The news was bad. There was no sign of the Duke and his men. Had they perhaps taken a wrong turning in the forest? Surely not. Surely they knew this entire territory, after so many years of riding it.
“Show me your tits,” the goat-boy demanded.
As he spoke he lifted his left leg and struck a stone with his raptor claw. A bright spark leapt from the place and landed on a tuft of grey grass, where it erupted into a little fire. It had too little fuel to keep it sustained for long, but in the five or six seconds that it took for the cycle of spark, fire and extinction to play out Tammy heard the sound of the Duke’s horses, and from the corner of her eye saw them emerging from between the trees.
The goat-boy narrowed his eyes to golden slits. The corners of his mouth turned down, showing the lower row of monstrous teeth.
“Show me,” he said again.
Plainly he wasn’t going to be toyed with any longer. He wanted to see what she had, and he wanted to see them now.
She didn’t pretend that the horsemen’s proximity was not of interest to her. What was the use? Everybody was in on this ridiculous game, the goat-boy included. He dropped his head a little, which should have been a sign for Tammy as to what he would do next, but she was too busy thinking about how long the Duke would take to get off his horse to realize that the goat-boy was making make a run at her. And by the time she did realize, he was already halfway there, and there was nothing between her bare breasts and his hands, his mouth, his teeth, but a prayer.
EIGHT
Fearing the worst, Todd let out a yell, and started racing across the muddy, bloody ground to do whatever he could to stop the goat-boy attacking Tammy. But before he could get there she had taken matters into her own hands. She let the last of the six buttons slip, and her blouse fell open, unveiling her breasts. The sight of them literally stopped the Devil’s child in his tracks. He opened his mouth and drool ran from it.
Tammy was smart enough not to reject this sign of adoration, however crude. Instead, she opened her arms, inviting him into her embrace. Todd would have betted against the wisdom of this. The goat-boy was no sentimentalist. He wanted to play rough. But had he made that bet, he would have lost it.
The Devil’s child fell to his knees, laughing. Then he crawled — yes, crawled — into Tammy’s arms. His hands went greedily up to one of her breasts, and he held the unwieldy bubble of flesh before his eyes for a moment of devotion. His mouth was slick and wet; the saliva glinted off his terrible teeth.
“Please God … ” Todd murmured.
It was very possibly the strangest sensation of Tammy’s thirty-four years, the feeling of the Devil’s child’s mouth around her left nipple. There had been a moment — as he closed his mouth around her — when it had crossed her mind that she should be afraid; that with one chomp he could give her an instant mastectomy if he so chose. But somehow she knew he would not. He was in love with her breasts. Instead he worshipped them, in his way. Though his mouth was tight around her flesh, she felt not so much as the lightest of scratches from those shark-like teeth. In fact she suspected he’d somehow sheathed them, the way a snake sheathed its fangs, because as he sucked and sucked all she felt was a slightly guilty rush of pleasure as his suction drew the blood to the nipple, and the flesh surrounding the nipple, sensitizing the entire area.
Then, as though all this weren’t peaceful and domestic enough, the Devil’s child closed his eyes, his fat little hands holding the source of his bliss, and Tammy gently rocked him in her arms.
Goga had been searching for Lilith’s child for many centuries now, under a sky that — though it was sometimes cloudy, sometimes clear — always showed the sun eclipsed. He had no real idea of how long his imprisonment in the Devil’s Country had lasted; his mind had long ago lost any grasp on the passage of time. He and his men had passed the centuries in a kind of fugue state. Sometimes, when they rested and ate what they’d hunted-rabbit on occasion, or venison, or wild pig-they would talk about what had happened to them that day on the hunt, and where they now were. It was the Duke’s opinion that this was not a real place at all, but a kind of dream that the Devil was dreaming, and they were trapped in it. How else to explain the curious limitations of their condition? The same ships forever heading towards the horizon, the same roads haunted by the same beasts; the same sun in the same heaven, half-blinded by the same black moon?