Morteza Read online

  The Demon Next Door:

  MORTEZA

  By

  Josée Renard

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Morteza

  Copyright© 2010 Josée Renard

  ISBN: 978-1-60088-555-6

  Cover Artist: Sable Grey

  Editor: Stephanie Parent

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  Cobblestone Press, LLC

  www.cobblestone-press.com

  Dedication

  Lisa. Thanks for—well, you know what. Everything.

  Chapter One

  Pretending to be human wasn’t as simple as Morteza had anticipated.

  The first few months had been relatively simple, so he’d expected the whole transition to go as smoothly. As an onlooker, he spent his time in coffee shops and Internet cafés, where he went unnoticed except for his exceptional height.

  “Are you a basketball player?”

  He’d heard the question dozens of times but had answered it with only with a smile, until he’d attained enough skill on the computers in his favorite hangout to research the sport. It took awhile because before he got to basketball he had to figure out sports in general. But once he’d done so, he answered the question with a smile and a, “No, I’m not, though I think I might have to take it up.”

  The trouble, of course, was that the more information he volunteered, the more the questioner wanted to know. So he learned to circumvent their next query by saying, “I grew up in a small town in northern Canada”—close enough to the truth—“and we played hockey.” He picked hockey because here, in this small town deep in the South, hockey was as foreign as a demon. So it was a lie, but the type of lie he had learned to call a white one.

  Those nuances, Morteza often thought, were what made his transition to human so difficult. Demons weren’t much for nuances. It was mostly kill or be killed in the Underworld. And you were either at the top of the pile or you weren’t. And if you weren’t—and Morteza definitely hadn’t been—your life was hell.

  Doing all the human things—buying groceries, getting a job, going out for beers with acquaintances (Morteza wasn’t yet ready to call anyone a friend)—didn’t make him human.

  So he settled in and he studied. Hard.

  He bought magazines—and read them, cover to cover—about everything from cooking to dressing to sports, though to begin with they were mostly about sports. He needed to become a sports fan. Quickly. All the men he knew from Big Dave’s Internet Spot and the Bar None were sports fans.

  He knew no women except the serving staff at the coffee shop where he had his breakfast, and for a long time he had no idea what they were interested in. He figured he couldn’t go wrong with cooking and renovations and decorating, given the number of television channels dedicated to those pastimes.

  Television—and all five hundred of the channels that came with his satellite purchase—was another of his teaching tools. But even though he started with reality shows, it didn’t take long before he realized that the fake shows gave better advice. Didn’t matter whether they were dramas or comedies, movies or made-for-TV shows. If they were fiction, they were gold.

  If he wanted to learn how to interact with humans, how to dress, how to act as if he were a bouncer or a friend or even a lover, fiction had a lot more to offer than reality.

  The instructions on those shows were clear and easy to follow. If they had nuances, Morteza didn’t get them, and he didn’t worry about them. Because now, eighteen months after he’d crossed over from the Underworld, Morteza figured he might finally be getting it.

  Okay, almost getting it.

  Because despite the hours at Big Dave’s, the money and time he spent on magazines and how-to books, the long, noisy nights he worked keeping order at the Bar None, and the hours of television he watched, there were still a whole lot of things about humans that didn’t make any sense.

  Still, he wasn’t the only male who didn’t get it. In fact, he got it more than most.

  Big Dave spent a whole lot of his time worrying about what his wife wanted, about what he’d said to upset her, about how he could fix things. The other guys, all of whom seemed to be a lot like Big Dave, didn’t get it either. They couldn’t help Big Dave because they didn’t know the answers.

  The funny thing was that Morteza did.

  He knew that when Big Dave didn’t notice his wife’s new haircut, the first part of the answer was to stop on the way home to buy some flowers and a bottle of wine. The second part was to say I’m sorry and then you look beautiful and I’m sorry one more time.

  When Big Dave stayed late at work, Morteza reminded him to phone and tell Mrs. Dave he was going to be late and ask her if she wanted him to pick something up on his way home.

  And when Mrs. Dave was crying when Big Dave came home, Morteza told him not to ask what was wrong but to gather her up in his arms and hold her until she stopped.

  Because it was obvious that women often cried for no reason at all. And the only way to make it better was a hug.

  Morteza hadn’t had a hug in a long time.

  It had been over a year since he’d foolishly believed he’d needed only one more experience to make him fully human. He’d found The Pleasure Club online and had met Ellie and Eli.

  He still dreamed almost nightly about that experience.

  He still woke up, his cock stiff and weeping from its tip, his lips tingling and his heart pounding. And those were the good nights. Because he could take a deep breath and pretend that Eli’s mouth was wrapped around his cock, his big hands cupping his balls so tightly the sensation bordered on pain. He could pretend that his fingers, instead of stroking his own cock, were tugging at Ellie’s nipples; that his mouth, instead of tasting his own fingers stroking his lips, feasted on Ellie’s juices as she lowered her cunt to his face.

  Those nights, when he came with a shout that made him glad he lived in a concrete building, were when he allowed himself to relive the best night of both of his lives.

  The bad nights were the ones when he woke, his duvet soaked with cum and his cock limp, loneliness filling him. Those nights were the ones he took another lesson from television and swallowed a couple of sleeping pills so when he fell back asleep, he would have no further wet dreams that he couldn’t remember.

  He hated those nights.

  Because more than anything else, he wanted to remember them. He wanted to remember Ellie’s eyes and Eli’s callused hands. He wanted to remember Eli’s hard, hot cock against his back and Ellie’s beautiful breasts in his mouth. He wanted to remember what it felt like to be surrounded by them, their bodies tight against his, their lips on his face, on his belly, on his thighs.

  He wanted to remember the first time he came, his cock in Eli’s mouth and his tongue in Ellie’s pussy. He wanted to remember how it felt to be sandwiched between the two of them—her body soft and scented, his hard and taut with unreleased tension.

  He wanted to remember the first time he felt Ellie’s orgasm with his fingers inside of her, those fingers gently guided to the exact right place deep in her vagina by Eli. And the first time Eli kissed him, his mouth still tasting of Ellie’s juices, transferring that taste into Morteza’s mouth so he, too, began to crave the taste of her.

  He had to remember how he felt falling asleep in their arms, their legs draped over his, their three pairs of hands entwined on his chest.

  He
had to remember how they had awakened him. Eli had rolled him over, Morteza barely awake, and tucked his hands underneath Morteza’s butt so his cock was raised up. The first thing he was conscious of was the sharp nip of Eli’s teeth on his scrotum, then the lush, almost unbearable feeling of his cock in Eli’s mouth.

  But it got even better. Ellie’s breasts rubbed his back as she kissed and licked and bit him from his shoulders down his spine. When she reached his ass, she separated his cheeks, and then he felt a soft, warm dampness drizzled in between.

  Ellie’s fingers spread the warmth around his anus, each time pressing a little harder. When Morteza moaned, Eli stopping sucking his cock and held tight around its base, the smallest pressure all Morteza could bear. Eli kept hold of the base of his cock and nuzzled at Morteza’s belly, taking long licks from his thighs to his belly button.

  The fingers at his ass grew bolder, pressing into him, a tiny bit at first, then deeper, spreading the warm liquid inside, making the progress of her fingers easier, quicker, deeper until Morteza could feel a scream rising inside his throat.

  “Ellie,” he heard, “slow down. He’s right on the edge.”

  “Good,” she said. “That’s right where he needs to be.”

  She slowed for a moment. Then he heard her hum and Eli’s fist released his cock, enveloping it again with his mouth. Ellie jammed her fingers in as far as they would go and Morteza did scream, for the first and only time in his life so far. He felt as if his whole body was spasming, his cock pushing harder and harder into Eli’s mouth until he worried that he might choke him.

  But Eli simply sucked him in while Ellie pushed her fingers in and out and Morteza continued to spasm until he collapsed. That was what he wanted to remember.

  He wondered, sometimes, why he didn’t just get in touch with them again, why he didn’t use the number scrawled on the card he’d found next to the bed the morning after.

  But he didn’t wonder for long. He knew why he didn’t get in touch with them. His experiment with sex had been possible because, in those first few months, he’d believed, honestly believed, that he had become human.

  Now he knew his humanity was only a façade—paint and mirrors and a whole lot of stolen information—and he cared for them too much to expose them to the demon self that lingered beneath that façade.

  But Morteza was working on it.

  He had a single name.

  Ali.

  Chapter Two

  Ali had once been the meanest and nastiest of all the demons, making him Lord of all. Right at the peak of his powers, he had disappeared from the Underworld, and he’d stayed gone.

  Odd, thought Morteza, because disappearing was never easy for a demon when every demon was linked to every other through the Lord of all the demons. Morteza himself had only managed it because nobody cared where he was or what he was doing—the advantage of being the lowest of the low.

  Morteza would have known if Ali was dead—he would have felt the moment of Ali’s death, would have experienced everything that happened to Ali. All demons were linked that way with the Lord to stop them from killing him and taking his place. But even with Ali still alive, Morteza’s link to the Lord had somehow been transferred to his second in command, Alborz, who had, with that transfer, become the new Lord.

  So Ali had to be somewhere, and that somewhere wasn’t the Underworld. The link couldn’t have been transferred if he were.

  Despite his fear of Ali, the most vile, violent and vicious of all the thousands of Lords who had come before him, Morteza had to find Ali and force him—though Morteza laughed at the thought of him forcing Ali to do anything—to explain how he had managed to stay here without being followed by Alborz and his minions. For when they caught up with Ali, they would surely kill him in the slowest and most painful way possible.

  Until he’d found Ali and learned the truth, Morteza couldn’t get back together with Ellie and Eli. He refused to put them in danger. And danger there would be if Alborz decided to find him.

  Morteza had been so low in the demon world that Alborz probably didn’t even realize he was gone, but that wouldn’t last forever. Eventually someone would notice that the demon who used to occupy that spot five places over had disappeared, and Alborz would be advised.

  The Lord of all the demons knew, if he put his mind to it, where every single demon was and what each one of them was doing. He didn’t bother with the lowliest demons most of the time, but if something brought Morteza to Alborz’s attention, he would be more than pissed to find out he was missing.

  Then he’d start the search for him, and he’d find him. And then it would be Morteza’s turn for a slow and painful death, as well as anyone around him. So Ellie and Eli would have to stay in his dreams until he had this figured out.

  Where should he start his search for Ali? What would a demon of Ali’s stature be doing in the human world? Certainly not hanging out at Big Dave’s Internet Spot or working as a bouncer at the Bar None.

  And he wouldn’t be working at some menial job, either. Whatever Ali was doing, it was something big. You couldn’t go from being Lord to being a minion—it just didn’t happen.

  Morteza realized that Ali’s former rank as Lord of all the demons was going to make it easier to find him. And suddenly, that status became a bonus rather than a problem.

  Morteza laughed to himself. The one thing he’d learned in the human world was that everyone was online somewhere and somehow. It was almost impossible to live in this world without being accessible on the Internet, especially if you were, like Ali, used to being at the top of your world.

  One of the things Morteza had learned to do was to help the people who wandered into Big Dave’s looking for a way to disappear, to put their pasts firmly and permanently behind them. Most of them were good people in terrible situations, and Morteza—oddly and satisfyingly enough—enjoyed helping them out.

  He knew how to vanish people, and he knew that in order to do that, he had to find out everything they’d ever done, had to discover every link to them in every possible database. That was how he would find Ali.

  And Morteza was damn good at those kinds of searches.

  The second thing he knew for sure was that Ali was somewhere in the general vicinity. Why? Because there was really only one way into the human world from the Underworld, and it was ten miles outside of River City. Ali would have arrived not all that far from this city, and this was where he would stay because the farther a demon got from the portal, the less of his demon power remained.

  Morteza had stayed, and he assumed that was what Ali had done as well.

  Most demons spent a little time in the human world—mostly, of course, to cause havoc and death and destruction. But almost all of that havoc happened close to the gate. It wasn’t that a human could kill a demon—that was pretty much impossible—but they could delay your return to the Underworld long enough to cause difficulties for the demon thus caught.

  There was no physical reason being trapped in the human world would cause a problem—demons could stay on earth forever, although they wouldn’t retain all of their demonic powers. The problem was the Lord. He hated losing demons, and he would do almost anything to get them back. And once he got them back, there would be all hell to pay.

  A Lord had never before left the Underworld permanently, so Morteza was willing to bet that Alborz had looked pretty hard for Ali. But he’d looked like a demon would look. Alborz had sent other demons to physically search for Ali, giving them clues from his connection to the demon.

  If Alborz hadn’t found Ali, Ali must have figured out a way to cut that connection. The usual demon search methods weren’t going to work; other methods would have to be used.

  The good news? Morteza was the only demon who knew how to look for someone as a human would.

  He needed, desperately, to know how Ali was hiding from Alborz.

  Because each day made his longing for Ellie and Eli stronger; each day without them made his he
art—and who knew a demon could have a heart?—ache; each day made his craving for not just their bodies, but every part of them, more and more unbearable.

  Morteza called Big Dave and booked four computers for the next five days. That was about as long as he could go without sleep, and he wanted to keep his job at Bar None, so he’d have to work all day at the computers and all night as a bouncer.

  He didn’t need the money he was paid at Bar None, but he had a fantasy. It involved Ellie and Eli and Morteza himself.

  Morteza wanted a family. He was almost four hundred years old, and all he’d known in his life was violence; all he’d seen in relationships was pain. The human world, while not perfect, had the one thing Morteza wanted more than anything else. It had families.

  And then there was the sex.

  He wasn’t sure he could bear to live the rest of his life without experiencing the passion, the heat, the tenderness, the release he’d felt during that single night with Ellie and Eli. He’d picked up the phone to call them a thousand times, always stopping before he dialed the final digit.

  Because he wanted them forever, and if he reached out to them now, he would lose them as soon as Alborz turned his evil mind to Morteza.

  Actually, Morteza thought, he had two fantasies. Okay, maybe he had dozens of them, though the family was the most important one. All the rest of them involved the three of them, naked and together.

  He had spent hours and hours trolling X-rated websites in the darkest of hours at Big Dave’s. He may have gone into his first night with Ellie and Eli as a complete novice, but that was true no longer. Morteza knew all kinds of things he wanted to try, all kinds of things he had carefully collected from the sex shops down the street from Bar None, all kinds of things he had learned.

  Next time—and he was doing everything he could to ensure there would be a next time—Morteza would be prepared to give as good as he got.