Dinner stretched out and a delicious state of coiled anticipation about how this night would end grew. Every glance, every touch, every shared bite of food was underscored with the mutual knowledge of two people who wanted each other but wanted to prolong the wanting until it was almost painful.
Truth be told, much as I enjoyed the simmering build, it was time to get on with it already. This European vacation had been lax on the saucy antics.
"I don't want dessert. You?" Rohan asked. He sat back in his chair, eyes hot, voice calm.
"I'm good." My words were at odds with my jittering leg. Once again, he insisted on treating.
I stepped outside while he finished paying, thankful for the brisk wind on my very flushed cheeks. No one else was out here. The night was quiet and still.
Rohan joined me a couple of minutes later. "They called a taxi for us but it's going to be about twenty minutes. Want to stay outside?"
Before I could answer, a demon bobbed into view under one of the parking lot lights. Roughly my height, fuzzy, charcoal-colored, and sausage-shaped, the demon boasted one cyclops eye and a red sneer of a mouth. Both its fingers and toes were long and sloth-like. A two-foot long external metal spine ran down its back with jagged spikes jutting up like a stegosaurus.
The demon swiveled its eye to look at me.
"What is that?" I asked.
"Most of it is a gogota demon," Rohan said. He tossed his jacket on a bench beside the restaurant door, his forearm blade extracting. "Dumb as a sack of rocks, but it'll focus on a task's completion until it's dead. The metal upgrade is new."
"Vashar! Vashar!" The demon screeched in a high reedy voice. It wobbled as if not sure how to accommodate its additional weight.
Rohan swore. "Someone has deliberately messed with it. A gogota's sweet spot is dead center of its back." Where we could no longer access it thanks to the metal spine. "Get it into the shadows."
Right. We didn't want the patrons to look out and see this.
The demon charged us, a blur of motion for such a slug-like shape. Rohan jabbed the blade along his arm into the gogota's belly, forcing it back into the dark reaches of the lot. The demon left a trail of sticky, silver goop that glistened in the moonlight.
Busy slicing and dicing, Rohan blocked the front of the demon from me, so I couldn't blast the gogota without hitting Rohan. I also couldn't sneak up from behind because the demon was backed up against the complex's fence.
It threw Rohan off, angling its body to smash Snowflake's head with one of its spikes. Rohan staggered back and, in that moment, the demon whizzed over to me, wrapping its fingers around my wrist. "Vashar," it insisted. Less like it wanted me dead and more like it wanted me to do something.
Blasting it failed to loosen its grip.
The demon dug its fingers into my jacket pockets. Its hands wandered over my body, probing me.
"Get off!" Even though parts of the demon were starting to shrivel and fall off under my attack, it ignored my demands. The damn thing couldn't even stand upright anymore but that didn't matter.
It pressed up against me, its blobby body expanding, secreting the sticky substance to keep me pinned to it as it continued its exploration of my person. The more I blasted it, the more it expanded, gluing me to its body that much harder.
Rohan tried to rip me off of it, but I was stuck fast.
Closer and closer it pressed into me, smelling of baby powder and sweaty baseball mitt. Soon the gogota would suffocate me, leaving it all the time in the world to violate me with its creepy touches.
My eyes glued shut from its sap. I could hear Rohan's cursing and labored breathing as he tried to free me. The metallic smell of my magic filled the air.
The demon's finger entered my mouth. "Vashar!"
Gagging, I jammed my right fist into the gogota's belly as hard as I could. Then I twisted my fist even deeper into it before firing a blast off my closed hand. A rumbled charge from deep inside me blew through my arm at the motion.
The demon ripped free, fresh air cascading around me. I reached out blindly. "Rohan?"
He grabbed my hand. "Got you."
I leaned on him, my legs rubbery. "Is it dead?" I had to pry my eyes open given the goop coating them. Once I had, it took me a second to figure out what I was looking at.
The gogota was stuck to a metal pole by its spikes. Not just stuck. Its spine was totally mangled, all twisted and melted, leaving the demon half-crushed in the deformation.
"Vashar!" Its fingers wriggled feebly in my direction.
"Why is it stuck to the pole? Is it glued?" Every one of my blinks was sticky with slime. I didn't think I'd hit it hard enough to send it that far back.