by Mima
“Open your mouth.”
She did and he slid one finger inside. She sucked on it, swallowing the heat. He slid it free, then gave her the next, and she extinguished that one too, her tongue sizzling. The next finger set her belly on fire. He pumped this one in her mouth and she tightened her suction, pulling back on it. His pinky traced her lips, sparking and swelling them. She made to take it into her mouth but his palm closed on her hair in warning. Round and round his finger traced, her skin soft, his hard.
“Give me your tongue.”
She extended it, expecting more of his flame. Instead he bent and sucked it into his own mouth. His kiss moved her jaw wide, his teeth meeting hers, her warmed mouth exploding at the touch of his. The kiss was firm and confident, but slow and careful.
When he pulled away, he clasped his erection with the hand she’d dampened, and pushed the tip of him down to her lips. She swayed, but his grip on her head supported her. The silken skin of him pressed against her lips. His spiritcraft pressed against her mind.
What had stunned during their first illicit meetings was now one of the purest, most peaceful, perfect moments of her life. She knew him. She knew him so deeply, it was like a piece of herself had been found, and was now held safe in her arms again. She grabbed his hips. Moaning, she lowered her head down the stretch of his flesh, pushing him into her throat, swallowing, sated, complete. Wrapping her arms around his ass, she held her forehead to his belly and worked him with her tongue.
Inside her mind, she lifted her head from his chest, brushed a kiss over his heart, and took both his hands. They dwarfed hers and looking up at him against the blue of her beach magescape, she’d never felt more feminine. Strong, made to take from him, receive his passion, and push it back into him. She walked him backwards, dragging him into his jungle. She pushed on his own psychic boundaries while her throat swallowed and her mouth sucked.
The jungle closed around her, strange and dangerous. It was a ruin of what it had been and the stench of darkcraft hung in the air. Pain pinched and pulsed, no longer under tight control. Her feet slid in swampy muck, no longer cushioned on layers of fern. To counter the ugliness, she bit gently into his erection back in real life, stroking all the way back up to the flared rim of him with her teeth.
Inside Donte’s magescape, Bear lay there, filthy, fur matted, still. She felt Donte quake and nipped the very head of him hard. He grunted, pushing her head down roughly. She laved over his veins, flicking them with the tip of her tongue. She couldn’t deal with Bear when his magescape was still so damaged, so fouled. Pulling her power into her, she grabbed at his earthcraft, and dragged it along, too. She worked at the soil, evening it out, pushing the moisture out, covering it in moss, then grass.
He built ferns in a ring around them, the tough ones. As he did, she could feel him fight the darkcraft, shoving it higher. In the real garden, she bobbed her head faster and faster, keeping him grounded, forcing sensation. In the magescape, the bare vines grew leaves and the trees healed their scarred bark. Once again it was a cozy hollow, although not quite the same. The canopy was much darker than it had been, but she wouldn’t think of that. She drew Donte down into the mossy, tender grasses. He lay back, Bear a short distance away.
She closed her magescape lips around just the head of his erection. When she drove her real body down to his base, wedging his tip in her throat, she sucked on his magescape tip with a gentle mouth. When she drew up to his tip in the real world, keeping the suction tight, she pressed a tiny psychic kiss to his hole. Again she drove down fast and rough, and in the magescape fluttered her tongue across his swollen tip. When she pulled in a long smooth rush to his tip in the real world, she closed her magescape mouth over his tip and hummed.
When he came in the magescape, his body was rigid, muscles straining, completely silent. She sank her fingers into the coarse fur of Bear’s warm side. In the real world, both of his hands clamped to the side of her head and shoved her face into his groin while his head whipped back and he bellowed, hips arching while she swallowed his tangy cum as fast as she could. It spilled into her mouth, foaming out of her lips. She focused on breathing through her nose and used all her skill to keep her throat relaxed.
He pulled back, angling her face up. She opened her eyes, dazed, cheeks and chin covered in his cream, and gloried in the furious look on his face as he watched his erection bob and slide and slowly leave her lips. His eyes were slashes, his jaw clenched, his teeth bared and that tattoo loomed down at her, not threatening teeth but a protective barrier of thorns.
In the magescape, she opened her eyes and stared at his face. Here he had no tattoo and the look in his eyes was more stricken, more awed than triumphant. She opened her mouth and stroked him with her tongue. Her thighs were so loose she knew she couldn’t move. Nothing had ever been more intense than having magescape sex at the same time as real sex. It was like having two synchronized but unique bodies.
Crouched on her knees between his splayed thighs, she licked his magescape cock clean while the real Donte held her face captive and studied her with an intensity that warned of more to come. She slid her hands from his hips to his wrists. Her grip told him she wanted him to let her go, but it took a few breaths before he did. She pulled on his arms, and he came to his knees in front of her. Pushing on his shoulders made him understand she wanted him to lie down, the way he was in the magescape.
When both Dontes were prone, both Morikos wasted no time in shuffling up his body and straddling his face. In the real world, her skirt covered his head, and all she could do was look at the lovely fountain and the glowing Wall she was determined to defend. In the magescape, she steadied herself with one hand on Bear and stared down into his eyes.
He inhaled once sharply, then both Dontes wrapped their palms around her splayed thighs and pulled her down onto his open mouth. He gave her creativity right back to her. The real Donte growled and mumbled through her folds, eating at the mouth of her vagina with great probing licks, sucking her cream in noisy smacks. The magescape Donte set his mouth around her clit and rubbed with a firm, fast motion of his tongue that instantly threw her into trembling need. She wanted it to last, so she tried to lift up, but his grip, even on his back, was stronger than her weakened legs could fight.
The sweet perfect dot of sensation was everything. The enormous, gathering pleasure exploded. She keened, burning, shaking. He buried his face deeper against her folds, groaning, gorging on her. His tongue flicked faster on the now scalding point of her.
The second orgasm bloomed like a spiraling morning tulip at dawn. It was gentle, relentless, dragging her mind dizzily in circles and ending with a breathless gasp. She caught her breath, wavering above him as her core strength faded.
In the magescape, she stared down between her bouncing breasts at his glittering eyes. “Touch him, Donte. He needs you.”
Donte snarled, his teeth scoring the tender, taut flesh of her inner folds.
She clenched her fist in Bear’s fur. He was warm, but too still. There was no sense of him watching or even sleeping beside them. “Just touch him. Please.”
Donte closed his magescape teeth and his real teeth ever so gently around her clit and held the precise balance between pain and pleasure. His tongues pressed her clit flat. The world turned black, and she fell.
When she woke up, she was cradled between his bare legs. He sat on the ground, leaning against the bench. They contemplated the tendrils of green mist and the burbling pond. Held against his warm, firm chest, wrapped in massive arms, she gently brushed her fingertips over and over the tattoo at his wrists. She was safe with her beast of a man. He didn’t understand her and she was still learning about him, but they were essentially the same. The Sacred Couple seemed like opposites, too, but look how they balanced each other. With her head in the hollow of his collarbone, she felt the thud of his strong survivor’s heart.
Finally, a long while later, he spoke. “I expected to like it more.”
For a moment her brows creased, thinking he spoke of their passionate, personal picnic. Then she caught his train of thought. “How many do you think you killed?”
“I couldn’t keep track. Dozens.”
“Thank you, Donte. Thank you for using your power to help my City.”
“You know I have to do it. It eats at me. I’m ending this for me.”
She shook her head slowly, rolling it loosely against him. “You say that, but you started it thinking yourself worth less than the hawks you wanted to save, and you still feel that way. No one could fault you for wanting revenge after what you’ve been through. You could selfishly fling yourself at Thad and kill him quickly. But you’re working toward a more complete sweep. I know how much that spell hurts you. You keep it because it’s our secret to finding them when they’re hidden with the Mage Guild’s privacy potion.”
Rocking her head to the side to look up at his face, she cupped his cheek and pushed until he looked down at her. “Thank you.”
He held so still under her touch. His gaze shook, but he held her eyes. A nod was as close as he got to accepting her gratitude.
They went back to contemplating the fountain. After her ass went numb, she asked drowsily, “What did Akisa do to you?”
“Mouthed off, put her hands on me. Why? Am I in trouble for scaring her?”
“Not at all. In fact, it led to one of the most glorious moments of my life. The Queen gathered the whole family and clearly placed her favor on you. She made it seem as if the marriage had been her idea, rather than your own devious little plot. Akisa was removed as Heiress. She will now be a more overt enemy, someone to watch for in the Compound.”
“Are you safe?”
Moriko nodded. “She’s worked hard to take away my respect, but today I learned that the honorable Guild members know how hard I’ve worked, and they appreciate my efficiency and dedication. She might try to embarrass me, but I’ll watch carefully.”
He rubbed his jaw along the top of her head and she sighed. To stay in his arms forever…
“Devious?”
She laughed. “Yes, you are.”
“I prefer ‘resourceful.’”
She smiled. Her brain churned with questions to ask him about how dangerous it had been today, his plans for tomorrow, or what he was thinking regarding taking her to Thad. But he needed rest. He needed peace. He needed this, holding her, coming to believe she was more partner than tool.
His stomach growled.
She waited.
“Do you think I could get something to eat?”
She took her husband to the kitchen. While he sat on a stool at the servants’ trestle table with a cold chicken leg in one hand and a tankard of ale in the other, she asked if she could play out her imagination. He raised one brow. She clarified her idea was sexual. He sat back in the chair. It was satisfying to kick his feet apart and unlace his breeches. It was wonderful that he never even paused in his eating, trusting her completely as she knelt between his legs and suckled his balls until he came.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The next three days were hard and strange, but satisfying.
It was amazing how much he learned about humans by walking among them. Even what was shouted at him in anger as he pushed through crowds was instructional. Over the last three days he’d learned more about the Sacred Couple the humans worshipped. The Skyfather had a Kingdom beyond the sky and the Earthmother had a Kingdom below the earth. The Cloud Kingdom was a place of incredible beauty and peace, gentle and thoughtful. The Caverns were a place of heat and lust, more chaotic party than dream.
Yup, he was an earthmage, all the way. But in the darkest part of the night, after his cock was initially sated and his body had succumbed to pure exhaustion, when he held Moriko’s warm, heavy curves scented with his Bond, he thought perhaps he understood why even those of the earth admired the Cloud Kingdom. Because when he lay in relative safety on a clean bed, without chains, on a full stomach, his body still sheathed in a good woman, his heart started to beat so fast he could almost picture soaring among clouds.
All day he went out into the seething City and killed. Guards died around him, and on the third day there were two civilian deaths, but each evening he came back to her healed and alive. The City rioted, but there had never been so many trux present and they quickly quelled them. None spoke to him, but none attacked. And with the Mage Guild broken, the source of the secrecy potion was ended. The clans sent their own hunting parties into the streets as the darkmage stench became increasingly unmasked.
Moriko went about her duties and he was amazed at how many people she knew. So many told him how organized and dedicated she was, but he sensed the truth of what they said, where it could have been an easy way to polish his favor. She had a smile and a moment for every person who approached her. She coordinated resources in a flurry of meetings and there was now a team who followed in his wake and dealt with the mess he left behind.
When Donte came back to her, he bathed, and he sat and let her wash some of his rage away. Then he wanted to walk, anywhere but the beach, so they strode the grounds and battlements, through storehouses and more gardens, hallways and towers.
After he’d stomped the last of his battle nerves away, he’d take her wherever they ended up. Against the wall, over a chair, on her knees. He didn’t always drag her into magescape sex at the same time, not because he worried about her ability to handle that kind of pleasure, but because doing so hurt, with Bear’s silent presence an open throbbing wound.
Bear remained immobile and the darkspell continued to creep down into the jungle nest, pooling too-dark shadows around Bear, withering the grass. Everything he tried to box up and separate the spell failed. Everything he tried to rouse Bear failed. His conditioning improved, his reflexes and strength beginning to return to fighting prime, but his mental focus continued to degrade, crumbling and shifting in a far more dangerous way than when the clans had been so concerned about Bear.
At first light on his seventh day of freedom, he rose from her side. The curtains drifted gently and he made sure to stop and inhale the crisp citrus scent of them before continuing to the balcony where the ocean’s stink drowned her out. He had arranged a gift for her today, bothered by the chafing she wore every evening from her struggle to satisfy her sexual needs while he was gone.
The time was getting close. He’d taken down another top acolyte yesterday. It had been hard and ugly. Rising up onto his toes, he let himself fall forward, catching his body before his nose smashed on the chilled marble and began his work out. Perhaps Thad would come for him today, or maybe tomorrow. He’d thought about Moriko surviving the coming battle. And he knew that if she did and he did not, he wanted her to remember the best of him, which was how he could make her body flow.
After he finished his stretches and warm-up, he fished out the little leather ball from his pocket. Rolling it up and down his arm and over the back of his hand, he toyed with it, ignoring the sibilant ocean, and watched her.
Shortly, she woke. She slid from the bed and padded to him, body still heavy and lax.
Like she did with him, he took her in his arms, wrapping her up tight. She lay her cheek against him, cuddling. Fucking fantastic.
“Humm.” Her fingers danced over his bruised shoulder. “Be careful, Donte. Your strength has limits, believe it or not.”
He’d almost gotten used to the relaxing inside that signified his spirit smiling. The darkmages had instructed him well on his limits, torturing him past them again and again to reinforce how weak he could be. Yet she thought him powerful. Four days of non-stop battle had left him with wounds even the bodymages hadn’t been able to heal in one session.
“When Thad is dead, I’ll have to get you to take a break. We’ll lie on the beach and I’ll work on getting you to give up this hate of the ocean.”
His inside-smile stayed in place, even though her vision was ridiculous. When Thad is dead … the words were so beautiful. A vision
of Moriko as the Earthmother filled his head, her body lusher, pregnant, covered in vines and flowers, skin more teak than gold. But no, he couldn’t pray. Not while he held so tight to this aching pain of a darkspell.
“I want to give you something.”
She lifted her head, surprised.
“I know it’s stupid. You’re a princess. But it is important to me. Actually, it is the only thing I own.”
She frowned. “If there’s anything you need, just ask me. The Queen should have thought to grant you a stipend of your own, but I’m sure she thinks you’re sharing mine.”
“I’m not worried about money.” He took her hand and turned it palm up. He put the little round leather ball against it and curled her fingers closed. “This was a gift to me when I first was imprisoned at River Mountain. It kept me together and I kept it safe. I like it.” He squeezed his fingers over hers, clenching their grip on the ball.
Blinking sleepily, she looked down at her fist nested inside his. “I’ll keep it safe, too.”
His head must be full of cobwebs. This room was full of ancient, beautiful things and she could have whatever she wanted with a snap of her fingers. Giving a princess a childish, common—
“I will commission a shelf to display it. A stone shelf, perhaps, carved with flaming suns. A symbol of your three mage strengths.” She held the toy like it was precious.
“Thanks.” He cleared his throat. “I need to tell you about something that happened yesterday.”
Her face fell. “What is it?”
His hair was already spiked for the day and his body hummed with heat. Her nipples swelled erect. He flicked one with his thumb. “I killed a high-level apprentice. That’s when Leonard and Sosh died.”
“Who?”
He pinched her nipples, pulling on them. “The baker and one of his customers, an older man with blue eyes.”
“How like you to know their names. What does that mean?”