When there was no up and there was no down, there was no way to tell who was on top and who was on bottom. Who moved on whom, with or against? There was no dominant position, no passive. Who could say they moved first? Neither could. While Grimm was inarguably pure, unconquerable predominance, he was also a force that could stealthily conquer. Here in the middle of their cosmic mating ground it was no different. He surprised her—besieged her before Raine even had a chance to arm herself with fear.
The breadth of him was the first thing to tear down her defenses. While she had been afraid he would tear her apart—quite literally, actually—he instead gently, but insistently, stretched her with the very broad head of his cock until she was gasping and moaning her amazed pleasure into his mouth. His tongue delved deeper now, as if his kiss was testing the waters of her willingness to continue. And she was very, very willing. So willing that she was wet and slick around the crown of him pressing inside her.
Soon she was panting, eager, her fingers clenching and unclenching in his hair. Her legs were squeezing around him. Raine’s heart was beating so fast she was afraid it would fly out of her chest and start fluttering around their heads, maybe even start hitting him for taking so long. She had never been more excited in her life. If she could’ve pumped her fists in the air she would have, but she was so scared something might go wrong, when everything was so perfect and amazing, that she didn’t dare.
Hurry, oh hurry. She whimpered. Oh yes, that’s it. She sighed with bliss.
He slid in a few inches. The way he stretched her made her feel as if she had swallowed liquid brass that had twisted and tempered into a Funde drum about halfway down its way to her womb. It played an insistent, primitive rhythm that demanded more, more, more.
The rough texture of his fingers learned the softness of her skin, leaving no inch undiscovered. He found her nipples and toyed with them, plucking like strings. She sang into his mouth. Her tongue found his, drew it into her mouth and sucked on it like a sweet treat. Her hips bucked against him and she was satisfied to capture his gasp of surprise. His hands fell on her waist to hold her still. Then, as if he couldn’t stop himself, he grabbed hold of her buttocks and squeezed, drawing her against him with a sharp jerk.
They both gasped.
He slid in a few more inches.
Fuck, how long was he?
Thirteen inches…
Geez, how could she know that?
Her body melted over him like sweet-cream butter. It was a smooth, even slide onto his thickness, but he still stretched her to the point that she could barely breathe around him. Raine was grateful for the absence of gravity now, because gravity itself would have acted against her. It would have pulled her over him when she wasn’t ready for more. And there was so much more of him left.
Grimm’s kisses rooted into her throat. He clearly adored her throat and enjoyed lavishing his attention there. He sucked on the tender skin, nibbled and nipped until she stung. Her sex throbbed, ached and clung to him, clamping down on his engorged phallus reflexively when he found that invisible connection between her throat and her clit and drew on it with his exquisitely talented lips.
Grimm cried out against her skin when her body locked down on him. It was a wild and broken cry that made her answer in kind. Her hands skirted the length of his arms and she dug her nails into his bulging muscles. He was so strong that it made her feel like a goddess to move him to make any noise, let alone such a raw, masculine call like that.
Sound didn’t carry in space the way Raine was used to hearing it, but she had never heard anything so magnificent as Grimm in the midst of his passion. She wanted to re-create it at once, and laved her tongue up the fine column of his throat while deliberately tightening the muscles of her sex on his cock. When he cried out again, Raine locked the sweet melody away in her memory to recall at her leisure, enthralled by every nuance of his pleasure.
He clamped his hands on her hips and with a roar that threatened to split open her skull, he slammed into her with the full force and invasion of his form.
Raine screamed. Her body detonated like a hydrogen bomb, fracturing into an agglomeration of singing, ululating starlight. One single note strung forever in her most perfect pitch. It was a music she had strived for all her life but could never quite achieve. Grimm brought it forth with a surge of his hips and a grip of his hands. His voice joined hers and they formed a melody, so enervating it could have started a revolution, so heartrending it could have ended a world. They made that song, that perfect aria, together.
Inch after inch, his body surged into her. Stretched her. Filled her and filled her, overfilled her. Stretched and filled her more. It never stopped. He never stopped. He rode her hard and she demanded more. Her breasts were in his face and he bit and sucked her nipples. He licked her skin, scraped the burr of his stubble against her flesh, rubbed his face and hair all over her.
She held him, raining kisses on his head and face and shoulders. Her hands touched him wherever she could reach. When she gripped his hips and demanded he pump into her faster, harder, he had to grab her wrists and hold her still. They trembled against each other, and he breathed into her mouth until they had both calmed just a little before he started again.
Her clit rubbed against him until it was swollen so big she was afraid it would burst. She was almost afraid it wouldn’t. His fingers found it so many times, and every time they did, Raine started singing again. When her fingers found his nipples and when he let her tongue taste them, he sang again too.
The floating ice crystals did melt against their skin now. Raine grabbed at them as they passed and rubbed them over Grimm’s skin. He rubbed them against her clit until she sobbed into his mouth and begged for release. The ice crystals floated away as near-perfect liquid spheres.
He pulled out of her until she was almost empty. When he did that she wanted to crawl over him and slam herself back down, but he would never let her. He was too strong to fight and more stubborn even than she was. But he couldn’t stay that way for long and he always thrust himself back into her. Every time he did, he was so big she felt an instant of thrilling fear that he might not fit this time. But he always did. And it always felt so amazingly good she feared it might kill her.
Raine felt a subtle stirring in her center when Grimm began thrusting and withdrawing a little faster. His cock had grown steadily harder. It had even gotten thicker. Heavier. Maybe longer as well. She was so wet and slick, swollen and hypersensitive it was hard to tell. His balls were slapping against her now, the sound carrying strangely in the vacuum, and he was riding her harder than ever.
Harder.
Faster.
Rougher.
Oh God.
Raine screamed.
Grimm roared.
She didn’t know if she blacked out or if he dissolved the world again, but the next thing she knew she was lying in bed and he was semi-hard inside her, lying underneath her, breathing heavily and unevenly. He was drawing circles on the small of her back with both of his index fingers. Her nipples were raw and aching. Her sex even more so. Her entire body throbbed from head to toe. Suddenly she could breathe air again.
She rose up on the mattress, getting her knees under her, so that she could sit straddling him. While he was only semi-aroused now, he was still far larger this way than any man she’d ever seen or heard of and it was shocking to say the least. It was a long while before she found her voice.
Testing her body and quite simply unable to help herself, Raine rocked back and forth on him. They both sighed heavily. Geez, she would never get enough of him. What had just happened to make her a junkie like this?
She put her hands on his stomach. His eyes were heavy, almost closed, but he was looking at her with his strange eyes beneath a heavy fringe of dark lashes. His hair was a shocking mass of black and crimson tangles on the velveteen sheets that encased his fluffy pillows.
“Grimm?”
“Yes?”
His voice
was languid and deep. Lazy. She loved the sound of it. She wanted to hear it like this every day from now until forever.
She smiled secretly and lowered her torso over him. Folding her hands on his chest, she rested her chin on them and listened for his heart but couldn’t hear it over the pounding of her own. “You’re right. You could grow on me.”
He chuckled and it flexed that part of him that was still buried deep inside her. She gasped and moved over him again. It felt deliciously sensuous.
He held her still. “Rest a moment.”
Raine watched him, composing in her head, only moving a little every now and then. Eventually Grimm growled and lifted her off him. He bit the shell of her ear and settled them so that he could spoon her from behind. “I said rest. Much as I want to, you can’t overdo it, Nightingale. I won’t hurt you.”
Well, then he was serious. Better do as he said.
He’d used contractions after all—multiple ones.
Chapter Eleven
Raine lay awake listening to the turning of the world.
She couldn’t sleep.
She and the planet kept each other company. For a while it was nice. No, it was more than that. The rhythm of the Earth in motion was enthralling. It was a perfect lullaby, a tempo that never changed. But it did not help her fall asleep.
Raine wanted to rest, but she wasn’t close to being tired, even after all she’d been through. Her mind was fully alert, her body was energized, senses heightened and keen. Rest would not come. So she found herself composing to the even, constant tempo set by the world—how had she never noticed it before now, and how was it she noticed it at all? What had changed inside her that she could hear this blue sphere moving through space?
When her internal symphony couldn’t distract her wayward mind, she waited long enough to be certain Grimm slept deeply so that she might creep out of bed without his noticing. In the bathroom, Raine sponged off and washed her face, patting it dry with a thick, soft towel. The geode chambers fascinated her, but pent-up—energy? Anxiety? Aggression?—kept her from fully investigating each faceted corner like she might otherwise have done if she were in a more stable mood. The bathroom itself was a wonder, and even the fixtures were made of crystals. It was the most mind-boggling thing she’d ever seen, but still somehow not enough to engage her.
There was a comb made of bone on a tray by the sink and Raine decided to tackle the very real problem of the mass of tangles her hair had become. There was a full-length mirror on one wall. Raine realized she hadn’t paused to really study herself since coming to in front of the hearth. That had seemed like a lifetime ago, but it had only been, what, a night and a day? Without a wristwatch and without windows or sunlight, it was impossible for her to know how much time had passed, and this realization suddenly made her very uncomfortable.
Why did it matter so much? Losing twenty-four hours was no skin off her crooked nose. She shoved at a boulder-sized fist of anxiety lodged in her stomach but it wouldn’t budge. The time, the passage of it, the unknown nature of it, bothered her.
Raine approached the mirror but hesitated to look too closely.
The lights were dim in this room, but Raine saw her reflection begin to take shape. As she’d previously noted, she had rounded out in some places, thinned out in others. Her hair was a pale corona around her head, reaching well past her shoulders, down the middle of her back, thin but frizzy in wild waves. Of course that hadn’t changed; the one thing she’d gladly alter and it was exactly the same, darn it. She was still gangly and awkwardly put together—but she was healthy and wouldn’t complain or else she feared the universe would turn around and put a boil on her ass the size of a dinner plate.
Her shuffling feet brought her even closer to the mirror until only a few inches separated her from the glass.
Raine’s features at last swam into clear focus, and she gasped.
Her face was leaner, the skin taut over the bones, deep shadows playing across her eyes and cheeks, lending her a pained, haunted look that instantly frightened her, because she still wasn’t exactly clear on what had earned her such a tortured countenance. Her twenties seemed to have passed her by, both in age and experience. Wisdom and war-torn heartache battled for supremacy in her visage.
And her eyes…
The comb dropped from her hands and clattered to the floor with a bang that shattered the quiet like a gunshot.
Oh God.
Something was wrong with her eyes.
Those aren’t my eyes…
But they were. Even as Raine denied the proof staring back at her, she knew it wasn’t some trick of the light or stress-induced hallucination. When she touched her face, the woman in the mirror followed suit. The reflection was hers. But the eyes were not hers—they didn’t belong in her haunted face.
Raine had blue eyes. These were not blue.
Raine had normal, plain, human eyes. There was something fundamentally wrong with these eyes—even aside from the color, which was alien enough.
Blood like ice in her veins, terror sweat beading on her upper lip, Raine leaned closer to the mirror, pressing her nose to the glass, widening the offensive orbs to better see all the imperfections, all the abnormalities that made her want to run screaming from the room.
Her irises were an unholy amalgamation of brightly glowing orange, candlelight yellow, flashing cornflower blue, royal blue, foggy gray and onyxian black. The too-vivid colors ran in uncountable striations throughout her irides, as if painted with a finely pointed sable brush dripping with oil paint. In addition, the dilation of her pupils wasn’t confined to the borders of neat little spheres like pupils should be. Instead they formed runny obsidian yolks in the center, the uneven darkness bleeding out into the color of her irides. It lent her eyes the illusion of constant movement every time her pupils dilated and contracted. The whites of her sclera were also affected. They had a strange metallic sheen, cloudy, almost silver, and when the light caught it, Raine’s eyes appeared to glow from within.
The longer she looked at herself the more agitated she became, but not for the obvious reason—that these were not the eyes she had been born with. Her initial shock passed faster than she realized, followed by waves of emotions that made no rational sense to her conscious brain…
At first.
Raine knew she should have run screaming, but she didn’t. She should have been surprised, shocked, even terrified beyond all human comprehension—initially she was, for a few seconds, but then she simply…wasn’t. It was impossible and strange, but this all seemed so familiar. Somehow.
All through the night she had been suffering from extreme déjà vu, and not just through reliving the memories of her accident and kidnapping. It was more than that.
She had known Grimm’s touch on her body.
They had fit together so well, it was as if they had been together a thousand times before—not just as two kindred spirits in half-fevered dreams, but as two flesh-and-blood lovers.
Grimm was a passionate lover and that, coupled with his immense size, should have hurt her.
It should have injured her.
Shouldn’t it have?
His beautiful, perfect but enormous cock should have stretched her so much that she couldn’t possibly be standing right now—not after their first time. He had fucked her hard and every second had been pure bliss. She’d been eager for more, but he had been the one to rein in their passion and caution against too much of a good thing. She should at least be stiff or sore. Right? The man was mind-bogglingly huge—it just wasn’t possible to feel this good after what they’d done…not if it was the first time they had lain together.
There was so much more that disturbed her. The way she’d thrust her hand into the gemstone floor was like something out of a comic book—nothing Raine had ever imagined could have prepared her for that, but she performed the feat as if she’d done it a thousand times. She hadn’t even freaked out afterward—she’d been more involved with her and Grimm’
s tiff than with discovering she had yet another superpower to go with all the others she had only recently learned…
Was she mental? Had she completely lost her mind?
Or was none of this actually new—had she been through this before?
Raine thought hard on what it would mean, if that last suspicion proved true. How it would change her world and everything she knew of it. She found herself delving deep inside her mind, searching frantically through her memories.
She was so afraid of what she would find.
Raine forced herself to search her own strange, turgid stare in the mirror’s reflection. She wouldn’t look away no matter how much she wanted to. Perhaps the answers lay there.
If there was a memory somewhere inside her to dredge up, she had to find it. She was desperate to understand. She just wanted answers; it didn’t matter if she liked them or not, she needed them now or she was going to go insane. She had to remember if she could…
The present world fell away as memories rose up in a churning tidal wave. Raine’s past took her down like the tentacles of some hidden leviathan that had simply been waiting for an invitation. Yet in reality, this time it was Raine who swallowed herself, transforming her sense of time into a Möbius strip upon which she could find no beginning and no end. Past and present fused into one and she fell into a trance that began in the bathroom and ended in the cavern.
Long ago…
Where the Horde waited.
* * * * *
Then…
It always stunned Raine just how bad the pain was every time she came back to herself. Nothing ever prepared her for the reality of it. She would have given anything to escape it forever.
Death would have been an easy out.
She prayed for death every second she was awake. But Raine had to keep fighting the good fight. The world needed her and she knew it. It wasn’t an easy burden but it was hers and that was okay. The Shikars needed her—the Daemons had gone after Niki last time. Who would they go after next? It was her duty to endure long enough to find out and somehow get word to the Shikars so that they could stop the Horde.
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