19 Reed
She lay beneath me on the silver bedrock of the Moon’s Threshold, glowing like a fallen star.
Her chest heaved with ragged, beautiful breaths, her skin glistening with astral dew, her thighs trembling in the aftershocks of the climax I had just drawn from her body.
The scent of her—sweet clove, wild honeysuckle, and musk—was an intoxicating gale that stripped away the last shreds of my twenty-year penance.
On the waking earth, I had to be the shield. I had to hold the line.
Here, on the starlit expanse of the healed Sanctuary meadow, I was only a starving wolf who had finally caught his mate.
Take what is ours, my obsidian wolf rumbled, towering beside us on the astral ridge, his dark fur shining with silver moonlight. No cages. No poison. Sink into her soul!
“Reed,” she whispered, her hands reaching up, her fingers digging into the hard muscles of my shoulders. Her gold-ringed pupils were blown wide, reflecting the stars above us. “Don’t make me wait another second. Put yourself inside me.”
I knelt between her parted thighs, my hands framing the pale curves of her hips.
Her skin on the astral plane was like liquid silk, warm and pulsing with incandescent white light.
Every curve of her body—the swell of her breasts, the delicate dip of her waist, the soft flare of her thighs—was a masterpiece I had spent seven thousand nights agonizing over in cold, solitary fire camps.
I hooked her knees over the crooks of my elbows, lifting her hips off the stone, tilting her pelvis up toward the starlit heavens.
Around us, the healed bedrock of the Sanctuary meadow hummed with quiet, unbroken power, silver grass whispering in the starlit wind where the toxic river used to be.
“Twenty years of waiting,” I growled, bracing my hands on the warm earth on either side of her head, the heavy, weeping tip of my cock pressing directly against her soaked, swollen entrance.
“Every second they kept us apart. We’re going to burn the fuel of your Heat into this deep stone. We’re taking our souls back.”
Claim our mate, the wolf howled, throwing his muzzle to the moon. Drive deep!
“Take me,” she demanded, her nails raking down my back. “Take me and light the fire, Reed!”
I drove home.
The sensation of entering her on the Dreamscape was an overwhelming, soul-shattering experience.
She was scorching, tight, and dripping with wet heat, her inner walls clamping down around my thick shaft like a velvet vice. There was no physical barrier, no friction of canvas or cold air—only the pure, uninhibited fusion of two ancient bloodlines colliding after two decades of famine.
A shattered roar tore out of my throat, echoing across the silver pastures.
Avaline’s head arched back against the bedrock, her throat bared, a long, keening cry of pure ecstasy ripping from her lips as she took the full, thick length of me to the hilt.
“Goddess,” she wept, her legs wrapping tightly around my waist, locking me deep inside her. “Reed... You’re so deep. It feels like you’re touching my soul.”
“I am touching your soul,” I rasped, leaning down until my lips brushed the shell of her ear. “Every inch of you belongs to me, Avaline. In the dream, on the earth, in the fire. You’re mine.”
I pulled back until only the broad head remained nestled in her tight heat, and then I thrust back in.
Hard. Deep. Relentless.
The rhythm was primal, tectonic, driven by the furious beat of our racing hearts. Every time my hips slammed against hers, a brilliant ring of white fire sparked across the bedrock, sending ripples of incandescent light through the silver grass.
She met every thrust with desperate, frantic hunger, her hips rolling up into mine, her inner muscles milking my shaft with devastating contractions. Her hands gripped my biceps, her nails digging into my flesh as she matched my pace stroke for stroke.
“More,” she gasped, her hands tangling in my hair, pulling my mouth down to hers. “Harder, Reed. Don’t hold back. Give me all of it!”
I captured her lips in a ravenous, open-mouthed kiss, swallowing her moans as I picked up the tempo.
I drove into her with everything the Founding Alpha had to give, my hips pounding against hers in a rhythm that made the bedrock tremble.
The heat between our bodies built from a flicker to a blaze, from a blaze to a four-alarm crown fire.
The deferred Heat in her veins was no longer a lethal fever—it was the fuel.
“Hold on to me!” I roared against her mouth.
She locked her ankles behind my back, her whole body bowing off the stone as her second climax struck like lightning.
Her fire detonated again.
Her climax erupted from the point where our bodies were joined, a blinding, incandescent shockwave of pure, uncorrupted white flame that surged across the healed meadow and sank deep into the roots of the Threshold.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
My eyes snapped open.
I dragged in a massive, ragged lungful of real mountain air.
The walls of the Sanctuary Farm bedroom surrounded us. I’d taken her from the bathtub onto the bed and locked the door behind us before entering the Dreamscape. The old iron bed was beneath my back, and a thick wool quilt was bunched beneath our hips.
Beside me, Avaline let out a soft, shuddering gasp, clutching the wet blanket to her chest.
Her skin was no longer burning with the lethal fever. It was warm, flushed, and radiating a healthy, steady glow. Her breathing was deep and even.
But the physical reality of the waking world hit me like a wall of granite.
Our souls had mated in the Dreamscape, but our physical bodies had never joined. She had found release. But I had not.
Down between my legs, beneath the rough, soaked canvas of my utility pants, my cock was brutally, agonizingly hard. I throbbed with a vicious, relentless ache that made my teeth grind. The head of my shaft was weeping against the rough cotton, swollen to the point of pain.
Lies! my wolf howled, pacing the bloody cage of my skull in absolute fury. A ghost fuck in the clouds! Look at our body—we are starving! Tear her clothes off. Mate her.
No, I commanded the beast, my jaw locked so hard it creaked. If we cross this mattress, the Heat catches fire for real. The Beacon flares. We hold.
Look at her, the wolf snarled, fangs dripping. She is wet. She is waiting.
A harsh, ragged groan ripped from my throat as I rolled onto my back.
My scarred hands tore at the button and zipper of my trousers, shoving the soaked canvas and briefs down past my thighs. My thick shaft sprang free into the cold air of the bedroom, dark with flushed blood, pulsing with each beat of my heart.
Beside me on the mattress, Avaline turned onto her side.
The thin white tank top clung to her heaving chest like wet paper, completely transparent, revealing the soft, heavy swell of her breasts and the dark, pebble-hard points of her nipples straining against the damp cotton.
Her pale panties were soaked—and the smell of her was a suffocating fog of sweet clove, rain, and wild honeysuckle that coated my tongue with every ragged breath.
Her gold-ringed pupils dilated until they swallowed the irises whole, fixing directly on my hand wrapping around the swollen base of my cock.
“Reed,” she whispered, her voice a cracked, breathless rasp in the shadows.
Feed the ache, my wolf growled. Look at our mate. She is wet for us. Don’t touch yourself—touch HER!
“I have to bleed this off, sweetheart,” I choked out, my knuckles turning white as my calloused fingers squeezed my weeping shaft.
“The dream banked your fever, but my body is still burning. If I don’t bleed off this pressure right now, my wolf is going to take over, pin you to this mattress, and mate you before we ever reach the Caldera. ”
We don’t touch, I told the beast, locking my fist in place. One inch of skin on skin and we burn the continent down.
“Don’t look away from me,” she said, propping herself up on one elbow, her eyes locked on my moving hand. “Let me watch you. Let me see what you’re holding back for me.”
I didn’t close my eyes. I locked my gaze on hers.
I pumped my fist over my swollen length, dragging the rough skin of my palm from the thick root to the weeping head, and the sheer agony of it nearly brought me to my knees.
She was right there.
Inches away. Barely a handspan of damp wool separating my bare, aching cock from her dripping entrance.
In my mind, the vision was so vivid it burned: reaching across the blanket, hooking my fingers into the waistband of her soaked panties, tearing the cotton in two, and spreading those pale, trembling thighs wide to the Harvest Moon’s light.
I could see it. I could feel the scalding, velvet clamp of her pussy taking the broad head of my shaft, stretching tight and slick around me as I drove in to the absolute root like we’d done in the Dreamscape.
I imagined the wet, rhythmic slap of my hips against her ass, the sound of her breath as I filled her to bursting, the way her womb would pulse and spasm around my cock, begging to be claimed, begging to be bred.
Every nerve in my body was screaming at me to do it. Tear the shirt off. Put your mouth on those hard nipples. Bury your cock in her center and let the whole mountain burn.
The restraint was a blade twisting in my guts. My hand pumped faster, a brutal, desperate friction, trying to simulate the heat of the only woman I had ever wanted while she lay wet, inches from my fingers.
“Tell me,” she whispered, her voice trembling with raw hunger. “Tell me what you’re going to do to me on the First Altar, Reed. Don’t leave out a single detail.”
“I’m going to tear your clothes off the second the ward activates,” I rasped, my breath coming in ragged, savage hitches as my fist stroked hard over my head.
“I’m going to push you down onto the bedrock, spread your legs until you’re completely open to the sky, and drive every thick inch of my cock straight inside you. ”