art by @julesjuliiet 🖤 🪄📞
Let us prey
Pairings: Albert Shaw / Camp Counselor!Reader 18+
Word count: 9k Rating: [E] explicit
Tags: TW: DARK content, horror elements, religious imagery, blasphemy, implied child murder, implied past abuse, predator/prey, choking, belting, dom/sub elements, dubious consent, nonconsensual touching, bondage, degradation, knife play, mask kink, praise kink, cunnilingus, vaginal fingering, vaginal sex, AFAB-Female reader.
PSA: I'm very aware this character is controversial but I'm here for a bloody, masked Hawke. My version of Albert has not/will not ever sa minors. Idc what Derrickson or Hill have claimed about theirs, this one is mine. That being said, he is still very much a sadistic predator. Please heed the tags and stay safe. 🎩🪄 (AO3)
You always look forward to winter camp.
Over the last couple years a few of the other counselors have come to be your closest friends. You all vary in age and hail from different parts of the country but every season the crisp, clean air of the Rocky Mountains draws you all back together. You don't really buy into all the preaching. There was enough of that when you were younger; so much so that the generalized guilt and shame still festers every once and a while like a wound stitched wrong… but the pay is decent. It is something you’ve grown to impatiently await along with the lights and whimsy and the ritual of the holidays. An annual break from the madness of balancing college courses, work, mental health; the all consuming grip of an overburdened schedule.
You, Hope, and Naomi are assigned to keep watch of the girls' cabins this winter, as is becoming routine. The camp's strict co-ed rules keep the boys confined at night to their own cluster of cabins to the northeast of the lake. You can just see their scattered specks of warm lights glowing through the frosted window as you help usher your small group of girls to their bunks for the evening.
It's been a busy day of ice fishing, sledding, and bracelet beading. Dinner tonight was a hearty stew and mashed potatoes. They still mix warm in your belly as you change into your loose thermal top and pajama pants to settle in your own bunk in the back corner. Thick covers drape over your waist and you sip at a hot cup of tea with just enough honey stirred in to sit delicately sweet at the back of your tongue. Your book is dog-eared from years of love and tender rereading as you begin another of the many in dull light from the wall heaters. They battle tooth and nail against the chill that tries to slither in through the cracks of the thick cabin walls.
The biting wind cries out in a steady, near constant groan. Heavy clouds have threatened fresh snow all day but now it's beginning to sound like the kind that has you betting you'll be shoveling out the front door come morning.
But for now, none of that can reach you. It acts almost as a lullaby, soothing your nervous system and weighing heavy against your eyelids as if the flurries piled there instead. You fill your lungs with the first full, unhindered breath of air that it feels like you’ve taken in months as you settle down against your pillow. Your muscles ache pleasantly from the exertion of a day well spent. Warmth seeps into your bones; thaws out your fingers and toes. You've always slept better here than you do at home.
Almost like the dead, Hope liked to say.
+++
You are startled awake by what sounds like a particularly angry howl of the wind gnashing its teeth. At first you try to talk yourself down. Try to breathe deep and slow your heart rate. It's just the passing storm echoing off the nearby cradle of the mountains. Nothing unusual.
Then you hear it again. Farther away but just as wrong, another muffled sound of torment too real. Too violent for the soft snow that falls much gentler now beyond the windows. Too human. It raises alarm bells in your mind and you fumble to rise from your cocoon of covers.
It can't have been long since you fell asleep but you're suddenly wide awake. You slide on your slippers and quietly make your way to the window. The moon still hovers near her crest, high above the dark clouds, shining through just enough to cast the endless white beyond in an eerie opaque blue.
You squint your eyes as you lean close to the glass, warm breath fogging up a portion of your view. You swipe it away with the bunched sleeve at your wrist.
The night does its best to conceal them, but you can just barely make their shapes out in the distance. Two shadowed forms move toward the wood line. One tall and broad across the shoulders, masculine in stature and gait; the other shorter, smaller. Little.
For a moment it looks like a picture of innocence. The man's hand rests somewhere behind the child’s head, a guiding hold. Perhaps Father lending some advice to a restless soul. Or a counselor scolding a rowdy camper out of earshot from their peers. A kindness.
But then the little one falls to his hands and knees. The man's hold does not relent. He does not slow or try to assist… If anything, it looks more like he's being scruffed… Dragged harshly across the ice until after a few dizzying seconds they are entirely out of view…
Something isn't right and the awareness is so sudden and sickening that it feels like the frigid water of the lake is trickling down over your every nerve. Like it's trying to rise and nip at the rear of your throat and suddenly you’re drowning in understanding.
You are witnessing something you are not supposed to see. There is no doubt in your mind. Your heart races in your chest.
You bolt.
The front door hinders you for only a handful of seconds as you kick away inches of fresh snow and close the latch securely behind your exit. The other counselors are asleep in their respective cabins and a logical part of you knows that the smart thing to do would be to get their attention. To let someone else know what you saw. But that had to be a child falling to their knees in the snow. Ripped from his bed and your view by a much larger being. And instinct tells you that there is no time to gamble on whether your perception is correct. That the longer you take to get to that wood line, the worse an outcome you may find.
You've done your research in your own spare time. It is an unfortunate truth that the Rockies have seen their fair share of violence and loss since long before your arrival. Vanished hikers. Murdered women. Dozens of bodies left to their slow decay in tombs of impenetrable ice. As ideal a place for destruction as any.
A yelp cuts from the trees.
Your slippers crunch through the loose powder as your decision is made for you. The terrain is uneven and slippery. Every forceful exhale sends a cloud of vapor spiraling up from between your lips as you drive your legs forward as hard as possible.
You pass the camp phone. The only one on the premises. It stands alone in the open valley, throwing a long shadow across the ice before you like a finishing line. There's been no reason for you to ever pay it attention before, but you swear you hear the echoes of a ringing in your ears as you leave it far behind, distorted like a distant memory. A violent ripple across water you already rest deep beneath. It only adds to the alarm pinging red behind your eyes.
Snowflakes stick in the wild of your hair as you run, loose strands breaking free of your ponytail to whip sharp little stings against your windburnt cheeks and neck. Your breath comes heavy as you near the spot you last saw the pair of shadows in the snow.
You freeze in horror.
Footprints. Too many of them for this path to have been taken only once tonight by two people. Some shallower than the fresher pair. Older. A small, yellow boy’s coat is torn at the seams and strewn across the ground. Fresh blood stains the neck and upper sleeves, trailing in small crimson dots here and there amongst the tracks ahead like a faithful companion.
Your stomach turns. You’ve told yourself for years that you would know exactly how to handle a situation like this should you ever find yourself in one. The hours of safety courses have been taken, the movies have been watched and digested, and you are not some easily frightened thing; but right now you can only think of grabbing the largest tree limb you can find amongst the edge of the forest. You press on deeper into the mountain's hold to find out exactly what the hell is going on.
It is your first mistake.
The cold is all but forgotten as the pools of blood across the snow grow larger and more viscous every dozen yards or so, not even yet having the time to settle down beneath to soil. Your own footsteps sound too loud in your ears as you slow to a halt, holding on to your trusted branch as one would a bat ready to swing.
For a moment, the small clearing before you holds nothing. Just the spreading puddles of cruelty and the faint reflection of starshine glimmering down over ice.
Then you hear footsteps, heavy as they compact the yielding ground beneath. Purposeful in their measured intent.
A man slowly separates from the blackness beyond. It clutches to him like ink to cotton, a stain on the horizon like the scarlet across snow.
No, not a man. A demon, you realize, as he moves nearer and you spread your stance to hold your ground. He is dressed in simple clothing from what you can tell. Dark pants and a dark blue sweater. It clings to his broad shoulders and the generous swell of his arms. He holds an axe stained with blood lax in his hand by his side. All combined, it is nothing compared to the mask. A face from hell tilts slow at you, two horns protruding high on either side of his crown. A wicked, toothy grin mocking bright though the darkness. Brighter still are his eyes, a glimmering curiosity in them as they meet yours and sweep slowly, slowly down; then just as languidly back up again.
It chills you to the bone.
Instinct asks you to cross your arms. To hide as much of yourself as you can from whoever this is. Or to turn and sprint back the way you came. But you heard that yelp. You can’t. So you only grip your weapon tighter, soggy tree bark melting damp against your heated palms.
“What the fuck were you doing to that little boy?” you ask, voice strained by icy abhorrence. It hisses a touch sharper when he doesn’t answer. You raise your filled hands an inch in warning. “Who are you?”
To your surprise and deep seated unsettlement, he giggles, a nasty little tease at the back of his throat as he takes a step closer and you find yourself matching him with a short step back.
“Such language in the land of God,” he tuts, and mentally you are already trying to match up his voice and stature with anyone you know. Anyone from back at camp. But none of them sound like that and you’re not sure whether to be the slightest bit relieved or fully panicked. “What little boy?” He spreads his free arm out at rib height in a slow, showy sweep. “You must be more specific. I only see you.”
His full attention feels like a vice, stopping your breath and adjusting your grip. There is a focused sort of energy to the way his eyes flick to each of the small motions as if categorizing them. He continues his study with another step forward. His hand slips lower down the wooden throat of the axe.
“One more step and I will knock that ugly mask right off your face,” you threaten, eyes wide and heart pounding. Without fully meaning to, you glance down at the drying specks of blood on his boots and fear gives birth to sparked embers of anger. “You know ‘what boy’. The one you dragged here from the cabins. What did you do to him?”
It successfully stills him but he is already too near. Close enough that you could reach out and poke him with your stick if you wanted to, but you know a beast when you see one and he makes no effort to hide. Instead, he meets your eyes once more, glaring proof he’s just as keen.
“That wasn't me.”
You do your own quick searching sweep of the empty void around you. Without any signals from his true expression you can't tell if he's toying with you or just thinks you're really that dumb.
“There is, quite literally, blood on your hands.”
Steam bellows thick rising up from between the mask’s toothy sneer. His suffering sigh is drawn and weary. It slightly deflates his imposing figure, but only just. The axe falls straight down from his hold to sink deep in the slush.
“I save them. Like you,” he nods in accusation. “Show them a kindness beyond the wickedness they've been born to endure, you know? Spare the rod and all that.” He chuckles short again like he expects you to join in his indulgence. To relate somehow. You're left feeling ill. “As a Bible camp counselor I believe you understand what I mean. But you’ve ruined it for all of us tonight, I’m afraid... How naughty.” The final claim rumbles like a purr from his lips. “What to do then, hmm - what to do?” he ponders aloud, complete with curled knuckles rising to his faux chin. His jewelry stands out with the motion, strips of silver against thick, pale fingers and sinewy wrist, all dripping of the gore and damning evidence of his own sins. As bleak and desolate a sight as the otherwise empty woods around you.
“Does that scare you?” he asks, studying your face in the silence, noticing your desperate search for anything beyond him. A savior to step in and help you at your time of need. That vile mask tilts slow to the left once more, reinvigorated. “The unknown?” he tries again, and you swallow thickly at rising bile. He hums to himself as if agreeing to an unspoken answer. “That's why you're here, isn't it?”
You're growing tired already of the diversions. The disturbing riddles. The adrenaline in your muscles urges you to move but your survival instincts beg you not to. Something else whispers louder that you're running out of time...
“I'm here,” you start low, visceral with your intent. “for the kids, you freak,” the curse slides heavy from your teeth. “Where is he?” you repeat a final time.
The demon’s eyes grow hard as he gradually straightens. Liquid glistens at his waterlines but the rage just above them burns it away as steadily as it comes; steam hissing wild from black pits of charred coal.
“The sins of the father are to be laid upon the child. What a complex,” he lilts and his voice does not match his eyes. Almost admonishing in its forced restraint. “But you are no child, are you dear? A daring rescuer, indeed.”
The quiet lingers for a moment too long and you strain to hear over the drum of your heartbeat pounding in your ears; over the undercurrent of his claims. You are hoping to hear a cry. A small weep for help. Something to tell you that you're not being devoured by the eyes of a madman in vain. A sheep led to slaughter for naught. Instead you hear nothing. None of the local night birds. None of the nocturnals. No wolves or coyote howling out their plight to the moon as if some larger predator has marked his claim. Even the wind has turn tailed and hushed.
Your hope drains steadily away from beneath your ribs. Judging by the amount of blood, general weirdness, and lack of remorse, you are standing before a true psychopath. You have seen nothing really, but you’ve seen enough. Enough to describe him to the local authorities. Heard enough to remember that slithering voice until the end of your days.
So you change tactics.
“Something tells me I'm too late anyway,” you murmur, elbows resting looser against your chest in feigned relent. Your heart is in your throat as you strain to talk around it. “I haven’t witnessed anything. I don't know who you are. Just let me go back to camp. There's still a few hours before sunrise-”
“Six,” he hisses out, cutting in. His hands fist white knuckled and relax at his sides.
“-a decent head start before anyone's the wiser.”
“I think I'm going to ruin you instead,” he says, casual, as if merely noting the swirling flurries that fall to cling in his wind blown mane; the curved slopes of his shoulders. Your blood drains hot into your stomach at the threat. His blink is slow, a predator well fed, as if the idea alone sates him. “Yeah,” he decides, “like you've ruined my evening.”
He is on you before he's even finished speaking. You get one good swing in, catching him high against his left temple. It snaps your branch in half like a twig and you drop what remains from your hands to put full force into fighting him off. He throws you brutally to the ground, his overbearing strength almost inhuman in the wake of deceptively long limbs and lean muscle.
You claw at his arms and the back of his hands as they grab hard and lock down.
The snow scatters in all directions when he traps one of your legs in between his own and flips you with a maneuver too fast, too nimble to not be adequately practiced. You find yourself pinned with your spine flush against his chest. Your head falls victim to the vice of his arm. He locks his forearm across your throat so tight your yelp is cut short, oxygen robbed, voice stolen. You tug and thrash and kick but his hold is absolute, like fighting your way from the clutch of solid iron. You tilt your chin up as you tug uselessly at his arm, trying anything to regain airflow as the edges of your vision flicker and begin to fade.
Teeth are all you can see in your peripheral as he dips his chin. The edge of the mask drags slow against the column of your neck as he presses the nose of it deeper into your hair. His breath is fast and feral behind you, each of his strenuous inhales pushing you farther away from your own.
This is it. Your mind unhelpfully supplies as the pressure in your skull builds. Your fingertips are beginning to lose their force where they clutch tight at his sleeve. You can feel your own heart struggling to pump oxygen past his blockage to your brain. Your jugular beats out its frantic rhythm against his chin…
You think of the home you once knew. All the pain and joy you've found in the spaces between as you've built your new life from the pieces. Each of the little decisions that’ve led you down the broken path to where you now lay…
The world goes black and blessedly silent for the stretch of a mere second.
“Oh nono, not yet," he whispers right against your ear with a rough shake as you are thrust back into consciousness. His arm lays slack across your throat. He pushes himself up on an elbow to watch down enamored as you gasp for sacred air. “You will first fear the terror of night for your sins.”
Your next jagged inhale tastes of bittersweet pine as a sprayed substance burns in your mouth and down your throat. The hazy stars begin to spin above again in dizzying whorls. Your last thought is that a pair of them are a chilling, barren blue.
+++
Opening your eyes feels like the hardest task you've ever had to accomplish. Your first sight as you blink them open is your wrists tied above you, knotted together tight and strung up to a high-hanging tree limb overhead. Your head feels too heavy where it hangs back against your neck. You balance only on the balls of your socked feet, your slippers lost somewhere along the way. At first you can't remember why you're outside. It is still dark. Well below freezing. Why aren't you tucked tightly into your bunk back in the warmth of the cabin?
Your whole body feels like you swim beneath the daunting pressure of a heavy sea. The tips of your toes and fingers are numb. The very first lessons you are taught in counselor training up here is CPR and the effects of hypothermia and how to prevent it. They flit through your mind as you wrestle up the strength to lift your head, to assess your surroundings.
That's when you spot him again and remember.
The devil is all your mind can produce at the scene he paints before you.
A small fire burns on the ground near his feet, kindled neatly with intent, just far enough away so that not a single tendril of its warmth can reach you. The flames lick wicked shadows across his mask. There is no longer a mouth where the taunting smile once spread. There is simply nothing and it is worse.
He sits upon a fallen fir, axe blade buried in the trunk at his side, legs spread wide where he leans forward to prod at the tinder along the fire’s edge. He is using your previous attempt of escape to do so, you realize like a physical blow, the tip of the splintered stick shifting what looks like fabric farther into the hungry flame; red and blue scraps of denim consumed and contorted into an angry, crackling orange.
“You were beautiful like that.” Fire fills the black eyed hollows as they slant in your direction. “In your sleep.”
You scream. True panic.
Every thrash against your restraint slips it tauter around your wrists. You grab the anchored rope between frozen fingers in an attempt to pull the whole limb down from above but all it does is lift your feet a bit further up from the ground; your balance already a precarious thing without any real protection from the elements.
“Scream all you want, no one will answer,” his dulcet voice is distorted even more by the solid mouthpiece. His words strike the same. “No one ever answers.”
“What do you want?” you cry, still thrashing. Still fighting. Death was one thing but he had been right. The alternate unknown laid out before you now was far more terrifying.
He snaps the wood, drops it into the fire and stands. It stops you mid flail. Bloodied fingers reach down for the belt that circles his waist. The large buckle clinks and jingles as he draws it unhurried from its confines.
Tears fall silent from your eyes, unbidden.
You press your thighs closed tight instinctively.
He notices.
“You keep asking the wrong questions,” it comes from him scolding like the threadbare corrections of a tutor. “It’s not what I want, it's what I have to do.” He lets his sweater inch its descent from his shoulders, fingers sliding reverently down to unfasten each of the buttons as if the Hail Marys behind them are stuck on his tongue. “You will understand soon enough.”
The uncovered bulk of him suits the coarsened woods he’d appeared from, built like the antithesis of cold and comfort. It makes your drug-addled mind wonder oddly if it's where he's originated from all along, a pied piper born and bred of the harsh elements; of jagged rock walls and remorseless icy infernos.
It would at very least explain his eyes and the way they look at you now.
Though he lets his sweater fall discarded to the ground, he keeps the belt in hand. Folds it over so that both buckle and tip are clutched tight in a straining fist.
“Let us do the math,” he closes in, nearer and nearer until you have to raise your chin to keep him in your line of sight. The proximity allows you to see your damage. The way his temple has bled down across the shell of his ear and the leftmost half of his mask. It drips in long trails from a single eyehole like unhallowed tears, cut off abruptly where the bottom has been replaced. You can’t help but imagine a great maw of gnashed teeth stained scarlet in the wake of your effort. “Three lives cut short by your intrusion. Six hours stolen…” he leans in so close you can feel the fire’s warmth radiating from his skin. His growled words raise your shoulders and wince your eyes. “And one failed attempt to flee.” You fight back a flinch as he raises his belted hand to gesture at your wound inflicted as if it does not sit stark before you. The small bit of pride is swallowed quick by the regret of not hitting him harder.
“Three lives?” You ask after that which clutches your attention most through the tears on your own cheeks and chattering teeth. You’d only seen one boy. One little coat in the snow… But the overlapping footprints… “You’re an animal-”
A puff of steam bursts from the nose of the mask; mocking.
“Yet here you hang like a fallen lamb just begging to be dressed.” He moves again, a pair of tight circles around you that needle at the back of your neck every time he drifts out of view. A fingertip traces light across the exposed strip of skin between your top and pants and it feels as if a fire poker brands your spine. “What’s your name?”
“Fuck you,” you hiss, squirming as far forward and away from his touch as you can. The result is you sliding backward through the snow as the rope over corrects and the entire rear of your body presses flush against solid warmth. A gasp passes your lips unbidden. “Don’t touch me.”
“That’s fine,” you can feel the shift of his chin against the crown of your head. The contraction of muscle against your upper back. “I always find out later anyway. But right now you’re freezing.” He takes a step away and the primordial part of your brain, born of the sheer need for survival, almost cries out at the sudden loss of heat. “Let’s fix that.”
The first crack of the doubled over belt between your shoulder blades feels as if flesh is torn from bone. Your racing thoughts fall silent. The chill is forgotten. The world stills on its axis. All you can sense is a molten lick of flame.
The taste of iron coats your tongue as you bite down on it hard enough to hold off the wail you know he’s after, a sadist in his truest element. You try your best to internally search for a reason to through the pain. To be an awfully worthy distraction for a murderer of innocents, lest he grow bored and move on.
The next four send your burning vision white; crisscrossing patterns along your spine as if some great treasure rests buried beneath and he desperately tries to unearth it. You lock your jaw and hiss your pain to the heavens above, no longer with any real hope for an answer. Moisture begins to soak, butter hot then ice cold, into the rear fabric of your night shirt.
A sixth hit lands lower, just above the backs of your knees. You feel them try to buckle in response, but there is nowhere to go. No lower level left for you to fall to. And you are, in fact, not some felled animal, strapped up for sacrifice. You kick back hard blindly in response, your socked foot missing its target and colliding instead with the trunk of the massive tree that traps you. If any damage is done, you cannot feel it.
It brings the devil round to face you again, horns pointed sharp and eyes wild, and you let every ounce of the anger and hatred you feel in that moment flash hotly in your own. A low hum comes from him in response, deep from within his chest. “Don’t worry,” he soothes, brushing sweat-dampened tangles of hair away from your forehead in an act almost gentle. It aches and degrades like the lashing. “We’re almost done.”
Seven and eight connect with bruising force across the meat at the front of your thighs. Almost identical in their placement. You swallow a sob and widen your legs to avoid as much repeat contact as possible, should he continue to hone his aim.
He catches you off guard with the ninth, the curved tip of the belt whipping out viper-quick against your pubic bone and this time you do yelp, writhing away from an entirely new variety of live wire pain that pools hot blood in the empty pit of your core. It twists in your stomach and burns up your neck and for a moment, you think you’re going to be sick.
“How many was that?” His mask stills above you in the fading firelight as he looms near again, silently awaiting your answer. A stretch of pale muscle and collar bones are all your blurry eyes can see.
“Nine.” It’s barely carried past your lips over the bite of the winds. You try to draw air into your constricting lungs. You’ve never known anything to be more true.
“That’s right,” he praises, voice the grate of flint, as he takes the final step that puts you chest to chest. The warmth of him floods your strung out senses once more; intensified through your suffering. Sulfur and iron. Menthol and pine sap. “And for the grand finale-” his tenth strike lands around and behind you again with every bit of evil possessed across the swell of your ass.
It lurches your forward, farther into him and what’s left of your strength fails you. The forest tilts. Your air is stolen. Welts swell and scream all over your body but that last one has your vision fading out again, ears ringing, grip on reality gradually slipping from your hold as you let your forehead fall forward in lament. It just so happens to catch against the dip of his shoulder.
“If you’re going to kill me-” you murmur, tears and spittle smearing against searing skin as you try to make your mouth form the words. “-please just do it. I can’t take anymore…”
He has not moved since you’ve fallen, stone still as if formed under the same pressure that forced the mountains toward the sky. Your plea tenses the cords of his neck. He stretches it side to side and you slide your eyelids closed in wait for what’s to come. For the unknown.
You have tried not to think much on your own death. There were life’s usual anxieties of course; sickness or accidents, easy slip ups that could remind those closest to you of how fragile life truly could be. Or there were the many, many times you could recall spouting the phrase ‘kill me’ over any and every incredibly trivial thing, in hindsight, to lighten the load or make your friends smile.
Now though you imagine a belt held tight around your throat. An ice cold axe struggling past ribs to reach the softer vitality beneath. Or, the most appealing, to be left hanging here in the frost until your blood slowly stops and your brain shuts down to the point that nothing can hurt you anymore. The thought sweeps a peace unfamiliar and all consuming over you and you only melt all the more.
The sobs you’ve tried so hard to hold inside roll free from your chest.
“That’s it,” he murmurs close to your cheek, reverent in its distortion. “Just let go.”
You feel the pressure lift from your straining wrists and feet as he places his hands behind either of your thighs to wrap them high around his waist. He clutches you against him, one arm bracketing across the small of your back. You feel a soft tug as he pulls your scrunchie free, then unclean fingers are petting down the length of your hair. “Your reactions were delicious, little lamb,” he basks in awe, woodland roughened hands moving, wandering to rub friction along the lengths of your outer thighs and up and down your arms as if trying to urge the warmth back in. “I could just eat you up. I knew you would be good. So good.”
His praise is whip lash and reaches something deep in the pit of you that you've spent your entire life trying to conceal. They are the words you’ve longed to hear from those you hold close for what’s felt like lifetimes; parents, therapists, friends, pastors, mentors, - anyone you look up to like a flower to sun. The urge to please and placate and impress always lingering effervescent in your mind.
To hear it purred in the timbered voice of a beast beyond saving lets you know, without a doubt, you yourself follow close behind. His abuse is tolerable but his kindness tastes like arsenic, a slow dripping poison through your veins to your core. Your body reacts free of your rationale. The sickening heat in your belly ignites deeper into something sacrilegious at the crux of your thighs where they shift uncomfortably against his hips. You have been warned about the devil's coaxing tongue long before you knew what to listen for, yet your pain drunk mind and coldburned body pay the enlivened warning bells in your ears no heed. He is simply so very warm.
Again, always, he notices; attuned with your every reaction like a predator determining the precise time to lunge. “Would you like that?” it comes dry, disbelieving from parched lips. Calloused fingertips press firm, aching lines across his work on either side of your spine. Enough to arch you forward still. “For me to kiss it better?” he adjusts you around him like your mass is unsubstantial, nothing in the cage of his arms. “It's… odd,” he admits; a wrung out confession through a thinning veil. “I'm tempted.”
You find you cannot answer such a question, sharp hooks like shame piercing each of your vocal chords and leaving his lewd offer hanging suspended in your mind, just beyond comprehension. You shouldn’t want this. Your body shouldn't react like this. He hasn’t moved as if your consent matters, either way. But how he touches you is already growing possessive, blunt nails digging against your ribs harder, deeper the longer you linger as if he means to pry apart and burrow beneath in wait. Survival kicks back in. The internalized drive to sate, please, placate, so that maybe, maybe the beast will quiet just so and you can walk out of this bested but alive.
It's the only grace you'll give yourself.
Beneath that hellish mask there lies a man, as you are increasingly aware. Well spread and shapen between your legs; tired around the eyes. Its own fitting disguise for the ferocity he casts out like a suffocating black smoke about the shared air between you.
All there is left to do is navigate it.
You raise your head high on your own shoulders again and nod; a shallow, dizzying descent to a whole new level of hell.
Your submission breaks something loose in the glaciers of his eyes.
He rips the bottom half of his mask from his face at the same time he falls to his knees in the snow at your feet. There is no real time to take in the shape of his true mouth or sharp edges of his maw before your sleep pants and panties are hastily tugged down your thighs by savage hands. The brusque chill on your most private parts makes you squirm. Your waistband stings as it's dragged over the swelling welts on your legs. He ducks beneath them, hoisting your knees over his shoulders, your own clothing trapping and binding your ankles across the small of his back…
That’s when you see them.
Old scars streak the wings of his shoulders down all the way to the dimples above his pants, like the struck through lines of a book. In the space of a blink you can read them the same as your own. Pain, torture, abuse. Small circular burns. Odd oval shapes the size of your fist stamped in sporadic blotches here and there across the maze of violence on his skin. A belt buckle, you recognize immediately because its the same shape as the one that rests disregarded in the snow by your feet. Power over the powerless. The truth, it finally seems. The answer to each and every one of the questions he's ignored. It always stems from childhood, this you know as fact. A monster formed by misplaced anger and a heavy hand… bound to repeat.
Of course it consumes and destroys those that dare to interfere. Of course it does.
“Look up,” he orders, more eldritch than man, laser focused in contrast to your distraction. “Don’t fucking look at me or I’ll gut you bottom to top.”
You obey without question, still expecting a blade.
“Jesus,” he whispers instead like a prayer, breath puffing hot against your naked thighs and swollen lips. “You’re already dripping.” Your back is shoved hard against tree bark, caged by the flat press of his crossed hands low on your belly. Your bound wrists are tugged almost painfully before your eyes by the hanging rope overhead. “Is that all for me?”
The first touch of his mouth against where hip meets leg is blinding. Wet tongue and crooked teeth. Not so much a lover's caress as a claiming drag of lips across tender skin. He aims to breathe you in until there's nothing left, you realize; to devour you as promised.
Down, down he trails, proving pious as lips turn quick to teeth; rounded, human, but savagely pointed as he marks the meaty insides of your thighs to his satisfaction. A drawn out torment that has you gaping wide eyed at bright flashes of red amongst the scattered starlight long before he's finished.
His own blood smears rusted up your left leg where his mask drags light behind. He stills at the apex of your thighs. Your heart drums rabbit fast in wait. You feel his shoulders dip forward as his own restraint fails him; a wolf drooling and lapping before a feast.
Worship is what it is, the way his tongue tastes your core, dipping in and sliding up over and over and over again to that spot that makes you moan aloud. It echoes through the valley and spurs him on, his weight pressing heavy against you as you're roughly shoved a few inches higher, bark scratching over the weeping skin at your back. Your thighs try to snap closed beyond your control at the steady overstimulation, your muscles squeezing over either of his ears and the sharp edges of his facade.
The sound he makes reverberates off the deepest parts of you, an unearthly growl deep from his throat paired with a cruel shift of his hands to part and hold you wide once more.
The coil low in your gut begins to tighten. A renewed sense of shame dampens your eyes at the pleasure it blooms behind your navel and burning down your legs. Too much, too much, too much, your mind screams frantically as your nerve endings splay open into live points of electricity where his mouth refuses to relent. You try to recoil away with nowhere to go. Trapped between cold earth and a raging inferno.
Another throaty whine leaves your lips when you feel a thick finger test your entrance. The single digit presses shallowly inside. You don't mean to look. You don't want to see. But the sight beneath you should render you smote where you sit. It sends another wave of heat blooming out in scarlet petals from your prayer-bound hands to the very tips of your curled toes.
He wears you like the heel of his mask, face upturned, eyes draped closed, nose buried deep in your offering. The rigid crown and filed horns of the devil seem to protrude from your own abdomen, hazy and horrifying through the misty fog of pleasure. Unrelenting and unrepentant as your legs begin to shake.
“Oh God, please-” you beg, though you no longer know what for. “Please, please...”
The wet sound your body makes is disgraceful as he pulls out and away with a squelch, saccharine leather forehead coming to rest against your hipbone. He draws a handful of ragged breaths into his lungs. The movement quakes you both. “The fruit of lips that acknowledge his name,” he pants; chuckling dark like an exhaled afterthought. “How sweet it is.”
Time suspends as he lingers, sinking down on his haunches. For a while you are left to catch your own breath and hope that his prophecy has been fulfilled; that the beast has been quenched before you could reach such similar depths. You are starting to feel like the axe would be kinder.
But with a tip of his head he catches you staring down. Your eyes meet and he holds them. Your heart leaps high in your throat. Malice edges the blue of his irises, nearly swallowed whole by a pair of blown out pupils. His lips and chin are damp with the same trophy of lust that grows uncomfortably cool across your gnarled thighs. The dying campfire halos his knelt figure in a warm, orange glow. There’s an etherealness to the figure he cuts below you that leads, not unlike a sermon, to the understanding of why Eve would try the apple; why Persephone would leave her flowers…
He ducks and rises and is at your throat before you can flinch. A hand fists in the thick mess of hair at the base of your skull. Your head is wrenched back with such a force that your teeth clack together before locking closed. Another quick movement before you and the tip of a skinning knife digs against the thin skin just over your jugular, enough to split and bite. It glints at you mockingly from the corner of your eye as he towers high once more.
“You broke the rules again,” he admonishes with an almost playful tap of the metal, then he shifts so that the entirety of its sharpened edge grazes up beneath your chin; a forced pawn in a twisted game of his own making. “But I’ve had a change of heart.” He leans in close and you can smell your sex on the curve of his dampened scowl. The blade drags slow up the side of your chin, along your cheek, around your eye… “Don't take it for granted or I'll skin you where you stand.”
If a heart does beat within his ribs, it's black and full of ichor.
He cuts through the rope around your wrists with a contrite little pattern, replacing its hold with his own as he guides your arms down to rest in a single of his hands. His thumb absently strokes at the rope raw skin. Pins and needles are immediate, inching down your tired biceps and forearms as blood rushes back to neglected muscle. At your gifted freedom, instinct begs you again to pull full-bodily away. To hike up what's left of your dignity from the ground and run as far and fast as you can. But you dare not move an inch without his good will, well trained already by his unpredictable mirth.
His eyes take full stock of you; the fear on your expression that holds you still, the way you so obediently look down in wait.
When he finally moves it feels as if he's read your mind. He bends at the waist to guide your pants back up unsteady legs, brushes your hair back soft from your shoulder. His hand comes to rest in a possessive curve around the rear of your neck. “I want you to run.” Another damning tilt of that mask. His face is only half covered and yet his sneer completes the puzzle, thin lips and set jaw. “Camp is, oh- about four miles that way,” a horn tips south, “and I urge you to try as hard as you can to reach it,” he points his knife-filled hand forward in your face, so close it cranes your neck away and crosses your eyes, “because when I catch you, I think I'm going to find out just how sweet you can be.” The tip boops needle-sharp against your nose. The world quakes beneath your feet. “I think you’d like that, too.”
His threat should leave you feeling repulsed, but your body is so wound up and confused by the onslaught of pain and panic and arousal that you can’t feel much of anything beyond it; the weight of his dominance and sheer imposition.
The truth is, you don't know. You don’t know what you’d like anymore. You don’t know why you left the protection of your bunk this evening. Why you’d driven hundreds of miles to the vast seclusion of the mountains when there were plenty of normal jobs in your town. Why you thought you would trail a madman deep into their shadows and leave alive…
“Say you understand,” he rattles your head with his grip in your hair when your silence stretches too long. “I want to hear it.”
“I understand.” It comes fast and compulsory from your lips.
“Good.”
He releases you and you're frozen for only a second longer, unsure, unhinged, before you're sprinting, trying to regain your balance simultaneously as you propel yourself away from the trunk of the tree and the devil's wicked games.
“Run little lamb,” he singsongs long behind you with a fluttering little wave of silver draped fingers. “Run.”
+++
++
+
You are freed for as long as he allows it.
Long enough that beads of sweat line your forehead and slide down your temples. Your pace falters. Air burns raw in your throat. The soles of your feet bleed from the rocks and foliage you’ve ignored in your haste. Your heart beats frantically in your chest like the prey you’ve been shaped into; more from anticipation than your actual effort. Your muscles ache, your core pulses with every slide of your legs, you are so so tired and confused.
An axe strikes a tree just ahead in your sightline, thrown with such force from behind you that it shatters the wood where the weapon rests buried. You yelp from shock at the echoing crack and lose your footing, falling forward across the ice.
The next drop of the blade is deep in the ground, inches from your face. You claw at the muddied slush to flip on your back and meet the inevitable. Before you can do so, the entirety of his crushing weight is pinning you flat. There is something unhinged in the way he snarls out air against the back of your neck, hips canting forward against you. The full swell of his arousal is unmistakable where it presses hard against the curve of your ass. You could have tried to hide, tried to find another, better weapon amongst the forest to fend him off; you could try to struggle away again now beneath his unmovable strength, but you don’t. You didn’t. You aren’t sure who you are anymore.
His hands gentle the slightest when he takes notice of your surrender, palms sliding heavy over your curves to your hips; drifting up under your shirt then down beneath your waist band to slide them away a second time, slower; savoring. He reaches beneath you to pull you up, to bend you to his will, hips high in the open air while the side of your face goes numb in the slush. One of his hands rests low on your spine as he hisses something pleased from between his teeth. “You should see yourself right now,” he says, and his voice is gone; guttural, the grinding of stone. “Offering yourself up to me like this… You don’t even know who I am…” A thick finger fills you all the way to the knuckle and the ease of its slide is indecent. You gasp at the sudden intrusion but it breaks off quick into needier cries as he searches and curls until he finds that spot so deep within you that has you pressing farther back into his hold. “Good girl, that’s right.” The reverence is sugar sweet on his tongue. “I won’t keep you waiting any longer.”
The slide of a zipper. The shift of fabric. Solid legs trap your thighs together as he lines up behind you. You don’t dare look back. You ground yourself instead with your own teeth planted deep in the rear of your hand as the heavy head of his cock parts your folds. Steady, insistent; without hesitation or remorse. It is more than you expected, the size and stretch burning wild as he bottoms out too fast for your body to accommodate; almost more than you can handle as you squirm and wail at being so quickly overfilled, ignored by his focused indifference. “That’s it,” he grits out strained in your ear, “just fucking take it.”
His pace is drawn but brutal, long, deep strokes that scrape your knees forward through the forgiving ground with every thrust. He's draped over your back, his long hair brushes against your upturned cheek. He fills every inch of you, hands like magic stroking over your wounds in a way that sends delicious whisps of pain straight to your fluttering cunt. You feel that burning coil begin to tighten again as the discomfort gives way to a sinister sort of pleasure.
“Jesus fuck, you're so tight,” talons grip your hips and pull you back to meet him each time you drift away. He will have left marks there too should you see morning. “See how much better it is when you just let go?”
To your own self loathing, you're beginning to. Your rational thoughts are muffled by the rough way he fucks into you, a claiming declaration of primal need. A last bit of violent pleasure before a blissful end.
“I've watched you, you know,” a fist is in your hair again, the wrench of your neck, a low whine from your lips. “Back at camp. Trying so very hard to practice what you preach like the rest of them. To be a savior to those wicked, little things. Woe to you, hypocrite.”
The new angle turns your face toward the half buried axe and he holds you there by the throat. Metal glints back like splintered ice, distorting the reflection of your own stricken eyes and those blackened above you. Two vengeful shadows colliding again and again as one… to be known by such a man…
It briefly punches you back to yourself, your arms flailing out wild at your sides as if you mean to fight yourself free and fly away. Plucked feathers of snow float high in the air with your thrashing and drift flightless back down to the earth all around you. Crimson streaks all across the disturbed ivory in a smeared mixture of both your failures.
“Who are you?!” you gasp one final, desperate time as your arms are tugged together and pinned behind your back in one of his. Two fingers glide beneath you to circle quick and rough against your clit as you are forced flat beneath him once more. His strokes have grown more erratic since your struggle, every one hitting that delicious spot that arches your spine and trembles your walls, your own body drawing him in impossibly deeper.
“I am your new purpose,” he promises like scripture, hot lips brushing the base of your neck. Each word is punctuated with a punishing thrust. “Your new God.” Sharp canines follow close behind, clamping deep in your flesh. Pressure breaks with the skin and you are coming. Every muscle in your body spasms. The world flashes white, luminescent-like at the edges, the ring of shattering glass fills your ears. Fear, pain, and guilt joining a pair of rough hands to inflict a pleasure on you you've never known.
Your cries reach the treetops as you clench and writhe. They coax him along to follow as he growls out his own pleasure; hips slamming hard against your abused backside once, twice more. He stills and you feel the warmth of his seed fill your belly and mark your insides; the ichor bled from his very bones and fed deep into you.
He slips from you without warning or theatrics. Flips you so that your back curves wrong across the bent banks of his knees. His eyes are back to a cavernous blue.
“And you just may be mine.”
He strokes your dirtied face with the meat of stained fingers; gentle, soothing. Curls over you in adoration.
The pinpricks of light between his horns fade black as you are swallowed whole by the night.
+++
You can hear the whine of plastic against metal from behind the safety of closed eyes.
The locking latch of a door. Old nicotine and the first start of the heater in winter. The sudden warmth of the air is like the blaze of an oven, dry ice dropped too quick into a molten pit.
Three little bodies rest like sunken skipping stones beneath the frozen lake behind.
Dozens more sleep undisturbed in their safe, warm beds.
You burn and tremble against the hot, dirty metal floor of a van. A new sort of unknown you'd never thought to fear.
You've crossed the devil, no doubt. And this, you think, this surely must be hell.
