Hey Jude

Wiley paced down the centre of the living room, eyes sliding over each of us in turn. I was perched on the arm of the sofa Vance and Mace were sitting on and Ethan had claimed the armchair. Sal had to work again, so she was absent.

"Wiley, stop being a dramatic attention whore and tell us why we're here," Mace said eventually. "This is our day off, you asshole."

Apparently Wiley had just been waiting for someone to crack, because he grinned. "Great, you're first. Come with us."

Wiley headed for his study and Mace reluctantly stood up to go with him, so I figured that was my cue to follow.

As soon as the study door was closed, Mace levelled Wiley with a glare. "I'm serious, this had better be good."

"Well sorry, it's not," Wiley told her. "It's terrible. But important, so calm yourself and prepare to be interrogated."

The look she gave him with was rather unimpressed. "Interrogation? Seriously? We’re basically the same rank, you massive tool."

He smiled at her and collapsed back into his desk chair. "Seriously serious. Now, how do you feel about McCartnnon?"

She just look baffled now. "I think I've made my position on that topic clear."

"Make it clear again."

Mace’s fingers stroked the hilt of the knife holstered at her hip. "I would slice his belly open and roll around in the offal if I thought I could get away with it."

"Gross." Wiley glanced at me, but didn't bother to wait for my response before turning back to her. "Could you perhaps phrase that in simpler, less descriptive terms?"

I was glad he said that because technically it had been a lie, for which I was glad. I was definitely not a fan of McCartnnon, but if Mace had genuinely desired to roll in his entrails it probably would have changed my opinion of her a bit.

"I hate him more than anyone else I have ever met," Mace said. "Better?"

Wiley smiled. "Much." Again he glanced at me, but turned back to Mace before I had a chance to respond. "Given the opportunity, would you betray him?"

“Doesn't betrayal require loyalty?” she pondered. “But yes, I would take any opportunity given to me to fuck that dude over. Is that what this is about?"

Wiley glanced at me again and this time I didn't even bother trying to respond. He gave me a look like I was an idiot, and I realised he required me to intend to. So I opened my mouth to say yes, she was being honest, and then shut it again when he turned back to her.

"Okay, I'm satisfied," Wiley said. "Go and get Vance. Don't tell him or Ethan what we spoke about."

"Yes, I wouldn't want to give them time to plan answers to your ridiculous questions," Mace said as she headed for the door.

Wiley swung from side to side in his chair happily as we waited for Vance. He repeated the same questions with Vance and got similar, if less aggressive and far more straight forward responses. He brought Ethan in after that, who made things difficult by repeated use of sarcasm, but eventually we got through him too and headed back into the living room.

Mace was sitting on the sofa and Vance was laying with his head in her lap. Ethan immediately reclaimed the armchair and I returned to my perch on the arm of the sofa. Wiley strolled out into the middle of the room and grinned at everyone.

"You gonna tell us what's going on yet?" Mace asked.

"Well," Wiley started, "the short of it is that McCartnnon is even more of an asshole than we realised and he's been mind controlling all of us into doing his bidding. We found out because Jude here has an immunity. There's also a secret floor in this base full of caged half demon children. We figure this shit needs to stop, but we're going to need some help."

For several long moments everyone was silent as Mace, Vince, and Ethan attempted to process what Wiley had just said.

Ethan was the first to give up, and he stared at Wiley with open bafflement. "What?"

Wiley smiled. "Let me start over..."

#

After Mace, Vance, and Ethan had agreed to join us, it had been decided that we would have weekly meetings to plan our mutiny. Wiley had immediately declared that these would take place in my apartment because I was the only one who lived off base.

Grudgingly, I bought some shitty plastic chairs so everyone would have somewhere to sit that wasn’t on my bed and on Saturday we had our first secret mutiny meeting. Honestly, I felt a little awkward even being part of it. Of course I needed to be there to know what would happen, but everyone else knew so much more about the base and about how things worked so I didn't really have much to contribute. To be honest, I didn’t even really consider myself an adult yet. It seemed absurd that I should be involved in something like this, even if I had been the one to set it in motion.

After a few hours of talking all we'd really come up with was that Evan could selectively control which doors opened, and so we could for the most part prevent anyone from intervening in our plans unless things really got out of hand. Where we went from there, though, had yet to be decided.

So that was how things continued for a few weeks. Training during the week, meetings on Saturdays, rinse and repeat. It actually wasn't too bad. Once I started getting used to things and getting to know people, everything became a bit less scary. I'd even started to get used to the cage matches with demons that Wiley intermittently subjected me to, though I didn't think I'd ever be totally okay with them. I could at least sleep at night after them without having nightmares now. Well, mostly.

Not that the whole thing wasn't affecting me emotionally. Whenever I went somewhere other than the base I got the strange feeling I was being followed and watched. Knowing so many terrible, dangerous things existed and could be anywhere had made me paranoid, even if logically I knew they weren't so common that they were likely to be stalking me wherever I went. That was how I rationalised the feeling, anyway, but rationalisation didn't make it go away.

Wiley got me those books he’d promised me at least, though of course those also came with a price. Wiley would be giving me the same tests they used for the demonology courses, and I’d be getting less time between them and none of the lectures to supplement the textbooks that were normally part of the course. That would probably be fine, though. I tended to be a pretty good learner, especially when it came to things I was interested in.

#

Hosting the meetings unfairly meant I was expected to provide snacks, so on a Saturday morning I headed out to buy some. It was only a ten minute walk to the store, so I opted to walk rather than drive. Yeah, that turned out to be a mistake.

Or perhaps the mistake was taking unpopulated side streets and alleys. What did I have to be worried about? Despite everything that I'd been through, everything I'd been training for, I still firmly told myself that the only real risks to me in my life outside of work would be normal, everyday ones. What were the chances of anything else, right? Well, it had already happened that one time, but there was no reason I should be more likely to be targeted than any other person outside of work. They say lightning never strikes the same place twice.

So when something jumped down on top of me from behind and dug something sharp into my shoulders, I was rather surprised. For the few seconds of awareness that followed before everything went dark, anyway.

When did I become a lightning rod for bullshit?

#

I dragged myself back into consciousness, but only made it halfway. For several minutes I lay still, only peripherally aware of my own wakefulness, as I began to feel the aches my body presented me with. I wondered if I'd gotten into a fight, but beyond an ache in my arms nothing really hurt. I tried to pull myself further awake and failed, and I wondered idly if that should be cause for panic. Had I hit my head? It felt floaty and weird.

I didn’t feel injured, though. I felt like my mum acted when she was on drugs. That thought stuck in the back of my mind and lingered uncomfortably.

I tried to pulled my hand down from where it was resting above my head to feel for bumps and found that I couldn't move it. I tried the other one, but it wouldn't come when I tugged it either. They were bound, I realised, and waited for the panic to set in. It didn't, so I continued taking stock of things.

The surface I was lying on was hard and stuck to my slightly sweaty skin where it made contact. Speaking of which, the general lack of clothing between me and the surface was alarming — or would have been, if I'd been receptive to feeling alarmed. I fidgeted a bit, and found it was difficult to get my body to obey my instructions. The movement did help me determine which bits of me were clothed. As far as I could tell, I was wearing only underpants.

Considering I was barely clothed I felt surprisingly warm. Without moving my head all I could see was the vaulted wooden ceiling, but that was enough to tell me that wherever I was, it wasn’t somewhere I’d been before.

"You're awake!" exclaimed a voice from behind me filled with far too much life and enthusiasm for my groggy brain. "I was starting to get bored. I was starting to think of ways I could wake you up."

I couldn't tell whether the person speaking was male or female and I couldn't bring myself to care. My arms hurt. This was not a comfortable position. I tugged them for a moment before giving up again.

I heard footsteps and could see someone moving around me out of my peripheral vision. I probably could have seen them if I’d craned my neck, but I didn't have the energy.

The surface I was laying on shuddered as somebody climbed onto the end. Something touched my leg and I twitched it away, but the touch pursued it. A hand up my leg, slowly making its way towards my thigh.

"Stoppit," I grouched and twisted my leg, but the hand stayed where it was.

"Relax," the voice murmured, and I almost felt like obeying. "I promise, this will feel good if you let it. I can make you feel very good."

I had to admit, it didn't actually feel bad. It felt nice. "Relax," the voice said again, and I relaxed, both body and mind.

It was probably only the fact that I was a complete and utter virgin and knew damn well I didn't do this kind of thing that kept me even partway aware. My mind tried to grasp around for some way to make this okay, but there was no dream or fantasy it could fall into where this situation could have been dismissed as inconsequential.

"Stop," I mumbled as a hand grazed over my crotch, bringing with it the realisation that I was at least half hard. Embarrassing. That was about all I could muster: mild embarrassment and a little bit of irritation. I reminded myself that I should have been frightened. The emotion refused to stick.

"I let you keep these," the voice said as a hand plucked at the band of my boxer briefs, "because these are my favourite kind of underwear. They just look so nice, don't you think? Especially on a young man like yourself. Has anyone ever told you you have a nice body? Do you work out?"

"Shut up," I told the voice, my speech slightly slurred, though I wasn't sure I meant it. I didn't like the sound of the voice — it felt disruptive — but perhaps that was exactly what I needed. Anything that would keep me alert was probably a good thing.

Weight shifted onto me, onto my thighs and over my groin, and I fought the urge to thrust up. Lost. Made an embarrassing groaning sound. A face appeared above mine, shrouded by long black hair. At first I thought it was a woman, then I wasn't sure. I got so distracted trying to work it out that I almost missed the predatory smirk before the head suddenly sunk to my neck.

There was a body pressed flush against mine and I was so turned on. I shouldn't have been, but I was. Hair that smelled of smoke brushed against my nose. Pain, bright and clear, suddenly blossomed on my neck, offering me a moment of clear thought.

The head drew back and smiled at me, now with blood stained lips. "Did you like that?"

I glared. "No. It hurt."

When the body on top of me sat back again I craned my neck up just far enough to see its chest. A tight army green T-shirt with the sleeves cut off made the flatness of the chest clear. Male. I probably wouldn't have been able to tell otherwise, and I had a vague idea that that was the point.

"Did you drug me?" I asked, my words slow as I focussed on keeping them coherent. Either he'd drugged me or I'd hit my head really hard. I had no point of reference for what either would feel like, but my head didn’t hurt and I couldn’t imagine a concussion making me this weirdly horny.

He ground his hips against mine and grinned down at me. "Poison. No, don't worry, it won't kill you. That would be a very dull way to die. No, it will just make you easier for me to play with. Most people resist, you see."

Though I couldn't see much of what he was doing from this angle I could feel his fingertips stroking across my chest. Suddenly there was pain, and I realised he must have dug his fingernails in. I cringed as he began to slowly drag them over the skin of my chest. It seemed more painful than it ought to have been. How sharp were this guy's nails?

Lifting my head took an awful lot of strength and energy I didn't presently have, but I managed it a second time just long enough to find out that the answer to my question was ‘pretty damn sharp’. They were more like claws than fingernails. Kind of like Zion's, actually, though longer and pointier. I realised somewhat distantly that this man was a demon.

My chest was on fire with pain and I could feel blood trickling down my sides. The demon on top of me bucked his hips against mine, and I could feel a worrying hardness in his pants. I couldn’t decide which was more disturbing: his boner or my own.

My head was spinning and all the progress I'd made towards figuring things out floated away. It felt nice. I didn't want it, but it felt nice. I didn't want it to feel nice, but I couldn’t really remember why. Was I just stubbornly sticking to my principles? What exactly were my principles?

The weight pressing down on me moved away, and I heard the same androgynous voice again but my brain was too lazy to put any meaning to the words. There was a sudden, sharp pain on my inner thigh and I let out a reflexive yelp.

I heard a loud bang off to the side somewhere and a moment later whatever I was lying on shook slightly as the demon climbed off of it. That was what he was, I reminded myself, a demon. There were more loud sounds, crashes and thumps, and my brow furrowed in confusion. I let my head drop to the side to see what was going on.

My vision was blurred, and I had to blink several times before I could make out anything useful. The demon was fighting with someone. I tried to track the fight but they were moving too fast. Half the time I wasn't even sure which one was the demon. It was very confusing, not knowing which blur to root for.

They went out of my range of vision and I heard a loud slam and then the thumping sounds became a lot wetter, so I figured someone had won. For a moment I wondered if the demon had been the victor and, if so, if he would come back over here and drip blood all over me. It was an unappealing thought.

Something touched my hand and a jolt of surprise ran through me.

"Hold still," someone who was not the demon said. This voice was far more distinctly male and, I thought, maybe a little familiar. I stayed still and a moment later I felt one of my arms release, and then the other. I pulled them back down to my sides and groaned happily as that particular point of pain began to recede.

"Um," the voice said. "Uh, one sec."

I batted my hand at the cuts on my chest, but stopped when that made them hurt more. They were deeper than I'd realised, but they probably wouldn't bleed for much longer. It was the cuts on my thigh I was more concerned about. I could feel the wetness of a growing pool of blood gradually spreading under the wound, but I couldn’t reach them without sitting up and I was pretty sure my current best efforts at applying pressure would more or less just amount to putting my hand over the cuts.

I heard running water and the sounds of someone washing their mouth out. Footsteps. I turned my head just in time to see dripping brown curls as my saviour walked past.

I felt weak and my arms still hurt, but it didn't matter. If I'd seen what I thought I'd seen, nothing else mattered. With a bit of determination, I managed to leverage myself up onto my elbows.

"You should lie back down," Zion told me without looking at me. His eyes were on the cuts on my thigh. I didn't. There were black splatters on his shirt, and some still on his arms and face where he'd missed washing it off.

"Zi?" I asked weakly, drawing his attention away from the wound on my thigh. He stared at me with golden eyes for a moment, expression unreadable, before turning back to my injury. If it weren’t for the pain, I would have concluded this was a dream. It felt disconnected enough from reality that I still had my doubts.

Zion lifted my leg under the knee with one arm to raise my thigh, then leant forward over the metal table I was lying on, stuck out his tongue, and began to lick the cuts. It stung, and I had no idea why he was doing it, but... well, I responded. I had a vague recollection of Zion saying blood tasted good to him, so was he...? He ran his tongue along each of the gashes several times before pulling back and carefully lowering my thigh.

I saw his gaze catch on my erection, which had gone from grudging to raging in the course of his tonguing, and his face flushed. His eyes cut to mine, wide with alarm. "I wasn't— I wasn't, like, molesting you. I should have said first, I mean— My saliva, it helps with clotting. You were bleeding. A lot."

"Oh," I said. I felt strangely disappointed. My arms hurt from holding myself up, but I didn't want to stop watching him.

Zion headed towards the other side of the room and I took the opportunity to take in my surroundings. We were in a small shabby looking room with wooden floors, wooden walls, and a wooden ceiling. There were blankets and a pillow on the floor for a bed and a beat up sink and fridge in one corner for a kitchen. The dead demon was further behind me than I could see, but there was plenty of its blood splattered around the room.

"Is this your phone?" Zion asked. He had my pants in one hand and, yes, my phone in the other. I nodded.

He came over and leant against the table while he pressed buttons on my phone. I dropped back down onto my back and rolled onto my side. I tried to take hold of his arm but he gently pushed me away. That stung more than any of my injuries. I didn't try again.

"Who should I call?" he asked.

I thought for a moment, but there was really only one person whose number I had who would be any use at a time like this. "Wiley."

"Is he one of them?" Zion asked, and his voice was full of scorn I hadn't expected.

I tried to piece together why he would be upset, but my thoughts were slippery. Who was ‘them’? The people I was working with? So why would... oh. Oh. I groaned. "S'not like that."

Zion let out an annoyed sigh and, ignoring me, pressed a couple more buttons before holding my phone to his ear.

Zion held the phone to his ear for a while, then moved it so that he could stare at it in confusion. "He just said 'I'll come get him,' and then hung up. What the hell? Should I call again?"

As groggy as I was feeling, it took me several moments to figure out what had happened. "No. He's a... a thing. He did a thingy. With the future."

Zion stared at me like I was an idiot, and it was probably warranted. He sighed and shook his head before tossing my phone back to me. "Whatever. Guess he'll come get you. Try not to fall off the table."

I tried to grab Zion as he left, but ended up getting nothing but an ineffectual slap to his ass before he was out of range. Zion turned to glare at me, but only for a second and then he was leaving again.

"Zion, plea—" I started to say, but my objections were cut off by the door slamming behind him.

I rolled over and whimpered in misery. Finally, finally I saw Zion again, and he thought I had betrayed him? That I was actually happily working with people who wanted to harm him? Even after all this time I would have done just about anything for him, and he thought... he thought...

Suddenly, I was furious at him. Hadn't I shown him I cared? Hadn't I done everything I could have to protect him? Why on earth would he just accept an apparent betrayal without question? Sure it had been a couple of years, but was that really what he thought of me?

In my current state, though, I couldn't sustain such a strong emotion. I relented back to miserable self pity, and by the time Wiley arrived with Sal I was still stewing in it.

"Guess today's meeting is cancelled," was the first thing Wiley said to me after he'd entered the room and gave me a quick glance over to assure I wasn't seriously injured. I flipped him off.

#

As my getting kidnapped and almost erotically tortured to death had ruined our Saturday plans, the meeting was moved to Sunday. Apparently what had happened to me wasn't bad enough for it to be delayed any longer. The joke was on them, though; I didn't get any snacks.

By now we had more or less fleshed out a plan, and I had a role in it. I would be making the very first move, in fact, which terrified me more than a little. My job was to make sure McCartnnon was well and truly unable to interfere in the execution of our plans before everything else got rolling.

This week, though, I found it hard to concentrate on the meeting. I couldn't get what had happened out of my head. I could have been killed! And not quickly and mercifully, either. But Zion had saved me. Zion had saved me and seeing him should have been a good thing and maybe it was, but he hated me. He thought I was working against him and he hadn't even given me the opportunity to tell him otherwise. Would I ever have a chance to?

Perhaps this had been what Delphi had meant when she'd said Zion wasn't always all right, but he was alive.

So I slogged through that meeting, and then another week of training. Though Wiley hadn't shown any particular concern for me following my kidnapping, he didn't make me go in the cage that week. I was grateful for the small kindness.