The Repentant Demon Trilogy Book 1: The Demon Calumnius Read Online Free

enough for comfort.  It wasn't much, but this was Abigail's haven.
    The strains of ancient instruments carried Calumnius back to Egypt three thousand years ago.  The music was a hymn to Osiris, heavy with the rhythm of the sistrum, an ancient form of tambourine.  He could see in his mind processions with millions of spectators and throngs of warriors dressed in shimmering gold, which sparkled in the light of torches.  How was it that this mortal in the twenty-first century was able to hear such sounds?  He examined the equipment and perused her collection of CDs, the random disks lying on the shelf, and the empty case that described an artist who took credit for this marvel.  Admiring this sampling of what human talents could create, he perhaps felt compelled to admit to their having some talents.
    Calumnius lingered there, examining her things and reading the titles of her books.  She emerged from her bedroom and passed before him, dancing naked in Middle Eastern style with a rolled towel stretched between her upturned arms.  The music was majestic, hardly meant for belly-dancing, but she forced it somehow to work rhythmically with slow, deliberate hip thrusts.  Her face was reverent more than sensual, and her body gyrations seemed like a tribute to some ancient godhead rather than a glorification of her female attributes, glorious though they were presented before him.  Though naked, she danced with innocence, her round, full breasts bouncing in a way that even he, who did not find humans attractive, could appreciate as having a certain beauty.
    Smart, gutsy, confident, and attractive, according to human standards , he thought.  Though he was not familiar with the rules governing the institution where she taught, it seemed to Calumnius as if she had handled the situation in the alley very well.  As she showered, he watched, seeing that her body was well-proportioned, much like the women pictured in the advertisements everywhere he cast his eye in this world.  This would probably classify her as an attractive specimen by her own species—desirable, to say the least.  Yet she lived alone, without a mate, and had never had one, from what he could observe.  The reason for this did not seem clear.  Judging by his observations of her kind over millenniums, it confounded him that she was so alone in the world.
    Calumnius watched her body as she lathered her long legs, her breasts shimmering in the water and her hips swaying with movements that jiggled the rounded flesh of her buttocks to the rhythm of the music filtering through the open doors.  Her rich, long, auburn hair, now wet, clung to her back and shoulders, reaching down to her tiny waist.  He did not understand sexual desire according to human standards, but he could admire the symmetry of her structure and the pleasing curves and dips of her anatomy.  Calumnius felt no physical stirrings inside himself, not that others of his kind had not had such inclinations.
    Legends proliferate throughout the human world about couplings between demons and daughters of men.  Some truth exists behind the preposterous notion, Calumnius would admit.  He knew of several of his kind that had attempted such unions, but all had failed.  Even then, he supposed that their inclinations were not so much based on attraction to the creature itself, but of a strong desire to bring about offspring—a living replication of themselves.  Sensual pleasures may have been a factor for some of the lower-level demons, ones with less mental capacity.  But procreation was the greater motivator, considering the extreme effort required for such attempts.  Reproduction was another gift from God to humans that had been denied both angels and demons.  But Calumnius did not share these twisted desires.  He himself did not approve of interspecies unions.  Such biological functions he considered beneath his level of comprehension.
    The level of difficulty in attempting copulation is