TravelersKiss

by Sherri L. King

  He was sprawled in a chair in front of the two lovers’ bed, his incredibly long legs stretched out. The folds of his cloak had draped around him like a cape and he looked every bit a superhero. He was so sexy. Raine gritted her teeth. How could he be so sexy? It was criminal. From the crown of his head, half-hooded by the cowl he always seemed to be wearing, to the soles of his incredibly large booted feet, he was every inch a male. His skin was perfect, his bone structure out of this world, his coloring to die for and his smell—dear heaven, the way he smelled was simply intoxicating. He oozed raw sex. There was no other way to describe him, push come to shove.

  Grimm was sex.

  Her eyes couldn’t tear away from his cock. It was engorged with blood, ready to erupt. She licked her lips, eager for the culmination of the machinations of his hand—if this was a fantasy, then cheese and rice, she was determined to see it through to the end.

  Just then, Raine felt a tingle at the base of her spine. At first she ignored it, eyes intent on Grimm’s loins. When the insistent tingle snaked up to the nape of her neck, she felt her head tilt up as if a finger were beneath her chin, lifting it.

  Her gaze found Grimm’s and she froze.

  He was no longer looking through her.

  He was looking at her.

  He could see her.

  He was with her, in whatever fantasy or delusion this was, Grimm was right here, his cock in his hand, hard and erect, ready and willing to get down and—

  “Fuck me.” She gaped, startled into swearing aloud.

  His teeth bared in what she thought might be a smile. Then his hips bucked up, his enormous rod pumping in his hand faster, more forcefully. She could hear the sharp breath whistling into his mouth as his eyes narrowed upon her, his hand tightened at the base of his cock and he tilted it toward her slightly in salute. A spurt of creamy white landed at her feet like a pagan offering and for one wild, heart-palpitating moment, Raine wanted to throw off her clothes and slam herself down over him so that not one more drop of him was wasted—

  Raine sat up like a shot, spine rigid with the image of her fantasy still burning behind her retinas. Grimm’s hands were on her waist, steadying her in the real world, and Raine felt madness teasing at the edges of her reason. “Oh my goodness gracious, I am so sorry,” she gasped.

  He eyed her, and to her surprise there was a dark cloud of irritation—not righteous anger—cast over his features. “Sorry for what?”

  Raine could tell from the weight in his question that she needed to give some thought to her answer before she jumped right out and said the first stupid thing that came to mind. Letting herself think, Raine wasn’t sure why she had apologized; it was just the first thing that had popped out of her mouth after her abrupt splash back into the real world. She fumbled for an explanation. “Uh, for taking my anger out on you. I lost control of my temper and you didn’t deserve me hitting you and stuff. I’m sorry.” Could she have felt any stupider than she did now?

  “Your apology was not meant for the kiss?” His gaze pierced her and she tried not to think of him watching her while he stroked himself to completion.

  She swallowed, flush with embarrassment. “No.” She definitely wasn’t sorry for kissing him. “I mean, I probably shouldn’t have kissed you while throwing a temper tantrum. But I’m not sorry I did it.” Her cheeks were on fire.

  “Do you feel in control of your temper?”

  Could the floor swallow her now please? “Yeah, I guess I do.” She barely managed to squeeze the word out past her dry lips. She licked them before they cracked and his eyes watched her tongue dart out—her nipples were now as hard as diamonds. Cheese and rice. “You okay?” she squeaked.

  “I’ll survive,” he answered drolly.

  “Oh my goodness.” She laughed breathlessly. “You actually used a contraction.”

  He rolled her beneath him, stunning her into silence. His hands held hers high above her head, causing her breasts to rise high between them. Small though they were, they felt swollen, ripe and eager to be touched. He looked down at her, his eyes twinkling, stars coming to life and then dying over and over again in his gaze. He held her that way, his hair casting them into gloaming, lending a quiet solitude that further alienated them from the rest of reality, as if only the two of them existed.

  Long minutes passed. With each new breath she became more aware of herself, of where she was, beneath him, in his embrace, surrounded by his scent. Could he feel her heart beating? She was sure the warmth between them rose from the frothing of her blood and her thundering pulse pounding out a rhythm more exciting than any she’d ever dared dance to. Raine was a creature in thrall to music and Grimm made her whole being sing just by glancing her way.

  Her body was tingling. Her breath was audible in her ringing ears. Grimm definitely heard her, if she could hear herself, and knowing he did only ramped up her arousal until she was trembling in anticipation. But he didn’t make a move, he only lay there, his lower half covering hers, most of his weight and his upper body lifted off her, held supported on his elbows, her hands still held firm high above her head. Every nuance of this pose reinforced her awareness of just how much larger he was than she, how much more physically powerful, and that he was the one in control.

  As if sensing the direction her thoughts had taken, he flexed his hand and she felt the bones in her wrists grind together. It hurt, but not enough to bruise. Instead the pain served to underscore her feelings of fragility, to emphasize her femininity against his overwhelming masculinity. Magically her hips seemed connected by some invisible strings to where he gripped her wrists; when he squeezed her wrists, her hips jerked up hard against him. A gasp wormed its way out of her lips when she would have rather kept it stifled. Somehow this had become a battle between the rationale of her higher self and her body’s instinctive, wanton responses.

  It didn’t help that he watched her face so fixedly. She couldn’t hide a single reaction and it reminded her how utterly defenseless she was against him. Her hips bucked again and his hips rode hers flawlessly, moving in perfect synch, flexing over her as if he’d unhinged at the waist. Again she was aware that he didn’t move at all like any human man should. “Grimm.” She tried to free her arms. He wouldn’t let them budge an inch. “Let me go.”

  He dipped his head, his breath playing over her mouth like a ghostly vapor. The taste of him rolled over her tongue and the ensuing rush made her gasp, so that she swallowed more of his flavor down into her lungs. Vivid images of blood drops on snow, green fields set on fire and flooded plains swept across her vision, all the while stamped with the glittering vortex of his eyes as he studied her.

  His stillness was predatory, hungry and calculating.

  What was he waiting for?

  Raine’s eyes widened. It was a struggle to hold his probing gaze. Her mouth trembled as he breathed into her the exotic flavor that brought with it such heady, carnal visions. He turned his head this way and that in tiny, minute motions, so that his hair caressed her skin in a hundred thousand individual silken strokes. Whatever battle her body was fighting with her brain, her body won out and she closed her eyes, surrendering to ecstasy, her head falling back into a froth of his crimson locks.

  Grimm’s mouth descended to the pulse in her arched neck. He strummed her body, tuning her like an instrument. Raine cried out, body surging upward beneath him, her legs clenched so tightly that her thighs squeezed the plump swell of her own sex between them. It was like taking hold of a live wire—a current running from his lips through all of her erogenous zones, electrifying her tissues. Her nipples were on fire and hard like chips of glass. Her stomach pounded with the bass of a concert packed with ten-thousand-watt amps. Her loins clenched as if Grimm had reached a hand inside her and gripped her womb in his fist. She was instantly wet, her panties soaked through, her clit was engorged and throbbing, pressing against the fabric of her underwear so that the friction of her own body’s movements soon became a sweet torture.
r />   The hot, slick flame of his tongue laved her skin and she sobbed with a need so volatile, it was robbing her of all inhibition. His hands flexed on her, his hips pressed down, his hair tickled her face, and she was overwhelmed with stimuli. She smelled the exotic spices on his breath, his skin and his provocation undoing her. With a sharp intake of breath that both burned and chilled her lungs at the same time, she came so hard her body went wild.

  Without even kissing her lips, stroking her body or entering it either with his fingers or any other part of his body, Grimm gave Raine the most amazing orgasm of her life.

  Her body completely betrayed her. But what a sweet betrayal it was. Her climax sang through her like a symphony, every note a perfect pitch of delight played out inside her skin.

  Grimm held her taut. She was a note suspended indefinitely. His mouth pressed against her heartbeat, holding there as if he were reading her ecstasy through the tempo of her blood, through the fine, translucent dampness of her skin.

  In her ears, in the dark hallways of her mind where memories slept still, Raine heard the most exquisite music and followed it into revelation. A veil was pulled back and suddenly, for one brief eternity, all was revealed to her. With a shudder and a last cry of rapture, Raine fell into the realm of memory.

  In a brief moment of weakness, her guard was let down, and no matter how strong Grimm’s embrace, he could not stave off the murk that seeped through the cracks in her mind…

  The rosemary nods upon the grave,

  The lilylolls upon the wave,

  Wrapping the fog about its breast,

  The ruin moulders into rest,

  Looking like Lethe, see! The lake

  A conscious slumber seems to take,

  And would not, for the world, awake.

  All Beauty sleeps!

  —Edgar Allen Poe, The Sleeper

  Chapter Eight

  Then…

  They had finally bested her.

  Their roar of triumph echoing through her head was followed by a howl of defeat held trapped in her own throat.

  Raine’s eyes flew open. She caught a brief flash of the heinous, vampiric thing above her, but quickly looked past it, not wanting to see it, afraid to even glance at it for more than an instant. It was safer to look ahead at the ceiling above her. The hazy, unsteady lights of thousands of glowworms dotted the cavern’s ceiling but she had no way of knowing how high up they were. They could have been miles away or inches—the scale of things was blown out of proportion here, to the point of being ridiculous.

  She had once taken a course in psychology and read about Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. If she didn’t already know that spending so much time at this incredible depth had altered all of her sensory perception—not just that of size—she would fear herself suffering from that very same syndrome or some other sickness of the mind. Unfortunately, Raine was afraid no amount of drug or cognitive behavioral therapy would fix what had happened to her.

  Her head hurt so badly. But she couldn’t allow herself to dwell on that now. It wasn’t a good idea to ever think too closely about it or else she’d go mad, because the reason her head hurt so much was—

  Stop!

  Don’t think about it. Don’t you dare look at that thing feasting away inside the hole in your head! Whatever it was…

  Raine could stop thinking about it, if she tried hard enough. What she couldn’t stop thinking about was her most recent failure.

  They had done it. The Daemons had won.

  The thieving, conniving snakes had finally managed to crack into her dreaming mind and steal a vital secret, wresting it from the dregs of her thoughts. They had been trying for a long time and she had fought them off valiantly. But time had worn her down and even the most stoic mind would have had difficulty fending the tricksters off for much longer. She’d slipped, and now the Daemons finally had a face and a name—they had a target to hunt.

  God damn them to the pits of hell, all of them. If Raine weren’t bound up in this stone cocoon she’d rip them all apart with her bare teeth.

  Raine could no longer keep the monsters out of her dreams. Her nightmares had become their playground; her mind was more and more vulnerable to them during these psychological bombardments sent to her courtesy of the Hive mind the Horde shared.

  Tonight’s nightmare had been so bad, it had seemed the dread had started the very instant she’d drifted off into a fitful sleep, something that came so infrequently to her now that she both feared and yearned for it. Feared it because it exposed her thoughts to the monsters that held her prisoner, yearned for it because it was an escape and because she was afraid that something fundamental had changed about her, or else why would she so rarely require sleep these days?

  The dream had begun with a sinking of her gut and a gnashing of her teeth…

  Anxiety gnawed at her stomach and tickled the back of her heart. Her hands ached from clenching, but the muscles in her fingers couldn’t seem to remember to relax no matter how fiercely she willed them to ease open. Strange as she knew it had to be, Raine couldn’t for the life of her pinpoint exactly what she was so anxious about. That ignorance only intensified her unease…

  Her armpits were damp, as were the backs of her knees. But she shivered, as if with cold, even though she felt neither hot nor cold. Her mouth was dry as a desert, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth, her teeth like pebbles of sandpaper against her cheeks. When she swallowed, her throat made a weird clicking noise as the flesh of her esophagus gummed together.

  Deep inside her ears she heard her own breath, shallow and panting. The erratic noise was enough to kick-start a full-blown panic attack. It began as a hot, scalding spark in her chest. It grew, swelling like a pustule filled with poison, until it exploded outward and flooded her veins with pure, unfiltered panic. Her flesh strained. She thrashed, hearing the sick thud of her head striking something hard before feeling the savage pain of the blow in her screaming skull.

  Her eyes bloated, blood-filled and huge, as if they’d rupture from her face. But she couldn’t close her eyes; her lids were stuck wide open. She couldn’t see anything, but even had her vision been able to penetrate the thick darkness, Raine was certain she wouldn’t have names for the monsters she’d find looming around her.

  The fear was going to rip its way out of her chest in a bloody mess. Her heart had become an angry imp gnawing behind the prison bars of her ribs in a desperate bid to escape. Her lungs were starved, shriveled to naught but dead leaves crumbling at her center. The fire in her gut turned in on itself, imploding until the twisting hollow left behind threw her into a fetal position. She was now gagging so forcefully that her spine threatened to exit by way of her mouth.

  If only she could die, all this terror, all this pain could die with her.

  Then, in her blindness and fear, she beheld a light.

  The light pulsed, throbbed, like a wound in the dark. Impossibly the light was black, as ebon as the shadows that filled all edges of her consciousness, but impossible or not, the black was light. It coalesced, grew denser, like a dying star. A glowing umbra so vivid it trumped the night. It was a beacon in the stretching ether. She grasped at it, even as it also pulled at her, stubborn as a kudzu vine, growing brighter and stronger the more she struggled to understand what it could be. What it could mean.

  A lurch in her heart bled out her ghastly fear and she reached into the night and embraced the light, fisted hands flung outward with all the sincerity of her desperate supplication.

  At once the fear and panic eased, fading. Not quite memories, not quite present, but dimmed in the illumination of all that brilliant darkness. A thousand whispers in her ears drowned out the strangled gasps of her own breath and she was grateful. Raine was surrounded and filled, no longer so stranded or bewildered.

  Currents ran through her form, electrifying every nerve until her body quaked with tremors. A sea surged in her veins. This was powerful magic, heady, intoxicating. Her impeded vision fel
l back inward, as if she plunged into the abyss of her own body’s shell. The black bled to white, then sparkled. Blinded.

  Starlight.

  Everywhere the endless twinkling of stars, winking just for her as if they all shared a wondrous secret Raine couldn’t remember keeping. Space sifted through her fingertips, the dust of all heavens sliding across her skin like grains of heated glass. Her blood welled from trillions of pinprick cuts and joined the life force of the universe. Drops of crimson wept from her flesh, floating out like bubbles in the strange cosmic sea. The starlight reflected on the blood, setting it to sparkling like rubies. Raine seeded creation.

  This isn’t real…

  Shrieking, Raine opened her eyes so fast that the sight of her blood shining in the vacuum of space remained branded on her retinas for long seconds. Then she blinked and the images died, replaced by the comforting sight of the walls in her bedroom. As if to reassure her of this reality, she thumped her fist on her lumpy mattress. She was glad to hear and feel the springs bounce jovially in response.

  It had been a dream, of course, another in a lifetime of dreams almost too intense to bear. Since her earliest memories, Raine had often experienced difficulty in separating her vivid dreaming from her waking world. And this dream had been so rich, so detailed. Everything about it pulled and lured her back to sleep.

  But no, wait.

  She was awake now and planned to stay that way, at least until the remnants of her nightmare faded.

  A headache was forming in the center of her forehead, like a blunt fingertip pressing hard just above and between her eyes, making her wince. Still, she’d gladly suffer the headache, so long as it helped keep her from falling back to sleep and into the dream again.

  “Are you all right?”

  Don’t look at her.

  Raine blinked hard and frowned.

  “Raine, are you all right? Hello, ground control to Major Raine, do you read me, Major Raine?”