She finally turned back to him and began a heated, if muffled tirade of mumbled syllables through the gag. Her pitch and tone rose and fell on her garbled end of the conversation.
Gideon looked on, utterly fascinated, as her angry tirade transformed into disgusted disbelief. She rolled her eyes and shook her head, all the while spewing a grumbling verbal barrage at him. Then the disbelief was gone, and once more, anger held sway and her words became a furious snarl through the gag. He waited until she wound down, then reached out and tugged the material from her mouth, letting it sag around her slender, tempting throat.
He waited, watching her in silence as his body vibrated with pure lust.
What. A. Woman.
A muscle in her jaw clenched as she glared holes clean through his hide. At last, she spoke, her voice filled with contempt. “Did that bastard send you?”
Stolas looked on in disgust and cursed the Fallen once more. The Halfling writhed in agony on the floor of the cell in his dungeon in a pool of her own blood. Every scream, every convulsion of her body caused the fury inside him to build until he felt the need to crush something, anything. Another Halfling dead, or as good as. Another setback in his plot to overthrow Lucifer.
Why weren’t they strong enough? Why did they continue to fail him? A female’s primary capacity—after a male’s pleasure, of course—was to bear young, wasn’t it? Why, then, did they keep hemorrhaging shortly after impregnation?
He snarled his disgust at the female as she began to pale, the flush of pain and fever fading to the translucence of death. The convulsions continued to rip at her body, but she didn’t even try to fight to them any longer. Her cries grew weaker, until she barely made the slightest whimper.
He’d given up on healing the Halflings. Subsequent pregnancies always ended the same way, so why waste the energy? If she wasn’t strong enough the first time, she wouldn’t be game for a second try, much less a third, thereby rendering her useless.
That he was forced to rely on these weaklings to accomplish his goal, to attain his birthright, was debasing. But he couldn’t get his hands on the Chosen One without a Halfling. And so he was forced to deal with this, forced to sift through Halfling after Halfling until he found one strong enough to bear demon seed to fruition.
Turning away, fists clenched at his sides, he stalked down the long, dim corridor lined on either side with cells. He stopped at the third on the left and let his gaze travel over the bedraggled creature crouching in the corner. A third generation Halfling, he’d been told when she’d first been brought to him. Long, matted hair straggled down her back and shoulders, partially concealing a narrow, pinched face. Her clothing was torn and filthy.
When she’d first been captured, her birdlike gaze had darted this way and that, intelligence lurking in its pale green depths. She’d displayed a will to live, a fighting spirit that had kindled a spark of hope in his breast. Oh yes, she’d given him hope. Perhaps, young as she was, possessed of the nature to fight as she was, she would be the one to bear the Chosen One.
But she’d proven as useless as all the rest. Even now she cowered, nearly comatose, her gaze dull as she stared at nothing. Though she’d lasted longer than the others, he didn’t have much hope for this one anymore either. She’d been here almost a full two months so far and had failed to breed.
Unable to find a first generation Halfling, he was growing desperate. Even so, he was too angry over the last Halfling’s failure to even contemplate mating this one again. Not now. In this state, he was just as likely to kill her as get her with spawn. Another lesson he’d learned the hard way. Halflings were a fragile lot. And they were getting harder and harder to find.
He shimmered to the sanctuary of his great hall, took a seat at the head of the long, onyx table and summoned a Charocté from one of the shadowed corners with a flick of his wrist. The servant scurried forth and bowed in submission. It summoned a decadent feast before him, then dropped to its knees a few feet from the table, arms crossed over its chest, fists pressed to shoulders, head lowered, all but prostrate as it awaited Stolas’s pleasure.
Stolas lifted the goblet to his lips, his mood too dour to savor the vintage of the blood therein. He toyed with the steak, watching the blood pool on the silver platter. The bread tasted of ash. The aged, hard cheese tasted of ash. The meat tasted of ash. Even the blood. All ashes in his mouth.
He leaned to the side, and propped his chin on his fist, as he glanced at the still kneeling Charocté. With Ronové’s demise, he’d been forced to enlist another demon capable of summoning him to Earth’s plane. A task easier said than done, but he couldn’t leave the bowels of Hell without the ritual being performed. The curse of his lineage. The problem was it took time to amass the necessary followers, time to build an earthbound nest stable enough to perform the rituals.