by Sam Cheever
“I don’t know. It’s big, gray and hairy with stripes and really big claws. You’ll know it when you see it. Let’s split up and search.” Glancing at the cat, which still seemed to be trying to tell me something, I added, “I’ll take the food prep area.”
The prep area was clear, as was the rest of the house. I was filling the cat’s water and food bowls when Slayer and Darma joined me with a report that there was nothing in the house.
I sighed, sinking into one of the tall chairs lined up along a short counter. Slayer dropped into a chair across from me. I watched the cat eat as my mind roiled. Something felt off. I shivered as a feeling of discord tweaked my senses.
“You look pale.” Darma’s voice held no concern, only a clinical awareness. She’d been a nurse at an unplanned care unit for most of her adult life. Taking care of people was second nature to her. She placed a hand on my forehead and frowned, turning to Slayer. “She’s burning up and she’s clammy.”
He was on his feet and striding toward me immediately.
I bristled, hating to be fussed over. “I’m fine. Let’s just get out of here.”
But Slayer stopped in front of me, way too close, and peered into my face. He reached out and touched my chin with one finger, lifting it to gaze at my throat. That was when I realized my daemon hickey was pulsing painfully.
“Your mating mark is bright red, Astra, and it looks swollen.”
I touched the mark Dialle had given me and found that it was giving off heat. Sparks flared and I jerked my fingers away looking at them. A small blister rose from the reddened skin of my burned fingertips. “Shit!”
Dizziness swamped me and my eyes rolled back. My legs turned to water. I toppled sideways off the tall stool and a strong pair of arms caught me before I splatted on the hard floor.
My mind felt as if it was filled with feathers. I was lying on something hard and cold as voices clashed far away. They sounded as if they came from the other end of a long, dark tunnel. One was high pitched, filled with hysteria, and the other was impossibly deep and calm.
Sound stopped and my head swam. I fought unconsciousness until we came out of the space shift and Slayer laid me down on something soft that smelled like flowers.
I tried to open my eyes but they wouldn’t open. They felt as if they’d been glued shut.
That was when the first wave of nausea hit me. I retched, expelling the contents of my stomach with a violence that cracked at least one of my ribs. Strong hands grabbed my head and turned me onto my side, where I curled into a fetal position and rode out several painful spasms tearing through my gut.
The cold sweats followed right on the heels of the gut spasms. Then the nausea returned. Knife-like pain moved into my head at that point, bringing back the nausea and rivaling the agony in my stomach. I curled into a tight, tiny ball in the middle of the bed and tried to hide from the exquisite pain.
Strong fingers touched my forehead. I shook my head, trying to shake them off, but pain banged hard against my brain from the unnecessary movement so I stopped. Heat emanated from the fingers, followed by a soothing numbness.
A deep, familiar voice spoke to me in gentle tones. “Sleep now, Astra. You’ve been poisoned but you’ll be all right.”
I expelled a breath on a sigh and my muscles loosened. Something soft and warm slipped over me and my thoughts started to fall away. I think it was a long time until I was able to form another useful thought.
CHAPTER FIVE
Gobsmacked!
Sex, sex, all around, her Settling riding sway,
But danger rides the daemon mark, and breeds a double play!
My thoughts roiled and snapped. Jagged, blood covered fangs lunged for me, the cool silk of fur smoothed across my heated, super-sensitized skin, and the feral stink of aggression swamped me. Claws ripped at my skin. Pain exploded across my awareness.
My angry dreams were softened occasionally by healing touches from large, slightly calloused hands. The calmer moments were interspersed with strident repairs dealt from softer, much smaller hands. A deep voice droned soothing nothings and shrill demands tried to pull me, kicking and screaming, back to health. I could feel myself thrashing one moment, and then settling into a hypnotic daze a moment later, only have my last nerve trounced upon a second later.
It was an exhaustive process.
Through it all a handsome, male face danced at the edge of my consciousness, the almond-shaped eyes snapping from blue to sizzling black at intervals. Lush lips tightened with worry and a square chin, softly peppered with dark stubble, tensed with anger.
At some point my dreams were filled with raised voices and the flash of violence. Sulfurous smoke filled my nostrils, causing me to cough and choke. Then strong arms snaked beneath my legs and shoulders, lifting me from tangled, sweat-soaked sheets. A deep voice rumbled against my shoulder, thick with warning. And then nothing. I drifted away again, thinking that my dreams were very strange. But the ultimate irony didn’t escape me and I knew that I would wake to an even stranger reality.
~SC~
Awareness came to me slowly. The first thing I noticed was the cool silk of the sheets beneath me. Secondly, I noticed that the silk touched me everywhere. I lifted my hands to run them over my body and felt only heated skin beneath my probing fingertips.
I was naked. Again.
Alrighty then. I didn’t want to know which of my “nurses” had removed my clothing. My stomach clenched with horror.
Moist heat enveloped my left nipple and I gasped, my eyes shooting open. A familiar, dark head bent over my breast, the black silk of his long, wavy hair arrayed over my stomach.
Dialle. I closed my eyes again, sighing with pleasure. “Hey.”
He gave my nipple a last, toe-curling suck and lifted his head. “Hello, my love.”
Dialle splayed a heated hand over my belly and rubbed, sending spirals of delight throughout my body. “I won’t even ask how I got here. But please tell me you didn’t kill anybody in the process?” I opened one eye to peer down at him.
He shrugged, lowering his head to drag the other nipple into the hot cave of his mouth.
“Dialle!”
“Your sister is fine.”
I frowned, but his lips slid downward, to trail a series of warm kisses across the delighted skin he’d just enlivened with his rubbing. Despite the tiny niggling of worry about Slayer, my thighs opened and my body throbbed in welcome. A long, super-heated digit slid between my folds and I moaned. Dialle’s tongue found its way into my belly button, making me giggle.
I opened my eyes and pulled an extra pillow under my head so I could watch him play.
Dialle’s talented lips and tongue laved their way across my belly and down one hip, creating tingles of sensitized skin wherever they touched. My thighs tightened with expectation as he worked his way across the top of one leg, toward the hopeful center of my lust.
But he skipped across that throbbing place, moving to situate himself between my legs so he could nibble and taste the quivering skin of my other thigh.
I opened my legs wider, hoping he’d get the message. Instead, he rose to his knees, giving me a truly delightful view of the thick shaft swinging between his legs, and the heavy balls hanging ponderously behind it. I licked my lips.
“Flip over, Astra.”
I quickly obeyed, knowing only good things could come from his request.
Dialle grabbed my hips and lifted them off the bed, opening me up to his happy inspection and playful touch. He knelt behind me for a moment, pressing the rigid length of his shaft against my dripping channel. Running his hands up my thighs, he tasted me with a long, lingering lick along my spine.
I shivered with delight, pressing my exposed sex into his shaft.
Dialle licked his way down to my buttocks and kissed each round globe, kneading them gently with his hands. He dropped to his belly on the bed and ran his heated tongue along the rounded bottom of each cheek.
I moaned and stre
tched out my arms, resting my cheek on the soft bed and offering my ass to his delightful ministrations.
Dialle didn’t disappoint. His talented tongue slid into my cream-drenched channel and I cried out with joy. He tongue frunked me hard for several moments, bringing me just to the edge of release, and then captured my pleasure-drenched clit in his hot mouth. It took only a few, strong pulls of his talented lips and tongue on the tiny bud to bring me screaming over the edge into release. His name was a term of worship on my lips. My head thrashed on the soft mattress, my thighs quivered from the power of my orgasm. My daemon hickey sparked and multi-hued flames surged up around us, their heat gently massaging my skin in accompaniment to Dialle’s talented work on my sex. His tongue left my channel and slid upward, toward the puckered skin of never, never land. I gasped as his tongue slid inside my anus and my sex clenched with pleasure.
His fingers found my aching clit and rubbed it as his tongue breeched the uber-sensitive skin of my ass. I widened my knees on the bed, begging him with my body to fill me up. His dual ministrations soon sent me roaring into release again, my muscles clenching and stars bursting before my eyes at the explosive nature of the orgasm.
As my body softened into the aftermath of my release, Dialle moved behind me and plunged deep, the rock-hard thickness of his shaft filling my hungry channel completely and delightfully. As he started to move, millions of tiny nerve endings inside my body fired to life and cream flowed from the juncture of our bodies.
My stomach tightened around the pleasure building there, my nipples were painful peaks against the silken sheets. Dialle’s hands found my hips and pulled me into the rhythm, slamming himself to the hilt with every stroke. He frunked me hard and slow, the heavy weight of his balls massaging my clitoris with every stroke. As my hickey flared to life again, I lifted myself to my hands and threw back my head, presenting my throat to him like an offering. “Suck it, Dialle.” My voice was husky with need, my body vibrating under the onslaught of his touch. “Suck my neck, please!”
My muscles tightened with expectation as he bent over me again. “It would be my pleasure, my queen.”
I jerked, doubt flaring in my breast. Was this moment of seduction merely another episode of Make the Queen Happy? I was monumentally tired of that show.
But then Dialle’s hot mouth closed over my throat and all coherent thought fled. The first gentle nibble sent a spear of delight slicing through my body. My toes curled hard against the soles of my feet and my nipples tingled against his chest. When he closed his lips over the sparking, tear-shaped mark on my neck and sucked, I came up off the bed with a scream. Every inch of my body exploded into sensation as the power in my mark blasted outward to bathe my flesh in a fire storm of sensation.
The pleasure was almost painful in its intensity. Dialle groaned against my throat, his husky declarations of pleasure throbbing against my tender skin. Dialle’s hips arched and he buried himself deep inside my body, his head lifting from my throat as he screamed. I shook myself from my dazed state and turned my head to look up at him. Sparks flew from the hickey I’d given him and his pretty, black eyes swirled with purple. The color of lust.
His body vibrated atop me, his strong fingers on my buttocks spasmed as he suffered some kind of sexual event that did not include true release. Though his shaft jumped inside my body, taking my breath away with its antics, I somehow knew he wasn’t coming.
Pulling my power forward, I focused on the hickey on Dialle’s neck—the ultimate connection between two creatures—and tried to feel what he was feeling.
At first I felt nothing. Then, resistance broke under the pressure of my delving and a wall of pleasure hit me like a tsunami breaking against a defenseless beach. I slammed onto my belly with Dialle on top of me. My skin felt furnace-hot and so sensitive that I could feel each tiny, interwoven strand of the silk sheets beneath our bodies. The flesh between my legs was impossibly rigid, so hard the skin felt as if it would burst. Heat enveloped my lower body, a moist heat, and something squeezed my flesh in a silken vise.
My nostrils flared as a strange yet familiar scent enveloped me, causing my nipples to tingle with lust. A soft hand touched my hip, caressing my buttock and my eyes flew open. I was looking at a slim back, tapering to a narrow waist and flaring to slightly too wide hips. I jerked, realizing I was looking at myself beneath Dialle.
Gasping, I turned my head and peered up at him from beneath a thick curtain of auburn hair. A flash of Dialle’s rapturous face looked down at me, through a green gaze.
Green gaze? Dialle’s eyes were black, sometimes blue. My eyes were green.
I screamed, trying to scramble away from Dialle’s driving thrusts.
That was me looking out of Dialle’s eyes.
And me beneath him on the bed.
Where was Dialle?
Holding on tight to the small creature beneath me on the bed, I felt the punishing grip of two large hands on my hips. I plunged faster, harder, into the clutching heat on my shaft. I gasped, terror warring with intense pleasure in my mind.
Dual hickeys sparked and intense pleasure coiled like venomous snakes in my belly.
My skin tightened. Stars burst before my eyes. I groaned as blessed release pulsed just out of reach. I stopped struggling as my channel clenched and my clitoris throbbed.
My balls tightened. My shaft swelled to an impossible hardness.
My breath stalled in my lungs. My muscles constricted.
The wave finally broke and release swamped me. I screamed and my voice came out in two tones. One deep and husky and one higher, breathless.
Two daemon hickeys throbbed, sparked and sent flames dancing higher around our writhing bodies as we convulsed into the final throes of our release.
As if exorcising me from my dual vision, my release sent me back to myself. I lay panting beneath Dialle, my mind roiling and my breath bursting from my lungs. My body softened and melted away from his. I immediately flipped over, looking up at Dialle.
He knelt where he’d been on the bed, his shaft still half hard and hanging heavily between his legs, glistening with moisture from my body. His broad chest was covered with a sheen of sweat. It heaved from exertion. His eyes were closed, his perfect lips slightly parted in panting breaths.
Climbing to my knees, I grabbed his shoulders and shook him hard, panic rising in my chest. “Dialle!”
Slowly his eyes opened, fixing me with a black gaze that spun with angry red and orange whorls. He stared at me for a long moment and then shook off my grip on his shoulders. “My god, Astra. What have you done to me?”
And then he was just...gone.
~SC~
I paced the confines of my new office restlessly. My werewolf friends Bob and Ralph had gone underground with their business after the explosion in my office that burned down our office building. It turned out that they’d been building the new offices for a while, and, although they weren’t completely finished, they’d moved to them after our building was trashed.
Fortunately for me, they’d offered me an office in their new digs, which was located far below the city in an abandoned leg of the sewer system.
The ceiling of my office was made up of arched, formed concrete, the floor was covered in lush, gray carpet. The foyer, where we greeted customers, was built around a circular pool that was fed with water running from an open rainwater drain in the wall above it. Rather than bearing paintings and traditional art, the concrete walls were carved with whorls and painted in bright, powerful street art. Greenery overflowed large flower boxes and spilled from enormous, clay pots. The plants were fed by light from a large skylight located at the convergence of several concrete arches fifty feet above our heads. The skylight was made of multi-colored, bullet proof and steel-reinforced glass, impervious to almost everything. I knew from having been given the security tour before joining Bob and Ralph, that the ground around that skylight was in an abandoned part of Angel City, in an empty lot owned by the werewolves, and
was surrounded by thick concrete walls. The walls were embedded with electrical currents and warded with magic to keep unwary intruders at bay.
The whole atmosphere of the office was very twenty-second-century paranormal. I felt right at home. It was also much safer than my former digs, which was important since someone was obviously trying to kill me.
I’d been calling Dialle for three days and he’d been ignoring me. Aside from my need to somehow rectify things between us, I was riding the jagged edge of my Settling and my skin jumped with unfulfilled lust. My nerves fizzed and my nostrils flared in search of his scent. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep and couldn’t work. I’d been avoiding everybody who cared about me since I’d inadvertently taken over Dialle’s body during unprotected sex.
Something banged against my mental drawers. I slammed the barrier firmly into place to avoid whoever was calling me. My televisual bleeped and I barked out, “end call” before the caller had a chance to speak a single word. “Shut down,” I added, and the machine whirred for a moment and then went silent.
The air beside me shimmered and I turned hopefully, praying it was Dialle. Slayer’s sexy, unwelcome form shimmered into view.
I glared at him. “You shouldn’t have been able to do that.”
He reached for my hand and lifted it, showing me the small, red mark that glowed whenever he touched my skin. The daemon hickey he’d given me so I could communicate with him. “This gives me entrance whenever I want it.”
I yanked my hand away. “Frunkin’ jerk! I never asked for this mark!”
Shrugging nonchalantly, he remained totally calm. His face showed no emotion whatsoever. “You’ve made use of it often enough.”
I swung away from him and resumed pacing. He was right. There was nothing I could say in my own defense. “Go away.”
He just stood there and watched me pace for several minutes.
Though I could feel the heat of his gaze he didn’t say a word. Finally, with a sigh, I stopped pacing and turned to him.
Slayer was leaning against the back of my divan with his arms crossed over his broad chest and his long legs crossed at the ankles. His handsome face was blank. He was waiting me out.
