Ashes Of Memory

by Aiden Bates

  My tongue played over his hole tentatively at first, exploring the shared sensations as nerves at my own hole woke up and almost panicked with pleasure, uncertain where it came from. It made my hips twitch. I licked again, then pressed my tongue in, and gave a long, shaky groan that vibrated into his body and mine as I had the sudden desire to push my ass back against the phantom sensations.

  I paused long enough to look over his cock to see him grinning, his eyes drunken with pleasure. “Either we do this every time from now on,” I said, “or you and I need to have a talk about the many things you’ve been holding out on me.”

  “From the way I scream for you,” he mused, “you could have figured out how good it was. Back to work. You’re the one repaying the favor.”

  I snorted, and became determined to wreck him until he was too crazed with pleasure to give that kind of attitude. With determination in mind, I plunged back down, prying at his hole with my tongue until I was out of my mind, and he began to howl, clawing at my scalp and pulling as if he might fight my entire head inside him.

  I at least managed to get a good portion of muscle in. And when he seemed to need more, I summoned my dragon up to my skin, let it fill me, let its bones become my bones and my tongue become its tongue—longer, warmer, thicker.

  Vance gave a shocked gasp, and nearly came off the couch cushions. I thrust my tongue deeper, wriggling and seeking, until I found the hard nub of his prostate. A dragon’s tongue is strong, not one muscle but more than a dozen all layered together, tight and tough. I licked at his prostate with force, curling the tip of my tongue enough to prod at it with the force of a strong human finger.

  Inside my own body, the shared sensation became first fuzzy, then almost jagged, then overwhelmingly intense. A slight pain ached at the front of my head, but I ignored it in favor of hearing and feeling Vance’s wildness as he began to lose himself entirely to my treatment. He grasped at the back of the couch, lifting his hips with my help, until he practically hovered in the air in front of me, riding my tongue as I huffed hot breath across his ass and went after his prostate like it was my own—which, it seemed, it practically was.

  I’d never really considered taking it up the ass before. It just didn’t occur to me. One day, that was probably going to change, now that I knew.

  I only just had decided to move on and give him my cock, and my knot, when a shudder rippled through him, and through me. A nervous, shaking kind of pleasure, as if I’d been given the lightest of shoves right at the edge of a steep and rocky descent into certain death. Vance gasped, made a sound like he might just fall from that height.

  Gently, I prodded at his prostate again. It responded this time by swelling lightly, hardening under my tongue. I repeated, following the sensations in my own body as it gradually seemed to fill and almost cramp. Vance’s breathing turned to short, sharp panting, as if he could barely get enough air. “Yes,” he moaned, his voice pitched high, “gods, Tam, just… do that… more of that, keep going… oh, fuck…”

  I redoubled my efforts until, at last, his entire body vibrated as the gland pulsed like a second, stuttering heart, and his cock began to trickle like a faucet left on. A second later, my own cock gave up, confused but unable to prevent itself from believing what we both felt.

  Vance didn’t make a sound. I didn’t realize why, until he let out a breath he’d been holding in. An explosive howl left him, and his hips bucked, his ass clenching around my thick muscle as the rest of the orgasm hit him. He pulled back from my mind just as I felt a sudden, sharp pain there. True loss of control.

  When I finally withdrew my tongue, his belly was covered in fluid, but none of it the thick, pearly white I expected. He trembled, his muscles still twitching. His eyes were closed at first, but he opened them slowly. “Fuck, Tam.”

  “I’d have thought you had enough,” I murmured, “but… if you say so.”

  I shifted carefully back down, fully in my human skin again, and swiped my fingers over his stomach, gathering slick precum mixed with the barest hint of his seed. I milked more from my own cock, and used it to lube myself slowly, before mixing it with the copious spit now spread over his hole before I sat up on my knees and pulled his hips further to the edge of the couch.

  As I pressed the head of my cock to his hole, he gave a sigh of relief.

  “Share with me?” I asked.

  His smile was lazy, but big. He stroked my arm with his hand, and a moment later I felt it as I pushed into him. Not just the sensation of being gently stretched open, but the willingness, the need—the profound sense of peace as that feeling of fullness did more than just stimulate nerves and stretch muscles and massage an already achingly sensitive gland.

  My eyes almost burned to feel what he was feeling.

  He felt whole. And to him, that was a reminder that he was no longer broken.

  “Vance,” I breathed as I sank into him. “Mate. I…”

  He gave a soft moan for me, and let a tear trickle from each eye. “I love you, Tam.”

  “I know, baby,” I said as I reached for his shoulders to pull him closer, sinking to the hilt inside him as my knot almost immediately began to swell. My heart swelled with it, and I gathered him to me and sat back, pulling him from the couch to settle him firmly on my lap as I felt my own knot fill him like it was filling me.

  Our hearts both skipped the same beat as the knot expanded into place, stuck inside him, and the pressure of his ass around it became a gentle but firm insistence.

  He put his arms around me. I pressed my cheek to his chest, listened to his heart fluttering. His fingers trailed along my spine. His body squeezed me. I had never been so slowly but inexorably dragged toward this pleasure. Other than the silent pulsing of his entrance around me, neither of us moved. We only breathed, and loved, and waited, seemingly surrounded by a gradually increasing pressure that threatened to crush us into one being.

  I tightened my arms around his waist. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I began to weep. “Vance,” I murmured, again and again as his body milked mine without even trying.

  His thoughts pressed against mine with sweetness and care. “Give it to me, mate,” he whispered against my hair, and then moved to whisper at my ear. “Give it to me.”

  I shuddered. I wept. I breathed him in, craned my neck to look up at him, to find his lips and seal them with mine. And I came.

  It didn’t so much hit me as rise up from the depths, swallowing me whole before it dove again like some great hungry leviathan. One long, terrible shot flowed from me and into him. A second later, his ass contracted tight around me, and he bit my lip as wet warmth burst between us, trickling down my stomach, lubricating the friction between our bodies as we rocked together, a boat tossed by stormy sea.

  The sea only gradually calmed. Unexpected swells continued to catch us both by surprise. Vance wiggled and twisted and rearranged himself, settling in for the long haul as my knot hardened, and my balls boiled to produce more seed to fill him with, convinced that if they made enough, if they pumped enough, this warm tightness that held me would bear fruit.

  I was not inclined to disabuse them of the notion.

  “This,” Vance said as he laid his head on my shoulder, “this is what I have missed the most.”

  “Being knotted for four hours?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “No. I mean… okay, yes, but I wasn’t talking about that part.”

  I shuddered as he squeezed, and extracted another short-lived burst of pleasure from me.

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “Feeling… feeling like I’m all put together,” he said. “Like there are no more pieces missing.”

  “If I’d known that claiming you would have helped, Vance, I—” I started.

  But he pulled back and put a finger to my lips, shaking his head. “No. No, Tam I don’t mean that. I was… doing fine before. Not great. But I survived, and I was getting better. But… I wasn’t, also. There was always some piece that I kne
w was missing and I just couldn’t remember what the whole puzzle was supposed to look like. I didn’t have the picture, just a bag of mismatched pieces. But it was short, and I thought that I would never know why.”

  I swallowed against a different kind of knot. The anguish he must have felt. He could remember it still, and I could feel some of it, but he held back like he didn’t want me to endure it with him. I would have, but it wasn’t my place to push. One day, I knew, he’d share all of it—the good and the bad. And we had a lifetime for that to happen.

  “You were the missing piece,” he said. “Even when I didn’t know you, when I couldn’t remember. I still felt you; felt the lack of you. I want you to know that. I always knew, Tam. Deep down.”

  Tears fell freely from my eyes, and I didn’t hold them back. I kissed them, and they mingled with his, and the mixed salt fell on both our lips and tongues—some kind of sacrament; atonement and celebration in the same act.

  And I wanted so desperately to stay like that, undisturbed, for the rest of our lives. A monument that would endure forever as the world moved around us, but we stayed still and perfect, just like this.

  But the world doesn’t move around anyone. It isn’t a Ferris wheel; it’s a hurricane.

  My phone rang. I only glanced at it, suddenly alarmed that it could be one of the security teams calling to inform us that Baz had been grabbed. Vance understood, his own worry, no matter how he tried not to let it show on his face, coming across the openness we shared. He gave a nod, and I lifted us both up and carried him to the kitchen, still stuck inside him, his legs wrapped around my waist as I fumbled for the phone.

  At the least, it wasn’t a security agent. But it was something just as worrying.

  “Who is it?” Vance asked, peering at the screen.

  I swiped to answer it. “Emberwood Weyr,” I whispered to him before I put the phone to my ear. My voice was shaky when I spoke, but I tried to sound professional. “Tammerlin Blackstone… Nix?”

  “Tam,” Nix said, something like worry and relief in the way he said my name. “Been a while.”

  I glanced at Vance, frowning confusion as he raised an eyebrow. “Uh... yeah, it has.” I almost told him to call me back, that I was a little tied up at the moment. But, Nix was the son of Emberwood Weyr’s leader, Roland Emberin. Asking him to let me call him back while my mate and I fucked was a questionable political decision. “How are things in your part of the world?”

  “Complicated,” he muttered. “Listen... I heard about a raid, up north. That you had help from mages; some abyssal thing?”

  Word traveled fast. Not from my weyr, I thought, at first. Though, Liana had been reaching out to other weyrs, to packs, clans, and prides, assessing the instability that seemed to be going around. I was about to fall over, though, and looked around before nudging a chair back from the table with my foot. I sank into it, my knees nearly giving out just as my ass hit the cool wood. “Liana call you?”

  “No,” he said. “She called Basri. Basri told Amon, Amon told me.”

  Basri was head of Emberwood security. Amon I didn’t know. “Right,” I breathed. “Yeah, we had mages. Hell, I snagged one for myself while we were in the market.”

  I winked at Vance, who rolled his eyes, then clenched tight around my knot.

  I swallowed a gasp, pulling the phone back from my ear as I held on tight to my mate and came again for him, just enough that it made spots flash in my eyes. I gave his ass a pinch, half playful and half warning, before I put the phone back to my ear, breathless. “Uh, what can I do for you, Nix?”

  “I hate to ask it,” he said, “but my people don’t have a good relationship with the cabals, obviously. Any of them. However... we have a problem.”

  I straightened, fresh new panic trying to push through the warmth. “What kind of problem? Missing kid?”

  Vance’s body stiffened against mine. He mouthed the words, “Dark Eaters?”

  “What?” Nix seemed genuinely confused at the suggestion. Maybe Liana hadn’t told Basri everything. “No, no one’s missing. In fact it’s kind of the opposite problem. Someone seems to have come back. We’re haunted.”

  Relief from the first worry, combined with a sudden, comical image of a dragon in a white sheet made me nearly burst out laughing. I managed to stifle it, and cleared my throat. “Oh. Okay. Ah...”

  “I know how it sounds,” Nix said, but a note of real concern entered his voice. “Tam, it’s not old-lady-in-the-library level haunting. Three of my people are dead.”

  That certainly washed away any humor on the matter. “Shit,” I muttered. Emberwood wasn’t a big weyr. Like Nix said, they didn’t have good relationships with the cabals. There was a reason for that. A couple of generations back, when the mages were working with the government to catalog paranormals, Emberwood had resisted. Peacefully, at first. Then not peacefully.

  Since then, they’d been persona non grata with the cabals ever since. The feeling had been mutual for more than seventy years now.

  “So, you need a necromancer,” I said. “And you’re hoping that my good will with Custodes Lunae might help get you one.”

  “I don’t want a necromancer,” he grumbled. “I need one.”

  “You’re overestimating my cachet with them,” I said. “If anything, I’m surprised they have anything to do with us at this point.”

  I looked at Vance again as he moved, and was surprised to find him picking his own phone up from the table. He held onto me with one hand while his other swiped through his phone. “But,” I said, “I... might know someone.”

  “Really?” He seemed surprised, even if he’d called me directly about it. “Who? A cabal mage? Not some grifter—”

  “No,” I said, “the real deal.”

  Vance looked at me as he waited for whoever he’d called to answer. “Hey, Mikhail,” he said, and winced again around a chagrined half-smile. “Uh huh. I know. No, I’m not running down any evil mages. Well, I’m just… I was… on a run, is all, don’t worry about it. Listen, I... may have a favor to ask. I told you, no evil mages. No, it’s just a... routine haunting.”

  I waited. Nix was quiet for a second, then, “Who is that?”

  “Just wait,” I murmured softly.

  Vance looked up at me. “Yeah, probably just that. Um... yes. Three people hurt. Well, okay—killed. I know it’s not the same thing, but people who have been killed have, by extension, been hurt. It pays.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Nix... can you pay?”

  He sighed. “Fucking... yes. I can pay. That shit happened almost seventy years ago, you’d think—”

  I took the phone away from my ear and nodded to Vance.

  “I don’t know, Mikhail,” he said, “I’m just head hunting. You’re third circle, you can take paid gigs. I’ll put you in touch. I know. I mean, technically you’re getting paid, so I’m the one doing a favor, I feel—okay, okay. I love you too. He’s good.” He smiled at me. “Mm hm, Baz is good, too. Yes, I would love for you to come over and make paprikash. On Friday, yes. Sounds good. Love you, too.”

  He put the phone down, and rubbed the side of his neck. “Necromancer sorted.”

  “Nix,” I said, relaying it, “I got you a necromancer.”

  “What,” he said, “just now?”

  “Just now,” I confirmed.

  He was quiet a moment. “Just what is your relationship with Custodes Lunae?”

  “I really did mate one of their espers,” I said, grinning at Vance as I rocked my hips, nudging against his prostate so that his eyelids drooped and his cheeks flushed with pink. “Guess I’ve got connections now.”

  “Oh, is that what it takes?” he wondered.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Mikhail is single,” Vance whispered, grinning.

  “And the necromancer I’m sending you is single and very cute,” I told Nix. “Best of luck with your ghost problem. Hope it works out.”

  “Hang on; single? Tam what’s that supposed
to—”

  I hung up. On Nix’s father, I never would have done it. But Nix called, I managed the favor, the conversation was done and I outranked him.

  Also, I was very close to having another bout of orgasm that threatened to be somewhat more painful and intense than the last.

  It wrung itself from me as Vance pressed his lips to mine and encouraged it with a steady clenching of his undoubtedly fatigued ring of muscle. When it passed, I eyed Vance. “Pimping out your fellow mages?”

  He shrugged and nipped at my lower lip. “Just figured, the faster we got him off the phone... and besides, Mikhail’s off stipend at the end of the month. He needs the work.”

  “You’re a good friend,” I said. “Now... where were we, exactly?”

  He took my hand and led it to his cock. “I think we were getting on with life.”

  Something inside that was always tense slowly relaxed, uncurling and stretching out as if it had all the space in the world, and nothing to worry about.

  “Now that,” I said, as I began to stroke him to hardness, “sounds like the way to spend a day. Or all of them.”

  “I vote all of them,” he said, eyes crinkling at the corners. “I love you, Tam Blackstone.”

  “I love you, Vance Beauregard,” I breathed as I kissed at his neck and felt him grow ready to go again in my fingers. “And I will for as long as I live.”

  And I did.

  Get ready for book 2 of the Dragon Magic Series, Ashes And Grave

  Available Now!!

  Ashes And Grave

  Get ready for book 2 of the Dragon Magic Series, Ashes And Grave!

  Available Now!!

  Free Bonus Chapters!!

  Get your free Aiden Bates Bonus Chapter for the Dragon Magic Series sent straight to your email inbox. Just Click here!

  Connect with me on facebook!

  Join Aiden Bates; newsletter for exclusive bonus content ➜ http://aidenbates.com/author-central-signup/