Chapter 14

I feel fog swirling around us, hear the roar of a waterfall, feel the pine needles under my feet and smell the dirt and the cedar and the pine and the mountain air.

I feel Caleb's body—a huge hard mass of man pressed up against me, his hands roaming my skin everywhere, hips and thighs and back and shoulders and hair and face and ass, and I feel the hot throbbing ridge of his cock nestled against my belly, pounding and pulsing and pleading for my touch.

I need him.

I need more.

I wrap my arms around his neck and lift up on my toes—he catches the cue and cups my ass in his hands and lifts me so I can wrap my legs around his waist. The scared, angry, hurt mortal girl with powers she doesn't understand—she is burned away in the fires of desire, of need—of fate, or destiny, or just pure, plain lust.

My vampire scents his blood, and my fae smells his prana—wild, primal, animal, morning dew upon the mountain grass and moonlight shining silver on a chuckling stream, howling the hunt and bringing down mighty prey.

I feel my fangs prick my lips and I clutch at his face, his stubble, the hard angle of his jaw. His hair hangs to tickle the backs of my hands, and it smells like fresh rain and the hot blood of fallen prey—delicious. I growl, and I lick his throat, tasting skin and salt at the pulse point of his jugular.

He snarls in pleasure as the venom soaks into his skin and sears into his bloodstream, and his already hard cock pulses harder, hotter, and thicker, the fat round tip pressing against my opening.

I sink my teeth into him and his sweet, wild blood floods my mouth and he plunges up into me. I whimper and gasp a breath, and swallow my first mouthful of his blood, and he bucks hard, fucking into me with beautiful power.

His hands grip hard into the muscle of my ass, and he lifts me as he draws back and down, and I take another long pull of his blood, and his prana calls to me, an amber river flowing through him beside his blood, and I pull it into me, drink it in, and it weaves in with and braids around his blood to become a heady, intoxicating tonic.

He sinks to his knees, and I sit on his thighs and drink from him, sipping now as he shudders inside me. I clench around him, and he thrusts deep. Prana boils in my veins, and his rakta, saturated with powerful maya, surges through me.

I feel The Dreaming around us. I feel its infinite expanse, the layers and layers of it swirling beneath us. I feel the power of it pulsing with the beat of Caleb's heart, a steady thumping, an anchor for my soul as I drink from his prana and rakta. I call upon my prana, and it surges like a tidal wave in response, a golden-white tsunami of inimitable, burning power bursting out of my pores, seeping out of my eyes and dripping from the ends of my hair—it coats me like a second skin, and I'm wrapped up in Caleb, and he is fully seated within my sex, so deep it almost hurts, so deep it aches beautifully, and the mana in him answers, surging, boiling, flooding out of him to mingle with my power and our maya sparks, ignites.

It feels like we are being burned but not consumed by a heatless flame; we are a pyre of power endlessly burning.

I drink from Caleb and I lift up and sink down and he thrusts hard to meet me, and his cock stretches me to an exquisite ache.

I crack open my eyes—the moss bed beneath us shimmers in a golden-white-amber haze, replaced by a distorted image of the cot in my cell. The bare granite walls of the naked mountain that is my cell become trees, and the ceiling is a blue sky shot through with streaks of white cloud, and the square of mirrored light is the sun. The cell is the forest, and the rush of the waterfall is my pulse crashing madly in my ears.

He lays beneath me, now, and I ride him, palms planted on his chest—I pull my fangs free and lick the wound closed. I'm so glutted with power that I feel close to venting, but I keep it crushed and compressed inside, coating our united bodies with our power.

He pulls at my mana, and I open myself to him, and I feel The Dreaming around us respond. The forest glimmers, brightens, becomes firm and solid once more, and a concrete sense of place fills me—I scent the air once more and hear the roar of the falls and feel the splattering spray of the water. Yet, simultaneously, the Tribunal cell becomes just as solid, overlaid or superimposed upon the forest scene—the cot beneath us is hard and the wool blanket scratchy and stinking, and the naked granite is damp and cold and the light a garish, brilliant white slanting spear of magnified sunlight.

His mouth finds mine and I open for him and take his tongue and tangle mine with his and taste his teeth and breathe his breath. I roll hard on him, hips lifting and falling with desperate speed and power, and his cock throbs thick and hot inside me, swelling with each thrust until it seems I'll split apart, so full am I with everything Caleb.

I feel The Waking and I feel The Dreaming, and they are swirling and confused. I hear a guard's footsteps—many booted feet.

I pull at my magic and push it out of me at the same time, and Caleb's mana pulses with our synched heartbeats, and the rhythm of our bodies joining in wild groaning primal thrust after thrust matches up with the pulsing of our bloodbeat and the slow swelling explosion of our magic.

Time stretches into infinity,

and there is no time.

Each harsh booted step of the approaching guards coming to take me to my death is a syncopated crack in reality, hours and days and eons between each thud of hobnails upon stone,

simultaneously, the roar of the waterfall twists like a ribbon lost to a long wind, a roar becoming a bellow becoming static as time coruscates and divides and shatters, becomes irrelevant,

and we are in between Waking and Dreaming.

Caleb grips my ass in his hands, strong fingers digging in hard, lifting me, slamming me down on his cock, and I scream as each perfect thrust crushes into me, and stars shatter behind my eyes and orgasm wells in the pit of my belly, the base of my soul, but I'm not ready for it, not ready to let go.

The moment is not yet come.

I feel the chill brush of Death touch my bones, and the hot flush of life radiating from my skin. I bite Caleb's lip and taste his blood blooming on my tongue and I claw my fingers into his shoulders and drive back against his thrusts with utter abandon, screaming in ecstasy as his cock fills me and stretches me and completes me, and the real magic is us, is this moment, imprinted upon eternity.

Cell and forest spin around us with wild speed, shifting back and forth, rocking from one to the other again and again, synched with each thrust as his cock slams into me and my ass slaps against his thighs and his orgasm ignites in his balls and his belly and mine unfurls in my chest and my sex, my pussy aching and throbbing, and even the throbbing ache of my sex is united with the same primal rhythm of our fucking—

our love

our mating

our union.

My orgasm threatens again, brimming with the force of the sun itself in the core of my being, and I know it's not yet time.

Not yet.

Not yet.

There's…a resistance. A pushback from The Waking and The Dreaming, a place where they have merged and seek to expel us, to put us back where we belong, in one or the other.

Caleb's mana swells within me, surging in a flashflood, and my prana as well, and they fill us with power, a golden-amber river, white-hot, blazing like the sun, pulsing to the ever present rhythm of the universe within us.

I sit up tall on Caleb and lengthen my spine, arching backward, throwing my head back, my face to the sky, the sun, the ceiling, the light, and I raise my hands and throw all my trust into Caleb, into my power, into us, into all that he is and we are and I am, and I roll my hips on him, taking his beautiful huge hard cock into me in desperate hunger, and I draw on our maya and I push—

I PUSH —

Caleb grasps my hips and jerks me hard down on him in thrust after thrust, pushing up into me with all the wild infinite power of his warrior's body, and I feel my core spasm with the rough delicious brutality of his thrusts, feel my breasts slamming and swaying and bouncing with our movements and his cock driving so deep, so hard that I scream with the lush, lovely pain of it, pain so perfect it becomes pleasure,

and his voice becomes a wolf's snarl, a roaring alpha taking his mate, and I feel his fur and his teeth and his claws, and I am a wolf with him, howling, arching for him beneath the full moon as our pack runs down prey and howls at the magic of our mating,

and still, the skin of distinction separates the reality of The Waking from The Dreaming and booted feet stomp nearer, and I hear now voices and the thump of hastaxi butts on the stone floor beyond my cell and the waterfall's roar is louder than ever and the scent of the forest wafts across my face and an icy wind skirls around our bodies,

and now it is time, now the moment is come, and I cannot put off my climax any longer, and I feel Caleb's begin, feel it in the way his cock pulsates thicker and harder inside me and I clench around him, and feel every vein of his length stutter against the stretched-thin lips of my sex and he pounds into me and I lift my arms high in benediction and taste air icy with the wind howling off of a mountain peak and smell snow and feel it swirl and gritting under my knees,

and Caleb bellows and fucks me with relentless love,

"Sparrow, Sparrow, Sparrow," my name chanted upon his lips,

"Caleb, oh god, Caleb, Caleb, Caleb," whispered on mine, and the whispers echo from mountain peak to peak,

"Now!" I scream, and the word ripples through The Dreaming and The Waking, echoing and banging off of the wild heaven-high peaks around us and off the naked stone of the cell and the trees and the leaves and the moss of our bed,

and heat shatters through me, and my sex clenches and clamps so hard around his cock that he can barely slide into me and out of me, and I scream wordlessly as my climax implodes, explodes, and stars go nova behind my eyes—I force my eyes open and meet Caleb's, and around us reality and Dreaming and Waking and both and neither and the admixture of the two distort and separate and unite and become a new thing,

and the resistance pushes back one more time,

and Caleb comes, chanting my name without pausing for breath, "Sparrow-Sparrow-Sparrow-Sparrow!"

and I feel him come inside me, feel his cock throb hot and thick and push deep, feel warmth flood through me, feel him crush me down onto him one last time and thrust deeper and deeper and deeper and I fall forward and release my orgasm, feel it smash the last pulse of resistance from the veil between Waking and Dreaming,

and Caleb's claws slash down my back from right shoulder to left hip, shearing open flesh and separating muscle, and his mana swells through me and I feel his spirit flood into my being as his release floods through my body, and I feel the pound-pound-pound of our hearts and the universe and reality and my orgasm and his, all pounding-pounding-pounding in harmony, in unison,

and the stomp of boots fades as wind howls and snow skirls, and the drip-drip-drip of water somewhere in the cell distorts and fades and the rough scratch of wool and the soft pungent moss becomes snow and ice, somehow a perfect bed,

and I collapse forward onto Caleb's chest, whimpering as the excruciating bliss of our orgasm rushes through my veins and his, and I hear him breathe in my ear, breath hot on my ear and my hair and his hands are vise-gripped into my ass cheeks, keeping me held crushed against him so I can feel his cock thrust deep, and my pussy spasms, aches, clenches and releases, and I can't breathe,

and then there is no moss, no waterfall, no pines and cedars and fog and darkness and shadow,

no naked granite walls, no hard rough cot, no mirrored sunlight,

no ward,

because

we have done it.