We fell to the carpeted floor, scattering clothing, half-dressed as we wrestled, our only goal to obliterate ourselves in each other. For that moment, everything I’d been through, everything that still stood before me—treachery, torment, death—they all fell away. I didn’t even stop to consider that making love in one of Hell’s most famous boutiques wasn’t exactly discreet, because at that moment nothing existed but the two of us, separated for so long but never truly apart, still burning for each other. It doesn’t make sense in Hell or on Earth, but if you’ve been there, you know. We were making a cathedral of sweat and skin and stifled cries in the worst place that ever was, and nobody was in it but us.
We gave up on the clothes at some point, having removed enough of them that I could climb on top of her and sink myself to the root. My demon body, I was discovering, reacted pretty much like my earthly one. I guess the scientists are right: most of sex is in the mind.
Caz gasped and stiffened, her nails driving into my thickened hide like the tips of knives, ten stabs at once, but it only made me crazier, more animal. I rubbed my face against hers, taking in her smells in insane gulps even as she wrapped her thighs around me, urging me past the chilly bite of her petals to her deep inner heat. She groaned. So did I. We were pushing against each other so violently, striving for some impossible completeness of connection, that we kept bumping into things on the floor, legs of tables, dressmaker’s dummies, knocking things over until we must have looked a lot like those two damned souls in the Lykaion race, trying to destroy each other in the bloody sand of the Circus Commodus.
At last I paused, panting, dripping sweat and blood, still too exalted and too stupefied to come. Caz pushed me onto my back and then slid her body over me, pushing her pussy in my face as she licked me and smacked at me with her clawed fingers, then she climbed back onto my cock to ride me as though I were a dying horse, pulling everything out of me she could. When my orgasm finally burst out of me it felt like a heart attack. I shouted and pulled her against me as tightly as I could, and this seemed to squeeze her into climax as well. She clenched my ribs between her knees and rode harder and harder until her ragged breathing rose to a sustained growl of desperate and only coincidentally pleasurable release, then she rolled off me and lay like a dead thing. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I could barely breathe, but what air I could draw in smelled like Caz. She might be a woman who had been damned since before Columbus sailed, but she was the woman I had crossed Hell to find: to me, it was the true breath of Heaven.
At last her own panting slowed, calmed. She reached out a hand, nudged my arm with it. For a moment I didn’t know what to do, then I realized she wanted me to hold it.
We lay there, both of us still breathing very hard, hand in hand in a pile of Hell’s finest couture.
“Well,” she said at last. “We’re really fucked this time, Dollar. I hope you’re happy.”
“Strangely, yes,” I said. Of course we would both suffer terribly when we were caught. Dying would be the luckiest possible outcome, but neither of us were that lucky. “Yes, I am.”
thirty:
a different universe
SHE GOT up. I hated that. I hated anything that wasn’t the two of us lying close and connected, preferably forever.
“Don’t.” I reached out a hand, barely touched the back of her cold thigh as she moved past me. “Stay with me.”
“I need to get out to some of the stores and look like I’m spending money, since I’m supposed to be shopping today, and I’m due back soon. And I need to let Poitou have his shop back. He only let me borrow it as a favor.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a nice one. “He thinks he’s doing it for Eligor, of course.”
The grand duke’s name was like a bucket full of cold water. I sat up. “Don’t. Don’t go back. That’s why I’m here, to take you away.”
“Let go of me, Bobby. This was already an incredibly stupid thing for me to do. You’ll just make things worse.”
“Worse? How could they be worse Caz? We’re in Hell! You live here, and I’ve spent better times in DMV offices—not counting what just happened, of course.”
She shook her head and kept gathering up her clothes. “Enough. My keepers are going to be after me any moment.”
“Keepers? You mean your former bodyguards, Crunchy and Yum-yum? I can take them. I can take them both.”
“Candy and Cinnamon. No, you can’t. Not here. Not in that body.” She was moving faster now, spinning out of my orbit, probably forever. “They’d tear your arms off like pulling the wings off a fly.” She nodded toward my partially regenerated hand. “Looks like you’re already having a hard time hanging onto body parts.”
I stood up. “Don’t, Caz. As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been telling me, ‘No, no, no! Don’t do it! Leave me alone! I don’t love you!’ But I’m not buying it. You just put yourself in terrible danger for me. You said it yourself, your big gray guidance counselors might come bashing through the door any second . . .”
“Not in here. They don’t know about this place. I’ve borrowed it before.”
“It doesn’t matter!” But a steam-jet of jealousy turned my insides scalding hot. Who had she brought here? I suppose I should have applauded her cuckolding Eligor any way and any time possible, but my feelings were a bit more complicated than that. “Just listen to me. I came here for you, and I’m not leaving without you.”
She was trying to ignore me but not doing a very good job. I wasn’t going to make it easier for her, so I got up and followed. When she sat down to pull on her shoes, I crouched beside her.
“I’m not going away, Caz. I’ve been missing you so badly for weeks—months! Can’t sleep, can’t do anything but think about you. I’m not leaving without you.”
“Months?” Her laugh was harsh, startled. “Do you know how long it’s been down here? More like years. Don’t tell me about missing someone. I was an idiot to let myself care. And now I’m paying for it. Just go away, Bobby. Let me heal.”
Years? Had it really been so long for her? “I can’t, Caz. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let myself care, either—but I did. And now I can’t stop.”
She stared at me for a long, quiet moment, eyes narrowed so that her irises were only blood-red stripes. “You’re a fool. I’m a fool! It’s going to end badly,” she said at last.
“What doesn’t?”
Tears suddenly welled in her eyes and spilled over. They slowed as they ran down, freezing on her cold cheek. I reached out and touched one, watched it flutter to the floor, a lost snowflake in Hell.
“Where?”
“Where what?” But she wasn’t pulling away now. She held her bag and her wrap in front of her chest, as if they were all she had left to protect herself.
“Where do I see you again? When?” The sight of the pale, vulnerable skin on her neck made me so hot for her that I began to drag my own clothes back on in self-defense. I didn’t want to get her caught, no matter how powerful my need for her. I also wasn’t ready to take her away yet. I still had a few things to prepare, and I hadn’t expected to find her so quickly.
She was so beautiful I kept getting distracted from my clothes. I crawled toward her and ran my hands up the insides of her legs, lifting her skirt as I went, rolling it back until it lay in an untidy pile across her belly. I bit her gently on the flesh of her thigh, just above the femoral artery. She was cold and hot, both at the same time. She pushed my head in irritation as if I were an overly familiar dog, but she didn’t push very hard. I nibbled further up her leg until I could barely hear her because her thighs were pressing against my ears.