I tried to stand up but Kris tightened his fingers, holding me captive. “Nope.”
“I just need some water.”
“Don’t care. You can die of dehydration before I let you go again.”
And because I scared him half to death, I didn’t fight him. Instead, I settled back against his chest and nuzzled into his shirt. The flannel was soft and comforting.
Rhysa was inconsolable so Dray took her home to the treehouse. Saoirse and Shoshanna had been huddled together in the corner of the kitchen drinking tea ever since. So Kris and I took the opportunity to recover in his garage apartment. We weren’t even on the bed. Just the chair by the window that looked out over the yard. He had me in his lap and apparently had no plans to change our situation any time soon.
“If you’re really thirsty you can drink from me.” He barely spoke, but I felt the vibration of his words.
“You’re tired.” Marhysa gave me a blast of energy that restored everything I drained, but Kris didn’t get that relief.
He huffed. “You really think that, don’t you?”
“Well…yeah.” He should be anyway.
“I’m not. I never am these days it seems. It’s strange actually.”
A memory niggled at the back of my mind. Something about the bond with a Shield. “Oh…”
He tried to look down at me, but the angles were all wrong, so he shifted me in his lap so he could see me. His eyebrows rose in question. “Oh?”
“The Shield is fed with psychic energy while bonded,” I recited. “This not only enhances the connection of the bond but provides the Shield with the energy they will require to perform their duties.”
He chuckled once. “Is there a user manual out there somewhere?”
“Kind of. Things have been so crazy I forgot my lessons. They were so long ago and honestly I never thought I’d need that information.”
“The most powerful psychic in thousands of years didn’t think she might need a Shield one day?”
“I’ve been focused on other issues.”
“And then I distracted you.” He grazed his teeth over my throat. His tongue licked my skin, sending a wonderful tingling through my whole body, then sank his fangs into my vein. I writhed in his lap as he took from me.
As a reward, he stroked his fingers over my clit and down my folds. When he licked away his eyes were black with lust. “Female…you’ve worn pants.”
I instantly regretted my poor choice in clothing. “I thought I was being practical, all things considered.”
“Perhaps you were.” His fingers hooked under the hem of my shirt, dragging it up. “At least you didn’t wear one of those infernal bras.” He bared me, flashing his fangs. “From now on, no pants. Only skirts. I plan to have you whenever I want you. And that means you either wear a skirt or I shred your jeans.”
I swallowed hard. It was so damn hot when he said stuff like that.
“But,” he went on, “since you went through a lot today, I’ll let it slip—and reward your hard work.” He sank into the vein that ran through my breast to my nipple.
Pleasure shot through me, but especially to my nipples. They hardened, then swelled and strained. The pleasure pulsed with each pull. He rubbed at the seam of my jeans. The pressure felt good, but I cursed the barrier between us. I wanted Kris to throw me on the bed, bare his thick cock and stuff me full. I loved it when he filled me so full I choked.
Plus, when I had my wall up, all I had was the physical. And my wall was firmly up. No more magic sex parties caused by my bubbles of psychic energy. Which was why I found Kris drinking from me such a turn on. Especially doing it in his lap, in a chair, in front of a window.
He licked away. “I bet you’re absolutely soaked and ready for my dick. Dripping all over your panties and soaking them through.”
“Yes!”
“I love the way your body readies for me. All hot and slick and swollen. But not now. You’re empty. No cock for you. You’ll have to come just as you are, princess.”
I squirmed with need. “Please Kris. It would be so easy to pull my pants down and fuck me. You don’t even have to pull them all the way down. Leave me strapped inside them.”
He froze. “Fuck it.” He lifted me, standing me up in front of him. Then he unbuttoned my jeans and slid them down my thighs halfway. Then he stood up beside me.
“You want me?”
“Yes!”
“Take me out.”
With trembling hands I unbuttoned his jeans and slid down the zip. Then I pushed the jeans down just enough to reach my eager hand inside and free his impressively thick cock from his boxer briefs. As usual it was impossibly thick and long. The vein along it throbbed and his head swelled and strained.
“Turn.”
Right here? On the chair? In the window? I spun.
He pressed on my shoulders until I bent over in front of him. “Yes,” he hissed. “I like you like this. Tits out–but just barely–ass out, but your jeans still on. You’ll have to take me just like this. It will be a lot and I love fighting my way into this tight little cunt.”
I swear his words made me even wetter. Which was a good thing because a moment later he tried to push inside me.
“So tight.” He wet the head of his cock by rubbing it through my arousal. Then he tried again, pressing at my entrance. I couldn’t widen my legs because my jeans wouldn’t let me. “This is fun. Are you fighting me?”
“Maybe just a little.”
“Careful,” he growled.
I relaxed and he pushed inside with a sigh. I moaned and braced against the back of the chair.
“Wet and hot, but oh, so tight. You’re fucking choking me.” But he didn’t sound in pain. Nope. He sounded like he loved it.
The pressure was intense. Every instinct told me to spread my legs or pull away, but my legs had nowhere to go and Kris held me to him, pressing, pushing, stretching me around him. He slid deeper and deeper, stuffing me full.
“Well look at that. Everyone’s returning to the house.”
I glanced out the window and sure enough, everyone who’d gone for a walk or for fresh air, or even home for a snack, was making their way through the yard, up the stairs to the house.
“All it takes is one. Any one of them could look up at my window and what would they see?”
It sent a thrill through me.
“They’ll see you getting railed by me. Taking a cock too big for you. Bent over for me. Will anyone look up?”
Half of me desperately wanted someone to look up. To stop and watch us. The other half never wanted anyone to see what Kris and I did together.
I got my wish. As he pounded into me, so tight around him, I choked each time he filled me. It was too much and it was perfect.
“Just remember, you asked for this, princess. I was perfectly happy to get you off in my lap. But you were greedy, as usual.”
He gripped my hips and, in one of his lightning-fast moves, spun us. He sat on the edge of the chair, me in his lap, legs together, his fist in my hair as I sank down on his cock.
I gasped for air. It was too much. Too intense to take him this way.
But the fist in my hair tightened. “Relax, princess. You can do it.”
He throbbed inside me, pressing out against my belly, the thick expanse bulging against my belly button.
“I—I can’t!”
With a groan, he shoved my jeans down my legs. I kicked one foot free and spread my thighs over his, sighing with relief. It was still entirely too much, but at least now I could breathe.
“So full of cock.”
I realized this was Kris’s relief. His reward. I scared him today. In truth, I was almost lost. I knew that. I just couldn’t dwell on it. Kris needed this. Needed to feel grounded and whole. He needed to brand me.
With his cock.
So I took everything he gave me. I let him fill me over and over. He gripped my hips and lifted me, then slammed me down around his cock, taking everything but his thick, bulging base. Then slowly, eventually, even that. He strained under me, his orgasm close. I had a feeling he was drawing this out. He didn’t want to come too fast because he needed all the relief.
I held myself back even though both my clits throbbed, swollen and ready. My nipples tingled in the cool air. As soon as I felt the change, the press of his cock as it twitched, the way his fingers tightened painfully on my hips, I let go, milking his orgasm right out of him.
When he was done he buried himself deep and pressed his forehead to my back. I kept pulsing around him for a solid minute.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he panted. “I know we haven’t been together long, but I don’t know who I would be without you, Rhiannon. You’ve changed who I am down to the bone. I can’t live without you.”
Shoshanna and Rever pulled me into a corner of the kitchen. “This is a very serious fucking situation,” Rever muttered. “Banshees?”
“Banshees being used outside of ceremonial purposes has never been done,” Shoshanna whispered. “What the fuck?”
I expected the expletives would fly hard and fast for the foreseeable future. “Not true.”
“Excuse me?”
I waved toward the library. “I told you this research project was important. The amount of information we think we know about our own history is sometimes very different from the historical record. Stories change over the generations. Unpleasant things get erased.”
Shoshanna bristled. “And you found some information on banshees?”
“I did. There are very old stories from the Dark Times after the War. Banshees used to find lost loved ones. Even older stories of banshees fighting in the War as secret weapons. But, as I’ve mentioned before, those stories were told thousands of years after the Dark Times. It’s hard to know how accurate they are. But that’s not all.”
“Of course it’s not,” Rever groaned, stretching his neck like he was physically preparing for a blow.
“There are accounts from the Ottoman Empire of banshees being used in battle. All our old stories from the original House are like the Celtic stories the humans wrote.” The human mind trying to understand what they saw and heard when they crossed paths with samhain was always an interesting insight into the differences between our minds. “But reading the history of the other Houses paints all that in a different light. We write that it was ritualistic. Mourning the dead. But the other Houses record that those deaths came from war. We like to think we’re a peaceful species but the record shows that we’ve had several large fights between the Houses. According to the old Wren records, we were locked in a bitter territorial battle with them at the time the Celts were recording our stories.”
“That’s a Wren lie,” Shoshanna hissed.
“Then why do the Argo have the same stories?”
She blanched.
“There are at least four separate periods of aggression between the Houses that got ugly enough and lasted long enough that the word ‘war’ was used by several of the Houses. This is one of them. Even the Heida have a record of it.”
Rever scratched his chin. “Well that’s an ego check we didn’t need right now.”
“I’m not trying to drag us down. I just want us working from the same page. We can’t pretend we’re ivory pure and that the things happening are unprecedented. We use banshees ceremonially, as we have for hundreds of years. But before that?”
“So you’re saying Rhine uncovered this information and used it to his advantage?”
“I’m not saying that at all. I am saying that we’ve done it before. And we repeat behaviors over and over. If a Gatlin thought it would be a good idea to harness banshee gifts once, some other Gatlin would have the same idea sooner or later. Our brains all come with the same hardware and connections and our psyche all come capable of the same desires, hopes, and fears.”
Shoshanna stood up and paced around the table before sitting back down. “I can’t argue with that. So what does that mean?”
“We have to stop looking at this as someone breaking a rule that needs to be stopped and fixed.”
“Throw the rule out,” Rever agreed with a nod. “There are banshees on the Plane. Rhine put them there for a reason. What’s that reason?”
“We can only guess,” I said. “But he was hungry for power, just like at House of Axl. Something is feeding this idea to vulnerable samhain—and they have been for decades.”
Rever frowned. “Helena, Mary, and Rhine all get the idea they should be in charge and start moving pieces into place. For Mary and Helena that looked like a Dreg Army and a massive new House of Axl. Rhine was small potatoes compared to that.”
“I wouldn’t call an army of banshees small potatoes,” Shoshanna scoffed. “It would only take a handful to…” She turned pale. “To paralyze all samhain and control the Plane.” Her eyes locked with mine. “But that’s preposterous, right?”
“The banshee cry of death and mourning can be beautiful and powerful,” I said slowly, “but when directed at you? It’s a weapon, plain and simple. It basically switched off my tether to reality and the Plane itself. The sound obliterates everything and knocks out all the senses except hearing, and that is overwhelmed so much that all you can do is experience it.”
“But not Marhysa?” Rever asked.
I had to think back of the sequence of events. “I think…I think she had a way of counteracting it. Maybe. Like I was able to at the house.”
“A Nala?” Shoshanna mused.
“Who knows what twenty years on the Plane does to a mind,” Rever said. “Can you find a way to protect yourself against a banshee attack on the Plane? Like Marhysa?”
I nodded slowly as I thought through the steps. “I think so. But the only way to know for sure is to try.”
And that truly scared me. Because if I failed, how would we stop it?
