Dream Lover (13 page)

 

Rhiannon came to when she heard a door closing. Her eyes flashed open and the breath sucked into her lungs. Had it happened at all, or had it been a hallucination? Had the whole thing just been
a crazed dream, a result of her injury? She put her hand to her head, where her hair had been matted with blood. The hair was silken smooth, and fanned out on soft pillows.

“Rhiannon?”

She rolled her head against the pillow. Morning light filled the room, and it was as it had been before, richly furnished with a wedding bed to be proud of. Edgar stood by the doorway. He wore a loose, white lawn shirt and knee breeches. His feet were bare. Glossy black hair fell to his shoulders and his eyes twinkled warmly as he looked at her.

Beneath the bedcovers her fingers went to the place between her thighs where she still felt him claiming her. Her clit felt bruised, bruised and sated from his delicious torment, her cunt heavy with the aftermath of the carnal pleasure that had swamped her. He had made her like him. She was sentient now, but would she end up like he was, half-feral in the light of the moon? She should’ve been afraid, she supposed, but the prospect didn’t faze her, because destiny had already embraced her, long ago
. Let it take me where I am bound.

She blinked when he walked over and sat down beside her. Staring into his eyes, she knew exactly where she should be: home, in the house on the moor, and everything she had left behind her faded away. Edgar had stepped out and called to her through the mists of time.

“You’ve come home,” he said.

Tentatively, she reached out and stroked his handsome face. “They made me leave you; I didn’t want to.”

“I know, but I also knew you’d find your way back to me, one day.” He turned his face and pressed his mouth to her palm. With a lingering kiss he breathed her in, deeply. When he turned back, his eyes had turned to molten fire. “Are you hungry, my love?”

Rhiannon nodded, her blood darkening with instinctive
anticipation. He rolled onto the bed, lying on his back. She swallowed hard, the urge to move closer to his body taking her over. Climbing to her hands and knees, she straddled his hips and arched over his neck. His hands went to her naked breasts and he molded them in his hands, a deep lingering sigh in his throat. Her sharpest teeth were aching for him, her mouth filling with saliva. She could hear his blood pounding. It was as if she had her ear to his heart. And his scent! His scent filled her senses to overflowing, her lips parted and it multiplied as she breathed him in across her tongue, every sensory receptor in her mouth and throat heightened in awareness—his scent, his body, his strong male body, all of it filled her and overwhelmed her with the need to take him.

Her teeth ached and her curious tongue felt its way around the edge of her sharpening fangs, dripping with saliva in anticipation of the act. Beneath her splayed pussy, his cock was hard, and he freed it from his breeches, readying for her to mount it. She could hear his blood roaring in his throat. She was changing—she could sense his anticipation, his interest, and, yes, his darkening arousal. She growled low in her throat, instinctively knowing how good he would taste and how fiercely his blood would run to his groin when she bit into his throat, how good that would feel in her mouth and her cunt. They would become strong through it, bonded as one.

She closed her eyes and felt desire run rabid in her blood. First she mounted his cock, then she sank her teeth into his throat, piercing the skin and closing her mouth around the hot, heady flow. As she did, she saw images of them together, out in the moonlight on the moor, mating copiously. The dark chalice that held the secret of the moors had been passed to her, and she would share it with him, forever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
n two years of drifting in place, Jayne had seldom looked out the window. What was the point? At night, clients came and went; in the daytime she slept. Sometimes, very rarely, she dreamed.

She might never have noticed him looming just beyond her balcony if a nervous college kid hadn’t felt in sudden need of air.

“Hey, terrific gargoyle! French, probably, limestone, taking a beating from acid rain. Not much detail left.” He grasped at the distraction. “They say gargoyles are demons cursed with eternal imprisonment in stone. Guess nobody figured even stone might not be forever.”

Jayne’s stroke on his thigh turned him from the window. Long, pale hair swung with the seductive tilt of her head. Gray eyes looked through dark lashes into his. “You like things… French?” He forgot about the gargoyle.

Jayne didn’t forget.

On a rainy evening she watched through summer dusk as
rivulets washed over the stone shoulders. Thin glistening ribbons of water crisscrossed in ill-defined grooves, giving a sense of layered scales, or feathers; something indelibly winglike.

The massive back was hunched. The twisted, upturned face hurled mute defiance at the heavens, while pointed ears and horns stabbed at the sky. The jaws had once spouted water from the eaves, but the intake had been clogged for years and the torrent spilled haphazardly down the head. The teeth were mere vestigial stumps. Jayne thought of the acid rain, and her own fleeting youth, and mourned for them both.

That night, after a bout with a truly nasty customer, Jayne leaned out into the light rain. Leopold sent such creeps from time to time to scare her, keep her in line.

She gazed at the still, dark figure as mist cooled her skin and a breeze swept the fouled air away. He hulked, blot-like, against clouds lit by ambient city light. “They’re wearing us down,
mon amie
,” she murmured.

As her eyes adjusted to darkness the stone face seemed to flush with a reddish glow. A dull light pulsed through slanted eyes and gaping throat, highlighting the teeth. At thirteen stories a connection to the basement furnace seemed unlikely, but Jayne was too drained to care.

In daylight she took a closer look, finding nothing but dry stone mottled by smoke and rain and bird droppings. Some obscure proprietary impulse drove her to take water and soap and a long brush and scrub as far as she could reach. A curse was one thing; debasement was something else.

Over the weeks she watched him in varying lights and weather. Only the combination of night and rain produced the strange effect, as though acidity ate away a thin veneer that resealed in daylight.

Jayne found herself trying to communicate. “Who trapped
you? Someone higher up the chain of evil? Or a self-righteous moral bigot? I’ve known both kinds. There isn’t much to choose between.” His pulsing glow seemed to quicken in agreement.

Her own sense of comradeship surprised her. Since the stone demanded nothing, she yearned to give. Not that she could think of anything worth giving.

In symbolic sharing, she reached up to lay morsels of food on the stone tongue. When she tried this on a rainy night, the offering was sucked into the red cavern with a force that thrilled and frightened her. When she offered raw meat, the eyes glowed hotter and a swirl of smoke rose from the rumbling depths.

She blinded herself to the ominous implications, preferring to think, if she thought at all, that her sanity was slipping. What had sanity ever done for her?

Reality was increasingly hard to bear. Someday soon Leopold would forget, or cease to care, that he couldn’t afford to mark her face or body.

On the night he finally snapped, rain splatted against the window, and shards of his spittle flecked her face as he shouted and raged and shook her.

“Yes!” she screamed at last. “Yes! I held out on you! I hid money! Why not? I earned it!” The capitulation startled him into releasing her.

“It’s out there, in the gargoyle’s mouth.” She gestured toward the window. “But it slipped down and I can’t quite reach it. You get it, if you want it!”

“Like hell! In the fucking rain? Get out there and don’t come back without it!”

The cold rain slicked her thin wrap to her body. She’d lied about the money being there, though she did have a stash secreted elsewhere, saving for…for some other kind of life. Any other kind.

It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going back.

She looked down. Neon flashed and car lights crawled along the street far, too far, below. To sprawl in their glare, broken and distorted…no…

She turned to the gargoyle and clung. It felt warm, vibrant, even…responsive. If only she had known! Such opportunities lost.

Leopold came cursing and stumbling out the window. He had shed his coat, but rain soaked his silk shirt and rage twisted his face. His cronies on Wall Street would scarcely have known him, even those who knew this source of his money because they had paid for the pleasure of Jayne’s company.

Jayne stepped up onto the low balustrade, reached an arm into the gargoyle’s mouth as far as she could, and willed herself to oblivion. Heat pulsed from within. Tremors shuddered through the stone.

Then Leopold was tearing and striking at her, not caring that her feet slid off the balustrade, that her arms were slipping from the stone torso.

The void below dragged at her, tried to swallow her—but something enfolded her, something warm and winglike and unseen, holding her safely while Leopold clawed at the stone and crammed his fist into the gaping maw.

Whatever she had hoped for, it was better and worse. His head went last. Hot blood streamed past, mixed with cold rain, and only when all ran cold did she know it was over. Then she was through the window, on the floor, not remembering how she had crawled there.

Dawn showed Leopold’s crumpled coat beneath the window. There would be cash in its inner pockets, but Jayne couldn’t bring herself to touch it. Yet.

No one would wonder at any cries from her apartment.
Leopold would hardly be missed except by his creditors. If she could just make sure nothing could connect her to his disappearance…

When at last she steeled herself to look outside there seemed to be no trace of him, until sunlight glinted on a gold wristwatch dangling from a stone jaw and jeweled rings tilting precariously on vestigial teeth.

She reached out, tentative at first; then her touch became a lingering caress across the rough stone face.

How quickly, she wondered, did erosion wear away the stone? What would happen to the world when the demon, if such he were, broke free? Did she care?

She knew what she cared about. She remembered the embrace of invisible wings, the power summoned by night and rain and her need. Her hands moved sensuously, stroking the folded wings, the breast, the ridged belly slanting away between braced forelegs. She sensed the mounting tension in the rigid stone, and whispered promises, waiting for night and rain.

For two days it stayed dry. Jayne took the necessary steps to change Leopold’s jewelry into cash, and to make the cash secure along with what she’d found in his pockets. Attention to such details occupied a level of her mind that seemed to be waking after years of sleep. She no longer drifted.

On another level, she was willingly swept along on a tide of erotic fantasy, feeling rough stone where there were only plaster walls; seeing slanting, glowing eyes in taxi taillights. When the first tongues of rain licked her skin as she hurried home through the dusk, ripples of heat flowed over and through her. Her breath quickened in anticipation.

She started tearing at her constricting clothing in the elevator. By the time she thrust open the window, she was naked.

The rain had intensified, and now it blew cold on her skin.
The shock gave her mind a chance to catch up with her need.

When Jayne finally climbed out onto the balcony she was wrapped in a hooded raincoat. She knew the allure of mystery and slow unveiling; she also knew all previous experience might be irrelevant. Could her demon be pleased like human men? Until she knew his pleasure, she would simply please herself.

The light from his depths glowed hotter than ever before—in anticipation of her coming? Or had he gained strength from devouring Leopold? A shiver of fear sharpened her excitement.

She pressed herself against the rain-slick stone and inched the raincoat open. Chill gave way to warmth wherever skin touched stone, and when she stretched upward from the balustrade a deep vibration pulsed through the rigid mass. She pressed closer, bruising her softness on his ridges, melding pain with pleasure. When she sensed desperation in his trembling she loosened her grip and stepped down.

Jayne knew the art of pleasing watchers. They had been her only bearable customers. In any closer interaction it was she who would become the watcher, removed, unmoved, observing with vague repulsion what her other self must do.

She wondered whether he could see her, but when she raised the edges of the coat like dark wings the light beamed obliquely from his eyes to warm the pale flame of her body. The coat, once released, did not fall but floated above and behind, supported by the light. She forgot the rain, forgot everything but herself and that burning presence, feeding on his hunger as it fed on hers.

Beginning with dance-like movements, slowly, sinuously, Jayne curved her hands from waist to hips, slimness to taut fullness. Her touch was the watcher’s touch, but under her command.

Then she drew her fingers lightly upward, brushing them teasingly around the outer curves of her breasts, catching her breath at the sweet soreness. As she cupped them gently and then
less gently, in her mind her outline transformed from slender to voluptuous.

The ripples of pleasure intensified. Urgency flowed down her body. She throbbed both with fullness and with an aching need to be filled.

Jayne thought fleetingly of pulling back. How could she bear it if this hot tide never flooded into release? But it was all she had to give. Besides, it was too late.