Chapter 44 #2
‘I don’t want to slow down,’ she said, the smile a torment. ‘I want you. Just you. We have unfinished business. You owe me, Nick Walker.’
Firelight glittered in her eyes as she pulled off her clothes. Such reckless abandon. It stole his voice, stole his reason.
‘Do you want this?’ she asked, so simply. ‘Do you want me?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Well then.’ She smiled and opened his jeans, pushing him back so she could free his cock. Nick gave in and struggled out of the restrictive clothes. It was like breathing again.
Because he did want this, more than anything. Maybe even more than he had ever wanted anyone else. He didn’t just want Alex. He needed her.
A moment later his breath caught in his throat as Alex’s mouth sank onto his shaft.
He groaned out her name, unable to help himself.
She was softness and warmth, her teeth grazing ever so gently against his most sensitive skin, drawing out his pleasure and leaving him helpless, needing, wanting, a creature of pleasure and nothing else.
He fought to focus and glanced down to find her looking up at him, her eyes wicked with reflected desire.
Not her eyes, something in the back of his mind tried to tell him. Those weren’t her eyes. They were dark and endless, glimmering with firelight.
Her hands claimed him again and he couldn’t fight her. He didn’t want to.
Alex pushed his helpless body back onto the carpet.
Both of them were naked now and he couldn’t tell anyone how that had happened.
It had been a flurry of fingers and fabric and then they were twined together again.
Breath on skin, lips and teeth and need, so much need.
She dragged her body up the length of him and settled herself astride him, pinning him down.
‘Tell me you’re mine,’ she said. Her voice trembled with desire.
‘Alex… are you… are you all right?’
Was she? Was he? This was all so overwhelming. He didn’t want it to stop. But he wasn’t sure he had any kind of control over what was happening. It felt… primordial.
And God, the hunger in him was almost out of control, but something was wrong.
Something was terribly wrong. The heat of the flames brushed over his body, and it was all he could do not to lose himself completely, to flip her over and take her like some kind of animal, all ravenous hunger and wild desire.
‘Say you want me,’ she whispered.
‘I do. Of course, I do but—’
Alex shifted her position, lifting herself for a moment, and then sank down on his cock, taking him all the way inside her, right to the root. He gasped, unable to think anymore, unable to move, so complete and overwhelming was the sensation. So perfect. This was perfect.
‘Tell me you’re mine,’ she said again, and that strange echo in her words made her sound…
There was another voice. Something ancient and endless and terrible. It lingered behind her words, a whisper, a sigh.
‘Alex,’ he hissed but all she did was smile down at him.
That was not her smile. Her body began to move and he couldn’t help himself, moving with her. It was a dance, a call and response, and he had to join in, to answer her every demand, spoken and unspoken.
Because God help him he did want this. All of it. He wanted her in every way.
That need swept him away.
In the firelight and the shadows, bodies sheened with gilded sweat moved, wound together in bliss.
He couldn’t tell where one started and the other ended, or how many they were.
In a clearing in the forest, where the great bonfire roared and lit up the night, where crackling sparks shot skywards, and the faithful gathered, shedding blood and seed and all the pleasure in them at the feet of the golden idol. Whatever it demanded.
The twisted little form squatted in its place of honour and the old god spilled out of it, travelling through the offerings and into the supplicants. It turned their pleasure to pain, their desire to destruction and it fed and fed and fed…
Cries of lust became howls of agony, but they didn’t stop, couldn’t stop. They tore at their bodies, drinking blood and devouring flesh. They were as endless as their divinity, and as relentless in their demands on each other.
‘Alex.’ He didn’t know where he found his voice but it was torn from him as if ripped through brambles and thorns.
They needed to stop. He couldn’t find the words to say it but that didn’t make it untrue.
He couldn’t tell her. That something was wrong.
That something was using them both, feeding on them, that this… this wasn’t…
But how could it not be right? He was with her. They were together. Finally.
He had to stop.
But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He knew that now. Alex wasn’t there anymore. Whatever was gazing down at him out of those beautiful eyes, it wasn’t Alex. It wasn’t even human anymore. And neither was he.
Perhaps he never had been. He had memories, true, but they were vague and distant things, like someone else had described them to him.
Like someone else’s life, a hundred years gone by.
All he remembered clearly was Sally’s voice in the wild wood, Sally telling him he was her guardian, telling him into being, calling him forth…
No. That wasn’t possible. He had a life, he had memories, a family, he had a daughter, he had…
‘Lies,’ the voice said. ‘All lies. You have nothing. You are nothing. You’re a thing made of wood and moss and all those stolen memories cobbled together. You should have died a hundred years ago. You’re nothing but lies made flesh.’
He felt the darkness reach out through him, into him, deep into the earth beneath the house. Into the power of the wild wood itself.
All he knew was its hunger. And that it was feeding.
Nick’s back arched and he cried out Alex’s name in one last attempt to reach her, before the nightmare swallowed him whole.