Neon Blue by E Frost (best big ereader .TXT) 📕

my hands grasping at his shoulders and back, and let him lave me into a sudden, violent climax. Stars erupt behind my eyes. Power fills me so full my nerve endings explode. My body bucks against the wall; I kick the shower curtain, which billows and collapses with a clatter of rail and rings.

He chuckles into my mind. Give it to me.

The power’s right there. I don’t even need to reach for it. My orgasm’s opened the gates to the well of power in and under and all around me. Instead of pushing it into the demon, I open myself to him completely, pull him into my power and let that floodtide fill him, too.

Fuckin’-a, he thinks as the power rushes into him. I feel him wrestle with it, gather it into himself until he begins to burn, flames flickering and sizzling along his skin. Then he thrusts it outward, burrowing through space and time, which shreds the shower wall at my back into a fathomless black rent.

Shit—

It’s okay. That’s our window. Hold tight.

I do, grasping him tightly, locking my arms around his neck, my ankles behind his thighs. I squeeze my eyes closed. I don’t know if this is going to be anything like traveling with the Squire, but if it is, I don’t want to do it with my eyes open.

I wait, clutching at the demon. I expect to feel something. The rush of air. A sense of movement. But there’s nothing. Nothing except the slow fade of the heat of the body against mine.

Chapter 31

Jou?

His hand strokes my cheek, but there’s no warmth in his touch. Just a faint pressure which quickly fades. It’s okay. You can open your eyes.

I blink. Flashes of light and darkness. Blue swirling shapes. A burning tower. A bright orange streak that spreads along a horizon endlessly distant or too close for me to focus on – I can’t tell which. I can’t figure out where things are. There’s no point of reference. Everything around us folds and moves like a turbulent ocean. A wheeling impossible whirlwind—

I squeeze my eyes closed again.

‘Sokay, sweetness. His familiar voice in my mind. I grab onto it. Cling to it like a lifeline. I haven’t brought a living human here before . . . I wasn’t sure what you’d see. Just relax. You’re with me. I’ll keep you safe. But you gotta open your eyes. I shake my head, too frightened to even try. Okay, here’s what we do. I’m going to describe things to you and when you open your eyes, you’re going to see things the way I do.

I’ll try. My own voice sounds so small, so lost in my own head that I shiver. But there’s no sensation. No feeling. Nothing.

We’re standing on top of the caves, just below the entrance to the Hill. This is my home.

His emotion seeps into me with that one word. Home. Everything that I’ve never felt about the places I’ve lived is invested in that word. All the years on the road with my Dala, I never had a home. Wherever we stopped, that was home. But it was always shifting. I never felt rooted anywhere. Never felt I belonged. Then she took me north to school, to a succession of institutional dorm rooms. And then she died. Any sense of home went with her. I’ve made a shell for us, there in my little duplex, for me and the ghosts of my family, but as Jou’s sense of home, of safety and belonging, fills me, I realize it’s just what he said it was, a cage. I’ve withdrawn behind its bars and shut out the world, but it’s not home.

My dame raised the Hill. With his thought, a stream of images spills into my mind. A slender shape, distorted by the heavy bulge of pregnancy, wrapped in the blowing veils of her own power, standing on the edge of a firestorm. A thin, bare foot, looking all too human, inches forward over the burning ground. With each tentative step, the ground cools, smoothes. The firestorm falls back, inch by inch, step by step. Until the pregnant woman stands on a dark hill, her veils swirling around her like smoke.

I was born here. I hid here as a grub. A distorted image, wavering and uncertain, seen through eyes that can’t focus as sharply as my own. A dark, swirling sky. Huge bat shapes cross it in a hunting pack, herded by the cracking whip of an even larger, burningly white, winged shape that follows them. Azhyyr. Fucking ice demon. He used to hunt the borderlands. Last time he tried to cross here I brought him down in the Fiendyke. Essie ate his wings before she let him go. A beautiful, fey woman, pillowed in the cloud of her own dark hair. He feeds me the taste of indescribable pleasure, and of exquisite pain as her spider-legs pierce his back.

I’ve grown strong here. I’ve made the Hill safe. See it the way I see it. I open my eyes cautiously and see it the way he sees it. The deep, secret caves where he was born and where one of his many lovers now makes her lair. The hollows and folds of the terrain that protected him when he was small and weak. Terrain he knows as well as he knows the contours of his own body. The dark walls of the tower he’s built as he’s grown stronger. The deep sense of him – his strength and power, his enjoyment of touch and taste beyond his physical needs, his sexual hunger and the delight with which he fills it, his driving sense of purpose – those things that make him uniquely him have rooted deep here. They defend his home from the firestorm in the distance. From the collection of glinting grey towers that thrust upwards like the fingers of a grasping hand on the far horizon. From the dark, gaping ditch that stretches between his hill and that iron