Page 5

Four

W ick woke up panicked.

At first, he didn’t know why. Then he felt something small and warm shifting in his arms, an unfamiliar scent washing over him.

Wick looked down. The strange human from last night was dozing against his chest.

He sniffed her carefully, pulling her back to examine her naked body.

No blood. No scent of pain in the air. The amulet around her neck had worked its strange magic: he had not hurt her during the night.

Wick slumped with relief. He gathered her back in his arms, setting her cheek against his chest once again. She hummed, nuzzling against him.

Wick touched her hair, charmed. No one had ever touched him like this before.

His encounters with other creatures were brief and bloody, and that was only when he couldn’t avoid them entirely.

He sometimes talked to his brothers, but that was rare.

When they did talk, they never touched unless it was to try to rip his throat out.

He had watched humans do this from a distance, once.

A young couple curled together on a blanket, sweat cooling on their naked bodies.

He had watched them through the trees until the blood frenzy started to itch under his skin, then he fled.

But he hadn’t been able to shake that image from his head. How gently they’d held each other.

He rubbed a cautious hand down Briar’s bare back. It was even softer than he dreamed.

He stroked Briar’s cheek next. She was curled up against him with her limbs bunched tight against her body, like she was prepared to leap up and flee at any moment.

She had scars decorating her body—knife marks and burn marks and other marks he didn’t recognize.

Some of them looked several decades old.

Or perhaps mortals’ scars aged differently from Skullstalkers’.

Briar stirred against him. Her body was so warm. Her thighs were covered with his dried come.

He buried his face in her hair and inhaled. Sweet with sleep and salty with his spend, it was such an intoxicating combination of scents he could feel himself getting hard again.

He looked down at his cock, filling out against his thigh.

The ridges stiffened with it, flushing the same color as his cockhead.

She had seemed especially eager whenever he fit those ridges into her.

After the shock faded, anyhow. At the start, she had been so surprised it made him wonder if she’d slept with a man with a ridged cock before.

Surely, she must. If she had to sleep with someone every day, she had to have run into a man with a ridged cock.

Skullstalkers had a variety of cocks, human men must be the same.

Briar shifted. He glanced at her, curled so tightly against him, then down at his cock. He was still surprised how much had fit inside her. He was smaller than his brothers, but not by much. His older brother Slate had needed a magic spell for him to fit inside his wife.

A gurgling sound echoed around the cave. Wick startled, only to realize that it had come from Briar’s stomach.

Humans needed to eat more often than Skullstalkers, Wick remembered.

Slate had experienced this very problem when he encountered his new wife.

He had tried asking Wick about what humans ate, and Wick had given his best approximation of a mortal diet, only for Slate to realize that Wick was talking out of his tail.

Wick had never been around mortals long enough to know what they ate.

But he had a vague memory of Slate mentioning something about eggs.

She was still asleep when he got back to the cave. For a moment, he just stood there and watched her, curled up in the morning light with her limbs tucked in like she was protecting herself against something.

Maybe she was cold. Slate had mentioned that mortals felt the temperature more than Skullstalkers.

Wick took a step toward her clothes, which were in a pile next to her. A twig snapped under his foot.

Briar sat up so fast he thought she had been lying in wait. Then she blinked groggily, and Wick realized that she had just woken up that quickly.

She looked up at him, startled. “ Gods !”

Wick raised the hand that wasn’t holding an egg. “Hello.”

Briar laughed and sat up, pulling her knees up to cover her nakedness. For a moment, she looked almost shy. Then she grinned, her cheeks flushing.

“So, it wasn’t a dream,” she said. Then she shifted and winced. “ Definitely not a dream. Ow.”

“Ow?” Wick sniffed the air. Still no blood. “I hurt you?”

“Only the good kind of hurt, big boy.” She closed one eye at him.

Wick frowned. The eye-gesture seemed significant, but he didn’t understand what it meant. She was smiling, so he assumed she meant it to be good.

“I didn’t mean to,” he tried.

Her smile faltered. Then it came back, bigger but somehow paler than before.

“You are a big boy. Couldn’t be helped.” She hugged her knees, resting her chin on them. “And it wasn’t like I didn’t have a good time. You enjoyed yourself, right?”

It was probably the best night of Wick’s life.

“Yes,” he said honestly.

“Lovely!” Briar ran a hand through her hair, glancing up at him. No, glancing around him.

Toward the cave opening.

He paused. She didn’t smell like fear, but she didn’t look completely at ease. If she wanted to leave, he wasn’t going to stop her. He just needed to ask her something first.

“Well,” Briar said. “I should…”

Then she stopped, squinting at him. “Are you… holding an egg?”

“What? Oh.” He looked down at the egg in his hand. “Yes. I collected two, but the second broke on the way back down the tree.”

He held out the remaining egg.

Briar stared at it. Her smile was getting smaller, but the discomfort was gone from her face.

Wick looked at the egg consideringly. “Is it not suitable?”

“No, no! It’s great!” Briar took the egg, examining it with a grin. “Haven’t done this in ages.”

She cracked it into her open mouth and swallowed it with a grimace.

“Better than nothing,” she announced.

Wick had the feeling he had done something wrong. “Are eggs undesirable for mortals?”

“No!” Briar said, wiping her mouth. “We just usually cook it first.”

“Oh.” Wick cursed himself silently. Slate had mentioned mortals and their tendency to cook everything.

Mortals and their blunt teeth, Slate had told him of his wife. Their sharpest ones couldn’t tear into a newborn rabbit. They even need to cook plants.

He didn’t understand why she had an issue with eggs. A raw egg seemed to go down easily enough. But it was clear that he knew even less about mortals than he thought he did.

Wick sat down at the other end of the nest. He had never realized how small it was until now, their knees almost touching despite his best attempts. He’d never had anyone in his nest before.

“You are traveling to the witch who gave you that amulet,” Wick said.

Briar touched it curiously. “I am.”

Wick paused. His older brother Slate was always telling him to be fiercer. Fewer questions, more demands.

“I will go with you,” he said confidently.

Briar startled. “You’ll what ?”

He gestured at the amulet hanging between her breasts. “If she made that amulet, she might know how to cure me. Truly cure me.”

He could hardly let himself hope. He had been to magic users of all kinds—even a fellow Skullstalker. And they all said the same thing: he was beyond hope. The blood frenzy was as deep in him as his bones.

“I can protect you,” he offered. “No one will hurt you when I am around. And I can help you with your curse.”

Briar stared at him. She shifted on the spot, and Wick’s nose twitched under his skull mask as he smelled the dried come on her thighs.

Then Briar burst out into laughter, curling over with the force of it.

“Sorry,” she gasped. Her cheeks were suddenly salty, and Wick frowned before he realized she smelled like giddy shock. Apparently, humans cried at strange times.

Her laughter trailed off into giggles. She wiped her tears away with the back of her hand.

“I did mean to find a man to accompany me through the forest,” Briar said, still chuckling. “You know what? Sure. A down-on-her-luck thief and her gentleman Skullstalker guard.”

“Wick,” he reminded her. He didn’t know how reliable human memory was.

“Wick,” she repeated, like she was surprised by it. She gave him an evaluating look, hidden quickly with another blazing smile.

“Well then. Time’s a-wasting.” She eased herself to her feet, gloriously bare. Then she took a step and winced. “Wow. That will be… an adjustment , if we have to do that every night.”

“I can just use the tip,” Wick offered. “If that is easier for you.”

Her brows rose. A pretty flush covered her cheeks, and Wick’s mouth watered.

Briar averted her eyes with another nervous laugh. “We’ll see what happens,” she said, bending to pick up her pants off the nest’s floor.

Wick watched her dress. He had a vague inkling that he should help—he had watched a mortal man do that for a woman once—but that was for a dress, which looked infinitely more complicated. Not to mention, he had no clue how to work those “buckles,” nor the laces on her shirt.

She pulled the laces closed over her breasts and turned to him. “Good as new. Do we need to do anything before we leave? Water any plants? Lock the door on the way out?”

Wick looked around the cave. He only had his nest. Plus a stack of shiny rocks in the corner that he liked to collect. But he could leave them here. Wherever he went, there were usually nicer rocks.

“No,” he said simply. “Do we need to lie together? Or should we wait until the sun goes down?”

Briar shifted from foot to foot, considering. Wick tried to focus on the pain she had shown before and not the sudden ache under his loincloth. He had never felt anything as good as Briar’s hole fluttering around him, trying to take him deeper.

“Let’s give a lady time to recover,” Briar said finally. She closed one eye at him again.

Wick nodded and wondered if this was a good time to ask about the eye-closing thing. It was obviously significant.

He led her out of the cave. Briar seemed eager to step out into the forest, her shoulders sagging in relief as the sunlight fell on her skin. Then she spotted the dead human from last night and huffed.

“Good riddance,” she said softly.

Wick looked over at her. Based on her attitude before, he had expected her to be more dismissive, or even victorious over his death. But she sounded almost regretful as they walked away from him, deeper into the forest.

“Did you know him?” Wick asked.

“Who?” Briar twisted to look at the corpse behind them in surprise.

“Oh, him? Barely. He’s a bounty hunter. At least, he is now .

Apparently, some of my fellow thieves, criminals, and bandits came together to hunt me down.

That’s why I was in your cave in the first place; I needed something big and bad to distract them while I ran. ”

It was a sensible tactic. Wick didn’t know why it made his chest feel heavy.

“Bounty hunter?” he asked.

She frowned up at him, uncomprehending. She looked different in the daylight, her features thrown into stark relief.

She looked… weary. Like she was older than her years.

From the little he knew of humans, she was in her younger adult years.

But she carried herself like she had seen much of the world and its dangers.

“Oh,” she said, her brow smoothing with understanding. “A bounty hunter is someone who collects someone for money. Usually dead. You don’t get out much, do you?”

“Not often,” he agreed.

She cocked her head at him, considering. Her pale hair fell over her face, and Wick experienced the strange sensation of wanting to push it behind her ears. It was the same impulse that made him want to pat baby rabbits and stroke river moss. It was usually followed by blood and claw marks.

Wick clenched his hands into fists. The blood frenzy was dormant, for now. But never for long.

“I thought Skullstalkers lived in voids,” she said thoughtfully.

“Not me,” he admitted. “I’ve always lived in the mortal realm.”

“Really? Huh.” Briar craned her head, frowning through the trees. “Gods, it’s going to take forever to get to Marigold’s place from here.”

“Marigold?”

“The witch.” Briar paused, looking up at him thoughtfully. She stepped in front of him, bringing them both to a stop.

“What is it?” Wick asked.

Briar reached up and, with only a little hesitation, touched a spike on the edge of his wing. “These things work, right?”

“They do,” Wick said slowly, confused. She had seen him fly briefly last night; he remembered flying at the bounty hunters, though his memories were spotty with blood frenzy.

Briar smiled pointedly up at him.

“You want me to fly,” he realized. “But what about you?”

She laughed. Then, when she noticed he wasn’t joking, she touched his wing with both hands.

“You’re strong enough to carry one little ol’ thief,” she said.

Wick stopped. She meant for him to… carry her? It made sense, now that he thought about it. He just had never done it before. Even the idea made him nervous. She could fall from his arms, or the amulet could fall from her neck, causing him to go into a blood frenzy all the way up in the air.

“Just an idea,” she said with a placating smile. “If that’s not your style, then—oh gods!”

She cut off with a bright laugh as he hefted her into his arms. She was inconsequentially light, just as she was last night. He worried he would frighten her, or that he should have warned her first. But the fear coming from her skin was so faint he almost didn’t notice it.

“Alright then,” she said, wriggling against his chest. “Let’s go, big boy.”