45. Time
Chapter 45
Time
In time, the quiet rhythm that had so comfortingly, so sensually haunted my dreams resolved into the steady sound of Victor’s heartbeat: for the first time, I awakened both in Victor’s bed and in his arms.
At the realization I sighed softly, my parted lips pressing a light kiss to his warm skin. I was unwilling yet to move my cheek from where it rested on his broad, bare chest.
He had kept me.
He knew I had killed—he knew it more certainly than even did I—and he had not turned me away; he had not so much as asked for me to explain what had happened, nor to account for what I had done: instead he comforted me, pleasured me, laughed with me, made love to me.
And then he carried me to his bed, and held me safe—for how long, I could not say: I could not guess the time of day, nor did I know how long we had slept. Time had little meaning in the long, still night of his underground dominion… but the shadowy half-darkness in his chamber was flickering, no longer entirely black, and I watched a red and quavering glow reflect from the veins of ore in the stony walls. The sound of a small fire crackled in the hearth, and it struck me that I was not the first to awaken.
A familiar strong, coarse hand ran gently through my hair, trailing away almost teasingly as I raised my head at last from his chest: Victor was watching me, waiting for me, and when I looked at him his brooding aspect softened into an unhurried smile.
He touched my face, lightly brushing the backs of his rough fingers down my cheek, and when I shifted a little for the simple pleasure I found that my legs were intertwined with his, both of us naked and warm beneath the bedclothes.
“You dreamed,” he said softly.
I felt the rumble of his voice in the pit of my stomach and against my soft breasts, we were so close.
“Of you, sir,” I whispered in reply. “Though I suppose you knew as much already.”
“Not yet.” He touched the backs of his fingers to my temple, then let them drift down my face again. “But that night will come. For now I see only glimpses—intimations of dreams which I know are not my own.”
The intimacy of the notion made my relaxed hand spread against his chest, my palm flat against the warm skin, my fingers pressing through the black hair. “And what did you see last night? Or—this morning, or afternoon, as the case may be?”
That familiar, ominous chuckle echoed faintly from the rough-hewn walls of natural stone. “Afternoon,” he replied, an amused warmth in his deep voice. “I should buy you a clock, if it suits you, until you grow accustomed to reckoning the hour by the feeling of the living earth itself.”
How suddenly my skin grew hot—I knew that my cheeks must have flushed beneath his scarred fingers—and in a mere moment I was fighting back the tears that stung the corners of my eyes. Again he thought so naturally of my needs and wants, anticipating them before even I conceived of them myself, and this time it meant yet more: he was speaking to me as if I lived here now, here forever beside him in his lair beneath the cold London streets; he spoke of it with such nonchalance and lack of introduction, such casual presumption, it was as if he took it entirely for granted that it would be so.
“My Elizabeth,” he whispered; I did not feel the tear that must have slipped down my cheek until I felt him brush it away with his scarred thumb. “You need never hold back for me.”
“I’m home, sir,” I managed breathlessly between quiet sobs of joy, laying my head down against his chest again, my salt tears flowing gently over his dark olive skin as I listened to his heartbeat and let him stroke my hair. “I’m home.”
“Forever.”
“Until I?—”
“—I will not allow even death to part us.”
“That was my dream.”
“That much I know.” I felt his chest rise and fall beneath me, his arms pull me closer. “Tell me more.”
“I had a dream we were immortal,” I began, not yet raising my head. “Both of us. You from the breaking of the Talisman, and I from—” I paused, searching my memory for the rest of the vision before it faded further away. “I don’t know, sir. Some other artifact, I think; some manner of second Lapis Philosophorum—I cannot say for certain, nor whether such a thing exists in the waking world.” I paused then, sniffing as my tears dried. “Is there such a thing? And are you immortal now, sir?”
“There may be,” he replied. “The world is wide, and still more than half-wild. As for me: not until we banish Gremio. Until then, I am the most entirely mortal of men; after that, I do not know. Nor do I know the extent of what was conferred to me by the Talisman, immortality being a condition notoriously easier to disprove than to prove conclusively.” He chuckled darkly at the last, but then relented, stroking my back from my shoulders to the base of my spine as if to ease some tension he sensed he had caused. “But there is still what I have always done. My old method of the past centuries, infernal infamy and all.”
“Making and breaking contracts with the denizens of Hell,” I replied, and I felt the rumble of his approving grunt against my skin.
“Until we determine the artifact of your dream,” he whispered, his strong fingers circling in a tender massage of the small of my back, “contracts can be drawn for two. If you wish, I will teach you my strategies; if not, I will deal for us both.”
“Do they allow such a thing?”
“They will. I will see to that.”
He spoke with at once such warm reassurance for me—and such grim confidence, such pride and defiance of all the worlds above and below and beyond our little chamber in the dark bosom of the earth—that I could not help but believe in him and trust in him with all my heart, the boldness of his claim no obstacle to my faith.
“I have not survived so long,” his deep voice rolled through me, “to be stopped now.”
“What were you waiting for, sir, all that time?”
“I never knew I was waiting for anything.” I felt myself sink deeper into him as he exhaled, his hand stroking languidly, thoughtfully at the base of my spine. “It was a pure lust for life, at first,” he went on, “a desire to continue to feel, and to discover, and to experience—for pleasure in itself, and in mockery of all who had attempted to kill me—a little thrill of the unattainable and forbidden. Then came the satisfaction of the strategy and the challenge, and all the contrarian delights of an infamous, impossible existence. And then, as time passed, the gamble and the game of it all—my winning streak, as it were—the urge to take all past the limit because I had come so far, and to see how long and how far my wits and my strength and my art would hold.
“And yet, for all of that: yes, Elizabeth, I was waiting: waiting with some unformed hope I buried so quickly it could never be used against me, so deeply I could not perceive it even myself. And so I never knew why I was waiting, all those interminable years—” he touched my chin, urging me gently with his rough hand, and I knew that I was meant to lift my head and look into those dark eyes—“until now. And now the answer is before me: you , my Elizabeth. I have never believed in fate, given how many times I have altered my own—but I know now that I was waiting for you .”
And then our lips met again: how it began was a blur of emotion and heat, but there was an ardent hunger in his kiss; his lips parted mine with a warm, insatiable force, and I relented with a shiver and a sigh, stroking my tongue against his, nearly dazed by the suddenness of my own desire as he gripped me and turned over so that I lay on my side still locked in his kiss, sinking deeper into the inescapable embrace of his muscular arms, listening to our quiet sounds of pleasure grow more urgent as I rubbed my swelling breasts against his hard, scarred chest.
But even as my body grew so ready for him again, a gathering unease weighed upon my mind, and to my frustration it began to dull the sensation of his lips and his tongue and his touch. I was the one who pulled away at last, watching the consternation in his eyes as I drew back, my fingers still in the coarse black hair of his broad chest, my parted lips a little swollen from the strength of his kiss.
“I had a terrible thought,” I whispered, closing my eyes so as not to see his, feeling the heaving rise and fall of his chest begin to slow. “A sinking notion I cannot shake.”
By his silence and the touch of his hand on my cheek, I knew he wished me to continue.
“The new Walpurgisnacht on the midnight before the equinox—it’s approaching all too fast, sir. Gremio. The masquerade ball. I have to be prepared for our spell—I have to be ready to banish Gremio with you, and with the equinox so near there’s vanishingly little time for me to learn?—”
From the sound of his quiet grunt of acknowledgement, he seemed so generally unperturbed that until he spoke I wondered whether he had heard what I said. “Then to ease your mind I will teach you, right now, all the rest that you must know.”
“All right, sir,” I replied with a kind of mingled relief and regret, shifting to begin to free myself from his arms and rise from the bed—but his strength did not relent, and I thought that I caught the barest flicker of humor in his dark eyes as he held me fast.
“No. You need not leave yet. This will be theory,” he managed to affect a professorial tone, “not a practicum.”
“All right then, professor.” I relaxed again into his arms. “I’m listening.”
“When the time comes,” he intoned, “you will stand across from me, with Gremio between us. And when I give you the signal to begin, you will do whatever you did to kill Reeve.”
“I cast a circle, as you taught me. The four winds. The four elements. I devised in that moment my own declaration of myself and my sorcery, and proclaimed it as I willed my imagination upon the world.”
“And what was the declaration you devised?”
“When I told Reeve that by my own will I had left the Order, and that he must step aside so that I could collect my things and leave, among his last words were to ask me who and what I was to command him so. I’m Elizabeth Buckingham , I said to him, and I am what I will .” I paused, meeting Victor’s gaze, watching his warm regard for me fill his eyes. “ I am what I will , sir. No sooner had I spoken those five words than I felt their power.”
“Because they suit you so entirely. And I could not be more proud.”
In our shared silence that followed, I allowed his words to sink into my mind, into my heart, and I found one of his hands and gripped it with my own: he accepted me and all that I had done, without condition and without judgement; if after our mutual passion I needed yet more proof, I had it now.
“And then?” I asked, my voice quiet yet expectant, when an inordinate amount of time seemed to have passed.
“ And then what, my Elizabeth?”
“And then, as you are teaching me the theory and process of how we are to banish Gremio together: when I am standing across from you with Gremio between us, and you have given the signal to begin, and I do what I did to kill Reeve—what am I to do after that?”
“And then,” he echoed again, calmly—almost absently—stroking my hair, “you will watch the smoke rise from the hot ash-heap of that horse-faced dunce’s sorry remains.”
I could not help that against all common notions of propriety I found his wickedness endearing, and I do not suppose it surprised him anymore to see the terrible fondness of my smile.
“Brimstone,” he whispered, taking a perverse pleasure in teasing me now, “will never smell so sweet.”
“But are you saying, sir,” I attempted to sober myself, “that I need not practice?”
“No. I am saying that I do not wish for you to practice—that I will discourage, dissuade, and otherwise prevent your practice, to such degree as I am able—because, with Reeve’s death by your art as irrefutable evidence, a deed accomplished so naturally that you were not even entirely aware it had been done—is that correct, Elizabeth?”
“Correct, sir.”
“Then, with Reeve’s death by your art as irrefutable evidence,” he repeated, “in this moment you have already all you need to banish Gremio with me, and likely more—in your body and your mind and your art, in the deepening touch of your liberated shadow—and vital passion has never grown stronger for becoming more mannered, for being practiced until the fury fades into routine. You are prepared. You are ready.” His voice grew lower, and he stroked my hair again. “Let this be one less burden upon your mind.”
“Thank you. At least, in that case, we have more time than I thought.”
“And how would you spend it?”
“With you. Even were it not for my need to remain here for protection—even if the Order were annihilated, or had never come to be, and the world above held no danger for me—my answer would not change: every day, every night, every moment with you.”
We resumed nearly as if we had never ceased, though his kiss was deeper and slower this time, and I gave in to him with the unfettered abandon of relief: all the warm intoxication that my worry once had dulled rushed back to me now twice over, leaving me helpless to do any more than run my fingers through his hair and quiver under the heat of his lips and tongue as they stroked so languidly over the line of my jaw, down my throat and across my collarbone?—
“Even when you’re so terrible a tease, sir,” I whispered between quickening breaths: he had put me onto my back in his soft bed only for his kisses to start over again in their descent, and scarcely had I managed that last word before his lips closed over mine, and he silenced me with a low grunt and a searching, thorough kiss before trailing lingeringly down to my collarbone again. The muscles of my stomach tensed in anticipation as I tried to urge him lower, pressing against his massive shoulders, but I could not convince him to hurry any more than my futile strength could move him a single inch. I felt the hard, heavy length of his erection resting against my leg, and between my spreading thighs I felt myself clench in eager reflex at the thought of him pricking and pushing into me again—but I was gently, pleasurably caught beneath him, and I could only lie back under the weight and the heat of his powerful body as he relaxed me and aroused me so excruciatingly slowly, as if to belabor the point that time was ours, and every moment was to be savored. His shadow seeped into me and through me with every stroke of his massaging hand on my hip, filling me inch by gradual inch with the shivering thrill of his darkness, and when my eyes rolled for the pleasure I felt his cock twitch against my leg, proving his delight at the sight of my surrender. His warm lips drifted down past my décolletage and over my right breast, my bosom already swollen with desire and tingling with his art—and then I heard his groan and my own stuttered gasp as the wet heat of his tongue stroked my tight nipple, swirled around it and then stroked again, as if first he meant only to tease but then lost himself to the luxury of indulgence: his hips flexed slowly in instinct—I felt the warm weight of his prick rub against my leg, the feeling of it on my skin smooth and slick with his desire—and as his mouth closed over my nipple and he sucked so deeply, so relentlessly on my heaving breast I clung to him in fervent desperation, gasping for breath, kneading at his massive shoulders as the thick muscles tensed and then relaxed under my hands, and I felt him growl in hunger over my sensitive flesh. With the last rational corner of my mind I thought to slide one hand down his back, reaching as far as I could—he arched subtly on his indrawn breath, letting the fullness of my ravished breast slip softly from his lips as he turned to lick and suck on the other—and then I endeavored to focus my shadow into my hand as he had done, and from my hand into his hot skin as I drew one finger slowly, slowly up his spine.
What a thrill it was to feel his deep exhalation against my breast: like an involuntary sigh as that powerful, invincible body shuddered almost imperceptibly under the touch of my art, his muscles clenching in a fleeting quiver beneath the skin as he broke into a fine, warm sweat. I could not stop myself—I was too aroused by the sensations of his strong body sinking into pleasure, my thighs parting and trembling under him with anticipation; I was glutted with a sense of power in my realization that I could affect him so—I willed my art deeper through his spine as I trailed my shaking finger higher with a helpless sigh of my own, the deft stroke of his tongue across my nipple growing desperate and slack, as if he were intoxicated by my shadow and his own desire—and by the time my touch reached the center of his upper back I felt such a deep, instinctive flexion of his shoulders, such a heavy twitch of his erection that I thought I had him already.
But Victor’s stamina was formidable. I could sense him battle to endure the sensation that had nearly overwhelmed him as he pulled back and gazed down at me with a look of wild adoration in his half-focused eyes, the muscles of his stomach tight and a sheen of sweat glistening in the firelight on his heaving chest. He was breathing as hard as was I when he knelt between my legs, my thighs tensing in the grip of his strong hands as he spread them inexorably apart, making my quim clench and almost pulse with anticipation. I felt his shadow flood my thighs as they began to tingle and quiver in his massaging hands—and then I heard myself moan as my eyes fluttered and rolled closed, my hands clutching at the bedclothes: he pushed the blunt tip of his bared cockhead across the length of my wet folds and then began to rub it slowly on my aching clitoris in hot, slick strokes, and I lasted only mere moments before my toes suddenly spread and then curled, my mind reeling with ecstasy as a trembling surge of pleasure overcame me. In some dim corner of my consciousness I was at once disappointed and deeply aroused by the thought that my body was already pulsing uncontrollably for him, that I had come too soon—and then I gasped with a shuddering moan: after my first strong pulses the smooth head of his prick slid back down and parted my throbbing quim, penetrating me in time with my own rhythm—pushing in every time my muscles released—and with each contracting clench around his impossible girth he was deeper inside me, deeper still, filling and stretching me as my muscles slackened and relaxed around his immense erection, until I was so soft and dark and swollen between my parted thighs that I could only quiver weakly as the weight of his heavy balls settled against my slick skin.
He paused for me, letting me adjust to him, his cock heaving inside me with every thick, panting breath; with what little strength and presence of mind I had left I wrapped my legs languidly around him, my hands holding onto his thick wrists as he held my thighs apart. My eyes blinked open as they rose to meet his. I wanted him deeper inside me yet, were only it possible, inside me forever, and if I had such power to keep him there, I would never let him go.
I tried to clench around him to pleasure him, to take him in closer somehow, and then he began to thrust: slow, smooth strokes, shallow at first, and then so long and deep and sensual that I began to gasp and to grip at his cockhead every time he nearly pulled out—and to sigh as he slipped in deeper again, inch after unceasing inch of his rigid girth sliding in through my parted folds until I shivered for the sheer length of him. And with every stroke and shiver, the muscles of my thighs tightened a little more in his kneading hands, my own hands gripping harder around his wrists; I tried to look deep into his eyes, to make the moment last, but the sight of him watching me only aroused me all the more, and I felt—incredulously—that despite having been so profoundly and so recently spent, I was nearing the verge of being overcome by him again.
He knew I was getting close—he had to have known—his slow, relentless strokes into me lost none of their depth as they quickened, a quiver rippling through my swollen breasts with the soft impact every time he drove in, and I felt myself squirm against the bed as my tension built, my eyes wandering down his naked body— Victor’s naked body, deep in lust as he made love to me, my wonder and elation at the fact of the scene no less at all for it being our second time. My hands clutched white-knuckled at his wrists, the muscles of my stomach drawing in as I watched the subtle flex of his massive shoulders and muscled arms, the slow rivulet of sweat that slipped from his broad chest down to his sturdy core, the powerful pumping of his thick thighs, but one glance between my legs—one sight of his heavy, veined length sinking into me, over and over again, and in an instant I was gone. I saw my stretched quim flutter and begin to throb around the girth of his shaft before the flood of pleasure even hit me—and when it did I nearly swooned again, trembling and trembling on the bed as my head arched back into the pillow, forcing myself to stay conscious; when I opened my eyes they fixed dazedly on his face, and I was witness to the most intimate, the most erotic sight I had ever seen: Victor’s dark, ruggedly handsome features were clenched, agony indistinguishable from exultation; I had witnessed the expression of a man in his pleasure before, but not like this—never anything like this—his black eyes burned with an unquenched fury, a consuming monomania that lost none of its volcanic fire as it melted, his eyes half-rolled, into a tormented, adoring love, and it was not until then that I truly understood the depth of his obsession.
His muscles rippled with the strain of their tension—and then with a last thrust and a low, halting groan he buried himself inside me as his body shuddered deeply and released, the strong throbbing of his erupting cock filling me with pulse after pulse of his heat, and as the tortured look on his face subsided into a delirium of ecstasy, I thought that I saw the shape of the syllables of my name formed by his breathless lips.
Then the throbbing diminished, and his breathing slowed, and with a deep, soft grunt of satisfaction, his coarse hands caressed my thighs and hips as he began to draw himself out?—
“Please,” I whispered as I squeezed him gently with my legs. “Not yet.”
He looked at me, his eyes still burning as they met mine, and we needed say no more.
With great care he bent down, arching in to kiss me and then gathering me close, and with us still together he laid down on his back on the bed and rested me on his chest, my cheek and my unbound hair against the warm, damp skin, the comfortable weight of his strong arms crossing around me.
Sighing quietly for the intimate sensation of his thick erection easing and relaxing inside me, I shifted closer into his embrace and closed my eyes to sleep.