The nocturnal mist into which Carmilla had vanished took only a few seconds to bleed out through the gaps between the cabin’s rough-hewn logs.
With her departure, the air inside shifted violently.
The vampire’s aristocratic, sepulchral chill which only moments earlier had numbed my overwhelmed senses evaporated from my lungs.
In its wake, a hollow, ravenous void tore through my gut.
The blood the Progenitor had forced down my throat still pulsed through my veins like a stagnant, dark lake of black ice.
Yet at the base of my spine, the budding root of my fourth tail refused peace; it screamed for fuel.
The bone-like protrusion vibrated beneath my skin with an almost obscene intensity, a spasmodic rhythm demanding fire to keep from withering in the dark.
My kitsune instincts howled for flesh against flesh right now, without hesitation.
I craved it with every shred of my being.
I wanted to burn.
In the dim glow of the hearth, Ignis wedged the heavy haft of her halberd against the splintered doorframe, sealing the entrance against the howling wind.
The firelight carved the colossal contours of her bare back into sharp relief: broad shoulders, cords of muscle tempered by millennia of war, and ridges of obsidian-red scales cascading in a flawless taper toward her narrow hips.
She looked imposing, magnificent, and utterly lethal.
Every cut and curve of her sun-baked skin drew my gaze like a moth to a pyre. The heat radiating from her was no ordinary warmth; it was the steady draft of an active volcano a thick, suffocating tide smelling of sulfur, scorched earth, and a raw vitality so brutal it parched my throat just looking at her.
A sharp, molten ache throbbed between my thighs.
A feverish shiver surged from my ankles straight to the crown of my head.
"She’s gone," the dragoness muttered without turning around, her voice thick and gravelly from held-back restraint.
"The leech will need at least an hour to sweep the ravine."
Then let’s not waste a second.
I wanted the exact same thing she did. I needed to feel her crushing strength against me.
Without a word, I rose from the straw pallet with deliberate, unhurried grace.
My bare soles made no sound against the weathered floorboards.
The shredded black silk of my dress slid off my shoulders, caught only by the flare of my hips, baring my pale back and the heavy, ragged rise and fall of my chest.
My two silver tails fanned out behind me in a hypnotic arc, their tips crackling with violet sparks that danced to the frantic cadence of my desire.
I’m going to be yours.
I crossed the room toward her, moving not like an invalid queen, but like a starving predator stalking its own salvation.
When I reached her, I raised my porcelain hands and pressed my palms directly against the scalding, living flesh of her shoulders.
At my touch, Ignis shuddered from horns to heel.
A hissing gasp of white vapor vented through her fangs as the icy tips of my claws trailed down the ridge of her spine.
Exquisite.
"Vixen..." she rumbled, her back muscles bunching tight as she tried to maintain her defensive stance.
"Get back on that pallet. Your core won’t hold if you move so—"
"Shut up," I whispered into the crook of her neck, flattening my bare chest against the scalding scales of her back.
Her skin burned like an anvil fresh from the forge, but rather than pulling away, I pressed my breasts into her dorsal crests, grinding against her with shameless desperation.
I dug my claws into the taut meat of her shoulders, feeling the titanic hammer of her dragon heart reverberating through my own ribs.
"Carmilla’s cold kept me alive, Ignis..." I purred, slipping one hand down over her armored abdomen, tracing every hard contour until I felt the iron coil of tension in her pelvis.
"But it’s freezing my soul.
I’m dying of cold inside.
My lovely dragon... I need you inside me."
Ignis spun around, her expression warped by a sudden, feral possessiveness.
Her hand clamped around my wrists like a shackle of cast iron.
Magma bright eyes webbed with gold locked onto mine.
Her chest heaved with violent fury, and deep within those slitted pupils, I watched her initial shock disintegrate into a blaze of unbridled greed.
"Do you have any idea what you’re asking for, vixen?" Her voice was a rolling thunderclap that rattled my diaphragm.
"If I unleash my fire into you right now, there won’t be a shred left of that haughty elegance you strut around with.
I will split you in two across these boards."
Do it. Just like that.
"Then try me," I challenged, fixing my golden eyes on her mouth as my parted lips glistened in the firelight.
"Burn me, Ignis.
Make me forget I was ever cold."
A bloodthirsty grin split the dragoness’s face.
Without letting go of my wrists, she hoisted me off the floor as effortlessly as a stray feather.
Two ravenous strides carried us back to the heavy wooden table, and she slammed me down onto my back.
The impact drove the air from my lungs, but before I could draw another breath, Ignis came down over me, pinning me beneath the scorching, suffocating weight of her frame.
The ruined silk of my gown didn't stand a chance. Her claws tore through it in a single violent sweep, reducing the fabric to black scraps that drifted down into the straw.
I lay completely bare beneath her. My pale skin caught the firelight like polished quartz, a sharp crimson flush spreading over my cheeks, down my throat, and across my stiff, aching nipples. Ignis’s gaze raked over every inch of my body, drinking in the curve of my waist and thighs with a hunger so raw it left her trembling with slick anticipation.
"You gorgeous, cursed aberration..." she snarled, dropping her mouth to my throat.
Her lips were liquid fire. She sank her fangs into my collarbone just hard enough to leave a mark without piercing the vein, then dragged her rough, burning tongue upward until she captured my mouth in a ravenous kiss.
I didn't wait for her to take the lead; I locked my bare legs around her scaled waist, bucking my hips upward and grinding against her with frantic need.
The slap of our sweat-slicked bodies broke through the cabin's quiet, punctuated by sharp, desperate gasps.
Yes... hard.
Just like that.
My moans were swallowed by her throat as my tongue tangled with hers, drinking in the taste of volcanic ash, smoke, and primal heat that flooded her breath. Read this novel at NovelPing for the best experience.
It was sensory madness.
Every sweep of her calloused palms across my breasts left trails of fire that flash melted the lingering vampire chill in my veins, replacing it with a feral ecstasy that made me arch off the wood in pure craving.
"More... Ignis, more..." I begged between shattered breaths as her mouth slid down to my chest, taking one erect nipple between her teeth and suckling with a ferocious greed that made me sink my claws deep into her thighs.
"Ask for whatever you want, my queen," she growled against my wet skin, using her free hand to force my thighs wider, planting her armored knees on either side of my hips.
"Tonight there are no blood-sucking countesses to lay claim to you. Your body is my altar."
I felt the heavy, scaled whip of her tail slither between my thighs, hot and damp, coiling with torturous slowness around my left leg.
At the same time, the broad, calloused fingers of her hand slid downward without hesitation, straight into the soaking heat of my core.
The moment her fingertips found my swollen flesh, a sharp shriek of pure pleasure tore from my throat and ricocheted off the ceiling beams.
Ignis seized the opening.
She drove her fingers into me with an unyielding, punishing rhythm, charting every nerve and applying an expert, ruthless friction that shattered my sense of time and space.
Yes... ah, gods... yes!
My silver tails lashed out, splintering the edges of the wooden table as the white hearth fire roared toward the rafters, gorging itself on the torrent of mana bleeding from our joined bodies.
"Ignis...! Right there... don't stop, by the gods, don't you dare stop!" I pleaded, casting aside every shred of royal pride, rolling my hips in desperate sync with her thrusts, surrendering entirely to the dragon’s siege.
The furnace inside me became unbearable. It wasn't just the friction of her hand or the crushing press of her body; it was the resonance of her draconic fire rousing the dormant fourth tail at the base of my spine.
The bone root throbbed with a feverish pulse, sending waves of lightning crashing straight into my lower belly, amplifying every tremor of pleasure a thousandfold.
Ignis saw the fracture in my composure and drove the stake deeper.
She leaned over me, framing my face in her burning palms, forcing my unfocused eyes to meet hers as she dragged me toward the brink.
"Look at me and burn, Elina," she commanded in a ruined growl, her breath brushing my swollen lips. "You are mine. You're fire, just like me."
Yes... I'm yours. Only yours.
"Yours...!" I screamed, my voice fracturing into a desperate, unending cry.
The climax hit with the cataclysmic violence of an elemental collapse.
My spine arched off the planks like a silver bow drawn to its breaking point.
From the base of my tailbone, a shockwave of violet and gold ethereal flame detonated outward, rattling the entire cabin, shaking the pine logs, and blasting a cloud of sparks up the flue.
The walls groaned under the sudden spike of mana as my depths clamped down tight around Ignis's fingers in a prolonged, exquisite convulsion.
Ignis roared against my mouth, caught in the very same backdraft of ecstasy.
She slammed her weight down against me until not a millimeter of air remained between our glistening bodies, her tail coiling around my hips like an iron shackle, holding me pinned at the apex of delirium until the final tremor drained from my muscles.
Silence crashed back over the room—thick, humid, and broken only by our ragged gasps mingling in thin plumes of steam.
I lay sprawled on the table, my chest slick with golden sweat and my silver hair spilled across the wood in glorious disarray.
Ignis rested her forehead in the crook of my neck, breathing heavily, her claws gently tracing the tender nub of my fourth tail, which now hummed with a warm, steady, thoroughly sated glow.
I lifted a limp hand, tangling my fingers through the dragoness’s tangled crimson locks, and pulled her down to brush her lips in a lazy, possessive kiss.
"Next time..." I murmured with a sharp, exhausted smirk, "don't wait for me to beg."
Ignis let out a low, gravelly laugh that vibrated against my ribs.
A smug grin tugged at her fangs as she closed her eyes, wrapping me in an invisible wing of furnace heat, relishing the fact that she had claimed the prize long before the vampire could ever return.