Fever Highs
Chapter Fourteen
The Chosen
An unknown torment grips me in sleep.
I wake writhing in bed, thighs pressed together as I try to fight off the ache.
It feels as if the fiery pits of hell are boiling beneath my flesh.
The heat is all-consuming, moving through me like something alive.
I swear it’s threading through muscle, bone, and vein—until my own body feels foreign as it worms its way into every limb and organ.
Sweat coats my temples and chest. The sheets beneath me are damp and sticky. Even the fabric of my nightgown, once soft and light, now abrades and clings.
It’s entirely too heavy.
Suffocating.
Giving up on it altogether, I drag it over my head and toss it to the floor.
I breathe in shallow pants. The air, for whatever reason, is restricted from fully entering my lungs.
Worse, I have no idea what’s happening.
It came on quickly after finishing the final line of my newest sigil.
One moment, I was fine. The next, agony.
I could barely make it inside before the pain took hold.
I’d used more elixir than normal, yes. A new compound—but I tested it multiple times.
There had been no indication it would cause such ill effects.
Today I was meant to return to the city. With heightened predatory senses, I thought I could slip in and out unnoticed. Hunt out the Red Horseman within the city and study my new adversary.
Instead, something went wrong.
What… I don’t yet know. This has never happened before.
A cramp twists low in my gut—abrupt and insistent. My insides knot tight. I turn onto my side, drawing my knees up to my chest as the pain crests and recedes in violent waves.
Each release sends another surge of heat through me.
Not fire, but a fever I’ve tried to quell with water, cold baths, and damp cloths. Nothing works.
As the hours pass, the cramps settle lower and become a constant throbbing. In my fitful half-sleep, it deepens—bleeding into something else entirely.
Understanding begins to dawn.
Yet putting a name to it feels as if it might lend it power.
I know this craving.
My vivid dreams take me back in time to nights with Grand Minister Judiah, when he visited my private room and took my body.
More so, the times near the end when his touches weren’t merely for the task of completing our union.
When he’d palmed my face as his hips circled and drove forward slowly, with intent.
That ache clawing through me now is identical.
My head shifts restlessly against the pillow as another wave crests—heady and all-consuming.
Oh, God. I shift again, raking nails over skin as if trying to fight an unseen enemy.
I need—
The thought refuses to stay buried.
I need him.
Only, it’s not just his face I see anymore as the dream returns. Or it is, but his familiar features begin to blur. His kind eyes fade. His face—his warmth—melts away and is replaced by something colder. Arctic eyes and features.
Darker brows.
Pale skin.
A sculpted chest. A wealth of muscle.
The White Horseman.
An appetite for the forbidden coils low in my belly, acute enough to steal my breath as his body moves powerfully above mine.
His chest is sweat-slicked, covered in black-as-night markings, ones I don’t recognize on sight.
My fingers trail over them, reading them, as if the symbols are a map to all his secrets.
When they reach his shoulders, my nails take hold, digging in. They help me brace against the force of his thrusts as he sinks his cock deeper inside me, stretching me open.
His fingers weave into my hair at the back of my neck. Suddenly, I’m lifted, pulled to him from my prone place on the bed, and his lips crash against mine.
The kiss isn’t sweet.
The Horseman doesn’t simply kiss.
He devours. Claims.
He takes full command of my mouth. Delivers a bruising assault to my lips that, as the minutes bleed into one another, proves to be addicting.
Only when I break from it to steal a lungful of air does his mouth leave mine.
It trails roughly down my neck and across the flesh of my shoulder, and further still.
He blazes a trail with his stubble grazing those coarse hairs across unsoiled skin, leaving prominent marks behind until he reaches my collarbone and sinks his teeth in, around bone.
I cry out—and reality snaps back.
Oh God.
These dreams don’t help. They only make it worse.
They fuel the ache. The craving.
And I have no way to fulfill it.
The sheet below me is soaked, and not just from sweat. The juncture between my thighs is wet.
Curious and unable to fight it a moment longer, my hand drifts there. Slickness meets my fingers. Satiny to the touch. As I explore there, relief flickers, so I venture farther, touching the small, sensitive nub at the apex of my sex.
A blinding light flashes behind my eyes. Pleasure ripples outward.
Ah, there. Yes.
My body begins to speak to me in a sense.
So I experiment, tentatively at first. To see, just to see, and yes, it helps. Then, with more urgency, I explore the sensation. The more I do, the more the ache subsides in the moments when the bursts of heat recede.
Innocent touches become anything but as I search for relief.
A theory builds.
I may not be lucid, especially when the dream keeps coming back and replaying in a loop, but I can no longer deny that my body is demanding exactly this.
I lose touch—not with myself—but with reality as I let events unfold as they may and sink my own fingers inside me when the Horseman vanishes. My fingers move as his cock did. Filling the void when the Horseman departs. They also roam over flesh, mimicking his ghostly, large hands.
The need never vanishes. Each time I wake from the dream, I am left bereft.
Empty.
For hours, I surrender to delirious indulgence.
The pleasure he wields so easily overtakes all else.
A painful onslaught that douses the fever to a bearable degree.
During each and every one of his visits, time loses all meaning, and desire runs rampant.
I unravel again and again, under the Horseman and my own ministrations, even while prayers echo to the heavens from my mind.
God forgive me.
Holy mother, give me strength.
I know not what I do.
And yet, no matter how many times I bring myself to the peak and feel the absolute rush of oblivion, it’s never enough. My body starves. Pleads. Screams for more of it. More of him. Either of them—the Grand Minister or the Horseman.
Remaining empty is an unendurable and endless hell. One, I don’t know if I’d ever wake from.
I don’t just want the dream. My body demands this, to the point it bends and blends and breaks reality to make it real and possible.
Finally, I succumb to sleep.
When I wake, it’s from a peaceful and dreamless state of rest.
For a moment, I don’t move. The world is full of distant sounds, but also quiet in a way that breeds serenity into the stillness.
It feels almost fragile. A cool breeze slips in through the cracked window, brushing across my bare skin.
It carries the clean scent of pine and earth, a stark contrast to the stale air lingering in the room.
Somewhere beyond the walls, birds chirp in uneven bursts, as if fighting off the night drawing in.
My body still carries the fever’s aftermath.
Limbs that once felt strong now tremble when I shift.
Muscles ache as if I’ve run for miles, and I’m sore in unspeakable places.
Even turning my head against the pillow pulls a quiet groan from my throat.
Flashes of what I endured crawl through my foggy mind—all that occurred in the dreaded days before, and all I did to relieve the ache.
The fever’s grip over me was absolute. Both molten and volcanic.
So intense that no amount of self-pleasuring could soothe it.
It felt unending at times and unbearable at others.
The agony nearly had me begging for the fire to simply consume me.
At one point, I thought it would burn me alive.
The indescribable carnality of it took me to the highest highs I’ve ever experienced, and still, the thought of reliving it is inconceivable.
I don’t know exactly how many days I lost, only that in my haze-induced state, the sun and moon rose and fell multiple times.
The air feels cooler now, thinner, and based on the dim amber light filtering through the curtains, I believe it’s near dusk.
Though it’s a struggle, I peel myself from the mattress and begin gathering the bedding. Each bend pulls at sore muscles. Each breath feels deeper than my body wants to allow. I dress with stiff fingers, grab the cleaning supplies, and walk down the hallway on shaking legs.
The breeze greets me fully as I step out of my front door, threading through my loose hair. The sky is washed in fading gold, and deep shadows build within the denser parts of the woods.
My stomach grumbles as I make my way toward the stream that funnels into the nearby lake, but I ignore it. Washing my sins away first takes precedence.
Crouching at the water’s edge, I plunge the sheets beneath the surface.
The cold bites instantly, numbing my fingers as I scrub the evidence from the fabric.
The rhythmic motion steadies my breathing.
I move to my nightgown next, working at it until my knuckles are raw and stinging.
My own brand of punishment for the indulgence I gave in to.
When I’m finished, I carry them both around back and hang them on the clothesline. The damp fabric snaps lightly as the wind catches it.
Minutes later, at the lake, I wade in without hesitation. I release the basket that I’ve brought with me, full of my supplies, to float on the surface. Then I quickly submerge myself in the freezing stillness.
The cold is a shock to my system, but one I welcome, because it grounds me to the present. When I rise, I sweep my hair away from my face, then reach for the soap. With it, I scrub my skin until every inch is red and as sore as the rest of my body.
I lather my hair next and pull a comb through the worst of the tangles with slow, deliberate strokes. It needs cutting, but I don’t have the energy for that today. Even twisting it into a loose braid is about all I can manage. It’s more taxing than it should be.
Once dry and dressed again and back on dry land, worry quickly settles in for the animals I’ve left unattended. Many likely suffered while I lay helpless, with no food or water, so I head back toward the house to check on them to see how they’ve fared.
It’s well into the night before they’ve all been fed.
My remaining chores follow, and I work into the early morning hours to make up for lost time. Only after setting my life back to rights do I allow myself time to sit and consider what transpired to put me in such a state.
My curiosity pulls me back to the cellar and my experiments.
I sit down at the bench in my workshop and immediately start reevaluating my notes. The lantern light flickers over parchment and ink. The scent of old paper is prominent, but so are the remnants of the wine barrels that used to fill this space.
I analyze the data and religious text over and over again.
I made an error somewhere—but where? And if the sigil I marked myself with didn’t work as intended, what exactly did it do?
It’s not like the others that failed and lie dormant on my skin.
Those had no ill effects, but this one upended my life for days.
And the most concerning question is…
Will it happen again?
The answer, when I find it, sends me reeling.
I drew the serif edge of the marking wrong. Not by mistake or because of poor execution—it matches the one in the extension of the Good Book perfectly. But the same symbol in the ancient Aramaic texts on one of the old scrolls relays a different intention.
They differ greatly.
The horror that fills me when I uncover its true meaning tells me that, yes—more than likely—I have cursed this immortal body with an affliction. Unless I can somehow reverse it or alter the mark, there is a strong chance I will experience another fever from hell in the future.
In the days that follow, my prayers grow more devout. More pleading. I offer submission and implore God for understanding and guidance. The request for forgiveness for my actions never leaves my lips, but it lives in my head and heart.
And though I do not speak it aloud, I am certain He knows.