Excerpt of Demons of Flesh and Stone by Louisa Crane

LATE THAT NIGHT, Adiega was awakened by the door of the
cooking hut scraping open. A man’s low voice rasped,
“Paullia.”

Straw crackled in the straw pallet next to hers as her
sister awoke. “Did you hear something?” Paullia muttered
sleepily.

Ducking through the open doorway was the figure of a man,
wide-shouldered but lean, and unusually tall even by
Celticum standards.

Elic?

He stepped into the hut, looking around. Unbraided golden
hair flashed in the moonlight.

By the gods, it was him. His eyes glowed like blue fire
as he fixed his gaze on Paullia lying on her stomach
beneath a sheepskin. She raised her head groggily to
squint at him. “Elic?” Wide-eyed astonishment morphed
into a slow smile when she saw that he was naked as
before, his sex rearing up hard and high.

How could this be happening? How could he have gotten
free? As Adiega and Paullia had taken their leave of him
this morning, the three Germani were securing their
barrier of wooden stakes over the entrance to the Cella
by means of iron bands encircling the natural columns to
either side of it. In addition, one of them, Lothar said,
would be standing guard at night while the others slept
nearby.

The dusios threw himself on Paullia, tearing the
sheepskin away and tugging urgently at her linen shift,
which had gotten tangled around her legs. She started to
roll over, but he pushed her back down, tore the hem of
the garment with his teeth, and ripped it open up the
back.

“Get away from her!” Bounding up off her pallet, Adiega
tried to push Elic away, but he flung her aside easily.
“I’ll get help,” she told Paullia as she scrambled to her
feet.

“No! He must have escaped from the Cella. Vlatucia will
be furious. She might burn him. It’s all right. I don’t—”
She sucked in a breath as Elic wrested her legs apart and
pulled her up onto her knees. “Elic?” she said, looking
over her shoulder, as he positioned himself and seized
her hips. “I’m not, you know, ready,” she said, although
of course he understood none of their language but what
Paullia had taught him while bathing him—and tempting and
teasing him while he was bound and powerless, which was
obviously why he had sought her out to assuage his
ravenous lust.

“I only now woke up,” Paullia said. “If you could just—”
She broke off with a yelp as he drove in with one fierce,
deep thrust. He grew rigid, his face darkening, his mouth
open as if in a silent scream. There came a hoarse shout
and a convulsive twitching of his flanks as he held her
tight, his fingers digging deep into the flesh of her
hips. A long, quavering groan issued from him as he
slumped down onto her back, his entire body quaking. He
whispered a few gruff words in his native tongue; they
sounded like oaths.

“Elic? Did you…?” Paullia blinked at Adiega. “Did he…
finish?”

“I don’t know. I think so.” A virgin Adiega may have
been, but she knew far more than she should about
lovemaking, Paullia having entertained more than a few
men in this hut while her sister was sleeping—or trying
to. Never before had she known one of those men to
achieve release after a single thrust, but judging from
that shout, that was exactly what Elic had done.
“Paullia, he was loud, too loud. Someone may have heard.”

Crossing to the open doorway, Adiega scanned the area to
make sure no one was coming, then shut the door. “You’ve
got to make him leave, Paullia. If Vlatucia’s guards find
him here, we could get in trouble, too. He should be
fleeing this valley, not...” She gestured toward the two
of them, still joined in carnal union.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Paullia replied. “They
don’t even know he’s missing.”

“But that Lothar said one of them would be guarding him
at all—”

“Elic probably killed the guard, or at least knocked him
out,” Paullia said. “He wouldn’t be here if it weren’t
safe.”

“Of course he would! He’s not thinking straight. He’s a
dusios and he’s starving for sex.”

“And I’m more than happy to oblige,” Paullia said, “but I
do wish he hadn’t ambushed me like that when I wasn’t
prepared. I’ll be sore for a week. I swear, it feels like
there’s an iron rod—oh!” she exclaimed as he grabbed her
shoulders and rammed her hard and fast, straw crackling.
“Elic, wait,” she pleaded, but he was in his own world,
eyes closed, hair swaying with every stabbing thrust.

She clutched one of his wrists and managed to wrench it
off her shoulder, whereupon he siezed her hands and
pressed them to the pallet, holding them down as he
reared over her, the muscles in his back and arms
bunching and straining. She twisted and bucked, trying to
throw him off, uttering a high-pitched little cry when he
lowered his head and closed his teeth on her neck to
restrain her. Adiega had seen stallions do this while
mating. The feral savagery of it shocked her.a