The Relic (Cradle of Darkness Book 2) Read online

  Who would blame her? I was hideously delectable.

  “I’m going to fuck you here. On this ground. Where everyone will see it,” I told her as her pupils blew on the high of a God’s blood. “And you will be angry with me for it later.”

  “No.”

  “But my hand is already up your skirt.” And it was. A very human-looking hand attached to a very human-looking body. That had a human-looking cock that she already fingered, unaware that she was addicted.

  Everyone fell into states of undress.

  Pearl’s first orgy.

  I let her keep her ripped crimson dress, working myself in after her back hit the planks of the platform created for the wedding.

  One thrust saw me deep in my bride’s body before she might recognize the depravities I pulled her down to.

  Blood-red satin singed and bundled to her waist, I thrust like a king might into a serving wench he favored. The girl was shocked. The girl’s mind trying to catch up as things took place beyond her ken.

  Pearl keened, cunt weeping about my human girth.

  The cry was not for my tricks. It was for my falseness. This was not my cock. This was not my body. But I made a show for all to see. Her perfect tits bounced from the tears in her bodice I had prepared for just this moment.

  At no time did she fight back. Instead, she tilted her hips so it might end all the sooner and she might die of shame in private.

  Rough, because she needed rough as the moans, hisses, and screams of pain rose up on that platform, I took her chin and forced.

  My Pearl liked to be forced.

  A dark secret I had manipulated to my advantage. “We celebrate.”

  A tear escaped the corner of her eye.

  “They have to see me this way, my soul. They have to watch me ride you as if I was one of them.” I was so close to spilling, just to end this. “I will fuck you into the next century day and night, while you feed on me until I am sad skin on old bones. Cry harder. I will finish sooner. And they who do not know me will see and respect the claiming.”

  Not waiting for a reply, I caught a peaked, red nipple with the flick of the tongue and a trick of the teeth. And I made her writhe.

  Dancing as the ripples and waves rocked her on my invasive, hideous human cock, I made the show one worth remembering.

  Of course, I added in some flair my bride would have never abided.

  I came. She gaped.

  I had given her no climax even as her womb was assaulted with my spend.

  Which drove doubt hard on the heels of a maiden’s stained morality.

  Resting my forehead against hers, I whispered, “This was for show in honor of a wedding. Expected. It’s easier to rip off the band-aid.”

  Her teeth went to my throat, because my words offended her to such a degree. It was utter reflex. Cornered prey fighting back… as she had done so many times. Yet fangless, she could do nothing.

  I could do everything.

  I could see all the men who had used her in this way. Noted their faces, their names, and made easy decisions on how to shuck their descendants into feeding pens. Bending the rules, I also empowered her in those memories, ripping the inborn church guilt away from a creature doing nothing more than trying to defend itself and succeeding.

  The flesh on my neck parted, because I willed it to do so, and black blood more delightful than sin drenched the tongue of an angry woman.

  She drank me, that sad human cock inside her, until her belly poked out. Falling back and panting with fullness.

  This moment, she would not understand for some time. But it was the price she had to pay to see Jade wed.

  For standing with me as wife in public.

  For my love.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  Glassy-eyed, she stared at the stars, utterly ignoring my presence.

  “If I had made you like it, that would have been wrong.” Why was I begging her to understand what had been on the agenda before time had been written? “This is not me.”

  Cerulean eyes moved from vacancy to daggers. “And that is what makes it so horrid.”

  My monstrous cock changed before the rest of me might stop it. Groaning in discomfort from the stretch, my bride’s hips wriggled to make room even as her body tried to remove me. “You refused the bath. You were ashamed of your breasts and how I enjoyed you. I knew public fucking would unnerve you, but your survival and acceptance require you to bend at least once to your heritage. I can make you forget this.”

  Not that I would.

  Drunk on my blood, she struck out with the tiniest, cutest little moon-white claws. My cheek was torn to shreds.

  Really.

  Down to the teeth and gums.

  Another dollop of come burst forth unexpectedly for us both.

  This must have been what the idea of heaven had been formed of.

  “Do it again,” I begged. “Rip me to ribbons down to the bone.”

  “No.” The weight of words she had never been able to speak in the past fell on me like boulders. “Get out of my body.”

  Hips snapping back, I pulled out the recrafted, human dick as if it had been burned with acid.

  And then she vanished.

  My bride left me there at her own daughter’s wedding.

  Shucking the fluids from my cock, I buttoned up the tatters of my demon-torn clothing, certain I was in more trouble than I anticipated. And that she should not tempt me with a chase.

  Pearl had no idea how much I craved a hunt. But for the first time since the sky lost its stars at night thanks to the cities’ ambient light, I felt a twinge of fear.

  She could be anywhere. And precious as they were, despite the time required to craft them, Pearls were delicate.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Pearl

  I should have known. This is where all men, or monsters, left things. With their seed inside me and my pride crushed. Yet this time, I had taken my innate foolishness past the pale. I had appreciated the monster. Not because he called me pretty or had given my pretty things. Because he had seemed to listen. I thought it was me he saw.

  Not my tits.

  Not my face.

  Not the things I might do with my mouth or the way the place between my legs might sate him.

  And though it had only been a blip of time, considering… considering the decades it had taken me to walk from California to the East Coast. It had been, what? A month? Maybe three?

  Half a year?

  Ten years?

  Who could tell how time passed when most of it was spent lost in the huge black hole of my mind?

  He had seemed so hideously kind. Ugly, grotesque in his mercy poured on my wounds. Care.

  For a thing like me.

  And ultimately, he had been no different from any other man who had pushed me down and thrust in.

  No different than the demon who had kept me for a pet in a stone box. I was still a pet, just with better surroundings.

  The rosary in my grip, I could feel the beads begin to crack from the force at which I fisted it. “I bet you’re laughing at me, aren’t you?”

  Of course he was.

  How could a crispy head on a pike do anything but?

  In France, I had been standing in the deep of night. Now, moments later, I was dumped in a pile on the soft grass of a balmy garden at dusk. Back in Manhattan where I’d once been so sure all my dreams might come true. Where I’d had a window.

  The sun set at my back, warming my skin, leaving my shadow stretching over the drooping eyelids of a grotesque familiarity.

  It didn’t matter if I was in France, or my golden city, or walking dusty roads, or begging strangers for scraps. I had been born in hell.

  I had never left hell.

  And hell would never leave me.

  I, the damned, whose slit ached with unsatiated need, sloppy with spend. A backward body buzzing with irritation at having not reached climax while totally unaroused by the horror before me.

  Dari
us.

  The pike jammed into the stump of his neck was layered with what seemed to be an endlessly dripping crust. The head juicy, despite its scabbed and hideous burns.

  What should have been shrunken from the rigors of the sun and starvation still possessed form. Cheekbones, sharp but identifiable. Burnt hair leaning toward the deepest brown. Lips.

  I knew the sting of those lips.

  The sun fully set, drooping eyelids twitched.

  “Yes. You are laughing.”

  So loud it almost felt as if my ears bled.

  “I know this place.” Turning, humidity leaving torn, red silk to stick to my skin, I took in the jutting stone edifice that seemed to erupt from the ground itself. A cathedral. A cloister. A monastery. A place where screams had seeped into the stone.

  My screams so small in the cacophony.

  I was home.

  How I knew that—considering not once before that night could I recall my eyes setting upon the outside of the terrifying warren—was utterly beyond me. But I knew. This was where I had rotted. This was where I had begged God to redeem me.

  This was where I had sold my soul.

  There was very little I could pull on from my memory, but I remembered the abject pain, how it was twisted up inside me as if it were pleasure, and how the little of me left splintered and let evil in just to make it stop.

  Lying in my own blood and shit, I had begged. I had begged.

  The ground had shaken.

  Darius had left me.

  And here he must have been since. Head on a pike in a garden outside his usurped kingdom now controlled by the child we’d created.

  While I wandered a room, frightened and alone.

  While I uncovered the secrets of my tomb. A Coney Island funhouse of horrors written in my own hand. Beautiful things too. Paintings, jewels, indecent nightwear. Tiny forgotten flecks of blood on the stone.

  In that room, before I had extinguished the last candle, I found myself.

  And found that I was nothing of worth.

  Forgotten.

  There would never be salvation. So I had sang the same songs I had heard mothers sing to their young as I journeyed from place to place.

  And I had dreamed of nothing.

  Yet still sang.

  Though my bones were brittle and my mind was rotted into mush, I heard another pick up the fading tune.

  Hideous life dripped down a withered, resisting throat.

  That first hacking cough, trying to expel not only the music but succor.

  I fought each part of me as it came slowly back to life. I could not take a single further second of myself.

  All of it had been….

  I knew the bible back and forth, and no scripture burned into what was left of my mind might assuage whatever I was. My very life was a cancer on the world, one that grew roots into it as I’d desiccated.

  The little hairs from those roots, I still felt them tugging me into the ground. Or maybe they were tugging me back into the ground.

  I had no idea how I had even appeared in this place, in a heap of skirts and weeping. One moment, I looked into the eyes of a monster I had mistakenly trusted. The next, those fuzzy roots—those spreading incessant roots—snapped me back where they had grown.

  Home.

  That is what I had longed for.

  And this.

  THIS!!

  This godforsaken ground was my home.

  Darius rotting on a stick. But alive and hungry—the eyes in his ragged head glowing as he drank me down under the rot of drooping lids.

  What was left of him was famished.

  Slack jawed head twitching.

  Even so, Darius began to heal before my eyes as if such a state could be made beautiful. His eyes, those terrible eyes, looking right at me as if to say that, yes, he laughed.

  Not that he didn’t also beg.

  “Come to me, treasure.”

  Damaged as he was, despite blaring, continuous pain, the demon was dangerous.

  And so familiar in the way he picked at my thoughts, indelicately scratching at each memory he fingered through.

  I should have gone screaming into the night.

  I should have done anything other than meet his eyes and feel.

  All my pain.

  ALL MY PAIN.

  Wrapped in a pretty bow of desecration and disappointment.

  That thing on the stick hated Vlad. Burned with the blackest bubbling oil of greasy animosity.

  I might have hated Vladislov in that moment too, but I hated Darius far more. “I enjoyed lying with him in a way you could never inspire me to enjoy you.”

  What was I saying? Never had I heard that level of spite in my voice. That dark seed only grew, expanding in my chest until I felt my sad fangs attempt to descend only to ache with the inability to be little more than nubs.

  As if that sorry head thought to console me, it whispered in my mind, “Dear treasure.”

  “I’m not your treasure.”

  “Always. None, but I care for you. Think of what you are now because of me and the sacrifices I made in your name.”

  Soft grass under my bare feet. Where had my shoes gone? Lost when Vlad pushed me to the planks. Fallen off when I popped out of thin air a few feet too high above the ground and thudded into the earth like a bird shot out of the sky.

  Dress torn, wrinkled, sodden, stinking of what had made me seek home. Ugly inside and out. So many gemstones around my throat that it ached. Breath confined, heart racing, I stood as I was. As who I was.

  A broken thing.

  “Your lips, Pearl. Put them to mine.”

  “No.” Resolute, that filthy word twisted my tongue into the most unfeminine of replies.

  I had been designed to be meek. Otherwise, God would not love me. I had allowed males to do horrible things to me in the name of subservience.

  And in that moment, held by the heat of blood-red eyes, I swore to myself that it would never happen again. “This sight comforts me, knowing you are trapped on a stick in my sun, boiling at midday and begging for scraps at midnight.”

  “Come, pet.” That fiddling in my thoughts, that itch. “Embrace me. I can save you from them.”

  Not that I had not noticed the growing shadows once the sun was no longer a concern, the Cathedral’s inhabitants began to gather and whisper, edging nearer where I stood in a breathtaking garden.

  The denizens of the Cathedral had seen me. No sun lingered to keep them away. And I was unwelcome.

  Openly threatened yet perfectly stalked.

  They wished for me to run.

  They thirsted for a chase.

  Yet still I stood hissing to the head of my personal demon as it oozed feted matter down the pike. Damn the whispering shadows back to their hell! I had words to say to this beast.

  “You tore my baby out of my body!”

  And it had words to say to me as well, the tone having skirted from seduction to cruel laughter. “More than one.”

  Bile in the back of my throat, visibly swallowing, I felt the distortion and the fact. “You’re lying.”

  If thoughts could smile, Darius was grinning like he’d eaten my babies for sport. “I can take you to them. How they cry for their mommy.”

  The mental flash of the monster tearing at the flesh of a newborn was jammed into my brain like a hot poker. Darius sucking their marrow as if it were fine wine.

  Yet, it didn’t feel real.

  Nor did the flashes of children flung into the night to defend themselves against the monsters alone.

  He had the power to plant lies like seeds. To water those lies with the victim’s doubt.

  And still it was his head on the pike and not mine.

  And terrible as those memories were, I laughed.

  I had been that beaten child. Those monsters had already devoured me. It was my bones bashed into uneven brick and mortar in an unforgiving world that needed to feed.

  It was a parlor trick of using my past, cha
nging the hue, and pretending it was another.

  I laughed harder.

  Choking back a giggle once my mind flooded with images of a little boy who looked every bit mine—same features, same tenacity. But his blue eyes held none of my fear as he fought. His were the sea in a storm.

  Refusal to submit.

  And I knew as I saw him that no matter what the monster tried to show me, the little boy was real.

  It was almost as if I could feel his little ghostly fingers curl around mine. The perfect greeting of a sweet child to a discombobulated stranger.

  It was too real to bear.

  “Mommy,” the memory called out, as if we had known one another. There was the lie. Not the voice. No, that voice was very real. It was the word.

  Mommy.

  He did not know me. Just as Jade did not know me. Just as I had never known my mother.

  “You will give me my son!”

  “For a kiss.”

  No. Though the argument was personal, more had come to bear witness. The undead, hissing threats yet failing to come closer. As if there were an unseen line in the garden no toe might cross.

  Lingering, circling, they called out obscenities. Clicked their tongues as if to draw my attention away. Others only cocked their heads as if this were the most entertaining display they had seen in ages.

  More laughter.

  But the unhinged sound was mine. I was laughing at them.

  They were afraid of a head on a stick! The irony being that... so was I. I was petrified of a skull with sorry flesh hanging from its twitching muscles. One that could not touch me in any way that mattered.

  One I was extremely tempted to simply… eat.

  He was already inside my mind, why not just digest what was left? I could imagine the crunch of bone in a powerful maw. Even though the sound of those screams had been more beautiful than any the sun might inflict on the most terrible demon of hell.

  Red eyes I remembered held mine as I said it. “I hate you.”

  I don’t think I had ever said that to another being in my life.

  But it was freeing! “I do, Darius. Not once did I love you. I might not remember, but I know I fought your desires.”

  And I had never fought Vladislov, not in that way. Not even on the planks when I’d let him have his show at my expense. No, I just ran, because I could not bear to look at him when he seemed so giddy.