Her gaze left his face, travelling over his chest, his abdomen. Her smile faltered and her brow creased.
She knelt over him, her moist cleft grazing his cock. “What’s this?” she whispered, staring into his eyes.
He moaned, at a loss for words with her so close. Hiram tried to buck his hips, but the vines crept across his body to hold him in place.
Secret swayed from side to side, the soft heat of her body teasing him. She dropped her free hand to his chest to pinch his nipple.
He winced.
The vines thickened. Thorns pierced his skin. Leaves tickled him in an annoying itch. He tried to twist away, to escape, but he couldn’t move at all.
The dagger lowered to his chest, inching down across his skin toward his erection. The edge bit into his skin and he screamed.
His eyes opened.
He was alone. Hands rushed to his body, to his cock still safe and hard in the confines of his unharmed breeches. He glanced around. No vines cut into his skin. The dark place in which he reclined had lightened ever so slightly to reveal the outlines of massive tree trunks. Above him, a whisper of sunlight peeled through the dense canopy of leaves.
“Secret?” he asked, tentative and unsure now.
The foliage on the forest floor swayed and shivered. Small creeling sounds tittered nearby. He peered into the ferns and saw a pair of black eyes watching him.
“Secret?” he whispered. “Is that you?”
The eyes blinked.
A black mist swirled over the eyes, obscuring the gremlin. In moments, Secret came forth, nude and as beautiful as he remembered her. Her smile was knowing and rent with mischief. “Did you dream of me?”
“Yes,” he answered. “It was a nightmare.”
She crept closer until she reached the edge of the bench.
He slid his legs over the side and looked up at her amber-rimmed eyes. “Did you send me that dream?”
“Yes.” She took his hand and placed it over her right breast. “You must understand what I am before I claim you. You must accept me.”
He cleared his throat. His breath caught, still harried by the nightmare. “I—I understand that you are Beorolf’s child…that your mother…”
“She was a gremlin, like the others. You saw them.”
He nodded.
“Do you still think you want me?”
He bowed his head and touched it to her soft abdomen. Things were strange in this land past the rift. “Yes,” he murmured. “A thousand times over, yes.” He kissed the skin above her small bellybutton.
She pressed her body closer.
Hiram’s hand caressed its way down her side until he gripped one hip. His other hand followed suit until he had her waist. Turning her as he stood, he guided his maiden to the bench. She sat, colors dancing in her wide eyes. “I want to taste you as you tasted me.”
She nodded, lowered her back to the bench and parted her legs to allow him access.
He dipped his mouth to her entry. Never had he been allowed to do such an act at home. He had watched from a darkened corner when his neighbor, Ilshem, had affairs with a widow from the far lane.
Hiram parted his lips and licked at Secret’s womanhood. The sweet scent of her, like musk and wildflowers tempted him. He sucked in the nub of soft flesh at her center. She flinched. He rode his tongue in circles over the sensitive area, causing her legs to tremor at either side of his head. Working faster, he reached up and traced the wet hole of her entry. He wanted to plunge his fingers in there hard, but resisted.
Instead, he rubbed the place until a forceful quake overtook her. She moaned and thrashed. He pushed his forefinger inside her body, finding it tight. He pulled out slow, still pleasuring her clitoris, and pushed in once more.
Working up a steady rhythm, he dared to push in a second finger.
She cried out with pleasure. Her juices pooled inside her body, making his invasion slippery. Hiram held still while she quivered. His cock felt about ready to burst.
“Again,” she pleaded. “Do it again.”
He sat back and pushed her legs up onto the stretching bench. Hiram stood, undid his breeches and kicked them away. Without asking her leave, he climbed atop her body, his knees at either side of her waist, and buried his face against her mound to begin once more.
Small hands grasped his hanging cock, tugging it down to her waiting lips. She kissed and licked along his length, drawing his attention from the task before him. He groaned when his balls tingled. Her fingers cupped them and she sucked him down inside her mouth. He couldn’t resist or halt his seed. It burst forth.
He laved her clitoris, determined to make her come a second time. She did, her voice humming around his sheathed sex. He plunged his tongue inside her body to feel the frantic contractions within. After she recovered from her orgasm, he crawled over to rest beside his Secret. He closed his eyes, the flavor of her on his tongue, the scent of her in his nostrils and the warmth of her spooned against him. Hiram had never been happier.
Chapter Seven
Behind the Golem’s Face
She opened the portal with her mind. That much, Hiram understood. Secret knew magic, to what extent, he didn’t know or care. His dilemma now was how to get her to come away with him and leave her vengeance against her father behind them.
“Come,” she said, gripping his hand. “It only stays focused for a little while.”
He planted his feet in place. “I don’t want to go back to the keep. Can’t we stay here…in your forest?”
Her grim expression answered for her. “Come,” she repeated.
Together, they walked through the swirling mist.
His body pulsed with sexual awakening as it tended to do when he crossed these strange gateways. His mother had told him of such things, fairy doors to other worlds and places, but until he’d passed through the one outside the rift, Hiram hadn’t believed her.
They came out the other side in the village below the keep. The metal horses and golems lay cast aside in heaps near the edges of the brick roadway. No green lanterns burned in the windows of the buildings they passed. Nothing moved or made a sound, except the chirps or twitters of the greenish black gremlins that darted into the shadows. The village was destroyed now, and Hiram felt responsible.
“I’ll be the one to kill him,” Secret stated, “so don’t worry, my savior.”
“It’s too dangerous,” he warned. “Come away with me. We can go back to the woods, back to Pig’s End even. I don’t care where we go, just as long as you’re with me.”
She stopped to face him, her eyes clouding over with tears. “You would take me to the land of your father?”
He drew her into his arms. “Yes, if that will stop you now. I’ll go back. I’ll be happy there if I have you.”
Secret ‘s eyebrows tensed. Her full lips pursed as she thought over his offer. “You know little of me, Hiram. Not enough to offer what you do.”
He combed his fingers through her thick hair. “I want to know you. Let me find out who you are.”
She took a step back, escaping his embrace. A cool breeze scathed his skin with icy fingers. Goosebumps prickled over his body.
“I must do this. I must avenge my mother’s death. It is my deed to do.” She took another step away from him. “Wait for me here.”
He shook his head no, but she shifted, her body nothing more than vapor, until she became like the others, a gnarled gremlin, as tall as his knees, spikes protruding from her green back. Without another word or even a shared thought, Secret scurried away from him.
He watched her lithe, little form as she raced up the hill and vanished at the portal leading into the keep. She had abandoned him in a way. That much he understood, and he doubted she’d be successful. The image of Beorolf readying to smash her small hand in the vise made him shudder.
He glanced the opposite way of the keep in the direction Old Lysen had come when they’d entered the village. Glimmering like a beacon of hope, he saw
the portal that led back home. It called to him in its own faint way. His feet shuffled him toward it. He moved faster until he broke into a sprint. Beyond the bleary mists, he saw the rift with its bonfires and trailing smoke. He smelled the fresh hay and dung in the pig fields and he remembered his father’s face. He was needed at home.
You should go back now, a voice said in his mind. Only it was not Secret’s sweet tone, but the gruff voice of a man. It went on, You don’t belong here, boy. Go home and forget you ever came to this place forsaken by the Gods.
Beorolf’s words halted Hiram. He glanced over his shoulder at the high keep where his maiden had gone. He had to have her before he went back home, otherwise, all would have been for naught.
“Mother? What should I do?” he asked her spirit. As always, no one answered, but he felt her distant presence watching over him.
He lifted his fingers to the portal’s surface and touched the incandescent mist. No trill of passion overwhelmed him. No images, save that of pigs and memories of toiling beneath an unforgiving sun, gave him reason to pass through.
His hand fell away, down to his side, brushing the lump in his pocket. He reached inside and pulled out the clay tablet he’d stolen from the keep. It rested in his hands, small and insignificant, the writing there holding no meaning to him.
He shoved it back into hiding and turned to go find his maiden.
* * * *
The keep smelled like burned hair. Hiram passed through its empty halls and rooms calling out her name. No one answered. Even the gremlins were silent, if they were there at all. He searched the entire building to no avail. In the south wing, he came to an open door and a garden beyond. Labyrinth hedges and herbs arranged in intricate patterns made him shake his head in disbelief. Gardens were for growing food, not to be made into art.
He walked along the stone path, his gaze scanning every shadow.
“Secret!” he shouted.
The magnetic pull of her mind finally reached out to him. He began to run. Beneath an arch draped with flowering vines, he found them. Secret and Beorolf locked in a battle, both choking the other. She looked sinister and beautiful, nude and angry as she squeezed at her father’s throat.
The half-man, half-golem looked terrible. His face contorted with rage and his non-human eye blazed red.
“Let him go,” Hiram said, creeping closer. “Let him go and we’ll leave this place.”
Secret faltered.
Beorolf used the moment to flip her to the ground. He fell atop her curved shape, crushing her beneath his deformed body. Her eyes bulged, and she gagged.
He barreled forth to tackle the lord. They rolled together, arms and legs scraping against the stone path until they came to a stop in the bushes near a statue. Piles of long dead bouquets crushed beneath the lord. Their stale perfume wafted up to Hiram.
“Leave her alone,” he growled. “Don’t touch her again.”
The lord’s eyes narrowed. “She’s bewitched you, boy.” He heaved out a worn breath. “She’ll never love you. They can’t love.” He turned his head away, and Hiram followed his attention to the marble headstone nearby.
“You killed her, Father,” Secret accused. “Not the other way around. It was you who could not love.”
Beorolf snarled as he escaped from beneath him.
Secret went on. “It was you! You who could not accept what she was…” She came closer, her fists clenched, her eyes narrowed. “You who pretended to love her while you stole her magic, her knowledge…”
“She gave it to me freely!”
“You stole her secrets and then, when she had nothing more to give, you killed her!”
“That’s not the whole truth! You were too young. You don’t know what happened. It was your mother who killed me first!”
Secret froze. “What?” she asked in a breathless whisper. “What did you say?”
Beorolf crawled backwards until he rested atop the grave, his back pressed to the headstone. His chest rose and fell in harried gasps. “That’s right, child. She killed me. She destroyed my body in the process…” He waved a hand to indicate what had been done to him.
“But you’re alive,” Hiram interjected. “You’re not dead.”
“Of course not.” He took hold of the small door on the golem side of his chest and unclasped it. Trembling human fingers reached into the knotted wires. “She brought me back,” Beorolf murmured. “Brought me back with the same magic she’d taught me. I could never forgive her for that.” He plucked out the small tablet within. His golem eye winked out. His human eye blinked once before widening. It went glassy after a few moments.
The tablet fell from his grip, clattered against his metal leg and landed on the stone walk, broken in two. Lord Beorolf took what remained of his own life in the end.
Secret sighed.
It was over, Hiram realized, and he wished it hadn’t come to this. His maiden crouched to her knees and wept. She cried as he gathered her in his arms and carried her away from her father and the grave of her mother. Things had gone terribly wrong for that couple, and he didn’t desire the same for him.
“You’ll come home with me now,” he said. “We’ll stay in my father’s house.”
The gray sky began to weep along with the woman he bore. The more she cried, the harder the rain fell, soaking her nude body and causing his clothes to sag. He took her to the shelter of the keep and set her beside him. Though her eyes were bleary, she let him hold her in the doorway. Together, they watched the sky pummel the garden in silence broken every so often by her sobs.
Chapter Eight
Beginning at the End
In the middle of the night, rumbling thunder woke Hiram. He reached over for the soft shape of the woman he’d fallen asleep by to find her missing. “Secret?” he whispered. He sat up in the lord’s old bed and caught sight of her near the window. “What’s wrong? Come back to bed.”
She shook her head.
He rolled off the mattress, carrying the coverlet with him, for it was cold. He stood at her back and draped it over her shoulders. Her body was cool against his warm bare skin.
“What’s to become of us?” she asked.
He nestled his face in her hair, breathing in her unique scent. “We’ll live in Pig’s End and have children.” It was a simple answer, but the truth of it felt right to him.
“But I’m not of your kind—not wholly. I’ll always be different from you.” She turned to face him, looking up with those amber-colored eyes that haunted his dreams. “One day you’ll tire of me, of what I am, or the other way around.” She touched his waist with icy fingers, the tips skimming along his naked hips.
“I will never tire of you,” he promised.
One of her eyebrows rose. “Never is a very long time where I come from.”
He shrugged.
She kissed him, parting her lips to invite his tongue to explore. He did so, tentative in his indulgence, afraid she might pull away. When he didn’t give her what she wanted, she took it from him, delving her tongue into his mouth to tease his. Her hands gripped his buttocks, squeezing until he moved closer against her body. Naked and at the cusp of arousal, he remembered Beorolf’s words. “It was a primal mating, like animals.” Her hips gyrated against him. His cock warmed to her coaxing. He wanted that primal mating, longed for it, and backed to the wall where she pinned him.
“I claim you as mine, Hiram,” she said when their lips parted. “You are mine until the end of your days.”
He nodded, mesmerized by her fierce expression.
She slipped her hands across his chest to pinch his nipples until they rounded with excitement. Secret nipped at his lower lip, smiling between her small attacks. “I want to feel you inside me,” she whispered. “Deep inside me.” One hand slid down to his hardening cock, stroking him into full arousal. “I want you to keep me in your world, always by you, to remind me why I must stay in this form...so I do not become what my mother was.”
“I’ll
try,” he squeaked out.
She guided him to her entrance, wet and hot, ready for this moment. Color flashed in her eyes, a warning of what was to come if he stayed with her. She was not entirely human, but a creature of the world beyond the portal, a thing his mother had warned him about. If the others back home found out what she was, they would call her a monster.
Hiram closed his mind against such thoughts. He took hold of her waist and thrust himself inside her tight body. She moaned in his ear. He knelt and thrust again.
Her feet twisted around his ankles until she clung to him in an awkward embrace, their bodies connected and pumping to meet. He turned in three quick steps, set her back to the wall and took hold of her legs, supporting her weight with his arms and parting her thighs wider. He delved inside, each time a little deeper, each time closer to his end.
She stared at him with half-closed eyes, and lips that begged kisses.
Hiram came in a rush of heat. He slammed into her as hard as he dared until she cried his name and knotted her fingers in his hair. “Make me forget what I am,” she pleaded when he carried her back to the bed. “I want to be what you are. I want to be human like you.”
“Shh,” he said before he devoured her mouth. “You are what you are, and I will love you for the truth, not any lies.”
* * * *
They did not tarry in the keep the next day. The rain let up at dawn, leaving the dead village wet in its ruin. Secret held Hiram’s hand as they strode down the road to the portal leading home. She skipped in her merriment and hummed a happy tune. He admired the shape of her in the makeshift dress she’d made from Beorolf’s bedcurtains. For shoes, she had fashioned slips of leather into sandals and her hair was braided and bound by a leather thong. Hiram had never seen a woman more beautiful.
“We must marry,” he told her as they stopped before the misty gateway to the world he hadn’t thought he’d want to go back to.
“If we must, then let it be done soon.”
“Maybe today,” he said, leaning close to kiss her cheek. “I’ll ask in the chapel by the wayside.”
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