Page 77 of Dead Drop

Then they slow. He sits back on his heels.

His tail uncurls from his waist and wraps around his own cock.

I watch. My chest still heaving, blood still on my face, the dead Stained cooling around me. I watch him stroke himself hard with his tail. The prehensile muscle working his cock—base to tip, the coil tightening on the upstroke, the warm muscle gripping and pulling with the same precise attention it uses on my clit. His cock thickens in the tail's grip. Lengthens. The color deepens—flushed, dark, the head swelling as the blood fills it.

His amber eyes hold mine the entire time. Not performing. Just getting ready. Getting hard for what comes next.

I don't look away.

When he's fully hard—the loincloth gone, all of him thick and straining, his cock flexing in slow urgent pulses—he pulls me into the furs.

He fucks the adrenaline out of both of us.

Face-down. His weight braced above me, his massive body mounted behind mine. Not the rut's mindless pounding—something harder, faster, with a cold control underneath the force that is entirely him. His hands pin my hips. His cock drives deep on every stroke.

The wet slap of his body against mine fills the aerie, drowning out the quiet that the Stained left behind.

I come with my face in the furs, biting his forearm, my walls clenching around him in waves that won't stop. His groan shakesthrough my spine and into my teeth. He doesn't stop. He fucks me through the first orgasm, through the second, through the aftershocks that keep my body clenching around him.

He comes inside me with a sound that's more growl than groan, a sound that shakes through my spine and into my teeth. His hands grip my hips hard enough to bruise—I want the bruises, want the marks, want the physical proof that I'm alive. That he's alive. That three Stained are dead on the aerie floor because we're both still what we are.

His cock twitches deep, the heat of his cum flooding me in thick pulses I feel against every wall. His tail wraps my waist—tight, possessive, the territorial coil that says mine in a language older than the one he lost.

After, he holds me. His wings fold around us both—the membrane warm against my skin, blocking out the aerie, the dead, the dark canopy, everything but his breathing and the slow steady beat of his heart against my back. His cock softens inside me by degrees, the prehensile flex going lazy, but he doesn't withdraw.

The Stained are dead on the aerie floor. My blood has dried on my shoulder. The night outside is quiet again, the insects resuming, the stream murmuring below, the canopy settling back into its rhythms as if nothing happened.

"I would have handled all three," I say into the dark of his wings.

His arms tighten around me. His mouth finds the crown of my head—the only place it reaches without effort, the place where his lips land when he isn't thinking about it. "I know," he says. And then, lower: "I wanted to kill them myself."

Not because he doubted me. Because something touched what was his. Because the possessive thing inside him, the thing the mutation gave teeth and claws, wanted to answer the threat with its own hands.

I understand that. I understand it better than I should.

He holds me through the rest of the night. The dead go cold on the floor. His heartbeat goes steady against my spine. Somewhere in the canopy below, the nightbird sings its two notes into the silence.

33

ADA

Brother Lief comes to the boundary with three attendants and that smile.

I see them from the upper canopy—Corvin's hand on my arm, his chin dipping toward the tree line where the white robes are visible against the dark green undergrowth like bleach stains on a living thing. The morning is warm, the canopy humming with insects, the stream loud after last night's rain. Mist hangs in the lower branches, turning the ruins into something softer than they are—the old towers half-hidden, the canopy floor lost in a white haze that smells of wet earth and growing things.

The Ordained don't belong in the canopy. Their long legs fold at wrong angles over the roots, the extended shin bones catching on every rise. Their sandals slip on the moss. The white robes snag on the low thorned bushes at the canopy edge, and they stop to free the fabric with those too-long fingers—careful, fussy, the gestures of bodies that have never learned to move through anything rougher than a stone corridor. The torches they carry are unnecessary—the morning light is clear through the gaps—but the Ordained carry torches the way they carry everything.

For ceremony. For the message.

Brother Lief is the tall one in front. I recognize his walk before I recognize his face—the loping stride, the hands clasped at his waist, the hunched shoulders held deliberately straight as if good posture is a choice he makes fresh every morning. His sallow skin catches the filtered green light and turns it gray. From up here he looks like what he is: something the mutation started and abandoned. Too tall, too thin, the proportions slightly wrong in every direction—arms too long, torso too narrow, the white robe falling from shoulders that curve forward no matter how hard he works to square them.

The last time I saw that walk, it was crossing a council room in New Reach while he explained why the offerings were necessary.

Three and a half weeks ago. Before the ledge. Before everything.

"I'm going down," I say.

Corvin looks at me. His amber eyes steady. His tail does a single slow sweep—not agitation but attention. He's reading me the way he reads his territory: the set of my jaw, the way my hand has moved to the knife at my hip, the fact that I said I'm going down and not should we go down. He knows what that means.