Ashes And Grave

by Aiden Bates

  I laughed, and would have cried, maybe, if I had the equipment for it here. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I did. And more. He claimed me. It’s… like getting married, but for shifters.”

  “Duh,” she said, “I know what it is. Oh, my sweet gods, Mikky—that’s… I’m really glad to hear that. Really. You shouldn’t be alone. You’re too kind, too sweet for it not to go somewhere good.”

  I looked up at the sky. My time was getting short.

  Gabby waved a hand. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Can’t stick around. I just wanted you to know—I’m not lonely here, either.”

  “Thank you,” Michael said. “Thanks for taking care of her.”

  I snorted. “She took care of me, believe me.”

  “She does that,” he murmured, and she leaned her head on his shoulder. They began to fade, losing cohesion. Laryn had likely expended as much of himself as he could. And this wasn’t where they belonged.

  “Tell Nix I said he’d better do right by you,” Gabby called. “Or else.”

  “I will,” I told her. “I… I’m glad you’re okay, Gabby. I’ll miss you.”

  “No, you won’t,” she laughed. “You’ll finally be able to fuck in pe—”

  And she was gone.

  And I was alone in an endless plane, and in need of getting home. I held my breath, though there was no breath and no need to hold it, and dove up, this time. Into the ocean above. Into life.

  Where, frankly, everything was a lot scarier.

  28

  Nix

  “Shouldn’t he be back by now?” I asked, pacing.

  Laryn gave me a long eye. He was tired from the effort of doing whatever it was he’d done. I didn’t understand it, and didn’t care so long as the part where he told me Mikhail was on his way back was true. So far, I wasn’t sure he hadn’t just been trying to get me to calm down.

  Mikhail was stiff, his skin pale, his lips and nailbeds blue. For all intents and purposes, he was dead. But I could still feel the little knot of him inside me where our bond was attached to whatever part of us it operated on. Our souls? Maybe. I’d felt him down there, and that was all I had to feel with, right?

  So shouldn’t I have known if he was getting close?

  “There we go,” Laryn muttered. “See? Told you. Nothing to worry about.”

  I watched Mikhail. “He’s not—”

  And then, Mikhail sucked in a desperate breath, and toppled over from his rigid sitting position. His hands clawed at the carpet.

  I dropped to my knees beside him, and took his searching hands in mine, pulled him to me and held him tight as I kissed his head, searched for his lips, kissed those, wanted to kiss every part of him. “Fuck,” I whispered to him, “don’t ever pull something like that on me again. What were you thinking? Why wouldn’t you let me—”

  “Breathe,” Mikhail wheezed.

  “I am breathing,” I told him, “you’re the one who wasn’t—”

  “Can’t breathe,” he told me, and gave my chest a gentle push.

  I eased my arms up a bit, letting him slide down my thighs some. He rubbed his eyes, winced against the light, and searched the room. “Master?”

  Laryn chuckled. “I’m here, Mikhail.”

  Mikhail breathed a sigh of relief. “Saw Ivan.”

  “I heard,” Laryn murmured. “How’d he look?”

  “At the end,” Mikhail said, and looked up at me, his affect earnest and flat, “he fell to pieces.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but the absurdity of it, especially after what had just happened, made laughter bubble up from inside. A mix of nervous release, and joy to have him back, and incredulousness at the way he apparently took dying and coming back.

  He laughed with me, and pulled my face to his to kiss me again. For a time, we... sort of forgot that Laryn was there.

  The old man cleared his throat. “Well. All seems well here. I’ll just leave the two of you alone, don’t mind the old man in the room. Ah... Mikhail, we’ll speak after. I’m to meet with this council, so I’m leaving now.”

  When the door closed, Mikhail released my mouth from his, and smiled up at me, his fingers tracing lines over my face. “Down there,” he said, “I read the script of your soul, you know.”

  “Unnerving,” I muttered. “Is that supposed to be a pick-up line?”

  He chuckled, and shook his head. “No. Not a pick-up line. A revelation. You have a good soul. And I do not mean this metaphorically. I mean that the quality of your soul—it is quite good.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “I didn’t notice much of that... writing, or script, or whatever, on you.”

  Mikhail sighed softly, and dragged a finger over my chest as if he could still read something there. “I have not done much in my life. Good things, when I have done them, I think. But... perhaps not enough. I think that I wish to change this.”

  “If you think you need to atone—”

  Mikhail chuckled. “No. Not to atone. I lied to Ivan, down there. I did wonder, always. Why he became like he was, why he treated me as he did. Now, I think that I know. He was born hungry. A hunger that he could never sate. He ate, and ate, but always the inside of him was empty and could not be filled. He must have been...”

  “Starving,” I provided.

  He nodded slowly. “Yes. It does not excuse him. He has paid now for what he did in life. But I cannot help but think that perhaps... perhaps he is now at peace. And that maybe he will stay that way.”

  I marveled at him. “I wish I could tell you that I feel the same. I hoped that he would suffer. Is that bad?”

  “No,” he said. “But I think that he did suffer. For a very long time.”

  “Can I tell you something?” I asked.

  He leaned in, rested his head on my shoulder. “Anything at all, my love.”

  “We’re doing the honesty thing, right?” I pressed. “Truth between us? Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else,” he agreed.

  I snuggled my head down against his. “You smell like you died. We should probably go get you cleaned up.”

  He leaned away from me, groaning, and thumped me playfully on the shoulder. “I saved your soul, you know,” he muttered. “Ungrateful—”

  He didn’t finish, because I scooped him up to the tune of his amused protests, and carried him to the shower.

  I really wasn’t kidding.

  “So,” Mikhail mused an hour later, after we’d both been scrubbed, brushed teeth, and finally smelled like people again, “I suppose this is your home, now.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, lying beside him on my old bed, trailing my fingers up and down his belly. “I’ll probably redecorate. But no point in living in two places. The only reason I left here was... well.”

  “I know,” he said, gazing up at me with what seemed like depthless compassion. “Are you okay?”

  “About Roland?” I asked. It didn’t feel right to call him Pop or Father anymore. I didn’t know if I ever could again. “He... he pushed me to it. I still don’t quite understand why. Pride, maybe? It would run in the family, I suppose. Or maybe he just didn’t want to die in his bed. Maybe it was some weird rite of passage to him. I haven’t had much time to think about it. I’m sure I will, though.”

  “If you wished,” he said, but hesitantly, “I could...”

  I didn’t know if I could face Roland so soon. Or if I ever wanted to. “I’ll keep it in mind,” I said. “But not yet. Not for a while, at least. You know I hoped that his last words would... I don’t know, be something special? That he loved me, or was proud of me. That’s pathetic, right?”

  “Of course it isn’t,” he said, and pulled my hand up to his lips to kiss my fingers. “I wish that Ivan had said something of a kind when he was finally finished. Even after everything. Some sign that he had realized what he became, and regretted it. Perhaps this is simply not the way of all people. What did he say?”

  I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter. The only thing that matter
s now, is that you’re here, and I’m here. And... the two of us have been through so much that it would be downright rude of anyone to come along and ask anything of us for... oh, I don’t know, at least a week. Or more.”

  A wicked grin spread over his face. “A week, he says.”

  “I’m not saying that we have to be naked the whole week,” I assured him, slipping down to snuggle against him, my hand gliding over his chest, down his stomach, to tease at his hip, “or that we have to spend all of that time tied together, my knot inside you, while you make that beautiful face that you make when I...”

  I passed my hand over his quickly hardening cock, barely grazing him with my palm, watching as his eyes closed halfway, and the pulse of the artery in his neck sped up. “But,” I murmured, coming close to his lips to tease out his tongue, “I do think that we could probably get in at least six good days...”

  He started to laugh, but it was swallowed up when I filled his eager mouth with my tongue, and wrapped my fingers around his cock to tug gently as he wriggled against me in slow motion.

  What began with gentle intention quickly escalated. Both of us, maybe, were hungry for life. For sensation, for everything that these bodies had to offer. I wondered briefly as he crawled on top of me, pressing my shoulders back to the old mattress, if he felt that way all the time.

  Whether he did or not, in this moment, we both craved. He worked himself down my body until my cock stood erect against the cleft of his ass cheeks, and leaned down to cradle my face in his hands and kiss me. I rose to meet him, starving for the taste of him, for the feel of his lips on mine, even for the slight brush of his breath across my face. Every nerve seemed to have forgotten what it meant to feel, and every time they remembered, it was an epiphany that spread through my body, shared like a rumor from one nerve to the next.

  He rocked his hips as we breathed together, our tongues tangling and vying for residence in my mouth and his, sliding his ass along my cock and back, hinting at what he wanted, making tantalizing promises with every move of his body.

  “Next time,” he said quietly as he pushed himself up to hover over my mouth, “there will be much foreplay.”

  I blinked and nodded. “Ah... okay. Definitely.”

  “But this time,” he said, nipping at my lower lip, “I feel a certain urgency.”

  “Do you?” I murmured as I thrust slowly against him.

  “I do,” he said, reaching back to find my cock, his deft fingers pressing down and then up along the fat tube of it until precum leaked and trickled over the tip. “So, if you will indulge me—I very much need you to fuck me, Nix. Deep, and long. I want your knot, like before. To be tied to you. To be unable to part from you.”

  The way he spread the slick fluid over me, and then glided his ass up and down me again, spreading it over his hole and between his cheeks, I couldn’t have argued with him if I’d really wanted to. And I didn’t. “Okay,” I breathed. “I mean... if you insist.”

  He rose up on his knees, and steadied me as he lowered himself, working the head of my cock against the tight ring of his entrance until he bit his lip and sank down.

  His eyes closed tight, and he gave a pained cry. There was no gentle opening, no easing into him, just like before. He threw his head back, and gave a stuttered moan that made my gut quiver, and called to my hips so that I couldn’t even help that I pushed into him, or that I delighted in the way he wailed again and his fingers dug into my stomach.

  Why he loved the pain of it, I didn’t know—but I knew that the sounds he made melted my brain, woke my dragon and narrowed every thought in my mind down to a single, concentrated need.

  I braced him with one hand on his stomach, and another on his hip. He clawed at my chest, one arm lifted, his hand behind his head as he rode me. I bucked, and he pressed back against me, seemingly intent on taking me deeper than I was ever going to get, convinced that if he took me hard enough I might reach some spot inside him that he knew was there but hadn’t been able to find.

  “Good?” I asked, panting as I filled him again and again.

  “Good,” he gasped. “Deeper. Please. Deeper.”

  “I can’t really—”

  “Shift,” he begged me.

  I gave a low, involuntary growl of excitement. My dragon didn’t even wait for my call. It rose up inside me, drawn by the need in my mate, and pushed out into my skin. My scales rippled out. My muscles bulged. All of me bulged, straining to accommodate the beast I shared my skin with.

  Mikhail’s mouth opened wide. He looked down at me, saw me in my half-form beneath him. His lips twisted to a pained kind of smile, wild and drunken as my cock stretched him wide and plunged into that deeper part he needed.

  He sank down, found the crest of a knot just beginning to swell, and pushed, slipping it just inside before it was too large to fit.

  He clenched.

  I roared, my dragon and I calling out together, loud enough that the windows rattled and no one in the weyr could have mistaken it for anything but what it was.

  My knot swelled inside him, lodging tight, and Mikhail cried with joy to feel it, clenching again, and again, desperate to feel me. I drew a heated hand, careful of my talons, down his chest and stomach, and wrapped my thick fingers around his cock. I tugged, bucked, ground my knot against his prostate.

  He stared down at me, his eyes misty. “Y-yes,” he breathed, “k-keep... ah!”

  There was no other warning than that. His cock burst over my fingers, a thick rope of cum dribbling first, and then rocketing across my stomach and chest. The next shot spilled across my lips, and my tongue snaked out to gather it, the taste of him driving me right to the edge as his body convulsed around my cock, throbbing and squeezing. I pushed as deep as I could. My head rolled, my back arching, as a wire-thin line of pleasure strained and then snapped along my spine.

  Mikhail let out a laugh of pure delight as I began to huff and thrust, emptying myself in prolonged bursts that rocketed out of my cock, pouring into him while I strained to keep from crushing him to me. His laughter continued, interrupted briefly by moans of his own still-bubbling orgasm, as he rolled his hips, working my knot with clear purpose each time it seemed like the biggest swell had passed, intent on seeing me drained into him.

  I let him work me as long as he dared, happy to watch the joy on his face, the lithe movement of his body, merciless at his hunger. If ever I was going to be devoured so totally, I could only pray that it would be like this.

  When at last, he was exhausted, and I was spent, I was careful to shift slowly back to my skin, my dragon receding with a warm glow, happy to have been as sated as I was. I brought my knees up, and pulled my mate down to my chest, where he lay contentedly, listening to my heart as I listened to his. At times, it was difficult to tell which was which.

  “Down there,” he said after a time, rousing me from a light doze, “I could feel our mating bond.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “Me too.”

  “It is not something well studied,” he said. “But... it may mean that our connection... it could last beyond this world. Into the next. And, perhaps, into whatever is after that.”

  “I hope so,” I admitted.

  He raised his head to look at me. “Do you? Truly?”

  I smiled, and kissed his forehead, and then his lips. “You already followed me into death once,” I said. “I think... that if we can find one another there, maybe we’ll keep doing it. In this life and the next. And the next. And the next. You’ll never be alone again, Mikhail. I promise you that, with all my heart. You’re my mate. Now and always.”

  He smiled. “I like that.”

  His head rested against my chest, and I heard his heartbeat slow, his breathing even out.

  I kissed the top of his head, and draped my arms around him. “Now and always, my mate. I promise.”

  29

  Mikhail

  “You know,” Tammerlin Blackstone said, almost a month later, during the first ‘off
icial’ visit by the leader of Emberwood Weyr to another weyr in close to fifty years, “it must be a hazard of mating a mage.”

  I overheard that part of it as Vance and I retrieved fresh drinks for ourselves from his and Tam’s kitchen. I shared a look of intrigue with my friend. “And what would this hazard be?” I asked as we rejoined our mates.

  Tam waved a half-drank beer in our direction as we crossed the living room and took our respective seats beside our dragons. “Getting stuck in other planes of existence,” he said. “Once is a coincidence, twice is a pattern, right?”

  “It’s twice,” Vance said. “Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern. Once is just... stuff happening.”

  “Is that the saying?” Nix wondered. “It really looks like a pattern.”

  “And,” Tam added, “technically I got stuck twice. Once in your mind, once in my own. That’s three between the two of us.”

  Vance gave me a long-suffering look, though he was smiling with amusement that he could not hide. “Okay,” he said, “so... technically, the subconscious isn’t another plane of existence. S, the score right now is actually just one. Which is nothing.”

  Tam looked to me, as if I would somehow contradict his mate’s logic. “I am sorry,” I said, “but he is technically correct. You are always in your unconscious, you just generally are not quite so aware of it.”

  “Okay,” Nix said, “but getting stuck in someone else’s mind has to count.”

  I conferred with Vance, each of us frowning slightly as we considered the puzzle. Finally, Vance shrugged. “Yeah. Okay, I’ll give you that. So—back to two. Still not a pattern.”

  We shared a laugh, and a drink, and what had been a very good evening seemed to be nearing a close at last. Not that I did not wish to see more of my friend, and of Tam—who had become more than a passing acquaintance, now that the issues I once had with him had begun to cool—but they had a night to themselves, which had become a rare thing. I understood the desire to make the most of that.