Chapter 9
MIA
Your destruction is exquisite.
Black charred fingers reach for my throat. I wince, bracing for the squeeze. He paints delicate strokes instead, tickling my prickled flesh as if his fingertips were feathers. I cough, my tongue heavy. Swollen. It blocks air from my lungs. Please, I beg in my mind. I know you can hear me.
Shhh. Save your strength. His fingers dance across my chest. Everywhere he touches leaves inky prints. Not ink. Shadows. His marks burn.
What do you want from me?
Redemption. Satiation. A soul for a soul. His voice shreds the inside of my head, like a thousand tiny cuts from a really big knife. Fear and panic fight for a place within me. A tug of war between two chaotic emotions that will no doubt be the death of me before the night is over.
He skates the tips of his fingers, his claws retracted, down my rib cage. “I could tear out your heart,” he whispers aloud.
Oh, fuck. My head swells as his voice pulsates between us. It’s low and gruff, yet it pierces my eardrums as if my head were inside of a giant church bell being rung.
I roll back, my body twisting on its own. A knee-jerk reaction that sends shockwaves through every cell. “Please…” I can barely muster a word.
He explores farther down, his bony digits skimming my flesh, hovering over the goose pimples that dot my entire body. When he rests his hand on my abdomen, my breath whooshes out of my lungs as if he’s knocked the wind from me. But how? I can’t make sense of it.
I heave and choke, my chest burning, desperate for oxygen.
He smiles so wide, the bones protruding from his cheeks splinter his skin. A flicker of fire dances in his amber eyes. “Power. That’s what you’re feeling. What you’re experiencing for the first time in your pathetic life. Absolute power. Mine.”
The sound of his voice echoes out of my head now. In the space surrounding me. Every inch of me revolts. I can’t fight back or even run. Sensations of falling roll through me. Nausea. Stabbing pain that pierces my ears and shoots daggers between my temples.
What… the fuck… are you? I can only think it into existence. My voice is gone. Destroyed. Perhaps forever.
He spreads my thighs apart. “I am dark matter. Shadow. The eighth deadly sin. Skelker. Made in his image, perpetuated by yours.”
Sharp claws like switchblades slip through his fingertips. He drags them down my thighs, tearing my flesh.
I scream inside my head. The pain from his surface cuts are enough to pull me under. Why does he hurt me so badly?
He lowers his head between my thighs. You might want to hold on, dark one.
I shake my head, confused. I plead with him. Let me go. I don’t want to do this anymore.
His tongue darts out, and I gasp. Then immediately regret it as a fresh burst of air burns my lungs.
I blink back my disbelief. Through the center of his tongue is a thick piece of bone.
But it’s the tip that’s split into three pieces—each piece seemingly with a life of its own—that sends me into renewed panic.
“The pain I’m about to inflict will make you wish you were dead. But if it doesn’t kill you, it will make you release so monstrously hard that you’ll pray I never stop.”
I try to squirm away from him, but he has possession over me. I can’t move, no matter how hard I try. I scream at myself in frustration. His grin widens. He is going to kill me one way or another. I think he wants to eat my soul after he destroys my body.
For a moment, I’m wildly distracted as I watch in awe how he spreads the lips of my pussy back with the two outer sections of his tongue. But my fascination quickly turns to agony. He thrusts the rough middle part deep inside me, bringing the thick bone along with it.
“Ahhh,” I cry out in agony. No. Oh gods.
The pain is not where it should be. It is everywhere. My screams are fruitless, open-mouthed silences. Nothing but hot, ragged breaths leave my lips. No sound. He’s set fire to my veins. To my soul. It’s as if he’s melting my bones and crushing my organs.
Click. Click. Click. His mouth is a suction. A vacuum. He sucks and sucks, draining the life from me. Drinking my spirit.
Sweat pools in every crevice. I’m hot and cold at the same time, chasing feverish chills while the darkness dots my vision. A force slams into me, and I bounce. How can I fall if I’m already lying down?
On instinct, I reach up, looking for something to grasp. I find nothing but the smooth bone of his antlers. I gag at the feel of them, yet wrap my hands around them all the same.
I told you. He taunts and burrows deeper. It’s the first time I remember that his three-pronged tongue is inside my core.
The thrusts are brutal. They threaten to liquefy my insides like acid. I flash back to the woods. The night I first watched Bones fight in the Circle. They stalked me. All three of them. Draven was the worst. But nothing they did comes close to this agony.
Razored teeth tear into me. You cannot escape this, dark one.
I cry out as he scrapes his canines over my clit. The sharp sting nearly knocks me out. I try to jerk away as he rolls part of his tongue over the tender spot. But my pain turns to pleasure.
It creates a swell, an aching throb. I’m spiraling, coiling around him like a snake. I curl my fingers around his antlers, gripping them so hard that pieces of bone splinter into my palms.
This is sodomy. Masochism. Ritualism stripped down between shadow and soul. Life and death. The sliver of a difference between breathing and choking. I ride his face despite the gashes it creates. He laps at my blood. He drinks my lifeforce. My essence.
Kill me. I beg of him, for I do not know how I am to face any other reality after this.
I am. His response is quick. I am eviscerating your body. Your soul. Your fragile mind. Piece by piece. Night by night. Until there is nothing left of you except the oath you made and the debt you owe me. We will leave this existence and become darkness together.
Click. Click. Click.
He sickens me with his mouth, and yet my orgasm builds. He devours me as if I were the last drop of water in a barren land.
I pour into him. I give. And he takes. He takes. He takes… More. His… Please.
You belong to the Wishing Tree, and the Wishing Tree belongs to me.
The devil’s son. Skelker. I can feel it in his violence. In distant dreams and ancient prophecies. His essence is darkness. Destruction and deviancy. But it is also fire and brimstone and sunbeams splintering through me like napalm.
I contort my limbs, twisting and turning as I clench and arch up to meet his poisonous tongue. His shard of bone rubs me raw until my cum and my blood are one and the same. I roll like thunder against him. My desire and repulsion crash together, shattering every inch of me.
I scream and thrash and rage. I throb. I am chaos. Have I died?
“This part of you has. It belongs to me now, dark one. Soon, all of you will. I will claim all of you.”
No. Not again. His voice. The tone. The timbre… It’s excruciating.
“Stop.” What are words? I can’t hear my own voice. I only feel it swelling, reverberating in my head like the beating drums of past lives.
My breathing slows as he coaxes me into a softer rhythm. “Damn him…” His voice is fading, growing more distant. Quieter.
Liquid sloshes between my thighs. Am I underwater? Am I dead?
This is a never-dream… He whines as if something seizes him back. He claws at my legs until the second he fades away.
I scream as he inflicts fresh wounds on my skin. My voice sounds mangled, warped, feral. My lips tingle. I push my tongue against the roof of my mouth, and it feels like a cannonball, heavy and sour like soot and ash and metal.
There’s something in my mouth. Something fragile in texture yet powerful in intent. I gag as it rushes to the back of my throat.
“Mia? Mi amor? Stop fighting me.”
I know that voice. It’s solid. Safe.
Bones.
The whiskey rolls down my throat like water.
Like salvation, quenching my thirst in a desert.
I sit shivering on Bones’s couch, wrapped in a thick flannel blanket.
The murky splotches of the Skelker’s fingerprints are fading but still visible.
All while my ferocious lover looks as if he’s seen a ghost.
“I thought you’d died.” He stares in disbelief, his eyes wide, pupils dilated.
“Didn’t I?” I snicker. I turn my hands over and examine my sweaty palms. If I were a mystic, I might be alarmed that all the lines dead-end.
But it’s just par for the course for an orphan girl who makes deals with the devil.
I set one nightmare free, only to become enslaved to another.
Sometimes I wish I had never come here. And on nights like these, I’d give anything to go back to sleeping in desolate parking lots with nothing to comfort me but dreams of Nox.
“Mia… I’m not scared of much, but I’m fucking scared for you right now. What is happening?” I’ve never seen Bones look so tired. His forehead is damp, his white muscle tee untucked and wet.
I can’t tell him everything. They will all think I’m crazy. “I-I don’t know.” My stomach knots and bile inches up my throat.
He arches an eyebrow. “Don’t fucking lie to me. Please…”
I swallow the acid down with another sip of whiskey. “I’m having nightmares again. This one isn’t as friendly as Nox. This one… hates me.”
He jumps to his feet and begins pacing. “I will kill him, it, whatever the fuck is haunting you.”
I nod to appease him, all while knowing full well that he can’t kill the devil inside me any more than I can.
Both of our phones ring at the same time.
We lock eyes. “Dray,” he murmurs.
My caller ID shows the Harker Mansion landline. “Nox,” I say on a shaky breath.
Bones grunts in frustration and disappears into the kitchen in a fit of barely audible curses.
I take a deep breath before answering. “I’m all right.”
“Come home. Now. I need to inspect you,” Nox commands.
He knows. Of course, he knows. We’re connected. “Okay.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Yes. No. I was. I’m fine now.” I can’t even try to lie to him. Not about this.
“Come home, dark one.”
“Please don’t call me that anymore.”
He sighs. “I understand… Please come home to me, Mia.”
I cradle the phone to my cheek. “See you soon.”
Bones is still shouting in the kitchen when I pour myself a second whiskey. Everything feels wrong. Distorted. I pull back the blanket to see the last of the Skelker’s marks fade. Or did they just retreat under my skin? Maybe they are like tattoos that I can’t see until he invokes them.
“I’m going to take you home. Draven and Aries will meet us there shortly. Where are your clothes, mi amor?” Bones scans the room to no avail.
I shake my head. “No fucking clue. Maybe in my car? I vaguely remember driving over here.”
He nods. “You can wear something of mine.”
I let him help me into a pair of his gray gym shorts, which hang down past my knees, and one of his signature white cotton muscle tees.
Since there’s no way I’ll be able to walk in any pair of his size thirteen shoes, I double up on a couple of pairs of his socks, then let him carry me over the gravel to his car.
“I can drive.”
He snaps his head toward me, his expression hard. “No. We’ll get your car later. The last thing I need is for this fucking demon to attack you again while you’re at the wheel.”
I nod and concede. This is exactly why I’ve been keeping the Skelker a secret from them. I can kiss my freedom goodbye from now on because there’s no fucking way they are going to let me out of their sight for a second.
As endearing as that is, it’s also a noose around my neck. Awake or asleep, I can’t ever fucking escape. The poison is the only thing that can keep the dark things at bay. If I can just convince Aries to give me more…