“Granite, this time.”
“Slate, I think,” he corrected me. “Some of it was. I saw things in the rock. Little animals of bone. Fish. Plants.”
Oh! I would love to see those.
“I’ll take you after. Come here.” He pulled me on top of him, angled up to seize my lips again. Less grit coated his mouth this time. He felt so warm, and without as much of the tingling as had been there last night. Had need eclipsed the constant resentment?
“Don’t think,” he whispered and nipped my lower lip gently. He didn’t break skin.
He settled back into the water. I followed his mouth down. We lay flush together, partly floating in the lake. It was a gentle and slow loving. Dizziness and need heightened as the minutes passed and we did nothing but touch and kiss, but I didn’t press him to hurry on with it. We had hurried too many times already.
“Haru,” he whispered.
I opened my eyes, nuzzled a creamy shoulder, looked across the tarn. Only a glimmer of sunlight shone in the valley. The rays limned one wall of peaks with fire.
“Haru?” he whispered again.
“Mmm?”
“I want you. I want to feel you in me.”
Oh! Creation. I almost lost control right then. My kisses became hungrier, and an edge of violence strengthened my grip.
“Not here!” he gasped, pulling back. He lurched upward and drew me to a stand. Light-headed, I stumbled into him. He put his arms around me, and we launched. I tangled my legs with his to keep from dangling.
“Where?”
“A place where the earth meets the sky.”
A place not far off. A place on the highest mountain, a slope of purest white facing the setting sun. A place without a single shadow. Here.
I looked at the long expanse of sea, at the cloudless sky, and understood.
“Please,” he whispered. “I can’t bear it any longer. Please!”
I didn’t protest as he laid me out on the bed of snow. We were wet still, the water beginning to freeze on us, but it didn’t hurt, didn’t matter. When he straddled my hips, the moisture all began to melt away. It rose off in steam from our skin, became swirling vapour that hid the sight of him settling on my shaft.
A span of silk encased me. The pressure was different from a woman, all in one place, his beginning. When he moved, he squeezed almost to the head of me, then rammed the length down, a ripple of force and a tingling of power that had nothing to do with the shock of physical pleasure he gave me.
The vapour began to blow off in the wind, and I beheld him in the dying sun, a creature of silver fire. Shots of blue flame shimmered down his length and sizzled back to his muzzle, swirled around black eyes with silver pupils. Bearded dragon, his whiskers seemed so much like those on a catfish. The opal horns rising back from his head shattered the aquatic image.
The tiny sliver that was his avatar lifted upon me and came down again, and the dragon expanded. Its ethereal shape further solidified, enough that I began to feel scales against my flesh. Silver and blue brightened and limned my brown body with fire. I didn’t burn, and I understood he couldn’t incinerate me, not when I held the cold of Vaal in my soul.
Intana’s right hand lifted up from my chest. His fingers formed a point downward, and a tooth in his greater mouth coincided with his human hand. A spear over my heart.
I took hold of his hips, wrested him up and slammed him down again. The pleasure. The threat. His eyes shut, but the strike remained poised.
“You can’t just let me see you as you are?” I spat. “I must die as well?”
“So long as you live, there is still one Oradhé remaining,” he answered.
The eyes of his human body opened. Nothing in them but hatred, an inferno of hatred. I’d known. I’d known all along and still couldn’t stop myself from loving him.
“Come into me, human,” he whispered, rising on my shaft again. “Come into me.”
I yanked him back down and gave him the release he wanted, my final moment of gratification ground hard into his body. And while I rocked into him, the point of his fingers, and the coinciding dragon tooth, stabbed into my chest. We stared at each other, the movements of my torso becoming gentler, the pain in my heart only beginning. He smiled.
Beautiful. Beautiful Intana. Free at last.
The smile froze, faltered, faded into shock. He stared at my chest where he’d struck me, and a wail of disbelief erupted from him, erupted as well from the greater beast that lay upon the cracked slope. The cracks became massive fissures. Snow began to crumble and slide beneath us.
Intana jerked to a stand over me, his expression now alarmed. His human shape became transparent, and I lay there stupefied as the ether dragon writhed up into the air, abandoning me to the avalanche that had begun around me. I thought to end my life buried and broken, bleeding from the hole he’d put in my heart, but warm brown arms gripped me from below, and I slid down the mountain in the belly of a shark.
“Vaal!”
He said nothing, and though he was with me, I didn’t turn into him, but watched through the pale walls of his greater body the faint image of Intana melting into the sky. Silver in blue, silver in blue, then nothing but blue.
“Intana!” I breathed. He had vanished. I felt nothing of him but the cold hurt he’d put in my heart.
The avalanche sent us crashing into a valley of fir trees that crumpled like so many minuscule splinters. Vaal’s shark shape struggled at the top of the wave until we came to rest at last. We lay motionless together, Vaal’s human form wrapped around me, both of us looking skyward and seeing only sky.
“He truly hated me,” I whispered. Why was I not dead?
“He didn’t,” Vaal’s deep voice rumbled into me. “In the end, he discovered you were a better prepared trap than he’d thought.”
“What have you done, Vaal? How did you save me? There were no shadows.”
His arms squeezed me a little, and I wondered that blood didn’t spray all over the jumbled snow. My heart. My heart had been pierced.
“There are shadows in plenty beneath the snow,” he said.
Oh. “And why am I not dead?”
“Not entirely my doing, beautiful Haru,” he murmured. He put a palm to my chest and pulled it away, to show me not a speck of blood. “Look at your heart, my love.”
I angled my head to view my chest. Silver marked it. I blinked in incomprehension. Vaal’s hand came down again. A nail traced his shark symbol, from tail to mouth around my nipple. Where once had been a gap between teeth and caudal fin, a writhing dragon shape was caught.
“Lord!”
Vaal’s nail touched the head trapped inside the circle, silver teeth just biting my left nipple, whiskers spreading to either side. Down to the neck captured within shark’s mouth and tail, his black nail scraped, and thence around my heart, over the long wriggling salamander that was an ether dragon. Even the small legs were present, two below the threatened neck, two more to the inner side of my chest. The tail ended just where the neck was seized.
“Lord!” I cried again.
“His lord,” he murmured. “He made you so the moment he struck you. His Oradhé for the time allotted to him, however long that might be. You own him, Haru. You own him forever.”
But why? I couldn’t conceive that this had come of Intana’s attempt to murder me. I turned into Vaal’s grasp at last and buried my face into his chest, refusing the sky. It was too blue. Too sterile.
Abandoned. Abandoned forever.
“He’ll return, Haru,” Vaal’s deep voice burrowed into me. “He loves you beyond his imagining and trapped himself to you without realizing he was doing so.”
“Did he?” I whispered. Erratic. Certainly erratic. A fool boy. It didn’t matter the millennia he had lived.
“Yes,” Vaal agreed.
“You were never planning to eat him, were you?”
“That baby? He’s not quite reached the age for his rite of manhood.”
I choked—a laugh, a sob coming out of me.
“I never meant to eat him, Haru,” Vaal said gently. “Believe me. It would have been a waste. He’s too pretty for food. I just couldn’t think how to keep him trapped to me without crippling him, but he crippled himself for you.” He rubbed a palm down my back, and I shut my eyes and lost the tension in my muscles, there at the death of an avalanche instead of me. It still felt like the death had been mine.
“He’ll be back,” Vaal whispered.
I smiled, and where there had been sadness, there came anger. “Then he can look for me in your teeth,” I answered.
A rumble of laughter lifted from him. “Ah, Haru! My pilot fish.”
And Intana’s, only I wouldn’t clean Intana’s teeth unless he begged me, no matter how long that might take before happening.
It didn’t matter. He’d given me eternity to wait.
“It will be dark soon, beautiful Haru,” Vaal whispered.
“Do you mind if we put that off for one night? I’m in desperate need of a long cuddle.”
“I can wait another night,” he answered, “but I won’t wait an eternity and don’t expect me to beg.”
I smiled upon his warm chest. “Begging is for erratic boys, my love, which I doubt you have ever been.”
“Most certainly not.”
“Losing him doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would,” I admitted.
“I know.” I could feel his toothy smile, despite that I didn’t see it. “I know, Haru. If I’d thought eating Jumi would cripple you for all eternity, I would have eaten you as well.” He drew me higher and kissed me. “And you know Intana will be back.”
“I know. I’m still going to make him suffer.”
Vaal smiled and kissed me again, and we went back to cuddling in the cradle of an avalanche. The proper order of my life had been heaved over much like this snow, and yet it felt so very right. I’d been in need of an avalanche, and Vaal and Intana had given one to me. For the first time since Jumi’s death, I felt alive again, and no longer afraid to love, regardless of all consequences.
My heart. My heart had finally been encased within a complete circle, one made of Vaal and Intana.
“You made the circle, Haru,” Vaal murmured, his lips at my temple.
Yes. I’d made the circle.
I kissed Vaal’s neck and drifted for a quiet moment in time with him, feeling, somewhere far from us, Intana sailing the ether as easily as an albatross sails the winds. We were together, however far he sailed. We were together.
Excerpt from
Loved Him to Death: Omos of the Ether
by
K.M. Frontain
Coming soon to
Freya’s Bower.com
Haru had gone aft next to the wheel. The ship had gotten underway while I’d been below, and the bow bucked up and down in the waves.
Ship roll never bothered my balance, and I strode along the deck toward him, thinking I’d shake him a bit, eat anyone who tried to protect him, and then show him Vaal’s insignificance compared to me. The stupid thing was, the closer I came, the less inclined I felt toward the violent approach. I stopped ten paces off to consider why.
I wanted him. Yes, I wanted him, but not forced. I wanted to sneak him out from beneath Vaal’s snout, the way Vaal had poached my son so many centuries ago. I wanted him willing. That would be the perfect coup.
So. How to go about it? He knew who I was. He knew. And we sailed on a ship in Vaal’s territory, the entire fucking ocean. Something of a dilemma. If Vaal’s boy knew I was here, then so did Vaal.
Ah, damn! The shark that had awakened me! Most definitely Vaal knew I was on this ship and that I contemplated his paramour with less than admirable intentions.
Clearly I had damaged my mind when I’d set off the charge that had decimated a peninsula. I was such an idiot. Planning the seduction of Vaal’s pet in a weakened state and on his territory. Stupid. Stupid. Stup—
“Here, you!” the paramour called to me. “Where’s your kit? Bring it up. I’ll show you your bunk.”
I blinked in surprise. “It’s not down in the forecastle?”
“Hell, no. You think I’ll let you eat my crew? Go and get your kit.”
Well. That settled all doubt in my mind. He knew exactly my true nature.
I stared at him a moment, but he paid me no further attention, and so I backed off a few steps, then turned about and returned to the forecastle. Valerys worked in the galley section chopping vegetables when I arrived, but she didn’t speak or look at me. The chopping knife quickened in pace, produced successively louder thwacking noises on the board. A piece of tuber flew off the counter and rolled along the deck. I picked up my satchel, my too bright boots, and retreated back above.
“Creation blasted mortal females,” I muttered. The only thing good about them, other than the fucking, was that they died. Immortal women were a nuisance for being the opposite—about the not dying, I mean. They could fuck your mind into oblivion, but they’d hang onto you after, and drag your ass along for eternity trying to create a meaningful relationship. I knew this because I was still running from such a female.
Vaal’s boy waited next to a different hatch this time. He ducked below the moment he saw me coming, and I followed him into the gloom of the captain’s cabin. There were four bunks, but I could smell only two permanent occupants, him and the woman.
“You sleep with your cousin?”
“She’s there, in that bunk,” he said, pointing to the lower one on the starboard side. “I’m here.” He kicked the lower bunk on the port side. “If you don’t like the top bunk, I’ll switch.”
“I’ll take the top.” I shoved my kit up there. He took it back down at once.
“No, here. Hang it on this peg, or it’ll come off the bunk the first time you stretch your legs.”
He set the satchel on the peg and looked up at me. I suffered a prickle of shock to see his brown eyes so very alert, not passive at all. The new air imparted an older look to his features, stole years from youth. I’d guessed him to be a young man under twenty. But now… What to believe? The lines of his face? Or this ambience of maturity?
“What are you calling yourself these days?” he asked.
“Attrin.”
“Not very Verdant.”
“I left Verdant. It doesn’t matter.”
“Did you know women have been using your naming style instead of men?”
Did he purposely goad me? I stepped in closer, enough to confer my heat. Most of the time when I did this to a mortal, especially a mortal man, the victim became confused and backed off at once, but this one only played his gaze along my shoulders and torso, then pinned my eyes again waiting for an answer. Cheeky little bastard.
“I forbade parents to use my naming style for their sons. I didn’t much care when they started using it for daughters, so long as they understood I had access to any one of them if they did.”
He grinned and slipped around me, but not because I’d intimidated him. He may have known with whom he dealt, but he really didn’t comprehend what this entailed. I was going to enjoy educating him properly.
“Why did you leave Verdant?” he asked. His arm brushed mine as he moved. I endured another prickle of shock and acquired a determination to have him touch me again. Fuck Vaal. I would get his boy, come what may.
“Woman trouble,” I answered.
He laughed, and the sound made the cabin grow warmer.
He seated himself at a desk, which faced the portholes to the rear of the ship. With his torso twisted toward me, he laid a bare arm over the chair back, and I thought of how the length of brown skin would feel wrapped around my waist.
“Did your son have anything to do with this woman trouble?” he asked.
“He did. Some.” I set the purple boots down and shoved them under his bunk.
“If you don’t like those, I’ll see if I can find some spare sandals.”
“Don’t bother, if th
ey turn out to be a pair of disasters like yours.”
He grinned and wriggled his toes. “They’re comfortable. When I’m on board, I like my comfort.”
“And when you’re not, you like gaudy footwear that could blind a man?”
He laughed again. “Yes, perhaps.”
“Why are your feet better groomed than your hands?”
“My hands work harder.”
I sneered in disbelief. He shrugged.
“All right. I like to feel the soft leather of my boots when I wear them, without any insensitive calluses hindering me.”
“You’re a foot pervert.”
“Yes, perhaps,” he repeated, appearing not the least upset over the accusation.
I sat on his bunk, smelled his scent come up off the covers. Damn. Damn! I should have found the odour irritating; instead, I wanted to shove my face in his bedding. “Why did you let me board ship if you knew who I was?”
“I need your help.”
That surprised me. “My help? To do what? Ask your cold fuck of a lover, Vaal, for help.”
He rested his chin on the forearm across the chair back. “Is there some particular reason for your intense dislike of Vaal, other than that he balled your son on the day of Intana’s nuptials to Blessed Land’s daughter?”
“Isn’t that a good enough reason?”
“Not particularly.”
Well, no. He wouldn’t think so, the little tart.
“It’s a good enough reason,” I asserted, but by the way he regarded me without comment, I knew he didn’t believe it to be my only reason. So quiet his manner, but I felt as if his gaze bored into my soul. I began to growl again, the rumble rising from more than my human avatar.
“There,” he murmured, cutting into my fury. “The beautiful hair. It’s taken on the sparkle of starlight.”
I stared at him, just stared, knowing he’d provoked me, knowing he’d done it to see this lapse in control. Had I been stronger, I might have continued on and destroyed him and his ship, but I hadn’t the energy to spare.
Perhaps, eating him and his crew quickly, I could fly to safety before Vaal came at me?
Loved Him to Death: Haru of Sachoné House Page 21