Pursued by the Gods

by Rebekah Murdock

  It had been years since I had thought about that time with any regularity, but these days it came to mind more and more often. There were so many memories that had faded, but it would have been impossible to forget the night that Kavi had offered me something that men and women have sought since the dawn of time, and I had found it impossible to refuse him.

  ---

  When Kavi came to bed that night, I watched him silently as he undressed in front of the mirror, admiring the long lines of his body.

  “Do you remember the night you made me immortal?” I asked quietly as he slipped into bed next to me. I was off of work that night, and Isa was still at his job, so we had the bed entirely to ourselves for a little while still, the far side of it empty.

  He looked at me, startled. “Of course,” he said. “How could I forget it?”

  “Why did you leave?” I bit my lower lip, propping my head up with one hand as I rolled onto my side. “You’ve never told me, and I never asked. Right after you touched my forehead and knew I was no longer sick, you ran away. Why? Where did you go?”

  He was quiet for a long moment. “I was afraid,” he said finally. “I was afraid of what I had done, afraid that you would come to regret it, that you couldn’t possibly understand what it meant. Afraid that I had doomed you to an eternity of torture for my own selfishness.” He reached out, his fingers sliding over the curve of my hip. It was a touch to comfort himself, and I leaned into it, enjoying the brush of his hand over my skin. “And I went to Isa,” he continued. “I went to tell him what I had done.” He laughed bitterly. “I think I half hoped he would kill me somehow, although I knew that was impossible. For a moment, I was so sure that I had damned you, that you would suffer horribly for loving me.”

  “What did he say?” I leaned towards him, curious now.

  “He was angry, at first. And then,” Kavi was quiet again for a moment. “I suppose he saw how very much I loved you,” he continued, his voice soft. “And he asked to come with us. He vowed to protect us both, the same vow he gave to you, later that night.” His hand ran over my waist, his thumb caressing the ridge of my rib. “You’ve never regretted it, have you?” he asked rhetorically, with something like awe in his tone. “All the running, the hiding, the fear, you’ve never wished that night would have gone differently?”

  “No,” I said softly, reaching for his hand and sliding my fingers through his, interlacing them together. They felt the same as they had that night. We were frozen in time, forever unchanged. “Neither has Isa.”

  I saw something like wistfulness cross his face, and I touched the edge of his jaw, turning his face towards me. “Have you regretted it?” I asked, feeling my heart squeeze at the thought.

  “No,” he said quickly, shaking his head. “I have never regretted it. How could I? You would be irrevocably gone from me a hundred years since if I had not. But I do think of the things we might have had if I had not done it.”

  My brow creased, and I bit my lip. “Like what?”

  “Oh, Ta…Ravenna,” he whispered, nearly speaking my nickname before catching himself as he reached up to run his fingers through my long, black hair. “A child, perhaps…a daughter with your eyes, that we could have raised together. A little warrior girl, with her mother’s spirit. I would have liked to have had that. A home of our own, one we could have lived in all our lives.”

  “All my life,” I corrected him softly. “You would have watched me age and die, Kavi, and our daughter too, or our son, and their children, until the pain of it would have been beyond what even an immortal being could bear.” I felt sorrow rise up in my throat, tightening it as I tried to speak. “I would have wanted those things too, Kavi. But we cannot have everything. Not even the gods can have everything they desire. You taught me that.” I stroked his cheek, wanting desperately to take the sadness from his eyes. “And perhaps we can have that home after all. This is a good place, I think. We can make a life here. It isn’t what we would have wished for, exactly, if we had chosen our place, but it’s the safest we’ve been in a long time.”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know, Ravenna.”

  I pulled back, startled. “What do you mean? I thought you had started to settle in.” I felt a sharp dart of fear at his words, and as much as I was aware of the hopes I had for this place, I was surprised at the intensity of it. I knew he was worried, but…I hadn’t thought he might be seriously considering leaving again. I felt something approaching panic at the thought of packing up and leaving again, and for a split second, Toven’s face flashed into my mind. I tried to push the thought away, but it lingered on the fringes. If we left, I would certainly never see him again.

  I saw something flicker across his face, and I had the sudden, terrible thought that he was keeping something from me. The three of us had never had secrets from each other, and the idea that perhaps he would hide something from me was unthinkable.

  “I just…I see that you’re still restless,” he said unconvincingly. “Perhaps we should keep looking. Surely there’s somewhere else that we could be safe, where we could stay and make a home. This may be a place that we cannot be extradited from, but there are still dangerous people here.”

  He’s talking about Toven, I thought, but pushed it away. Isa had promised not to tell Kavi about the encounter that first night. Surely he wouldn’t break that. Surely Kavi was just referring to the crime, the everyday incidents of danger that we heard about here. “I’m fine here,” I insisted. “We have jobs…you have a better job than any of us! This house is one of the nicest places we’ve lived in for some time, and we don’t want for money. And…” I hesitated. “We can’t leave, Kavi,” I said finally. “We have to give it more of a chance. I want to stay, and I know Isa does too. It’s taken us a long time to find somewhere even as safe as this.”

  “Isa will go wherever we go,” Kavi said with certainty. “You know that. He is bound to us.”

  “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider how he feels.”

  Kavi shook his head. “Ravenna, I know how he feels. We are nearly as close as you and I are. I just spent the evening talking with him, just a few days ago.”

  I remembered that night clearly, coming down the hall from my shower, still wobbly-legged from the heat and desire, and finding the bed alarmingly empty, only a note on my pillow: Out for drinks with Isa. Be back soon. I’d crawled into the empty king-size bed, feeling as if I were lost in it, lonely and wishing for at least one of my men to curl around, to anchor myself to. It was unusual for Kavi to go out so late, and the whole incident had left an anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach, one that hadn’t entirely eroded since then. Something felt…off about the whole thing, but I consistently pushed it down, reminding myself over and over that I had no reason to doubt them. And after all, was it so strange that they might want some time alone together, just to be men, to have a few drinks and a chat? They were friends and lovers themselves, and I knew it shouldn’t feel as if there was something wrong.

  It’s just another facet of a “normal” life to get used to—the men going out on their own, having a guys’ night. This is what you wanted. I told myself this over and over, until the anxiety had receded to a small, insistent flutter in the back of my head, one that I was trying desperately to silence.

  “I don’t want to leave yet, Kavi.” My voice sounded small and tired in the darkness.

  “And we aren’t, not right now,” he said. “Just, don’t get too comfortable, Ravenna. It’s too soon to know if this is the right place for us.”

  I nodded quietly. “Try, Kavi,” I said softly. “That’s all I’m asking. I know you’re afraid. Just…try.”

  He said nothing else, and after some time, I heard the deep, even rhythm of his breathing. I rolled away, burying my face in the pillow. I tried to imagine packing up again, piling our belongings in the old pickup truck we’d been using for years, that amazingly still ran. A wave of exhaustion passed over me, and I shook my head in the darkness, swallow
ing hard. “We need to stay,” I whispered, knowing Kavi was asleep, and wouldn’t hear me. “I’m so tired of running.”

  15

  Ravenna

  I drifted in and out of sleep for a while, until the soft click of the door latch and Isa’s soft footfalls on the carpet woke me. I heard the rustle of clothing, the sound of metal on metal as his belt fell to the floor, and then I felt the warmth of his body as he pulled the covers back and slipped into bed.

  He had just showered, and I smelled the vanilla and honey of the new soap on his skin as his shoulder brushed against mine. I rolled towards him, curving my body around his. He was unsurprisingly naked, and I luxuriated in the sensation of his smooth, bare skin against mine as my tank top rode up, baring my stomach. I heard him make a small, soft noise in his throat, and he turned towards me.

  “Ravenna? Are you awake?” he whispered, reaching up to smooth my hair away from my forehead.

  I answered by sliding one of my legs between his, pressing myself against him as I leaned up, brushing my lips over his. “I’m awake,” I whispered back against his mouth, my nose and forehead touching his. “I missed you.”

  “And I missed you,” he returned, kissing me back gently as his hands ran through my hair. He glanced over my shoulder at Kavi, sleeping soundly, and brushed his lips over mine again. “Should we wake him?” he asked quietly.

  I hesitated. It was rare that we weren’t all three together at once in bed, although no one had ever said that we shouldn’t. If it was only two of us, it was more often Kavi and I than Isa and I, or Isa and Kavi. But it was Isa that I wanted in that moment, and I shook my head. “No,” I whispered. “Let’s let it just be us for a little while.”

  He paused for a second, and I thought he might say no, and simply go to sleep. Over a hundred years and the closeness that had sprung up between him and Kavi had done a lot to make him feel that he wasn’t an intruder in my and Kavi’s marriage. The vow he had given us bound us together as certainly as the one that Kavi and I had shared. But still, I knew at times that he felt that Kavi and I had something that no one else could touch, and perhaps in the end he was right.

  Then he kissed me, his hand sliding beneath my tank top and I leaned into him, letting out a sigh of pleasure. He tugged the thin black fabric up, tossing it aside and running his hand over my small breast. I moaned softly as his fingertips brushed over my nipple, and he kissed me harder, his tongue slipping into my mouth as my lips parted. He tasted faintly of beer, and I laughed softly. “You stopped for a drink before you came home, that’s why you were so late.”

  “Actually, I had a beer in the living room, watching an episode of that show I like that you both hate,” Isa said, chuckling. “More relaxing, really.” He kissed me again, the tip of his nose brushing against mine. “Can’t hide anything from you.”

  “Would you ever want to?” My eyes flicked up to meet his, and I felt that uncertainty again that I’d felt earlier with Kavi. How much time did you need to really know a person? Was a century and a half enough?

  “Of course not.” He ran his fingers through my hair again, spreading it over my shoulders. He had always loved mine and Kavi’s hair, both of ours much longer than Isa ever kept his. He ran his hands through it endlessly, brushed it sometimes, braided it for us. He’d been as sad as I had been when Kavi had cut his to shoulder-length. He kissed me again, a slow brush of lips as he caressed the line of my jaw with one finger. “I would never want to hide anything from you, my love.”

  I tried to relax into the caress. Why was I so paranoid? Was it this place? Was Kavi right, and this wasn’t where we should make our home? Would there never be a place where danger and questions didn’t lurk around every corner? I felt Isa’s hands run down the length of my side, tracing the smooth contours of my body, and I let my eyes flutter closed. Wherever we were, whatever we did, they were my constant. I had to hold on to that.

  I felt another pair of lips then, along the line of my shoulder blades, and I knew Kavi had woken. Part of me wanted to be obstinate, to tell him I was angry with him, but the truth was that I really wasn’t that angry anymore. If I could fear not being able to trust the men that I had shared so much of my life with for so long, then I could understand his fears, too. He loved us, and he wanted us safe. Whatever that meant, I had to remember that that was always the reason.

  Some of the tension drained out of me then, and I let myself relax into the bed, caught between the two men.

  One might think that after so many years together, it might have gotten boring, or routine among us. Even I had feared it, from time to time.

  But it hadn’t.

  I thrilled to their touch every time I lay between them as if it were the first night, and they moved over and around me as gracefully as dancers or courtesans, practiced in the art of love, and yet it never felt routine or stale. How many times had we done this? Thousands? And yet I knew I would never tire of it.

  Kavi ran his lips down my spine, his fingers trailing over the curve of my waist, meeting Isa’s as his mouth moved down my throat, down to the spot on my collarbone that he knew always made me shiver when he touched it.

  ---

  The first time he found that spot was the first night the three of us were all together, on the floor of a cave somewhere in the woods, less than four months after we ran away. We were soaked through from the rain, cold without a fire, and Kavi’s arms were around me, holding me close as I shivered. “Come here,” he’d said to Isa, sitting some feet away, huddled in the last remaining blanket. “No reason for us not to be as warm as possible.” And so Isa had come over to us, turning away from me at first so that I curled around his back. Late in the night we had awoken to the sound of wolves in the distance, and I found that Isa had turned in his sleep, his mouth pressed against my neck, his breath warm on my ear. Without thinking, still half asleep, he let his lips trail down until they were resting against my collarbone, and I gasped softly, a shiver going through me at the touch. His eyes opened then, and met mine, and I would never be able to forget the look in them when he realized that I desired him, as he had always desired me.

  ---

  I felt Kavi’s hand run down my thigh, hooking my leg back over his as his touch moved over my stomach, down between my legs, his lips on the back of my neck as he kissed the nape of it. I moaned softly, my hips arching up as Isa kissed me again, reaching to hold one of my wrists above my head as he angled himself alongside me. I could feel him, hot and erect against my thigh, twitching as Kavi’s fingers brushed against him as he reached for me.

  ---

  “There’s more than one way to stay warm,” I’d heard Kavi whisper, and I realized he was awake, too, and he’d seen Isa touch me. For a moment I was afraid that he was angry, and I felt ashamed, suddenly, angry with myself that I would want anyone else. After all he’d sacrificed, all he’d done, I was trembling with desire at another man’s touch. But then I felt him pressing against me, hard through the layers of clothing, and I moaned softly, my neck arching as I felt Kavi’s lips at the top of my spine, and heard his voice at the edge of my ear, whispering to us both. “Do you want her, Isa?” he’d whispered, the new name still sounding harsh, unfamiliar. “I know you do. I see the way you look at her.”

  I felt Kavi’s hand pushing up my woolen skirts then, rucking them up around my waist so that I could feel his fingers sliding up the inside of my naked thigh. “I’m sorry,” I heard Isa whisper in the darkness. “I know I shouldn’t. I know I have no right.” And yet I felt him move closer to me, his lips trembling against my neck, his breath coming in small gasps. Kavi’s fingers were between my thighs then, where I ached, hot and wet, and my hips arched, wanting more. I felt Isa in front of me, rock hard beneath the soft deerskin of the pants that he wore, and I couldn’t help myself. I rubbed against him, even as I felt Kavi’s cock against the curve of my ass, throbbing with barely restrained lust against the thin fabric of his own trousers. I felt suddenly, deliciously wanton, ca
ught half-naked between two fully dressed men, both of whom wanted me.

  ---

  We were all three naked by then, my tank top and panties long since stripped away, and I felt Isa nudging insistently between my legs, his hands on my breasts as Kavi stroked his down my back, his lips roving over my neck and shoulders, up to the shell of my ear. I moaned and shivered as I spread my legs wider, gasping as I arched my back, wanting Isa inside of me. I was hovering right on the precipice of desire.

  “Please,” I whispered softly, my hands tangling in Isa’s hair as he nipped at my collarbone again, grinding against me teasingly.

  “Is this what you want?” Isa asked, reaching down so that the tip of his cock brushed against me, just close enough that one thrust would bury him inside of me, where I ached to feel him.

  “Yes,” I hissed, as Kavi bit lightly at my neck, kissing the same spot to soothe the sting the moment that he did. “Yes, yes, please!”

  Isa moved forward a fraction, sliding into me by an inch, and behind me I felt Kavi throbbing against me, his hips moving ever so slightly. “Like this?” Isa whispered, sliding another inch further, and I moaned with pleasure and frustration, caught between the two men so that I could only have as much as they gave me.

  ---

  “What do you want, Ravenna?” Kavi asked, one finger sliding slowly inside of me, and I moaned. He knew what I wanted, could tell in every inch and movement of my body that I wanted Isa, and him too, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I felt Isa trembling against me from things that had nothing to do with the cold. “What if I tell him that we are his, if he is ours?”