Chapter 19
Dreven
Nyssa’s orgasm rips through her again as Voren sucks on her cunt like it’s his last day on earth.
Who knows? Maybe it will be. When the slayer returns and the woman retreats, we are all in for a world of trouble.
I should walk away, or I should beat Voren into a pulp, or I should join in.
I do none of those things from the shadows where I watch them.
Voren is clearly pleasing her, and she wants it; that is plain from her screams of pleasure and lack of pushing him away, so who am I to interfere?
I can bask in the knowledge that I got to her first, and Voren is burying himself in her cunt already lined with my cum.
It’s a base, territorial satisfaction, perhaps beneath a deity of my calibre, yet I can’t quite scrub the smugness from my mind.
The shadows curl around me, eager to slither across the floor and join them, to slide over her sweat-slicked skin and remind her who claimed her first. I unleash them.
Voren has had his turn. It’s time to put this slayer to the test before she decides to kick us all back to the Pantheon realm and lock us away for another few centuries.
My shadows are faster than thought, sliding across the damp stone like liquid obsidian.
They don’t ask for permission; they simply take.
A tendril curls around Nyssa’s ankle, cool and solid, while another glides up her inner thigh, teasing the sensitive skin Voren has momentarily neglected.
Nyssa gasps, her head tossing back as the sensation registers. It isn’t the biting cold of the grave, but the heavy, velvet weight of the dark. Voren chuckles. He knew I was there all along.
I step from the corner, letting the glamour fade so I am fully solid, fully present.
“She is wrecked, beautiful, and utterly consumed. You’ve made a mess of her, Voren.”
Nyssa blinks, her amber eyes hazy with lust but sharpening as they find my face. “You were watching,” she accuses, breathless, her chest heaving.
“I am the shadows, Nyssa,” I say, crouching down to trail a finger over her cheek, smearing a drop of rainwater. “I am always watching. But now, I am done watching.”
Nyssa glares up at me, defiant even while sprawled in the wreckage of antique furniture and god-induced lust. “You think you can just step in?” she challenges, though her voice is a wreck, breathless and husky.
“Yes,” I murmur. “The divine energy was sated, but you can feel it rising again, can’t you?”
Voren hisses, but my attention is fixed on Nyssa.
“Divine energy?”
I nod, but offer no more explanation.
“So what?” she manages, her voice scraping against the silence. “I have to bang my way through the Pantheon to stop exploding?”
Voren goes back to sucking on her pussy, and she gasps, arching off the stone floor. I trail my shadows down her body until they are drifting over her clit. She trembles as Voren thrusts his tongue into her, leaving my shadows to tease her.
“Only the ones capable of handling you,” I correct, my voice a rough purr that vibrates through the damp air.
Her hips buck, grinding down against Voren’s mouth while my shadows flick and caress, imitating the rhythm of his tongue.
It’s a sensory overload she can’t fight, no matter how much that stubborn pride of hers wants to kick us both in the teeth.
She is drowning in sensation. It will burn through the divine energy that Voren infused her with when he saved her life.
It was a necessary act, if a little irresponsible.
“This is for your own safety,” I murmur and clap my hands, loud enough to mimic thunder. The three of us land on the faded covers of the bed in Voren’s chosen room.
“What do you mean?” she asks, her voice shaking.
“If you don’t burn off that excess energy, it will burn you,” Voren says.
“You’re just telling me this now?”
“You kind of distracted me by throwing yourself at me,” he points out.
She accepts that as the truth. “So, what now? We fuck until I’m cured?”
“No,” I say. “You won’t survive that. Your mortal body is harbouring a power far beyond your means. We would have to fuck for days for this to burn out of you before you died.”
“And?” Voren asks with a sly smile.
“She would die from the fucking,” I point out, ignoring her moan of protest.
“So, what then?” she says. “I’m dead either way. You should’ve just let me burn up from the supernatural infection. At least I wouldn’t know what was going on!” She pushes herself up onto her elbows, glaring between the two of us. “So, explain to me, in small words, how I’m not completely fucked.”
“We need to siphon the energy directly. Not burn it off through physical exertion but draw it out.”
“Draw it out how?”
“It will hurt,” I murmur and place my hand flat on her chest. Trying to ignore the fact that she smells like sex and sin, I close my eyes and concentrate.
“How come Voren couldn’t do this? Or did he just want a fuck?”
“You threw yourself at me, remember?” he says. “I kind of lost all sense of thought after that.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she grouses.
“Oh, do—”
“Shut the fuck up,” I snap and bear down, trying to latch onto whatever godly power is swirling around her bloodstream and causing her to be not herself.
The energy Voren dumped into her is chaotic, a freezing slurry of the grave that doesn’t belong in a living vessel.
It fights me. It clings to her ribs like barnacles on a hull, refusing to let go of the vitality she burns so brightly.
I push my shadows deeper, past the skin, past the muscle, hunting the intrusion.
Nyssa arches her back, a guttural sound tearing from her throat that is half-scream, half-sob.
“Easy,” Voren warns, hovering close. “Don’t snap her in half.”
This isn’t just extraction; it’s a battle of wills. The energy wants to stay; it likes the fire of her spirit. I have to convince it that I am the darker, hungrier void.
My shadows hook into the icy current. I pull. Nyssa thrashes, her hands scrabbling at my wrist, nails digging in. I don’t relent.
“Look at me,” I command, forcing her gaze to mine. Her amber eyes are wide, dilated with pain and lingering lust. “Breathe, slayer. Give it to me.”
She gasps, her chest heaving against my palm. “It burns.”
“That means it’s working.” I give a sharp tug, and a visible tendril of silver-blue mist leaks from her chest into my hand, dissipating into the darkness of my skin. She collapses back against the mattress, limp and pale, but the frantic, vibrating hum beneath her skin finally goes silent.
Until it doesn’t.
With a screech that could rival a banshee, she flies upwards, through the top of the bed canopy, ripping it to shreds before hitting the ceiling and causing a shower of dust and debris to fall down.
“Uhm,” Voren mutters as we stare up at her. She is clawing at the old ceiling, vibrating with an energy that is neither human nor slayer. Nor is it divine.
“Fuck,” I grunt as she drops suddenly, slamming back into the bed, sending up clouds of dust and the gods only know what else.
Voren and I step back, exchanging a look that screams neither of us knows what in the seven hells is happening to her.
“Well, this is new,” Dastian says from the doorway. “I go out for a bite to eat and come back to find you’ve broken her.”
“We didn’t break her,” I snap, waving a hand to disperse the cloud of plaster dust settling over my leathers. “We attempted a recalibration that went... awry.”
Dastian wanders further into the room, stepping delicately over a splintered piece of the canopy frame.
He’s holding a greasy paper bag that reeks of vinegar and fried potatoes.
“Recalibration? Is that what we’re calling it?
Because from the doorway, it looked like you tried to launch her into orbit. Impressive trajectory, though.”
Nyssa groans, a low, vibrating sound that makes the shadows in the corners of the room recoil.
She pushes herself up from the ruins of the mattress, hair wild and static-charged, standing on end like a dandelion clock in a gale.
Her eyes are wide, glowing with a faint, pulsing luminescence that isn’t the cold blue of Voren’s death magic, nor the dark tint of mine. It’s raw. Volatile.
“I feel...” she starts, her voice echoing strangely, as if she’s speaking from the bottom of a well. She blinks, and a spark of literal electricity arcs from her eyelashes to her cheek. “Like I just licked a car battery.”
“She’s leaking,” Dastian observes, popping a chip into his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. “Chaos. Pure, unadulterated entropy mixed with something I have never encountered before.”
“Well, that’s fucking helpful,” I growl and move closer to Nyssa. I place my hand on her forehead and knock her unconscious with a single thought. She slumps to the bed, her eyes closing, her face going peaceful. Leaning over her, I study her. “She isn’t who she says she is.”
“Meaning?” Dastian asks.
“Meaning,” I say, straightening up and wiping the plaster dust from my hands, “that no mortal, slayer or otherwise, should be able to take a cocktail of death and shadow and turn it into a kinetic explosion without turning into a pile of wet meat.”
I look down at her. She looks deceptively peaceful now, though the air around her still hums like a high-tension wire. A stray spark snaps from her fingertip to the ruined sheet, leaving a tiny scorch mark.
“She didn’t reject the energy,” Voren notes, leaning closer, his pale eyes narrowing as he studies the phenomenon.
“Oh, she did,” I say, looking over my shoulder at him. “At least, whatever is already inside her did.”
“You are saying she isn’t mortal?” Dastian asks, coming closer and throwing his pile of chips on the ancient bedside table. He also leans over her to study her face. “So, what is she?”
“Who knows?”
Voren reaches out, his finger hovering over the spark arcing from her shoulder. “It reacted to my cold and your shadows by creating heat and kinetic force. That’s alchemy, Dreven. Biological alchemy.”
“It’s chaos,” Dastian corrects around a mouthful of chips, bits of salt falling onto the ruined duvet. “Or at least, chaos-adjacent. I like it. She’s like a human firework.”
“She is a danger to herself,” I mutter, brushing a strand of hair from her face. The static stings my fingertips, a sharp bite that travels up my arm. My shadows recoil in confusion. They don’t know how to consume this light she’s generating.
“So, we defuse her somehow?” Voren suggests.
“We contain her,” I correct. Straightening up, I fix her torn and sodden clothes and let the shadows form a protective, suffocating circle around the bed.
“For how long?” Voren asks warily.
“Until she wakes up and blasts the fuck out of you for imprisoning her,” Dastian murmurs, his gaze never leaving her.
“Her lineage is old. The blood of the Firsts is potent, but this? This feels like she unlocked a reserve she shouldn’t have access to. Probably after that abomination earlier infected her, and then Voren cured her.”
“So, this wasn’t me?”
I shake my head. “No, when you cured her, you didn’t leave your mark on her as I suspected. It felt like you, it wasn’t you. It was traces of your godly power that was clinging to whatever is inside her, trying to consume it. It’s a clash, though. Not compatible.”
“Felt compatible enough to me while she was riding my dick.”
Dastian chokes on a chip. “You two are pathetic. I’m the one supposed to be thinking with my dick, and yet it’s the two of you who are falling under her spell.”
Falling under her spell. The words hit me like a blast of icy water.
That would explain my behaviour in her house earlier. I haven’t had sex in centuries. I haven’t touched or been touched in just as long. The mere thought of hands on me makes my skin crawl, and yet I couldn’t keep mine off her.
“You are not compromised by her?” I ask, seriously enough that he looks up and frowns.
“Do I want to fuck her? Yes. She is hot and feisty. Am I about to lose my mind over it? No. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Precisely,” I murmur, turning away from his cavalier attitude to stare at the woman who has effectively unravelled us in less than twenty-four hours. “If she is a vessel for something else, every monster in this realm is going to want a piece of her.”
Voren grunts. “They already do.”
I lock gazes with him. “This is only the beginning.”