by K. A. M'Lady
My voice, thick with emotion, rough with the change that still lingered just beneath my skin like a coming storm called out, “Leave us,” to the room in general, never taking my eyes from his. Part of me was afraid of what was to become of me. Yet part of me, the side where the creature lay waiting in anticipation, knew they couldn’t get out of the room soon enough.
“Rihker…” Ien began, but Gimlit silenced him.
“No, Ien. This is her journey. Only she can make it. Whatever her choices. You’ve advised her—that is all you can do. Her Way has been written. It is now up to us to see that she is protected.”
Gimlit’s words trailed away as the door closed behind them. As it is written, so will be the Way, I thought as I reached for Jade.
He tasted like sunshine and longing and all of the promises of home I’d never known were possible. As I clung to him, tasting and delving into the heat of his mouth, I could feel the soft, slow dance of our two beasts sliding against each other. This was a mating ritual older than time, and instinctively I knew that together we would set our beasts free.
Jade’s strong, sure fingers deftly removed my shirt and as skin met skin, I knew that this was now my path. The right path. There would be no going back for me. That whatever happened I would be forever changed—but I would be okay.
As soon as his lips moved from mine, his teeth and tongue grazing along my jaw to find the soft spot at my neck, I felt my beast once again stir within me. She too was growing restless as our two beast mingled as one within the fire of our auras.
His deft fingers on my breast brought a gasp of yearning as he caressed the fullness into a hard, tight peak; my mind visualizing his tongue and lips where his fingers followed. As he trailed hot kisses down the line of my throat to the hollow of my collarbone, past the curve of my breast, he cupped me like an offering as he took the swell of my engorged nipple into his mouth, suckling me deeply, whirling the bud between tongue and teeth before moving on to the next.
I began writhing beneath him, the heat of his mouth sending shards of desire to course through my limbs; to pool between my legs until my beast and I were both frantic with need, hunger, and bordering on explosive heat.
My chest was heaving as I tried to control not only my breathing, but that of the Wolf that seemed to be running rampant inside me. I didn’t understand fully what was happening to me but I knew that Jade would never hurt me. That he would never allow something else to hurt me. And that Gimlit would never dream of leaving me, if he thought for a second that I would be harmed.
“Let her free, Rihker,” Jade said as he began to burn a path of wet searing kisses down my abdomen.
I didn’t understand what he meant and with the way his mouth felt on my body, the things that his tongue and teeth were causing me to feel, I don’t think I really cared. I just didn’t want him to stop.
“Show me,” I whispered, too aroused to stop myself. Too far gone with passion and hunger to control myself, or the creature that was running wild inside me.
I felt his hands on the tops of my pants and thinking that he would undo them and slip them off of me, I all but quivered with yearning, wanting him to hurry. When I felt the tip of a claw skim the edge of my waist and I heard the material rip down the sides as though the very seams were splitting I arched up on my elbows. The sight before me was not what I expected.
Jade’s hands were extended and the tips of his fingers sported claws the size of half of my finger; one slicing down the side of my pants as he tore through them like a knife to butter. I looked from his hands to his eyes and caught the sheepish look on his face as he said, “I am Alpha, Rihker. I have known for some time. It is why the creature within you calls to me. It is why she has chosen me over my brothers.”
I looked at him again, silently for a second, as though my own Wolf were calculating the creature and the man before me. “They don’t know.” I didn’t make it a question.
I didn’t give him a chance to respond, just pulled him to me as he tossed my clothes and the remnants of his own to the floor. I didn’t care why he hadn’t shared this information with them. I didn’t care why they hadn’t known. It was something we’d work out after. Right now I wanted nothing more than for him to fill me. To fill me with the heat of him before my creature decided to find another way.
At this point in the game, it was I who was flying blind. It was not a state that I liked to be in. But for some unholy reason, the Prophets were choosing to grant me another gift—if you wanted to call it a gift. I was about to fully become one with the beasts—my own beast. What that would mean to my Pixie powers, I had no idea. What that would mean to the Prophecy itself, again, I had no idea. But at the moment, with the heat and hunger of the Were rushing through me like a storm of violent need, I really didn’t care. All I wanted right now was Jade.
His lips on my mouth and the touch of his once again human fingers between my legs brought a thrill of desire rushing through me as the inferno inside me threatened to spark out of control. I could feel my creature begin her pacing anew. When he opened me, then slipped one finger inside, it brought a growl of approval from deep within me.
Jade took the growl as appreciation and kissed me deeper, driving me on as he began to drive my body to a fever pitch. His tongue and finger set an equal pace before another finger slid in with the first. I arched into his touch, needing him closer, needing fulfillment as my beast began to grow wild inside of me.
I was writhing beneath him, my body humming with fire as he prepared me for his entrance. I could still feel our two animals inside me, the thickness of their fur brushing me where no hands had ever touched and my body began to tighten as the beginning of my orgasm started.
Jade suddenly stopped and flipped me over on my belly, his chest hard and hot against my back as he pulled my hips up against the hardness of him, positioning me for his entry. I could feel the hard tip of him rubbing against me, seeking my entrance as he leaned over me and growled in my ear, “I’m going to take you, Rihker. I’m going to take you until you come so hard that you and your Wolf become one in my arms. Until both of you are set free.”
His words stirred me on as he spread my ass cheeks, opened my nether lips and drove the thickness of him deep within me in one hard thrust.”
The force was almost too much, my body quaking around him, trying to adjust to his size as shock waves of electricity spiked through my entire body. Slowly, almost cautiously, he pulled out to the tip of him and then did it again. He did this over and over until I was once again writhing.
Jade set the pace; steady and even until I was groaning with need, pressing myself against him. Pleading for him to take me; to finish this. Until my creature was growling inside of me for more.
The shredding of my pillow right next to my head brought my eyes open as raging sparks of fire and hunger washed through my body. Jade continued to ravage me, his large hands splayed around my waist, controlling our love-play. When I felt his fingers go seeking, searching for lower places of impact on my belly and then reaching for the engorged nub of my desire, wet, and swollen from his voraciousness, my body spiked as I quivered around him.
He stroked me; I clung to the pillow, claws digging into the feather-soft material. This time I noticed the claws extended were from my own fingers, but I didn’t care. My body was too far gone to stop this. Any of it. My body began to clench tighter and tighter around him as he pumped harder and faster inside me, the thickness of him all but reaching my soul.
When my orgasm started, shimmering lights exploded through my vision; brilliant hues of gold, emerald and crimson streaming through my mind like a kaleidoscope. I could even smell the forest, thick with peat moss and the lushness of deep turned earth lingering through my senses. Then, suddenly a blast of cinnamon, sandalwood, and earth and then there was Jade; the rich lush smell of fur, sweat, sex and his body rocking into mine.
The feel of his claws wrapped around me, the softness of his fur mixed with his corded ch
est and arm muscles enfolding me as light—brilliant and white suddenly exploded through my mind in a rapturous glory. It ripped through my limbs in a numbing, fire-filled rush. As my orgasm exploded, I felt something give way deep inside of me. A release like a merging of my soul with that of my she-Wolf—two halves of a whole coming together in a unified circle of light. The light was brilliant and powerful, and it all felt so right.
All that was left for me was acceptance. Delight and acceptance filling me up, leaving me with the one primal instinct left to me—the glorious howl of my Wolf as bliss and acceptance sang through the night, echoing off the walls and rafters before finally settling somewhere deep within my every bone.
That’s how I’ll always remember it—the first time I lay with Jade. Amazing. Amazing and violent and brilliant.
That is, until Kieran tore through the bedroom door and spoiled it. Just the sight of him brought every horrid detail of my screwed-up life crashing back over me in waves. Murky black waves of damnation, which were certain to drown me.
Yet another beautiful sunset gone to shit in a casket.
Chapter Twelve
Well now! The clock of life stopped a few minutes ago.
I’m not in the world any more.—Theology’s a serious thing,
hell is certainly way down—and heaven’s above.—Ecstasy, nightmare,
sleep in a nest of flames.
From Hellish Night by Arthur Rimbaud – A Season in Hell & Illuminations
“Get out!” His voice was filled with so much rage that it shook the glass mirror attached to my dresser along with every window in the room. By the stark blank set of his features, you could definitely tell he was rippin’-pissed and somebody was about to pay for it. He was so pissed that even I was afraid of what he was about to do.
“Kieran, don’t.” I reached for the sheet in an attempt to cover myself. I grabbed the crimson coverlet and Jade made to move off of me, but I caught the glimmer of my claws in the bedroom light and couldn’t help but stop to stare at the strangeness of my newly extended appendages. My heart did a little flip-flop as my nerves somersaulted. I couldn’t keep from staring in horror-filled wonder at my elongated fingers.
They were somehow both beautiful and wicked all at once, and I vaguely wondered what it would feel like to tear through the warmth of flesh as blood began to pool around them; as I tore through to the underbelly of…something.
“What the hell have you done to her?” Kieran raged, stalking towards the bed, his anger pooling around him like a swirling cloak of darkness. As he reached the mattress he lunged for Jade’s throat—just suddenly there and gone—as he tossed him effortlessly across the room.
Jade didn’t have time to even react; he just landed against the wall, his back slamming into the drywall, ripping a fractured crack from where his head bounced off the wall all the way up to the ceiling. Pissed didn’t even begin to cover the emotional turmoil that swarmed through me as I caught the blur of movement from the corner of my site.
At first I was stunned that Kieran had even reacted in such a way, and then I was just furious. Furious with him on more levels than I could even begin to count off my newly clawed fingers. Slowly, as my rage began to boil, I looked up from where I had been staring at my fingers as though I had actually begun counting, to where Kieran knelt on the mattress. With rage fuming inside of me, I felt my Wolf’s hackles begin to rise and knew whatever hope of keeping a civil tongue was far too late.
“Don’t fucking touch him!” I growled, the roll of my she-Wolf coiling tightly inside of me. “You should have been here.”
“Rihker,” Kieran said, his head catching at the sound of my voice as he cautiously took my hand in his, “what has happened?” His eyes took in the disarray of the bedroom, Jade’s partial Werewolf state, and then the subtle changes to my appearance. “Who has done this to you? Tell me and I will destroy them. We can destroy them together. Tell me who has poisoned you with this bloodline, and I will decimate every last one of them.” The concern and conviction that lined his amethyst eyes was the first real emotion I had seen in him for some time.
His extreme anger and concern after the last few months of careful companionship was both interesting and disturbing. I knew that Kieran knew so much more than he had ever let on. But how much and exactly what that ‘more’ could be was what worried me.
Ever since the summer when Kieran had been thrust upon me by the Silent Court we had been taking our relationship very slowly. His behavior tonight just proved that nothing was what it seemed with him.
First off, he had not been here when I called him—when any of us called for him. When we had need of him. He was supposed to hear his people when they needed him. He said he could even hear me. So why hadn’t he come?
And now, now that he had seen what had become of me, now he was pissed. Now he wanted heads to roll?
Kieran had marked me twice as his companion; the companion of a Death Stalker. But because our three days had ended before he could mark me again I was not completely bound to him. I was still my own person—belonging to no man.
He knew damn well that I wasn’t thrilled that he had marked me in the first place. And we both knew that I wasn’t able to remove the marks, nor was he able to give me the third. But we were both living with the choices. Carefully living with the choices and the outcome.
When we had met, the Silent Court had ordered Kieran under house arrest. They told me they didn’t care whose house it was. They even went so far as to use a police investigation as their excuse. But Jirvel, Kieran’s creator had decided to come to town and with her she brought a century worth of anger directed square at Kieran for him leaving her centuries earlier.
It was during one of her bombshell tantrums that the white bitch with teeth decided to take over his home, kill a large handful of his people, torture his first in command, and set the resting place of his brethren on fire. Something that was just not done among the Death Stalkers.
Oh, and let me not forget the final nail in the coffin: the crazy bitch tried to kill the both of us as well, using her own Werewolf flunkies to do her dirty work. So it was pretty much decided that my house was definitely safer. And it cemented the Silent Court’s hold over the both of us.
There was also the fact that there was a war brewing with the Death Stalkers and there had been hints leaking out of the Court of a new Goblin uprising. For reasons I didn’t understand—or reasons no one wished to share with me—Kieran was high up in the ranks of those who would either rule or needed to be killed. So the Court deemed it necessary for him and his band of merry death dealers to stay with me.
Seemed I now possessed Rihker’s halfway house for the indiscriminately dead, furry or soon to be fodder. More Court bullshit, if you ask me. Just one more way for them to attempt to rule my life.
That, and the wee fact that I had somehow supposedly become chosen. Not just chosen, but The Chosen. As in ‘the bringer of all peace to the Other World’. I’m supposed to heal all rifts and fix all strife; I’m to balance the field between the Light and the Darkness—blah, blah, fucking blah.
If you’re buying all that, I’ve got some property in Sherwood Forest to sell you, too. Just a bunch of Other World hou-ha bullshit, if you ask me. But yet again, no one’s asking me.
According to Maebe—the Wandering Wanderling; prophetic teacher to all Other Worldly Creatures, along with half of the population of Other World Zealots, my birth had been prophesized. Written and recorded in the Book of the Way. The book is the ancient text of our people; it is said to hold all of our powers, all our history, and supposedly the fate of our future.
And now it is up to me to save said people from the destruction and degradation that they would certainly suffer at the hands of the Darkness if I don’t take my place in the universe.
That’s right, me, and this whacked-out band of misfits I seem to be acquiring along the way. Somehow, all of our lives are entwined and like as not, we’re stuck with each other
.
But let me tell you, right at this very moment, I am so not liking it.
“She is not merely touched by the Wolf,” Jade told Kieran as he stood up from the floor, naked and gloriously handsome; the thrashing across the room not having affected him whatsoever. “She is now a part of us. She runs as one with the Werewolf. It is a part of her soul.”
His words brought me back from my introspection. With all of the other shit I have going on in my life right now, it seems that now I am not merely just a half-breed any longer. My little run-in with my Werewolf friend may have altered my life more than even I could anticipate.
Oh, I could definitely feel the warmth of the she-Wolf settling inside of me like a long lost piece of my soul coming home as she curled against me, the warmth of her fur brushing along my insides. I’m not certain how it happened or even why, but I was definitely going to get me some answers.
I didn’t quite understand the smugness that crossed Jade’s pale eyes or the calculated look of controlled anger that flashed in Kieran’s before he turned back to face me, but I knew that there was much more to this than either one of them were going to tell me.
I sat there for a second looking from the naked Werewolf to the pissed-off Vampire and knew neither one of them would prove to be forthcoming. It seemed that too many people had a hidden agenda and everybody had secrets to hide. So I did the only thing any smart, irritated hunter with the amped-up power of the Chosen would do. I used my newest Tell. I used The Claiming.
I knew that there was one person who would be thrilled that I’d acquired this new power, and she’d be just as thrilled that I’d truly taken a beast to my bosom as the Prophecy supposedly had foretold.
Maebe appeared in my bedroom in a swirl of grey smoke, a ladle in one hand and a jar of slimy eyeballs in the other. I think if she could have blinked in stunned shock she would have, but having your eyes burned out made the reaction a little difficult.
