Addictive Nightshade

by Poppet

  “This was his, and instead of fashioning a new one for you I thought you might like to keep his key to home close, warming your skin and reminding you that you're cherished.”

  Fingering the little arrowheads dulled by age, I examine it. It's long, scooping the chain together to hide in my cleavage. They remind me of shark's teeth and it feels tribal to have my own.

  It works because I suddenly don't feel so alone, like I have an invisible legion of kin lined up behind me ready to defend or snatch me out of harm's grasp.

  Out of the folds he unearths two shot glasses and a beautiful vial of ornate crystal filled with resin hued fluid. It looks like honey. Uncorking the ampule he pours a measure for each of us, folding my numb fingers around the little glass that looks ridiculous in his hand. Clinking his to mine, he says, “To Lars, long may he light your way through the constellations.”

  He downs the beverage and I copy him.

  Alcohol tickles flavors across my tongue, blasting citrus and raspberry vapors up the back of my nose.

  “It was your father's favorite. You can still get it in Quebec.”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Lakkalikööri. It's cloudberry liqueur that we colloquially call highland gold. Viddas gull. In legend it ranks as the first berry ever picked, in Sweden they call it hjorttron in honor of the accolade of it being the original berry.”

  “It's nice,” I nod, the smell on his breath casting me back through the cornucopia of time to a buried memory. He smelled of it. I recall this being a scent associated with dad. Melancholy embalms me.

  Wrapping it up again he hands me the leather parcel, “Keep it, it's yours.”

  Closing my hands over his while the liquid fire thaws my heart, I meet his stare across the dark pocket of intimacy, “Thank you, Mac. For everything.”

  He puts a hand in his pocket, wriggling awkwardly to free something from its recesses, withdrawing his hand in a closed fist, holding it out to me in silent offer.

  It's automatic to open my palm up to receive the next surprise. A small love crystal the same shade as the liqueur drops onto my hand, shining golden rays over the lines of my palm, “And one from me. It's a harii guidelight, and I love you and never want you to forget it. It's my duty to guide you when you're lost. It's the gift we call ljótr. It means to give light. It's the most authentic of Raven gifts, just as our forefather released the sun to give light to the whole world, we consider this a ceremony beyond duty, it's the ultimate expression of love. We may be shadows, but we shadows are nothing without the light within.”

  The chemistry between our hands flares the crystal and I snatch my fascinated gaze to his, loving his eyes so vivid. He put the contacts back in when he went to the wardrobes and his eyes look like twin solar eclipses, lit from behind, helios rings encircling nightshade.

  Glancing back at the crystal I note he's chosen one in a heart shape. Romantic sap.

  “I love you too,” I mumble through a strangled throat, wishing I had something to gift in return. This whole thing feels like a holy ceremony. A prelude to something profound.

  Shifting, he pulls a long slender box out of his back pocket, “And I thought it prudent to get you your own. These are yours, we'll get more as and when we need them.”

  Inquisitive I snap the lid up, surveying a box of dark gray contact lenses stacked like saucers. He's so thoughtful. Is there nothing he hasn't already anticipated? He's given me everything I've yearned for and more. He knew dad better than I ever did. He has memories, real ones.

  Standing, disconcerted by the square dancing emotions in here, I turn to the table, placing my treasures down and leaning against the wall to resurrect composure.

  *

  Macala:

  Watching her vulnerability taps directly into my soul, compelling me to complete the bond. She wasn't ready before, but she is now. Now she's grown into her gene pool, her body strong and invincible, and I need to melt the sorrow off her face.

  Shadowing her to the table the power surges from the clan leader mark on my heart, on my hand.

  Visually tracing the necklace nestled between the blossomed breasts my balls tighten, and I look into her eyes. Taking her left hand I softly trace the valhalla triangle, my own heart-rate increasing exponentially, totally screwing up my shallow measured breathing.

  Chapter 24

  Emma:

  There's something voodoo in this semi dark, the atmosphere thick with history flirting with fate. The future is occluding my ability to think because he's standing so damn close, I can feel his heartbeat tapping against the tympanic membrane of my ear the way a soul knocks on purgatory's door.

  Intent is forged in his features, in the expression in his eyes, it's enough to squeeze my heart like a stress ball.

  “Emma,” he purrs, using the voice which trepan's my ability to think and stirs my hormones into a hazy fog, obscuring everything but my primal response to the suggestion of the raven dance.

  Pressure is wrapping plastic around my face and I fucking can't breathe, my ability to is amputated when he slides a long finger down my arm, running a furnace of languid heat all the way down, capturing my hand and lifting it above my head, leaning in to pin me against the wall when he licks the valhalla triangle on my palm.

  It obliterates the grief, replacing it with a blizzard of conflicting desires. All worries flee as our chemistry ignites. Closing my eyes while my chest jiggles into his torso with every serrated gasp, shaky, broken, desperate, the scrape of stubble against my cheek pops a bullet into each kneecap, my legs give, the inferno spreading a plague of desire from my hips to my feet. It's clearly a flesh eating virus because I'm no longer able to make my body do a damn thing.

  Dizzy and weak, I press in with the arch of my back to accommodate the tilt of my head to meet the invasive tongue, sucking it into my mouth and wrapping my lips around the moist heat licking across my taste-buds.

  He keeps stroking his thumb in delicate sweeps across the sigil branded into my palm and it's rupturing my soul from my body, it's slicing me into ribbons, I'm coming apart, misting passion while my skin slicks with need.

  Emma...

  “Hmmm?” I moan into his mouth, sliding the tip of my tongue across warm lips, sweeter than dew on a feather.

  My head is disjointed, heavy, the world is tilting, spiraling across the cosmos, sending me into the drunken swoon of vertigo when he sucks on my earlobe, his hips still impaling me to the wall, impeding me as surely as a tranquilizer dart, his free hand up under my shirt, kneading my breast with the finesse of a rune shaman, reading fingers over secrets and electrifying me into blasts of ecstasy which leak readiness into saturating the air with neon-loud pheromones.

  It's fuck me and fuck me hard aching through my loins, the carnal captivity almost cruel now that he's sucked each of my five fingers and licked his own palm before suctioning it over mine.

  Open your eyes...

  It's an effort, like I'm heavily sedated on Asgard carnal-cocaine, but I unstick my eyelids to stare seduction into his.

  Pressing his forehead against mine, aligning our left eyes, I'm ravaged, stolen, plundered...

  All the shadows in the world cocoon around us, a bomb blanket to protect the planet from the annihilation happening in the dream of sensual ecstasy.

  He's holding me, one arm sticking rifle fingers in the base of my back, his other hand cupping my head and jamming it rigidly against his, I can't tell what's up and what's down but manage to figure out he's on top when the hard floor replaces his hand and his palm seals over mine again in the soul tapping delirium it induces.

  The hand in my back is gone, my cargo pants loosening while that bright eye sends shooting rapture into mine, the helix an endless warp of reality when I see his past, his hell, his heaven, his muse, his pain, his destiny, nothing is omitted. I feel like this is how the matrix started, plugging in, seeing the big picture in an instant download when a shadow became solid, became a raven, became a god, became a lov
er, became a friend, became my heartbeat, became ambrosia, became a high, became....

  The nebulae becomes blinding, the colors of his mandala eye scrolling across the plateaus and pinnacles of his soul, purging his vulnerabilities into my spirit, burning his essence into mine, sticking them together wherever they touch, the explosion lava red, magma hot, orgasmically divine, my body shaking, the seizures a crescendo of worship, awe, euphoria, the pleasure obliterating until all we are is a long undulating wave of emotion.

  He's licking my pain, fondling my pleasures, tilling my secrets, planting promises, kissing tears, hugging me inside where my soul hurts, caressing the bruises and heartaches, exchanging them for pockets of shining safety, security, vows, oaths, leaving himself in those places that are hollow and broken, filling the fissures with the mortar of luminescent synapses of a spirit which shines brighter in the glass lamp of love, until the glass grows so hot it fractures, blasts outward. The hurricane of the harii charging in to rescue, resurrect, returning the goddess to her rightful place with the tender attention to detail of a god, the addictive moonshade weaves, takes and gives, teasing laughter, tears, purging agony, raping my soul of the rubble, cleaning my house and filling me with himself.

  I'm inside him, he's inside me, it's impossible to tell who's me and who's you, which body is mine and which is yours, which memories are mine and which are yours, which scabs are mine and which scars are yours... it's... whole.

  He completes me, building a fortress of power and security. He releases my hand and the separation begins, just enough for me to feel him hovering inside my aura to press a heavy yoke of possessiveness around my heart, and now I become aware of the sweet chaff of velvet skin running softly inside my thighs, his torso hard and slick where it crushes mine, my chest heavy with his weight, breathing is labored and ragged, the slide of passion long, hard, wet, salacious.

  He does a maneuver where he seems to be fondling my passion both inside my own spirit / soul / body and fondling my clit and o-spot with his overheating invasion inside me. The slap of skin is a rhythm setting the tides on every ocean, the orbit we hold in stasis affecting every moon on every planet, aligning not just stars but the entire passage through to the other side, birthing galaxies like runway lights for the souls looking for love and needing to land on the runway of sex, sliding in a downpour to crash land in the pillowed clouds of tender embraces with kisses for blessings, ribs torn apart with the jaws of life to rescue broken hearts and massage them better in the hands of Odin's penance.

  “I love you,” whispers hoarse and gruff, as if speaking is agony, persecution, punishment, execution.

  It detonates a reaction right through me, rippling me out in endless waves until I'm crying, the tenderness too sweet, too severe, too deep, too real, too enormous.

  Finding hands attached to the ends of my arms I use them, cupping his messy hair, pulling his face rough and hard to mine, mashing our kiss, biting his lips, straining every muscle to reach in and invade, to lick the pain out of him, to do to him what he did to me but I can't kiss deep enough, hold him tight enough to be the one we were before, I can't reach inside him.

  The dynamic reaches a cusp and my rabid attack is returned, delivered with teeth cutting into my lip, teething and suckling in one fluid move, grinding thumbs into my cheeks to force my head away, my neck nicked in multiple gouges of love bites which suck hard and nibble sweet oaths of numbing adoration, my feet caught and propped on wide shoulders that stirrup me wide, and he rides me so hard into the floor, grunting out moans of merciless claim, the pressure succinct and perfect, the rigid hammering so perfectly placed I'm whimpering, moaning, groaning louder than a megaphone, screaming into his bellow when the wave becomes so short and sharp and immediate, the pleasure attenuates me in a shaky battle cry of a savage ready to burn down the village and take the last drop of mercy from the body joined to hers.

  His tension captures my fascination, watching his shoulders cut into segments, his chest covered in lines from sternum to ribs when he arches his head back and bellows the primeval destruction of his restraint.

  My sensitive lips, my bruised sex, it all seizes up in terror when he climaxes, purging the oldest stake into my body, the one which marks and coats, adhering and burrowing in the primal dance of 'you're mine'.

  I feel it too. I am yours. There's nothing left, you've touched, tasted, and plundered every corner of my soul, my body is under siege. But that orgasm was worth it, it was worth the wait, it was in my mind, my spirit, my soul; my body was the last to weaken and succumb, the final frontier.

  The soul caress was a vesper, the 'full package' is a celestial chorus.

  He sags heavily and I'm bent uncomfortably, my ankles forced down to my ears when he wraps his arms under me and hugs me so tight it should have snapped my bones and torn ligaments.

  Unbelievably he kneels, pulling me up onto his knees and acrobatting to lift us both off the floor in a careful stand, his desire still deep inside me, our eyes on the same level, his shining like nuclear explosions, and like this he strides with me to the bed, gently lowering me into the cradle of comfort, shifting his hips and starting all over again, releasing my ankles to wrap around his waist, his smile diabolical and dangerous.

  I'm yours, every step of the way Mac.

  Where the fuck have you been all my life?

  He pauses, bracing on his arm to point a dart into my heart with an insistent fingertip, tapping the breastbone between my man-rashed boobs, “Right here, Em. I've been hiding in here, waiting for you to let me out so I can love you.”

  Tears trickle from the outer edges of my eyes.

  “I love you back,” I warble, breaking apart in some hallowed sanctified place deep in my spirit. I feel him, it, the love, the... this is so big I can't cope, but no one has ever managed to make me feel this cherished, treasured, fabulous, special, needed, perfect.

  It's more than I deserve, more than I could pray or hope for, or ever think I'd know, experience... feel.

  Leaning close, resting elbows either side of my head, he thumbs the emotional tears away, sucking each thumb individually, then looking back at me he aligns his Odin eye over mine, “This eye elskling, it was the first love crystal. It's the first promise. I will always shine for you, you're safe, I swear.”

  Then he kisses the promise on my arrested mouth and I'm sucked right back out of my body to frolic through the cosmos of the soul with him, lost in the eye of the storm, in the domain reserved for creatures belonging to the night, belonging to the everlasting sun.

  Chapter 25

  Emma:

  It's been a long and indulgent day. I've sucked cloudberry off his fingers and played with it like lipgloss. We swam together in the lagoon and cuddled in the bathtub, languid and lazy, exploring and tantalizing until we both ran out of strength.

  Leaning against his body, my head supported in the curl of his shoulder, I track the arms holding me close with my fingertips. Veins so raised on the landscape of his arm they are laces more than striations, noosed together to confine and restrain muscle and sinew in place with intricate knotwork forged by spells, the inspiration for corsets and jewelry first woven on the body of a jötunn god. Pale skin stretched taut over it as a sheath is so translucent its opaque surface burns with the scars of blue as blood courses back to be re-oxygenated.

  Lethargic and smug I fold the armbands tighter, snuggling, looking into the secluded night sprinkled with freckles, like a million lighters burning through the dark of a rock concert.

  A gazillion thumbs up, every one of them a candle lit in our honor, the silent applause as the astral harpers thrum the dimensions between worlds to sing praise.

  The tabernacle has opened for hymns, all the gods saying a blessing and lighting a flame for us to celebrate the handfast of hearts and souls in a rite more ancient than time. Our witnesses writing down their testaments, the new gospels of the raven and the owl and how they traded feathers to fly across the moon.

  He l
aughs, it's soft and appreciative, a lullaby to kneel to, “You have skald in your heart, Em.”

  “What is a skald exactly?”

  “A poet. A bard. But when you think it you make it seem more than plausible and possible. I see it through your eyes now, and love the way everything you look at is with the lens of an artist. It's not black or white, or dark as night, instead you describe as you think, a stream of consciousness where everything becomes a collage of crisp moments identified with a pinpoint of beauty.”

  Shy, I shrug, not knowing what to say. I won't apologize for being me. I can't help that I think his skin feels like heated velour, the hairs so fine and soft they force me to stroke them flat in silent reverence, savoring the way the air is biting the ground in lover's nibbles, a foreplay leading to the intercourse of winter swallowing summer the way mindless need of a nipple loses itself in a hot mouth on a journey down the body of the planet, leading right down to another hot wet summer where rain orgasms ecstasy into parched earth and the wind is a savage exhalation of bliss. The monsoon is the meeting of lovers in a dance that takes all year to finally reach its summit.

  The whole world is in a constant state of flux between sub and dom, top and bottom, rolling together round and round with their endless foray into the pleasures of the other, tangling their legs, teasing with spring and taunting with autumn, the seasons betwixt the true measure of a lover's game. Snow is a blindfold and sensuous soft tickle down a spine, then the lovers hide under cover and snuggle, catching breath before desire starts to melt icicles into gushing their need and greed and endless appetite to be fed kisses and sunshine wine.

  “Are you telling me the heat of summer is the carnal fever reaching a pinnacle of lust before the erotic damn bursts in release?” he chuckles softly in my ear.

  “Affirmative,” I smirk, unashamed that I find the turning of the planet romantic and telling a story even the sages recognized. “Why else are all the ancient masterpieces of gods and goddesses in compromising positions, or in various stages of nudity? This is the dance of lovers.”