Page 115 of The Fire Went Wild

The wind blows outside, rustling the vines I used to build the tomb, and I take that as a yes. I slide down and carefully push her dress up, revealing her pale, unpainted thighs, the skin already turning a blueish-grey at the edges. I touch her like the treasure she is, soft at first. I still half-expect for her to moan and shift beneath me, the way she did when was asleep. I’ve gotten so used to fucking her, my living girl.

But she’s not living. Not right now.

My fingers land on her pussy, dry and cool in death, a sensation I’ll admit I missed. I push one finger in, feeling her, and then palm myself almost distractedly as I touch her. I wonder if her soul can feel my touch in the Abyss. If her ghost will come for me.

If the gods know, they don’t say a word.

I lower myself down to kiss her cunt as reverently as I kissed her mouth, her flesh already edged with a faint, chilly sweetness that I know will deepen in the next few days. She won’t rot because shetechnicallyisn’t dead. But her systems havestopped. Her blood will pool in her limbs, and she’s stiff with rigor mortis. But the flies will leave her alone. The bacteria will find no home inside her. She’ll remain as she is until the moment she wakes up.

I plunge my tongue between her folds, moistening her pussy for my cock. When she’s ready, I sit back on my heels and spit in my hand to get my dick nice and wet, too.

Then I press myself into her.

Once again I’m reminded how used I am to her living body. I miss the rainstorm of her arousal, but her dry, dead pussy is familiar in a different way, and I groan as I push my full length into her, thrusting in hard, sharp bursts. Hard enough that her body slides limply across the blanket I laid for her. Hard enough that one of the coins falls off her eyes, and she stares at me through the white cloud of her death.

It’s fucking beautiful.

I groan, fucking her harder, her dead cunt clamping down hard on my dick. She stares sightlessly up at me, both with her actual eye and with the two eyes of the Unnamed I painted on her hand.

“Do you see me?” I rasp, not sure if I’m talking to her or to the gods. “Do you see what I’ve done?”

The wind picks up, blowing in from the north, whistling and howling through the trees. The tomb shakes with the force of my thrusts.

“Do you feel it, cher?” I squeeze her hardening tits over her dress, slam myself inside her until my cockhead meets her cervix. And she doesn’t react. Doesn’t cry out. Doesn’t clench down on me.

Just stares at me, her pupil swimming in blood and mist, her lips parted.

I lean over to kiss her, carefully not to smudge the paint on her face. Then I straighten up and I fuck her as hard as I can, myorgasm building hot and tight in my balls. She stares at me, and I reach down and play with her clit just in case she does feel it.

I fuck her until the very last minute and then pull myself out so my cum arcs in a glistening, pearly rainbow and splatters across her white dress and the top of her her tits. I moan through my pleasure and then sit down on my heels, admiring the work of art I made of her.

A year is a long time not to have this woman at my side.

But at least I have her corpse.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHARLOTTE

Ifeel something. A faint tingle in my fingers, like the blood is flowing back into the tiny, delicate veins there. There’s a kind of electric buzz at the bottom of my feet. I’m not nothing.

It fades.

The next timeI feel something it’s like when you’re in a club and the music is so loud you can feel the rhythm deep in your chest, so heavy it drowns out your heartbeat. For a long time, I’m nothing but that bass line, slow and droning.

And then the tingling starts again.

I’m a lightning storm.

Then that fades, too.

The third time,I itch.

My throat itches, and I remember the moments before I died, Jaxon’s fingers crushing my trachea as pleasure bloomed hot and roiling through my body.

There’s no pleasure this time.

But I think I can remember what it’s like to breathe.