Chapter 42 Mother of Thy Serpent #2
“Why?” Niklaus is quiet. He doesn’t yell, but that’s because fury lives in the weight of his tone.
Apple May blinks a few times. “I couldn’t sleep.”
I’d laugh if this weren’t so fucked up.
“You are fucking crazy,” Niklaus says.
“Pot kettle, baby.” Meridei’s mother flips her hair over her shoulder. “Back to business. I need you two to finish so that I might be able to finish. Understand?”
I scramble toward the bed, scared and desperate to reach Niklaus. I have a bad feeling. This insane woman has something up her sleeve, and I need to tell him this before it’s too late.
My weak hands find Niklaus’s shoulders, and I pull my lips to his ear.
“Whatever she forces us to do, you have my consent, okay? Whatever we need to do to survive this—you have it, okay?” I whisper frantically, eyes growing misty as he stares back at me. I’d never hold any of this against him. We’re in a place we’ve only ever read about like a scary folklore story.
The Emerald Lake Asylum has come back to life.
And it’s claimed us as it’s forgotten son and daughter. Anything that happens in this place—anything we have to do—it’s for survival. Nothing more.
Niklaus stares back into my eyes. “You’ve always had mine.”
I’m stung in the side of the neck. The bite is small, pointy, sharp. It’s a poke that stays in place for several seconds before a sudden release.
I wince, and Niklaus’s face darkens before his focus cuts to a space over my shoulder.
“What did you do to her?” Niklaus snarls.
“Oh relax, gorgeous. She’s going to thank me for this modest boost in a moment,” Apple May chimes, clapping her hands together in a manic uproar of excitement.
I sink to the floor, but Niklaus extends himself as much as he can to keep me close to him. With a few blinks, I almost smile at him in respite. I don’t feel anything. Was it supposed to be poison? Something to make me sick again?
“Spitfire?”
“I’m okay. I’m fi—”
A blast of heat spreads from my lower belly to the sensitive space between my legs before I can finish my sentence. I feel betrayed by my own body. It leaves my legs trembling and my back arching.
“Hey. Look at me.” Niklaus dips his head to get my attention. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”
My mouth falls slack, and I wage a war in my head to regain control. To ignore that flutter, that bizarre stirring inside me to be touched. To touch him.
I can’t hide it either. My breathing is heavy and loud. My thighs pinch together as I begin rolling my hips and undulating around air. It feels so good to chase this feeling, to squirm and grip the sheets on Niklaus’s bed.
“I—”
My pulse stammers as I finally look up at him through heavy lids.
And fuck, how did I not see it before? How did I not realize how handsome he is?
That serious look on his face. The way his scorching, infinitely blue eyes track my every move.
I reach out and touch his facial hair. The prickly texture charges me with a typhoon of electricity.
Oh god! I want to feel it against my lips. I want to kiss his cheek, his jaw…
“Your eyes are saucers, Sapphire.” Niklaus goes pin straight and stares at Meridei’s mother with ferocious distain. “Give her something to make this stop!”
“You should be thanking me, ungrateful man,” Apple May hisses.
I whimper pathetically, running my hands up and down my thighs as I try to relieve the downpour of arousal being pumped into every cell of my body.
Niklaus glances down at me, pinching his eyebrows together, and exhaling loudly through his nose.
Is he angry with me? I don’t want to upset him. Have I done something wrong?
“Niklaus, I’m sorry…” I pant, continuing to grind against nothing.
“You’re sorry?”
“You’re mad at me. Please, tell me how to make you feel good. Don’t be mad. Please!” I’m desperate. Hungry. And I haven’t an ounce of dignity to keep me from begging.
“I’m not mad at you.” He looks down at me again as I wedge myself between his knees. His gaze darkens once more, and he curses.
Apple May is suddenly kneeling next to me. “Didn’t it feel good when he fingered you, Mrs. Valdawell?”
I nod like an eager puppy, bouncing up and down.
“Mmm-hmm, I thought so. Don’t you want to touch him now? Make your husband feel so good too?”
“Yes!” I moan excitedly. “Yes, I want to make my husband feel good.”
“Prove it to him. Touch a place on his body you’ve been dying to feel all day,” Apple May suggests.
My eyes redirect to Niklaus’s stomach. Without another thought, I do as she says. My hands slip under his white shirt, and I run my fingers over his warm skin. I moan loudly as his strong abdominal muscles flex and harden.
Desire floods my veins and makes my vision vibrant and vivid.
“Christ,” Niklaus says. His knuckles turn white, and I can’t tell if he’s holding his breath or just not moving.
“How does that feel?” Apple May asks.
“So warm. I want him so badly.”
I flash my pleading gaze up to Niklaus, and every emotion whirls through me. His stare unearths me. It’s my safe place. My home. I never want to stop looking at him.
“Apple May.” My husband raises his chin in defiance. “I am begging you. Please, don’t make her do this. You want me? Fine. Control me. Not her.”
Apple May taps her fingers to her chin. “I’ll tell you what.
Mrs. Valdawell? Why don’t you run your hands over your husband’s cock?
While his pants are still on of course. If he isn’t hard for you, I’ll put an end to this right now.
When I inject you with a special counter drug, you won’t feel this strange burning desire anymore. Okay? Fair enough?”
My heart rate picks up as I feel terror at the idea of this ending. Of Niklaus not being hard for me. Not experiencing any type of arousal to my touch, to my waist pressing between his knees. But as my attention falls to his pants, my mouth begins to water.
“That. Isn’t. Fair,” Niklaus whispers in a gravelly, unwell voice.
I’m no longer listening, because as my quivering hand lowers, I make contact with his hard cock. It twitches under the light weight of my hand. A new burst of endorphins explodes in my veins because he groans with me, enveloped in this shared euphoria.
“Ahhh. Wouldn’t his cock feel so nice in your mouth, Mrs. Valdawell?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.” I hardly notice Apple May touching herself as I fumble to unzip his pants.
“Wait. Fuck, Spitfire…” Niklaus wraps his hands around mine, momentarily stopping me in my tracks.
“He’s right, eager little girl. You can’t just have whatever you want. You need to tell him how badly you want it. Beg your husband for his cock.”
It takes several moments for her words to reach my brain. Because his hands are holding mine. The delicious warmth from his palms spreads into my ice-cold fingers. I want to kiss them, I want them under my gown, feeling my breasts.
“Mrs. Valdawell!” Apple May scolds irritably. “Beg your husband to lick his cock.”
“Please, baby. Please, God, I need you to fill my mouth!” I rock back and forth impatiently, a little surprised at myself because I’ve never called him that before. “I’ll be so good for you. I’ll swallow and take all of you. I promise. Please I’ll make you feel so good!”
“So help me God, Spitfire…” Niklaus groans, dropping his head back with an aggravated exhale. “Yes. Okay. Fuck.”
Bliss fires through every pathway in my brain, and I unzip his pants, nearly crying in delight as his long cock stands up for me. I act on instinct, running my tongue from base to tip, savoring the taste of his skin.
Niklaus’s pulse races and so does his breathing.
This spurs me on. I lick again and again, making a mess as I begin to drool from the hunger building.
I’m insatiable, ravenous, feral. Each move he makes from the pleasure of my touch is another concentrated dose of ecstasy for me.
It’s as if his reactions control my puppet strings. He moves, I move. He moans, I moan.
“You are so beautiful,” Niklaus murmurs as if he’s in pain. “I am so sorry, Spitfire.”
“Enough teasing! I want to see you suck it.” Apple May snaps her fingers.
I look up at Niklaus from under my eyelashes and slide my mouth over the tip of his cock, desperate to do this however he wants it done. I want to please him so badly, I could come without being touched if he comes in my mouth.
Niklaus growls, and I know I’ve summoned the animal in him. Despite the war waging behind his eyes, he wants this. He’s given in to how good my wet mouth feels as I suck more and more of him past my lips.
“Oh yes! Atta girl. This is far more erotic than the patients I’ve done this to in the infirmary!” Apple May’s voice gets higher as she shakes her hand faster, getting closer to climax.
…than the patients in the infirmary.
Wait. I know this woman, don’t I?
Hey, Ruthie, didn’t you have a run-in with her mother?
It was a conversation at our last family dinner.
Apple May, yes.
You did?
At the infirmary during my recovery. She really had it out for me.
The cosmic darkness that used to rest under my thoughts like a sleeping giant, resurfaces at this memory.
The part of me that can travel through time.
I thought it died from the torture and electroconvulsive therapy.
But it stretches its wings, and slowly, it begins to eat away at whatever Apple May injected me with.
I remove my mouth from Niklaus to get a better look at her.
“I did not say you could stop!” she gasps.
“You’ve been a patient at the infirmary…”
She tormented me a few times, said Aunt Ruth.
The family dinner conversation ricochets around my head.
Aunt Ruth clawed Apple May’s eyes out with her thumbs.
With a new pulse of energy, I’m able to care again. To feel the venomous fangs of anger.
A black, boundless flame burns away the rest of the drug coursing through my system. It manifests into an entity that possesses me, full of hatred and the unbearable need to protect those I love. And I gain tunnel vision right on Apple May.
“I think I’ve had enough,” I tell her. Cold. Expressionless. Empty.
“You want him, Patient Two! You need him!” Apple May shrieks, revving herself up into a childish tantrum. “Please your husband! It is your duty!”
The air in the room is sucked from existence as the quietness grows loud.
“One day, many years from now, you’re going to hurt someone I love.”
Beside me, Niklaus covers himself, straightening his back. I can sense he put the pieces together just as I have.
“You insane little girl! You’re more delusional than I once thought! My daughter would love to hear how disobedient you have been, and how your mental diseases have completely overtaken your mind!”
I rise to my feet. “You should spend as much time with your daughter as you can, Apple May.”
“I beg your pardon?” She stands, not coming anywhere close to my height, but trying her best to stand tall to intimidate me.
“Her days are numbered,” I say, detached, dissociated, disconnected from the weakness my body has known for so long now.
Before this psychotic mother can open her mouth again. I take a vulturine step toward her. “Somehow, I don’t think Meridei’s fate will harm you as much as you deserve.”
I remember the pain in Aunt Ruth’s eyes as she recalled the time she spent with Apple May.
The way she spoke about the aftermath of the war.
How she clearly didn’t want to tell my mother what happened to her in that infirmary.
She didn’t want Mom to hold the guilt of not being there for her best friend.
“The injection should have lasted another hour!” Apple May holds a stern finger up to me. “My daughter will make you bleed for approaching me with such disrespect. I am an Emerald Wife. You’ll wish you were dead when she’s through with you.”
“You made me do intimate acts with a man I’ve known my entire life,” I whisper.
And for some reason, it’s as if I’m attempting to convince myself to not unleash something so dark, so sinister, so positively ferocious…
it goes far beyond feminine rage. A beast whose hunger won’t end once it’s tasted freedom—because I know that once it’s been released from its cage, there will never again be a world untouched by what comes crawling out.
She was an incredibly vain woman, Aunt Ruth recalled.
The breath between us curdles into earsplitting silence. And Apple May takes a step back, her confident sneer faltering as she sees something sacrilegious, hideous, blasphemous, petrifying spread like a contagion—a black fog from my pupils.
And Niklaus sees it too. “Spitfire…”
“Her name is Ruth. I want you to remember that name.”
She was an incredibly vain woman.
She was an incredibly vain woman.
She was an incredibly vain woman.
She was an incredibly vain woman.
She was an incredibly vain woman.
She was an incredibly vain woman.
The Nightlung crackles from my fingertips as I heave forward, sinking my nails into Apple May’s scalp until I’m certain the moisture touching my skin is her blood.
That dark, stunning head of flawless hair shines to me like a beacon.
Her screams sing to me, serenading me with that precious tune of terror.
I don’t care that her arms punch and flail hard enough to leave bruises across my entire upper body. I can’t even feel it.
And as I drink in her vanity, her constant habits of devilish sins, I let that bond between the Nightlung and the void blast through every pore, every cell, every nerve until it burrows into one targeted area. Apple May’s beautiful black hair.
Just as the Nightlung gives me the path to travel forward or backward through time, it also gives me another vessel to explore. It gives me a magnifying glass to turn the clock forward or backward on anyone or anything.
And I choose this.
A catastrophic hurricane of power engulfs me, stitching into each hair folic, every pour and imperfection of her scalp. And I fast-forward her clock…
…by sixty years.
The black hair shortens and shrivels, becomes white brittle straw before our eyes. And as patches of her scalp become clear, that skin withers too. Sunspots, sores, and a horrid smell of decay. I push those years, magnifying all the focus on that hair until it’s gone.
Nothing but white cottony clumps.
Nothing but her decaying, sun damaged scalp.
The rest of her remains young. But that hair? That scalp?
That hideous top of her head is now that of an old woman who has lived past the age of a century.