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