The Scholomance (42 page)

“It may astonish
you to hear this,” Mara said dryly. “But I don’t spend my days planning ways to
impress you.”

His eyes didn’t
change. ‘Dost thou not?’ he thought, the words so clear, so deliberate, that
Mara knew at once he had shaped them just for her to overhear. He bent again to
lick slowly, insolently, along the slit of her sex.

“I know how I
look as far as humans go,” Mara continued, idly spreading her legs a little
wider to accommodate the demon’s broad shoulders, particularly the unyielding
spikes that made them even broader. “It just surprises me that your standards
would be the same.”

“Indeed?” He had
begun to make his way up her body, but his hands remained low at her thighs. He
caressed her there in long, sweeping passes like figure-eights, up to her hips
and down again, tender movements made abrasive by his unnaturally rough skin
and the occasional scrape of a claw’s edge. His kisses came quite often with
teeth, but the little flares of pain only made the pleasure that much greater.

“I can’t imagine
you’d really consider me beautiful. Wouldn’t I look better with scales or
something? Wings…claws…a tail?” She reached out and gave one of the bony spears
jutting from his back a playful tap. “Spikes?”

“Such things are
easily amended,” he told her. He slid one hand up and over her belly, and where
that hand moved, she could see her skin moving, bubbling almost. Changing, or
at least, wanting to change. She didn’t need to look to know he was watching
her, ready to relish any squirming sign of unease.

“Is that what
you teach?” she asked instead. She reached out and touched the high knot of his
black hair and felt it pouring around her fingers like water. So fine. So
strange to be so fine, against all those spikes and rock-rough skin. “What you
used to teach, rather?”

His tongue
dipped into her navel and trembled there suggestively as he moved his hand back
to her thigh. “It is Master Ruk who instructeth the newcome students of the
Scholomance in the art of manipulating fleshly form,” he said. “If thou wouldst
know my specialties, why dost thou not ask?”

“It’s called
small talk. I don’t actually care.”

“Nay?” Another
of those too-smug smiles nettled at her.

She laughed at
him. “Look, I give up. I didn’t come here for conversation anyway.” She gave
him a shove and he rolled onto his back agreeably, shrugging in a huge,
cat-like motion as he did so that the spines fanned out and lay flat. He was
still smiling as she straddled him, still smiling when she took his cock in her
hand and pulled it back against her belly, stroking. Her answering smile did
not require much in the way of acting to make it hostile. “I think it’s cute
when you act like this is a real relationship. I like just one thing about you
and no offense, but I could get it from anyone.”

“Aye?” He laced
his hands behind his head, his gaze tracking the motion of her arm in apparent
unconcern.

“Yes. Well…anyone
with a cock. I admit I prefer yours, but let’s be honest here. That could be
just because I haven’t seen them all.”

He chuckled. His
mind remained completely black to her; his body, completely relaxed. The only
rise she was getting out of him was the one in her hand.

“At least I don’t
blow smoke up your skirt telling you how beautiful you are. I just take what I
want.” She rolled her thumb over the thick head of him and rocked up onto her
knees, tilting her hips forward so that he could see how near, how far, he was
to what he’d been so aggressively pursuing all this time. He didn’t seem to
care now. He shut his eyes, baring his teeth and snarling pleasure. Mara
thoughtfully settled back down and watched him. After a while, she reached with
her free hand and gave the great spear on his shoulder another tap. “Does this
hurt to lie like that?” she asked.

He grunted. “What
matter to thee?”

“Nothing, I
guess, but I could be persuaded to try another position if you asked nicely.”

“Pain is transitory,
young one. As is pleasure. I shall suffer the one to savor the other. The
years,” he mused, “have been long and empty.”

“You hopeless
romantic, you.” She licked her fingers and moved them in light, tickling
gestures all up and down the underside of his cock, riding the quick, hard
thrusts of his hips with which he met this treatment. “Fortunately for you, I’m
more interested in my pleasure than in your pain. Open your eyes.”

He did, smiling.
“Why?”

“I want you to
see me putting you inside me.”

She felt his
cock twitch in her grip, saw his eyes spark with faint, green light. He raised
his head, his gaze dipping to stare with hot intensity at her hand. She gave
him a little squeeze, fit the head of him to her, and impaled herself slowly,
writhing as she took him in. The sensation was as good as it ever was, good
enough that it was easy to dial it up, to fill all her outside-thoughts with it,
to let him hear her silent pleasure as she showed him this mask of
self-control.

“Thou art home,”
he said softly.

“Don’t talk,”
she whispered, digging her fingernails at his chest as she bent over him. “I
just want to fuck you.”

He touched her
stomach as she began to move, just once, as if petting her. That was all. Then
he merely watched her. The only sounds were those their bodies made in mating:
his broken growls, her coarse breaths. It didn’t take long—a minute, two at
most. She came, fucking harder as she dug her nails at his chest, and came
again through pure force of will greatly influenced by friction. She bucked off
him at once, taking his hot, slick cock in her hand and working him hard,
wanting him to see his cum hit her, mark her, wanting him to think she was his.

Rage replaced
the complacent lust that had suffused the Mindstorm until this moment, striking
her with all the force of a slap. He seized her naked throat in his fist and
roared as his semen arced, splashing hot against her breast and dripping down
over her belly and thighs. “Thou
bitch
!” he bellowed.

“Someday, I want
to taste that,” she said, very calmly, and he drew back with a frown, his grip
easing. His cock, soft and spent in her hand, twitched. “But not today. I don’t
like being yelled at and I’m done with you for now.”

“Art thou? And
to what gameboard now, thou deceiver?” He showed her his fangs, then slowly lay
back on the bed. The hand at her throat opened, but did not remove itself. He
slipped his claw under the chain of her locket and pulled it out taut. He
studied it, tracing the lacy pattern on its face with the very tip of his
thumbclaw. He didn’t look at her, but only at it, and his expression was coldly
speculative. “To whose welcome bed?”

Much as she
tried, she could not contain the spark of alarm from flaring in her breast, but
she didn’t grab for it. If she did that, it was lost. She waited, still
straddling him, fighting for calm.

“I have seen
this ‘round thy slender throat even at our first meeting,” he remarked, and
shifted his eyes to her. “Thou knowest not such trinkets are forbidden within
the Scholomance?”

“Horuseps let me
keep it.”

“Did he indeed,”
Kazuul growled, his eyes blazing, then just as suddenly smiled at her. “Yet how
easily I amend his error.” His finger tightened, pulling the cheap chain tighter
as he bent close. “Wilt thou beg me for its keeping?” he murmured, his sharp
teeth inches from her face.

“Yes.”

His brows
lifted. He drew back slightly, his predatory smile broken.

“Please,” said
Mara. “Please let me keep it. I beg you, Kazuul. I beg you, Master.”

His brows swept
even higher, knotting as they did. The cold, green glint of his eyes shifted to
the locket, ridiculous on the hook of his claw. “What is it?” he asked,
sounding wary now.

“A gift.”

“Be it blessed?”
He cut a sharp glance at her when she huffed out her startled laughter, and
then frowned. “No relic then. Hm.” He turned it over, polished it with slow
circles of his thumb, and turned it back to its face. “It looks a toy.”

“It is.”

“Yet precious.”

“Please.”

“Tell me how it
came to thee and I shall allow thee to hold it.”

“It was a gift,”
Mara said again.

“Or tell me
not,” Kazuul continued with deceptive mildness, “and I’ll have it off and
forever ruined.” He polished it some more, the tendons of his fist creaking
like old leathers. “Truth, I suspect I would enjoy that better, yet I shall
hold to my word. Whose gift, Mara? What occasion? Why so marked and so deeply
remembered? For that, I confess, I understand least. I see a toy, one readily
replaced. Sentiment passes well enough from one trinket to another. Better dost
thou know than most how supple are mortal minds. Unless it is as the lenience
of Horuseps that thou dost treasure it.”

“It was my
birthday.”

“Eh?” He looked
up sharply, his eyes incredulous slits. “Thou liar! I would know it if thou hadst
borne a child!”

“My birthday. The
anniversary of the day of my birth.”

He continued to
stare and finally sat up, putting her roughly at arm’s reach before slapping
his free hand ominously against his thigh. “Who art thou in human reckoning
that thou art so honored?”

Mara laughed
again, the same breathy, disbelieving laugh that had jumped out of her when
he’d asked if the cheap locket were a holy relic. “Jesus Crazy-Horse Christ. Everyone
gets to celebrate their birthday! It’s not like they closed the banks for me!”

“I see.” His
expression and tone remained guarded. “And so, a closed ceremony, each year to
each human.” He eyed the locket. “With tribute paid.”

“Were you ever a
child?”

“I?” He wasn’t
used to being surprised so often. She could feel a stirring of unease in him,
ready to become anger. But he thought about it, and even if those thoughts were
closed to her, she sensed a kind of careful sincerity in the way he answered. “So
I must assume, having seen those of my kind birthed and suckled. I recall no
age of youth. Perhaps…a sibling…” He closed his eyes, simultaneously closing a
fist around her locket, and remained silent for some time before shaking his
head. “The very stones of that world are surely ash and gone by now. There are
no more memories and no children. How strange.” He raised his head and gazed
broodingly out the open aerie at the empty sky. “So should reason say my day of
birthing wouldst be remembered and a human’s hardly marked even at its
dropping. But there again doth Time divide us. We, disdaining all that comes of
its passage, and they, dissecting it until naught but names remain. When wert
thou born?”

“November 4
^th
.”

“Aye.” He shook
his head, still watching the sky. “For certain. Speak on.”

“You know who
I’ve come for.”

“Aye, enough I
know.” He shrugged and opened his fist to look at the locket. “She gave it to thee?”

“Yes.”

“Was it her only
marking of thy birth? The only tribute ever paid thee?”

“No.”

“Yet this is
more precious. Why?”

“I know you
don’t really care. I know you’re only doing this to hurt me.”

“Then well thou
knowest me, and know thou also that there are hurts far worse I could inflict,
if I chose. Tell me.”

“She gave it to
me—” In spite of it all, her damned voice cracked. Kazuul’s attention was on
her in an instant, burning deep. “—so that I would always remember…” She
couldn’t do it. Not the truth, not to him. Mara did not drop her eyes or in any
way show the lie, but finished simply, “…remember her.”

He stared at
her, into her, for a very long time without altering his grim expression in the
slightest. At last, he snorted out a single, short, soundless breath that might
have been a laugh if only it were repeated. He released the locket and turned
away, swinging his legs out over the edge of the bed. He sat there, glaring out
the aerie, and finally snorted again, louder this time. “Keep it,” he said
blackly, and then threw back his head and laughed, terminating with a snap of
his jaws loud enough to make her jump. “Keep it and go.”

“You’re the one
who had to know,” she said, her cheeks burning.

“True,” he
muttered, and laughed again, an angrier, even more bitter sound. “Keep it all
the same. Do we not all hold our store of useless treasure? Do not ask me,
Mara,” he said curtly. “Thou hast set in me a dangerous mood. If thou wert to
ask, I should be compelled to answer honestly, and it is bound to end badly.”

“What is so
goddamned funny?” she demanded, and he heaved an angry, laughing sigh. “You
make me…You make me bare my soul to you and then you have the…the goddamned
gall to snicker behind your fucking hand at it? Fuck you!” She threw herself
off the bed, shaking and hot with anger, and stormed for the stair.

“Thee, Mara. Thou
art the horns of my humor. Not thy worthless toy and not the absent calf who
gave it, but only thee.”

She snatched up
her robe and kept going.

He was there on
the dais when she reached the top of the stair, his green eyes blazing out over
the jagged features of his snarling face. “I laugh,” he said, coming towards
her on all fours like a beast, “for that thou believest thee loves thy Connie.”

She backed up,
caught herself doing it, and made herself stop. “What would you know about
love?” she demanded. “Nothing!”

“I know it is
not she thou lovest,” he said quietly, now face to face. His breath was hot on
her mouth. His eyes were cold. “Thou lovest only that she loveth thee, and it
is a pale, desolate love.”

She gaped at
him, too shocked and furious even to think, much less answer.

“I think thou
wouldst love her if thee could,” he went on coldly. “Thou lovest so the idea of
love—”

She’d slapped
him before she even knew she was going to do it.