by Erik Reid
“Now, if you’ll excuse us, your highness,” I said, “we have a demon to vanquish.”
“Goddess speed,” she said.
With my hand on Dani’s shoulder, I instructed Oscar to take us back into battle.
CHAPTER 31
As the flash of blue light receded, Dani and I found ourselves back in the heart of A’zarkin’s Abode.
We had been gone for a matter of seconds, but without Dani and myself soaking up the attention of the demons and their spawn, things went downhill fast.
First, Kaylee had collapsed under the burnout rage induced by her curse. Second, Lissa lay sprawled out on the floor with a bloodmonkey’s foot pressed against her skull while Pakson was just sitting back onto his throne to pet Jasmine on the head. Third, a bloodhound held a pointed javelin made of ice against Clara’s throat, pinning her to the wall. Her body trembled, either from fear or from the aftershock of crying.
But the most immediate concern was the tight circle of bloodhounds that surrounded us, forming a living, breathing barricade around my waypoint marker. A’zarkin stood among them, waiting for Dani and me to return.
I balled my fist and punched forward, slamming into A’zarkin’s chest and expecting to pulse him backward enough for Dani and me to burst through the opening I’d create.
Instead, A’zarkin grabbed my forearm with both hands and his fingertips ignited with blue magic. He summoned a layer of ice that coated my arm in a dense, immobilizing sheet.
Dani reached forward but a pair of demonspawn pulled her away. I struggled against A’zarkin, but I felt weak in ways that I hadn’t since long before I had first put Oscar on. I waited for him to absorb A’zarkin’s blue energies, but his energy reserves didn’t update. Something was wrong.
Thermal vision, I thought. My eyesight flickered with the overlay of red, orange, and yellow light emanating from each of the girls, and the dark blue shapes of demons and their spawn. The overlay was inconsistent though, blinking out like it was on the fritz.
Run diagnostics. I kicked at A’zarkin and fought hard while I wondered why Oscar was struggling. Then his diagnostic menu flashed before my eyes before fizzling out again.
Onicite Skin Cohesion-AR Diagnostic Summary:
Water-proof: Y
Fire-proof: Y
Puncture-proof: Y
Radiation-proof: Y
Surge-proof: Y
Not frost-proof, I thought. I had taken Oscar’s indestructability for granted. The cold from A’zarkin’s magic was so powerful it numbed my bones and shut down Oscar’s circuits.
“Dani!” I yelled. “Aim your—”
“Get the draykin away from him,” the demon said. “Her breath will undo my hard work. Go!”
They held Dani’s hands behind her back. One ripped the sword from its sheath and stabbed it into the ice floor behind him, keeping the weapon out of Dani’s reach.
My legs went slack under the assault of cold. I thought my hand would shatter into a hundred pieces with my blood frozen solid within my veins.
Then A’zarkin’s nails scraped down my skin. I felt the pressure of it, but not the pain as he scratched my skin and plucked the rim of Oscar’s fabric between his claws. He peeled the black glove away in one quick motion.
“Your prize, my son,” he said, tossing the gauntlet to Pakson. The demon prince made no move to catch it, but a bloodmonkey fetched it for him.
I rubbed my hand, warming it from friction as best I could. With Oscar gone, the cold was far less. The poor glove took the worst of it.
“And now,” A’zarkin said, “to rid myself of nuisances.”
A bloodhound pushed Dani toward him. He grabbed her by the hair and gripped my vest in his other hand. Then a burst of blue light engulfed us in a blinding flash. A moment later it was gone. We were gone.
“Without your sliver of the Oscar suit, this will be your final travel by waypoint,” he said. “You have proven resourceful and difficult to kill. Take pride in that while you die here with your draykin whore.”
He threw me forward and I landed on my ass in a deep pile of fine sand. A pillar of blue light erupted from where he stood, briefly illuminating a desert around us that stretched in every direction, and then the light faded. He was gone, traveled by waypoint back to his glacial hideout.
Dani dropped to her knees next to me and looked away, but not in time to hide the quivering of her lower lip. “What a spectacular failure.”
Every direction was flat and dark, lifeless dunes beneath a starry sky. Only the thin mark of light in the distance gave me any bearing at all. The floating letters beside it were small, but clear. A’zarkin’s Abode was a hundred and three miles away.
“We saved the draykin,” I said. “That counts for something.”
“No, Kyle,” she said. “You saved the draykin. You would have done it without me too. I added nothing to this team. I’m dead weight.”
I sat next to her in the sand and reached for her face. She tried to look away again, but I placed a finger beneath her chin and turned her toward me.
“Without you,” I said, “I would have done none of this. Was Oscar a little OP? Sure. But I didn’t used to give a rat’s testicle about people I didn’t know, and even then I always put myself first. You turned me into something more than that.”
“I’m glad you’ve had a chance to blossom,” she said.
“Daniana Weyforth,” I said. “Was that sarcasm? Do you even know what sarcasm is?”
“What I know is that I spent my whole life on a dead-end dream. I obsessed over my recipes; I harvested rare ingredients with special properties; I studied chemistry with the kingdom’s wisest man—”
“Benoch?” I asked.
“He was skeptical, but he did try tutoring me. He gave up on me after a single session. I should have taken the hint, but I had believed in the lie of my own potential for so long I just couldn’t let it go.”
“No,” I said. “That candy you gave me when we first met was heaven. You have a talent, and when this is over, the world will know it.”
“What will they know?” she asked, reaching between her breasts and coming away with a small candy. “That synapper confections don’t work when you accidentally infuse them with noxyweed?” She tossed a wrapped candy onto the sand.
“That wasn’t your fault,” I said.
“It wasn’t not my fault,” she said, pulling more items from her hiding spot. “My recipes are at best uninspired and at worst they’re dangerous.” She threw a handful of paper scraps in the air, letting her recipes scatter across the sands.
“You risked your life for those papers,” I said.
“When fate burned down my apartment,” she said, “I should have listened. This candy nonsense was a distraction that kept me from becoming something useful. I should have trained harder with that sword, learned a skill that would matter in the fight with A’zarkin.
“Noxyweed, raw synappers, cupid’s tooth,” she said, tossing the items over her shoulder as she named them. Each plopped into the sand and vanished beneath the desert’s surface. “Useless. Emberstick?” Now she pulled a twig from the space between her breasts. It was candy-apple red and came to a little curl at the end. “It’s supposed to ignite the senses, but it’s a dud in my hands, worth a low-grade fever and that’s it. I bet it tastes better raw than it does in my own stupid failed candies.”
She bit off the top half of that sprig of emberstick, but broke out into a cough after she swallowed it.
“Okay,” she said. “It actually tastes terrible on its own. But the point stands. I have no future in this.”
“Even Tiffi had to start somewhere,” I said. “And she’s the queen of sugar crushes.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Dani said, balling her hands into fists. “Just like I don’t understand half the things you say. Everything’s a joke to you, fodder for some side comment you make for your own benefit. I don’t need jokes right now, Kyle.”
She wa
s breathing heavier, her eyebrows pinched close together and her pupils wide. I reached for her hand and uncurled her fingers so I could lace my fingers between hers.
“I don’t mean to make light of everything,” I said. “I don’t deal with heavy emotion well. That doesn’t mean I can’t learn to.”
“I want to know why everything I do is below average.” Her skin was getting hot. I had to drop her hand and shake mine out to cool it off.
“You’re not okay,” I said.
“Of course I’m not okay! Our friends are trapped on a mountain with a murderous demon because I’m totally and completely useless!”
Dani’s volume rose into a yell as she finished speaking. She tilted her head back and screamed at the sky.
A pillar of fire erupted from her mouth. Her draykin’s breath lit up the desert night like a flamethrower, blinding my eyes and washing my skin in a burning heat.
The whole thing only lasted a second. Dani quieted instantly and clasped her mouth with both hands while the fire she had released continued toward the sky like a rocket.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“I thought the emberstick was expired,” she said. “It burned all the way down and gave me a fever like it did that time I mixed it with cupid’s tooth and made a fool of myself. Maybe I was wrong about its potency.”
“Or maybe you shouldn’t have eaten a whole stick of it like it was licorice,” I said.
We watched through squinted eyes as that fireball ascended toward the clouds, then it extinguished on its own.
What goes up, however, must come down. The sudden burst of hot air colliding with the desert’s cool night atmosphere created a powerful, swirling wind that descended on all sides. Sand pelted our faces and the ground shifted beneath us. Dunes swept upward from the sand that escaped under our feet, leading us toward the bottom of a sinking pit with high sand walls encircling us.
Dani held onto my arm and buried her face against my chest to shield from the sandstorm that followed. A strip of paper smacked me in the cheek, so I peeled it away and strained to make out its writing. It was a small parchment square, with ingredients listed in specific quantities: raspberries, vanilla, rosewater, honey. The script was skillful and feminine. I tucked it into my pocket for safekeeping.
Dani’s wayward recipe wasn’t the only litter kicked up by the storm. As the wind calmed and the desert settled into an updated topography, a few dark glass bottles rolled down the side of our sandy pit and collected by our feet. A scrap of wood jutted out from the sand nearby, and a long strand of netting clung to scraps of fabric that lay mostly buried in the sand wall that surrounded us.
“So this is where the trash ends up,” Dani said. “Buried under the desert, left to rot until Silura swallows up its smallest shreds. Is that what we are now?”
“I’ve always seen treasure where others didn’t,” I said. “Like now, in fact.” I pulled Dani close and kissed her while we stood at the bottom of that conical sand pit beneath the moon.
She pulled back. “Is this the right time?”
“We never manage to find a ‘right’ time,” I said. “This? Now? It’s the only time we have left. When the sun rises, where will we take cover? What will we drink? We’ve been left for dead, but I’m going to live before I die. Aren’t you?”
“It’s not how I pictured this,” she said.
“But you did picture it.”
“Many times.”
“I hope I live up to the hype,” I said.
My hands gripped her neck and held her steady while I kissed her again, then they traced down her shoulders and her upper arms. I forged a path down her neck with my lips, kissing my way down toward her cleavage. Her top held her breasts tight, and as I kissed them, I noticed something amusing and exciting.
“Your tits taste like candy,” I said.
“The hazards of using that space for storage,” she said. “Sometimes things melt.”
“I’m glad they do,” I said, swirling my tongue across her supple skin. I cupped her breasts from beneath, lifting her rack against my face. They were heavy in my hands, equal globes of supple flesh held by a tight band of fabric that wrapped around Dani’s chest.
“That feels so good,” she said. “I’ve wanted you to touch me for so long, Kyle.”
“You have no idea,” I said, grazing my hand down her front. I sneaked my fingers past the waistband of her shorts and slid down her pubic bone. I traced and teased, though there wasn’t much room to maneuver between her tight shorts and her skin.
Dani braced one hand against my shoulder and used the other to unfasten her fly. She had to shimmy to get out of those shorts standing up, bouncing her breasts as she wriggled and bent to one side. I enjoyed every second of it.
She kicked her shorts into the sand, then started unfastening my pants, flicking open the button with her long, dark fingernails. Then she tugged them down to mid-thigh. She began stroking my cock while my fingers played with her hole, testing her slickness and then sinking deeper inside her.
With a cool desert breeze on my bare ass, I grabbed onto Dani’s hips and touched my dick’s head against her outer lips. She reached down with two fingers and opened her slit wider.
I slid my dick into her wet canal and she wrapped her arms around my back, then brought her legs around my waist, slowly, without breaking our connection. She spread her wings wide, shifting our combined balance and making it easier to stand upright with her weight across my front.
My hips tested their motion against her pelvis, withdrawing my cock a few inches, then forcing its way into Dani’s depths with a quick, hard, thrust. She gasped as I filled her completely, and I paused there, enjoying the throb of my manhood so deep inside her tight hole.
She took over after that, rolling her hips back slowly and pulsing them forward again quickly, screwing me where we stood in the open desert as I clenched her hips in my greedy hands and held her off the ground.
The faster she thrust against my cock, the harder her nails dug into my shoulders and the quicker her heels rocked against my lower back. I shifted my grip, leaving her hips to work freely and grabbing her ass to support her while she worked her body around my dick. Powerful glute muscles tensed and relaxed in my palms as my fingers dug into her cheeks.
When Dani threw her head back and let her dark green hair drape behind her, I leaned forward and kissed her chest, cursing the modest band of fabric that kept her breasts from hanging free and her nipples from hardening in my view. I tugged at it with my teeth, pulling her top down until one breast burst loose.
I teased Dani’s erect nipple with my tongue and she moaned toward the sky, speeding up the rhythm of her body ravishing mine and adding a swivel to her hips that drove me nuts.
It drove her nuts too. Her wings started to flitter, then they thrust downward and lifted us a few inches off the ground. Before our feet could touch the sand again, she flapped her wings and kept us aloft, keeping us hovering as she caused a faint gust to shift the sands around us.
Her hips pumped like mad and she rested her forehead against mine, peering into my eyes with her emerald irises and vertical pupils.
“I can’t hold back,” she said.
“Then don’t,” I said. My toes touched no solid ground now, Dani carrying us higher with each burst of wing power. I kissed her, exploring her mouth with my tongue, though she barely kissed me back. She was too distracted by the oncoming rush of climactic completion, her muscles clenching my dick tighter with each passing moment.
My core was burning for release now and my hips couldn’t rest while Dani did all the work. Instinct and pleasure took over, forcing my pelvis to pump in time with hers, meeting her in the middle as our bodies worked each other to completion.
Desert air filled my lungs faster each second, my body heaving for breath as I finally came, shooting hard and fast into Dani while her body tightened around me. Dani let out a low moan as her body shuddered in pleasure, her body rocking
with a deep, long orgasm.
I couldn’t know how long we held each other in that position, dazed at the power of our synchronous climax. Finally, Dani’s legs slid downward, landing her feet in the sand, and we separated.
She brushed back her long, dark green hair and stood for a moment, just breathing. “That was amazing.”
“It was,” I said, tucking my dick back inside my pants while Dani shook the sand out of her shorts and pulled them back on. Once we were dressed again I reached for her hand and stared up at the moon.”
“What’s going to happen to Kaylee and Clara?” she asked. “And that other girl — Lissa.”
“I wish I knew,” I said, pulling her close. “They’re a hundred and three miles away, at the mercy of a bloodthirsty psychopath.”
“That’s a very specific guess,” she said.
“Nah, the waypoint marker tells the distance, Oscar’s good like—” Dani and I locked eyes and smiled. “I have Remote Access. I have Remote Access!”
We stood in the sand and held hands. “Oscar,” I said. “Waypoint travel to A’zarkin’s Abode.”
Dani’s grip on my hand tightened. I squeezed hers lightly in response. That’s all that happened. No burst of blue light, no instant travel.
“Hmm,” I said. “Magnify. Activate infrared thermal overlay. Run diagnostics.”
Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.
Yet, as I spun around to scan Silura in 360 degrees, other waypoints moved with the terrain. Benoch’s Bunker was 98 miles from here. Draykin Domain, 101. “What good is Remote Access if it’s just a bunch of location markers?”
Then this little gem popped up in my vision.
Party Assist: 0 Degrees
Party Assist: 90 Degrees