I gasped over my burnt tongue and nodded. “What’s this about an orgy?”
In the darkened car his white teeth showed up like a Cheshire Cat’s. “Yes, ma’am.” He sounded way too excited. “According to Gardner, who took the call from Eldritch, a couple of sororities started an orgy on campus. When the campus cops stepped in, the girls began attacking them and all hell broke loose.”
“By attacking them you mean—”
“Fucking them.”
I nodded slowly. “Are you trying to tell me there is a sorority sex riot at U of B?”
My partner put the car in gear, rubbed his hands together, and hit the gas. “Best call ever.”
As much as I wanted to find humor in the situation, I couldn’t. “Morales? Dionysus stole a rape potion from Aphrodite, remember?”
His smile faltered as he pulled up to a red light.
I raised my brows and looked out the windshield at the fat moon overhead. “It’s only a couple of nights until the Blue Moon.”
“Fuck.” All traces of amusement disappeared. He punched the window button and reached down to grab the siren from under his seat. A second after he slapped the light on the roof, he kicked the gas. “Get Mez and the others on the phone. We’ll need backup.”
At University of Babylon, the sororities were all grouped together on a street called Sorority Row. Across the street from the line of McMansions was a large park with a playground, baseball diamond, and tennis courts. Every available surface was covered in naked bodies contorted into positions that made the Kama Sutra look like Dr. Seuss.
“Jesus H.,” Morales breathed. He practically smashed his face against the windshield for a better view. Close to the road where we’d parked, some co-eds were holding down a campus cop. One girl was sitting on the guy’s face and another on his crotch. The way the guy’s legs were kicking and his arms strained against the delicate hands holding him down, he wasn’t having the time of his life.
My phone buzzed at my hip. “Prospero.”
“It’s Mez. I called in a favor at the sheriff’s department. They’re bringing in a riot tank.”
I watched five women chase down a pair of large frat boys and bring them down like sacrificial lambs to the slaughter. “That thing have a salt-cannon in it?”
“Yep.”
“Good. Get here fast.”
As I hung up, red and blue lights flashed on the perimeter of the park as some of our backup arrived. Once we’d told Eldritch that we suspected the city’s most wanted was behind the scene, he’d pulled several black-and-whites off patrol to help subdue the crowds.
I looked over at Morales. The sense of wonder had disappeared from his face. Now he looked pale as he absorbed the reality of the situation. I’m sure most red-blooded heterosexual men would tell you they’d love to get gang-raped by sorority girls. But the scene before us wasn’t sexy: It was grotesquely carnal. The air vibrated with masculine screams and the scent of violent arousal. And judging from the horror on Morales’s face, he was having trouble reconciling the fantasy with the ghastly reality.
Over the years, I’d arrested my share of sexual predators. The thing was, rape was never about lust. It was about power. To an alpha male like Morales, seeing a group of young women exerting such power over an entire campus of men had to be unsettling as hell.
We’d already pulled on our bulletproof vests and loaded down with weapons—mostly salt flares and extra canisters of S&P spray. Our goal wasn’t to kill any of the attackers, but to subdue them. Now that we were there, it was obvious these women were freaking on dirty magic. I nudged Morales. “Let’s roll.”
We climbed out and met up with the dozen unis Eldritch had sent us. Not nearly enough but better than nothing, especially since Mez was on his way with heavy metal. The fourteen of us formed a line—each about arm’s length away from the next—and started pushing our way into the crowd. The only benefit to wading a group of naked people was that it was easy to see none of them was armed.
The first grouping I met up with was a pair of girls—one blonde and one redhead—who were using a sex toy to violate a boy who couldn’t have been older than nineteen. Judging from the tears rolling down his face, he wasn’t enjoying the ministrations. “Back away, ladies!” I said in my command voice.
The blonde looked up but kept her hands busy on the boy’s shaft. She smiled and licked her lips. “Ooh look, Rachel, a lady cop.”
The redhead pushed the sex toy deeper, eliciting a pained groan from the kid. “You can sit on his face.”
I raised the S&P canister. “Stand down or I’ll spray you with sodium capsicum spray.”
The redhead laughed, a deep, throaty sound. Then she slowly pulled the phallus back out before slamming it home again.
The spray hit her right in her face. She sucked in a breath, forcing the stinging mixture deep into her lungs. She shrieked and fell to the side, her naked body convulsing in pain.
I turned the can toward her friend. “You want some, too, Blondie?”
Instead of answering, she lunged. Ready for her, I sidestepped and she face-planted into the grass. Removing a zip-tie from my waist, I made quick work of tying her wrists together. “Stay.” The redhead got the same treatment. I left them to two unis who ran up to help and went to intervene elsewhere.
I didn’t get ten feet before I ran into a cluster of bodies with pretzeled appendages. Diving in, I was grateful I’d had enough forethought to don a pair of gloves as I grabbed arms, hair, legs, whatever else I could get a handhold on and pulled people out of the pileup. Unlike the last encounter, I didn’t bother to warn them before spraying them with the saline canister. The salt water wouldn’t hurt them, which was kind of a pity, but I didn’t have as much S&P spray to waste on noncombative perps. Besides, I didn’t want to go overboard with the highly caustic spray and risk a lawsuit later from some spoiled sorority girl’s parents.
I was almost at the bottom of the pile where a male and a female were performing an enthusiastic 69 on each other when the sound of music nearby grabbed my attention. I looked up to see a shirtless, goateed man traipsing through the naked, writhing bodies. He wore a pair of fake goat horns on his head and woolly chaps on his legs, held up with suspenders. While everyone around him tried their damnedest to create sparks by furiously rubbing their genitals together, this guy pranced and played a pan flute.