The Prison of the Angels

by Janine Ashbless

  “I love him.” I nodded helplessly. “All that I can love a man, I love Egan.”

  “I understand now.” She drew herself up. “So I will acquiesce, for honor’s sake. Though I will miss him.”

  I shut my eyes momentarily. “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “As long as you promise to look after him.”

  “I will do my best.”

  She looked over my shoulder. “Then it is your job to protect him from Azazel.”

  I felt my heart meet my stomach with a sickening lurch. I turned.

  A few paces out on the sports field a post stuck out of the level snow, and on top of that, like a vast hunched crow, squatted Azazel. He was wrapped in a long cloak of black feathers. Our eyes met. In that sallow face, his were points of red, like glowing embers. He opened his arms and the cloak spread out sideways, flaring in a wind that blew nowhere else, and then he began to rise.

  My heart clenched so hard I couldn’t breathe.

  “Azazel! Don’t go, please!” My cry was thin and airless. I lunged toward him, jumping off the edge of the platform onto the grass.

  Only I’d guessed wrong, and it wasn’t grass. It was a skin of ice, with snow on top and water beneath. The moment I stepped off that fishing platform, I broke through.

  The cold water flashed like white fire over every inch of my skin. It burnt my eyeballs and my lips and the inside of my throat, and beyond the white fire was a darkness so immense that it swallowed me whole.

  I fell forever.

  Something grabbed my wrist. Something so hot that it boiled away the darkness, so that there was suddenly light flashing in my eyes. I felt myself grabbed up bodily and lifted. I felt heat against my lips, blowing fire into my frozen lungs. I saw the wooden posts of a flight of steps, and then I pitched forward onto hands and knees in the shallow snow, choking up pond-water. In front of my blurred vision an inchoate swirl of darkness poured up the steps onto the lit porch and then disappeared. Unseen, something slammed against the door, a knock that made the house shake.

  I was on the ground beneath the back porch of John’s house, I realized, shuddering.

  Mama. Oh Mama. The thought seemed to come from nowhere.

  Three times the knock sounded, and on the third the door burst open—outward, onto the porch—to reveal Egan in the lit room within; shaven, shirtless, and frozen mid-lunge for what I could only assume was a weapon of some sort.

  He stared.

  I tried to cry out.

  “Milja?”

  Grabbing his pistol he ran out barefoot onto the porch and looked around for enemies that were not there. Then he clattered down and pulled me up into his arms. I pressed my face to his neck and he carried me up the steps and over the threshold—not like a bride, but like a child he could hold tight against his torso, his wrists locked under my thighs. His skin blazed against mine. He hefted me into the kitchen and propped my ass on the table in front of the range.

  “What the hell?” he demanded in a low fierce voice, sweeping locks of sodden hair back from my face. My hat seemed to have disappeared. “What happened, Milja? What were you doing out there?”

  “Ice. I fell in the lake.” My jaw chattered. It was obvious I was telling the truth—I was soaked from head to toe, and after clasping me so close he wasn’t much drier himself.

  “Feckssake, woman!” he growled. “What the hell were you thinking of?” He shucked off my coat, which lifted a sodden ton from my shoulders, then stooped to pull my boots off; ice-water spilt all over the floor.

  I tried to strip off my gloves but my fingers weren’t capable of gripping anything.

  “Come here, come here,” he said softly from where he knelt at my feet, grabbing my wrists and peeling away the useless gloves. He pressed my hands on either side of his warm neck, holding them there. They must have felt like ice-blocks to him, but he didn’t wince.

  He looked like a knight kneeling before his queen, I thought. I could feel his pulse.

  “I’ll go get towels, Milja. Are you going to be okay a sec?”

  I nodded, though he probably couldn’t see it through the shuddering. He rose and hurried off, leaving me with the radiant warmth of the stove. I thought I should probably get the rest of my clothes off, but even after I struggled with my fly zipper my jeans seemed determined to cling to my bum-cheeks.

  I heard the back door bang shut and I flinched.

  Azazel?

  Had he been gathering himself to come get Egan? Was he the one who had saved me from the black waters? Where was he now?

  Egan came back in carrying armfuls of towels. “Alright?”

  “I’m okay,” I told him, smiling through my shudders. He was still shirtless, and I could see the faint Ethiopian scars on his arm and chest.

  He wrapped my hands one at a time in a towel, chaffed them dry, and then set them deliberately against the hard, hot wall of his torso.

  Oh God.

  Then he slipped all the buttons on my thick flannel shirt—the one I’d chosen this morning precisely because it wasn’t provocative or distracting—and he only slowed when he realized I was wearing just a bra-top underneath. My nipples stood in shamefully hard points under the stretch cotton. I tried to wriggle out of the long tartan sleeves of my shirt on my own, to spare his blushes, but everything clung like a freezing cold second skin and he had to help.

  The shallow slash on my forearm wasn’t bleeding anymore, but each brush of his fingers felt like hot coals.

  My wet garment made a slap as it struck the floor.

  He draped a towel around my shoulders and another over my head. He started rubbing the water from my face and hair and scalp, his movements precise and gentle. For long moments I was buried in a soft darkness. I reached out, blind, to put my hands back on his bare ribs. I could feel his heart pounding beneath them, like a beast pacing a cage.

  I have no idea when it all changed for him. When his grueling self-denial simply fell apart, like a garment worn and washed until the fabric was weakened beyond all use. All I knew was that he dropped the towel off my damp head, cupped my face in both his hands and—absolutely without warning—kissed me.

  3

  THE WAY OF A MAN WITH A MAID

  He kissed me.

  There was no holding back. No hesitation. There was so much hunger instead. And warmth—I felt the warmth flowing through me from my lips, all the way down to the tingling tips of my fingers. The shuddering in my bones stopped, just like that. Like a faucet turned off.

  I gasped, and saw a visible shiver run up his frame.

  “Milja,” he whispered.

  My heart flipped over inside me, and the only answer I had was a breathy grin of wonder. Which he covered in another hungry kiss, and another, eating his way through the cold and the shock into the heat I always bore beneath my skin. His mouth was as sweet as I’d always imagined it. I slid one hand up the back of his neck and jammed the other down behind the belt line of his trousers and into the coarse hair hidden beneath, making him jump.

  Oh Egan.

  He hadn’t forgotten he was supposed to be getting me dry, but it just somehow got all mixed up with an overwhelming need to get my clothes off. He wrestled my bra-top off over my head, then toweled down my cold breasts, finding nipples stiff and puckered with chill, hard under his warm palms and so sensitive that I cried out when his callused fingertips snagged on them. He stoppered my mouth with his tongue and swallowed my moans, the strong rub of his hands quieting my breasts too, waking yearning aches and sudden warmth instead.

  His kisses were so wild that we were both gasping and dizzy with the fire of them.

  My goddamn jeans resisted hardest of all, so heavy with water that they were stiff as leather; Egan all but tore them off in the end and my panties went with them.

  It was the first time he’d seen me naked outside a dream, I realized, my breath catching. Shyness overwhelmed me and I tried to keep my stupidly gangly legs together. But he leaned into me, one hand on the sm
all of my back, his mouth demanding yet more from my own, his other hand running up the inside of my thigh like a forest fire across a winter hillside—and there was nothing for it, because my body would have it no other way but to twist and open to him and yield the head of that valley to the clasp of his hand.

  I wasn’t dry there either. Wet heat blossomed through my flesh at his touch.

  “Feck, Milja,” he groaned. For a moment we froze, limbs intertwined, our faces so close that I could see nothing but his flecked blue eyes, all my weight off-balance as I arched over his left arm, his hard thighs grinding against me.

  “Please,” I panted, kissing his lips, pushing myself down onto his fingers. I was so afraid that his better judgment would rally and win the fight over base instinct and appetite. I was terrified he’d drag himself away.

  He drew back and shook his head, but it was the rueful gesture of someone who has already lost some inner struggle, and knows it. He’d made his choice. Without answering he hefted me up against him, lifting me clear of the table. I wrapped my arms around his neck and my thighs around his hips. Not a word was spoken as he carried me through to the bedroom and laid me on the bed beneath him.

  Not a word.

  I’d always imagined him deferential; always pictured him cautious, even hesitant, in bed. The reality surprised me. It was like he’d thrown all his words overboard behind him to speed his charge. He swept down to lick and suck at my nipples, making me arch and yelp and bury my fingers in his tufty blond hair. Then his urgent need got the better of him—this was to be no sexual performance, no virtuoso demonstration of foreplay. In fact there was nothing playful in his expression at all; it was as fierce as if he were going into a life-or-death battle. Straddling me on knees and one braced arm, he tugged with flurried impatience at his pants belt.

  I got my hand on his fly and inside his combats first though. He was going commando after his shower and I seized his thick hard length, laying claim. He had no recall of the last time I’d held him like that—he’d been too feverish—but I remembered every lovely inch. Oh God; after all this time, I wanted that promise so much that I would have literally got down on my knees and begged for it.

  “Ah,” he said, a low heave of breath. Then he broke my grip the only way I could have forgiven him, by pressing down and pushing into me.

  Egan. Ohmygodohmygod—yes.

  I wrapped my legs around his thighs. He pulled my head back and bit my bottom lip.

  Egan in me.

  I could feel him inside me. I don’t just mean I could feel that wonderful stretch of his girth or his length or his hardness. I don’t even mean that every slow, full, twisting thrust of his hips sent a building wave of pleasure through me. I suppose I’m easy to please—Azazel had produced an uncanny effect on my body in all sorts of ways and one of them was to make me highly responsive to sexual stimulus. But I felt at that moment something that I’d never felt before, not even with my demon lover. I could feel Egan’s arousal as actual physical sensation, just as I could feel my own; much like my own, in fact, but a different color or taste—or whatever, because there were no words for this, it was not normal, it was not even human. But it was wonderful. I could feel the overwhelming load of his need and the bone-deep ache and the thrill of each thrust into my tight wet grip.

  It was also too much—the shock and the pleasure, his and mine. It sent me over. I cried out and slid into spasm, writhing beneath him, making noises that must have sounded like agony because he stopped, holding his breath, holding everything back, staring into my face, his hands cradling me as if they could prevent me from exploding into a million shining stars.

  I laughed, because I couldn’t help it, and I stretched up to kiss his parted lips, reminding him to breathe.

  “Oh God.” His voice was soft, but I could hear the strain in it. “I love you.”

  “No shit,” I whispered.

  I was warm now, I realized dimly, from head to toes. Tenderly I touched his lips with my fingers, brushed his eyelashes, tested the tension of his jaw. There was no laughter in his eyes, and none in mine now. The need was back. The lust. His cock impaled me like a red-hot length of steel, and I was melting around him.

  “Yes,” I groaned, pulling him deeper. “Egan, please.”

  Oh God, his ass, under my hand. The smooth strong dip at the small of his back. His weight, his strength, the sheer masculine beauty of him. And this time as he moved I kept my eyes open and watched everything in delight; the big ridged muscles of his arms; the shake of his hair; the here-but-not-seeing glaze of his eyes as he pushed harder, deeper, faster. I came again, but he did not make the mistake of pausing this time; I urged him on and he kept going, forcing me to catch up. Years of self-control took a long time to batter through, but I felt his momentum build, felt his control crumble. He was nearly there; desire had become an implacable imperative, a merciless spike running through him from his balls upward.

  I felt him tense, and start to withdraw.

  No!

  I dug my nails hard into the dense meat of his ass-cheeks, hard enough to draw blood, denying him any escape. So he thrust like a battering ram into me instead, roaring through the hurt and the explosive release.

  And I felt it. I felt his climax, and it took me too. We twisted together, my cries higher and sharper than his guttural gasps, but a perfect harmony. And in those seconds afterwards, in the golden glorious backwash, I felt it pour through me like light, down to my toes and up to my tingling scalp. Like he had filled me to every corner of every cell. Not his actual physical emission—but something.

  He rolled off me onto the quilt, gasping. Still wearing his pants, I noted. We hadn’t taken time to get him out of all his clothes. Our eyes met with a strange shyness.

  “Milja,” he said hoarsely. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

  “Shut up,” I told him tenderly, bundling forward to snuggle into his solid chest and kiss his chin. “Shut up and sleep, soldier.”

  He slipped his arms around me, holding tight, and passed out within moments.

  I woke after daybreak, feeling parched. We’d managed to move under the covers sometime during the night, and Egan slept on. He was half-curled around me and his fingers tightened as I slid out from under his arm, but I didn’t want to wake him. He needed his sleep.

  In the bathroom I drank a glass of water and brushed my teeth. The world outside the window was white and utterly still. I wondered if we’d missed our flight to Europe, and found I didn’t care just at this moment. I wondered how big the pond I’d fallen into would look by daylight, and how deep it was. I shivered.

  “Azazel, I love you. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s still true.”

  I walked to the back door and opened it onto the white world. Footprints dinted the drifted snow on the porch and steps—mine, Egan’s, and one set of others. They didn’t look human. More like cloven hooves.

  Returning to bed, I found that Egan had rolled over onto his back, a forearm draped across his eyes. I could see the blond fluff under his armpit which I found so desperately cute that I wanted to tickle it, but even I wasn’t that cruel. Instead I contented myself by sliding back under the quilt as cautiously as I could. My skin was cold though, after wandering around naked, and he stirred as my knees brushed his thigh. He dropped his arm and turned his blue, blinking eyes upon me. I ran my cool hand down his chest and stomach and into his crotch. To my delight I found that he was already in a state of glory, and at the first exploratory squeeze of my hand that staff of righteousness jumped and swelled even harder.

  “Ah…” He sounded ashamed.

  That was too much to resist. Throwing back the covers, I pounced up and knelt between his legs, bending to cover him with my mouth. My tongue danced over his helm and Egan arched so hard that he nearly took off vertically from the bed.

  “Mary Mother of God!”

  I had no idea why his response was so strong—he must have had someone suck him off before now, sur
ely? Whatever, he seemed absolutely pinned by my hand and my mouth, his own hands clenching the sheets frantically and his shaft red-hot in my fingers.

  Which made me happy. Very happy, in a dark and squirmy way. My view up his supine body was unparalleled, from the dark gold thatch of his groin, over the hard ridges of his belly and the broader upland of his chest. Oh God, how he excited me. Paler than Azazel, yes; more robust, less body-hair, and—it turned out—much more of a challenge to bring to climax, since I was used to a fallen angel who came quickly, but as often as he cared to try.

  Egan resisted. But I didn’t resent that, because there was no question that he was hard for what I was doing to him. It just gave me time to play, to explore, to sheathe him all the way down my throat and feel myself choked, then to tease him with the tip of my tongue until he groaned and heaved. And I used my hand as well as my mouth, hard, because he was big enough and stubborn enough to warrant it.

  I flashed on poor Uriel, complaining that he’d never had a blowjob and didn’t understand the fuss, and I laughed darkly inside. Azazel knew. Egan knew.

  He was mine, totally under my control. That turned me on so much. What I gave, he had to take. What I gave, he craved. His pleasure, his release—all was at my mercy and under my direction. I could stop any moment I chose, I thought, and he’d beg me bring him to orgasm. Except that I didn’t want to stop, of course. I wanted to give him bliss like he’d never known before in his life. I wanted to give him so much pleasure that he’d be my slave forever.

  I wanted to break him.

  And I did. He came, sweating and shuddering; came like I’d cut his throat and it was his life he was pouring out. Came with taut, despairing groans that I had already learned to recognize and relish.

  I sat back as he caught his gasping breath, chasing some spill from the corner of my mouth and then licking it off my finger. I smiled at him. Egan’s eyes were wide, almost shocked.

  And not bloodshot anymore, I thought. A clear, wintery blue. He looked so much better now that he’d surrendered to his desires. Not happy of course—the day I saw him unreservedly, thoughtlessly happy would be the day Hell froze over—but whole, which was what mattered, and gratifyingly awestruck.