I Will Marry You

Lois Lane had never imagined those word coming out of her mouth...not with a thick-cocked she-demon kneeling before her, imploring eyes fixed on her own. Eyes that widened at her answer, and squeezed her hand; Lois squeezed back. The demon dipped her head and pressed her lips to Lois' hand.

"I take it you don't want to find a justice of the peace at this hour," Lois' thumb rubbed against her fiance' hand.

"A demon wedding typically takes place at midnight." Blaze rose to her feet and moved in close, resting one hand on Lois' lower abdomen. "...If you don't find the rush...unseemly..." She bit her lip. "I would the children be born legitimate."

Lois almost laughed at the old-fashioned thought...but it had been a strange night, and he had been through quite a lot in a short time.

"Come!" Blaze held her hand and led Lois on, through a maintenance door at the back of the bathroom. She felt oddly un-self-conscious about being naked, although it helped that they passed no one as Angelica led her bride-to-be down hallways, through doors and down stairs. They did pass people, as they descended the stairs: four women, whom Lois recognized. Their clothes were disheveled and stained, eyes wild but clear, and Lois and Blaze pressed their backs against the walls to let them pass. Lois could name each of the missing women as they fled upwards.

Blaze had kept her first promise.

Instinctively, Lois tried to remember the route, and realized they were going deep beneath the city...concrete giving way to red brick, brick giving way to stone—and Lois wondered how far down beneath Metropolis' streets it was to bedrock, and how long ago this all must have been carved...

To her unasked question, Blaze supplied an answer. "A thousand years ago, when the native people fished in the sea and built up their shell-middens, a sachem called to me in his dreams...and I answered. My gifts made him mighty among his people, and they built this place for me, dedicated in my name, with the rites I revealed to them...and I have always returned to it, in many incarnations, my womb of the earth, a tie to this plane that ha never been severed. It hall be the chapel for our joining."

The final stair, smoothed over centuries by the tread of many steps, ended at a rough archway. Lois saw that it was carved in the shape of trees, their branches entwining over head, and all around the trunks and branches were creeping mistletoe—which the reporter recalled from some long-ago article, was a warning among Native Americans.

Beyond...a kind of cavern, hewn from the rock, which vaulted overhead. Little more than a dome-like space with an altar on the far wall, which was painted with a likeness of Blaze in her true form. Light was provided by a electric bulb on the roof, obviously a much later addition. As they stepped in, Lois could feel...something. A warmth in the air, a crackle like static electricity that made the hairs on her arm and the back of her neck stand up, and more than that a scent...her scent, Blaze's own, stamped on the room, familiar and close...and the scent of it alone made Lois' nipple erect.

"Do you bring all your brides here?" Lois thought to lighten the mood with a joke. Yet Blaze turned to her with all seriousness.

"You are my first. There are no others. Do you think it is a light thing, what we have done, are about to do? Many silly women have given themselves to demons out of passion, thirst for power, or tricked into thinking themselves in love with mortals. You are the first that...has accepted me, as I am. With full knowledge."

Lois was moved by the declaration...and by the way Blaze's shoulders stooped when he poke, her voice shaking a little as if admitting some secret. Acting on impulse, Lois drew her fiance into an embrace, feeling the throbbing heat of that erection against her belly.

"Well, first time for both of us."