Ashes And Grave

by Aiden Bates

He twisted in my arms. I kissed him, and tasted salt on his skin. Tears. “Mikhail?”

  “Gabby,” he breathed. It turned into a cry. I pulled him against me, and he buried his face in my chest, shaking as he sobbed.

  16

  Mikhail

  I stayed as long as I could, wandering the etheric plane as far as I dared, calling for her. I called with words, with magic. I found every spirit I could and told them to spread the word, to seek her out, to pass the message as far along as they could, and as deep. I found at least two spirits on the verge of passing over, and told them to carry messages for me to Elysium if that was where they were bound.

  But there were limits. I couldn’t stay there forever. Back in the world of the living, my body would be slowly dying. It would start with the cold, and then progress to dehydration, and starvation. I could feel the strength of it waning. When I knew that I wouldn’t find her, I finally answered the call of my desperate body, and let myself return.

  I woke to warm arms around me.

  “Mikhail?”

  It was Nix. Snuggled against me. I sucked in a breath, and realized that I wasn’t as cold or as thirsty as I should have been. He’d been taking care of me, all this time. I might have been gone for days.

  And I hadn’t found her.

  She was gone. Gabriella Ruiz. The girl from Panama City, who had enchanted me the moment I met her, who had managed to cling to her humanity as she wandered an apartment building for almost thirty years, mulling over the circumstances of her murder. The girl who had told me how to find her killer, gone with me to bring him to justice. Who had the chance to move on to paradise but had chosen, instead, to keep me company when she realized just how lonely my life would be.

  She had made me laugh. She had goaded me into doing some stupid things, but always with the hope that I might have a bit more fun, be a little less lonesome. In two days, if she’d made it out of the hungry ghost, she’d have come back to me. She hadn’t. So, I was alone.

  Mikhail moved beside me, and I twisted around in his arms, desperate to fill a fresh void inside me with warmth and connection. “Mikhail,” he said again, “Hey—you’re okay.”

  I wasn’t. But I let him kiss me as tears streamed down my cheeks. The spark of it drove back just some of the grief. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

  “Mikhail?” he asked, drawing back a bit.

  I didn’t know how to put it into words. He couldn’t possibly understand what she’d meant to me. Couldn’t comprehend the meaning of the choice she’d made, to put off eternity in comfort and peace to run around with me dealing with my shit.

  All I could manage as the pain in my chest peaked, and my throat began to tighten into a painful knot, was her name. “Gabby,” I wheezed.

  And then he was gathering me close, and the floodgates opened, and the sobs wracked my body like a second heart that was shattered to a thousand bloody pieces and still desperately trying to beat.

  I cried until I was empty, until my sobs were dry, until my eyes had given all they could, until I was out of breath, every muscle aching, and all that I could do was shiver from the loss.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, his lips pressed to the top of my head.

  He didn’t ask what happened. Didn’t urge me to explain. He just held me.

  In the depths of this pit that opened beneath me, it felt as though I had something to hold on to. I clung to him, my fingers digging into the muscle of his chest, clawing to feel the beating heart beneath. I hungered for life like a ghost, and tilted my head up to look at him.

  My nose had to be disgusting. My eyes puffy, the dried tears on my face crisp where salt had doubtless crystallized. But he pressed his lips tenderly to mine, and squeezed me to him, wordlessly reassuring me that he was there. That I was not alone. Not just now, at least; not yet.

  Heat rose between us. The hunger overtook me, promised me momentary reprieve if I would only drink of the cup that was offered. I pressed my tongue to his lip, and he met me there, pushing his tongue to mine, slipping into my mouth as my breath quickened. His fingers grew insistent, pulling and pawing at me, slipping under my shirt. I started to move, to sit up and take it off, but he pulled at it, and for a moment scales scraped lightly against my stomach as he shifted just enough for a talon to tear the cloth before he became warm skin again and tore the shirt away.

  When it was ruined and forgotten, he pulled at my boxers until the elastic snapped and the fabric ripped, and I barely noticed as I wove my fingers into his hair and pulled his lips harder against mine. And then he was pulling again, drawing my thigh over his, thrusting his hard cock against my stomach, reaching for my own cock to tug and stroke until I was as hard as him, gasping in his mouth.

  We said nothing; nothing was needed and I couldn’t have uttered a word anyway. In silence, he worked against me, pulling at my cock, promising me the oblivion of release. When his hand wasn’t enough, he rolled me to my back and bit my neck, my collarbone, my nipple, trailing down my body with his lips and teeth until he found my cock and swallowed me down, wrapping me in a blaze of wet heat and pressure. His fingers found my lips, and I opened to let him in, sucking on them as he consumed me. His fist and mouth working first at a frantic pace and then slower, and slower, until every pass of his tongue was an agony stretched out to last hours, and my brain swam with pleasure instead of loss.

  I bucked slowly with him, moaning softly around his fingers, grasping fistfuls of his hair, every nerve more alive than I remembered them ever being before, singing an endless elegy that rang in my bones, resonated in my gut. Nix had begun grunting, growling as he sucked me, his fist tighter, as if he could wring the sadness from me and swallow it like some sin-eater, taking it from me forever.

  My back arched. My breath came in shuddering puffs of growing need. I pulled at his hair just before I thought it would end, then reached for his jaw and drew him more insistently to me, pulling until he finally let me out of his dangerous mouth and slid up my body to put his weight on me. His fingers left my lips and were replaced with his mouth and the faint taste of me, of the collected musk of two days languishing in his bed. It was a bitter, sour kind of musk but in the moment it only heightened my awareness of him, and of me, of this moment between moments.

  I wrapped my thighs around his waist, and hooked my heels behind his ass. I pulled, urging him silently. He never left my mouth as he reached between us and found his cock, worked it for a moment and then pressed it to my hole, smearing slick precum against me. He pushed gently, and I gave a plaintive growl as I dug my heels into him. Like a spurred mount, he obeyed, pushing deep.

  The pain of the sudden stretch, of taking the thickness of him so suddenly, shot through me and blinded me to everything except his presence inside my body. I opened my mouth in a silent cry of hurt, scratching down his back as I dragged him closer, deeper, embracing the agony of it until the pain spread and dispersed into heat. I tugged, and squirmed, and thrust against him as he plowed deeper, bottomed out, withdrew and slammed back into me. The base of him swelled, stretched me wider. He started to pull out, but I bit his lip and clutched tight, pulling him in as I lifted my hips to meet him.

  His body trembled against mine as his knot swelled to fill me. The pressure against my prostate was immediate. My body responded like he’d set off a bomb there, a shockwave of pleasure erasing any lingering pain I felt as it swept through me, wrecking nerves and blasting through the thin walls I still put up against my grief.

  Life roared in my veins, crashing through me as Nix drove himself deep and pulled, his knot grinding against my gland. I began to sob again, uncontrollably. He kissed my tears, my cheeks. I clung to him as my body began to shake. Inside me, his knot hardened, his cock swelled. He slipped his arms beneath my shoulders, and I couldn’t breathe as he burst into me, hot seed flooding me, followed a moment later by an almost painful contraction inside me as orgasm hammered at my nerves. Each shaking thrust he made as he came rocked me, sending a fresh
wave of renewed ecstasy cascading through me, feeding my release as I continued to sob against him. I bit down on his shoulder, angry and delirious with pleasure, unable to sense the borders between one feeling and another.

  His teeth found my neck. “I’m here,” he reminded me. “I’m here, Mikhail. I’m here. I’m here.”

  It was stupid of me. A decision made in the midst of grief. I grabbed the back of his head. I pulled him closer, to my shoulder. He answered on instinct as I pressed him down, opening his mouth to bite down on me.

  “Please,” I gasped.

  He bit. Fire coursed into me. Some deep part of my being startled awake, surged up to meet the fire. The two forces met, tangled, grasped at one another. The struggle was brief, and as it resolved, the stormy ocean of my emotions grew gradually still, calming after the hurricane that had churned them up.

  I only realized afterward what I had asked for. What he had given me. Nix seemed to only realize it in the moments after the storm passed as well. He pushed himself up on his hands, breathing like he’d run miles up a mountain, staring down at me with a mix of wonder and horror.

  His cock quivered inside me. I clenched automatically, grunting as his knot pulsed against my aching prostate. He shuddered, closed his eyes tight as his hips hunched forward again as if muscles he had no control over tightened to make it happen. Another burst of heat blossomed inside me.

  He recovered, his arms shaking with the effort of holding him up.

  “I...” he licked his lips, searched my face. “We should have talked...”

  I knew. In our passion, in a moment of thoughtless, animal pleasure and a need to grab on to this moment of connection we both craved... he had claimed me.

  I was his. He was mine.

  Nothing broke the mating bond of a shifter and their mate.

  All I could think as I looked up into his face was that I loved him. That I wanted this.

  And that his heart would break when I told him the truth of who Rav was.

  17

  Nix

  I couldn’t process what I had done, how I felt about it, what it meant for both of us, or how I was going to explain it to... well, anyone, including Rezzek.

  Beneath me, trapped there while my knot remained trapped inside him, Mikhail seemed equally unable or unwilling to say anything. Maybe he was trying as hard as I was to process what we’d one. To make sense of it, to rationalize it. Maybe, like me, trying to see the future.

  Parts of it seemed to stretch out ahead of me, playing out in short, silent vignettes. Us in a house somewhere, away from the weyr, in a kitchen, cooking something together. Mikhail consulting with someone about something magical. A kiss at the end of a long day. A kid, bouncing on my knee as Mikhail told a story. Good things.

  And less good things. Mikhail screaming at me, demanding to know why I had trapped him into this. The back of his shoulders as he slammed a door. A lifetime of solitude that stretched on, and on, as I could no longer claim a true mate.

  His whispering voice interrupted the spiral that was beginning to drag me under. “So. It’s done, yes?”

  I knew what he meant, but gave my hips a tug to pull out of him and let out a grunt of reflex as the spent nerves of my knot rebelled at the stimulation. The slightest burn of a trickle of seed squeezed out of me and into him. “Not yet,” I said. “It can take a while.”

  He sighed, and combed his fingers through my damp hair. “You are inside me,” he said, “I am more than aware that you are not done. But this feeling. This is the mating bond, yes? We’re...”

  “I’m sorry,” I breathed against his neck, just above where I’d made the mark. “I didn’t mean to, really, I—”

  “It is consensual,” he said. “The mating bond. I am familiar with it. At least in the moment, we both desired it. Otherwise, the magic would not affect the bond. Is this not so?”

  “That’s how it works,” I agreed. “But normally there’s more... I mean we should have talked about it, it isn’t supposed to be spontaneous.”

  “You regret it?” he asked.

  I sighed. “Mikhail... no. Of course I don’t. I... I haven’t met anyone like you. I know you have a good heart, that you would go into a place where you weren’t wanted or even really safe to protect people who don’t deserve it. That you would face off against something terrible, put your life at risk, to save children you don’t know. That your loyalty and love run deep, deep into your soul. There’s nothing about any part of you that I would regret being connected to forever.”

  “But?” he asked.

  “But...”

  I couldn’t find the right words. But what? But I worried about my father’s reaction? About what Rezzek would think? About being kicked out of Emberwood?

  Everything that I worried about was external to us. If I pushed all of that out of the picture, only thought about right now, about us, about how I felt and how I hoped he felt—and, at least in that moment he’d wanted the bond, asked me for it; pleaded for it, even—then...

  “But nothing,” I said. “The only question I have is whether you want this or not. Now, after the... moment is passed.”

  He squirmed a little bit. In the process, his ass tugged at my knot, and in response, the ring of muscle it was trapped behind clenched again. I gave an involuntary whine as another trickle of seed was milked from me.

  “I think the moment has not entirely passed,” Mikhail remarked, his heart pounding a bit harder in his chest before it slowed again. “How long, exactly, until it does pass?”

  My dragon was satiated, content knowing that one of the core drives it harbored—to find and claim a mate—was concluded. It slumbered inside me, drained and complacent, comforted by the tie. “It... could be a little while,” I admitted.

  “Then,” Mikhail said, “we should find a better position. You are very hot, and quite heavy.”

  It at least wasn’t a full-throated rejection. I tucked my knees under his thighs a bit deeper, and pushed myself up to sit on my heels. With my help, he sat up as well, and we did a comical tandem crab dance to turn ourselves around so that I could lean against the pillows and headboard, he could sit more comfortably in my lap, his arms draped over my shoulders. Three times in the course of our maneuver, I had to stop and wait for another tremor of orgasm to leave me.

  “So,” he said finally, when we’d both settled, his legs wrapped around my waist, “you ask if I want this.”

  “If you don’t,” I said, “I’d understand.”

  Mikhail hesitated, and I steeled myself against an answer I didn’t want to hear, so that I could be prepared to accept it.

  Instead of telling me he regretted it, though, he kissed me, and leaned his forehead against mine. “I think that there are perhaps worse things than to be bound forever to a man who has been willing to see past an old wound to glimpse the truth. It takes strength that few have to do this. I do not know where our future will lead us. It may be complicated, and we may have a great deal of... growing to do, perhaps. If we are patient, though, and we remember one another, then perhaps it can work. I cannot lie to myself. To have you with me, to feel your presence and strength beside my own in this bond... it eases my pain.”

  “I’m sorry she’s gone,” I told him. “What happened?”

  I had held off asking. Now, though, he seemed to have settled into some place more peaceful, even if it was still painful.

  “She gave herself to ensure that I would survive,” he said quietly. “I know that I must have worried you. When I lost consciousness, I left my body, and went looking for her. I knew that I should not have stayed away so long, but... I couldn’t stop myself. I had to know if there was any chance that she had gotten out in time. There was a possibility, however remote, that she clung to some place in the near-ether, recovering and unable to return to me.”

  “So she... she’s gone?”

  He closed his eyes. “It may be that she subsumed herself entirely in the hungry ghost that Rav attempted to unle
ash on us. It may be that she went with it to Tartarus, and can no longer return. It could be also that she was able to extract herself, but not soon enough, and was able to escape to a plane of Elysium. Or, knowing Gabby, she is even now holding the hungry ghost captive, preventing our enemy from using it again. She is... insistent, at times.”

  “I know how much it hurts to lose someone so close,” I said, and tightened my arms around his waist. “I also know that it can be painful to talk about the person you’ve lost at first. But so you know—if you ever do want to talk about her, to remember her, or for any reason at all, I’m here. You can talk to me. About anything. You’re my mate. From here on out, I’ll never turn from you, never judge you, never push you away. I promise.”

  “You cannot make that promise,” he said. “I appreciate that you wish to. But you do not know all of me.”

  I smiled, and nudged his nose with mine until he lifted his head enough for me to kiss him. “I know that I don’t know all of you,” I said gently. “The point is, I’m not afraid to. There’s plenty you don’t know about me.”

  “I cannot promise you the same,” he said. “I have standards. Limits. If you have some dark crimes in your past, I feel that now is the time to tell me of them. Or perhaps after we are untied. It will only ruin the moment if I cannot get your cock out of me. Why did nature endow you with such an inconvenience?”

  I grinned. “Well... inconvenience can be nice. The knot is meant to make sure mating is successful. It might not have been evolved with this specific use in mind—”

  “I am, to my knowledge, unable to get pregnant,” Mikhail observed.

  I hummed thoughtfully, and held his waist steady as I rocked my hips and watched his eyelids flutter. My knot contracted briefly, along with the small muscles at the root of my cock, and I bit my lip as I forced my eyes to stay open and on him, and what must have been the barest drop of cum leaked out of me and into the warmth of him. “But,” I murmured as we both settled again, “it does have some other useful advantages.”