Chapter 36
Chapter thirty-six
Double
“This will never work.”
I sit by the waterfall alone, gazing at the water and saying goodbye to Nawie. I can’t even drink anymore, because we’re supposed to go tomorrow, and I must be sober.
So when we fail, no one will blame it on my drunkenness.
“Try to sleep,” she says, the cunty little tease. She hasn’t fucked me even though she promised.
“Come here. Let me breathe into you, make you more powerful. Maybe that will save us.”
She is silent, and I throw diamonds in the water, taking perverted pleasure in sinking this glorious, glittering wealth where no one will find it.
They will destroy Nawie. All of it. Every last one of my creations will be spoiled, and I will be nothing.
“Where are you?”
I sit up, my heart beating with painful hope. I should know better, because she’ll just tease me again, and nothing will come of it. And yet, I am beyond lost, and so I’ll take whatever she gives me.
“By the waterfall.”
Flames come to life behind me, and Jaga steps through. I stare, mesmerized. She wears a black dress with red trimmings, long-sleeved and made of soft fabric that clings to her skin. Her feet are bare, her hair braided.
“Is this what you wear to bed?” I ask, staring shamelessly. “I’m going to move in with Rada. Fuck.”
She heaves a long-suffering sigh and sits by my side in the grass. We look at the waterfall splashing into the river, and it’s warm here, like on early summer nights right after Kupala. A lone bird trills somewhere in the branches, a soul.
“Can you imagine what they must feel?” I ask, my voice hoarse from all the screams I haven’t let out.
“Trapped forever. Sentient, feeling, magical beings born of my breath and magic, and they can never come home. Dead bodies will decay around them, and they will still be trapped. I don’t think they will find sleep.
In Nawie, souls are able to lay to rest, but that’s because they’ve recovered from the trauma of death.
Those trapped cannot. They will exist forever, awake, afraid, in torment. ”
“I think we both can imagine how they feel,” Jaga says, and her voice is flat, her hands tight as they grip cool grass, tearing it out with clumps of wet earth clinging to the roots. “Like being buried alive, isn’t it? With no escape. An eternity of suffering.”
I release my breath into the sky and lie back, looking at the stars and willing them to imprint on my mind, so that when Perun chains me again, I’ll at least see them when I close my eyes and weep.
“That’s why you must stop this,” she whispers. “Weles, you didn’t make us for eternal suffering. You made us to live, to play, to cry and love, and then to come home. To you.”
I close my eyes and heave a shaky breath.
“He’ll take everything I’ve ever loved,” I confess, and I hope she’s not looking at me, or she’ll see the tears flowing down my temples.
“He’s already taken so much. My beautiful people, my city, all my shrines.
He will take you, too. And I will forever have nothing. ”
When her lips press to my wet temple, I know she sees them, but I don’t mind it as much. Jaga licks off my tears and kisses the corner of my eye, and I don’t dare breathe or move. This is so precious. She was never so sweet like this.
“You said you’d breathe into me,” she whispers, straddling me. “Do it now.”
“Let me see it first.”
When a red glow penetrates through my eyelids, I open my eyes and behold her broken glory.
Her soul spreads out above her like a pair of misshapen, torn up butterfly wings, and I sigh in awe.
Her lips press to mine, and I breathe into her with my eyes open, watching her soul undulate and pulse with magical life as she takes in what I give her.
She groans when my breath pours down her throat.
I grip her braid, winding it around my fist like a leash, and give her more, watching as the red, glowing tendrils elongate, stretching into the night like seeking tentacles.
Her hips snap ungracefully, and she braces one hand on my chest, a low, reedy sound pouring from her throat and into my mouth. I exhale again, and she moans.
I try to force another breath into her, but she turns her face, and I breathe onto her cheek while she shakes, gulping in the night air.
“Too much?” I ask, disappointed. Maybe she would fuck me if I gave her more, but she doesn’t want it.
“It’s too… It’s like I’m raw, endless, exposed. I need time. I have to get used to it.”
I sigh with pleasure, putting my hands on her round hips, my thumbs resting on her hard hipbones. This is such a satisfying fit. It’s as if I’d made her just for me, even though she was born and raised without my knowledge or input.
“So I can’t just pump you full and aim you at Perun,” I murmur, caressing her curves through the soft fabric. “Pity.”
She straightens, and I let her thick braid pass through my loose fingers, letting go. Jaga looks down, her face in shadow, framed by the stars.
“This will not mean anything.”
Before I can ask what she’s talking about, her lips are on mine, soft and gentle. I sigh into her mouth, and she shivers, pinching my ear. A warning. So I try to breathe through my nose, kissing her back like my life depends on it, because it does.
She shuffles over me, finally settling on top of my cock with a purr of pleasure. She grinds on it, and I feel how hot she is under her thin nightshirt tangled between her legs, how wet. She wants this as much as me.
“Remember the last time you rode me?” I ask with a breathless laugh, because I can’t stop taunting her even when she does exactly what I want. It’s like I’m trying to spoil this. Mad Weles.
She throws her head back and slides her nightshirt down her shoulders. The neckline rips, and she bares her breasts, her hips undulating on top of me in a slow, deliberate rhythm.
“You looked very good lying on your back for me.”
My cock jumps with a pulse of heady arousal, and I flex my hips, lifting her once. This is exactly what I need to hear right now. Yes. Let her be in charge.
And yet. She said I looked so good then. I am different now.
“Do you want me to change?” I ask, my voice hushed, because it hurts to ask this question. “Do you want Woland?”
She shakes her head, and I exhale with relief.
“I know it’s you. It makes no difference how you look.”
I grip her hips harder, anchoring her to me, and thrust up repeatedly to show her my ardor and gratitude. She shakes her head and squeezes my throat with one hand. I still, gazing at her with all the love she forbade me to speak of.
“Be good,” she says, her gaze tense and watchful as it slides from my lips to my eyes and back. “Or I’ll go away.”
I lift my arms high over my head, stretching myself open for her use.
She smirks, and ropes press into my wrists.
I pull to see how much give there is, and they tighten.
These ropes are not wet with my blood, and I can easily undo them with magic.
That knowledge settles the small flutter of fear that rises in my gut as I remember another woman who fucked me when I was tied up.
Jaga is in control, but she gives me a way out.
“Fuck. Yes. You’re so perfect,” I rave, breathing faster and faster as she drags her nails down my jaw, settling one sharp tip right on top of my pulse point.
I shiver and arch my back, and she runs her fingers down to the neckline of my shirt.
She rips it in half with bare hands, so strong, this girl.
“Woland is too much in so many ways,” she murmurs, gently stroking my skin from collarbone to sternum, giving me gooseflesh. “And this… This is just right. Not too much. Not too little.”
She grinds on me to let me know her meaning, and I close my eyes, shivering all over. After months of nothing—I can’t handle it. But I will not say a word. If she stops, I’ll fucking die.
“You’re willing to do anything to have me, isn’t that right?” she asks with a mean little laugh, and I nod desperately. “Good. Eat me until you drown.”
She shuffles closer, her knees flanking my head, and drops her dress down, but doesn’t sit. It’s hot and stifling in this little tent, and her scent is overwhelming. I lift my head high, straining my neck, and just manage to lick her with the tip of my tongue. She sighs and sinks down.
I groan as her cunt fills my mouth, clit and labia right where I need them to suck on her in worship. She rocks her hips, controlling her pleasure and mine, and I clench my fists helplessly, getting drowned, indeed.
She is so wet. How can she, when she resisted me so easily all this time? I don’t understand her.
“Oh, yes,” she breathes. “That’s good. You want to do this forever, don’t you? Pathetic Weles. Very good, I like this.”
“Only like?” I ask, delirious and starving for more. “I need you to love it.”
“Then try harder.”
I strain and arch, doubling my efforts. My tongue grows longer and thicker, and I push it inside her, massaging all the right spots even as I deprive myself of air, my mouth so full of her.
She grinds down so hard, the back of my head hurts from being pressed into the earth, and I moan my thanks right against her clit.
It’s swollen and hot, pulsing in my mouth, and I lick it as hard and fast as I can.
Without warning, Jaga stands up. I exclaim in protest, fighting the ropes to get free and bring her back, and she stands above me, bathed in the blue moonlight, and takes off her dress. I stop struggling and watch her, my chest heaving with mad desire.
“There is something I wanted to do with you,” she says, looking down like a goddess about to trample me into the soil. “But which of us should get your mouth? Do you have a preference?”
She exhales heavily and becomes two, her zmora untangling from her being as she steps away, another Jaga, only wilder, crueler, infinitely worse. I flex my hips, hurting in the constraints of my trousers. She hasn’t freed my cock yet, and it’s torture.