Ellie
Something’s waking up in me, and it isn’t him.
I can feel it coming the way you feel a storm before it shows—a pressure behind everything, the edges going sharp. Everything’s louder than it was yesterday. Like someone kept a hand over my mouth for thirteen years and just lifted two fingers to see what I’d do.
There’s a wrongness under my skin. An itch I can’t get at because it’s below the muscle, not on top of it.
The venom sits over the whole thing, warm and thick, the way it’s covered everything since his teeth went into my throat.
But the old quiet, the smooth, the dull, the thing that’s lived in me since I was a kid—it’s wearing thin. And whatever’s under it won’t shut up.
“Okay,” I say to the dark. Out loud. Just to hear it. My voice comes out rough and used. “Okay. Think.”
He shifts behind me. Not awake, just settling, his arm going heavier over my ribs, his breath warm on the back of my neck. His tail finds my ankle and stays there, like he’s keeping his place in me.
“You’re a terrible conversationalist,” I tell him. He huffs—warm against the back of my neck. Somehow that’s an answer. Somehow it’s more than I expected from the thing that carried me up into the dark.
I breathe him in. I can’t help it, my face is against his chest and the smell of him fills me up on every inhale, and it’s nothing like the Cage.
The Cage smelled of nothing. Approved nothing: clean linen, the floral steam off the cup, air scrubbed of anything that might mean something.
He smells like a whole world. Warm skin and woodsmoke with no fire anywhere near, and under it something green, dark, and alive, like he soaked up the deep places he lives in until they started living in him.
When he breathes out, the musk of him goes deeper.
When he breathes in, the green note lifts.
I lie there and read him through my nose the way I used to read a room by the slant of its light, and the thought that comes is almost embarrassing in how small and new it is: I have never once in my life been let to smell anything this much.
And then, quiet, underneath it—the thought that should have come first.
I could leave.
He’s asleep. The rut’s gone quiet. I’ve got arms, I’ve got legs, and somewhere up above us there has to be an opening, a way back into a world I can’t see.
The thought arrives wrapped in cotton, the way the tea used to wrap everything, soft enough that I can hold it out at arm’s length and just look at it.
A day ago I’d have been clawing for that opening with everything in me.
I don’t move.
I tell myself it’s the dark, that a body that can’t find a wall in the black doesn’t make it ten feet out there, that the canopy’s full of things with teeth.
All true. None of it the reason. The reason is the warm weight of his arm over my ribs and the smell of him in my whole head and the awful new fact I’m not ready to say even to the dark: that the safest I have ever been in my life is right here, pinned under a monster, and I don’t know yet what that makes me.
So I stay. And I keep talking to the dark instead, because that I know how to do.
I keep talking. Quiet, to myself, because there’s no one else down here and because the Cage never let me.
“There’s a thing in my head that still sounds like the lessons.
Divine union. Sacred bond. The body fights what the soul already knows.
” I almost laugh. “Drink your tea. Stay safe. Stay sweet.”
There’s a second voice that’s just the venom. Stop thinking. This feels good. Let it.
And under both of them, a new one. Quiet and a little mean. What if everything you ever felt got poured into you out of a cup? What if you only know the wanting’s real because the stuff hiding it finally wore off?
I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure I want one.
For half a second, between one peak and the next, a little girl comes up out of me.
Seven, maybe. Standing in dry grass behind some building I can’t name anymore.
I’ve found a beetle shell, the whole thing, empty, the bug long gone but the shape still there, every leg, thin as paper.
My mom says it’s just a shell. Says they leave them behind.
I don’t want it explained. I take it inside, set it on the windowsill, and check it every morning without knowing what I’m looking for.
Turns out I was learning what it looks like when something climbs out of itself and walks off as something else.
Then the next surge rolls in and takes her under.
His breath shortens. The wire pulls tight through him. I know what that means now.
I brace and it doesn’t help.
He drives up into me and the air leaves me in a sound I don’t choose.
“Aah!” He’s so big the stretch of his cock is the whole world for a second, that first deep shove splitting me open around more than my body’s decided it can take.
No working up to it. He’s just in, all the way, and my back bows off his chest.
Then he moves, and feeling him move is worse. Better. I can’t tell anymore.
Every drag out leaves me empty, clenching after him.
Every drive back fills me past full. I feel his cock forcing my walls apart, the thick of it, the heat of it, the slick of my own body letting him in with a wet sound that fills the dark each time he pulls back and slams home.
I’m soaked. I can hear it. I can hear me.
His cock shifts inside me, curls, presses, finds the spot near the front of me that makes my whole body jerk, and stays on it. Drags over it. Again. My hips push back into him without asking me first. I’m chasing it. I hate that I’m chasing it and I do it anyway.
“Oh—oh god—”
The knot’s swelling at the base. I feel it build against me with every thrust, fatter each time, pushing at the rim of me, asking in. The stretch starts to burn, a bright line of too-much right at the edge, and my body opens for it because it doesn’t know what else to do with him.
Then his wings open over us.
The air changes. The sealed-in hush cracks wide, his breathing bouncing off something huge, the dark going tall above me. All that reach, held up by the same muscle pinning me down.
His chest fills. He drives to the root and holds.
He roars. “RRRAAAHH!”
It goes through the walls, through the furs, through me, through the knot buried in me, so I feel the sound in the place where we’re joined. My ears ache with it. And right there, with him locked deep and roaring and the vibration climbing my spine into my skull, I break.
I come so hard the dark goes white behind my eyes.
“Aaah!” My walls clamp down on him in waves I can’t stop, gripping the knot, and it sets and seals and locks us together while I’m still going.
Then the knot shakes to life against the spot it’s locked over, and the coming won’t stop, one peak folding into the next while his cum floods me, the fullness tipping me past anything I’ve got words for.
His cock kicks, and his cum spills into me, hot and thick and sealed in, the pressure swelling deep behind my navel until I’m packed full of him. He shudders over me, all that weight emptying. “Grraah.” His mouth drops to the crown of my head.
I’m crying. Not from pain, the venom turns that into a neighbor of good, the burn folding into the pleasure until I can’t pull them apart. I’m crying because the roar cracked something open in my chest and I’ve got nowhere to put what came out.
The wings fold shut. The tall dark drops back to the small warm dark, and he’s just a shape again instead of something that could black out a sky.
His breath rasps against the top of my head.
“I’m okay,” I get out. My voice is shot. “I’m okay. That was just—that was a lot.”
A sound rolls out of his chest. Low. Not a word. But it answers me. His tail comes up and wipes the wet off my cheek, clumsy and careful at the same time, and I let it.
The lull settles over us slow.
I reach up. I want to know what made that sound.
Past his jaw, up to the top of his head, and there they are.
His horns. The left one curves back smooth, the whole line clean under my fingers, sweeping to a point.
I find the tip. Sharp. I think about the scrape of stone the night the wall came open.
This is what made that noise. This is what came through the rock to get to me.
The right one’s wrong.
I find the break partway up—a jag, a chunk gone, the edge rough where it should be smooth. The curve just stops and turns into an angle, shoved forward instead of back. I keep my fingers on the rough part.
“Someone broke this,” I say. Quiet. “It didn’t grow this way. Something snapped it.”
He goes still under my hand.
“And nobody set it. It just—healed however it could.” My thumb moves over the bad edge. “By itself.”
His breath has gone careful.
My hand drifts down without me telling it to. Down the thick column of his neck. And there’s a line there. Raised. Even. Running side to side across the softest part of him, too straight to be a fight, too neat to be an accident.
“Who did this to you?”
The hum stops dead.
His throat works under my fingers. A sound climbs it and breaks apart halfway—a low snarl with no word in it, aimed at nothing I can see. Whatever he wants to say, his mouth won’t make it. Then nothing.
The quiet is enormous. I’ve hit something. I pull my hand off the line and lay it flat over his heart instead, and his heart is going hard and fast, and that’s an answer too.
His hand comes up. Closes over mine—swallows it, my whole hand gone inside his grip—and holds it there. On his heart. Off the scar. He’s not pushing me away. He’s just moving me. Telling me where he can stand to be touched and where he can’t, the only way he’s got.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay. Not there. I hear you.”
The hum starts back up. Shaky, then steady. His thumb drags once across the back of my hand, rough and slow, and stays.
I don’t push it. Whoever you were before all this, somebody owned you. Somebody put a blade on your throat just so you’d never forget who was holding it. I don’t know the whole story. I know that much.
The Cage told me his kind are divine instruments. Weather with teeth. Things that happen to you, with nothing going on inside.
The Cage lied about the tea. The Cage lied about me. I’m starting to think it lied about him too, and that not one thing they ever taught me is going to make it out of the dark in one piece.
There’s a heat in my chest that wasn’t there this morning.
Small. A coal. It’s not the venom. It’s not the wrongness. It’s under both, in the spot the tea kept flat for thirteen years. It’s warm. It’s mine. I don’t have a name for it. It lit while my fingers were on his broken horn. It got brighter when I worked out what the line on his throat was.
Some of it’s for him. Some of it, I think, is for me.
His arm tightens over my ribs. The hum drops lower, like he can feel the coal catch, like some part of him knows something’s changing in me and he’s holding steady while it does.
I breathe with the sound and the coal glows.
I keep the beetle shell behind my eyes, the empty, whole thing on the windowsill, the shape a body leaves when it climbs out and goes on as something else. I think I’ve been the shell a long time. Smooth. Whole. Hollow. Checked every morning by hands that liked me best when there was nothing in me.
Something’s climbing out of me down here.
I don’t know what it’ll be yet. But it’s awake, and it’s mine, and it is not going back in the cup.