Her tongue met his, and she gave a quiet gasp of apparent pleasure at the touch. He tasted her, finding the faintest sweetness, and before he realized it he was stroking her hair, drawing the ribbons away from her body with slow, attentive motions.
"You came to me before," he whispered. "You came to be with me."
She raised her arms to embrace him, lying down beneath him. As before, the ribbons began to unwind themselves, without his help: soon she lay naked on a nest of them, her fair hair splayed carelessly in a fan over the slick green grass. The last of the ribbons—those wrapping her eyes, of course, and her pretty choker—remained in place, but she arched to him with eager, supplicant motions.
Questions rambled through his mind, but Conall's body wanted only to take this impossible beauty once more. He wanted to trace the lines of her limbs with his caresses, kiss her neck, shoulders, breasts, and belly. He wanted to part those pristine thighs and gaze upon her pink cleft, to feel the softness of it as she melted to him, her stone stiffness easing into ardent need.
He laid atop her, gently holding his weight on his arms, feeling her the length of his body. He kissed her face, running fingers through her hair as he brought her mouth to his, brushed his lips over her cheeks, her brow, even the tip of her nose. All the while, he felt his response building. Soon his clothes were too much in the way, but he could hardly tear himself from her long enough to strip off his shirt and shuck his pants. She helped, those articulate hands soft on his skin: the tips of her fingers ran down his chest, delicately engraved nails rasping over the dark curls of hair. He seized her hand and kissed each perfect fingertip, the inside of her wrist, down the length of the limb until he came to her chest.
She moved to meet him; Conall nuzzled the twin mounds of her breasts, rubbing his warm cheek along the tender shape of them, gently blowing warm breath over their pert tips. The mere sensation of that breath upon her brought a silent, stirring groan from her; though she made no sound, her body rolled to him, her head lolling back in the grass as her white lips parted in pleasure, and he understood it entirely.
Slipping his hands beneath her torso to lift her closer, he brushed his mouth over each nipple, barely touching, planting light, fleeting kisses to them. He could feel the tension in her by the languid, wanting motion of her arms, her hips: she arched her spine, offering herself up to him, pulling him to her breasts in desire.
He kissed more deeply this time. Teasing, he traced the tip of his tongue around the barely perceptible ring of darker porcelain marking the sensitive tips, before taking each tight peak into his mouth. The cold bud, like a sweet chip of ice on his hot tongue, thrilled him. Though crafted like fine china, her skin proved responsive as any other woman's. She exhaled sharply, her fingers tightening in his hair, and he wanted to immerse her completely in deep pleasure. He wanted to experience her total surrender to him and carry her to unimaginable heights.
"Sweet...little...doll..." he whispered between kisses, beginning to move down her body, leaving a trail of mischievous, hinting delights. "Beautiful...cemetery doll..."
She tightened when he reached her stunning white sex. He slid his arms under her thighs, curling hands around to ease them apart, and, as before, he began merely by nuzzling. Yes, here, her flesh grew soft and warm. He found her tiny bud of pleasure with the blade of his nose and traced it with worshipful adoration. He breathed on her again: she writhed. Even her gray ribbons curled up from the ground in arching, needful tension.
His tongue dipped between the folds of her pussy, drawing a long, slow line up the valley of rosy pink flesh. The heat and scent of her drove him wild; his kisses found her ready, silky, delicious. He would savor her until he had her shaking beneath him, until the memory of her helpless rattling porcelain had been replaced with the needful, fervid trembling of a woman on the edge.
She lifted her hips as he stroked his tongue up and down her cleft, growing hotter, wetter. When he slid his tongue inside her, he sampled the very real, sultry savor of her essence. She'd become slick, so ready for him, and he sampled her generously, licking her with deep, hungry motions. As he lavished her sweet pussy, she undulated to him, twisting in the grass, hands balled into tight fists. She thrashed her head and he believed he had her truly in the throes. Still he licked slower, with more deliberate, broader motions, until one bright, sudden, and desperate word came to him in ghostly whisper.
Please!
He obliged. Changing his rhythm, he flicked the flat of his tongue over her clitoris before plunging the tip inside of her. She came up from the grass, rocking with him while he repeated the pleasure, feeling for her change in tension or the groan of her voiceless ecstasy. He'd grown hungrier, though, hungry to taste her coming against his mouth, feel her muscles squeezing tight. There were plans beyond the first orgasm, but he could hardly think of them as he drove her higher and higher, marking every twitch and quiver of her body.
She lifted long legs to wrap them behind his neck as she reached the point of no return. It swept her up, and her thrusting hips demanded him as she climbed, until finally she paused, going completely rigid for one hesitant breath.
Then her climax broke and she fell into violent, clenching orgasm. The taste of her cum ran over his tongue, wild and sharp, setting his mind and mouth to ravenous need. He wanted more—he had to have more.
Before her orgasm subsided he mounted her, sliding up between those crossed legs until he could sink his rigid cock into her in one smooth, hard motion.
The doll threw her head back with an expression of overwhelming bliss. Her legs tightened to hold him inside her as her pussy tightened around his girth, still seizing and quivering.
"Ah, yes," he breathed, staring down at her. "Yes...you feel...so ready."
More than ready—her first orgasm subsided into an immediate second, tightening on him with renewed demand. He moved out of pure, mindless hunger, surging, withdrawing from her heat with slow deliberation and plunging deep again.
His doll caught his rhythm readily and moved with him, her expression intent, seeming to meet his own stare as he claimed her. His thrusts came hard, but her wetness wanted him, tantalizing and sweetening each motion. His cock swelled. Pleasure intensified: her tight sheath squeezed him, stoking pressure to life. He imagined his whole body coalescing into one heavy release.
Please, the doll's voice repeated in his head.
"I want to," he gasped. "Yes...I need to. Need to...come...inside of you..."
Something like a breath hitched in her, and Conall gritted his teeth as the rake of pleasure became nearly too intense. He slowed, then picked up; slowed, then pumped harder, working his need to a head.
"Fuck," he breathed. Her porcelain fingernails raked through his hair, and her breasts pressed cool against his hot, damp chest. "Fuck, yes... Fuck...yes—"
The pressure tipped then came crashing down through his whole body. He came hard, burying himself, pouring himself into her. Throb after throb of cum coursed from him into the deep heat of her sex, release so intense it dizzied him. For some moments he irrationally thought he might not stop coming, until finally the tremors started to fade.
"...fuck..." he panted heavily. "...ah...ah, damn..."
Several more moments passed before he found the strength to withdraw. To his shock, the motion struck up a trembling rush, the tightness of her entrance stroking him to a second, practically instant climax: stunned, he gripped his cock in his hand as the first fresh jet of cum shot over her pale, smooth stomach; another and another marked her, breasts, belly and even the freshly dripping pink heat of her pussy. Conall's eyes rolled back, heavy contentment akin to exhaustion settling on him as the last spurts of his cum fell to the grass.
He gazed down at her. She lay supplicant, arms bashfully held close to her chest, but her legs still spread open to him, welcoming him, should he want more. She offered more. She said so with the tender set of her body, and the way she actually nibbled her bottom lip with desire.
&nbs
p; For a moment, he hung over her, seeing her before him, his. A wolf growled in the pit of his heart, predatory and possessive for the ethereal creature. She'd been hurt; he would see her healed. She'd been sorrowful; he would protect her from any more grief. The sheer senselessness of the emotions meant nothing him. He stretched himself over her, taking her by the wrists and gently pinning her to the grass, kissing her. He closed his eyes, merely to taste her, imprint the memory of her mouth under his. She returned his affection, and he imagined he heard a soft, satisfied sigh escape her cool lips.
Time slid by; Conall had no idea how long. They shifted together until he held her in his arms, her smooth back to his chest, her long ivory legs tucked in close to her body as he shielded her with his. In the shining mists all around them, day might have melted into night, then resolved into sharp morning once more. While their bodies touched, though, Conall had no sense of the moments ticking away. Everything here drifted, suspended in a single crystallized stillness: the heart of a cold, white ember.
"What happened to you?" he found himself whispering at one point. He had the sense he'd been speaking for some time, murmuring against her chill ceramic flesh, asking her questions she could not answer. His arms tightened around her as those questions cycled through his mind anew. Who are you? Why do you come to me? Why are you shattered?
The worst of them:
How can I help you?
He believed she heard him, believed she listened to the thrum of his voice in his chest, where she rested her head. She didn't reply, of course not...but she heard. Perhaps, somewhere deep in her own chest, she held all the answers, and ached for the means to communicate them to him.
Conall buried his face in soft curtains of golden mane. She smelled like winter, and evergreens, and rain. He drifted to sleep with the weight of her safe in his arms.
Chapter Thirteen
When Conall woke, he reached out for her, a smile half-formed on his face...but the doll had gone.
Conall blinked, staring at his hand, splayed out in the empty grass. The riverbank around him stood quiet, dark with the light of early evening. The water trilled its way past him and somewhere—back in the cemetery, he imagined—a night bird called out. He lay alone, though, still on the bank.
Still naked.
He winced. Shyla could have come down here looking for him. He would be humiliated beyond the point of contemplating, had his daughter discovered him sleeping bare to the world in ignorant post-coital bliss. He'd probably had a simpering idiotic grin plastered on his face while he slept too.
With a resolute sigh, he reached for his clothing and slid down to the water to wash himself off. The cold splash on his face woke him more. His mind began to catch up to him. He rubbed at the spot right between his eyes, contemplating what had happened here.
You can't deny it, man. Much as you really, really wish you could.
Something is going on here.
"Aye," he answered himself. "Something definitely is."
If he had been inclined to doubt it even now, once he stood up and donned his clothing and readied to return to the path, he caught sight of his first confirmation. The first true sign, telling him his cemetery doll had, in fact, come to him.
A swath of gray silk ribbon had been tied to an old iron bar, once part of the graveyard gates and long absorbed into the gnarling roots of the oak.
Tied. Deliberately.
She wanted him to believe in her.
***
Shyla waited for him on the back porch, clutching a shawl around her shoulders, face white with worry. When she saw him coming up the path she cried out and ran to him, her pale hair streaking out behind her like a banner in the night.
"Where were you?" she demanded as she threw herself at him. Her voice sounded hoarse, as though she'd been crying. Deep shame spiked through him as she squeezed her arms tight around his waist, trembling.
"I came home hours ago! I've been looking for you all day!"
Yes, she'd definitely been crying, and he imagined if he didn't start explaining she would start crying again. He put his hands on her skinny shoulders to calm her shaking, but she pushed him away.
"Where were you?" she demanded.
Her little face wore the faint shadows of tears, her eyes red-rimmed and fever-bright with emotion. The little shawl rippled in the wind and made her appear frail.
"Shyla," he soothed. "Honey, I'm sorry. I fell asleep by the river. I...I didn't mean to, and I certainly didn't mean to sleep away the whole day. But why didn't you come down there after you saw I wasn't in the graveyard?"
She stared up at him, puzzled.
"Dad...I did go down to the river. You weren't there!"
He scratched his head. On instinct he would have corrected her without pause, because of course he'd been there. Hadn't he woken up there but five minutes ago? Shyla couldn't have missed him if she'd come down to the banks and walked a mere ten yards upstream. Why lie to him about it, though?
Was she...afraid? After what happened in the graveyard earlier in the week—after Maya toppled—Shyla might very well want to avoid going down by the stones, or even farther down to the river, without him there to go with her.
His shame deepened. So he'd left her alone, afraid, and with no word of where her father wandered off to, when the home she'd always known had so recently become a place of unfamiliar fright to her.
"Lass," he said gently, brushing back a lock of her hair. "I'm telling you, I...I simply fell asleep down there and...and I didn't realize how long I'd slept."
She frowned at him.
"Were you with her?"
The question startled him. He didn't have to ask which 'her' Shyla meant, though. Even after days of silence on the matter, apparently the doll had been on both their minds.
He sighed. Letting his hand fall to her shoulder, he glanced down toward Maya's ring. He noticed Shyla standing on tiptoe, looking with him, but nothing moved in the circle of stones.
"Shyla," he finally said. "You want to talk about her, don't you?"
"I want to know...if...if we're safe," she said very quietly.
"Let's go inside. I'll try to explain where I went, but...if you searched for me by the river and didn't find me, I'm afraid I might not have an answer for you."
She nodded. Her expression hadn't changed from its worried cast. She appeared older, and something about it tugged at his heart.
His daughter was afraid. Afraid of her home for the first time in her life. Afraid of the graveyard where she'd played for years, never having feared it before. Afraid of the dark.
Afraid...of something he couldn't yet name.
Conall noticed then she had the medallion of Saint Margaret around her neck again. He didn't like it...it brought a twitch of anxiety to his gut. He began to reach out for it, instinctively meaning to take it away. He stopped himself, though. If Shyla did fear the strange things surrounding them lately, and he hadn't been here to comfort her like he should have...he couldn't begrudge her whatever comfort she found for herself. He might have his own particular disagreements with Father Frederick's church, but Conall couldn't keep Shyla from discovering faith there, if she did indeed find it.
He'd asked her how she liked the idea of leaving Whitetail Knoll to go to a convent in the country, a sisterhood of Saint Margaret which Frederick himself endorsed. At the time, Shyla appeared to dislike the idea. Now...might she be reconsidering?
The worry in her eyes, as she gazed down on the dark circle now empty of Maya's familiar presence, made him cold. She did look older: like a child crossing the threshold into young adulthood. New knowledge glinted in her eyes, a tinge of shadow which hadn't been there before. Hadn't even been there yesterday.
Conall bowed his head, cursing himself to think he might be losing his girl.
They walked back up to the house. Once inside, Conall put on a pot of tea. Shyla sat on the sofa before the fire, saying nothing, and it was obvious the kitchen hadn't been touched since breakf
ast. Not a hide nor hair of dinner, which Shyla almost always had ready before he came in from his work. Conall frowned, not out of anger but, instead, deeply anxious. She hadn't even made dinner for herself.
Without mentioning it, he rooted around the kitchen for cooking implements, resolving to make her something right away. He doubted it would be enough to make her forget her crossness at him, but the child needed to eat. He would curse himself double while he cooked, but he would have a meal on the table for her before the hour ran out. He swore it.
The kettle over the fire whistled after some moments. He paused in his work to go retrieve it, but Shyla had already taken it off the fire and brought it to the kitchen table. She said nothing as she retrieved two tin mugs from the shelf and poured them both a cup.
"Thank you, dear," he told her as she handed one to him. He looped an arm around her when she came close, kissing the top of her head. She remained there, leaning against his warmth, for long enough to tell him she forgave him. Presently, though, she returned to the table and carefully mulled over her tea.
"Dad," she finally said. "What is happening?"
He didn't answer right away. Stirring a bit of the beef he'd put on the skillet to fry, he considered the question for several quiet moments.
In the end, Shyla broke the silence for him.
"What is she, Dad?"
Conall drew a heavy breath.
"I...couldn't say. I've never believed in ghosts or ghouls, Shyla, not even as a lad. But...it's hard to imagine she could be anything else, now, isn't it?"
The girl stared down into her steaming cup.
"What if she's...bad?" she asked.
"Bad? What do you mean, bad?"
An unhappy flutter of irritation stirred in his gut even before she said, "Father Frederick...says sometimes...sometimes demons walk among us."
Conall closed his eyes, glad to have his back to her so Shyla couldn't see his jaw clench. "And why exactly is Fred saying these things to you, lass? He shouldn't be putting such ideas into a young girl's head. Did you mention the do—the woman, to him?"
His Cemetery Doll Page 8
