Free Land of the Beautiful Dead by R. Lee Smith

have some fair and reasonable rebuttal, I believe our audience is concluded.” He stood. The thick shaft of his organ hung before her eyes, gnarled with scars even there. “I will now hear negotiation for your personal surrender.”
    “Will you unchain me?”
    “I can be persuaded.” He gestured to himself.
    Lan reached up her hand and touched him. He was surprisingly cool; she’d expected that of dead flesh, like the ferryman who had brought her here, but even compared to him, he was cool. It was not merely the lack of warmth, but as if he actually radiated cold. More than that, there was a strangeness to the feel of him. He was at once too smooth and too twisted. Unnatural. Worse than that. Anti -natural, if that was a word.
    He hardened quickly as she stroked him, but even that unnerved her. He was much, much harder than human flesh could be and there was no pulse to be felt just below his thick, scarred skin. When he had risen fully, she licked her mouth for moisture, rose higher on her aching knees, and fastened her lips to his swollen head. He tasted of ashes and bones. She shut her eyes and went to work, grimly wetting the full length of his shaft with long, slow swirls of her tongue, but his strange skin dried quickly, so that even the gentlest pass of her fist scraped on her ears. She soon abandoned the effort to suckle at him instead, managing with determination and no small pain to take perhaps half his cock into her mouth. She moved there for some time, claiming and reclaiming the same few inches while milking the rest in her fists.
    “You promised me enthusiasm,” Azrael murmured, combing idly through her hair.
    She pulled back enough to catch a breath and say, “My knees hurt,” before latching on again, this time suckling slow kisses all the way along his undershaft to his balls. They were very hard and smooth, like twinned eggs with just the thinnest velvet cover over them, and she spent some time there, pulling each one gently into her mouth for her tongue to tease while petting his cock where it rested in her hair.
    “You have some skill at this,” Azrael remarked.
    “I should. Would you like to know who taught me?” she asked, rising up on her knees to trap his cock between her breasts and bob slowly up and down. “Or how old I was?”
    “Another appeal to my sympathies,” he explained to the empty room. “You can tell by the withering of my cock—” His cock was stone between her breasts. “—that I am deeply moved.”
    Lan shrugged and bent her head so as to lick the very head of him whenever it pushed out into the open air. “I can’t help it if it sounds that way. I don’t think I could say anything about my life that wouldn’t. Or anyone else’s life, for that matter.”
    “Shall we trade tales, you and I? Shall I tell you of my childhood and the games I was taught to play in those first years? Oh, I was a child once,” he said, seeing her startled upturned face. “I was never human, but I was of woman born. It is my first memory—pushed out into the light between the mountains of her thighs, the cold air and hot blood, and the screams. I remember that she held me, too weak to run, and her voice as she begged for my life was the same voice I had heard so long in the warm oceans of her womb. It lulled me and so I closed my infant eyes and did not see when the man took the stone from her small hearth and crushed her skull. Her blood fell across my face, blinding me with redness. Her brains fell into my mouth. Through this gore, I saw the man raise up the stone while every other man and woman among them did nothing, and I saw the stone grow huge as he brought it down.”
    Azrael wrested himself from her slack, staring grip with just one backwards step. His eyes were burning brighter, lighting the ruins of his face and staining whatever his gaze raked across with faint crimson. “My bones do not break, but I felt the plates of my infant skull separate, heard the sound it