Page 67 of Craving Demons

“You know, if you like swallowing sausages that much, I’ve got another one you can suck down,” Ramsey said, all swagger and lust.

He wasn’t in his usual suit, but jeans and a T-shirt, like me. Though on him, they were skintight and stretched to their max and gave definition to all of his many, many muscles. It was the first time I’d seen his bare arms. I’d known they were huge from how they bulged in his shirts, but seeing the mountains of muscle and bunching tendons made me just a little weak in the knees and short of breath.

After dinner, we jumped in his supercar and zipped across town to some underground garage. From there, we took a winding path of underground halls with pipes exposed along the ceiling, leading to brutish guards, standing next to a reinforced door. This was his secret. And apparently, it wasn’t an easy place to get to.

Then I heard the sounds of raised voices, cheering. Was this some sort of literalundergroundconcert?

Ramsey nodded to the guards at the door, who seemed to know him and let him in. We came out into a large room, and in the middle of it was a boxing ring, surrounded by a heavy cage. Inside, two…things… fought it out, bloody and brutal. Definitely not a concert.

“Welcome to the Empyrean fights,” Ramsey said with a sweep of his hand.

“This is your secret?” I hissed.

“Yup, you’re going to watch me fight.”

“Oh.”Let me contain my joy.This wasnotwhat I’d hoped the secret would be though itwaswhat I should have expected from Ramsey.

I was left — alone, of course — in a seat in the second tier of the arena. Thankfully there weren’t many people back here. Most of the spectators were down on the first level, where there were no seats and they jostled and cheered, close to the action and the blood splatter.

And soon enough, Ramsey was stepping into the ring.

I sat forward, suddenly interested, not in the fight, but in the fact that he was only wearing a loin-cloth. And holy fuck did he have a lot to show off.

Fen was tall and lean but still muscled like a Hollywood star. Grey was tall and broad and had a sense of danger about him. Ramsey was massive, with muscles on muscles, rippling over his heavy frame. I’d known from the very first time I’d seen him in that elevator he was dangerous, and I was about to find out just how dangerous he was.

Then his opponent got into the ring, and I gasped. The man — if he could be called that — was announced as Cottus The Hundred-Handed, and he was… impossible.

He was easily twice as tall as Ramsey, so big I couldn’t quite fathom his actual height. And he wasn’t just tall, but impossibly large as well. Not only was he a mountain of muscle, with smaller mountains of muscle bunched on him, but he had dozens of arms sprouting from all parts of him. They weren’t haphazard, but symmetrical along both sides of him.

Except that didn’t make him any nicer to look at. He had two arms coming out of the sides of his head and one off the back. Arms protruded off his shoulders, chest, back, down his sides, off his legs. There was even one arm where his dick should have been, which led to all manner of questions my mind didn’t want to try to answer.

The beast-man-thing roared and stomped one foot and the entire arena shook.

Ramsey must have been insane because he was grinning like a madman.

Then a whistle sounded and the fight began.

I’d never been much of a boxing fan. It was just too violent for me. And this superhuman version was even worse. There didn’t seem to be any rules other than pummel the shit out of your foe and whichever fighter wasn’t a bloody carcass at the end was the winner.

I didn’t want to watch. I wanted to look away, but some morbid fascination kept me looking — even if it was from my periphery. I winced and twitched with every bone-jarring hit and my stomach heaved with every spray of blood.

Ramsey was surprisingly quick for all that bulk, running up the cage and bouncing all over the place to avoid the many strikes from his foe while landing hits of his own. He was the better fighter by far, hitting far more often, but his hits seemed to do little to the massive hundred-handed man. Whereas every hit the larger man landed sent Ramsey flying, crashing hard into the cage or floor.

And every time, Ramsey got back up and kept bouncing around the ring.

After what felt like hours — but was probably only minutes of watching Ramsey get the shit beaten out of him — he finally lunged in, grabbed, and twisted the hundred-handed’s dick arm.

The larger man let out a horrible scream, answering one of the questions I had, namely: was that arm as sensitive as a dick? Then, as the bigger man bent over in pain, Ramsey landed a very solid hit to that massive jaw and the big lug fell back, out cold.

Ramsey was bloody and breathing hard, but he looked up at me and smiled.

I gave a halfhearted wave. I was happy he’d won, but only in so much as I hadn’t wanted to watch my date get beaten to a bloody pulp. Still, I wasn’t really happy I’d had to witness that.

That said, some primal part of me had responded viscerally to such a display. The part of me that liked bad boys and got all hot and wet at men displaying their brute strength hadlovedit. The savage cavewoman in me had chosen Ramsey as her ideal mate and I blamed her for the heated throbbing between my legs.

Ramsey came to me straight from the ring, he hadn’t even dressed. He was all bruised and bloody and manly as fuck with those heaving muscles and that skimpy loin-cloth. And my cavewoman was really hoping he’d throw me over his shoulder, take me back to his cave, and ravage me.

I swallowed hard as he flopped into the seat next to me.