So, okay. Trying to bring Irdu back to the mortal realm was not the simple maneuver she’d thought it would be. She should have known. In the stories, there’s always a price for leaving. For Inanna, two different deities had to take her place in order for her to leave the Underworld. For Osiris, even after being resurrected by Isis, he had to return to the Underworld as the resident deity. For Persephone, leaving was only a temporary respite, from which she would be recalled again and again throughout eternity.
Autumn’s heart began to race. Nothing’s set in stone, she tried to soothe herself. You’re still human. You just have one little mark. Irdu’s humanness fades, your mark will probably fade too. You have to stop trying to see the Underworld when you come.
She glanced over at Irdu, who had sandwiched broccoli, pumpkin pie, and chicken in a buttered biscuit and was dunking it in gravy. She couldn’t ask him to stop eating—to stop trying to be human. But what if the only alternative was to give up her own humanity?
Irdu took a bite of his layered biscuit monstrosity. He chewed, then grimaced. After a moment’s hesitation, he kept chewing.
She repressed a smile.
Tomorrow. She’d figure it out tomorrow.
Irdu caught sight of her. He gave a hard swallow, clearing his mouth, then smiled rakishly at her. There was broccoli caught between several of his teeth. “Well, hello there, gorgeous. How about a tumble with a real, live, human man?” He waggled his brows.
“Being human has given you an appetite for more than just food, I see.”
He rounded the counter and caught her in his arms. “I want you no matter what form I take.” He tossed her on the bed and leapt after her. He crawled up her body, bracing himself over her. “But I want to know—to really know—what’s it’s like to be with you as a normal man.” He peeled her sweater off and stripped her pants away.
She wanted to give him every possible pleasure he could experience in his human body. She touched every inch of him—running her fingers through his hair without the impediment of horns, stroking the length of his spine without having a tail to grip at the end, sucking his blunt fingertips into her mouth, stroking her tongue across his full bottom lip without feeling the press of fangs. She wrapped her legs around his waist, aware of the absence of his tail curling around her leg or stroking her flank. She looked into his eyes—brown, human eyes that glazed with pleasure, but otherwise remained unchanged.
When they came, there was no enveloping darkness, no glittering blue haze. There was only each other, holding on, riding their shared pleasure. They lay together, glowing with warmth, sated and peaceful.
Irdu stroked her hair. He watched his brown-skinned hand as it slid through her dark locks. “I wonder how much longer I have before I change back.”
“Maybe all night. When I woke up yesterday morning, you were like this. I’m not sure how long it lasted.” She froze, suddenly alarmed. “What happens if you get called back to the Underworld and you haven’t harvested an orgasm in your demon form?”
Irdu blinked. “I don’t know.” He suddenly pulled her close. She felt his cock harden against her belly. “Can you take me again?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He turned her onto her stomach and pulled her hips up. His hands sank into the mattress on either side of her shoulders, and his chest pressed against her back. She felt the blunt tip of him nudge against her folds, and then he was inside her again. She thrust back against him, savoring the feeling of being completely enclosed by his body.
She came before him, arching up against the weight of his body, shuddering and crying as the potent pleasure of orgasm combined with the awareness of his closeness, the feel of his body still with her. It hurt to be given something so perfect, and know it had to be taken away. A tear slipped down her cheek, and then another.
When he came, he gripped her arms hard, his face pressed to hers as he gritted his teeth and groaned through the pleasure. As the last wave of his climax shuddered through him, he withdrew from her, and gathered her into his arms.
They lay together in the silence, listening to their breaths, feeling the beat of their hearts. A gentle touch turned into a searching caress. A tender touch of lips turned into a deep, hard kiss. They melded together again and again that night. They had each other in every conceivable way. As the night shifted closer to dawn, and Irdu remained in his human form, the possible finality of their situation weighed over them both.
“I love you,” Autumn whispered hoarsely.
Irdu’s face was stark with emotion as he gazed back at her.
“I do. I just need you to know that.” She buried her face against his chest so he wouldn’t see her tears, but he felt them.
“Don’t cry, Autumn.” He tilted her chin up, kissed away her tears.
“It’s not fair. None of this is fair.”
“Shhh. Nothing’s written in stone.”
She shook her head. She needed to tell him the truth, tell him about the mark on her neck. She couldn’t form the words. She’d no doubt sweated away the concealer she’d put over it, but it was small and placed in a shadowed part of her neck. It would be easy to miss. She reached for her neck, ready to point out the mark to him.
But before her eyes, Irdu began to shift. It started with his skin. The warm golden-brown bleached away, turning cooler and cooler, until finally it bled into blue. The cuneiform tattoos snaked their way across his body. His horns and claws curled outward. His tail announced itself with a flick.
“You—you changed back!” She grabbed her phone to check the time. There was only an hour until sunrise. “Quick! We have to—” She clutched his face and kissed him frantically.
Irdu caught her wrists, pulling her hands away, and pinned them above her head. “It’s alright, love. We’ve got time.” He kissed her, keeping her wrists pinned. It was a gentle, sweet kiss. She arched up, trying to deepen it, but he pulled back, keeping it soft and light.
“Irdu!” she twisted in his hold. “This is important!”
“I know.” His other hand caught her hip, pinning her flat to the mattress. He feathered light kisses along her jaw and her throat.
She whined her frustration.
His lips came back to her mouth, soft and easy. He kissed her like that for long minutes, until the tension eased from her body. The hand on her hip slid between her thighs, cupping her sex. He rubbed gently, a steady pressure, and kept kissing her. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, everything about his touches and kisses became a little harder, a little faster. It grew and grew, until Autumn was gasping into his mouth, her hips rocking to meet the tease of his fingers. At last, she shattered apart.
When she came back to herself, instead of watching the blue haze clear from Irdu’s eyes, he was staring at her in abject horror.
“Are you okay?” she asked, sitting up. “What’s wrong?” She reached for his face, and when she saw her own skin, she froze. Faint purple cuneiform marks were spidering across her arms, becoming more and more clear. She looked down at her body and found more of the same. Frantic, she felt her teeth, her hair—but there were no fangs and no horns. Her fingernails were ordinary, rounded human nails.
The cuneiform continued to darken, becoming more and more clear against the neutral tone of her skin. She looked back up at Irdu, unable to hide the fear in her eyes. “What’s happening?” she whispered.
The horror had faded from Irdu’s face, leaving a mask of such inconsolable grief that Autumn began to cry. Fat tears rolled down her cheeks as she stared at him.
“This is what I feared,” he said hoarsely. “You’ve managed to trigger the soul exchange ritual. I didn’t—” His voice broke. He took a ragged breath. “I didn’t think it could be initiated by the victim.” He pushed away from her, scrambling off the bed.
“Irdu—”
“Never say my name again! You’ll damn yourself.”
“But, listen—”
“I shouldn’t have taken food from you. I should have known it
would be a risk.” His face twisted into a self-loathing grimace. “But the marks? You haven’t marked me…”
“I bit you,” she said, a defeated whisper.
“That’s not enough. It has to be—” his gaze fell on the narrow shelf where she stored her art supplies. “You painted me,” he said darkly.
“So?”
“It’s the perfect inverse. Instead of me putting my mark on you, you’ve made me into a mark. You’ve created a graven image of me.”
“I’m not worshipping it!”
“No.” He looked back at her, eyes bleak. “But love is a kind of worship.”
“I can’t stop loving you!”
“You must.” He grabbed the canvas of his portrait off the top of her dresser and broke it over his knee. Autumn cried out in shock. He ripped the canvas from the frame, using his claws to slice it into a thousand shreds.
“Stop!“
He spun back to her art supplies and pulled out her sketch book.
“What are you doing?”
He flipped through the pages until he found the drawing of him. He ripped it out of the sketchbook.
“No, stop!”
He tore the page in half.
Autumn scrambled off the bed. “Irdu!”
“Never say my name again!” he snarled so viciously, it made her draw up short. His expression faltered at the fear in her eyes, rage giving way to sorrow again. Outside her bedroom window, the sky was beginning to lighten. “I’m sorry. It has to be this way.” He began tearing the drawing into hundreds of pieces. “You must burn both of these when I’m gone.”
There was a finality to his words that terrified her. “When you’re gone?”
“I’m not coming back to you tonight, Autumn.”
Her throat burned. Tears flooded her eyes until she couldn’t see. “No…”
“I’ll let myself dissipate, as I should have done millennia ago.”
“Please, no! Don’t do this—we can figure something out!”
“We can’t. The cards have always been stacked against us.” He let out a bitter laugh. “How many times do I have to learn this lesson?”
Autumn managed to stumble to him. She threw her arms around him, holding for dear life. “Please don’t do this. Please, please stay with me! You can’t die.”
“I’ve been dead for more than four thousand years.” His arms came around her, and he pulled her tightly against him. “Being with you has been a privilege I had no right to.” He cupped her face and tilted her head back. He pressed a gentle kiss to her tear-soaked cheek. “I love you. I don’t deserve to, but I love you. I want you to have a good life, and I’m a threat to that. When you remember me, always know that I left you because I loved you.”
“Please—”
The first gleam of sunlight edged over the city’s rooftops. The light gleamed through her window, limning his face with gold. The markings on Autumn’s skin pulsed, then vanished.
Irdu pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Goodbye, Autumn. I love you.”
And then he was gone.
11
Autumn stood in the wreckage of her apartment, numb.
The entire world was silent, and she stood in the very center of it—the smoking shell at the epicenter of a bomb blast.
A thousand years passed. A million.
Or maybe only minutes. But when Autumn finally managed to move again, her body felt like a withered husk. She looked down at the shredded remains of her art. She fell to her knees and scooped them up in her hands. Confetti. His strong hands and sharp claws had turned everything practically to pulp. She let the scraps sift through her fingers and flutter back to the floor.
Her sketchbook lay open on the ground where Irdu had dropped it. The next page after her drawing of him was still intact—his tattoos. She picked the sketchbook up and stared at the tattoos.
Night. Body. Slave.
Brutalized by the greed of others, punished for trying to take back his own life. Now condemned to die again.
A scream welled in her throat.
Useless. Useless to scream. Useless to cry. Useless to beg, to bargain, or to plea.
But there was something she could do.
She could descend.
12
Since she was a teenager, Autumn had been able to control her dreams. It sometimes took her a little while to realize she was dreaming. But once she did, she could push the dream in any direction. Lots of people could do it—there was even a name for it: lucid dreaming. When she was young, she thought of it as telling herself a story—an immersive fiction that she could manipulate.
But as she grew older, she began to understand that dreams weren’t separate from reality. The happiness, fear, hope, and sorrow that she felt in her dreams lingered into the waking world. The worries and obsessions of the waking world chased her into her dreams. In dreams, she’d worked through the grief of her father’s death, because her waking mind couldn’t process it. And it was in dreams, too, that she’d come to accept that her relationship with her mother was irrevocably broken. When she dreamt, she created art for her hands to translate when she was awake. She’d dreamt the website design that had saved Dylan’s company.
Dreams weren’t the antithesis reality—they were an extension of it.
It was through dreams that she had met Irdu. And it was through dreams that she would find him again.
Autumn stripped herself naked and tied up her hair. She took the sketchbook page with Irdu’s tattoos and began redrawing him from memory. But when she drew in his tattoos, she made a few, tiny adjustments. When she was done, she took a permanent marker and covered her body in the same tattoos, repeating their meanings in her mind as she wrote. Dream. Body. Death. Descend. Bridge. Power. Return.
When all of her skin was covered, she dropped the drawing, letting it fall to the floor. She crawled into bed and waited for the exhaustion of the previous night to take her under.
She stood on a wide, empty plain. The air was silent and unmoving. A wall, several stories tall, stretched across the infinite width, going on to the ends of the horizon. Directly in front of Autumn, a twisted black gate was set into the wall, in front of which stood a robed figure, easily twenty feet tall. The figure shifted, its hooded head turning towards Autumn. It clutched a bone stylus in one emaciated hand, and a tablet in the other.
You have not yet been called to this realm, mortal. The voice boomed inside her head like thunder. It did not speak in language, and yet its meaning was crystal clear. Turn back.
She spread her arms, displaying her nakedness. Even her hair was bound up, revealing every inch of the cuneiform written on her skin. “I haven’t come to stay,” she said in a shaking voice. “I’m here to negotiate.”
The massive creature bent low to examine her. Autumn fought the urge to run away.
You bear a claim mark. The figure’s hooded head tilted curiously. But you are the claimant.
“Yes. And I’m here to take what’s mine.”
The Gatekeeper straightened. What is taken must be paid.
“I know.”
Then enter, mortal. But understand that the gates of the underworld open only in one direction.
“I understand.”
The gates creaked open, revealing at first only darkness. But as Autumn crossed the threshold, the same dark realm she’d seen in her dreams resolved before her eyes. In the distance, the terrible black tower stood. The sides of it glowed orange, reflecting the fire of the forges. Deep fissures scored the ground, radiating out from the tower. Lightning split the pitch-black sky, illuminating the figures of winged demons. And ensconced deeply inside the growing tower, a cold presence that Autumn could feel, all the way across the dead-packed plains.
Eyes, so far away, and yet so forcefully present, watched her from within the tower. She felt their regard like needles over her skin. Curious malevolence rolled over her in sickening waves. The cuneiform she’d drawn upon her skin began to burn. Smoke curled from
her skin. She hissed at the pain, but would not yield. She tore her gaze away from the malevolent eyes and began her journey to the tower.
Out on the plains, still so far from her destination, she was surrounded by gray, insubstantial bodies. They milled listlessly towards the tower, compelled by some unspoken mission. Their hollow eyes swiveled to fix upon Autumn. Amidst the incorporeal gray, she stood out like a beacon. Vitality glowed from her skin, warm and steady.
She moved forward, and they parted for her. She walked faster, and the dead swept themselves out of her way. They watched her pass with something like reverence in their slack faces. Their mouths moved in speech, but the words were lost—nothing more than the voiceless rasp of fallen leaves.
The distance to the tower was immeasurable. She felt as if she walked forever. The dead stretched as far as the eye could see. The tower never seemed to grow closer, but the looming glare of that malevolent presence grew stronger and stronger.
And then, without comprehending quite when and how it had happened, Autumn stood at the base of the tower, blinking against the fire-bright flare of the forges. Within them, demons seized the dead and thrust them into the fire, hammering the burning souls into diamond-hard bricks.
Initially blinded by the flames, it took Autumn some time to realize that the fuel for the forges was more bodies. Demons, sprawled on the ground, consumed by flame. The demons were conscious, twitching and writhing in agony. But stakes driven through their hands and feet kept them pinned in place, helpless to escape the roaring fire that licked along their flesh. Their mouths were stretched wide, but their screams were drowned out by the roar of the fire and the noise of the bricks being hammered into shape.
Demon Lover Page 14
