Chapter 111: A Dream with Teeth

Her fingers closed around my cock, hot and sure, and the sound that left me was low, stupid and entirely involuntary. She stroked me once, then again, watching my face as though it contained an answer she had been denied. Her thumb circled the head, spreading the wetness gathering there, and then she lowered her mouth over me.

The first sensation was heat. The second was the soft, wet pressure of her lips sealing around me. She took half my length in one smooth movement, drew back with a quiet slk, and went down again until the head of my cock pressed into her throat.

My hips lifted off the couch. Her talons settled against them, not quite restraining me, simply holding me where she wanted me while her mouth moved.

Nyssara had the patient expertise of someone who had done this for longer than I had been alive. She learned what changed my breathing and repeated it. Her tongue traced the vein underneath on the way up. At the bottom of each descent she turned her head just enough for the inside of one cheek to drag along my length, then eased back until only the tip remained between her lips.

I had a fistful of her dark red hair. I don’t remember deciding to take it.

She looked up. Almost no amber remained around her pupils, and the hunger in her expression should have frightened me. Instead I watched her tongue circle the head of my cock before she swallowed me again, and my grip tightened.

A muffled glk sounded in her throat. She made a pleased noise around me, and the vibration travelled through my pelvis and up my spine.

This is not permission. You told her to wait.

The thought arrived clearly and went nowhere. Glamour had turned every objection into something I could examine without acting on it. Beneath that influence, maddeningly inseparable from it, was my own desire. I wanted her mouth. I wanted the woman who had arrived crowned in fire kneeling between my legs, and wanting it made resisting what she had done to my judgment even harder.

"Please," I heard myself say.

I did not know whether I was asking her to stop or keep going. Nyssara either didn’t know or chose the answer her hunger wanted.

She pulled off far enough to breathe. A strand of saliva still joined her lower lip to the head of my cock.

"Be still," she said, her voice rough. "Let me take what I need."

Then she took me to the root.

There was a soft resistance at the back of her throat, then it opened for me. Her nose pressed against my lower stomach. Her throat worked around the full length of my shaft in slow, deliberate contractions while one hand closed around the base and the other pulled my hip tighter against her mouth.

The pleasure was obscene. I lasted perhaps fifty seconds.

Her tongue moved once along the underside, and my body locked. I came without warning, the climax tearing through me hard enough to drive my shoulders into the couch. Nyssara swallowed around me. Each contraction dragged another pulse out, and the wet suction of her mouth refused to let the sensation break.

But she did not stop when I finished.

Her lips stayed sealed around me. She kept swallowing, and my orgasm continued beyond the point where my body should have begun to soften. The pleasure climbed instead of fading. It spread through my hips, up my spine, across my shoulders and down both arms.

That was when the feeding truly began, and I missed the boundary because there wasn’t one.

Something behind my navel loosened and flowed outward. The taking wore the exact shape of pleasure. Every pulse emptied me a little further, and Nyssara drank it through the same movement that kept my body arching toward her.

The pleasure kept dragging at me even after I understood what it concealed. That betrayal by my own body frightened me more than the numbness spreading through it.

My knees began to shake. My hand slipped out of her hair because the fingers stopped closing. I looked at them—the same hands, the same broken scabs across both palms—and ordered them to move. They curled weakly, like the hand of a man half asleep.

"Nyssara."

She didn’t stop.

Her rhythm had changed while I wasn’t attending to it. Deeper. Faster. Her hand had slid from my thigh to the small of my back and was pulling me toward her, and there was nothing playful in it any more. The heat coming off her skin had gone up. The soulfire under it had brightened until I could see the shape of her ribs through the coat, black-crimson lines running toward her sternum like something being drawn down a drain.

And the pleasure kept going, which was the worst part, because underneath it a hollow had started to open.

I have been hungry. Two weeks of it, in the flat, at Level 1, when the water stopped. This was that, but sideways — not an empty stomach but an empty everything, the sensation of a room being carried out of a house while you stand in the doorway feeling pleased about the weather.

"Nyssara, stop—"

The dream flickered.

For about a second and a half I was in two places. There was the warm dark and her mouth and her hand at my back; and there was, faint underneath it like a picture bleeding through wet paper, a concrete floor at a wrong angle, a strip of white afternoon light, and the cold specific knowledge that my real body was no longer standing up.

I tried to push her shoulder. My arm went out and didn’t arrive.

I’m going to die on my own workshop floor with my trousers open, I thought, and even then — even then — there was a part of me that did not want her to stop, and I have never entirely forgiven it.

Then she froze.

Everything stopped at once: her mouth, her hand, the pull. Her whole body locked in place the way a dog locks when it hears a sound under the floorboards.

"No," she said.

She came off me so fast that I felt the air move. She was up on her knees, then on her feet, and she had both hands out in front of her like she was pushing something back — and she was, I think, she was pushing it back into herself, because the crawling fire under her skin surged toward her palms and she closed her fists on it and it went out.

Her breathing was wrecked. Her wings were out and shaking at the joints. There was blood at the corner of her mouth and it took me a long stupid moment to work out that it was hers, that she had bitten through something in the effort of stopping.

"That is enough," she said to no one in the room, and tore the domain open.

The warm chamber split through the middle. Concrete, daylight and gravity came through the break together. My legs failed as the workshop returned, and my injured shoulder struck the bench hard enough to light the bruise from shoulder to hip.

The floor rushed at my head. Nyssara caught the back of my skull and lowered me through the last few inches, then released me immediately and retreated three full paces.

I lay on my side and shook. The tremor ran through my arms and into my jaw, accompanied by nausea and the taste of copper and burnt sugar. When I tried to rise, my elbow folded and put me down again.

"You are not permanently damaged," Nyssara said.

Her voice was level, almost light, but the ruler’s mask had not caught up with the rest of her. Blood ran from the corner of her mouth to her chin. Her hands remained open at her sides, visibly unsteady, and she stared at the floor rather than at me.

She’s frightened.

That did not make me safer.

On the second attempt I got hold of the bench leg and dragged myself upright. The rifle lay on the boards above my shoulder, exactly where I had deliberately left it. I did not take it. I placed one palm flat on the stock so both of us knew I could, then reached for the water jug with the other hand.

I drank until water ran down my neck. It helped the ringing in my ears, if not the weakness.

Nyssara still hadn’t moved closer.

"What did you do to me?"

Her chin rose. For one beat I watched her consider answers that would have sounded better.

"I fed," she said.