In a blur, she appeared in front of the Midlander and grabbed the front of his tunic, pulling him down to meet her eyes. “Am I less powerful because I have been touched by the king’s monstrousness? Does enjoying the flesh of beasts such as these change that I have survived even death, that I destroyed Murial and every last one of the dragons with my own hands and my own knife? Does touching you diminish me, sir?”
The Midlander swallowed hard. “No.”
A growl rose from among the clusters of wolves seated around the banquet table. Lysan shifted into his wolfish body, three legs more balanced than his one.
The captain had assigned him to remain in the kingdom as well, but the assignment was less voluntary than Callina’s. His three legs could run far faster than a man’s two, and he could keep up with the pack, but as soon as he needed to stand on two legs, his one would hobble him too much in a fight.
Lysan crept closer and closer until the Midlander realized the error that Lysan intended him to rectify. The wolf’s usual easygoing nature was nowhere for this man to find.
“No, Your Majesty,” the Midlander said.
“Would you like to know a kingdom woman’s helplessness, Gram? What it feels like to have no escape and no alternative when faced with someone given greater power? I could barely fight back when begging outside the marketplace. A man who struck me put a woman like me in my place, but if I struck a man, I needed reliable witnesses to the man’s offense. I could only carry a knife and could not aim to kill. If I hurt them too badly and the men received a scar, I knelt in the stocks. What kind of world was it, where a man taking me against my will meant I could never work anywhere but in service to the same man and all like him, with no right to refuse? I will give you more consideration than your kingdom ever gave to me. Give yourself to me, and I will show you a fraction of the helplessness I will not allow you or your sex to give to mine again, unless they permit it.”
Gram’s gaze lowered to her lips, then to the cleavage her bodice made. As though hypnotized, he raised his hand to her breast.
“Even if you offer yourself to me, I—”
She released his tunic to knock his hand away. “No. I do not offer myself to you. I have one use for a man, and it is not his body. What do you think these teeth are for?”
The man peered through her parted lips. By the time he had recoiled, Asha had taken him by the tunic again.
“It does not hurt. That I can promise you. It is more than your kind could promise me. It will not hurt, and I will not kill you, although I could.” She jerked him back when he tried to pull away from her grip. “Do not run. Face me. They chose you to speak for them. Feel what I want you to feel, so that you may speak to the people who will listen to the words of a man over that of a woman or a demon.”
She loosened her grip upon him, lifted her mostly retracted claws to stroke the coal dusting of hair along his pale jaw. She remained cold, but she did not want to terrify him, not when they needed the kingdom to trust their devil king and queen as never before. If he had been a Tapestry son, she might have been less charitable.
“It is good for you to fear us, but I have no desire to kill you,” she murmured, tantalized by the pulse visible near the cord of his neck. “Trust me. You need to trust me.”
“Why should I trust you, if our men treated you so poorly?”
A wise man. “Because things will change, Gram. And they can only change if you trust me. It suits us both to forget the past when we meet.”
She sent out a tendril of her thrall to caress him, not to force his will but to convince him that yielding would give him something in return, although his pleasure interested her only insofar as it would lead to acquiescence.
“Do you have the control, Ashling?” the king whispered in her mind.
The man slowly came closer to her, his skin warm and fragrant and his heartbeat enticing.
Gripping his shoulders, she lifted herself onto her toes to bring her parted lips to his neck. She trembled where she touched him. Since the battle, she had only tasted blood in a chalice, the blood of her husband, or the blood of wolves—nothing straight from a human source, filled with the life she needed, craved, lusted for. She licked the length of him, a prayer of gratitude to his living body for what it could give her just underneath the surface.
Gram both tensed and loosened under her hands, his shoulders dropping but his cock stirring against her hip.
When Asha peered through her eyelashes over his shoulder, she met the gaze of the whore who had joined the representatives. She wore a Tapestry gown, but even if Asha had not recognized her from the brothel at the edge of the Gray, the colorlessness of her skin and the prominence of her collarbone would have given her away. Some of the representatives watched Asha with fear or with righteous disdain, but the woman was calm, intense, almost hungry when Asha brought her teeth to the man’s flesh and sank them in.
Hot, flowing blood spilled down her throat in the same way lust poured down her spine. Her eyelids fluttered closed, and she brought her body close to his, clutching at his shoulder and his head to press him to her. The experience of taking blood straight from a man’s neck was profoundly sexual, stirring every part of her that could stir, but her focus remained on the blood alone, the sensual flood of it, the way life spread to fill her, enriching her all the faster directly from the vessel.
With her thrall as deep in him as her teeth, he succumbed without resistance, nearly melting in her arms. When she withdrew from his neck—reluctant but resolute to leave him conscious—he could not let her go without risking a fall.
The king came in from behind and covered the gushing wound with his palm. When he removed it, the bite mark had closed.
“Best not to drink from the neck if you intend to leave your victims alive, but you resisted the lure of death well, my love.”
He kept the whisper in her head rather than alarm Gram or the other representatives with what she had overlooked, but Gram was little worse for the wear. He stumbled to the other representatives in a daze—the good kind rather than one that suggested he had lost too much blood. He fell onto the bench, and when Asha offered him a plate of fruit and meat without a word, he accepted it.
“Does any other challenge your monarchs’ right to rule?” the king asked, tucking Asha against him with his arm around her waist.
Asha discerned wariness, perhaps discontent, but no one outright resisted. Time would teach the kingdom to accept them. She ran her fingers over her face to catch the blood that covered the lower half, then licked her fingers with relish.
“Never again will my kingdom forget who and what protects it. Wolves will now roam your streets, my eyes and ears in daylight and night, to keep order as you rebuild. Beasts they may be, but I assure you, they shall not apprehend or challenge without cause, and they shall bring criminals to me to mete out justice until law and order has been planted within the new kingdom.”
The king beckoned toward the door. Servants in red, female and male, entered. “Your villages shall not start with so few. My prisoners of war outnumbered their usefulness long ago. While some have elected to remain within the castle, many will return to the village with you, captured soldiers from other countries, men and women alike. Many know an additional trade or can curry contacts and alliances with other kingdoms. Their diverse cultures may aid in dissolving the one cultivated within our borders. Welcome them with equanimity. They have endured their own sufferings. With our dwindled population, I still require no draft from the youth of my kingdom, but for a time, I shall accept voluntary admission into my army. There is no leaving the pack or renouncing loyalty once you transform, but recompense will be provided to your family.”
Asha slipped from the king’s hold as he continued to detail how the Crimson Kingdom would change, establishing his rule and declaring the part he insisted on playing. She brushed her fingers over Lysan’s mouth. He licked at the last traces of blood before retreating back into the form of a man.
&n
bsp; She returned to the platform, where the captain adjusted his position on the throne so that she could seat herself upon it as well.
And encircling her head, her husband’s gift—a golden diadem of roses and thorns. His declaration and a symbol for all to see that she was queen. A dead queen. A demon queen. A Grayling queen. The kingdom’s queen. His queen.
Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Page 31