38. Xander
Chapter 38
Xander
Hands of Gold — Peter Hollens
F lying used to give me a sense of peace. Now, there is only agony. When I leave Francesca in our marital bed and set into the night, she’s not happy with me, protesting and demanding things, but I can’t fucking care about that when there’s a constant rage in my mind.
We’d said our vows, burned and healed each other in the sacred ways of our ancestors, and that would just have to be enough for now.
I head up to the family dragon launch pad. It’s the highest balcony of the castle, a massive open-air turret made exactly for the perch of one dragon with space for them to spread their wings and launch off the castle from a height, directly into the sky.
It’s raining tonight when I get in there, a cooling drizzle that is like a balm to my hot skin. I rip off my pants, toss them aside, and shift.
Expanding under violent energy feels good, and stretching out my wings feels even better. I was a creature born to fly, born to tear through the wind and let my majesty be known to all beneath me.
And yet I want to tear apart the very sky. I want to sink my claws into the world and shred it to pieces. My dragon toys with my mind like it’s his personal Rubix Cube, flashing through fragments of foreign images, sounds and smells on a near constant basis. They are from other times and places, maybe even from other worlds.
Sometimes they are images of death, sometimes many bodies, writhing together in a rhythm I’ll never understand.
He roars in my mind as he relives these moments. Pure furore. Pure pain. Pure yearning. It’s agonising and irritating all in one.
But this is my price to pay for what I did. And by the Wild Gods, I will pay it with joy. I fly hard and fast, high into the sky until the air is so thin there’s no oxygen for my lungs. At this point, I plummet, tucking my wings in and making my nose a spear, keeping my eyes open so I can see the expanse of the darkness as I fall through it.
But even the roar of the air past my ears and the oxygen deprivation can’t drown out the living nightmare in my head.
Only one thing had done that today.
Swearing bloody murder, I head back to the estate, rearing up and backflapping to slow my speed so I don’t go crashing into my family home. I extend my claws out, finding a perch on the massive black stone bar that runs the circumference of the platform. Shifting into my human form, I wait until I’ve shrunk down to my human height before stepping off and striding to the stairs at the centre of the tower.
The rain beats harder still deep into the night, drumming away even the sound of Mozart in my ears. I don’t bother with my pants, leaving them there for the servants to pick up on their morning sweep. There’s a towel rack as I exit, and I dry myself off before marching back into the castle proper, naked. The sound of the rain penetrates all the way inside, and I’m thankful for that thunderous, regular hum.
It makes me want to kill something just a little less.
My bedroom is dark when I enter it, rubbing my temples to try to dispel the images of a bloody sword fight flashing through my mind’s eye. Although everyone looks different, I recognise them all, and I know the tall blond man who took a killing blow for his brother was me.
Exhaling black smoke, I close the door behind me, surveying the pitch-black room. Francesca is fast asleep on her side of the bed, the sheet tucked right up to her chin and Spawn’s cage is covered for the night as usual. Rain beats on the double window panes, which have been left open, suiting me just fine. Beads of rain water trickle down the window, their reflection making a pattern across the bed. Hoping I don’t wake her up, I slip under the sheets.
My head pounds in time with the pulse of my cock, the need for release, long built up within me. With one hand covering my eyes, I allow my right hand to wander where it pleases, down the hard plane of my abdomen and lower, to that insatiable beast between my thighs that has been aching all day. My balls feel heavy, calling me to empty them.
I crack open my eyes just enough to see the shapely mound that is the anima next to me.
My wife.
A scream pierces my skull and the fractal vision of a bloody chase blinds me for a moment. I don’t realise that I’ve reached for her until I feel smooth, luxurious skin. Closing my eyes so I don’t have to look at her face, I run my hand down her shoulder.
She makes a small, sleepy noise that might be endearing if I didn’t dislike her personality so much. Francesca sighs, the scent of arousal perfuming the air as she turns towards me.
At least she can’t say that I’m not doing my husbandly duties. For all I know, she’ll take every detail of this back to her father. Her arousal is so strong that it consumes my sinuses, leaving no other scent, no other thought in there. It drags me deeper into my own need and my hands sweep away her long tresses, finding her face and tilting it up towards mine. I capture her lips, the taste of her heady and sweet. So fucking sweet.
She gasps into my mouth.
And it does something so primal to me. A growl tears from my throat, greed and desire taking me over completely. Her scent —gods, her scent is everything, and my dragon sways in approval. I sweep the sheet off her, sliding my hand down the curve of a delicious waist, down a smooth thigh and lower to the back of her knee. With another growl, I hike her leg over my hip, my cock painful and hard as obsidian stone.
“I need you,” I mutter. “Fuck, I need you.”
She whimpers, her own primal desires making her writhe, making her skin slide over my naked skin, leaving me panting and half-mad. My cock twitches and catches her between the legs, the head sinking into moisture.
She hisses and so do I, making me slide my hips, greedily wanting to be coated in that sweet wetness. I palm her breast and she arches into me, moaning wantonly. The scent of her wet pussy makes me drunk and I suddenly can’t think of anything else except what that would feel like inside of my mouth and on my tongue and on my entire face. I want to cover my whole body in that sweetness.
“I need to taste you,” I say hoarsely, sliding down her body, tasting her skin as I go. The centre of her chest, a line down her body. The taste of her is almost orgasmic, like a buffet of every perfect taste in the world. It gets better the lower I go and I covetously grip her hips as I find my lips tickled by a tuft of soft curls.
I took her for a Brazilian type of woman, but it doesn’t fucking matter, not when it’s ambrosia, not when I crave it like I crave the fucking sky.
She cries out when my lips kiss the line where her labia meet. I stroke my tongue down her centre, lapping up the beads of her heady juices as I do. Sliding my tongue between her lips, I groan deep in my throat as that nectar slides into my mouth, simultaneously heating me up and cooling my brain. The cerebral relief I feel is unmatched as I lave into her pussy, exploring the delicate skin like a skilled explorer. A flick of her clit makes her cry out, hands reaching into my hair and tugging in just the way I like. My lips find her clit and I suck on it gently, and happily find a flood of the heady slick in my mouth. I reach down and stroke myself as I savour this delicacy, feeling my hard shaft respond to the pleasure in my mouth.
I squeeze the base almost cruelly hard, milking my cock and feeling its veins bulge. Precum coats the broad head and I imagine the flutter of my tongue of her most sensitive spot, grinning as I feel her writhe and almost choke on a moan. I’m relentless, wanting to feel more of the unexpected pleasure, pumping my shaft hard and fast as if I was in her.
Release gathers at the base of me, rumbling like a volcano ready to explode. I work my cock as I work her clit and she comes first, screaming and crying, her back almost lifting off the bed completely before she pants, yanking on my hair so hard it hurts in the best way. Pressure hits a breaking point in my own body and I sit up, tilting my head back and moaning into the sky as I let go weeks of release onto her body, milking out every laboured millilitre of my seed. I inhale a sweet breath and exhale a relieved one before flopping down on the bed.
Lazily, I rub my cum into her skin, letting my scent claim her, letting my seed soak into her skin.
Silence.
There is blissful silence in my head.
And for the first time in an age, I go soundly to sleep.
I wake to a soft, warm body wrapped next to mine. She smells like me and my release and that makes the dragon in me snort in lazy contentment. My mind is calm, near serene, the feeling so unexpected and so delightful that I actually smile. It’s a vague thought in the back of my mind. Could it be that fucking another dragon is the only thing that placates my own? Perhaps I should take Francesca out flying like she’d asked. We could probably work out how to fuck in mid-air and that would bring back my joy for flight again. Keeping my eyes closed against the cruel light of day, I run my hands up that interesting curve of her waist, then higher up, dragging the pads of my fingers up her arm, across her collarbone and?—
Find a thick hunk of metal encompassing her neck.
My very world tilts sideways as my limbs throw my body to the other side of the bed and Aurelia stares at me, wide-eyed and panting, as shocked as I am.
Olly knocks on the door before opening it, revealing himself and Heather in the doorway.
Spawn’s off the bed as fast as a rabbit, scrambling back into her cage and shutting the door as if she’d been in there the entire night.