“You can open your eyes now.”
His lips pressed into the other side of her neck, and she opened her eyes as she felt his fingers pluck the emerald from her hand and begin running it along her skin, down from her wrist to past her elbow, as far down as her blouse would let him reach. In front of her eyes, there was still only black, and the blindfold remained in place, but suddenly she began seeing sparks of light, as if there were tiny sparklers appearing and disappearing between her eyes and the fabric. She opened her mouth to ask, having all but forgotten the gag, but was stopped sharp by the feel of a cold point of metal near her elbow, along her skin.
“So I can reach your shoulders,” he said, as if he’d been able to read the question in her gasp, and then he trailed it down through her blouse, so that she could feel the fabric parting all the way down to her shoulder along one arm and then the next.
“I’ll get you a new blouse,” he told her, and then the emerald was back, tracing up and down her arm as his lips came back to her throat.
The sparklers in front of her became more vibrant, spinning and flashing more quickly in the dark, but her focus was so torn now that she couldn’t have asked a question if she’d tried. Where the emerald traced her skin, she felt an unnaturally cool slickness that warmed after it passed, and where Daelend’s lips had been on her skin, wherever they traveled, she felt a tingling that was nearly electric, or even poisonous.
When the emerald touched her neck, pressing into the point where he’d kissed, a surge of pressure ran through her blood, heavy enough that it spiked into fear and set off an urge to struggle that she couldn’t resist, or even consider. Daelend pulled aside the gag and his lips came down on hers, hot and warm, and one of his arms wrapped around her to hold her against him. The pressure at her neck, underneath the emerald, was a lashing of discomfort, as if a jellyfish's tentacle had not just been pressed up against her skin by the cool emerald, but pushed into her vein.
The bonds at her wrists seemed to tighten as she pulled at them, and the sparklers grew into lightning-sharp flashes that blinded her. Struggling, she yanked her lips back from Daelend’s, jerking her shoulders back and forth in an attempt to dislodge the emerald or find some relief.
“Focus on the kiss, Ina. This is what you wanted, remember. Focus. My kiss. The bonding will take faster.”
With that, his lips came down on hers again before she gained the breath to speak, and she heard whimpers coming from her own throat. But she stopped thrashing and attempting to break away from him, forcing herself to try to trust him and focus on the pleasure of his lips rather than the pain in her neck or the new ache in her wrists.
True to his word, the pressure of the emerald remained, but the sharp sting of its presence lessened, ever so slowly, as her breath intermingled with his, her mouth accepting his tongue, and then sucking hard on his lip. His hand gripped her hip tighter, bringing up a warmth in her core.
He leaned back from her then, and she worked to catch her breath as she took some accounting of herself. There was heat running through her in reaction to him and whatever he’d done, but there was also a cool stinging in her muscles, branching out from the skin where he’d touched the emerald to her body. It ran all over her now, as if his fingers were tracing along her skin and tracking her veins with some cool, tingling lotion.
His hands rested on her hips still, lightly, but his fingers toyed with the bare skin above her jeans, which she imagined showed clearly with her arms above her head as they were. His palm landed at the small of her back, pressing in as if molding itself to the shape of her body, and she bit back a moan at the pleasure of the contact.
“Better?” he asked.
“Mmm,” she agreed, swallowing hard. “Yeah.”
“Good. Just two more, Ina.”
Before she could say in protest, his lips were back on hers, the emerald pressing into the other side of her neck. Now, she knew what to expect, and she worked to hold herself still against the pain of it, focusing on his warm lips on hers, and on his hand pressed into her back as if he owned her, holding her there against him as the cold emerald ran a lancing, white-hot rain of what felt like poison into her neck and through her veins. She couldn’t help jerking her shoulder once against his arm when the pain suddenly tightened, her body looking for a reprieve, but despite the fact that she wasn’t truly struggling now, it seemed to go on forever.
When Daelend finally pulled the emerald away, she was gasping for breath, all of the skin of her body running hot or cold with either pleasure or pain, confusing her senses in a way that she wouldn’t have thought possible. His fingers traced her cheek and she flinched, but then he rubbed the torn cloth of her blouse along her face and she realized she’d begun crying, and that he was simply drying her face.
“We’re almost done here,” he said, that gruffness from much earlier in the night back in his voice.
“I can’t.” She yanked at the bonds holding her wrists above her head, but there was no give in the chains. “I can’t, Daelend, it’s too much.”
“We’re almost done, Ina.”
Pulling at her wrists, she jerked away from his touch when she felt his arms encircling her again. She’d expected the emerald to come back to her neck, and wasn’t prepared when it landed at the small of her back where his palm had pressed into her earlier. His arm wrapped around her torso, holding her still as she thrashed and tried to escape the gemstone’s force, but the coolness of it was pressed firmly into the base of her spine now, and the stinging cold lanced into her from there, running up her spine and circling her body. She screamed into his shoulder as her body tensed with a surge of cold pressure, her wrists spasming above her with the shock of it, and the lightning in front of her eyes flashed brighter than before. She went limp in Daelend’s arms as her temple pounded with a sudden hammering of pressure.
When her body began to run with more heat from Daelend’s body and touch than cold from the emerald’s sting, Marina finally realized that the pain was dissipating. The hit of pressure that had felt akin to a migraine while it lasted was dulling behind her eyes, and her breath evened out. There was a dull tingling along her muscles, and an ache in her arms where she’d pulled against the bonds, but the unbearable spikings of pain that had been running through her were gone, and Daelend was kissing her forehead, smoothing tears away with her torn sleeve again.
Her voice came out in an unrecognizable whisper when she first spoke, so she swallowed and tried again. “Are…is it done? Is it over?”
In response, she felt Daelend’s fingers untying the blindfold that had been wrapped around her face, and then she sighed as they went higher to begin untethering her.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
She brought her arms down, and his hands landed on her shoulders, holding her in front of him as she finally answered, “That was worse than a tattoo.”
His eyes squinted at her out of the darkness, but his lips quirked in some acknowledgement of what she’d said. “Because you’ve got a stronger will than most. Do you regret it?”
She shook her head, trying to take stock of how she felt. There was a buzz to her blood at the moment, as if she were running with static electricity, and a slight euphoria that reminded her of the one time she’d tried drugs. She’d been so scared at the lack of control they’d brought on that she’d never tried them again. Her skin was tingling, but not unpleasantly—it was almost as if she’d just applied Aloe to herself after getting too much sun.
Her gaze moved from her freed hands up to Daelend’s eyes—they looked more green than black now, and shining, though the darkness of the woods around them seemed complete. “I don’t…think so. I’m just…I guess I need a minute,” she murmured.
One of Daelend’s hands went to her elbow, and she let him guide her to the ground. She rested her arms on her knees, curling into herself as she tried to come to terms with the fog surrounding her brain and the tingling along her skin.
When he pulled on
e of her hands to his lips and kissed it, the warmth of him felt familiar and comfortable—something from that evening when they’d been on the log by her river, though that felt like a lifetime ago. She curled her hand into his and left it there.
“I didn’t think it would pain you that much,” he said quietly.
He reached to the side, into a pack she hadn’t seen before, and pulled out some white cloths, then poured some liquid onto them from a canteen he’d also brought out. She didn’t flinch when he reached out and ran the cloth along her neck, and then put it to the small of her back for another few seconds. The coolness was welcome, and the warmth of his hand over each patch of skin was even more welcome when he removed the cloth and passed his skin along hers.
“Will the tingling go away? It’s still… it’s still everywhere,” she admitted, realizing that the heat in her veins and the desire that had risen up in her core were also still more than present, offering up a dull pulse of want that kept distracting her, stealing her mind back to Daelend’s touch.
“It will. Your body is getting used to the presence of the bond, and of my power. It will pass, and you’ll get used to the heat in your blood, too,” he added.
The smile on his face was knowing, and Marina had to look away from it, already feeling a blush in her skin.
“You didn’t answer my question, Ina.”
“Hmm?” She’d been looking at her hand, wrapped in his. The tightness felt right—as if she didn’t just belong to him, but belonged here.
“You didn’t answer my question, as to whether or not you regret what you did. What bargain you’ve made. Some do,” he added, more quietly.
She glanced up, noting his tight lips and narrowed eyes. There’d been something new in his voice that she hadn’t recognized. “I don’t entirely know what’s ahead of me, Daelend…it’s hard to answer that.”
He shook his head, frowning. “No. If you regretted it, you’d regret it now. The bond between us—it would feel tight. You’d feel, on some level, like you wanted out of your own skin, like you were scratching at the bond. You might be angry or sad or confused…but you’d feel trapped. More trapped than you were in those chains,” he added, gesturing to the small links of chain lying nearby on the ground, which didn’t look half so strong as they must have been. “I didn’t think you would—I wouldn’t have pressed for a bond if I thought you truly weren’t ready or able to accept it…but I couldn’t know for sure.”
“You were afraid,” she realized, the emotion in his eyes suddenly hitting home for her. “You thought I might hate you because of the deal we made.”
That ripple of a shrug ran through him again, and the familiarity of the motion on him—the very comfort it offered in how familiar and simply him it was—sent a warmth running through her, springing through that core of desire and doing something to overcome the fog that had seemed to be settling over her mind. “There’s never any way of knowing for sure. Once, I might have brought you to my world as a plaything, but you would have gone back to yours eventually. I’ve thought of putting a bond between us, but…”
“I don’t feel trapped,” she told him, squeezing his hand like he’d squeezed hers earlier when they’d been on the riverbank. “But you said I’d have no will—that my will would be yours—earlier, so…I don’t know what else to say. Would I feel regret? I don’t. I don’t know what I feel right now. But I was glad to have made the trade earlier. I believe I still am.”
She watched as he swallowed, and then that friendly smile came to his face, crinkling the lines by his eyes as a huff of air passed his lips. “That’s all that matters. And you’ve still got a will, Ina. It’s not that it’s ceased to exist. It’s that it will bend to mine if we’re ever at odds, and align itself with my wants before any other’s. You couldn’t betray me if you tried, but you could hate me right now, and that hate would last, and make us both miserable. For a moment, when you screamed, I thought the bonding was too much—that I’d set us both up for misery.”
The thought of feeling trapped in her own skin, and what might have happened, came to her mind for just a moment, but she shook it away as Daelend reached into his pocket yet again and brought out the damnable emerald that had been pressed so hotly into her skin just minutes before.
“This is yours,” he told her, holding it between them.
She glared at him.
“It won’t hurt you again,” he promised, meeting her eyes. “And we can make it into a necklace or something else if you’d prefer. But it’s a symbol that my kind respect. It needs to be with you. Later, I’ll teach you how to borrow some of my power through it, but now that we’re bonded, that won’t cause you to feel more than a tingling, as you described it.”
When she didn’t answer, he plucked her hand from her knee and deposited the emerald in her palm. She’d braced for pain, but it was only the cool stone she’d carried earlier. “It made me feel connected to you earlier,” she acknowledged quietly. “It helped me get through tonight.”
His body scooted closer to hers, and then his arm wrapped around her, pulling her against him so that their bodies were flush. The darkness was beginning to gray, and she could see more and more trees and shrubs now, some of them with a strange glow. For now, it was too much. She turned her head into his shoulder and closed her eyes, and then sighed when she felt him settle his chin onto her head, tightening his grip on her.
The emerald seemed to pulse in her fist, but in a way that echoed the heat and the warmth already weaving in and out of her veins, and she gripped it tighter as she settled fully into his side, and into belonging.
THE END
About the Author
Michaela L. Cane writes dark fantasy, horror, and erotic paranormal romance. As a full-time book editor and writer, she likes to say that she specializes in all things dark, and you can find her on twitter at @MichaelaLCane. Her first novel, Spells in Waiting, is an erotic dark paranormal romance now available from Hellbound Books. It tells the story of a witch whose fate is twisted out of her hands when she becomes entangled with an investigation into her mother's coven, as well as the agent at the head of the investigation and some of her mother's own dark spells.
Daughter of the Forsaken
by Alegra Sterling
Chapter One
Screams tore through the night, echoes of pain that hung above the nearby village as the vampire ripped people limb from limb, leaving nothing but terror and fright in its wake. Mayze and Wyatt were fast on its trail. Wyatt hollered at Mayze to stay by his side, but she ignored him, speeding ahead.
She had to find her friend, and this monster was the only one who knew the truth. Mayze recalled the agony and desperation in Zacharias’s voice as she replayed the conversation back through her mind. It was just about sunset when Daz’s father went searching for his only daughter and best friend to Mayze. She was last seen by the stream the two used to play when they were younger and when Mayze had seen her earlier.
She left with Wyatt because there was chatter of a vicious attack on the other side of the village while Daz was finishing collecting water for the night for her and Zacharias. He told them he heard screams nearby, but when he arrived all was left was part of the dress she was wearing. When he pulled the material from his pocket Mayze knew that something terrible happened and that they were the only ones that could reach her in time.
Mayze nodded her head at Wyatt and, before Solomon could get a word out, they both vanished.. She had this sudden urge to stay in front of Wyatt as they looked for her. Thoughts flooded her mind like someone had left on the faucet. Where could she be? Her feet carried her forward, the urge to find her friend stronger than the pain in her legs and aching in her chest.
Abruptly, she stopped dead in her tracks. On the path before her was a body that had been torn beyond recognition. She turned over the mutilated corpse and spotted a necklace clasped tightly in the girl’s right hand. Engraved on the silver heart locket were the words, Best friends always a
nd forever.
“Dazielle.” Mayze clutched her friend’s body close, bellowing her anger at the darkening sky.
She couldn't believe how such a beautiful, young, talented lady such as her friend could be erased from the living without a moment's notice.
“How cruel can one be to just snuff out a soul as pure as yours, Daz? Why?”
In spite of her injuries, all she could see as she looked at her best friend’s face was the life they were going to have once they reached adulthood. They had plans to see the world together.
Wyatt tried to shake her out of current state. “Mayze, we must go if we want to catch the beast that did this to Dazielle. Come quickly! It must be now.” Wyatt tugged on Mayze’s shoulder to get her attention.
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