Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Read online

  Asha brought the tips of her claws to his flawless face. “What if I believe your contrition comes too late?”

  “I am yours.” His black eyes were fathomless without her reflection. “Life and death, flesh and blood. I offer myself to you. You killed Murial. You eliminated her dragons with her death. You spared me a life in her captivity. I offer you my freedom in her stead.”

  “You would yield your life? You would become my dragon if I demanded that sacrifice? You would give your kingdom to a Grayling whore’s fatherless daughter?”

  “Yes.” He remained resolute, unflinching, meeting her eyes without attempting to avoid the accusations there.

  Pain drew deeper shadows under his brow, but the lines she left along his jaws were not the cause. He drank the pain from her and held it in like smoke, reflected back to her what he could, promised without words that he would bear that for her as well—the pain of regret, guilt, shame, grief, for the present and for the past, memories mixed with the moment into a strange potion that healed behind its poison. But she did not know yet which property would win.

  “I would have you the monster again.” She stroked black blood along his skin. “There will be no chalice for you but me until then—animal blood, if you must. I do not want you a dragon, only the demon.”

  “Done.” He leaned into her touch when she painted his lips dark.

  “You cannot have me as your queen alone. If I am your queen, I am their queen, too. I shall rule at your side, an equal.”

  “I expect nothing less.” He climbed to his feet in a single fluid motion and wrapped his fingers around her slender neck once more. She covered his hands with hers. If his hands could not take her breath, he tried to take it from her with his kiss.

  The crowd deterred his pleasure as little as it deterred his submission. The kingdom folk would never have seen such a thing, a man of power and honor ceding to a woman—any woman. Yet he showed them that a king could yield to a queen, and he showed them that he wanted her, desired her—not just a body against his, not just an orifice, not just a fuck, not when he let her guide them with unrestrained force to the partially standing wall of the church, where she slammed him against the thick, wooden doors.

  He throttled her tightly against him before yielding his grip on her neck to allow his hands to roam, explore, with desperation that belied his control.

  “I will watch you kill her every night for the thrill. I will watch her almost kill you every night to remember how I cannot let you go,” he murmured into her skin before lining her neck with shallow bites, each one a boost of his thrall under her skin. He still knew how to awaken his roses.

  “And I will have you on your knees again, my lord. You have my oath.” She grasped him by his hair to pull him from her neck. Her blood bled down from his lips. She licked it from his chin but avoided his kiss. The urge to smile had been lost since the abduction, but though her expression must have been severe as she stared at his face—such an unexpected mixture of dark angelic and tender demonic—warmth uncurled within the cold.

  “Have you seen enough?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Anything you wish to reclaim from your old life? From the Tapestry, in payment for grievance?”

  “I have reclaimed what I could.” She punched through the wooden doors on either side of him and tore them away. The part of the wall that the doors had held up collapsed to block the corpses, saints and sinners both, within—the best crypt Asha could offer her mother in the end.

  The king kissed her cheek as though unable to resist touching her, but when she turned away, he yielded attention from her to address the crowd. They leaned or stepped back when the king lifted his black eyes to them.

  “All citizens are granted access to the Tapestry to live in its comfort if you wish. There are not enough of you to distinguish between sons and daughters of Tapestry, Midland, and Gray. But representatives from each village are formally invited to the castle in five twilights’ time to confer on the transformation I shall bring upon my renewed kingdom. How you choose your representatives matters not to me, as long as they are evenly split between men and women. Regardless of your misguided castes, you know who of your number has the fortitude to listen as well as lead, who will face the demon in his own den. Come in peace, for I will make my kingdom flourish more richly than it did before. No more will the monster stay in his cave—my protection now comes at a price greater than women you never knew the value of.”

  “It already came at a greater price,” one of the women said. She was not with the three, but from her gown and bearing, she was clearly a prostitute as well.

  “After five hundred women you willingly gave me to die,” the king replied. “But I mourn with you, for the loss of my own, for your loss, for hers.” He brought his claws to Asha’s scalp, combing through her hair. “Such a supernatural assault will not occur again. Asha slayed the dragons, and I shall make no more of her kind so recklessly. You have five days to assemble, to bury the dead you wish respected. My warriors and servants will aid you in gathering the rest, burning some with incense, a mass funeral to dispel the disease. And with your representatives’ help, perhaps we can forge order from this chaos.”

  “What if we would fight you? What if we would not serve a demon king?” the man asked, clutching the boy close with white-fingered knuckles.

  “You have served him for centuries. If you did not favor serving a demon, there was every opportunity to seek your fortune under another.” The king kept his voice kind, as polite as any merchant to men of his equal rather than a king to his subjects, although haughty command edged through a few words. “You are welcome to flee. But your greater fortunes are here, left behind by the dead and awaiting their new masters. All I can promise you, children, is that I will help you build a better kingdom, one that will not create such a need for demon brides or gray scars upon your brow.”

  “At what further price?” the braver woman asked.

  “Little different than the price of before,” the king replied. “Your worst criminals for our chalices, nothing more.”

  Asha lifted her face to him. “Perhaps a rescue or two?”

  “I would rather deter those who would create such a need, but I see no reason why a queen cannot choose subjects for her service.” The king slid his arm around her waist and raised them from the cobblestone, to the collective gasp of the crowd. “Five twilights. Do what needs to be done. My warriors will see order kept until then.”

  Halfway back through the Gray toward the castle, the king released her to fly on her own. “As soon as you know that Callina has received what she needs, return to my room rather than yours to wait for word.”

  13

  The wolves had commandeered a carriage to bring the bodies back with them. The servants did quick work stripping them of clothes and jewelry. Asha and the king arrived as the wolves were tossing the nearly bloodless bodies over their shoulders to take down to the den.

  The captain met her eye and nodded in acknowledgement, almost a bow in the lowering of his eyes.

  “Inform me of any improvement,” Asha said. “Or deterioration.”

  The captain did not reply, but his assent needed no words. He indicated with his head for the wolves to bring their bodies down. The king followed them. Asha wanted to join him, but she had been given her request, and she intended to honor it. She stopped in the audience chamber first, then rounded the curved corridor to the master’s room.

  The opening and shutting of the door was the only warning that the king had entered. She stood before the fire, its low flames barely reaching her—but the fire in a cold demon’s hearth did not need to be tended as thoroughly as that of a woman or a man.

  He drew the straps of her gown down over her shoulders, unbound the easy corset of the back to convince her body to reveal itself to his feverish gaze. The fever in her responded of its own accord.

  “How do you enchant me so, my queen, without even the thrall of you under my skin?”
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  She sent it into him anyway, like mist under a door. His claws curled into the flesh of her arm, and he lowered himself slowly, kissing down her spine until he was on his knees again.

  “I promised you a year. You promised me a year. Changing so early accelerated that promise. You are no longer bound to me by the sacrament of a priest, if that ever truly bound you.” He slid his fingers between hers as she turned around. He had removed his clothes as silently as he had entered.

  “His blessing decayed long ago, no matter to whom he confessed his many unrepentant sins.” Asha intertwined their fingers. “I might one night wish to see the world beyond these mountains. But if you would have me as queen, I would stay. Do not expect me to rule in silence and submission, my lord. I have not much to say, and to submit to you pleases me greatly. But I will not allow the Gray to fall again. I will not see hunger and despair in another girl’s eyes. I will not watch from my knees as men bring women low and call them damned as though it is none of their own doing.”

  “With no need to save other women, you can be queen in more than name. The wolf warriors have declared their loyalty to you. I taste Rafe’s vow in the scent of his blood. In your victory against Murial, it would not amaze me if they knelt to you rather than me because of my weakness against her and your strength—as they would shift loyalty to a new alpha. My alpha’s devotion to me wanes.”

  “He is angry with you. He grieves. They pledged their deaths to you, as did I. That so many deaths came so swiftly has shaken them. I carry my own anger, my own grief. But my devotion, my lord, has not waned.” Asha released his hand, cradled the curve of his skull with her claws. “Give them time. As for what you will do for me… Do not rise. Spread your arms again. Then remain.”

  “Yes, Asha.” The gentleness of his promise brushed against her mind like wind rustling rose vines.

  She had left the whip on the bed. She retrieved it now, skittering the fall over the stone for him to hear, to catch from the corner of his eye.

  “Your beasts taught me to use this in your absence. The way we experience pain suggests you might derive the same conflicted enjoyment of it as Lysan, whom the captain compelled me to punish.”

  “Asha.” The way he said her name again was more moan.

  She landed the first line across the pale expanse of his back, the final flick of her wrist where she focused the most of her strength. He winced against the blow, pain escaping his lips. Blood seeped from the welt for a brief moment before his skin closed again.

  “I am not like her. I will not put you in chains unless you bring them to me.” She laid the fall over his back two more times, biting her lip each time he flinched and grunted yet remained on his knees with his arms outstretched. “You can stand and take the whip from me at any time. You can toss the leather into the fire, wrap me in your arms, throw me upon the bed, and take me if you cannot stand the bite of the whip at my hands.”

  “No.” He kept his teeth clenched. They gleamed in the flickering light. His cock jutted out almost parallel with the floor now, twitching harder after each blow of the fall.

  Every time she split open his flesh, it wove together before the leather struck him again. Despite how his face contorted, his cock rose tight and hard, almost touching his abdomen. He did not lower his arms to stroke himself, nor did he demand that she stop.

  After thirty lashes, blood smeared over his back, the only sign that the whip had torn through skin at all.

  Asha threw the whip to the floor and brought her claws out instead, slicing over the wings of his shoulders as Murial had sliced at her chest.

  The king’s back arched, and he screamed like an animal in pain, falling forward and bringing his hands down to catch himself. She covered him from behind, drawing her claws down his arms and running her tongue along the scratches she had made, deep enough that they would linger. She trembled as his blood spread over her tongue, as his thrall shivered through her, unleashed and uncontrolled. He groaned in waves, shifting his shoulder blades to bring himself closer to her mouth.

  “Now,” she whispered in his ear. “Take your vengeance on me now.”

  He shoved himself up with her still latched to him, but she let him go as soon as her feet could touch the floor. She backed toward the bed with a thrill of fear as he turned to her in shadow.

  “No.” He darted to her in what had once been a blur. Before she knew it, they were over the copper rose vines and in his bed, with him over her and caressing her face. “There is no vengeance to take.”

  He took her lower lip between his teeth as he kissed her, entered her, his flesh healing under her fingers. He tangled himself in the sheets and her hair. He fucked her with his whole body, and she shuddered beneath him, digging her claws in until she could not keep from crying out, could not stop the tears stinging, wet and salty, down her cheeks and temples. She gasped as though she needed to breathe, sank herself deeper into him as he thrust deeper into her.

  “Asha.” Now a prayer.

  She clutched at his back and clenched everywhere around him, begging him to join her. He brushed the tears on one side away with his thumb. On the other side, he tasted her grief and brought himself as deep as he could before coming, gazing unblinking into her eyes so she could see his own grief, his bloodlust, his vulnerability, the weakness he shared absolutely and without reservation.

  He kissed her into the cushions until she forgot for a moment what she needed to forget.

  HE KEPT her in that bed, drunk on their woven thralls, sliding between dream and consciousness, between sunbeams and moonbeams crisscrossing through the windows at the top of the bedroom. Servants entered with wine in one carafe and blood in another. She shared the wine from the king’s chalice, but she alone drank the blood, straight from the carafe. He drank only what blood remained in her mouth when she kissed him.

  After her vision of the ceiling included moonbeams a second time, Asha finally sat up away from him. “He has sent no word.”

  “If he has not sent word, it is because there has been no change,” the king said.

  “There should have been a change.” She effortlessly vaulted over the copper vines, pulled her gown on from where the servants had placed it with greater care on a settee.

  “She has not worsened either. Stability is better than deterioration.”

  “I need to see her.”

  He covered her hand on the door handle. “Do not torture yourself.”

  “Do you keep me from her because something has happened?”

  “You enjoy her too well. I would not be cruel,” the king said.

  “Then permit me to see her again.”

  “I never forbade you.”

  He allowed her solitude to descend to the den. When she pushed through the door, the number of wolves resting in the dark had greatly diminished. The meat brought had given the warriors what their bodies needed to heal. Lysan had since left to join the rest above. But a servant in red still tended to Callina, and the captain still brooded from his place in the shadows, following Asha’s progress until she knelt beside Callina again. The wound in her neck had healed, leaving a pearly scar, but the wound over her abdomen still seeped, resisted the stitches that tried to keep the edges tightly closed.

  Asha gathered Callina’s hair from under her head and separated the thick, wavy wildness into three parts. Callina’s eyes fluttered open when Asha had woven her hair halfway down in a loose braid over her shoulder.

  “Hello, pet.” Callina brushed her fingertips against Asha’s hands, but she winced at the effort it took just to do a simple task.

  Asha eased her arm back onto the cot. “Rest. How do you feel?”

  “Like rotted fruit in the sun. Fever burns in my abdomen, and it will not heal. Or it will not heal fast enough to combat the extent of the infection. My appetite has returned, but how I suffer after.”

  Callina tried to turn but winced again. This time, both Asha and the servant urged her to remain still.

  “I h
ave barely moved in days. The wolf does not like to be tethered so.”

  “The wolf will split her stitches if she tries to run,” Asha said.

  “Transformation does not accelerate the healing. I shift, and the wound in my belly gapes open wider, tears away the thread. Asha…”

  Asha finished the braid, knotting it with a leather cord. She stroked Callina’s forehead with one hand, brought her cool palm to Callina’s abdomen.

  “Do not leave me, Callina.” An unadorned statement, almost without the strain of emotion. “I do not want to bury you with your blood in my mouth and on my hands.”

  “It was my blood, my will, my duty…my queen.” Callina hissed as Asha trailed her fingertips over the enflamed edges of the infected opening, but though her muscles tensed, she seemed to calm again from the contrast of Asha’s skin to the fever.

  Asha called the air around her so that she could lay next to Callina in the air, not enough room in the cot for her without disturbing the wound. “Please,” she whispered.

  She could plead all she wanted, but Asha recognized the haze of pain in Callina’s eyes—the same haze in starved animals struggling to stand in the gutter, not enough strength to find the scraps to give them strength.

  Callina closed her eyes, her brow drawn, and she looked away. “I will try.”

  Asha reached behind her to pull an empty cot closer up against Callina’s. She took Callina’s hand and rested herself upon the crude cushion. She could not bring herself to close her eyes as Callina had. The king had helped her forget, but now Asha suffered the guilt of all that time not cradling and caressing the presence of Callina in her mind for every hour, every minute, every moment. At any moment the presence—a beacon of light as none other had been—could blow out.