Body Temperature and Rising - Book One of the Lakeland Heatwave Trilogy

by K D Grace

  And Deacon said something about fulfilling her duty, about magic greater than she could imagine, about her death opening the doors.

  Her feet hurt, and her hand ached. It was then that she noticed her lovely scrying mirror clasped tightly in a white-knuckle grip. She raised it to look into its sacred depths, and swayed slightly forward. It was not her face that she saw, but it was Deacon’s face there over her shoulder filling the mirror, looming large and terrible.

  When she woke from the dream, the first intimations of dawn stained the fells pink.

  As Marie watched Michael walk away and vanish into a nearby copse of hawthorn, the sky was greying with dawn. She stood breathing in the fresh air, wondering how so much time had passed. She smiled to herself. What had she expected, a quick fuck and a hand shake?

  Though it hadn’t done much to cool things off, the rain of last night had left everything freshly cleansed and jewelled in droplets of water, and the air felt like warm velvet. Almost the moment Michael was gone, Sky materialised and Anderson next to her, both taking her into their arms and kissing her.

  ‘There is no denying, my darling, that last night, you did indeed bring the Cumbrian heatwave into the Ether.’ Anderson offered her a wicked smile. ‘You alone would have been enough to make it difficult for a man to contain himself, but Tim Meriwether’s ride only added to my struggle to keep my mind on the task at hand and keep my hands away from my member.’

  ‘Tim? Had a ride?’ Marie’s heart raced at the thought.

  ‘Tim Meriwether is notorious for doing things his own way,’ Sky said. ‘But damned if he didn’t enflesh Lisette last night and reward her for putting up with him all this time. Tara suspected, and Tara’s seldom wrong.’

  Anderson nodded his approval. ‘Tim Meriwether’s compassion is far greater than he would let on, and what happened to him with Fiori cannot but have left deep scars.’ Then he added. ‘Tara is with him now, though it is likely he still sleeps, unaware of her presence.’

  A sense of relief washed over Marie that nearly took her breath away. ‘I was so worried about him.’

  ‘We all were, sweetie,’ Sky said.

  ‘News is already filtering through the Ether that there are two new and powerful riders in Cumbria, and they are not to be trifled with,’ Anderson said. ‘Shall we return to Elemental Cottage, then?’ He reached for Marie’s hand. ‘I believe Fiore is preparing a celebration breakfast.’

  ‘I’m starving,’ Marie said. ‘Just let me get my shoes from the cave and I’ll be ready to go.’ She ducked inside.

  Tim woke on the floor to find the fire stoked and the smell of bacon wafting through the house. He was just beginning to think perhaps the spell had not dissipated as he slept and that Lisette was still in the flesh. Then Tara stepped through the door from the kitchen carrying a mug of coffee. ‘You need to eat, Tim, the magic of a rider is hard work,’ She handed him the cup and nodded to his cock, which was already half saluting her.

  He pulled himself into a sitting position and contemplated covering up with the throw, but he liked Tara seeing him naked.

  She offered him a half smile and nodded to the kitchen. ‘Even you flashing your fine package at me won’t get you breakfast in bed.’ She folded her arms across her breasts, barely hidden in a thin vest and no bra. ‘However, I won’t make you dress for the meal.’ She turned on her heals and headed back into the kitchen offering him a very fine view of her lovely arse clad in khaki walking shorts. Even if he hadn’t been famished, he would have followed that into the kitchen.

  But his exhibitionist streak didn’t quite extend to eating breakfast in the buff, so he slipped into a pair of track bottoms, which afforded his burgeoning cock a little more breathing room than his jeans.

  In the kitchen, Tara was just placing full plates on the table, and the sight of bacon and eggs made his mouth water, though he wasn’t sure how much of his salivation was due to the meal and how much was due to the chef. She took in his less exposed state, offered a knowing smile, and nodded for him to sit.

  ‘Fiori’s the cook in the house, for the most part, I can’t be arsed, but even I can’t mess up bacon and eggs.’

  She watched him as he tucked in. ‘First peaceful night’s sleep you’ve had in a while.’

  He swallowed a mouthful of egg and nearly scalded his mouth on the coffee. ‘You been talking to Marie?’

  ‘Didn’t need to, Tim. Dream magic is my specialty, and your dreams were enough to have the whole house on edge.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, blushing hard. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb anyone.’

  ‘Well you should have. You should have disturbed us all loudly. I told you this isn’t a journey to take alone. How long have the dreams been going on?’

  He avoided her gaze, and chased his eggs around his plate with a fork, suddenly not sure he could get food past the knot in his throat. ‘Since he … since Deacon started hurting Fiori. They got worse after he … after her death.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Tim, no wonder you couldn’t work the spell. It’s a wonder you’re still sane.’

  He forced a smile, more like a grimace of relief. ‘Not sure I am really. Certainly not sure you are.’

  She chuckled softly and looked up at him from beneath thick lashes as she buttered her toast. ‘Ever been to a three-D film? Notice how things almost make you dizzy until you put the glasses on, then everything’s not only clearly focused, but it’s three-D.’

  He nodded.

  ‘We dreamers have to learn to filter, Tim, or we let in everyone, everything, and some things we don’t want in our heads. You’re a witch. You have a feel for magic, whether you like it or not, and after last night there’ll be all sorts of new tools on the shelf for you to play with. But your gift, your true gift, as is mine, is to traverse the dream world and to understand it.’

  He suddenly felt dizzy. ‘Dear God, I hope that’s not true because –’

  ‘Because you saw Marie die the way you saw Fiori die. I know. It’s not prophecy, Tim, and in your case, Deacon has been getting to you in the way you were most open. He invades your dreams and shows you what you most fear. That’s why you need to filter, set guardians around the perimeters of your sleeping world, protect yourself. You have a lot to learn, Timmy Boy, and you have to let us in so we can teach you.’

  The sigh of relief was so damn near a sob that he would have been embarrassed if circumstances had been different. But Tara had seen him at his most vulnerable, and she was not squeamish at looking into dark corners. His stomach growled, reminding him that he was ravenous.

  He was half finished with his eggs before he thought to ask the obvious, and even then he felt silly asking. ‘I’m a rider, then?’

  ‘That’s right, you are, and it can be a bit disorienting to come down from the first ride. We always make a point of having someone there when the new rider wakes up, or soon after. And since you’re a dreamer, I was the best choice.’

  He laid down the toast he’d just spread marmalade on and wiped his hands on the serviette. ‘Did you know? That I would do what I did, that it would be Lisette?’

  ‘It wasn’t planned, if that’s what you mean. But I had a hunch that perhaps, if you were in your own space, you would be able to relax a bit more and do what we all knew you could do given the right circumstances.’

  ‘And you provided the right circumstances?’

  ‘I didn’t have to, Tim. In fact, I didn’t have to do anything. Anderson picked up on the magic while monitoring the Ether for Marie’s ride. You followed your instincts, as I suspected you would.’ She held his gaze. ‘You followed your heart.’

  He stuffed half the piece of toast in his mouth and swallowed without chewing. ‘It wasn’t a sympathy fuck, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘You’re hardly the sympathy fucking type, Tim, give me a little credit for being smarter than that.’ The mocha maker on the stove began to gurgle, and she stood to pour fresh coffee.

  He wondered if Fiori had
purchased that for him too. He wondered if he should be offended at the way the Elementals seemed to be barging right into his life. Give them an inch, he thought. And yet Tara dressed so invitingly, so unassumingly, making him breakfast after he had fucked all night didn’t seem like too much of a hardship to endure.

  When she leaned over to set his cup on the table, he pulled her down onto his lap, and his anxious cock pressed upward against one deliciously round arse cheek. She responded with a lingering kiss that tasted of coffee and marmalade all blended up with her own intriguing taste. He could smell the last residual of her own foray into the dream world on her skin, between her breasts, in the pits of her arms as she encircled his neck in a lazy embrace.

  She pulled away with a flick of tongue and repositioned herself so that she straddled him face to face. ‘I won’t fuck you, Tim, no matter how damn sexy you are.’

  He ran a heavy finger down over the crotch of her shorts, easily tracing the swollen splay of her cunt. She uttered a soft grunt and shifted against him. The heat of her radiated over his fingertips. ‘You hide it well, I’ll give you that, but at the end of the day, you’re even more neurotic than I am, Tara Stone.’

  She raked her khakied pussy hard against his erection and he gasped at the exquisite agony of it. ‘I’m more neurotic than anyone, Tim Meriwether, and it won’t be you who psychoanalyses me to the cure.’ She nipped his lower lip between her front teeth. ‘But that doesn’t mean we can’t help each other come.’ She raked him again then found a rhythm that made it feel as close to fucking as it could get without being the real thing, a rhythm he was happy to match. Shockingly he could even feel the grip and release of her swollen lips through the thin layer of khaki, as it rubbed his cock solicitously. As he ploughed his way, mouth first into her cleavage in a nosedive toward the nearest nipple, he wondered briefly if she was using some kind of magic on him, but he didn’t care.

  She wrapped her thighs around him and gripped the legs of the ladder back chair with her ankles for more leverage, enough leverage to convince him that with their combined efforts they would grind right through their clothes and end up fucking anyway. But he wasn’t going to last anywhere near long enough for that, and she was already spasming. The grip and release and slip and slide of her shuddering slit through scant layers of clothing was enough to send him. He grabbed her arse and held her splayed so that as the front of his track bottoms darkened with each spurt of semen, his wetness rubbed against her until her own crotch seam was dark and soaked. He hoped it was as much from her juices as from his.

  He didn’t know how long they sat wrapped around each other gasping and groaning for breath. They might have drifted off there, in each other’s arms, at the breakfast table, and Tim couldn’t think of a better way to end a great breakfast.

  It was the beeper for Mountain Rescue that brought him back to reality. And it wasn’t a nice one.

  ‘What is it? Tim … What wrong? Your hands are shaking.’ Tara’s voice dragged him back to the kitchen and he released the breath he didn’t know he was holding.

  ‘Some walkers found a body. They think maybe a suicide off Raven Crag. Tara, where’s Serina?’

  Tara was instantly on her mobile, which she’d left lying on the credenza. He hurried off to dress. When he returned, her face was pale, her lips set in a tight line. ‘Serina’s gone, Tim. They thought she was asleep in her room until my call.’

  Chapter 19

  ‘So this is what you’ve been reduced to, Marie Warren, offering your cunt to rutting ghosts like some whore.’

  Marie had just bent to pick up her shoes. There’d barely been time to feel the burn in her belly when she saw Deacon’s reflection in the globe of the kerosene lamp still burning low inside the cave. The skin prickled up her neck as she whirled around to find no one there. But she felt the warm breath of laughter against her ear.

  ‘Remember, Marie, I can be wherever I want to be. And I can choose if you feel me or not.’ And suddenly the physical press of his body forced her back against the wall of the cave. ‘As I recall, you rather enjoyed the feel of me, even though you wouldn’t admit it.’

  His invisible hand splayed wide against the small of her back, and she could feel his hard cock against her belly as the press of him rucked up the front of her dress. ‘Serina Ravenmoor finds that gift of mine intriguing, incidentally. She likes what I can do to her in public places, in plain sight, that no one else can see.’ She felt his chuckle against her neck. ‘Rather, I should say she did like it. Serina Ravenmoor is dead now. She jumped off Raven Crag.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ she gasped, struggling in vain to push the weight of him off her. ‘Serina is safe away from you.’

  She felt the brush of his lips against her nape and a hand moved up over her neck and throat with just enough pressure to feel threatening. ‘My dearest Marie, your first mistake is to assume that Serina wanted to be safe away from me. Though she was a bit of a dolt when it came to her craft, even she could manage an elementary scrying spell, enough to call me to her rescue. Oh, don’t look so distressed, my dear. Serina Ravenmoor’s last hours were the highlight of her life. I kept her happy, made her feel valued, satisfied her voracious appetite, and that was all she really wanted. Even to the very end as she stepped off over the edge of the fell, her heart was full of her Deacon, of her dark angel, as she called me.

  ‘Oh, the coroner will say it was suicide, Marie, and they will find her lovely scrying mirror, the one you threatened to send me back through, shattered into tiny little pieces. In fact it will be Mr Meriwether who finds her. Well, it was actually a couple of unfortunate walkers who found her, but Mountain Rescue is already on its way to retrieve her poor shattered corpse, and Mr Meriwether, being a faithful member of the team, is with them. Such guilt he’ll feel. I shall savour the memory of such delicious self-blame for months to come. Ah, but his guilt will be as nothing compared to Tara Stone’s. You look pale, my love. Have you not been feeling well?’

  He tut-tutted. ‘I must have a talk with Fiori. Perhaps she’s not feeding you well. Perhaps now that she’s dead, she has forgotten the nutritional requirements of the living. But that’s not the reason I’ve come, my dear Marie.’ He stepped away and she nearly fell forward at the sudden release. Still he was only visible in the shimmering globe of the lamp. Leaning heavily against the wall of the cave, she kept her eyes on the reflection.

  ‘The reason for my visit is to thank you and Mr Meriwether for finding me such an extensive list of Help Meets.’

  ‘Help Meets? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Not being a product of the technological age, I was completely unaware of just how many, so called, witches there are in Cumbria until you and Mr Meriwether put your heads together for a little online research. Nor did I know how desperately some of them long for someone from the other side to guide them, comfort them, satisfy their carnal lusts, nay even abuse them. Oh how they long to be martyrs for their respective deities.’

  Marie found herself suddenly fighting like hell to keep from hyperventilating. Her heart went into overdrive hammering against her throat. ‘Why? Serina did nothing to you. None of them have?’

  He moved back close to her and slid a curled finger down the curve of her throat and her heart accelerated still further. ‘Oh, I have nothing against any of them. But until I get what I want, I will make do with what is available to me. I have my eye on a lovely witch over in Rosthwaite at the moment. Well she considers herself a witch anyway. A good divorce settlement from an over-controlling husband has converted her to Paganism.

  ‘Can you imagine? Back in my day being a witch meant something. And even though Tara Stone and her lackeys have you spreading your legs for rutting ghosts, I cannot deny that it takes a certain skill to manage such. In my day, you certainly didn’t brag about being a witch unless you were anxious to meet a fiery death. You kept your skills to yourself. And yet in your modern world, you can purchase a few trinkets from a local curiosity shop and v
oila! You are a witch, and very proud of it, indeed. And you may freely advertise it all over the internet without fear of retribution and without the least bit embarrassment at your complete and utter lack of skill. Ah, such a brave new world, Marie.’

  Dark spots swam in front of Marie’s eyes and there was not enough oxygen in the cave, as cold sweat broke on her forehead and between her breasts. Damn it! She didn’t need this right now! She struggled to listen to what Deacon was saying.

  He laid a hand against her clammy face. ‘My dear, you really aren’t well, are you? If I didn’t know better, I would say perhaps you are suffering from a panic attack. Yes, I believe you are prone to such maladies, are you not? You had them often in your silly little world of material wealth and money grubbing where there was nothing at all to fear really, not in the grand scheme of the universe. Such a foolish waste of energy when there are so many truly marvellous reasons for fear and panic.’ He brushed her nipple with the tip of his finger and her heart felt as though it would hammer its way out of her chest. ‘Now then, my dear Marie, I will make my meaning perfectly clear. I gave Serina Ravenmoor an easy death because in spite of being an imbecile, she served me well. However, our lovely divorcee in Rosthwaite will not be so lucky, I fear. And the one after her. Well I shudder to think.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Marie managed between gasps for breath. Her heart jackhammering in her chest had become painful.

  ‘Simple, my darling. If I cannot have what I want, I will take what I can get.’ He tut-tutted again. ‘I can be such an unpleasant fellow when I don’t get what I want.’

  ‘What do you want, damn it!’ It took all she had to force the words up through her tightened throat.

  ‘Why, my dear, I would have thought you would be smart enough to figure that out. But then it is terribly hard to think when one is so overwhelmed by fear. Is it not? I want you and Mr Meriwether.’ He waved a hand as though he were shooing away an insect. ‘Oh, I have no interest in either of you personally, but Tara Stone does, and that, my lovely, is enough to intrigue me terribly.’