The Immortal Queen Tsubame: Ascension

by H. D. Strozier

  The room had to be enchanted because MaLeila had little issue finding the items she needed around the room. She found hair products and a hair tie in the bottom drawer of the dresser in the room and at one of the vanities that Tsubame seemed to be so fond of, she moisturized and combed through her thick locks and found a black stocking to secure it in a shrunken tightly coiled puff that would take her forever to detangle later. When she was done, she searched the drawers and found a loose solid burnt orange chiffon tank dress that just passed her mid-thigh. Then she found a pair of sandals in the closet to protect her feet from the cold stone hall floors.

  Once she honed in on his aura with her senses and determined that he was alone, MaLeila followed it to his room, a level beneath her own. MaLeila made a note to tell Tsubame later that even though she had followed her willingly, being secluded on the top floors was starting to make her feel like the princess trapped and hidden away in a tower like in fairytales.

  She didn’t knock on the door when she got there figuring he had to sense her coming to him. When she entered the room, he was lying on the bed in a tank and lounge pants sans his glamour and scrolling through a tablet, no doubt already researching the fallout of the day’s events.

  “And here I put myself as far away from you as possible so I wouldn’t be tempted to bother you and still you come to me,” he said, grey eyes still looking at the tablet.

  “I thought we could finish our date since it was interrupted by whatever Tsubame needed you to do,” MaLeila said as she sat next to him on the bed.

  Marcel put his tablet down before rolling over to his side and propping his head on his elbow, ebony locks falling in his face as he asked, “Are you sure about this?”

  His question took her by surprise. The only time he had paused to get her reassurance regarding sex when she offered it was their first time together. Since then, he’d never asked for her reassurance again and she’d never stopped him.

  “What do you mean am I sure?” MaLeila asked.

  Marcel sat up and looked her directly in the face, close enough to kiss her if he wanted, but far enough away to resist the urge to.

  “I’m certainly not above being someone’s rebound and I’m certainly not above taking advantage of someone’s breakup to get next to them. I’ve done it before, but I’m not going to do that to you. Not unless I’m sure that you’re sure this is what you really want, that you’ll have no regrets about it later,” he explained.

  MaLeila frowned. “Is that what you think this is? Me rebounding?”

  Marcel shrugged. “Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. That’s why I’m asking you. I may not have heard what you said to Devdan, but obviously something happened between you two before you chose your side and I’m too old to believe that whatever happened has nothing to do with the fact that you’re here now after barely wanting to hold my hand these past couple of weeks.”

  “You’re right.”

  He raised his eyebrow, not in a patronizing matter-of-fact way like she was only telling him something that he already knew, but in a way that indicated MaLeila had caught him off guard.

  “I am,” he stated in an effort to recover.

  “You are.”

  MaLeila’s relationship with Devdan had very much dictated her relationship with all men, just particularly so with Marcel. It had gotten worse when she learned that Marcel was an alternate version of Devdan from another universe, and she thought that her relationship with Marcel was only because he reminded her of Devdan on some subconscious level, making it possibly just as artificial as the relationship forced between her and Devdan to begin with. Marcel’s explanation of the alternate universes helped. So did the realization that it was the differences between the two that attracted her to Marcel more than the similarities. But even as she realized that, she had also needed closure.

  “We’re toxic together. Me and Devdan. We’d never work any other way except by tearing each other apart. We never loved each other. We were just dangerously co-dependent. I realize that now and I don’t want that anymore,” MaLeila explained.

  Marcel looked her directly in the eyes. Usually when he did this, she squirmed, blushed, averted her gaze; but for once she had nothing to hide. There wasn’t anything to find because there wasn’t anything she didn’t want him to see.

  “And what do you want now?” he finally asked.

  MaLeila didn’t hesitate. “You.”

  His lips were upon hers and her hands went to the hem of his tank, lifting the garment up between them. She pulled her lips away from his to remove the tank and while they were already apart, she lifted her dress over her head uncovering her naked body. Marcel didn’t take time to admire her, only pressed his lips back to hers and positioned her thighs so she was straddling him. He lifted his hips to help him get his lounge pants off and she was pleasantly surprised to see that it was the last barrier between them.

  Both naked, he laid back and pulled MaLeila down with him. She caught herself on her hands, separating their lips from each other. Neither was in a rush to reconnect their lips though, eyes locked on each other’s and to MaLeila’s surprise it was so easy to look at him like this, in the same body but without the disguise. She had doubted Marcel before when he said that despite all appearances she and Tsubame were very different from each other to him, but now MaLeila understood what Marcel meant about seeing people with much more than just his physical eyes. Now that she could see him beyond what her naked eyes could see, without the haze of her own doubts, hesitancy, and conflicting emotions, she saw that being with him, regardless of who he looked like, was still the same.

  “What are you waiting for?” MaLeila asked finally. Marcel normally wasn’t this patient, especially not by the time they were both naked. He usually couldn’t keep his hands and mouth off her.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” Marcel said. He grinned up at her, eyes flashing in amusement as he said, “You’re the one that came to me. So go ahead. Ravish me.”

  MaLeila flushed, as comfortable as she was being naked with him, having him touching and fucking her, she wasn’t comfortable with this idea of taking the lead in their sexual encounters. Usually he led and she followed.

  “Don’t act all shy and like you don’t know what to do now. I like to think I taught you well. You sure you want this? Then take it.”

  There was a challenge underlying his tone, and the need to rise to this challenge and prove Marcel that she was just as capable of making him squirm just like he made her made her act. She kissed him once on the lips and then peppered kisses on his face, his jaw, continuing to make her way down his neck, sucking, biting him as she continued to make her way down to his chest. His cock throbbed against her thigh and he grabbed her butt on either side while groaning in her ear. This was the impatience MaLeila was used to, the need to make her his and let her know who she belonged to. A startling sense of ownership and control suddenly possessed her. She didn’t mind belonging to him, but she would certainly make sure he knew that the inverse was true today.

  She repositioned herself so that both her legs were on one side of him so that he couldn’t align himself with her and enter her. Then she continued down his chest trailing kisses around his left nipple, then his right, before going back to cover it with her entire mouth, sucking it, licking around it, pulling away and then breathing her hot breath on it.

  “Fuck girl,” he said trying to guide her head to the other with his hand, but MaLeila continued down his chest, licking a long trail down his abdomen and around his bellybutton.

  His cocked throbbed into her neck and she leaned back to look at it before grasping it with both hands and beginning to massage it. She ran her hand up and down and rubbed her thumb over the tip causing him to thrust into her hand. Feeling a little more confident now, she continued with less hesitation, moving one hand to play with his balls. Finally, when it started to throb in her hand, she ran a finger teasingly up his length and over the tip, enjoying the way she coul
d make him squirm underneath her.

  “MaLeila,” he said, voice deep and husky, grey eyes burning into hers when she looked at him, a coy smile playing on her lips. “Stop fucking with me and fuck me.”

  MaLeila was only too happy to oblige as she once again straddled his hips and grabbed his cock so she could guide it into her. He groaned as she slowly consumed all of him, hand gripping her hips tightly as she began to lift up and down in a slow steady pace, struggling to find a rhythm and figure out how high she could lift without making him come all the way out of her.

  “Try this,” Marcel said, loosening his tight grip on her hips and helping her settle in a motion where her hips rocked both back and forth and up and down at the same time until she was comfortable doing it herself, without his hands guiding her.

  Finally able to settle into a rhythm, she rocked back and forth, creating that sweet friction between them that sent jolts through her entire body. She cupped her breasts in her hand, to keep them from bouncing so much and closed her eyes to focus on the sensations, the sound of both their labored breathing and their hips slapping against each other’s filling the room, the smell of them mingling together with the musty scent of sex, magical aura’s intertwining with their sexual dance. She felt him pulse inside her and slowed down, stopping him from reaching his climax.

  “Fuck, girl,” she heard him growl and them she felt his cup her sex, thumb rubbing her clit causing her to cry out and speed back up again feeling herself on the verge of coming.

  Her body suddenly tensed, thighs clamping together against Marcel’s body in a vice grip as the powerful contractions of her orgasm quaked through her body. She gasped, gritting her teeth as a primal sound escaped her lips, vaginal walls clamping tightly on Marcel’s cock. He moved his hand from cupping her sex so he could grab her butt and thrust upward in deliberate hard strokes. Once, twice, and then she felt him pulse in her a final time before coming inside her. Her thighs continued to tremble as she slowly came down from her sexual peak. Slowly, she lowered her sweaty body onto Marcel’s, both their hearts racing as they struggled to catch their breath again.

  “Marcel,” MaLeila said after a few moments.

  “What?”

  “What was Tsubame talking? When she said most people wouldn’t begin to know the depths of Claude’s perversity?”

  “So that’s what this was all about?” Marcel laughed as her picked at her now tangled puff of hair. “Get me in bed, fuck me and then interrogate me while I’m coming down from the sexual high? Pillow talk so to speak?”

  “No,” MaLeila said quickly. “It just came to mind is all.”

  Marcel laughed again and kissed her forehead. “I’m just kidding. Besides, even if that was the case, being used isn’t something I take offense to especially not when the sex is that good.”

  MaLeila lightly swatted Marcel on his upper arm in response to his statement and then asked, “So?”

  Marcel sighed. “To be honest, I wouldn’t even completely know. She only knows the things about Devdan that I’ve told her and that wasn’t much to begin with.”

  “What about your Claude then?”

  Marcel shrugged. “Hell if I know. Nika probably knows more about Claude’s depravity than I ever did. I was never his slave.”

  “You weren’t?”

  She felt Marcel shake his head from the friction of his chin against the top of her head. He continued, “By the time I met Claude, I was nineteen, had been on my own passing as a white person with a magical disguise since I was fourteen, and I certainly wasn’t about to let any cracker make me a slave again. He’d been looking for me. Apparently had a vision of me and knew I was in disguise. He offered to train me further in my magic while letting me stay on his plantation. I alternated between pretending to be his slave and an orphan boy he took pity on and invited to stay in his home.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just say you were his son or nephew? Family?”

  Marcel laughed. “Even before the age of the internet and social media, word traveled through the grapevine like fire. The rest of the Thorne’s and the Long’s would have certainly heard about it and investigated. The last thing Claude wanted was for his family to come snooping around to see who this family member was and wonder why Claude was keeping a free untamed nigga around.”

  “So you don’t know what Tsubame meant?”

  “If anything, he was always frustrated with me because I was always defying him and was a powerful enough sorcerer in my own right to one up him in his schemes to assert his authority over me and make me his slave. Whatever perversity she’s talking about, you’re going to have to ask her directly about it,” Marcel said. “I really never put too much depth or thought into Claude’s motives.”

  That was another difference between Marcel and Devdan. Marcel spoke about Claude with notable indifference like he really couldn’t care less about the man and that he wasn’t in any way relevant to his life. Devdan spoke with the same indifference, but only as a veil to cover the hate and anger he really felt toward his former master. There was no way to tell if Marcel didn’t possess that same hate and rage though. Devdan only showed it when he let his guard down. Marcel always seemed to have his guard up, even when he was being open.

  Noticing how quiet he was and how his breathing had significantly slowed, MaLeila tilted her head up to see the man had fallen asleep. MaLeila figured she should try to do the same. Her curiosity would wait.

  8

  When MaLeila returned to her room the next morning, she found a royal purple kimono dress and undergarments to match lying on the bed. She took the under garments in the bathroom with her and put them on after she showered. When she came out, Tsubame, sans her disguise as Nadiyyah, was in the room arranging makeup on the vanity. MaLeila silently dressed in the purple dress and just like the fuchsia one Tsubame had given her, it two had off shoulder billowing sleeves and swept the ground at her feet.

  “Let me help you with that sash,” Tsubame said when she noticed MaLeila struggling with it.

  MaLeila turned her back to the woman and allowed her to tie the sash for her. Then Tsubame guided her to sit down at the vanity and began to comb through the girl’s tangled locks.

  “Sex is great,” Tsubame said after a few moments. “But in the books and movies they don’t talk about how long it takes a black girl to comb her locks back out after she’s sweated it out and tangled it up after good sex… or any woman for that matter.”

  MaLeila felt her cheeks heat up at Tsubame’s thinly veiled accusation and probably sensing her embarrassment, Tsubame laughed.

  “Where else would you have gone last night?” she asked.

  She didn’t say anything else as she parted MaLeila’s dark locks into small sections, put some sweet smelling serum on them, and blow dried them. Only when the blow drier was off for good did MaLeila ask, “Why not just do it with magic?”

  Tsubame shrugged and said, “I could. But you deserve to be pampered.”

  “You’re the queen. Aren’t you the one who gets the pampering?”

  “That’s a common misnomer. Contrary to popular belief, the first quality of being a queen is not being a spoiled greedy bitch, but knowing how to serve and pamper others,” Tsubame replied.

  MaLeila frowned, partly from the small comb with flatiron following right behind it as Tsubame pressed her hair in even smaller sections than she had blow-dried it and partly from the woman’s comment.

  “Is it?”

  “Such a shame. You’re so used to encountering entitled rulers who herd their people like bad shepherds for their own greedy purposes that you don’t what it means to be a real ruler,” Tsubame replied.

  “What does it mean to be a real ruler then?”

  Tsubame didn’t answer immediately, only continued to flat iron MaLeila’s hair. Knowing the woman would eventually answer because she wouldn’t have said MaLeila had no idea what it meant to be a ruler if she didn’t want MaLeila to know in the first plac
e, MaLeila waited.

  Finally, Tsubame said, “I spent some time with the Japanese Clan after I was outcast from the broader controlling western magical world.”

  “Is that where you got your name?” MaLeila asked.

  “No. I went by Tsubame for certain purposes long before that. The fact that I very purposely pronounced it wrong according to Japanese phonetics greatly amused the clan though,” the woman said. “While with them though, I learned a lot about the culture of the Geisha. Have you heard of them? I remember them being a subject of American curiosity for a while.”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “The Geisha didn’t know the type of power they held. If they hadn’t limited themselves to two silly districts in Tokyo and Kyoto, not to mention evolved with the times, they could have ruled Japan.”

  “How?”

  Tsubame looked at her. “Because they understood the first step to being a competent ruler. Service. Because when you give people good service, when they know you’ll do everything in your power to take care of them, you’ll eventually have them eating out the palm of your hands and the Geisha had that opportunity with some of the most powerful men in the world. If only they had seized the opportunity. Maybe then they wouldn’t simply be the remnants of a dying culture. I learned a lot about them and their ways while with the Japanese Clan and their tactics eventually helped me learn how to rule the people beneath me, particularly the men who opposed me on my rise to the top, but whose power I still needed to aid me.”

  “Couldn’t you have just used your magic? They did.”

  “Secretly mind you,” Tsubame corrected. “By the time I was on my rise to power the broader world still wasn’t accustomed to the idea of magic although it was easier to make them follow me when anytime my enemies came against me they found themselves suffering by some natural catastrophe that only meant I was backed by some higher power. But you’ll come to learn that adoration is much better compeller than fear. And that adoration is what a Geisha’s entire career is based on.