Free Cover Him with Darkness by Janine Ashbless

mercy. He reached out and took a grip of the hair at the back of my scalp, pulling my head up and drawing my throat taut. Wet heat ran through me. His thighs were hard and rough against the bare skin of my exposed bottom.
    â€œOh God, oh God, oh God,” I sobbed as he entered me again, all the way. He felt more solid than the mountain beneath my knees; the only real thing in a world that seemed capable of vanishing in a trice. I was grateful for the implacable grip and the inexorable impalement. I was grateful for the hot brief pain—and more so when he slipped a hand around to the front of my sex to caress that pain away. Ass in the air, fingers clawing atthe turf, I felt him start to move inside me, fierce and urgent. I let go then of any sense of self, any right to a rational understanding, and yielded to him entirely, my mind an empty hollow thing, my body nothing but an open vessel vibrating to his punishing rhythm.
    I wasn’t expecting pleasure, but then I had given up expecting anything. My spasm, when it came, took me by surprise—and my cries made him roar. He was so deep in me when he came that I felt like I was being split in two.
    I came back to consciousness when he laughed in my ear.
    â€œI remember.”
    My face mashed into the grass, I couldn’t even breathe properly, much less answer him. Only when he withdrew from me did I tip over and roll onto my back, my heart thundering. He stood over me, silhouetted against a red western sky and the bare rock of the high mountain peak.
    â€œI remember now,” he repeated, stretching up his arms and staring at his spread fingers as if he’d never seen them before, “who I am.”
    The sunset had found its way into his eyes, somehow: they gleamed like live coals.
    â€œWho?” I asked. The sky and the mountain were wrinkling up around him, like a plastic backdrop exposed to a heat gun. Reality shrank and warped, the stress lines radiating in threads from behind his shoulders.
    It almost looked like he wore great blurred wings.
    â€œAzazel,” he said, his bared teeth white against the black scruff of his stubbled jaw. “Right arm of the Serpent: commander of the Egrigoroi: of highest standing amongst the Watchers: scapegoat for the world: fallen and most loathly son of Almighty God.”
    The misshapen fabric of the universe snapped and gushed light, blinding me. The mountainside vibrated like the skin of a drum, making rocks dance and slide and tumble. I flung an arm over my face and screwed my eyes shut.
    When I opened them again, he was gone.

chapter four
    FORGOTTEN GODS
    F or a long time I sat there on the mountainside, hugging myself and shaking with shock. My damp clothes didn’t keep out the breeze. The light turned to pure sunset red, and then the sun dipped behind the peak to the west, and shadow slipped over the rocks and the grass and wrapped me in its clammy hand. I started to shiver from the cold then.
    I waited, but he didn’t come back. Eventually I admitted I was losing the light, and that if I didn’t get down off the mountainside, I’d be trapped up there all night. Stiff and stooped, my thighs cramping, I set off.
    The descent was nightmarish. Not so much at first—I had enough light to see where I was putting my feet, and where the cliff edges were on the narrow shepherds’ path—but as the day turned to dusk and then darkness, with no moon yet risen, I found myself stumbling and slipping and creeping along with one hand on the rock face. I barked my shins and wrenched my muscles. I started to cry, too scared and angry to hold it in any longer. My tears scalded my cheeks. By the end, in my despair, I was even cursing him out loud.
    Him: Azazel; angel then and demon now; a Prince of Darkness. I must have been crazy to call him the names I did.
    But it didn’t make any difference. He didn’t return, either to rescue me or to rain hellfire upon me. I’d been