Chapter 11 #2
“Do you feel this?” I whisper, tracing the jagged landscape of his stomach where smooth skin fights for dominance over exposed sinew.
Death looks down at himself, at the abs on his stomach clenching harder the lower his cloak slips. “Yes…”
The lower I go, the faster he breathes.
My fingers hook into the waist of the shadow cloth, giving a tug until—
Bone clamps around my wrist.
“No,” he grinds out, the word fracturing in his throat as he holds me there, suspended inches from…from what?
I look from his desperate, skeletal grip to the fabric straining beneath my trapped hand. Even through the heavy material, I can see the outline. The rigid, unforgiving ridge that betrays him.
“Guess you were right when you said that Death is a man.” I don’t pull against his hold. Instead, I splay the fingers of my trapped hand, running my nails over the twitching thickness of him. “Can you father a child?”
“I—” His breath hitches, a jagged intake of air that sounds like a sheet ripping as his grip eases on my wrist. “I do not know.”
I take the opening. I grip the fabric and shove it down.
Shadows pool at his knees.
Moonlight claims the rest of him.
My breath catches. There’s no bone here.
No rot. No horror. He’s entirely man where it matters, and…
proportionate to his height. His cock is massive—thick and heavy, a pale, veined length that strains upward from a nest of dark hair.
It pulses as the cold air hits it, twitching, hardening further, yet it is so incredibly heavy that it fails to stand fully upright, resting instead with a thick, bobbing weight against his abdomen.
Death looks at me, his chest heaving. He’s rigid under my scrutiny, his body a coiled spring of tension. Black hollows fixate on my face, waiting, watching for the curl of my lip, for the flinch of revulsion.
But the disgust never comes.
“I thought you’d be cold and…decaying.” My hand slides easily from the remnants of his grip as I struggle to wrap it around his length. He’s hot there. Hotter than the rest of him, pulsing with an impossible living existence. “You’re neither.”
My fingers curl, straining to encompass his full girth, but my tips don’t even meet on the other side. It’s an impossible task, trying to hold a god in a mortal hand. So I slide my hand down his length, past the straining root, and lean in closer, cupping the heavy, heat-drenched sack.
Death’s head lolls back against his shoulders, a low, guttural groan tearing from his throat. “Enough…”
“Only I get to decide when I’m done exploring.”
I fill my palm with him, dense and weighty, testing the heft of him as I gently lift. Death hisses, his skeletal jaw unhinging slightly as his hips buck forward, seeking the friction of my grip. He’s starving for this. Just like I thought.
My eyes go to his throat.
Wed him. Bed him. Slit his throat. The words heat my blood, sharper than the strange desire uncurling in my belly.
I tighten my grip, sliding my hand back up the formidable column of him. The motion draws a broken, hissing gasp from his throat, his hips jerking instinctively to meet my palm.
“There was no need to hide this,” I murmur, my thumb circling the weeping head before dragging back down the vein-roped shaft. “Could’ve showed me sooner.”
My hand continues its slow, rhythmic work, stroking him from root to tip, and the effect is devastating. Every glide of my palm pulls a ragged, broken sound from the depths of his chest as our faces drift closer once more.
He tries to turn his away, the sharp angle of his jaw tense with desire. “Don’t…”
“Why not?” I whisper, drifting closer until the tip of my nose brushes against the cartilage of his.
His groan warms the air between our mouths. “You have to stop.”
My lips brush the corner of his human mouth, soft and tentative.
He jerks back, a sharp intake of breath, but I follow him.
I trace the line of his lower lip until I meet teeth.
We hover there, suspended in a terrible, beautiful gravity.
He wants this. Gods, he wants this so much that the heat radiating off him feels like a physical weight.
I squeeze him, hard, at the same moment I tilt my head. His resolve shatters. A low, anguished noise tears from his throat, and he surges forward to bridge the gap.
Our mouths connect.
The right side of his mouth acts as Vale would—lips parting, warm and soft. But the left… The left is a threshold of hard, unyielding ivory. My tongue darts out, tasting the stark difference, sweeping against the smoothness of his exposed teeth.
It should horrify me.
Instead, it maddens me.
The contrast of soft flesh and hard bone is tantalizing.
I moan, the sound vibrating against his skull.
My strokes slow, growing heavier, dragging the skin of his cock tight until he matches my rhythm with a desperate, bucking grace.
I’m lost in it, the scent of carnation, the sensation of bone pressing against my own teeth as I—
Death rips his mouth from mine, heaving. “Enough!”
It isn’t just a shout; it’s an ancient roar that silences the woods and arrests my heart mid-beat—his clenched teeth, those black pits of his eyes wide with something close to panic.
I could argue that I haven’t reached the end of my explorations yet, but what’s the point? Looking at the rigid tension in his frame, I’d be arguing with an earthquake. But that only gives me wiggle room, doesn’t it?
I slowly withdraw my hand, smoothing my skirts with a composure I don’t feel. “Fine,” I say, my voice steady despite the rapid hammering of my pulse. “I’ll consider myself done exploring, if…”
He exhales, a long, annoyed breath. “If…?”
“If you come to one of the orphanages with me.”
His skull tilts, incredulous. “You want to parade Death through a house of children?”
“I wouldn’t mind, but I’m sure the carriage would prefer your Vale costume,” I say. “Agree, and we’re done here.”
Death straightens his neck while shadows knit up along those knees still pressed into the ground, the fleshy side of his mouth thinning. “I will accompany you.”
Then he rises. It’s a sudden, soaring ascent, and yet I see it, the red flutter behind the white of his ribcage. His…heart?
“Wait!” I don’t think. Impulse overrides sanity, moving my arm before my mind can catch up to the horror of what I’m doing. I reach up. No, not up.
Up and into.
My hand passes through the bottom of his ribcage, reaching into the warmth of his chest and straight for an organ that beats wildly against my palm.
Death goes absolutely still, looking down at me with shock-choked eyes. He doesn’t breathe, doesn’t move. He just watches, paralyzed by the intrusion.
“It’s…actually broken,” I whisper, my thumb brushing the scarred, uneven surface of the muscle.
“Destroyed,” he corrects, his voice a hollow shell of sound. “Hanging on by merely a hair of a thread of my last remaining heartstring. The second, I accidentally tore completely in my rage, while the third pulses in your crown.”
I narrow my eyes, squinting in the gloom. “That’s not what I’m seeing,” I murmur, tracing the distinct artery. “The second string is shredded, alright. But the first one…it seems intact. Strong, even.”
Death stares at me, and the black void of his eyes suddenly seems to…deepen? In a blur of motion, he clamps his hand around my wrist and yanks. He pulls my hand out of him, his chest heaving, looking at me with a strange, almost frantic expression that chills me more than any grave ever has.
“Is it… Is it true?” I ask carefully. “Can you really not feel love?”
He swallows. I watch the gray tendon in his throat work, a hard, painful movement. “I feel joy,” he says hoarsely. “I feel… some sadness. I feel blinding anger. And…lust.” His gaze drops to my mouth, darkening for a brief second. “I cannot feel love.”
A profound, aching sadness washes over me, heavier than it should. “What kind of existence is that?” I ask softly. “To live without love?”
Death looks at me for a long moment. Then, his form begins to dissipate. He melts into the night, but the grating rasp of his voice echoes through the clearing one last time.
“A sane one.”