Page 20 of Wicked Things

He literally flinched, but very slightly as if not to frighten me, and his eyes widened. They became so dark they turned almost black, or maybe that was a trick of the light. It took him a moment to process what I’d said, and probably to know how to respond, but finally he looked up into my eyes.

“Why would your mother try to kill her own child?”

“She wasn’t like other people. She was truly moonstruck, and I think she wasn’t really responsible for all the things that she said and did. She was determined to die that day and wanted to take me with her. I don’t know if anyone ever really knew why or will ever know. She said it was because we were both evil. But I was only five and when I refused to go into the river with her, she pulled out her athame and struck me in the chest. I fell down and she fell on top of me and tried to dig my heart out of my chest, but her weapon was mostly ceremonial and wouldn’t cut deeply enough. A woodcutter working nearby in the forest heard my screams and came to investigate. He stopped her attack, and he kicked her away from me. She flung herself into the river then, and he picked me up and ran for help.”

“You were lucky he was nearby.”

I gave him a sad, little smile. “Perhaps if I’d been truly lucky, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. I remember how much it hurt and how ill I was for a really long time afterward.”

He surprised me by leaning over to gently brush his lips over the scars on my chest, tracing the faint, white markings with his tongue. I was shocked that he seemed to so easily tear down all my defenses and leave me breathing hard and reveling in his every touch.

He began kissing me, not on my lips but all over my neck and chest and eventually trailing down even lower. When he reached down to take my balls and hold them in his hand as he stared directly into my eyes, I was far too gone to protest.

“You belong to me now, Braden,” he told me. “Make no mistake about that. And no one will ever hurt you again.”

“Then you belong to me too,” I whispered back to him, a little shocked that I had the nerve to say it. He surprised me by smiling, though, and finally he kissed me full on the lips. It was brief, but he’d done it.

“It seems as if I might, at that. What should we do about it?”

“I-I don’t know.” I looked away, unable to meet his gaze. “I’ve never really been with anyone before. Not like this, I mean.”

His hand stopped the undeniably pleasurable thing it was doing, and he stared down into my face. “Not even with a woman?”

I shook my head. “No. Not really. I’ve had women put their mouths on me a few times. Down there on my... you know. At taverns where I stopped on my trade routes. But nothing more. It was always transactional and just their mouths. I’m not bold in that way and my uncle Leofric warned me about what he called St. Anthony’s Fire, and the burning and the rashes I could get from sex with strangers. And I was always afraid of it, so I never did it much. Leofric said I should get myself a good, clean girl as my wife and I’d be safe. He said that what I was doing should be all right in the meantime.”

“Perhaps, though not always. Still, it was good of your uncle to try and watch out for you.” He began to stroke my naked pintel, which was what my uncle had taught me to call it—other men I knew called it a cock. I squirmed under his attention, not knowing if I wanted him to leave me alone or keep going and going and never, ever stop.

He brushed his thumb over the slit on top, and I almost cried out. He swallowed my gasps of shock along with my breath and pulled his head back long enough to allow me to breathe a little. “You’re all right, a chuisle. Try to relax.” He eased me back on the bed and resumed kissing me, destroying my last defenses and sweeping them away like playing cards laid out on a table.

He told me to turn over after a while and get on my knees. He said it would be more comfortable for me, though I was embarrassed by that position, and I didn’t like it one bit. Then he did something incredible by licking his tongue right over my exposed hole. I thought I would faint or die or something, and I opened my mouth to protest or scream—I wasn’t sure which—but it came out a moan. He followed that up by rubbing oil on me there and making me hold that position until I thought I’d truly die from embarrassment and along about that time was probably when I truly lost my mind. He had a whole bottle of oil that he got from the dresser beside me and used on his fingers. He even dribbled some down over me back there. I moaned again, long and loud, and tried to hide my face on the pillow. There was a great deal of mindless begging, and it wasn’t that he should stop either.

I felt him slip his free hand under my stomach as if to hold me in place if I tried to get away. I didn’t, and never even thought of doing it, to be honest. There was nowhere I’d rather be. He pushed one finger up inside me, crooking it slightly. That burned even with the oil, but as he found the place he was looking for and swept his long finger over it, a final and devastating assault, I gave a long, loud cry. My body began to do the thing it did when I was alone in my bed and I touched myself down there—only this time the straining and shaking were more intense, and I truly thought I might die from it.

He stroked me on my pintel again and I begged him to stop—or keep going. Or to do both at the same time. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Then, as my head fell down on the pillow again, he pulled his hand away, cupping my chin and turning up my face to kiss his lips. I think I swooned, though I’d never done that in my life before this. He leaned up beside me on the bed and continued to massage me down there at my back entrance and he put more oil on me too, though I thought I might slip off the bed if he used much more. And then I felt him nudging something hot, hard and covered with the oil against me.

Was it his fingers again? No, this felt different—and much larger—but I surrendered and relaxed into whatever he wanted to do to me. He asked if I was all right, and I nodded yes, though that was a total lie. He kept on massaging and caressing me, even rubbing my ass and telling me how “pretty and round it was.” I prayed to a god I didn’t really believe in that this bed I was on might turn into a hole and open to swallow me up.

I tried to calm down, but I was feeling things I’d never felt before. And never even imagined. He told me to spread my legs a bit and pulled me up closer to him. I could imagine finally what that nudge had meant and what he was about to do, and I figured it would hurt. I’d gotten a glimpse of his cock, and it was big. But I would do this for him, because he’d given me so much pleasure already, and it was only right that I return the favor. Another oily finger slipped inside me, still preparing me, and I groaned. How could that feel so good and bad at the same time?

At the same time, Fionn took my hard and aching cock in his other hand and began to slide his fist up and down over it. I thought I’d be too sensitive, but instead I started leaking harder. I heard myself make a whimpering noise I didn’t think I’d ever made before and relaxed totally in his arms. I groaned at the burn and the feeling of being too full of his fingers. He increased the speed of his hand on me and since the fingers in my ass weren’t moving for the moment, I allowed myself to relax again and concentrate on what was happening elsewhere.

The fingers pulled out, but before I could feel relieved, I felt something bigger and harder pressing against me. It was his cock, of course, only for real this time. He eased the tip inside me, and I shifted and groaned, but pushed back for more. He whispered something to me in his language that I didn’t understand. Then he slid in hard and fast and held still, making me feel stuffed and aching, yet strangely excited. He wasn’t moving, letting me get used to feeling so full. I reached a hand back over my shoulder to touch his face, wanting to connect with him. He kissed my fingers and whispered to me. “It’ll be better from here, a chuisle. Breathe for me.”

I began to breathe again, and the pain lessened, then morphed into something far sweeter. He was still making sure I felt the thrusts on my own cock and suddenly a feeling swept over me that was more intense than I’d ever known. I moaned and cried out, but he knew what to do and gave me what I needed, moving inside me with hard, but careful thrusts, though I still felt every inch of him. He angled his hips so that the place up inside me was being caressed with each stroke, and I pushed backward into the pleasure/pain. The sensations were coming too fast for me to process them, and I gave myself over to it completely. When I thought I couldn’t take much more, I felt a wet explosion deep inside me, and I felt like I’d accomplished something to give that to him.

I collapsed down on the bed, and he rolled off me and lay down beside me, pulling me close to nuzzle me. He took my hand in his and kissed the back of it. Then his hand fell onto the back of my head, caressing me, and we both drowsed a little. The hard length of his body was warm and comforting next to mine, and I drifted gently down to sleep.

The next morning, after we woke, we got dressed, and he took my arm to walk me downstairs. He’d told me that he had arranged a small ceremony with a late breakfast for us afterward, and that all I had to do was follow his lead. He told me not to be scared.

We continued our walk toward the huge double doors at the end of the hall. They were open wide, and the people inside the huge ballroom must have wondered at the stunned—make that poleaxed—expression that had to be on my face at what I saw inside the room.

A huge crowd of beautiful, glittering nobility was watching us carefully. The handsome and young-looking creatures crowded the hall all the way to the door, though they parted like the Red Sea was supposed to have done for Moses when the king and I began to walk inside the enormous room and past them to go toward the front. They all looked at me admiringly, and I thought enviously as we passed by them. I believe by that time that only Fionn’s arm was keeping me on my feet, or I might have collapsed in a heap on the polished marble floor.

We came to a dais, and he gave me a hand to climb the few steps up to stand on it beside him. With my shaky knees, I needed one. A regal man in long, red robes and wearing a hood stood waiting for us, with two young boys, acolytes, who were standing slightly behind him, swinging bronze bowls on slender chains containing some earthy-smelling incense. It smelled awful, and I tried to breathe through my mouth. I realized the man must be one of the pagan priests of Cocidus, a northern god of Briton, and the god of hunting, forests, and war. When the Fae merged him with the Roman god, Mars, he became Mars Cocidus, a protector of soldiers.

The priest began to speak in a low tone with the boys behind him occasionally chanting something in singsong voices back to him when he paused. He tied a long cord loosely around our joined hands and spoke a few words. All of this was in their language, so I didn’t get a word of it. Afterward, Fionn slipped a heavy gold ring, studded with small jewels, off his own finger and slid it onto mine. I looked down at it in disbelief. It reached all the way to the joint of my finger. It was a little loose, so I clasped my hand into a fist to make sure it didn’t fall off.

The whole ceremony lasted perhaps ten minutes, and then the priest held up a Celtic symbol, made of polished metal and attached to a long bar. I’d seen them before a time or two when I’d traveled in Alba, which was later known as Scotland. They were a bit like a regular cross, made with knotwork, but these had a circle in the middle, called a “halo” around the center. When it was held up in front of us, King Fionn leaned forward to lightly kiss it and then stood back for me to do the same.