Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Read online

  “You could break me if you chose,” she murmured against his chin.

  He spoke in kisses, his lips brushing against her, sometimes his teeth. His claws scratched against her scalp where he held her head.

  “Yes. I choose not to. I could fill your head. Instead, I allow you to fill mine. I could think of nothing but what I left behind from the moment I left. When I drew blood from the pitiful creatures on the other side of the mountains, I could taste what I imagined yours to taste like. I saw your face in the moon, heard your screams whenever wolves howled or owls screeched, killed you a million times with my teeth inside you and my blood painting your lips, dreamed of your heat when the sun beat against my cloak. God, you burn hotter than fire against me now. And my imagination could not compare to the real taste of you.”

  Asha loosened her hold on the rope and opened her eyes to his, to the darkness there that reflected her.

  “I do not know when it began, but you already enthrall me, my lord. Take me. Make me bleed for you. Take me in all the ways you wish.”

  “Your wish, my queen, is my command.”

  Tracing the ropes, he ducked under her arm to bring himself behind her once more. He hummed his admiration against her cheek. “Do you understand now why I wanted to bind you for the first bite?”

  “To keep me from worshipping you, from debasing myself in every vulgar way I could think of—and I worked across from a brothel, my lord.”

  “Do not tempt me so,” he growled into her ear before catching it between his teeth.

  “No, I think you enjoy wrapping the gift to yourself with all the luxury you have at your disposal, despite the disluxury of what waits beneath it,” Asha said.

  “You do not see yourself as I do, Ashling. You do not see yourself as any of us do. Gray hair is nothing new to the wolves, and gray, translucent skin is nothing new to me. If you resemble the monsters of this world more than the race of man, wear your gray with pride, my ashen queen. Two months of warmth, food, and good company has brought light to your skin, as though alit with the moon rather than the sun, and your eyes show presence more than when you arrived. I saw death there long before I planned to give it, but when you stand now at the balcony, I no longer fear that you will leap to the frozen lake.”

  “Only that I shall climb down and risk falling,” Asha muttered with a slight smile.

  “When did you climb?”

  “Another time, my lord. Foolishness I shall not repeat, and which the captain will not force me to repeat.” She leaned against his shoulder. “Suffice it to say, I did not fall. I am yet yours to break rather than the rocks and ice below.”

  “I would ask you about the captain after what I have seen and heard since my return, but your heart beats fast, your fever burns, and I can no longer honor you with my resistance.”

  She leaned her head to the side to bare her neck once more, enticing him with the skin from shoulder to the curls of black hair under her ear. Her breath came more shallowly as he tightened his hands over her waist, his claws overlapping at her navel and at her spine.

  “Please, my lord, my king. I would slice every vessel in my body to give you what you make me hunger for.”

  “I cannot tell you what watching you take a knife to just two fingers did to me.” He showed her instead by forcing her hips back against his, where his rigid erection curved against the small of her back. “If you had brought your knife to a more potent place on your body, I might have stripped you of your beautiful gown in front of all my warriors and bathed us in your blood as I took you. But I shall not take you in that way tonight. Tonight is for teeth, my love, and they ache too much now to speak any more. They grow too long, so close to what…I…need…”

  He faltered for the first time she had been with him, the length of his fangs forcing his mouth open and garbling his words.

  Lightning flashed through the high windows in the room, though it was too soon before spring for a thunderstorm. When Asha raised her eyes to the light, she thought she saw two figures silhouetted against the flashing sky, one on either side of the room. But before she could peer more closely, the king latched onto the base of her neck, pushing his teeth in.

  His thrall wrapped around her like a whirlpool pulling her to a drowning death. Anything other than the king’s teeth inside her ceased to matter.

  The ropes held despite the rush of strength through her limbs with the rush of her blood. She writhed as she could, pushing up against his teeth, pushing back against his cock. She begged him without words to enter her, which meant he had to want it as much as she did, but he did not fuck her with anything more than his teeth deep inside her. He had not punctured something that would give him blood too quickly, but the heady combination of arousal and preyful fear filled his mouth nonetheless, left her light-headed and trembling for reasons other than lust, though they intensified it.

  She cried out, her moans free with every breath. But she muffled his as he milked her, teeth digging deeper as he turned his head to find a new angle. Her struggles against the ropes made the scaffold creak like a bed. She moved against his body and he moved against hers as though he fucked her

  Asha tossed her head from side to side, screwed her eyes closed, then screamed with the burst of her blood when his teeth found a rich vein. Her climax was a beautiful twist of blade through her body and silk through her head.

  The master’s room—the whole castle—seemed to quake, though it could have just been in her mind or her shudders testing the scaffold’s limits.

  He came against her back, his seed seeping through his trousers and her gown to cool her skin, but her orgasm continued, unrelenting, cracking through her foundation until she could do nothing but shatter for him. She left nothing of her self behind in the scarlet darkness behind her eyelids, a glimpse of the death with which he would gift her. Such blissful nothing, such beautiful emptiness.

  Flashes of light, fire. Winter burned against her skin, joining with the sun burning beneath. And his mind filled hers with a never-ending hunger until there was nothing else left.

  Her limbs loosened, went limp. Her head drooped until her chin fell against her chest.

  “For you, my love. All for you. I would kill for you, and I would die again for you if I could. Do not be afraid.”

  She could not fear. She could not think. She could only be him, beginning and end, forever, alive, dead. Nothing mattered but teeth.

  3

  When she opened her eyes, ice sounded on the roof of the castle and lightning flashes continued through the windows. The flickering firelight still waved through the room. There was nothing in her mind or memory between the moment the king had taken everything and when she had regained awareness, but she sensed that many hours had passed.

  Asha no longer hung from the scaffold. She lay in the master’s bed, cradled by the men’s bodies beneath the blankets and cushions, with a feather pillow under her head. The ropes were still woven and knotted around her body, but the ends rested loose over her wrists. Her neck stung and ached—the thrall did not remain in his bite after he had withdrawn his teeth. It felt as though a feral wolf had attached itself to her neck and torn through it.

  She shifted her shoulders to reawaken the sensation, curling her nails into her palms to remember claws as well.

  “The servants should not be long bringing beef broth and a pomegranate and orange nectar for you,” came the king’s voice from behind her. He had wound his arms around her like the rope. His breath was warmer than usual when he spoke into her ear, his deep voice a balm all on its own. “You will need to be careful for the next few days. And I will need to be more careful the next time I take your blood. You are slighter than many of my wives, and I forget that, for all your fire, you do not have as much blood as some of them, despite how beautifully you bleed.”

  Asha groaned as she tried to sit up. The room spun. She held her head steady with a hand, but it did nothing to help.

  “Slowly, Ashling. I told you to t
ake care.”

  She lowered herself back to the pillow, and he tucked himself closer, tighter against her, as though to hold her down as well as embrace her.

  “Does it pain you too much? I did not intend to go so deep.”

  “It pains well, my lord. Did the castle shake when we came, or was it a hallucination, a shuddering only inside me?”

  His laughter caressed her in a ripple. “Close thunder quaked us, an early storm for such a cold winter. I am fortunate that the stained glass and greenhouses are as protected as the castle stone. I value the rose windows too much to see them destroyed by the ravages of natural phenomena.”

  Asha gazed up at the windows. The figures she had thought were there before he had bitten her were there no longer.

  The king pressed his lips to the wound he had made, solicitous rather than fierce, although his arms tightened further. A sigh escaped her as he ran his tongue over the crackling, healing skin. She grasped his sleeves at her waist and bared her neck to him once more.

  “Other than the pain, how do you feel?”

  “Weak,” she replied. “Stretched thin. Hot and cold at the same time. Hungry.”

  “Just a few more minutes.”

  “I do not hunger for food.”

  She attempted to turn around in his arms, but he held her still tighter, almost too tightly for her to breathe.

  “My lord?”

  “Do not fear me.”

  “When will you learn, demon king, that I fear you no longer?” she asked, turning her head to try to see him, but he stayed just beyond her sight.

  “Is that so?” Amusement colored his tone. “I simply did not wish to startle you when you saw something you did not expect to see.”

  “You said your form and figure would change with human blood, that it would make you appear more human. I have not forgotten. Let me see what my blood has done to you.”

  He loosened his embrace, sliding his hands to her belly, where she noticed the first alteration. The claws that had made touching her skin dangerous had receded to almost as short as those of his warriors. Though they were still like obsidian, he could dig his fingertips into the fabric of her gown without tearing through. His skin, too, had changed, albeit more subtly, a different quality of pale gray that leaned toward life more than death or night-dwelling beast, although the color was powdery, as though brushed with a thin layer of white ash.

  Asha turned around in his arms.

  His eyes were the same ink-dipped darkness, with the barest trace of white at the corners. Inside his mouth, he was still stained black against his gleaming white teeth, his tongue still pointed when he licked his lips. But his teeth had receded, much like his claws. They stayed different from the warriors’, rounder, more like that of a bat or viper than a wolf, but the long canines could hide when he closed his mouth, just a touch of black in the inner part of his lips to suggest anything beyond was strange.

  His face was almost human. The prominent cheekbones, chin, and brow, the ridges over his forehead, and the pointed ears had all smoothed into something approaching that of a man. Delicate in physiognomy, but almost a man nonetheless. His nose had become more defined. Hair black as his eyes—blacker than hers before the gray had taken away its richness—had sprouted from his scalp overnight. It fell in waves to nearly conceal the milder pointed tips of his ears.

  She could not tell while they reclined in his bed, but she guessed the bend at his knees had straightened and the proportion of his torso had taken on a more human cast. He was still tall, still slender—though not as much so as Lysan—still with stone-like strength of muscle roped over the bones. But in his present form, he could stride through the streets of his kingdom at night without anyone crying ‘devil’ in his direction. All he would need to do to break the illusion, however, was open his mouth, and the rest of the oddities became more apparent.

  “The camouflage is not quite complete. After several more feedings or one generous one, I will appear almost completely human but for my teeth and claws, like my warriors. It is why the transformation to my truer self does not concern me. It takes much longer to shed the guise of humanity than to gain it back. A year or two is not enough to lose my mind to the monster, just my body. And I embrace the monster that I am in its truer form as well as its disguise. Sometimes, I regret to watch it conceal itself in the masquerade of a man once more.”

  Asha touched the king’s face, mapping it with her fingertips. She would have to remake the memory of him, because none of the features were the familiar ones that had stayed with her in his absence. If he had come back to her like this, she might have suspected he was an imposter.

  “Did you truly grow to desire the devil, little Ashling?” the king asked with a smile, as though to remind her who he was underneath the transformation.

  “I have no interest in men. I find I am quite ruined for them. I prefer wolves and demons in my bed, my lord. I already miss what you were, but I would not deny you my blood again—or deny myself your bite—for the sake of his visage before me.” She drifted her fingers down to his mouth, where he curled his unnaturally long tongue around one of her self-wounded fingers. “I suppose if part of you stays the monster, I can still want you.”

  “Oh, I assure you, my strange wife, I am still the monster, and I shall always have teeth to take you, claws to mark you, strength to overpower you.” He took both of her wrists and pinned them above her head to kiss her into the cushioned bodies beneath them. “And it will be a pleasure, in my newer form, to be able to touch you where I could not.”

  He nipped her lip just a little too hard. It did not break the skin, but it could have if he had bitten any harder.

  Asha could not withhold a small cry. Every touch was magnified—not to the point of excruciation, but enough for her to notice how such a small thing made her thorn and bloom, especially when his fangs pressed into her skin. His thrall, the promise of his bite… It all seemed intertwined like the rope he had knotted around her, except within her, wrapped around the winter rose tendrils that in turn wrapped around her vessels—vessels he had claimed as his own.

  He had taken blood from her, but his teeth had left behind more than a healing wound at her neck. He had slipped inside her like an invited ghost through the slightest of holes bored into her flesh.

  “Does the thrall disturb you?” He lapped at her lower lip in unnecessary apology.

  “I sense it, but it inconveniences me less than the infernal fever,” Asha said. “In losing blood, I have lost the heat for now, for which I thank you. I experience desire well enough without its urgency.”

  The king cut her off with his kiss once more, holding her hands above her head with one fist and pulling out the ruby comb and tossing it aside on the blankets with the other. He laughed when she lifted her hips to meet his as he slotted himself between her legs, blocked only by the skirt of her gown. Raising her knees raised her skirts, but he wanted more than her bare legs. He fought with the ties at the back of her gown under the ropes, which had halfway unraveled down her arms.

  He bit her shoulder in frustration. “While you please me with its color, did you have to choose such a binding gown to fully consummate our unconventional marriage?”

  Ropes slithered over her like serpents as they unwound themselves and draped over the black copper. The king shifted his touch away from her back to stroke down her thigh and hold it more tightly around him as the bodice ties unlaced themselves as well. He dug his claws into her with relish until she cried out again and strained upward to catch his mouth.

  “Do not think I have not noticed fresh claw marks on your arms and legs, my love. You challenged me to mark you, and I am not one to step down from a challenge. If you desire new scars to obscure the ones the Gray left upon you, I would have your body stitch you a new history, and I will taste you everywhere you bleed.”

  Her bodice loosened, and the gown folded up from the skirt to the sleeves and pulled itself over her head. In the absence of her f
ever, she praised the master’s fire, for though the king had more of a man’s appearance, he still ran cool to the touch and warmed her less than the blankets beneath.

  Once again, she was naked and he clothed. She almost spoke up about their inequity, but the tunic’s buttons flew from their loops, and he raised himself onto his knees to yank his arms from their sleeves with a frustrated growl. He did not bother unfastening his trousers himself. They pulled away from his hips and down his legs to discard themselves, leaving Asha and the king in a tangle of naked limbs, his cock a warm weight against her abdomen.

  “You are not usually so impatient, my lord.” Asha ran her fingertips down his torso, more lifelike, more humanlike, but still odd in physiognomy—difficult to say exactly how. She wanted to bring her mouth to it, rake her nails over it, though she could not tear through or bring a flush to his skin.

  It had been so long since he had been exposed before her, she fought not to reveal her own weakness before it. His thrall could only account for a small portion of her lust. She had underestimated the sensation of his skin on hers, the intimacy of flesh, though his was less vulnerable and delicate than it appeared.

  “I still have control, but human blood invigorates as animal blood cannot. I waited months for Longest Night to arrive. I waited for you to realize I had nothing but pleasure to offer you. The night you gave yourself to me, you still struggled to trust me. Then my gentle, more delicious persuasion had to be cut short when I left my castle for weeks that strained my reserves, intensified my cravings. I suffered the phantom taste of your blood that I had not yet sampled, the memory of your sighs, gasps, moans, and screams, and the exquisite promise of pain lacing your appetites… I had to leave you, Ashling, just when you had finally let yourself find me. And now I am not only in your blood, but every part of you smells like mine with the brand of my thrall. I am impatient, my queen, and I would take you now and in every way possible this very moment if you would have me.”