Page 41 of A Velvet Kiss After Dark

"Oh, phooey, Ezekial. You know I wouldn't mind taking a bite out of you." She laughed and laughed, the sound grating and overdone.

Ezekial scrubbed at his ears, but the sound was a menace. "You don't have to be this way," he told her, but even he knew it was a terrible, ugly lie. She'd been irrevocably changed, and he had exhausted all means possible to try to bring her back to the light. But, with each new bloodletting, she grew more and more maddened, more insane, and more intoxicating to him.

Her love to him was like a drug, one he longed to subjugate himself to. His desire to throw himself into that room with her and let her claw him to pieces and lick his wounds for fresh blood was like a magnetic pull, so he forced himself to back away, one step at a time. He did it through sheer force of will.

"OPEN THE DOOR, EZEKIAL! MOMMY WANTS TO PLAY!"

The door shut violently against the frame as she threw her weight into it. She did it repeatedly, her entire body smashing against steel and iron.

Crash, crash, crash, crash, crash…crash…crash, crash.

13

Tabitha peeled off her socks and contemplated squeezing the goo from them, but that would mean having to touch their filth even more.

"This is so gross."

Should she chuck them or keep them? These were the decisions she ruminated over while Kane and the others finished investigating the rest of the tunnel for threats. What she needed was a hot shower and some soap. She smelled worse than she looked, unfortunately. After being taken to the king of the town and dropped into a hidey-hole, she'd been quickly grabbed and imprisoned in a terrifying ordeal. She'd used Kane's gun and mowed through one vicious demon before they rested the gun from her and shoved her into a cage like a cow.

I just want to go home, she thought morosely, not for the first time.

If I ever make it home, the first thing she was going to do was file a police report on that predator purse snatcher who caused all of this debacle.

She sat in a pile of spongy wet muck in the middle of a cave with three dead ogres. She wasn't even fazed anymore. A giggle escaped her. This whole entire situation should be funny, but hysteria was rearing its head like an ugly bug. Her giggles soon turned to hiccups and her stomach growled. Ugh, the last thing she wanted was food when this entire place smelled foul like moldy sludge and gore.

If she was disgusting looking, then Kane was worse. His fur was gunked up with wet gross body parts, blood, and other despicabilities that she dared not thing about. The light at the end of the tunnel was visible and true. A pathway behind her led outside and back into the sandy desert of Hell realm.

Tabitha stood on shaky legs and wandered that way while the rest of the team finished ripping to shreds, quite literally, the final ogre.

A chuckle escaped her again. First dragons, oh my. Then demons, wow. She was beginning to feel like Dorothy in Oz, and all she wanted was to go home and wake up from this dream world. First, she'd been led to a shoddy king in the center of a courtyard after the singing dancers led her there. She thought they were trying to help her, but it turns out, they were turning her over to her captor. After falling down a trapdoor hole, she'd been abducted by green, filthy alien beings who shoved her into a cage next to other women. Although, none of them were human. All of the women had vibrant orange skin and brightly colored hair in hues of purple, blue, yellow, orange, or gold.

She was in La La Land, wasn't she?

"Okay, that's it. I'm getting out of here. I don't want anything to do with this place anymore, not that I ever agreed to any of this!" she said, seething for none to hear, as Kane and Graham were over there slobbering and making chop suey of a twenty-five foot tall ogre.

"I just have to wake up," she muttered to herself and made her way, stumbling, toward the light at the end of the cave. She pinched at the skin on her forearm, but it didn't appear to wake her any back to earth, where she ought to be back in the office working on her next dazzling story.

Her legs trembled from being tightly confined in the cage, and the threat of imminent harm or death had kept her for the last few hours in a dire state of fear, which had drained her of all energy. All she wanted was a soft bed with clean sheets and a long hot shower.

She neared the end of the tunnel where a metal grate covered the hole. She held onto the metal bars and stuck her face through and gasped in a welcoming breath of clean, fresh air. Her lungs felt welcoming relief and she sighed in gratitude and whispered a fervent prayer of thanks.

Behind her came heavy footsteps. It was Kane, and he was still a furry beast instead of a man. In this state, he couldn't speak to her as he had the mouth of an animal, but he did look at her—and it freaked her out, if she was honest. Don't bite me, she couldn't help but think. She'd never seen him in his werewolf form before, nor had she ever seen him kill anyone, but there were firsts for everything and her list of interesting subjects to share for publication were rapidly growing, at the very least. She could already see the headlines on VNN : "Today, urgent breaking news—ogres exist, and so do dragons and demons!"

Yup.

She'd be fired in a jiffy if she dared post that nonsense, unless she had photographic proof to back up her claims.

At least she couldn't be sued for slander, she thought, and laughed again. The thought that she might not be able to report upon any of this demon, Hell-realm stuff really made her sour. But, as a professional journalist, she required evidence as proof, and right now she had nothing but her insane experiences. Next up, people would start thinking she'd been abducted by aliens, it was simply too far-fetched.

Kane's hairy paws, for they were paws and not hands, grabbed the bars she had her face stuck inside, and he shoved the metal, and as if they held no barrier to him whatsoever, they snapped and bent like a child's toy, freeing them all from their imprisonment.

Outside, he began to shift back to normal. It was a quick and miraculous thing to watch. Then, she watched, aghast, as he sauntered completely nude back into the cave, without expressing a single word to her, and retrieved his filthy clothes. He returned sometime later with the rest of his entourage.

Only Seth and Alexis looked better than ever, aside from being covered in blood that is. Their mouths were stained red from their recent meals of demon and ogre blood, and their breaths were heavy with excitement, pupils dilated and eyes wide as if they'd gotten a high from their feeding session.

Creepy, Tabitha thought, and she inched her gun closer to her just in case they suddenly wanted to eat some of her. Vampires were always so proper around her: politicians, entertainers for media appearances running charities and signing doctrines with various other sects of the government. The last thing they ever appeared as were red-mouthed hungry leeches. It was quite a frightening sight to Tabitha.

Kane approached her with his backpack, weapons, and satchel of goods slung about his body. He knelt beside her as he stared off at the seemingly infinite landscape of sand dunes that lie before them.

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