Ashes and Flame

by Aiden Bates

  When his voice returned to him, it was a song in my ears that pounded against nerves already electrified by the pressure of him around me. He reached for his cock to give into the urge that built up in him as much as it did in me.

  I caught his wrist and held it, bucking against him as the partner to his dance. “Don’t,” I groaned. “Let me… let it… fuck, keep going, baby. Keep going, beautiful, ride till you finish, you’re almost there…”

  He was. His ass clenched and trembled around my cock. My knot ached from the pulling, and that ache reached down deep, to the bottom of my balls, drawing something almost painfully sweet out of me by hard-won inches as something inside struggled to give up another burst of seed.

  His wrist twisted in my hand. His other moved in, and I caught that one as well and held them both tight. “Rez,” he whined, still liquid, still moving, still working my knot against his gland, “please let me… let me touch it…”

  “No,” I growled, and kissed his fingers, and sucked his thumb into my mouth. I rocked faster, pushing his pace, wild with the heat and pressure inside his body. “Almost there. Almost there, sweet boy. Fucking beautiful—you’re so fucking beautiful, Daniel, baby, keep going. Move for me. Ride me. I’m almost… I’m close… fuck, Daniel… I fucking love you…”

  He looked down, his face twisted with something like fear. But instead of warning me not to say it again, he looked further down, at his own cock, just as his ass began to pulse. It was enough. I heaved up and slammed back down, my back arching as the pulsations robbed me of another load that wrenched out of my balls with a force that threatened to crack my bones. At the same moment, Daniel gave a cry of near-panic as a gush of heat spattered onto my stomach. He shook, his knees clenching against me, his body jerking hard. Inside him, my knot swelled further. He bucked. I cried out, would have crushed his wrists if I didn’t let go and grab his hips instead.

  My dragon took me over. I rolled him to the side, pressed him down to the bed as he wrapped his legs around me, and roared against his neck as I pounded into him with what little room my knot allowed. Another burning shot of seed left me. Daniel’s arms clung to me, his fingers clawing at my shoulders and back as he began to sob.

  “More,” he wailed against my shoulder, as if something under my skin could hear him. “Keep going… keep going…”

  I did, driven by a powerful urge that held me in a grip of fire and iron and wouldn’t let go. Heat grew inside Daniel’s body. It burned against my cock, swallowed my knot, and if I was anyone else, it might have truly burned me—instead, it deepened the howling of my nerves, called my dragon out. My scales rippled over my skin. Wings even burst from my shoulders as I swelled. I opened my jaws, and was only barely conscious enough of myself to keep from clamping down on the boy’s shoulder to claim him. I had to fight my dragon for it, and nearly lost as the glowing heat inside Daniel drew another long, agonized orgasm out of me.

  I threw my head back and roared. The walls shook. Daniel howled and writhed, and a burst of fire swelled around him, enveloped us both, and the bed. For one impossible moment, we seemed to be suspended in the heart of a star, staring at one another in wonder and shock as our bodies, in some distant place, gave up everything inside of us and died the little death again, and again.

  Until, that is, the fire alarm sounded.

  12

  Daniel

  I have had to do things to survive in the world on my own as a glitcher mage with no other choices. I’ve been caught digging through dumpsters. I’ve prostrated myself at strangers for a few pennies. I’ve seen the looks on people's faces as I pass them when I haven’t had a chance to shower or wash my clothes in two weeks or more. All of that, though, I got used to eventually. It no longer stung when I saw those looks. I didn’t bat an eyelash when someone spotted me digging for food. My technique for panhandling at this point is a simple, direct ask. “Got something to spare? I’m hungry and alone and that’s not changing soon.”

  What was absolutely new, and utterly mortifying, was having a woman I barely knew burst through a door into a room I had just set on fire, while a half-shifted dragon plugged my ass full of dragon jizz and stare with horrified fascination at the sight for about three seconds before her hands rose and snatched the air, and with a jerk of power that I felt in my gut, snuffed out the fire and left the room momentarily silent before oxygen finally rushed back in.

  Amy waved her hands in front of her face, brushing away floating ash that had swirled up on the sudden gale, and sputtered as some of it got in her mouth.

  Then, as if it weren’t bad enough she’d caught us like that, she blinked, focused on us in a collapsed, blackened bed, her jaw slowly hanging open.

  I wanted to die. I wanted to die so badly, but it didn’t happen. So I instead buried my face in Rez’s scaled shoulder to hide.

  Rez cleared his throat, and when he spoke, it was with a voice that was half-human, half-saurian, but somehow painfully polite all the same. “Thank you, Amy,” he rumbled, like rocks trying to play a string quartet. “If you could please give us a bit of privacy?”

  “I’ll handle the staff,” she said slowly. “You two better get dressed.”

  Then she must have withdrawn, because the door closed.

  The worst part of it all? My body still quaked from that final, impossible, world-breaking orgasm, that the knot inside my ass had caused. Fine muscles that gripped it tight trembled and tensed as the last flickers of pleasure twitched through my cock. My head dropped back onto the ruins of a blanket, throwing up a puff of ash where some of the fabric and the frame had burned hottest in my outburst. “I… I didn’t know I would…”

  Rez exhaled a long breath, and his body lost mass gradually. His wings withdrew, vanishing behind him, and his scales smoothed and eased away until he was soft skin over hard muscles again. He was smiling, at least. “Okay. Well. Now we know that we should be somewhere fireproof when I do that to you again.”

  The ghosts of four terrifying words haunted the space between our breaths. I didn’t know if either of us was going to acknowledge them or not. I chose not. It just felt safer that way.

  “I shouldn’t have been able to do that,” I said. “The magic—once it leaves like that, it’s gone for a while. At least a couple of days.”

  “Maybe there are rules you don’t know about,” he offered.

  That was almost certainly true. But it wasn’t like I hadn’t jerked off at least a few times in my life. If I’d had a recent explosion, it was never dangerous. This was something else. I’d drawn magic from some place.

  “Is…” I looked down between us, where his body met mine. “Is dragon, um… I mean did you like… pump… magic cum into me or…?”

  He snorted, bit his lip, and then laughed as he collapsed on me briefly. I laughed with him at the sheer absurdity of the idea, but even if it was laughable, it was still a legitimate question. When the bout passed, he gave a cough from having inhaled a bit of ash, and cleared his throat from it. “I can’t answer that,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe? I’d have to ask one of my friends who mated a mage.”

  A sudden spike of panic ran through my gut. “Are we—did we mate?”

  His eyes widened a bit. “No. No, no, no. We didn’t—I didn’t claim you, or anything. You’d know if I did.”

  I relaxed a little. “Oh. Uh, we should get dressed, I think. They’re not gonna want us staying here after I—”

  Rez winced. “Yeah, ah… that’s not happening right now.”

  “Why?” I looked around. The place was wrecked. My glyphs at least survived, still marking the ceiling above us, and the walls I could see. The blast radius wasn’t like a normal explosion—the fire had flowed out of me, rather than slamming against everything. I didn’t actually think the fire was what had broken the bed, either. It had cracked in the middle on one side, leaving us kind of cradled in a mattress that had sunken in the middle.

  As an answer, Rez rocked his hips slightly. His knot
rubbed against my prostate. I shivered, clenched reflexively around him. He groaned as I did, his head hanging as if he’d gone suddenly limp, and the muscles of his chest and arms bulged before he hunched forward, pushing into me. His knot swelled, his cock twitched hard enough that I could feel it, and a burst of warmth filled me.

  “Did you just…?” I caught his glossy eyes just as a flash of red-gold left them.

  “I would have explained,” he said, his voice weak, “but you, uh… you insisted and I couldn’t say no. Not the way you begged for it. You turned me on too much. I can’t just pull out. We’re tied until it goes down. If you don’t move, don’t squeeze, just try and relax, it won’t be long. Couple of hours.”

  I swallowed, looked around again. “We can’t stay here a couple of hours, Rez. People are going to want to know what’s going on, why the alarm went off—”

  “Then they can find out when we’re done,” he breathed, and pushed himself up on his hands to look at the other bed. “Here—hold tight to my neck, and wrap your legs around me. I’m gonna move us to the other bed.”

  “What, how are you—”

  He slipped a hand under my lower back and when he heaved us up, I yelped and threw my arms around his neck to hold on. With a long groan of effort, he managed to get to his feet and stumble off the broken bed and to the other, where he laid me down and leaned against the edge of the bed. “Easiest way to relax,” he said, “is for you to turn around.”

  I looked between us again. “Turn around?”

  “It’s easy,” he said. “Just takes a little doing. Here.”

  He took one of my ankles and passed it over the front of him, so that I could roll on my side. As I did, his knot moved inside me, and the angle of it put even more pressure on that aching, worn-out gland inside me. I gave a little cry, and clenched again.

  Rez’s head rolled and his fingers gripped my ankle more tightly as he shuddered through another tiny orgasmic release.

  “Sorry,” I breathed.

  He grunted, gave a chuckle. “Pleasure’s all mine.”

  I thought that maybe he was slowly getting delirious. He had to be close to passing out.

  We completed the maneuver with only a few more such incidents, before I was finally bent over the bed with him behind me. With his help, we got onto the unbroken, lightly singed bed, and managed to get on our sides. Rez pulled me close against his body and we wriggled around until we fit together perfectly, his big arm around my chest, his hot breath against the back of my head.

  It was so strange, feeling him inside me like that. It took everything I had not to clench against the fullness. But it was nice, too, despite the foreign feeling. Like there was something happening between our bodies that we had no control over. They’d made some decision based on animal instincts, and all we could do was wait for them to be done.

  His breath huffed against my hair. “‘M sleep,” he mumbled. “I’m here. Right here, ‘kay?”

  I turned my head a little, but couldn’t get it far enough around to see him. So instead, I pulled his arm closer around me, cuddled tighter, and closed my eyes. He’d worn me out, just like I wanted. So, maybe I’d manage a short nap, too.

  But when I closed my eyes, I heard those ghosts at my ear, speaking with Rez’s voice.

  I fucking love you.

  It made my stomach sink to hear them echoing, again and again.

  He didn’t. He couldn’t. People just said things like that in the middle of good sex. And we’d had fucking good sex. Hell. We still were. Once in a while as I lay there, even if I didn’t clench, I could feel his knot twitching as his cock just leaked more of him into me.

  But it was still scary that they’d even come out of him. The words, I mean. The other things coming out of him were kind of hot. Like he just couldn’t help it because it was me.

  So I lay there in the quiet, surrounded by the smell of sex and smoke, and tried to imagine, just like we’d agreed, that I wasn’t on the run, that we weren’t facing anything dangerous. That it was just me and him on our way to some cabin on a mountain somewhere, maybe by a lake. Something distant and far away, where nothing could reach us.

  And when I convinced myself of that, the words weren’t so scary.

  And when the images became more real, and I could almost feel a cool breeze on my forehead, and almost see him lounging on a chair by a dock, waiting for me to join him…

  I could almost believe the words.

  And just because he was asleep, and I wanted to try them out, just to see what they felt like in my mouth, on my tongue, I whispered them—just once. Just so I could know. So I would remember.

  “I love you, too, Rez.”

  13

  Rez

  “You what?” Nix asked, incredulous.

  I shifted the phone from one ear to the other and dropped another six quarters into the vending machine. “It was an accident,” I said. “And I couldn’t tell them that it was Daniel’s magic that did it, or there would be a whole report, the police and the local cabal would have to get involved. So I told them I had a cold. They believed me. There’s no weyr nearby, they don’t get many dragons. But that also means they think we’re all, you know, sitting on a hoard of gold or something. I told them that we’d take care of the damage, and they gouged me over the cost.”

  I could almost see Nix’s expression as he put a hand to his face. “Fuck. Fine. You know, we’ve got a fund, man, but it’s not infinite.”

  I mashed a button and collected another soda. After all the fire, Daniel had a pounding headache, and didn’t feel like he’d managed to sleep at all, and Amy suggested it was his blood sugar running low. “Magic burns it out of you,” she said. “Can’t believe none of the others explained it.”

  It certainly explained a lot for him, apparently. He’d been floored by it, and they’d started on some conversation about magic that was entirely beyond me but really hopeful. The more Daniel could learn from Amy, the better. “I promise, it won’t happen again.”

  Nix grunted. “I can’t believe you fucked him. What in nine hells is the matter with you?”

  I sighed, and slipped more quarters into the machine. “Nix, I… you aren’t here. You haven’t met him, you don’t know him. I couldn’t—”

  “Don’t you dare tell me you couldn’t help yourself,” he sighed. “You’re not some drooling wolf, Rez, you’re a dragon. You could help it.”

  “Says the guy who accidentally claimed his mate in a moment of passion,” I muttered, and winced as soon as the words left my mouth.

  “First of all, fuck you,” Nix said, more calm than I deserved, “second of all, Mikhail wasn’t a walking natural disaster with a cursed book on his back. Oh, fuck me—please tell me you didn’t…”

  “I didn’t claim him,” I said with as much of a reassuring tone as I could muster as I hit another button. I didn’t actually know which sodas were Daniel’s favorites, so I was just getting one of everything. “Um… and hey, while I’ve got you on the phone, I have another sort of related question.”

  “What, about claiming a mage?” he asked.

  “No, no,” I said, but paused. “Uh… well, it’s not not that, kind of. Um, when you and Mikhail fuck, is he a little more, like, magical or something for a while after?”

  There was no answer, but I knew Nix well enough after all these years that I could see with perfect clarity the look of abject incredulousness on his face. “Is he more… magical?” he asked, bewildered. “Why would you even—what?”

  “Ask him,” I urged him as I set the newest soda aside and started on the next and final one in the machine. Whatever Daniel didn’t drink, I could, I figured. “Is he around?”

  “I’m not asking him that,” he muttered.

  “So he is around?” I pressed. “Nix, it’s important.”

  He sighed. “Fuck. I should have sent Basri. He doesn’t like anyone, and has no emotions.”

  “Basri has emotions,” I muttered as I fed the machin
e. “They’re just limited to irritation and condescending nonchalance.”

  “Mikhail,” Nix groaned. “I have a… a mage question.”

  After a moment, I heard Mikhail’s voice in the background. “What is it?”

  “Do you… hang on.” The sound went dead. But the call hadn’t dropped. He’d muted his end. I snorted, and shook my head as I collected the final soda and squatted to load them all into the bag I’d brought. There were twelve in all—I had skipped the diet stuff that didn’t have any real sugar. I stood, and carried them back toward the car. We’d taken another stop at a rest area just up from the exit where we’d ruined a motel room and incurred a $6,000 bill for damages. Daniel was at a table near a monument marker having an animated conversation, still.

  “Rezzek?” Mikhail asked.

  I set the bag down in the back seat. “I’m here. Nix asked you?”

  “He did,” Mikhail breathed. “There… is perhaps some small change to the texture of my magic after… afterward. Not so great as to be remarkable. Why do you ask this?”

  “Nix told you what happened?”

  Mikhail gave a soft snort of amusement. “He explained some, yes.”

  “Well,” I said, “Daniel says that he shouldn’t have been able to, you know, blow up like that so soon after the last time. He thought maybe it was because I, uh—you know. Anyway, he also said it felt different. That it flowed out of him instead of exploding forcefully, kind of.”

  “That sounds as though you simply need more practice,” Mikhail said, his voice flat.

  I barked a laugh. “Mikhail Baranov—did you make a dirty joke?”

  “I do not make such jokes,” he said. “Perhaps it was somewhat in jest, but also, while I do not condone this behavior because it is dangerous and irresponsible—the only way to know is to experiment. I am not really suggesting that you do so, however. Nix does not believe we can afford to repair another motel. How close are you to Loup City?”