The Scholomance (64 page)

Only now she
was. And now she had killed not just the people who had tried to prey on her,
but people who had just been standing around waiting for dinner. People who’d
never seen it coming. People who hadn’t cut her so much as a dirty glance in
all the time she’d been here. And she couldn’t make herself feel bad.

Mara finished
her bath, brushed her hair, and dressed in her old neophyte’s robe. Her black one
was still in Kazuul’s chamber, she remembered, unless it had fallen off the
broken pillar and blown itself out the aerie.

Two people came
into the baths, saw her, and bowed themselves out again.

‘I want my robe,’
thought Mara, who had never in her life cared about the clothes she wore. It
had nothing to do with the other students or with the cautious way they crept
around her, as if she were another demon who would at any moment stalk them for
her own cruel amusement. It was all about her robe.

The ephebeum
quieted when she came into it. It was nearly empty now. Loki was gone. The few
students lingering here before lessons watched her walk by as they would a
Master among them, waiting to see if she wanted something before returning to
their own pursuits. She wanted to believe that things would go back to what
passed for normal here in time, that she would go back to being just another
lion, and in the meantime…

In the meantime,
she wanted her robe.

Across the Nave
and into the lyceum, Mara walked without looking at the students who bowed to
her, or tapping at their minds to hear what they were saying when they ducked
away to whisper. She climbed the winding stair to the very top, took three
steps into the straight-walled tunnel there, and stopped.

The lamps that
lined the walls leading to Kazuul’s doors were already lit.

Well, she didn’t
really think she was the only person who knew this place existed, did she? Particularly
when she had been coming here so often, and she knew people were watching her. It
was probably Devlin. He’d followed her here before.

But he couldn’t
light the lamps.

‘I’m not going
to kill anyone,’ thought Mara, and started walking again. ‘It might be a trap,
but I will not lose my temper, even if it is Loki. It’s just as easy to put
someone to sleep as it is to—’

To turn their
blood to salt. To burst their bones out through their eyes. To catch them,
crush them, cut them in half.

Kazuul’s door
opened.

Mara stopped
again, and watched as bronze-bodied Letha came gracefully into the hall. She
was naked—she was always naked, why would Mara even notice that now?—and the
slender quills that grew down her belly cut points of black shadow across her
sex like hungry teeth. She saw Mara and smiled, her sensuous stride unaffected
as she came closer, passed her, and continued on. She didn’t say a word.

Mara turned to
watch until the demoness had vanished from sight down the stairs. She stood a
moment, not thinking, and then went quickly to the doors and pulled them open. Letha
had left no footprints on the dust that carpeted Kazuul’s abandoned theater,
but the perfume of her body’s musk still lingered. She followed it down to
Kazuul’s bedchamber and tore the curtains open.

He sat at his
table, hunched in a brooding way over his cup, and he didn’t look around, only
growled, “Away with thee. I’ll give thee no more ear, only the cut of my
claws.”

“Jesus, fine,”
said Mara.

He snapped
around, the cup and its suspiciously thick wine flying. He stared for a
heartbeat, then seized the great stone slab of the table and threw it into one
of a very few standing pillars, smashing both. “
Do not take that form with
me
!” he bellowed.

Mara tapped at
him, making sure he could feel her own true touch, and the rage which howled
through the Mindstorm blew out like a candle and was gone. His mind brushed
back at hers, but she withdrew and sealed herself up tight. “I came for my
robe,” she said.

He didn’t look
for it, didn’t even turn his head. He came to her, his powerful mind still
stroking gently at the Panic Room’s walls.

“Just the robe,”
said Mara, as he swept one arm around her, pulling her against him. She turned
her face away when he bent to kiss her, and he, undaunted, grazed his teeth
across her cheek instead. She shoved at him; he would not be shoved. “Didn’t
you get enough from Letha?” she snapped.

His snarl
blasted into her ear, but he swiftly bit it back and tried a smoky purr in its
place. “Still the vipers of thy heart. Thou remainest mine own.”

“Your property.”

She drove him
back with that one, but not far, and not for long. Then he smiled. “My
beloved,” he said, and this time when she turned her face away, he caught her
chin and brought her firmly into his kiss. His inhuman mouth forced hers open.
His tongue drove into her with violence and then began a lazy conquest. He
pressed her against the wall and took from her easily in spite of her feeble
struggles. Nothing she did to him had any effect. When he released her, it was
with laughter.

“Thou wouldst
seem to be recovered,” he observed as she struck a harmless fist off his broad
chest. “Didst thou seek me out to test thy strength?”

“All I want—”

“Thou art
wearing one.” The corner of his mouth twitched upwards. “For the present.”

“I want that
one.”

“Indeed.” Kazuul
stroked at her thigh, then began to draw her robe up as he nuzzled fondly at
her throat. “Then thou shouldst do away with the first.”

She smacked at
his hand. He dropped the robe and his smile and looked at her. Then he seized a
fistful of robe at her shoulder, punched a claw through the taut cloth, and
ripped it open from her neck to her knees. In two rough yanks, he peeled her
free of the sleeves and snarled at her as she stood in its ruins.

“I was using
that,” Mara said coldly.

Kazuul picked
her up and threw her. She swept through empty space too shocked to cry out and
landed in a deep drift of his tattered bedding. She sat up fast and he sprang
after her, cutting the air into howls with his leap, towering over her in a
black fury. His toe-claws scored at the stone edge of the bed, then he dropped
into a bestial crouch and stalked towards her, fangs bared and snarling.

Mara gave inches
grudgingly, lying down only as he rose over her, and when his face dominated
all her sight, she said, “Sometimes I really hate you.”

“That will
change.” He lowered his burning body over hers, pressing his weight atop her as
he teased her lips apart with gentle bites. “Admit me, Mara.”

“No.”

He drove the
plane of his hand between her knees and cut upwards, effortlessly wedging her
thighs apart and settling between them. “Tell me why thou hast come to me,” he
growled, grinding his covered hips against her naked ones in short, powerful
thrusts. The aged leather and layered silks rubbed on her bare pubis to intense
and terrible effect, igniting heat as effectively as if he’d touched a live
coal to her, and like a live coal, it hurt. “Tell me truthfully. Tell me thee
came to fuck me.”

She tried to
laugh at him, but groaned instead, one leg wrapping of its own will around him.
“I want my robe,” she insisted, digging her fingernails at his shoulder.

“So thou art desperate
to believe, but thou knowest the lie as well as I.” He caught her hand when she
slapped at him, bit her palm until she bled, and then sucked slowly at the
wound, purring, his tongue lapping and teasing at its lips in a brazenly sexual
manner, and God help her, but she could feel an echo of everything he did in
her aching pussy. “Thou desirest my bed and not thy garment. Tis in every touch
of thee, save the lie of thy lips, yet I shall be thy fool and believe it. Tell
me what thou wouldst have of me, o my beloved one. Tell me, and whatsoever you
demand, so I shall give thee.” She writhed against his constrained erection and
he smiled, thrusting at her even harder. “What shall it be, Bitter Waters? Thy
robe…or my cock?”

The thought of
walking back to her cell dug at her inexplicably, as sharp as daggers in her
gut. She could see the stupid robe when she twisted away from him, see it lying
empty on the floor, and for a moment, she felt every bit as limp and hollow as
it looked in her eyes.

“I came to fuck
you,” she whispered, slapping a hand over her face.

“Ha!” He pulled
her wrist away, his eyes burning ferociously into hers. “Again!”

“I came to fuck
you!” she shouted.

He reared up,
lips stretched in rapacious triumph, to work his belt open, and Mara sat up in
the same instant to shove him on his back. He went agreeably enough, growling
as he watched her tear his sparse clothing away.

She mounted him
with a snarl of her own, bucking him deeper and deeper inside her until he was
wholly sheathed and she, riding wildly. Impaled on his blistering heat so
fully, she could feel every beat of his alien heart like a hammer inside her,
and she rode that too, pulling blindly at his spikes for leverage. He didn’t
make a sound when she broke a thick point off one of the cracked ones, only dug
his claws into her ass and began to yank her against him in even greater
violence.

Why did it have
to feel so good? She looked down and saw him beneath her—his head thrown back,
his spikes gouging fresh tears in all his bedding, his every muscle standing
out in stark relief—and saw a man in the agonies of death, not the ecstasies of
flesh.

She hadn’t
really seen the men she’d killed, but suddenly, unpleasantly, the two thoughts
merged, and it was in that awful instant that she came. Climax like claws
ripped through her even as all the frenetic heat of lust turned in a heartbeat
to sick horror. She recoiled, kicking and screaming at him, and he opened his
bewildered eyes and let her go.

She retreated in
a thrash of limbs until her back struck the spreading wings of his headboard
and there she sat as he pushed himself up on his elbows to gaze thoughtfully
back at her. The candlelight turned his stone-grey skin to the sallow yellow of
a corpse, and his eyes were sunk in shadows. He watched her without expression,
his mind all that moved.

“What am I
doing?” Mara asked. She tried to laugh. It was an even shakier effort than her
words. “What am I doing here?”

The hot glow of
Kazuul’s green eyes dimmed minutely. He sat all the way up, drawing in his legs
and leaning on them in a comfortable manner, utterly ignoring the erection
jutting wetly between his thighs. “And where else shouldst thou be? Building
cairns? Singing dirges?”

“I killed those
people. Why am I…fucking
you
?” She laughed again, pressing her hands to
her head. “I don’t even like you!”

“Good,” he said,
with disturbing sincerity. “Like, a pale word of half-felt meaning. I would
rather have the red meat of thy hatred than the milky cup of thy liking until I
have earned thy honest love.” His head cocked. “How long wilt thou mourn the
deaths of those who meant to murder thee?”

“I’m not
mourning them, I’m—” She stared at him, thinking, ‘mourning me,’ and that was
so ludicrous and baffling a thought that she couldn’t sit with it. She looked
around, saw her black robe lying in a heap beside the broken pillar, and swung
her legs out over the edge of the bed.

Kazuul caught
her shoulder. She stiffened to shrug him off, but then just relaxed and sat
there. She hated to think what she must look like, hunched and naked and still
flushed from orgasm—sulky and slutty at the same time, and it wasn’t the
sluttiness that bothered her.

“I don’t feel
bad,” she said.

He shrugged,
bone spikes clacking.

“I should feel
bad. I should feel bad that I did it, even if I don’t feel bad for them, but I
don’t. Instead I’m here…trying to cum my brains out with someone—” She glanced
at him, eyes moving restlessly up and down his powerful frame, still wanting
him. “—someone who’s arguably the most terrifying living thing in this whole damn
world.”

He grunted,
neither flattered nor offended.

“I’m not a good
person. I’ve known that all my life. I’ve learned to be okay with it, but damn
it, I am better than the kind of person who would kill nine people and then
fuck
you
.”

She tried to get
up again, and again, he stopped her.

“I don’t want to
be here anymore, Kazuul,” she warned him. “You want to finish, you can bring
Letha back.”

Now his
annoyance stabbed the Mindstorm, but his tone was even as he said, “Thou
wouldst yet be with me if thou had not worked thy vengeful will upon thy
marauders.”

“That’s awfully
presumptive.”

“So what matter
their deaths to thee now?” he went on. “Thou art what thou art. Thou owest
their bones no apology.”

“It never
occurred to me to apologize. Jesus, I need to get out of here.” Mara looked
around, but she didn’t mean this room, and he knew it as well as she did. “I
think I’m losing my mind.”

“Nay.”

“Don’t you ‘nay’
me, you don’t know a goddamn thing about me! I killed nine people in at most
three minutes, and maybe that’s all in a day’s work for you, but it’s fucking
new to me! No one sane loses their temper like that!”

“Nay, I say.” The
hand on her shoulder patted her twice and removed itself. “Thou hast developed
admirable control to fit thy little purposes in thy short life, but thou art
become many times more powerful in a sparing handful of days and thy controls
have not grown in accordance. Thou art sane enough and thou wilt learn to
master thyself once more in time.”

She heard the
low clack and rustle as he recovered his belt, felt the bedding shift as he
rose. He dressed, showing no emotion at the abrupt end that had come to this
interlude beyond a slight tightening of his lips. His gaze drifted as he cinched
his belt, and then he took two steps, bent, and came up with her acolyte’s
robe. He tossed it on the bed beside her and walked away.