Chapter 23 #2
The heat was shocking, perfect, enveloping him to his chest as he sank down. He let his head fall back against the porcelain rim, his eyes closing, his muscles surrendering by degrees.
Alessia poured water over his hair, her fingers working shampoo through the strands with gentle thoroughness, her nails scraping against his scalp in a rhythm that bordered on hypnotic.
Then her hands moved to his shoulders, kneading the knots there, the tension that had coiled like serpents beneath his skin.
Fly let himself drift, his mind wandering through the corridors of memory and magic.
Again, his mind filtered through that first time at the font when it had given her immense strength, transformative grace, the ability to become the owl, to see through eyes that transcended human limitation.
She had become something more than mortal at that moment, something tethered to the old magic, to the Veil itself.
The entire glade had lit up with it, the trees glowing from within, the air thrumming with potential energy, with the promise of completion. For one breathless moment, the font knew her…and him?
Then it stalled.
Like a key cut almost right, bumping against the pins, refusing to turn that final degree, leaving them stranded on the threshold with salvation visible but unreachable.
The water had cooled, the steam long since dissipated into the shadows of the bathroom.
Alessia's hands slid from his shoulders down his chest, her palms flattening against his sternum, and then she was moving, rising from her kneeling position, her body arching over the rim of the tub.
She found his mouth with hers, the kiss deepening with an urgency that spoke of fear and need and the relentless press of mortality.
Fly rose from the water, droplets cascading down his abdomen, his thighs, every inch of him exposed and seen and wanted.
He was fully erect, the arousal immediate and aching, born from exhaustion, adrenaline, and the desperate need to feel alive in his own skin.
Alessia dropped her dress and undergarments and went to her knees before him, her mouth hot and wet and devastating, and the pleasure took him like a current, disconnecting him from the machinery of his mind, reducing him to pure reaction, pure sensation, her tongue and the hollow of her throat working him with devastating need.
When he couldn't take anymore, his fingers tangled in her hair with desperate force, and he dragged her up, water sluicing between their bodies, pinning her against the tiled wall.
Her legs wrapped around his waist, her heels digging into the small of his back, and he drove into her with a single, savage thrust that tore a cry from her throat.
He fucked her against the wall, the rhythm hard, punishing and necessary, each collision of their bodies a denial of death, a claiming of what he needed at this moment, meaning.
When she began to tremble, when her nails scored his shoulders and her head fell back against the tile, he shifted his angle and pressed his thumb between them, working her with rough, knowing circles until she broke apart around him, her climax pulling his own from him in shuddering, endless waves.
After, when they were both spent and shaking, when he had lowered her to unsteady feet and wrapped her in a towel that smelled of eucalyptus and them, he carried her to the bed.
The sheets were cool, the pillows deep, and he slid in beside her, pulling her close until her back pressed against his chest, her hips nested into his, her head beneath his chin.
His fingers traced idle patterns along her arm, the skin velvet-soft, the muscle beneath trembling with aftershocks.
"Sleep with me, sweetheart," he whispered against her hair, his voice hoarse, stripped of everything. "I need you."
She murmured something unintelligible, already drifting, her body relaxing by degrees into his embrace.
He held her, feeling the rise and fall of her breathing synchronize with his own, the warmth of her seeping into the hollow places the vision had carved out.
Alessia sighed in her sleep, a soft, trusting sound, and Fly leaned over to kiss her again, her mouth soft and giving even in dreams, her tongue meeting his in lazy exploration.
He pulled back slowly, his lips lingering against her temple.
He slipped deeper into slumber, holding Alessia, her warmth soothing him even as his mind drifted into the space between waking and dream.
Alessia was sweet, kind, and willing, but she would never challenge him.
How good it must feel to find a woman who stirred a man’s body and soul, like Flash had found, like the completeness he'd witnessed tonight between two people who fit each other like puzzle pieces carved from the same stone.
Hours later, between his dreaming and waking states, feathers rustled. He shifted, downy softness sliding across his naked back. Something pushed at him like updrafts, an overwhelming urge to spread his wings and fly.
Deep in his mind, the memory of the font was spinning. The Tumi. The gray stone. The shared pain. The mingled blood. The pieces were sliding across the tactical map of his brain, threatening to connect but lacking the proper altitude to see the whole grid.
Suddenly, Fly jolted awake, his eyes snapping open in the dark.
Behind his shoulder blades, the air violently superheated.
With a sharp, electric snap, the phantom wings erupted from his back, casting massive, spectral shadows across the ceiling.
The feathers rustled with a frantic, low-pressure hum, kicking up a literal wind in the closed bedroom that stirred the curtains.
The kite energy was roaring through his veins now, desperate, claustrophobic, and demanding release.
Alessia stirred beside him, blinking against the sudden, shifting air currents. She looked at the translucent, powerful wings flaring from his shoulders, then shifted her gaze to his eyes, her fingertips brushing his arm one last time to absorb the worst of his tremors.
"You need to take to the sky," she whispered, her voice calm in the center of his tempest.
The logic of her words hit him with absolute necessity.
He lunged out of the bed, his bare feet hitting the hardwood as he quickly dressed in a pair of shorts.
Driven by pure, instinctual momentum, he rushed across the room, threw open the double doors to the balcony, and sprinted straight into the cool night air.
Without a second of hesitation, he threw himself over the stone railing, plunging into the empty drop below.
For an exhilarating split second, he fell through the darkness.
Then, the kite energy detonated.
With a blinding flash of golden light and a sharp, explosive crack that echoed across the estate grounds, his human form dissolved.
The phantom feathers turned solid, the wings caught a massive, sweeping updraft, and Fly burst into his full Veil form, soaring upward into the moonlit sky to finally look down at the pattern.
The initial shock of the detonation dissolved into a breathless, sweeping rush of pure human awe.
Fly wasn’t falling anymore. He was rising, cutting through the night like a spear thrown toward the stars.
The suffocating claustrophobia of the bedroom vanished, replaced by the endless expanse of the Peruvian night sky.
A manic, wild joy flared in his chest, a sudden, electric realization that this time, no one was pulling him back.
The last time he had taken this form, the sky had been stolen from him by that flying assassin, Vertigo, cut short before he could even learn the shape of his own wings.
Now, the wind was his. He let out a sharp, piercing cry, a pure kite’s screech that echoed over the valley, an absolute shriek of triumph.
For three glorious heartbeats, he just felt the sky, his feathers drinking in the icy drafts, his body drunk on the sheer velocity of the ascent.
Then, the boundary layer of his mind shifted.
The human euphoria crested and cooled, instantly giving way to a familiar, deep-seated ease.
The wild joy locked into place, weaponized by years of Navy SEAL conditioning.
The chaotic rush of the wind suddenly became an array of tactical data points.
His heart rate plummeted into a steady, predatory rhythm.
The awe hardened into an icy, impenetrable calm.
Fly stopped fighting the air currents and began to budget them.
He tilted his primary feathers, reading the thermal heat bleeding off the estate's stone structures below, and flared his tail to arrest his vertical climb.
In an instant, the ecstatic civilian flyer was gone.
In his place hovered the ultimate aerial recon platform, predatory, invisible, and locked entirely onto the mission.
High above the estate, the wind ceased to be an obstacle and became a tactical readout.
Fly tilted his primary feathers, arresting his ascent, and let the thermal updrafts lock him into a perfect, motionless hover.
His human mind was gone, replaced by the hyper-accelerated processing of the kite.
His crimson eyes scanned the earth below, but he wasn’t looking at the terrain. He was looking at the grid.