Page 24 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

I have to get out of here.

It’s nearly dawn. At some point in the last few hours, I fell asleep, or passed out, or was enspelled by Laphriel. I don’t know. When I woke, he had changed my clothes again, and so now I’m sitting on the bed, watching the sun rise, in a motherfucking ball gown.

I can only guess that’s what it is. It’s sea foam green, with a sequined bodice that, like the other dress, is too tight for me.

The skirt is full and sweeps against the floor when I walk, and there are these long, wispy tails hanging from the low-cut back that I think were meant to wrap around the wearer’s arms, although they’re currently decayed into spiderwebs

It’s not exactly the kind of thing I’d choose for making an escape, but I didn’t have a choice, did I?

I walk over to the broken window. The passionflowers pour in, lusher than the ones that grow around my house. These vines are so thick that they almost look like snakes. Or maybe it’s because there’s something in the early light that makes them seem to move.

I frown, leaning closer. Something is glistening just outside the window, a kind of bright, oil slick shimmer on the air. Is that the barrier that’s keeping me in this place?

I couldn’t see it before.

I lift my hand to it, but I can’t feel anything. And I’m too chicken to try and stick my hand through. But this barrier, whatever it is, doesn’t look that thick—a gossamer membrane, like the shell of a bubble.

If I run, if I brace myself, I bet I could make it through to the other side. The pain yesterday was bad, but it didn’t do any permanent damage. And it did fade. Eventually.

I step back, my heart thudding. I have to try something.

It’s not like anyone’s going to come looking for me here.

If they saw the meteor (well, Laphriel), some of the park rangers might come looking for it.

But I doubt they can navigate the swamp as well as I can, and it could take days before they trace the landing to the Montcroix mansion.

And they certainly wouldn’t come into the house.

I’m due back at work on Monday, which I think is tomorrow—my sense of time is all skewed—but they wouldn’t know to come looking for me here. Not in a million years.

So, yeah. If I’m going to escape, I have to run through that barrier.

I gather up my skirts and brush out into the hallway, moving quickly. I keep expecting Laphriel to show up, but there’s no sign of him, not even when I make it to the front door.

I ease it open. The air shimmers like it did in the bedroom window, a faint, transparent rainbow swirling in on itself.

Strange that I didn’t see it yesterday. But the wind still blows through it, damp and hot, and I tell myself it’s not real.

It’ll hurt for a little while, and then the pain will fade, and then I’ll be free.

I take a few steps back, giving myself room to run. I hoist my skirt up around my waist.

The whooshing sound of wings fills the air from somewhere behind me, and I don’t hesitate. I take off like a shot, even as Laphriel shouts, “Natasha! Don’t!”

It’s the last thing I hear before I crash into the barrier, and then all I hear is screaming.

I don’t know if it’s me or if it’s the atoms in my body, which are being shredded apart.

All I can see is a blinding pale light. The house is gone.

So is the swamp. I’m trapped between them, and I’m burning alive.

Two hands wrap around my waist and pull me backward.

“No!” I sob, shrieking as the doorway materializes into view, and then the swamp beyond it. Then I can’t even say that, because the pain is everywhere, shooting through my limbs like electricity.

The world tilts. I’m not looking at the doorway anymore, but the vaulted ceiling overhead, the plaster cracked in places to show peeks of an empty blue sky. I thrash against the ground, screaming in agony and clawing at my dress, which feels as if it’s melted to my skin.

“Can not do that,” Laphriel mutters, his voice close to my ear. I try to jerk away from him, but he pushes me down. “Not ready yet.”

“Fuck you!” I don’t even know how I manage to get words out, the pain is so intense. I swear I can feel it in the marrow of my bones. “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Laphriel grabs at the bodice of my dress and pulls. I scream like he’s tearing my skin off, because that’s what it feels like, even though I can see, through the haze of my agony, the glitter of sea foam fabric and nothing else.

“Can help,” Laphriel says. “Do not move. ”

I try to tell him to stop, to get his hands off of me, but all that comes out is a long, wordless wail.

He shreds the rest of the dress, throwing the fabric to the side. I howl and grab at my naked flesh, certain I’m going to find blood and muscle and exposed nerves. I don’t. I only find skin, although my touch is like razor blades slicing it to ribbons.

“No,” Laphriel says firmly, jerking my hands away. “Let me. I can devour your pain.”

Those words are somehow more harrowing than anything else that’s happened.

He pins me down to the floor, his wings spread above us like a canopy. Every face traced in the patterns of the markings looks like my own, screaming in torment.

“It will help,” he says again, more softly this time.

Then he presses his mouth to my forehead. I barely feel it through the pain, and I try to fight him, but he holds me down, pressing my wrists to the floor on the other side of my head. He keeps kissing me, moving his mouth over my temple, to my cheeks, then down along my jawline.

And—

And it does help.

The pain’s still there, electrifying every part of me, but my panic and confusion seep away. When Laphriel gets to my neck, he licks me, his tongue long and silken and cool, like putting aloe vera on a burn.

“Incredible,” he murmurs into my skin, kissing and licking me between words. “Like nothing in?—”

He cuts himself off with a moan, then moves down to my shoulders, and I hate that I can feel myself relaxing into his kisses. Every time his tongue laps over my skin, the pain disappears with it, like he really is devouring my suffering.

I slump back against the floor, staring up at the cracks of blue sky in the ceiling. Laphriel moves across my chest to the other shoulder, then down. I suck in my breath as he teases the top of my breasts with his tongue, and when that tongue finds my nipple, I squeeze my eyes shut.

Because it doesn’t just take the pain away. It feels good.

Laphriel pauses and lets go of my right wrist—tentatively, like he expects me to fight back. I know I should.

But he’s an angel. Or a demon. Or both. And I’m just a human girl who can’t even get out of South Florida.

He runs his palm over my breast, then squeezes it gently. I jerk against him, whimpering. I’m not sure if I’m whimpering at the heat of his touch or the pain still burning through my body.

“It’s better,” he gasps, disbelief clear in his words. “It’s better .”

Then he latches his mouth to my other breast, his silky tongue lapping at my nipple.

I cry out as he licks the pain away and replaces it with pleasure.

At some point, he lets go of my left wrist, too, and I’m distantly aware of him touching me as his mouth moves lower, over the soft swell of my belly.

He makes strange, hungry noises in the back of his throat as he licks me with long, soft strokes, and I notice there’s something experimental about them.

He lingers in one area—the valley between my breasts, the top of my hip, the soft flesh beneath my belly button—and then stops, like he’s listening to me.

But all I’m doing is breathing through the lingering pain and trying desperately to fight the growing ache between my legs.

“This pleasure,” he says, his mouth on the flare of my hip. “It is new for me. To taste your agony is...”

His tongue make a long, meandering path down to the top of my thigh, dangerously close to my pussy. I suck my breath in, body tensing.

And not from pain.

“Not what I knew before,” he says. “But better. Yes. So much better, all this sin and suffering.”

His tongue laps down to my inner thigh.

And God help me, but I spread my legs for him .

I’m damning myself , I think foggily, still watching the blue sky. But then Laphriel’s long, dexterous tongue finds my clit, and then I can’t think of anything else.

I’ve had my pussy licked before, but always by men who saw it as some dull but necessary fee for getting to fuck me.

But Laphriel does it like this is the thing he was searching for.

His tongue slides along my slit, as cool and gentle as satin, probing and testing until his tongue works inside me.

I cry out and grab instinctually at his impossibly silky hair, his tongue deep inside my cunt. Deeper than a human’s tongue would be.

My pain is gone. Not just the pain from running through that barrier, but every dull, constant ache I’ve lived with since I started to work at Pearl’s after my parents’ deaths.

The faint twinge in my knee. The exhaustion in my muscles.

The discomfort of not having taken a bath in the Florida humidity. I feel brand new.

Laphriel presses his tongue against some sensitive spot inside me, and I cry out, bucking my hips into him.

He lifts me up, his arms hooked under my knees, and devours my pussy with wet, hungry slurps.

He slides his tongue out and presses it against my aching clit, sending hot sparks of pleasure up through my core.

He makes a satisfied groan and latches himself there, lapping at my clit with such a furious precision that I barely realize I’m going to come until I do.

The pleasure rolls through me in hot, electrifying waves, like an inverse of the pain he licked away.

I scream and clutch at his hair, jerking and spasming around him.

Somehow, he licks me faster. Devours me faster, as if my orgasm is water and he’s dying of thirst. I scream at the intensity of it, and a second orgasm rolls through me, smaller and more languid than the first.

He’s not going to stop , I think as he thrusts his tongue up inside me again. He’s going to do this to me forever .

The thought doesn’t bother me. I’d rather die like this than be ripped apart by burning knife blades, which is what it felt like when I tried to escape .

But then Laphriel groans and jerks his mouth away from me and drops my hips against the floor. I blink, so heady with pleasure that I don’t really understand what’s going on.

Until I see him sitting back on his heels, furiously stroking his cock.

All his eyes are closed, his head thrown back, his wings draped like a cape from his shoulder, his oversized pants jerked down around his hips so his cock is the centerpiece, thick and long and rising along his firm belly.

I don’t know what to say or what to do. There’s a part of me wants to climb on top of him and slide that gorgeous cock into my cunt.

Another part of me, more clear-headed, tells me I should run.

I do neither, and one pair of Laphriel’s eyes open and meet mine. They seem to blaze with the same pale, fiery light that burned in the place where he landed on the lawn. The same light that burned me when I ran through the door.

“I understand now,” he gasps. “Sin is exquisite.”

And then arcs of pearly cum erupt out of his cock, splattering across the floor and across my ankles. I gasp at the heat of it—not like a human man’s cum but hotter, like candle wax. Enough heat to tingle with pleasure but not enough to burn.

Laphriel drops his hand to his side, and the rest of his eyes flutter open. I feel suddenly very exposed, and I draw my knees up to my chest, trying to hide my nudity. His cum slides down my ankle, still pleasantly warm.

He watches me, eyes blinking out of rhythm.

“What just happened?” I finally whisper, my voice hoarse.

Laphriel rises to standing in a single, graceful movement, and I squeeze my knees tighter as he towers over me. He seems bigger, somehow. His skin seems to glow.

“Your suffering,” he says. “My nourishment.”

And then he shoots straight upward, vanishing into the labyrinth of the mansion.