by Sam Hall
“Jennifer? Yeah, it’s me…” I heard before she got out of range.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, my consort is going to retire.” Liam stroked me like a pet. “She’s tired, jet-lagged, and overwhelmed. She only went through transition days ago. Jonathon, if you could escort Kira back to the bus.”
“How much for the girl, Hartley?”
The words cut through the pleasantries like a knife. Green hair and some of his corporate raider garbed flunkies had clustered together now, forming some kind of syndicate.
“I’m not selling Kira out to any of you, and to persist in discussing this is to cause offence.” Liam’s words were flat and terse.
“Come on, Hartley. Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone knows you want to get out from under Rutherglen. Sell her to us for a night, and you’ll have enough in your coffers to declare yourself independent by morning.”
Green hair’s eyes roamed over me, noting how Liam held me in place, stopping me from running, how his thumb rubbed over my wrist. I saw that confident, sneering visage falter as my thighs parted slightly, his tongue flicking out to swipe across his bottom lip. His fellows had identical looks, like sharks in a feeding frenzy.
I flinched as Liam stroked his hand through my hair. I wanted him to answer, to say no, to be like the dream version and declare I was it for him. To hold me tight and to wave away this dream-slash-nightmare of confusing rituals and even more confusing responses, mine included. But it isn’t going to happen, I told myself. There were several gasps as my skin began to glow bright, the fearful response blood in the water for these people, a potent lure.
“Easy,” he murmured, gentle and soothing, but I couldn’t trust it, trust him. He’d been everything in my dreams and for what? To whore me out to people who came to court to meet his aims? It made sense in a way, following the scripts pimps used to entice women into becoming prostitutes for them. Form that bond, tie them to you, then ask for what you want and keep on asking until they had no more to give.
Fuck this. I wasn’t a pawn or a sick little girl to be shuttled around anymore. Whatever being a part of Hartley meant, I wasn’t going to accept this. Liam’s grip tightened as I began to rise, pinning me to the spot, and only I was able to hear the rasp of his breath as he did so.
“Kira is not for sale, to anyone. She is precious to us. If you can entice her, make her an offer that she accepts, then like any other member of a free court, she may go. But I don’t own her. She is mine, as I am hers. Now, you are tired, love?”
This was addressed to me, though it took me a moment to respond. His words stung me like the gentlest of whips, making my skin feel red and raw and overly sensitive. Was he making noble declarations to maintain his standing? Provide a united front? Or did he mean them? That rasp in his voice as he said them gave the words a kind of rough authenticity, but what was all of this but an impressively wrought surface? One thing was right though—I was tired.
“Yes, I’m fighting to keep my eyes open.”
“Take my consort and keep her safe as she rests,” Liam said, finally letting me go, but my skin missed the pressure of his grip as soon as it was released. Curiouser and curiouser? More like less and less comprehensible. All of a sudden, court didn’t seem like such a beautiful, enticing place. It was just so dizzying. I felt Johnno’s hand on my hand, steering me down the steps, and I moved obediently until I stumbled up to Marlow.
“Marlow…”
I couldn’t form sentences, but I hoped the longing in my voice would be enough.
“I need him to act as herald for me tonight,” Liam said, as if reading my mind. “No one will touch him while he is with Hartley, I can promise you that, and he will be with us in the bus tonight. But for now, may I borrow him?”
The man in question kept his face schooled into a polite mask, something I wondered how often he had to do. I wanted to say no, Marlow wanted me to say no, I was sure of it.
“My brother plays games,” Johnno said, his voice tickling my ear. “But he always does so for a reason.”
“Of course.” I turned and faced the king on his throne, keeping my face sweet and compliant. “Don’t be too long, my love. I’ll be waiting for you.”
The best lies are the ones that are halfway true, authenticity overshadowing the part that was pure fiction. My problem with all the game playing and masks here was I couldn’t work out which part was true and which part was false, even in my own words. I watched Liam’s eyes widen slightly at that, his expression shifting into one of terrible need, one that matched my own, but for what, I was still unsure. But it was there and gone again in seconds. I didn’t want to leave Marlow behind, but something inside me settled as Johnno took my hand and tugged me after him, forcing me to keep pace with him until we finally emerged from the auditorium.
I breathed deeply, the night sky, the early morning air all somehow simpler and easier to breathe than whatever the fuck was going on inside the magical space they’d created in the concert hall. My eyes soaked in rough asphalt and broken glass, chain-link fence and glaring neon lights, and somehow, this helped. I’d stumbled out of the faerie mound, and it felt like a million years had passed, or none.
“Hey,” Johnno said, coming closer. The floodlights turned him into a dark shadow before me, limned by a halo of light. I caught glimpses of golden eyes and the glint of teeth, but not much else. “Are you OK?”
Was I?
I’d breezed through everything pretty much unscathed until now, had still if I was being honest. It could have been me held down on a dais of moss, having the brains fucked out of me by goat men. I could have been passed around by expensive suited fae like a party favour, or I could have been kicked to the curb when Rhiannon turned up. Instead, I’d been protected, then released from this crazy world right when it was starting to do my head in. The inconsistencies of this world made me feel like I never knew which way was up.
Was Johnno my teacher or my heart’s desire? Was Liam a manipulative prick or my dream lover? Was Billy a predator or a friend? Was Jake a wild crazy boy or a submissive looking for a Dom? And what was I? We were strange little misfits, us changelings. We’d grown up at odds with our environments, little aliens lying in wait, never settling, always changing and unable to find where we fit. This should have been it—my place, my people. I just stared at this artificial, desolate wasteland and ached. For what I wanted, for what I needed, for what I was too scared to admit.
“It’s been too much. It’s OK, Ki—”
The fact that the light made him somewhat featureless made this easier. I stepped into his shadow, looked up into the darkness, and breathed in his scent. He was blooming something fierce, the scent tugging at me. Just another thing demanding my attention, but I was done being wide eyed Alice. I was rushing towards this. I brushed my nose across his chest, seeking like a young animal until I found it—that hard sternum where the scent poured off him the thickest. I took a deep breath in, then another, drawing him and only him into my lungs until my head began to spin.
“Kira, we can—”
I put my lips to his, not wanting any more words to cloud the issue. I tasted the salty residue on them, letting my mouth melt against his until he stopped trying to talk, stopped keeping himself locked up behind considerate words and kind gestures and just let himself be. I welcomed the bite of his fingers around my arms, no doubt marking the skin red. I loved the part of his lips, the thrust of his tongue, the sharply sucked in breaths between endlessly hungry kisses. But that wasn’t enough right now. My mouth had laid down some serious frequent flyer miles, drawing me close to people, letting me taste them on my tongue, but nothing more than that. I was done with promises, I wanted deliverance.
I broke away to his protest and grabbed his hand, drawing him after me as I ran to the bus. He was confused at first, then ran after me on feet fleeter than mine. He opened the door and ushered me in, following hot on my heels. I could feel him, looming over me, encasing me in his shadow, remaking me da
rk where I had been light.
“Wait, Kira…” he said when my hand went to my shirt, but I refused to let him close. I needed it, the soft feel of sheets and blankets around me when I was feeling overwhelmed, nothing between my skin and them. I yanked the shirt off and tossed it to one side and then went for my bra.
“Wait. Let me,” he begged.
I shook my head, and it felt light on the top of my spine.
“I can’t have clothes between us right now,” I said. “Take yours off.”
He scrambled out of them with a flattering speed, emerging bare skinned and beautiful. A thin strand of moonlight caressed his body, showing me just how ready for me he was. He stopped me when I got to my knickers, about to peel the sodden fabric off. My mind might have been in a whirl about all that I’d seen, but my body had no such qualms. My cunt was slick, dripping, and it wanted all the latent power his body kept banked thrust into me.
I wanted Johnno to fuck me.
He came in close, brushed a kiss across the top of my shoulder, his bare chest brushing against my hard nipples, then he dropped down, pressing his mouth gently onto my hipbone, and my hand went to his hair as he slid them down.
“Fuck, you make my mouth water,” he said, little more than a rasp. “I’ve dreamed of this so fucking often. I want to—”
I drew him back up again, not ready for declarations yet. People talked so much in this world, and there were so many shades of meaning. I’d never trusted the spoken word less than I did now. I wanted what I knew—the surety of his body, his reactions. I crawled onto the bed, knowing he would come with me.
Something settled as I got further into the orgy bed, the scents of clean male and sun-dried cotton soothing me. I threw myself down onto the soft surface, and he followed, covering my body with his. I wrapped all I had, my arms, my legs, around him, just wanting that warm, heavy weight to ground me, and for a while, that’s how we stayed. His cock throbbed against my slick pussy, his breath matching mine.
And then he seemed to get it, what I needed, and why wouldn’t he? There’d been five spies in my house of love, observing my actions and reactions over and over until they learned me like a book. This was why Marlow was kept back, this was what Liam wanted. Short of guiding his brother’s cock into me, his hand was all over this, but I found I didn’t care. Not as Johnno rained kisses on my neck, not as they grew harder and more insistent.
“I need you so much,” he mumbled into my collarbone. I stroked his hair and arched up under him as his hands moved lower. I knew how he felt.
I tried to do as he did, stroke and tease his body, but he reared up, a demon lover in the night, swatting my hand away when it went for his rigid dick.
“I can’t…” he said. “I’m too close, this is too raw.” His voice broke on the words. “I’ve wanted you for so fucking long. I reached through your dreams with everything I had, dying for a taste and trying to capture every moment in glass. I wanted you to see me, not my brother. See all of us. We tried and tried to introduce the lot of us, but your subconscious resolutely stuck on him. I’m sorry—”
“I don’t need your apologies right now,” I said, sliding my hand up and down his length now that he was distracted. “I need this.”
He growled low in his chest. “I’m trying to do the right thing here!”
“Don’t. Save that for later when I can deal with it, but that’s not what I want right now. I want your cock, Johnno. I want you to fuck me. I want to feel every damn inch, feel the way our bodies fit together. I want you to dig your fingers in, wrap your hand in my hair and—” He dove down on top of me, his hands, his mouth everywhere. “I just want to feel. Just make me feel.”
So he did.
I pretended I couldn’t feel the shake of his hands when he reshaped me, stroking my arms, tracing my fingers, underlining my collarbones, spanning my throat possessively. I felt his sweet pain as my nipples, my clit throbbed with need for him, but he took no pity on me. He skimmed across my ribcage, spent an inordinate amount of time on my now newly taut stomach, learning the new muscular curves there. My breath caught in my chest as the backs of his hand grazed my hips, my pelvis thrusting up, hoping to direct his hand. He chuckled, low and dark, hooking his thumbs under my knees and pushing them up towards my chest. For a moment he held me there, splitting me open, making me feel the cool air playing over my wetness, the tension in my thighs making my clit sit up and take notice.
“Fuck, you’re beautiful,” he said. I was pretty sure I was no more than a grey blur in the low light, but as I felt his thumbs grazing my thighs, I didn’t much care.
“Please,” I moaned, his fingers tightening in response to my plea.
“Kira…”
“God, Johnno, I’m fucking going out of my—Oh!”
My knees were abandoned so I held them in place as he settled between my legs, his capitulation a thorough swipe of my pussy, every nerve ending singing at the contact with his tongue. And in case I thought he was going to tease me further, he flicked it across my clit, battering the poor swollen nub until it bloomed with the most forceful of pleasures.
“Fuck…!” I yelped, my hands going to his head, my fingers going into his hair, trying to keep him where I needed him, but I needn’t have worried. His hands slid under me, dragging me closer, like I was a cup he would drink deeply from, a meal he would gorge on. The rapid shift, from teasing touches to wholehearted burying himself in me had me twisting and turning, crying out incoherent prayers to dark gods whose avatar Johnno apparently was. It was almost too much when his lips closed around my clit, his fingers thrusting inside me and hooking up. I’d never made noises like this, never felt myself running down another person’s chin, never felt pleasure like lightning striking my body.
I was swelling, blossoming, massing into something huge and earth shattering, the pleasure I felt enough to shake the world to its foundations. He dragged me higher and higher, and the point where I’d usually come passed by several times. It was almost frightening, this level of a reaction. Johnno didn’t make love or fuck me, he was rewriting me on a cellular level. Nothing in the dreams I’d had of The Changelings prepared me for this. I was pulsing around him, my poor pussy twitching, but it gave me no release until he finally pulled away.
“Yes, yes…” I gasped, clawing him towards me, needing that thick cock that had worked its way down my throat inside me now. I’d been titillated, teased, and appalled all damn day, and I was fucking done with ambivalence.
“We do this. If I put my cock inside you, it’s going to change things,” he gasped, softening the blow of his words by rubbing the bulbous head of his cock against my aching slit, slipping in the ridiculous amount of slick there.
“You tell me this now?” I moaned, unable to lie still as the dragging pressure drove me mad.
“I’m your preceptor. I’m honour bound to tell you this.”
“And what will happen? Tell me that I’ll come really hard. I need to hear that.”
It wasn’t my golden Johnno here right now—it was his dark twin. One whose eyes shone in the near dark, his grin wide and carnivorous. Fear and arousal twined so tight inside me, they just exacerbated each other.
“I’m not a good man, Kira. None of us are. But if we do this, we’ll be yours. We’re tied to you already by that dream bond, but this, this will make that permanent. You won’t be able to get clear of us. We’ll always know where you are. We’ll be drawn to you, tied to you, and this?” He pushed the head of his cock inside me, giving me horribly shallow thrusts, enough to let me know how wide he’d split me, but none of the actual relief. “If I was a good man, I’d wait. I’d have told you when you were clear-headed. But I’m not.”
That low growl sent ripples of pleasure through me, promising me everything. I should have stopped, thought about what he was saying, asked questions, got more details, at least considered what he was trying to tell me, but he’d laid his plans well. Everything in this day, from being brought onto this
bus, to the concert, to court, was all so well-orchestrated.
But sometimes, you wanna be the girl with the most cake.
I threw him down on the bed, clambering over him, and before he could protest anymore, slapped a hand over his mouth, the other closing around his dick. I straddled him, the weight of my power palpable around me. I was bringing a whole lot more to this than just a fuck, we both were. He was my stranger-slash-lover, the worm twisting inside my brain, and I was surrendering to whatever this was. I liked the feel of his teeth against my palm, the harsh breaths heating the surface as I mimicked his teasing strokes. But unlike him, I sank down, inches at a time. Slowly, inexorably, I worked him inside me until we both began to glow.
I saw all of him now. He couldn’t hide behind the shadows, his golden light burning brighter and brighter as I moved with a long, slow, rollicking pace. He was so fucking perfect, the right stretch, the right angle, dragging against that tight bundle of nerves that just unfolded inside me.
There was a whole world of pleasure out there I’d never seen, and the quick, furtive, not quite right, ‘desperate working of my clit to get where I needed before he did’ fucks of the past were so different, they couldn’t be classified as the same thing. I opened a door, saw the bright world before me, and leapt out into it.
“Kira, love!”
He was desperate, throbbing, growing impossibly harder inside me, terrified that he’d come too soon and not do the thing he’d longed for so long, well. I could feel it all right then. But he needn’t. It was like a tidal wave, shaking the earth, sending the smaller people running as it swept through us, starting where our bodies joined, but the feel of his cum spurting helplessly inside me, my cunt fluttering in response was almost irrelevant.
It spread further out, the pleasure such a generous thing that it couldn’t be contained to two people. It rushed through the carpark on light feet, blowing out lightbulbs and casting a comforting dark blanket over everything, touched those security guards patrolling the fenced off area, bringing them helplessly to their knees. Their bodies twitched like fish on a hook, spasming as their poor human bodies fought to contain that which the gods’ gifted. I saw Mark’s grey eyes, wide and unfocussed for a moment, before it moved on.
