Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Read online

  Sunbeams stretched into the den as the servant convinced Callina to eat strip after strip of flesh—it was not as fresh as it could have been, smoked for preservation.

  By midday, the reflection off the snow in the forests and off the sides of the mountains were too powerful for Asha’s eyes, even indirectly. She had to join the captain in the deeper shadows. Neither of them acknowledged the existence of the other except to pass their gazes over one another as she joined him.

  One of the wolf warriors died in the span. The last five were brought to the surface. Then there was only Callina, the servant tending her, Asha, and the captain.

  “I have told her that she is to fight the infection,” the captain said. “I ordered her to survive. How poor an example she would be to her troop if she were to succumb. She battles her body at my bidding as well as yours. It is the only thing keeping her here.” He glowered at the tableau of his wolf warrior struggling, the stench of festering disease like fumes from an alehouse. “If she does not improve by next dawn, I might have to give her another command, out of mercy.”

  “No.”

  “This is one of the few things over which you have no authority. The alpha cares for his pack, knows when to let them shut their eyes, when to let them rest. You cannot forbid me from showing her compassion, not when our commands merely extend her suffering.”

  “She should not have lasted this long on sheer will alone,” Asha said. “She should have worsened if the infection was meant to take her. How could she stay unchanged since we brought human flesh?”

  “Callina cannot fight this forever. It would be cruel.”

  Her teeth clicked where she brought them tightly together. She crossed her arms, mirroring him, and focused her anger upon the infection, as though she had the magic inside her capable of killing it.

  The captain shuffled against the wall to stand closer to her—still apart, but closer.

  AS THE SUN SET, light dimming, Asha returned to the cot next to Callina and took her hand again. She dozed awake, with the same waning grasp on reality she had experienced with the king. She slipped in and out of consciousness, only aware she had slipped out when she slipped in again. Too often, when she slipped out and into a dream, Callina would arise, skin strong and renewed. Over and over, Asha startled out of the miracle.

  The sun burned red against the wall when Callina lifted herself up on her elbows. “It stitches together. The lines of infection are less.”

  The servant helped her sit as Asha continued to struggle between waking and dreaming.

  The line slashed across her belly still gaped, but in sections rather than as a whole pulling against the stitches. Pus and bloody lymph dripped down to her thighs, but the stretching vines of infection had pulled back in toward the edges, which were still enflamed.

  The servant tested the newly healed parts of the wound. “I believe the fever has lessened as well,” she said to Asha, who raised herself upright.

  Confusion had waned, but disbelief replaced it, a refusal to believe that the outcome she had sought could come to fruition. The servant seemed to understand. She beckoned for Asha to feel for herself.

  Callina gasped as Asha rested her hand over the wound. “Yes. That is better. The flesh is not so tender that a delicate touch agonizes.”

  “More meat,” the captain said from the shadows, but this time he emerged. The tension along his shoulders loosened as he approached, although he attempted to temper the rest of his tentative relief. “If your body’s healing has finally overwhelmed the disease, now is the time to bolster your forces.”

  “Yes, captain.” Callina held her abdomen, her own relief more overt.

  “I cannot speak to a wolf’s prognosis under such a physical strain,” the servant said, “but if we can eventually remove the stitches, we will know the warrior has conquered yet another enemy.”

  Asha pressed her forehead to Callina’s. Callina raised her head to brush their cheeks together in wolfish affection.

  “My mind is clearer,” Callina said softly.

  “I thought you already haunted me.”

  “I shall torment you on this plane instead. Can you rest now? Can the both of you rest now? I know I need to.”

  “Feast. Then sleep,” the captain said. He handed the servant a bundle of smoked meat. “A deep sleep, Callina.”

  “You need not order me to do what I already know I must. My body begs for it.” Callina nipped at his thumb when he stroked her face.

  “Do not disappoint me.”

  “How can I help but disappoint you to your greatest disapproval?” Callina replied. “But to continue driving you to exasperation and bursts of entertaining fury, I must remain alive.”

  The captain brought his fingers to the back of Asha’s neck, a hold no less possessive for its brevity.

  “We will do her more good to leave her be. If you had waited above, I would have told you now that her condition shows promise. Come, Your Majesty, back to your world.”

  Asha slumped against the wall outside of the den, pressing her cheek to the unforgiving stone. She dug grooves in the rock, her preemptive grief dissipating but not quietly.

  “I will apprise the king of the final consequences of the battle and of Callina’s progress. Whether or not you need sleep as you once did, Your Majesty, Callina shows wisdom to recognize that you need rest nonetheless. Go. I will distract the king. Take the time you need.”

  He left her at the base of the stairs. Nothing pressed her to move from where relief weighed over her in an avalanche that she struggled not to bear—too soon for certainty, yet the captain spoke as though Callina’s full recovery were foregone.

  Her world did not work like this. She had lost her mother—lost her well before the poison had crossed her palm—but fate had granted her a king as a husband, the conquering of her enemies, and the survival of each of her lovers, despite marks left behind.

  The king, the captain, Callina, Lysan, the castle, the kingdom… The world had never given her such gifts before. She had choked and breathed the grit of misery from birth, eaten dirt to give her stomach something to digest, sewn gowns until they puckered and she left the holes open in frustration. Her world had yielded fathers twice in the grave and a mother who had never wanted to love her too closely, for the world had never given her such gifts either.

  Surely it would not allow Asha what it granted her now.

  The wall sent warmth into her palm and up her feet, mimicking life as it reached her chest.

  Not the world, then. Not the kingdom. Let them have their stingy ways. The castle loved her, had chosen her as the king had chosen her.

  “Thank you,” she whispered into the stone. Asha slipped her claws from it, caressed it with the smooth backs instead. “We shall make you busier than ever in the years to come. Would you like that, to be put to use? As more than the king’s diversion, that is.”

  The floor beneath her feet vibrated with a low hum.

  “What new wonders we will have to show you,” Asha assured it. “I promise.”

  The stairs almost lifted her up to the rose window hall on their own.

  She made her way back through the carpeted corridors, avoiding the broken windows and their beams, to her bedroom.

  Her servants had taken their place flanking the door once more now that the threat was gone. It was almost as though nothing had happened at all, but despite a distinct lack of scars upon her skin from the battle, healing could not run quite deep enough to reach all of it. It struck her as quite odd to consider entering her room only to rest, no fear of a woman or dragon peering through her window or spiriting her away.

  “My lady?” one of the servants asked at her hesitation.

  “I would like a bath, please.” She felt as though she needed to ask them for something, a distinctly usual task. The command stumbled upon her tongue.

  “Hot or cold?”

  “Whatever requires the least work for you. I do not mind the cold, though I would like
the fire built.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  When she stepped into the cool water, she sighed in contentment. “Thank you.”

  “Anything else, my lady?”

  “Nothing.”

  Asha closed her eyes. She unknotted her hair before submerging herself. Without the need to breathe, she stayed under, listening to the footfalls of the servants leaving the room until she was alone.

  She kept her eyes closed as she raised herself once more and lay her head against the edge of the tub. Silence was something that had been stolen from her in the preparation for the attack. She listened to it with all the intensity of a performance, nothing but the shift of the water and her body against the tub to break it.

  Heavier footsteps alerted her to a new presence, but she did not open her eyes to him. The perfume of fresh human blood wafted across the water, coaxing her chin up so that she could sniff the air.

  She took the brass chalice and drank from it, savoring its lingering heat. Quite fresh, the freshest blood she had tasted since the end of the battle.

  “To mark what occasion?” she asked. “Celebration? Passing?”

  “The king told me to meet him here. I expected him to precede me,” the captain replied.

  The bedroom door opened again, less covert this time, with the parts of the scaffold flying in of their own accord, followed by a placid king who closed and locked the door behind him.

  Asha finished her chalice while the scaffold built itself in front of the fire, assembled as it had been on the night the king had first drunk from her.

  “Plans?” Asha said.

  “I have been patient. I have borne your grief, for I was cause of it. I gave myself to you without resistance, to my delight. With the worst behind us, I thought it time to remind you that I am still king, and you are still mine.”

  The king cradled the base of her skull with his palm. His magic drew her from the water, though his fingers did not clench. He watched with unbridled lust as water poured in rivulets down her body.

  Asha did not reply. She dipped her finger into the chalice, staining her skin red as she gathered leftover blood. She slid her lips around its length and licked away the blood in one motion, leaving her finger clean as she pulled it from her mouth.

  “You,” the king said slowly, drawn to the stain on her lips until she licked it away, “are cruel.”

  “I know.” But he had promised that he would become the monster for her, and that meant abstaining. “My linen, captain, if you would.”

  She handed him the chalice in exchange for the linen she used to dry herself. He idly tasted some of it himself as both he and the king watched her.

  Asha warmed at the knowledge that she kept their attention. Never before the castle had men looked upon her body and desired the substance more than the emptiness. She was entirely present to them, and her figure—which the Crimson Kingdom had called too bony, too fleshless, too gray, too scarred, too unwelcoming, too sharp, too cold—was desirable, despite no lack of more attractive and available women roaming the castle.

  The curve of a crimson rope against her chin gave her pause. She glanced up at the king. “Do you think ropes will hold me?”

  “You could break through them,” the king said. “But you will enjoy yourself more if you submit to me, my love.”

  Without warning, he struck her across the cheek with the material in his hand, withholding none of his strength.

  She clapped a hand against her face, mouth open and blood heating her until it was as though the flames of the hearth roared too high.

  The captain started forward, to protest in words or action, but the king, in a blur, wrapped the rope around his neck multiple times in a makeshift noose. He forced the captain to his knees as unrelentingly as he had struck her.

  “You, my friend, have been cold, sullen, and enraged at me in turns.” The king jerked the captain against his legs, tangling long fingers in his hair. “I understand your frustration with me. I never claimed to be perfect, but you have less cause than Asha to take those imperfections personally.”

  “My wolves—” the captain began.

  The king bent down to stare the captain straight in the eye, giving him no space or slack to escape it. “I mourn their loss as well. To watch them slaughtered by my lineage while I could do nothing was torture I have never before endured. But you are warriors. You have been fortunate that the only armies you have ever encountered were of the race of man, against whom casualties were few and quick. You could hardly expect to lead a pack of warriors into battle after battle without death taking them. I bear the responsibility and the blame, as their king, but you are too old and too great a leader to maintain such an idyllic notion that your soldiers will always survive.”

  “What do you know of survival, living dead?” the captain asked through teeth that had gone feral. “What do you know of loss? The pack is mine. Yours in loyalty, but they are my family.”

  “I have survived death, survived centuries. What do I know of loss? How can you not see?” The king’s voice became dangerously quiet, a knife’s smooth blade against silk. “You speak of family. I let mine go, yes, but to relinquish them at the end of every year, send them out into the world after learning to love every one that would accept it from me… The only thing that allowed me to release them was the knowledge that I gave them freedom their birth had not. Then I learn in that Tapestry square that Murial killed every last one of them, some before they had taken a taste of that freedom. Asha rightly killed her, but for all the destruction she rained upon the northern kingdoms and my own, she was still one of my wives, whom I loved. My children are all dead but for Asha, and though I worship her unbeating heart, I suffer for all the rest. Do not speak to me of loss, of the weight of mortifying sacrifice, as though because my blood runs cold, I cannot comprehend mortality.”

  “My lord.” The captain struggled to swallow against the rope.

  “Spare me your apology, wolf. I accepted the death of those around me long ago. Perhaps I expect too much of you to accept it as well, young and mortal as you are. But despite the decimation of my people, of my kingdom, I still have my fiercest queen, she has her wolves, and I still have my mercurial alpha, the one who gave himself completely to me as no other alpha has.”

  The corners of the king’s lips curved as he loosened his hold on the rope around the captain’s neck, but the captain did not withdraw even when the king leaned in a finger’s breadth from his mouth. “You let me into your blood, Rafe, and you let her in. You succumbed to our absolute control of you, my captain. You gave my thrall unfettered access. Submit to it now. I give it to you only for your pleasure. Give in to me for her to see, and I promise I shall make the submission well worth your while.”

  The captain stopped trying to remove the ropes. His bright blue eye deepened and darkened. His breathing slowed, but his heartbeat quickened, audible to her in the quiet room, and his heated blood reached her despite the strength of the woodsmoke.

  The captain’s cock strained against his trousers, just the way Asha liked it. Her own thrall slithered over her skin, but she kept it close, stroking her cheek where the king had struck her and salivating over the aftertaste of blood.

  “Show her what you did on that first night, when you came to me, beaten, bloody, bruised, but victorious over the deposed alpha,” the king murmured, his lips almost brushing the captain’s as he spoke.

  The captain opened his mouth to the command of the king’s tongue, a moan tearing through his chest. He worked the king’s tunic open one small cloth button at a time, fumbling with them blind when the king would not relinquish his kiss or the press of their bodies against each other as the king eased the captain onto his back.

  They consumed each other like predators, teeth flashing in the light, but the captain forced the king’s tunic open and down his arms. The king had to sacrifice contact in order to remove it, which he did as hastily as possible, bringing their bare chests together. Th
e king’s skin was smooth, poreless, pale, and the captain’s rough, dark, dusted with hair, shadows, scars old and new. The king’s physique was strong but deceptively delicate against the captain’s more rugged body, but there was no mistaking which of the two was the stronger, the dominant.

  The king manipulated the captain with every weapon in his arsenal. He drew blood from the captain’s jaw and shoulder to bring to the surface the spell of his teeth. They rocked their hips together, cocks aligned between their urgent bodies.

  Asha could have watched them do nothing but kiss and fuck each other through their trousers all night, but too soon, the captain tried to push his trousers down his hips. He reluctantly took his hands from their fervent adoration of the king’s chest to undo the fastenings. He kicked them away as soon as he could, groaning with the vibration of a growl when the king brought himself against the captain’s bare cock.

  “Yield to me,” the king commanded into his skin. He bit into the captain’s shoulder and drank, but not for long, not when the captain arched up against him and let his head fall back, baring his neck in what Asha immediately recognized as a wolf’s submission.

  “Good boy.” The king caught flesh between his teeth down the captain’s chest, over his abdomen, paying particular attention to the newer scars from the most recent battle, before pausing with teeth parted and tongue poised above the captain’s erection.

  The captain looked down at the king, panting, reaching for him, but not to push him down. “Cyric, do not…”

  He howled and partially turned as the king dodged his grasping hand and sank his mouth over the cock that practically swelled to fill it. A discernable dent in the flesh from the tips of the king’s teeth followed the descent. This time, when the captain clutched at his head, it was to hold him down, a swift alteration that clearly pleased the king.