So You Summoned a Soulmate

Chapter 3 - Mercy

My nose wakes me up hollering at me about a delectable smell. Something salty and yummy. “What is that?” My befuddled and likely dehydrated brain is in shambles. Light streams in like an assailant chasing away the comfort of the night through the still-open window. Sleeping on a couch past your teenage years should be a crime punishable by chiropractors worldwide. My aching muscles scream in protest as I lurch forward with the realization that I am smelling bacon.

I don’t even have bacon in the fridge, where is that coming from? Pushing the throw cover off my legs I hobble myself away from the comfort of the couch as several things slide into place in my brain all at once.

There is music coming from the kitchen along with the enchanting aroma of bacon. Tenderness takes the place of concern in my chest as I grin to myself, it all clicks together that it must be a visit from my enchanting best friend Melody. She is the only other person that has a key to my place and the audacity to come over and just start cooking in my kitchen.

“Mels! You didn’t tell me I would be blessed by an angel this morning.” I shout at her as my feet shuffle toward the bathroom. Aching head and trembling muscles be damned I’m getting my ass to the table before that bacon does. Decision made I let the echoes of Sam Smith encourage me toward the bathroom.

Not even offering a glance toward the mirror I go about my morning relief routine and add some medicine for the headache for good measure. Cussing myself for drinking way too much wine I regrettably remind myself to clean up that abominable excuse for a love spell I made last night. ‘Gods above Mercy, what were you thinking?’ I had better get that cleaned up before Melody sees it. She will know what a pink candle means and have about a thousand questions for me. Then Leo will hear about it and I won’t be able to survive their torment. Murmuring to myself as I meander back toward the kitchen I consider having a mimosa with breakfast, just to slow the ache in my temporal lobe.

“Tell me you brought booze.” My hand slaps against the doorway at the exact moment my eyes meet the lean muscled back of a person that is not Melody, my best friend of more than a decade. Standing facing my stove in the modestly sized kitchen is an extremely naked man. Deep red skin stretches over muscles rippling over broad shoulders as the functioning slowly returns to my brain.

“Who the f**k!” My shouts jumble as I backpedal across the living room to put more space between us. Turning to look over their shoulder I am met with eyes so completely black I could not fathom the ends to their depths. My brain categorizes what kind of being this could be as I continue my scamper away. Crashing past the end tables, books flop to the floor as terror strikes through me. That is not a human, I don’t know what it is - he is? Turning completely toward he grins a wide far too toothy smirk at me as my eyes race over his broad muscled shoulders down his arms to the lean sharp blackened fingers gripping a spatula.

“Good morning beautiful! I’m making the breakfast foods.” His smile is eerie and creepily childish as I fumble my legs over the back of the couch putting more objects between us. His teeth are sharpened to points and too long, my brain races a mile a minute trying to make any sense of this intrusion.

“Who the hell - What the hell are you?” His eyes are black, like all black with no whites and it is at that moment that I remember my summoning spell from last night. What did I do?

The tray lying exactly where it was when I awoke pulls my attention as the information comes crashing down around me. No, no no! There’s no way this happened because I lit a little candle and put a little intention out into the world. That could not have been enough to bring this demon here. Absolutely not!

“Well, that’s just the thing, isn’t it? I’m not IN Hell anymore.” Chuckling warmly at his own joke he turns back to the stove and flips some very crispy bacon over in the pans that I use daily. My breath rushes out in waves as the panic runs a full 5k course through me. A triathlon of fear boils inside my veins as his words start to enter my ears.

“H-hell?” That could mean so many things, I haven’t studied it extensively but I was aware that many people have met their untimely end at the hands of an unruly demon. Did I summon a demon? How?

“Yeah, well I was just guarding my block of prisoners when I heard your call.” Gesturing over his shoulder with the spatula he explains to me, cooly as if this isn’t the most bizarre thing to happen on the face of the earth. “And as you can imagine I got right the f**k out of there when I got the chance.” His sharp teeth gave him a slight lisp on the harsh f of the word f**k. It was chilling in a third-grade speech therapy kind of way. If my eyes could get bigger they would cease to work as optical nerves. Guard? Of a prison? What? The number of questions I have been collecting in the last few moments are far too many and the answers are far too few.

“Who are you?” Glancing around in a growing wild panic I categorize the living room for the most sturdy weapon I can find. Any other time I would be criticizing my poor cleaning routines and the clutter stacked everywhere. Not today.

There! The small knife on my altar table is good, but I wonder if I can get one of the kitchen knives. Snatching the sheathed ceremonial knife I slide it into my pocket as I rounded the couch back toward the kitchen. You can do this Mercy. You got us here, you can get us out.

“Oh, I’m no one really. I was created to guard the prisons in hell, I don’t even have a name really.” Shoulders busily working the scrambled eggs in the pan I inched closer to the kitchen door as his height became realized in my mind. Closer to seven feet than six, he was nearly hunched over the stove to cook at my black stove top. Hands busy with the spatula I studied the burnt red skin that stretched from his back to form a toned ass and the longest legs that I’ve ever witnessed. Do they not have clothes in hell? Maybe that was just a prison-in-hell thing?

Toeing my way toward the kitchen my eyes track every flip of the pan as he deftly continues cooking what is decidedly some delicious-smelling bacon. Floorboards creaking ever so slightly beneath me grind my flighty chaotic energy as I study the being in front of me. Carmine skin darkens to the color of soot at his fingers and feet. Horns like those of a ram protrude from his forehead, giving a tight curl and ending in blacked daggers.

“Wait, you don’t have a cool demon name?” That strikes me as odd, most of the horror stories I’ve heard about summoning a demon involved a terribly hard-to-decipher name in infernal. My feet carry me thoughtlessly further inside the kitchen door as my heart rate beats a tango in my chest.

“No,” he shrugs one shoulder lazily, “we just called each other the letters of our cell blocks.” His mannerisms are so close to casual that I could have missed that it wasn’t a big deal to him if I wasn’t watching him with excruciating glares. The rise and fall of his shoulders were just enough to let me in on the sore spot of never having been named. My hungry eyes slide over the deep muscled definition of his shoulders and find a home at the divots of his hips. Dimples of Venus they were called, the place where muscles affix to the bones of the hips. Deeply carmine in color his skin beckons.

My fingers suddenly itch to touch those dimples set into the tapered hips of an impossibly muscular frame. A frame belonging to a demon! I silently admonished myself. Head shaking with a sudden sense of shame I pulled my eyes from him to categorize the kitchen. Knives Mercy, find a big knife to protect yourself. Do not drool over the demon.

“And your cell blocks were which letter?” Sliding further into the kitchen I slowly ease myself to the wall opposite the stove as he presses several buttons and accidentally turns the oven on several times before he manages to turn the stove burner off. Clumsy as a toddler he arranges bacon and scrambled eggs onto two plates. The strips of surprisingly perfectly charred bacon and eggs that I am pretty sure have shells in them look minuscule in his hands. Pride shines on his face when he brings the plates to the table, pulling out a chair for himself my eyes eat up every inch of his chest as he finally turns in my direction.

Tracing every inch of deeply red skin my eyes fall from his childishly proud grin to the mound of muscle that makes up the traps that anchor into clavicles so deep I could drown in their pools. Rough-hewn muscles spill forward in pectoral mounds that beg to be touched by the hands of mere mortals. My mind slows to a snail's pace as I trace the peaks of his deeply darkened n*****s. Following the trail of dusky black hair that entices downward his chest tapers into a deliciously rounded belly. Hips taper in and beg for my hands to find their home as the dusky black hair leads to a resting place my eyes beg to glimpse.

Hips flex as he walks toward the table and my breath hitches as I realize there at the apex of my curiosity lays a barren mound. No junk? My brain seems to short-circuit. What was I expecting? A barbed p***s? A d**k that compares in size to the mammoth man that slides into the chair before me. Looking all together like the chair is going to give out beneath him I find my breath again and the questions in my brain explode.