Neon Blue E Frost (speld decodable readers .TXT) 📖

His hand closes over my eyes. He presses the cool ghost of a kiss against my forehead. That’s the Fiendyke. We don’t go there, not without an invitation. You don’t even look there.

Gotcha. Absolutely. I have no interest in a second look. I’m still shaking from the first.

Concentrate on the tower. Feel it with your mind. I laid the stones with my own hands.Feel the foundations? He takes my mind the way he would my hand and leads me to a ring of stones buried in the shifting, ashy soil of the hill. Feel the power I laid down to hold the foundations. I see it in my mind’s eyes. A glistening web of energy, the strands encasing and connecting the buried stones. The power is so him. It tastes like him. Feels like him. And as the web takes on color and texture in my mind, pinkish and sticky, I realize what it is.

Eww.

There’s nothin’ disgusting about it. It’s the way I channel my power. His memories begin to flow into my mind: women, and men, and creatures that aren’t either, stretched across the foundation stones, his enjoyment of each of them, and then at the moment of orgasm, withdrawing from them and letting his seed, and his power, spill across the stones.

I push his memories away. Urk. Okay, too much.

Why?

Look, I know you’ve had a million lovers—

Not quite.

Okay, thousands or whatever. I don’t need to see it.

You do if you’re gonna be my seggurach. This is me. This is what I am. You have to at least be able to understand that to be with me, Tsara.

His use of my name focuses me, makes me understand how serious he is. How much this means to him. Okay. Okay, let’s try again.

I let the memories flow into me and this time I focus not on the details of the act, but on the way he directs his power. The slow build of energy during sex. The drawing in of his lover’s lifeforce through each touch. The gathering ball of power that builds stroke by stroke until it strains through him more powerfully than any orgasm. The control he exercises in that final moment to shape the energy into what he requires. The complete giving of everything that he is, and the devastating loss of self that follows.

This has been hard for you, hasn’t it? I ask, trying to feel my way through what he’s done. Each effort has been a delight, but also a trial. A little death.

Yeah. Help me make it stronger. Help me keep Him out.

Him. Asmodeus. Lord. Father. Enemy. I feel the complex tumble of Jou’s feelings for his sire roll through my head. I gather them, twist my own feelings for my family into the jumble, and cast it outward, over the plain between his hill and the iron city, across that dark ditch I can’t bear to look at. An impenetrable tangle. No one you don’t want here will ever be able to find their way again. I stretch my mind into the dark sky, down into the burning ground. Not by air. Not by earth. Not by foot, or wing. No one can come without your invitation.

Bring what’s mine home, sweetness. He feeds them to me. Image and touch and scent. Fulsome, his warden. Face and form so golden-beautiful my breath catches in my not-chest. Heart and mind so cold and calculating that touching his mind seers me, sends me spiraling into the heat of Nevida, Morion of Ash Hill. Flaming, unbearable passion. The scent of sandalwood and sex. Skin and hair so silken my not-fingers ache to touch her. My mind incandesces and my body convulses in yet another orgasm. Nevida’s heat gives way to the cool calculation of Zeifyr. A pair of eyes, feline and dispassionate, open in my head. She examines me, takes enough of my compulsion to find her way home and then turns her back on my call. She wraps her metallic indifference around herself and her sister-lovers, Ziporah and Zahira, and disappears.

Leave ‘em. They’re safe enough topside.

I retreat from Zeifyr’s copper-cold psyche and reach for the next impression Jou feeds me. Reece. Blood and the paper-musk of money. A hard, winter-burnt core around which the flesh constantly shifts. I can’t get a grasp on Reece. Male. Female. Beautiful. Grotesque. Sweet. Depraved. He/she shifts through my mind like a fall of broken glass, sharp-edged and painful to grasp. Like Zeifyr, Reece examines my call and debates for a timeless moment. Unlike Zeifyr, Reece follows my call and I feel him/her swell within my mind, until Reece stands beside us in the growing crowd.

That’s my clutch. Call the others. He helps me direct my thought, catch the rest of his household in my mind. Bizzy, a goat-legged, red-skinned demon wearing a green plastic ‘Herrods’ apron, who appears bent over and holding a huge metal spoon, as if called in the moment of stirring a pot. Cazin, a massive, shaggy, horned monster who roars into existence a few feet away, looks around in surprise and fury, then wraps Nevida in an embrace so tender it brings tears to my not-eyes. Icozi, a minature version of Cazin, red-skinned and bandy-legged. He responds to my call with such enthusiasm that he hops across the burning ground. He cradles something between his legs as he runs, and after a moment, I realize that he cups a pair of black testicles so large they look like bowling balls.

Yeah, that’s Icky. Bring ‘im home. Bring ‘em all home. Jou stretches out his phantom arms, encompassing those he cares for. His family, kith and kin. He embraces them all and closes Ash Hill around them. I feel the tower’s stone encircle them. Keeping them safe. But I’ve also felt the inferno of Asmodeus’s rage. The stones Jou’s piled on this shifting hill of ash won’t protect his family from his father. That’s why the tower has been