Dark Paradise (11 page)

Her nipples stiffened to painful little points, and she allowed her own moan to escape. Two sexy, naked men at her disposal—who
wouldn’t
moan?

Elder placed his hand below hers on Mach’s huge cock, and they masturbated him together. Elder took Mach’s balls in his hand, and Cin nearly drooled at the sight.

“
That’s
sexy,” she said.

“Yeah,” Elder agreed. “But watch this.”

He leaned forward, sliding the other man’s cock into his mouth. His lips touched her fingers, still wrapped around the base, when he swallowed the huge erection.

Mach growled, and his grip on her breasts tightened.

“Oh, God,” she whispered. She took her hand from Mach’s cock, grabbed his fingers from her breasts, and pushed them between her legs.

He rubbed her pussy with hard movements, and she held his wrist, thrusting herself against his fingers as she watched Elder suck him.

Elder closed his eyes and gobbled Mach’s dick like there was no better banquet in the world. Faster and faster he moved, his mouth moving with a wild sexiness she couldn’t resist.

Her pussy dampened and throbbed as she rode Mach’s fingers, her orgasm dangerously close to exploding.

She took a deep breath and held it, and her orgasm roared through her entire body. She yelled and fell forward onto Mach’s big chest as her climax continued, those few seconds of ecstasy seeming to go on for an eternity.

At last the tremors eased, and she sat up shakily, slightly dazed. “Oh my.”

Mach’s laugh was weak and strained as his own orgasm loomed, and she suddenly realized that Elder was being neglected. Kind of.

All it took was a little rearranging, and she slid Elder’s rigid cock into her mouth as he continued to suck Mach.

Elder thrust into her mouth gently, perhaps more inclined than Mach to be gentle, but she would break him of that eventually. She smiled around his cock and matched her movements to his, and in moments, his quickening breaths and light grunts heralded his own nearing orgasm.

She wanted him in her mouth when he came, wanted to swallow his essence, wanted to give him that pleasure. She sucked him faster and harder, and when she heard Mach yell his orgasm, she knew Elder’s would follow.

It did. His cock bucked inside her mouth, shooting a hot stream down her throat. His voice joined with Mach’s to break the stillness of the night as their releases shook their bodies.

After she’d milked Elder dry of every ounce of come, she flopped to her back, her head on Mach’s belly, her legs wide, and brought herself to another shattering orgasm. Knowing they watched her pleasure herself made her climax harder, faster.

Mach tangled his fingers in her hair as she cried out her orgasm. Elder moved down and rested his head on one of her thighs, his fingers sliding up her leg to find her clit. He pinched and massaged the swollen, sensitive bit of flesh until she screamed and came so hard she thought, for a second, her heart would stop.

She fell asleep with Elder’s fingers lying heavy and still against her pussy, her head on Mach’s stomach, and her heart full of satisfaction.

Chapter Eleven

It was surprising how little trouble they met as they walked the reach. Cin couldn’t help but think how different it might have been if she’d been alone. It was so much better having companions. She couldn’t really remember why she’d been so against grouping up to begin with.

But this was different than just joining with some random group. She’d gotten lucky and was grateful. She wouldn’t admit it to
them
, but she was.

She felt a quick tug of foreboding when they left the reach and walked the final steps that would lead to the post with an abruptness she wasn’t sure she’d ever get used to. They stepped from the wall of trees into what the miners jokingly referred to as a town.

Silent, they stood side by side, getting the feel of the town. Dirty, tired, and hungry, they waited. All of them had learned the value of patience on Ripindal.

The town consisted of the trading post, a few huts in which the gargoyles—the Zathmanians who minded the post—lived, and a smattering of outhouses in which to relieve themselves. There was really little else, besides the random camp set up by desperate miners too ill to hunt.

She’d heard one of the camps was inhabited by a one-legged beggar who, for some unknown reason, hadn’t been put down by housekeeping. Another was supposedly occupied by a blind woman. How she’d been blinded no one could say. How either one of them survived was as much a mystery as anything else.

“It’s quiet,” she said, her fingers hovering over Saint and Satan.

“Too quiet,” Mach said. The low hum that heralded the start of a growl was sounding deep in his chest.

Her stomach clenched as threads of unease floated through her body. Something was wrong. She glanced toward the usually busy post, where no man stirred, no voices raised in argument or song floated through the glassless windows. The door remained solidly closed.

Elder glanced at her. “Arm yourself, sugar.”

He and Mach pulled weapons at the same time, and she hurried to do the same. They’d made it through the fucking reach with no problem, only to find danger in town.

Mach lifted his face, sniffing the air.

“What is it?” she asked.

Mach finally stopped scenting the air and looked first at Elder, then her. “Dry bones.”

She frowned. “What does that mean?”

Elder’s hand shook on his sword. “Fuck me. Are you sure?”

Mach nodded. His big fists were full of sharp short swords, with more holstered on his body. For one instant, he looked uncertain.

That scared her more than anything.

“That’s why even the reach was quiet,” Elder said, and in his voice was a dreadful understanding that she did not want to hear.

“What the
fuck
are dry bones?” She meant to sound aggressive and pissed off. The wobble in her voice gave her away. She cleared her throat. “Tell me!”

“You should hide,” Elder said. “Come out when it’s safe. We’ll distract them.”

“Fuck you!
You
should hide!” She knew she was freaking out but couldn’t seem to stop. They were scaring the shit out of her.

“Dry bones are—”

But before he could explain, a man ran into their field of vision, screaming, sobbing, begging. “No, no! God, no!”

Cin frowned. She saw no pursuers, nothing that would rouse that kind of fear in a man. And he was not a small man.

He stumbled and went down on one knee, started to rise, then bowed his head and stayed put. He mumbled something she couldn’t hear.

“What’s wrong with him?”

Elder put a finger to his lips. “Wait.”

They crept from the edges of the clearing, and she knew instantly these were the dry bones. She frowned, unable at first to process what she was seeing.

“What…”

“
Shut up
.” Elder’s whisper was barely audible, but she heard it.

But she couldn’t. “Let’s just go back,” she whispered, and began to actually tiptoe backward before Mach’s bruising grip on her arm stopped her.

“Do not move. They will feel it through the ground.”

“But—”

“Stay still, sugar. They—”

Mach hissed at them, and she knew if the danger were not so severe, he might have hit them in his rage. He wanted them quiet.

Terrified, too afraid to look but too afraid not to, she lifted her gaze to the dry bones, and to the poor man kneeling in the dirt.

Zombies
. That was her first thought. But even the fictional zombies of her youth were not as frightening, surely, as these monsters.

They had been dead once, she had no doubt. Maybe still were. Bits of clothing and flesh clung to bones, and dried up, shriveled, black organs peeked through the bones on some of them. Some of them were simply, as their name suggested, dry bones.

Skeletons with clacking jaws and empty eye sockets, long yellow teeth, and stiletto fingers.

One of them advanced upon the kneeling man and with one of those fingers, drilled a hole into the man’s head.

He screamed and fell over.

Cin waited for him to die, but he kept screaming. Kept screaming and screaming, hideous sounds she knew she’d not be able to forget for a hell of a long time. If ever.

She couldn’t put her hands over her ears because she held her knives.

The dry bones had surrounded him, and as though it was a game, they destroyed him. They ripped his skin with sharp teeth, stabbed him with long fingers, pulled the flesh from his body as though it were simply clothes he wore.

And still he screamed.

“They don’t…kill,” Elder said. “They torture. When it’s over, he’ll be one of them.” He looked at her, his eyes full of the deepest horror she’d ever seen.

And then she understood. “They live? He’ll live? Like that?”

“With a certain intelligence, at least at first. Eventually, he’ll just be mad. Craving a warm body to eat.” His whispered words just made what he said all the more terrible.

Because yes, they were eating him. Eating him down to the bone.

She leaned over and retched, suddenly so weak with terror she nearly lost her grip on Saint and Satan.

“Most of them came from the earth,” Elder continued, even though by now she wished he would just be quiet, “and they feel the earth. They feel vibrations when someone in the area moves.”

How had she avoided them until now? Maybe there was a secret to that, she didn’t know, didn’t care. She’d rather face the fucking zippers.

“Stand still,” Mach said.

She wanted to scream, wanted to turn and run, wanted to lose herself in an empty field of madness. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t, not because it would mean her death but because the men weren’t. And she would never be less than the men, would never humiliate herself that way.

So she forced herself calm, stood straight, and waited. Mach met her gaze with his own, and she took courage in his icy eyes. He nodded, once, and she grinned.

Saint and Satan vibrated in her hands, eager to be released, eager to find the blood they craved. They wouldn’t be getting any blood from the dry bones, though, and she wasn’t sure what they’d do in their disappointment. Break the bones, maybe. Could the dry bones be destroyed?

The victim finally stopped his horrendous screaming and lay torn and destroyed upon the bloody ground. He didn’t move.

The dry bones finally began to move away, quietly and quickly, the clacking of their bones the only sound.

She held her breath.

The murdered man stirred, then sank with an impossible suddenness into the earth. The spot where he’d been slain bucked and boiled as it sucked him into the ground, until finally, the only proof anything had happened was the scarlet splashes on the rocks and dirt, and the torn remnants of fabric from his clothing.

The dry bones faded into the copse of trees from which they’d first appeared, their movements jerky but fast. Very fast. Had they chased her, she knew they would have caught her. She wouldn’t have been able to outrun them.

“This,” she said, “is why a person would commit suicide instead of having to live here if there was no hope of a paradise.”

Elder looked at her, his face pale, eyes empty. He said nothing.

She holstered Saint and Satan and touched his cheek. “There
is
paradise, Elder.”

Mach put away his weapons. “To the post.”

“Can wood stop them?” she asked. “If we were inside a building with the door locked, could they get inside?”

Elder answered her. “Depends on how determined they were. We’d have a better shot inside than out.”

“Why didn’t that man run to the post?”

Elder’s laugh was bitter. “Do you honestly believe the Z’s would have opened the doors to save a human and risk themselves?”

The Zs was an easy way of referring to the Zathmanians, who ran the trading posts for the Gamlogi. She preferred calling them gargoyles. “No. I guess not. But he didn’t even try.”

“Let’s go,” Mach said. “Be watchful.”

She should have known it wasn’t going to be that simple. Perhaps the dry bones had been created by the devil, with blackness and torment and evil mischief the things that kept them going.

When she and the men stepped from their hiding place, watchful but content the dry bones had left the area, they discovered they were wrong.

The dry bones were waiting.

Chapter Twelve

There was no time to think. Her desire to survive kicked in. Her mind crept back from the horror, and her reflexes took over.

She’d known Saint and Satan wouldn’t be able to do a lot with the dry bones, but when she loosed them with a despairing battle cry, they shot from her hands with a determined lust to try.

Maybe because no one who encountered the dry bones had lived to tell the facts, Cin discovered quickly that the term
dry bones
was something of a misnomer.

The bones looked dry, picked clean of flesh, but they were soft. At least inside. The outside was a shell of brittle bone, but when Elder tossed her a small but deadly ax and she made contact with one of the dry bones, the ax sliced through the bone and stuck briefly on a thick jellied middle.

The two men were seasoned warriors, and though she hadn’t been on Ripindal for long, she had years of mean living behind her. She could use a fucking knife.

She could fight.

Facing away from one another, the three of them fought the dry bones, but it wasn’t like with the zippers. This time, the humans were losing.

She was hurt; the dry bones had struck her several times and had stabbed her with their knifelike fingers. She felt no pain. There was only white noise and adrenaline.

But they were losing.

Mach was yelling, cutting through the dry bones like a madman, using his blades as though they were extensions of his huge, muscled arms.

She caught glimpses of him and of Elder, who fought nearly as well. But even as she watched, he slipped and fell, and the dry bones he’d been holding off fell upon him.

Cin screamed, but there was no time to help him. She couldn’t make the dry bones wait a minute while they regrouped, while she went to care for Elder.