Free Feverborn by Karen Marie Moning

in his thick, dark hair. When a fang grazed my clitoris, I pulled his hair—hard—and he laughedbecause, like me, when we’re having sex, drugged or not, there’s no such thing as pain. We did everything possible when I was Pri-ya. I became conditioned to him in that state. It’s all sensation. And it’s all good.
    I let my head fall back against the wall, lost myself in the bliss of his hot mouth on me, his tongue moving inside me.
    I arched my neck and roared when I came. Damn the man, he touches me and I explode and just keep moving in a red-hot haze of lust from one orgasm to the next until at last he stops touching me. He knows exactly how to work my body. It’s incredible. It’s frightening.
    In desire, in lust, Barrons and I are perfect together. In everyday life, we’re porcupines who must navigate the circumference of each other’s existence carefully because one poke and either of us might bare our teeth and scuttle off. Not because the needles hurt but because we’re both…volatile. Temperamental. Proud. Obtuse as hell. It makes for difficult days and incredible nights. I can’t change. He won’t. It is what it is.
    Here, now, in lust, we unite, bond in a way that makes the days work fine. I realize as I explode again and hear him make that low, raw sound in the back of his throat that makes me crazy, vibrates into my pelvic core, spreads in a rumbling purr through my body, enhancing my orgasm to exquisite proportions, that this is essential to us, to our ability to stay together.
    I don’t dare not fuck this man frequently because this is the glue that holds us, the tie that binds, the only tether, collar, leash either of us can permit, the place where everything else falls away and we become something more than we arealone. I get now why he fucks with the single-minded devotion of a dying man hunting God. Sex with him is the closest thing to holy I’ve ever known. Barrons is my church. Every caress, each kiss, a hallelujah.
    Burn me in Hell if you have a problem with that.
    He’ll be there with me.
    We won’t care.
    As the orgasm ebbed, flashed red-hot then ebbed again, he leaned back and slid me down the front of his body, eyes glittering crimson, face half transformed into beast. He was two full feet taller than he had been before, shoulders massively wider, skin darkened to burnished mahogany. I could feel talons on my skin. Low humps of horns were sprouting on his skull.
    I was shaking with aftershock, and still, fresh lust blazed through me, sanctifying my blood, opening a floodgate I’d not even realized I’d closed. I was breathless for a moment, stunned by the sudden unsought awareness that I’d once again been repressing all emotion for months. Every single bit of it. Just like I did after I believed I’d killed him on a cliff with Ryodan. Skimming the surface, a flat stone skipping across a bottomless loch, grateful to be a dispassionate observer, the invisible narrator of everyone else’s life. I’d
hungered
to be unseen. I’d wanted to disappear long before it happened. I have a critical fault line of a defect and it’s not the Book inside me. And it’s not something I can fix. At least not any way I’ve been able to figure out. The relentless, unsolvable clusterfuck in my own head made me choose to deaden myself rather than contend with the uncontendable.
    Yet one carnal touch from Barrons and I was alive again. Awake and so very damned alive. And my problem that couldn’t be fixed would be as ever present and unmanageable as always when we were done. May as well savor the now.
    He dropped his dark, misshapen head forward and long matted hair brushed my back. “I taste Unseelie in you,” he murmured thickly into the hollow of my neck around teeth much too large for a human mouth. I felt his tongue trace my jugular. Felt my heartbeat in my neck, pulsing against his fangs. His next words were guttural, violent, barely human, “Just how hard do you want to play?” He