Page 65 of The Demon's Fire
Fuck.
“I’m right here. Stay put. Damn it.” He inhaled, blasting the boulder once again before he returned to her.
****
Though Kole lay beside her again, she wasunable to sleep. So, Skyler finished her story, despite his apparent mood change.
Abrahm’s son, Raymond, grew up in the Caldwell house hearing only how his father was a beast. For all the Caldwells knew, Raymond could be the same. Never able to move out of this evil shadow, at age thirteen he tied a tablecloth around what few clothes he owned, walked out the door, and hopped a train.
He traveled the rails for years looking for a small carnival with a lion tamer. When he found the Arneson Traveling Show, they directed him to one of the wagons where he located his father.
Raymond suspected the Caldwells exaggerated his father’s cruelty, but they hadn’t.
After Abrahm studied his son, he declared him to be short and scrawny. “Turn around,” he commanded. “Let’s see what you’ve got. Do you eat enough, boy?”
Raymond shrugged. “Enough. What I can git.”
Abrahm, wanting some sign his genes had been passed on to his son, decided to conduct a test. “How often do you bed females?”
“I haven’t. That don’t come up on the rails.”
“Hmm. Follow me.” The lion tamer took his offspring into a run-down part of the city where life was cheap. “Look into my eyes, Raymond.”
Raymond looked. His father’s irises glowed with an inner power. When Abrahm saw a female on the street, he lured her into an alley with his smile. “Let me see you take her, boy.”
“What do you m-mean?” Raymond glanced at the puzzled woman.
“I ain’t doin’ no kid. I came here for a man.” She turned to leave, but Abrahm pinned her with a glowing light shooting from his eyes.
“What do I mean? Fuck her, lad. Use your power from me to take her. You do have the power to draw others to you, don’t you? Your mother was the easiest female I ever had. I barely had to use my gift. She was so compliant.”
“I don’t even k-know this woman.”
Abrahm stormed toward the boy, slammed him against the brick building, and screamed into his ear. “I don’t give a fuck if you know her or not. Lure her. Use your eyes. Lift her skirts. Make her beg you. Now!”
Raymond, scared of this man, tried. He approached the woman. “I want to h-have s-sex with you. How about it?”
She sidled along the wall, trying to escape. Terror replaced the confusion in her gaze.
“Let’s just do this.” Raymond glanced over his shoulder at a frowning Abrahm as he whispered, “Then, he’ll l-let us go.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“You are not your father’s son.” Abrahm stomped to the woman, his glowing irises casting a beacon of light. The slack-jawed female stumbled to the boy. She undid his pants, pulling out his cock. She lifted her skirts and dropped her drawers, guiding the boy’s rigid penis into her cunt. Once buried inside her, Raymond understood. He grasped her ass, pumping in and out of her. He didn’t last long, wailing as he came.
Abrahm pushed his son away. “You aren’t through yet, honey.”
When Abrahm finished with the sobbing woman, he shoved her to the ground. Draping an arm over his son’s shoulder, he led him out of the alley. He told Raymond he had escaped Scath and was a pride demon. He explained since his mother was human, obviously Raymond had inherited none of his abilities.
About ten years later, Raymond heard his father had been killed. He felt nothing. Yet, strangely, he spent his entire life feeling somehow “deficient.”
Raymond married a “deficient” woman at the start of the Civil War. Having been drafted, he was incarcerated from 1864 till the end of the war in the infamous Andersonville Prison. Though he didn’t die there, the disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, and exposure took a toll on his life.
He returned to a failing farm at the end of the war, more broken, sickly. When he died, he left his wife two things—a son, Samuel, born in 1867, and a journal documenting his father’s cruelties and demon heritage.
The child, Samuel Maxwell, grew up in post-war Illinois on a farm that was mortgaged to the hilt. The land was incapable of raising crops despite neighbors who did quite well. But he was strong. He was determined. Determined to make money, determined to have a good life, determined to make something of himself, determined to marry well, determined to find others who claimed to have Aeternals in their family history. He did those things, becoming an early founder of the Earth-Scath Alliance. Over the years, the name changed to the Alliance Security Agency. Modeling itself after the famous Pinkerton National Detective Agency, it became a private protection operation with investigators and a paramilitary. Behind the scenes, it cooperated with new-found ancestors on Scath.
Samuel’s son, born at the turn of the century, rose higher than his father. Jedson Maxwell was the first in the family to attend law school, graduate, and pass the bar. He labored at private firms for years until the Alliance opened a legal office to handle their growing businesses.
