Rage

Chapter 4

Chapter Four

Briar

A t least the bathwater was warm. It felt good to soak the sweat and bile off of my skin.

In the end most of the women in the bathing chamber refused to fight. They were either too frightened or too weak from hunger and neglect. I didn’t blame them for their choice; I could only guess at the nightmares they’d experienced in their captivity.

The ones who hadn’t yet been broken got tips on how to defend themselves from Atreya, who proved as scrappy as she was cranky.

Cassandre had allowed me to undress her after I calmed her down. She sat next to me in the steaming waters and cried softly as a couple women brushed through and washed her hair.

She didn’t say anything to the effect, but I thought she looked a little more at ease as the two women gently coaxed their fingers through the snarls in her hair.

A curl of unnamable discomfort had me stretching my neck again as Cassandre sighed and Diana carefully worked cleansing oils into deftly divided hair, focusing her lathering on the roots of her dense, curling tresses. I didn’t have the mental faculties to keep track of the rest of our virginal cadre as the sensation inside of me deepened.

The same feeling as when I spoke with the entity in the cell. The hair on my arms stood on end as I closed my eyes and a warm wrongness swept through me before his hot breath brushed the shell of my ear.

“You’ve chosen,” his voice rumbled as clear as my own thoughts inside my mind. It wasn’t a question. He paused then spoke again. “The fighting won’t work. You must become.”

“I know,” I responded.

A large, warm hand settled on the upper part of my back, shifting my buoyant weight until I lay on my back, floating. The warm water flooded my ears, the resonance in the room going silent. His hand was still warm even compared to the water, as if some sort of hellfire kept his body at a feverish temperature. I marveled at the size of his hand again, tracing how it spanned across the distance between my two shoulder blades, his sharp nails pressing against the ridge of my spine in a way that made a shiver course from my head to my toes.

After a few moments, his hand receded and I missed it. I opened my eyes and found myself alone in an expanse of… well I struggle to describe it.

It was neither dark or light, neither hot or cold. The lighting in the expanse held the same subdued quality of newly burgeoning dawn or dusty twilight. Like waking from a blissful nap I couldn’t remember falling into, I couldn’t tell which it was without the context of what came before.

I rose from my reclined posture and dropped below the surface of the water when my feet didn’t touch the bottom I expected. I clawed at the water, surprised by how much stretched above me. No matter how much I kicked and swam, I couldn’t break the surface.

My heart thudded loudly in my ears as fear overtook me. Was I swimming the wrong way? How could I find the surface? How long could I be without air? That strange, watery light–the expanse of the void around me–made it impossible to know.

“Be calm.” His voice sounded steady. Comforting. “You don’t need to breathe here.”

I stilled, my nude body suspended in the expanse, my hair drifting like a cloud around me. I looked around to the left, to the right. That endless expanse of gloaming encompassed all I saw.

I felt a stirring in my hair and looked up.

Floating above me, the lock of hair in question entwined in his fingers, drifted the nothing from before. The angle of his face mirrored the angle of mine, his body pointing down where mine pointed up. Or at least I thought so, I still couldn’t be sure which was which.

The nothing was no longer absence, but he certainly wasn’t human. He appeared enormous, almost twice my size. We were almost nose to nose. His skin was the color of charcoal, which made the bloody crimson of his irises almost glow like jewels. Two sets of horns curled back from his brow, one set longer than the other, and both of them that same charcoal color with sharpened points of bone white. Silken strands of hair billowed out around his face, shorter than mine, perhaps cropped just past his pointed ears when it wasn’t floating buoyant.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I told you,” he said, his full lips revealing two sets of over-large canines. “A servant of the Forgotten One. A vessel.”

He released the strand of hair he had twined around his large finger and set himself to rights, coming to face me right side up. He stayed eye level with me, but his large body extended far past the soles of my feet. He scooped his hand around my back, his sharp nails pressing into the sensitive skin of my waist and just beneath my breasts.

I suddenly grew aware that I remained naked. My skin rippled with gooseflesh and my face flushed with heat. The vessel smiled, his sharp nose wrinkling with mirth as he cupped my face in his other hand. “Little carver, how your blood blooms like roses beneath your skin,” he said. “Such a vicious little creature, yet you demure to be bare before me?”

That wasn’t the only reason I found myself flushing. I could not ignore the fact that he also wore nothing.

“You said I have to become. But what does that mean? What does it entail?”

He gathered me closer to him and I found myself placing my hands on his sculpted chest. His skin almost burned beneath my hands. My heart raced in my chest in a way that was different from the way that it did when I was alight with the thrill of violence. My thighs squeezed as the hand cupping my face smooth down the back of my legs, covering the space beneath my seat all the way to the crook of my knees. He almost fully enveloped me in his large hands; almost entirely cradled against his muscled abdomen.

“The Forgotten One placed her power within me, but it is a seed encased in ice. It cannot grow within me. I have to pass that seed to you.” He smoothed his thumb over the crest of my hip bone. “Yours is the fertile soil it needs to take root.”

Despite the flowery language, I knew exactly what kind of seed he meant to expel and just where the fertile soil would be, too. My skin blazed, but not with arousal. With anger.

“Of course,” I spat. “The promise of everything I could possibly need, the promise of protection, but only if I fuck you for it.”

I pushed against the creature but his hands tightened around me, not painfully, just enough to keep me still. “No.” His voice came out as a snarl. “Not protection. Power. Not given. Returned. Not fucked. Worshipped .”

His ruby eyes burned with fervency as the strong line of his nose brushed mine. “Allow me to worship you, little goddess. Let me kneel at the altar of your bloodlust, baptise me in the waters of your retribution, let me devour the fruit of your pleasure and I will forever be at your beck and call. Just as I always have been. Just as I always will be.”

I closed my eyes and shuddered, leaning my forehead against his, feeling the smooth ridges of the roots of his horns against the planes of my brow. “I… I’m frightened of it,” I said softly.

“You don’t have to be.” His voice was a gentle purr reverberating through his chest, his breaths almost as labored as mine. “Let me show you.”

I opened my eyes, finding his irises still glowing–burning into mine. He was waiting for permission.

“Alright,” I said. “Show me.”

His hand on my back smoothed along the line of my spine, nails dragging enough to bite but not enough to break the skin. He cradled my neck, my hair billowing out as I let my head fall against the soft pads of his fingers. His thumb and forefinger gently curled to hold the edge of my jaw, the bend of his thumb pushing underneath my chin, granting him more access to my neck.

I closed my eyes again as hot, soft lips pressed against the place where my neck met my shoulder.

It was chaste at first–at least as chaste as a demon’s kiss could be. But after that initial contact, his lips parted and brushed a wet path from my pulse point to the edge of my jaw. One of his canines caught the lobe of my ear and dragged with delicious slowness.

I whimpered and was rewarded with a kiss on the other side of my neck. Teeth nipped and captured the skin. He suckled on the captured bit of skin and I gasped as that unfamiliar heat coalesced between my thighs.

“Kiss me,” I whispered.

He released the skin on my neck and captured my mouth with ravenous fervor. His tongue, I learned, was split down the middle. It brushed the seam of my lips, requesting entry. I obliged him, parting my mouth and relishing the overwhelming fullness as his tongue overtook my mouth, the two halves of his tongue wrapping possessively around mine.

I gasped, my body arching against his.

His hand supporting my legs shifted.Oh so easily, those massive fingers and palm supported my seat, allowing his thumb to brush a questioning path on the line where my thighs squeezed together.

My skin blazed as I leaned back into the hand supporting me, opening my legs to him. Then, with savoring slowness, the pad of his thumb slicked across the outer part of me. He broke the kiss to look into my eyes as he held me aloft. His thumb brushed a circle over a spot that caused a spasm in my thighs and a sharp gasp to escape me.

A low laugh rumbled through him, his smile sharp as he watched my face with rapt attention. “See, my priestess of carrion? See how your body sings for this? No man has stirred you like this, because no man can worship you as I have. I am devoted to you.” He pressed a little harder as he circled again, my thighs clenching around his thumb. A tightness began to coil in me, like a snake preparing to strike. Slick, wet sounds came from between my legs as his circling shifted into a rhythmic slide from that sensitive tip down to my opening.

He didn’t press into me, just kept stroking me as that tension wound tighter and tighter. My eyes were locked on his as he kept coaxing my pleasure. I rested my hands on his neck, smoothing one over the thick cords of muscle and into his hair.

“There is nothing to fear from me, beautiful monster,” he said. “I will make you bleed but once so that you can bathe the world in blood.”

I pulled him closer to me and he lathed the sensitive skin at my neck with his split tongue as I ground myself against his thumb. There were sounds coming out of me the likes of which I’d never heard before: whimpers, moans, pleas.

“Let go,” my demon said. “Come undone and be made anew.”

My toes curled as I did just that, my body going loose and my head falling on his shoulder as I shattered under his ministrations. I gasped against the heat of his neck as he slowed his stroking, letting the sensation taper off at a deliberate pace.

“You see? There is nothing to fear,” he murmured against the shell of my ear while shifting me again, cradling me in his arms with surprising sweetness after such a carnal display.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked, still breathless as I lifted my head.

“You need not do anything,” he said. “The arrogant men will serve their purpose, they will call me forth from where I’m locked within you.” His large thumb settled between my breasts, over my heart, as if to show me exactly where he was imprisoned. “I will come to you and your power will be yours again. No longer will you have to stare into darkness to find me, or quiet your mind while I whisper your will. I will have a form as solid as yours, and you will never be alone again.”

My vision blurred and I swallowed tightly, looking away from him.

This man–this creature–was far more destructive than any man like Richard. With a simple promise of companionship I was sundered apart, my shattered heart laid bare.

He made a perch of his bent arm and wiped tears away with large, clumsy fingers. “No,” he cooed softly. “Do not despair, little goddess. By the night’s end, you will no longer be forgotten. The cruel and the greedy will tremble to know your name.”