by E J Frost
I set my jaw. “I can’t think of anything right now. Not that you’ll give me.”
“Well, thinka somethin’ I can. You wanna come a thousand times in a row? I can do that. You want to look different? Have more money? Drive a fancy car? Tell me something I can give you and it’s a deal.”
I sigh with relief when he turns the car into my street. He pulls up onto my drive, but when I go to unbuckle my seatbelt and escape the car, he puts his hand over mine on the seatbelt latch. “We’re not done here. Tell me what you want.”
I tug my hand out from under his and cross my arms over my chest. “I told you I can’t think of anything right now.”
He turns his head slightly, the dreadlocks shadowing most of his face, but the light from the street plays over his mouth and I can see how tight his lips are. “You are such tough fuckin’ work sometimes.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah, I bet you are. I’m not givin’ you a future favor. This ain’t Monopoly. There’s no get outta jail free card.”
I’m surprised he knows what Monopoly is. But then, he knows a lot about my world, particularly for someone who has mostly been a magical battery.
“All those junkies I ate in New York? I fed on their memories, too,” he growls. “Stop trying to change the subject.”
“I can think whatever I want!” I flare, furious at his intrusion into my every thought. “Fine, I want you out of my mind!”
“I like bein’ in your mind.” He sits back in a creak of leather. “That what you really want?”
“I—” I swallow hard. Make my choice. “Yes. I want you out of my mind. For one day. Of my choosing.”
“One day.” He scratches his dreadlocks. “Not now. I gotta be able to talk with you when we’re down below.”
“Okay.”
“And that’s it. One day where I stay outta your mind.”
“Unless you want to offer something else.”
He blows out a breath. “Sure you don’t want the thousand orgasms thing?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘no’ to a thousand orgasms.” I smile tentatively. “But do you mind if it’s not all at once? I get kind of sore after three or four in a row.”
His dark chuckle reverberates through the car. “Humans. Just no fucking stamina.”
I expect him to hurry me, now that he’s gotten me to agree to what he wants. But he doesn’t. We eat dinner, lingering over the crème brulee, which, thankfully, he doesn’t make me lick off his ‘little demon,’ but he does feed me spoonful by spoonful. He’s paired the lamb tagine with a wonderfully oaky white wine. With the crème brulee he pours me a different wine, the color of butterscotch, which he tells me is a Sauternes. Whatever it is, it’s sweet and delicious with enough of a citrus edge to keep it from being cloying and I drink two glasses before I know it.
He eyes my glass when I put it down empty for the second time. “If I let you have another, you’ll be too tipsy to do anything useful, won’t you?”
I consider the glass, and him, seriously. “Probably.”
“You’re such a light-weight. All right, we’ll save the rest of this for another night. C’mon.”
He corks the wine, takes my hand and leads me upstairs, over my protests about leaving the dirty dishes sitting on the dining room table. I can almost hear my Dala’s ghost tutting at me from the bottom of the stairs. The demon leads me into the bathroom, where he begins stripping off my clothes.
“Uh, wait a minute—” I protest weakly.
“Shh, sweet meat. I know what I’m doing.”
“You do? I mean, you’ve done this before?”
“Yeah. I’ve helped humans raise power hundreds of times. Whaddo you think all those warlocks were doing with me? Playin’ cards?”
“I, um, I don’t know. What were they doing with you?”
He runs his hand down my leg, lifts my knee and strokes off my ankle boot. I don’t know how he does it. I’d be fumbling with the zipper, tugging at the heel; he slips my clothes off like he’s brushing away feathers. “Different things,” he says, his voice low and intimate, close to my ear. His breath blows warm along my cheek. “The al-Assassin had me brainwash their followers. Made them think old Sabbah controlled the gates to Heaven an’ Hell. Masaharo had me bend the minds of a bunch of kids so they’d kill some guy named Inukai. Start a war. The dead bitch used me to make her irresistible. Steppin’ stones to the power she wanted.”
“She did?” My heart aches. Oh, Ro, what happened to you?
“Don’t try to analyze it, sweet meat,” the demon says, stroking wisps of hair back from my face. “You won’t ever understand her. You’re wired a different way.”
I look up at him uncertainly as he takes off my bra. “I am?”
“Yeah.” He pulls his shirt off over his head. I know he’s not really trying to be seductive, but seeing all that golden skin exposed, the hard muscles of his arms and chest working as he moves, makes my mouth go dry. I lick my lips. His dark eyes track my movement and he chuckles. He gathers me to him, lets my bare skin find his. Brushes his mouth across mine, the promise of a kiss. “Not yet. First we gotta get you ready.”
I nod. “I know how to prepare for ritual magic.” I slide out of his arms to collect the wintergreen scrub. Behind me, the wet rush of the shower begins. The rustle of the shower curtain. A sigh that seems to rumble up from the bowels of the Earth.
I smile to myself. He does like the shower.
I follow him in. He’s standing under the spray, head thrown back, eyes closed. The way he was the day I saw him through the walls. Was that only two days ago? It’s got to be longer. And I thought it couldn’t be any sexier, but I was wrong. It’s even more seductive when he’s right in front of me. Water sheets over his body, wet rivulets tracing the muscles of his chest and belly, dripping off his dreadlocks. He’s partially erect, engorged but not standing to attention yet. I hesitate for a moment before touching him.
“Don’t be shy, sweetness.” Without opening his eyes, he guides my hand to his groin.
I trail my fingers down the line of dark hair on his lower belly. His stomach muscles clench at my touch and I watch them with fascination. He rocks his hips forward, brushing his tip across my thighs. My breathing suddenly sounds loud over the pounding of the shower.
He chuckles. “Don’t stop.”
I almost pull my hand away, but when I glance up at his face, into his eyes as he opens them, there’s such delight there. Real delight. Not wickedness. Not some new form of torment. He’s enjoying this. Just for its own sake. I let my fingers drift lower, through his wet curls, down his shaft, which pulses at my touch.
“Mmm, now this is the way it should be. Fuck of a lot nicer than bein’ doused with cold water and rubbed dry with a stinkin’ fleece.” He catches my hand and draws me close, into the spray. He looks down at me, his eyes glowing so brightly they cast shadows into the corners of the tub. Kisses me, and before his mouth even touches mine, I know this is going to be a hungry kiss. He eats at my mouth, laps at my tongue. His hands slide over my ass. He pulls me tight against him.
I put my arm around his neck, melt into his hot kisses. He takes the tub of wintergreen scrub from me just before I drop it. I lose track of everything when he kisses me like this.
His chuckle sounds warm and dark inside my mind. I feel his arms work where he has them around me. Hear the scrape of the lid as he opens the scrub. He smoothes a cool, gritty handful down my spine and I shiver against him. He shifts against me, a sinuous undulation, so his chest rubs my breasts. Then he pulls me tight against him and envelops me again in all that hot, wet skin.
He rubs the scrub all over my back, then rubs it all off again, leaving my skin tingling. When he opens a space between us to smooth the scrub over my breasts, I have to brace myself against the back wall of the shower to keep from falling. My legs are trembling so badly they’re not going to hold me up without help. He slides a finger along my labia when he rubs the scrub between my thighs. Finds
my body’s aching response. Kisses me again so hard and so hot I’m amazed we don’t combust.
He lifts me, pushes my back against the shower wall. His hands guide my legs around his hips and I have a moment to wrap my arms around his neck before he pushes into me, thick and full and slippery with something that isn’t water. Power sheets over my skin. Slides inside me. I pull my head back enough look into his face. His eyes have incandesced. The air above his head shimmers. The huge black horns sprout from his forehead, grow towards the ceiling, recurving like bull’s horns.
I grip his shoulders. Seeing him go demon when he’s inside me is a little scary. But sort of exciting, too, and my body tightens around him.
He tilts his head back. Squeezes my hips. Wedges himself deeper inside me. “Mmm.”
I try to respond but coherent thought is fading fast, particularly as he rolls his hips, circling himself inside me and setting fire to the ring of nerves encasing him. I writhe, caught between the hardness of his chest and the unyielding wall. The wintergreen scrub rolls grittily between our skins, filling the shower with its good smell, but the abrasion’s a little too much, and I reach between us to wipe it off. He brushes my hand away and does it himself, making each motion a seduction. Stroking me, tickling me, kneading my breasts. His fingers trail blue sparks over my skin. And all the while, he rolls his hips between my thighs, burying himself in me over and over.
“Oh, God, Jou . . .”
You ready, sweetness? A firm, hot wetness flicks over my clitoris and I shudder. He’s going to lick me into orgasm again. I clutch at him, my hands grasping at his shoulders and back, and let him lave me into a sudden, violent climax. Stars erupt behind my eyes. Power fills me so full my nerve endings explode. My body bucks against the wall; I kick the shower curtain, which billows and collapses with a clatter of rail and rings.
He chuckles into my mind. Give it to me.
The power’s right there. I don’t even need to reach for it. My orgasm’s opened the gates to the well of power in and under and all around me. Instead of pushing it into the demon, I open myself to him completely, pull him into my power and let that floodtide fill him, too.
Fuckin’-a, he thinks as the power rushes into him. I feel him wrestle with it, gather it into himself until he begins to burn, flames flickering and sizzling along his skin. Then he thrusts it outward, burrowing through space and time, which shreds the shower wall at my back into a fathomless black rent.
Shit—
It’s okay. That’s our window. Hold tight.
I do, grasping him tightly, locking my arms around his neck, my ankles behind his thighs. I squeeze my eyes closed. I don’t know if this is going to be anything like traveling with the Squire, but if it is, I don’t want to do it with my eyes open.
I wait, clutching at the demon. I expect to feel something. The rush of air. A sense of movement. But there’s nothing. Nothing except the slow fade of the heat of the body against mine.
Chapter 31
Jou?
His hand strokes my cheek, but there’s no warmth in his touch. Just a faint pressure which quickly fades. It’s okay. You can open your eyes.
I blink. Flashes of light and darkness. Blue swirling shapes. A burning tower. A bright orange streak that spreads along a horizon endlessly distant or too close for me to focus on – I can’t tell which. I can’t figure out where things are. There’s no point of reference. Everything around us folds and moves like a turbulent ocean. A wheeling impossible whirlwind—
I squeeze my eyes closed again.
‘Sokay, sweetness. His familiar voice in my mind. I grab onto it. Cling to it like a lifeline. I haven’t brought a living human here before . . . I wasn’t sure what you’d see. Just relax. You’re with me. I’ll keep you safe. But you gotta open your eyes. I shake my head, too frightened to even try. Okay, here’s what we do. I’m going to describe things to you and when you open your eyes, you’re going to see things the way I do.
I’ll try. My own voice sounds so small, so lost in my own head that I shiver. But there’s no sensation. No feeling. Nothing.
We’re standing on top of the caves, just below the entrance to the Hill. This is my home.
His emotion seeps into me with that one word. Home. Everything that I’ve never felt about the places I’ve lived is invested in that word. All the years on the road with my Dala, I never had a home. Wherever we stopped, that was home. But it was always shifting. I never felt rooted anywhere. Never felt I belonged. Then she took me north to school, to a succession of institutional dorm rooms. And then she died. Any sense of home went with her. I’ve made a shell for us, there in my little duplex, for me and the ghosts of my family, but as Jou’s sense of home, of safety and belonging, fills me, I realize it’s just what he said it was, a cage. I’ve withdrawn behind its bars and shut out the world, but it’s not home.
My dame raised the Hill. With his thought, a stream of images spills into my mind. A slender shape, distorted by the heavy bulge of pregnancy, wrapped in the blowing veils of her own power, standing on the edge of a firestorm. A thin, bare foot, looking all too human, inches forward over the burning ground. With each tentative step, the ground cools, smoothes. The firestorm falls back, inch by inch, step by step. Until the pregnant woman stands on a dark hill, her veils swirling around her like smoke.
I was born here. I hid here as a grub. A distorted image, wavering and uncertain, seen through eyes that can’t focus as sharply as my own. A dark, swirling sky. Huge bat shapes cross it in a hunting pack, herded by the cracking whip of an even larger, burningly white, winged shape that follows them. Azhyyr. Fucking ice demon. He used to hunt the borderlands. Last time he tried to cross here I brought him down in the Fiendyke. Essie ate his wings before she let him go. A beautiful, fey woman, pillowed in the cloud of her own dark hair. He feeds me the taste of indescribable pleasure, and of exquisite pain as her spider-legs pierce his back.
I’ve grown strong here. I’ve made the Hill safe. See it the way I see it. I open my eyes cautiously and see it the way he sees it. The deep, secret caves where he was born and where one of his many lovers now makes her lair. The hollows and folds of the terrain that protected him when he was small and weak. Terrain he knows as well as he knows the contours of his own body. The dark walls of the tower he’s built as he’s grown stronger. The deep sense of him – his strength and power, his enjoyment of touch and taste beyond his physical needs, his sexual hunger and the delight with which he fills it, his driving sense of purpose – those things that make him uniquely him have rooted deep here. They defend his home from the firestorm in the distance. From the collection of glinting grey towers that thrust upwards like the fingers of a grasping hand on the far horizon. From the dark, gaping ditch that stretches between his hill and that iron city, and out of which glint a thousand malevolent eyes.
His hand closes over my eyes. He presses the cool ghost of a kiss against my forehead. That’s the Fiendyke. We don’t go there, not without an invitation. You don’t even look there.
Gotcha. Absolutely. I have no interest in a second look. I’m still shaking from the first.
Concentrate on the tower. Feel it with your mind. I laid the stones with my own hands. Feel the foundations? He takes my mind the way he would my hand and leads me to a ring of stones buried in the shifting, ashy soil of the hill. Feel the power I laid down to hold the foundations. I see it in my mind’s eyes. A glistening web of energy, the strands encasing and connecting the buried stones. The power is so him. It tastes like him. Feels like him. And as the web takes on color and texture in my mind, pinkish and sticky, I realize what it is.
Eww.
There’s nothin’ disgusting about it. It’s the way I channel my power. His memories begin to flow into my mind: women, and men, and creatures that aren’t either, stretched across the foundation stones, his enjoyment of each of them, and then at the moment of orgasm, withdrawing from them and letting his seed, and his power, spill across the stones.
> I push his memories away. Urk. Okay, too much.
Why?
Look, I know you’ve had a million lovers—
Not quite.
Okay, thousands or whatever. I don’t need to see it.
You do if you’re gonna be my seggurach. This is me. This is what I am. You have to at least be able to understand that to be with me, Tsara.
His use of my name focuses me, makes me understand how serious he is. How much this means to him. Okay. Okay, let’s try again.
I let the memories flow into me and this time I focus not on the details of the act, but on the way he directs his power. The slow build of energy during sex. The drawing in of his lover’s lifeforce through each touch. The gathering ball of power that builds stroke by stroke until it strains through him more powerfully than any orgasm. The control he exercises in that final moment to shape the energy into what he requires. The complete giving of everything that he is, and the devastating loss of self that follows.
This has been hard for you, hasn’t it? I ask, trying to feel my way through what he’s done. Each effort has been a delight, but also a trial. A little death.
Yeah. Help me make it stronger. Help me keep Him out.
Him. Asmodeus. Lord. Father. Enemy. I feel the complex tumble of Jou’s feelings for his sire roll through my head. I gather them, twist my own feelings for my family into the jumble, and cast it outward, over the plain between his hill and the iron city, across that dark ditch I can’t bear to look at. An impenetrable tangle. No one you don’t want here will ever be able to find their way again. I stretch my mind into the dark sky, down into the burning ground. Not by air. Not by earth. Not by foot, or wing. No one can come without your invitation.
Bring what’s mine home, sweetness. He feeds them to me. Image and touch and scent. Fulsome, his warden. Face and form so golden-beautiful my breath catches in my not-chest. Heart and mind so cold and calculating that touching his mind seers me, sends me spiraling into the heat of Nevida, Morion of Ash Hill. Flaming, unbearable passion. The scent of sandalwood and sex. Skin and hair so silken my not-fingers ache to touch her. My mind incandesces and my body convulses in yet another orgasm. Nevida’s heat gives way to the cool calculation of Zeifyr. A pair of eyes, feline and dispassionate, open in my head. She examines me, takes enough of my compulsion to find her way home and then turns her back on my call. She wraps her metallic indifference around herself and her sister-lovers, Ziporah and Zahira, and disappears.
