46. Double Stuffed
double stuffed
—ASHáN
The dream dust felt like liquid lead poured directly into my veins, pinning me beneath a mountain of suffocating sleep. I spent hours screaming into the void, tearing at the chains that held me down, while outside our mind, the scent of her bloom practically set the walls on fire.
She was ready. The altheria was singing in her blood, calling to us, begging us to claim her and plant our seed.
And the whole time, a rogue male sat on our couch while both of us were incapacitated.
I wanted to paint the kitchen walls with whatever silver fluid kept his mismatched limbs attached to his torso.
Instead, Sage gave him a room in the far wing of the house.
I will kill him while he sleeps, I hiss, tendrils of my consciousness whipping violently against Sage’s.
No, Sage shoots back, exhausted as he guides Eden up the stairs. He carried us across the meadow. We owe him a debt, Ashán. Control yourself.
I hate his honor sometimes.
I understand the dust can be disorienting, but you’re being aggressive… even for you.
Disorienting? I rasp. It’s not disorienting, Sage. I was clawing my way out of a grave while you were asleep and oblivious to the enormous male in our house.
Oblivious? His voice hardens. I woke up the second the dust was out of my system. He has his own mate, Ashán. He doesn’t want ours.
Smooth, coming from the man who was about to rip him apart until our mate gave you a sternum rub back to reality.
Sage pushes the bedroom door open and guides Eden inside. Her hands smooth over our chest. Her relief and unshakeable trust flood through our senses, and I know I have no leg left to stand on.
… Maybe you were right about Damien… I mumble. I wasn’t actually going to kill him.
Sure you weren’t, Sage scoffs.
“Ash, you can stop now,” she whispers.
“Stop what?”
“Pretending the only thing you woke up feeling was anger.”
I try to look away, but she catches my jaw and holds me there.
“It was dark, wasn’t it?” she says. “Like before.”
I can’t even muster a lie. My jaw trembles against her fingers.
“You said you’d pull me back. I screamed for you: use the leash. Pull me back. And this time you—” I choke on the rest of the sentence.
A sudden pressure builds beneath our skin, followed by a freezing heat that surges down my arm. A single shadow tendril bleeds out from my wrist.
It’s solid.
It’s me.
A physical piece of the Reaper, manifesting into the world. It wraps loosely around her forearm.
Did you do that? I ask Sage.
No, he breathes. I’m not doing anything. That’s all you.
“I didn’t know,” she murmurs. “When Sage finally went into a deep sleep, I thought you were both at peace… I couldn’t feel your unease.”
“If he had wanted to hurt you,” I choke out. “I wouldn’t have been able to stop him. I was… dead to the world. Eden, I cannot go back into that dark while you’re unprotected.”
She stares at my eye, a well of endless, starless night staring back at her, and brushes a single fingertip along the dark thread wound around her arm.
I feel it. Stronger than I have ever been able to feel her before. When I break through Sage’s skin with my vorí, it hurts. It filters through his nerves as a secondary sensation. When I use my shifted hand to touch her, it is still through his biology. I am always feeling the ghost of her touch.
But this shadow—this is all me.
There is no bone between us. No flesh. No medium holding us apart. It is a literal manifestation of my soul, and as her fingertip drags across its absolute blackness, the sensation detonates through me.
I can feel the ridges of her fingerprint, and the heat of her blood. The tiny, electric static of her life-force jumping directly into my void. It is a sensation so pure and unaltered by Sage’s physiology that my side of our body gives out completely.
Eden lets out a soft gasp as we sink down before her.
“I-I can feel you, Eden.”
A shiver rips through our frame. The shadow pulses and widens under her finger, greedily flattening itself against her skin the way a starving animal presses against the first warmth it has ever been offered.
Ashán, Sage whispers in the back of our mind. She is smitten.
Her fingers tighten on our shoulders.
“I know,” she whispers. “I can feel you too, Ash.”
I press our face forward, resting it against her stomach. The scent of sugared blackberries and sun-warmed earth fills our lungs until my fangs ache.
Easy, Sage breathes. She’s right here. We have all the time in the world now.
That may be true, but I was the half stuck in darkness, and now nothing is holding me back. It’s just her, warm and ripe, life pouring into the coldest part of me like she’s trying to thaw the whole underworld with her bare hands.
I hook one claw beneath the hem of her shirt and drag it upward until the soft plane of her stomach is bared to me. The skin here is warm, glowing faintly gold in the low light. I tease my mouth across her belly, and she shivers beneath my lips.
“Ash.” Her fingers slide into our hair. “Your fangs—”
“I know,” I rasp. “I won’t. I would never. But vresh, ash’kaela, you smell like the only thing that’s ever made me want to be alive.”
“I want them, though.”
My fangs throb like a second heartbeat, and for one blinding moment the whole world narrows to the two inches of air between my mouth and her pulse.
Ashán, Sage warns. She wants you right now. But remember what she asked for when you took her into the void. She wants you to mark her the first time you’ve fully shifted.
I know what she asked for, I snap.
Her pulse is right there. It would be so easy. Just one bite. Sinking my fangs into all that warm, blooming life and finally making her mine in a way no one could ever question.
“Ash.” Eden tips her head back, baring her throat to me. “I can feel that you want to. Don’t stop because you think you’ll hurt me.”
“It’s not that.” The tendril at her wrist slides up to caress her forearm. “You have no idea how badly I want to.” Our face slides from her belly to her neck. “You asked me to wait. In the void. You said you wanted my true form to be the one that marks you. Remember?”
Her breath stutters. “That was before your shadow could touch me on its own.”
Sage must feel my restraint teetering because he forces our eyes closed.
Open our eyes, I growl at him. Let me look at her.
No.
“My shadow isn’t the same, mí’maru.” My voice cracks against her collarbone.
“A piece of me reaching for you isn’t all of me claiming you.
It’s a—a finger through the bars of a cage.
Not the door opening.” The tendril tightens mournfully around her arm.
“When I mark you, I won’t be reaching out of him.
I’ll be standing in front of you. Whole.
My fangs. My venya in your blood. My eyes watching yours when I take you for the first time as only myself.
” A shudder rolls through us. “I will not give you a fraction of myself and call it a gift.”
“Ashán—”
“Please.” The word trembles on the way out. “Do not ask me to break this. Not when I’ve come so far. Not when I can already feel myself becoming the male you deserve.”
Bloodlust howls inside of me, venom pooling so full my gums threaten to split.
The tendril at her wrist surges, and a second peels from our spine, then a third—winding up her arms, across her ribs, cradling her like a dozen cool hands, and through every one of them I feel her, pouring into the void until I think it might finally be full.
Slowly, Sage allows our eyes to open, but he holds the reins just enough to pull our face away from the temptation of her neck.
A desperate whine escapes our throat as I stare at her, our dual gaze locking onto her flushed face. My hands slide down to her thighs, fisting into her t-shirt just to keep from reaching her pulse point.
“Not like this, ash’kaela,” I whisper. “Not when I’m hidden in Sage’s flesh.”
“Okay,” she agrees. “But…”
Her glassy eyes drop to our mouth, delicate fingers sliding to cup our jaw, her thumbs pressing right against the corner of our lips.
“If you won’t bite me tonight…” The scent of sugared berries is so thick it chokes us. “Let me take it from you. Let me drink your venom.”
Gods, Sage stammers in our mind, no longer holding the reins to anything.
This, I rasp. This I can give her.
It doesn’t break a single promise—it only bends toward her, the way I’ve been bending since the first time I clawed my way up into the light to see her face.
Sage. My voice is barely my own. I’m doing this. I won’t bite. I swear it on our vúsha.
Do it, Sage breathes. He relinquishes control of the physical threshold between us.
“I’ll give you every last drop,” I rasp. The tendril at her hip moves fast, sliding lower until it slips between her thighs. “You’ll take my shadow too, won’t you, mí’maru?”
Her breath hitches as her hips tilt forward. The shadow glides closer, tracing her heat through the damp white cotton.
“Please.” She pulls our face down, lips hovering over ours. “I want every piece you’ll let me have, Ash.”
The cool tip of my shadow slides beneath her panties until it finds the slickness covering her pélas.
Her fingers tighten in our hair as it parts her, gathering her valúsha until the shadow glides easily over her kísh.
I press forward slowly, and the first inch of me sinks into the tight heat of her lavína.
She clenches around a piece of my soul that has never, in all my fractured existence, been inside anyone.
I feel everything. The wet drag of her walls.
The flutter of her pulse where she grips me.
The way her body softens and yields, drawing the cold dark of me deeper like she was carved to hold it.
“Ash,” her nails rake down our neck. “I can feel the weight of you filling every empty space inside me.”
She’s validating my absolute reality—that I’m not a phantom, or a curse, but a weight that belongs inside her. The void in my chest bursts open, swallowing her words like a glutton.