Lucinda, Dangerously

by Sunny

  Sweet Goddess!

  Sparks flew. A tumult of sharp, sweet sensation that spiked through me and blew me apart in a hard climax. He pulled back and watched me with wonder, feeling all that I felt: the bright shards of fracturing pleasure, the clenching contraction of my womb, the spasm of my empty sheath as waves of powerful release pulsed through me. He cupped me with his hand to feel the gentle, hidden convulsions of my flesh. Slid a long finger inside my wet sheath to experience physically what he sensed through our mental joining.

  Lord and Lady, how sweet that slight fullness felt. But I wanted . . . needed more.

  This is how it will feel when you’re buried deep inside me, I crooned to him. Your finger is nice but an inadequate substitute for what I really want: something bigger and much longer than what you have inside me now.

  My words squeezed another drop of wetness from his tip.

  He lowered his weight down onto me, his finger still buried inside me until the last of my spasms ebbed away. The press of his body was nice—satisfying. Being held by him even nicer. From our linked minds, I knew he enjoyed the pillowed feel of my breasts, the soft cushion of my body, just as he knew that I savored the long, ready hardness of him pressed against my thigh.

  For now, in that languid moment of post-orgasmic bliss, it was enough to hold him. To lightly run the sharp tips of my nails up and down his back in a gentle, dangerous caress. To have him hold me and let the closeness of our bodies and his hard, sweet ripeness begin to stir me once more as satisfaction faded and hunger grew anew like a rising tide. It grew even more when he pulled his finger out of me.

  I mourned the loss. Wanted . . . needed something else to fill the empty space he left behind. Wanted and needed him—my sweet and gallant, beautiful Flower of Darkness.

  I am none of those things, he protested softly.

  You are all of those things in my eyes. You know I speak true . . . that I cannot lie to you.

  I am the worst of cowards.

  How can you say that? Think that? You came and saved me.

  Because I selfishly wanted you.

  Oh, Talon. You are much braver than I am, reaching out for what you wanted while I hid myself away from what I secretly desired.

  Because you thought to protect me—from yourself! An inelegant snort. How can you think of yourself as bad for me?

  How can you think yourself ugly when you are so exquisite, so finely built?

  I’m different from everyone else—utterly black.

  I let my eyes drift over the smooth, pure lines of his midnight-dark face, his features exquisite enough to belong to a girl: large eyes, thick lashes, bold nose, delicate mouth.

  With that face, the tall, slender build and lean muscles smoothed across his graceful body, he would put top models to shame.

  Models? he asked, not knowing what that was.

  I flashed him images of fashion magazines and scrumptious male models gracing the covers.

  I tried to suppress my next thought as my gaze traveled slowly and appreciatively down his body but it squeaked through to him.

  Underwear? You think I could attain great wealth modeling underwear? He thought the idea quite funny.

  Different, in your case, is very, very nice, I assured him, my eyes lingering longingly on his long, tumescent stretch of hardness.

  A smile slowly teased the corners of his mouth. I think I might like being different in this way for you.

  I guarantee that you’ll like it even better if you put that big, long thing inside of me where it belongs.

  A thought, a vivid image of him sliding into my wetness moved him back over me. He held me with his gaze—held me with the still, suspenseful waiting of his body . . . then slowly began to push his way into me.

  A shiver, a shudder shook my body. Hitched him a little deeper into me.

  We must be quiet. His voice sounded strained as he gave the mental reminder. Quietly he forged his way into me with killing slowness, filling me more and more.

  Talon . . . Oh, yes . . . yes . . . more!

  I bit my lip as he continued to forge his way into me. Ye gods! He was so deep I felt him nudge up against the cervical end of me. The sensation had me crossing my eyes.

  Through him, I felt how he felt: the tight, wet, and warm squeeze of me all around him, the firm noselike resistance there at the end, pushing back against his sensitive tip. How unbelievably good all of it felt and yet incomplete; he had an inch or two more to go, and a strong instinctive need to sheathe himself all the way in, all the way home. And through me, he knew that never before had I ever felt what I did now. That sharp, sweet rain of pleasure and bite of pain as he knocked with gentlemanly politeness against the door of my womb, as if to politely ask if I would be good enough to let him in?

  A half-laugh strangled in my throat and his mouth sealed across mine, ate the sound down. Hush, he murmured in my mind, no sound.

  No sound when I wanted to scream, to cry, to grunt and groan and thrash beneath him. But I did none of that. I held it all back, restrained in so many different ways—in sound, in movement, in all but my mind. In my mind I let him know, let him see, how I felt and what I wanted to do.

  I know you wish me to take you wildly, he said, but I can’t. I don’t want to hurt you.

  He pulled out slightly and pushed firmly back in, bumping against my cervical door. It was the most unusual, exquisite, pleasing-painful thing I’d ever felt or experienced.

  Don’t worry . . . Oh, Goddess! . . . just keep doing what you’re doing.

  I’d never had a lover this long before. And sweet blessed moon, he wasn’t all the way in yet!

  I had been content to just pleasure Talon, to make this a sweet experience for him, knowing that he was too gentle a soul to give me the edge of pain and sense of danger I enjoyed with sex. Those expectations flew out the window as he pulled out then plowed back in another insistent half-inch, his teeth bared, his eyes locked on mine.

  This little bit of sweet pain I don’t mind giving you, he said and danced that long length in and out of me again. Slip, slide, deep nudge—oh!—in just a little bit deeper.

  His eyes grew even more heavy-lidded as he took on a gentle rhythm, his body moving over me with strength and grace, sliding in and out, pushing, knocking harder, deeper within me. That sharp, sweet, edgy pleasure had me arching up, sweeping the peaked points of my nipples against the lean muscles of his chest—extra stimulation that was suddenly too much and not enough.

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I have to move, I cried out, and drove my hips up with a strong thrust. The jarring jolt of pleasure and sweet pain was blissful, divine—almost overwhelming.

  He cursed and snarled within our minds, and began a faster, harder rhythm, pulling out—long, so long—pushing back in with deep and powerful drives, rubbing slick and snug and hard through my swollen channel, his end meeting my end with more and more insistent force until with a soundless pop he didn’t push through but past my cervix into a little cup of space beyond it, impaling me deeper than I’d ever had anyone inside of me. Sinking his entire long length home, buried full in me.

  At the sweetly painful, full joining, we both cried out, silent, within our minds, and held there unmoving, his hips ground against mine, my pelvis lifted up to his in arched symmetry. My hands lifted without thought, on pure instinct, and gripped the tight muscles of his buttocks to me even harder. The added shove of him so deep . . . my sharp nails piercing his meaty flesh . . . my teeth biting into his chest to keep the scream of pleasure locked inside my throat . . . it all combined to flash us into a convulsive climax.

  He spurted inside of me, one hot, fluid burst that I felt physically through our joined bodies and mentally through our joined minds as my own contraction hit, making me clamp down so tightly down on him that I cut off his ejaculation, halted it for one hot, clenching moment of blissful agony. Then my closed-fist contraction relaxed and he came in three more hot, wet bursts, his release coming harder for having been dela
yed and interrupted, shooting his wad into me like hard bullets as I squeezed and spasmed tightly around him until he was wrung out, completely dry.

  We had made love with hardly a single sound; with emotions and sensations linked and layered deliciously on top of each other so that ecstasy spiraled and reverberated within us still like undulating after-ripples.

  Wow, I thought as my body gave one last tired twitch around him. That was different.

  He smiled and relaxed down over me, covering me like a hard, firm blanket. With a heroic heave of effort, he rolled until I lay on top.

  In this case, I definitely like being different, he purred contented and happy.

  We drifted off to sleep still connected.

  Talon’s mind brushed lightly against mine in welcome when I woke up a short time later. He rolled until I was once again on the bottom, then eased out of me, a long pull that had me shuddering and him smiling.

  You liked that, he thought.

  So did you.

  Oh, yes. Most definitely. Although putting it inside you is even nicer.

  The smell of his blood filled my nostrils. I hurt you! I’m sorry.

  No need. And I felt the ease in his mind. I liked your nails, your teeth, there at the end. The bite of them felt surprisingly good. I loved most knowing that I’m not too gentle for you. That just my size is enough to give you what you like and need.

  I shuddered in remembered pleasure, a reaction that had him smiling even more.

  We have to go, he said regretfully. Rolling to his feet, he helped me up.

  Standing, my eyes were level with the raw bite mark on his chest, skin bruised but not broken. Your wounds aren’t healed, I said puzzled. Neither are mine.

  We had healed that first time when the bond had snapped into place between the three of us with Nico buried deep inside of me, and Talon joining us in orgasm. We’d been healed, I thought later, because of Talon and our bond with him. Floradëurs healed far faster than demons and Monère through their tie with nature and their ability to tap into its plentiful energy.

  There is something about this place, Talon said, frowning as he pulled on his pants. He slipped his T-shirt over me. The area feels enclosed somehow. Like a capsule.

  His observation had me looking around uneasily. It was a tiny cavern hidden below the ground. Nothing unusual about it but for the long, unusually thick tree root complex that tunneled out through the wall to lay on the ground like a giant foot—that and the sense of containment I sensed now through Talon.

  I think it comes from this thick tangle of roots, Talon said thoughtfully. The gnarled structure was thicker around than a man’s body.

  That must come from one heck of a big tree.

  Let’s find out. Without any more warning than that, he touched me and merged us with that heavy root system, flowing us up it. There was no easy sense of travel this time, only a jarring sensation of something wrong, something off in the life force of the wood and sap we flowed up through.

  There was sharp relief when we emerged aboveground and physically separated from it. Then all that relief died as I looked up into the branches of the large tree above us . . . into the heads that hung from it. Demon heads.

  I shrieked, but only in my mind. Outwardly I made not a noise, moved not a single muscle of my frozen body.

  It was a gourd tree. Green gourds hung high in some of the branches, but you didn’t see them at first. Your eye was drawn first and foremost to the demon heads hanging beside them, far outnumbering the natural fruits of the tree, although “hung” wasn’t really quite the right word. The heads had apparently started that way but then as time had passed, branch tips had connected into the severed necks, thickening and distending into rootlike structures, so that the heads became perched atop these supports.

  Most of the heads were dried and brown, shriveled and shrunken effigies. The rootings beneath these necks were like the heads they supported—thin, old, and dried out . . . as dead and gone as the husked heads they were attached to. The rootings beneath fresher heads, though, bulged thick beneath their still-moving, still aware heads, draining them of—what? Their blood, their energy?

  The eyes from these alert heads were focused on us; jaws opening and closing, tongues moving inside like large obscene worms. The freshest head belonged to the bandit Derek had beheaded, the one the other demon had skinned.

  Jesus! Now I know why Derek had wanted his head: To feed this damn tree. That was the wrongness I had sensed traveling up this thing. Power had thrummed from it, and I knew why now. The energy I’d felt running through the sap, built into the wood itself, must have come from the blood and vitality drained from these demon heads. But to serve what purpose? I wondered.

  Gods! There were so many heads. Forty or fifty of them, maybe. Then the fog around our feet swirled and thinned enough to see the ground, and fresh horror stabbed me anew. The ground we stood on was strewn with dried heads fallen from the tree. Holy Mother! Not fifty but hundreds of them!

  The fog swirled again, and out of the thick white mist stepped Derek, two demon heads swinging with bloody freshness from his hands.

  “Ah, perfect.” Grim surprise and pleasure lighted Derek’s face as he dropped the heads and drew his sword. “You found my Tree of Death. No need to hunt you down. You came to me.”

  Derek had taken one eager, ominous step toward us when the ground suddenly began to shudder and tremble violently beneath us. A large circle of soil shot up like a geyser, raining chunks of dirt over us as something leaped out of the hole that had been formed in the ground—a male creature. He felt like a demon to my senses, but with an altered flavor to his essence like nothing I had ever encountered before. Broken bits and pieces of something that looked like bark but wasn’t quite that—it was smoother, thinner—hung around him like a ragged mantle. Beneath that bizarre covering you could see old and rotted remnants of cloth, what had once maybe been his clothing. The face . . . no, actually his head was the most eye-catching of all. Not so much the blood smeared across his mouth and chin like gruesome paint, but the thick, bulbous structure perched atop his head like antlers; they looked eerily like the strange branch-roots that drained the demon heads in the tree above us. The end of it looked as if it had just been freshly broken off, inches above his head. The bottom half seemed anchored into his skull.

  He should have looked utterly ridiculous standing there. But there was some sort of odd power that emanated from him that made him more frightening than funny. You could even see it—a sheer rim of whiteness that outlined his body and almost made him seem to glow.

  “Whose blood woke me?” the strange thing demanded in a hoarse and rusty croak. He glanced at Derek, noted the offering of heads tumbled at his feet, then turned to study Talon and me with more careful scrutiny. His gaze took in the deep cuts and scratches on my arms—the damage the sharp stones had done to my wings. His scrutiny, however, lingered the longest and with the most interest upon Talon. Nostrils flared as the strange apparition scented the wounds my sharp nails had cut into Talon’s buttocks.

  Derek’s reaction was quite strange. He paled, his dark demon skin going ash gray. “Tree Lord,” he said in a strangled whisper.

  Tree Lord? I had a second to wonder. Then Derek sprang at the strange demon with a harsh cry, his sword raised.

  Derek never reached him.

  With the simple languid lift of a finger, the strange demon froze Derek and held him suspended in the air, halted mid-leap. There was an ease and elegance and effortlessness to the gesture that bespoke great power. It was easy to stop and hold a Monère in such a way; much, much harder to do to a demon whose own mental strength should have battled and negated your own. Perhaps my father, maybe my brother, had the sheer brute psychic power to do such a thing. I, personally, could never have held Derek suspended so.

  Then an even stranger thing happened. The limbs of the Tree of Death above us reached down and twined around Derek’s wrists and ankles, holding him bound and suspe
nded above the Tree Lord.

  At this point I’d seen enough to know I could not fight this thing.

  Run, I screamed to Talon.

  He tried to. And so did I. But what the Tree Lord had done to Derek, he did now to us. His will swept out and overpowered us like a giant rolling wave, freezing us into immobility.

  I was captured, but not necessarily Talon. He was a Floradëur. He didn’t have to move a muscle to slip his way down a plant.

  Go! Slip away while you can!

  Whether Talon would have listened or not, I never knew. I felt something thrust through me, so horribly cold and painful and wrong, it stole all my strength and shocked a breathless gasp out of me. At first I thought it was Derek’s sword, run straight through me, but no blood spilled out. It was only as I saw it happen to Talon also that I came to know what it was.

  Something white and slim and shaped like a spear thrust through Talon’s slender back and came out the front of him. It wasn’t until it dispersed and dissolved its form, and became just white mist once again that I realized it had been formed from the pervasive fog that blanketed this land. It was only because I had felt it go through me that I knew now what that white mist really was: spirits. Demon spirits that had been captured and chained to this land somehow through the Tree of Death.

  Death magick.

  Death magick had enslaved those poor souls. Death magick that I watched being wielded by a master’s hand as more of that white mist formed and thickened around Talon and me in imprisoning bubbles of his willing. It lifted us up several inches, separating us—separating Talon—from the ground through which he might have escaped.

  The weakness was temporary. I was already getting back my strength, enough to rake demon claws down the wall of my misty bubble. It was like scraping down solid stone—no give, no weakness. No way to claw my way through this thing. I retracted my claws, curled my hand into a fist, and punched the damn thing. Curse it, but it hurt! Not from the physical force of the blow but rather from the harsh contact of my bare skin against that misty white. I was standing in the sphere with my bare feet flat against the white surface, but that passive contact didn’t give me the flash-burn feeling the violent action of punching my prison had. Emotion speared through me much like that mist-spear passing through my chest. Hatred, fear, despair, violence. Guilt, grief, and anger—so much anger. I felt the emotions of those imprisoned ghosts—because that, I realized, was what they were—and that brief flash of contact with them sapped me of energy, strength, vitality.