Ellie
It comes for us in a lull, and I feel him know it before I know anything at all.
We’ve been sealed together so long I’ve stopped thinking of us as two separate things.
The knot holds. His cock rests soft and huge inside me, the rut banked down to embers between surges, his arm heavy across my ribs, the dark warm and total and smelling of us.
And that’s the thing. I’ll understand it later.
The smell of us. Weeks of it pouring out of the nest into the canopy like a signal fire.
Sex, venom, blood, the cum that’s been keeping me fed.
A beacon, in a world full of things that hunt by scent.
I’m half under, drifting in the place between sleep and the next surge, when his body turns to stone around me.
Not the rut-tension, not the wire that pulls taut before he takes me.
This is colder. Every muscle locking at once, his breath stopping, his arm going from heavy to a band of iron across my ribs.
His head lifts off the furs. And a sound starts in his chest that I’ve never heard from him—lower than the hum, older, a vibration that isn’t for me.
A warning. The thing a predator makes when a bigger dark moves into its dark.
“What—”
His hand covers my mouth. Not rough. Final. Quiet.
Then I hear it.
Something in the passage. Big. Bigger than the small busy things that click through the wood at night, this is mass, weight, the slow drag of a body that fills the space it moves through.
Claws finding purchase in heartwood. A wet, heavy breathing that isn’t his.
And a smell rolling ahead of it that turns my stomach, rot and musk and old kills, the breath of a thing that eats and eats and has come down here following the scent of us, weeks of the beacon we’ve been pouring into the dark.
It’s coming for the smell. For the source of the smell.
For us.
I can’t see it. I’ve never been able to see anything down here, and now the blindness is a hand around my throat.
I’m naked, pinned, sealed onto a body in a dark where something the size of a nightmare is dragging itself toward me, and I can’t see it, and all I can do is feel his heart slam against my back and the warning climbing out of his chest into a snarl.
He doesn’t pull out of me.
That’s the thing I’ll keep, after. He could.
The lull’s loose enough—he could leave me, meet it on his feet, fight it free.
He doesn’t. He folds his wings around me instead, the membranes sealing me against his chest, a wall of him between me and the dark, and he keeps me on him, sealed and shielded, and turns the both of us to face the thing in the passage as one body.
If it gets to me, it gets through every inch of him first. He decides it the way he decides everything—completely, without a flicker.
It hits us, and the world becomes noise and motion in the black.
I feel the impact through him, the slam of a body into his, the jolt of it traveling down his spine into the place where we’re joined, so I feel the fight in my own pelvis, in my teeth.
He roars, and it’s nothing like the rut-roar.
“RAAAGH!” It’s all rage. His free arm moves.
I feel the muscle of it work against me, the wrench of his shoulder—and somewhere in the dark his claws find skin and something screams that isn’t him.
His tail leaves my thigh. I feel it whip out, the loss of its weight, then a wet sound of it wrapping something, crushing, a shriek that climbs and breaks.
The thing fights back. A claw rakes. I feel him flinch, feel a hot line open on the arm wrapped around me, his blood running warm down over my hip—and the snarl that comes out of him then has murder in it.
He drives the thing back. I feel every motion of it through his cock still seated inside me, the two of us one body, him fighting and me sealed to the center of him with the violence ringing through my bones.
And then, for one heart-stopping second, it’s almost on me.
Something cold and wet and reeking lunges past his guard, a snout, a claw, I can’t tell, I can’t see, and the air moves against my bare skin and the stink of old kills washes right over my face, close enough to taste.
A sound comes out of me that isn’t a scream only because I’ve got no breath left to make one.
His whole body slams sideways to put himself back between us, hauling me with him on his cock, and whatever it was rakes down his shoulder instead of my throat.
He gets a forearm across my chest and crushes me back into him, walls me off behind the whole front of his body—and the sound that tears out of him then is past murder.
It’s terror. His. For me. The biggest thing in my dark world, and I’ve finally heard it afraid, and it’s afraid of losing me.
I don’t scream. I bite down on the heel of his hand still over my mouth, and I hold on, and I feel my mate kill something in the dark with me locked inside him.
It takes a long time, or it takes seconds—the dark eats time. There’s a final wet crunch, bone, something that was a skull, and then a weight drops, the dragging breath stops, and the passage goes quiet except for the two of us breathing hard.
He doesn’t move for a long while. The snarl winds down by degrees. His wings stay closed around me. His heart hammers against my back. His blood cools on my hip.
“Is it—” My voice shakes. “Is it dead?”
A sound from his chest. Low. Spent. Yes.
His wings ease open. The cooler air of the passage touches my skin.
Somewhere out there the bulk of the thing he killed lies cooling, and I will never see it, and I’m glad.
I have enough of it from the smell, the sounds, the feel of the fight ringing through our joined bodies. I don’t need its face.
“It came for the smell,” I say, working it out aloud the way I do. “Us. The rut. We’ve been—” A signal, in the dark, for weeks. “We’ve been telling the whole canopy exactly where we are.”
A grunt. He knew. Of course he knew. He’s been listening to the dark the whole time, one ear on me and one on the things that might come for me, and tonight one of them came.
And then the rut comes back up through him, fast, the way it does, the adrenaline, the fury, the simple animal fact that the thing that smelled his mate is dead and she’s still here, still sealed to him, still his.
His cock hardens inside me in a rush. His hands find my hips, and there’s blood on them, his and the thing’s, and I don’t care.
My whole body’s still wrong with it. The adrenaline hasn’t drained, my heart slams so hard I feel it in the soles of my feet, every hair on me lifted to read a dark that’s already gone quiet.
And all of that, all that terror with nowhere left to go, pours straight into wanting him.
His blood’s warm and slick where it’s smeared between us, tacky on my hip and down my thigh, and instead of turning my stomach it lights the fuse faster.
I’m shaking, not from fear anymore, but from the sheer overflow of a body that braced to die and didn’t, with the proof of it buried inside me, still snarling, still mine.
He takes me hard, there in the dark beside the cooling body of the thing that came for me, his blood slicking my skin and the snarl still living in his chest, and it should horrify me and it doesn’t.
It’s the most alive I’ve ever felt. His cock fills me, his cum sealing hot behind the knot as it swells and locks us, and I understand something about the dark I’m in: it is full of things that would eat me.
I’m sealed inside the worst of them, and the worst of them would die before he let any of the others touch me.
The knot swells and locks, and it shudders against me, a deep merciless thrum I can’t get clear of, and I come apart on him with the kill not ten feet away.
“Aah! Aah!” It won’t let me stop. I come and come while his cum floods me, on and on until there’s nothing left in me to give.
He holds me through it, his wings folding back around us, the warning-sound finally gone and the hum coming up in its place—low, warm, mine.
“Anything else out there?” I whisper.
He listens. A long moment. Then his arm tightens, and the hum deepens, and I take that for the answer it is.
Nothing that’s getting through me.
I sleep sealed to my monster, his blood drying on my hip, the dark full of teeth and him between me and all of it.