When I eventually fell asleep, I dreamed of Elvi. She was beautiful, healthy, and smiling, her shiny green hair falling all around her shoulders. In her hands was a bowl of soup. She held it out to me with pride and triumph clear on her face, like she was giving me an award.

“Thank you,” I said, taking the bowl from her, not once questioning how or why she was here. In the murky, tilting way of dreams, this felt totally natural. I wasn’t surprised to see her in the least. I wasn’t dragging her into a hug or telling her I missed her because this was a dream and of course in a dream she wasn’t dead. Maybe, in dreams, she never had been.

But neither was I specifically aware that I was dreaming. I just.... was there. With Elvi.

And the soup.

“Eat it,” she told me, still looking so proud of me. “You’ve earned it.”

There was no spoon, so I raised the bowl to my mouth and took a sip. It wasn’t like any sort of soup I’d ever had in Finland. It was Bohnebregg fish and riverweed stew. But once again, cloaked in the bizarre normalcy of the dream, I didn’t once question why my dead sister was bringing me soup from an alien world instead of from home.

I also didn’t question why the soup was so fucking hot.

The sip was molten, and yet somehow it didn’t burn me. It didn’t cause pain to the surfaces of skin it touched, it just heated me from the inside out, raising my core temperature as it went down my throat into my stomach. It was like I was back in a Finnish sauna, but somehow the sauna was inside me.

Though it didn’t hurt, it disturbed me. Maybe it disturbed me precisely because it didn’t hurt but should have. My stomach churned, like that one single sip had turned all my insides to soup. The places between my legs and around my womb felt hot and liquid and strange.

I tried to drop the bowl, but the bowl was already gone.

Elvi was gone.

Everything was gone but that oozing heat, the burn that did not properly burn because it sluiced instead of scorched.

Fluid fever, it melted my mind until, of all the entirety of language I’d collected over my lifetime, only one single word remained.

Skallagrim.

In the heated dreamscape, the word was entirely devoid of literal definition, but I knew that it meant something to me. Something vitally important.

When I was strong enough, I would take that single word inside my throat...

Then scream it.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Skallagrim

My little star called me forth from the darkness.

Like a soldier beckoned to battle, I rose in the night and I went.

Water dripped down my scales with every harrowing step. My scales bristled like hairs, fangs tight, cocks jutting ahead of me and wings flexing behind as I came upon my mate.

Suvi was naked. Splayed and writhing. Her spine arched in pulsing motions, making her breasts and abdomen shake. The moonlight through the coloured glass was like liquid on her, as if she were as wet as I was. Her hair was a fanned-out river, her cheeks darkened with need, her eyes shut. The air was thick with the cock-swelling scent of her. One needy roll of her hips revealed the seam of her cunt, and it was drenched, spilling moisture onto her inner thighs.

“Skalla,” she said again, a mere whimper. It seemed as if she meant to scream it, but did not have the breath to do it.

Starburning.

The word came to me as if from a great distance.

There was no moment of clarity, no sudden realization. I’d known without concrete thought, without words, without anything but bone-deep feeling, what she’d needed when she called me.

For the first time in days, I thought nothing of my knot. The arousal, my need, got locked into some cage inside myself, imprisoned by a drive much more powerful than any other I had ever known.

The instinct to take care of my mate.

“I am here, Suvi,” I rasped.

Her eyes opened, landed on me, glassy and feverish. For a moment, I wondered if she could even see me at all.

But then she mewled in pain, a sound that fanned the primal flame of that need to protect her, and she reached a little hand for me. She did not retreat or hide. She did not race past me into the cold clutches of the bathtub. Stricken and suffering, she sought no other comfort. She sought only me.

Because she loves me.

“Suvi,” I murmured. My voice sounded deeper than it usually did. An authoritative growl. “Lie back and spread your legs.”

She whined. With dismay, I saw the tears streaked across her cheeks.

“Suvi,” I said again, coming to the edge of the bed then dropping to my knees on the mattress above her. I gripped her thighs, massaging with my thumbs, and she keened. “Spread your legs. Right now. Let me take care of you.”

She gave a hitching breath and then, like the perfect little mate that she was, she obeyed. Her heated musk, already thick in the air, crashed over me with the weight of a mountain. Normally, with some effort, I could have withstood such a thing. But under the mighty influence of her tiny body’s gravity, I fell the way a dying man might fall.

And I drank from her the way a dying man might drink. Desperately, hungrily, wanting to bathe myself in her, fill myself with the sweet slick of her heat.

Her flesh was hot and swollen. When I plunged both tips of my tongues inside her and stretched, her shuddering passage gave way more easily than it would have before. Her silken canal was deeper, wetter, more pliable now. Ready for my knot. My upper cock spasmed, completely untouched, a jet of seed spewing forth.

Suvi ground herself eagerly against me, her fingers instantly digging themselves in my wet hair and dragging me closer. It was as if she wanted me to bury my entire snout inside her, and if there were some way to do that and still breathe, by the river, I would have tried. Blast, maybe I did not even need to breathe. Seemed as good a way as any for an immortal to expire.

But she told me not to die. Because she loves me...

That had my upper cock spurting again – remembering the terrified yet determined look upon her little face. And that beautiful, human voice I loved so well, trembling but fused with the kind of authority only she could wield against me, commanding me to live.

Suvi rocked, her hips frenzied, her arms quivering as she held me. I hated that she suffered in the starburn, but the force of her reactions aroused me desperately. Usually, there was some shyness, some hesitation in my human mate. Now, there was only need.

And in that need, both her bane and antidote, I was there.

She came to climax quickly, shouting and shaking, sweet fluid pouring out of her. Even as she clenched and bucked, she still yanked me hard against her body, as if it wasn’t enough, would never be enough.

“Skalla, I need... Not that, please.” She sobbed when I withdrew my tongue. “I’m afraid.”

I jolted, then raised my head to look at her. Really look at her. Her eyes met mine, slits of hazed silver.

“Of me?”

“No!” She cried instantly. Her gaze, made innocent and honest by pain, widened, and I knew she did not lie.

“Then what?” I growled, pulling her by the thighs until she slid towards me, her hair folding and then stretching along the mattress above her head.

Her face twisted, human tears spilling like stars.

“I’m afraid of how empty I feel without you!”

With the force of a universe ending, her words blasted all rational thought from my skull. My brain was no longer a brain but a coiling, writhing mass of activated instincts. Ancient. Darkly urgent. Entirely unstoppable.