“Humiliation,” said Kharon. “Pain.”
The Watcher stepped closer to Mark and wrapped long coffin-ready fingers around Mark’s wrists. His touch was cold as the grave and hard as bone. Mark couldn’t help but see the ribs pressing through the man’s parchment-thin skin, or the blue veins that protruded across the man’s chest and waist where he was poorly covered by the robe.
“You’ve passed the trials where your own life was the toy. Today, you’ll need to use another. We have a willing victim here for you. She needs to be defiled. We have drawn you the map of her degradation. It remains up to you to complete.”
“And if I do, you’ll finally let me see Rae?” Mark asked.
Kharon nodded. “You will see her if you do this. But I warn you…she will not see you as the knight in shining armor you think you are being. She is happy here. And she is trying to complete her own final steps towards the place she has always yearned to go.”
“I’ll take that risk,” Mark said.
Damia stepped forward and pressed a black leather whip into Mark’s hand. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” she laughed.
Kharon turned the woman so that her naked back and ass faced Mark. “Whip her until her flesh melts beneath your power.”
Mark gulped. How far did they expect him to go?
“Remember what you looked like at the end of yesterday?” Damia whispered in his ear. Her eyes flared with excitement. “That’s what you’re going to do today…to her.”
He raised the leather and snapped it forward. The end landed with a flat slap against the woman’s shoulder blades. She didn’t flinch.
“You’ll need to step it up a notch,” Damia laughed from behind him. “Or we’ll be here for a year.”
Mark pulled his arm back and snapped the whip harder the next time, and this time it actually did make a cracking sound. Where it touched the moon of the woman’s ass, the black paint flaked away, and the paler skin beneath bloomed red.
“Better,” Damia said. “But still pathetic.”
Mark pulled back and let the leather go again, and again, each time growing a little harder and firmer in his delivery, and slowly beginning to cover the woman’s back in hurt.
“I don’t see anything yet,” Damia taunted. “Are you kissing her with that thing, or flogging?”
Mark rolled his eyes. He wasn’t used to handling a whip, and he didn’t really want to hurt this woman either.
“Unless you find a way to enjoy the hurting…you’ll never pass this trial,” Damia whispered in his ear.
Mark was sweating now, the exertion of handling the whip made his armpits and chest grow damp, but still he struggled to hit harder. He tried to imagine the woman not as some innocent stranger, but rather as Kharon, or Damia…people whom he
The gambit worked.
The more he thought about Damia’s cartoonish back in front of him, the harder he was able to make the whip snap. Weals of red began to pinstripe the woman’s back, and when one blow landed perfectly across the woman’s snow-white ass, the skin instantly changed color-from the faux black to a more human-hurt purple-and a moment later, a spot of blood appeared at the top of the mark.
Behind him, Mark heard voices begin to chant. He couldn’t tell what they said, but it seemed ritualistic. Maybe demonic. Certainly rife with evil.
From somewhere deep within the walls a steady pounding began as well. It echoed through the small room like a heartbeat, steady and slow.
Mark’s arm began to tire, but Kharon urged him on. “Speak your thoughts,” the ghoulish creature urged. “Tell us about the pain you inflict. Tell us why you defile this woman.”
“I…want…to…whip you…to death!” Mark said, slamming the whip harder and harder into the woman’s back. Blood now broke from several places on her skin, dripping down her shoulder blades and ribs as he beat her, while explaining through clenched teeth, “If this were you, Kharon, I’d…be…happy!”
Two hands grabbed Mark at the waist and ran down his thighs.
“What, you don’t want to whip me to death?” an annoyingly feminine rasp asked, while a tongue wet the back of his knee.
“If I could…Damia…” Mark promised, “…I would…kill you.”
The whip was hitting the body wetly now. The woman’s back ran with blood, and Mark could see the deep red lines that bit down beneath the skin-carved canals in her flesh.
The woman flinched, but never screamed. Mark wondered at one point if she was truly even conscious.
But then two robed figures stepped forward and took the woman by the shoulders, turning her around to face him.
Mark’s breathing was now coming hard, and he bent over, struggling to catch his breath.
Damia stepped up to the woman, ran a finger down her back and held the finger up, dripping with blood. Then the hermaphrodite used it to draw a circle around her sex.
“Let’s see how well you’ve mastered the whip,” Damia said. “When you hit the bull’s eye, we’ll move on to the next stage of our little…game.”
“Jesus,” Mark said. “I can’t hit her there. C’mon.”
“You’re going to quit now?” Damia taunted. “I knew you’d never go through with this. Rae is better off where she is-without you.”
“Fuck you,” Mark said and pulled his whip arm back. As he did, he felt something tug against the leather. He looked back to see one of Kharon’s helpers holding the last tail of the whip. A black-haired woman with deathly white fingers fastened something silver to the edge of the whip.
A metal hook.
“Time to go fishing,” Damia said. “Remember, the faster you hit it, the faster you quit it!”
Mark felt a sinking sensation in his groin. The first time he hit this woman, he was going to rip her skin. And to hit the place he was supposed to…with a hook? Jesus fuckin’ Christ! His arm felt frozen in place…he couldn’t do this.
“Rae never loved you,” Damia whispered behind him. “She only loved to be defiled. Think about that…marrying you was her way of being degraded…”
Mark struck out with the whip without thinking. The anger took him over. The hook caught just to the left of the woman’s belly button, but instantly pulled free, a trickle of blood flowing in its wake.
“Nice shot, Sherlock. Maybe aim next time? You didn’t even hit the circle!”
The next slap caught her above the belly, beneath her left breast. A jagged wound appeared as soon as Mark pulled the whip back. He held the whip in his hands for a moment then, and stared at the three-hooked implement that was tied with a heavy filament to the end of his whip. It really was just an old-fashioned, three-pronged fishhook.
“If that were me up there, would you miss?” Damia asked. Her voice was a seductive tease in his left ear.
“No,” Mark growled and readied his arm to release the whip once more.
He caught her five more times across the belly and with one horrible strike hooked her breast, stretching the skin out taut before the flesh released the hook and began to drip blood, down across her belly and down across the target Damia had drawn in the woman’s own blood.
With each miss, the woman’s body shook, and when the hooks caught her breast, she did give out a faint, gurgled scream.
And then Mark held his arm back and took a deep breath, really focusing before he let the whip go. The slap of the end of the leather hit right between her legs, in that narrow cleft where every man wanted to go, and where now, none would enter without seeing the scar that Mark had made. When he pulled the whip back, setting the hook and then gouging her as he called it back, there was skin stuck to the hooks, and the delta of the woman’s crotch instantly blossomed in angry red.
Someone stepped up and took the whip from Mark’s hand, replacing it with the hilt of something heavy. He brought his arm down and saw that he now held a black-handled dagger.
The robed figures moved as one and released the woman from the pole. Her arms fell from above her head like
