The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

Another double dose of Headless Over Heels! First, it's Seth il Gutierre and the Mother of Execution performing the title track from the classic album Seraphim Ripped My Flesh!

Well, shit! You guys went and unlocked the final bonus chapter!!

Thank you all so much for your continued readership, especially KainYusanagi, PineapplePizzaNew, Wantee, and Milc, who took the time to leave reviews.

RZZZZZ!

Seth scrambled back from the hellish bug-seraph. His back thumped against the closest of the office’s emerald-papered walls. Their cheery aquatic theme seemed suddenly ridiculous in the face of the horror that had spawned in its compass.

The seraph’s scything left arm snapped outward like some skeletomuscular slaughterhouse piston, tearing into the wall behind him, shearing a slice of gypsum board away. It bit into a vertical stud, and that saved Seth’s life, kept its right arm followup from reaching his stumbling dodge.

“Fucking saints,” he yelped.

“BZZZZZZZZZZZNRZZZZZZZZZGRZZZ,” the thing replied, and now its claw was free, and it pounced again. He dove to one side with such desperate haste that he fell on his ass; it ricocheted off the desk with a chitinous crunch, sending a blizzard of papers flurrying through the room, and then another leap, and it was on top of him. It was all he could do to tuck his knees up and prevent its grappling claws from spilling his entrails. It pressed its weight in, legs going thok-thok-thok on the hardwood in its mad scramble to close the distance. Another swipe from the claw and this one grazed his chest, ripping open his rental suit and scoring a shallow slash of red on the skin beneath. He screamed in pain and fear, and outrage at this absurd, bullshit death which had found him and he didn’t even understand why.

Your boot. The Fox’s giggly whisper in his head. The stiletto.

No, he hadn’t brought it. He remembered even as he reached for its place. Stupid Fox. Why would it—

His fist wrapped around a thin, cruciform hilt. No time to wonder why, no time to do anything but rip his stolen knife from where it was tucked impossibly into his boot and overhand plunge it like an ice pick into the seraph’s eye-blob.

The seraph burst into flames.

It clattered and caterwauled, burning brilliant and horrible and smelling like boiling trash, catching and spreading the fire in its dying frenzy—embers and melting flesh scattering to the rug, the bookshelves.

Seth sprinted past the odorous insectoid bonfire and out onto the second-floor landing and here was Marston’s doughy guard, powering up the stairs and hissing breath from his nose.

This fucking guy. Seth dashed back into the office, which was filling further with dirty smoke, and when the man got to the doorway and saw the burning, mutilated seraph lying on the smoldering rug, that moment of horror was what Seth needed to lunge past his attacker like a striking stoat, popping out of the belated attempt to catch him by the arm and scampering to the first floor.

He shouldered through the swinging door and nearly plowed face-first into Lisa, who was on her feet. Breakfast, it came as little surprise, was abandoned. Cutlery and cuisine lay strewn where it had fallen. Marston and Luka were huddled on the windowed side of the room, sheltering behind the upturned table.

On the other end of the chamber stood Lisa, her humanizing glamour dispelled, her unlit eyes wide, wild, and black as new-moon night. Still with her omnipresent smile. “How about everyone stays still and quiet,” she said, “and do what I tell you.”

Her hands were outstretched, fingers quirked into a preparatory gesture Seth knew, because everyone knew it.

A sorcerer was not a sorcerer until they could cast it; certainly not a Legion sorcerer, at any rate. You could learn your glamours and your infusions and your utility magicks later, after you learned the first spell. This was the reason everyone was afraid of sorcerers, why their names were registered on a Legion list, and they had to introduce themselves to whichever Corregidor governed them, and spend their lives under constant watch. Because of the one spell every sorcerer knew, the first spell they were taught, and for most of them the last.

There were many names for it, from the stuffy arcanists who called it offensive kinesioclasty to the hard-bitten veterans of the Winter Wars who called it the siege spell, to the frontline serialists and writers of martial poetics who had endless sobriquets for it, awe-inspiring as it was to watch the artillery mage lines unleash a volley across the sky.

Seth, being an uncultured rural sort, had always thought of it by its popular moniker. Two simple syllables, as unsubtle as the battlefield magic from which they came: Fireball.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...zzzzzgrzzz
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2409571/

No more bonus chapters to poke you guys about up here since you totally fucking CRUSHED all the goals I had. So I guess I'll just say enjoy the chapter and please follow/fave/rate.

Poor Beautiful Boy

“Seth,” Lisa said, quietly, and Seth felt as rooted to the spot as he’d been when the seraph had stared him down. “Do you want me?”

The dam cracked.

“Do I want you,” Seth repeated, trying to pull the starter cord to restart his brain.

Yes, the Fox whispered. Say it. Yes. “Yes.”

It was only when she smiled, wide and lovely and relieved, that he realized the word had escaped him.

“Seth,” she breathed. She reached her hand out, palm wide to accommodate his. “Brave boy.”

He stared at the offered palm. He took it, and held Lisa al Ydris’s hand. And they stood, staring at one another, and Seth remembered to ask. “What about you?”

“Yes.” Her wide, callused fingers laced between his. “Yes, Seth. I do. I want you very badly.”

“Oh,” he said. The dam was washing away now. The flood worsened, threatened to sweep his legs out from under him.

“Of course I want you,” she said. “Look at you. Young, handsome. Superb at what you do.” She laughed softly. “And you know it, too. Cocky little thing. I like that. And I want you.”

“I’m… uh…” Seth’s heart was a caterpillar thrashing in its cocoon. “Short.”

“You’re the perfect height. Look.” A delicate little step, and she’d closed the distance to how near they’d been when they were dancing. “Your face, right where you want it.” Her left hand departed his, and landed on the nape of his neck. “Your hips, right where I want them.” Her right hand slid to his waist. Both hands applied gentle but irresistible pressure until his hips were pushing firm against hers, and the lower half of his face was submerged in cushioned round warmth. “Do you know what they call a man and a woman like us in Orwiny?”

His voice was so tinny in his ears, like the manly bass had left him. “What?”

“A watchtower.” The mirth always behind her words tickled at the membrane of her solemnity. “We could do it freestanding. Don’t even need a wall to lean on. Where I grew up, that’s the perfect height.”

A throbbing shiver along his spine alerted him to how hard he was. His pulse leapt. He tried to shift, tried to make some distance. But she shook her head, her chin rubbing his hair, and kept him stationary.

“It’s okay,” she whispered. “I don’t mind. I already felt it, remember? When we danced together. How you want me. It made me so happy, Seth.”

His ears were ringing.

“Am I hurting you? Your chest?”

Just a twinge. Not nearly enough to make him pull away, not from this. “No,” he said.

“Then stay.” Fabric whispered as her thighs rubbed together. The friction against him blanked his mind. “Such an indecent boy,” she cooed. “So salacious, Seth. Don’t you know I’m old enough to be your mother?”

“I know.” He tried to take a deep breath but that just flooded his brain with her, with the leather and the apricot. “I know that.”

“And I’m unlit. I’d turn you. No going back.”

He looped his arms around her waist. “I know.”

“And there’s more of me. I’m just one head. What would Anna think, hmm? Or Annalise, for that matter?”

She was so solid. So big. Such grace in her bold, broad curves. He’d found it hard to meet those vantablack eyes. Now he found it harder to look away. “If it’s just—if it’s just the part of you that’s Lisa, just the head…” Just the lips. “Maybe that’s all right?”

Her grayscale tongue slid across the pillowy crest of her cupid’s bow. “Are you telling me you want to kiss me?”

“I’m just… philosophizing.”

A strained laugh from her. Was her throat as tight as his was? “But Seth. A kiss would be too dangerous.” She tsked and shook her head. “Surely you don’t want to desaturate this smooth, lovely skin. This warm tone.”

His ears were ringing. “Just a kiss wouldn’t do that.”

“A kiss? No. Not a kiss. But it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been kissed. So many solitary, aching years. And if you kissed me, Seth, you’d have to take responsibility for it. You’d find out how desperately I’ve been holding myself in check.” Her broad fingers fanned out across his back. “And how strong I am.”

“How strong?” he whispered, and she pulled him even closer, and he let her. The muscles in her core lengthened as she arched her spine. Her breasts invited him further into the hot, heart-pounding bliss between them. His eyelids were heavy. He felt drunk.

“Stronger than you, Seth,” she whispered, her voice scratchy and low in his ear. “Strong enough that I don’t think you could stop me.”

“Stop you?” He was so hard it was making him dizzy, and Lisa didn’t care. She only got closer. All he could do was remember to blink and breathe. “From what?”

“From pinning you to this wagon,” she whispered. “And doing anything I want to you. Right here by the road.”

Her chest pressed against his and pulled an involuntary noise from his throat.

“And those things. Oh, Seth. Poor, beautiful boy.” She buried her face in his hair and took a deep, ribcage-expanding inhale. “They would snuff you out like a bedside candle.” Her hand slid upward, from his spine to the back of his neck. “Don’t you remember what you were told, about what the big bad Verdugo does with little misbehaving thieves like you?”

Her fingers curled in. Her thumb caressed his jawline. He—was that a whimper? Was Seth il Gutierre fucking whimpering?

“I’d steal your soul away. Just like you feared. Just like the old wives’ tales. Your beautiful brown eyes would go black as ink. And you would be mine.” That big hot thumb tucked under his jaw, to his neck, to the Adam’s apple she’d admired, and nudged his face upward, inches from hers. “I’d take you away from everything you’ve ever known. And I would never, never give you back.”

He swallowed. She watched it—felt it under her fingertips—and licked those full, ripe lips again.

“Your heart is beating so fast,” she whispered. “Am I frightening you?”

“No,” he murmured.

Suddenly her heat, her pressure, her breath. It was all off him. She took a sinuous step backward. “Of course, you were just philosophizing.”

He sighed out his held breath. That was mean. “Of course.”

She planted a boot on the wagon step and hauled herself back into the driver’s seat. “And if you hadn’t been, well. I have a rule, I’m afraid. It’s a rule that I feel strongly enough about that even when I’m Lisa I have to hew to it, frustrating as it is.”

He took a couple of shaky steps back toward the wagon, then paused to tuck his stiffness upward into his waistband. “Rules? I love rules. What’s the rule?”

“Anyone who wants to kiss me has to kiss Annalise first.” She wrapped one huge hand around his forearm and tugged him onto his wagon seat.

The limerence that had seized him—seized them both—was ebbing. She flicked the reins and the greater part of it drained, left in the clearing they were departing. His heart was finally giving his ribs a break from its hammering.

“Annalise was there first,” Lisa continued. “And I’m her most of the time. And she’s really the most sensible one, nine times out of ten.”

With that, she sighed and settled into her task. They rolled along in nebulous silence, cresting another hill. The whole world stretching out before Seth, it felt like. And all he wanted was what she’d promised. For her to take him away from it, and never give him back.

“Now if I recall correctly…” He pulled his thieves’ tools out again. “We’d just made it to the tension wrenches.”

“Uh huh.” Lisa grinned indulgently. “And what are those?”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...utiful-boy
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2410610/