Page 21 of The Nightmare King

“Oh, you want me like this, don’t you, Lilac?” He stepped forward, balancing the rod of the scythe on my hip bone while teasing the tip of his cock at my entrance. I fought to buck forward, to greedily take him, but I still couldn’t move. Under the shadow of his hood, I caught a small glimpse of his wicked smile. “I’ll give it to you, even though you aren’t asking nicely. But you’ll have to do something for me afterward. Deal?”

Words tried to spring from my throat but stalled. I couldn’t even summon a nod.

He chuckled darkly. “I’m going to take that as a yes because you don’t really have a choice either way.”

Pushing forward, I took him in halfway and let out a strangled breath. The stirrups held my legs apart, biting into my heels as the heart monitor beeping sped up. Any moment a nurse would come in to check on me. What would happen then? Would Mare disappear? Or would the nurse see me getting sleep-fucked by the Grim Reaper?

The scythe met my lower lip as Mare slid inside me all the way, stretching me to the max, and making me wish I could scream. Instead, all that energy had nowhere to go but to build between my legs. With every thrust of death, I felt as if I could truly die from pain and bliss.

He hooked the tip of the blade into my mouth. “Suck on it,” he demanded. “Come on, Lilac. You said you wanted death, right? Here it is. Fuck death, be fucked by nothingness, come on the grim reaper’s cock. Just like that, baby.”

Filthy words mixed with rough and incoherent sex with a phantom man should not have made me feel alive. But it did. Lying in a hospital bed, likely drugged out of my mind, sucking on the grim reaper’s scythe while he fucked me in stirrups, shouldn’t have made me emotional in a way that nothing had in a long time.

I wanted my headphones.

I wanted to go to sleep.

No, wait. I was asleep, right?

When I couldn’t hold myself together any longer, I looked up to see the reaper pull off his hood. Mare’s hair was dark and tousled, his cheeks red from exertion. Those pouty, full lips parted as his violet eyes looked over me, so full of emotion. I wanted to feel his sandpaper jaw in my palms. Wanted to pull him close and never let him go. I didn’t care if a doctor stumbled in and saw us— I wanted him to take me with him wherever he went when I woke up.

He shook his head, still thrusting hard and long. “No, not that. You know, don’t you? You know where you have to go. You know what you have to do.”

Control came back just enough that I barely shook my head, feeling tears streak into my ears as I continued to suck the tangy metal of death’s legendary instrument.

I didn’t know.

I didn’t want to know.

I didn’t want to go there.

Don’t make me go there.

“You can and you will,” he answered my unspoken thoughts. “It’s time… you’re doing so good, Lucy. You’ve been working through this all with me this whole time. All on your own. We’ve done it, baby.”

In tears of sorrow and of ecstasy, I broke apart. Sobbing into an orgasm as he buried himself deep within me. The scythe scraping against the back of my teeth, the walls of me clenching and fluttering around his girth, I came again and again until I was spent.

Limp once more, but not tense, my heart monitor flashed red.

He carefully removed the blade from my mouth and gently placed my feet back on the bed, covering me with the blanket. Mare’s lips tenderly kissed my temple that was wet from sweat and tears, before cloaking himself with his hood once more. “See you soon,” he whispered, just moments before the heavy hospital door burst open. Half a dozen doctors and nurses flooded in, crowding around me, and death dissipated as they tinkered with the machines and needled something into my IV bag.

He was gone.

I was gone.

I knew what I had to do.

Who I had to see.

But nothing in me wanted to do it.

Chapter

Ten

BROKEN WING

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

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