Alex shifted her position, lifting herself for a moment, and then sank down on his cock, taking him all the way inside her, right to the root. He gasped, unable to think anymore, unable to move, so complete and overwhelming was the sensation. So perfect. This was perfect.
‘Tell me you’re mine,’ she said again, and that strange echo in her words made her sound…
There was another voice. Something ancient and endless and terrible. It lingered behind her words, a whisper, a sigh.
‘Alex,’ he hissed but all she did was smile down at him.
That was not her smile. Her body began to move and he couldn’t help himself, moving with her. It was a dance, a call and response, and he had to join in, to answer her every demand, spoken and unspoken.
Because God help him he did want this. All of it. He wanted her in every way.
That need swept him away.
In the firelight and the shadows, bodies sheened with gilded sweat moved, wound together in bliss. He couldn’t tell where one started and the other ended, or how many they were. In a clearing in the forest, where the great bonfire roared and lit up the night, where crackling sparks shot skywards, and thefaithful gathered, shedding blood and seed and all the pleasure in them at the feet of the golden idol. Whatever it demanded.
The twisted little form squatted in its place of honour and the old god spilled out of it, travelling through the offerings and into the supplicants. It turned their pleasure to pain, their desire to destruction and it fed and fed and fed…
Cries of lust became howls of agony, but they didn’t stop, couldn’t stop. They tore at their bodies, drinking blood and devouring flesh. They were as endless as their divinity, and as relentless in their demands on each other.
‘Alex.’ He didn’t know where he found his voice but it was torn from him as if ripped through brambles and thorns. They needed to stop. He couldn’t find the words to say it but that didn’t make it untrue. He couldn’t tell her. That something was wrong. That something was using them both, feeding on them, that this…this wasn’t…
But how could it not be right? He was with her. They were together. Finally.
He had to stop.
But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He knew that now. Alex wasn’t there anymore. Whatever was gazing down at him out of those beautiful eyes, it wasn’t Alex. It wasn’t even human anymore. And neither was he.
Perhaps he never had been. He had memories, true, but they were vague and distant things, like someone else had described them to him. Like someone else’s life, a hundred years gone by. All he remembered clearly was Sally’s voice in the wild wood, Sally telling him he was her guardian, telling him into being, calling him forth…
No. That wasn’t possible. He had a life, he had memories, a family, he had a daughter, he had…
‘Lies,’the voice said. ‘All lies. You have nothing. You are nothing. You’re a thing made of wood and moss and all thosestolen memories cobbled together. You should have died a hundred years ago. You’re nothing but lies made flesh.’
He felt the darkness reach out through him, into him, deep into the earth beneath the house. Into the power of the wild wood itself.
All he knew was its hunger. And that it was feeding.
Nick’s back arched and he cried out Alex’s name in one last attempt to reach her, before the nightmare swallowed him whole.
CHAPTER 45
ALEX
Her name on Nick’s lips, a cry of ecstasy and despair combined, shuddered through her half-delirious mind and Alex opened her eyes to see fire. Not the one in the fireplace. No, this was something else, far bigger, as tall as the trees, crackling and dancing, laughing at her. A bonfire. A huge bonfire. Like the one people still lit at Hallowe’en, like the ones they lit millennia ago to celebrate the days when the world of the living and the dead were closest, when spirits could reach out again and touch…
Nick was spread out beneath her, his bare skin painted with a language she didn’t know, his arms bound above his head, his head thrown back and his eyes closed. And they weren’t in the house, not any more. They weren’t anywhere that still existed in this world, but somewhere else, somewhere long destroyed. They were in a forgotten chamber, a tomb, a structure of ancient stone, and he was going to die. He was a sacrifice and he was dying, even as she moved on top of him, even as he filled her with life and desire.
Alex’s hands pressed to his chest, to the painted whorls and spirals that decorated it, white and blue and black smeared beneath her touch. Tears leaked from the corners of his clenchedeyelids and he knew… somehow he knew… what she was doing to him…
No, not her.
No, not her. This wasn’t her. She’d never hurt him. Never.
But she couldn’t seem to stop.
‘Make him ours,’the voice hissed in the back of her mind and it wasn’t even Blaise anymore. Not now. This was a voice as old as the stones from which Wildewood Hall was built. And she would make him hers. Theirs. She had to.
Alex bent to kiss him. He tasted of blood, but that didn’t stop her.
