Page 37 of Seduction of a Psychopomp
Chapter 22
Grim
Celestehadahardtime falling asleep once we went to bed together—a ritual I’d finally become accustomed to and begun to find strangely enjoyable in the last few weeks. Her nerves and concerns made her twitchy and kept her mind from settling fully for long into the night. I briefly considered trying to help her settle through physical means, as I’d found that she relaxed substantially after being stimulated to culmination. It would be difficult to keep her from being heard by my family members now that they were here, and I knew from her reaction to Helda’s interruption while we kissed that others being aware of our coupling would be an entirely unwelcome circumstance for her. I felt the same. No matter how quiet I kept her, though, they would be aware, simply due to the nature of our senses. Even now, I could hear them moving about their rooms—my grandmother’s quiet murmurs in the kitchen, my sister splashing water on her face in a bathroom. Celeste’s stiff posture as she lay with me made me even more hesitant to attempt such a union, though I had found her eagerly receptive to my urges surprisingly often over the last week. Tonight, though, I merely gathered her into my arms and held her close until she finally relaxed into sleep and my mind drifted to other things.
On the one hand, my family’s return meant that I no longer had to maintain my constant vigilance. The spirits in the region seemed to be coming out of the woodwork in search of her magic. There had been a disturbing number of the cadaverous-looking ghouls around since we’d arrived. I’d had to step away and quietly dispatch dozens of them, striking them down before they could come anywhere near the walls of the small castle or its inhabitants. It was a relief to know that we were now surrounded by people who were similarly equipped with the senses and abilities that I have. That I was no longer the only thing standing between my wife’s delicate soul and the parasitic creatures that seemed so intent onhuntingher.
Even so, I felt unfairly resentful of my family’s return and their intrusion on the personal peacefulness Celeste had found, as well as the tentative relationship that we’d begun building with one another. Yes, I loved my family and was grateful for their safe return, and yes, I had departed our wedding against their wishes and left them to deal with the fallout. But…theyhad decided that I would marry this woman and handed her into my personal care. I didn’t regret my actions.
That said, I spent the entire night trying to ignore the uncomfortable sensation of heat and tightness demanding attention in my groin, unwilling to wake her up for relief even though I knew she would receive me if I asked. I could have gone outside to blow off steam by sparring with Nikolai—and to make him pay for the unnecessary flamboyance with which he entered our quartersuninvitedupon their arrival. Loudly slamming doors when you are perfectly capable of walking through them was nothing short of drama for drama’s sake, and Celeste had jumped nearly a foot in the air at the offensive sound.
Not that he’d noticed.
But I didn’t want to leave her. She liked it when I stayed close while she slept, and I’d grown rather fond of this quiet time spent watching her dream and listening to the soft lull of her breathing. It was a special kind of torture having her warm, soft body pressed against me all night, calling to mine for hours on end. I’d never understood this intense craving people seemed to have for the affections of their partner, but the slow journey to understanding I’d been on with Celeste had taken a forceful leap forward the first time we joined physically. Then I hadn’t just understood—I’d known.The unexpected rush of bonding chemicals that poured into my brain in the moments following our first act of making love—a euphemism I hadn’t realized was literal until that moment—had caused a distressing shift in my emotional state.And physical state,I thought with a grimace as I shifted to try to find some relief from the frustrating erection that seemed to plague me constantly now.
My mood plummeted every time Celeste flinched in her sleep, her facial expression contorting into that tiny frown that told me her dreams were not pleasant ones. I watched her, presiding over her sleeping form throughout the night like a dragon jealously guarding its precious treasure. The idea of living beings as a dragon’s hoard was no longer as silly an imagining as it might have been to me once. I’d never personally felt any desire to sleep, but when the frown melted away and her peaceful expression returned, I wished for the first time that I could join her in her slumber and see her dreams with my own mind. But since I couldn’t, I was happy to be here with her, guarding her from both the outside world and her inner dreams. She tossed and turned but I held her close and murmured quiet nothings into her hair until she calmed.
By the time morning came I’d already made up my mind to take Celeste and leave again as soon as she was well enough. I didn’t know when that would be, but the infusion of my family members clearly had her on edge. In the meantime, though, since I wouldn’t be able to pacify my baser urges within the tight hold of her intoxicating body, I would happily work off some of my frustration by beating my cousin into the ground with whatever means of combat he found most desirable.
I rose with an irritated growl when I finally heard Brishta, the servant girl, deposit a tray of food outside the door, adjusting my maddening erection through my pants before I retrieved the tray to plate a meal for Celeste. Leaving the prepared meal on the desk near the bed, I slipped from the room while she was still asleep and headed for the kitchen, knowing my family would be lurking about, waiting for me. It would be better to get these conversations out of the way before she was awake to witness them. My mother was the first to find me, silently taking a place at the table across from me as I sipped my morning tea. I loved my mother, and it pained me to have angered her.
“I’m sorry I disappointed you,” I told her honestly when she didn’t speak but, instead, simply stared at me with the same unspoken wrath I’d received the few times I’d gotten into a fight at school as a child. Iwassorry that my departure with the princess had inevitably caused trouble for both of our families, even though I didn’t regret doing it. Because if no one else was going to put her well-being first, then I felt justified in removing her from the situation. But that didn’t mean I didn’t care about its effect on my mom. My father hadn’t arrived with her, which meant he wasn’t angry with me and had decided to skip out on the rebuke and return directly to their estate. Though we didn’t really age, he liked to pretend he was too old to be “gallivanting around” all the time or burden himself with unnecessary familial disagreements.
My mother’s face softened a little, but only averylittle, as she regarded me from across the table. I poured her a cup of tea and handed it to her. She accepted it with grace.
“What were you thinking, Vitya?” Her words held censure, but she also truly wanted to know.
I flicked my gaze to her as I refilled my own cup of tea and then replaced the kettle on its tray. “I did what was best for the wife you entrusted me with,” I told her mildly, before blowing on my tea. “And I would do it again.”
She slapped her open palm onto the table in frustration but never got to voice her opinion on the matter because my cousin came barreling down the stairs into the kitchen at that moment.
“I thought I heard you!” Nikolai said, pointing at me. “Courtyard. Now. You and me. Let’s go.”
My mother nearly snarled at him for interrupting her, and I rolled my eyes at him trying to act like he was being a tough guy due to some imagined slight over me leaving. His expression was stern, but anyone who knew him could see that his eyes were sparkling with excitement at the prospect of sparring. He was practically bouncing on his toes. But I would join him today. I did feel like I owed him for being subjected to all the angry quarreling after I left.Even though the man lives for drama.And it would be nice to have some kind of physical outlet for the frustration building within me, even if it wasn’t the one I wanted.
I drained the last of my tea and set my cup on the table as I stood to follow him outside, nodding at my mother to acknowledge her grumbles of irritation and gesturing to Nikolai to lead the way. “Why does this please you so?” I asked him with a sigh as we traipsed down the short staircase to the courtyard.
“Because you never have time to spar with me and now you have nothing but time, so you can’t make excuses not to,” he told me as the door banged shut behind us and we stepped out into the crisp, cold air. Our boots sank into the soft earth beneath the thin layer of melting snow. “No portals. No ranged weapons,” he declared.
“You have a lot of rules.”
“No blades, no weapons changing, and no magic blasts,” he added.
I slid my gaze to him as he dropped into step beside me when we reached the center of the courtyard. “WhatamI allowed to use?” I asked, half expecting him to declare a fisticuffs match like some old-timey boxer.
“Staffs,” he announced, stepping in front of me with a mischievous glint in his eye. Quarterstaffs and baton fighting had always been his strongest fighting styles. Shadows were already beginning to swirl around us as we amassed our magic, and I had my staff conjured before he’d settled into his stance. The staff I formed was nearly a foot taller than me and a full two inches thick—larger than Nikolai’s, which only reached the height of his eyes. He always complained that larger weapons were unwieldy, but I preferred the longer reach. “Compensating for something?” he quipped.
I raised an eyebrow and waited for him to get on with it.
My cousin opened the match by swanning about as usual with a showy little flourish, spinning his staff high over his head as if it were a war scythe. I went straight for his vitals, aiming for a hard, direct hit, mid-torso, forcing him to bring his staff down to guard himself. If he wanted to fight, we were going to fight. The clack of our weapons impacting echoed dully off the ragged stone walls surrounding the yard as we began our dance. He grunted with the effort of repelling my attack, and I slid my hands down the haft and pivoted, bringing it around behind me as fast as I could to aim another blow at his head. A hard hit would hurt, possibly even break bones, but we healed fast enough that I had no real fear oftrulyharming him. I didn’t hold back at all, and I knew he wouldn’t either. If he could bash my head in, he was going to try.
He knocked my staff away and brought the back of his own at me, finally beginning to take it seriously. His movements were flowing and practiced, reminding me that he had one hundred years more experience with this form of combat than I did. But having been stationed in the Void, I used it more purposefully than he did. And I used a brute-force fighting style that hehated.
“Gah,” he growled as he contorted his body to dodge the end of my weapon when he failed to deflect it in time. “You always do this. When did you get so bloodybig, Vitya?” he groused.
“Twenty years ago.”
“Blink of an eye, really,” he bit out before I knocked his staff away from me and managed to land a hit on his thigh. He pivoted from stance to stance with steady, measured steps while I buffeted him with a burst of quick, powerful, rapid hits that left him unable to do anything but defend. The end of my staff connected again, this time with his right hand, and he responded by flinging himself to the side and bringing his own staff around in time to clip my shoulder. My entire focus narrowed down to the pinpoint goal of driving him backward so I could take advantage of my extended reach and push his strike zone away from me. The cold, the wind, the distant waves, the churned-up mud and snow all faded away as I spun and struck and dodged and fought. I briefly wondered what he would do if I summoned shadow hounds—he hadn’t forbidden those—before I finally got him back into a defensive position, fending off my strikes with every ounce of his concentration.
