Asha remembered when he had pierced his skin and denied her, the pull of it as though his blood was his thrall. She bit her lip and spread her legs wider over his thighs. She had pinned his cock between them, the head twitching against her navel. When she parted for him, he arched to meet her.
He extended his claws and fanned them to her cheekbone, then stroked her brow. “There is that pain once more. A man would swear his heart had revived.”
His claws found her lips now, tapping against their softness before beckoning her down. She traversed the hills of his ribs, not as prominent as when he had been a monster but still discernable against her fingers. He brought her mouth just short of his collarbone.
With a hiss, he drew two claws across the skin, slicing through easily after the initial effort. The rocking of his hips challenged her balance more than before, especially when she ran her tongue along more pristine skin, resisting the immediate lure of his blood’s scent—the most arousing potion to perfume a man’s skin for a woman’s delight.
Cerval had promised that she would do the obscenest things at his command. The scent of the king’s blood would have her doing those things without breaking her will. Her mouth watered to linger so near the wound but not take the offering.
She could not resist, not when the blackish blood began to drip down along the prominent ridge of his collarbone toward his shoulder. She caught the straying blood with a kiss. Then not even the king could have torn her from him.
At first taste, death spread over her tongue—decay nourishing graveyard soil, ash, ichor, earthworms, beetles, black ooze that killed a pond or lake when it skimmed the surface in dark rainbows, metal sparks from a blacksmith’s forge, burnt flesh.
In the next second, it was sweeter nectar than the ripest summer fruit could hope to yield for all the gold in a gild merchant’s coffers. She moaned into him, sinking deeper as though taking his cock into her mouth. At the same time, the king lifted and poised her above his cock so that he could sink into her as well.
She refused to wait for his aid. She had been brought to a gallop, and she rode him hard, as hard as his blood took her every time she swallowed him.
Her roses opened to his moonlight, reddened with his blood. Thorns dug into her deliciously, entering the healed wound in her neck and creating a new one, a welcome one.
Their sexual congress did not drive this encounter; it was a consequence rather than the aim. Whether or not they came or how many times mattered little, not when their blood flowed, their mouths and veins a convoluted ouroboros. She could not determine who devoured whom, whether she was the monster or the woman.
Asha of the Gray fell away like black smoke from cold mist.
9
The king had her in a collar and held her with a leash. The collar was thick, polished leather—not the rough leather the wolf warriors wore but well-oiled, expensive leather. Asha thought that if she brought her fingers to the collar, she could tear it open, but she allowed herself to be leashed.
Moonlight entered between the stone mullions and new iron chains. But were the moonlight absent, she would still see the men, chained themselves to the walls. They wore no collars—to keep their necks bare—and their shackles were metal on their wrists and ankles rather than soft leather.
The dirt under their nails and the bedraggled state of their hair suggested they had been recently cleaned but not groomed. Their clothes had been cleaned as well.
The king unhooked the leash from her collar, but he used her hair to pull her head back. He kissed her forehead. “Proceed how you will, my love. Do not feel as though you must control yourself so early in your death. Restraint will not serve you.”
“Please, Your Majesty. You can stop this. You can free us,” the chief elder begged. Time in the dungeon had rendered his voice ragged.
The king gave not the slightest indication that he had heard the plea. He released Asha’s hair and gave her a subtle nudge between the blades of her shoulders.
Asha curled her fingers into fists in the loose, black dressing gown in which she had awoken, skin scrubbed of dirt and blood, hair still wet from the care taken, and the dressing gown easily tied closed with the silk sash—and thus easily removed.
Her claws tore through the fabric when they extended with her teeth. Her tongue had run over the difference immediately upon awakening, but her eyeteeth grew even longer the closer she came to the chief elder. Her jaw ached with their growth, but not in pain—the sensation compared more closely with the pangs of arousal that shot down her spine at the sound of the man’s quickening heartbeat. Her mouth watered as it had once watered for the scent of stew and ale.
“If I were gracious, I suppose I should show gratitude.” Asha was unaccustomed to her new teeth and how they changed the shape of her mouth and words. Her teeth clicked together awkwardly, but it did not obscure her meaning. “Without the elders’ callous disregard of unwanted women, the king would never have taken me from the kingdom, and he would not have killed me so well. I smell your fear, chief elder, as though you feel it solely to call me closer. If men had carried such fragrance under their skin while I was still human, perhaps I would have found solace in the whorehouses, to have that perfume near me always and often indulged.”
She relinquished her hold on the fabric and found instead the ends of the sash.
“Stay away from me!” The chief elder stumbled back against the wall, attempting to crawl through the stone.
“I am curious. What do you see that makes you so afraid? I cannot see my reflection anymore, not that I indulged in vanity much before my death. How have I changed? When I look down at my body, much seems the same. My skin is just as gray, though it has become more delicate to the sight and more durable to the touch. The scars remain. I am still lithe of limb, angular, jagged, unwelcoming. But that did not make you run from me before. Tell me, sir, how have I changed?”
“You are an abomination.” The chief elder shouted when his hand slipped and his head struck the unpolished stone. It did not break his skin—a pity indeed—but he ceased his fruitless efforts to escape.
“No, that has not changed. What else would you marry to a demon? Changes, chief elder, changes. Neglect no detail.” Strangely, her mouth curved into a smile with more ease now than when she had been a woman, as though her mouth had widened in the transformation and become more inclined to smile—as predators tended to appear in the moment they met the eyes of their prey.
“You did not have those teeth when last I saw you,” the chief elder finally said. He stayed on the ground, cowering.
Asha did not mind.
“Your ears narrow to a point through your hair. And your eyes are paler gray than before, nearer to the whites of your eyes than the gray of your skin. The shape of your skeleton seems more pronounced against your flesh, but it is difficult to tell when the robe covers you so.”
Asha pulled the sash undone and let the dressing gown fall to her feet in a black puddle. “Does this aid your observations?”
The chief elder swallowed hard as though something thick caught in his throat.
“You wanted to make me your queen concubine when you believed the king dead. I could not understand how a man with such disdain for my kind would consider me spoils, but I sense more now. I can smell your fear, chief elder, and your desire. It emerges from your pores like seeds sprouting from the earth. I do not create or cause it, only sense its presence. It was there before, was it not? Did it please you to give me to the demon so that you could imagine what torments and perversities he would rain upon me? Is that why you wanted me? Because you wanted to plumb the depths to which I had sunk? Ah, yes. That makes desire creep along your skin. How you and yours condemn the instruments of your own wickedness.”
Asha flexed her fingers. The nails had gone black, thick, smooth as glass, the tips narrowed to a point. “I do not just sense your desire,” she murmured. “I believe I can…”
She held her hand over his wisps of gray hair
, his broad, furrowed brow, those terrified blue eyes. She liked seeing his fear, fear of the same little girl he had once dismissed—not nearly changed enough to render her a monster to the eyes, yet he feared her as though she had changed into the dragon for her first dead days.
Arousal and hunger were one and the same within her, velvet and thorns over and under her skin. It hovered around her like a mist. She had never seen it from her king, although when she had awakened, it had surrounded him with shadow without obscuring.
Her own yearning was a deep, dark red, deeper and darker than human blood and closer to that of the monster she had become. She stretched it out from her skin with her will, sent it to wrap around the chief elder, entering him when he inhaled.
He fell back again, groaning helplessly. Against his chief elder robes, his cock rose and tented the fabric, a humiliation in and of itself as he tried to cover it from her sight.
She tilted her head, her lips parted to breathe in his scent, and sent more of her thrall into him. It filled his body to the tips of his fingers and toes, centering most intensely in his cock and his scrotum but also finding other denser avenues that taught her his proclivities, some which he might not have known himself. Could she make him come by thrall alone? Could she stand to simply watch as she did, the scent of him more and more tempting as arousal gripped his body?
And with the men enchained, how far could such delectable influence extend? Asha turned to view down the line of traitors, sending out her thrall to determine its reach. The deep red miasma slithered into the next man. Even as it filled him, it crawled along the floor to the next and the next. She did not stop until all eight men writhed on the stone, their hands over their cocks to cover or rub against the need she awoke in them. In an effort to justify their desire, they gazed upon her as though her unwelcome form had become a point of common desire. It was different than when she had been bound to the auction platform, because here she had cultivated their lust, and their lust made them weak rather than a threat.
Asha released the other men, although she left the traces of her thrall already within them to keep their flesh heated and fragrant. She turned her attention back to the chief elder alone.
“I could grow accustomed to this.” She stepped over him, straddling his body and biting her lip. It was still strange to have her own teeth so thin and sharp—to bite her lip made her remember when the king had bitten it instead, igniting new sparks to add to the cold fire. “I am curious how far I can take this. What can I make you do? Kneel? Beg? Grant me your body and soul in the hopes I offer you a crust of bread in return? You have had multiple women in your life, chief elder. Should I consider you ruined and therefore free for me to use at my discretion, since you can no longer be useful in any other way?”
“Asha. Please.” He scrabbled at his clothing, pulling at his collar.
“Please what, chief elder? What do you want? Do you want me to stop this? Or do you want me to finish it?” She crouched down, too fast for him to follow her progress until she was right before his eyes. She ran the tip of her tongue along her teeth. “What do you know of craving, when everything you have ever wanted fell into your lap, and what did not you could write into law? Your belly has never known hunger, your tongue has never known thirst, and your cock has never known abstinence. Not a single part of your body has ever cried out in true need. You are made of comfort, chief elder. Shall I teach you what it means to need? How have you wanted me, chief elder? What filthy images have passed through the white-washed sewers of your mind?”
He ripped at his robes, pulling them open over his chest in an effort to reach his straining cock. She stood again, laughter bubbling in her throat, but she swallowed it down.
“What would you have done, sir, had you made your vizier take me to your bed? He would have had to bind me, but you do not strike me as a man who would quell at a tied-down woman. What marks would you have left upon my skin?” Asha trailed her claws from her thighs up to her belly. Her abdomen was longer than she remembered it, the already pronounced curve of her ribs even more so, but she had been thin enough before that the distinction was almost negligible—at least in this stage of her transformation. “Would anticipation render your attentions upon me quick but painful, at least at first? Would you have been able to hold yourself back?”
She kicked his hand when he reached for her even as he fumbled with his trousers with the other. He shouted, bringing broken fingers close to his chest with cries of pain. She had not meant to crack the bones with her newfound strength, but the damage left her unfazed. She grasped him more tightly with her thrall, made his pain negligible to his pleasure.
“You will not touch me. Men may not touch me. Touch yourself, because I will not. I have no interest in your body, chief elder, in matters of your flesh. I want two things from you, and this now is the first.” She clenched her thrall over him like a fist. This time, his cry of pain accompanied the frantic effort to wrap his hand around his deeply flushed, swollen cock. “They are watching you, chief elder. Your colleagues are accessories in your humiliation. I only regret that it could not be the entire kingdom, as they made themselves accessories to mine. And I assure you, sir, my humiliations will be far kinder than yours ever were or would have been to me.”
The chief elder clutched his broken hand to his chest, but his free hand struggled at his cock. Though he glanced over at the rest of the elders chained along the wall with him, he granted the acknowledgement with barely a blush before returning his gaze to her, to the progress of her hands over her body, the shift of her hips, and her cunt exposed to him between her straddling legs.
“A woman should be modest and tasteful. She should not flaunt wealth nor prestige nor base femininity. Of course, wealth, prestige, and base femininity are relative. I noticed cleavage aplenty as well as translucent fabrics, rich thread, gold, silver, and jewels among the women of the Tapestry—as long as they were no more ostentatious than their husbands. But if I had worn a golden belt, you would have thought me an immodest woman.”
She wrapped her hands around her beggar’s waist, her claws almost touching. When they grew, they would overlap. “You made me the wife of the demon, then accused me of being a demon’s wife. Well, sir, I am that demon now, and I condemn you for every stroke of pleasure you give yourself, so give me more. Do you imagine me lowering my cunt around you, my moans ringing against the walls, squeezing you more deliciously than your hand can hope to offer? Do you dream of your women playing whore for you? The devil already made me his, so I can be nothing else to all others.”
Asha slid a hand down to her folds, tracing her claws over the flesh. The rest of her body was cold, but her cunt was warm, her folds more sensitive than before, especially to the dangerous caress of her claws.
With a slight whimper, she slipped her clawed fingers inside, where she was warm as life and wet with lust and hunger. She ran her claws over the flesh within, and nothing punctured, pierced, or pained—rather, the scratch of it rendered in such focused pleasure, her eyelids fluttered closed, and she tasted the air for lack of anything else to fill her mouth.
But she forced her eyes open again. The chief elder huffed and panted, his cheeks ruddy, his hand slapping rudely over his cock as he watched her. She slowly lowered herself down again, her balance better than it ever had been, without a pulse throwing her off, without weakness limiting her movements. She stroked her clit and tormented her cunt, both more than she could bear, yet she could not convince herself to stop.
“I am not yours,” she said through gritted teeth. “You are mine. I will make your life mine.”
He bucked up into his grip, helpless the harder she tightened her thrall.
“Come for me, sir. And do not dare stop until you cannot come anymore. Make yourself a disgrace for me. Only then will I relieve you of your misery, kill you in my pleasure, give you dying moments you could never hope to receive with your God.” Asha shivered, rocking on her toes to keep her balance. “Now!”
she demanded, a hiss edging the cry.
He bucked up again, no dignity in his shouts as seed spurted from his impossibly hard cock onto his stomach, his chest, a few thick droplets on his face. He stroked himself through the orgasm, his hand a blur, then slowing down as his urgency lessened.
“Did you not hear me clearly? You will have no relief, chief elder. You will come until pleasure has become pain. That is an order from your queen.”
Though she had never latched her teeth into him, never made him hers in blood, her thrall surged through him as the king’s had within her in his bed—it became so much easier to control every second more she used it.
His cock dared not soften. Instead, it pulled up tight against his abdomen, twitching through the small puddle of his come. He whined, bringing his unbroken hand back to his cock. He winced at the first stroke, but the more she played his lust, the stronger his strokes became. He smoothed his way with palmfuls of his own semen.
Asha held back her own pleasure. She did not need her climax more than she needed to feed, and the feed itself would be all the orgasm she would need. For now, she stroked herself to his beautiful agony, exploring the newness of her desire as well as what had remained the same. She was still so much the woman she had been, but magnified, more powerful, with greater clarity and more finely honed weapons at her disposal. She was still Asha of the Gray, a Grayling queen, but more herself than she had ever been in a weak human body.
“Yes!” he shouted, coming again, this time hard enough to hit the walls behind him as well as join the rest on his body. “God, yes! Please, Asha, let me—” He released his cock to reach for her again, desperation stealing even a recent memory. But he winced and grabbed his shaft as she brought him up hard once more.
“Again.” She impaled herself faster over her fingers, teeth extending still farther within her mouth. She did not know how many more of his orgasms she could last before taking the only other thing she wanted from him. “Make yourself the spectacle of shame you should be. Until tears join the salt of your seed.”
Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Page 20