Loved Him to Death: Omos of the Ether

by K. M. Frontain

  “No more destroyed peninsulas for you,” he said against my wet cheek. The tears just wouldn’t cease.

  No more destroyed peninsulas for me. I was so weary from my long bout with self-destruction. “I love you,” I whispered.

  “And I you,” he replied, kissing down my jaw.

  Ah. Sweet Creation. He loved me. It was enough to help me endure.

  “You were wrong, you know,” I said, suffering from a strange sense of disassociation that let honesty surface. “Intana won’t want to revenge himself on me because of his mother, but because I am with you.”

  Haru smiled against my cheek. “We’ll deal with that as it comes. He’s young. He still has time to learn before he makes all the same mistakes as you.”

  Disassociation burnt like so much paper in a furnace. “Shut up!” I tightened my arms around his back and sealed his lips with mine. I could have eaten him; that he was so wise with so few years, compared to the eternity of me.

  I wasn’t born a beast, my love. Stop hating. Trust me.

  I did trust him. I did, to keep a muzzle over my snout. “Please,” I whispered. “I need.”

  Words ended, and we concentrated on pleasure again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Such soft lips. I adored Haru’s lips. We spent minutes just lying there side by side, kissing, our shafts pressed together, our hips squeezing forward and easing off. Dripping, dripping all over our groins.

  “Unh!” That was me, spilling solely because of his lips, the taste of his mouth, the softness of his tongue when the tip brushed mine, the hardness when it stabbed between my teeth to claim me.

  Lord. Creation. Fuck. He was too damned beautiful. It was like a sin. After all that I had done, to feel such pleasure, such joy. A sin.

  Easy, he whispered into my spirit.

  Easy? I could have laughed, only I was still shooting, suffering what seemed another of those never-ending orgasms in his presence. And he made it better, or worse. He rolled me to my back, put my legs over his shoulders again, scraped my seed off his belly and used that to slide his fingers into me.

  “Ah, fuck! More!” I cried, bucking my bottom upward, almost driving him back with my legs. His fingers retreated, and the head of his shaft pressed on my hole instead. He gave me more in one hard shove.

  The shock to my insides was different than the ones of before. Better, good. Devastating. “Lord! Eat me! Kill me! Unh! Fuck me!”

  “Animal,” he grunted and chose fucking. He lunged down to kiss me. My knees threatened to break my ribs again. “Spread your seed over my face.”

  Damn! I started coming again, only seconds after the last orgasm. But that one really hadn’t ended yet. This was more of the same wave of bliss.

  “Now!” he cried. I scooped my fingers through my seed, caught his face, and kissed him with my liquid dripping down onto my cheeks. And I rode another wave of the orgasm, listening to his noises, feeling his pleasure, the shaking, the stiffness of his arms to either side, the hard ripples of his abdomen on the backs of my thighs. The burn of his seed deep within me. Oh, Creation, how I loved him, how he could be so wicked and pure at once.

  He smiled even as he was still grinding his last into me. “If to fuck until I collapse from pleasure is wicked, then let wickedness collapse me.”

  He heaved into me one more time and did as he said. Collapsed. After a few seconds wherein my orgasm at last washed away, I grunted and shifted one leg out from beneath him, then another.

  “Haru!” I complained. He was a dead weight.

  I wriggled my hips a little to release his shaft, then rolled to put him beneath. His long, messy braid fell on his chest between us. I wrapped it around my wrist, tugged tentatively. No reaction but for a loose shift of his head to the side.

  “Haru?” I straightened him out and kissed him, but he didn’t respond. His lips were lax like he slept. It came to me that he’d not only collapsed, but gone out of his body.

  “Damn it. Where did you go?”

  I went to check on the ship.

  “Yahhhh!”

  His eyes opened, and he laughed. “What are you yelling for? How can you be startled by someone right in front of you?”

  “You went through my head coming back! It shocked me!” It had been like a shark diving through a host of jellyfish, making them swirl about in my previously still pond. Now the pond was all…jiggly, interested souls jousting for position just beneath the surface of my skin. Damn that Haru.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, but wasn’t really. He squirmed upward, forcing me to sit, but I stayed crouched over his lap and glowered at him.

  “Do you know what that feels like, to have a person slip through one’s head without warning?” I asked.

  “Sort of like getting swallowed by Vaal, only in pinpoint?” he offered.

  I stared at him, trying to work it out, and decided it was an insult. “Are you saying I have a small mind?”

  Laughing, he shoved me sprawling onto my back. His torso lurched forward and his face smacked into my chest. “Ow! Let go of my braid!”

  “No!”

  “Yes!” He caught the hair in his fist and yanked free of my grip. “And no,” he said, sitting up, “I’m not saying you have a small mind. It’s just that Vaal’s so expansive when he envelops a person, a ship, an island, or whatever, whereas I just sort of did a neat dive through a confined space.”

  “You’re saying I have a small mind!”

  “Omos! With countless souls resident inside you? You do not have a small mind!” He huffed in exasperation, untangled his legs from mine, and rose up to stalk off to the washstand.

  Just as he went by the window, a distant bang sounded and glass shattered. Haru froze in place, gawping at the falling shards, but I shot off my ass and slammed him up against the wall where his figure couldn’t be seen through the gauzy drapery.

  “Fucking hole in Creation’s butt!” I whispered. Erant Sirran was mad to have dared this.

  “We really can’t afford to kill anyone while we’re still in harbour,” Haru said, calmer than me. “And definitely no eating anyone, not with your little fetish for collecting spirits.”

  Little fetish? Wasn’t he polite. Not that I wanted to eat anyone, not any longer. One more soul and I might just blast apart. I knew it now, had known it all along, really—realized, somewhere deep, that I had to refrain from consuming mortals, or suffer the consequence of a spiritual eruption.

  “The lost peninsula,” Haru murmured.

  I almost groaned. The lost peninsula. Apparently I had suffered an eruption, and that had been the outcome. How many souls had I released with my power? If any.

  “Do you think you lost any?” Haru asked.

  “This is hardly the time for a discussion,” I answered. “Someone just tried to assassinate you.”

  “But do you?”

  No, I don’t think I did. I think I just lost control for a moment, and all of me had expanded at once, all of me including the mortal souls that were now a part of me.

  And the peninsula had gone into the ocean.

  Had I eaten someone to precipitate that calamity? I recalled, vaguely, looming over the one woman that had been decent looking.

  Damn.

  “Damn,” Haru agreed. “No more eating mortals, love. Not even for tasting.”

  I could not but agree with this edict, for I was feeling fragile beneath my skin, even with his help keeping my pool of spiritual jellyfish placid. Some were listening, pressing up to drag tendrils along my surface. In its way, this prickling touch was almost worse than the pressure of a multitude heaving up as molten bubbles wanting to burst me apart.

  “We may have no choice but to kill today,” I said. “How else are we to leave this house? There might be more than one marksman out there.”

  I grimaced. There was certain to be more than one marksman out there, and more coming to this room now that the element of surprise had gone.

  I jerked away from Haru and started fo
r the door, but he tugged me back. “No killing as the dragon. You mustn’t be the dragon. Rumours must not spread. As it is, they’ll only think Sirran made up excuses for his greed.”

  Fuck. It was easier as the dragon. I was faster and with less of the encumbrances that came with a human body. Basically I’d be impervious to these balls of metal fired from a distance.

  “When did Vaal leave the house?” Haru asked.

  He released me, and I continued on to the door, worrying how I’d stop these attackers without pulling power from beneath my skin and thereby showing a hint of divinity. I could hear them now, entering the house, trying to be quiet even as they rushed, but they couldn’t hide their noise from my dragon self, which lay unseen on the manor roof, listening.

  Damn me. I hadn’t been alert enough last night. I’d let the enemy take positions within the manor grounds, permitted them to approach close enough to attempt an assassination with these new weapons, weapons that could shoot farther than arrows. Idiot.

  “Omos? When did Vaal leave?” Haru asked again.

  “Very early, before dawn. But you would know if he was hurt.” Wouldn’t he?

  “No, he’s not hurt. I was just wondering how the marksmen missed him. Did he leave by shadows?”

  “Yes. He didn’t want Sirran knowing he was gone.”

  I arrived at the door, naked, and suddenly I had problems with that. Now, after I can’t remember how many aeons of living, I was bothered by nakedness. What was the matter with me? I shivered slightly, suffered a tendril of attention that touched my surface, felt my skin rip, cried out in protest.

  “Noooo!”

  My voice? The pitch was—!

  Fuck. I’d gone woman again. “Haru!” I squeeked, turning toward him.

  He gawped at me. “Who is that?”

  “What do you mean? It’s me!”

  “That’s not Intana’s mother. Not this time. That’s a pale-skinned girl.”

  Fuck! Fuck! FUCK! “How should I know? I don’t have a mirror!”

  He pointed across the room toward a dressing table. I looked at him, the mirror, the door.

  “Quit dithering and go look,” he said.

  “But the attackers?”

  “I can handle the attackers. What do I look like? An innocent virgin? No! That would be you. You ate a virgin! Didn’t you?”

  Had I? Well, more than likely. There had been sacrifices. But how was I to remember which one she’d been?

  “The mirror?” Haru suggested again.

  Staying away from the window, he stalked off toward the chair where we had draped his clothes last night. I watched, my skin getting hotter and hotter as he grabbed first his curved sword, then his matching long knife. He turned toward me and approached. My eyes dropped to his crotch, fixing upon the soft meat of his sex.

  “Are…aren’t you going to dress?” I slapped a hand over my mouth. My voice! It quavered!

  “Definitely a virgin,” Haru muttered. “Move your little butt, Omos. I have some murdering to do.”

  “But you’re not dressed!” And his meat was losing the soft and becoming a threat to my continued mobility. I only wanted to stare at it. “Shouldn’t…shouldn’t you dress?”

  “No time! Move!”

  I moved, the door burst inward, and the attackers came on. I squealed.

  I…squealed.

  I couldn’t believe I squealed, and like a silly girl. And that made me just boil with indignation. “Creation blast me apart! I’m a virgin!”

  Two attackers tumbled over themselves gaping at me. One of them fired his musket as he fell. The shot whizzed by my head. Blond hair wafted in front of my eyes. I squealed again. In outrage. And I was myself again. Omos, the deity. The male one.

  I kicked the shooter in the head. I think I broke a toe, because the next noises I produced were a string of foul epithets dating back centuries. Meanwhile, Haru took off the head of one attacker, gutted another with his knife, blocked a bayonet with his returning sword, and blasted three more soldiers backward into the hall with a shock of power that flashed out from his chest.

  There was more musket fire, but all of it missed. The shots smashed into walls, furniture, anything but him or me. Realising this, I stopped cursing and blinked in astonishment.

  “I’m deflecting,” Haru huffed and took of the head of the man I’d kicked.

  Damn. Fucking damn. That was so erotic, watching him murder without hesitation. And there was so much blood, and fresh meat without souls attached to any. Souls fled away the moment he cut the cords of spirit to life.

  The remaining fallen soldier scrambled away on his knees. Haru cut his spine through, then went after the men in the hallway. They scattered. I listened to them shouting in terror, heard tumbling sounds from the main stairs, a scream, more terrified shouts, and then it seemed as if even the servants abandoned the house. Female shrieks sounded, and more male shouting, and the thudding of many feet on wood.

  Hell. Haru had routed everyone in only a few seconds.

  While I had broken a toe.

  Damn it.

  He returned and noticed me glowering. “What?”

  “I broke my toe.”

  His lips quirked up, then settled.

  “Go ahead. Laugh,” I said.

  But he didn’t. Very meekly, he walked around me and executed a careful navigation to the washstand, avoiding the window. He laid his bloody weapons down on the floor and began his morning cleansing.

  “Omos?” he called, not looking at me, water dripping on his face.

  “What?” I snapped, still where I had been, next to all the blood and death, fuming that I hadn’t perpetrated any of it.

  “You should wash, dress.”

  Right. I didn’t feel dirty. The shift in skin had taken away even the scent of his pleasure. I was very grumpy about that. I returned to the bed to retrieve my clothes, wincing every step I took with my injured foot.

  “I won’t tell Vaal,” he said.

  “You had better not.”

  “But if you change in front of him, especially into that girl, he’ll…”

  I spun around. “He’ll what? What? Laugh his brown ass off?”

  Haru stared at me a second, then said, “Make certain you’re no longer a virgin in that particular shape.”

  My shoulders slumped in mortification. “Oh, fuck. What have you done to me, Haru?”

  “Omos of the Ether. Be so good as to realize you’ve done this to yourself. I have merely provided the key to your continued sanity, and you must confront all your other selves to maintain it. One skin change at a time.”

  I shook my fist at him, which involved shaking my clothes because I had forgotten I held them. “You told me I could start over! You told me to forget the past!”

  “I wasn’t aware that you’d swallowed the past sufficient to carry it with you for all eternity,” he replied. “You are Omos of the Ether and as many mortals as you have consumed, and you must remember them all to gain control of these abrupt skin changes.”

  I groaned in defeat and sagged onto the bed. “There were thousands and thousands! You shouldn’t have unlocked the first!”

  “They were ready to burst you apart, Omos. Don’t tell me that your temper with regards to the peninsula was the act of a sane god. They are your people, your little selves harboured within you, and not all of them as nice as that pretty virgin,” he said. “Actually, I’m glad she popped out and not someone vicious. I think you’re already too well acquainted with the vicious elements of your populace.”

  I looked up at him and my heart did a double thump that felt…girlishly romantic.

  Fuck.

  “You thought she was pretty?” I said, hiding my chagrin, my anticipation.

  “A bit too delicate for my tastes.”

  Virginal anticipation turned into desperation. “But—! I don’t want Vaal to do her! She’d be terrified!”

  This time Haru’s shoulders slumped. “Damn,” he breathed. “Omos, s
he’s an inexperienced girl. I don’t have any interest in girls.”

  “She had tits. She was old enough to get experience.”

  “Omos—!”

  “She had tits!” I repeated.

  “Oh, fine!”

  I hopped up from the bed in excitement, then blushed in embarrassment.

  “At least put on the shape to go with the behaviour, Omos,” Haru said, smiling wryly. He turned away and commenced to wash his male parts, and I stared at him, wondering how to split my skin and let a girl out. I hadn’t done it knowingly the first time.

  “Haru?”

  “I don’t know. You were embarrassed by nakedness. Shut your eyes and think of all those men staring at your unclothed body.”

  That did it. I was her again, chill bumps coming out all over my delicate, little self. I shivered over to the mirror, with feet that weren’t injured, and looked at the image of the terrified virgin I had consumed.

  She’d been pretty. Such huge, pale blue eyes. I scarcely recalled her, but I remembered the eyes. The terror. The need to eat her terror. She’d urinated as I’d taken her into my jaws.

  “Damn it!” I hissed. I’d just done the same on the floor, remembering me, eating…me.

  Haru walked up with towels and dropped them between my legs. I shivered worse than before. He picked me up and laid me on the bed, threw a linen sheet over my body.

  “Wipe yourself dry,” he said. He went to the door, prodded the bodies out of the way and shut it. He shoved a wardrobe in front. It was massive, a heavy rectangle of ornate oak, but he heaved it along as if it were nothing, leaving scrape marks behind on the floor. His muscles rippled so…deliciously.

  “You’re not wiping!” he sang to me.

  “I’m wiping!” I sang back and shoved the linen sheet between my legs. I wriggled at the sensation. Hell. I was playing with my own cunny, not something even I had ever expected.

  Haru returned, but not directly to me. He went back to the washstand for a piss into the pot beneath. I watched him, thinking wicked things, places to put urine other than a pot. The girl me was thoroughly disgusted, but she couldn’t stop the real me from ruminating over the needs of territory.