A Heart So Cold and Wicked (Wicked Darlings)

19

Nothing exists but the two of us.

No house, no Fae-hunters, no family, no decisions or dangers.

Only Krael and me, and this bed, and the ecstasy that rolls through our bodies in overwhelming waves.

I come three times on his cock and once on his tongue. While I’m recovering from the fourth orgasm, he stares at my swollen, damp pussy for a few minutes before lifting my legs and pushing inside me again. He comes almost instantly, and he pulls out halfway through, spurting white liquid across my sensitive clit. There’s something intensely erotic about seeing his cum on my pussy, especially when he drags a finger through it and traces several lines and swirls across my stomach.

Impulsively I dip a finger inside myself and dab a little of his cum and my arousal on the end of his nose. Then I paint both his cheekbones with it.

“You’re making a mess,” he growls, crawling over me, burying me in the sheets and blankets while I giggle.

“It’s not my mess to clean up,” I reply.

“I do pity the inn staff.” He gives me a sheepish grin. “There was a lot of cum. Far more than my usual amount, which is already more than the average human male.”

“Most of it is inside me,” I point out.

“I know.” He pries my legs apart and peers between them. “Some of it is trying to escape. Let’s keep it where it belongs.” He runs a finger up my sex, scooping up the cum and pressing it back into my entrance. “Not that it will have any effect, since I’m not in heat.”

“What does that mean?”

“Fae are only fertile when they’re in heat,” he explains. “So no matter how much I come inside you, you won’t get pregnant.”

I nod, remembering the bits of information my favorite Mother gave me about pregnancy. In the cabin, my captor made each Wife take a tonic when she first arrived—one that would render her permanently infertile.

He never made me swallow the tonic, but I’m far from ready to contemplate having children. In fact, I’m not sure I ever want to.

“That’s good,” I murmur. “One less thing to worry about.”

Krael’s face sobers. He rolls onto his back beside me and stares at the ceiling. “Yes. We have enough worries.”

I sit up, oddly pleased at how quivery my limbs feel. I’m sore inside where he fucked me, but it’s a warm, pleasant, sated kind of soreness .

For a moment I simply gaze at him, as he lies beside me with one arm tucked behind his head. The bicep of that arm is a smooth bulge, terribly tempting for my fingers. His hair has mostly come loose from his braid. The lamps in the room glitter on the jewelry in his nose, his eyebrow, and his pointed ears. When he smiles at me, my heart flips over at the sight of his sharp upper fangs and the jutted lower ones.

I love the strong male slant of his throat, the smooth expanse of his chest, the neat double row of his abdominal muscles, and the way his hips and stomach taper down to lean, strong thighs. My gaze lingers on the smooth, thick cock lying between those thighs.

“Don’t look at me that way,” he murmurs, grinning wider. “I’m spent, Feather.”

“So am I,” I confess.

“Then we should go home.”

I wince and look away from him. “I’m afraid we’ll go back and sleep, and then tomorrow you’ll change your mind. I’m afraid you’ll be harsh with me and reject me again.”

“I wouldn’t reject you .” He sits up too. “If anything, I’d be rejecting myself. I know I’m being selfish, starting this with you. I’m immortal. You aren’t. You need a peaceful life with a normal man, and I’m a condemned Faerie with sadistic tendencies. Soon I may have to flee for my life, and you can’t accompany me.”

He’s right about all of it. That’s what he meant when he said he loves me beyond logic and beyond hope.

He can’t abandon the house or his duties, and I can’t go with him when he moves. Our only chance of staying together is if the hunters fail to find him. And even that is a limited future, because, as he said, he’s immortal. Sooner or later, he’ll have to leave, and then I’ll be adrift in the dark, lonely sea of the world.

Not even the idea of my true family is any comfort. I’m more wary of them than I am of being alone .

Krael lets out a gusty sigh. “Fuck reality. I liked it better when I was inside you and I couldn’t think of anything except how perfect your cunt feels hugging my cock.”

I blush violently and pull a bit of the sheet up to my chest, but I can’t stop smiling.

“You’re shy now, after what you just did to me?” He smirks. “Too late. I know the taste of that sweet little pussy now, and I believe it’s my new favorite flavor.”

“Hush,” I whisper, smiling wider.

He grins as if he’s about to keep teasing me, but his face changes from playful malevolence to resigned ferocity in half a second. At the same time something echoes faintly in my mind—the distant, barely perceptible ringing of a bell.

“What’s that sound?” I ask.

His eyes flare wide with shock. “You can hear it?”

“Yes. Are you being summoned?”

“That’s not possible,” he says, stunned. “Have you heard a bell before, when I’ve been called?”

“No.”

“It’s not possible,” he repeats. “None of this is possible… Shit, I have to go, and I might not be able to come back for hours.”

I’d rather not linger in this inn by myself. The thought of sleeping anywhere unfamiliar without him chills my blood. What if someone broke into the room and hurt me, or stole me away? It’s simply not safe. “I’ll come with you.”

“You can’t.” Even as he rises from the bed, he’s changing. His muscles swell larger, veins snaking over them. His neck thickens while the goat-skull mask appears out of thin air and settles over his face. His legs shift in shape until they’re thicker, more goatlike, covered in fur, and his feet transform into cloven hoofs. The ragged cape appears, cloaking his form, turning him into the hulking, horned creature I remember from the night I rang my own Krampus bell .

He stretches out one clawed hand and a chain appears in his palm. “You can’t come with me, Feather.”

“I refuse to stay here.” I’m pulling on my dress, heedless that it’s unbuttoned in the back. “You can’t leave me alone in a strange place—what if something happens? Please, Krael.”

“I don’t have time to argue with you about this,” he growls.

“So let me come with you. I’ll stand aside. I won’t be any trouble.” I stuff my feet into my shoes, then snatch my cloak and swirl it around my shoulders.

“Fuck,” he snarls. “Fine. This one should be simple enough. Once we arrive, you’ll wait outside while I enter the house, understand?”

“I understand.”

Hastily we sweep the items we stole into a pillowcase, which I hold close to my chest. Then Krael drags me against his huge form. As Krampus, his usual smell of fresh winter midnight is laced with the bitter tinge of blood, the sourness of horror, the dull reek of death.

My heart hammers wildly as he draws the geistfyre circle.

Instantly we’re somewhere new, at the edge of a town, behind a snow-covered shed. I spot a crooked wheelbarrow, a stack of old clay pots, a half-rotten wooden lattice. The fence around the frozen garden is bowed or broken in several places. Three cows stand in a miserable clump beneath a sagging shelter.

“Wait here,” Krampus tells me. He stomps past the garden, chains dragging through the snow behind him. Then, with a startling leap, he springs onto the roof of the cottage.

I’m not sure why he chooses the chimney as an entry point when he could simply smash through a door or a window. Perhaps it’s a means of striking fear into the heart of his target.

Curiosity wages a swift war in my mind. On the one hand, I’ve never seen live cows. I pity them, and I’m fascinated by them. On the other hand, I want to see who Krampus is after, and how he carries out their judgment.

There will be other chances to experience animals up close, but Krampus may never bring me along on one of his violent forays again. So despite his warning, I set down my pillowcase bag, pull my hood over my head, and hurry toward the cottage. Krampus is up on the roof with his back to me, looking down the chimney, so I make it under the eaves of the house without attracting his notice.

I peer through a narrow window beside the back door. Its glass is grimy and coated with frost, so I can barely make out a table with a lamp on it. But I can hear a woman’s voice inside, ranting and shrieking, interspersed with a child’s cries. Something slams, and the child’s voice cuts off mid-wail.

Terror sends a sickening thrill through my chest. Without really thinking, I locate the handle of the back door and push. To my surprise, it gives way. The hinges creak, but the sound is cloaked by the thunder of heavy chains falling down the brick chimney. Those chains will magically expand the space so Krampus can land among the logs, stalk out into the room, and seize whoever he’s meant to punish.

My mind keeps replaying the child’s wail and how it ended so abruptly. I have to know if they’re hurt, so I slip inside the cottage, finding myself in a kitchen alcove.

Quickly I take everything in. A table in the center of the main room, with a lamp, a bottle, and a cup on its well-worn surface. A woman stands beside the table, staring at the fireplace. A few paces away I spot the outline of a trap door, possibly leading to a cellar. Was that door the source of the slamming sound? Perhaps she banished the child down there.

The house stinks of rot, of water damage, of mildew—something my kidnapper said was the enemy of all wooden houses. He was forever making repairs to the cabin, daubing corners and cracks with a tarry mixture to prevent moisture from taking hold. Apparently this cottage enjoys no such care. The odor of feces hangs in the air, too. I’m not sure if it’s from humans or pests.

I can sense the cottage’s personality dimly—or rather, I sense the shadow of its former consciousness, before it succumbed to its own rot. The very walls seem to be groaning silently, endlessly, the boards and beams drenched in despair. The poverty and deprivation of this place contrasts starkly with the luxury and abundance of the Mayor’s mansion. It’s far more difficult to be a decent person in a place like this, with so little hope.

The fireplace widens suddenly, its brick walls flexing, expanding outward. Exactly what happened in the cabin on that fateful night, when Krampus arrived.

The woman whimpers and moves back, putting the table between her and the fireplace. The flames sink low, turning a vivid red as Krampus’s cloven hooves crash into the center of the fire.

The woman is gibbering now, backing away, half-swearing and half-sobbing as Krampus bends low and, with jerky, frightening movements, lurches out of the fireplace and rises up. He can’t straighten to his full height, so he remains slightly hunched, his horns dragging along the low ceiling as he flings a chain toward the woman’s legs.

She screams and bolts for the kitchen alcove, perhaps intending to grab a knife or a weapon. But his chains are too quick. As they snake around her ankles and tighten, their tiny spikes tear through her shabby stockings and into her flesh.

She falls with a scream that shears right through my heart. The abject terror on her face is as familiar to me as my own reflection.

“Stop!” I hear myself cry out .

Krampus looks up. His bone mask renders his face unreadable, but his tone is unmistakably furious as he growls, “I fucking told you to wait outside.”

“It’s not her fault,” I begin, but the woman is shrieking and clamoring so loudly I can barely hear myself speak.

Krampus drags her close, seizes her by the throat, and leans down. His tongue lashes across the woman’s face.

The effect is immediate. She goes utterly still and silent, paralyzed by his venom.

“Now that we have a little quiet,” he snarls. “What apology were you about to give?”

“No apology,” I say. “Only this—that I understand why she’s angry. She lives here , in this wretched place. The despair, the deprivation, and the loneliness are making her cruel.”

“There are many such cottages, in which mothers or fathers struggle alone against misfortune and poverty,” he replies. “And yet they manage to be reasonably kind to their children. Perhaps not always, but most of the time. She screams at her child. She locks her child in the cellar. She sometimes eats her child’s portion of the food herself. When a little money comes to her, she drinks it away instead of using it to repair the cottage. She is not the only one in a situation of dire need. And yet she has chosen to respond this way to her circumstances.”

I see his point, but I’m not convinced. “What will you do to her?”

His tone is darker and deeper than ever. “What I must.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to help her? To teach her how to do better?”

“That is the duty of other riders in the Wild Hunt, yet they have not been assigned to her. I have. This is my role, Feather. It is not for you or me to debate the will of the Hunt and of the god-stars. I’ve been given my orders, and I will follow them.”

My knees are trembling and my lips quiver, but I step forward, willing myself to see Krael through the guise of this monstrous masked figure, this terrifying beast in the cape, this deep-voiced, demonic wielder of chains and death.

“You’re just as trapped as I was,” I tell him. “Bound to the role they have set for you, whether it’s right or wrong. Is there no escape?”

“None. If I do not follow orders, I will be annihilated. Now wait for me outside.” The last sentence is a command so ferocious his voice shakes the house.

I retreat a few steps. “What about the child? Are they alright?”

“The boy is alive. Mother Holle will see to him after we leave.”

“And how do you know she will—”

“Enough!” he roars, and flames leap high in the fireplace at the explosive thunder of his voice. “Get the fuck outside!”

With hot, angry tears spilling down my cheeks, I march back out into the cold and through the snow to the shed. I stand there seething and chewing my lip, clutching the pillowcase bundle, until Krampus blasts up out of the chimney again, leaps down from the roof, and stalks toward me. The large blood-red bag on his back is full now, stuffed with the woman’s body. When he reaches me, he drops the bag into the snow with a thump and stands there, huge and dark and furious.

“The back door was open,” I point out.

“I chose to leave by the chimney,” he snarls. “Are you going to criticize every part of my job?”

“Is the woman alive or dead?”

“None of your gods-damned business, Feather. By interfering with my mission, you put both of us at risk. I took a chance bringing you along, and if you’d stayed out here, there would have been nothing to worry about… but you came into the house. You may have attracted the god-stars’ attention, or my overseer’s attention at the very least. Do you know what that means? ”

I shake my head.

“They could take you away from me.” His voice carries all the wretched fury of fear. “They could wipe all memory of me from your mind. And I could be severely punished for letting you become such an important part of my existence. I’ve been punished by them before, centuries ago. Do you know why it’s been that long? Because I learned my lesson so fucking well, thanks to the soul-grinding, mind-eviscerating torture they inflicted on me the first time.”

“But the god-stars gave me the Krampus bell,” I say. “They let all this happen, didn’t they? Maybe even wanted it to happen.”

He shakes his great horned head. “I’ve wondered. I’ve hoped that might be the case. But the more likely scenario is that someone made a mistake, and once they begin paying closer attention, they’ll rectify it.”

A low moan from the bag draws my attention and I wince. “Believe what you want. But I don’t believe you should kill all of them. What if some of them could change? What if some of them have reasons for doing terrible things? Or if not reasons… circumstances they couldn’t handle any other way.”

My voice falls at the end, because even though I can’t see his face, I sense the keen look he’s giving me from beneath the mask. It makes me shrink a little.

“This isn’t about her at all, is it?” He nudges the bag with his hoof.

I catch my lip between my teeth and look away from him.

“Feather,” he says, low. “What did you do?”

If he’d asked me when we were in bed together, I might have told him everything. But out here, in the cold, with a moaning woman in the sack by his side, and his burly Krampus form standing over me like a dreadful judge, I can’t. I don’t know where to begin, or how to say it .

“Tell me this, then,” he says. “Have you done something worthy of punishment?”

Slowly, I nod.

“After what you did to Midrael, I promised I’d give you the punishment you deserve. I could do it tonight. Punish you and elicit the confession. I think it would do you good to say it aloud, to purge the sin instead of letting it fester. Besides, I would prefer that there be no secrets between us. I gave you my darkest secret, after all. Yours cannot be worse.”

I lift my eyes to the dark holes of his mask, my soul full of pleading dread.

Maybe I didn’t murder dozens of children out of a twisted sense of mercy. But to me, what I did feels worse. It gnaws at my heart with poisoned teeth, veins of rot stretching outward from that spot through every part of my being.

Much as I hate it, I think he’s right. I think I need to confess to someone aloud, and experience a dramatic purging of the evil.

Krampus steps closer, planting one cloven hoof in the snow right in front of me. His bulk makes me shiver, as does the deep, growly timbre of his voice when he says, “I need your spoken permission, Feather. Do you wish me to punish you? To coax out your secrets with the most intimate kind of torture?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Then choose a safe word. It will be your key to stop the punishment, end the torture, and escape the process.” He grasps my chin with his thick fingers, careful not to hurt me with his ragged black nails. “Unless you speak that word, I will consider myself free to do anything I want to you.”

“Will you be in this form?” I ask.

“Since I am punishing you for a sin, and since my judgment of this other woman is not yet complete—yes, I can retain this form. Is that acceptable to you?”

As I nod, a quiver of pleasure trickles through my clit, along my pussy .

I’m horrified at myself. Why should I be aroused by the idea of Krampus punishing me and eliciting my secrets with torture? It makes no sense. And yet a second soft thrill teases my body as I picture it.

Krampus lowers his bone-masked face near mine, and I hear him sniff. His claws twine through my hair for a moment, toying with the wavy locks. Then he hums low in his chest and moves to pick up his bag again.

My attention swerves to a distant glow across a field, near a line of trees. I squint, trying to make out the pale shape. It looks rather like a tall white reindeer, with a cloaked figure on its back.

“Mother Holle,” Krampus says. “She’s coming to care for the child.”

“She’s part of the Wild Hunt?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“How do you know she’s helping the children? Have you ever watched what she does?”

“Yes, and I’ve met her. She is an ancient force, generous and gracious, but not to be taken lightly. We must go. Stay close, little one. No sleep for either of us tonight.”