HORNS (BoyXBoy)

Chapter 69

WARNING: This chapter features a lemon. Read at your own risk.

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Chapter Sixty Nine

Face... it flickered... red, like roses.

Hands reached out to me, caressing without ever truly touching, ghosting over my lips. I tingled under the sensation, recognizing the feeling of these hands even though they were swirling and changing before me. Tapered claws, then smooth fingers, then fur as black as the night sky...

Ah, there were more, touching me from behind.

I shivered as the soft tingle of a fingertip slid from the base of my fluffed-out tail up, up, up across the curve of my back, making my breath hitch as the hands belonging to the vampire I yearned for continued caressing my face. I saw eyes, then, as the features came into view... beautiful eyes that reflected everything back at me, eyes that showed...

My mind snapped awake when I saw the mass of shadow in Echo's eyes. It wasn't me he was looking at, it wasn't me... his face was contorted, a look of terror on his face, and his caresses were actually attempts to hold onto me.

The fingertip touching me continued going up across my skin, tracing the curve of the scars I'd gotten protecting Katrina during the storm before moving between my shoulders. Echo's eyes were wide with terror.

I saw a flash... a flash of something, something strange, I was running... I was running, but it wasn't me.

My breath was heaving out and I was sprinting as fast as I could, using so much supernatural speed that the world was little more than a blur, but it wasn't me. It wasn't me, and yet, it was, and I knew then and there that I was being chased. I opened my mouth to let out a scream as my existence distorted, twisting, rippling, and something inside me jerked.

Nothing came out of my mouth.

Echo's eyes looked at me, crinkling in terror. His pretty lips moved, frantically. The finger on my back trickled up to the nape of my neck, and then higher, coming to rest right between the divot of the tendons in my spine, slightly below the beginning of my skull.

Pressure built. Pressure full of heat that sent stars into my brain. Pressure that gave me a sensation of rage, of hatred, of agony. Echo was screaming but I was so angry, so fucking angry, that I reached out to his throat and--

I rocketed upright with a gasp, curls flying over my face as I heaved for air, panting. I frantically looked around, blind, hands flying up to the back of my head to feel around. Nothing was out of place, though, and after a second I remembered I was lying in Echo's bed.

"What is wrong?" a soft voice asked me, and when I looked to my left I saw him lying on his side, head cushioned by a pillow, pretty ruby eyes open and very bleary. Long, somewhat greasy hair fell across his face when he sat up a bit, reaching out and touching my twitching cheek. "Horst... you are trembling... what has distressed you? Were you not just as asleep as I was?"

"Nightmare," I said through a mouth as dry as sandpaper, rubbing my arms and rolling my shoulders to erase the sensation of the finger on my back. "I had a nightmare, that's all."

Echo blinked, tilting his head, and I realized he was back to looking like his new self. When had he even shifted back into his human form? He'd still been furry like a weird black satyr-cat when I'd confessed to him last night.