Page 85 of Rogue's Pawn (Covenant of Thorns 1)

So much easier.

Another wrenching wave of pleasure racked me, bringing a keening cry. Rogue was driving me up, beyond where I could deny my own release. His long fingers burned into me as if delving into my deepest parts, wrenching the climax from me, dragging it into the bright light of day for him to devour. His face, so close to mine, shone with avid hunger, the obsidian pattern pulsing.

The lines gathered, filling my vision, as darkness rushed in from the edges of my retinas. Black filled with pounding red, spiked with bright stars of wildly flashing neurons.

Everything in me engorged with blood, filled to bursting.

I screamed when the blood dam broke.

Screamed out to the sky all my frustration and exaltation and rage.

I rode Rogue’s hand like a plunging horse, careening through the pulsing waves of his magic. The words were on my lips, ready to tumble out.

Yes,I wanted to scream.Yes, take me, do whatever you wish with me.

It terrified me.Never again!

So I seized the emotion. Seized it, tore down the cool barrier and threw that impulse, that final surge of yielding so profound that the self was immolated, into the vast sky.

And it roared back down on us, a lightning bolt sundering the tree.

Chapter 25

In Which I Learn a Thing or Two

‡

At least, soI was told.

The thing about being hit by lightning—even one’s own—was that the enormous electrical surge scrambled the nervous system. Senses, thinking processes, organs—everything connected to that nervous system—got hard-booted in the most wrenching way possible. So all you really got of the experience was how you felt afterward.

If you survived.

Rogue regained consciousness first—which only confirmed my suspicions that he had nerves made of steel, or at least some sort of aluminum alloy. Immortality was an enviable thing.

I awoke to find him crouched over me on all fours, holding my hand wrapped in his so that our wrists spiraled around each other, just over my heart. His face loomed over mine as he breathed into my face. For a confused moment, I thought the Black Dog had me pinned, but my blurred vision resolved and Rogue’s gorgeous face appeared.

My heart thundering in a beat too rapid to feel possible, I gasped for breath. Every rib protested the movement. This had to be how a hummingbird felt, just before its heart exploded from stress.

Rogue squeezed my hand hard, drawing me back from the precipice.

Oh yeah, don’t imagine your own heart exploding, dammit.I calmed myself, shrugging the well of nothing around me. His hair was singed and still vaguely smoking. He blew steady breath between my lips—even now only touching me with one hand and no lips, I noticed with wry humor. His breath streamed into me like mountain run-off. Like the oxygen-saturated chunks of glacier dropping into the ocean in Alaska, effervescent as Alka-Seltzer, releasing primordial air back into the world, fresh, clean, powerful and ancient.

I drank it in and my heart slowed. My ribs moved. My lungs drew air.

At last Rogue sat back, drawing me to a sitting position as he did so. Then he released me, drew up his knees and, echoing my earlier position, wrapped his long arms around them, steadily studying me.

I didn’t know what to say.

Apparently he didn’t either.

I watched Rogue, waiting for an acid comment, but he only gazed back, weary and faded.

I felt curiously depleted, so I tried standing and, though my legs were shaky, managed to get to my feet and turn to look at the tree. Rogue had either dragged me or we’d been thrown about fifteen feet away. The tree was neatly cleaved in half, limbs draped over the ground as though a drunken debutante passed out in her own voluminous skirts.

I turned back to Rogue, who still sat, eyes unfocused. He seemed to be concentrating on something. Holding something tightly inside. It made me uneasy. I looked at the tree again.

“In the stories,” I said, “of places like this—there are dryads, spirits who live in the trees.”

---