CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

V elina…

“You came. I didn’t expect you to come all the way here.”

I looked up from where I was kneeling on the folded blanket before the fire. The clearing in the little old and decrepit cemetery was empty now. No Bayou Baroness priestess lady, no LaCroix, no Saint, and no boat. The colors were almost more vivid than life, and lit across the fire from me was Garnett, my little brother, his keen green eyes made luminous by the underlighting of the flames.

“Where are we?” I asked, my heart stilling in my chest, squeezing down almost painfully tight.

Garnett sniffed. “A place between worlds,” he said. “A crossroads. I’ve been here a while, it feels like. Even before I died.” He took a hit off the joint he was holding, inhaling deep and holding his breath as he said, “Got some good shit here on the other side. All the good and none of the bad.”

I blinked and looked him over. He looked… fine. His cut sharp, and the patches still nearly new, having not been road- worn to the extent of the other guys. There was a 1% diamond patch, and over his right breast was the name patch that proudly proclaimed Loup Garou. His tee shirt underneath was white and almost gleamed in the firelight, his jeans baggy and a light wash but likewise clean. His boots worn but serviceable as he shifted his feet and planted them more firmly in the leaf litter of the ground. He rocked on the fallen log he sat on and blew out a big plume of smoke that drifted my way.

I expected to be hit with the dank green smoke of some quality fucking weed, but there was no smell… nothing smelled, actually. I didn’t smell the deep green and brown of rich earth and green growing things. I didn’t smell the underpinning of rot or decay that was pervasive along the bayous and in the swamps.

I didn’t smell the smoke from the crackling campfire in between us, and I felt my heart drop as I realized… this was just a dream.

“Aw, no, don’t be sad,” Louie said and sniffed. “It’s not a dream. It’s more like a vision – and you just got here, so don’t go yet. I mean, we don’t have a lot of time, but I want to talk. You came. I didn’t expect you to come. It’s really cool that you came.”

“Of course, I came! You big idiot. You couldn’t keep me away!” I said, and I swallowed back down the thick feeling in my throat and willed the red in my nose to back down and the watering in my eyes to stop its bullshit.

“Hey, don’t cry! For reals, sis. It was my time. While I’m bummed that I didn’t get to get further with True, and I miss her and the guys, it’s not going to be so very long for me. It’s going to be a while for you guys, but I’m here, and I’ll wait forever.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “You don’t have to wait for us. You’ve been through enough, little brother. It’s totally okay for you to rest.”

He shook his head, smiling, and it was a rueful thing.

“Nah, I have to watch over you and the rest of the boys,” he said. “Make sure you all get through what you got coming unscathed.” He flicked the butt of his joint into the fire.

“What’s coming?” I asked.

He grinned, and it held a reckless and savage quality to it.

“Revenge.”

“God, I hope so,” I said bitterly.

“You should know!” he crowed. “You’re leading the charge.”

“You’re damn right I am!” I cried. “Why wouldn’t I?”

He smiled and said, “Our time’s up – but I see you, Vel. I see you and what you’re doing for me, and I’m right there. You may not be able to see me or feel it, but I am.”

“Wait!” I cried, the mist pushing in from the surrounding waters, rolling in unnaturally fast.

“Time waits for no one, sis. You should know that in your line of work. Every man’s got his time, and it was and is my time to go.”

“But you just got here!” I cried as the fog reached out tendrils, and one curled around Louie’s wrist. It formed into a hand, the fingers lacing between his, and he clutched it back, the rest of the fog pushing at his back and starting to envelop him.

“The guys will take care of you,” he said. “Try and take care of them back for me. We’re all the same, after all.”

“Wait!” I struggled to my feet, but my legs were asleep from the way I’d been sitting on them. The fog swallowed Louie whole then and the fire with it. I reached out and screamed in frustration, but then it felt like many hands grabbing me from behind, pulling, grasping, the whispers unintelligible filling my ears – feminine, masculine, overlapping, and babbling like water over stone. I fought to stay with my brother just a moment longer, but it was no use.

Those hands pulled me back into the vapor, those voices drowned out all sound, and as I was dragged mercilessly back into that warm cloud that felt like feathers from an angel’s wing brushed my skin from every direction, the light receded from the fire, became diffuse, and winked out. Then there was only the warm, close, dark, and nothing else.

When I opened my eyes, it was to a dark so pressing, I couldn’t immediately tell if I was awake or if I’d died myself.

I sat up sharply, my hands shoving into blankets and covers, a mattress that was almost too soft below me, and there was a nearby grunt in the dark.

I froze as someone big shifted next to me. An arm wrapped around my naked waist, and another snaked around from behind me and wrapped my chest, pulling me back down to lay awkwardly, half on the bed and half against a very warm and very solid chest.

“Relax.” The voice was rich and dark, darker than the darkness of the room around us. “It was just a dream.”

I scoffed, choked slightly on my bitter regret of not having more time, and said, “That was way more than just a dream.”

The hands against me smoothed up and down my body, my back, over my nude hip, and I pushed up and flung a leg over the hips that belonged to the man I was in bed with.

I knew it was Saint. I could smell him, and after the last day or two of being pressed to him aboard his bike, his smell had become familiar to me. Woodsy, leather, and sunshine – the underlying tang of pure masculinity. Clean with just a hint of smoke from the occasional cigarette he smoked.

He let me straddle him in the dark and smoothed those rough hands over my hips and up my ribs. I arched back, feeling him grow hard against my pussy lips, which I ground against him to get him going.

The chill of that fog, of the spirit’s hands that lingered through my clothes and against my skin, damp and with that otherworldly cold and clammy of beyond the grave – I wanted, no needed , something life-affirming.

I craved his warmth, the fire of his hands against my body, the warmth and heat of his cock inside me, and the magic we created when we fucked.

I needed it something fierce in that moment, and I was relieved and grateful that he seemingly had no designs on stopping me from taking what I wanted.

I rose up on my knees some and wrapped fingers around his thickening cock, and he gasped and moaned slightly, his hips jerking below me. I stroked him from root to tip and back down, giving my hand a little twist, relishing the hot, velvet texture of his flesh against my palm and fingers as I worked him.

“Not that I’m complaining, but what brought this on?” he demanded from the dark, grunting as I picked his cock up from his body and pressed it at my opening.

I was aroused, but it was the early stages of it yet, and I hadn’t quite stretched with my arousal to fully accommodate him. I didn’t care. Dropping over him and taking him into my body fully, if a little prematurely, the zing of pain associated with taking him before I was ready was erotic and arousing in its own right.

Saint grunted below me, and I moved, rolling my hips, my fingertips brushing the nest of curls at the apex of my thighs, parting the hair, and finding my clit. I pressed fingertips into the throbbing bundle of nerves and struck a rhythm not only with the dance above him, moving him inside of me, but with my fingers against that sensitive spot, pressing, circling, rubbing, the friction between the pads of my first three fingers and the hardening kernel of flesh, hungry and desperate for the attention-sparked fire in my veins, chasing back the chill of the grave.

Saints’ rough hands found my hips, his fingers digging with a near-bruising force that just turned me on that much more. The sounds coming from him, the grunting, the impassioned breathing, the gasping and muttered words in their tone of aw and practically worship, goaded me into relaxing more fully.

I let my head fall back, my tits thrusting forward as Saint’s arms stiffened and he held me aloft.

“Fuckin’ touch that clit, baby. Come on, come for me,” he urged, and I renewed the fervency with which I touched myself as he struck a hard and fast tempo from beneath me, thrusting up into me.

I felt my tits bounce with every contact our bodies made as I let myself fall to meet his upward thrusting. I bit my lip against the sharp but bittersweet pain of him bottoming out against my cervix. Sometimes, I liked it. Sometimes, I didn’t. And sometimes, like now, I was trapped somewhere between the two, undecided if it was good or if it was just too much.

I concentrated on my breathing, timing things, playing with my pussy, even as Saint worked to destroy it. I felt myself, so wet, the sound of his cock sliding in and out of me, the wet slap of our bodies connecting, all of it a dirty symphony of carnal delight that I couldn’t get enough of.

“Oh, yeah,” I gasped as that tingling started, making my pussy tighten around him.

“Oh, fuck yeah,” he echoed, and I was pleased he felt it. That he felt what he did to me. “Come on, baby, do it for me, come for me. That’s it.” His voice was low and filled with a concentration that could only be him trying not to go until I got mine, and I appreciated that. That shit took restraint, and it was a restraint that most guys didn’t fucking bother with these days.

I liked sex with Saint. I felt like a partner and not like a living sex doll with him, which was nice. It was really nice.

“Oh, yeah!” I knew I sounded breathy, I knew I sounded close because I was close. So, close. So very close! The heat building between my legs, the fire low in my belly stoked and all-consuming, rising higher and higher within me, splitting somewhere near my navel, both licks of flame curling and writhing, seemingly tweaking and tingling in my nipples from the inside. Reaching further and choking me off as lightning struck, forking up through my pussy, and down through my head, causing my heart to seize and my body to tighten, coiling like a spring. I was hanging on that beautiful shining precipice of looking at the starlight and becoming the starlight until, with a final inhalation of breath, the stars burst and shattered around me, diving at me, the shining particles sliding underneath my skin and amplifying me into a supernova of pleasure so fine that it became a decadent pain, a beautiful torture that I never, ever wanted to end.