snapped into focus: his own, dingy blue-yellow and expansive; Diane and Jason two floors down, sick green and bubbling hot pink respectively, and most pressingly the colorless void of the demon right past the door, twisted in on itself and _sharp_ in some indefinable sense, like it was a hole opening into a meat grinder. His talent was seeing auras. Diane's talent was actually _fixing problems_, since she was the one taking all the Introduction To Multiverse Theory (Practical) classes. It wasn't unusual to have him distract various vengeful specters while Diane sanctified their bones or unbound them, just — just there was a certain upper limit to how unpleasant a ghost could make your life, whereas with the demon it was definitely shaping up that his body was just the crunchy shell around his soul. He knocked his head back against the closet wall, freezing after the dull _thud_ of impact was a lot hollower than he expected. Hollower, and _louder_ — the scrabbling in the bedroom stopped for a second before starting up again, like there were knives being scraped all over the floor, slowly converging on the door. "Fuck", he said, and then "God, please let there be a secret passage." He twisted around, fingers scrabbling over the flaking drywall, looking for a latch or a lever or something. The door rattled against his back, followed by a low growl about an inch from his head. He hadn't gotten a great look at the demon, but he was pretty sure it didn't have, you know. Thumbs. And the doors were solid rowan, which meant that it was _probably_ limited to just clawing through it — and another grating scratch rung out, showing that yes, that seemed to be exactly what it was doing. It was close enough for its stench to seep through the door: something like rot and disinfectant, that made everything wobble when it hit the back of his nose. "Come on, come onnn," he said, tugging at the coat-hooks on the wall as the screech of claws carving through wood got louder and louder. Something clicked and the whole back wall sagged back, old drywall peeling off in sheets as the hidden door opened. Calvin scraped through the narrow opening, slamming back against it until it sealed with a click. He leaned back against the bare lathe, breath puffing in front of his face, and the displaced air came back with cobwebs attached, fluttering down his face. He flailed, and when an angry growl came from directly on the other side of the wall he screamed, taking off at a run. The secret passage was awful. It was cramped and near pitch black; the only light was from cracks in the drywall from who-knew-which rooms. He blundered face-first into dusty cobwebs, yelping and thrashing and careening back and forth off the walls, desperately hoping that the itch going down his back was just sweat and not whatever had been living in the webs. If he had the breath to sarcastically mimic Diane and Jason, he absolutely would be. "We can work together," she'd said, and Jason had clapped him on the shoulder and said, all smug-like, "with three of us we might even be able to keep you from getting into trouble all the time," and oh, how they'd laughed. Jason was supposed to be the muscle; a psychokinetic; _he_ was the one who should've been distracting the demon. Admittedly, he'd been the one to _open_ the portal to hell, but given that the other two weren't walking "on" switches for everything paranormal they didn't really get how difficult it would've been to _not_ open it. Maybe it was just that he was running down a shadowy secret passage in a crumbling and demon-infested Victorian house, sweaty and scraped-up and generally miserable, but he wasn't feeling charitable about his past ideas _at all_. Past him had been an idiot and it was going to be his fault when he got eaten by a demon in a few minutes. The problem had been getting into the ghost-hunting business in the first place. The next wall he hit sagged under his weight, and then something snapped, unceremoniously dumping him out on his ass into the conservatory, all full of dead plants. He sat there for a few seconds, gulping in cold, fresh air, with the tiles chill against the feverish heat of his hands. "Christ," he said, "This is awful." Diane & Jason's aura's had faded into points, and the demon's had gone all fuzzy, the way they did when he was trying to look for something he didn't really know the shape of, but it was definitely still moving towards him. He scrambled up, looking for something to slow the demon down with, but he ran out of time when he reached the center of the room: the secret passageway door exploded apart, and the demon prowled out from the darkness. It was a blot of darker shadow, and when it stepped out into the center of the room it grew under the moonlight streaming down, a living shadow distorted and enormous. It crept closer, low to the ground with an animal shape. It was moving slower now that it had him cornered. Great. Seeing it clearly for the first time really didn't give him a good feeling. It was the size of a small _horse_, and very roughly dog-shaped — or hyena-shaped, maybe — and hazy at the edges, black smog peeling off in clouds, but it was unmistakably a solid thing at the center. It left huge rents in the floorboards behind it as it advanced, obsidian claws tearing right through the wood with sharp, splintering cracks. It didn't have any eyes in its head, just a featureless shadow-plane that ripped open in a ragged tear, zig-zagging gashes of shining obsidian teeth, drooling black smog. "Great," Calvin said, backing up slowly, hands raised. "Is there anything I can say to get you to _not_ kill me?" he tried. Ghosts were pretty nice about that kind of thing. Ghosts he could usually _talk to_. The demon lunged, and Calvin yelped, windmilling backwards, tripping over his own feet. His ass hit the tiles and they caved in under him, old boards gone rotten. He fell down through the floor, weightless for a second before the impact drove every thought from his body. --- He woke up into darkness, painfully aware of his pulse through some sharp-feeling gashes on his side. There was a wetness under him; he was bleeding freely enough that thinking about it made him woozy, but he'd always had a bad mind for... blood. His shoulders and back were bruised all to hell. He ran a hand over his skull; it didn't hurt, which he was taking as a good sign. Touching the gash was a bad idea, but it didn't hurt that much — his hand came back slick and a little sticky, and he just... made sure not to look at it. It took a second for him to remember why he hadn't been expecting to wake up at all. His pulse shot up; it throbbed along the gash in his side. He was in a dark room, light coming in from the hole above, but not enough to illuminate anything around him. Some basement. Probably not the same one he'd opened the portal in. It was a big house. He tried to focus on auras again, closing his eyes, but that was a mistake. Everything was warped, auras spun out into interweaving spirals, sickening as they spun around him. All he could get out of it was distance: Diane and Jason, far; demon, closer. If he'd been standing up he would've fallen over; as it was he gagged and dry-heaved, drool heavy in his mouth. Yeah, that was definitely the start of a concussion. "Great." He tried to get to his feet, only to have everything go swimmy when he sat up, and his body listed over, shoulder hitting the floor with a painful jar. He bit out a curse, lying there gasping for a second before everything settled down. "Fuck. Fuck." His voice was mumbling and fast, hissing through the still air. "There's a stairway behind you." Calvin started so hard he slammed his shoulders back into the mess of broken spars behind him. "Jesus fucking Christ!" he yelled, and then the demon stepped from the shadows, its body just one more black shape in the basement. Its voice was a dry snapping and crunching, or like dry twigs crackling before they were burnt up — almost accidental that the sound made words. "You can talk," Calvin said, dumbly. The demon looked right at him, with its eyeless head and serrated mouth yawning open. It barked. "You can talk and _you're a smart-ass_!" "I ate your dreams," the demon said. "That's really creepy. And... it doesn't really tell me anything." Calvin was all but panting in fear, and it was really sad that this was actually firmer ground for him. Being the decoy meant talking to the vengeful spirits; he'd gotten a bit used to intensely uncomfortable situations with incredibly creepy things. This wasn't even on the top ten list of creepiest situations. "You're not gonna eat _me_, right?" "Thinking about it." Its tongue lolled out, and then it _branched_, less like a tongue and more like a questing antenna, a quirked finger reaching out through the shadow-mass of the demon's body. "Call it a weird human foible, but it would be really really relaxing to me if you'd tell me you're not gonna kill me, okay?" The demon took a step forward, and then another, until its forelegs were bracketing Calvin's legs. He tried to move back, hissing in pain as his shoulders pressed against the beams. He pushed at it with both hands, sinking through layers of shadow-substance until they crashed against the solid wall of its shoulders; the demon didn't even budge. Its shadow burned hot and cold across his palms. The demon's mouth opened wider, shadowy drool dripping out and hissing over his skin. He squeezed his eyes closed, turning his head aside in a whimper, a certain fatality filling his mind: this was it, he was so fucking dead. "I'm not gonna kill you," the demon said. Its breath washed over Calvin's face, stinking of something rank and metallic. He could feel the grinding of its teeth, resonating through his chest where its body was closest to him. Calvin just gasped for breath, fast and sharp. "Fucking Christ," he finally said, wheezing. "You're such a smart-ass." The demon snorted and stepped back, and Calvin wobbled from the effort of not just toppling over. "Also, your pupils are uneven; your dumb ass is definitely concussed." "How do you even know that?" In the wake of the adrenaline rush Calvin just felt weak all over, arms and legs trembling. Even the mortal terror felt washed-out. He gasped for breath. "I've got to stop smoking so much," he said, struggling to sit up. "Here:" the demon said, and pushed its muzzle under his arm, shadows burning across his side as he levered himself up. "I _said_, I ate your dreams." "What, and I was dreaming about how to identify the symptoms of a concussion?" The demon's lips curled up. "I might've nibbled on a few other things while I was in there." It gave him a once-over look that was both unsettling sexual and unsettlingly _hungry_. "You're tasty." "God, I wish you were the first terrifying paranormal thing to say that to me." It was a side-effect of his aura thing. More specifically, the aura thing was a side-effect of having what was apparently (scientifically speaking) a really delicious looking soul. It was bigger than usual, or at least, it had been before it'd gotten nibbled on by more than a few spectres. Regrowing part of your soul, he could say from experience, sucked. Calvin wobbled, tottering around the wreckage behind him, one hand skimming the beams for balance. "Come on, if—" His phone rang, and he cut himself off. "Hey." "Oh good, you're still alive," was what Diane opened with. "It's great that was in doubt." Calvin cut his eyes over to the demon, looking on with a grin. Or it was baring its teeth. He really wasn't sure if it was operating on human or dog body language, given that it was nowhere close to really being either. "Please tell me you figured something out." "Head to the library; we found Mr. Anterbery's secret room full of demonology tomes. I mean, you don't _sound_ like you're still running from a demon, so." "Yeah, about that." Calvin said. "...Anyway, I fell into the basement; it might be a while. Be there soon." "Seeya." Calvin turned to the demon. "So I figure you have no clue where the library is either, right?" "I didn't get a floor map when I ripped through to your dimension." Calvin tottered to the stairs, hands windmilling as he tried to keep himself upright. The burning-cold touch of the demon against his side was almost comforting. "Yeah, so, like, enjoying the prime material plane so far?" The demon's teeth shone brighter in the light as they shuffled up the stairs, each one like a twisted obsidian dagger, complex patterns lighting up along their surfaces. "Oh yes," it said. --- They were actually fairly close to the library. At least, "fairly close" when the main manor had four separate wings. Calvin's concussion was... not great. He kept meandering down the halls in a wobbling line. The demon nudged him back in a straight line whenever he came too close to falling over his own feet, and then kept him upright when his rolling nausea peaked. It was seriously the size of a small pony: its shoulders came up to his chest, and its head was perfectly level with them, like some kind of dire wolf. It stretched and grew unnaturally every time they walked past a bank of windows. His concussion was pretty mild, and, again, there was so, so much wrong with his life that he could rank this head injury against the many others he'd had in the past. It wasn't great, but something like "inability to form short-term memories" would've been a _lot_ worse, given the situation. No shit he was glad the demon didn't want to kill him immediately, because there was no fucking way he could do anything about it. "Don't give me ideas," it said, and that was when Calvin realized he'd said it out loud, mumbling into its fur. Not that it had fur, exactly, just shrouded layers of shadow, smoking up from its body. Its rot-and-disinfectant smell was a hundred times stronger draped over it, the fertilizer burn stench making his coordination even worse, dizzying and potent as he sucked in breaths. "Is this getting me high?" he said, twisting his head and almost toppling over. "This is just gonna make things worse, Jesus, I'm a danger to myself." "I don't think it's the concussion that makes you a danger to yourself." "Cute. Seriously, though." You could do all sorts of shit with ectoplasm, and as far as he knew no one'd looked into this specific kind of bizarre demon ichor. He didn't even know what kind of demon, _specifically_, this one was, which was another worrying thing on top of a pile so high he'd stopped caring. The demon coughed, or laughed, maybe, something hacking and awful. "Don't blame me for the shit your neuroreceptors do with shadows." "I've had a shadow my entire life, thank you very much." "Cute," the demon said, baring its teeth. He supposed they made quite the pair, stumbling — well, him stumbling — into the library side-by-side, a gawky stoner and his pet nightmare demon thing. "It's a lot closer to _you_ being _my_ pet," the demon said, under its breath. "I'm _concussed_!" Diane loudly cleared her throat, and Calvin started and slid forward. The demon just let him fall right onto the library carpet. "So, I might've run into the demon!" Calvin didn't move from the ground, staring up at the ceiling. "Also, I have a concussion!" He knocked a loose fist against the demon's foreleg. "Hey, dude, you weren't just using me to lead you to the other humans so you could eat all of us, right?" There was a pregnant pause. "You guys, look, the demon can totally talk." The demon growled, low. "No, look, you're totally not gonna Michigan J. Frog this shit, come on." Calvin kept hitting the demon's legs. "Speak, boy." The demon snarled, shadow peeling back to reveal rows of spiky teeth, black drool hissing as it hit the carpet right next to Calvin's face, black fumes burning as he inhaled and making him feel all floaty. "Don't call me _boy_. Or dude." The demon's tongue lolled out and licked Calvin's face, leaving behind a greasy black streak over his cheek. "I'd eat you first, anyway." "That's super encouraging!" Calvin gave it a thumbs up. "Seriously, don't eat me, though." Jason actually yelped when he stepped out from the recessed hidden library, staring at the demon and then at Calvin. "Is he really—?" "I'm real impressed by your lack of a self-preservation instinct," Diane said, Calvin yelling "You should be glad you got such a good decoy!" over her. "Well, _one_ of you has definitely charmed the other," she continued. "No bets about which one, yet." She sighed. "How about I show you, _Calvin_, the stuff we found, and _you_, giant demon, stay back so I don't have to use my emergency banishment kit." The demon's lips pulled back, and a chainsaw growl rolled from its throat, Calvin just patted its shoulders as he stumbled to his feet. "Hey, Cujo, cool it." He weaved over to the table Diane had covered in ancient, gross-looking books, trying to focus enough to see them. "Hit me with the exposition, I'm good for it." Diane rolled her eyes. "So as it's now _extremely clear_, Mr. Anterbery was a Satanist —" "LaVeyan, not Gnostic," Jason clarified, unnecessarily. "— and when he established the estate, he did so with the express purpose of building a soul-trapping battery to aid him in demon summoning. As you can see on his copy of the blueprints—" "Wow, that's super illegal," Calvin said, slumped over the table; everyone else ignored him. "— he's placed astral wells through the floorboards, concentrated on a structure in the basement that he called a 'demon pylon', to be used to 'attune the aether to the foulest of the demon realms, and so call forth the most profane demon to conquer the world'." All of them looked over at the demon, who made an elaborate show of wagging its tail. "I'm not _that_ foul," it said. They looked at each other. "So, chances on this thing actually being the demon?" Diane asked. "Why are you looking at _me_?!" Calvin said. Jason piped up. "You're the one all buddy-buddy with it, man. Please tell me this isn't like Casper." "This isn't— you said you wouldn't bring that up!" Casper — _not_ his actual name — had seemed like such a friendly ghost, up until he tried killing all of them as part of a plan to steal Calvin's body. Sometime before the killing part he and Calvin had... been in a situation where he'd learned that ghost jizz tasted gross, but not entirely objectionable. "When I said that, I was assuming you wouldn't _do it again_!" "Listen," Calvin started, except: The demon leapt up on the table, sending tomes flying. They pretty much all screamed. Diane and Jason jumped back, because they actually had survival instincts. "Yo, I don't like being _ignored_," the demon said. "_Down_," Calvin said, patting the edge of the table. "Seriously, no animals on the furniture." The demon snarled, teeth an inch from Calvin's face, legs poised to pounce. "Call me a dog again." "It's like—" Calvin started, and then it actually did pounce, bowling him back with a "mother_fucker_!" He hit the ground and stayed there, his arms pinned between its splayed claws, the demon snarling above him, drooling black down his hoodie. "How about you get off him," Diane said, leveling her fucking consecrated athame at the demon's head, its aura sharp enough to give Calvin a ringing headache. The demon didn't seem to like it either, flinching back and snapping at her hand. "Woah, settle down, come on—" Calvin started. "You're really telling _me_ to settle down?" Diane looked pointedly at him, pinned under the bulk of the monster. "I like to envision the good in all the things we come across," he said, sanctimoniously. "Also, he didn't eat me when he had the chance!" "Oh yes," the demon said, voice barely comprehensible under the buzz of its growl, teeth scraping against each other. "I'm _nice_." "How about we start by getting off the useless stoner," Diane said. The demon snarled again, waiting just long enough to make it seem like it wasn't doing it _because_ Diane had said so. It seriously reminded Calvin of a cat. "'Yeah I can totally help with fights'," Calvin said, snidely, before rolling over and trying to push himself at least up to his knees. "'Those ghosts won't know what hit them.'" "Don't worry, next time I'll just flatten the both of you." Jason cracked his knuckles. Much like Calvin's whole aura thing, Jason's psychokinesis was a pretty blunt tool. When he'd been a kid, Calvin had been super hype to have a magical superpower, but it turned it was pretty useless in practice. "_Children_," Diane said, long-suffering. "Y'all wanna stop posturing and actually listen?" "No," Calvin said, voice muffled by the carpet. "Let's keep posturing." "_Yes_," said Jason and the demon, almost in unison. Jason looked over at it and blanched. "Short version, because god forbid you stop creating problems for long enough for me to give a full explanation." Diane picked up one of the books the demon'd sent flying and put it on the desk with a thump. "The house is a ghost trap; a few months ago it finally got enough energy stored up to power Anterbery's demon portal; he planned on binding his spirit to the demon's body and, I don't know, conquering the world?; if we want to _do our job_ we need to disable the trap glyphs and then free the ghosts, so there won't be anything left to power the hell portal." Diane slammed the book shut again. "_Questions_?" she said, in a voice that very much implied the answer should be "no". "No, we're cool. Super cool. Frosty." "Good." Diane paused. "I hate to say it, but we should split up. We need to get that portal closed as soon as possible, before anything _else_ comes out." Diane looked over at them, Calvin bruised and slumped against the demon's flank, his cheek smeared black with shadow ichor. "Uh, are you really good to—" "It's cool." Calvin patted the demon's side, barely even flinching as it twisted around to snap at his fingers. "Spot here can help me out." "Christ. Look, there are glyphs hidden all over the place; _we'll_ take the front two wings, _you_ can take the back, and don't get killed." "Sounds great," Calvin slurred into the demon's side. It was embarrassing. --- Two floors up and half the mansion away, they were walking down a creaking hallway, moonlight spilling in through the open doorways on the right side of the passage, turning everything silvery grey. The carpet was a rich crimson in the beam of Calvin's newly-acquired flashlight. The demon stretched under the beam, impossibly massive, painted in two and a half dimensions across the floor and walls. Calvin stopped shining the flashlight in its direction after the first time. "So this is cool, right? Much better than trying to kill me, right?" The demon looked at him — or at least, it pointed its muzzle towards him. "Might be," it said, and pulled its teeth back. Calvin made a face and listed to the side. "I really don't know why I ask questions I don't want to know the answers to." "I think you might wanna ask more." "What did I just say, come on." The demon twisted under Calvin's hand and he went toppling to the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust from the hallway rug. "Dude!" "I already said, don't call me 'dude'." The demon's lips were pulled back as it paced towards Calvin, boxing him against the wall, its forelegs digging into his skin of either side of his waist. Black drool dripped from its mouth, steaming when it hit the carpet, splattering over Calvin's hoodie. "Uh, good doggie? Come on, we were doing so well!" Calvin said, holding his hands out. "We were," the demon said, words almost incoherent under the snarl. It was drooling and hungry, sides heaving in eagerness. Its hot breath wafted over Calvin's cheek. "I was gonna eat you up; body and soul all at the same time. You look delicious." Black slime painted a burning trail across Calvin's cheek when the demon pushed closer. "A fucking _feast_." "But you got an interesting mind," the demon continued, and Calvin flushed, already knowing where this was going. "That means no eating me, right?" His voice was a little shrill, catching in his throat every time the demon shifted. "Depends on what you consider _eating_," the demon said. When it bowed its head Calvin's first thought was it was just gonna bite right into his guts, ripping under his ribcage, but— the demon's tongue lolled from its mouth and dragged a heavy, slobbering swipe over the crotch of his pants, and then again, cupping against the mound of his dick. "Are you _serious?!_ Jesus Christ!" Calvin punched at the demon's shoulders, as ineffectual as before. "You're such an asshole; if you wanted to gimmie a BJ you could've just" and he hitched, the demon's slobbering tongue lapping across his soft cock, dragging his words out into a sharp moan. "Asked," he finished, weakly. His face was hot, his cock shifting under the demon's tongue, slowly filling out. It paused between laps, tilting its muzzle up like it was looking up at him. "I like this better." It punctuated with a lazy swipe, the thick furl of its tongue catching against his cock through his jeans. "You smell better when you're terrified." "Glad I could fucking _oblige_. Christ. I need to stop fucking weird monsters." Even without the licks, his cock was still thickening, tenting his jeans in an overt bulge, clear through the sodden material. The rank smell of the demon flooded the air, heavy and almost musky. "And you like it," it said, with a growl that went straight to Calvin's cock. "Not fair, just because you read my mind—" Calvin said weakly, voice fading into a cracked whisper as the demon shifted down, lapping over the head of his cock. "I _really_ shouldn't do this." He reached down and popped the button in his jeans, tugging the zipper down. "You're really fucking hot." He had a really fucked-up danger response. Instantly the demon was on him again, the flat point of its muzzle digging into the soft flesh of his stomach, tongue pouring hot drool lower, matting down his pubes. Its tongue slapped over his bare skin, tip dragging at the waistband of his stretched underwear. "Such impulse control," it said, voice muffled but not as much as you'd think. Calvin whined as its tongue folded against his cock, the burn-chill of its touch shocking through him. Its broad tongue swiped along his shaft before it pulled tighter, and Calvin shoved his jeans and boxer-briefs down to his thighs, letting his cock loll out. It was — obscene, in more than a few ways, the featureless dire-wolf head split open, its shadow tongue lapping out over the nightmare of its teeth, smearing goo all over his skin. It smeared thin, darkly translucent, pooling pitch-black in the divot of his hips. His skin tingled, buzzing hot under the sludge. "This is _really_ not gonna last long." Calvin kept one hand on his hoodie, tugging it back against his skin so he could stare down at the demon slobbering, his cock slotted neatly between two jagged obsidian spikes. He was flushed, cockhead vividly red even under the slime, his entire body prickly with sweat, pulse spiking each time the flat edge of the demon's teeth rubbed against his shaft. His cock twitched in its mouth, oozing pre — not that he could tell, outpaced in an instant by black slobber. Its breath rolled out in a hot wash, rank rot breath billowing up his chest. It was barely even a minute before Calvin was whining, hips arching up as he rocked into the demon's mouth, whimpering with each slobbery lap. The demon's tongue flexed, coiling around his cockhead and squeezing, and that was it: Calvin gasped and rutted up, cock spurting into the demon's mouth, coating its tongue with a splash of white for a brief second before it was drowned in dark drool. The demon kept licking, coaxing out more thin dribbles of jizz until Calvin was limp in its mouth, cock absolutely soaked in black sludge. "Holy shit," Calvin said, thumping his head back against the wall and gingerly trying to keep his hoodie from touching the sludge smeared across his stomach. The demon pulled back, letting Calvin's cock fall with a soft splat against his thigh. "My turn," it said, and when it lifted its head there was a clear line of sight to its haunches; Calvin's gaze snapped to between its hind legs: its cock shone with more shadow-sludge, the very tip peeking out from a sheath. The heat in his face grew, until he could feel his pulse. He hadn't even realized it _had_ a cock. "Oh god," he said, voice cracking, just staring. It mounted his face. It reared up, hind paws dug into the rug beside him, its forelegs tearing straight through the wall above, and suddenly its cock was right in front of him, shining with sludge. Drool pattered in his hair, thin strings dripping down from the demon's panting muzzle. The shadows wrapped around its body were thick along its underbelly, in dark bands, smearing in flat lines across its sheath and outlining the hanging swell behind that could only be its balls. Calvin reached for its cocktip, fingers squelching under the layers of shadow-sludge. Like his touch was all it took, muscles — muscles? — in the demon's stomach clenched and went lax, and the length of its cock unsheathed itself in a long, liquid gush. It hurt to touch, but he kept his hand on it, bringing the other to bear as more of it spilled out, milking it for runny spurts of black pre. Slime shot across his face, hot-cold and burning, pinking his cheeks even more as squirts drooled down over his jaw, and then its cock itself slapped down, smearing up his forehead and into his hair, matting it to his scalp. And all this in the middle of the hallway, the two of them the only thing to see in the entire long length: him backed against the wall, the demon hunching and lurching above him, drooling and spurting thin black slime across his face. Seeing him lean in and start eagerly sucking on its bloated dog cock. Calvin really hoped no one'd have reason to come up here. The demon's hips jerked, pulling back enough for its shaft to drag back down over his face, ending with the tip pointed right at his mouth, dripping rank dog slime into his mouth, all rotten and foul-tasting. Calvin whined, high in his throat, and sunk forward, mouth hanging open, sloppily kissing the tip eager and open-mouthed, pulling back with sludge dripping over his lips. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, just tracking a huge greasy smear all the way up to his elbow, and kissed it again, lips pursing around the barely-there ridge of the tip, tongue curling up to press against the flanged underside. The demon's cockhead pulsed in his mouth, spilling rank slime over his tongue, liquid enough to spill right out past his lips. Its cock was massive; cockhead like a fist in his mouth; fingers not wrapping all the way around its shaft, and long enough he could fit the head in his mouth and still easily have enough left over to pump two-handed. The demon could've fucked his mouth, rocked forward and forced the entire thing down his throat — and fuck if that wasn't a thought that had his cock twitch and thicken — but it just rocked forward, barely even thrusting, letting Calvin kiss and suckle on the very tip. The demon's roar rumbled through him, vibrating his bones, and Calvin moaned into it, bobbing forward and pulling back, sucking on the demon dog's tapered cockhead. His hands pumped its monstrous cock, down to the sheath and then up, sloppy with the slime overflowing his mouth and drooling down the shaft, building up into a gummy well of sludge, ringing his mouth dark. He swallowed, demon pre burning down his throat. Calvin took his time, only sucking on the head and pulling back, coaxing out strings of pre between the demon's cock and his mouth, snapping when he pulled back to drool down his chin, watery and rank. He lapped over the underside of its cock in imitation and its body buzzed, growling low, until he took the tip back into his mouth, lips aching as he slid past the pointed tip to where the shaft grew fatter. The demon was leaking like a faucet, gushes plumping his cheeks and overflowing his mouth, and he had to pull back, let it coat his face, so he could swallow, gulping the foul sludge down. His hands crackled as he stroked the shaft, fingers completely coated, hands streaked in thin black lines down his forearms. It was simply dripping too much for him to keep up; even swallowing as he suckled on the head he had to let his lips go slack, watery demon-dog pre drooling over his lips — and down its cock, and over his chin, and dripping down on his soaked hoodie. He pulled off with a long, gulping slurp and instantly caught a burst of slime between the eyes as the tip popped over his swollen lips, pre beading in his eyelashes and streaking down his cheeks. He slid his hands all the way down to the base of its cock, where the shine vanished into the matte black shadow of its sheath. Below that — he could feel its knot in its sheath, barely swollen but still there, thick and bulging, rock hard, and below that its balls, monstrously huge, too big to do anything other than drag his hands over. Calvin swallowed again, gulping down the mess that'd drooled into his mouth in the mean time. His lips parted just-barely around the very tip of its cock, enough for it to spurt right across his tongue, so much that it spilled over his lips between swallows. His hands milked the base of its cock, squeezing its knot and stroking fast and short before its sheath. It pulsed larger in his hands, in tiny fractional jerks, filling out slow. He felt drunk: dizzy from the shadow fog burning into his lungs; from the endless sea of drooling pre he was swallowing down, burning hot in his stomach. Everywhere the slime touched prickled, shuddering waves of heat roaring across his body. The demon's knot burst from its sheath in a gush of black sludge, painting a shiny-wet splotch all the way through his hoodie, soaking into his skin underneath. He moaned, open-mouthed, sinking on its cock until the tip jabbed against the back of his throat. The angle was all wrong to try deep-throating it, the cock rock-hard and inflexible under the slickness of pre; he gagged and sputtered, squirting bursts of pre around its shaft, splattering down over his body. The demon growled, cock kicking harder as Calvin gagged around it, knot swelling heavier under his hand. His own groan was lost, throat convulsing, lips twisted up in a grin — as much as they could twist, spread to splitting around the demon's jaw-crackingly thick shaft. He stroked down, both hands together, hitting its knot with a sharp _slap_ and a spray of black water, again and again as he faux-knotted it, slowly spreading his hands around the heft of its knot until it was cradled in his palms like a burning ember, painfully hot and swelling larger, pushing back as he squeezed down. The demon threw back its head and _bayed_, the noise completely inhuman and not much animal, cracked and stuttering, ripping out like a shockwave. Its hips hunched, fucking just an inch of its cock back and forth through his lips. Its knot swelled with each uneven heartbeat, inexorable: his fingers seamed apart, further and further until his fingertips were barely touching, both hands barely sufficing to contain the bloated swell of its knot. Calvin'd thought it couldn't get any more messy, already pouring slime in a constant stream, but when the demon came it was like opening the floodgates. Its cock kicked, skewing in his mouth, and its jizz lanced out, the first spurt bulging his cheeks and then some in a half-second, like someone'd poured a full glass of water into his open mouth. The shit was _thick_, too, gummy and heavy, like a solid mass. He tried to swallow; gagged as the second shot bubbled into the messy slurry filling his mouth. Black slime erupted over his lips, splashing in all directions. Thick slime burned up through Calvin's sinuses and drooled in huge, sluglike blobs from his nose, barely even adding to the mess streaking down his face. He choked and gagged, pulling off just as its jizz went from tar-thick to thin water. Acrid cum poured over the thicker morass caking his tongue, just washing thin over it, and he choked down the gummy, chunky mess, eyes tearing from its acid burn. The demon hunched forward, rutting its cock over his face, hosing him down all over again with its rank dog jizz. His face was completely covered in streaky film, hair matted to his skull in clumps. It didn't even _stop_: its knot was locked into his hands, and it was gonna keep coming until the tie was over. Calvin sputtered and gasped, eyes closed, mouth open, drooling dog jizz, face hosed down over and over with watery spurts. It took him a few minutes to even realize he could _let go_, fingers locked around its knot and only unwillingly creaking out of position, leaving the demon's cock to bob in the air, each pulse of cum heavy enough to send a shock of recoil through its shaft, knocking it up to squirt the tail of each shot across his forehead. It dismounted him, claws tearing from the wall above him, and came down over him with a crash. It was still coming, black jizz spraying over his stomach, over his hard-again cock, and Calvin just arched up against it, pasting their messy stomachs together. Its mouth yawned open, tongue flapping out to lick through the mess caking Calvin's face, slurping into his mouth in an obscene kiss, swallowing down Calvin's desperate moan. Calvin rutted against it, arching up into its shadow-body until it almost enveloped him, shadow like fur covering his entire body. His cock rubbed against the void of its underbelly, its cock squirting across his hip. He came again with a wet, muffled moan, lips spread around the demon's tongue, sucking on it like a replacement for its cock, swallowing black drool indistinguishable from its load. Calvin slumped down, eyes blown, expression dazed and invisible under the sluicing mess of dog jizz, letting the demon just hose him down with the dregs of its load, from waist to head saturated in shadowy sludge, looking more like a black shadow himself than a human. "Fuck," was the first thing Calvin said, watery and breathless. The demon just sat on its haunches, cock still sticking out, dripping black slime onto the carpet. The carpet around Calvin — and the wall — was sodden, streaked grey-black with its jizz, spreading into an oily puddle under him. Calvin swallowed, the acid taste of the demon's jizz still heavy in his mouth. His stomach hurt, over-filled with shadow ooze. His hands skidded on the slime under him as he tried to push himself up, and he listed to the side, shoulder hitting the ground and leaving a black smear. "Wasn't that better than murder?" the demon said, grinning down at him, close enough the final black drool of its load spurted across his arm. Calvin finally managed to shift himself up, hand clutching at his stomach. "You sure all that shit isn't gonna kill me?" Now that he wasn't getting more slime pumped into his mouth, it was more clear just how much _he_ was drooling, body salivating like wild trying to flush the foul sludge out. He swallowed. "Well, not _immediately_. It's good for you." "Super." Calvin struggled out of his hoodie, zipper jammed and fabric matted to his arms; under it he was wearing a t-shirt that had been yellow but was now a patchy black, sticking to his skin. His skin burned where the black jizz had soaked in, something that made his skin hot and flushed, blood rising to the surface. "God, that was a bad idea." "You liked it." "Well, _yeah_, but..." "I could fuck you, right now," Its voice hissed in his ear, even the wet crunch seeming sultry and seductive. Calvin whimpered. "You're such a fucking bad influence." His cock, smeared black and splattered with his own load, was already showing signs of life. He sighed and shied back, stuffing his cock back in his jeans, and making a face at the wet squelch, sludge oozing between his thighs and saturating his underwear. "After we take care of the ghosts. Help me up." The demon nosed under one arm and stood up, dragging Calvin with him. He tied his hoodie around his waist, painfully aware of its wet slap when he let it fall across his front. His legs wobbled when he tried walking. His concussion had faded, replaced with the dizzy, stoned feeling of demon jizz; either way he was _not_ steady on his feet. Calvin looked at the mess where they'd fucked, oily ooze spreading over the floorboards in shiny waves; the carpet slowly going black. He tried wiping his face and just smeared the mess further. "Christ, what a mess. Gonna blame this on ghosts." --- After that, the _ghost_ part was simple. There were huge, intricate ghost traps in the bedrooms, painted on the floorboards under each bed. Calvin spent a minute or two raggedly prying out floorboards until the sigil broke for the first one; after that the demon just tore its claws through them, though even that turned out to be unnecessary — the sigil burst apart the second it stepped into it. Calvin just... wasn't gonna ask, what the hell kind of thing the demon was that it could do that. In the final room, the demon looked aside, prowling through the closet and en suite while Calvin got down and tried to clean up the broken boards, sifting through them for parts of the sigil he could read. "Sure you don't want to take a shower?" the demon said, abruptly right next to him. Calvin started and slammed his shoulders against the bedframe. "It's like you're asking me to get killed in some gruesome horror movie cliche," he said. "Oh, I think I'd find something better to do with you than _kill_ you," it said, pacing around him, tongue lolling out, cock peeking between its haunches. The throb of arousal as he watched it watching him was almost embarrassing in its intensity. "We should, uh." Calvin started, trailing off when the demon pushed him back, onto his ass. "go meet up with the— mmph" The demon licked his face, tongue smearing over his face, and Calvin let out a rough groan, lips parting as the demon kissed him, sloppy and wet, with black slime drooling down its tongue and into his mouth. More of its tongue squirmed into his mouth, folding over itself, and Calvin slurped wetly, gulping down mouthfuls of drool. Its jaw creaked open, wider and wider, until it was panting across his face, jaw gaping impossibly wide, its teeth scraping over the back of his head. His response to realizing it'd stuffed his head and shoulders into its mouth probably shouldn't have been a whimper; arching his body up to rut against its underbelly, but— but it was, right, and he refused to feel that bad about it. It pulled back with a wet slurp, feet of its tongue pulling back from his mouth until the tip popped past his lips in a final wet gush, leaving Calvin panting on the floor, even more soaked then before, cock tenting his jeans. "You're not gonna—" Calvin said, when the demon stepped back, and he flipped over, practically crawling toward it. "Come on, you're not just gonna leave it at that, right?!" "We should wait until you take care of the ghosts," it parroted back at him, grinning. "Fuck. _Fuck_." Calvin staggered up, tugging at his jeans to try and make his trapped erection a little less obvious. "I can't believe this is my life right now." Walking chafed. It was brutal. Shadow slime kept dripping from his hair, until he scrubbed his face down with his hoodie, leaving it completely beyond salvaging. The demon kept _grinning_, letting out these awful choking laughs whenever Calvin would rearrange himself in his jeans. "Look, c'mon, you gotta gimmie _something_," Calvin said when they rounded the second-floor staircase. "I mean—" at the demon's broken-glass chuckle. "Not like that. _Information_. Like, uh, what's your evil plan here?" "'Evil plans' are for idiots. I just _do_ shit." Calvin rolled his eyes. "So what are you planning on _doing_?" "You really have to ask?" The demon looked up at him, hungry. "Let's say you spend a few years walking around between hells, eating tormented souls, that kind of thing, and then some dumbasses open up a portal to the sweet little mortal realm, just _overflowing_ with clueless souls." It exhaled a cloud of darkness, walking through it left it streaked in shadowy streamers before they dissipated. "So just... raise some havoc?" "Oh, I think I've already raised some." The demon's head cut over, like it was looking at him. Its voice dropped lower, like the grind of boulders, husky. "You've got a gorgeous soul. I could eat that shit for years, _slow_." The ominous shiver down Calvin's spine was matched by the throb of his cock. "So, uh, when you say _eat_—" "Oh, you'll love it," it said, leering. "You're already so desperate to get fucked." and it laughed again, like metal twisting apart slowly. Calvin rolled his eyes. "I'm just saying, I dated a succubus for a while, and that shit _really_ didn't end well." The demon snorted. "_Sex_ demons. Don't know how to handle a soul when they got it." "That's kind of—" Calvin started, but they'd reached the basement. They were in a kitchen, with a stairway down, wide and shallow, each step a huge slab of stone. Below, in the cellar proper, there were narrow hallways that opened into root cellars, hard dirt underfoot. Now that he knew about it and he'd seen the wards, he could kind of _feel_ the ghosts. A century's worth of ghosts under his feet, and it was just a whisper, not quite in tune with his senses, not quite sure what they should feel like. "Uh." He'd zoned out while talking, letting his feet take him in whatever direction he needed to go, and the ghosts felt sharper at his senses with every step. Much more reasonably, Diane and Jason were dead ahead, like beacons. "You feel that?" "You _don't_?" "It's just— hey, actually, what kind of fucked-up demon senses do you have, anyway?" The eyeless staring at him had gotten a little disorienting. "All of them." It leered again, tongue flitting out and branching into veins, with little strings of ichor drooping between them. "Just about, compared to you." "I can't _believe_— there's no way you're not being all creepy intentionally. I've got your number. I know what's up." "I'm sure you do." The demon grinned, shadow slime oozing from the gash of its mouth and streaming in a dense fog behind it, shadowy shapes visible in its roiling depths. "Yeah, you're an asshole." They came to a massive door, old rowan, and barred with an immense wooden bolt. He could dimly hear Jason's voice through it — the words were muffled, but the tone of voice was clearly annoyed. Calvin put his shoulder to the door and pushed, the scabbed-over gash in his side throbbing as he levered the old wood up until it slid to the side with a deafening _clunk_. After that, the door opened about an inch, with juddering snaps, rust flaking down from the hinges. "Oh hey!" he said, waving through the thin crack at Diane and Jason, "don't worry, it's just me, not some axe-murderer." The demon growled behind him, grating. "Well, me and— uh, the demon, hey" he turned to the demon, away from the door. "So like, do you have a name or anything?" "Is that thing _still_ following him around?" came Jason's voice, and then Diane was there, kicking the door a sliver further open. "I— wow, I was going to ask why the fuck it took you so long, but now please never tell me." She looked Calvin up and down, every dusty and shadow-splattered inch of him. "Also, please stay away from me until you're not covered in, uh..." "I told you you should take a shower," the demon said, and Calvin rolled his eyes. "Oh don't even, you know—" Diane snapped her fingers, focusing both of them. "You two can keep flirting, or whatever, _after_ we fix the ghost problem." Jason yelled across the basement, coming closer to the doorway. "What are you even— wow, uh, gross, dude." "Could we not?" Calvin rubbed the back of his head, wincing a little when his fingers came back stained oily black. "Look, most of it's not even—" "_Let's not._" Diane cut through what he was saying, which was probably for the best for everyone. "Just... get in here." Calvin squeezed through the gap, glad at least he didn't _squelch_ when he did it, and then the demon just kind of... oozed through, shadow pooling over the doorframe until it resolved again to the black silhouette. Actually inside the room he could see it was... basically just a room: dirt walls with wooden beams, creaking rafters, dirt floor. The other doorway, how Diane and Jason must have gotten in. The distant fluttering of ghosts seemed stronger and stronger as he approached the center of the room, until a feeling shot through him like lightning: his foot on a worn square of stone, hidden under a thin layer of dirt. "Holy shit," he said. "Yeah, no shit." Jason said. "It's ghost central. The _good news_ is the wards have kept them weak enough that most of them will just pass over once they're not stuck in there, but some of them might try to make a break for it." "Do we even care about that? Honestly after a century I figure they've earned some haunting." "I'd rather not be blamed for unleashing a ghost plague." "Fine, whatever." Diane was already scratching down thin lines of symbols in the dirt, the diagram that'd more aggressively funnel the unleashed ghosts to the afterlife. It took a minute or two; Calvin mostly spent it trying to wipe demon jizz off his face, hands grimy with it. "Go for it," Diane said, after she finished, stepping back neatly out of the circle, and Calvin took his cue. He stepped inside and let the switch flip. It really did seem like a physical switch: the rock was part of some ungodly complex ghost trap, but it was so clear that it _wanted_ to be shifted, slightly, pushed into a new state. There was a pop and the sharp smell of ozone, and then Calvin was at the center of a whirlwind of ghosts: translucent figures, people, animals, _bugs_, all whirling up through the floor and condensing to a bright point just below the ceiling. Calvin yelped and jumped out of the circle, brushing off the invisible chill of ghost-bodies flying through him, patting down his body as if to make sure it was still intact. "So, uh, after this the hell portal should just shut down on its own, right?" he said. "I mean, this is what's powering it, right?" "Maybe," Diane said. "It won't be jammed open after this, at least." "I—" Calvin cut himself off with a yelp. A pair of hands were straining against the edge of the circle, pushing out as a spectral form forced its way out from the ghost tornado. It resolved into an old man, face lined, wearing a sharply cut but faded suit. Calvin recognized the face, even blurred in death. "Mr. Anterbury," Diane said. "I suppose you're what pass for exorcists, in this degenerate age?" Mr. Anterbury tugged on his cuffs, lining up the seams. "And with a pet demon, as well," he said, turning to the demon, whose mouth had opened into a spiky blender, a growl like radio static buzzing through the room. He looked to the side, where Calvin — with a second of concentration — could feel the hell portal, still burning away. "Magic is the work of gentlemen, not ruffians like yourselves. Stand aside and allow the more-informed to go about their business." Calvin started with "Yeah, that's—" but the ghost had already swooped through a wall, on a straight line to the hell portal. "_Fuck_." The demon's ears perked, head tilting like an inquisitive dog. "You should probably hurry," it said, a new note in its voice. "Uh," Calvin said. "_Hurry_," it repeated, and it dashed for the door, and then they were all running after it. The hell portal was still open: a black flame, and through the flame was a dark landscape, immense thorns and spines curled in on themselves. Mr. Anterbury was chanting, low, his voice sliding back and forth between the hollow echo of a ghost's voice and something sharper. "Stop!" Calvin said, as he tumbled into the room, gasping, and the demon just _leapt_, pouncing at the ghost, jaws open. Instead of phasing through each other, they collided, Mr Anterbury sprawling on the ground under the demon's jaws for a second before he flickered to the side, suit torn and bleeding ectoplasm. "So you've bound yourself to a barghest," the ghost said, coldly, form flickering like a candle. "What an idiotic thing. Do you even know what they do with their captive souls? Bound to it in death, and it will hunt you through the wastes of the lowest hells, killing you each night only to raise you for a new hunt each morning." Calvin looked over at the... demon-thing. Barghest. It looked back at him, drooling ichor and the ghost's ectoplasm from its teeth, grinning. "Super. I don't suppose there's a way to, like, break that?" Mr. Anderbery snorted. "Pray your idiocy has only damned your soul, and not that of your companions." "Right, great, whatever, I don't really care. Uh, Barghest, feel free to rip him apart any time." The demon's — the _barghest's_ — muzzle twitched, looking from the ghost to the portal and back, ears pinned back. There was a crackling filling the room, a snapping and tearing noise that was coming from the other side of the portal. Mr. Anterbury was grinning, expression inhuman. "My new host comes. I have defied death itself: ones such as you stand no chance!" His voice had rose to a keening scream, energy pulsing behind Calvin's eyes every time he blinked, and then a lot of things happened all at once. Jason and Diane burst into the room, one after the other, stumbling over each other at the tableau. Blobby shapes moved on the other side of the portal, and with a crackle of sparks an immense arm tore through, grubby white with vividly purple veins. Mr. Anterbury started, surprised by — something — and it was the opening the barghest had been waiting for, apparently: it leapt again, teeth fastening on his neck, and they went down in a tumble of ectoplasm, the barghest tearing jelly-like clumps of ectoplasm from the ghost's decohering form as the ghost screamed and writhed. "Holy shit!" Calvin screamed, falling back on his ass and then kicking backwards, trying to get as far away as possible from the _thing_ crawling through the portal. It was too big to fit easily. Clawed hands curled around the edge of the portal and pushed it wider, the flame billowing huge, and something like a head pushed its way out, all beaks and oozing eye sockets. It screamed, the noise inhuman, and awkwardly reached for them, claws scything through the air a foot from Calvin's sneakers. "This is how I'm gonna die," was absolutely a thought that flew through Calvin's head. The barghest had been — was still — scary enough, but this thing was a lot more unequivocally murderous. He pushed himself back until he was pressed against the wall, staring at Diane and Jason, at the doorway. Jason was straining, face screwed up in tension, and Calvin could feel the impact of his psychokinesis, trying vainly to push the demon-thing back through the portal. They were at least out of the room, but if that thing got out it wouldn't save them. They were so, so fucked. Then the barghest landed on the thing's face. Its teeth cut through the other demon's flesh until they hit something hard with a nails-on-chalkboard screech that resonated through Calvin's bones. The demon screamed; the barghest ripped a huge chunk of flesh from its body, and in its reflexive shudder they both toppled back through the portal, leaving Calvin in a suddenly empty room, the wailing and howling from beyond muted and distant. "Close the portal!" Calvin yelled, and they both dashed inside. In the melee the signs Diane had drawn there before were completely obliterated, and she had to redraw them, her athame cutting neat lines in the dirt. Calvin almost — _almost_ — said "but try to let the barghest back in!" but he bit it back. The barghest seemed... nice, for a soul-eating demon, but it wasn't worth getting everyone killed on the off chance, what? It made its way back through? He settled for staring at the portal, trying to see through the flickering flames at the blurry shapes moving on the other side. Diane scribbled down the last glyphs. They caught, everything lighting up behind his eyes, and Calvin clapped, diagram flaring to life as the portal snuffed out. The black flame below cut off, dispersing, wafting up in little curlicues towards the ceiling. Fading fast, but not quite gone: as the blackened, thorny landscape faded it was eclipsed, something close and fast on the other side. A dark shape lurched through it an instant before the flame faded completely, leaving them in a near-lightness basement with a looming shadow monster. "You're okay!" Calvin yelled, hugging the barghest. It wobbled from the impact of Calvin hitting it, claws skittering on the dirt. It was weirdly tacky now, huge glowing rents in its side dripping ichor. There was purple something burning out of them, like dirt in a wound. "Been better," it said. "Jesus fucking Christ," Diane said. "Seriously?" Jason said. "Look, shut up," Calvin said, pulling back from the barghest. "You need, uh—" The barghest gave a wracking cough, spraying Calvin's front with black ichor. "I gotta eat something." it said. "I'm _hungry_." Calvin felt a chill go through him. The barghest's maw was open and panting, ichor spilling all down its front, painting a silhouette on the flood below. "You can't seriously be thinking about —" "He just saved our lives, okay? Come on." Calvin paused for a second. "And besides, it'll grow back." It wasn't the first time something had tried to eat his soul, after all. "We should — can you make it to the entrance?" he asked, and the barghest nodded, not even complaining about it. In a loose clump, with the barghest trailing behind, they made their way from the manor. "I'll catch a bus back, it'll be fine," Calvin said. "Oh, and —" that probably wasn't the best time to say it, but: "The old guy said it was a barghest and that it was bound to me, so, like, if that's..." Diane covered her face with a hand. "Jesus Christ. I seriously can't believe you're doing this. Listen, if anything happens, just... call me, okay?" "It'll be _fine_," Calvin repeated. Jason drove away with a few looks back, Diane shotgun, and that left him standing out on the manor lawn in the night, next to a bleeding demon. Its body was warped and attenuated by the moonlight, glowing purple scars streaking through its body and along its shadow. It really didn't look good. "So, are we gonna do this?" Calvin couldn't quite keep the worry from his voice. "I mean, you saved my life a bunch, so I guess I'm hoping, uh, you won't kill me again." "We're gonna do this," it said, ichor flooding from its mouth when it spoke, and lunged. Weight bore him down, its burning-chill touch expanding to cover his entire body. The burn blotted out all other sensation; the prickle of wet grass under him, the chill night air in his lungs, the colorless moonlight painting everything in sharp silhouette. There was just _teeth_ on him, in him, digging down to his core. He screamed, voice swallowed up by the darkness, sobbing from the pain as things cut inside him, deeper and deeper. And then it was over. Sensation spread slowly, and he found himself spread out on his back, body feeling like it weighed a ton. Everything was woozy and distant, like the world was being beamed to him through a long, dark tunnel. His arms trembled when he tried to clench his hands. And the barghest was over him, purple scars gone, its obsidian glass maw yawning wide. Its meat-grinder aura felt distant, his sixth-sense almost obliterated, but even still he could touch its inhuman energy, its spinning vortex pulsing faster like some demonic heartbeat. It was like it'd forgotten it was pretending to be a dog: it still had four legs, roughly, but its body had gone amorphous. It was like a window cut out of the world; its body opened into an abyssal space, an infinite expanse of blackness, punctuated at intervals by obsidian spars and ranges, sharp clusters of black crystal lit by an unseen light. Serrated maws opened across its body like ragged gashes, black tongues — or antenna — coiling out in clusters, tasting the air. A fog of ichor sunk off its body and flowed over Calvin, pooling around him. "We good?" Calvin said, and the words came out slurred, tongue thick in his mouth. "_I'm_ good," the barghest said, the voice nearly incomprehensible, shattering glass and crashing rocks. "You could be better." Then, after a pause, and awkwardly formal: "Thanks." "Oh, you know, no problem." Calvin tried to wave an arm; it barely twitched. "Fuck." "Funny you should say that," the barghest said, licking a burning stripe — _that_ he had no trouble feeling — across his neck. It was hard, its cock drooling across his chest, the burning ichor indistinguishable from the blood it'd been bleeding moments ago. "Eating always gets me worked up." Calvin's body reacting _hurt_. His pulse battered his body, flush burning through his cold skin, and his cock felt about a thousand pounds, stiffening across his stomach, like it was the weight keeping him pinned to the ground. The pleasure that sung across his stomach was almost indistinguishable from pain. "We're really doing this now?" The barghest bent, tongues spilling from its mouth and squeezing his cock, ripping a half-pained moan from Calvin's throat. They flexed and curled, prehensile, and tugged his zipper down, slithering inside his jeans and wrapping around his cock. "Next time we're doing this when I'm _fully conscious_," Calvin said, groaning as the barghest sucked him into its mouth, the crystal pylons of its teeth pressing against his hips. Its tongues coiled around his shaft, a tip squirming down over his balls; the barghest whined and drooled across his crotch, matting his pubes to his skin as it messily slurped on his cock. Calvin didn't have the energy to do much more than huff and whine, stomach tensing as a drooling tongue dug against the underside of his cockhead. The barghest pulled off with a wet slurp, fat dollops of drool spattering down over his stomach, and nosed against his inner thigh, his cock dragging against its muzzle, smearing the oily drool across his skin. It nipped at his jeans, tugging them down, and Calvin had just enough control over his body to shift right and then left, letting it pull the waist down to his thighs. The grass was prickly and cold on his bare ass, and quickly replaced with the barghest's muzzle — a wholly different kind of prickly and cold. Its nose dug between his cheeks, followed with a wet swipe that hit him like a bolt of lightning, the sensation _sharp_ more than anything else. "Oh fuck," he said, mumbling. The barghest growled, static spiking across his skin, the reverberation concentrated against his asshole. It licked across his ass, squirming tongue pushing against his pucker. Calvin shuddered when it pushed inside, mouth slack and open, breathing fast. It squirmed inside him, too-hot and freezing cold at the same time, sending dizzy pangs rippling up through his body. He dug his hands into the grass, or, at least, tried too, blades slipping between his fingers. The barghest shifted its bulk, a shoulder dipping down and coming up under his thigh, his left leg lifted across the barghest's back to give it better access. The barghest's maw spread, crystal teeth digging into the flesh of his ass, its tongue like some squirming tentacle, unfurling from its mouth in a mess of ichor and spearing shockingly deep only to squirm and twist, dragging against his inner walls. "Fuck, fuck, fuck," Calvin said, mouth open, hips twitching up into the barghest's licks. The tension across his stomach, in his balls, _hurt_, a cutting kind of pain that ripped out of him in a wail as he came all up his chest, pleasure hitting him like a brick wall a second afterward. His cock twitched with each of the demon's laps inside him, dribbling out droplets of come across his stomach. The barghest pulled back, tongue spilling from his ass, and the loss of the burning-cold ache made him whine and twitch towards it. His hole was flushed and aching, fucked-open already. Ichor drooled past his puffy lips in slobbery spurts, down the curve of his ass and onto the grass below. "Come on, fuck me," Calvin almost begged, still lacking the strength to even look up at the barghest, staring at the night sky, dotted with stars. The sharp touch of its teeth on his thigh, followed by the burn of its body. "Yeah," it said, more growl than word, and then it was on him. It reared up, haunches suddenly bracketing his hips, and bent him double, knees pressed against his chest, sodden jeans tangled around his thighs. Its forelegs came down on his shoulders, claws clicking as they dug into his flesh. Its head was right in front of him, mouth opened all across its head and slavering, a froth of ichor like a rabid dog foaming between the jagged crystal teeth. Its cock slapped against his bare ass with a wet _smack_, and its entire body rolled in the thrusts, spraying spurts of black slime across his sides. It hunched against him, the tapered point of its dog cock skidding and spurting across his ass, and then finally it got it right, tip slotting between his cheeks. Its next thrust slammed into him, its slick, sharp cock spreading his asshole wide, slick ichor sending it almost balls deep in a single brutal thrust. Calvin screamed, yelling into the demon's neck, and it opened wide, jaws eclipsing his vision as it clamped down on his head, his face _inside_ its mouth, sunk into the nightmare abyss inside its body, the prickle of its teeth in an uneven ring around his head and shoulders, painting his face with its slobber. His asshole felt broken open, puffy and slick as it hammered into him, so sloppy with ichor it was almost frictionless, letting it pump its cock into him with rapid slams. Its breath was loud in his ears, like thunder rolling in the distance, huffing and whining as it strained deeper. Each thrust jostled him; there was a sharp pain behind his ears as its teeth dug in, and then stinging as its ichor drooled into the cut. He huffed for breath, lips pushing against shadow-substance like thick fog, and then its tongue stabbed into his mouth, down his throat, less like a tongue and more like some abstract second cock, prehensile and warted. It fucked his mouth, his cheeks bloating with black drool, its slime gurgling and squirting identically from his lips and from his wrecked ass. The barghest's hips met his ass, sheath bunching against his asshole, and its balls smacked into him like wrecking balls, a sloppy _crack_ that sprayed demon pre in all directions, the thick sludge webbing across his hips with each thrust. Calvin just gurgled, the barghest's tongue squirming down his throat, breathing in ragged, wet gasps. Floods of acrid shadow-slime poured down his throat between choking gags, roiling in his stomach. The demon's hips snapped back and forward, spearing its huge cock deep into his guts, and Calvin groaned. The demon sure wasn't going to last long — already its cock was catching at the base, its knot bulging out. There was a fractional pause, knot bashing against his asshole and straining for a moment, only for his wrecked asshole to spasm and gape, letting the final inches of its cock slam into him in a brutal plunge, ichor squirting from his overfilled ass and coating the demon's haunches, filling the space between them with greasy, rubbery ropes of sluicing black slime. Its knot locked them together, the next spray of slime caught in his ass, gurgling and slopping as it poured over itself in thick waves, its burning chill spraying higher and higher in his ass. The barghest howled, crushing its body against Calvin's, shadows coiling around him until they probably just looked like one big mass of churning darkness, its haunches pressed so hard against his ass its body seemed to warp, less a dog-shaped shadow and more just a mass of pressure surrounding him, _inside_ him, its cock pulsing and straining all the way through his ass and into his guts. He was wrapped around its knot, like a fist lodged just past his asshole, and a weight of watery jizz bearing down against it, sloshing and gurgling, burning inside him. It was straining to shove its knot deeper, the rubbery flesh of his guts practically squeaking with each sudden jerk. His guts convulsed, a spray of watery slime erupting from his ass as its knot bore down, sheath flattened in grimy furls between his cheeks to reveal even more cock. It was spilling half its body inside him, the weight of its jizz shifting of its own volition, forming churning tentacles of shadow that squirmed further and further inside him as it bred him. Calvin panted, gasping for breath between slobbery gushes of ichor streaking down the barghest's tongue. It felt like an eternity before the demon pulled back, teeth peeling away from his skin, tongue spilling from his wrecked mouth with a final gush of drool, leaving him dazed and half-conscious on the wet grass, knees pinned to his chest as it stood over him, its dog cock tied tight in his ass. Calvin concentrated on just _breathing_, coughing up globs of black slime, nose clogged, eyes red-rimmed, face painted in oily smears. His guts ached from the amount of jizz it was spraying inside him. It was a steady pulse, knot twitching with each spurt, pressure building and building until it was enough to overcome some new fold of his guts, and then there was a wet gurgling, audible even to his ears as it flooded deeper. He felt saturated, coated inside and out with black slime. The barghest just huffed at him, lips peeled back in a doggish grin, drool pattering across his face as it bred his ass. His stomach was bloated and swollen, skin and flesh aching all the way to the bone from the heavy, over-stuffed weight. He whimpered again, asshole clenching around the barghest's cock. The coagulated slime inside him was still slick; when it finally dismounted him it twisted its cock around backwards, the flared pit of its knot dragging against his wrecked asshole . It _pulled_, taking a half-step back, and Calvin's entire body seized against its cock, clenching tight until the straining pressure was too much. His worn muscles completely gave up, asshole distending into a gaping crater as it yanked its knot out with a rubbery _slurp_. It stepped back, and its frighteningly-huge cock spilled out of him in a frictionless slide, with watery dog jizz slopping around its shaft. Black steam rose from its underbelly, sizzling from Calvin's gaping ass as its slimy jizz drained out, building up behind the rim of his ass until a messy gush of black ooze spilled out onto the lawn. Calvin was dazed; with the soul-eating he'd probably be incapable of moving even _without_ having been brutally fucked afterwards; as it was, all he could do was limply flop. "Fuck," he said, low and drawn-out. Without the demon pinning him down, his leg flopped down; the pang as his hips shifted pulled a sharp gasp out of him. His asshole was burning, flushed hot and bloated, thick between his cheeks, the swollen flesh grinding against itself and only slowly sucking back into his body. The barghest grinned at him, expression — insofar as it had one — still hungry. Its cock was still burbling black jizz, spurting out ropy lines over his bare thighs. Calvin tried getting his arms under him, forearms trembling from the effort of pushing himself up, and he flopped back to the ground, panting and covered in a cold sweat. "We're definitely doing that again," he said, between wheezes. "But only _after_ I can fucking move, christ." "Relax," the demon said. "Close your eyes." Calvin didn't have them open in the first place; he rolled them behind his lids. "You can feel it, can't you? Inside you." It was slavering, eager; the usual crushed-glass of its voice was, for lack of a better word, _wetter_. Calvin tried looking at auras. That was a different kind of painful: a blank, hollow ache inside him where he usually felt... _something_, and it twinged like a ripped muscle as he kept trying. He could still feel his aura, ragged and dim, barely there, but the barghest's churning wheels-within-wheels of hungry nothing was so close and so vibrant — pulsing inside him, clawing at his guts as its jizz soaked into his flesh. There was a new kind of mental pinprick, a stabbing pain that resolved into a dizzy rushing, and in his mind's eye — and viscerally, all through his body — he could feel the gnashing teeth of the barghest's soul catch on what was left of his and seal tight. It felt like the concussion all over, everything going swimmy and spinning. He was whimpering and groaning, not sure if it was in pleasure or pain — sweating, breath coming fast, ripples of pressure and heat burning through his entire body. He groaned and rolled to his feet, heavy films of jizz slurping from his asshole, drooling down his inner thighs. He was flushed all over, arms and legs trembling still. "What— was that?" he asked, even though he could already see — already _feel_ — what it was. "I just gave you a little boost," the barghest said. "It'll keep you on your feet until you heal up." Which would be, best-case scenario, most of a year from now. Calvin patted his body, like he could physically feel the change. Deep inside him, the barghest's soul had bit tight, suffusing what was left of his — or maybe the other way around, him reaching out and drinking down the nightmare stuff of its soul — but either way, the result was the same: he was burnt through with a new energy, blue-black and shining a yellowish silver, its meat-grinder teeth not so much blunted as serrated further, into a clockwork mess of interlocking tongues, all hungry. "So, what, am I a demon now?" "Wanna think that way, sure. For a while. Better than being in a coma for a few weeks, before you can even start to recover." Calvin narrowed his eyes at the barghest. "All the _other_ times I got my soul eaten I didn't go into a coma." "I was _hungry_," it said, defensively. "And you taste so good." "You're such a freak," he said, grinning, and ruffled the shadow where a normal dog would have a head. "You're so fucking lucky I'm into that." He staggered to his feet, taking a few tottering steps before he had to lean against the barghest for support. His jeans were still tangled across his thighs, completely soaked with black slime; he was still leaking jizz in messy bursts. He wrestled his jeans up until he was almost decent, half-hard cock sticking over the waistband, and then he checked his back pocket, pulling out a battered and more that a little slimy pack of cigarettes. He pulled out one and lit it with his lighter, inhaling between still-heavy breaths. "Speaking of..." the barghest said as it started herding him down the driveway. "You'll be a little more... indestructable until it wears off. Demon souls aren't the spindly little things you humans have." It licked its chops, tongue spraying black drool in all directions. "There're a few things I want to do to you that you wouldn't survive otherwise." Calvin laughed again. "Yeah, well, let's hear 'em." His asshole twinged with each step, slime slurping audibly down the inside of his jeans. "You fuck, they wouldn't let me on a bus, even if they're running at this hour. You _better_ carry me this time." "Fine. I guess I owe you a _little_," the barghest said, effortlessly bowing its head and bodily dragging Calvin across its back. Calvin cursed, half-laughing, hitting the barghest's shoulders as he clung tighter, breath steaming up into the chill night. The barghest trotted down the lane, body indistinguishable from the shadows of the overhanging trees, until they both vanished into the night.