Cover Him with Darkness

  Praise for Cover Him with Darkness and Janine Ashbless

  “Thrilling…. Milja has to choose whether to betray the lover she risked everything to rescue, or go against the divine plan, while staying true to her own values—all while navigating a rocky romance with an appealing supernatural creature who feeds off her desire for him…sharp and enticing.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Calling Cover Him with Darkness a romance is like calling a Lamborghini a cute little car. Janine Ashbless has broken every unwritten rule of writing romance and makes it work most spectacularly—it’s dark and gritty and so beautifully written that the words are pure poetry.”

  —Kate Douglas, author of the Wolf Tales series

  “Janine Ashbless has long been a master at conjuring the erotic in myths and legends. Now she’s taking on religion and all I can say is wow. Just wow! What is evil? What is good? Could the faithful have completely missed the point? Sexy food for thought: Cover Him with Darkness is an intensely wild ride.”

  —D. L. King, editor of Seductress and The Sweetest Kiss

  “This book was truly a fantastic read. Janine Ashbless amazed me over and over again with her presentation of the sort of tribal, religious mystique of Montenegro and especially with her detail of its jagged scenery. I felt I was on a tour and actually bearing witness to the stunning mountainous landscape—I walked along the narrowest of goat trails, could feel the drafty little church atop its cold mountain, taste the bean soup… and the dream sequences between it all?… Help me. No… Gimme.”

  —Rose Caraway, editor of The Sexy Librarian’s Big Book of Erotica

  “Vivid and tempestuous and dangerous, and bursting with sacrifice, death and love.”

  —Portia Da Costa, author of Entertaining Mr. Stone

  “The best erotic fairytale writer around.”

  —Saskia Walker, author of Inescapable

  “One of the most talented, original and brave authors in the erotica field.”

  —Shanna Germain, editor of Bound by Lust

  “The incredibly talented Janine Ashbless.”

  —Erotica Readers & Writers Association

  Copyright © 2014 by Janine Ashbless.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Tempted Romance, an imprint of Cleis Press Inc., 2246 Sixth Street, Berkeley, California 94710.

  Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink

  Cover photograph: Robert Daly/Getty Images

  Text design: Frank Wiedemann

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-940550-06-0

  NB: All Bible quotes are from the King James version. All quotes from the Book of Enoch are from the R. H. Charles translation (1917). An Evil Cradling was written by Brian Keenan (Vintage, 1992). Milja’s father quotes from St. Nicholas Cabasilas (fourteenth century), and sings lines from a prayer by St. Dimitri of Rostov (seventeenth century).

  For Phil, my rock of ages

  And with huge thanks to Brenda at Cleis, who read my short story “Cover Him with Darkness” (Red Velvet and Absinthe, 2011), and wanted to know what happened next.

  And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the Sons of God saw the daughters of man, that they were fair. And they took them wives of all which they chose.

  Genesis 6:1-2

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  chapter one

  THE PRISONER

  chapter two

  EGAN

  chapter three

  OUT OF THE DEPTHS

  chapter four

  FORGOTTEN GODS

  chapter five

  THE FALL

  chapter six

  SANCTUARY

  chapter seven

  CONFESSION

  chapter eight

  GHOSTS

  chapter nine

  A SEA DREAM

  chapter ten

  AN EVIL CRADLING

  chapter eleven

  THE BURNING MAN

  chapter twelve

  MENTAL RESERVATION

  chapter thirteen

  THE CAGES

  chapter fourteen

  WE HAVE SEEN

  chapter fifteen

  THE ADVERSARY

  chapter sixteen

  WHAT WILL YOU DO?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Four of them accompanied the prisoner: a lion, a bull, an eagle and a man. At least, that was what they looked like—except that the lion and the bull were both winged, with six wings each, and they beat the air with the sound of a hurricane as they flew. And the man was winged too, and bore fire in his open palms, and his face was a blur of flickering light crowned with stars. The eagle, shining like hammered gold, was three times the size of the naked, wounded human body it carried in its claws.

  They swooped down onto the mountainside, and in that moonless night the light the crowned one shed turned the jumble of bare rock to shifting bars of black shadow. When the snow-white bull put its head down and charged the cliff face, the earth shook and crumbled. Beneath that blow the mountain split in two, revealing a deep ravine.

  The eagle had dropped its prey as they landed. Now the lion, crimson and pinioned with flame like a phoenix, went over to the unconscious man. He was already bleeding from dozens of places, and his hands and feet were tied together with slick red cords. The lion stooped its huge head and closed its jaws about the man’s shoulder and chest, lifting him. As the teeth bit into his flesh, the prisoner moaned in pain.

  The crowned and shining figure led the way into the mountain cleft and the lion followed, dragging their captive across the broken stones. The bull brought up the rear.

  They took him deep into the mountain, to a place where a great rock lay fallen, and they laid him on his back across the stone like a sacrifice upon an altar. Then the burning seraph untied his hands and feet enough to spread his limbs out. The broken man looked tiny beneath their huge, effulgent forms. Their light bleached him of color.

  With hooves of glittering diamond, the winged bull stamped the loose ends of the bloody rope into the stone, and the rock gave like dough beneath the blows and then closed up around the tethers, holding the man fast. He roused from unconsciousness as his last limb was pinned, and lifted his head, screaming defiance and spitting blood, then arching his back and trying to tear free from his bonds.

  The crowned figure stepped back a little, as if to protect its shining robes that glittered with all the colors of precious stones, from the spatter of blood and sweat and spittle.

  But the eagle hopped closer. It darted its hooked beak to the prisoner’s stretched stomach and tore open the skin, rummaging about in the bloody entrails within and pulling shreds out through the open wound.

  Their captive screamed in pain, and the earth shuddered.

  They left him there, vanishing from within the bowels of the mountain and reappearing outside in a sunburst of glory. With a wave of his hand, the crowned one closed the mountain up once more.

  The lion disappeared.

  The eagle disappeared.

  The bull disappeared.

  The seraph lingered a moment, thoughtfully.

  It started to rain. Softly at first, but then hard and steady, like it would never stop.

  And I woke up, hands clenched so tight that my nails had dug into my pa
lms, my body aching with tension from my spasming muscles. The pillow slip under my cheek was soggy with tears.

  What was it I had been dreaming? The last shreds of vision flickered away into the dark. Something awful, I thought, feeling my heart pound. Something about rain?

  Outside the window of my Boston student apartment, the rain fell like it wanted to drown the world.

  chapter one

  THE PRISONER

  The first time I saw him fettered there in the dark, I wept.

  I was seven years old. My father led me by the hand down the steps behind the church altar, through a passage hewn into the mountainside. I’d never been permitted through that door before, though I knew that the key was kept under a loose floor tile beneath the icon of St. Michael. In those days that picture made me nervous: the archangel’s painted eyes always seemed to watch me, even though the rest of him was busy throwing down the Devil and trampling him underfoot.

  All along the narrow tunnel beyond the door there were niches cut into the rock walls, and near our church these were filled with painted and gilded icons of the saints and of Our Lord, but farther back those gave way to statuettes of blank-eyed pagan gods, growing cruder in execution and less human in appearance as we walked on. I clung to Father’s hand and cringed from the darkness closing in behind me, as his kerosene lamp picked out the rock-cut steps at our feet and our breathing sounded loud in our ears. The journey seemed to take forever, to my child’s mind. I couldn’t help imagining the carved and painted eyes in the tunnel behind me: glowing pinpoints of light that watched my retreating back—and I kept looking over my shoulder to see.

  Finally we came out into a roofless chamber, where the walls leaned inward a hundred feet over our heads and the floor was nothing but a mass of loosely tumbled boulders. I looked up, blinking at the light that seemed blinding, though in fact this was a dim and shadowed place. I could see a wisp of cloud against the seam of blue sky overhead, and the black speck of a mountain eagle soaring across the gap.

  There he lay, upon a great tilted slab of pale limestone, his wrists and ankles spread and bound by twisted leather ropes whose farther ends seemed to be set into the rock itself. It was hard to say whether the slab had always been underground or had fallen long ago from the mountain above; our little country is, after all, prone to earthquakes. Dirt washed down with the rain had stained him gray, but I could make out the muscled lines of his bare arms and legs and the bars of his ribs. There was an old altar cloth draped across his lower torso—and only much later did I realize that Father had done that, to spare his small daughter the man’s nakedness.

  “Here, Milja,” said my father, pushing me forward. “It is time you knew. This is the charge of our family. This is what we guard day and night. It is our holy duty never to let him be found or escape.”

  I was only little: he looked huge to me, huge and filthy and all but naked. I stared at the ropes, as thick as my skinny wrists, knotted cruelly tight about his broader ones. They stretched his arms above his head so that one hand could not touch the other, and matching tethers held his ankles apart. I felt a terrible ache gather in my chest. I pressed backward, into Father’s black robes.

  “Who is he?” I whispered.

  “He is a very bad man.”

  That was when the prisoner moved for the first time. He rolled his head and turned his face toward us. I saw the whites of his eyes gleam in his gray face. Even at seven, I could read the suffering and the despair burning there. I squirmed in Father’s grip.

  “I think he’s hurt,” I whimpered. “The ropes are hurting him.”

  “Milja,” said Father, dropping to his knee and putting his arm around me. “Don’t be fooled—this is not a human being. It just looks like one. Our family has guarded him here since the first people came to these mountains. Before the Communists. Before the Turks. Before the Romans, even. He has always been here. He is a prisoner of God.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I don’t know, little chick.”

  That was when I began to cry.

  “What did he do?” became a question I repeated many times as I grew up, along with, “Who is he?” My father didn’t lie, but neither could he answer my question truthfully. He was an educated man, though he had taken up the vocation of priest of an isolated village in one of the most barren, mountainous corners of our rugged country. He had studied engineering at university in Belgrade, but he admitted that the answers to my queries were unclear to him. “The gods have condemned him,” he would say, with a sigh. That sounded so strange coming from an Orthodox priest that I didn’t know what to think.

  Every Sunday, after going down into the village to celebrate the Divine Liturgy with the congregation in the church there—nobody ever climbed up the two hundred steps to our dingy little chapel carved into the sheer rock—he would descend into the prisoner’s cave. He would take the man water and bread, and wash his face. My father was not without compassion, even for a prisoner, and he felt the responsibility of his position.

  “Is he…Prometheus?” I asked when I was ten, and had been reading the Greek myths in one of the dog-eared books Father had brought from the capital. “The gods chained up Prometheus forever. Is it him?”

  “It may be.”

  “But…Prometheus was good, Papa. He taught us how to be civilized. He stole fire from the gods to bring it to men. He was on our side!”

  “What did man do with fire, Milja?”

  “Cook?”

  “He smelted iron, little chick, and with iron he made swords. He made all the weapons of war, and men have slaughtered men in countless millions ever since. Are you sure Prometheus had our best interests at heart? Would we not have been happier if we’d stayed in the innocence of the Stone Age?”

  I was too young to answer that. Father sighed and fetched a blackbound book, laying it on the table by the window where the light could fall upon it. He opened the pages to somewhere near the beginning.

  “My grandfather told me that it is Azazel we hold in our keeping. Have you heard of him?”

  “No,” said I in a small voice.

  “Neither man nor pagan titan, little chick, but a fallen angel. A leader of the Watchers: those Sons of God who lusted after mortal women. The Israelites dedicated their scapegoat sin-offering to Azazel every year when they drove it out into the wilderness. And just like the Greeks’ Prometheus, he is credited with teaching men metalworking and war-craft—and women the arts of seduction and sorcery. Here in the Book of Enoch, see; the angel Raphael is commanded by God: ‘bind Azazel hand and foot and cast him into the darkness. And lay upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there forever.’”

  “Which is right, then?” I asked. “Is he a demon or is he Prometheus?”

  “Maybe he is both, and it’s the same story. Or maybe he is something else altogether. All I know is that he’s been here since the beginning, and that it is our duty to keep him bound. It’s what our family forefathers dedicated their lives to. And you must carry on when I am gone, Milja. You must marry and teach your husband and your sons, so that it is never forgotten. And you must never tell anyone else, all your life. It must not go beyond the family. Promise me!”

  “Why not?”

  “What if someone, someone who did not understand, felt sorry for him and set him free? What if he is one of the great demons, Milja? What would happen to this world?”

  I was eleven when I started to visit him in secret. I took him food, because I couldn’t bear any longer to lie awake in bed thinking of how hungry he must be. I knew he could get water—when it rained it would run down the rocks onto his face—but at eleven I was always ravenous myself, and starvation seemed the worst of tortures. And the image of him lying bound there haunted my dreams more and more, evoking feelings I had no words for—not then—until it seemed impossible for me to stay away.

  Still, I went at midday, when the light was strongest and the cavern least fright
ening. I brought him bread crusts and cheese. I picked berries from the mountain bushes and fed them between his cracked lips.

  I remember the first time I did it, the first time I went alone. I climbed up on that big rock slab and knelt over his dirt-streaked body, and he opened his eyes and looked up into mine. His irises were so dark that they couldn’t be distinguished from the pupils, and in this half-light they looked like holes.

  “What’s your name?” I whispered.

  I don’t know if he heard me. He certainly didn’t reply. He just looked at me, from the depths of his private torment.

  “I brought you some milk.” I tipped the teat of the little skin of goats’ milk to his lips and let it trickle into the side of his mouth, carefully: I was scared of choking him. His throat worked and his lips twitched, bleeding. He drank it all and I sat back. That was when, with obvious and painful effort, the lines of his face pulled into a brief smile—a smile so fragile a butterfly might have trampled it underfoot.

  That was when I was lost.

  I was fourteen when I first heard him speak.

  “Milja,” he murmured, greeting me. His voice was hoarse from disuse, but its depths made the hair stir on my neck. I nearly fled.

  “What’s your name?” I asked once again, but he didn’t answer, withdrawing instead, it seemed, into his anguish once more. He only twisted from one hip to the other to ease the strain on his back, and hissed with pain. The power of his corded body, terrible even under constraint, made me tremble.

  He spoke only rarely in the years that followed, and what he said made little sense to me—often it wasn’t even in any language I knew, and when I could make out the words they seemed to be nothing but fragments. “Leaves on the brown-bright water…” he might mutter to himself. I think he was remembering things he had seen before he was imprisoned. As I grew to realize how the uncountable years had stolen even his mind, I felt dizzy with horror.

  I was eighteen when Father sent me away.