He'd somehow found his way to the entrance and the flames had slowly dwindled back to a slow ember, but he didn't leave yet, instead he took them both off the path to a sheltered corner and lay down, curled around Barth like a giant cat, the Sloth demon in his coils. And then, because he had nothing to lose and he knew that curiosity would never forgive him if he did not at the very least pursue this, he closed his eyes and this time let himself fall wholly into sleep.
The very action meant that he lost whatever conscious control he had over himself and over his mind, surrendering to the subconscious and as a result once again throwing the link wide. And he let it, because he wanted to be able to be there properly, to listen properly and to shape the world in any small way. He reformed but this time sharp and clear, defined and surrounded by his own emotions, every single inch of wounded hurt, of rejection and of a deep inertia and terror of change. And he didn't plead, but the emotions pleaded for him.
He sat down, this time feeling nothing but the cold and not flinching from it. "It is only fair that I give you my full attention." he explained.
Barth returned the look, and did not look away.
"If he's going to get you killed, don't bring him up again. If you are going to be Bound to another demon, it changes things. Between us. I told you before, I trust Christof with very little. He does not belong to me."
Still, Barth guard relaxed, even as he regarded the sudden flow of emotion with suspicion. They always felt real, but ultimately he had no way of knowing if they were. Zar suddenly became present, which meant he must have abandoned the course. Barth did not have strong feelings on this. He did not have much of a work ethic to begin with. They got the same amount of points for failure as they did for success.
"It's difficult," he agreed finally, "wanting."
Barth's emotions were a dark and underlying tangle more than a flood. They were punctuated with melancholy, desire, patience. He didn't like dragging them out into the sunshine to turn them over and examine them.
It felt good to have himself entirely here, not stretched too far between sleep and waking, waiting to snap back to one or the other if he didn't give his full attention. It felt good to have the predatory edge, the confidence, the things that Barth had given him over time, it was a temporary shot of confidence into the hurt and pain, it let him stand up, but of course it didn't feel like true confidence, rather than that thick golden thread it was somehow tinnier, more manic and fragile.
"But one day he might belong to you." Zar said, and this time there was nothing to stop the sleek rise of bristling jealousy, resentment and dislike as he considered the Igor, slithering down into self loathing at his own inability to be what he was. "And I don't know if it will get me killed, how could I? But it would get me away from you. Like you hinted you wanted. It was why I brought it up." Zar's emotions read like sheet music, clear and flowing, rising into crescendos and stooping into deep valleys. Sometimes they would manifest in strange abstract ways around him. As he paused on the offer there was a steep black suicidal resignation, twisting up into hurt as he considered Barth bringing up that anyone else could do what he did in the first place.
"And you think you know what wanting is." Zar said, emotions tensing up into sharp claws of anger and bristling fury. "You think you know what it's like to want something with everything you are, and when what you are is a creature that wants." And his shape shifted, the beast unfurling, all teeth and claws and tensed, poised muscle. "You think you know how it feels to want but never have, to try to pursue prey which is alwayssss alwayssss looking SOMEWHERE ELSE."
And in a ripple of swirling energy he was himself again, curt and calm, his emotions a tender deep violet of aching longing. "It is difficult, to say the least. Almost unbearable at times in fact. And eventually you have to ask yourself if it is worth it, if you are being played, if you are being effected by the other person's innate charm, if they even realise."
Blue, was the colour the thoughts shifted then, a strained stretched pale blue that tormented the eyes as they fought to discern it from white, from surrender.
"If you want the truth." and he recoiled at the word, as abhorrent as it was to their kind. "I do not want to go anywhere. My heart - hah - wants to be where I am. And you know why I want to be here. But by the same token, when I am offered only contractual arrangements in return, potential exploitations of what is an undemonly weakness. Surely you understand why I want to run instead, the way any creature wants to run from a trap."
"One day," Barth agreed.
Barth stood, and drew closer, even as Zar boiled with feeling, his entire body melting, reshaping, forming. Zar's head grew heavy and wild, the volume increasing with teeth, and then shrinking back to something softer.
Already close, Barth took Zar's chin in his hand.
Barth's chest peeled back, thorns spilling slowly but surely from the hole, wrapped around a thin and black heart.
"You don't enjoy it? Predator, prey, consumer, consumed? Is it a disagreement over roles?"
The vines had a kind of sobering weight. Thorns crawled up Barth's arm, and cinched around Zar's waist and chest.
"I can play either. The games between us have always been serious ones. I do want you."
At the contact, the sickly, drained white shattered into shards like broken glass, revealing veins of red beneath its surface, a rich wild blood colour that was desire and want. It was as huge as the beast itself, as overpowering and looming, intoxicating and smothering as Zar's fear itself. Even as his shape wavered in flux, none of his forms and all of them resplendent at the same time, he did not flinch or pull away, simply stayed in Barth's grip. And there was that pull again, like the rose but different, a draw of need, of sexuality but of more besides, of emotions that were not demonic and yet in their strength and the terror of what they could wreak entirely as terrifying as hell itself.
The thorns reached out and he let them twist around him and defiantly let them feel (because in this world of dreams and emotions, who said that thorns could not feel) his chest with its twin beating hearts because in him there was always two, always the duality, the human and the beast, the creature that lurked below the brain demanding to be fed carnality, the beast that devoured the world and all the good in it. It was hunger and it was simplicity. But it was the humanity in him, the very facet of his creation that had left him with emotions like these ones, complex and twisted, but they made him stronger, not lesser. He was not a monster, he was a demon and the difference was never more apparent than when he was laid bare like this.
His slithering tail, impossibly long like this twisted back and met the thorns, all muscle and defiance, letting them bite, savoring it the way he always did.
And he let Barth feel the arch of arousal and interest, the swell of want and need that he elicited. "I enjoy it." he hissed through two sets of teeth, and once again there was a vast maw in Barth's hands. "You are my prey and yet I am hunted."
And the slithering grip multiplied, as many tails as there were thorns because he was unafraid, he could write on this canvas, he could be creative, perhaps not in the real world but here he was learning. "I want you." he said, and it was enough to ripple through the very place they sat, dark splintered trees jarring from the snowy earth, wrought from flesh, their trunks an array of lewd and hellish shapes, and all of them, all of them, an entire forest, angled their branches towards them, towards him. He let the emotion spread until the sky itself roiled red, until it felt as if it was pressing in on them both. "I want you so much it is pain worse than you could ever inflict with your hands or thornsss."
He clenched once hand, now a taloned paw, now a hand once more around the thorns and let the barb jut through his flesh. "Keep me." he hissed and his eyes slitted down, the words edged with the emotion of mirth, of goading. "And prove it because at the moment I would say you were no good at playing the predator."
"I want you to keep me. I want to know the calamity that awaits us. I want to know what void, what trap, what place you have created for me to fall into." And the strange forest clustered with shadows that were nothing but imaginings.
He reshaped into his humanoid form, unclad and wreathed in thorns. "I want." he said, and as the beast separate in a heartbeat loomed behind him added curtly. "And that has always been my problem."
Barth shifted in turn, wearing only the thousand grasping tails. Barth's feet, clawed and oddly articulate, were bare. He slipped the claws alongside Zar's calf.
The thorns wrapped up and pulled Zar with steady and machine-like patience, an inch at a time, to his knees. As Zar sank, the claws moved from Zar's human calf, to his thigh, to his stomach, and with needled care rested at last to trace long, gentle lines down his throat.
Barth leaned forward over Zar and peeled back the lips of the beast. He kissed his long, wicked teeth.
"I'll bind you," he whispered into them, and he didn't have to use his mouth. The sound rattled on the cold wind, more October than winter, sending a shiver through the branches of the trees, and rustling the beast's fur. Goosebumps prickled up and down Zar's skin. "And keep you," the wind continued.
Zar did not give in to the thorns easily, though he did shiver a the contact of Barth’s claws against his bare skin and the gesture rippled out into the world in the form of a hundred thousand tiny cracks prickled with spikes in the surface of the trees, all laced in the same hue as Zar’s own markings.He resisted but he did not fight, he simply made the thorns earn their prize. As they brushed his throat, he swallowed intentionally, his throat rising against the grazing point to draw a thin line of pristine black, a swipe of crimson mirrored it across the canvas of the sky, but it did not last, fading and surrendering the winter as it crept in, as his knees met the ground. Demons did not kneel as a rule, it went way, way back, but he knelt now, the thorns biting in the most satisfying way. Barth could feel everything but especially his emotions, the way his arousal soared at the touch, the want spiking higher and higher the more he conceded until submissiveness and defiance twisted around each other at his feet.
And as he kissed the beast he felt the other side of the coin and the deep bottomless focus of the predator, the hunger older than Zar, as old as life. The teeth parted and along with the hot breath on his face he felt the surge of longing, the drive to devour, to consume him, to hold him and keep him, to test him as he found himself pressed up against those thudding hearts from the inside, to test the trust that he would ever return. It craved fear, it craved submission, but from Barth it craved something deeper, he had already claimed its weapons without fear, the teeth that crushed and rent but which intended no fatal injury to him. The black tongue dragged itself across the curve of his throat, slick and hot, a stripe of warmth against the chill of the wind which did not cool the way it might have in the world outside but lingered.
The tails tightened their grip and dragged themselves lower, dragging themselves across the curve of his rear, between his thighs.
Two sets of eyes watched him, predator and prey, one and the same, bound by the thrumming core of fear. “And you in turn.” he growled, a keen that snarled in the ground, the trees wrenching roots away from it. The tails spread his legs subtly, curling like a beckoning finger to drag across him. “Will be kept and bound.”
The tongue twisted around his throat like a hand, firm but not enough to strangle and Zar arched into his bonds. “There is only magic in it when a promise goes two ways.”
The thorn pricks left behind an odd, buzzing feeling. Not quite numb, but they wrapped together the sensations and made the ground seem welcome. Tension was nursed from Zar’s limbs, dripping onto the ground with each steady constriction, pulsating to the slow rhythm of Barth’s heart.
“You wish to make an Agreement, Zaraphomet?” Barth hissed. The pupils in his sleepy eyes narrowed to slits.
The area washed over with the faint smell of blood. Barth did not need to breathe here, but he did, expanding and contracting underneath the coils.
Zar succumbed to the relaxation the way he so readily succumbed to sleep in contact with the Sloth demon, every breath seeming to ebb more of the anxiety and stress that had gathered in his body like silt from the grating and grinding of the world away from him into the ground. Small flurries of spikes appeared wherever it fell and then were gone. It was intoxicating and Zar’s head lolled heavy under his suddenly weighty horns, relying on Barth to hold him up with the thorns.
The beast did not wane in strength or bow, it held Barth close, staring into him, its own breathing the pant of an animal resisting its most primal nature. The trees seemed to press in closer as he exhaled with a hiss. There was a twist of deep blue uncertainty as once again the term Agreement came up and on the edge of where they stood another figure appeared, composed entirely of dream, tall and slender with long antennae and eyes that shone unnaturally. It was clear where the apprehensiveness stemmed, the “contract” that had bound him to the life he hated so much.
But still even through the apprehension there was a sharp spike of arousal and want, the idea of belonging, bound by blood and fear ran fingers of desire across some intrinsic part of him. The beast drew back his tongue and smiled, all teeth, all the way back to his ears.
“Belzgaphor.” he said and took great delight in running his tongue across every syllable of it, dragging it out, spreading it lewdly the way he would spread its owner. “Agreements are dangerousssss.” And he hissed, but he did not back away, the landscape drew closer. The tails twisted closer, compressing against the breaths despite it making no difference here. He did not say yes, but the world they had created said spoke for him.
Blank, white pieces of paper rode on the wind, blowing between them, but they rifled past until the very first piece stuck to Zar’s father. Another, and more and more, in an angry swarm, until he was wrapped up in a cocoon. The tall, oval form shook once, and then the wind carried the paper away, peeling away to reveal nothing. Whatever had been inside had been dismissed.
“We are not peddlars of empty, meaningless lies. Sssstill, thisss is no prenuptial. And our lives can be very, very long.”
There was something very old about Barth, too. The same instincts. The same origins. The mirror of bound arousal, rooted to the deepest part of him, to serve and be served. But where Zar had hunger, and life, Barth had a mired pit. At his very center, he was the end of wanting, a cousin of death.
Zar looked on and there was a swell of satisfied amber delight that he could not control at seeing the very concept of his father and the threat he represented idly dismissed. His whole life the man had seemed impossibly powerful, but it was only in growing up he’d realised that was through the eyes of a scareling. In comparison to the forest, he felt small and insignificant. The confidence borne of this observation made the Incubus seem larger, made his wings arch out into the embrace of the thorns, finally at their true size and filled out his horns to their capacity. Around them the trees mirrored him by throwing out new twisted arterial branches against the sky.
“Not to each other.” Zar hissed, because he was indeed a peddler of lies, feigning interest in connection to others where there was none. But not here, not in this place. Here he was stripped of all lies the way he was stripped of all control, his subconscious a twisting dark place where paranoia, jealousy and lust reigned, where endless tendrils sought to pull things down into his control. Here he could not conceal the reality of his attachment any more than he could stop his heart in the world outside. And for the first time he did not care that he was laid bare, there was no fear or apprehension at what lay ahead and no pulling away or concealment from Barth.
“If I thought for even a moment that in a hundred years, a thousand years I might change my mind, I would not be here.” he hissed, two voices that were one singular voice. “I have seen what you are.” And he should have been afraid, there should have been the pale green of anxiety and uncertainty sparking on the edges of his feelings, but there were only the rich deep rolling reds of desire and want, melding into the deep violets and sometimes blacks of something infinitely deeper. “And I do not fear.” He had looked oblivion in the eye and had been, even at his young age ready to accept it as an old friend, Barth was the one who had pulled him back and though he represented the same kind of oblivion, he met it now not with despair and hopelessness but with a searing desire to change everything.
“When we met I could not dream, I had no aspirations to aim for. I could not do anything. And though I still cannot build or design the way that you or Christof-” And even as he said the word Christof, the beast bristled and snarled, shining teeth against the shadow of darkness that fell across them, suddenly flickering out the sky. “ do.I can create. And I too want to change the world.”
And as if to prove his point, something about the trees changed all around them, they reached up, up and up towards the sky until they cut into it, ate it like the teeth of a vast, an infinitely vast beast, rolling into one another and meeting like a rippling wave, sexual and sensual as they roiled, twisting up in one another until they arched as if in climax and twisted into sleek edges and shapes, forming buildings, streets and twisted impossible skyscrapers. And from those places there appeared signs, written in some ancient language, neon and raw against the strange metropolis, and from them like ants emerged humans, spilling onto the rain slicked streets where strange flat cars inhabited by dead eyed featureless shapes slowly cruised along streets lined with what one moment was a flesh market, the next were rows of humans, their flanks exposed like meat in a butcher’s window, the fishnet stockings they wore the netting around a roast. A feast that prepared and presented itself. It was a world writ in debauchery and sin, where the path of least resistance was the path of damnation and fear. And all around the city the inhabitants found life easy, found it simple to do nothing but eat, sleep and ******** like animals. All of this was shown and known in the way that only dreams can show.
“We are going the same way along the same path.” he said, and the beast walked those lined streets, lewdly nuzzling the meat-people as he passed, the tail always testing and probing, the subjects spinning on it like a pole or grinding against it like livestock in heat. He was a looming shadow, one moment pulling them close to his busom, the next stretching vast jaws out to devour them whole. “We do not want a fight. Why would we fight? When they could come willingly and never know they were bound?”
The cityscape melded into the people, the buildings reaching out with grasping hungry arms, a hundred, a thousand twisting bodies, an orgy that took in the entire world, spending their energy on nothing until all were indebted to exhaustion and even the world itself surrendered to sleep and the vision dropped once more into that forest of flesh.
“I understand what I am getting into.” he said and in that moment the beast and him were one, straining against the thorns as two sets of eyes moved and blurred in the same place. “Do you?” he asked.
The vision was compelling. Barth hummed with intrigue and interest.
“An exchange of such exacting equal value is rare,” Barth said. While the price must always be fair, there was a craft in contracts. What might be easy for certain demons to procure: wealth, for example, might hold enough weight to curry all variety of dire favor from the contractee.
And his eyes seemed unnaturally wide. The blood thickened, veining through the cold ground, and snow (without falling) began to build up around their feet and up the trunks of Zar’s trees.
With a contract under those terms, Barth would not have the upper claw on Zar. If he waited, he could possibly procure a deal that was less equitable. Barth’s skin, pressed cool against Zar’s chest and neck, poised on the verge of both violator and violated, unraveled like a ball of yarn until he was all shifting thorns. Long thorns, wicked thorns, not unlike black teeth. The only part of him that remained in the tangle was the heart, equally black and wicked, suspended alone and uncovered.
Allies were always advantageous, and Barth was not unfamiliar with sacrifice to keep them (without that, where was he? the trash, the blood-filled halls), but was that enough?
He knew now, more than ever, what hung over Zar. Him, or oblivion. The thorns looped indulgently.
For Barth, there were advantages that had gone unspoken.
The brand of intimacy Zar offered was unique, in all of Barth’s experiences. In pleasure, in dreams, in the mind, in the heart-
The thorns shot forward, whole vines suddenly straightened knives. They pierced Zar, both the beast and man, and there was no death here. The pain was heightened, exquisite, and the thorns were more than just an extension, but all that Barth was. He coiled underneath their skin, around muscle and bone, lacing himself through them, inside, outside, consuming, consumed.
“Yes,” he sighed.
Outside, in the waking world, the thorns had been busy. They were cocooned, closed off in a dark thicket, with only a few shreds of the orange sun making it through the growing bramble. Barth’s claw folded and unfolded, and brushed Zar’s.
Twisted up and bound, Zar made no effort to flee the gathering mass of thorns, even if he had been able he would not have run. This was what he wanted - Barth was what he wanted. And though he could never openly define how deeply he meant it in words, it could be felt here in the very colour and shape of the world.. The slithering lurking shadows held a jubilant sort of tension and a strange breeze swirled anticipatory through the trees, touching the snow, raking claws of wind through the gathering drifts but making no difference to its increase. His own form had ceased to shift and flicker in the other demon’s grip and was now true and monstrous, a creation between all of his potential forms and shapes, a tangled web of sinew and bone, teeth and tails, and suspended in the middle his human guise, gnarled and bleeding into him like some infernal demonstration of his intention towards humanity itself..
When the thorns jolted forward, it was satisfying to Zar in a way he could not even begin to define. It was lewd and it was fatal and both of these things scratched some itch he didn’t know was present. It was simultaneously a penetration and a willing meal. He threw back his head and let out a sound that was equal parts scream and roar, arching his back as the razor sharp thorns thunked into him and writhed - but did not struggle - as they twisted around him, through him, in him.
The sensations were impossible to describe and flexed out from him, the trees changing their shape, their heights varying into a ragged and raw wound that snaked through the snow and flexed like a sound visualiser. Except here, instead of sound the peaks and troughs etched out his ecstasy on the landscape. It was what both aspects craved, the man and the beast both, neither felt slighted or compromised and it was with pride and shuddering delight that he wore his horns wreathed in thorns like some biblical nightmare, temptation and the walls of eden in one place. Breathing - even dreamingof breathing was almost impossible but he did it anyway, ragged, delighted panting because he wanted to feel the movement in him, to know that it was absolute. In his struggling chest his own hearts beat, one on either side, twinned the way so much about him was twinned, pumping jet black blood and ichor onto the earth with abandon. And curved around it all, Barth would be able to feel Zar’s resolve, the lack of fear. It did not matter to him what Barth did to him, the games that they played, so long as there were those unspoken, unseen chains of loyalty. And there would never be another master, another demon, there would never be the betrayal or abandonment the Sloth demon anticipated so often. If all else did not come to pass, there would never be that cluttered apartment, he was willing to stake his very life upon it.
It was only when the sensations ebbed back to an acceptable level - and he knew not how long that took - that he was able to speak again, satisfied and euphoric, hovering on the edge of some indescribable mental climax. “How is it done?” he asked, because though the instincts were there, pristine and new, he did not understand the mechanics of it all, inexperienced despite his lurking potential.
Outside Zar had tangled himself up in Barth, subconsciously drawing the cool skin and familiar comfort close as he could get it. Somewhere along the line he had shifted back, as if this would permit him to get even closer. He rested their horns together, still twisted up in tail and when he felt the claw move, it was reflex that made him move and reach out with his own hand.
“We shake on it,” Barth said.
His claw grasped Zar’s with a certain ferocity, even asleep.
The mental point, the build-up, finally tipped over the precipice, accented by a very real searing as energy crackled between them, racing until it circled and sizzled into a mark.
In the dream, the sky boiled, and the snow blew away, ground crunching open with ash as the smell of smoke and fire and finally blood, heavy blood, new blood, curled into the sky like incense.
The thorns dragged Zar down, and down and down and down and down, wringing out the last sparks of sensation. It plummeted him towards nothing, in the deep sleep beyond dream.
To Zar it was better than any sex he’d ever had, the lurking, waiting anticipation and commitment, the rise of want and need, the pain - oh the pain - which seared white hot in his veins, in his mind. Logic and reason fell apart as he found himself caught in the handshake, forged on the anvil of fear, of magic older than he was. He took several gasping breaths as for a moment pain sparked and leapt across the worlds, from sleep into waking and back again as the mark settled itself into his chest as if it had always been there. It felt like death, but he was not afraid of that either. And as he was dragged down, he reached up with the tentacled tails, reached up to the crumbling sky and it was a gesture somewhere between triumph, jubilation and a challenge. When the world did crumble, he intended to be there. He would not give in again.
And then he held onto Barth, as he fell into the place beyond dreams - and was upset no longer.
The sensation of falling made it difficult to stay anything solid or coherent. Zar too broke apart as they fell, unraveling. Soon he was only teeth and coils, and Barth was only thorns and vines, and they tangled up so close with the exception of the three hearts, singed with fire and marked with heat, the source of the turmoil.
And then they were down in the cool dark, both coming apart together. Oblivion.
They slept.
There was no sense of time or self in that place beyond waking, and it was still something Zar wasn’t used to, sleep took huge bites of time out of his day, out of his awareness and left no trace of ever having been there. Sometimes he wondered why everyone was able to go around acting like this wasn’t absolutely terrifying, like it was normal to lose time. If it happened at any other people people would assume they were going mad. This time though there was none of the old panic that often accompanied waking, the frantic grasping for logic and stability. He felt comfortable, very comfortable, warm and satisfied, nestled around his own body heat and Barth’s. He kept his eyes closed longer than he usually did, succumbing to the weary desire for just five minutes more. It was only when he resurfaced once again that he finally stirred, hardly even aware of where they were, some bone-deep satisfaction meaning that the rest of the world simply ceased to matter.
“How long were we out?” he asked, groggy and dazed, he didn’t bother to ask if Barth himself was awake, because when it came to communication, it didn’t entirely matter.
“Difficult to say,” Barth yawned, and he felt…rested, which meant it must have been a good deal longer than a few hours. He was not a creature built for endurance. Or shortdurance, really.
He stretched against Zar, resting his head on the other demon.
They were clothed, and the thorns had grown so substantially that the time of day was obscured.
Barth looked out, and they opened gradually, letting in the soft, full light of the harvest moon.
Zar forgot he was still touching Barth, the swell of satisfied pleasure at the contact - at being close - felt through the link before he so much as thought to stop it, trailed closely by an edge of apologetic embarrassment at feeling that at all.
He let his tail twine loosely around him regardless, more loosely than it had been before, bordering on gentle.
“Probably not that long.” he hazarded, as a guess, and then carefully added. “That was certainly something else.”
“And also against school policy, without the proper paperwork.” Barth added. “Our secretary is the Mayor. And our gym teacher the head of the Boogeyman. And since it’s not a homework exchange, they’ll likely seek to have it dissolved.” Barth idly put one claw up to his cravat, pushing his jacket and shirt aside. There, on the left side of his chest, was a mark he’d only seen once before.
“I don’t actually very much feel like paperwork, at the moment. In fact, I think I’m a bit tired of being subject to school policy.”
Zar looked closely at the mark, still openly fascinated by the entire process, and the mark, he recognised it as his own, though he’d only seen it once before as Barth, for him looking at it was like looking at his own face in the mirror, the sound of his own voice from inside his head. It was him as much as his Name was him and there was a tug of attachments, a draw that reached right into him and closed hands around his thoughts. He didn’t hesitate to investigate his own chest - demonstrating the usual uncanny speed when unbuttoning his clothes. In the middle of his chest, white against the black of his markings was Barth’s mark. He was derailed by it, reaching out with his claws to touch it, tracing the curves and lines of the sigil distractedly. with a hum of satisfaction. It was only at the mention of dissolving it that he snapped out of it, looking up with his eyes sharp narrow slits.
“No, certainly not. I agree. There won’t be any paperwork. Paperwork has no place in my life any longer. If they want to find out about it, they can use their own supposed wits to do so. I do not see it happening.” He defiantly shook his head. “Besides, illegal things are so much more appealing, all considered.”
