She stopped struggling and panted in my hold.
“Sorry,” I muttered against her silken hair. “It has to be this way for now.”
For now...
Maybe for always.
She did not reply, just kept breathing heavily. It made her breasts press and shift against my arm, and now that I’d gotten her still I had a whole new problem.
I was aroused.
She smelled so good and felt so good and all I could think about was the pink seam of her cunt when she’d been bent over in front of me this morning. This position was not helping. Her rump was currently pressed firmly against my groin. Or, rather, based on how events had unfolded, I supposed it was my groin that was firmly pressed against her rump.
In short, I seemed to have brought this entirely on myself. I could have come at her another way, maybe simply tried to hold her hand, instead of cornering her until I was forced to practically wrap myself around her to keep her from escaping.
But there was no changing that now. Here we were. Her, seething. Me, doing everything possible to keep my cocks inside my slit. Stone of the sky, how long had it been since I’d rutted someone, or even just spilled seed at all? I could not account for all the time spent in darkness.
Based on the protestation of my cocks, I wagered it had been a very, very long time. I ground my fangs against each other, trying to focus on other things – the press of wood into my side, the poke of the knife sheath against my thigh – so that I did not feel her body against me. So that I did not picture her bent, bare form in torturous detail while imagining the sudden deterioration of her clothing, the only barrier between us besides my rather overwrought slit muscles.
Lost in excruciating thought, I did not notice at first when Suvi had fallen asleep. Eventually I realized that the tension had eased out of her form and her breathing had grown slow and even. I exhaled tightly and rolled onto my back, keeping my upper arm flush against her spine, but at least creating some distance between the luscious shape of her backside against my twitching slit. I palmed my groin with a bit-back groan, feeling the engorged tissue behind the muscle, and resigned myself to a very long night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Suvi
As soon as I began to wake, I knew that something wasn’t right. My whole body felt achy and stiff, and when I moved my feet, I cried out in white-hot, pulsing pain. I was on my back, and I grew slightly aware of someone – the alien – sitting bolt upright beside me and leaning over my face. I groaned, shivering violently despite the heat pouring off of him.
Fingers ghosted over my forehead and cheeks, scraping sweaty hair back from my face. When I cracked my eyes open, an intensely focused alien face looked back, snout twitching and tight, golden eye dragging a panicky line back and forth over my face. He was saying something, asking me a question, following it up with my name. I groaned again, and let my eyes fall closed. Everything hurt, especially my feet. I was scared to even look at them.
He wasn’t scared, though. Or if he was, he didn’t let it stop him. He released my face and the sudden feeling of gentle pressure on my ankles was so painful I writhed and tried to twist away.
The alien grew very, very still. Trying not to vomit, I forced my eyes open to look at him, finding him with his eye trained on my feet which he held gingerly aloft.
Oh, fuck.
My feet were swollen and purple. The alien slowly peeled my pant legs upwards, revealing angry redness that had already started spreading up my calves.
Oh, God. Please, please, no.
I tried not to cry, because my head already felt like it was going to explode and the thought of crying made it seem like it actually would. But the sheer, desperate panic was undeniable. It bubbled up in my chest until I lurched up onto my elbows, leaned to the side, and vomited on the floor.
Infection. Now that I knew what was happening, I was convinced I could literally feel it sifting through my bloodstream. The feverish forward march of an unseen army, creeping all the way up my legs like ants. There was no medicine here, no antibiotics, no other humans, no nothing. Nothing except the alien who’d done this to me and who now had the gall to stare, frozen, down at my broken body as if stunned by the consequences of it all.
I was going to die here. I’d always suspected that, but now it seemed incredibly real. So close I could taste the acrid curl of it on my tongue.
My feet would go necrotic. My fever would get higher and higher. And then my organs would shut down.
I wasn’t sure I could dream up a more agonizing way to end things.
I’d watched Elvi die, but she’d been asleep and pumped full of drugs. I wouldn’t even have that small comfort.
“No,” I choked out. I spit, trying to clear the last bit of bile from my mouth. Even staying up on my elbows was too hard, and it was only the quick shift of the alien’s hand beneath my head that kept me from collapsing into my own vomit.
That seemed to have shocked him out of his stillness. Now, he was all movement, and it was explosive. He snatched me up into his arms, clutching me close and spreading his wings with a vicious crack. He didn’t even bother walking out the door. He jerked his head upwards, and the entire ceiling cracked before blowing outwards off the house entirely. Sun blinded me, and I screwed my eyes shut as he took off into the air.
I huddled against him, fighting the urge to vomit again. I couldn’t even be bothered wondering what he was doing or where he was taking me. I was too ill to feel afraid of how high we flew.
In the last dregs of consciousness, it occurred to me that we’d left my boots behind.
Then it occurred to me that I probably wouldn’t need them anymore.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Skallagrim
Icould not remember ever being so afraid. I flew like something terrible pursued me, like I would die if I stopped.
I would not die if I stopped.
But Suvi might.
I did not know what to do or how to help her. Concepts danced at the edge of my consciousness before fading like mist. Words exploded, sparks that lit up the surface of the river in my head – fever disease medicine amputate – but I couldn’t string them together in any way that seemed to do me any good. That last word, “amputate,” started to pound through me like an illness of my own and I flew faster, harder, so that I would not have to wonder if the knife at her hip would be sharp enough to do it.
There was.... someone. Somewhere. Who could help. I was certain of it in the maddening, contextless way I seemed certain of so many things these days. There had been a place, a person. People?
I chased the memory with my body, beating my wings hard while keeping Suvi safely nestled against my chest. I leaned into instinct, dove into the barely-there feeling that plagued me, the feeling that told me someone could help her, could fix this, if I could only find them.
I flew all day. I did not stop. Suvi drifted in and out of consciousness, and as the sun began to descend on the horizon, I feared that maybe I’d been wrong. That my memory had failed her, failed us both.