Chapter Thirty-Eight
I grabbed his free hand and slid it over me. His fingers flexed against me, and the sound that came out of me was truly primal.
“I assume this fit is suitable?” asked Astarte. I knew she was asking me, but I didn’t care. Of course this fit was suitable. This was the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world. I wanted to feel his teeth through my skin, his fingers in my flesh, the throbbing pulse of his cock as he filled me. I grabbed for him and whimpered in disappointment that he was still clothed. His black shirt was an unwelcome barrier. His pants stood between me and the thing I wanted more than anything.
“Merit, I need to hear it from you,” Astarte said firmly.
“Everything is perfect,” I purred, and I meant it.
“Please.” She remained cool. “Can you give me a—”
“Yes.” I practically begged the word.
She could stay here and enjoy the show of her life as we made true, deep, perfect love. Jessabelle would be so lucky to stay against the wall and watch from the corner. I could be in front of kings and queens and emperors and gods and bishops and pastors and coliseums of pious women clutching their pearls; they’d be little more than noise. The electric, earth-changing, palpable chemistry that was about to pound through me was all I cared about.
Caliban was here. He’d come for me. Nothing else had ever mattered.
I glided through time and space as I moved off my tiptoes. I knew logically it was a small distance between standing and resting my ass firmly on the table, but I jumped backward onto the nearest surface. Caliban seemed to realize my intention before I was halfway off the ground and helped me onto the waist-high table, both of his hands on my hips. I groaned against the sensation and ran my fingers through his hair, balling my fists in the arctic fox strands. I was barely aware of how the table teetered against my disregard for the laws of physics, hardly noticing how Caliban had steadied both me and the table. The bass of the music piping into the room buzzed through me, filling every cell, every heartbeat, every breath. I arched again as I used my legs to draw him to me. I tore at the robe until it opened in the front, draping over my shoulders while exposing me to him.
I tried to say his name again, but the first hard c of his name barely escaped my throat before he grabbed my hair and pulled, hard. I yelped in a sound mixed between pleasure and pain as his name was lost to the smoky air around me.
I wanted all of it and more.
I wanted him to pull my hair. To slap me. To bend me over. To grab and grope and bite. I wanted leather and whips and straps. I wanted pain to heighten the pleasure. I wanted his mouth on my throat, his fingers clawing at me, his dick to throb inside of me as he kept time to the loud music—so loud, so wholly filling, so incredible, so sensational.
Astarte offered him a glass of water, but he said, “Trust me, I don’t need it.”
She seemed satisfied with the answer as he lowered his mouth to make contact with my throat. I wanted to cry out for him, ready to beg, to plead, to pray. I tried again to gasp his name, but he slipped two fingers into the back of my throat until I gagged on them. My eyes rolled into the back of my head as I slipped my tongue between each of the fingers, sliding off the counter. I grabbed his hand to keep it secured to my mouth as I continued sucking, drinking in the flavor of ferns and red tree trunks and moss-soft earth after the rain. I rotated until I was bent over the table, holding his fingers against my mouth with a vice-like grip.
If I hadn’t been bent over the table, I wouldn’t have seen the screen blink to life.
Anath had hit the intercom to showcase the anarchy occurring in the lobby. I released Caliban’s fingers and abandoned the table to lean backward into him. I looped both hands behind me, one running through his silvery locks, the other grabbing at his hips while the disruptive color of the lobby cut through my haze.
I recognized…something.
I struggled to discern the life happening beyond the present bubble.
Anath was yelling. She said she’d tried to kill him. Kill him? That couldn’t be right. It didn’t matter. It was so far away, so unimportant.
My head spun as if I were twenty-one and had thrown back seventeen drinks on the same night. It was a rowdy frat bar where I tried to forget my life and my pain against the music that shook the walls. It was shot after shot after without the nausea, without the pain, without the regret. I didn’t care as I watched the familiar face of the clerk from the Bellfield Inn appear on the screen, knowing his presence was impossible; it was a nonsensical vision. I wasn’t interested in Anath’s angered demand for backup, in her words, in her aggression. I barely saw Astarte cross to the tablet embedded in the wall and stand in front of it to block its light, as if she were more invested in blocking me from the spell it might break than anything going on in the Venus Clinic.
Caliban’s hands continued to move over my front, exploring my stomach, my breasts, my throat, my thighs. My sighs of pleasure filled the gaps created by any concern from the others, uncaring, focused only on the one who held my heart, my body, my soul as I pressed my ass against him, feeling the member still trapped in his pants.
I reached around for him, aching for him.
Astarte covered the screen with her back as she hissed to Jessabelle, “Get up there and take care of this.”
Jessabelle disappeared in a blink.
Good. The only two I needed in the room were Caliban and me. We were owed this pleasure. We didn’t need their company.
Astarte had barely stepped away, back still to the screen in its final moments of electronic glow as I saw the silvery glint of a lasso spin above the clerk’s head. Somewhere in the distant caves of my mind—somewhere more buried than the memories of past lives—I remembered Azrames and his meteor hammer. The screen went dark as the metallic shape escaped the clerk’s hands and it launched for Anath. It blinked into shiny black nothingness just as Astarte reached us.
“Possession?” was the word I managed to speak, hips still rolling against Caliban’s.
He knew what I was asking, even if I was barely present enough to form the question.
“Yes,” he said, lips reaching the exposed line of demarcation that ran from my belly button to my sternum, separating my breasts, tracing it up my throat. “Possession,” he repeated. The word was so fucking sexy on his lips. His hands ran over me, pressing into me. He explored my body with his fingertips as Astarte joined us at the table, as if Caliban were reiterating that he possessed me, which he did. I belonged to him and succumbed fully as his hands roamed me from the fluffy exterior of robe until his hands pressed against two hard shapes in my pocket. He pressed the metallic shapes in my robe into my body with significance as he pressed his mouth over mine. The metal hurt in a wonderful bite as he pushed them into my hips. “Such a good girl,” he rumbled, lips over mine, scarcely louder than a whisper.
I drank in the praise. My hands flew to his face as I pulled him close to me. They drifted south to his clothes as I tried to tear him free of the fabric that separated us.
“I love—”
I couldn’t finish my declaration. He bit my lip so hard I was sure I tasted blood. The words were stolen from my mouth as I drank him in, his tongue working against mine, his lips over mine, his mouth absorbing the droplets of blood stolen from my mouth.
“She’s ready,” said Astarte. “This is a greater deal that we could have hoped for.”
Maybe her words were important. Maybe they weren’t. I didn’t care.
“I know,” he said, not taking his mouth from my neck.
“She’s ready,” Astarte repeated. “We both are. Are you?”
“Do you want a third, Love?” Caliban asked.
He shouldn’t have asked. I didn’t. I didn’t want anyone but him. I said nothing as I tried to tear at his shirt again, but he snatched both of my wrists into one hand.
He pushed me down into the table until my chest, my head, my upper body twisted as it slammed against its surface, leaving him behind me. With my hands in his grip like cuffs, I was practically immobilized. I wriggled unsuccessfully, staring at the glossy surface that remained black and lifeless on the wall.
Astarte took the gasp of my impact against the table as confirmation as she came closer, shedding her white lab coat like it was a snakeskin. She turned her back to Caliban and pulled her hair to the side as she offered him the zipper. Something permeated my pleasure in a distant, foreboding way as his hands went to her zipper and began to tug.
I struggled against the table, but Caliban pushed the twist of my wrists harder until I knew if I fought against his hold, my arms would break. No, I didn’t want to share Caliban with Astarte. No, I didn’t want anyone else to experience him, to taste him. No, I didn’t want him to get pleasure from anyone else. Jealousy was stronger than the drug as I struggled to emerge from the sensual fog that smothered me. I flipped my face against the table with the tiny freedom allowed from my space.
Her dress dropped around her ankles.
No, I didn’t want to share Caliban. I didn’t want her here for this. I didn’t want—
She slipped her hands through my hair, and my thoughts melted away against the touch of a goddess. I relaxed my face into the cool table. I made an approving noise, a desperate noise for more as she ran her fingers against my scalp. I fought against the yes and the no warring within me.
I knew she was naked between us, but as long as she continued the sensual scrape of her nails…they rained from my scalp down my back as she turned toward Caliban. I did love the sensation of her fingers… I relaxed again, wanting the tantalizing stroke of my scalp to continue. I didn’t want a break in the pleasure as each nerve was stimulated with the pleasurable chill of fingernails.
“Do it,” Astarte said, and I knew she was talking to Caliban.
Through the haze, I heard him ask me for confirmation once more. His voice was hitched with a sincerity I barely understood. I always wanted him. I wanted him day in and day out. My love life had been destroyed by my need for him even before I’d believed he was real. He was all I’d ever wanted. Yet something in his voice…
“I need you,” I said.
“Love—”
“Please,” I begged, needing him inside me more than the sun in the winter, more than water in the desert, more than air. I pressed myself into him, knowing my robe was hiked up over my hips. The only thing separating us was his pants, and I pushed into him as if hoping it would burst through its cage and into me. I wriggled against him until I heard the sound of something—a button? a zip?—then the only noise accompanying the deep pulsing bass of the music was my gasp.
My head kicked backward. I cried out in pleasure, in agony, in surprise, in desperation, in need as he slid into me. I was so wet that I accepted him fully in a second. I cried out in fullness, in victory as he stretched me, filled me, completed me.
His reciprocal groan was music to my ears—sweeter and more vital than the thundering songs that shook the walls. I still felt the cool press against my face and bared breasts. I was still aware of the dark, dimly lit room. I knew Astarte was here with us. But all I could feel was the heartbeat of the cock inside me. I gave myself over to it, wanting fingers to dig into my hips, wanting the slap of skin as he drove into me, wanting the claiming demand of thrust after thrust.
I waited. And waited.
It took a second for me to recognize the wet sounds of a kiss behind me.
Breaking free from the haze again, I tried to jerk free to see what was happening, but the painful twist of my wrists kept my arms rod-straight. I grunted as I resisted it all, resisted the drug, the threesome, the world as I heard their mouths meet. I was his, and he was mine. He pushed into me more deeply and I gasped, feeling the fabric of his pants against my ass cheeks as if he’d barely popped himself out of his zipper to take me. I wanted to enjoy it, but I couldn’t. The lust slipped away as I heard the sounds of tongues and lips behind me again. I craned my neck just enough to see Astarte slip her hands into his hair. I tried to cry out, to stop their embrace as my eyes homed in on his free hand.
It didn’t go to her, or to me.
His free hand slipped to the back of his pants. I was barely conscious enough to see the moment he released my wrists. My hands flew forward to grip the edge of the table, groaning against the release of my bone-breaking grip. Time slowed as I watched Astarte’s hand in Caliban’s hair. His free hand went to hers, balling in her dark locks the way they had in mine so many times. His wrist yanked her head back, and her lips parted in a smile. Her eyes closed in pleasure. I arched up to protest the moment I saw his hand break free from its hidden place as his face changed completely from pleasure to concentration. His arm arced as his hand pointed down, the ornately engraved dagger angled for her heart. Her eyes flashed open in the last second before the knife plunged into her chest, buried up to its hilt as it found the tender spot between her ribs. She’d barely begun to scream out in rage as his other hand yanked her head back farther. Blood spurted from her center as he freed the dagger from her heart and slashed her across the tender flesh of her throat.
I watched and felt…nothing. Was I supposed to?
Her cry cut into gurgles.
On the far wall, Jessabelle’s face blinked onto the screen as she screamed for backup. I caught Azrames’s gray-and-black form. The clerk had crumbled in the corner of the lobby, pool of blood so red it looked black collecting below his head. Jessabelle scarcely had time to scream as the lasso whipped above Az’s head before the spiked hammer released. It shot across the room and embedded into the back of her skull. The screen went black.
Caliban pulled free from me, tying my robe as my head spun. I grabbed the table for stability. I heard the bizarre, squishing, crunching noise of sawing before I dared to look down at his blood-covered hands. I refused to let my eyes see the sight before me as he decapitated Astarte with the dagger. I blinked against it, struggling between arousal and horror, need and confusion, shock and terror.
“Caliban.” I finally managed his name.
“Trust me,” he said through gritted teeth, a muscle ticking in his jaw as he scooped me up. I looked to the slowly growing lake of vermillion that gushed from Astarte’s prone shape. A woman…her eyes open in unblinking surprise…mouth ajar in a silent scream…she’d been so pretty…
I bounced in his arms as I looked over his shoulder, scarcely aware as we passed the locker rooms, the shallow pool, the pillars. He hit the bank for the elevators again and again as he impatiently summoned the machine.
As if speaking through dozens of shots, I slurred, “Is it broken?”
“The elevator?” he asked, still pressing the button.
As if speaking through molasses, I tried again. “The seal.”
“Yes, Love,” he growled, face set in a hard shape against the tremor of fury that he struggled to contain.
“Jump,” I said. I could scarcely speak, nor did I want to. It was with the low purr of a bedroom voice that I slipped my hand toward his pants as I said, “Jump realms.”
He shook his head, snatching my hand to stop me in my pursuit. “We can’t leave Azrames with Anath. Stay in the elevator.”
Azrames. I knew that name.
The moment the doors parted, he shot into the rectangular box and pressed the button for the lobby over and over again. I knew this was important. I knew I needed to focus, to fight, to be an asset. Instead, I buried my face against his neck and pressed my lips against the pulse in his jugular. I felt like a storybook vampire as I could sense the blood beneath his throat. I wanted it. I wanted every part of him.
I wasn’t sure how much time had or hadn’t passed when the elevator doors parted for the lobby.
“Stay put!”
Caliban set me on the ground, and I felt the slapping offense of a cold fish across the face as he abandoned me. He dashed into the sounds, the whir of metal, the scream, the chaos and noise of the lobby. I heard more than three voices. Whoever was in there, it wasn’t just my demons and Anath. I’d witnessed Jessabelle’s death on screen in the moments before…
I struggled to my knees as I hit the button for the door to open. It did in a second as I crawled from the elevator. I got to my feet on unsteady legs. Wine and whiskey and molly and coke and music and lust and passion and tension and craving tore me into a thousand pieces, each vice grabbing me with greedy hands as it pulled me in every direction. I struggled to move forward, eyes nearly unseeing, head swimming, ears hearing little above the ancient throb of bass-heavy music. Their drums filled me, demanded of me, called to me.
There was another scream—but not one of terror. A feminine rallying cry sharpened my attention, affording me another small moment of lucidity. I tried to understand the shapes between the cream-colored couches, the Juliet roses, the mosaic tiles of the marble flooring, but I couldn’t discern the shapes.
I barely made into the lobby when I fell to my knees, joints hitting the lobby floor with the purple, bruising pain of the cobblestones of Hell.
Anath broke her battle with the demons as she spun for me. She sprinted toward my prone form. Something shiny cut through the haze, if only for a moment. Azrames swung his lasso with the spiked, silvery ball at the end as he knocked her out of the way. He succeeded in stopping her advance, but I caught movement from everywhere as if I were a spider seeing out of the refraction of twelve arachnid eyes rather than two, useless human ones. The enemy was everywhere. And Caliban and Azrames were only two.
“Call him!” Caliban shouted across the lobby while he pummeled an entity. His brilliant eyes lifted to me again in a demand before another parasite scrambled toward him.
I struggled to understand the shapes that rallied to defend Anath. Parasitic entities. Cheshire cats. Evil. So many. Too many. She cried to them to continue her battles against Caliban and Azrames as she turned her attention to me once more.
My panicked gaze went between Caliban and Azrames to Jessabelle’s still, bloodied form. The creatures continued to flood the lobby with incomprehensible speed. Blood filled the space in different colors—red coursed out of both the clerk and from the corporeal Jessabelle. Blue pulp oozed from the creatures as they fell. Oil-slick black seeped from Anath’s brow as she rallied again for me.
Azrames lunged for her, tackling her to the ground as Caliban shouted to me again.
“Call him! Call Silas!”
I blinked at him in confusion. A child-like parasite began to crawl toward me with the forward motion of a crab. It cocked its too-human head as it eyed me. I tried to scramble backward as its smile widened. I recognized the scabs at the corner of its eerily wide smile, its brilliant, sapphire eyes too blue to be anything other than terrible. Its mouth split into tiny, blooded edges as its sharpened teeth continued to grin at me.
I crawled backward farther until my back hit the far wall of the elevator banks.
Once again, Caliban begged above the overwhelming noise of Anath and her parasitic army. “Call Silas!”
The angel? But that meant…
Caliban knew something I didn’t. I trusted him. I should listen to him, right?
Fuck, I needed to be sober. I didn’t know how to blink free from the haze stronger than drugs, than drink, than everything that suffocated me. I barely had the wherewithal to slip my hand into my pocket and grab the golden poppet. I wrapped my fingers around the shape and brought it to my mouth. I squinted against the approaching Cheshire cat as its head exploded in a blue spray the moment Azrames’s meteor hammer made contact with its skull. Its goo rained around me like the thick, horrid memory I’d buried from Richard’s basement. I would have died had it not been for…
Azrames turned for Anath as she advanced on him again. She lofted a weapon in the time it took me to bring the gilded poppet to my mouth and speak his name.
I didn’t know how much time had passed.
I heard the unreal cries of parasites and the feminine scream of Anath. I heard the metallic clang of the meteor hammer and the high, shrill ring of the dagger as Caliban slashed. It could have been one second or ten minutes. I had no concept of war or battle or fights. I could only perceive the enormous crystal chandelier, the blur of colors, the high-pitched noises, and the continuous throb between my thighs.
The glitter had barely appeared in a flash of white light before I heard three sentences in Caliban’s powerful, authoritative voice over the sounds of battle.
“We’ve got this! She’s still mortal! Save her!”
I barely had time to gasp at Silas’s presence. The gold-dust shimmer of wings dissipated as I struggled to see him. I was loosely aware that my robe had fallen to pieces, breasts, bellybutton, and everything in between exposed in my scramble. Perhaps spa robes were not the most qualified garb for war, but despite knowing I should care, I didn’t. I looked up into his golden eyes, seeing those tiny halos burning around his pupils.
I extended a hand toward him.
Silas spun away from me. He locked eyes with Caliban as he said, “You want me to—”
“Take her!” Caliban shouted back.
My hand found his chest, then glided over his shoulder. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to be held. I wanted to be close. I wanted…
The high-pitched scream of a Cheshire-cat smile advanced on us as another parasite rushed the bank of elevators. Silas scooped a hand around me. “Do you have your broach?”
One hand already gripped his golden poppet. My free hand slipped into the opposite pocket as I blearily procured the dangly, silver s?lje. I nodded through glazed eyes. I was loosely aware of the flare of his nostrils as he flinched against my naked body, as if struggling for decency. He pressed me against him as the paint globes of cream and blue pulp and the diamond white of Caliban’s skin ran down the canvas of my inner eyes until I saw only black.