"Rich, thanks for meeting me," Cal Sterling said, his voice both businesslike and familiar. He was wearing an indigo suit with a white button-up and mustard-yellow tie; a tie-pin in the shape of the One True Cross was attached at the midpoint. His pocket square was fastidiously folded and his hair recently barbered. He looked every bit the big-money pastor that he fancied himself, and for the job at hand, this was the impression he wanted to make.
The man he was greeting, Rich Turlis, was every bit as unpretentious and egg-shaped as Cal was imposing. He shook Cal's extended hand. He was bald, with thinning hair around the sides and back of his head. His pork-chop jowls sloped down toward a neck that wasn't really there; his polo shirt was not mustard yellow, but rather featured a mustard stain. A belt strained to keep his round midsection contained in his khakis. Small town, small-time. And there was a look of nervousness about him, too - Cal picked up on that right away. He liked to think they were friendly - Rich had attended services at the Church of the Divine Pentecost for years - but something was irking the short, round man now.
"Sure," Rich said. "Anytime, Cal. You know, me and Julia… we're always happy to help out if we can." Rich was holding a manila folder in his chubby fingers. He worked in child outreach, as did his equally egg-shaped wife. It was they who had recommended the adoption agency that Cal and Vanessa had used to adopt Bobby. He certainly had been gregarious enough then, but now he seemed hesitant, and his fingers played with the folder as if he felt uncomfortable holding it.
"Is that it?" Cal asked, and gestured toward the folder. They were in Rich's office, a cluttered space with forms and files stacked high, a desk with a yellowing computer that seemed to be from the stone age, a coffee mug, and pictures of egg-shaped Rich, Julia the egg-shaped wife, and their soon-to-be-egg shaped kids, who were a mixture of biological and adopted, judging from their skin colors. One thing Cal knew, if they ate Julia's cooking - he often brought food to the Church bake sales and luncheons, most of it incredibly fried - then they would look like their parents soon enough.
He sat down in front of Rich's desk and raised his eyebrows as Rich looked down and seemed troubled. "Well?" Cal prompted. He was already losing his patience with the entire situation.
"Yeah," Rich said, finally, sitting down across from him. "Yeah, this is the file, Cal. But I gotta tell you-"
"What? Is there a problem?"
"These records were sealed. You know, he's a juvenile," Rich said, clutching the folder in the crook of his arm. "I shouldn't even have these, technically. And if Julia knew I was doing this-"
Cal flashed a gregarious smile. "It would trouble her? Rich, what could be more Christian than helping a father to understand his son? Bobby is having a difficult time adjusting, and his mother and I, we think it stems from what happened in his past. We just want to understand it." He turned on as much pastoral charm as he had. "You know, Vanessa and I need to come your way for some of that fine cooking. It's been two long since our families were together. You can tell her I said so. It's like I said in my sermon last week."
Rich looked even more awkward for a moment, and then took a breath and spoke in a quiet southern drawl. "Well Cal, I got to tell you, Julia and I, we haven't attended services the last couple of weeks. What happened to that old woman, it's got Julia real shook up."
Cal controlled his reaction, but with real difficulty. After several weeks of doing damage control, he was completely sick and tired of hearing about the death of Miss Carlyle. Attendance and donations had both dropped more than twenty percent, and a local reporter was sniffing around, trying to spin the whole thing as manipulative and callous on his part. He was in crisis mode just trying to reassure his flock - and being reminded of how devastating a blow her gruesome death had been was not improving his mood. "Well now, Rich, you know you're missed by more than just the congregation. Your absence is felt by God," Cal managed.
"That old woman," Rich lamented, fiddling with the folder. "I keep seein' her, Cal. She came and gave so much to the offering plate, and to die like that… it's an ugly thing." He shook his head, and pushed the thought away from him, which was just fine with Cal. In fact, he decided to take a new approach, if the old biddy's heart attack was bothering good ol' Rich Turlis so much. Maybe she ate too much of your fat wife's artery-clogging fried chicken , Cal thought sourly.
"It was especially tough on Bobby, to see that," Cal lied. He was already convinced that Bobby could see the earth yielding up it's dead for the Rapture and not even blink. "And Vanessa and I… you know, we're looking for a new way to get him to open up. We think maybe it's similar to some trauma from his past, but without knowing the details, we can't get him to open up."
Rich glanced down at the folder, then back up to Cal. Cal saw his face change, and he knew he had him. Sad-sack Rich Turlis had a soft heart, he couldn't deny a man of god his chance to connect with his son, even if it wasn't strictly legal to unseal the files of a juvenile. "Well, you know, Cal, there was a criminal proceeding here. And, I mean… there's courthouse stuff in this folder. Depositions and all. I could get in real trouble."
Cal was getting even more impatient, but he realized he was close to his goal, and kept up the charm. "Sure. I understand, Rich. And the last thing I would want is to put you in a jackpot. But there are the laws of God and the laws of man. And the law of God says, help thy neighbor." Cal actually often sermonized about how the hippie, help-everyone Jesus was actually a misinterpretation of the bible, but in this spot he judged that a religious call to action was what Rich Turlis wanted to hear.
There was a moment of silence, and Rich dropped the folder flat on the table. "I can't give you the file."
Cal's eyes narrowed into a frown. "But-"
"It can't leave this office," Rich clarified, looking grave. "And you can't read it. But… I've seen it. And if I was to talk about what's in it, and you were to overhear, well - not nothing can be done about a thing like that."
Cal leaned back in his chair. "That's right," he said. "I could just be talking to myself, asking questions. And maybe you could be giving answers."
Rich gave him the nod, and then his face seemed to weaken. "Bobby is really having trouble, huh?"
Cal had trouble meeting Rich's gaze, afraid if he did, the man would see through the lie that followed. "Yes, he… well, he's acting out."
"Oh, dear."
"There was a fight. A rather serious one."
"I see." Rich's face was sympathetic.
Cal said no more. He knew he had him. He would let Rich Turlis fill in the blanks, and offer his condolences. And then he would learn all he needed to know.
For the last eight weeks, Vanessa had made a ritual of drinking Bobby's semen each day.
It had started as an irregular compulsion when she changed the linens on his bed, scooping up those thick, lumpy piles of sperm and licking the heavy issue off of her hand, rubbing it on her tits, wanting to feel saturated by it, a strange form of intimacy as she explored Bobby's drawings and the ejaculations he left behind, seemingly for her to discover. Eventually she had entered the room to replace the linens with Bobby still laying on his bed, playing with a video game handheld or doing sketches.
At this point Vanessa had originally just asked Bobby to move and changed the linens, which he was happy enough to do. But as she left without scooping all of that thick, jelly-like semen into her mouth - when Bobby was in the room, there was none on the sheets to be found - she'd felt such an aching emptiness inside her that it practically screamed out. She'd locked herself in the master bedroom and masturbated furiously on such occasions - it was the only thing that helped.
The next time Vanessa entered the room to make the bed and tidy up, Bobby was there again, laying on his back, shirtless and reading a book - Lord of the Flies , by William Golding - and wearing a pair of school gym shorts bunched up around his hips, showing off the pale-complexioned skin there in its youthful smoothness.
Her son's fat, long penis had been hanging out of one of the leg holes. Bobby never looked away from his book, and Vanessa had gone about her business, occasionally stealing glances at the way that long, flopping cock was long enough to reach all the way down the leg of his shorts and then curve and dip down to the mattress. They never exchanged a word or even a glance as she gathered his laundry and picked up his wastebasket (pencil shavings, apple cores, crumpled up, discarded half-finished drawings).
She looked away to pick up the trash bag and tie it… and when she looked back, she saw it. That big, fat cockhead, pulsing. The pisshole opening and dilating to disgorge looping, heavy strands of the thickest, gooiest cum Vanessa had ever seen. It wasn't spurting out onto the comforter, it was piling on it in chunky, gelatinous ropes. There was a smell in the air like semen and sulphur, and she was the first one to speak in the forbidden silence of the bedroom. "Oh god, Bobby…"
The wastebasket was forgotten. She walked to the bed as if in a trance and crawled onto it, the her large, heavy breasts hanging down like cow udders and stretching her blouse, giving the boy a view of her matronly titflesh if he wanted it - but Bobby made no move, no indication that he was paying attention to her at all. She'd crawled further forward at that point, back arched, heart pounding, like a cat approaching a dinner dish. One inhale filled her nostrils with the scent of her son's impossibly thick, virile semen - sperm that was still looping out of his pisshole in irregular, chunky bursts that couldn't fly and splatter, they were so heavy.
Wordlessly and with no acknowledgement from either of them, she leaned forward, her beautiful dark hair brushing his bare thigh up to the hemline of his shorts, and opened her mouth, placing it on the tip of his penis. Not as a seducer attending to her target, but more like a pet at her feeding tube. Her matronly body was blazing with heat, a need to be nourished by him.
That day, on the mattress, her adopted son had fed her until her belly was full. In the days to follow it was repeated, and it became their silent ritual. Sometimes she would caress his balls, occasionally he would be topless or bottomless and she would run her long, agile tongue over the flawlessly-complextioned paleness of his flesh before attending to her part in their unspoken pact. She was enchanted by the fact that his pre-teen penis was so heavy and virile that she could drink her fill from it, and each day, Vanessa swallowed semen until she felt saturated with it. Then, she would gently caress Bobby and say goodbye, her inner thighs absolutely soaked with her own wetness. Then, she would proceed up to her room to masturbate away from Cal's prying eyes, and the orgasms were so strong they were almost frightening.
Many times, she squirted so powerfully that she splattered the nightstand where the pictures of she, Cal, and the family were propped with dull, saccharine sentiment. The fantasies she explored were different than any she'd ever had before, different than the simple fantasies she'd entertained before Bobby's arrival. She saw orgies where Bobby stalked among the rutting figures with the keen eye of a predator, his long, thick penis banging against his smooth thighs, slender baphomet horns sprouting from his head. She saw a corrupted and perverse parody of the traditions of the church, a libertine mass held before a pulpit and pentacle, with naked masses falling on each other, a gaggle of bountiful young women prostrate before her son, and he ready for them with a massive erection.
The ritual - going to Bobby's room, attending to him, and then retreating to her own to masturbate with her thighs spread and her nipples throbbing as she pawed at her breasts and caused them to jiggle - had become an increasingly large part of Vanessa's day. What took fifteen minutes originally, the swallowing of semen from his sheets, was now taking more than an hour. She welcomed it as an escape from Cal, who had grown increasingly ill-tempered and brooding with the difficulties of the CDP, and even from Isaac, whose jealousy and hatred for Bobby she now felt, despite their blood connection, as a sort of sacrilege all its own.
This time , when Vanessa approached the door to Bobby's room and raised her hand to knock briefly and enter, she heard sounds from within. Sounds that caused her to blush and look down with a sense of guilt and recognition. Regular, soft, glottal noises. Flesh being enveloped and consumed by a hungry mouth.
It was Katrina, she knew. Taking care of Bobby.
Vanessa had both known, and not known. Over the previous weeks and months, like ships passing in the night, they had made regular visits to his room, occasionally glimpsing each other going in and out, but never explicitly speaking about what they were doing. They both shared the same sense - that Bobby was an extraordinary young man who needed extra love and attention. As Cal and Isaac grew apart from the newest member of the Sterling family, they both grew more attached.
Vanessa had noticed a change in Katrina and for good reason. She had changed, perhaps more than any of them. In the two months since her trip to the back alleys with Bobby, she started spending more and more time with him. They were always talking, laughing together, as thick as thieves, and the results were clear. Previously very reserved for her age, and almost childlike in her outlook and attitude, Katrina was showing a wilder, more adventurous side. This was first reflected in the clothing she wore and the way she did her hair. Gone were the simple, straight hairstyles (with prim ponytails on occasion) and the dowdy skirts. Recently, she had taken to doing her hair in the long bohemian style of 60's and 70's, with a thin, organic looking leather twist headband. It was wild .
She was wild. It was as if something primal had been awakened inside her by Bobby. Cal said she looked like a 'flower child' and expressed concern that her dressing habits were being influenced by watching 'old movies' with her friends. But he was missing the true genesis of her transformation. Katrina with her wild hair and her flowery vine-like headbands wasn't imitating the spirit of the sixties. Rather, she looked like a woman who lived in nature. A woman who knew how to catch a bat and throw the entrails into a pan with some cat teeth and read the coming weather.
A witch. Not the warty-nosed halloween kind, either. But the sensual, flowing, servant of the earth. The sort who would hold the darkest congress with animals and the devil. The sort who would have been burned in Salem.
Vanessa opened the door and her heart thudded with the obscenity of what she saw. Vanessa was flat on her back on Bobby's bed, legs and arms splayed, totally without clothing. The full beauty of her explosive teen body was on display and couldn't be denied. Her breasts were pert, shapely orbs that hung only slightly down the sides of her chest. Her belly was smooth and taut, the soft crescent of her blushing pubic mound dusted with thin hair. Only her face couldn't be seen, because Bobby was mounted on her face, very slowly making his hips rise and fall. Katrina's features were thus completely obscured by Bobby's cute, round rear end, his heavy balls mashing against her chin and neck, his legs bent at the knee on either side. His anus, pink and flawless between his buttocks, was shamelessly displayed.
"Glllnnncch!" Katrina gurgled, as Bobby pressed his pelvis into her face. His cock was totally buried down her throat, Vanessa could see her daughter's neck bulging around the girth. Katrina's pelvis twitched and honeyed wetness drizzled from her slit. A bubbling mix of semen and throat slime slid down one cheek. Bobby kept up the same rhythmic stroking, and each slow and grinding thrust elicited the same result.
My eleven-year-old… adopted on… is face-fucking my daughter… with his huge penis , Vanessa thought. Her midsection turned to liquid and she felt a forbidden heat inside her beyond anything she'd felt yet. What she was looking at was an obscenity… a perversion of mating, not procreative sex in the religiously-ordained way but rather a lewd, nasty throat-fuck. Bobby was using Katrina's throat as a cum toilet… nothing but a sleeve to dump his sperm into… and Katrina seemed to be loving every second of it. Her wild hair was fanned out on the mattress on each side of her obscured face, and the fact that her expression could not be seen - only Bobby's smooth, young ass - made it all the more depraved.
Vanessa made sure the door was shut securely behind her and walked toward the foot of the bed as if in a trance, pulling off her blouse and bra as she approached. Her heavy breasts, laden with size befitting her motherly age and instincts, swung free and bounced. Her skirt was next, and her heels, pushed off by her painted toes. She knew there was little danger of Cal coming to Bobby's room; the way the two of them were at odds. What happened would be a secret known only to the three of them.
She knee-walked onto the mattress and lifted one leg over her daughter's midsection, straddling Katrina's body and lowering her face down between the cheeks of Bobby's ass. She could see every detail of his smooth ballsack pouring over Katrina's chin, holding those two huge boy-nuts that were just churning with semen. Bobby pressed his hips down steadily again. Katrina gurgled again and another gout of thick throat-cream poured down her cheeks. Vanessa moaned and exhaled at the pure domination of it. She felt a seed of unseemly pride at the way Bobby was so effortlessly alluring to both her and Katrina. Even though she wasn't his biological mother, something inside her wanted to nurture and cultivate that instinct.
She also found Bobby to be physically perfect. That smooth, round ass… parted for her to see his pink asshole as he dipped his hips onto Katrina's face… she couldn't help but want to service it. She moaned, exhaled and lowered her face, feeling the hairless perfection of Bobby's buttocks brushing her cheeks. She extended her tongue and began to lick around his asshole, moaning with hunger like a starving woman who hadn't eaten in weeks. For some absurd reason, as with her swallowing of the boy's semen, she began to think of communion.
This is my body. Eat it, in memory of me.
It was so obscene but… it felt and tasted so good . Vanessa felt fulfillment, both spiritual and physical, course through her as she slid her tongue up Bobby's asshole and licked around the walls of his bowels, loving the earthy taste of boy-musk and intestinal juices. Her hands clapped onto his perfect, pert boy-butt and spread his cheeks as his soft flesh sunk into her palms. She and Katrina moaned in unison and she could feel Bobby's balls twitch and disgorge more thick ropes of semen down Katrina's throat, spurred on by her oral attentions.
Bobby's pelvis was now sandwiched between their two faces, mother and daughter, being serviced by each. Vanessa's huge breasts hung down, the nipples puffy and poking, jostling with Katrina's perky nips as their two sets of tits - one gravity-defying and shapely, one heavy and hanging - mashed against each other. Their sets of spread thighs gave way to pussies that were sordidly wet, their inner thighs glistening. Vanessa felt a slick rivulet of her honey leak from between her folds and drizzle straight down, and knew that she was creaming all over her daughter's young, peach-fuzzed pussy mound. Glazing it. Preparing it.
For what?
For him.
Of course. In that moment, it seemed inevitable, and perfect. "Oh, g-god," Vanessa moaned, and then she leaned in and started making out with Bobby's asshole, kissing it more vigorously than she ever had her husband's mouth, in all of their years of marriage. She ground the flat of her tongue against the orifice and then pursed her lips around it and began to suck, hollowing out her cheeks until her cheekbones were stark, her eyes half-lidded and totally content as she made lewd baby-with-a-pacifier slurping noises. Her pussy roared into orgasm from the nasty, submissive act, and she squirted extravagantly downward, in a jet, hosing down her daughter's tender clit, driving her over the edge in turn. She felt Bobby's cock twitch and deliver another huge, lumpy gout of fat semen ropes straight down Katrina's throat.
She could actually feel and hear the fat, chunky cum curds rocketing down his dickpipe and piling in Katrina's taut stomach. It was impossible to imagine anything sexier or more virile. She had felt the pain of being barren, of being unable to bear a child. She knew in a second, though, that Bobby could kindle her if he wanted. And that was the sexiest thing she could ever imagine.
Vanessa did not rush in attending to her eleven-year-old boy. She groped his buttocks, moving her mouth to kiss and suck on the young, buoyant flesh with worshipful moans. She swabbed him inside with her tongue as deep as it could go, and spent more than ten minutes simply sucking on his asshole, fellating his hairless, perfect anus as if it were a cock, while her eyes rolled back and her lips pulled into a lewd, degrading tube shape. Much like her suckling at his cock those many weeks, it felt like a form of feeding; the only means by which she could satisfy her deep desire to nurture and worship her son's body.
It felt so good. On the other side of the coin from the prim and proper churchgoing life she had known, in which appearance, faith and adherence to dogma had been all that mattered, there was a place with Bobby where only gratification mattered. Nothing was forbidden, everything was permitted, even the most obscene acts of incest. She had seen echoes of this place in his drawings; mothers upon sons, sisters upon brothers, the darkest parts of the Bible twisted into a religion far from anything she'd known before his arrival. And in this place where gratification and the ritual of sex loomed largest, she found a deep, worshipful need for her adopted son's body. Bobby had the roundest, cutest eleven-year-old ass and Vanessa absolutely loved that. She wanted him to sit on her face whenever he wanted so she could clean out his asshole with her tongue. It made her proud that he had a massive, impregnating penis with a huge pair of virile sperm tanks . That he was totally using Katrina as a cock sleeve like a true alpha. She felt about these things how she imagined a penitent of a dark mass might feel, kneebound before a pentacle of iron, hoping to summon something great and good and superior.
All these images, Bobby had shown her.
He pulled out of Katrina's well-fucked throat, raising his hips. His long cock emerged slick and covered in throat slime, Vanessa couldn't resist reaching out to milk it downward, to stroke it, to pull it back through his legs and lick the tip, squeezing out every bit of semen she could and pulling it into her hungry mouth. Bobby looked back over his shoulder, making eye contact for the first time. Vanessa saw the bandage over his left eye, the way the sclera was hemorrhaged and filled with blood in one corner.
The fight. Those older boys from the private school had given Bobby a beating. Split his eyebrow to the bone and gave him a heck of a shiner. Yet even in the aftermath, Bobby hadn't complained, and had declined to name the culprits, saying he would 'deal with it himself'. Sitting at the dining room table and holding a pack of frozen corn against Bobby's forehead, Vanessa had cried blue murder over that, insisting she was going to call those boys mothers and read them the riot act, maybe get the police involved. But Bobby simply shook his head slowly and firmly.
No. Don't worry about them, mom.
And she remembered how Isaac had been skulking around, not asking if his adopted brother was okay, as both Vanessa and Katrina had been doing. While they fawned over him, Isaac only sulked, as if jealous that Bobby's beating had robbed him of attention. And of course, she realized quickly that her shrieking overreaction was more akin to what Isaac would have wanted in the same situation. But not Bobby. Bobby was strong. And more and more, Vanessa was coming to realize that Isaac, her biological son, was weak.
He was staring at her, as if he knew what she was thinking. And the discoloration around his eyes - the black rings, the blood-red sclera - somehow looked… fitting. Vanessa couldn't explain how. It was as if this darkened state wasn't alien to Bobby at all. The grotesque masks, the suggestive drawings… it was just something else he was showing her. Katrina, who had traveled to the back alleys with Bobby, could have told her mother that Bobby had shown her not to be afraid of injury, and things most considered 'gross'.
Bobby turned over onto his back, propped against his pillow, and held out the piece of paper he had been using to draw, which featured another woodcut tableaux. His cock lay fat and flopping over one of his slender thighs as the image passed between them; the only sound was Katrina's harsh breathing, as she recovered from a throat-fuck that had lasted nearly half an hour.
Vanessa looked at the image. It showed a circle of angels surrounding a baphomet-horned devil, attacking it. The devil was smaller, earnest in expression, being scourged by their lashes and poked by their spears, yet seemed to be bravely surviving despite the odds. Its face was boyish, and reminiscent of Bobby himself.
In the foreground, apart from the larger angels, was a cherub, hiding behind a cloud, peering over to watch the proceedings. It was sneaky and cowardly in countenance, and the parted hairstyle and peering eyes seemed reminiscent of Isaac. A sash around the cherub's chubby chest was overspilling with coins.
The caption below was carefully written in pencil:
Am I my brother's keeper?
"What is it, mom?" Katrina asked, propping herself up on her elbows. She did not seem self-conscious or ashamed that her mother had witnessed her servicing Bobby. They had already shared so many glances; they had taken his communion together. She knew instinctively there would be no rebuke for what they both now considered their duty as Bobby's family. "What did Bobby draw?"
Vanessa's eyes narrowed. "It's…" Her voice trailed off, and her lips moved silently as she muttered to herself.
"Is that Isaac and Bobby?" Katrina asked. The two women were sitting up on the mattress now, unabashedly nude, shoulder to shoulder, their breasts hanging - Katrina's a little and Vanessa's enormously - and their hair feathered down wildly over their shoulders. "Do you think?"
Vanessa shut her eyes and clenched her teeth with anger. What had happened was now apparent to her - and though the choice the truth offered would have seemed impossible as recently as four weeks prior, now, she made it resolutely, and without regret.
The fight happened on the 21st, a Friday - but Isaac had put his plan into motion several weeks before. Though he wasn't lacking on most conventional forms of courage, he steeled himself enough to walk up to where Lorne Callahan and the older, taller boys would hang out behind the athletic field, doing 'delinquent' things like vaping, swearing, and talking about which teachers had it in for them. Lorne Callahan was fourteen, but could have easily passed for eighteen. He had the start of a wispy moustache on both sides of his mouth and stood nearly six foot, so large that his St. Gabe Prep Academy uniform had to be ordered special. This alone made him a school legend. It was known among all the boys, especially in the younger grades, that Lorne Callahan would grab your head and rotate it around four times if you so much as looked at him funny.
Rumor had it that Lorne's father could barely make the pricey tuition; that in addition to being the biggest and meanest boy in school, he was also the poorest. But woe betide the fourth or fifth-grader who made a comment about the worn knees on his slacks of the ill-fitting sleeves on his jacket, which barely reached mid-wrist and made him look like a neanderthal. To do so would be inviting disaster.
Normally, Isaac would never have ventured near him or his circle of equally-delinquent friends, but on that day, he'd had a purpose. A purpose, and a hundred dollars in cash allowance that he'd gotten from Cal and Vanessa through a mixture of whining, lying (his dad and mom weren't on good terms, so it was easy to convince them both that the other had been forgetful) and outright thievery from his mother's purse. Isaac figured that stealing was against the teachings of the Lord, but he reframed the act in his mind as a 'reappropriation' of funds for a good cause.
The cause? Exposing his 'brother', Bobby, as the dangerous creep that Isaac just knew he was. And maybe, just maybe, teaching Bobby a lesson in the process.
"L-Lorne?" Isaac stammered, face red. Even saying the name had been almost impossible. Walking behind the bleachers and standing in their shadow had made him feel like running and putting the plan off until later. But in the end, he swallowed his terror and made the stammering offer, with tears in his eyes, pinned up against the chain-link with Lorne's fist grabbing his shirt and two other cretinous older boys pinning his arms.
He would pay the boys fifty in advance for beating Bobby up. Fifty more when the job was done.
Lorne called him a queer and told him his family must be really fucked up if he wanted his own brother to get beat up. But Isaac found a new level of lying in the midst of this danger; he imagined it must be like the inspiration his father felt up on the pulpit, ensuring his livelihood. Isaac became silver tongued when it was his own skin on the line.
Bobby was, Isaac claimed, always talking about how Lorne was a big stupid idiot who didn't belong at the school. Bobby further said that the girls that Lorne favored were all ugly and that Lorne and his friends (and here Isaac guessed at what would enrage Lorne most) were probably queer for each other anyway. Speaking quickly, he tried to make Lorne as mad at Bobby as he himself was; the first and greatest sermon of his young life. Isaac knew that much of what his father said was designed to get people to do what he wanted, and now it was his turn to step into those shoes.
"Don't tell him I sent you," Isaac clarified - and the twinge of fear he felt at the idea of Bobby finding out was enough to make his skin prickle. "Just tell him… he doesn't belong here." He gulped. "Tell him… tell him adopted kids should just get lost."
Isaac produced the fifty, and Lorne set him down on the ground, finally letting loose of the checkered cardigan sweater that was now stretched in the front. "Alright, you little shit," Lorne said. "It'll be our pleasure rearranging that kid's face. But if you try to jew me somehow-"
Isaac shook his head with almost comical vigor. "I won't. I'd have to be crazy to do that."
"Got that right."
That was how it had started. But Isaac had several things in mind that he didn't share with Lorne of his goonish friends. First, he thought Bobby was dangerous. He thought that if Bobby was backed into a corner, he might do something violent. And that violence would be even better in the long run for Isaac's plans. Isaac thought if Bobby lashed out and hurt one of the older boys, his dad might put him back in a boy's home. He got the sense, just from observing Cal's brooding demeanor over the prior weeks, that his father was just looking for any excuse to bed rid of Bobby, any infraction he could point to and justify shipping him out.
Isaac's heart had been pounding as the boys left him against the fence, his sense of both righteousness and jealousy fully inflamed. More than anything, it was the attention that his mother and sister paid Bobby that had caused the hate to grow in his heart, and that hate had driven him to become sneakier and more resourceful than even his father would have thought possible.
On that day, as he waited for his breathing to slow down, he imagined he would get rid of Bobby, and then he would help his father resuscitate the attendance at the church, which he would eventually take over and run himself once his father was ready to retire. He would talk each week about the love of Christ and the grace of God, and the money would roll in, and he would use that money to buy whatever he wanted. And he would meet a girl that he could spellbind with his words, a girl who looked more than a little like his mother and his sister, and marry her, and have a son of his own, who he would raise to turn a dollar at the pulpit, as his father had raised him.
As it turned out, nothing went quite as planned.
It was overcast and raining outside on the 21st when Lorne and his two friends, Murray and Connor, intercepted Bobby in the school bathrooms. It was Lorne himself who grabbed Bobby by the collar and dragged him in, manhandling the much smaller boy. Connor kept watch, Murray turned the lock and pressed on the automatic hand-dryer, covering up any initial noises of struggle. The science of shaking down and beating up other boys was old hat for them; they were going nowhere, wanting nothing, and would achieve no greater heights than their current status as school boogeymen - big, older boys in Catholic school uniforms, hair buzzed close to their heads, older than Bobby by three years and the biggest of them perhaps twice his body weight.
"I heard you've been saying I'm a homo," Lorne said to Bobby, shoving him against the cold tile wall and moving into smashing distance. Bobby's body slammed into the wall with tooth-rattling force, and then the boy looked up, his black hair hanging over his eyes before he cleared it with his hand and the green of his irises seemed to flash. Lorne cracked his knuckles. "I'm gonna take out a tooth for every time you said that."
Bobby's expression didn't change. He leaned back against the wall and then lifted one hand to loosen his tie, and then removed it, tossing it on the row of three sinks that was nearby. Next, he took off his jacket. Lorne laughed.
"Better take off your shirt too, if you don't want blood on it," he said. "You know what's gonna happen, don't you? Well, you got this coming." The automatic dryer flicked off and suddenly the bathroom seemed eerily silent.
Bobby looked at Lorne evenly, a black lamb staring down the looming white wolf. Suddenly, he spoke. "Your father killed your mother, did you know that?" he said.
Lorne's eyes bugged out. "What the fuck did you say?" he growled. "What did you just fuckin' say?" He closed to punching distance.
"I said, your father killed your mother."
WHOCK!
It was a bone-chilling sound as Lorne's right hand swung and connected with Bobby's head, smashing his eyebrow, splitting the skin, banging his head off the wall. Bobby made no noise, only exhaled with the impact, and then slumped to his hands and knees as a sluice of blood dripped into a puddle below him.
"You don't know anything about my old man," Lorne growled, and as Bobby held out a hand to press himself up from the floor, he kicked it out. The room grew coppery with the scent of blood.
"He said… she ran off and left the two of you when you were five," Bobby said, breath hitching with pain. But his face didn't show discomfort. It looked vicious. He looked up to stare at Lorne through a mask of blood that covered half his face. His canine teeth gleamed through the crimson. "But that was a lie. She did run off, but she changed her mind. She tried to come back home."
"Shut up!" Lorne cried, and kicked Bobby in the ribs, turning the boy over and knocking more wind out of him. A memory of his mother's touch, warm and nurturing, began to ache inside him with a need beyond any he'd ever experienced. For years, he had hated her, hearing stories at his father's knee, beer in one hand, remote control in the other, about how she had run off. But he had always wondered why, if she had run away, she had never tried to contact him, her only son. Why? Unless-
"He caved her skull in and buried her in the woods, out at the cottage on Lake Mirabelle. The year before he started to build the boathouse." Bobby gasped, and the pool of blood running from his busted eyebrow was becoming macabre. Connor and Murray, dim as they were, could recognize that something dangerous and unexpected was happening; what was supposed to be a quick beating had transformed into a terrifying revelation, given by a crimson masked young boy who was smiling like the devil himself.
"Shut up," Lorne said, but his voice sounded hollow. He drew back his hand, and hesitated. "Shut up. Shut up!" He had never been sorry to beat someone up, but felt real regret now, regret and terror. He knew the truth of the strange black-haired boy's words as instinctively as he knew the familiar shape of his father's lies.
"I can tell you where to dig," Bobby seethed, and now it was him who seemed tall and Lorne who seemed to be shrinking. "She wants to see you again, you know."
An image entered Lorne's mind and he screamed, sounding far from the balls-out bully that was his reputation. He didn't punch Bobby again but simply shoved him down under the sinks, turning away and beginning to run. He knew that as long as he lived, he would never shake the image of his mother's mouldering body, resting underground, one hand extended upward, as if reaching for the son she would never see again.
He would live the rest of his childhood with a murderer.
Lorne burst through the bathroom door and his friends followed, leaving Bobby alone. Out in the hall, where students were just filing into the next of their classes, there was one figure pressed into the shadow of some lockers, hiding, not wanting to be seen watching with undue interest. Isaac watched as Lorne fled past. The bigger, older boy had tears in his eyes, blood splattered on his shirt and hands. He hoped for a moment the job was done… but then he heard laughing, a deep and maniacal laugh that seemed to echo through the halls and caused the teachers to take notice.
It was one of the teachers who called for the nurse Bobby emerged, his entire left side covered in blood from his spit eyebrow, laughing. Before he ducked back behind the lockers, they made eye contact, and Isaac saw that Bobby was grinning like a wolf.
He looked right at me , Isaac realized. Dozens of people in the halls and he didn't look at anyone except me.
Isaac ran. Bobby, losing blood and badly beaten, sank to his knees. The nurse arrived. Calls were made to parents. And Lorne Callahan, later that night, began to think with serious resolve about his father's gun safe, and what revenge he might take if he could gain access to it.
That had been a week ago, and now, realizing the truth of what had happened - that Isaac had sold his adopted brother out no less contemptibly than Judas Iscariot had done so to Jesus Christ - Vanessa felt an overwhelming mix of emotions. Anger, that her own son would do such a thing, would try to take the gift of a new brother from the family. But even more than that, she saw the need to apologize… and atone.
Bobby was so superior, so physically and mentally beautiful, that it was an affront to try to harm him. And Isaac was trying to hurt Bobby. That was… was...
A passage came to her with startling clarity, even though she had never studied the bible as thoroughly as Cal. She opened her mouth, and as she spoke, she realized that Bobby was speaking as well, his voice overlaid with hers in harmony.
"Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you."
The book of Genesis.
This would be her binding of Isaac .
Wordlessly, Bobby stood up on the mattress and held his fat, long pre-teen penis out in front of the two prostrate females, as if offering it to them. This, Vanessa realized, was the mountain, the place of sacrifice. Bobby's huge cock was the peak to which she would now ascend. And the sacrifice…
She took her last matronly feelings for her biological son and pushed them away. She spread her thighs, arched her back, and looked up at Bobby with pleading eyes.
"I'm sorry Isaac is such a tiny-dicked fag," she moaned, rubbing her lips on Bobby's cockhead. "I'm ashamed that his little worm-sized cock came out of my womb. Please… punish my body for giving birth to suck an inferior boy. He's… Isaac is a piece of shit." She began to finger herself, and Katrina, seeing the utter depravity of her discarding her matronly association to her flesh and blood, as Abraham had done on the mount before god's messenger made the save, grew excited, her eyes - ringed with black mascara that she wore only for Bobby, more witch-like than ever - were utterly entranced by the ugliness and wrongness that had become her bread and wine. "I… I can tell that Isaac wants to have sex with both me and Katrina," Vanessa confessed, shamefaced. "He's a little pervert. I… I want him to know that we're both going to suck and fuck your huge cock from now on, Bobby… and that we'd never touch his underdeveloped little dick in a million years!"
Both women were fingering themselves, arching their backs like whores, entranced by Bobby's cock. Vanessa continued to make verbal tribute to the boy as he stood before them like an idol. Mashing her huge, bouncing tits together with both her forearms, she stretched upward and pressed them together around Bobby's shaft, massaging him, letting him thrust and fuck her cleavage as he liked, all while keeping smoldering eyes contact.
"Oh, fuck… that's so hot, mom!" Katrina said, blushing. "I wish I could do that!"
"Let me… make it up to you!" Vanessa moaned, pleading up at Bobby. "Repay you, for how Isaac caused injury to your perfect body! Use me and my daughter as your personal toilets… I want Isaac to know that he's a nothing but a faggot and every inch of our bodies has been covered in your cum. That the breasts I used to breast-feed him are only good for milking the loads out of your huge dick!"
"I wish he was here, watching!" Katrina added. She sensed what had happened, and her appetite for darkness and depravity had grown apace with her mother. "He could watch you pump out all your cum on our faces, totally covering us…"
"Please, fuck us up with your loads! I want you to abuse my daughter in front of me!" Vanessa moaned. "I'll give you any of my children, Bobby… nothing is more important than you!" His long cock burrowed through her cleavage during the degrading titfuck and the tip pressed against her mouth. She extended her lips into a lewd, eye-rolling blowjob face to suck it, slurping wetly, not caring about the indecency of the noise she made, wanting to sound stupid and whorish and low .
Katrina, not content with simply watching, pulled Bobby's long dick away and started to bob her mouth aggressively on it, showing off how well she could use her young, barely-teen throat to gag on Bobby's meat, letting it skewer her until spit bubbled poured down over her chin. "Gluuuurk!" she croaked. "Uuuuuuuuuuuuaaalk! Huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurk!"
Vanessa bit her lip and looked to the side with jealousy. "Oh, god… you've turned my daughter into such a cocksucking, stupid whore piece of shit, Bobby!" she gasped, kneading her nipples and fingering her soaked pussy. She slid next to Katrina and reached around each side of her head, fishhooking her mouth open, giving Bobby as much access as he needed to fuck her throat like it was a cunt. "Use her!" she begged. "Let her be my apology! For Isaac being such a worthless, dickless piece of shit!"
Bobby let Katrina suck his prong for a few strokes, then withdrew it, covered in saliva and sperm bubbles, to let Vanessa suck it for a few. The two women adoringly took turns choking on his cock, their dark hair mirrored one each side of his jutting meat, flying and flashing as they gagged all over him, each seemingly trying to one-up the other in how much of a mess they would make.
Vanessa seemed both scandalized and challenged by how eagerly Katrina was choking down Bobby's prong. "You're such a throat whore, Katrina!" she marveled. "You've been sneaking around with Bobby for weeks now, haven't you?" Katrina gurgled as Bobby withdrew from her mouth, forming another saliva bridge between his knob and her pretty lips. Bobby lowered his hands to both of their heads and pressed their faces together. They didn't hesitate before mashing their spit-soaked mouths together and starting to make out, embracing, Vanessa's huge tits mashing against her daughter's perfectly-shaped, gravity-defying melons as they gasped and sucked tongues and exchanged spit.
Bobby walked closer, they turned from making out to suck and worship his balls like whores, pursing their lips and sucking each fat nut as hard as they could, stretching the scrotal skin out and making wet, sloppy pulls on each heavy sperm orb with all the suction their stretched-out blowjob faces would muster, their eyes glazed and overwhelmed, a mother and daughter utterly entranced. This was Bobby's revenge, no doubt - any abbreviated, childish sexual fantasy Isaac might have had about the formative women in his life, he was completely trampling and taking for himself.
He beat their faces with his cock, spit on both of them, made them open their mouths and swap it. He lay down and lifted his knees to his chest, letting them both slide their tongues into his asshole at once and entwine into a shared french kiss inside his hot bowels. They women fought over who would be the bigger whore for him, who could more lewdly lick and worship his asshole. And then, when it seemed they could degrade themselves no more, Bobby reached out to grip Vanessa's hair and push her down sideways. She rolled onto her back, thighs spread, tits bulging, looking up at him, and panting. Next, Bobby walked behind the gasping Katrina and used his foot to push down between her mother's legs, leaving her face just inches from Vanessa's slick slit.
"You know what to do, Katrina," Bobby said, and she did . She turned face down, face between Vanessa's sprayed thighs, and buried her tongue into her mother's slit. Vanessa's eyes went wide and she pushed her legs together around her daughter's head, reaching down to bury her hands in that wild mane of dark hair that was so like her own.
"Oh… fuck!" Vanessa moaned, eyes shut, head tossed back. "Katrina… you… bad girl! You… rug-munching fucking… dyke!" It felt so good, so forbidden, that she could scarcely think. The idea that Bobby had been teaching her daughter behind her back was a dark discovery that was sordidly welcome. Her body, her daughter, and her son's sacrifice were all she could offer. Her thick, round buttocks clenched and she drove her pussy up into Katrina's face, raising off the mattress. When she collapsed back down, Katrina was staring slyly at her, mouth slick with her juices, over the top of her pubic mound.
"Bobby showed me how girls lick cunts, mom," Katrina explained. After their first trip out together, she had become hooked; obsessed with whatever the boy had to teach her, the hidden, adult, secret information that was beyond the boundaries of her sheltered childhood. "Everything Bobby showed me… it's so much better than church and the bible!" She gave her mother a smoky gaze over the older woman's puffy, hair-dusted pubic mound. "I'm going to muff-dive and scissor with every one of my friends. I want their cunts in my face! Bobby showed me so many things. I'm going to piss in front of people in public. I'm going to go to gloryholes and suck every cock that comes through! I'm going to fuck dogs."
"Oh you little whore!" Vanessa groaned, and she took a fistful of Katrina's hair and forced the girl's face deep into her pussy. "Eat me out! If you're such a whore now, suck on my pussy! Make me cum in your little face, you bad girl! You fucking slut! All you're good for is putting on a show to get Bobby's dick hard!" She threw her head back and clenched her teeth as her daughter's tongue explored inside her, teasing her clit, grinding on her folds with uncanny skill. And dimly she could see Bobby positioning himself behind Katrina and pressing his leaking, heavy cockhead not against her pussy, the god-ordained method of procreation, but at the entrance to her asshole.
Vanessa's mouth twisted into a smile. "Y-yes, Bobby… I wish Isaac could see you right now. Ripping apart his sister's asshole with your huge cock. Making her eat my pussy like a dyke! Training her… he'd see how inferior he is… how stupid he was to ever be your enemy!" Bobby thrust his tight, boyish hips forward; his body precocious in size, almost faerie-like as it scampered on the mattress amidst their larger ones. His slick, spit-soaked prong bent slightly as Katrina's asshole resisted, and then it began to slide in with a wet, meaty noise of churning ass-pipe. Katrina cried out, exhaling into Vanessa's pussy - her eyes rolled back with the darkest, most devouring pleasure she had ever known. Vanessa saw there was no trace of her daughter remaining at that moment, there was only a rutting, cock-addicted animal, and seeing how thoroughly Bobby had trained Katrina drove her to her own orgasm, knowing it was her son, her hung son, her amazing, flawless, perfect son, who had done it. Oh, how could Isaac have been so foolish? How could Isaac have betrayed the true power of the household, the black lamb who had become the lion?
She forced Katrina's face into her pussy and came powerfully, bucking her hips up and squirting wetly and extravagantly into her daughter's moaning, willing face, overflowing her mouth. Bobby was driving his huge penis into Katrina's asshole nearly all the way to the balls, and the teen girl was feeling sensations of pain and pleasure beyond anything she could have imagined. She wanted Bobby's thick meat to reshape her asshole the same way his tutelage had reshaped her mind. She wanted to shit his cum. She wanted to be fucked doggystyle in a glade where the toadstools sprouted in a pentagram shape and unknown, unnatural shapes moved in the trees.
Her orgasm tore through her like a banshee as she bounced back against his thrusting cock, her teenage bubble-butt clapping against his smooth pelvis and jiggling around his dick. She soon felt the pressure and pleasure of Bobby's cock pumping cum deep into her ass, knowing those sperm were being blasted into the place she used to shit , that she was fucking for pure pleasure, having sex that was a denial of life, a denial of everything but rutting, squirting, wracking orgasms. She knew in that moment, at the tender age of thirteen, that she never wanted to have a baby. Unless of course, it was with Bobby. She wanted to get fucked up the ass . She wanted to get mounted by men and dogs in ways that would never result in a child. This desire was the abjuration against the church, and a life she'd seen, only six months prior, as set in stone and without escape. She was free.
Free to be her younger brother's fucking whore.
When Bobby pulled out, spent for the moment, Katrina collapsed forward onto her mother, and the women embraced, their bodies covered in lube and spit and cum and sweat, an obscene parody of Madonna and child. Bobby nudged Katrina with his bare foot and she moaned. He walked to stand over their heads and held out his foot again, so they could suck at lick worshipfully at his toes.
Bobby spoke aloud as he stood over them, reciting by heart, effortless, as if he had heard the words a million times. "On the night he was betrayed he took the cup, saying 'This is the New Covenant of my blood." He reached down and took Katrina by the hair, guiding her upward, and his gaze was enough to tell the worshipful teenage girl that all he wanted was for her to squat and spread the cheeks of her flawless bubble ass over her mother's face.
"Drink it, in memory of me," Bobby said. Vanessa moaned orgasmically and opened her mouth as Katrina squatted like an animal, her hairless, pink anus puckering and pushing out, before a thick, bubbling cum fart erupted and a solid stream of thick, white semen poured forth, spraying all over Vanessa's teeth and tongue, covering them, filling her mouth quickly.
She drank. Swallowed. Opened her mouth again, and Katrina pushed out more thick, gelatinous cum into her mouth. Bobby's cum. BRPPPPTHTHT! Vanessa's mouth and lips were splattered by another loose, nasty sperm fart as Katrina voided her semen-packed bowels all over her mother's face. Her tongue was hanging out and dripping saliva like a dog as she looked to Bobby for approval.
The boy took his long, half-hard penis and began to piss directly into Katrina's face. She too, needed to take her communion. The foaming, virile yellow stream filled her mouth instantly and she began to gulp, and gulp, and gulp, wanting to drink every drop of Bobby's emission. She voided more sperm into her mother's mouth, and bathed her face, and cooed as the thick stream of piss erupted all over her unblinking eyeballs, and she felt her mother's tongue slide into her well-fucked asshole and lips purse over her anus, as Vanessa began to suck the thick, chunky cum curds out of her shithole.
When it was over, the lead pencil shavings in Bobby's wastebasket served to darken their fingers, and each female eagerly drew a pentacle of powdered blackness on the pelvis of the other, smudged and halting but still recognizable for all that, a sigil directly above the place where their wombs were throbbing inside their fertile bodies.
Bobby smiled when he saw the completion of this act, his huge penis hanging down to his knee, his left eye still discolored, the injury adding to his dark allure rather than detracting from it.
It would not be long now.
"Tell me about the case," Cal asked, crossing his hands and leaning forward. "Whatever case you might think may be my reference, Rich. We're just talking here, like you said."
Rich didn't break eye contact, and opened the file without looking at it. Cal caught a glimpse of some photocopied reports but couldn't read the fine print. "There was a case where a foster father was convicted of abuse. But the man didn't end up in prison, even though I think he should have."
"Where'd he end up?"
"Montfaire Psychiatric. He's still there."
"What about the mother?" Cal asked. "In that case, I mean. Was she also-"
"Nobody knows," Rich said. "During the hearings and trial she attended. She testified against the father. She wore black lace." He flipped a piece of paper and there was a courtroom drawing inside of a rather voluptuous-looking woman in a wide-brimmed black hat, like a grieving widow or mother might wear to a funeral if she was particularly stylish. Cal couldn't help but notice the woman was extremely large-breasted, not unlike his own wife.
"The father, he… beat the boy?" Cal prompted. Rich nodded gravely. "Badly?" Cal pressed on. The idea of someone beating Bobby held a particular fascination for him, because he didn't know how the completely unflappable boy would respond. In the few times he'd lectured Bobby or confronted him about something, the boy not blubbered or apologized or looked down in shame, as Isaac had done in the same situations. Rather, Bobby didn't give an inch. He simply took his rebuke and punishment without a word. No wonder his foster parents wanted to beat the shit out of him , Cal thought, and found he felt less guilty about it than expected.
"Yeah, badly," said Rich. "But that isn't what landed them in court." He flipped a paper over and there was a photo of a room, a metal spring bed with the mattress completely burned away and the floor blackened. He saw Cal glance at it and then added. "I'm just talking to myself here, Cal, remember. And if you happen to be looking over and see anything-"
"Right," Cal said. "So, there was a fire."
Rich Turlis swallowed and his jowls fluttered. His eyes flashed down to the photo and back up. "I should say so. According to the testimony of the mother, the father doused the boy in gasoline and set him on fire."
Cal was silent for a moment, his brow furrowing a little. "Nobody set Bobby on fire," he asserted.
"The boy. Whatever boy we might be-"
"Cut the shit, Rich!" Cal snapped, raising his voice to the level he used on the pulpit. "We both know who we're talking about. And nobody is going to touch you for this. I'm an important man around here. We both know it. So let's cut the spy routine. Nobody burned Bobby. I've seen boys on the news who were burned. They have burns all over their bodies. They're disfigured. Bobby doesn't have a scratch on him."
"I'm just telling you what it says in the report," Rich said, looking both scared and alarmed. He seemed scandalized that his pastor of many years was speaking in such a way.
"It's horseshit," Cal barked. "What, do you think I'm stupid? You've got some other boy's file."
"Everything on him was burned. His clothes, totally destroyed. The room, too. But it was him, Cal. I've got the right file. Somebody lit that boy on fire, but by the grace of God-"
"Ha!" Cal flopped back down into his chair and rolled his eyes. "God! Indeed. Bobby is blessed, is that your assertion? That what we're talking about is an honest to goodness miracle?"
Rich turned his eyes down. "W-well, I don't know… the medical examiner thought maybe the fire burned away Bobby's clothes, and-"
"Nonsense," Cal grunted, crossing his arms. "The father, what did he have to say about it? He was crazy, right? Carted off to the nut house. He probably burned a pile of clothes he thought was his son." A part of him a part he would never admit aloud, almost resented the fact that Bobby hadn't been burned.
Rich shook his head slowly, and turned over more photos to a page showing a deposition. "No, Cal. The father testified - I mean, they didn't think he was crazy until this testimony. The father - he said he set Bobby on fire on purpose, and he made sure it was him. But even though the boy was burning, he was unharmed, and simply rose from his bed and walked away." He flipped a page. "And he said he burned him because… well… goodness." His voice trailed off.
"What did he say?" Cal prompted.
Rich looked up at him. His jowled face had gone pale. His mouth trembled as he recited the final remarks in the transcript, not needing to look down at the page, one glance having been enough.
"He said 'my son is the devil, and he's here to do the devil's work. '"
Cal reached out his arm and swept the file off of the table, sending it into the fall with an airy whap of flying papers. When Rich put out a hand to restrain his arm, Cal pulled it away. He turned and walked briskly from the room, not saying goodbye to Rich Turlis, who he never expected to see at one of his services ever again. He resented Rich Turlis for letting Bobby get to him, for shying away from the church because of one gruesome incident. He resented Rich's pallid moon face and his jowls and his B-movie actor recitation of Bobby's file, like he was in a horror film and trying to build the tension.
He resented that Rich had made him believe.
Cal Sterling did not believe. He believed in money. He believed in the ability to control people. He even believed in the power of the church - as an institution. But he had never believed in miracles. The supernatural.
And he did not believe in the devil. That horned, cloven-hoofed, sulphur-smelling cartoon character. He had never even believed a little.
Until now. And Cal hated that. He hated that seed of belief so desperately, he would do anything to kill it. If that meant removing the source of his misgivings…
That little bastard.
He slid into the front seat of his Mercedes and slammed the door, fuming. His fingers gripped the wheel with white knuckles and he looked straight ahead, seeing nothing, only thinking. Vanessa had already made it clear that she favored Bobby a great deal - even more than their own biological son. It was a situation that had developed over the preceding months. She doted on Bobby, sheltered him from harm and reprisals, and resisted Cal's attempts to change his behavior. She would never allow him to send the boy away, that much was clear. He would need to come up with a plan.
Can the devil harm you if you don't believe in him? A small girl had asked him that question once, and Cal, not wanting to offend her rich and generous parents, had given the most gentle of answers. Now, he asked it of himself, grunted in frustration at his own doubts, and pushed the query out of his mind without considering it further.
He put the car in gear and started the drive home.