Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

B eliath instantly knew he had overstepped. He could see it written in the little human's expression. The way her lovely mouth suddenly gaped at him. The way the blood momentarily drained from her face, then came surging back twice as bright as before. The way her dark eyes flickered between defiance and abject horror.

She was not one of the priestesses of old, he reminded himself. She had never witnessed a ritual offering, so she did not know the things he was capable of doing to a woman. She had never heard their wanton screams of pleasure, or the desperate way they always begged him for more.

Too bad nobody had bothered to write that down in her little book.

His words had offended the little woman. Most likely, nobody had ever spoken to her like that before. So be it. Beliath wasn't about to beg forgiveness for telling the woman what he wanted. He was a demon, after all, and a demon never begs.

He waited for the woman to make the next move.

"I'm not going to come inside that circle with you," she said at last.

Beliath couldn't resist. "Woman, if you enter this circle with me, I can assure you, you will come many times."

She knitted her brow in frustration.

"I am not going to set foot inside that ring, demon."

"No? And how do you expect me to put a baby in your belly? My cock is long, woman, but not that long, and even if it were, I could never penetrate your precious cunt with this magic barrier between us."

He couldn't help himself. He knew he needed to back off, before he drove the woman away, but there was something about her, a kind of innocence, that made him want to tell her obscene things. He watched as the woman composed herself. Then she answered him with a calmness she clearly did not feel.

"It is not my desire to lay with you, demon."

Beliath started to say something about doing it on all fours, but he stopped himself. He had already pushed the woman far enough, and as much as he hated to admit it, she was the one in control here. He needed to win her over, and so far he was failing miserably at that task. A thousand years in the void had tarnished his silver tongue.

"You do not wish to lay with me," he said. "Yet you want me to give you a child?"

The little queen frowned.

"You're a demon," she said. "I thought you could give me a child by magic ."

It was, Beliath supposed, a reasonable assumption.

He tilted his head back and looked up at the night sky. A thousand thousand glittering stars looked back at him.

"Tell me, Malissa, do you know where we demons get our power?"

"No…"

"A long, long time ago, the Ancient of Days created the Sabaoth to be his servants. He instilled within each and every one of us a modicum of his power, so that we could aid him in the fashioning of the world. We could raise mountains and split canyons, summon rains from the heavens and fires from the depths of the Earth. We even had the power over life and death. However, there was one power we Sabaoth were never given—the power to create humans. That power was reserved for the Lord of Creation himself."

"The Sabaoth became demons?" the woman asked.

"Some of us did. I guess you could say there was a bit of a falling out, but that's a long story, and irrelevant to the present discussion. The point is this: I can work many wonders, but I cannot conjure a child in your belly by magic alone. If you want me to make a baby inside you, I'll have to do it in the—how did you put it?—in the natural fashion ."

The woman's eyes widened a little.

"How do I know you're not lying?"

"You'll just have to trust me."

"Trust a demon?"

"You've trusted men, and look where that's gotten you. Who knows, maybe you'll have more luck with a demon. But if you can't trust me , then trust your instincts instead. Trust your desires . Admit it, woman, you want to enter the darkstone ring with me. Just step over that line, and I will show you a world of pleasures you never knew existed."

Something gleamed in her dark eyes, and for a moment he thought he had her, but then she turned her face aside and looked off into the woods.

"I… need some time to think it over."

"No you don't," Beliath snapped, his frustration getting the better of him. "What you need is—"

Before he could finish, the woman cut him off with a single word, spoken flawlessly in the elder tongue of the priestesses—the word of banishment.

" Begone! "

And just like that, the world disappeared around him. The woods, the stones, the candles, and the stars—even the woman herself. All of it blinked out of existence, and Beliath's mind was plunged back into the inky black nothingness of the void.