Addictive Nightshade (16 page)

Chapter 24

Emma:

There's something voodoo in this semi dark, the atmosphere thick with history flirting with fate. The future is occluding my ability to think because he's standing so damn close, I can feel his heartbeat tapping against the tympanic membrane of my ear the way a soul knocks on purgatory's door.

Intent is forged in his features, in the expression in his eyes, it's enough to squeeze my heart like a stress ball.

“
Emma,” he purrs, using the voice which trepan's my ability to think and stirs my hormones into a hazy fog, obscuring everything but my primal response to the suggestion of the raven dance.

Pressure is wrapping plastic around my face and I fucking can't breathe, my ability to is amputated when he slides a long finger down my arm, running a furnace of languid heat all the way down, capturing my hand and lifting it above my head, leaning in to pin me against the wall when he licks the valhalla triangle on my palm.

It obliterates the grief, replacing it with a blizzard of conflicting desires. All worries flee as our chemistry ignites. Closing my eyes while my chest jiggles into his torso with every serrated gasp, shaky, broken, desperate, the scrape of stubble against my cheek pops a bullet into each kneecap, my legs give, the inferno spreading a plague of desire from my hips to my feet. It's clearly a flesh eating virus because I'm no longer able to make my body do a damn thing.

Dizzy and weak, I press in with the arch of my back to accommodate the tilt of my head to meet the invasive tongue, sucking it into my mouth and wrapping my lips around the moist heat licking across my taste-buds.

He keeps stroking his thumb in delicate sweeps across the sigil branded into my palm and it's rupturing my soul from my body, it's slicing me into ribbons, I'm coming apart, misting passion while my skin slicks with need.

Emma...

“Hmmm?” I moan into his mouth, sliding the tip of my tongue across warm lips, sweeter than dew on a feather.

My head is disjointed, heavy, the world is tilting, spiraling across the cosmos, sending me into the drunken swoon of vertigo when he sucks on my earlobe, his hips still impaling me to the wall, impeding me as surely as a tranquilizer dart, his free hand up under my shirt, kneading my breast with the finesse of a rune shaman, reading fingers over secrets and electrifying me into blasts of ecstasy which leak readiness into saturating the air with neon-loud pheromones.

It's fuck me and fuck me hard aching through my loins, the carnal captivity almost cruel now that he's sucked each of my five fingers and licked his own palm before suctioning it over mine.

Open your eyes...

It's an effort, like I'm heavily sedated on Asgard carnal-cocaine, but I unstick my eyelids to stare seduction into his.

Pressing his forehead against mine, aligning our left eyes, I'm ravaged, stolen, plundered...

All the shadows in the world cocoon around us, a bomb blanket to protect the planet from the annihilation happening in the dream of sensual ecstasy.

He's holding me, one arm sticking rifle fingers in the base of my back, his other hand cupping my head and jamming it rigidly against his, I can't tell what's up and what's down but manage to figure out he's on top when the hard floor replaces his hand and his palm seals over mine again in the soul tapping delirium it induces.

The hand in my back is gone, my cargo pants loosening while that bright eye sends shooting rapture into mine, the helix an endless warp of reality when I see his past, his hell, his heaven, his muse, his pain, his destiny, nothing is omitted. I feel like this is how the matrix started, plugging in, seeing the big picture in an instant download when a shadow became solid, became a raven, became a god, became a lover, became a friend, became my heartbeat, became ambrosia, became a high, became....

The nebulae becomes blinding, the colors of his mandala eye scrolling across the plateaus and pinnacles of his soul, purging his vulnerabilities into my spirit, burning his essence into mine, sticking them together wherever they touch, the explosion lava red, magma hot, orgasmically divine, my body shaking, the seizures a crescendo of worship, awe, euphoria, the pleasure obliterating until all we are is a long undulating wave of emotion.

He's licking my pain, fondling my pleasures, tilling my secrets, planting promises, kissing tears, hugging me inside where my soul hurts, caressing the bruises and heartaches, exchanging them for pockets of shining safety, security, vows, oaths, leaving himself in those places that are hollow and broken, filling the fissures with the mortar of luminescent synapses of a spirit which shines brighter in the glass lamp of love, until the glass grows so hot it fractures, blasts outward. The hurricane of the harii charging in to rescue, resurrect, returning the goddess to her rightful place with the tender attention to detail of a god, the addictive moonshade weaves, takes and gives, teasing laughter, tears, purging agony, raping my soul of the rubble, cleaning my house and filling me with himself.

I'm inside him, he's inside me, it's impossible to tell who's me and who's you, which body is mine and which is yours, which memories are mine and which are yours, which scabs are mine and which scars are yours... it's... whole.

He completes me, building a fortress of power and security. He releases my hand and the separation begins, just enough for me to feel him hovering inside my aura to press a heavy yoke of possessiveness around my heart, and now I become aware of the sweet chaff of velvet skin running softly inside my thighs, his torso hard and slick where it crushes mine, my chest heavy with his weight, breathing is labored and ragged, the slide of passion long, hard, wet, salacious.

He does a maneuver where he seems to be fondling my passion both inside my own spirit / soul / body and fondling my clit and o-spot with his overheating invasion inside me. The slap of skin is a rhythm setting the tides on every ocean, the orbit we hold in stasis affecting every moon on every planet, aligning not just stars but the entire passage through to the other side, birthing galaxies like runway lights for the souls looking for love and needing to land on the runway of sex, sliding in a downpour to crash land in the pillowed clouds of tender embraces with kisses for blessings, ribs torn apart with the jaws of life to rescue broken hearts and massage them better in the hands of Odin's penance.

“I love you,” whispers hoarse and gruff, as if speaking is agony, persecution, punishment, execution.

It detonates a reaction right through me, rippling me out in endless waves until I'm crying, the tenderness too sweet, too severe, too deep, too real, too enormous.

Finding hands attached to the ends of my arms I use them, cupping his messy hair, pulling his face rough and hard to mine, mashing our kiss, biting his lips, straining every muscle to reach in and invade, to lick the pain out of him, to do to him what he did to me but I can't kiss deep enough, hold him tight enough to be the
one
we were before, I can't reach inside him.

The dynamic reaches a cusp and my rabid attack is returned, delivered with teeth cutting into my lip, teething and suckling in one fluid move, grinding thumbs into my cheeks to force my head away, my neck nicked in multiple gouges of love bites which suck hard and nibble sweet oaths of numbing adoration, my feet caught and propped on wide shoulders that stirrup me wide, and he rides me so hard into the floor, grunting out moans of merciless claim, the pressure succinct and perfect, the rigid hammering so perfectly placed I'm whimpering, moaning, groaning louder than a megaphone, screaming into his bellow when the wave becomes so short and sharp and immediate, the pleasure attenuates me in a shaky battle cry of a savage ready to burn down the village and take the last drop of mercy from the body joined to hers.

His tension captures my fascination, watching his shoulders cut into segments, his chest covered in lines from sternum to ribs when he arches his head back and bellows the primeval destruction of his restraint.

My sensitive lips, my bruised sex, it all seizes up in terror when he climaxes, purging the oldest stake into my body, the one which marks and coats, adhering and burrowing in the primal dance of 'you're mine'.

I feel it too. I am
yours
. There's nothing left, you've touched, tasted, and plundered every corner of my soul, my body is under siege. But that orgasm was worth it, it was worth the wait, it was in my mind, my spirit, my soul; my body was the last to weaken and succumb, the final frontier.

The soul caress was a vesper, the 'full package' is a celestial chorus.

He sags heavily and I'm bent uncomfortably, my ankles forced down to my ears when he wraps his arms under me and hugs me so tight it should have snapped my bones and torn ligaments.

Unbelievably he kneels, pulling me up onto his knees and acrobatting to lift us both off the floor in a careful stand, his desire still deep inside me, our eyes on the same level, his shining like nuclear explosions, and like this he strides with me to the bed, gently lowering me into the cradle of comfort, shifting his hips and starting all over again, releasing my ankles to wrap around his waist, his smile diabolical and dangerous.

I'm yours, every step of the way Mac.

Where the fuck have you been all my life?

He pauses, bracing on his arm to point a dart into my heart with an insistent fingertip, tapping the breastbone between my man-rashed boobs, “Right here, Em. I've been hiding in here, waiting for you to let me out so I can love you.”

Tears trickle from the outer edges of my eyes.

“I love you back,” I warble, breaking apart in some hallowed sanctified place deep in my spirit. I feel him, it, the love, the... this is so big I can't cope, but no one has ever managed to make me feel this cherished, treasured, fabulous, special, needed, perfect.

It's more than I deserve, more than I could pray or hope for, or ever think I'd know, experience... feel.

Leaning close, resting elbows either side of my head, he thumbs the emotional tears away, sucking each thumb individually, then looking back at me he aligns his Odin eye over mine, “This eye elskling, it was the first love crystal. It's the first promise. I will always shine for you, you're safe, I swear.”

Then he kisses the promise on my arrested mouth and I'm sucked right back out of my body to frolic through the cosmos of the soul with him, lost in the eye of the storm, in the domain reserved for creatures belonging to the night, belonging to the everlasting sun.

Chapter 25

Emma
:

It's been a long and indulgent day. I've sucked cloudberry off his fingers and played with it like lipgloss. We swam together in the lagoon and cuddled in the bathtub, languid and lazy, exploring and tantalizing until we both ran out of strength.

Leaning against his body, my head supported in the curl of his shoulder, I track the arms holding me close with my fingertips. Veins so raised on the landscape of his arm they are laces more than striations, noosed together to confine and restrain muscle and sinew in place with intricate knotwork forged by spells, the inspiration for corsets and jewelry first woven on the body of a jötunn god. Pale skin stretched taut over it as a sheath is so translucent its opaque surface burns with the scars of blue as blood courses back to be re-oxygenated.

Lethargic and smug I fold the armbands tighter, snuggling, looking into the secluded night sprinkled with freckles, like a million lighters burning through the dark of a rock concert.

A gazillion thumbs up, every one of them a candle lit in our honor, the silent applause as the astral harpers thrum the dimensions between worlds to sing praise.

The tabernacle has opened for hymns, all the gods saying a blessing and lighting a flame for us to celebrate the handfast of hearts and souls in a rite more ancient than time. Our witnesses writing down their testaments, the new gospels of the raven and the owl and how they traded feathers to fly across the moon.

He laughs, it's soft and appreciative, a lullaby to kneel to, “You have skald in your heart, Em.”

“What is a skald exactly?”

“
A poet. A bard. But when you think it you make it seem more than plausible and possible. I see it through your eyes now, and love the way everything you look at is with the lens of an artist. It's not black or white, or dark as night, instead you describe as you think, a stream of consciousness where everything becomes a collage of crisp moments identified with a pinpoint of beauty.”

Shy, I shrug, not knowing what to say. I won't apologize for being me. I can't help that I think his skin feels like heated velour, the hairs so fine and soft they force me to stroke them flat in silent reverence, savoring the way the air is biting the ground in lover's nibbles, a foreplay leading to the intercourse of winter swallowing summer the way mindless need of a nipple loses itself in a hot mouth on a journey down the body of the planet, leading right down to another hot wet summer where rain orgasms ecstasy into parched earth and the wind is a savage exhalation of bliss. The monsoon is the meeting of lovers in a dance that takes all year to finally reach its summit.

The whole world is in a constant state of flux between sub and dom, top and bottom, rolling together round and round with their endless foray into the pleasures of the other, tangling their legs, teasing with spring and taunting with autumn, the seasons betwixt the true measure of a lover's game. Snow is a blindfold and sensuous soft tickle down a spine, then the lovers hide under cover and snuggle, catching breath before desire starts to melt icicles into gushing their need and greed and endless appetite to be fed kisses and sunshine wine.

“
Are you telling me the heat of summer is the carnal fever reaching a pinnacle of lust before the erotic damn bursts in release?” he chuckles softly in my ear.

“
Affirmative,” I smirk, unashamed that I find the turning of the planet romantic and telling a story even the sages recognized. “Why else are all the ancient masterpieces of gods and goddesses in compromising positions, or in various stages of nudity? This is the dance of lovers.”

“
Keep thinking, I'm getting an education,” murmurs in kisses under my earlobe.

Totally distracted I slump indulgently against him, sitting in a summer sweat even though winter's cloak swaddles us. Nestling in the swathe of his strength I peruse our humble new home.

Our hideaway is wearing moss like olive tweed on a distinguished gentleman, the spikes of brown mushrooms on their long swan necks truly reminiscent of a baron smoking a pipe. I can imagine the fairy's hidden in that wonderland using them as chimneys in their rendition of fiddler on the roof, crooked and quaint but irresistible.

It blows my mind more than a little to consider how cataclysmically different my life is from a fortnight ago. I'm with a legendary myth, prehistoric even, and we're playing house in the woods like a couple of Disney fugitives.

How could I have been remotely satisfied with bills and smog, queues and stress, when truly every human has this option. Drop the baggage and fly.

Just fly free and refuse to adhere to this separation from nature, the adherence to boundaries and borders when honestly no land belongs to any one person. Governments own most of their countries whether you pay a mortgage or not, they hide it in snide sub-clauses which explain how they own the minerals 'for the country' which includes every grain of sand and every drop of water because they all contain minerals.

We contain minerals in our bodies, which means if you read the fine print we're all owned by the tyrannical system. They milk the populace dry when truthfully the entire illusion of entitlement is delusion, it's all an elaborate fabrication.

This is how it should be. A man, a woman, a secluded and pristine waterfall fed pool, a patch of sky and burrow of moss, here lies happiness.

“Is that true?” murmurs in my ear.

“
Yup,” I nod, glum that I destroyed the elation of our moment.

The anger in his eye catches my periphery and I can hear him seething as if I have an inner monologue tuning into his mental frequency. “The shadows will rise,” he nods. “Right after we stop the bad attitude of being the last clan standing.”

“I don't understand why your own kind would attack like that?”

“
Pride, ego, it licks its wounds with vengeance. I have a hunch but need to catch an interloper to verify it,” he says.

“
What's the hunch?” I ask, twisting so I can see his face properly.

“
Eagle has no beef with Raven. They have no motivation to attack us, period. We've never wronged, insulted, or harmed Eagle in any way, so why would they want to annihilate us with such covert force? I tried to argue this point with Kake. I went through the book of shadows over and over looking for the one clue or reason I'm missing. Nowhere in all the records of the Raven clan have we managed to make an enemy of our kindred clan, the Eagle. One clan has a reason to loathe both, Eagle and Raven were both very dear to Odin, but the final clan doesn't have pride of place in the halls and doorways of Asgard. The Wolf clan have a grudge against us, they have a reason to resent both our clans, and I think somehow Wolf has managed to make Eagle think we are attacking them, just like we thought Eagle were attacking us. But neither of us instigated this, someone else is making us think we must defend against and fight our ally. And they managed it too because those were Eagles we threw thundereggs at, but in my heart it doesn't resonate. This war isn't about Raven versus Eagle, it's about Wolf taking out his competition. He's the only one who could gain from this.”

“
So what did Kake say?”

Mac grunts a huff, “
The wind never lies
. That was his answer. What a load of bullshit.”

“
What do we do now?”

Unwrapping his arms from me, he stands, sauntering to face me on the incline, looking lean and luscious in just his jeans dripping off his long legs.

He makes me think very wicked thoughts and I catch myself smiling.

Macala smiles back, it's cute and coy, acknowledging my appreciation but not allowing me to sidetrack him. “Emma, we have to take a journey. The only way to know the truth is to head out of the forest and meet the leader of the Eagle clan. It could be perilous as they want to skin us and cover their drums with our hides, but if this is instigated by Wolf we have to take the chance to set the course true again. Only truth will free us from an endless dance of offense and defense, then we can help each other face the only dark force with anything to gain. We join forces and confront the liar together.”

Now I know why the harii are considered warriors. Mac certainly thinks like one. He's looking for reasons, causes, rooting out a ruse and sniffing for evidence. He's all strategy, reasoning it out and finding a gaping hole for motivation. In court it wouldn't even stand up to reasonable doubt, so why does Kake just believe the wind without substantiating the threat?

Crouching in front of me, impeccably keeping his balance, he says softly, “Because he was vindicated when Eagle attacked. If I do this I will be defying my grandfather. I'll be acting as a rogue warrior. He won't let a single harii go with me, not even you.”

“Fuck that, Mac! I'm coming! I refuse to let that old dodger segregate us again.”

His smile splits the twilight, “I was hoping you'd say that. It will snow tonight which means we move out at first light. We'll fly out over the mountains so you can practice your skills out there, then we'll use conventional transport until we reach their lair.”

The waning daylight blots with a tenebrous flurry of activity and I automatically flip to camo-mode. Pulling annoying white mist around myself and looking as out of place as a ship in the middle of a sand dune.

Mac doesn't hesitate, throwing shadows over both of us, pressing the valhalla mark on his hand to dim my light, reaching me in one fluid move and gripping my mark to his, blacking us both out of existence instantaneously.

Too harried to breathe I watch a flock of crows land at the edge of the lagoon, my eyes so wide I'm even afraid to blink.

Are they birds, are they enemies, or are they our ravens?