Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Page 21
She made him come three more times, until he could not bear to touch himself anymore, his continued erection too chafed and his come little more than droplets. But she had not yet quite drained him dry.
“I cannot. Not again. I beg of you, please…”
Asha removed her hands from between her legs and rested them on his chest, caring not that she smeared his seed over them. Semen coated his chest, painted his face; he appeared the recipient of many men’s pleasure. The sight of it satisfied her.
“Do you wish for me to relieve you of this torment?” She had not released his pleasure from her thrall, though he could no longer satiate himself. The chief elder groaned as he nodded. He had forgotten his status, his station, his contempt for her, his indifference. All he could see, all that mattered to him, was her as she knelt over him and opened her mouth as though to kiss him. But she bypassed his questing lips and instead buried her face in his neck.
Perhaps one memory still lingered—the one of her tearing out his vizier’s throat. But it surfaced in his mind only a moment, one shout cut off as she sank teeth better suited to the task into his neck. The artery provided a fountain his cock no longer could.
He came again before the end, with her legs latched tightly around his hips and her arms around him while he frotted his erection against her belly.
She drank him with mewling cries, her head bursting with his blood in little explosions of orgasm, like tossing skins and glasses of wine against pristine church walls. She could not catch all the blood in her mouth, still learning where to keep her lips and her trembling tearing the vessels open further.
This was the only real pleasure he could ever give her, and this was the only real pleasure she would ever deign to give him. He died with a moan on his lips.
When she rose, fresh, hot blood dripped from her body as though she had emerged from a bath. Each of the men screamed as she came after them, but each of them succumbed at the first bite. She made their deaths swifter, without the added disgrace. Once the blood had entered her, she wanted nothing else, and her little body seemed to have endless room for the flood of heated life.
Her body burned among the ice, but the burning did not recede nor did the ice melt. They survived in parallel, entwined and entangled. And as terrible as her craving had been, eight men barely slaked her thirst. But she could rise from the last body without attacking the others still in the room.
They waited for her. Lysan reclined in a chair, although he had mostly healed from the axe wound. She came to him first, one of the men’s arms dangling from her hand to tantalize him, a leg for Callina, and viscera draped over Asha’s shoulders for the captain, liver in her mouth for the werewolves to share. She dropped the limbs and intestines to the ground before them like offerings to older gods.
They had partially changed during the carnage, fierce calling to fierce. Lysan slid the arm closer to himself as the captain ripped the liver from Asha’s mouth. She kept a lobe in her teeth with a smile. Her strength rivaled his own, and such truth tasted as sweet as the meat in her mouth. She spat it to Callina as she lowered herself over Lysan, who had not yet occupied his appetite. The rest of the bodies would serve them as well, but they did not need to hurry to the meat. They could gain power from spoiled as well as fresh, and it would be fresh a little while longer.
Lysan stroked up her body, his long fingers and broad palms strong as he mapped the same angles and concaves the chief elder had inspected and described. He would have left bruises on her had she still been human, but now, though she still experienced the ache of it, she no longer needed to flinch or fear how blood would spread under the surface of her skin.
“I promise, I am no longer the poor, injured soul I was yesterday. Your pity and solicitude are unnecessary.” He hissed, his teeth feral, as she lowered herself over his long erection without hesitation. “But not unappreciated,” he added.
“You found me. You saved me first. Did you think I would not repay?”
“Not when we are expected to prepare for war.”
“What better time?” Asha murmured against his mouth. He tried to kiss her, but she nipped at his tongue. “What better time than when we might die? And so soon after my first death.”
“Dead you may be, but you certainly remind me that I am not.”
“Never have I felt more alive.” She let him catch her, taste the blood, taste her mouth, as she rode him with all the fervor the men wished she had given them.
The growl that came from Lysan was like that of a predator much bigger than he. It was her only warning before he whipped them around on the chaise, poised above her with only the tip of his erection inside. She tore her claws across his back in wordless plea. The growl of a predator gave way to a helpless moan, and he shoved into her as hard as she could have desired.
“You see, I am quite recovered, vital and virile.” He rutted as though he had lost his control, but she understood that he had not lost his control so much as unleashed it, as the king had unleashed her. “And I do not have to take such care, do I?”
Lysan fell against her when the captain struck him over the side of his head. The captain grasped him by the scruff of his neck and lifted his head up.
“For your service to her, I allow this dalliance, but the objective of the brief time the woman and her dragons grant to us is to gain strength. You could bite Asha without repercussion, as she could you, but that would drain the strength of both. Finish with your distraction, pup, so that you may consume what she has graciously left for you.”
Callina lashed out at the captain’s trousers, not tearing through the leather but threatening. “If our time is short, should we not enjoy what we love more than a simple dalliance? We have done nothing but hunt since we arrived—hunt and run from our own fears, fears we did not know we could feel.”
“We feed to become strong. We are not like the king and queen or like the woman and her dragons. We are not strong despite what we take in. Our hearts beat, our lungs breathe, and we must prepare.” The captain snatched at the viscera that Asha had brought him, baring his teeth as his face contorted away from the man and into the wolf. He stalked away from the chaise, his growl laced with menace rather than lust, despite the erection that weighed heavy against his trousers as he walked in wolf form to the chief elder’s remains.
Callina sidled closer to the chaise. “He seems to be in one of his moods again. I would let him fight me if I thought it would help, but he has fussed ever since we realized you had disappeared and were not simply hiding.”
“Leave him be,” the king said quietly. “He faces the end far differently than you, my free-spirited Callina.” He guided her to her feet and kissed the corner of her mouth. Then he released her, distracted by the vision of Asha stretching out her hand for Callina even as Lysan resumed his fiercer possession of her—though he acknowledged his captain’s warning not to strain her ability to heal herself, and she acknowledged the warning not to strain his more than the executioner already had.
Callina pulled Asha’s head back from Lysan’s kiss, baring her neck for Lysan to leave dents, if not wounds. She mouthed at the pieces of flesh and viscera still draped around Asha’s shoulders, tasting Asha’s skin and the men’s blood that covered her, speaking between caresses.
“When we thought you had been taken, when the king had us searching the castle high and low—through unused and blocked passages, through the deep, dark dungeons and dens, through the gardens, through the forest, each crevice and cave of the mountains—we could not move fast enough. We scented out every last trace of you, fear keening our senses. If the woman had not promised to destroy the kingdom in your name, I wonder whether we would not have done so on our own. We exposed ourselves, turned the kingdom upside-down to find you.”
Callina closed her hand around Asha’s neck, squeezing to keep her neck arched as her body trembled with tension. New sensitivities, new pleasures, mingled with the old to draw her higher. Callina smiled toothily when choki
ng Asha did nothing but steal her voice. She captured Asha’s mouth, fed her with her own sighs and moans, hunger for the blood that coated her, hunger for the woman beneath it. And with that hunger, desperation quite different from the kind shown by the men sentenced to death at the teeth of a monster.
“I will not let her take you away,” Callina whispered into her cheek, loosening the hold on Asha’s throat. “We just found you.”
“I will rip apart everything that tries to take me.” Asha demonstrated on the chaise cushion, which was fortunately cloth rather than the king’s unique brand of furniture. She wrenched from side to side, hips canting furiously through her orgasm, strange though it now was without blood pouring down her throat.
“We will not allow anything close enough to try,” Lysan promised. He ruined the rest of the chaise, splintering its frame and opening new holes in the upholstery near Asha’s head. “If I must obey my alpha to the letter in order to be strong enough for you, my queen, I suppose I must start now.”
Asha’s claws left accidental streaks of his blood over his face, but she tendered her kiss. The resultant emotion for the creatures surrounding her became too large for words, too large for her slight body, more powerful though it had become.
“I, too, Asha,” Callina said, wistful as Lysan climbed from the chaise. “Despite the brusque dismissal, our alpha speaks truth. It was a gift to see what you have become. Your transformation only strengthens what was already there.” She kissed Asha, lingering with her tongue on what blood remained. “I wish to see it for years to come, pet. I hate to leave, but to serve you and my king is to leave you now.”
Asha licked her cheek in undeniably lupine affection, bringing a smile through the concern and sadness that solemnized Callina’s expression.
When Callina joined Lysan and the captain at the corpses to feed, the king offered Asha his hand. “That is the freshest blood I can give you. My servants and objects have done nothing to cause me to break my contract with them, not like the kingdom. While the servants trust me to bleed them when they volunteer, you are too new to trust their veins to you. They have donated what they can to the black copper rose. My roses can survive while white. You need to take all the red you can. Come with me, wife. I shall show you how to scale the castle walls without fear.”
HER CLAWS WERE NOT the secret. It was the air, the colder the better, a quality in the night more invisible than her thrall. She could call to it as she called to a man’s lust, conjure it to cradle her against the stone wall, to hold her suspended above the gardens, and land her gently upon the gravel path leading to the winter rose house.
The white roses climbing over the exterior glittered, and not just from frost. With her new eyes, she discovered just how remarkable the winter roses were, their petals like glass, though velvet met her fingers. Further in, the crimson-centered roses called to her—to breathe them in was to breathe bloodied flesh frozen into snow and ice, as though each rose were a body in battle.
The king plucked a rose from one of the center-most bushes, but though he caressed the petals, he could not tear his eyes from her, from the bloodstained expanse of bare skin. She no longer needed a fever to keep her from freezing in the winter night. She had become a rose in his garden, white and red against the black copper rose that had sung her into the greenhouse.
“What are we doing, Cyric?” Asha ran her hand along the edge of the copper rose’s petals. “For what do we prepare? The woman has dragons at her disposal, to be strengthened by the blood of your entire kingdom. I have the blood of eight men within me; you, fractions of your servants and objects. Your wolves may consume the entire contents of the forest but still not strengthen themselves enough, if they do not gain strength as your kind do.”
“Our kind.” He neared to stroke the rose over her cheek. “It is true that the odds are weighted well against us. We have but one course, my little Ashling. I conquered once. I can conquer again, with the right muse.”
He broke a petal from the reddened rose, the heart of the flower that had drunk the most from its black copper mother. When he brought it to her mouth, the velvet compelled her lips to part, and he rested the petal upon her tongue. Blood. She closed her eyes, swallowing the petal from his fingers. Asha swayed from the blood scent that surrounded her, not just from the glass that fed the copper.
“But they are your roses,” she said.
“They will not die for losing their petals, and they are not the rose I need to survive.” He plucked the red petals from the rose in his hand and fed them to her one by one, drawing her closer with each, until he nearly took the last petal for himself. Once she had swallowed, he pressed his lips to hers instead. His robes slid down his arms, freeing him to take her face in his hands.
If she had had breath, he would have stolen it, but he took advantage of her lack of air. Their legs tangled, but neither stumbled in their dance as he crowded her to the black copperwork frame of the house.
The glass had been panes of icicles before, but she was the icicle now, barely aware of her own coolness, especially as the fever seemed to return. It struck her differently than before, heat without consequence, no racing of her heart, no beads of sweat on her altered skin, but the king sensed the change and broke away, panting with his forehead against hers.
“I thought the fever would leave you when you died. It makes you feel alive under my fingers, makes the scent of your blood seem more human under the scent that I gave it.” The king lowered his head to inhale from her. “I should not bite you,” he murmured. “In that, the captain was correct.”
“It is not weakness if it is shared,” she whispered back.
He laughed against her skin, his smile sharp where he caught her skin between teeth. “How familiar.”
“The woman fed her dragons her blood for loyalty.”
“I do not need your blood for that. I have tasted the blood of my kind without loyalty paid—she has kept her dragons for centuries, serving them herself alone. One bite can forge a human’s desire, but it touches us differently than the men you ensnared or the wolves you charmed long before a thrall could hook into their flesh.” He traced her lips with his thumb.
She bared her teeth for him, and he caught the tips of the longest canines with the pads of his fingers, forcing her mouth open. She snapped at him, triggered as an animal rather than in anger.
“I have my thrall in you yet,” he said. “I would like yours within me.”
“You would weaken yourself?”
“Only to you.” He cradled the back of her head, tension in his hand despite his gentleness.
“Have you never given your wives a taste after they change?” Asha asked.
“All my wives but one were slaughtered, and she never tasted me after her death. I was a different king then, although I had resolved to alter my nature for my wives.” He tightened his grip on the back of her neck. Had she still been human, he might have crushed bone. “Remind me now, Ashling, of the creature I was. Help me recall what it means to be fierce and feared. Show me what comes so naturally and beautifully to you.”
“Naturally?” Asha slid her claws into his tunic, tearing through the material without effort. “I was taught by demons and monsters, my lord.”
“Did demons and monsters rend the flesh of Tapestry sons in the marketplace square where I first marked you?” He kissed her with his teeth, startling a cry from her. “Were we the reason you were punished so publicly and so often at the executioner’s behest? When you heeded the demon’s and monsters’ calls, do you believe it was from our influence, or from whatever resided within before you ever bound yourself to me? Oh no, Asha, I am not what made you writhe at the wolves’ howls, nor did I incite you to tear the throat from the elder’s vizier, nor did I compel you to desecrate the face of a dead man.”
This time, when he came after her with teeth, she let him stroke them along her cheekbone. Then she grabbed him by the throat with a hiss.
“There she is.”
“Here we are, in the place where I began to realize I could not ever let you go.” The king rocked his hips against her, tightening his grip on her nape and tucking her leg around him. “Had I relinquished you, I could have kept everything I had ever built. But the creature who has watched centuries pass him like seasons, for whom wives bleed through the years, the creature whose roses are the only timeless fixture and for whom lives seem to sift through his fingers like grains of sands… I chose you, and I would choose you again. I would destroy the whole civilized world if I could keep you by my side.”
An unexpected burst of wind gusted into the greenhouse through the open windows and entrances, tugging at her hair like fingers and whipping through the vines and branches of the rose bushes. Petals swirled through the air in eddies, tossed about in a whirlwind behind the king. Only crimson petals.
“Take the roses’ blood offered,” the king said. “Enthrall me to give you my loyalty, Asha of the Gray. Do it.”
Asha tore ribbons in his tunic, tangling herself in the fabric as she surged forward, the air coalescing around her body to add its force to her attack. She pushed him back toward the center until his boots caught on the stone and they fell. The fall did not steal his breath, but he arched just the same as though in pain. The rose petals pelted her in blood-perfumed blows. Her mouth watered in spite of herself. She licked her teeth, licked her lips, but still the blood called her as she gazed down upon him.
She plunged her thrall into him, every last bit of it with all her might—power that would have had all the men in the Tapestry falling to their knees and spilling into their palms.