Again I screamed, “Stop,” and he stopped.

I fell back onto the ground, eyes unable to focus, fighting to breathe, unable to move. But even while my body lay helpless with the afterglow, I began to ache. I ached where his teeth had touched me there, and I knew that it was just going to hurt more later. I’d let my desire — and Mistral’s — send us too far over that fine edge.

His voice came. “I did not bleed you, and I did not bite you as hard there as I did on your breast.”

I nodded, because I couldn’t speak yet. The air was so dense with the coming storm that it made it harder to breathe, almost in the way the queen could make the air too thick to breathe.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

I found my voice. “A little.” The ache was becoming sharper. I had only a limited time before it was simply going to hurt. I wanted him to finish before the pleasure truly did become pain.

He crawled over my body on all fours, so that he wasn’t actually touching me, but he could see my face. “Are you all right, Princess?”

I nodded. “Help me turn over.”

“Why?”

“Because if we finish this with you on top, it’s going to hurt too much.”

“I was too rough,” he said, and he sounded so sad. Lightning flashed first in one eye then the other, as if it traveled from one side of his mind to the other. The light blue lightning bolt on his cheek paled in the brightness of it.

He started to crawl off me as if he were going to stop. I grabbed his arm. “Don’t stop, bright Goddess, don’t stop. Just help me roll over. If you take me from behind, you won’t be brushing up against the part of me you bruised.”

“If I have hurt you so badly, we must stop.”

My fingers tightened on his arm. “If I wanted to stop, I would say so. Everyone else has been too afraid of hurting me, and even if you went too far, I do like it. Mistral, I like it a great deal.”

He gave an almost shy smile. “I did notice.”

I smiled back at him. “Then let us finish what we started.”

“If you are sure.” In the moment he said it, and meant it, I knew that I would be safe alone with him. If he was willing to pass up some of the first intercourse he’d been offered in centuries for fear of my being hurt, then he had the discipline to control himself in private. Consort preserve us, but he had more discipline than I would have had. How many men would have turned down the finish, after a start like that? Not many, not many at all.

“I am sure,” I said.

He smiled again, and something moved above us. Something grey was in motion near the high domed ceiling. Clouds — there was a tiny knot of clouds up near the ceiling. I looked into Mistral’s face and said, “Fuck me, Mistral.”

“Is that an order, my princess?” He smiled when he said it, but there was an edge of something that wasn’t happy in his voice.

“Only if you want it to be.”

He looked down at me, then said, “I would rather do the ordering.”

“Then do it,” I said.

“Turn over,” he said. His voice did not have quite the firmness it had had earlier, as if he wasn’t sure I would obey.

I had recovered enough to roll over, though I was slow. He moved back until he knelt by my feet. “I want you on your hands and knees.”

I did what he asked, or ordered. It put me looking at Abeloec, who still knelt, motionless, at the top of our makeshift blanket. I expected to see lust, or something to let me know he was enjoying the show, but that wasn’t what was in his face. His smile was gentle, peaceful. It didn’t match what we were doing, at least not to me.

Mistral’s hands stroked my ass, and I felt him rub against my opening. The front of me was sore, but the rest of me was eager.

“You’re wet,” Mistral said.

“I know,” I said.

“You really did enjoy it.”

“Yes.”

“You really do like it that rough.”

“Sometimes,” I said. The tip of him rubbed around the edge, so close, but not inside.

“Now?” He made it a question.

I lowered my upper body, so that my lower body lifted toward him, pushing against the feel of him. Only his slight movement backward kept me from taking him into my body. I made a small sound of protest. The wind held the smell of rain, the press of silent thunder. The storm was coming, and I wanted him inside me when it came.

He laughed, that wonderful masculine sound. “I take that as a yes?”

“Yes,” I said. I pressed my cheek into the brittle leaves, my face, and hands, touching the dry ground. I had to close my eyes against the push of dead leaves and plants. I pushed my ass up at him, and asked, wordlessly, that he take me. I didn’t realize I was saying anything out loud, but I must have been. For then I heard my own voice chanting, “Please, please, please,” over and over, soft under my breath, my lips closer to the dead earth than to the man I was begging.

He pushed just the tip of himself inside me, and the wind changed instantly. It felt almost hot. I could still smell rain, but there was also a metallic smell. The scent of ozone, lightning. The air was hot and close, and I knew in that moment that it wasn’t that I wanted Mistral inside me when the storm broke, but that the storm would not come until he was inside me. He was the storm, as Abeloec had been the cup. Mistral was the heavy press of the air, and that neck-ruffling promise of lightning.

I raised up and shoved my body onto him. He actually stopped me with his hands on my hips. “No,” he said, “no, I will say when.”

I went back to pressing my upper body to the dry ground. I said, “Mistral, please, don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel it?”

“Storm,” he said, and his voice seemed lower than it had been, a growling roll, as if his voice held an echo of thunder in it.

I raised up, but not to try to control him. I wanted to see him. I wanted to see if there had been other changes besides the growl of thunder in his voice. He still glowed with power, but it was as if dark grey clouds had moved in over that glow, so that I saw only the shine of his power through the veil of clouds.

He stared down at me, and his eyes flashed bright, so bright that for a moment his face was half obscured by that white, white light. The brilliance faded, leaving afterimages in my vision. But without the lightning, his eyes weren’t the grey of rain clouds; they were black. That blackness that rolls across the sky at midday, and sends us all running for cover, because just by looking at the sky, you know that something dangerous is coming. Something that will drown you, burn you, concuss you with the power that is about to fall from the sky.

I shivered, gazing down my body at him, shivered, because I wondered…was I too mortal to survive this? Was his power going to burn along my flesh, and hurt me in ways that I did not want?

It was as if Abeloec heard me thinking. He spoke, in a low, soft voice that made me look at him. He was still kneeling in front of us, but it was as if his pale skin were fading into the growing dark, as if he, himself, were dissipating into the circle of power. His hair was shot through with lines of blue, red, and green, and those lines traced the circle that held us, and on into the dark to the men beyond. His eyes held sparks of all those colors, but it was as if his power grew. He began to be that power, and not be as much Abeloec. I could tell that if he were not careful, he would become only the lines of power that traced out into the dark.

“Earth and sky is a very old dance, Meredith,” he said. “Do not fear the power. It has waited too long for you to allow you to be harmed now.”

I found my voice in a hoarse whisper. “Look at him.”

“Yes,” Abeloec said, “he is the storm come to life.”

“I am mortal.”

I thought he smiled, but I couldn’t be certain. I could not see his face clearly, though I knew he was only a few feet in front of me.

“In this time and place, you are the Goddess, the earth to meet the strike of the sky. Does that sound like someone who is merely mortal?”

Mistral chose that moment to remind me that he was there. He bent over my body, and bit me on the back, as his body shoved inside me. The combination of the two made me push myself tighter against him. He bit me harder, and I writhed against him, trapped between his body and his mouth.

His mouth let go, and he wrapped his arms around me. His weight lay along the back of my body, in a warm, solid line. I was supporting most of his weight, for his hands played lightly over my breasts and stomach. He was inside me, but as he had done the first time, once he was in, he had stopped moving. He spoke with his face next to mine. “It has been too long. I will not last if you move like that.”

I turned my head, and he was close enough that when the light flashed in his eyes, I was blinded for a second. I closed my eyes and saw white and black explosions against my eyelids. I spoke with my eyes still closed. “I can’t help moving.”

He sighed, and didn’t so much push himself farther inside me as writhe while he was inside me. That made me writhe, and drew a sound from him that was half pleasure, half protest.

Thunder rolled through the cavern, echoing against the bare rock walls, like some gigantic drumroll that seemed to thrum across my skin.

“Hush, Meredith, quiet. If you move, I will not last.”

“How can I not move with you inside me?”

He hugged me then, and said, “So long since anyone reacted to my body.” He moved off my back, so that he was again on his knees, still with his body sheathed inside mine. But he pushed his hips against me and let me know that, bent over my body, he had not been completely sheathed inside me, because now the tip of him found the end of me, and I realized he might be too long for this position. If the man was too long, entering from behind could hurt. It didn’t hurt yet, but it held the promise of it as he pushed gently against the inner limits of my body. The thought of what he could do to me was exciting, and a little frightening. I both wanted to feel him pound himself into me, and didn’t. The thought was exciting, but it was one of those pains that worked better in fantasy than real life.

He pushed the head of himself inside me, gentle at first, then more firmly, as if he were trying to find a way deeper. He pushed slow, and firm, and tight, until I made a sound of protest.

Thunder rumbled again, and the wind gusted. I could smell rain and ozone, as if lightning had struck somewhere near, though the only lightning had been in Mistral’s eyes.

“How much do you like pain?” he asked, and his voice held thunder the way that Doyle’s could hold the growl of a dog.