Fifth a Fury (Goddess Isles 5)

The death of Eleanor as I knew her.

I waited for him to plunge inside me.

I braced myself to die.

Only…strangeness wasn’t done with me today.

Yet another bizarre twist in my godforsaken fate.

The sun suddenly snuffed out.

Gone.

Vanished.

No more.

Only the glow of the fire illuminated a suddenly haunting forest.

Daytime to night-time, just like that.

Chills decorated my skin as Drake stilled above me. “What the—” He looked around, his eyes peering in the sudden blackness, sensing the dangerous change. The perilous whispers in the trees. The slithering serpents in the dark.

The campsite, equipped for erotic couplings between guest and goddess, switched.

It morphed and cracked from one cocoon to another, shedding a chrysalis of daylight for shadows drenched in menacing peril.

Trees sloughed their leaves and stood like mighty stakes. Fissures opened up in the ground, glowing with crimson lava, revealing the stomach of the underworld. Crows flocked through the sky, their caws grim and condemning.

The world switched from normal parameters to a wasteland of trickery.

A deeper level of fear attacked me.

A fear born from a human steadfastness in seasons and the fact that the sun couldn’t just…disappear.

A forest couldn’t become hell, bleeding normalcy into fiction. Spiders the size of cats weren’t supposed to crawl by, nor wolves the size of polar bears to slink in the shadows.

I swallowed a scream as more and more predators arrived from nowhere.

Sabre tooth cats with canines still holding carrion from prior meals. Bears as tall as houses, their shaggy fur dreadlocked with gore. Vultures fell from the sky, ringing us in our fire circle. A stampede of furious wildebeest snorted in the gloom. A howl and snarl of more wolves sent elixir second-best beneath my desire to flee.

This…wasn’t possible.

This threatened to break my mind, to prove my imagination had limits and I’d reached the threshold of what I could accept.

It’s not possible!

Wait…

It’s not possible unless the man who made all of this possible is here.

Hope sprang.

Wishes spilled faster than my tears.

Sully!

I fought harder, knocking Drake sideways in his stupor of what’d happened to his fantasy. “Did I load it wrong?” He scowled, crawling back over me and pinning my wrists deeper into the dirt the more I struggled. “Quit it.”

A wolf snapped at his head.

Drake didn’t react, almost as if he believed it was just a mirage. A program glitching that couldn’t hurt him.

But I smelled the wolf’s rancid breath. I felt the breeze of its jaws. I heard the thunder of its paws.

“Let me go!” I fought again. I fought to wake up before something far more dangerous than Drake decided to have me. This might not be real. This might be entirely in our minds.

But our minds made it real.

Our brains told our skin what to feel and how to react. Our nervous system was the only reason we felt the world we lived in.

This was now the world we lived in—regardless if it was true or not. This world could kill us as surely as our old one.

“Get off me!”

God, I need.

Need!

My hips rocked as instinct suffocated beneath elixir.

Stop it!

It wasn’t the animals I had to be afraid of, it was me.

I was my own worst enemy.

Please!

“Shut the fuck up.” His red beard shuddered as he spoke. “Let me think.” He rocked his hips into mine, his cock still unnervingly close to taking me.

I hated that I shuddered in horror but also hunger. I contemplated riding him just so I could be free of the constricting, clutching mayhem of my heart.

I needed to come again.

The palpitations and skipping, tripping beats made me sick and lightheaded.

“You’ve been in these illusions plenty of times, how do you reset it?” Drake stared at me, his gaze orange from the flickering fire.

Elixir bowled through me, no longer willing to play nice, dragging me deeper into sex-crazed.

My back arched. My core begged. I let out a pitiful scream.

I need.

I can’t.

Stop it!

Drake pressed his hips into mine, scattering me in all directions, leaving only hate and shame behind. “Finally want me, huh?” He rubbed his cock against my clit, driving me headfirst into the beginnings of the most diabolical release. “I’ll fuck you, girl, but not until I figure out what the fuck is going on around here.”

“Allow me to show you.”

That voice.

My head whipped to the side.

The release taunting me erupted from the sinful snarl.

I convulsed with carnal clenches.

It wasn’t Drake who granted me pleasure. It was the owner of that magnificent growl. A grumble full of hellfire and brimstone fury. Darker than night, blacker than sin, as deadly and as lethal as venom.

Sully?

Disgusted tears drenched my cheeks as echoes of my climax made me feeble, unable to fight Drake off me. I had a small window to get away before I lost myself entirely. A few precious seconds to stay loyal to Sully and myself.

“Let her go.”

Drake twisted to look behind him as the night shimmered and parted like a veil, delivering not a man but a monster.