Page 3

3

Pixie

I shiver, the cold running the length of my back as a breeze travels over my skin.

But the warmth of the bed beneath me and the blissful way my body is utterly relaxed has me reluctant to move. And when I feel the soft touch of lips slowly trailing kisses up my spine I smile into my pillow. A warm tongue glides its way back down.

I roll over, sleepy and excited to see which one of my beautiful monsters is waking me up.

But when I open my eyes, the monster I see is not one of mine.

Not one I wish to keep, anyway.

Cole looks down at me with a twisted and deformed grin, his mouth three times too big and the corners curling inwards.

I scream. But nothing comes out. Not a single sound. My voice is gone, and no matter how hard I try, my body won’t move. It won’t cooperate with me at all!

A nightmare. It’s just a nightmare.

I lie beneath him, frozen in terror and revulsion as he pulls out a knife from his pocket.

I watch the blade slowly move closer and closer, my unblinking eyes unable to look away as he rests it over my collarbone.

And then he cuts.

I feel it carve into the bone.

It hits me.

I’m not fucking dreaming!

He counts.

‘One.’

My skin burns, and blood slides down past my neck.

Cut.

‘Two.’

The flashbacks begin. My mind fights against the tug of those vivid and agonising memories of my mother's execution. One of the three deaths I was forced to live through as if they were my own.

The door explodes, and a great black form crashes into the room.

He has to crouch to fit, but that doesn’t stop him from soaring towards us. His wings are enormous at his back, and his long, taloned fingers are outstretched.

Dorian has come in his shadow form.

But his fingers go through Cole as if he’s made of nothing but light and smoke.

He tries again. Nothing. But Cole has hold of me. His grip is unbearable and will likely leave bruises.

Dorian looks over his shoulder.

Shaw is sitting in a chair by the window. An open book on his lap and his makeshift bookmark consisting of a piece of cloth resting on its pages.

He’s asleep. Judging from the empty bottle of spirits beside him, more like drunk as fuck and passed out.

But his eyes are open and swirling with a pale grey.

He’s dream walking.

Archie runs in, his eyes wide as he looks at Cole.

‘I killed you,’ he growls. ‘You’re fucking dead!’

Cole continues his torture as though no one is here but us.

Cut. Cut. Cut.

No matter how hard they try to get a hold of him, the only one who seems able to feel him is me. And the more he cuts, the harder it is for my mind to stay here. To remain mine and not Neve’s.

‘Six,’ Cole breathes, slowly slicing me again.

The bedroom starts to bleed. From the ceiling. The walls. From the fucking floorboards. Blood, thick and hot, quickly begins to cover us all, falling like heavy rain from above and pooling all around us. It lands on my face, burning my eyes.

‘Seven,’ Cole laughs, his blade trailing across my cheek.

Dorian looks at Shaw sitting in his chair, still as stone except for the heavy pants that make his shoulders rise and fall.

From the blood, we hear a female begin to laugh. Her giggle is a dark and seductive promise of pain and revenge. The blood swirls and morphs upwards. Into the form of a woman.

Neve. My mother.

Cole places the blade between my legs.

No. Not again. I can’t go through this again!

‘Eight.’

‘WAKE HIM!’ Dorian yells. ‘NOW!’

Archie runs to Shaw and delivers a firm punch to his face, sending him crashing to the floor. He lands face down and in inches of hot blood.

Cole and his blade fade into nothing, and the form of the blood queen and the inches of blood disappear.

It remains on our skin, hot and putrid, proof that it was real.

My voice becomes my own, as does my body, and I release the scream I had in my chest from the moment I saw Cole.

I throw myself into Dorian’s waiting arms, shaking and gasping for air.

‘You’re safe,’ Dorian promises me, holding me close as I try to get myself to calm the fuck down. I cling to his black robes and almost disappear in his Shadow Master form. ‘It’s over, Poppet.’

Slowly, Shaw pushes himself up to his knees. His head remains low as the blood drips from his clothes and hair. We all watch him as he refuses to meet our gaze.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers, his head still low and a tremble in his words. ‘I am so fucking sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault, mate,’ Archie tries. As soon as his hand rests on Shaw’s shoulder, he shrugs him off, stands, and storms out without looking at a single one of us.

This isn’t the first time he’s fallen asleep and lost control of his nightmares. It happened once before, and I woke to much the same as I just did.

Cole, Neve, and blood.

So much blood.

Shaw’s powers are his once more. But his soul, whatever he has of one, is just as broken as mine. And when a dream walker's nightmares come to life, they can be unbearably realistic.

‘Are you okay?’ Archie asks me, his eyes wide. ‘You’re bleeding.’

Dorian sweeps my hair from my face to get a better look at the cuts.

‘Does it hurt?’ Dorian asks.

I hear Shaw’s feet thunder down the stairs, and when I hear the front door hurtle open, I panic and get to my feet to follow.

He can’t leave. I need him. We all need him!

The others don’t bother trying to stop me and let me go without the slightest bit of complaint.

‘Shaw!’ I call after him, following the bloody footprints down the stairs and through the hall.

The front door is wide open, and the bloody trail leads outside. I throw on a pair of boots and Archie’s coat left over the back of a chair and follow.

‘SHAW!’ I call loudly. ‘Please, don’t go!’

The sun is up, but only barely. And the snow is falling hard and fast now, whiting out the trees and any sign of the dream walker fleeing our home.

‘Gods damn it.’ I wrap the jacket tight around my bare body and run after him, following the imprints in the snow.

I’m pretty sure I can’t die of cold. But as the earth goddess, I don’t exactly thrive in the barren lands of winter.

The snow is a good twelve inches deep and a struggle to wade through. But I have a dream walker trying to escape, so I push through

I brush my fingers against the bark of each tree I run past, and they share where he has gone with me. They speak as if they are half asleep. I can almost feel them yawn as they rest in the winter season. I feel his steps through them, like a message passed on just for me.

It doesn’t take me long to find him.

Through the snowfall, I spot his silhouette. He’s sat on a boulder with his face buried in his hands. I approach slowly, but he knows I’m here. He always knows.

My hand rests on his shoulder as I stop before him, and with a wave of my hand, the thick root I had wrapped around his foot releases him. I caught him like a rabbit in a snare. He could have snapped it and walked on. But he didn’t.

My hand moves to his cheek.

I kneel and find his eyeline. But still, he refuses to look at me. So I rest my forehead against his.

‘You didn’t mean it,’ I say softly, my thumb going back and forth across his cheek. ‘And it wasn’t real.’

His fingertips run the length of the cut across my collarbone.

‘It was real. I made it real.’

I know that it’s not only guilt inside him. But fear. His fear of Neve somehow returning to this world. Of the blood curses reclaiming us all. Of Cole coming back to brutalise the woman he loves.

These are his nightmares. Not mine. But it’s us who gets the brunt of it. His last nightmare left Archie unconscious for an entire day when a version of Sethick, the baby-eating demon, appeared.

His hand falls, and he tries to turn away. I climb atop him, straddling him in the snow, and I take his face in both my hands to make him look at me.

His eyes shimmer with the threat of tears. An image I have seen only twice before.

When I died. And when I returned to life.

But it breaks my heart as I watch it now. As it is his pain. His trauma literally bleeding through the wall.

‘Please look at me,’ I say softly.

With a long blink, his gaze finally meets mine.

‘I love you,’ I tell him. ‘And I’m here for you. Don’t walk away when you’re in pain. Come to me, and I will suffer with you. I will share it all, just as you do with me. Our pain. Our nightmares. Our fears.’ I lean down, my forehead meeting his. ‘You’re safe.’

‘ You’re not. My nightmare almost killed you.’

‘I’ll take a lifetime of your nightmares, Dream Walker. Rather than suffer a moment of peace without you.’

A tear slides past his cheek, and I lean in to lap it up with my tongue. He releases a beautifully sad little laugh as he pulls me closer to him so our fronts meet.

‘You’re a strange little witch to love a monster like me.’

‘You’re my monster, and I am yours. We’re made for each other.’ I run my thumb across his lower lip. ‘Neve is not coming back.’

He shudders at the mention of her name.

‘The curse of blood magic is gone.’

He swallows painfully and closes his eyes. I jolt his face so he reopens them.

‘And Cole is rotting with his organs around his throat and a hacked-off arm up his arse hole.’

I chuckle, recalling the very descriptive ending Archie delivered to him.

Shaw’s body un-tenses as he smiles.

I lean in and kiss his lips. He meets them gently and unsure, the shame of what just happened still too fresh to feel like he has any right to kiss me.

‘You’re going to get through this,’ I assure him. ‘We all are.’

‘What if the next time I have a nightmare I can not control, you… or Archie… or Dorian… what if you get seriously hurt? I’m not safe to be around. You should just let me go.’

‘None of us are safe to be around. None of us are stable or well-adjusted. None of us can be trusted around others. Why do you think we live on a deserted island? We’re in a place where we can be dangerous as we heal.’ My hold on him tightens. ‘But we heal together. We bleed together, and we scream together. We always have. And we always will. We have seen darkness no one else has seen. Hell, we’ve been the darkness that everyone else fears. But we are that darkness together. Not alone. Never alone. My Lord .’

My fingers run through his hair as I lean into his lips again.

‘I love you,’ I breathe against his lips. The snow falls all around us as I slide further onto him. His cold belt meets my exposed flesh. ‘I said I love you. And you give me silence?’

‘I love you, too,’ he replies in a hush.

I move my mouth to his ear.

‘I didn’t hear you. My Lord .’

With my free hand, I let my jacket fall open, showing him that I’m completely naked beneath. My teeth clamp down on his ear.

‘Speak to your goddess as she deserves, Dream Walker. Say it like you mean it.’

His hand twists in my hair as he pulls my head back to look deep into my eyes. The shimmering tears have quickly faded, replaced instead with a fierce look of devotion and desire.

‘I said I fucking love the very bones of you, my goddess.’

‘Show me.’

His teeth grind together.

He pulls me close by my hair, and our lips clash in a desperate embrace. Tongues and teeth meet in a violent need that has our breath mixing. His fingers tighten in my hair as his other slides beneath the coat and rests on my backside to pull me closer still. His cock is hard and pressing against his trousers as I grind against him. My shoulders fall back, and the coat slips down, leaving me exposed to the elements. Snowflakes land on my skin and melt. Each one feels like a spark of fire, meeting my flesh in the most sensual way I could imagine. I’m still learning about this new body. This form is filled with so much power.

I’m cold. But in the most perfect way.

He tugs on my hair so my head falls back, and his lips seal around my peaked nipple. The warmth of his tongue is a stark contrast to the air. He nips and sucks on one and then the other before gently blowing on them both to make them as hard as glass.

He watches the snow fall on my breasts with wonder.

‘Have you ever been fucked in the snow, Pixie?’

I shake my head, and his delicious grin widens.

He grips my jacket and drops it to the floor, leaving me naked and straddling him.

‘Lean back. Let me see you.’

I do, and his thumb quickly finds my clit. He circles it slowly, watching my breasts rise and fall with each desperate breath. I moan and bite down on my lip when his thumb glides from my clit and sinks inside my pussy, finding its way in with ease as I’m slick with need. He returns it, wet and warm, to my clit.

‘I want you,’ I breathe, my need unbearable as that deep ache in my core builds and builds.

‘My thumb not good enough for you?’ he teases, running it over my entrance but not inside me.

‘I want you !’

‘Say it properly, Pixie. I want to hear you beg for what you want.’

‘I want your cock, My Lord. Please.’

‘Then take it.’ He leans back a little.

My trembling hands go for his trousers, and I fumble with cold and lust as I release him in all his glory. His erection springs free, and I quickly wrap my fingers around him. I work him slowly at first, just enough to get that beautiful growl I love to hear him make. I run my fingers across my pussy and use my arousal as I work him.

His hand slides from my backside down. Between my legs and inside me. Two fingers at first, massaging my walls as I stroke his length. Our deep breaths lie heavy in the cold air, and our intense gaze never falters.

He is my world. And I am his.

I hold him firmly and rest his length at my pussy. He moves his fingers from there and instead rests them at my arse. As I lower myself onto him, his fingers push inside my second entrance. I stop when he’s in as deep as he can go, and we both just watch one another.

The silence of the snow-covered forests broken only by our heavy breaths.

‘Are you going to fuck me, Pixie?’

‘I’m going to love you. For the rest of time. And yes. I’m going to fuck you.’

‘Good.’

I ride him hard and deep, driving him into me with slow and steady movements. His fingers fuck my arse with the same speed as his other hand sweeps through my hair and down to rest over my heart. The tips of his fingers stop below the first cut his nightmare made.

It’s already healed thanks to my earth magic channelling the power from below us, but he knows precisely where it was. He still sees it.

He reaches up, plucks a holly sprig from the great branch above us, and places it against my skin, right where I was cut.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask. My movements slow, but he drives his fingers harder inside my rear entrance.

‘I didn’t tell you to stop. Keep fucking me, Pixie.’

He looks down at the holly with deep concentration and presses it into my skin.

‘Shit…’ I whisper, watching the bead of blood trickle down my skin.

I never look away as he drags it downwards. It feels like a blade, but the comfort of earth magic accompanies the pain.

‘Eyes on me, Pixie,’ he warns.

My eyes flick up, and I see him watching me closely.

The comfort of his eyes keeps me grounded, chasing away the threat of flashbacks.

‘I’ll be your nightmare,’ he says, easing in a third finger as I continue riding him. ‘And I’ll be a far greater nightmare to anyone or anything that threatens your peace.’

He takes the holly and presses it into the second place I was cut. The old mark is gone, but the one he creates replaces it, hot and comforting as he drags it over my skin. The threat of flashbacks bites at me again, but he simply holds me closer, looking up at me with nothing but devotion and a promise.

That he is mine, and I am his.

And in our darkness, we are safe.

‘Count, Pixie.’

He cuts a third time.

‘Three,’ I whisper.

The snow falls. My blood trickles into the blanket of white.

He stops when he gets to seven. That’s the number Cole got up to. He’ll go no further.

He drops the holly so he can pin me to his body. Both his arms engulf me as I ride him. He thrusts upwards and slams me down onto him. The pain cuts right through me and has me shouting.

But my gods… the pain is perfect, and it’s all I want.

His tongue runs along the cuts, and he moans in response to its taste.

‘You taste so fucking good,’ he says, sealing his lips around the wound and sucking.

They do not need my blood, and only Shaw seems to enjoy the taste of it still. A fact he has kept to himself. He only indulges in that need when it’s just us, and I haven’t said a word to anyone about it.

I would willingly open any vein for him.

His pace quickens, and with his fingers still buried deep inside, as well as his throbbing cock, I feel him tense.

He grunts and swears as he spills himself inside me. And I am almost crying as I find my release, too.

Panting, I look down at him. Our breath is still visible in the air, and as we smile at one another, I lean in to kiss him.