Fic: Corruption
Author: linaerys
Title: Corruption
Rating: R/NC-17, slash, Damien/Tarrant
Warnings: Some non-con-ishness, although not for our pairing
Standard Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, plot, etc. are the property of C. S. Friedman. The original characters, settings and plot are the property of the artist/author. The artist/author is in no way associated with C. S. Friedman and no copyright infringement is intended. This work is an amateur fan effort and no profit is being made.
Summary: At the beginning of When True Night Falls, Tarrant struggles to find dreams that will inspire Damien's fear.
A/N: I'm a little bit regretting writing this, but I don't want to delete it. So here it remains. Anyway, I'd like to think I will do something a little better in the future. Caveat lector.
Damien becomes harder to frighten as the voyage goes on. A man always in control of his life will fear impotence, not a petty impotence in the bedroom, but a real loss of puissance, so Tarrant puts him on the field of battle with no magic to call.
One night, he places Damien into a fight but moving too slowly-Tarrant makes Damien’s avatar dodge each dream-blow more slowly than the last, and the fear banks, then builds, then spills over and fills the Hunter's veins with its cold, pure pleasure.
He doesn't need to be in Damien's room when he causes the fear to flow-this ship is small enough that anywhere is close enough to gather in his food-but sometimes he likes to see Damien twitch in his sleep, see his eyelids move, and inhale sour scent of terror-sweat.
Women's fear is more easily generated, easily enjoyed, while men’s is a tougher meat. And yet, it has its own savor.
He would plant a garden of his dark haired beauties; make them bloom like hothouse flowers. They were his first prey and still his favorite. He loves to play the courtier, even when he feeds, to let them feel as if they are heroines in some terrible fairytale-it makes the denouement all the more sweet.
They were so simple to frighten-just a slow, knife-edged smile and their fear flows like wine, spilling over him. If their fear is a clear summer wine, Damien’s is more like drying blood, sticky, sluggish, with a deep, metallic tang.
Yet Damien’s mind seems to recognize these battlefield scenarios as dreams now and rejects them. Tarrant's genius for causing fear can't penetrate his serene inner core anymore, that glow of religiosity that Tarrant fears he finds as seductive as Damien does his darkness, and more dangerous.
Damien won’t admit his own attraction to the Hunter’s horrifying intellect; he will claim that he is using the Hunter. Binding evil, and thus changing its purpose, he will say smugly. When he allowed the soul-bond, Tarrant knows, he did it because he expected to kill the Hunter when their quest was over. Now they both live, and Tarrant can feel through the bond that the idea of his death is becoming as distasteful to Damien as Damien's death would be to him.
And this musing reveals the key to a deeper level of fear for Tarrant to evoke.
There is Ciani in a circle of moonlight; its blue hue makes her skin as pale as the Hunter’s, but she turns to him with a warmer smile than he ever saw on that face. She is naked and beckoning, and Damien goes to her.
Her arms are long and slim, and they reach out to him, but as he comes into the moonlit grove, she sees him for the first time and her face grows even paler, her eyes grow wide with panic.
She tries to run from him, while Damien pulls her to him. He tries to comfort her in his dream, but her face grows more terrified and agitated. It is nothing else she fears, no nightmare creatures from the dark forest, it is him. And her struggles make his passion rise in this dream as they never would in life. He kisses her neck as she always used to enjoy, and holds her tight to prevent her escape.
She screams silently as he pushes her down. She is paralyzed with fear now, lying on the ground, looking at him as prey does to the hunter, and then he rapes her with a fierce enjoyment, bruising her wrists with his hands, pounding into her until her screams stop and her eyes close.
Then, and only then does the disgust set in, the fear and despair, that he could be the instrument of her painful, horrifying death.
He runs away from the scene, from her torn body in the clearing, through pitch dark woods. In the distance gleam the spires of a castle, and now he knows for certain-it is the mockery of the Merentha castle in the Forest, the Hunter’s castle. The doors open as if for their master. Damien puts out his hands in front of him and sees bloodless, attenuated fingers instead of his own blunt brown ones.
In the entrance way to the castle is a mirror. Damien looks into it and sees not his face, but that of the Hunter, a drop of blood glistening on the side of his lips. He starts to scream . . .
And then he wakes.
The first time Tarrant gives Damien a dream of raping Ciani, he expects confrontation. You go too far, demon, Damien will say. Tarrant looks out over the calm ocean-too calm-only the most sluggish of breezes have stirred the slack sails these past weeks.
Instead his jaw works when he sees Tarrant, but he doesn't say anything. Maybe Tarrant can detect a hint of grudging respect flowing across their linkage. “You know me well, demon,” is what he says instead. He grips the railing, and Tarrant sees his knuckles whiten.
He conquers it too easily, though. The next time Tarrant confronts Damien with Ciani in the dreams, Damien turns it casually aside, and the Ciani figure evaporates. Tarrant brings her back, pairs her instead with an avatar of himself, makes her enjoy it, but he can feel Damien’s mind retreating from him, not in fear or even disgust, but in boredom.
With a snarl, Tarrant banishes the vision, and leaves Damien to sleep out the night in peace. He contents himself with spooking the sailors, and feels contemptuous of himself. I am become a boogieman for lesser minds, he thinks, as he uses nothing more than stealth and guile to startle a boy coiling rope. He has promised Damien to do use no more than naturally generated fear with the rest of the crew.
The next dream seems so simple to Tarrant he wonders why he never thought of it before. Tolerating my evil . . ., yes, that is what frightens Damien the most. Beyond the fear of helplessness, which all men and women share, Damien has a greater fear-that he will stop seeing the Hunter's evil and start seeing only the man.
Damien dozes fitfully in his cabin. He fears to sleep again, fears that the Hunter’s ability to generate fear will one day overwhelm him, then remembers the words of the Prophet himself. If the fae have taught us anything, the Prophet said, it is that fear is what we should fear the most. Tarrant would likely agree, and Damien rebels at feeding him with his waking thoughts as well as the dreams.
He gets up and walks around the tiny cabin for a moment to clear his mind and touches the few keepsakes he has with him. The crystal vial that once held the Fire seems to burn him, but the burn is a pleasant one, dispelling the remnants of Tarrant’s most recent assault on his psyche.
Night must have fallen while he slept because no telltale light sneaks in around the shuttered window. Damien considers rising for his day, a dark day he shares only with the night-watch and Tarrant, but he still feels tired and decides to lie down again. There will be little to do tonight besides look out over the empty ocean, and wish that by force of will he could hurry this voyage along.
He makes his way toward the bed as the door opens behind him, and Tarrant’s malevolent presence fills the room. Damien turns and as always, he is struck by the perfect panes of Tarrant's face, the silver eyes and knife-like smile. Tarrant’s vanity may be galling, or occasionally amusing, but the power of his appearance cannot be overstated.
And more . . . Damien notices the shadows around his eyes, the pallor-more than pallor-of his skin. It has taken on almost a waxy quality, like a corpse laid out for burial, yet not repulsive, for all that, just vulnerable. Funny, Damien would never before have thought to use that word to describe this man, not even when they pulled in his blackened corpse from the heart of a volcano.
“Is there anything I can do?” Damien offers hesitantly. He doesn’t even consider offering a Healing-he knows that much at least. Tarrant doesn’t say anything. His eyebrows draw together in a familiar scowl, but something is different, the expression somehow lacks its usual venom.
“Something is different,” says Damien.
“I don’t know how much longer I can go on,” says Tarrant, words Damien never would have thought to hear him say. Damien’s soul soars briefly within his chest. Could this be the first crack, the first offering, the first turning of the Prophet back to God?
He comes closer to Damien then turns away. Moonlight illuminates his profile, and all Damien can think is that he looks defeated, beaten. After a thousand years of unlife, did this voyage undo him?
“You corrupt me,” says Tarrant. “You challenge my perfect existence.” Responses fly up in Damien’s mind, to argue that the Hunter’s existence is anything but perfect, but he knows what Tarrant means, that before their trip to the Rakhlands, Tarrant was whole and contained in his forest fastness, and now something has cracked.
Then Damien seems to step outside himself, and sees them from above, light and dark, bleeding into each other, until only gray remains. He sees himself reach out to touch Tarrant on the shoulder, and then he is back in his body, and the shoulder is under his hand.
The warmth of that shoulder should warn him, as should the fact that Tarrant doesn’t shrug him off as he would in life, but allows the comforting touch. He turns toward Damien but does not attempt to free himself from Damien’s grasp.
Damien looks again at that perfect face, made, perhaps, more beautiful by the soul’s pain etched across those features. His body responds strangely to this Tarrant; he feels heat flooding his limbs, his face, and then arousal tents the front of the loose trousers he sleeps in.
He drops his arms as if Tarrant’s flesh has burnt him. Perhaps it has. “What have you done to me?” he whispers. “What new torment is this?”
“Who else is there, priest, who else in the world but me?” Tarrant’s whisper is melodious, seductive, and Damien wants to reach out to touch him again as much as he wants to flee this room, this ship, to swim back to Jaggonath if he must.
“Your pilot?” Tarrant continues. “No. Who knows you better?” Tarrant’s cheekbones catch the moonlight, high and elegant, like a woman’s but infinitely more beautiful.
Damien reaches out to touch that face, and Tarrant lets his cheek be cradled in Damien’s hand. The sight of his rough, scarred hand against the pure white of Tarrant’s skin stokes his lust more. It is inevitable-he will bridge the distance between them, take Tarrant’s face in both his hands, feel the impossibly soft skin under his fingertips; there is no turning back, and whatever horror he felt has been turned into nothing but longing and an anticipation that twists his stomach into knots.
It is more than a kiss that joins their mouths together-it is a rush of sensation all over his body, tightening his throat, making his hands tingle. He’s never hungered for a man before, but he hungered for this-he must have, because when he runs his hands over Tarrant’s back, he feels like a parched man who has just bathed in cool water, and Tarrant is touching him back, cool shivers tracing over Damien’s skin wherever Tarrant's hands go.
Their clothes disappear, and Damien doesn’t stop to think about how that happened, whether Tarrant used his precious resources to banish them, or whether he just forgot when he removed them, but they are naked together, cold and hot, tanned skin and skin that has not seen the sun for centuries, and it seems so right that Tarrant should come to him thus, come into the light at last.
Something in that thought jars Damien, and he takes a step back within his mind, and sees himself again, locked in an embrace with a demon. He is himself, and not himself-part of him still drowning in the exquisite sensations, and part of him starting to claw against the prison of his body, too full of desire to stop.
He pushes Tarrant down on the bed, face to face. He may have never been with a man, but he knows what to do. It should jar him that without any oil to slick his fingers, he can push one, then two into the man, the demon, whatever this creature is underneath him. Tarrant is cool inside where he should be hot, but that fuels Damien’s lust more, and Damien enters him, longing, more than for the sensation, for some signs of passion on Tarrant’s face.
Passion-like procreation, like Healing, is owed to Life. This may sever the bargain that holds Tarrant in unlife, but perhaps that is the price Tarrant will pay for his soul. The illogic of this doesn’t strike Damien, tangled as he is in emotions and sensations beyond thought.
Instead he drives into Tarrant, feels him clenching and releasing around him, feels the most transcendent physical bliss this life has ever granted him. He should feel horror, revulsion, something, but all he feels is pleasure, and a fullness of heart that not even Ciani engendered in him.
He thrusts and sees the Hunter’s face contorted in pleasure too, an expression he has only seen when the Hunter feeds. That realization makes Damien’s blood run cold, but not soon enough to stem the tide of his orgasm, which carries him over the boundary from sleep . . .
Into wakefulness.
Tarrant pulls himself up, gasping, out of the threads of the dream as they dissolve around him. He can feel Damien’s revulsion, but that emotion is not enough to feed Tarrant, and even if Damien overflowed with fear, he would want to sever this tie. The dream had nearly as much of a pull on him as it did on Damien, and he feels the heat of the Life that waits to end his bargain tingles on his fingertips, burning like the sun does.
Stupid, he berates himself. He thought that because the goal of the dream was to create fear, he would be safe from Life’s terrible seduction-the intent would still serve the evil forces that hold his death in abeyance.
And they would have, if Damien had felt fear. Stupid, and careless. Why had Damien not felt revulsion and fear? Why had he allowed such . . . Tarrant rubs his hands over his arms to dispel the feeling of the priest’s hands on his skin.
He read me better than I read him, thinks Tarrant finally. He must have showed Damien some small sliver of doubt, some tiny part of his soul that still longs for redemption, and Damien’s mind magnified that until the dream followed a path of Damien’s choosing. He meant, yes, for some dark sexual dream, something that would horrify Damien for days whenever he looked at the Hunter. The mixture of lust, fear and horror would have been a better meal than Tarrant had gotten since the journey began.
He corrupted me, Tarrant realizes. Exactly as I said he did, turned lust and fear into love and redemption. Tarrant shivers with horror. His body keens with hunger, but also with something else, recently fanned to the surface, something long-buried, which he’d thought dead: lust, not for the unclean darkness and pain that fed him for so long, but the uncomplicated lust of the body, lust for touch, lust unsullied by fear.
Tarrant dampens down the link between them to its smallest ebb as Damien rises from his room and comes to stand next to Tarrant at the railing. Oh, if I didn’t need you, I would rend your head from your shoulders, and drink down every drop of blood in your corpse, thinks Tarrant venomously. Your painful death is the only fit revenge for waking this in me. Not just lust. Affection.
Tarrant swallows down a greeting and gives Damien his best scowl. Damien shrugs and looks out over the water. If you say something smug, I will, Tarrant promises. Let the crew watch me dismember you, let Coldfire eat through your veins so you die in screaming terror. Let them try to kill me-I will no longer be bound by your ridiculous morality, if you just say something.
Damien’s body thrums with tension, and Tarrant can pick up through the link between them an uncertainty, as if Damien doesn’t know whether the dream came from Tarrant’s mind or his own. He says nothing. Tarrant feels Damien looking over at him, and if he turns he will see Damien’s brown eyes full of unvoiced questions, but he does not.
Instead he expends some hard-won energy to chill the air around him down to levels that Damien will find uncomfortable, and Damien takes the hint. He sighs heavily and shivers, then turns and walks away toward the ship’s wheel-house.
Damn you, thinks Tarrant helplessly. If you don’t damn me first.
Title: Corruption
Rating: R/NC-17, slash, Damien/Tarrant
Warnings: Some non-con-ishness, although not for our pairing
Standard Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, plot, etc. are the property of C. S. Friedman. The original characters, settings and plot are the property of the artist/author. The artist/author is in no way associated with C. S. Friedman and no copyright infringement is intended. This work is an amateur fan effort and no profit is being made.
Summary: At the beginning of When True Night Falls, Tarrant struggles to find dreams that will inspire Damien's fear.
A/N: I'm a little bit regretting writing this, but I don't want to delete it. So here it remains. Anyway, I'd like to think I will do something a little better in the future. Caveat lector.
Damien becomes harder to frighten as the voyage goes on. A man always in control of his life will fear impotence, not a petty impotence in the bedroom, but a real loss of puissance, so Tarrant puts him on the field of battle with no magic to call.
One night, he places Damien into a fight but moving too slowly-Tarrant makes Damien’s avatar dodge each dream-blow more slowly than the last, and the fear banks, then builds, then spills over and fills the Hunter's veins with its cold, pure pleasure.
He doesn't need to be in Damien's room when he causes the fear to flow-this ship is small enough that anywhere is close enough to gather in his food-but sometimes he likes to see Damien twitch in his sleep, see his eyelids move, and inhale sour scent of terror-sweat.
Women's fear is more easily generated, easily enjoyed, while men’s is a tougher meat. And yet, it has its own savor.
He would plant a garden of his dark haired beauties; make them bloom like hothouse flowers. They were his first prey and still his favorite. He loves to play the courtier, even when he feeds, to let them feel as if they are heroines in some terrible fairytale-it makes the denouement all the more sweet.
They were so simple to frighten-just a slow, knife-edged smile and their fear flows like wine, spilling over him. If their fear is a clear summer wine, Damien’s is more like drying blood, sticky, sluggish, with a deep, metallic tang.
Yet Damien’s mind seems to recognize these battlefield scenarios as dreams now and rejects them. Tarrant's genius for causing fear can't penetrate his serene inner core anymore, that glow of religiosity that Tarrant fears he finds as seductive as Damien does his darkness, and more dangerous.
Damien won’t admit his own attraction to the Hunter’s horrifying intellect; he will claim that he is using the Hunter. Binding evil, and thus changing its purpose, he will say smugly. When he allowed the soul-bond, Tarrant knows, he did it because he expected to kill the Hunter when their quest was over. Now they both live, and Tarrant can feel through the bond that the idea of his death is becoming as distasteful to Damien as Damien's death would be to him.
And this musing reveals the key to a deeper level of fear for Tarrant to evoke.
There is Ciani in a circle of moonlight; its blue hue makes her skin as pale as the Hunter’s, but she turns to him with a warmer smile than he ever saw on that face. She is naked and beckoning, and Damien goes to her.
Her arms are long and slim, and they reach out to him, but as he comes into the moonlit grove, she sees him for the first time and her face grows even paler, her eyes grow wide with panic.
She tries to run from him, while Damien pulls her to him. He tries to comfort her in his dream, but her face grows more terrified and agitated. It is nothing else she fears, no nightmare creatures from the dark forest, it is him. And her struggles make his passion rise in this dream as they never would in life. He kisses her neck as she always used to enjoy, and holds her tight to prevent her escape.
She screams silently as he pushes her down. She is paralyzed with fear now, lying on the ground, looking at him as prey does to the hunter, and then he rapes her with a fierce enjoyment, bruising her wrists with his hands, pounding into her until her screams stop and her eyes close.
Then, and only then does the disgust set in, the fear and despair, that he could be the instrument of her painful, horrifying death.
He runs away from the scene, from her torn body in the clearing, through pitch dark woods. In the distance gleam the spires of a castle, and now he knows for certain-it is the mockery of the Merentha castle in the Forest, the Hunter’s castle. The doors open as if for their master. Damien puts out his hands in front of him and sees bloodless, attenuated fingers instead of his own blunt brown ones.
In the entrance way to the castle is a mirror. Damien looks into it and sees not his face, but that of the Hunter, a drop of blood glistening on the side of his lips. He starts to scream . . .
And then he wakes.
The first time Tarrant gives Damien a dream of raping Ciani, he expects confrontation. You go too far, demon, Damien will say. Tarrant looks out over the calm ocean-too calm-only the most sluggish of breezes have stirred the slack sails these past weeks.
Instead his jaw works when he sees Tarrant, but he doesn't say anything. Maybe Tarrant can detect a hint of grudging respect flowing across their linkage. “You know me well, demon,” is what he says instead. He grips the railing, and Tarrant sees his knuckles whiten.
He conquers it too easily, though. The next time Tarrant confronts Damien with Ciani in the dreams, Damien turns it casually aside, and the Ciani figure evaporates. Tarrant brings her back, pairs her instead with an avatar of himself, makes her enjoy it, but he can feel Damien’s mind retreating from him, not in fear or even disgust, but in boredom.
With a snarl, Tarrant banishes the vision, and leaves Damien to sleep out the night in peace. He contents himself with spooking the sailors, and feels contemptuous of himself. I am become a boogieman for lesser minds, he thinks, as he uses nothing more than stealth and guile to startle a boy coiling rope. He has promised Damien to do use no more than naturally generated fear with the rest of the crew.
The next dream seems so simple to Tarrant he wonders why he never thought of it before. Tolerating my evil . . ., yes, that is what frightens Damien the most. Beyond the fear of helplessness, which all men and women share, Damien has a greater fear-that he will stop seeing the Hunter's evil and start seeing only the man.
Damien dozes fitfully in his cabin. He fears to sleep again, fears that the Hunter’s ability to generate fear will one day overwhelm him, then remembers the words of the Prophet himself. If the fae have taught us anything, the Prophet said, it is that fear is what we should fear the most. Tarrant would likely agree, and Damien rebels at feeding him with his waking thoughts as well as the dreams.
He gets up and walks around the tiny cabin for a moment to clear his mind and touches the few keepsakes he has with him. The crystal vial that once held the Fire seems to burn him, but the burn is a pleasant one, dispelling the remnants of Tarrant’s most recent assault on his psyche.
Night must have fallen while he slept because no telltale light sneaks in around the shuttered window. Damien considers rising for his day, a dark day he shares only with the night-watch and Tarrant, but he still feels tired and decides to lie down again. There will be little to do tonight besides look out over the empty ocean, and wish that by force of will he could hurry this voyage along.
He makes his way toward the bed as the door opens behind him, and Tarrant’s malevolent presence fills the room. Damien turns and as always, he is struck by the perfect panes of Tarrant's face, the silver eyes and knife-like smile. Tarrant’s vanity may be galling, or occasionally amusing, but the power of his appearance cannot be overstated.
And more . . . Damien notices the shadows around his eyes, the pallor-more than pallor-of his skin. It has taken on almost a waxy quality, like a corpse laid out for burial, yet not repulsive, for all that, just vulnerable. Funny, Damien would never before have thought to use that word to describe this man, not even when they pulled in his blackened corpse from the heart of a volcano.
“Is there anything I can do?” Damien offers hesitantly. He doesn’t even consider offering a Healing-he knows that much at least. Tarrant doesn’t say anything. His eyebrows draw together in a familiar scowl, but something is different, the expression somehow lacks its usual venom.
“Something is different,” says Damien.
“I don’t know how much longer I can go on,” says Tarrant, words Damien never would have thought to hear him say. Damien’s soul soars briefly within his chest. Could this be the first crack, the first offering, the first turning of the Prophet back to God?
He comes closer to Damien then turns away. Moonlight illuminates his profile, and all Damien can think is that he looks defeated, beaten. After a thousand years of unlife, did this voyage undo him?
“You corrupt me,” says Tarrant. “You challenge my perfect existence.” Responses fly up in Damien’s mind, to argue that the Hunter’s existence is anything but perfect, but he knows what Tarrant means, that before their trip to the Rakhlands, Tarrant was whole and contained in his forest fastness, and now something has cracked.
Then Damien seems to step outside himself, and sees them from above, light and dark, bleeding into each other, until only gray remains. He sees himself reach out to touch Tarrant on the shoulder, and then he is back in his body, and the shoulder is under his hand.
The warmth of that shoulder should warn him, as should the fact that Tarrant doesn’t shrug him off as he would in life, but allows the comforting touch. He turns toward Damien but does not attempt to free himself from Damien’s grasp.
Damien looks again at that perfect face, made, perhaps, more beautiful by the soul’s pain etched across those features. His body responds strangely to this Tarrant; he feels heat flooding his limbs, his face, and then arousal tents the front of the loose trousers he sleeps in.
He drops his arms as if Tarrant’s flesh has burnt him. Perhaps it has. “What have you done to me?” he whispers. “What new torment is this?”
“Who else is there, priest, who else in the world but me?” Tarrant’s whisper is melodious, seductive, and Damien wants to reach out to touch him again as much as he wants to flee this room, this ship, to swim back to Jaggonath if he must.
“Your pilot?” Tarrant continues. “No. Who knows you better?” Tarrant’s cheekbones catch the moonlight, high and elegant, like a woman’s but infinitely more beautiful.
Damien reaches out to touch that face, and Tarrant lets his cheek be cradled in Damien’s hand. The sight of his rough, scarred hand against the pure white of Tarrant’s skin stokes his lust more. It is inevitable-he will bridge the distance between them, take Tarrant’s face in both his hands, feel the impossibly soft skin under his fingertips; there is no turning back, and whatever horror he felt has been turned into nothing but longing and an anticipation that twists his stomach into knots.
It is more than a kiss that joins their mouths together-it is a rush of sensation all over his body, tightening his throat, making his hands tingle. He’s never hungered for a man before, but he hungered for this-he must have, because when he runs his hands over Tarrant’s back, he feels like a parched man who has just bathed in cool water, and Tarrant is touching him back, cool shivers tracing over Damien’s skin wherever Tarrant's hands go.
Their clothes disappear, and Damien doesn’t stop to think about how that happened, whether Tarrant used his precious resources to banish them, or whether he just forgot when he removed them, but they are naked together, cold and hot, tanned skin and skin that has not seen the sun for centuries, and it seems so right that Tarrant should come to him thus, come into the light at last.
Something in that thought jars Damien, and he takes a step back within his mind, and sees himself again, locked in an embrace with a demon. He is himself, and not himself-part of him still drowning in the exquisite sensations, and part of him starting to claw against the prison of his body, too full of desire to stop.
He pushes Tarrant down on the bed, face to face. He may have never been with a man, but he knows what to do. It should jar him that without any oil to slick his fingers, he can push one, then two into the man, the demon, whatever this creature is underneath him. Tarrant is cool inside where he should be hot, but that fuels Damien’s lust more, and Damien enters him, longing, more than for the sensation, for some signs of passion on Tarrant’s face.
Passion-like procreation, like Healing, is owed to Life. This may sever the bargain that holds Tarrant in unlife, but perhaps that is the price Tarrant will pay for his soul. The illogic of this doesn’t strike Damien, tangled as he is in emotions and sensations beyond thought.
Instead he drives into Tarrant, feels him clenching and releasing around him, feels the most transcendent physical bliss this life has ever granted him. He should feel horror, revulsion, something, but all he feels is pleasure, and a fullness of heart that not even Ciani engendered in him.
He thrusts and sees the Hunter’s face contorted in pleasure too, an expression he has only seen when the Hunter feeds. That realization makes Damien’s blood run cold, but not soon enough to stem the tide of his orgasm, which carries him over the boundary from sleep . . .
Into wakefulness.
Tarrant pulls himself up, gasping, out of the threads of the dream as they dissolve around him. He can feel Damien’s revulsion, but that emotion is not enough to feed Tarrant, and even if Damien overflowed with fear, he would want to sever this tie. The dream had nearly as much of a pull on him as it did on Damien, and he feels the heat of the Life that waits to end his bargain tingles on his fingertips, burning like the sun does.
Stupid, he berates himself. He thought that because the goal of the dream was to create fear, he would be safe from Life’s terrible seduction-the intent would still serve the evil forces that hold his death in abeyance.
And they would have, if Damien had felt fear. Stupid, and careless. Why had Damien not felt revulsion and fear? Why had he allowed such . . . Tarrant rubs his hands over his arms to dispel the feeling of the priest’s hands on his skin.
He read me better than I read him, thinks Tarrant finally. He must have showed Damien some small sliver of doubt, some tiny part of his soul that still longs for redemption, and Damien’s mind magnified that until the dream followed a path of Damien’s choosing. He meant, yes, for some dark sexual dream, something that would horrify Damien for days whenever he looked at the Hunter. The mixture of lust, fear and horror would have been a better meal than Tarrant had gotten since the journey began.
He corrupted me, Tarrant realizes. Exactly as I said he did, turned lust and fear into love and redemption. Tarrant shivers with horror. His body keens with hunger, but also with something else, recently fanned to the surface, something long-buried, which he’d thought dead: lust, not for the unclean darkness and pain that fed him for so long, but the uncomplicated lust of the body, lust for touch, lust unsullied by fear.
Tarrant dampens down the link between them to its smallest ebb as Damien rises from his room and comes to stand next to Tarrant at the railing. Oh, if I didn’t need you, I would rend your head from your shoulders, and drink down every drop of blood in your corpse, thinks Tarrant venomously. Your painful death is the only fit revenge for waking this in me. Not just lust. Affection.
Tarrant swallows down a greeting and gives Damien his best scowl. Damien shrugs and looks out over the water. If you say something smug, I will, Tarrant promises. Let the crew watch me dismember you, let Coldfire eat through your veins so you die in screaming terror. Let them try to kill me-I will no longer be bound by your ridiculous morality, if you just say something.
Damien’s body thrums with tension, and Tarrant can pick up through the link between them an uncertainty, as if Damien doesn’t know whether the dream came from Tarrant’s mind or his own. He says nothing. Tarrant feels Damien looking over at him, and if he turns he will see Damien’s brown eyes full of unvoiced questions, but he does not.
Instead he expends some hard-won energy to chill the air around him down to levels that Damien will find uncomfortable, and Damien takes the hint. He sighs heavily and shivers, then turns and walks away toward the ship’s wheel-house.
Damn you, thinks Tarrant helplessly. If you don’t damn me first.