In Bonds of the Earth (Book of the Watchers 2) Read online

  “Yes,” I whispered to the tiles as the light caught, flickering through my nerves. I wanted him inside me. I wanted to draw him in and swallow him whole. “Yes!” I moaned, as I felt him swell, rising on my tide.

  I opened, willingly, as I came.

  I felt him move into me, sighing.

  No matter how much I crave his lovely hard cock it’s always a moment of doubt, that point when he enters me. There’s always a little fear. Is it too much? Will he hurt me? And the only solution is to welcome it.

  This was like that—but not just my sex or my ass, but in every cell of my skin, in every bone of my spine. I felt something—I don’t know what—the slide of huge muscle, the push of inexorable mass. And no, it didn’t hurt, but only because I surrendered, only because I was still tumbling through my orgasm. I felt Azazel pour himself into my body, suffusing the cytoplasm, invading the nuclei, twining up the DNA spirals. It was terrifying and joyous in equal measure—and when it was over I stood alone, barely holding myself upright against the bathroom wall.

  His spill ran down the insides of my trembling legs. I felt feverish.

  Groggily, I reached for the shower handle and let the water gush out over my burning skin. It took a long time for me to cool down to a comfortable temperature, minutes in which I seemed unable to collect any thoughts at all. I watched my hand on the wall and the splash of the water drops, the way they ran down and ran together. It was the only thing I could focus on.

  Behind my eyes, somewhere at the back of my skull, something lurked, vast and watchful; something barely contained.

  If he stretches, he will shred me. It was my first coherent thought. I imagined an explosion of bone fragments and blood splattering the shower room, like some horror movie. Keep still, Azazel, I told him.

  He didn’t answer, not in any way I was aware of. But I didn’t die—and when I looked down at myself, rinsing off our mingled sweat, I didn’t look bloated as I’d feared. Swift worms of water trickled their way over my breasts, fountaining from my hard nipples. I played with the rivulets, letting them spurt over my fingers, dinting the soft pale flesh experimentally, fascinated. Every drop. Every dimple on my areolae. I could see them all. I hefted my breasts in my hands, squeezing them together, delighted at the way that changed the flow of the water over their luscious swells.

  I was getting gooseflesh now. That was fascinating too. The way the stippled texture of my skin interacted with the water…

  Okay. Okay. What am I doing here? It dawned on me that I’d been standing under the cold flow, mindlessly distracted, for at least fifteen minutes. I flipped the shower handle, stepped out into the bedroom and grabbed a towel. The soft fibers felt glorious on my skin, and it was only a glimpse of my reflection in the full-length mirror that distracted me from patting myself dry with sensual extravagance.

  My eyes flashed silver.

  Oh, what?

  I stumbled to the mirror. For a moment it was Azazel’s inhuman eyes locked on me, before they darkened to their usual brown. I shivered. For some reason, that glimpse of my demon lover looking out from my face was more disturbing to me than the whole notion of being possessed by him. I glared at my reflection, half-panicked, daring it to change.

  God, I was beautiful. The realization dawned on me slowly, as my focus slipped from my eyes to my face, and then further down. My cold goose-pimpled skin was beautiful, inviting the brush of fingertips, promising so much sensitivity. Those bumpy red insect bites on my shins made a delicious constellation almost the exact copy of Pegasus. My small-breasted body with that embarrassing mole right between my breasts was perfect. All that soft kissable skin—the pliant curve of my waist and back—the jut of my hip that cried out to be grabbed. My lips, full and pink and vulnerably soft. Perfect. Perfect.

  I ran my hands over my stomach and felt a clench of post-orgasmic aftershock deep inside. The sight of my hands on my own breasts, hefting them, pinching those dusky pink nipples, the droplets of water hanging from the curls of my dark pubic hair…It was all unbearably provocative. I thrust my fingertips into my crotch, cupping the flame there, searching for soft, wet, lickable pussy.

  Oh that looks so fucking hot. I want that.

  My eyes flared like silver searchlights.

  “Azazel!” I yelped. “Dial it down a notch, will you?” Forcing myself to turn away from the mirror, I grabbed at the clothes he’d pulled off me earlier. I could feel the burning of blood in my cheeks.

  Was that how he saw me? I was genuinely shocked, and not until I had my clothes all back on did I dare look into the mirror again.

  Hair and eyes mismatched. Beautiful. Perfect.

  I couldn’t help smiling.

  As I set off down the corridor, my good mood grew. I felt taller and stronger somehow, my spine longer, my feet more sure. I could imagine a heavy dong swinging at my crotch as I strode along, and the thought made me laugh. A big vervet monkey sat on the open balcony window, staring at me; I walked toward it without feeling a flicker of my usual wariness—just fascinated by the consciousness in its dark eyes—and it turned to jump away into the frangipani tree outside. I paused to watch, at first following its movements among the branches, then distracted by the flowers, each whorl five-petaled and yolk-yellow in its heart. Tiny spiders scuttled over the velvet cushions of the petals and I caught one up on my fingertip, almost cross-eyed as I focused on the workings of its legs and the angle of its gemlike abdomen. How wonderful it was in its miniature perfection, I realized. And so many spiders on so many flowers on so many trees…

  The sound of feet snapped me out of my fractal reverie. A woman was coming down the passage toward me, carrying a mop and bucket. She was small and stoop-backed and elderly, slack-bodied and wrinkled and just incredibly lovely. Every wrinkle was a work of art. Each limping step took my breath away. She was a miracle of creation, it struck me, making my heart leap; a living sentient art-form wrought with utmost cunning out of raw atoms which ought really to be nothing more than swirling gases. Every stray hair, every cracked nail, and every lash on her drooping eyelid was fashioned with painstaking artifice.

  “What are you staring at, lady?” she muttered as she passed me.

  “You are… I’m sorry.” I caught myself before I blurted out how beautiful she was, and grinned. “I thought I knew you.”

  She shook her head and stamped onward. Only then did I realize that she’d spoken in Amharic—and that I’d replied in the same language.

  Holy crap, Azazel, I gasped under my breath. Is this what it’s like for you?

  I hurried into the bar, and found Roshana leaning against the counter chatting to a young man in hotel uniform who was hanging on her every word. She dismissed him with a flick of her wrist the moment she saw me, though, and came across to lead me to a nest of armchairs. Her mouth was pursed tight and her gaze intense.

  “You’ve got him, haven’t you?” she said in a low voice, staring at me across the glass coffee table. “He’s in there!”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You’ve suddenly started to walk like a man, honey. And you’re sitting like one too.”

  Panicked, I clapped my spread knees together and sat up fast from my slouch. “Shit!” I hissed, and Roshana laughed.

  “What’s it like?”

  “Like being a bit drunk,” I admitted. “Full of confidence. I feel like punching a lion. And he’s got…this amazing ability to focus. Not eyesight—I mean, to notice stuff. There are eighteen pillars in this room, each made of four sections, each with the hotel logo repeated three times. There are fourteen different kinds of whisky behind the bar. There are three hundred and sixty-three sequins on that blouse you’re wearing, two hundred links in your necklace, the stone is a fire-opal.”

  “And there I thought you were just staring at my rack,” she said, amused. “I’m up here, by the way.”

  “No!” Far too late, I wrenched my gaze up to her eyes.

  “Well you checked out every woman in th
e room when you entered.”

  “I did not!”

  “Oh, you did.” She flourished a grin. “I think he’s particularly good at focusing on titties, don’t you?”

  I didn’t answer, just dove into my jacket pocket and jammed on my gloriously dark sunglasses as fast as I could. It might look odd wearing them indoors, but that was the least of my worries. “How the hell am I supposed to manage outside of here?” I moaned.

  “Well.” Roshana stood and offered me her arm. “Keep your shades on, don’t talk if you can help it, and stay close to me.” She winked as she drew me to her side. “And honey, do try not to get a hard-on.”

  I did not enjoy the meal out. To be honest, I don’t recall it that well. I do remember that Roshana had to stop me ordering seven different courses because I wanted to try every possible flavor; sweet, savory, spicy, fruity, meaty—I just couldn’t make myself chose only one. Azazel’s immanence made me dizzy, and I could feel his restlessness. I think he was exploring the other potentials offered by my body too, because I found myself inconveniently—and very uncomfortably—horny, and I had to grit my teeth and cut myself off mentally from my inflamed sex.

  But we took our time over dinner. We lingered until all the other tourists had finished and gone back to their rooms and hotels. Then we walked out through town. There was no street-lighting in Lalibela, only that which spilled out accidentally from bars and shops. We kept to the shadows purposefully, hoping not to draw attention. Roshana was carrying a chic little rucksack with, I assumed, all her expensive essentials in. I simply wore the jacket I’d arrived in, its pockets loaded, most of my clothes and toiletries abandoned back in my room.

  I’d expected the site of the churches to be quiet at this time of night, long after tourist hours, but we could hear singing as we approached.

  “Do they never stop?” Roshana muttered, aggrieved. “There was some sort of service going on at three this morning. I heard it from my room. They had a loudspeaker.”

  Thanks to our reconnaissance and the Internet, it was easy enough to find the approach trench to Bet Gebriel-Rufael, though not so easy to pick our way along it. Our boots sounded horribly loud as we scuffed our way there through the deep shadows. Above our heads a strip of starlit night showed where the rock faces ended, but did little to light our way, and though I’d brought a small flashlight I didn’t turn it on in case we were noticed. Just because there were no visible barriers, it didn’t mean we weren’t trespassing.

  If it hadn’t been for Azazel flaming inside me I think I would have been terrified, but what I felt in actuality was a wolfish eagerness. The darkness felt like my ally.

  We climbed through the arch cut from one section of trench into another. The singing was more muffled back here, and I hoped the service was keeping all the priests occupied.

  The bottom-level door to the church was, as we’d previously discovered, a small portal deeply recessed into the rock at the head of seven worn steps. The wood of the door was ancient, cracked and reinforced with big iron studs. I took the lead, reaching up and pressing upon the boards.

  It didn’t yield. It didn’t even shift.

  For a moment I was genuinely nonplussed. Hadn’t I leaned on Chance to leave it unlocked? My unnatural luck had been good enough to stop a gun going off before now—how was the door defying me?

  Roshana stood on the step below, close enough to waft me with her perfume. “What’s up?” she breathed.

  I shoved my shoulder against the door. It didn’t rattle on its hinges. “I don’t know.”

  She groped around behind me. “Wood’s swollen. Let me.”

  So I retreated a few paces, staring around us twitchily. There was just enough light for me to see her lift her hands and shove the door hard. Really hard. The wood let out a loud crack and fell back from the frame, revealing a slot of pitch darkness as it swiveled on a single intact hinge and sagged into the room.

  Okay…just how strong is she? She might look ordinary, but that push had been anything but.

  “Oops.” Roshana stepped through into the dark and I followed a moment later. We were both conscious of the noise we’d made breaking in, and the first thing we did was grope about until we had the door between us, lift it back into place, and wedge it against the door jamb. I’m sure Roshana could have managed that on her own, to be honest, but I was trying to gloss over the fact that I’d noticed. And that I was slightly annoyed that she was stronger than me.

  “Okay?”

  “Uhuh.”

  Then she took out her phone. The pale glow of the screen seemed incredibly bright as she played it around the chamber.

  “Holy…” I blurted. She lifted an admonishing finger to her lips, then pulled out the phone stylus and wrote on the screen. I read the lines of handwriting she brandished.

  ‘We found where they stash the bodies then.’

  10

  BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO DIE IN THE LORD

  I could only agree with her verdict. We were surrounded by corpses, dried-out and fragile-looking, stacked so high that the ones at the bottom must have been flattened by their brethren. The easiest features to make out were feet and skulls; everything else was a leathery dusty mess of disintegration, draped ineffectually in chintz curtains.

  I pulled an Ewwww face, baring my teeth. Hundreds of empty eye sockets looked at us, the shadows shifting within them. It took an effort of will not to work out exactly how many.

  Roshana seemed a lot less perturbed. She glanced over the piles curiously, shining her light into dark corners. There was no particular smell in here, thank goodness—just a dusty church aroma—so the bodies must have all been really old. Nevertheless, I found myself trying not to breathe too deeply.

  With the tip of her finger Roshana indicated a long ladder of warped poles that led up to a square aperture in the ceiling.

  ‘Church up there,’ she wrote on her screen, and I nodded. ‘Where’s the lady?’

  For a horrible moment I wondered if Penemuel had just been stashed under all the bodies, a needle in a macabre haystack. But she hadn’t mentioned cadavers when we’d talked in my dream, only red rock.

  ‘Not under this lot,’ I wrote. Gingerly, trying not to step on anything that would give me nightmares forever, I plucked the little flashlight from my pocket and picked my way across the rocky floor between two piles of ex-pilgrims.

  I found an interior door easily enough. I judged that it faced back toward the so-called River Jordan. A device was carved into the rough rock of a lintel that threatened to smack the forehead of anyone entering: a deep U-shape cupping a ball. I stared at it, wondering what it could mean. It didn’t look Christian. It looked a lot older, somehow.

  Roshana nudged me. ‘Sun and moon’ said her phone screen. Her lips quirked smugly.

  Oh. Penemuel had said “The sun and moon stand over my head”—and I’d assumed she meant she was near the equator. I touched the carvings gingerly, noting every tiny pit in the stone.

  There was a padlock on the door, but it looked rusted. I glanced back at Roshana and she didn’t need telling; she snapped it off the hasp with one pull and dropped the broken pieces. Beyond the door was the narrowest of stairways which descended steeply into the dark.

  Azazel’s impatience shriveled a little.

  Down we go then, I told myself, and instinctively took the lead. Not my own instincts, of course—Azazel’s. Personally I’d have been happy to be in the rear when it came to meeting danger, but he felt strongly he should go first. Roshana pulled the door shut behind us. The stairs were not constructed for someone as tall as me; I had to arch my spine and crane my head back from the overhang of the roof. That angle and the worn stairs, scalloped by the passage of feet, made the descent precarious, and I considered sitting on my ass and sliding down.

  That plan was discarded when my feet hit water. I squeaked in shock and recoiled. Roshana hissed as I fell back against her shins and she poked me in the shoulder in an interrogative manner.
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  I shone my torch down and oily-looking blackness gleamed up at me. I reached over my shoulder for the phone and—clenching the flashlight in my teeth—wrote, ‘Flooded. Looks like the passage levels out tho.’

  ‘Is there room?’

  ‘Think so.’

  ‘Go on then!’

  I hated her right then more than anyone else in the universe. The dank, stale air of the passage felt claustrophobic, and I was sweating despite the cool stone against my palms. Azazel, I’m sure, would have much rather faced a thousand armed enemies than this rock squeeze. My inner heat in no way encouraged me to touch that lightless sump water. I wondered how long it had been standing in the tunnel, growing stagnant. Gritting my teeth, I eased down, step by step, into the tepid seep.

  At least I don’t have to worry about waterborne tropical diseases, I told myself. Leeches, maybe. Do you get leeches in caves?

  Ankles. Shins. Knees. Ugh! Thighs. And ah—now it levelled out. Luckily the roof was high enough here to allow me to stand upright, with caution. I played the torchlight from side to side as I waded slowly forward, testing my footing each time. The tunnel was wide enough for only one person to pass comfortably and there was a line of grave-niches on either side, all of them occupied. Those were above the tide mark, thank goodness. Or at least I hoped there were no open graves under the water, because that was a mental picture I really wanted to keep out of my head as I sloshed through the turbid fluid. It smelled like old dishwater, but I tried to be glad it wasn’t worse.

  Skeletal remains gaped at me like confused drunks, half-woken by the flash of my torch. Sorry, I told them.

  The tunnel was long, and nearly dead straight. It was going under the trench of the Jordan, I surmised, with more confidence than I’d ever naturally feel. We were heading back toward the northwestern group of churches.

  And there ahead of me, thank goodness, was a short flight of steps leading up through a rock arch. I gave Roshana a thumbs-up sign over my shoulder and felt hope as well as water surging around my strides. There was a chamber beyond the arch. It couldn’t be far now…