Prince of Tricks Read online

  Dedication

  For Pussy Riot, and all the Russian voices being silenced.

  Pervaya

  The demon in his bed had a spectacular ass. Belphagor let the sheet slide down as he shifted position beside Vasily on the narrow cot, baring the ass in question. Light played against the marked flesh in stripes through the threadbare curtain—watermarks against fire.

  “Sweet boy,” he murmured against Vasily’s shoulder, sculpting a hand around the firm slope at the thigh. Vasily stirred, not yet awake, but his muscles tensing beneath the flesh. “Moi malchik,” Belphagor breathed, an exhalation of essential rightness and desire. This was his boy, his malchik.

  Vasily’s breathing quickened, waking mind surging to the surface. Belphagor rested his cheek against a flexing biceps and watched the magnificent cock swell with an infusion of blood.

  “Good morning.” Belphagor pressed his own hardness against the small of Vasily’s back. “Any regrets?”

  Vasily turned his head toward him, the rough nap of bearded cheek rubbing a pleasant irritation against Belphagor’s skin. “Regrets?” The gravelly voice sounded even more pronounced first thing in the morning. “Nyet, ser.”

  The Russian response sent a rush of possessive fire through Belphagor’s veins. It was the language he demanded during discipline, part of the ritual of obedience as well as a device to focus the subject’s conscious mind on something other than physical sensation. Vasily had used it without prompting, a sign of his total surrender. It made Belphagor want to possess him fully. Immediately.

  But he was also a bit of a masochist in his own right. He could wait. He’d waited a year just to have him the first time.

  He tightened his hand against the bruised, beautiful ass, and Vasily made a slight noise of discomfort. “You’ll have quite a reminder of my hand when you try to sit for the next few days.”

  “Not just your hand,” said Vasily gruffly.

  To keep from giving in to the desire for instant gratification, Belphagor had to bite Vasily’s shoulder, drawing a lovely sound of firespirit breath from the demon. “Show me how that memory makes you feel.” He sucked lightly at the place he’d bitten. “Put your cock in your fist.”

  The larger demon didn’t hesitate, the sizeable hand closing around the sizeable shaft. He stroked himself rapidly, enthusiastically, while Belphagor snaked an arm around his waist beneath the pumping forearm and played with Vasily’s nipples, whispering encouragement.

  “Good boy. That’s it, my sweet boy.”

  “I’m not a boy,” Vasily growled, his last word grunted in an almost surprised ejaculation of sound to match the efforts of his body. Hot firespirit fluid shot from the swollen head of his cock in a perfect trail up his abs and into the hollow below his throat.

  Belphagor pushed him onto his back and straddled him, his own unfulfilled erection poised between them like an exclamation point. “I told you, you’re my boy. Mine.” He dipped his head and scooped his tongue into the warm stuff at Vasily’s throat like a cat’s into cream. There was an implication in the words that Vasily couldn’t miss. The firespirit had been earning his bed and his supper on the streets of Raqia since the word “boy” had been applied to him more literally, likely from an even earlier age than had Belphagor himself. When Vasily had come to him after the night Belphagor caught him trying to cut his purse, he’d attempted to continue with his street business as usual until Belphagor forbade him selling himself to angels or to rough trade demons. He wouldn’t stop Vasily bartering his favors if that was what he chose to do, but he would see to it he was treated as the valuable commodity he was if he insisted on continuing in the trade.

  This hadn’t sat well with a firespirit just coming into his prime. Angels in particular desired him, finding his rough looks and the wild coloring of his tangled hair the epitome of what they pictured as demonic. Mostly students out on their own for the first time with purses of crystal facets to burn, they wanted the quintessential Raqia experience. They crossed Elysium’s River Acheron to slum in Heaven’s Demon District, and in their eyes, Vasily was as low-rent as they could get. Which was all the more reason they were to keep their filthy angelic paws off Belphagor’s boy.

  A red glimmer of flame threatened in the black depths of Vasily’s pupils, giving the hazel irises an amber cast. This evidence of his defiant anger, despite the fact that Belphagor had finally given him what he wanted—or broken down and caved to his charms, more like—was a Pavlovian bell to Belphagor’s hunger for him. It had nearly driven him mad to keep Vasily at arm’s length this long, telling himself he didn’t deserve him, that Vasily couldn’t possibly want him—the Vasily in his head still the same skinny cutpurse youth he’d first encountered, though his “boy” had long been nothing of the sort. Even now, his heart fluttered like a panicked bird caged in his chest, waiting for something terrible to happen, for Vasily to realize Belphagor wasn’t as young as he appeared and to ridicule the helpless state to which he’d reduced him—hopelessly enamored of another demon after the equivalent of a human lifetime of solitude.

  For Belphagor, solitude had been his strength. He hadn’t needed anyone since the earliest betrayals of youthful love. But Vasily had brought him to his knees. Never mind that it was Vasily on his knees that had done it to him.

  “What’s got your fire up, malchik?” He kissed the spot he’d cleaned with his tongue beneath Vasily’s Adam’s apple. “I thought you wanted to be mine.”

  “I hate it when you treat me like a child.”

  Belphagor raised an eyebrow. “I’m fairly certain I treated you as rather the opposite last night. Was it not satisfactory?”

  The natural pink of Vasily’s cheeks reddened more obviously. “Of course it was. I mean, it was more than satisfactory. Way more. Dammit, Beli.” He crooked his arm over his eyes as if looking up into Belphagor’s embarrassed him during such talk. He was utterly charming. As was the little endearment that had just slipped out, though Belphagor might have decked another demon for it.

  He kissed Vasily’s sullen mouth. “It was far more than satisfactory for me.” The soft words were almost a whisper. “You’ve absolutely spoiled me for anyone else.”

  “Good.” The word was delivered with a sudden sharpness. So that was what was bothering him. It sparked a bit of defiance of his own. He wasn’t used to having anyone put restraints on him. That was Belphagor’s specialty.

  “Don’t seek to possess me, malchik. I’m an airspirit.”

  Vasily moved his arm away from his eyes, and they were glowing with furious heat. “So that’s how it is. You own me, you tell me what I can and can’t do, but you can do as you like.” The roiling anger in the firespirit eyes heated Belphagor like combustion from the inside out. The thought of putting Vasily over his knee once more made him almost painfully hard. Without equivocation, he was a slave to this brutally beautiful young demon.

  “Yes, Vasya. That’s how it is.”

  The violent rebuff wasn’t unexpected, but Belphagor, nonetheless, had failed to brace for it, too absorbed in the feel of the body beneath him and the thoughts of what he wished to do with it. He found himself forcefully ejected from the cot and sprawled on the cold wooden floor, with Vasily standing over him, magnificent in his literally naked anger.

  “Then maybe you should just skip the foreplay and go fuck yourself!” Vasily delivered the Germanic hardness of the lovely verb “fuck” as if he were demonstrating it. As Vasily jerked his jeans onto his legs like he was punishing the fabric, Belphagor watched with unabashed admiration of the musculature being regretfully hidden away. Hooray at least for his lazy laundering habits that had resulted in this morning’s “commando” mode.

  He picked himself up, along with the black T-shirt on th
e floor beside him, which he handed to Vasily as if he couldn’t care less whether the demon walked out on him. Vasily snatched it from his grip and yanked it on over the tangled red locks he’d been cultivating. The shirt had once been Belphagor’s. It had stretched to its limits and was now much too small on the firespirit frame. Belphagor wished there were cameras in Heaven. He could just about die from gazing at the image Vasily struck.

  Vasily was waiting for him to apologize or take back what he’d said, to placate him into staying. He had no intention of doing so. Vasily was his. It was an indisputable fact. He’d be back.

  The younger demon turned and yanked open the rickety door in danger of coming right off the hinges at his grip, cast one last furious, fiery glare in Belphagor’s direction, and left him with a fierce slam. The bottom hinge bent.

  Belphagor glanced down at his relentless and unameliorated state of arousal with a sigh of resignation. His masochistic streak might be at an all-time high.

  He’d expected Vasily to be gone no longer than a day. Tooting his own horn though it might be—and the exquisite whipping he’d delivered aside—he’d fucked Vasily to the point of blissed-out insensibility. It was difficult to imagine anyone not coming back for more, let alone his malchik, who’d been begging for the physical consummation of their intense attraction for nigh on a year. Belphagor had once again failed to factor in the degree of Vasily’s own masochism. Coupled with the most stubborn, bull-headed personality he’d ever encountered, Vasily might potentially deny himself what he wanted most even after having had a taste of it, just to get back at Belphagor for his apparent selfish indifference.

  Vasily didn’t recognize the manipulation for what it was, which made doing it all the more irresistible. The power dynamic the younger demon craved required the added element of emotional betrayal. Vasily needed to feel wronged, to reach a fever pitch of indignation, in order to let go and fully surrender himself to Belphagor’s control. Without being driven to a sort of hopeless despair and resignation, no amount of physical dominance or eroticized pain would satisfy him.

  Wringing that sense of anguish and defeat from the demon and then enveloping him in the comfort and tenderness he despaired of, knowing nothing else in the world could make him feel loved, was in turn the most emotionally fulfilling experience Belphagor had ever had. To be loved himself by the one who felt utterly abandoned by him pierced Belphagor in a deep, internal place—went to the very marrow of his bones. He knew what it was to love desperately and to be abandoned. The one he’d loved would never come to redeem him, but he could be for Vasily what he himself had once so desperately needed.

  In the gaming room of the Brimstone for the next several evenings, Belphagor kept an eye out for Vasily’s entrance without appearing to do so. He hadn’t become the best wingcasting player in Raqia by telegraphing his moves. He played exceptionally well, in fact, by maintaining an external awareness beyond the boundaries of the marble-rimmed table while projecting an air of inattentiveness to anything but his own cards. The false inward focus was contagious and tended to make his opponent forget to take note of the broader actions of the game.

  When he cast the die or called his opponent’s cast, he let his attention encompass the entire establishment. This part of the game was only chance; willing the die to land on the elemental creature one had called or staring anxiously at the twelve-sided game piece as it struck the table’s rim after an opponent had called one’s own cast had no effect on the outcome. Shifting the air around the table might, of course, but that was easily done with the flick of the wrist in casting or the breath of a bored sigh. If Belphagor’s cardinal element responded more readily to his influence than it did for other airspirits, it was no coincidence.

  He’d devoted years of his life—and the number was considerable for a demon who frequently fell to the world of Man where aging was far more rapid than in the pure celestial air—to understanding how to master the dominant element in his blood. The number of Fallen who literally fell was small in comparison to the demonic population, and the average demon had never experienced terrestrial magic. In Heaven, a demon—or even an angel, though they were generally too uptight to try—might manipulate his element for simple tricks and folk magic, but in the world of Man, every celestial possessed a radiant power that manifested as elemental wings.

  Belphagor had first fallen when he was only fifteen years of age. He hadn’t made the discovery right away, and the Fallen he’d encountered there, in the city of Petrograd, hadn’t told him. It was only in fleeing the law some months after his arrival that he’d inadvertently found his wings. Leaping from a bridge to escape, he’d expected to swim for it and found himself instead soaring on the wind, the radiance that burst from his shoulder blades outstretched as wings of solid air that seemed to swallow up the visual range of light into their element.

  “Ptarmigan,” he said absently as the die tumbled from his opponent’s fingers and struck the rim. The other demon scowled as the die landed with the ptarmigan face-up. Sometimes Belphagor’s luck was better when he put no effort into the game at all.

  “It’s a loaded die,” the player accused. The demon had clearly had too much to drink.

  Belphagor narrowed his gaze on the pallid-looking waterspirit. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Loaded die!” He stood and delivered the accusation loudly enough for the house to hear. Any such accusation had to be taken seriously. The game was immediately halted and the pot forfeited to the house while the deck and die were confiscated for examination.

  It took every ounce of Belphagor’s restraint to keep from leaping on the little worm and delivering a very unerotic beating. He’d automatically turned up the cuffs of his shirt in preparation for it without being aware he’d done so, showing his ink like an animal might show its teeth in warning.

  The bluish-black tattoos that marked his fingers and the backs of his hands were the badges of his incarceration in the Russian prison system. They marked him as vor, a thief, and announced in no uncertain terms that he was not to be trifled with. The association commanded a certain level of respect in the world of Man—among the right people—that he might never have been afforded due to his less than impressive physical stature, but in Raqia it had the added intimidation factor of making it clear that he had not only dealt with the harsh prison system of the Zona but with the Seraph bounty hunters who exploited it with their own terrestrial magic.

  Just as the game inspector pocketed Belphagor’s favorite wingcasting set, the street door opened, ushering in a blast of wet winter wind and admitting a party of young angelic toughs—arrogant, but breathtaking in their sterile waterspirit purity. One of them had his arm over the shoulder of a demon smartly dressed in a black velvet frock coat and tailored slacks. Despite his impressive size, had it not been for the shock of red matted locks done up in a knot just below the demon’s crown, Belphagor might actually have missed him.

  The sore loser still glaring his defiance across the table at him ceased to matter in the rush of possessive desire and jealous fury that nearly knocked Belphagor off his feet.

  Angels were touching his boy.

  His brain dropped into his testicles, and he charged across the bar like a bull sporting bloody banderillas and struck the angelic prick right in the kisser.

  The angel went down in stunned surprise, and time seemed to freeze for a moment before the rest of the angels in the fancy one’s entourage sprang forward and descended on Belphagor, dragging him upstairs to the street. Despite his stature, he was more than a match for a pair of the little bastards, or even three; prison had taught him a number of valuable skills. But he’d had the misfortune to anger a pack of them.

  “Learn your fucking place, you Fallen piece of trash.” A fist landed in his gut while he struggled, snarling, with the group of angels who had his arms, and another slammed into his cheek. As he spat blood into the snow, the angel before him raising his fist for another blow suddenly howled with pain. Behind him,
Vasily had reached over the angel’s shoulder and twisted his arm into an unnatural pose.

  Belphagor’s odds had just improved.

  The angel went sprawling across the slush-dirty cobblestone while two of the angels holding Belphagor let go of him to converge on Vasily. Belphagor slammed his elbow into the throat of another on his left, simultaneously kicking sidelong against the knee of the angel on his right, dislocating it with a loud pop drowned out instantly by the angel’s shriek as he hopped backward. While the choking one on Belphagor’s left swung wildly at him, he grasped the wide-swiping arm and knocked the angel face-first into the brick wall of The Brimstone, punching him in the kidney for good measure.

  He turned and saw the two angels Vasily had grabbed scrambling away, badly bloodied, while the one on the ground dragged himself across the street with one arm at an alarming angle, howling like a child. Two others that had been behind him, and the first one Belphagor had punched, who now stood on the top step, wisely took off running, shouting racial slurs over their shoulders in cowardice.

  Belphagor wiped his fist across his bloody lip and met Vasily’s eyes. Flame sparked dangerously in them.

  “Sukin syn,” Vasily snarled. This was not the Russian Belphagor had taught him. “You think you own me, you son of a bitch? You think you can just march up and mark your property the moment someone else takes a fancy to me?”

  Belphagor’s stance was casual, but the set of his jaw was hard. “I told you.” He spoke calmly. Dangerously. “Angels are not to touch you.” Vasily had just dispatched a handful of angels in seconds, the same angels who’d been beating the snot out of Belphagor a moment before, yet his angry expression was now tinged with fear. Knowing he could strike that fear into Vasily despite his superior physical strength made Belphagor hungry to make good on the unspoken promise. “Did I not make myself clear, malchik?”

  “No—I mean, yes, you—” Vasily stopped and swallowed nervously, clearly trying to pull his defiance back on. “Why?”