God!
I arched up, and it felt like time slowed. The floating embers in the air became a stream of rubies. The drag of Pritkin’s stubble over my thighs was like the scrape of velvet. The sheen of water on his bare skin a shining coat, like the armor I’d seen on the fey, like the cascade of watery diamonds tumbling in through the tent flap as the wind shifted.
I felt every one. I felt everything, arching under the heavy droplets hitting my breasts, and then under Pritkin’s lips as he chased them down, as his fingers replaced his tongue elsewhere, as I felt the tent rock, like from another earthquake, except nothing was moving but me. I tried to stay grounded, to think, before sensation tore me off this earth and sent me spinning into madness. But it was impossible. The tide had me now, and I was helpless to do anything except squirm and shudder and make soft little sounds at the back of my throat that I couldn’t seem to stop or control.
Pritkin groaned, and that sound in that voice had my back arching until I thought it would break, my fingers tightening into fists in his hair, needing something, anything to ground me. But nothing helped. It was too much sensation, far too much, and I couldn’t even think clearly enough to ask what was happening.
And then I didn’t need to. Because something looked up at me, but it wasn’t Pritkin. At least, not in the form I knew. An incubus stared at me out of his eyes, thin and starved and desperate. He didn’t say anything, but I could feel his emotions battering me. He hungered, he hurt, but if he fed, he hurt others. So he had starved, for so long, so long . . .
“It’s all right,” I said unevenly. “You . . . won’t hurt me.”
But he didn’t believe it, was already backing down, was sinking away from me. And I realized why as Pritkin’s head dipped again, his lips drawing runes whose meanings I’d never known on my skin. I’d always thought those symbols were to enhance sensation, but I’d been wrong. Goose pimples retreated as he painted my skin in magic, heat cooled, the light bled back to simply light. And I cried out at the loss.
“No! I don’t want you to—”
But he wasn’t listening. He’d become afraid to feed, to take what he needed so badly. Afraid to be who and what he was. Rosier might have been wrong about some things, but he’d been right about at least one. Pritkin wasn’t human. And trying to be so was killing him.
“You can’t hurt me,” I said, my hand in his hair. And there was enough of that other still there that he rubbed up against the touch, like a cat. Thoughtlessly sensual in a way that Pritkin never was.
“I could. I did—” His fear bled through the words, raw and anguished, and my conviction answered it.
“No. Not now.”
I had been afraid my whole life, but there was nothing left to fear. Nothing for either of us. And I’d rather die by his hand than Ares’.
“Take what you want,” I said steadily. “Take everything.”
And the power roared back.
I could see it when he finally entered me, in sunburst flares of pleasure exploding across my vision. Could hear it in the blood roaring in my ears as I writhed under him, struggling to accommodate his size. Could feel it with every movement, slow and stuttering at first, as if he was as overwhelmed as I was, and then with longer, surer strokes that made me squirm and cry out. And then lock my legs behind his back, pulling him farther into me, pulling him as far as he would go.
Until his heart beat, strong and sure, at my core. Until we moved together as one. Until, instead of riding the power, we were swept up by it, carried off with it, into a maelstrom of light and force and sensation.
I cried out, and heard it echo in his throat. Saw our shadows splashed on the ceiling of the tent, as if there was a fire burning inside instead of out. Saw it grow brighter and brighter, until the light burst into a thousand fractured rainbows, whiting out the shadows and spilling out the door.
And then I saw, not with my eyes anymore, but with my mind: power sweeping around in a huge arc, like a glittering wave. Or an ocean, I realized, watching the enormous span of the Pythian power shimmering and dancing as if under a distant sun. I saw it all, just for a moment—
Before it came crashing down—on Pritkin.
I screamed, afraid that it would hurt him, would rip him apart. And maybe it would have, except that all those years, all that lonely starvation, had done something, hadn’t it? The incubus part of his soul had withered and shrunk, barely clinging to life. It was hollowed out now, empty, a vast, echoing cavern full of exactly nothing. Waiting—
For a tsunami.
Like the one that was pouring into Pritkin. It would have killed another incubus; it should have killed him. But the great void at the heart of his being took it gladly, more perhaps than any other incubus had ever taken, because no other of his kind could fast for so long. And instead of killing him, it reanimated a part that he’d almost forgotten, one that suddenly remembered how to feed, how to love, and how . . . to magnify.
A second later, I found out exactly what a starved incubus of the royal line can do when presented with a banquet. Because all that power, doubled or tripled or whatever it was now, came roaring back. I cried out, in agony and ecstasy—and disbelief, because I’d never felt anything like it. And because I’d assumed it would rejoin the Pythian power, where it came from. But it didn’t.
It came back to me.
Suddenly, I could see the light shining out of my pores, feel it screaming through my veins, taste it in my throat as it bubbled over into laughter, insane, impossible laughter because it was good, so good, so much. Too much, overwhelming my body, mind and spirit, the feel of him surging into me, the strength of him under my hands, the emotions I’d denied for too long, all of it.
So I sent it rushing back into Pritkin, who magnified it again and sent it back to me, beginning a thrumming, heart-stopping, explosive cycle that went on and on until I thought I would die from it, die and not care.
And then climax ripped through me, and the world exploded.
I vaguely understood that the tent had just been torn away, blown off by the hot desert wind flooding all around us. Dimly saw the trees above thrashing as if in a hurricane, every leaf shining like a floodlight was beneath them. Distantly knew that this was dangerous, so dangerous, because I was human; I couldn’t hold this much power. It was why the Pythian power was separate from its hosts. We borrowed it when needed; we didn’t inhabit it, or it us. We wouldn’t have lasted a day if we had, before it burned us up.
Like this was about to do to me.
Because Pritkin had just given it back, everything he could, one last time. And then rolled off, gasping and stunned, his body shaking from his own climax, and from the strain of holding that much power. Because he wasn’t meant for it, either.