Chapter Eleven
Dr. Evan Trask sat behind his desk on a stiff-backed chair in his darkened office. He brought his tall slender fingers together at the tips, flexed his hands, and forced himself to breathe slowly. He’d found Douglas Wingfeather…or rather, the lovely male had found him.
What luck the woman, Kate, had stumbled upon his doorstep looking for her son, little realizing what she, once again, set in motion. A stirring started deep within Trask. One he hadn’t experienced since the male had been taken from him. Now he had something to look forward to, a goal. Surging lust sprung to his loins along with the breathless need to move quickly. If his prey spooked, he might try to run, and if that happened, how would he ever find Douglas again?
The doctor waited, not so patiently, for his strong-arms to return and tell him where he could locate the precious male. His gut instinct told him it would not be Boston. The story he’d been fed about a mental hospital there had stunk to high Hell. But he’d let them think he bought it. Between the three oversized males, Douglas, his companion, and the erstwhile Dr. Penmarch, Trask had known enough not to kick up a fuss. He’d bide his time, instead, and get Douglas back when he wasn’t surrounded by so much muscle. Trask couldn’t help the smirk of satisfaction that passed across his thin lips. He’d have Douglas again. A sigh of satisfaction escaped. And then surely, with a few more treatments, Douglas would be his…forever.
Trask drew his brows together and let a rare moment of self-pity emerge. No one understood how it felt to be him. As strong as Trask appeared to the outside world, he had a weakness. Loneliness. Nothing sucked worse than being stuck as the only one of his species on this purely human plain. He’d worked tirelessly to redress that.
Humans were self-serving whiners, falling into two categories. They either used him―in his role as a doctor―to get rid of their unwanted and mentally challenged burdens. Or if they were colleagues, they picked his knowledgeable brains for what they needed, then avoided him like the plague.
Luckily, Trask had gained the ability to surround himself with lesser beings eager to help him with his work. But one could neither commune with the Underworld ghouls he’d procured―who were morons―nor sit down for a good game of chess with the likes of his receptionist, Belinda, who had once been a patient and currently missed some serious cranial bits and pieces.
Trask had always longed for someone just like himself, but finding a way into the deepest regions of the nebulous Underworld―where he’d been told his sperm donor lived―had proven impossible, and he’d remained alone…the only Cambion stuck on earth.
The doctor had been given the story of his birth when young, his flighty mother filling his head with tales of a handsome succubus who’d found a way out of Hell to seduce her. She’d fallen in love, and at least according to her fantasies, the succubus had too. When, against all odds, she’d become impregnated, her lover had railed at her, assuring her of the impossibility. Disgusted with her presumed infidelity, he’d fled back below.
His mother hadn’t had a chance to tell the succubus that she had demonic blood from an unknown paternal grandfather―a heritage she’d never been interested in…Bajang, or some such thing―that must have made her pregnancy possible. By the time she’d sorted out the whys and wherefores, it hadn’t mattered. She’d been left to raise little Evan on her own.
The doctor didn’t know much more. Human libraries held very little about the incubus and succubus species who were said to have roamed the earth during the dark ages. All the texts agreed although sex had been rampant, spawning on earth had been unheard of. A different story unfolded in Hell, where a male incubus could use fallen females and beget offspring, or a female succubus could quicken with the get of a doomed male. The lurid drawings he’d discovered depicted debauched parties in Hell where spirits and sex flowed freely. Sometimes, Trask longed to be a part of that, but he didn’t know how to get there, so he made a life on earth instead.
While in college, his mother had died of an aneurysm, but even before that, she’d been no help figuring things out. From the start, he’d always forged his way alone through the unknown. What he’d learned had been through a lot of trial and error.
Trask had aged normally for the longest time, and despite a few odd habits, he’d been able to blend in well with the population. But once he turned twenty, his sexual appetites had emerged, and he soon became voracious.
He had to be very careful and more than discreet. He liked both women and men and found although he procured consensual sex fairly easily, he was vastly more amused when he held total dominion over an unwilling partner. Many a violent, late-night tryst required one of these latter liaisons to ‘disappear.’ He had no moral problem making that happen.
Medical school, which had been extremely easy for him, lent him the credentials and an endless opportunity to flex his proclivities by having people declared mentally incompetent and placed under his care. He eventually opened a private practice and began many long years of experimentation on the humans legally assigned to him by the state; lost souls about whom no one cared.
By the time Evan turned fifty, it became apparent to him he wasn’t aging as quickly as his human counterparts. It became suddenly necessary for him to move every ten years or so, in hopes no one caught on. A decided inhibitor to the experiments he’d begun to perform.
In the year 1922, he’d turned seventy in human years and become sick and tired of relocating. But the time had come for him to pack up yet again. He’d gotten wind of an institution in Belchertown that had just opened, and it became a godsend. The large, mostly unregulated ‘school’ made a perfect fit. With his credentials, stellar in his field, the state gave him full and unconditional authority to treat residents as he saw fit. Gleefully sequestering himself in his own private wing, Trask had been able to do as he pleased. But even he needed staff to help keep things running in his most private sanctum. So, his…diverse…procedures had to be done late at night when prying eyes of employees remained closed in sleep.
The doctor’s biggest stroke of luck had been the day he’d overseen the interment of a deceased patient. Standing in the cemetery, he’d caught a scent on the wind. Something that bespoke of other-worldly creatures. Blood had rushed in his veins, and he’d searched frantically, but to no avail. He refused to give up.
Trask had been patient, night after night staking out the graveyard. Weeks he waited until finally, his vigils came to fruition. He managed to sedate and trap his first ghoul.
With the being privately caged, research ensued, and the doctor found that ghouls were devourers of dead flesh, and just his luck, they could take the form of those upon who they chose to snack. Trask, taking full advantage of his newfound knowledge, killed the most able-bodied members of his staff―the highly muscled men he used to help subdue patients―and fed them to his ever-growing stable of ghouls. In this way, he built his small army.
Under his guidance, he tendered to his ghouls the choicest bits of mortified flesh. He learned to control the flock with freshly-killed meat. Feeding time at the zoo took on a whole new meaning. Things had been so easy. Trask sighed. What a lovely period in his life that had been.
But the advent of Douglas had been even sweeter.
Once assigned to his wing, Trask had several years with the unwilling male, using him with no limitations. He’d experimented…and sated himself. All with a final goal in mind.
Alas, he became too cocky. Not with Douglas, but with another particularly luscious male who came under his care. He hadn’t checked the young man’s credentials and found out too late, he treated the son of a prominent and nosy politician.
Accused of improper sexual practices―just as his long-term work with Douglas showed fruition―he’d been fired from the hospital. What an idiot he’d been to make waves. Instead of realizing a lifelong goal, he’d been forced to start over.
Luckily, he landed on his feet, and the private practice he’d maintained had thrived due mostly to the fact he’d take any case, no matter how severe the mental impairment. Humans who were turned away from other venues, flocked to his door with a grandparent, a child, an aunt.
Using the few connections he still had at the new school―which had replaced the old, broken down facility―Trask kept track of Douglas. To say he’d been completely broken when he’d heard of the human’s death was an understatement. Years of progress had been taken from him with no possibility he’d ever find someone else like Douglas in his lifetime. The doctor had been crushed.
Eventually, his deviant nature hungered once more, and he stopped wallowing in self-pity. He needed the stimulation of new victims in order to survive…and survive he did.
Trask looked down at his unwrinkled hands, his nails perfectly trimmed. He was one-hundred and sixty-two years old and still vibrant. Not that he hadn’t aged. Every few years, a little more gray appeared in his hair. His knees ached when a storm threatened, and he needed his ghouls to do the heavy lifting he had so easily accomplished himself twenty years before.
But now. Now. Things would change.
Nothing had prepared Trask for Kate’s visit nor her assurances Douglas still lived. The doctor had tried to remain calm, recognizing the woman didn’t appear entirely lucid but had done the only thing he could. He locked her up. If what she said proved true, Douglas would come to find her.
In the end, it hadn’t even taken a full day. When his favorite patient walked through the door, every molecule in Trask’s body had come alive. Everything he wanted to do to Douglas flashed through his brain and triggered feelings that had lay long dormant. And then Douglas had been spirited away. But not for long.
The doctor grew impatient. Where were his ghouls? They were taking their time. Trask needed to know Douglas’ whereabouts. He wanted to strap the male down and begin again.
The smell of Douglas that lingered in the room came to the doctor’s nostrils along with the heady scent of his companion. His companion. Now there was an interesting fellow. Trask remained intrigued. The bald giant had been a smooth talker with the air of a free spirit. Trask doubted the delicious male had ever been incarcerated.
Despite Dr. Penmarch’s credentials, too many variables bespoke of subterfuge. Kate’s disappearance from his clinic, the incapacitation of a very strong ghoul, not to mention the companion’s lack of fear regarding Trask, none of it added up. The more likely scenario bespoke a well-executed snatch and bolt. Trask had to give them credit. He’d been expertly played.
But who were these new people who backed Douglas? Trask shook off his hint of trepidation. It didn’t matter. He had a host of skills at his fingertips to stymie even the shrewdest of humans. He’d dealt with earth’s pesky inhabitants for many years and had always―with the exception of the dismissal from his position―prevailed. If Douglas had backing at this juncture in his life, it might be more difficult to bring him in, but the word impossible did not even occur to Trask.
The doctor continued to ponder the bald male with the rich, deep voice and the finely-honed body. An irreverent one, demanding to be tamed. The things the bold individual had intimated. It had incensed and inflamed Trask at the same time.
He fantasized stripping the large man naked, hanging his sweat-glistened body from ceiling restraints, to hear him scream while Trask worked. The picture had the doctor trembling. Perhaps he’d be as enjoyable as Douglas? How would it be to have two such magnificent specimens under his dominion? Trask found himself salivating.
Life suddenly looked to be worth living again, and not only for the physical benefits the two men could provide. No. If Trask’s work produced the results he expected, the rest of eternity would be the most gratifying slice of his existence.