1.39. Warm Together

Seth laughed.

Lisa joined in. The will-o-wisps in her eyes gleamed brightly.

“You’re joking,” he said.

Her lips closed around her laugh, muffling it into a giggling hum.

“You’re joking, right?”

“You can say no,” she said. “I promise not to mope if you say no. But I want to do this for you, Seth. I’d love to. You’re a good man—”

“Not really.”

“Yes, you are.” Her expression sharpened. “You’ve lived a life where being good gets you nowhere. Gets you a bed in the stables and a knife to your throat. You’ve been taught to hold it in, that goodness is foolishness or weakness. You have been longing and longing for permission to be a good man. And your opportunity came, and you took it. You might not believe that but I do.”

Seth’s eyes darted from Lisa’s face to the shadow of his discarded boots. The stolen stiletto still tucked into the bootleg, probably. How would she feel if she knew he was still stealing, everywhere they went?

“You’ve won over my children,” she said. “You’ve had their backs. You’re good-looking and hard-working, and you really deserve to cum in someone’s mouth, and I’d be delighted if it was mine.”

She was so close. She was practically straddling him now. There were reasons he couldn’t do this. There were, right? What were the reasons? He stalled: “Wouldn’t I—” You’d unlight, dummy. “I’d turn. Wouldn’t I?”

She rested her hand on the lower curve of her abdominals. “My cunt would unlight you, Seth. Not my mouth. But if you really want to be careful, you could cum on my face. Or between my tits. Or wherever you’d like.” A soft laugh. “I’m rather curious, really, where you’d like.”

She made those jagged vulgarities, cunt and tits, sound so gentle. So cute, like pet names whispered in the dark. Seth was finding it difficult to breathe.

“Though there’s a tidiness to the face, isn’t there,” she mused. “Keeping it all strictly Lisa. The slow skin-contact unlighting will be a factor, of course. Maybe a little faster, even, thanks to the saliva. But we can be quick. I haven’t pleasured anyone with this mouth yet, but the sorceress who gave it to me has quite the trove of technique up here.” She rested a hand on his forearm and clucked her tongue sympathetically when he shuddered under her touch. “And you are pent-up . Poor thing. I can tell. You’re being such a saint for me. I could release some of this pressure for you. I’d barely need a minute. The first time, anyway.”

“You said Annalise first.” Why was he saying these things? Why was he squinting at this brilliant diamond she’d handed him?

“I said you have to kiss Annalise first. This isn’t a kiss.”

“I guess not,” he murmured. “I mean, not on my part, I guess.”

“I reserve the right to kiss it,” she said. “Before I suck it. And after, probably. And a few times during. But that’s not breaking the rule either.”

“Well, you are the lawman.” He raised his forearm beneath her hand, putting their radii flush together, and rested his own palm on the ink-etched Weeping Razor hexentat that curved out from her elbow. “Does Annalise see it that way?”

Lisa sank lower. Her chest brushed his, just enough for him to feel the unspeakably erotic nudge of a firm nipple through the fabric. “Do you think I wrestled my way onto the stump?” she asked, hopefully loud enough she didn’t hear the gasp she just drew from him. “I’m here because Annalise wanted me to be. She dug me out and put me on, so that I could visit you. She realized the answer to your question, Seth. What is it about me, you asked. You remember? What makes Lisa sure, and Annalise unsure?”

When she breathed in, it brought her breasts a hair’s breadth closer once again. They rested lightly on him now. Just the slightest smush. Soft, downy deformation. “I remember,” he said.

“The answer,” she said, “is nothing.”

His head was swimming.

“It’s just me, Seth.” Her thumbs kneaded against his upper arms. “It’s always just me. It’s me and Annalise and even Anna. It’s just that I’m the only one who can say things like this:”

Her hips touched down. She was sitting in his lap now.

“I want to feel your hands in my hair while you fuck my throat, Seth. I want to choke on you. I want to know what sounds you make when you finally let go. I want to stop being a weapon for a night. I want to feel like a woman again. I want to feel like your woman.”

The sensation of her body making firm, unashamed contact with his was so shockingly substantial after the strange half-dream, half-nightmare his new job had been. She was so real . So solid and big and hot. The reality of her, of how close she was, of the unimaginable things she had just said to him, thundered through him like a slap. Fucking saints—he could feel her plump round ass settle into a heart shape as she let her weight spread across him. His fists balled into the blankets.

“Annalise wants to say that, and she can’t,” she said. “And instead she came back to the carriage, and found her Lisa head, and now here she is. Here I am.”

“Should we—should I talk to her, then? About this?”

“No, Seth.” Lisa’s smile and softness made no retreat, but her tone brooked no argument. “I’m sorry, but no. I am making a clear delineation. Neat and tidy. I’m Anna when it’s time to hunt seraphs because she’s best at hunting seraphs. I’m Annalise for executions because she’s best at executions. And when it comes time for dealing with beautiful boys, I’ve refused my own expertise, for some ridiculous reason. No longer. No more of this angsty nonsense. Annalise can be your friend and mentor, Anna can be your taskmaster, and Lisa …”

She pressed her lips to his forehead again. He nearly fainted.

“Lisa can take care of you. In ways that’ll keep you lit. My mouth, my hands, my chest. There are some wonderful things I can do for you with my thighs. Whatever you’d like. I can keep you focused during the day, and keep you company at night. They keep getting colder.”

Her palm slid into his. Their fingers interlaced. She had calluses at the base of each digit, marks of training in strength and swordwork. With slow, deliberate intention, she lifted his captured hand and placed it on her chest, right over her heart. Her collarbone under the tip of his middle finger, her breasts cushioning his wrist. Her heart, pounding hard under his palm. Her spine arched and pressed her stomach to his and rolled her hips, and he felt what he was doing to her. She was burning for him.

“We could be warm together,” she whispered.

He could barely breathe. He was dizzyingly, brain-chokingly hard. Something tore inside him and what had been an unspoken, nebulous yearning became profoundly explicit:

Seth wanted to go unlit.

He didn’t just want those other things she’d offered. He wanted to lose his soul inside this woman, more than he’d ever wanted anything. And who the hell was he kidding acting otherwise, like there was still any kind of decision to be made or doubt to be pretended at?

Why wasn’t he saying this out loud? Why wasn’t he grasping her around the muscular swoop of her waist, where her childbearing hips flared into perfect handholds, and begging her to snuff his wick?

“You don’t have to answer yet, of course,” she whispered, as the maddening moment passed. “We haven’t even gotten the job done yet. But I am offering this to you.”

“I—” He swallowed down the youthful shake in him. “I’ll think about it. Is it okay if I think about it?”

“Of course it is. Think as much on it as you like. Only get me my head, Mr. il Gutierre.” Their faces were so near that he could hear the click of her eyelid as she winked. “And I’ll give you yours.”

And then she was getting up. Her weight and heat were departing. “Wait,” he gasped, and there went his nerve again when she paused, partway out of her straddle. His hand slipped through the unbuttoned gap in the front of her tunic and brushed the defined abdominal groove on her stomach. “Do you want to stay? Not to do anything, just… stay.”

She shook her head. “Not yet. My heart is beating too fast. I don’t think I could keep my hands off you. And then you really will go unlit.”

He released a strained sigh and nodded, and she shifted the rest of the way off him.

“But soon , Seth.” Lisa drew herself up to her knees. “Lift your head a second.”

He obeyed and craned his neck up from his bedroll. “What are you doing?”

She leaned over him again and slid his pillow out from beneath his head. “Nothing.” The cool cotton of a replacement pillow rubbed the nape of his neck. “A little trade.”

“Why?” He settled back warily. “What’s wrong with this one?”

She rose to a crouch and hugged the stolen pillow to her chest. “That one doesn’t smell like you.”

She ducked out of the tent flap and was gone. He heard the dewy sound of the grass brushing against her bare ankles.

He lay back and felt the blood rush past his throat and wrists and aching chest. Sleep would elude him tonight, he was sure of it. He’d have to chase it down with this abject need dragging at his heels. Need and what else? He probed for answers in the troubled turning of his stomach. What was this streak of melancholy in him? Why did he feel that itch , that maddening little thief-itch?

Greedy, thieving Seth. Nothing is ever enough, is it? It always comes back. She’s offering you so much. More than you deserve, surely.

But you want all of her, don’t you?

“Hello again, Marston.” Lisa’s voice bounced an echo across the heavy flagstones of Fontana’s jailhouse. “How have you been keeping this past week?”

Marston il Molacq, the black-market head salesman, he of the boxed seraph and the burnt-out house, leaned with affected casualness on the mildewed wall of his cell. His face was sallow in the chilly mitelamp light. “Madam, I have been better.”

Above their heads the snaking pipes of Fontana’s labyrinthine water system pinged and rattled momentarily. Marston looked up warily—the water stains on his floor spoke to a leaky history—then settled again.

“Pardon the delay in our meeting,” Lisa said. “My business took me back to you circuitously. I only returned to Fontana this morning. I have suggested—and your host the good Corregidor has allowed—a two-day moratorium on the executions I am here to carry out. Entirely for you. I hope that makes you feel special.”

“I feel a great many things, Madam Verdugo.”

“Because if I marched you up to that great big scaffold right now, Marston, you know, I would have no choice but to march back down with your blood on my shoes and your hexis in my sword. You have been a naughty boy, haven’t you?”

“I am eager to prove otherwise, Madam Verdugo.” Marston’s smile was dented from a few drops, but he’d kept it polished. “Only tell me what I can do.”

“The entry in your book was scribbled through,” Seth said. “The buyer’s name. You give that to us, you’ve bought at least a few inches of neck back.”

“Scribbled through isn’t redacted, young sir,” Marston said. “I have erasers for that. I have no name to give you.”

“You’d better have something, Marston.”

“I have no reason to defend the woman I met for this bloody business.” Marston held up his hands. His manicured nails were growing back in uneasy half-moons. “The reward she gave me was meant to chew my head off, after all. But the woman I dealt with I had never met before, and haven’t since. All I know is that she was like your mistress here. Unlit.”

“ Really. ” Lisa’s brow raised. “Now that’s the sort of interesting thing that will keep your head and hexis in place. What else can you tell us?”

“That would be the main thing. I have had precious few interactions with the unsouled. I am more and more convinced my life would have been simpler had I kept to that. Let me think.” He rubbed his chin where his confinement had sprouted a patchy mat of bristles. “She was about my age, a bit older, maybe. Fine clothes, but not clean. Hair down to here, yea tall.” He indicated with his hands. “Black eyes, gray skin. The usual.”

“And did she tell you anything? About what she wanted, or what to do?”

Marston shrugged. “She gave me the lockbox, told me she’d send me the key once she was out of the city, and then I would have my reward. I was waiting for the key, still, when you came to visit.”

“What was it supposed to be?” Seth asked. “The reward. Unless you mail-ordered a seraph.”

“I certainly did not.” Marston scratched at the roughcut neckhole of his canvas convict uniform. “My wife and I—well. Sharp lad like you saw there were problems, I’m sure.”

“Maybe you should have done a better job keeping your drool off my employer.”

Marston scoffed. “In case you hadn’t noticed, sir thief, your employer is built like a primordial warrior race’s love goddess. I suppose that’s not what a lad likes to hear about his aunt, but it’s the truth.”

Lisa chuckled. Seth wondered what kind of ring Marston’s head would make if he bounced it off the bars.

“The root of the thing between us,” Marston went on, “was that we could not get with child. No matter how we tried. This was supposed to be an enchanted whatsit to cure her. Or me, or wherever the problem laid. A girdle, I think it was.”

“There’s no such magic, Marston.” Lisa’s unearthly beauty lent her carefully composed face the look of a runway glamor-girl. “I’d know if there was.”

“I surely believe you, Madam Verdugo. If your man hadn’t stolen that box from me, I’d be a neatly tied-up loose end. As it stands, it burned my house, my marriage, and generally my life to ashes. So I suppose it’s all moot now. Perhaps whatever man Luka finds to replace me will be able to give her the children she deserved.” Marston strolled from the bars and lounged on his cot with a chorus of metallic complaint from its ill-fitted pipework frame. “But I’m still alive for a few more days, you say, and in this slower, sparser mode I have come to understand how much I took for granted. I’ve started a Bana Hazaim reading club with a couple of the other convicts. Have you heard of her?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Lisa said. She looked to Seth, who shook his head.

“A sarkanian poetess,” Marston said. “Writing on resilience. I really do recommend her. Butcherknife Barry turned me onto her and lent me his copy of her folio. Right, Butch?”

From a nearby cell, a man with a thrice-broken nose and a tattooed bat on his shorn scalp nodded in solemn agreement. “Yeh,” he said. “It’s her mastery of the inherent propulsiveness of the trochaic meter, innit.”

Marston returned his attention to the bemused Verdugo. “Anyway, the point is: I do not blame you. I blame the cleansing flame of entropy whose flick’ring tongues are to be borne with mortal grace, et cetera.”

Lisa folded her arms. “Your absolution, unnecessary and unsought as it was, is appreciated.”

“That said, all my newfound gratitude for a fire-cleansed life really does require living . And I can’t but fear my lack of useful answers might, uh…” Marston turned briefly inward, perhaps in a Hazaim-esque pilgrimage to find the right words. “Might fuck my narrow ass with a scaffwood strap, to use the cellblock lingo.”

“Unfortunately, Mr. il Molacq,” Lisa said, “the scales are still looking rather out-of-whack. I must ask—” Seth’s behind-the-back gesturing finally caught her attention. “—For a moment with Seth, here. If you’ll excuse us.”

“I will allow it,” their bedraggled prisoner said, magnanimously.

Seth met Lisa at the opposite edge of the drip-smoothed hall, by a vacant cell. “Far be it for me to speak in that popmite’s defense,” he whispered.

Lisa hid her laugh behind her knuckles. “The look you gave him was portraiture , Seth, it really was.”

“I know the lady he’s describing,” Seth said. “I think I do, anyway.”

Lisa’s mirth froze. “By Saint Procas’ providential prick. Really?”

He nodded.

“Who is she?”

“I don’t have her name either,” he said. “But she stabbed Ofelia with a pitchfork.”

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