Authors: Nara Malone
She did what he instructed, careful to keep her eyes on the
paper and away from any mystical apparitions that might sneak up on her. She
could imagine his breath against the back of her neck, his voice something she
now felt more as a vibration in her skin, rather than heard in her head when he
continued.
Spread your pussy lips with your left hand and press your
right thumb over that slick, sweet pearl.
It was slick. And sensitive. The cool air against it nearly
made her come. Made her pussy clench, hungry for something hard to hold on to.
She pressed her thumb to her clit.
Feel that pulse, the beat of your passion, the untamed
you, the essence you work so hard to contain. We’re not going to let it go. But
we are going to expand your boundaries.
Her breath caught. She knew what was coming and it still
didn’t prepare her for the physical sensation, for the mental surrender, the
hold sentences scrawled on paper could have over her.
Or the fire. What started as a warm tingle where she’d
spread the oil leveled up to buzz and moved on to all-out blaze. She folded
over, both hands pressed over her burning pussy, knees together, forehead to
the floor.
The pulse beat under her thumb rose and the sensation of
Marcus, in the room, was physical. Energy sizzled and popped in the air around
her. She was certain if she looked she would see him. She was so terrified she
might that she couldn’t look. The humming sensation, like a cat’s purr, started
softly in her clit.
Let that pulse get stronger, raise the energy just like
you did with the candle. Let it radiate out through your body, each breath
expanding its reach.
Purr turned to thrum and then to thump. Extending up through
her belly, into her chest, pulsating at the tips of her nipples. Her heart took
up the beat, a primal drum getting faster and faster, spiraling outward. Eyes
squeezed shut, she felt for and found Marcus’ shirt where she’d left it on the
bed. She buried her face in it and moaned like an animal. Sweat sprang from her
pores, drenched her body. When she tried to get to her feet, a wave of chills
hit, bringing her back to her knees.
“Fucking hell,” she swore, not caring who heard. Through it
all the pulsing in her pussy intensified, a raw ache deep inside. She tried
reaching it with her fingers, only succeeded in spreading the fire to more
sensitive places. Making her pussy weep as if it could put out the flame. She
couldn’t reach the spot she needed to reach. She needed something. Needed it
bad enough that she risked looking around, her eyes scanning the room to find
she was indeed alone. Her search skidded to a halt at the candle.
She couldn’t.
She closed her eyes, curling on her side. The ritual ended
here. Marcus could threaten all he wanted the next time she saw him. She was
done playing his games.
But the idea had already taken root. It would feel so good.
“The man is a fucking sadist,” she gritted out between
chattering teeth. The wild thing inside clawed for release. Simmering blood seared
her veins on the inside. Throbbing in her pussy threatened to send her
screaming hysterically into the night.
She tried to ride it out. The chills passed and heat spread
again. With the heat, the gnawing in her pussy grew intolerable.
She crawled to the candle, blew it out and grabbed it from
the holder. The scald of hot wax over her fingers nothing compared to the burn
inside. She was on her knees, rubbing her fevered pussy with the candle.
“Marcus,” she hissed. “Fucking silver-eyed satan.”
“I thought I was a monk.”
That wasn’t her imagination. She was sure of it. She paused,
looking around, her breath coming in quick pants. The room was completely dark
now. She was past the point of caring if his voice was real. She needed to hear
it.
“I need you,” she whimpered.
“I’ve got you, sweetheart. You can do this.”
She felt, or imagined convincingly, his lips pressing a kiss
to her shoulder. His fingers running through her hair.
“This feels so real,” she said, eyes wide open. “But you
aren’t really here.” Where she’d been afraid to see the impossible before, she
was afraid she wouldn’t see him now.
“Paint the picture with your intention, Allie. Visualize
what you want with a clarity that allows you to step inside the scene and make
it come to life. Scent is the most powerful of senses. Use scent as the pigment
to paint a new reality.”
She inhaled the sensual combination of cinnamon, licorice,
melting wax and her own desire. A signature incense blended from all their
encounters. Desire knifed through her. She could only rock on her knees and
whimper.
“You’re bigger than this challenge,” he said.
“No I’m not,” she sobbed. “God. Fuck. I can’t do this alone,
Marcus.”
“Then make me real. You have to get us that far. Gather me
from your memories. Use the candle. Start there. It’s my hands guiding it where
you need to feel me.”
He didn’t want to frighten her, but he couldn’t continue to
watch and not come to her aid. He wasn’t sure what factors allowed his presence
there. Maybe a mate in need. Maybe something specific to their natures that
went beyond traditional Pantherian abilities. His body was in a bed in another
town, he could recall stepping out and looking down at it, watching the steady
rise and fall of his chest as he slept. Jake had been dozing in a chair next to
the bed, one of Adam’s babies draped over his shoulder. He’d walked to the
basement lab and stepped through the mirror portal and out of the mirror in
Allie’s wardrobe.
While he didn’t have the strength to lift an eyelid in his
human body, he felt lighter and more powerful now. He wasn’t dead and he wasn’t
on the shifting plane. As far as he could guess this was astral projection, a
vestigial version of shifting some humans retained. His presence here was
connected to Allie’s need for him, to the latent powers the rituals were
opening.
He hadn’t expected this small lesson to impact her to the
degree it had. He could feel the agony of a female in heat pulsing in the room.
Not true biological heat. A chemically induced mating drive, possibly some
allergic hypersensitivity to something in the Pantherian fire oil. Possibly
he’d overdone it with the absinthe when he’d mixed that bottle. The physical
symptoms manifested were classic. She needed a mate and she needed him now.
He was determined to ease the suffering he caused if it
killed him. He was aware that in his weakened state it might. The only
alternative being that he try to regain enough consciousness to send someone to
her. But then he was left with the matter of whom. Jake and Seth were Yeti.
Ben’s and his boys were lupine. Adam and Ean were mated to Marie. He didn’t
know what Allie was. All indications were feline. He could be any species he
chose, therefore he was her only option. And while it went against everything
he’d been raised to believe, he didn’t want to share her. He wanted Allie to
himself. He wanted to always be her only option.
She was in the most submissive of poses now, shoulders to
the floor, hips raised in offering to her mate.
Mating fever worked like a drug on the mind. She thought him
an apparition. Technically he was. If he could raise her vibrational state a
little higher, get her to a translucent state close to his current vibration,
he would feel real to her. He could use her hard, use up the fever crawling
through her body. After he broke its hold, he could leave her to her dreams.
She’d feel the effects of one hell of a hangover in the
morning, but he couldn’t do much about that. He’d be lucky to survive getting
her past the crisis of tonight.
“You need me?” he asked. “Do you need me enough to see me,
even if you don’t understand how it’s possible?”
“I don’t know,” she moaned. She turned her head, to one side
and then the other, squinting into the darkness.
“Show me how much you need me, Allie.” He squatted behind
her, mindsight showing him a clearer view than he’d have with physical eyes. He
pussy was swollen, glistening. He couldn’t touch her in a way she’d feel. Not
yet. Without a body he couldn’t grasp a physical object. She had to get herself
across the threshold before he could help.
“Put the candle where you want me most, Allie.” Her fingers
tightened around the shaft, the warm wax giving a bit under the pressure.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “Please, Marcus. Can’t we skip the
games and lessons and just do it?”
“Do this one thing for me first, baby. Do it for me,” he
said. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are? Those lips all dewy and
plump. An invitation. I want to watch you just like this, offering yourself in
the sweetest pose a woman can present to her lover, teasing pleasure from that
swollen pearl. I want to see you sliding that fat candle up and down in your
pussy, just the way you want me to fuck you.”
The lips of her pussy quivered. Her entire body trembled
with the effort it took her to resist.
“You’re not real? This is a dream?”
“It’ll be what you want it to be, Allie. What you need it to
be. If you want it to be real, you know what you have to do.”
She pressed the base of the candle between her nether lips.
Moaned as it sank in. He watched her muscles squeeze and felt her heat engulf
him as if he were inside her. He wished he could see inside her mind to know
what mental image had created that sensation. She started to move her hand. A
hesitant dip in, then drawing out. She angled her head to look behind her, her gaze
zeroing in on his position. Her pupils narrowed.
“I see smoke,” she whispered.
“Where, there’s smoke—”
“Shut up,” she spat.
He loved it when she got her fur up.
As the primal drive to mate burned hotter with each stroke,
fanning the flames, her body glowed, the aura around her cycling through the
colors from red right up to white. When the climax hit and she stifled her
cries in the folds of his shirt, she went translucent. The candle slipped from
her grasp.
Marcus took his place behind her, dragging her hips back,
thrusting inside as they flickered in and out of physical reality.
He ran one finger along her spine and she mewed, pressing
back against him. Her juices dribbled over his cock.
“Almost there, baby,” he said. “Come for me now.”
She did. Her catcall of pleasure shielded by the flickering
vibration of her body, taking the sound above the level of human hearing. But
Marcus heard it. Every anguished note crawled up and down his spine.
He grabbed her hair in one hand, her hip in the other, and
slammed inside her, unleashing another pantherish scream from her. Humans
compared the sound of a big cat screaming to a woman screaming. They found the
sound unsettling. He wondered what they’d say if they could hear a Pantherian
female mating, a cry that resonated from teeth to toes, throbbed in the bones.
Sucked everything from a male’s mind but a drive to satisfy his mate.
He drove into her. Slammed into her, pushing her from one
climax to the next. Reveling in the fact that as the stones had kept her earthbound
last night, his astral body held her to this limbo world between real and not.
He could fuck her through eternity without risk of shifting either of them.
Draining away the mating fever in a constant stream of orgasms. Each sucking
his energy a little more than the last.
When he finally let her slip back to the physical plane,
into her body curled asleep on the rag rug, he was barely substantial enough to
transfer through the portal. He wondered how he’d summon the strength to crawl
back inside his skin.
He slipped away without a word, while she slept. Hating
himself for it. He wished he could draw a blanket over her to keep her warm, or
bathe her sweaty body and tuck her in bed. The tug of his body called him back.
Demanded his return, a weight dragging him through the portals and into his
human skin.
The crushing pain that greeted his return was enough to
force his eyes open. Baby Marisa was on the bed beside him, shifted to her
tiger form, a behavior her parents had unsuccessfully discouraged. He didn’t
have the strength to rub her ears. She was watching him with that thoughtful
wise-baby stare of hers, tail twitching as she contemplated. Her sympathetic
mew told him she guessed how far gone he was. He had a sense of foreboding when
she crept close. He couldn’t stop her before she touched her nose to his. The
power in that connection nearly turned him to cinders, made a lightning bolt
seem as insubstantial as a firefly. He burst onto the shifting plane and
reappeared in the bed, feeling charred on the inside and shattered without.
Her mother must have come in during the display. He heard
her calling him and his son, alternating frantically between names. Marcus
wanted to reassure her he was fine. He wasn’t fine enough to pull it off and
lost the fight to stay conscious.
* * * * *
When she woke up stiff from sleeping on the floor, Allie’s
first thought was that she needed to get back on that bus out of town and stay
there this time. It wouldn’t solve anything though.
The room tilted when she sat. Her head felt as if it had a
drum band playing inside. She collected the contents of the lesson box and
stowed them. Her memories of last night were vague, scattered flashes. She
thought she recalled Marcus there, but the apartment door was still locked and
she couldn’t imagine him leaving her to spend the night on the floor.
She had three basic needs—aspirin, a shower and coffee. Once
those had been dealt with she hoped the world would make sense again.
It didn’t.
She had to think on the move, already running so late there
was no time to stop at the diner for breakfast. Franny would worry. Allie would
call her from the office. She grabbed her purse and the canvas tote she kept
stocked with minimal sketching supplies should inspiration hit when she was at
lunch. The lesson box was back on her desk. For a reason she couldn’t explain,
she wanted it with her. Or maybe she just wanted it out of her apartment. She
slid it inside her tote. She’d figure out why later.