Page 26 of Hell and Hexes
The vampire held up a go-cup with a lid. “Liquid diet.”
“I’ll do the double anchovy,” Eshu said.
“Bold choice, my friend,” I teased him. “Rio’s the only one who normally likes the fish pizza.”
The nymph shrugged. “What can I say? I’ve tried shrimp, crab meat, lobster, and salmon, but nothing beats anchovies. That salty brine…that little crunch….”
I shuddered but put a huge slice on a paper plate and handed it to the demon.
“Are you joining the game?” Trapper fluttered up near Eshu’s face, barely keeping aloft with his giant slice of pizza in hand. “We’re smack in the middle of a battle with an alien right now, but maybe you can play an NPC until Sylvie can bring you in.”
“I can totally add you in that if you really want to play.” I figured he was silly and quirky enough to enjoy this sort of thing and to fit in with my diverse bunch of players.
Eshu shrugged, taking a bite of the pizza. “Sure. I can play and stare at you adoringly all evening, imagining you naked and under me, and—”
“How about we stop at staring adoringly?” I interrupted him. “I’ve got a bard side character that’s about to join in, so you can play him if you want.”
The demon nodded enthusiastically as he ate his slice of pizza.
We all walked back to my table. Eshu pulled a seat up next to me and did proceed to stare adoringly at me as we finished the battle with the alien. When we were done, Fernando’s character was near death, but alive—which was a huge improvement over previous games. As the players searched the treasure chest further, they found a key, and at the back of the room, they found a cage with a man inside—a man who’d clearly not eaten well or bathed in a very long time.
“I let him out,” Ebony announced.
“I hold my nose because he stinks,” Trapper complained, actually pinching his nose.
“I see if he’s fuckable,” Rio said, eyeing Eshu as if she was in fact evaluating that very thing.
“You’re playing a half-ogre warrior, Rio,” I told her. “Not a nymph.”
“Half-ogre warriors screw.” She licked her lips. “And this half-ogre warrior likes what she sees.”
I rolled my eyes then listened as the rest searched the room, patted down the dude in the cage, healed each other, and guarded the entrance. When they were done, I told them night was approaching and they all decided to make camp in that spot, setting up guard shifts and pulling a makeshift dinner from their packs. I’d slid Eshu a character sheet, which he’d glanced at briefly before scooting his chair closer to mine and putting his warm hand on my thigh. I tried to concentrate on the game, completely aware of his fingers massaging my leg through my pants, moving slowly upward into the danger zone.
“I see if any arrows or arrow heads are salvageable,” John the Cyclops told me.
“I eat, then take first shift at guarding the entrance, but stay in the shadows so I’m not a target with the fire at my back,” Flora the Valkyrie said.
“I put my belongings on the floor then lie on top of them so no one can steal them. Then I go to sleep,” Fernando the dragon said.
“I’m going to sing,” Eshu announced.
We all turned to stare at him. “What?” I asked.
“Sing.” He shrugged. “It says on the paper I’m a bard, so I assume I’m supposed to sing all the time.”
“Well, not all the time,” I told him. “You sing as a profession. No one here is paying you. And you’re malnourished and dirty. And you just got released from a cage where you’ve been kept by an alien for two weeks.”
He shrugged. “Sounds like the perfect segue for a song to me.”
Without further warning, he broke into an extremely bawdy, off-key ditty about a laundress and some crusaders, where the holy land was clearly a badly disguised metaphor for the woman’s hoo-hoo. You could have heard a frickin’ pin drop. And when he was done with the song, we stared at him for a moment, stunned. Then Bob, the vampire, applauded.
“I’m totally fucking this guy,” Rio announced.
Something lit up inside me, fierce and full of a sense of ownership. I felt magic crackle around my skin a way I hadn’t experienced for two weeks.
“You’re not ‘fucking’ him,” I told Rio in the sort of voice that would frost over hell itself.
Her eyebrows shot up and she raised her hands. “Okay. No problem, Sylvie. Not poaching at all. We nymphs know better than to do that. What’s owned is owned.”
