TravelersKiss

by Sherri L. King

  Chapter Eighteen

  Raine surfaced in the Gray Land and sound slid back into her ears like a needle. However, this was not the shady land of yesteryear, a crossroads for spirits to traverse between one realm and another, this was something alarmingly transformed. The Gray Land Raine knew had been a plane of gentle transition for the newly dead, but this place was a maelstrom of chaos.

  Bright, steel-hued lights flashed like lens flares, threatening to blind her. The shapeless, shadowy figures of ghosts were congested, filling up the mist-filled world, wandering aimlessly as always, but the air was rife with panic and the bodiless spirits darted with a furtive desperation that had no place here. These were not quiet ghosts, intent only on their own private business, they were banshees, wailing woeful hymns to unseen gods. The ash of forlorn dread fell on her like dry rot from an unseen cloud hovering low about her shoulders—an atom bomb had detonated and this was the fallout, the detritus settling in the aftermath.

  Something had happened here, something recent and very bad.

  She stumbled through the mass of incorporeal forms, her head ringing with their baleful cries. It was impossible not to absorb some of their pain, impossible not to join them in their worried rush. Before long Raine was running, even though it was pointless—this realm had no length, no up, no down and technically no direction at all. Its exits appeared only when they were needed and location had nothing to do with their emergence. They simply appeared whenever the supplicant was ready to cross through the threshold. Raine suspected it was a little different for everyone depending on the culture or religion—the power of the imagination ruled here—but for her, the way out was always through a door.

  The entire realm quaked around her and more dust fell, blinding her.

  Raine bumped into a solid form and nearly fell. Stumbling, she turned with a startled cry, recognizing him.

  “Grimm!” She grabbed the edges of his cloak. Even without it, she would have known him anywhere. He carried himself with such assured grace and authority, even amidst all this chaos.

  The ebony folds of his cloak were a stark contrast to the never-ending gray.

  “What in mercy’s sweet name happened here?”

  He didn’t say anything. Was, in fact, alarmingly silent, as if he were swallowing all the chaos that raged around them. Raine couldn’t see his face, hidden as it was by the cowl. She gripped his arm. “Grimm?”

  Without a word, he enfolded her in an embrace that smelled so good it made her knees go weak.

  All of her worries melted away at once.

  Her eyes went hot, tears running at the corners as if they were melting. She hadn’t been away from him for more than a few hours but it had felt like a lifetime.

  When she was in his arms like this, nothing else seemed important. He was like a drug and she’d do anything for a fix. She put her arms around him and held on tight, resting her head against his chest for a moment, glad to set her troubles aside and just be with him. It didn’t matter that they were in a war zone. They made their own world together and it was always a safe harbor.

  “Raine…” His voice was no more than a sigh of wind.

  Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest. Something in her memory tried frantically to escape but she grabbed it, brutally threw it back in its dark hole, locked it up tight and threw away the key. This was not a good place for memories. This was a place for forgetting.

  The Gray Land shuddered violently as if to disagree.

  Grimm seemed to understand Raine’s distress. He lifted her to him and when she felt his erection pressing against her, she gasped. It was so hard and heavy. It always surprised her how enormous he was.

  How had she ever truly lived without him? Had food ever tasted good, colors been bright, or had music even been truly beautiful before she’d met him? It all seemed like a washed-out version of the way she knew things could and should be.

  She gladly wrapped her arms and legs around him. Her clothing dissolved like papier-mâché in a lazy summer shower. He did that for her. His skin was bare as well, but his cloak remained. It billowed and grew to an impossible length. It acted like the many tentacles of an octopus, winding around and around her body, binding her to him tighter and tighter. Its voluminous layers consumed her in a billow of darkness, swallowed her in folds of shadow.

  Raine was blinded to the madness surrounding them and suddenly they were alone in the silence together.

  “Raine.” His voice seemed to come drifting from far away, but his mouth was a hairsbreadth away from hers. “You shouldn’t be here. I told you never to come here again.”

  His hand touched her mouth, his gaze following as if he wanted to commit the sight of her to memory. He kissed her and let his hand fall to her breast while pulling her closer, hitching one of her legs higher over his hip. He touched her stomach and then her sex, testing her readiness.

  She was swollen and wet, more than ready. She’d been ready for him since the first moment he’d touched her. He groaned against her mouth, kissed her hard and then scattered kisses over her jaw, down her throat, where he lingered.

  When he entered her, it felt as if she were invaded by a great, Cimmerian gloaming that splashed against the very edges of her own soul, staining it to indigo and red. The swelling twilight rose up inside her, stretching her as his cock stretched her, filling her as his cum would soon fill her, transforming her into a darker creature than she had ever dreamed of being. She dug her fingers into his shoulders, but all she felt was his cloak, the fabric twisting in her grip, confusing her, disorienting her, making him loom larger than ever before.

  “Raine…” His voice seemed closer now, stronger. “I am failing you.”

  She didn’t know what he meant. He felt like a wild thing inside her, not failing her at all.

  He moved in and out. In and out. His tongue laved her throat. Up and down. He bit her. He thrust hard. Soft. Harder.

  “Grimm!” she cried out, tasting the feel of him on the back of her throat. He was still working to fill her, inch by inch, stretching her wide. “Oh my God.” As if unable to stop himself, hearing her cry out pushing him to his limits, he thrust his hips violently until he was fully seated inside her body, touching the throbbing heart of her.

  Her nipples were sore from rubbing against his cloak, or from his cloak rubbing them—his cloak seemed to move with a mind all its own. It was moving now.

  It was pulling her arms up over her head. Binding her wrists tight. Her arms were pulled back, bowing her spine sharply back, impaling her more deeply upon him.

  Grimm took the whole of one breast in his mouth and sucked hard. His teeth felt as sharp as fangs on her delicate skin.

  While his cloak held her bound wrists steady, he gripped her hips and began grinding his between them salaciously. He undulated in a circle between her legs. Raine was sopping wet, her clit tingling every time he entered her. Her body clinging to his desperately, hungrily, craving more, demanding more. Getting more.

  His cloak pulled her inexorably farther until she was lying flat, her breast audibly popping out of his mouth, the wet tug of his lips driving her wild. They were alone in this world of shadow and he fucked her wildly, his long hair swinging about his waist as he pumped his lean hips into her. His hands were on her knees, holding them apart, his fingers dancing on her thighs. Her stomach. Her breasts. Tickling her. He threw his head back and growled lustily, his washboard abs rippling with every motion of his body.

  His cloak had formed a tent around them, a strange chamber of darkness, and Grimm had become a wild animal, a savage lover, and Raine his sex slave, tied up, helpless and completely overcome.

  The musical form of their lovemaking was enough to inspire every bit of the artist in Raine, but too complex for her to understand as a woman—there was something in Grimm’s eyes that frightened her. Something feral and untamed. With a giddy buzz, she realized that no matter how many times they did this, the songs they created together would always be a
little beyond her comprehension. She would never be able to re-create them in a studio—this music was something they could only make together like this.

  The bonds on her wrists pulled again until she was practically standing on her head. Now Grimm was fucking her on a downward stroke, his cock stuffing her so full that at a glance, she could see an excess of his swollen flesh overflowing between her legs at this extreme angle, and yet somehow it was still immensely pleasurable and not at all awkward. His cloak supported them both, riding invisible pockets of air and magic.

  She watched him pinch her clit with his fingers, most of him lost in shadow. She watched as he licked his fingers with his long tongue and then rubbed his glistening digits over the heat of her swollen flesh. Panting, Raine watched him buck his hips into her until his face was slack and his eyes were glassy with passion.

  His sinfully sentient cloak repositioned her again and she was on her knees in front of him, her ass pitched high. It had to be for this to work, because he was so tall and his cock was so huge. This angle allowed him to penetrate her so much more deeply that they both began crying out, mindless with ecstasy. Grimm’s hands kneaded the curves of her buttocks, his head flung back as he sang his pleasure wantonly.

  If not for the support of Grimm’s cloak, Raine would have collapsed in a boneless heap when she came. Instead she screamed his name and quivered, her cunt milking him like a hungry mouth. Grimm thrust his hips into her with enough force to injure a lesser woman, and shouted her name again and again while his body pumped into hers a hot jettison of creamy cum.

  They panted, recovering. But how did one recover from such a hurricane wind of stormy passion?

  The world around them shook and Raine heard a vicious howl, like the cry of a million zombie hyenas thirsting for blood.

  “What was that?” she gasped.

  Suddenly Grimm’s cloak slithered away, freeing her. He pulled his cock out of her sheath, leaving her feeling empty and chilled. “I am so sorry, Raine,” he whispered, stirring the hair at her temple. “I am failing you,” he said again. He buried his face in the hair at her nape. “I cannot keep us separate anymore. She is inside me now…I’m trapped inside her… I cannot keep you safe here.” His voice broke. “You have to flee.”

  Alarm and confusion warred within her. “I don’t understand. Grimm, please, try to make sense. Who is she? Who are you talking about?”

  Raine’s clothes reappeared on her body. Grimm lifted her to her feet and brushed her hair back from her face. He gave her the strangest look.

  Haunted. He looked haunted.

  “I’m not really here, Nightingale. I’m trapped inside—”

  Raine wanted to reach out and tell him it was going to be all right, that she was with him and that no matter what was troubling him, as long as they were together, everything would be fine. She extended her hand, about to do just that.

  Without another word, Grimm vanished.

  Stunned, Raine could only stand there, staring at the vacant place where he’d been.

  The reality of the Gray Land came back with a whoosh that nearly deafened her. Raine blinked, hurt and confused. Bright lights flashed, sending her reeling. “Grimm? Grimm!”

  If he could hear her, he didn’t answer.

  She felt like an idiot, but still she called for him a few more times before giving up. She didn’t understand. What had just happened? Had she imagined it all? It was so hard to think straight with all this noise and movement going on.

  No, it couldn’t have been her imagination, surely. Raine winced at the tenderness between her legs—no matter how elaborate a hallucination, there was no mistaking that feeling of being so recently possessed by Grimm.

  What was she to make of all this then? She had to get out of here, go someplace where she could think clearly.

  Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes, opened a door in her mind, stepped through into—

  Sunlight.

  And heat.

  Not yet pain. But it soon might be. Raine squinted against the glare of the sun overhead, tears already wet on her cheeks as her eyes protested the light. The sun was a bully in the sky, an oppressive force reminding her that she didn’t belong here. She looked about, blind from the light. Where was she now?

  She stumbled over a low shoulder, noticed the familiar stretch of road under her feet…

  “Ugh, you’ve gotta be kidding me. Seriously.” Her shoulders sagged and she slunk off toward the tree line to find some shade and gather her thoughts. Raine was getting tired of this place. She really wished she’d wrecked her car near Disney World or someplace halfway interesting. “This is getting so old.” With a sigh, she put her back against the trunk of a tree and was just about to sink onto the dew-soaked ground when she heard the clearing of a throat from behind her.

  “How is it you smell so lushly of Grimm’s touch, when The Traveler has been dead now for a sennight?”

  Raine spun, lost her footing and fell on the forest floor.

  In a full-blown panic, she looked up and met Lord Daemon’s golden gaze. Her blood turned to dry ice in her veins, burning her tissues with frostbite, filling her lungs with carbon dioxide.

  The word echoed in her ears.

  Dead…dead…dead…dead…

  “What are you talking about?” Her tongue was thick as mud behind her teeth.

  His head tilted one way, then another. “Let it simmer awhile, it’ll come to you.”

  “Get away from me,” Raine hissed.

  He lifted his nose to the wind and breathed deeply, his nostrils flaring. “I smell the ghost of a dead Traveler on your skin, yet the scent is most strange. I think, perhaps, you have secrets to share.” His shining gaze fell on her with the weight of a sheik’s ransom and her heart sank low in her belly as she drowned beneath a wave of dread.

  Grimm wasn’t dead; she’d just been with him. No way. It wasn’t possible. A sennight? Was Daemon being deceived into thinking Grimm was gone or was she missing something?

  Whatever, she knew for certain that Grimm was alive and well.

  She still tasted his kiss on her mouth.

  The fluttering thought that had assaulted her in the Gray Land, the one she had thought locked away, now broke free of its prison and flew loose in her mind.

  No.

  Grimm wasn’t dead.

  He couldn’t be.

  But…

  Why hadn’t he been there with her last night, with the others? Why had he disappeared when Emily had come to their apartment? And why had everyone tiptoed around every mention of Grimm? Even referring to him in the past tense.

  With a jolt like a lightning strike, Raine finally remembered…

  She recalled why she’d lost her memories…

  She understood why she had been afraid to delve too deeply into her subconscious, why she had shied away from what her friends had said about her destroying the entire Horde army. It hadn’t been the act of war that had brutalized her mind into wiping itself clean like a hard drive being reformatted, no, it had been something far more traumatic than that.

  What could have been more traumatic than witnessing the death of an entire army of ravenous, bloodthirsty monsters?

  Raine finally remembered everything…and she immediately wanted to forget again.

  She understood that there were worse things than waking up with no knowledge of who you were, what your past was or even what your future might be. There was knowing with certainty that your future was a wasteland, an empty battlefield strewn with the bodies of those who had loved you, of those you had loved, and the realization that you were the only one left standing amidst the blood and the carnage you alone were responsible for.

  There were far worse things than forgetting.

  There was remembering.

  Eyes wide, mind clear, aware at last of what she’d done, Raine began screaming.

  The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,

  Which is enduring, so be deep!

  Heaven have
her in its sacred keep!

  This chamber changed for one more holy,

  This bed for one more melancholy,

  I pray to God that she may lie

  Forever with unopened eye,

  While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!

  —Edgar Allen Poe, The Sleeper

  Chapter Nineteen

  Seven Days ago…

  Standing at her side, Grimm regarded the vast army and had to take a moment to collect his thoughts. “I have never seen so many gathered in one place.”

  “I called all of them. Unless some are too weak to make it this far, this is the whole lot.” She took his hand, holding it fast, and glanced over her shoulder at the rest of the team. “You guys ready?”

  “This is insane, even for you.” Emily’s eyes were huge in her pale face as she surveyed the mass of Daemons. It looked like an ocean of frothing death, all teeth and nails and glowing eyes.

  But Raine knew they weren’t the real danger. Something much worse was waiting in the Wastes. It had always been there, hiding, poisoning the landscape with its presence. The Shikars just hadn’t known it was there, hadn’t thought to even look for it. Meeting that abomination would be the real battle.

  This was really what the Horde war had been about all along.

  “This is the way it ends,” she said, and her stomach fluttered. I hope, she amended. Please let it end here.

  Raine had known on some level from the first moment her mind had touched on the Horde’s. Their shared consciousness had left no room for secrets and she had sensed the danger even in those early days of her captivity. She had known it would one day come to this. The Leviathan would never stop hunting Raine and now she could no longer afford to run.

  “I don’t trust them,” Emily reminded her.

  “The Horde will do as I say,” Raine assured her. “They will fight for us. Anyway, their numbers are what matter, not their smarts. We don’t need them to think, just follow orders, which they will do,” she explained. “Don’t worry about them. Just worry about the Leviathan.”