Jory Strong: Spider-Touched

Malahel shuddered. “Doing so would make him ifrit . One whose name can no longer be spoken out loud and whose spirit can’t be guided back and reborn into a new life.”

“Will he be freed if I kill Anton?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

If the Spider Djinn cared at all about Abijah’s fate, it wasn’t reflected in either answer or voice.

Araña could feel how little time she had left before the choice she’d made would no longer matter against the consuming nature of fire. “Will you tell me how to free Tir?”

The raven stirred, ruffling its feathers.

Malahel turned her face toward it, and something passed between them before the Spider Djinn’s attention returned to Araña. “Abijah knows the incantation. You have his name. If the maze owner is dead, and the moment right, you can gain the information you desire.”

“I can’t speak in the language Anton uses.”

“His use of it is a conceit.”

The last of the kingdom city behind Spider and Raven went up in flames with a whoosh that engulfed everything—burning away moment and scene like a match put to paper—turning reality into a rush of heat and the hungry song of the fire, then nothingness until Araña opened her eyes to descending nightfall seen through a canopy of trees.

The stench of death surrounded her. Blood and feces and urine.

Goose bumps pimpled her skin, making her realize how cold she was.

Her shirt was soaked in blood, both hers and her enemies’.

But the Dji—Malahel hadn’t lied. She was whole. Healed. Strong.

Araña found her knives among scattered bones and leaves. She got to her feet, sheathing them, taking a last look at Jurgen and the Were.

The soft sound of sobbing and whispered prayers reached her. She retraced her earlier steps, going to the place where the remaining guardsman, Salim, who she knew only from the vision she’d changed with her visit to the witches’ house, cried in a cocoon of silk. There were twenty or thirty spiders around him, protecting their prey as others scurried along the branches on either side of the path, anchoring the threads that would allow them to lift their meal and suspend it where other predators couldn’t get it.

The spiders let her approach, parting to create a path through their midst, those displaced climbing onto the cocoon.

Perhaps he deserved this fate. Perhaps he didn’t. But Araña couldn’t walk away and leave him to die slowly.

She drew the knife, and the spiders converged on him, completely covering him. They lifted the front part of their bodies, telling her by their action they would protect their prize even from her.

Use your gifts wisely. Use all of them .

If there’d been fire here, she could have used it as a weapon. But in doing it, she would have betrayed a gift of trust, a birthright forged for her in the womb of Earth’s fire, where her nature was chosen.

Instinctively she willed the mark to her hand, then concentrated on the spiders, asking them with pictures if they’d let her cut away the silky threads of the cocoon.

They answered with movement, parting again but only enough to reveal a small patch of silk above the guardsman’s heart.

His fate was out of her hands. But she could grant him mercy.

Araña drove the knife in, accepting the spiders’ offering.

Then she turned away, racing the nightfall and hurrying toward the Constellation — and Tir.

THE scent of blood made Tir’s heart stop beating for an instant as he entered the boat’s cabin.

The air was heavy with it.

Were.

Human.

Araña’s.

She was safe. Alive.

The sound of the shower was testament to it. The way terror had morphed into relief as he ran, making him stumble and nearly fall, had told him, but until he saw her, held her…

A faucet was turned and the water stopped. A moment later, the door separating them opened.

She was naked. Beautiful. Her skin glistening, as if she’d known he was waiting and been in such a hurry to get to him that she had only allowed herself a cursory sweep of the towel over wet flesh.

Dark, dark eyes consumed him and made him burn as though he’d stepped into the heart of a primal fire.

He shed his clothes without being aware of doing it. Closed the distance between them, helpless against his need to hold her, to touch his skin to hers.

“Love me,” she whispered. Command and plea. Inescapable desire stripping away any thought he might have other than to obey.

Tir lifted her into his arms, his mouth against hers, their tongues rubbing and twining in carnal bliss, in a ravenous joining of breath and soul.

His cock strained upward toward her, licking across his belly as each step toward the bed brushed the wet tip of it across his abdomen.

It was more than lust. More than the sating of physical desire.

If he’d lost her…

Her fingers touched the collar enslaving him, transmitting regret. Worry for him. Fear only barely masking a deeper terror.

“Don’t,” he said against her lips, wanting to lose himself in her, to become a willing prisoner to the passion that eradicated all reality other than the touch of flesh to flesh, soul to soul.

Tir placed her on the mattress and followed her down, no longer content to taste only her lips. He trailed wet, hungry kisses to her breast and reveled in the way her back arched, thrusting hardened nipples against his mouth, her body begging for him to suckle with the same fervor her words did.

He laved. Bit. Sucked. And grew more aroused as she writhed, pressing her heated cunt to his belly, adding her honeyed arousal to his own.

She cried out when he left her breast and kissed downward. But when he lifted his head after tormenting her with the shallow thrusting of his tongue into her navel, he erred in underestimating her, in forgetting how ruthless a warrior she was in her own right.

“I want to put my mouth on you at the same time,” she said, wriggling out from under him, making his hips buck. The erotic images suddenly bombarding him hardened his cock further, leaving his testicles burning with the need for release.

Savage, feral determination swept through him when she would have pushed him to his back and taken the dominant position, crawling down his body and tormenting him before pleasuring him.

He grabbed her and pulled her underneath him, not allowing her to linger over his chest or nipples, not allowing her to tease. His forearms pinned her thighs to the mattress, holding her open so he could breathe her in, savor the sight of her glistening folds.

Even as he watched, the color of her aroused flesh darkened, beckoned. And it was all he could do to resist its call. He’d be lost as soon as he buried his face against her cunt, helpless against anything she wanted of him.

“Now, Araña,” he said, commanding rather than begging, forcing steel into his spine as her lips and tongue found his cock.

Pleasure rippled through Araña, his so easily becoming hers as she willingly obeyed him by pressing her mouth to his rigid penis and measuring its length with kisses and sinuous rubs of her tongue against hardened flesh.

Tir was everything to her. Unlike the truth of the spider mark, it hadn’t taken death for her to accept how important he was to her. Part of her had known from the very first, in the heart of the flame when she’d touched the strand of her life to his.

There’d never been any other choice for her but to fall in love with him, to need only his touch, crave it with a desperation that made it easy to turn away from the promise of power and a home among the Djinn.

His cock pulsed, wept for her just as her cunt throbbed and cried for him. She wanted him, ached for all of him, his body as well as his heart, his present as well as his future.