Page 26 of Dark Mate

A sound breaks out of her, startled, then not. “Mmh!” Her thighs fall open for me with no say from her. Her body knows mine. Knows it fast—opening, slicking, taking the thick of me as I push up and seat deep.

My hands stay soft while the rest of me goes to iron. One on her back. One spread wide over the small of her, holding her down on my cock, feeling how soft she is everywhere, how little there is in her yet to stand up to me. I take her slow. Slow is all she can hold. Not mercy. I don’t carry mercy. She’s mine to keep whole. I don’t ruin what I mean to keep.

She comes with no name for me in her mouth, just sound. “Ah… ahh…” Her walls clutch me in waves and I go over after her with a snarl bitten into the crown of her head, my cum flooding her. Sealed, kept, mine.

My knot swells and locks us, and the vibration of it takes her clit and won’t quit, wringing her around me again and again while I empty into her. The sound starts again on its own, out of my chest, for her.

She goes loose on me. Her hand never leaves my throat.

Far off, north and east, the dead men walk my line with their torches and their calling.

Let them call. She’s down here in my dark, my mark in her, my sound in her bones. The only hands that reach her now are mine.

12

ELLIE

Something’s waking up in me, and it isn’t him.

I can feel it coming the way you feel a storm before it shows—a pressure behind everything, the edges going sharp. Everything’s louder than it was yesterday. Like someone kept a hand over my mouth for thirteen years and just lifted two fingers to see what I’d do.

There’s a wrongness under my skin. An itch I can’t get at because it’s below the muscle, not on top of it. The venom sits over the whole thing, warm and thick, the way it’s covered everything since his teeth went into my throat. But the old quiet, the smooth, the dull, the thing that’s lived in me since I was a kid—it’s wearing thin. And whatever’s under it won’t shut up.

“Okay,” I say to the dark. Out loud. Just to hear it. My voice comes out rough and used. “Okay. Think.”

He shifts behind me. Not awake, just settling, his arm going heavier over my ribs, his breath warm on the back of my neck. His tail finds my ankle and stays there, like he’s keeping his place in me.

“You’re a terrible conversationalist,” I tell him. He huffs—warm against the back of my neck. Somehow that’s an answer.Somehow it’s more than I expected from the thing that carried me up into the dark.

I breathe him in. I can’t help it, my face is against his chest and the smell of him fills me up on every inhale, and it’s nothing like the Cage. The Cage smelled of nothing. Approved nothing: clean linen, the floral steam off the cup, air scrubbed of anything that might mean something. He smells like a whole world. Warm skin and woodsmoke with no fire anywhere near, and under it something green, dark, and alive, like he soaked up the deep places he lives in until they started living in him. When he breathes out, the musk of him goes deeper. When he breathes in, the green note lifts. I lie there and read him through my nose the way I used to read a room by the slant of its light, and the thought that comes is almost embarrassing in how small and new it is: I have never once in my life been let to smell anything this much.

And then, quiet, underneath it—the thought that should have come first.

I could leave.

He’s asleep. The rut’s gone quiet. I’ve got arms, I’ve got legs, and somewhere up above us there has to be an opening, a way back into a world I can’t see. The thought arrives wrapped in cotton, the way the tea used to wrap everything, soft enough that I can hold it out at arm’s length and just look at it. A day ago I’d have been clawing for that opening with everything in me.

I don’t move.

I tell myself it’s the dark, that a body that can’t find a wall in the black doesn’t make it ten feet out there, that the canopy’s full of things with teeth. All true. None of it the reason. The reason is the warm weight of his arm over my ribs and the smell of him in my whole head and the awful new fact I’m not ready to say even to the dark: that the safest I have ever been in my life is righthere, pinned under a monster, and I don’t know yet what that makes me.

So I stay. And I keep talking to the dark instead, because that I know how to do.

I keep talking. Quiet, to myself, because there’s no one else down here and because the Cage never let me. “There’s a thing in my head that still sounds like the lessons. Divine union. Sacred bond. The body fights what the soul already knows.” I almost laugh. “Drink your tea. Stay safe. Stay sweet.”

There’s a second voice that’s just the venom.Stop thinking. This feels good. Let it.

And under both of them, a new one. Quiet and a little mean.What if everything you ever felt got poured into you out of a cup? What if you only know the wanting’s real because the stuff hiding it finally wore off?

I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure I want one.

For half a second, between one peak and the next, a little girl comes up out of me.

Seven, maybe. Standing in dry grass behind some building I can’t name anymore. I’ve found a beetle shell, the whole thing, empty, the bug long gone but the shape still there, every leg, thin as paper. My mom says it’s just a shell. Says they leave them behind. I don’t want it explained. I take it inside, set it on the windowsill, and check it every morning without knowing what I’m looking for.

Turns out I was learning what it looks like when something climbs out of itself and walks off as something else.

Then the next surge rolls in and takes her under.