Demon's Fire (23 page)

Pahndir was tired of fighting his arousal, exhausted from trying not to let it rise. His mind wanted more than anything to turn off. He pulled in air, seeking strength for his flagging determination, but it was too late. He was coming, dry but hard, the strong, tight spasms chasing up and down his genitals.

More,
he thought. But the golden moment was gone. He’d shot up to the next plateau of frustration as if he’d never climaxed.

The logic his more primitive brain operated on said this wasn’t right, not even remotely. Beth was so close to him, her breasts flattening on his chest, her panting mouth mere inches away. He yearned for her kiss so strongly he had to moan. He wanted to spill his kith down her throat, to share his madness and his esteem. That was how mating was supposed to be. Both partners were supposed to dive into the maelstrom.

When he licked his lips, she must have guessed what he was thinking.

“I can’t,” she breathed against his ear. “An enemy wouldn’t kiss you.”

He groaned, swallowing the kith himself so that the swimming in his head increased. She was right, though he couldn’t quite remember why. He’d just have to wait for her sweet pussy, just have to pour his kith into her there. The thought inflamed him. His cock jolted longer, harder, until he wanted to bend in two from the pain. Sweat rolled down his chest and back in a steady stream.

“Bring him again,” Beth said to Charles, loud enough for the others to hear. “He’s almost where we want him.”

Where they wanted him seemed to be completely out of his mind. Charles’s pounding in his rectum intensified, squeezing the kith his kingmaster gland was so frantically producing into his seminal vesicles. Pahndir grunted as it tried to spurt from him. It wouldn’t be able to until she took him, until she plunged her dripping sheath over his aching shaft. He could smell her overflowing with her own desire, the scent as heady as the strongest wine. He couldn’t think of anything but that, couldn’t want anything but to be inside of her.

Unless it was for Charles’s hips to keep up their battering while he was there.

“Aren’t you going to ride him?” asked a voice he couldn’t recognize any longer. “We’ve heard demon cunts are as clever as human mouths.”

He liked the voice then. It was urging his mate to do the very thing he wanted most. The prospect was enough to make him come again. He nearly did cry that time. The pleasure was too brief, too insubstantial. All it did was madden him. He forced his eyes open to meet those of his better half. The fire that flared behind her irises was dark and sweet.

“Beg me,” she demanded, her voice as harsh as sandpaper. “Beg me to come onto you.”

“Please,” he groaned, unable to remember why he shouldn’t.

“Please what?”

“Careful,” cautioned the man who pumped so wonderfully into him from behind. “You don’t want to get too distracted.”

Pahndir dismissed that advice the way one would the buzzing of a fly. As long as the man kept moving, Pahndir wasn’t going to regard a word he said.

“Please ride my cock,” he ground out. “Please, goddess, ride me hard.”

His mate wasn’t listening to the man, either. Pahndir’s words were the ones that spurred her. She undid her linen trousers and shoved them down. Luckily, the legs were wide enough to tug over her narrow boots. At the sight of her shapely limbs rising from the leather, he swallowed hard, drinking in lemon and cinnamon. The hem of the man’s shirt hung over her pubis, but that was right. The three of them doing this together was right. He caught a flash of her gleaming slit before she slung her shapely, booted leg around his hip.

His cock was standing too high, shuddering flat against his abdomen. Her slick, plump lips just glanced across the tip. The contact wasn’t long enough to free the bursting pressure of his kith. His glans burned like coal, too swollen, too ready to explode.

“Please,” he whispered, craving her wetness like a smothered man craved air. Something that might have been a tear rolled from the corner of his eye. “Please, please, please.”

She seemed to welcome his desperation. Her fingers caught his shaft, pulling the pounding pole down to her. A moan tore from him as the juicy mouth of her sex cupped the distended knob. His kith shot out, a hard, concentrated burst like a miniature orgasm. His mate gasped in surprise, but a gasp was all she had time for. The madness took her almost instantly. She shoved herself down on him, fully, tightly, her muscles wet and rippling with hunger.

She ground her pleasure bud against him, but this was not required. With his kith inside her, every inch of her sheath became climactically sensitive. As soon as this became apparent, she began to undulate like a wild thing, avid to take in the pleasure everywhere she could.

A sob broke in his chest. Relief was the power behind it. Pleasure. Gratitude so deep it needed another name. The other man liked the sound. His hips churned harder into him from behind, offering more ecstasy, more hunger Pahndir could delight in. Streams of luscious human energy coursed into him with each surge, the exact vintage he’d been longing for. The man was tugging at the bonds that held Pahndir’s wrists, though Pahndir couldn’t imagine why.

When the man stopped and cursed, it might as well have been a foreign tongue.

“Shit,” he said barely audible above the sounds Pahndir couldn’t help making. “There’s steel under these leather cords. My knife won’t cut through it.”

His mate ground her teeth together and gave her head a little shake, still trying foolishly to think. “What about the wood? Can you saw through that and free him?”

Pahndir didn’t know why they cared. Who wanted to be free when there was such pleasure to be shared? He tightened his anus around the other’s hard-driving cock, as thanks for the bliss he had already brought. The man had been saying something in a worried tone, but the words broke off as Pahndir’s tricks made him forget himself. They were all shoving together then, harder, stronger, each slap of their bodies a delicious, reverberating blow.

The others’ cries were music; better than caresses for his long frustrated lust. Release swelled inside him, thick, hot, like lava gathering beneath a slumbering volcano. He reached for the climax with all his might. Two years he’d waited. Two fucking years. His balls were so full they could not draw up, just lurch in and out in desperately eager pulses. His mate was fire around him, kith and cream trickling from her in a steady stream.

He snapped his hips so fast they must have been a blur.

“Oh, God,” she said, high and thin, her fingernails biting into his back.

That tiny pain was nothing to the unbelievable discomfort in his genitals. He should have been going over. She was his mate. His friend. Every molecule of his being wanted to give itself to her. But maybe his body was too long out of practice. Groaning, he shifted the angle of his strokes to press a hotter energy spot inside of her, a swollen, coin-size patch beneath where her clitoris rooted. Despite his need, he rolled his hips with every ounce of skill he had. Her muscles moved over him like a Yama’s, bringing him almost too much enjoyment to bear.

Come,
he thought.
Please, love, come and bring me with you.

She shivered and gasped and then she went over.

This was the explosion he’d been waiting for. Every vessel in his groin contracted at the blazing burst of etheric force. He needed no more kick to come than that, but suddenly the man went, too, driving so deep it felt like the force of his ejaculation would shoot out Pahndir’s navel.

His own orgasm stuttered at the additional stimulation, as if the very magnitude of the pleasure had confused his nerves. But it was right to have the man there. He was warm and kind and he fit them. He was another lovely piece of their biochemical puzzle. Pahndir tried to accept the addition, tried to will himself to keep coming. Before he had much time to worry, his sensations swelled more than twice as large. His cock convulsed from tip to root to balls, his stored-up seed erupting like it was indeed molten.

He roared with pleasure.
More,
said his delighted body.
More-moremore.

Wood splintered, then snapped to bits. The three of them tumbled to the ground in a pile, still fucking, still gasping for air and sanity.

Pahndir’s hands were free, and that might have been the best thing of all. He poured himself into his mate with complete abandon, spilling, pumping, yanking her thigh up to wrap her close. The climax went on and on. He couldn’t stop it, couldn’t let go of her to save his life. He was reduced to less than an animal. All cock, all pleasure, all shooting seed and nerve and biological imperative. Into her and into her he worked his hips with all his strength. A puddle spread beneath her as he overflowed her sex with his white-hot spunk, and all he could think was that he wanted her to drown. Her spine arched hard as she came again, lifting both him and the sighing man behind him.

Her strength surprised him. Clearly, his mate was a woman to be reckoned with. She breathed a prayer to her human deity, after which his madness temporarily receded.

If coming like a volcano hadn’t restored his cognitive power, he thought just maybe the rifle blast would have.

“Stop!” Sahel ordered. “Stop, stop, stop!”

The sound of her shoving up the rifle’s bolt to chamber the next round stood Beth’s hair on end. The gun was a beautiful piece, dark oiled walnut with brass details. Surely a prized possession, the chieftain handled it with ease. Beth had a feeling the next time Sahel pulled the trigger, the bullet was going to rip a hole in more than the roof.

“You made him spend,” Sahel accused, appearing to strain against an undignified impulse to stamp her foot. “You’re not supposed to be able to do that.”

“Well,” Beth said, “at least I also made him cry. You can see the tracks on his face.”

Sensing how fraught with danger this moment was, Beth tried to decide if she should squirm out from under Pahndir. Charles had already rolled off their pile, but Pahndir sprawled atop her, heavy as a corpse. Free or not, he didn’t seem a good candidate for escape—unless she and Charles intended to drag him across the sand. Unbelievably, his shaft was still firm and full inside her, despite the veritable ocean of seed he’d spilled. His continued presence within her felt better than she could be easy with. He’d had the ejaculatory climax he’d been hoping for, and the handful
she’d
enjoyed had been nothing short of glorious.

That being so, shouldn’t they both have been ready for a rest?

Sahel decided the issue by yanking Pahndir off Beth herself. Liberated from his weight, if not the distracting sight of his erection, Beth found sufficient coordination to pull on her pants. She was more than a tad embarrassed that she’d doffed them so readily. She’d gotten more involved in this pretense than she had planned.

Still holding Pahndir roughly up by one arm, Sahel swore as she observed the splintered ruins of his torture frame.

“You,” she said to him, “are getting staked out on the ground again.”

Pahndir was sagging in her grasp, his knees too uncertain to balance him. He gazed through the bedraggled curtain of his hair toward Charles, looking oddly feral in his disarray. Charles had set himself to rights the quickest of them all. He stood near one of the knife displays on the wall.

“Yes,” he said in answer to some silent question Pahndir’s eyes had asked.

With a sudden surge of excitement, Beth realized Pahndir was exaggerating his weakness. They were making their break right then, before Sahel figured out she had three enemies instead of one.

The prince spun into motion almost too fast for her eyes to follow, grabbing Sahel’s rifle and breaking it—lock, stock, and blue-steel barrel—across his thigh. Chaos erupted in the tent as Sahel’s warriors surged forward to quash this threat to their leader. Pahndir jabbed back with his elbow at Sahel, but his attempt to clip her jaw was stymied by the others.

“Here, Beth!” Charles called over the tumult. “Catch!”

She’d been gaping at the sight of Pahndir in full fighting form, but Charles’s shout jerked her out of it. As if they’d choreographed the move, Beth snatched the knife he’d tossed her out of the air. An exuberance that wasn’t completely hers rose from her solar plexus, like a ball of heat expanding. Tou would have wanted a knife for each hand. Rather than ask Charles to toss her another, she filched one neatly from the weapons belt of the incautious tribeswoman who was charging her.

Not surprisingly, the next few minutes were a blur of violence and confusion.

Sahel’s women came at Beth and she fought them off, sometimes with her daggers, sometimes with whatever body part was available to snap out at them. Being pummeled by women shocked her, for Sahel’s warriors held nothing back. Nor were they above more traditional female tactics of gouging and pinching. Despite Tou’s memories and Beth’s mysteriously enhanced strength, she was soon bloodied and bruised. She wished she felt prepared to kill someone. That would have been easier than simply trying to defend herself. She could see she needed more practice drawing on Tou’s ferocity if she was going to fight as well as the famous queen.

Her braid might have been her worst disadvantage. Beth was ready to lop it off herself the third time someone tried to swing her off her feet with it. Her neck wrenched from resisting, Beth drove the woman away with her knives…which gave someone else an opening to snake an arm around her neck from behind. Beth kicked back hard and heard bone snap, but the elbow choking her windpipe didn’t ease at all.

Boy,
she thought. These women didn’t know the meaning of “cry uncle.”

“We have you now,” gloated one of the two tigresses who faced her. Their unrelenting assault made it impossible for Beth to turn her blades against the one behind her. She counted herself lucky that her strangler needed both arms to exert enough pressure.

And then, like magic, the throttling squeeze on her neck was gone. Pahndir had plucked the woman off. He lifted her over his head and was tossing her like a log into a tent pole. Beth had a second to wonder if
she
was strong enough to do that, and then the wood cracked and bent in the middle as the body hit. When the woman fell to the ground, she joined three others who weren’t moving.

Beth took advantage of the diversion to slice one of her attackers across the arm. She grimaced as blood spurted hot and coppery across her face. Some aspects of fighting she was never going to get used to.

“Sorry,” Pahndir panted when Beth had a chance to glance his way. “Would have been here sooner. Not up to my normal strength.”

She didn’t have time to roll her eyes at that, because she’d spotted trouble on the other side of the tent. “Charles,” she said, pointing.

He’d been backed into a corner by a crowd of women with sickle blades. Though most appeared worse for wear, they were overwhelming him with numbers. Looking far too tired for comfort, he was fending off their blows with an iron kettle.

“I’ll get him,” Pahndir said, pitching his voice for her ears alone. “See if you can shove over a second tent pole and slip out of here. Charles and I can cut our way out when the roof comes down.”

“We have a car,” she told him.

Pahndir’s uncustomarily grimy face split into an equally uncustomary and blinding grin. He was off a second later, ducking and weaving on his way to the aid of Charles.

“I don’t know why you’d rescue
him
,” jeered a voice that spun her around. One of the veteran fighters faced her in a crouch, her face scored with the same crisscrossed scars as Sahel’s.

“Yes,” agreed her companion. “When I raped him with my wooden dildo, he fought like a little boy.”

The inside of Beth’s head went white and still. She felt Tou then, every ruthless memory, every protective instinct toward her men. It didn’t in the least surprise her that Sahel’s harem had stayed hidden during this fight. Women without honor did not deserve to have their males defend them.

With the thought that these women really, really shouldn’t have hurt
her
male, Beth ended the half a second she’d spent on the pause. Taking a page from Charles’s book, she dropped one of her knives, grabbed a big iron skillet from beside the cook fire, and—in a single sweep—brained the two women hard enough to crumple them to the ground.

That’s more like it,
she thought, refusing to dwell on the fact that they weren’t breathing. She didn’t need to dillydally with the blasted blades; all she had to do was whack her enemies down.

With a quick glance to make sure Pahndir had reached Charles, she sidestepped her next would-be attackers and ran for what looked to be the nearest critical tent support. Her shoulder slammed into the pole at full speed, cracking it as her momentum carried her conveniently past it toward the closed door flap. A foreboding creaking circled the tent’s structure.

Judging she had mere seconds to get out, she crouched and launched herself through the door as the tent collapsed. No one screamed (Sahel’s women seemed immune to panic) but there was a satisfying bit of yelling. Deciding she might as well do what she could to head off pursuit, Beth hopped onto the top of the settling roof and swung with her big skillet at whatever wriggled and looked female.

She stopped when she heard Charles laugh.

He looked awful, his face distorted by goose eggs, his lip bleeding. He was on his feet, though, just like Pahndir. “I’ll never again accuse you of not knowing what to do with a frying pan.”

“Or a whip,” Pahndir added sardonically.

Fresh tears leaked from his eyes in the outside light. The day was drawing to a close, but it still was too bright for him. He wore his own vivid embroidered robes, the silk extremely creased but recognizable. Sahel must have tucked his clothes away somewhere. As Beth absorbed the look of him dressed again, he wound one of the women’s turbans around his head and face. Quick motions of his hands tucked his tangled black hair inside.

“Can’t tolerate any sun at all,” he explained. “It hurts the eyes when you’re in heat.”

His tone was matter of fact, but sensation tickled strongly between her legs. She was wet for him, beyond the wetness he’d already left. The realization that he remained in heat, that this wasn’t over, coursed like flaming brandy over her skin. Oh, yes, she wanted more of what they’d shared, and she’d rather not wait for it. Her gaze dropped to the bobbing hummock that had reshaped his groin. Whatever showed in her face caused Pahndir to catch his breath. The sound was like catnip to her fresh desire. Beth looked into his jet-black eyes and took a step forward.

“Hey!” Charles snapped his fingers to recall them both to the present. “Some of those women are going to be waking up. We need to get to the jeep and ride the hell out of here.”

“I’m driving,” Charles announced before Pahndir could argue. He had no doubt the prince could operate this demon technology–inspired car, but the way he was devouring Beth with his eyes told Charles the prince’s mind was not on practicalities.

Beth was no better. She was so busy mooning at Pahndir that she tripped over her own feet on their hurried journey back to the car. She would have pitched into the sand if Pahndir hadn’t been quick enough to catch her.

Now the pair were holding hands. They slipped together into the dusty backseat of the jeep, leaving Charles to get in the front like their damned chauffeur.

There was no point whatsoever in the knot that was tying itself steadily bigger inside his chest. Given what he’d seen today, between the two of them, Charles knew he’d never be anything but a somewhat handy sexual third wheel.

“I’m so sorry we didn’t find you sooner,” Beth murmured to her lover. “I wish they hadn’t been able to hurt you.”

Pahndir shook his head as Charles scanned the landscape to make sure their tail was clear. “That’s in the past now. The two of you turned my capture into something I’ll be grateful for all my life.”

“You fought so well,” Beth breathed.

“So did you,” Pahndir returned. “Like a warrior queen.”

Charles turned the starter and suppressed a sigh. Neither of his passengers jumped when he gunned the engine and took off. Beth simply caught her balance by bracing both her hands on Pahndir’s broad shoulders, an easy thing to do with their knees nestled so intimately together. Charles forced himself to tear his eyes from the sight of that in the rearview mirror.

“I suppose they didn’t give you a chance to get away before we came,” Beth went on. “Obviously, you were strong enough to free yourself.”

“Strong enough, yes, but not fast enough to avoid having twenty knives flung into my back before I fled. I discovered I wanted to survive my escape.”

“And why is that?” Beth’s coquettish tone was not at all like her. Her face was turned up to Pahndir’s like a flower soaking in the sun.

“I had things to live for. I had…hopes that were very precious to me.”

“And now some of them have been fulfilled.”

“Some.” Pahndir cupped her chin. “The rest of my hopes are still aching.”

Oh, for Peter’s sake,
Charles thought as Beth nuzzled Pahndir’s palm. If they got any sappier, they were going to stick to the seat.

Oblivious to the danger, Pahndir tilted Beth’s face back up. “I need to know, love: Was the story you told Sahel true? Are you half demon?”

“No!” she exclaimed. “I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s a
long
story.”

Charles glanced at the mirror again and found Beth tracing Pahndir’s mouth with her fingertips. Her emphasis on the word
long
had brought a grimace to the Yama’s usually unrevealing face. Their gazes had locked together as if joined by a supernatural force.

“Maybe we don’t need to talk right now,” Pahndir said huskily.

“Maybe we don’t,” Beth agreed.

“Bloody hell,” Charles muttered to himself as the sounds of wet, openmouthed kisses drifted to his unavoidably waiting ears. Both Beth and Pahndir were making throaty
mmm
noises, as if this were a feast and they’d been starving. When Charles heard clothing start to rustle, he’d had enough.

“So,” he said loudly, trying and not quite succeeding to keep his eyes on the stretch of sand in front of the jouncing car. “How long does this ‘heat’ thing last?”

Pahndir broke free reluctantly, his chest rising and falling beneath Beth’s caressing hands. “Four or five days. Under ideal conditions, we’d have sex continually during that time.”

“Continually?” Beth asked, but not like she’d mind.

“Yes.” Pahndir turned his head to meet Charles’s eyes in the mirror. Seeing them solid black was like a kick to his gut, though exactly what the kick meant Charles could not have said. “It’s hard for me to predict what heat will do to a human, but I’m afraid my kith has infected Beth.”

“Your kith?” The electric jeep bumped over a rise Charles hadn’t navigated carefully enough. The two lovebirds barely seemed disturbed.

“A hormone,” Pahndir said, his darkened eyes back on Beth. “Royals secrete it in our saliva and pre-ejaculate. It acts as an aphrodisiac for mated partners.”

Charles knew what hormones were. He’d read scientific journals on Yamish medicine—or as much of it as humans had access to. “Mating” he’d never heard of until the chieftain mentioned it. It sounded ominously permanent. He wondered if it explained the scent Beth had spoken of, but if it did, he didn’t know why
he’d
be smelling it. The lemony-spicy fragrance wasn’t his imagination, either. The pair were throwing it off like they’d swum in vats of perfume.