Cover Him with Darkness
Read Cover Him with Darkness Online
Authors: Janine Ashbless
Praise for
Cover Him with Darkness
and Janine Ashbless
“Thrillingâ¦. Milja has to choose whether to betray the lover she risked everything to rescue, or go against the divine plan, while staying true to her own valuesâall while navigating a rocky romance with an appealing supernatural creature who feeds off her desire for himâ¦sharp and enticing.”
â
Publishers Weekly
“Calling
Cover Him with Darkness
a romance is like calling a Lamborghini a cute little car. Janine Ashbless has broken every unwritten rule of writing romance and makes it work most spectacularlyâit's dark and gritty and so beautifully written that the words are pure poetry.”
âKate Douglas, author of the Wolf Tales series
“Janine Ashbless has long been a master at conjuring the erotic in myths and legends. Now she's taking on religion and all I can say is wow. Just wow! What is evil? What is good? Could the faithful have completely missed the point? Sexy food for thought:
Cover Him with Darkness
is an intensely wild ride.”
âD. L. King, editor of
Seductress
and
The Sweetest Kiss
“This book was truly a fantastic read. Janine Ashbless amazed me over and over again with her presentation of the sort of tribal, religious mystique of Montenegro and especially with her detail of its jagged scenery. I felt I was on a tour and actually bearing witness to the stunning mountainous landscapeâI walked along the narrowest of goat trails, could feel the drafty little church atop its cold mountain, taste the bean soup⦠and the dream sequences between it all?⦠Help me. No⦠Gimme.”
âRose Caraway, editor of
The Sexy Librarian's Big Book of Erotica
“Vivid and tempestuous and dangerous, and bursting with sacrifice, death and love.”
âPortia Da Costa, author of
Entertaining Mr. Stone
“The best erotic fairytale writer around.”
âSaskia Walker, author of
Inescapable
“One of the most talented, original and brave authors in the erotica field.”
âShanna Germain, editor of
Bound by Lust
“The incredibly talented Janine Ashbless.”
âErotica Readers & Writers Association
Copyright © 2014 by Janine Ashbless.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by Tempted Romance, an imprint of Cleis Press Inc., 2246 Sixth Street, Berkeley, California 94710.
Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink
Cover photograph: Robert Daly/Getty Images
Text design: Frank Wiedemann
First Edition.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
E-book ISBN: 978-1-940550-06-0
NB: All Bible quotes are from the King James version. All quotes from the
Book of Enoch
are from the R. H. Charles translation (1917).
An Evil Cradling
was written by Brian Keenan (Vintage, 1992). Milja's father quotes from St. Nicholas Cabasilas (fourteenth century), and sings lines from a prayer by St. Dimitri of Rostov (seventeenth century).
For Phil, my rock of ages
And with huge thanks to Brenda at Cleis, who read my short story “Cover Him with Darkness” (
Red Velvet and Absinthe,
2011), and wanted to know what happened next.
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the Sons of God saw the daughters of man, that they were fair. And they took them wives of all which they chose.
Genesis 6:1-2
Contents
F
our of them accompanied the prisoner: a lion, a bull, an eagle and a man. At least, that was what they looked likeâexcept that the lion and the bull were both winged, with six wings each, and they beat the air with the sound of a hurricane as they flew. And the man was winged too, and bore fire in his open palms, and his face was a blur of flickering light crowned with stars. The eagle, shining like hammered gold, was three times the size of the naked, wounded human body it carried in its claws.
They swooped down onto the mountainside, and in that moonless night the light the crowned one shed turned the jumble of bare rock to shifting bars of black shadow. When the snow-white bull put its head down and charged the cliff face, the earth shook and crumbled. Beneath that blow the mountain split in two, revealing a deep ravine.
The eagle had dropped its prey as they landed. Now the lion, crimson and pinioned with flame like a phoenix, went over to the unconscious man. He was already bleeding from dozens of places, and his hands and feet were tied together with slick red cords. The lion stooped its huge head and closed its jaws about the man's shoulder and chest, lifting him. As the teeth bit into his flesh, the prisoner moaned in pain.
The crowned and shining figure led the way into the mountain cleft and the lion followed, dragging their captive across the broken stones. The bull brought up the rear.
They took him deep into the mountain, to a place where a great rock lay fallen, and they laid him on his back across the stone like a sacrifice upon an altar. Then the burning seraph untied his hands and feet enough to spread his limbs out. The broken man looked tiny beneath their huge, effulgent forms. Their light bleached him of color.
With hooves of glittering diamond, the winged bull stamped the loose ends of the bloody rope into the stone, and the rock gave like dough beneath the blows and then closed up around the tethers, holding the man fast. He roused from unconsciousness as his last limb was pinned, and lifted his head, screaming defiance and spitting blood, then arching his back and trying to tear free from his bonds.
The crowned figure stepped back a little, as if to protect its shining robes that glittered with all the colors of precious stones, from the spatter of blood and sweat and spittle.
But the eagle hopped closer. It darted its hooked beak to the prisoner's stretched stomach and tore open the skin, rummaging about in the bloody entrails within and pulling shreds out through the open wound.
Their captive screamed in pain, and the earth shuddered.
They left him there, vanishing from within the bowels of the mountain and reappearing outside in a sunburst of glory. With a wave of his hand, the crowned one closed the mountain up once more.
The lion disappeared.
The eagle disappeared.
The bull disappeared.
The seraph lingered a moment, thoughtfully.
It started to rain. Softly at first, but then hard and steady, like it would never stop.
And I woke up, hands clenched so tight that my nails had dug into my palms, my body aching with tension from my spasming muscles. The pillow slip under my cheek was soggy with tears.
What was it I had been dreaming? The last shreds of vision flickered away into the dark.
Something awful
, I thought, feeling my heart pound.
Something about rain?
Outside the window of my Boston student apartment, the rain fell like it wanted to drown the world.
T
he first time I saw him fettered there in the dark, I wept.
I was seven years old. My father led me by the hand down the steps behind the church altar, through a passage hewn into the mountainside. I'd never been permitted through that door before, though I knew that the key was kept under a loose floor tile beneath the icon of St. Michael. In those days that picture made me nervous: the archangel's painted eyes always seemed to watch me, even though the rest of him was busy throwing down the Devil and trampling him underfoot.
All along the narrow tunnel beyond the door there were niches cut into the rock walls, and near our church these were filled with painted and gilded icons of the saints and of Our Lord, but farther back those gave way to statuettes of blank-eyed pagan gods, growing cruder in execution and less human in appearance as we walked on. I clung to Father's hand and cringed from the darkness closing in behind me, as his kerosene lamp picked out the rock-cut steps at our feet and our breathing sounded loud in our ears. The journey seemed to take forever, to my child's mind. I couldn't help imagining the carved and painted eyes in the tunnel behind me: glowing pinpoints of light that watched my retreating backâand I kept looking over my shoulder to see.
