Heart of Stone

by Regine Abel

  When he abandoned my breasts, his lips trailing towards my neck, I pushed him back before he could settle down on top of me. As much as I wanted his cock inside me, I wanted him in my mouth first. Before him, I’d never been too crazy about giving head to a guy. It always made my jaw hurt and the choking, gag-reflex part of it, when the guy got overly excited, had never done much for me. But with Alkor… Holy shit! A cock had never tasted so good. I could go down on him for days.

  Surprised, Alkor leaned to his side and gave me a questioning look. I pushed him onto his back, pressed my lips to his, and then licked and kissed a trail down his muscular body. I loved the strangely rough texture of his light grey skin. I’d never been with a man with such sharply chiseled muscles and abs. He had the body of a god. But when I edged lower towards my prize, Alkor straightened and yanked me back, making me yelp in surprise. Turning me around, he had me kneeling over his face. I smiled, feeling naughty as I leaned down to take him in my mouth.

  It must have been ten years since I’d last done a 69.

  My abdominal muscles contracted as Alkor’s wicked tongue once more lavished my clit with skillful attention. A moan rose in my throat as pleasure already started building again, deep within. How could I focus on pleasuring him when he so easily brought me to the edge?

  Trying to block some of the bliss he gave me, I lowered my gaze to his crotch and wrapped my hand around his alien cock. Long and thick, a slightly darker, bluish shade of grey than the rest of his skin, the rippling ridge along its length would forever keep it from being confused for a human’s. He was too big for my fingers to touch but that didn’t stop me from giving him a few strokes before leaning down and kissing its head. His shaft jerked in my hand, and his balls contracted, making me smile.

  I loved how sensitive he was to my touch and especially to my tongue teasing his head and the small slit at the top. Alkor moaned with pleasure when I tightened my grip as I stroked him, until he rewarded my effort with a bead of semen. I licked it, moaning with delight as the taste of salty caramel exploded on my taste buds. I didn’t know if it contained some kind of aphrodisiac or addictive substance, but every time I tasted him, my skin heated, my inner walls contracted with desire, and I ached with the need to have more.

  With a hungry moan, I wrapped my mouth around his cock until the head hit the back of my throat. A shudder coursed through him, and he emitted a strangled moan which only fueled my hunger. I sucked him with a feverish energy, reveling in the sensation of his ridges on my lips, his heavenly flavor on my tongue, and his moans in my ears. But even as he neared his climax, my own threatened to rob me of my prize as wave upon wave of pleasure had me riding the edge. Knowing I wouldn’t last much longer, I took him as far back in my throat as I could and hummed.

  Alkor detonated with a roar, his seed bursting inside my mouth, his fingers sinking almost painfully into the tender flesh of my bum. As I swallowed the sweet and salty treat, Alkor rubbed my clit until I, too, climaxed. The room spun, figuratively and literally, as my lover flipped me onto my back. Destroyed by my two orgasms, I lay boneless on the bed. But he wasn’t done with me.

  Climbing on top of me, he covered my neck and face with kisses, grazing his canines across my shoulders, before claiming my mouth. His kiss was deep and possessive. He was staking his claim, branding me. Eyes locked with mine, he pushed himself inside of me.

  “You are mine, Brianna. Now and forever. No one will ever take you from me.”

  “Yes,” I whispered as he started rocking in and out of me.

  I had never felt so full, so utterly possessed as by this man. When I was in his arms, the world ceased to exist. Nothing mattered but him, around me and inside me, his rough skin setting every single one of my nerve endings on edge, his mouth conquering mine, and his body dominating me in every way a woman could want.

  “Bite me,” I pleaded, needing to be completely claimed.

  He froze, the liquid gold of his eyes, darkened by pleasure, seemed to glow. I wiggled beneath him, urging him to continue.

  “You want to bond with me?” he asked, hope and uncertainty making his voice quiver.

  I nodded, my gaze holding his, unflinching. “Yes. I want to be yours.”

  “Once I do, there will be no going back, Brianna,” he insisted, his eyes sparkling, pleading for me to be sure. “Are you certain you want this?”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding again. “I’ve never been more certain of anything,” I added with complete honesty.

  “My Hondassa,” he whispered with reverence, making me feel worshipped. “My beautiful mate. Nothing and no one will ever keep us apart.”

  Something was happening as his throat worked, and his eyes darkened further. He kissed my lips, mouth closed, and resumed pumping in and out of me. After a few moments, his lips parted at last, and the taste of salted caramel invaded my mouth as his tongue tangled with mine. But unlike when I’d gone down on him, this time a strange tingle spread inside my mouth, down my throat, and then throughout my body.

  In mere moments, all my senses went into overdrive while a new, hotter, burning lust surged through me. My vision sharpened, my hands and skin felt every subtle detail of his skin, and my ears caught the subtle scraping of his rough flesh rubbing against mine, and even the sound of his claws coming out to play. As if sensing the change in me, and the insatiable hunger taking hold of me, Alkor picked up the pace. Gone was the passionate but gentle lover I’d known from the start.

  He snarled, baring his fangs at me, his claws digging into my sides, breaking skin. He’d never looked so alien, so beastly, or so feral. Instead of scaring me, another bolt of lust and need had me moaning his name and writhing beneath him. I felt feverish, my overheating skin somewhat appeased by his cooler temperature as a thin layer of stone covered his flesh. My shout of pain when his fangs sank into my neck was quickly followed by a strangled cry of ecstasy as liquid bliss poured into me through the puncture wounds.

  I detonated, my vocal chords all but tearing from crying out so loudly. Relentless, Alkor licked my bite wound then growled his pleasure in my ear as he pounded into me with unbridled fury. Wings spread wide, the molten gold of his eyes glowing, he loomed over me like a demon escaped from the darkest pits of hell to claim his bride. Even his tail whipped savagely at the bedding as if he needed to expel an overwhelming excess of sexual energy. Alkor devoured my lips again, and the same delicious, salted caramel taste added a second wave of tingles throughout my body.

  My eyes rolled back when another violent orgasm swept me away. I couldn’t say how long he carried on, or how many times he made me fall apart. By the time he finally climaxed, I was drowning in a sea of ecstasy, my voice completely shot from having screamed so much. Seizing me in a bruising hold, his claws digging into my flesh, he roared my name as his seed erupted. Unusually warm as it poured inside of me, the same tingle his kiss had provoked in my mouth manifested itself a hundred times more powerfully in my womb before spreading to the rest of my body, wresting an ultimate orgasm from me.

  Completely destroyed, I lay limp on the bed, too wrecked to move. Gathering me in his arms, Alkor rolled onto his back. Holding me tightly to his chest, he closed his wings around me.

  “We are one,” Alkor whispered, his heart pounding in my ear. “We are bonded for life.”

  In the three days that followed, I didn’t see any glaring changes, whether to my appearance or otherwise. However, the puncture wounds that Alkor’s claws and fangs had inflicted upon me completely healed within hours and so had the bruise from Stephen backhanding me. Alkor profusely apologized for losing control and hurting me.

  When I told him I hoped he would claw me like that again, he nearly lost it. I wasn’t a masochist and never really contemplated any type of kinky play, but whatever his mating fluids had done to me, his claws hadn’t been unpleasant. I mean, yeah, there had been a bit of pain when they pierced through my skin, but it was the good kind of pain. I’d never been so turned on as when he’d gone
full gargoyle on me. Errr, rather full Khargal. The partial shift of his skin to stone, rather than irritating my skin as it rubbed against mine, had instead stimulated my nerve endings, enhancing every sensation.

  Alkor couldn’t swear that no other changes would occur over time, especially the more we continued to mate with him releasing his dassa, the mating fluid produced by the glands at the back of his mouth, near his tonsils. Until he’d pointed them out, I’d never really noticed that his speech got slightly slurred from them swelling whenever he would get super horny. Since I’d be leaving Earth, I didn’t worry too much about whatever changes might happen to my appearance, as long as they didn’t turn Alkor off. I’d love a pair of wings, but would gladly pass on the tail. Alkor said that neither were likely. That didn’t stop me from hoping.

  But those three days weren’t all just fun and kinky play. If not training to build up his stamina, Alkor would fiddle for hours with his gear, especially on a small box to prevent the Rose Syndicate from tracking the sigil, and some other device. After overhearing the conversation between Stephen and Daniel, he realized they were able to track the signal emitted by the sigil, or to track its frequency. We needed to mask it while we traveled so that they couldn’t follow our trail. At the same time, we needed a decoy sigil to fool them into thinking it was still sitting pretty in The Darkest Hour.

  Thanks to VPN, I connected remotely to my work computer. Sitting on Alkor’s couch, cross-legged, my laptop on my lap, I tried to wrap up as much of my work as possible so that my clients wouldn’t get screwed over and another engineer could pick-up where I left off without too much difficulty. It saddened me that I wouldn’t see some of those projects through, The Darkest Hour ranking at the top of the list.

  Lifting my head, I peered at Alkor’s beautifully exotic face. His features were set in an expression of deep concentration as he tinkered with a portable version of the solar energy converting device he used to recharge his suit and shield.

  “So how do you know how to do all this technical stuff?” I asked. “I thought you were a soldier?”

  Alkor raised an eyebrow and looked up at me, his head still bent over his contraption. “Being a soldier doesn’t exclude having skills in scientific, technological, or artistic fields. I’m also a pretty damn good cook.”

  I blinked. “You’re saying you’re good in all of the above?”

  Alkor smiled, straightened and then leaned back against the chair of his work desk. “I’m not too big on science, although my general knowledge probably exceeds that of a majority of the non-scientific and non-medical population. Since I can’t just waltz into the doctor’s office, over the centuries, I’d kept myself educated in the basics of medicine and biochemistry to try and cater to my own needs. But with our natural enhanced healing and the wonders of duramna—not to mention different anatomies—I devoted fairly little time to that.

  He looked at all the equipment in front of him and picked up the fake sigil he’d put together to throw off the Syndicate into thinking it was still sitting inside The Darkest Hour long after we’d left with the real thing.

  “Now this stuff, I enjoy. I first became tech savvy out of necessity, and now out of passion. It is exciting to try and figure out how I can push primitive technology into performing more advanced functions it hadn’t been meant to. This era makes it all the more exciting that humans finally have computers, the internet and nanotechnology.”

  “So you spent the past thousand years tracking down every bit of tech you could find?” I asked in a teasing tone, but actually wondering how it must have felt to have lived all those eras and witnessed humanity’s evolution.

  Alkor chuckled.

  “Not at all. Decades could go by before any new technological discovery worth looking into popped up,” Alkor said with a shrug. “When you have so much time to kill, you learn stuff, whatever is hot at the time. During the Renaissance, I did a lot of drawing and sculpting. During the Age of Sails, I tried to overcome my fear of water, but that didn’t work out too well. Plus boats are way too slow when you can fly.”

  “Fear of water?” I asked, taken aback. “But you saved me from the water.”

  Alkor nodded slowly, a slight frown on his face as he reminisced. “Yes. But I was flying. Your vehicle had only begun sinking, which is a relatively slow process. Had your car already been submerged, I couldn’t have helped you. Khargals can’t swim. We’re too heavy. I am…” His voice faltered, and he looked slightly distraught. “I am terrified of large bodies of water.”

  I gaped at him for a moment, the haunted look in his eyes driving home the depth of his phobia.

  “And yet, you came for us,” I said, even more deeply moved now knowing what fear he had to overcome to rescue us.

  “Reflex. It is my duty to protect,” Alkor said with a shrug. “But in that specific instance, I think instincts kicked in because it was so reminiscent of the crash when my companions and I were trying to get out of our sinking spaceship. I had to help. I had to save them… to save you.”

  “I’m glad you did,” I said with a smile, allowing both my gratitude and the affection I felt for him to shine through.

  “So am I, my Brianna,” Alkor said.

  The possessive way in which he claimed me gave me a pleasant shiver.

  As it turned out, Alkor wasn’t just a tech wiz, he also spoke six languages fluently—down from the twenty plus languages and dialects he had learned over the centuries but had now mostly forgotten from lack of use. Where Arabic had proven easy for him in terms of pronunciation, he had given up on Chinese, unable to reproduce the right pitch. Alkor used to play the piano and a plethora of stringed instruments, half of which I didn’t even know existed. Finding out he’d had a five-year obsession with playing the harp blew me away. I couldn’t quite picture my badass-looking, thick-muscled, sharply-horned Khargal sitting demurely behind a harp.

  Through his tales of life over the past millennium, I came to realize Alkor had grown to love Earth and would leave with a great deal of sadness, although I expected most of it would be from parting with Lana.

  She would inherit Alkor’s network of themed clubs throughout the world. Having managed the operation since the beginning, it only made sense. It warmed my heart that she intended to complete the work in the catacombs. In the two weeks remaining before our departure from Earth, I would work my magic and send her a near final draft of the plans for it.

  11

  Alkor

  Too soon, and yet not soon enough, the time of our departure from the club arrived. We would travel light, only carrying the strict minimum—essentially the clothes on our backs and one change of clothes—and plenty of cash as debit or credit cards would be too easy to trace.

  The Rose Syndicate had been multiplying their attempts to break into The Darkest Hour. During restaurant hours, ‘customers’ would get ‘lost’ on their way to the bathroom, despite them being clearly indicated, and would conveniently find themselves near the lift or climbing the stairs to the upper floors. During club hours, same thing, except some of their agents would try to bribe the staff into leading them to the big boss, or sweet talk VIP members into letting them inside their booths to search for a way into my box located on the same floor. One of them even pretended to be a Hydro-Quebec employee needing to check the counters and electric panels of the building, including every power outlet and heating system to make sure they were up to modern standards. Old constructions were known to be fire hazards, especially now that we operated it as a club.

  But one of the senior waiters getting mugged on his way to open the restaurant so that they could steal his access key convinced us the time to leave had come to prevent things from escalating. The rescue mission wouldn’t be here for another two weeks. We’d hoped to delay our departure from Montreal for another week so that I could continue to train and for us to be in a safe haven. Despite their various attempts, my private quarters were nearly impossible to break into. With the rendezvous point loc
ated in Canada, traveling would be a lot easier as we wouldn’t be crossing any borders with all the security headaches that entailed.

  After much deliberation, we agreed to travel by train. The rendezvous point was located on Mount Nirvana. We booked a one-way trip to Toronto, and then a connecting ride to Edmonton, Alberta. From there, we’d fly a hydroplane into the Northwest Territories. The whole trip would take five days, including spending a night in Toronto and another in Edmonton.

  It would have been faster to take a five-hour private jet flight directly to Tungsten airport. The mostly abandoned mining town sat a stone’s throw away from Mount Nirvana. However, you needed prior permission to land there. Even if Lana worked her magic to get us the authorization, we suspected many of the other Khargals would be heading there as well. So many special requests at the same time would raise too many flags, especially considering we would have to wait the remaining two weeks there. A slower transit would keep us moving over a longer period of time rather than sitting still in the same location for too long.

  With The Darkest Hour under heavy surveillance by the Syndicate, we needed to sneak out without getting noticed. If we used one of the upper entrances on the roof to fly out in stealth mode, they would suspect we had left by the mere fact that the doorways opened and then closed with no one in sight.

  Instead, Lana’s sister, Militza, came over to the club with Lana’s son, Tommen. I was coming down the stairs just as he was finishing exchanging greetings with Brianna.

  “Uncle Alkor!” the boy screamed when he saw me.

  Tommen ran and threw himself into my arms. My throat tightened seeing the adoring way in which he embraced me, his small body feeling no bigger than a twig. Smiling affectionately, I caressed Tommen’s hair before kissing his forehead. The staff wouldn’t arrive for another hour, sparing me from having to wear my perception filter.