“Can you both just shut up?” Quillan asked.
“All you want to do is accuse and, yes, Dulcie is the victim here,” Vander continued, presumably speaking to me. “I’m the asshole, and I fully admit that but it doesn’t mean I can’t make up for it!”
“You cannot make up for it. There is no making up for what you did,” I said.
“According to you,” he spat the words out. “But you aren’t Dulcie, and she’s the only one who matters here.”
“Perhaps you should be less worried about how Dulcie perceives you and more worried about Dulcie in general?” I started.
“I am worried about Dulcie! I’m always worried about Dulcie; don’t you get how fucking paralyzing that is? I’m a hundred yards away on a good day, and I can’t fix anything because she won’t even look at me!”
He was getting very fired up, which pleased me because an emotional man is not a logically thinking man.
“Why should she?” I asked.
“I don’t know, because that’s what you do when your friends fuck up—you forgive them and you let them try and make it up to you!”
“Knight, this isn’t the kind of thing you can just do over,” Quillan said, bless his heart.
“I know!” Vander threw something against the bars. We spent a long thirty seconds waiting for the illusory echo to abate.
“I know,” he said again, softer. “Dammit, I know. Dulcie, I’m sorry. You have to believe me.”
“Mmm,” Dulcie murmured, a sound like melting sugar.
Vander struck the bars again. “You never have to look at me again, I’ll leave the goddamn country if you want, but please, believe me that I regret everything that happened between us.”
Dulcie huffed loudly from her cell. “This is boring, I want to fuck something.”
I nearly choked on the air.
Well, I thought, laughing. Points for frankness, I suppose. Dulcie never was a subtle creature, I couldn’t imagine being in Dromir was helping that at all.
“Dulcie, Hades,” said Quillan.
“I do not suppose you can get ahold of yourself, my dear?” I asked.
“No,” she answered. “I want you to get ahold of me, Bram.”
“Don’t even fucking think about it,” Vander warned me.
“It is simply the prison walls that are keeping me away from her,” I responded calmly. “Certainly not your idiotic threats.”
The growling noise he made in reply was most gratifying.
“If we stay here, Darion will kill us,” reiterated Dagan.
“We must find a way out, now.” The urgency in Quillan’s tone was growing.
“Must we? I’m rather enjoying the view,” I replied. Across the way, a largish black mass stirred and rumbled. Something oil-brown and viscous oozed between the bars and into the lava, where it hissed and steamed.
“Bram. Please,” Quillan whined.
I put my hands in my pockets and sighed with all the drama I could muster. “Right, yes, we’ve all got places to be, I suppose.” I appraised the locked door in front of me. “Anyone have any bright ideas?”
Clang, clang, clang went something metal against something stone as someone attempted to bully the door into opening. It stopped, and Vander made a most distasteful growling noise.
“No luck?” I surmised.
“Just shut up and try to bust yours.”
“Bust my what, Vander?”
“Just fucking do it!”
I grabbed the bars and gave them a vigorous shake. They barely moved, certainly not enough to warrant the stony rattling that followed. I could not say I was surprised.
“No luck?” asked Vander, without much venom.
“No.”
“Okay, what do the locks look like?” he pressed.
“Hmm.” There was a shuffling noise, perhaps Quillan situating himself by the door to examine the lock. It was a ghastly red steel thing with a comically large keyhole just begging to be picked. “Christina, do you have a hair pin or something?”
The sound she made in reply was not encouraging.
“Christina? Babe?” Quillan hesitated.
The sound repeated itself, louder this time. It was then that we realized it was coming from Dulcie’s cell.
“Is she…?” he started, then trailed off.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think she is.”
We spent an awkward moment standing stock-still, listening to Dulcie as she brought herself to climax. It was taking some time, but she seemed to be enjoying every moment of it. How sorely I wished I could be assisting her.
“Well, at least someone’s having fun,” I quipped.
Quillan groaned. “Bram. For the love of Hades. Locks, doors, murderous demons. Try… I don’t know, blast the lock, or pull it loose or something.”
Vander made an attempt, throwing a ball of fire at the unfortunate lock, and someone else, likely Quillan, was making a lot of jangling sounds as though trying to pry it off with his bare hands.
I did nothing. I had a different plan.
Do you recall what I said about demons being prepared? While their fore-planning is a monumental sight, their moment-to-moment perception is rather more constrained.
You see, what the demons, in all their performed extravagance, had somehow neglected to do was pat us down.
“Well,” I announced, taking the portal ripper out of my pocket. “I think now I am thoroughly fed up with the view. Everything appeared so much cozier in the brochure.” I spun the dial, listening to the steady click-click-click of the magic in its gears reaching through the dimensions. “Shall we take the party elsewhere?”
“Oh my God, you still have the portal ripper,” realized Quillan.
“That I do.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I was enjoying listening to the rest of you fling yourselves at the walls looking for an alternative solution.”
“Haha, yes, very funny. Can we go, please?” Vander was using a tone of voice that makes one think of weary detectives massaging their temples.
“Temper, temper,” I scolded.
I opened a door between the inside and the outside of my cell and stepped through it, into the fiery hallway. The heat, however imagined, was nigh unbearable. The fire reached for me as I walked the length of the hall, popping in and out of cells.
Dulcie first. I was not in her cell for more than a moment before her hands were all over me.
“Bram,” she cooed, wrapping her arms around me and looking up at me from where our chests met. “I need you inside me.”
“I would love to appease you, my dear. But the sad truth is that we must go.”
“Please?” Her voice was seductive and persuasive. “It won’t take long.”
“Hades,” muttered Quillan. “Bram, come on.”
“It’ll only take a minute,” Dulcie purred, hands on my face, body pressed firmly against mine. The sensation of her fingers on my throat was among the simplest yet most titillating feelings I have ever experienced.
“Dulcie, my heart,” I said. I took her by the wrists, enjoying the softness of her skin, observing the strange glow that hung about her. Her wings fluttered madly behind her, but did not lift her off the ground. “Anything I would do with you would take far more than a minute.”
“Get the fuck moving!” Vander groaned.
That only made me stall longer.
“Then let’s take more than a minute.” Dulcie slid her hand down my bare chest, tracing the lines of my abdomen, pressing her thumb into the divot below my ribs. “Lots and lots more.”
“Oh, my dear,” I moaned as I cupped her bottom beneath my button-down she was still wearing.
“Leave her alone,” warned Vander, lingering on each word as though putting spaces between them would force me to pay attention.
I clucked my tongue at him. “Someone’s rather growly today, aren’t they?” I remarked to Dulcie, pulling her as close to me as was physically possible, a growing bulge in my pan
ts practically begging for entrance into her body. Her eyes fluttered closed and she inhaled sharply.
“Bram,” urged Quillan. “Get moving. Demons could be back any minute.”
“Make me growl, Bram,” begged Dulcie. “Make me hiss.”
“You’re really not very good at this, are you?” I asked. I pushed her hair out of her face, my hand lingering behind her head. She took my hand and forced it between her thighs. All my awareness was centered on her lips, her tongue, her breasts, her legs, and the impossibly warm, throbbing space between them.
She lifted herself up on her toes and pressed her lips next to my ear, brushing them softly against my stubble. She looked up at me, or perhaps gazed is a more appropriate word, and bit her lip with dastardly purpose. “Tie me up, Bram.”
Most of me froze solid. Other parts of me demanded the remainder of my largely stagnate blood supply immediately.
I frowned at her, not sure I had heard correctly. “I beg your pardon?”
She undid my belt and slid it out of the loops until it hung limp in her hand. The light in her eyes went out and replaced itself with a most peculiar, mischievous darkness.
“You heard me.”
“So I did,” I agreed, very quietly. “So I did.”
“What’s the matter? Don’t you want me?”
I grabbed her hair, pulled her head back, and kissed her throat with a vigor I had not known I possessed. The taste of her in my mouth was the sound of wolves in the night, the flavor of sugar in a chaser, the smell of rain on the sea. The belt dropped to the floor, forgotten.
When I spoke, I was breathless. “What a stupid question.” I turned us around so her back was against the wall and lifted her up. She wrapped her legs around me and gasped as I returned my lips to her neck, sucking at her skin, losing myself in her completely.
“Bram! Leave her the fuck alone!” Vander yelled. “She’s not in her right mind!”
“Not fair,” whined Christina, “I want to play.”
It is important to note that, while Dromir makes fairies uncontrollably horny, it does not make them clever.
“Bram, Knight’s right. She’s not in her right mind,” said Quillan, attempting to reason with me.
“Don’t listen to him,” pleaded Dulcie.
“Bram,” said Quillan again, more insistently. “You know she wouldn’t let you do this in any other situation, you know she wouldn’t.”
“I’m letting you do it here,” promised Dulcie alluringly. “Isn’t that what’s important? I want you, Bram.”
Yes, cried the voices within me, breathless and insistent, hungry. I was a man lost in the desert, being led to the oasis by an angel of my wildest imaginings, a glittering star fallen from the sky to bend to my every whim. Every instinct pulled me toward her, dragging me into the gravity well of her eyes, her hips, her hands, all of her bright and bloody and brilliant. Such power, such raw energy, fire fit to level cities, to rend continents.
She was asking me to taste her. To feel her. She was insisting.
She ground harder against me, fumbling with the zipper of my trousers. “I want to feel you inside me, Bram,” she continued. “Right here. Right now.”
“Bram! I will fucking kill you!” Vander continued, his voice buzzing about my head like a determined mosquito.
I sighed, then put her down. I pushed her gently away. “The elf is correct, you know.”
She growled, a sound stolen from lions and thunder and jilted exes the world over. “No, he’s not. I want you! I need you! Please!”
“I must ask you to forgive me for touching you at all.” I kissed her nose. “Perhaps we shall continue this later, yes? When you are in your right mind.”
She stomped her foot without vigor. “Braaaaaam.”
“If you will not want it later, you do not truly want it now.”
“What if I want it now and later?” she whined.
Dulcie, my darling, do not test me, I thought. It was taking every ounce of my self-control to keep myself in check as it was. “Then we shall have our way later. In a cleaner locale. Perhaps in a bed.”
“What’s wrong with the floor?”
“Everything, Dulcie. Everything is wrong with the floor.”
She pushed at her bottom lip with her thumb. “We don’t have to lie down, you know,” she persisted. “There’s a perfectly good wall right there.”
Keep it together, keep it together, I told myself.
Never before had I been so vexed by my own mind. On any other day, in any other place, under any other circumstances, nothing but Dulcie herself could have stopped me from doing unspeakable things to her. Temptation was not something I had made a habit of resisting. “If it means so much to you, we can go home and have all the sex you want on the kitchen floor, instead.”
Even her pout was bewitching. “I don’t wanna wait.”
Neither did I, but we rarely get what we want, do we? “I shall make it up to you tenfold.”
“…Promise?”
I took her hand and drew an X across my chest with her finger. “Cross my heart, hope to die.”
“But you’re already dead.”
“Indeed, I am,” I agreed. The fairy-lust of Dromir, I was rapidly learning, made one horny, whiny, and completely stupid. “Why don’t you go ahead and think of some interesting ways to make me feel more alive, hmm?” My hand dropped until my thumb circled her nipple, squeezing it gently. To convince her, of course.
She giggled. “Oh, fine.”
I motioned to the portal. “Off you go.”
She gave me a hungry once-over before walking through it, and I snapped it shut behind her.
Hades, Hades, Hades, I thought, trying to calm myself, but the want she had stirred up within me was that of a wildfire on a windy plain—the moment you think it is gone, there comes another gust and the fire starts anew.
“Bram,” called Quillan.
I popped into his cell. “Do stop addressing me like a child.”
Quillan opened his mouth to reply, then seemed to remember that I was his only way out of this hideous place and that offending me would not be in his best interests. “Right, sorry. Let’s go.”
I cut a portal into the air and motioned to it where it was trembling before me, and he disappeared through it. I closed it behind him.
Christina, when I came into her cell, was sitting on the ground, clutching at the bars with one hand and clutching at herself with the other.
“Oh, hey,” she said, languidly, in the dulcet tones of someone thoroughly drunk.
“Hey,” I replied, and the word felt wrong in my mouth. “It is time for us to leave, Miss Sabbiondo. I don’t suppose I can persuade you to come with me?”
She looked me up and down, which was apparently the only way either she or Dulcie could contrive to seduce me from a distance. “What’s in it for me?”
“Sex,” I promised wearily. “Sex, sex, all the sex you could possibly desire. But only if you get up now and start moving.”
She rose to her feet, pulling herself up breasts first. Squinting up at me, she mumbled to herself, “You know, I don’t think I want to have sex with you.”
Ouch.
“Nothing personal,” she added. “You’re pretty, but I don’t give my milk out to just any farmer, you know?”
“People cannot possibly still be using that metaphor,” I said.
“They are.”
Christina blinked as though waking from a most confusing dream. “Oh, Hades. I’m going to regret so many things when we get back, aren’t I?”
“Yes, I daresay you are,” I confirmed. “But I applaud your self-control. That you are lucid here at all is a testament to something, I am sure.”
“Thanks.” The thirsty air of the place seemed to descend upon her all over again, and she stumbled back like she was trying to get away from it. A smile slipped across her face and fell to the floor almost at once.
“Perhaps you should go, before you do something we will bo
th regret,” I advised. Nothing against Christina, of course, she was as lovely as ever; but there is something inherently less sexy about someone to whom you have been giving your false paperwork for half a decade. I don’t know what all the fuss with secretaries is about. Must be the glasses.
Christina walked towards the portal, patting me on the chest as she passed. “Great idea.”
She stepped through, and I closed it.
I stood before Vander’s cell. I waited. And I smiled.
“Well. That was fun, was it not?” I asked.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Not in the slightest,” I responded. “In fact, I find this whole endeavor quite serious. Were you paying attention?”
“To what?”
“To Dulcie and myself.”
“You’re a sick fuck, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told. Answer my question, please.”
“Why the hell does it matter?”
“Because I am trying to give you an object lesson in self-control. Look me in the eye, Knightly Vander. If I, of all creatures in the world, could stop myself from ravishing Dulcie when she wanted it with the fervency of a drowning man scrabbling for the surface, how could you, of all people, continue when she so vehemently asked you to stop?”
He threw himself full-force against the bars. They rattled with an exaggerated clanging sound.
“Careful, friend,” warned Dagan. “He’s baiting you.”
“Yeah, I can fucking see that.”
“Can you? Because it looks an awful lot as though you’re rising to it.”
“I’m not.”
“Throwing yourself at the door isn’t rising to his bait?” Dagan asked, the disbelief evident in his tone.
“Okay, you know what?” railed Vander. “I don’t need to hear about self-control from a vampire and a goddamn demon.”
“Do as I say, not as I do,” Dagan said dismissively. I could not see him, but I imagined him leaning up against a wall, examining his nails with affected nonchalance.
“You have not answered my question,” I pointed out.
“What question?” demanded Vander.
“How did this vampire,” I said, “manage to stop himself from fucking the brains out of the object of his every fantasy when you, yourself, could not? What do I have that you apparently lack?”
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