He smiled and his smile was horribly sympathetic. “A trial, then.” He straightened and gestured to his groin. “Please me and be rewarded.”
“With what?”
He spread his open hands. “What would you have? And appreciate, if you will, that I could promise you any number of things to win the privilege of your body’s pleasures, but I choose to treat with you honestly.”
She didn’t know what to ask for, so she returned to the one thing she knew that mattered. “A hearing.”
“You have already had it,” he said, with some exasperation.
“A fair hearing.”
“Implying what? That I was less than fair in my assessment of your circumstance?”
“You asked me what I wanted.”
“You try my patience, child, and I warn you, it may be a deep well, but it is not bottomless. If this is not the audience you insist upon—” He caught her chin and pushed her head back, forcing her to look past his thickening cock to the sullen embers of his eyes far above. “—what is it?”
Lan raised her arms in clanking chains. “Captivity.”
“So then. As my prisoner, you think to set the terms of your imprisonment?”
“You can do a lot of things to me,” Lan said, as neutrally as possible, “and I’ll lie there and take most of them, but if you really want this, you’re going to have to give me what I want.”
“How very dramatic.”
“No matter what you do to me, you can’t force me to suck your cock without my permission.”
“I would not force you in any—” Azrael broke off and gazed at her a long time while fire smoldered in the fathoms of his eyes. “You threaten to bite,” he said at last.
“It’s not a threat. A threat is something that might happen. I absolutely will bite if you force your cock into my mouth and I don’t care what you do afterwards. But hear me out, let me at least try to convince you, and I will do whatever you want not only willingly but with enthusiasm.”
“You have been trying to convince me. It has not made you biddable.”
“You’ve been refusing me out of hand and twisting my words around.”
“You forbid me to refute your childish idealism? This is the fair hearing you suggest?”
“You don’t like it? Plumb some other pipe. I’ve only got the one with teeth.”
“Is that a challenge?”
This time, it was Lan who shrugged.
They stared each other down in silence.
Azrael released her and hunkered down, letting his arms rest on his bent knees, his hands dangling and claws flexing between his thighs. “An audience,” he said.
“Yes.”
“To beg my mercy and—finding it, one assumes—end the suffering of your kind.”
“Yes.”
“Fairly and reasonably, I say to you that I did not seek to make Man suffer at my ascension.”
“Okay, so I admit you didn’t start the war. I’ll even go so far as to say the people who provoked you deserved your vengeance, but not the whole world and not forever! Anything you could have called a war has been over for years, but only you can end it.”
“What is it you would call an ending?” he asked with some asperity. “No, do not answer. Hear me.” He paused, thinking, then raised a hand and gestured vaguely where his heart might be, if he had one. He said, “Let us imagine that I possess mercy. Let us imagine further that your fleshly pleasures earn my favor and I am moved to grant your every appeal. Say that I put an end to the creatures you call ‘Eaters’ and recall my Revenants to Haven, there forevermore to dwell apart from the living race of Man. How many days of peace will you guess I am given before the gratitude of your kind brings them once more to my threshold to murder my children? Mm? To murder me?”
Lan did not answer, but didn’t drop her eyes either.
“You speak of ending the horrors of your existence.” Azrael’s mouth twisted behind his mask, making the exposed tendons in his throat creak. “I am one of those horrors. They will not end for your people until I am ended and I can never end. So. Unless you have some fair and reasonable rebuttal, I believe our audience is concluded.” He stood. The thick shaft of his organ hung before her eyes, gnarled with scars even there. “I will now hear negotiation for your personal surrender.”
“Will you unchain me?”
“I can be persuaded.” He gestured to himself.
Lan reached up her hand and touched him. He was surprisingly cool; she’d expected that of dead flesh, like the ferryman who had brought her here, but even compared to him, he was cool. It was not merely the lack of warmth, but as if he actually radiated cold. More than that, there was a strangeness to the feel of him. He was at once too smooth and too twisted. Unnatural. Worse than that. Anti-natural, if that was a word.
He hardened quickly as she stroked him, but even that unnerved her. He was much, much harder than human flesh could be and there was no pulse to be felt just below his thick, scarred skin. When he had risen fully, she licked her mouth for moisture, rose higher on her aching knees, and fastened her lips to his swollen head. He tasted of ashes and bones. She shut her eyes and went to work, grimly wetting the full length of his shaft with long, slow swirls of her tongue, but his strange skin dried quickly, so that even the gentlest pass of her fist scraped on her ears. She soon abandoned the effort to suckle at him instead, managing with determination and no small pain to take perhaps half his cock into her mouth. She moved there for some time, claiming and reclaiming the same few inches while milking the rest in her fists.
“You promised me enthusiasm,” Azrael murmured, combing idly through her hair.
She pulled back enough to catch a breath and say, “My knees hurt,” before latching on again, this time suckling slow kisses all the way along his undershaft to his balls. They were very hard and smooth, like twinned eggs with just the thinnest velvet cover over them, and she spent some time there, pulling each one gently into her mouth for her tongue to tease while petting his cock where it rested in her hair.
“You have some skill at this,” Azrael remarked.
“I should. Would you like to know who taught me?” she asked, rising up on her knees to trap his cock between her breasts and bob slowly up and down. “Or how old I was?”
“Another appeal to my sympathies,” he explained to the empty room. “You can tell by the withering of my cock—” His cock was stone between her breasts. “—that I am deeply moved.”
Lan shrugged and bent her head so as to lick the very head of him whenever it pushed out into the open air. “I can’t help it if it sounds that way. I don’t think I could say anything about my life that wouldn’t. Or anyone else’s life, for that matter.”
“Shall we trade tales, you and I? Shall I tell you of my childhood and the games I was taught to play in those first years? Oh, I was a child once,” he said, seeing her startled upturned face. “I was never human, but I was of woman born. It is my first memory—pushed out into the light between the mountains of her thighs, the cold air and hot blood, and the screams. I remember that she held me, too weak to run, and her voice as she begged for my life was the same voice I had heard so long in the warm oceans of her womb. It lulled me and so I closed my infant eyes and did not see when the man took the stone from her small hearth and crushed her skull. Her blood fell across my face, blinding me with redness. Her brains fell into my mouth. Through this gore, I saw the man raise up the stone while every other man and woman among them did nothing, and I saw the stone grow huge as he brought it down.”
Azrael wrested himself from her slack, staring grip with just one backwards step. His eyes were burning brighter, lighting the ruins of his face and staining whatever his gaze raked across with faint crimson. “My bones do not break, but I felt the plates of my infant skull separate, heard the sound it makes, tasted my own blood in my mouth. All this, but I do not die. I have been burned, beaten, starved, crushed, stabbed, torn. Do you know, little one, the exquisite pain of drowning? Not for moments or even minutes, but for years? I have felt ice forming in my blood and smelled the smoke of my own flesh. I have worn chains until they rusted through!” He caught hers in his fist, gave them a derisive shake, then flung them at the footboard of his bed. “When at last they thought of entombing me, I embraced my captivity, though it meant aeons in the lonely dark, eternally dying of hunger and thirst, enduring the damp and the cold and the deafening silence, so tell me, o unhappy human, what is your suffering to mine?”