Читать книгу Paranormal Erotica - Elizabeth Coldwell - Страница 5

‘Candidates eleven and twelve.’

She strained to hear her number as the pairs were called, one instructor’s voice rocking the gym hall louder than the rest.

Marchosias.

All-knowing, all-seeing, he waited for a demon candidate to show weakness then plucked them from the course, declaring them unfit for his legion. His voice rumbled around the cavernous gym like the wake of an avalanche, alternately cajoling and hectoring, often irate.

But in Marchosias’s case, appearance took precedence over voice.

Arrestingly hard-faced with rust-brown skin, his left arm punctuated with ink in a jagged, chaotic stream of tattoo blacker than his close-cropped hair and scowl. Easily mistaken by a human for ‘tribal’, the sigils marked Marchosias’s place in the hierarchy of Hell – at the top, with all the other millennia-old arch-demons. Even without the sigils Vanth would have known his status. It was stamped, far deeper than any tattoo, in the arrogant tilt of his head, his acerbic tongue, the way his ochre gaze stripped her bare and found her clearly wanting.

The only thing more humiliating than the sting of his cold glare was its effect on her. Only yesterday she was half-heartedly sucking the cock of a fellow student in preparation for the final Fornication 101 exam, wondering how soon class would end and what was for dinner, when the raw yolk of his stare fell on her and, bam, like that, a needy ache set up between her legs and, next she knew, she was hoovering every last drop of come from her partner in an urgent, frenzied motion as small, undignified whimpers crowded the cock in her throat for space.

Unsettling stuff.

But Marchosias was older than time itself, and, as the legion’s expert in leading humans astray, who could tell where his sway ended?

She frowned as more and more names were called and she remained unpaired. Around her, students jogged on the spot and limbered up with their partners, preparing to get the most out of their fragile human forms over the hour-long exam.

‘Candidates twenty-six and twenty-three.’

Unease tugged at her guts as the last remaining names were called out.

She squinted at the instructors. Had they left her off the exam list? Where was her partner? Only a handful of instructors remained.

Oh, no. A possibility so awful occurred to her that she had to close her eyes against the very idea. Surely not?

Spit turning sour in her mouth, she opened her eyes and watched, appalled, as Marchosias approached.

Her gaze lifted to his mile-wide shoulders then slid down the muscled torso straining his T-shirt. A thick belt sat above the sinful sweep of his lean hips like a black halo. Hard thighs drew her unwilling gaze to a denim bulge that concealed the downfall of many a candidate: Marchosias’s cock.

According to demon lore, the monster was not overly long, but unusually thick.

Her thighs clamped together involuntarily.

How stupid of her: human form was affecting her brain. His cock would be the least of her problems. Thousands upon thousands of years old, he had to know human sexual tricks she couldn’t even begin to imagine. There was no way she could make him come while controlling her own body. She might as well give up right now on joining the legion.

Months of instruction in human etiquette and culture flashed before her eyes, the wasted effort welling like a blister inside her. She and the other legion candidates were just a joke to the instructors, right down to the tacky faux high school gym setting conjured for training.

Two large bare feet planted themselves in front of her on the navy-blue gym mats, and with misgiving she raised her eyes. Had he singled her out because of her moment of mirth during fellatio class? Surely not …

Under the black wing of his brows, ochre eyes gleamed with amusement. Unlike her, he didn’t have to keep his eyes looking human.

‘Hmmm. Uneven class numbers are a bitch, aren’t they?’

His rich baritone reverberated in her ears as her gaze darted around the gymnasium where the other students were in various stages of coupling, observed by grading instructors.

She licked suddenly dry lips, her eyes on the other pairs. ‘What about a threesome? That has to be worth extra credit, surely?’

He grinned, teeth flashing white against his deep tan. ‘Sorry. Wouldn’t be fair to the other students, would it?’

Fair? What was fair about any of this?

As hope drained from her, he conducted a leisurely inspection of her body from head to toe. Under his unblinking gaze, the human form she’d viewed as largely uninteresting took on a new dimension as his body subtly unfurled and stood to attention. Hmmm, her cheerleader outfit was obviously a good choice for the exam. Feeling a little more hopeful, she gave her pom-poms a tentative shake.

A sneer curled his lip.

Damn.

An instructor wandered over, clipboard and pencil in hand, expression bored. ‘You two good to go?’

‘Screw off, I have this in hand.’

The instructor stiffened. ‘Ah, apologies, arch-demon Marchosias.’

She watched the demon scurry away and her courage threatened to leak out through her bare soles and dribble down between the gym mats.

‘Candidate twenty-nine, I’m waiting.’

He didn’t even know her name, just the number written in felt-tip pen on her arm. Still, what was the name of a mere hundred-year-old demoness to him?

Fear frothed just below her skin but she took a deep breath and forced her feet a step closer to his lean, taut body. She carefully avoided his gaze, focusing on his chest. Was it her imagination or was he suddenly bigger? A light buzz set up in her ears, chasing the memory of every lesson out her brain until she stared dumbfounded at the nipples punctuating his grey T-shirt. Where to start?

Unpeeling, everything starts with the unpeeling. With a flourish she tossed her pom-poms over her shoulders, her panties behind them, and shimmied out of her tight sleeveless top. Not too fast. Would a bump and grind be out of place? He was no mere human, easily impressed by jiggling flesh. She decided to skip it, unzipped her skirt and let it fall in a puddle of crimson at her feet.

A-ha, he wasn’t sneering now. In fact, his lips were slightly parted in a way she liked the look of.

Now to unpeel him.

If the exam had allowed changing to demon form she could have just shredded his T-shirt with a single swipe of her clawed hand. Instead she hooked a finger under its hem and crept her hand north, glacially slow, taking in the way his nostrils flared and the pulse jumped in his throat.

The hem reached the prow of his nipples and would go no further as his arms remained stubbornly by his sides.

She cleared her throat. ‘A little help here, please.’

He raised one dark, haughty brow. ‘Help? This is not a social working bee, candidate twenty-nine, this is an exam.’

‘Fine,’ she huffed, and stepped in, grabbed him by the nape and buried his face in her cleavage. She twitched his T-shirt over his head as his long arms flailed for balance.

He spluttered against her nipples, but when he straightened he was shirtless.

Victory over a thousand-year-old demon was sweet and she savoured it, along with the smooth, tanned landscape of his chest and abs, and the sinful groove bracketing each hip in a graceful V shape that swept low to disappear down his waistband.

He narrowed ochre eyes at her and her smirk faltered. ‘You’ll pay for that.’

She swallowed. ‘Let me guess, no sense of humour?’

‘None whatsoever. Unless it involves failing candidates.’

Ouch.

She unhooked her bra with sad hands. Every demon needed a sense of humour. What had happened to his?

Cupping her breasts she jiggled them, but failed to raise a smile.

Instead he growled at her. ‘You’re boring me. Hurry up.’

Boring him?

Swallowing a hiss, she lunged forward and fastened her mouth over one of his small brown nipples and sucked as if her life depended on it. A shudder rewarded her, but before she could savour her victory his shoulders flexed and large hands engulfed her breasts, hot palms swallowing the lower half of each globe as deft, clever fingers worked her nipples.

Aiii! A jolt of pleasure shot from nipple to cunt, as overwhelming as it was unexpected. This had never happened in class before. What was going on?

Desperate to get away from his cunning fingers she dropped to her knees. His jutting denim-clad erection gently grazed her cheek and she jerked away from it.

‘On your knees already, candidate twenty-nine? It must be my lucky day.’

His deep, hateful voice mocked her as she eyed the bulge in his jeans with resentment.

‘Eyes up,’ he commanded.

Grudgingly she looked up and was caught in his smouldering, ever so mildly contemptuous, stare.

Holding her gaze, his eyelids grew heavy as he rubbed his hand over his chest, let the same hand sink down past ribs and abdominals, sweeping lower and lower in a lazy trail that made her mouth water. With a deft movement of his fingers he undid the top button of his jeans, unzipped himself and let his cock spring free.

He dressed commando-style. Of course.

Palming his shaft, he stroked it hard, swirling his thumb over the head. A muscle jumped in his jaw and she gave voice to the whimper building in her throat. She wanted his hard, heavy shaft in her hand, no, wanted it in her mouth, wanted to feel its warm, pulsing thickness and taste its salty precome.

A wicked gleam lit his eyes as he stared her down. ‘I’m not sure you’re entirely worthy of sucking my cock. What do you think, candidate twenty-nine?’

Incapable of speech, she stared at his hand, licked her lips and almost moaned as he stepped closer to trace her lips with the head of his prick. She’d imagined sucking him off many a time, but in her dreams he begged and moaned her name rather than drilling her with an icy look that was part challenge, part disdain.

Her hand hovered small and pale above his enormous tanned thigh before settling on the furnace of muscle. The other hand she placed over his to feed his cock between her lips, opening wide to take his thickness. Her training kicked in and she ran the tip of her tongue along the underside of his shaft, savoured his harsh intake of breath as she laved the groove below the head of his prick.

He was warm, salty, silken in her mouth. Somehow she had expected him to be made of stone, as flinty as the drill-sergeant words that flew from him like shrapnel.

Fingers dug into her hair. ‘Ah, what a lovely fuck your mouth is. Take me deeper.’

Shamed by the way his compliment thrilled her, she tilted her head and let him slide deeper, freeing him only to roll her tongue around the thick, red, swollen head of his cock. His hips pumped once, then twice, involuntarily, and she stole a glance at his face. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted.

He was hers.

Jubilant, she slid her hand from his thigh up to the invitation of his balls, cupped his sack, fondled the hot, heavy flesh and registered his jerk, followed by a light shudder. Keeping her mouth firm on his cock, she rubbed and teased him. Elation warmed her cheeks as he came undone, his movements less controlled, more graceless with each moment. She might be the one on her knees servicing him, his social inferior in every way, but she was going to make him spurt, make him lose control, make him shudder and explode. And enjoy every moment of it.

With an oath he pulled free from her mouth and dropped to his knees beside her on the mat, his skin slapping against the vinyl as he grabbed her around the waist and pinned her with the ease of a seasoned wrestler. His other hand found her cunt with unerring accuracy and he pushed an unhurried finger inside her. Leisurely exploration was soon replaced by intent as he withdrew his thick, blunt digit with a slow and sensuous twist and then added another finger. Unable to wriggle free from his unyielding grip, she endured with panting curses as he drilled his fingers deep into her pussy with long, gliding strokes and treacherous twists, a growl of approval escaping him at the juices flowing from her and easing his path. With a turn of his hand, the pad of his thumb found her clit, working it with unquestionable skill, and a dangerous heaviness built inside her. How could she save this situation?

If she rode his fingers as she wanted to, countered his thrusts and fucked herself on his hand, the test would be over for her in minutes. She was already perilously close to joining in the chorus of moans wafting through the gym hall like a chant.

‘Do you like my fingers in your wet cunt?’ His whisper tickled her ear and she squirmed, her pussy clamping down on him. ‘Oh, yes, you do, don’t you?’

He liked to talk; perhaps she could use that. Calling upon the hundreds of hours of B-grade porn they’d sat through in class, she conjured her breathiest starlet-cum-whorelet voice. ‘Oh, please, take me with your cock. I need you inside me. Please.’ Too corny?

A snort of surprise and his fingers stilled. He narrowed brilliant yellow eyes at her. ‘What a terrible liar you are. If you were my student in lying, I’d have to change my name so no one ever found out I’d been your teacher. Still, this is human fucking 101, so spread your legs, candidate twenty-nine.’

He freed her from the arm around her waist and slipped his fingers from her sheath, but she only dimly registered both as she frantically tried to remember the least sexually satisfying position from class, one that would allow her to keep control and not shift to demon form.

She watched as he stripped his jeans off and stepped out of them, his heavy-lidded gaze on her raw with expectation.

Control. She needed to be on top so she could control the depth of his thrust, the pace and the angle. But how to get him there? How to force a six-foot-plus, thousand-year-old arch-demon, meaner than cat’s pee, on to his back?

She shuffled forward on her knees, smiling.

He raised a withering eyebrow.

With a sigh she gripped his shaft and his gaze flew to her hand as she fisted his cock, his sneer washed away by hungry need. She pumped her hand up and down his length with deliberate languor, delighting in the way his gaze lost a little more purpose and intensity with each stroke, grew a little more vacant with each squeeze.

With her other hand she took his and tugged. ‘Come down here.’

He dropped to his knees, the sight as awe-inspiring as an angel felled in mid-flight.

His body so close she could bury her face in his thick column of a neck, could feel the oven of his muscles radiating heat, she breathed in his light, dry scent and watched his face tighten with each milking motion of her hand, watched his wild struggle not to succumb to his body’s need, to her control.

It was a dangerous thing, this ability to beguile with the human form; it went straight to a she-demon’s head and almost made her forget she was fooling with a millennium-old arch-demon who wanted her to fail. Almost.

She took her hand from his cock and gave him a sharp shove with both hands and grinned as he toppled onto his back with a chuff of surprise.

Pouncing on him before he could recover, she knelt, straddling his chest, and stared down at him. Every young demoness, she reflected, should have the opportunity at least once to be in the wholly satisfying position of sitting buck-naked on an arch-demon and rubbing the proof of her arousal on his chest.

His ochre eyes, once haughty, stared at her with a mixture of awe and confusion at her unspeakable boldness, an expression she found at once delicious and adorable. Oh, she’d never dreamed she’d enjoy her exam so much, not in a million years.

She rubbed her palms over the broad planes of his shoulders, stroked him, tweaked him, kissed him, ground herself against him until his eyes glazed over in a half-crazed haze of horniness.

Pheromones. She learned about them in class, but seeing them in action kicking Marchosias’s mighty butt was a different matter. Oh, how her frail human body’s pheromones had turned the tables …

She wriggled lower down his length, hips taunting, and leaned forward to push her breasts towards his face and offer him a mouthful. She gripped his face between her hands, trying not to drown in the warm honey of his gaze, which was focused, most surprisingly of all, not on her nipples but on her eyes.

‘What’s your name?’ His words so ragged, so out of sorts at his unwilling arousal, stirred her more than the furnace of his breath on her breast.

Her name. Did she feel inclined to give it? He didn’t care a fig about her name a moment ago when he tossed his careless comment at her about failing candidates …

Still, the same firm lips that had sneered at her were now almost begging her for mercy. Perhaps she could afford to be generous? Or not.

‘What do you care?’ she mocked, just to see his reaction, just because she’d never get another chance to talk to an arch-demon that way.

And, oh, the anger. His eyes hardened to tourmaline and fingers bit into the pillow of her hips, turning cruel. She ate it up. She didn’t want to be given any quarter on this battlefield; she wanted him proud, mean and hard as ever.

His hands forced her further down his body, skin dragging against skin each delicious inch of the way until the head of his cock nudged her folds and he whispered to her. ‘Feel that, my nameless friend? That thing poking you, that’s your downfall.’

She smiled. What a dramatic turn of phrase he had. ‘We’ll see. My name is Vanth.’

Thirty minutes into exam time and he hadn’t made her lose human form yet, though she hadn’t made him come either, and to pass the test she must. For a demon can only steal a human soul at that moment of fused fever between two bodies. But. Only. In. Human. Form.

He sat up, no longer obedient, and all she could do was quiver in anticipation of the rough ride instead of taking control as she should. Where was her ambition now? What of her lofty dream of joining the elite cadre of demons trained to steal souls from the careless lips of men, on God’s very own green earth, right under the noses of angels? What of her hunger for another century of existence for each soul scalped?

Where was her ambition now? Why, in his thick, blunt hands. The hands between the junction of their flesh, gripping his shaft, searching her out, searching for a way in.

She rubbed herself playfully along his length, heard a harsh intake of breath, smiled at the way his whole body tightened and coiled under hers, smiled a little less at the wave of lust that cramped her insides.

His head poised at her entry, she teased him once more, gyrating her hips hula-hoop fashion to frustrate his cock. His hot, swollen head was too big to slide in without a large serving of stillness on her part.

‘Quit that,’ he hissed, then, in a low whisper that was almost a groan, ‘stay still, Vanth, please.’

Please. Oh, how nice, what nice manners from her haughty demi-prince amongst demons, and what lovely desperation those manners hinted at, lovely desperation for her. Pleasure heated her from the inside, radiating to prickle her skin. Very well, she’d be still, but on her terms.

She pushed his hand away from his shaft, wrapped her own hand around it and marvelled anew at the hardness grown from soft flesh, the battering ram encased in silk pulsing hot under her fingers. His big hand closed over hers, guiding her hand up and down his length with strokes rougher than any she would have administered, and his eyes narrowed to mere slits.

Breathing laboured, he watched as she tightened her legs around his waist to raise herself slightly before settling her pussy square on his cock and bearing down a good, purposeful inch. His groan was heartfelt, bone-deep, obscenely masculine in her ears, almost enough to distract her from the inch of cock crammed so tightly in her cunt that a bead of sweat formed on her brow. She was stretched around his cock so snugly that if she merely touched her clit she would shatter into a million pieces.

‘Give me another inch,’ she whispered, enchanted by the fact that her examiner, at this point, was beyond speech, looked half out of his mind with his teeth gritted and jaw clenched, and she was further enchanted when he obeyed with a single inch instead of trying to bury himself to the hilt.

But even two inches of Marchosias and his shallow thrusts was a dangerous thing and with a dry swallow she registered the beating of black wings just beneath her skin, demon spikes longing to spring from her back, claws itching to bud from her fingers and toes, her gums aching with the pressure of teething fangs. No – she closed her eyes – no, she must hold on.

The hips below hers stilled and, when she opened her eyes, she found her haughty arch-demon watching her, concerned. ‘Too much? Are you too close? What do you need?’

To pass, she wanted to say, but she knew that wasn’t true, what she wanted more than anything else was for him to lose himself in her and then for her to chase after him into that forest of oblivion. If he had a soul, she’d want that, too.

Instead she told him to lean back, and then she spread her thighs wider, only gasping a little when he clapped a hand over the outside of each thigh and stroked her, muttering her name like a promise. With intense focus she gripped the base of his cock and jerked him as she took him a little deeper, a little harder, a little faster. So this was melting, having no direction but his flow of incoherent words, the urgent undulation of his hips against hers, no greater need than to feel him thick and hard inside her, filling her beyond full.

A string of admirably earthy curses, a series of uncontrolled thrusts and his deep shuddering release flooded her with heat.

She’d passed her test; she was now legion.

But her focus remained on the flesh joined with hers, still hard as she writhed on him reaching for her own peak.

Lost, she was lost in the desire pooling, desire bubbling, desire crippling, the wild yearning for completion. It came, slinging her over the edge in waves of contracting pleasure, and with it her wings sprang from her back with a snap, like a sail unfurled. A storm of sensation penetrated every cranny of her being until her fingers sprouted claws and her fangs lengthened to graze her lips as she shuddered out her climax.

Marchosias blinked, ran a slow hand up her thigh, eyeing her wings. ‘Well, we may need to work on that before we send you out on your own.’

She smiled, smiled because she knew what her haughty arch-demon was really saying, that he wanted her again, wanted her many times before she went anywhere. In crusty arch-demon speak, he was flirting with her.