Unlimited

Darina Grotto, 2017

Summer, 2013. Moscow. Just a young redhead girl. Just an amazing and unusual meeting. The meeting which thwarted plans and dreams of the young redhead girl, Victoria. And totally untypical love that got under the girl’s skin. What if she mustn’t love? Horrifying! What if she mustn’t want? Dangerous! And what if Victoria really wanted to love? How to live when suddenly as if touched with a wand everything became unusual including the redhead girl? In a Moscow beautiful summer, one beautiful day Victoria made a mess of things that led her into apocalyptic troubles.Содержит нецензурную брань.

2

^nd

September 2013 (Monday)

The days went by as weeks and months did. Victoria got her project review with an excellent mark and felt down completely in seeking for Lucifer. She looked very bad, she ate almost nothing, just drank, mostly strong coffee. Her eye pits were almost seen, coloured in black by weakness. Her red hair, her flecks once having resemblance to the Sun and giving warmth to others died out and grew dim.

For a long time, Victoria hadn’t slept well. She spent most of her nights for seeking for Lucifer. She tried to get him in any way and that was possible only at nights as all spells talked over.

In the mornings Vic had to pretend to be a healthy, sane person. Her mother was prudish and if she noticed that her daughter wasn’t sure in her own mental health, she would treat her.

Of course, at times when her mum was at work, Vic was sound asleep, setting up, but it wasn’t enough anyway.

In addition, she had to look for a job, to pretend that she was looking for it. Moreover, she had to pretend to live and rejoice that fact. To tell the truth when passion and love settled in heart and soul, the desire for living became almost impossible. Everything that had been done, heard and looked, turned into one continuous suffering.

‘Hi, Vic. Being up long?’ mother’s call was sometimes worse than fire.

‘An hour ago. Eating now. What’s the emergency?’ Vic asked, chewing a miserable cucumber.

‘I’ve forgotten papers on the table. See them? Can I ask you to bring it to me at work? I need them.’

‘Mum…’ Vic sighed.

Vic had planned her day different. She was going to some book stalls near the MRHW. She had no time to rush over hospitals.

‘What mum?’ a severe voice asked. ‘You have no interviews for today. I need those papers.’

‘Fine. Fine! I’m there in an hour and a half.’

‘I’m in resuscitation department. Running the operation room.’

‘Ok, I got it. Order the pass for me.’

‘Already done. I’m waiting.’

Hating the whole world and most of all her mother forgetfulness, Victoria went to the hospital.

Vic hated hospitals and never understood how people could work there. The place was full of pain and desperation. People cried and begged there. A believe in supernatural was born and doctors’ help was forgotten instead. Too much suffering and worries. Her heart hurt too much looking at what was going on there.

Vic was going along the resuscitation department and there were ten or fifteen meters left to get the staffroom, when she heard a weak sound, a voice asking for something unintelligibly.

The girl turned to the open ward and from the first bed something strong got her by the hand. That was an old lady who had a healthy man grasp. Victoria was nervous, trying to free her hand, but the woman was holding it fast. Her whitish eyes, having no life in, pierced into the girl’s face.

‘You will take it. I chose you.’ The crone wheezed in a sepulchral whisper and squeezed her hand stronger, no matter stronger seemed impossible.

‘What’re you talking about? Let me go!’ Victoria was almost fighting with a “weak and ill” old lady.

The crone answered nothing. She lay back on the pillows, closed her eyes, kept on holding the hand.

‘You will take it…’ she repeated again and finally left the numb hand.

The old woman looked peacefully like if she had been sleeping and dreaming of something beautiful.

“Crazy bitch”, Victoria thought and ran out of the ward and made a little distance she turned out in the staffroom.

‘You’re fast’ her mum looked out of the case. ‘Vic, I’m really sorry but I gotta go, I have a planned surgery now. Leave the papers on the table, will you?’

‘No problem.’ The girl sighed in replay.

‘No offence?’ the woman stopped in the doorframe and looked at her daughter. ‘What’s up with you? Are you ill?’

‘No, I’m fine. I’m tired…a little.’

‘Damn it! The most terrible sound for any resuscitationist!’

They both heard an argute sound line, affronting the ear. Olga Vladimirovna jumped out of the staffroom, Victoria followed her.

In the same ward the peacefully sleeping old lady’s heart stopped beating and the apparatus rang about it through the whole department, calling for the doctors to resuscitate.

‘Defibrillator, epinephrine…’ the doctors cries, nurses were rushing near, answering all the orders.

Victoria leaned on the wall, looked and worried about the poor old lady.

‘Time of death is 7 past 7…’ she heard the sentence after that you exactly understood the deepest and, perhaps, the most heartless meaning of the phrase “that’s all”.

The old woman was connected from the apparatus, the data was being written and the doctors were upset.

‘Sveta, call her relatives, they have to call to Pathology lab…’ Vic’s mother ordered to the nurse.

‘Olga Vladimirovna, she had no relatives.’

‘No one?’ The doctor surprised.

‘No one. Then shall I do as usual?’

‘Yes.’ Olga Vladimirovna looked at her daughter, ‘you shouldn’t be here. Go home. I’ll be at home after dinner. Thanks for bringing the papers.’

The girl took a deep sigh, turned around and left. She was a little bit sad because her mother had made a doctor way in life and she still kept on doing it. It was clear, that she did it successfully and by now she gained a reputation of a God-given doctor. The only pity was that when people did their career, they couldn’t do their family at the same time.

Victoria came back home dropped off to sleep…

In the middle of the night, she opened her eyes and with no understanding why, she started whispering something in unknown language.

Ebenus, opprobrium, conticinium, lacrimose, venetum, abominamentum, reflabriventi, basiator, zodium, horripilato, perfluus, flammosus, universus, gloria, tabifluus, damnatio, martyrium, infidelitas, securitas, necrosis.

As she said the last word, the killing silence came. It was too silent so Victoria could hear her blood stream rushing inside. The breeze was blowing, also silent as well as everything was around. The girl was so much scared that her breathing almost stopped. You shouldn’t be a wiseman to understand that something was going wrong. When everything that had moved in chronical way, suddenly got frozen in a paralytic horror was strange at least.

Victoria was in her bed and kept her eyes wide open, looking at the ceiling, with no idea what was going on. She was afraid of even moving.

‘Within two months and a half…’ she heard a heavy man voice, throwing out imperturbable power.

Despite of its heaviness and powerfulness the voice was hypnotically attractive and so pleasant as if it had touched a back with silky flaps. One could listen to that voice for hours, could fall in love with it and lose mind. But Victoria, on top of every sweet feeling, had an animal fear: the voice had nothing to do with Kharon.

‘Yes, for two months and a half,’ the man confirmed, ‘I’ve been listening to you summoning me.’

Victoria finally pulled herself together and lifted up her head to look at the guest. The man silhouette was sitting at her computer table.

‘So, I am here!’ the man sharply bounced out of the chair and rushed to the scared to death girl. Victoria gave a start and covered herself with the blanket. A second silence and a laugh could be heard. The girl closed her eyes and whispered the same pray, the only one she knew.

‘That’s funny… “hallowed be thy name…”’

The voice was under her blanket. Victoria understood that it didn’t come under the cloth, but she was sure for 380 percent that whom voice belonged to, was with her under the blanket.

Victoria screamed with all her might, flew out of the bed and tried to run out of the room. Near the door in thick darkness she bumped into a tall man and fell with crash on the floor.

‘No, please!’ the girl closed her eyes, trying to calm down the starting hysteria.

She’d never been so scared in her entire life. Even that first time when Kharon came to her she hadn’t been scared so much.

Suddenly, through her closed eyes, Victoria felt the room getting lightened. It was not like during the day, but it wasn’t so dark that you could hardly see your hand before you.

Praying, crossing herself, begging not to touch her, Vic opened her eyes at her own risk. Too close to her face she saw a man face. In surprise she stepped back, asking her heart beating not so fast. The green-brown eyes with barely noticed burgundy were staring at her.

Victoria saw nothing but those terribly beautiful eyes. About two minutes later the girl dared to range her eyes round the guest: light-brown hair was on his eyes, scarcely noticeable squint, his lips were curled in an engaged smirk, straight nose like if it was artificial. His face was too ideal.

The stranger was burning the girl away with his heavy staring.

Victoria was silent, hypnotized by his piercing stare. The drop-in creature was silent, too, carefully examining the girl’s freckled face.

The man moved and Victoria shivered, before she could bat an eye his hand was touching her hear.

‘What an unusual ginger colour…’ he whispered seeing the strand of hair in his hand. ‘A setting of a dying sun… He was good to create such beauty… Why have you stopped whispering your funny pray?’

The man shifted his gaze at the girl, at her eyes. She didn’t move, still sitting on the floor with bated breath.

‘You…’ she said under her breath, ‘Are you an incubus?’

The man smiled, shifted his gaze at her quivering lips.

‘No, Sunshine, I am not. Have you been waiting for an incubus, while your lips have been whispering my name? Do you know my name?’ he bended his body closer to her.

Victoria smelled something pleasant and tender like if there had been no threat and nothing of supernatural. It was a smell of blooming nature, a subtle aroma of cedar fir-needles, making heavier the composition: the main one made Vic understand that the man in front of her wasn’t just a man.

The stranger moved to her at maximum distance, looking at her burning cheeks.

Victoria wasn’t breathing. Each move of the guest made her completely forget about her own physiology. She just got frozen and gazed at the man.

‘…Lucifer…’ she whispered gravel-voiced.

The man smirked and raised up. He looked around the room, doubled down on the chair near the table. Having grasped the one he settled in near the bed, where the scared the hell Victoria was sitting near.

‘Why are you so surprised, Sunshine?’ he asked, setting his ring on his left hand.

It was a big signet-ring with some patterns. But they weren’t just patterns. Even Victoria who knew nothing of runes, recognized that there were ancient, maybe unknown sings and symbols on the ring.

‘It’s stuffy here,’ the man looked round again and undid two buttons of his shirt. ‘Like in hell… Kidding. That is you, people, who think it’s an eternal sizzler there.’

‘Is that not so?’ suddenly the girl asked.

‘An eternal sizzler is on the Sun… But I’m not sure about eternal. We have a normal, stable conception of nature and natural science.’

‘You mean that you don’t fry anyone on the frying-pan with pitchforks?’ Vic allowed her to smile.

Lucifer gave her a rapid smile and came down to the girl on the floor, closer to her olive eyes.

‘Deuces have a lot of work,’ he whispered, staring at her neck, ‘there are pitchforks and frying-pans… Putting it in a metaphorical way, of course.’

He was so close to her ear that his lips were almost touching her earlaps. Victoria closed her eyes, for the nth time having forgotten of the oxygen.

‘But I know that deuces are not that thing why you’ve been summoning me for so many days…Tell me, Sunshine, why did you summon me? Why did you make me to push very important business aside to come to you? Why?’

‘You know it better than I do…’ Vic lowered her eyes, reddening in her face.

Lucifer dropped his head and smiled. The situation obviously made him laugh and the only thing he regretted for was why he hadn’t come before to have fun.

‘Correct me, if I’m mistaken,’ he coughed, having sat on the chair again. ‘You, a human child, fell in love with one of my subordinates.’

Victoria cast down her eyes. Lucifer stood up and walked across the room. His moves were so graceful, smoothing, slithering, impossible elastic.

‘Wow! Fell in love with… Do you know whom you are in love with? I mean what his activity is?’

Vic looked at the guest, at his light movements.

‘Kharon… he is…’ hesitantly she started speaking. ‘He’s an incubus.’

‘That’s right, Sunshine! You’re in love with the incubus! But he’s not just an incubus. He is the Sovereign Legionary Demon. He is the King of Incubus in my Kingdom and many legions report to him! It’s very touchable to fall in love with him. And stupid! But it’s not for me to say. What do you want from me?’

Victoria kept silence. She was staring at the floor and kept her tongue between teeth, turning around her thoughts, not knowing how to put it correctly to the guest.

‘Don’t hesitate, my child, you have such a rare possibility to be received in audience by me and I hope you use it sensibly!’

‘I’m sorry…forgive me’ Vic got up from the floor and to be on the safe side, took couple of steps closer to the door. ‘I want to agree a contract.’ She whispered, having mustered up courage.

Having heard “contract” in a blink of an eye, the man became serious and came up to the girl quickly. Being fully afraid of the man, Vic moved back to the door until she bumped into it.

‘A deal?’ Lucifer touched her hair again, set the strand of it behind her ear. ‘The young, blooming Sun, are we speaking about the same deal?’

The girl kept silence, looking at the man’s eyes. Red-burgundy colour in his green-brown eyes became brighter.

‘I’d like to ask your help.’ The girl said in a low voice. ‘What’s the price?’

‘What help do you want?’ he took her by the hands and led her to the bed, seating her on it. The Lord himself sat on the chair near to the bed.

‘I want Kharon… but not only like a lover and obviously not for a night.’

‘You want to make an idiot in love from one of my best friends, do you?’

‘Not really,’ the girl began to jabber, ‘not really. I want him as a man. I want love, I want him to be with me. But I can’t give you my soul because if I give it to you, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy that I would have…’

Lucifer rubbed his chin, sitting on the chair, looking at nowhere. He was perplexed.

‘A hell lover… Tell me, Sunshine, are there really so few men on the earth who would like to give you love that you’ve decided to go down to hell to get it and give something important for you? Maybe you should take a closer look, shouldn’t you?’

‘No,’ she answered firmly, ‘I need only him.’

‘Oh, Kharon… Seducer of female hearts… What should I do?’

The man stopped speaking and went into his thoughts. Five minutes later Lucifer began to speak.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘What are you ready to give if it’s not your soul?’

Victoria dropped her head silently. She cracked her knuckles nervously, sighed, looked awry at the room interior.

‘I’m ready to give you my voice…’

‘Your voice?’ the guest re-asked in surprise. ‘I’ve heard it somewhere… Well, yes, it was in a perfect childish fairy tale about the Mermaid. It was so romantic!’

The man stood up and looked seriously at the girl. Then he stopped smiling and frowned.

‘Sunshine, you really want to give me your voice in return of I give you my best supreme demon-seducer, plus my friend to live on the earth?’

According to only his tune Victoria guessed that she had said a stupid thing.

‘What can I give except my soul?’ she carefully asked.

‘Bargain?’ the Lord was surprised. ‘That’s interesting. Come on, suggest me something else that you have except you soul.’

All that the girl could give, made Lucifer laugh. He brushed asides her suggestions one by one. Victoria began being nervous when she got that the deal was about to fall through. And who else but Lucifer could help her?

‘Fine. Thank you for making me laugh, but I’ve been here for two hours already. I have to go. Before I leave, I’d like to tell you something: what you suggested is not interesting for me. I’m not a collector and don’t collect people by their parts. I adhere to principles and follow blindly rules that I laid down. I can suggest you next: I’ll take your soul in two years and let your live on, let it be so. Victoria, listen to me very carefully, you will live on, and you will be able to have a company of Kharon within two years. After it I will take your soul.’

‘Why can’t you give me all my life with my soul and take it after my death when I am old? My soul can’t be old, so what’s the difference when to take it? Two years or seventy…’

‘Are you sure that you will face your seventieth? I’m taking a risk now by giving you these two years. If something bad happens to you, I won’t be able to have time to take it. It’ll go there where it should be, not to me. Plus, I can’t allow Kharon to be on the earth for so long period. My last word, Sunshine, it’s two years and after I take your soul and let you live on. So, tell me, yes or no?’

The girl knitted her brows. Two years were so little… 730 days, at the best case 731 if a year was leap…

‘Two years… and there will be no women in his heart, right?’

‘His heart? Incubus’s heart? Sunshine… You’re so funny. I give him a leave for two years. He will be here.’

730 days Kharon will be touching her, looking at her, kissing her… He will belong to her. Damn the soul!

‘I agree.’ Victoria tried to smile.

‘Let’s sum up. I let Kharon go here, make him free from his responsibilities in Hell for two years. In two years, I will take your soul and reserve the right to live on. You will continue living. Right? Is that what you agree with?’

‘Yes.’

Lucifer smiled and came up to the girl so close. Their eyes were staring into each other, the silence stole into the room. The man took off the ring which was getting bigger until it became a size of a standard cup bottom.

Vic was watching the odd attribute, getting nothing what was going on.

‘May I?’ Lucifer, scarcely touching her shoulder, put off the strap of her tank top.

‘What’s going on?’ Vic was nervous, covering her shoulder with her hand.

‘Sunshine, you have concluded the deal. I have to get the confirmation.’ He pulled her to himself, firmly holding her waist.

‘Get lain with me?’ she asked terrifyingly, slightly kicking him off.

‘No, my Me! Does it really look that I’m speaking about sex?’ he pressed her stronger and looked her shoulder blade.

He put his ring to the naked blade and Victoria felt the strongest agony like if red-hot metal was blowing out. It burnt through her skin, making her crazy.

Victoria struggled against him, trying to disarm the pain but Lucifer held her tightly.

‘No, Vic, you must get through it… Stand for it. I know it hurts but the seal has to appear on your body as a mark of guarantee that you owe me and our next meeting not far off…’

‘I can’t take it anymore!’ Vic was screaming, tying herself into knots. ‘It hurts so much! Please, I’m begging you, stop it!’

‘Doesn’t it hurt when you love someone?’ Lucifer asked, let the perished girl out of his severe embraces. ‘It’s done.’

Vic got on her knees, wiping away her painful tears. The man hunkered down near her and put on his ring on his finger.

‘Victoria… Nice to meet you. I hope it was nice for you, too. It’s the 3^rd of September 2013. I am going to take you soul on the 3^rd of September 2015, then the seal will be gone.’

‘How will you take it?’ the girl asked shyly, touching her shoulder.

‘You will see! Hope to see you soon, Victoria. It’s pleasure of mine to have a deal with you.’

Lucifer smiled and disappeared. Vic took a sigh and felt so tired as if someone wasted her. She barely had strength to come up to the bed to fall and got asleep.