Chapter 32 #2
I duck the lunge. His claws rake the air where my head was—close enough that I feel the wind of them across my cheek.
I come up under his arm and drive the blade into the soft tissue beneath his ribs.
Good steel, sharp edge, the angle I've trained a hundred fighters to find.
The blade goes in to the hilt. He screams—a high, broken sound that fills the aerie.
I twist and pull.
He drops.
The other two are on me before the first one hits the furs.
One grabs my arm. His grip is wrong—too tight, too fast, the desperate clutch of something that can smell what it wants and can't think past the wanting. I slash his wrist. He lets go. His blood is dark, almost black, and it smells like the sour venom that's rotting him inward.
The third one is circling. Faster than the others. His broken horns are low, his tail whipping behind him in short vicious arcs.
He's the dangerous one—the one with enough mind left to wait while his companions go first.
I'm bleeding. The first one's claws caught my shoulder on the way down—a shallow gash, burning, the kind that doesn't stop you until the adrenaline fades. My knife hand is steady. My breathing is controlled.
I am standing in an aerie above the wasteland with two addicts circling me and one dead at my feet, and I am the best fighter New Reach ever produced.
The broken-horned one charges.
Corvin lands between us.
His arrival is the sky cracking open. His wings hit the aerie floor like sails snapping taut. His body—nine feet of red muscle, crown horns, absolute violence—fills the space between me and the remaining Stained.
He doesn't roar. He doesn't need to. The territorial display is his body: the wings spread to full extension, the crown horns lowered, the tail uncoiling behind him in a slow deliberate arc.
Every line of him says mine in a language older than words.
The broken-horned one hesitates. That's the last decision he makes.
Corvin's tail strikes. The coil wraps the Stained's throat, lifts him from the floor, holds him at arm's length. The one with the slashed wrist tries to run. Corvin catches him with one hand—casual, efficient, the way he catches canopy prey.
Two kills. Less than three seconds. The Stained are dead before I've lowered my blade.
The aerie is quiet.
I'm on my knees. I didn't decide to be—my legs gave, the adrenaline crashing, the withdrawal underneath it surging up like something that was waiting for the fear to crack the door open. My knife is still in my hand. Blood—theirs, not mine—is on my face, my arms, the furs around me.
Corvin crouches in front of me. The full mass of him folding down, his wings settling behind him, the firelight catching the blood on his claws—theirs, dark and sour-smelling, the wrong kind.
His hands find my face. He tilts my head, his thumbs along my jaw, checking my eyes, my throat, the gash on my shoulder.
His claws are gentle. His touch is deliberate—the careful attention of hands that could break me and choose not to.
"I handled one," I say.
"I know." He's not dismissing it. His amber eyes move to the body at the edge of the furs—the one I killed, my blade still wet with its blood.
He looks at it, then back at me. Something in his expression that isn't surprise.
Confirmation. "Good blade work," he says.
The words come clearly, without effort. He's not reaching for these. He has them ready.
"The other two were manageable."
"I know that too." The corner of his mouth moves.
Not quite a smile—something harder, something that looks like pride wearing the face of restraint.
He's looking at my shoulder now. The gash is shallow but it's bleeding freely, the blood running down my arm in a warm line that drips from my elbow onto the furs.
"You're hurt," he says. Not a question. His voice is low, the tone of it changed from the clipped reading of damage to something quieter. His hands move to the wound. His claws hover over the torn skin, not touching, just close enough that the heat of his fingers reaches me.
Then they slow. He sits back on his heels.
His tail uncurls from his waist and wraps around his own cock.
I watch. My chest still heaving, blood still on my face, the dead Stained cooling around me.
I watch him stroke himself hard with his tail.
The prehensile muscle working his cock—base to tip, the coil tightening on the upstroke, the warm muscle gripping and pulling with the same precise attention it uses on my clit.
His cock thickens in the tail's grip. Lengthens.
The color deepens—flushed, dark, the head swelling as the blood fills it.
His amber eyes hold mine the entire time. Not performing. Just getting ready. Getting hard for what comes next.
I don't look away.
When he's fully hard—the loincloth gone, all of him thick and straining, his cock flexing in slow urgent pulses—he pulls me into the furs.
He fucks the adrenaline out of both of us.
Face-down. His weight braced above me, his massive body mounted behind mine. Not the rut's mindless pounding—something harder, faster, with a cold control underneath the force that is entirely him. His hands pin my hips. His cock drives deep on every stroke.
The wet slap of his body against mine fills the aerie, drowning out the quiet that the Stained left behind.
I come with my face in the furs, biting his forearm, my walls clenching around him in waves that won't stop.
His groan shakes through my spine and into my teeth.
He doesn't stop. He fucks me through the first orgasm, through the second, through the aftershocks that keep my body clenching around him.
He comes inside me with a sound that's more growl than groan, a sound that shakes through my spine and into my teeth.
His hands grip my hips hard enough to bruise—I want the bruises, want the marks, want the physical proof that I'm alive.
That he's alive. That three Stained are dead on the aerie floor because we're both still what we are.
His cock twitches deep, the heat of his cum flooding me in thick pulses I feel against every wall. His tail wraps my waist—tight, possessive, the territorial coil that says mine in a language older than the one he lost.
After, he holds me. His wings fold around us both—the membrane warm against my skin, blocking out the aerie, the dead, the dark canopy, everything but his breathing and the slow steady beat of his heart against my back.
His cock softens inside me by degrees, the prehensile flex going lazy, but he doesn't withdraw.
The Stained are dead on the aerie floor. My blood has dried on my shoulder. The night outside is quiet again, the insects resuming, the stream murmuring below, the canopy settling back into its rhythms as if nothing happened.
"I would have handled all three," I say into the dark of his wings.
His arms tighten around me. His mouth finds the crown of my head—the only place it reaches without effort, the place where his lips land when he isn't thinking about it. "I know," he says. And then, lower: "I wanted to kill them myself."
Not because he doubted me. Because something touched what was his. Because the possessive thing inside him, the thing the mutation gave teeth and claws, wanted to answer the threat with its own hands.
I understand that. I understand it better than I should.
He holds me through the rest of the night. The dead go cold on the floor. His heartbeat goes steady against my spine. Somewhere in the canopy below, the nightbird sings its two notes into the silence.