“What …what are you doing?” he gasped out, eyes going wide.

Kael’s smile was evil incarnate as she rode him mercilessly. “Seeing what it feels like to fuck a dead man.”

Raphael’s struggle to escape became his undoing. As his hips bucked in a desperate attempt to lift Kael off of him, he unknowingly slid into her with just the right force, at just the right angle, to cause him to fall over the chasm into release. His body betraying him, he arched and bent back, his head slamming repeatedly against the hard wood of the platform as he groaned, flooding her.

Kael’s hand stayed rock steady on the dagger, drawing only a thin line of blood as the man thrashed helplessly beneath her, trapped by the power of his own desperate release. Her laugh was low and teasing and cruel, and she looked down with dispassionate eyes as Raphael spent himself totally within her.

“That’s a good boy,” she crooned as he finally relaxed and lay panting and dazed, weak as a kitten and scared out of his wits. “Such a very good boy.”

Her tongue played teasingly across the sharp edge of her teeth as she casually drew the dagger down the front of his body. “Aren’t we having fun?” she asked, her coy tone a blatant contrast to the dark mirth in her eyes.

Scenting Raphael’s fear the way sharks scented blood, Ianna stalked to the head of the table and grasped his face between the palms of her hands. She moaned in ecstasy when his terror assailed her senses. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her lashes fluttered. “Oh yes,” she murmured, her voice dark and husky, “give it to me. Give me your fear. Let me taste it.”

Staring up into the priestess’ lust-filled, demented eyes, Raphael began to feel a kernel of anger develop deep within. He nursed it carefully, and grunted with some satisfaction as it ran through his weak, spent limbs. Wrenching his head away, he brought both hands up and shoved Ianna back away from him.

She stumbled, then went down in a heap, scattering the circle of candles at her feet. Cursing, she jumped back up and began to right the fallen and scattered objects before the power of the spell she was laying seeped out into the dark emptiness beyond.

Raphael’s gaze tracked up to the blue-eyed she-demon still astride him and his lips pealed back in an ferocious snarl. “Get the fuck off me, you fucking whore!”

Kael laughed, riding out the wave of his bucking hips easily. When his futile struggles ceased, she leaned casually forward, her breasts brushing against his sweaty and heaving chest, the point of her dagger drawing a whimsical trail along one chiseled cheekbone. “Ya got the fucking part right, lover,” she purred, grinning. “But as for the whore …well, I suppose I’ll need to collect payment for… ” her hips rocked lewdly against him, “services rendered, no?”

“You bitch!” he screamed, throwing a muscled arm up in an attempt to beat her off of him.

Laughing again, Kael evaded the slap easily, but opened a gaping slice in his cheek in the process. Sparkling eyes went wide with mock innocence and shock. “Whoops!”

His left arm came up in reflex and managed to deal a heavy blow to the side of Kael’s face.

A lesser human would have tumbled off the table with a broken neck.

Kael barely flinched.

A snarl curled her full lips. “You’re gonna pay for that, lover boy.”

Looking into those soulless blue eyes, Raphael was sure he saw the depths of hell. Terror seeped into him again, and he began struggling with everything in him, cursing his weakened muscles and uttering the incoherent sounds of a trapped and snarling animal.

“No!” Ianna shouted, looking up from her task in time to see the glittering silver of the dagger held high over Kael’s head, ready to begin its downward plunge. “Not yet!”

Somehow, Kael managed to arrest the furious descent of the knife but not her burning desire to inflict pain on the man beneath her. Turning the dagger in her hand, she dealt a crashing blow with the hilt to the side of his skull.

Raphael went limp as his eyes glazed over. Dazed, yes, but still alive.

Grunting in satisfaction, Kael slid off of the table just as Ianna moved by.

“Did you have to do that?” the priestess hissed.

Kael shot her a narrow-eyed look but refrained from commenting.

“Help me,” Ianna continued, reaching up and pressing a button on the near wall. The thump-rattle of a heavy chain hitting the table was clearly heard in the silence of the room. “Strap those around his ankles and I’ll haul him up. Quickly, before he wakes up.”

The American’s pristine white teeth glowed in the flickering candlelight. “You know, the last asshole who tried to tell me what to do gave up trying to breathe through the extra holes I put in his skull.”

The priestess’ return smile was every bit as false. “Please,” she conceded, tilting her head in a way that could be construed as sarcastic, but wasn’t.

After a long, assessing moment, Kael turned away and bound the semi-conscious man’s ankles tightly with the thick cords attached to the chains.

When the American stepped away, Ianna pressed the button on the wall again. The hidden winch began to turn, drawing Raphael up toward the ceiling by his ankles. When his hips left the table, he became aware enough to renew his struggles, though weakly.

Those struggles trebled in intensity once his shoulders, and then his head, left the table and he found himself hanging upside down, suspended from the ceiling.

Twisting fruitlessly like a fish on a line, he tried to bend at the waist to free his ankles, but it was no use. His body simply betrayed him, the only thing left to him was a string of rabid curses which flew from his mouth in a spray of spittle and flecks of foam.

“Help me move the table. Please,” Ianna said, already coming to the head and gripping the plywood with fingers hooked to talons.

Nodding, Kael went to the foot of the platform and, on the count of three, easily lifted it up and to the side, revealing the gleaming black of the cauldron beneath.

Instantly, the scents of death, despair, pain and hunger assailed her, causing her to take an involuntary half-step backward while still holding the table.

Ianna yelped as splinters drove themselves into her palms, and she dropped her end of the platform, hissing in pain.

Raphael simply screamed.

Mindlessly, Kael simply tossed the plywood off to the side, and stepped forward again, stared into the cauldron, eyes wincing and watering as the icy chill seared through her skull. Those same eyes widened when she realized that the icy mass of …whatever it was in the kettle… was now coming to a full, violent boil without any type of heat source whatsoever.

She wanted to look up, wanted to demand the priestess’ explanation for this trick, but found her gaze unbreakably captured by the boiling, putrescent miasma beneath. She tried to set her formidable well against it, but the pull of the darkness was just too powerful, and as she felt it wash over her, her will crumbled to dust, and with it, her desire to fight.

The second she relaxed, it moved through her, filling every vessel, every cell, until she was part of the darkness, and it was part of her. Voices whispered to her, their sibilant tones teasing just below the level of her hearing. Raphael’s keening, terror-filled screams were just so much static as she attempted to chase down the elusive voices, if only to hear the messages they seemed to be imparting to her very soul.

With the darkness came a hunger. A hunger more powerful than any she had ever known. A hunger for fear, for rage, for death in all its bloody glory. She raised glittering, colorless eyes to Ianna, her brain not even registering surprise that she was now able to move.

The smile which pulled her lips back from her teeth was a deaths head mask as chilling as the boiling cauldron below.

Ianna met Kael’s gaze without flinching. Her lips moved to the rhythm of the chant she was softly singing. Her body swayed with sinuous, sensual grace, like a snake dancing to the pipes of his charmer.

In her hands was another knife, much larger than the first. Its hilt was made from a partial shaft of a human femur. The blade, blue-fired steel as dark as midnight, was bound to the hilt by human tendon, yellow and brittle with age.

Kael looked on, tongue darting out to moisten dry lips, her eyes following every movement of the priestess as she swayed and chanted.

Ianna stepped forward and handed the knife to Kael, pressing it into her hands and curling her fingers tightly around the handle. “You know what to do,” she whispered before resuming her melodious chanting once again.

The moment the dagger touched her hands, Kael knew exactly what to do. Long fingers caressed the haft as one would caress a lover; slowly, gently, lovingly.

The voices became more insistent, and though she still couldn’t hear the words, the message was loud and clear.

Kill.

Kill.

Kill.

Hefting the knife, she turned and approached her flailing victim. She easily sidestepped his desperate, sobbing attempts to keep her away. Reaching up, she latched an inhumanly strong hand just below his knee, clamping down hard to steady his helpless movements.

“No!” Raphael sobbed, his voice whispery and raw. “God, please, no.”

“Your god can’t help you now, my friend,” Kael replied in a surprisingly conversational tone.

He lifted his head as much as he was able. “Please,” he begged, tears rolling down his face, “please, don’t do this. I beg you, please.”

She actually appeared to consider his pleas for a moment, before a sneer distorted her face and she plunged the knife deep into his gut, just above his pubic bone.

The blade was razor sharp and slid in easily past skin, fat and glistening viscera. With a soft grunt of effort, she brought the blade slowly down, cutting a surgeon-straight line through his gut until the knife was stopped by his sternum. Hot blood glutted from the wound, bathing Kael in its essence, coating her hands and arms and spraying against her face and chest.

Raphael had long since stopped screaming, and hung limp and unconscious, his blood falling into the caldron below his head in a river of red.

Ianna’s chanting became louder, her dancing wilder. Her face and eyes glowed with dark power.

As if viewing herself from a distance, Kael saw her hand come up and plunge itself into the opening she’d made. Her long fingers slipped easily past the man’s ribcage, questing for his still beating heart. Once she found it, she wrapped her fingers around it and, steadying herself, she pulled.

It came free far easier than she imagined it would, and with a look just short of rapturous, she pulled it from Raphael’s body and held it high in the air, where it quivered, glistening in the wavering light of the candles.

Blood poured down her arms to coat her breasts like some grisly coat of armor, and she moaned in ecstasy as her neck lolled back and her eyes rolled up in her head, showing only the glittering whites. Her body writhed and jerked in time to Ianna’s chanting, as if she were a puppet given life by a master’s hand.

Obeying a silent command, she finally lowered her arms and dropped the heart into the boiling cauldron.

Everything stilled.

Even the sound of Raphael’s still draining blood made no sound.

Then, very like an erupting volcano, the cauldron came to life once again, spewing out brilliant beams of light every color of the rainbow.

Enraptured, Kael stayed rooted to the spot, staring downward as the light shafts pierced her torso and head, lancing through her body and continuing onward through the ceiling of the building and to the infinity beyond.

She felt a dark, malevolent power enter with the light, filling her as if she were nothing but an empty vessel created expressly for that purpose. The power of it was overwhelming, causing her to stumble a bit as her knees weakened. Her strength returned rapidly, however, as she felt a huge surge of vitality flow through her with the force of a tidal wave.

Her vision, already perfect, became even sharper. Scents previously undetectable now assailed her senses. Likewise, her hearing became almost uncomfortably acute, to the point where she could easily hear the sound of Ianna’s heart beating furiously in her chest.

This is how it feels to be a god, she thought, reveling in the dark power which consumed her. Nothing could hurt her. No one could stand against her. She was invincible.

Ianna waited in the proverbial wings, the same dark energy roiling through her own body; though in her case it was something she was well used to, and as such was not quite as intoxicating.