Body Temperature and Rising - Book One of the Lakeland Heatwave Trilogy (13 page)

‘I am sorry, my love. But when next I enter you, I promise it shall be truly for pleasure.’ He sank his cock into her with one swift thrust, and she screamed like a mountain lion before the world exploded into blessed relief and she lost consciousness. 

‘Oh please, Tim, hurry. I’m so scared.’ There was no disguising the high pitched hysteria in Serina’s voice. Seeing where she was and that she wore only a thin nightie, Tim knew that speed was of the essence.

‘Serina, are you hurt?’ he asked.

‘No. I’m not hurt, please hurry!’ She burst into more sobs.

‘Listen very carefully, Serina,’ he said as he tightened the climbing harness and clipped onto the rope he had secured to a nearby tree. ‘I need you to relax for me and stay calm. I’m coming to get you. Just stay calm and hang on.’

He could have scrambled down to her without roping up, but he could never get a terrified woman, with, as far as he knew, no climbing skills, safely to the ground below.

The closer he got, the more audible her sobs became. ‘You said you served me,’ she sobbed. ‘You told me that you were here for me. Why did you tell me that? Why?’ Then she gasped. ‘No, please don’t. Please. I did as you asked me. Please don’t.’

Tim approached from her blind side, thinking that perhaps she was hallucinating. Maybe that’s what had got her in this position in the first place. Some of the herbs she had offered him last night were just barely legal. And then he froze on the tiny footholds of rock just out of her view. 

She was not hallucinating. 

There next to her with the bare wedge of the moon visible through his transparent body, standing effortlessly on nothing, was Deacon. While Serina sobbed, he turned a warm smile to Tim, as though he were welcoming him to his house for tea. 

‘You are very punctual, indeed, Mr Meriwether, just as I knew you would be. Are you surprised to see me? Certainly your Marie was. And she was quite upset when I told her I had sent you off here to save a damsel in distress.’ He gave an unsympathetic nod in Serina’s direction and she flinched. Then he returned his attention to Tim. ‘Of course, you understand, timing is everything, isn’t it? And contrary to popular belief, we who are not among the living have a much more finely honed sense of that. Oh yes, Mr Meriwether, we are very aware, often painfully aware of every passing fraction of a second.’ He knotted his hand into a tight fist and the woman on the ledge cried out and doubled around herself sobbing. ‘Every breath concerns us, Mr Meriwether, every opening of every single pore.’ He heaved a happy sigh and looked down again at Serina. ‘So, as you can imagine, I knew exactly how much time I would need with our dear Marie before I should return my attention to you. In all honesty, it took much less time than I had expected. Pathetically weak really. I was sorely disappointed with her.’

‘If you’ve hurt her, so help me I’ll –’

Suddenly Deacon stood nose to nose with him nearly unbalancing him. ‘You’ll what, Mr Meriwether? You’ll what?’

With his eyes still on Tim, he reached behind him toward Serina and made another fist, and suddenly she convulsed and writhed in hysterics.’ Tim let out a loud yell and half jumped, half dived through the transparent Deacon. He felt like shards of ice had passed through his whole body, just before he landed on the lip of the ledge, grabbing Serina around the waist as she shuddered dangerously close to the precipice. With his back to the cliff wall, he sat down hard and hugged her tightly against his body, taking all the strength he had to keep them from both going over. ‘Stop it!’ He shouted breathlessly. ‘Stop it, you bastard. She’s done nothing to you.’

Immediately the convulsions stopped and Serina went limp in Tim’s arms. ‘You’re right, of course. She hasn’t.’ Deacon sighed. ‘But she’s weak and thick and not very interesting really. Surely there are others more deserving of life than she.’ He shrugged. ‘Either you or your Marie, Mr Meriwether. Both are worth much more than this breathing carcass. Hardly worth the risk of one such as yourself, certainly not in the larger picture, as you say.’

Tim slipped the rope around Serina and secured it, fearing that Deacon would cause her to convulse again, and not at all sure he could hold her in such a tight space. 

Deacon offered a deep sigh that Tim felt like ground glass low between his hip bones. ‘Of course you can save her, Mr Meriwether, I’m certain those of you who find it rewarding to give your time to rescuing unfortunates off the fells must possess among you some ridiculous code of honour, something about the sanctity of life. So of course I won’t prevent you from rescuing poor unfortunate Serina. However …’ Suddenly he loomed over Tim and Serina larger than life, roiling like heavy smoke. ‘… You must choose whom you shall save. Shall it be this worthless lump …?’ With the flick of a finger, Serina cried out in terror and scrabbled desperately closer to Tim, tightening her arms around his neck to a near stranglehold. Deacon shook his head in disgust. ‘… Or your lovely, vibrant Marie, whose pleasure I can still smell on your body. You may have the life of one or the other, Mr Meriwether, but I cannot allow you both.’

‘Please, please! Don’t let him hurt me any more,’ Serina keened, tightening her grip.

As the horror of the situation settled around Tim, Deacon gave another flourish of his hand, and a howling wind rose buffeting the two from the side, threatening to blow them off the ledge.

Deacon looked around at the miniature storm he’d created and smiled. ‘Not gale force, not yet, my dear Mr Meriwether, but soon, very soon. If I were you, I would make my decision quickly.’

‘And if I don’t choose?’ Tim shouted into the wind, pulling Serina closer to him.

Another twisting of Deacon’s hand had Serina choking for breath she could no longer get. ‘I don’t need the wind nor the cliff for this one’s demise, Mr Meriwether, and your Marie is only a split second away for me. As for you, well, I’ll be ever so careful to keep you safe so that you will live with the guilt of two deaths on your hands rather than one.’

Serina was now desperately clutching at her throat, eyes bulging and Tim could barely hold them both on the cliff face. ‘Stop it!’ he shouted. And instantly Serina could breathe again. ‘You son of a bitch, Tara was right about you. You’re a coward, always happy to hurt people weaker than you.’

Suddenly the image Deacon had projected wavered and he roared. ‘That woman knows nothing. She is the coward. She is weak, unable to protect those she loves.’ The image of Deacon wavered, then disappeared, then stabilized again. For a second he looked frantically around him before slowly unfurling his bullwhip, then the air crackled with static, and the smell of ozone made Tim’s eyes water. For a second the wind calmed and he shot into action.

‘Get on my back, get on my back!’ he shouted to Serina. He was suddenly thankful that she was so bird-boned. ‘Be as still as you can and hang on. The rope’s secure, just hang on.’ Dear God, he hoped his instinct wasn’t wrong, but his gut told him Deacon was having a bit more trouble than he had anticipated, and there wouldn’t be another chance. 

All he needed was time to abseil down to where the fell flattened out. It wouldn’t take long, seconds if he were reckless, and he couldn’t afford not to be at this point. He had swung into position when the burn in his gut nearly made him lose his footing. Goose flesh prickled along his neck and he looked up to see Deacon standing above him, the shiny blade of a very large knife glistening in the moonlight. 

‘I won’t make it that easy for you, Mr Meriwether.’ He spoke between laboured breaths. ‘I have informed you of my demands. They have not changed. As you see, I hold the upper hand.’ He lifted the blade so that it caught the reflecting light of the moon. ‘A fraction of a second, Mr Meriwether. A fraction of a second is all I need to assure a swift death for that one.’ He nodded to Serina, who whimpered against Tim’s back. ‘And a very painful death for your Marie.’ He stroked the flat of his blade with a thick finger. ‘You see, to your sweet Marie, I will make that fraction of a second seem like a thousand years, and I promise visions of her suffering will haunt you in your dreams for as long as you walk among the living. It’s simple, really. All you need do, Mr Meriwether, is take your own blade, cut the charlatan free and give a tiny shrug. Then you will be relieved of your burden. I will allow you to descend to safety and return home to fuck your Marie, and no one will ever be the wiser.’ He nodded to Serina, who whimpered on his back but didn’t move. ‘At some point someone will find a decomposing corpse, and when the coroner’s report comes back, the conclusion will, of course, be suicide. Suicides happen all the time, after all, a tragic part of the human condition. Make your decision, Mr Meriwether. My patience grows thin.’

Tim would have doubled over with the pain between his hip bones had he not been pressed tight against the rock. He didn’t waste breath cursing, though he felt like it. What he needed was a clear head, what he needed was a way out, a way to assure Marie’s safety. But a split second for him was only that, a split second. Once again, the image of Tara snapping Fiori’s neck flashed through his head followed quickly by Fiori, Sky and Anderson fiercely flanking Tara Stone in her defence in spite of the truth she did not deny, a thousand years of suffering, Deacon had said. A thousand years of agony at his hand, played out in a split second. And suddenly, Tim understood completely. With every ounce of strength he could muster, he mentally shouted and screamed and begged for Tara, for Anderson, for the Elementals. And in his mind’s eye, he pictured Marie safely folded in Anderson’s strong arms. Dear God in heaven, please let it be so!

‘Your time is up, Mr Meriwether.’ Deacon raised the knife. ‘Indecision is such a weakness in a man.’ 

The reflection of the blade in moonlight flashed blindingly bright. In the blue-black after images that paraded across his retinas, Tim saw Tara Stone flanked by Sky and Fiori, drawing a blade of her own, long, thin, and desperately sharp, a blade that hissed and crackled with old magic. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. Tara’s voice carried on the wind. ‘It’s your time that’s up, Deacon. You will go, and you will leave me and mine alone. There will be no more sacrificial lambs, but bared swords and sharpened daggers waiting for you. There will be no more meek for you to trample upon. I will live to see my mother and my husband and my sisters and all of those you have stolen from me avenged. And you will be returned to the dust, forgotten as though you never existed.’ Lightening crackled, heat sizzled, and with a wide, sweeping arc, Tara Stone brought the blade upward and rent Deacon from groin to shoulder with a deafening crack of thunder. 

And just like that, he was gone. 

Chapter 13

Marie woke, burning up. She clawed off the duvet and sat bolt upright as terror knotted her stomach. Then she realised she wasn’t at home. Other than the pale moonlight shining through the window, the room was dark. She was sitting naked in the middle of a very large four-poster bed, and Anderson was sitting next to her.

‘Everything is all right now, my darling.’ He placed a cool hand on her cheek, then her forehead. You are safe at Elemental Cottage.’ He didn’t wait for her to ask. ‘Tim Meriwether is also safe and resting under the watchful care of Fiori. He asked to return to Lacewing Farm. As is the case with most of my sex, he is very protective of his territory. Tara and Sky have taken Serina Ravenmoor to a safe place.’

The events of the night came crashing in on her in a wave of nausea. She braced herself and closed her eyes until her insides righted and she was certain she wouldn’t be sick. ‘I need a shower,’ she forced herself to sound calm. ‘I’m sweaty, and … I feel really dirty.’

‘A cleansing ritual of some fashion after what you have been through, my dear, is not only recommended, it is essential. But are you sure you are recovered enough?’

It was only when she stood by the bathroom door and saw the shower looming in front of her like a gaping mouth that she balked, as memories of Deacon’s shower visit flooded back to her. Anderson, who was standing next to her with a reassuring hand on her arm, brushed the damp hair away from her ear. ‘I will stay with you, if you wish it.’

‘Thank you.’ Her voice was breathy and thin, like it too might belong to a ghost. Perhaps she was a ghost. Perhaps Deacon had killed her, and she just hadn’t realised it yet.

With Anderson’s comforting form fully visible through the safety glass of the shower, she took her time, scrubbed herself hard, and let the tears slide down her cheeks. How was she ever going to survive what she now faced? And even worse, how would Tim survive when it was clear Deacon planned to use them each to the detriment of the other. And worst of all, as the water stimulated her skin to a rosy pink, she realised the desires Deacon had kindled were still there, and in spite of herself, she wondered what it would have felt like if she had given in, if she had let him pleasure her to release. 

She cranked the water to cold and stood in the sluice of it until her teeth chattered, and still it was as though a million tiny pinpricks were alive just beneath the surface of her skin, as though he were still reminding every single pore in her body how desperately she needed to come.

She was shivering uncontrollably when Anderson opened the shower door and shut off the water, ignoring the splash on his pristine white shirt. ‘It is enough, my love. I cannot allow you to catch your death.’ He bundled her into a huge blue towel and began to dry her goose fleshed skin vigorously. He tisk-tisked. ‘My dear, even I am warmer than you when I first take the flesh. This will never do.’

She tried not to writhe beneath his touch, but the misery of her need was overwhelming. Her lip trembled, and in spite of her best effort her eyes misted. ‘I wanted him, Anderson. Dear God, how could I want him?’

He lifted her open palms and placed a kiss on each where her nails had pierced her hands. ‘You have no idea what you have done, do you, my sweet Marie? Of course you wanted him. That is his magic, to make himself the most desired of all beings, to make his victims feel in their bodies hunger and lust for him like they have never imagined. Even Fiori, who is a powerful witch, not to be trifled with, gave in. But you did not. You banished him twice and remained free.’

‘Then why do I feel this way if I’m so special? I feel like I’m on fire, I feel like I’ll explode if I don’t … if I don’t get some relief. It disgusts me that it’s because of him, and yet still I want.’

‘Shhh!’ Anderson stopped her words with a light kiss. ‘My darling Marie …’ He wiped a single tear from her cheek and lifted her chin so that she met his dark gaze. ‘… There are many elements, many facets to sex magic. And that with which Deacon has afflicted you, he cannot now take back from you. It is now yours. And what is now yours, you may freely give to me, you may allow me to ease your need, as you did earlier when the situation was more desperate. In doing so, we may, together, transform it to pleasure and even something more powerful still.’ He kissed her palms again. ‘If you will permit me?’

‘Permit you? I beg you, Anderson.’

‘My love, it would never in a hundred lifetimes be necessary for you to beg love from me.’ He took her mouth deeply, tongue plundering, teeth nipping, lips insisting. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bedroom, where the bed had been mysteriously, perhaps magically, made up. There, he pulled back the duvet, kissing and coaxing her down onto the soft mattress.

His body was shades of silver and shadow in the moonlight, teasing her eyes with glimpses of the hard plain of his belly and the tight half domes of his buttocks. As he shrugged out of his clothes, the shape of him still remained vague and mysterious but exquisitely solid, substantial as he moved onto the bed next to her, his anxious cock leading the way. He dropped a wet, suckling kiss on each of her heavy nipples, and she arched her back and ground her arse against the clean sheets. 

‘I think we must first give you some much-needed relief.’ He brushed a thumb solicitously against her bulging clitoris, and she whimpered and shifted her hips against his touch. ‘The seat of your pleasure is ripe with your desire,’ he said. ‘And I have such a fondness for ripe fruit.’ Still stroking the swell of her with his thumb, he slipped two fingers between her pouting labia and the catch of his breath mirrored hers as he gently probed and withdrew and probed again until he found her g-spot and she soaked his hand and nearly bucked off the bed. 

He released a deep sigh. ‘You are as wet as the fells in heavy dew, and the feel of you makes my own need almost more than I can contain.’

‘Please,’ she moaned. ‘Please ...’

He lifted her on top of him and carefully positioned her, stroking her pussy lips, then parting them. She felt the press of the head of his penis against her pout. His hands on her hips guided her downward, and she cried out at the exquisite pleasure of him pushing into her grudging tightness, then yielding, then pushing again until she had completely accommodated the fullness of his erection. And suddenly her thoughts were as filled with Anderson as her body was with his substantial cock. Then he began to move inside her, shifting his hips in such a way that with each thrust he raked against the swell of her clit, sending shock waves of delight up through her body as she thrust back. 

‘I think we shall not linger long this first time,’ he gasped between barely parted lips. ‘Your need is too great, and mine is little less so. Once we have achieved some measure of relief, there will be all the time we need for pleasuring, and I think we shall need a lot.’ 

She thought he might be right.

He cupped the bounce of her breasts with skilled hands and stroked and tweaked her nipples until they were bullet tight, and every sensation seemed hardwired into her clit and her grasping, gripping cunt. Each time he thrust, she felt him deeper and deeper, and each time she tightened her grip, she felt his penis surge inside her. 

As they grunted and pushed, the sound of their lust filled the air, and urgency grew. It was as though they were suspended in the infinite moment before the explosion. They shoved in and out, grasping and clenching and desperately needing until at last the room exploded in bursts of light as they gasped for breath and bore down against each other, overcome by their respective orgasms. With each spasm of pleasure, Marie could feel the surging of Anderson’s penis as he emptied himself into her. And with each spasm, each emptying she felt cleansed of Deacon’s influence. Even more, she felt in her mind’s eye as if she, with Anderson’s help, was bending and twisting and transforming Deacon’s dark magic into something flash-fire bright and razor sharp. They were creating a tool for her own use, as surely as Serina had spoken of her scrying mirror. A tool no one could touch without her permission.

For a terrifying, ecstatic moment, she was above her body looking down at the two lovers in the throes of their passion. She feared she might be dying. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think, but it hardly mattered. Then she was back inside herself convulsing with the aftershocks, trying to get still closer to the man, the ghost, who had given her such pleasure, who now crushed her to him with strong arms and covered her face with kisses.

‘Most often ghosts quickly forget the needs of the flesh, and pass on effortlessly to other realms,’ Anderson said as he fed Marie mushroom pâté on toast from a silver platter, which had mysteriously appeared on a cart outside their room. He had retrieved the feast and insisted that she eat. She should have done upon his arrival at Lacewing Farm, but he agreed, offering her his delicious dark smile, that under the circumstances, there had been more pressing matters to be dealt with. However he apologised heartily for not seeing to her sustenance before he engaged her in sexual congress for the second time in her weakened condition. Sexual congress! That remark was nearly enough to make her throw him down on the bed and mount him all over again. 

He wiped the corner of her mouth with the edge of a finger that smelled like her pussy and continued, ‘For some ghosts, however, the needs of the flesh intensify when there is no flesh for the satisfaction. The need grows beyond all proportion until the poor ghost is desperate for relief. The necessary relief, however, can only come in the flesh. That is why the work of my dear Tara and the Elemental Coven is so important.’

‘Is that how it is with you?’ She spoke around a grape he had just popped between her lips.

‘It is different with me,’ he said, flicking his tongue over the pâté that had dropped from the toast onto his finger. ‘My family practised Ethereal magic. Being out of the body was a common experience, and therefore returning to the body after working high magic in the Ether was always a time of powerful hunger in the flesh, every variety of hunger. ‘I am descended from a long line of witches. My grandmother was burnt at the stake. You see, I am the grandson of a martyr.’

‘Then you knew the spell when you died?’

‘It is more accurate to say that I was born with the spell as a part of my being. Wandering the Ether is not so different from wandering the realm of the living as a ghost. Both my mother and my grandmother walked often with the living after their deaths. As a child, it was long before I realised my grandmother was no longer numbered among those who drew breath. Both she and my mother took many lovers after their deaths. They were women of boundless passion.

‘And I am my mother’s son.’ He sipped the heavy red wine that had come with the feast, then he took her mouth, drizzling the heady liquid onto her tongue until she suckled at his lips with hunger for something far more than wine.

He guided her back down onto the bed, fingering open the sash at the waist of her robe, shoving aside the fabric and kissing the outside of her knee and her thigh just above it. 

She squirmed at the warmth of his mouth and reached out to run her fingers through his dark hair. ‘And your need is never diminished?’ 

He looked up at her with lust in his eyes. ‘Not in the 38 years before my death, and not in the 150 since.’

‘Anderson,’ she breathed, halting his progress up her thigh. ‘I want to see you. I mean really see you.’

He rose over her, kissed her on the mouth, then lay down next to her, chest heaving with desire. ‘As you wish, my love. I am at your command.’ He nodded down to the sash of his own robe, losing the battle for containment. One dark nipple peeked out at full attention and the heavy folds of terry cloth mounded precariously around his growing erection, then fell open to reveal the straight line of one hip and the hard muscles of his thigh. 

With her heart racing, she eased herself up on to her haunches and undid the sash to reveal the broad expanse of hard muscled chest, surprisingly smooth and lacking in hair. She ran her hand down over the mounds of his pectoral muscles, and his areole tensed and puckered at her touch until he squirmed beneath her. Just above his left hip was a white scar rising like a ribbon atop his smooth, olive skin. She traced it with her finger. ‘What happened?’

‘A dual. Over a woman.’

‘You lost?’

His hand came to rest on top of hers, pressing it to his flesh. He held her gaze. ‘I won.’

‘Then this is not how you …’

‘How I died, no. I lived a long time after this; long enough to have many more lovers and fight several more duals.’

‘Then how?’

‘I fell from a cliff trying to rescue a friend. Not far from here. Perhaps some day we may go there together.’

‘And the friend?’

‘He lived to sire many children and named his eldest son after me.’ 

‘You were a good friend.’

‘I did only what had to be done, Marie, as we all must.’

His body was a map of his life. There were other scars in other places, and yet the centre of that map lay fully erect against his belly, springing from its cushion of soft brown curls. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she whispered. 

‘It gives me great satisfaction that the sight of me pleases you,’ His breathing had become more laboured, and he now struggled to lie still for her explorations.

‘Turn over,’ she commanded. ‘I want to see all of you.’ He did as she asked, holding his cock tight against his belly as he rolled, exposing first the straight lines of his hip, then the elongated mounds of his buttocks, which she stroked and kneaded and separated until she could view the knotted grip of his anus, which tightened and relaxed as she fondled his bottom.