Notes: Ya'll rock. Thanks to those of you who have dropped a note or even just clicked on this. It's always so much fun to discover who enjoys the various offerings I put up as writing sacrifices (pun perhaps intended here). Anyway, thanks for trying this little story out.
Chapter title shamelessly co-opted from the Edgar Allan Poe story.
~*~ Three: A Tell-Tale Prince Charming ~*~
Tom smirked, all sharp edges and undisguised desire. "Clever, like I said."
She should turn away now, should run until he could not catch her, until the forest swallowed her whole and she was free of this twisted fusion of desire and horror burgeoning within her. But his eyes were a siren's song and his lips were far too close to hers.
She couldn't want this. But she was already kissing him. She'd already stumbled off the precipice and now the only thing left to do was fall. He was undeniably real against her, no trace of anything but human desire and heat in his every caress. She opened her mouth for him readily, begging him to devour her, to steal her soul away into the depths of his wickedness.
Hermione knew he was wrong. Could sense it just as surely as she could touch the humanity of him. But Godric, he was making her feel something else entirely, far beyond the heated fumbles she'd endured with boys at home during breaks from school and an entire universe away from the cold formality of her relationship with Viktor.
The bark of a tree dug into her back and she realized her dress was pushed up to her hips, her legs wrapped around his waist as he feasted upon the exposed flesh of her clavicle.
This wasn't her. This couldn't be her.
But she needed him closer. Her hands dug into his satin waves, fingernails trailing viciously across his scalp. He ground her against him, a gasp escaping his lips and echoing across her skin. Hermione whimpered—honest to Merlin whimpered—when she felt him press against the apex of her thighs.
Every sigh she'd ever overheard when the other girls recounted their carnal adventures suddenly made so much more sense. This wasn't just the slide of lips or the clandestine brush of skin. This was desire made manifest. The promise of a pleasure she hadn't ever deigned to imagine.
And she was experiencing it with a boy who was something like dead in the heart of the Forbidden Forest under a glutted moon on All Hallows Eve.
And he was going to kill her.
The sudden horrifying clarity of the thought was nearly enough to permeate the lusty haze. But not quite. She couldn't seem to stop her hands from pulling off his jacket, her hips from seeking his. Not even when she knew in her bones that he had led her here to kill her. That she was his ritual sacrifice.
But if Tom was kissing her, he wasn't killing her. So she didn't waver, didn't attempt to temper the desire coursing through her veins. They had time. His words made sense now. The ritual had to be completed before the moon reached its apex. But until then he could delay his dark sacrifice and she could find a way to stop him, a way to see the light of dawn.
She didn't allow herself to question what sort of boy would seduce the girl he meant to sacrifice. Nor did she examine the desperation that seemed to fuel his every caress. No, she had only one purpose now: survival. And if she needed to surrender her body to him to ensure that end, then she would.
The new paradigm should have extinguished the heat roiling in her core, but it didn't. If anything, the heightened awareness, the newfound danger made her burn hotter. Her caresses turned brash and uninhibited. He was a viper, but Hermione was no defenseless hare. She would let him believe her none the wiser. Let him dull his senses in this dangerous liaison until the opportune moment arose or the moon reached its final ascent.
Hermione gasped as his teeth scraped the column of her neck, her head rocking back with a thud against the gnarled bark of the yew tree. Her eyes traced the sky, searching for the height of the moon. It glowed brightly as ever beyond the shadow of the forest, higher still than before. A silent calculation of the remaining hours until its zenith warred with the heady urge to fully surrender to the ecstasy of his lips and forget her precarious position.
She just barely discerned that she had perhaps an hour or two until his window closed. If he was to be believed. But Hermione had the uncanny feeling that Tom hadn't outright lied to her, but merely obscured the truth when he could have concealed it. Perhaps this… connection she felt was not so very one sided after all.
And perhaps her faith in him—that this sacrifice was not entirely his choice—would simply get her killed. It didn't seem as dire as it ought to with his lips on her cheek and his hand up her dress.
She took a shaky breath and dragged his lips to hers. She only had to distract him until the moon began its descent. Then it would be too late and whatever plans he might have made would be foiled.
Never mind that she'd never had a boy's hands on her thighs like this. Never mind that she was burning up, trembling with tension she could not understand. Never mind that this was not what she'd ever imagined.
Because, despite it all, Hermione knew she wanted him. It was improper, beyond absurd, perilous beyond measure, but she would welcome him, this Lord Raven with death in his shadow. Perhaps if his touch had seemed manufactured or controlled, she could have found another way, but his hands against her were raw and earnest, fractured by a pain, an unbridled desperation she could not quite discern. She wanted to devour his suffering until she understood why he had brought her here. Why her death was his choice.
"Hermione," he rasped and she felt it in her core, in the flutter of muscles she'd never before felt ache.
He had no right to her—to her body or her life—but she only sighed in response. His grip on her tightened and then they were falling, sideways and backward into the abyss of darkness and beyond. But it was only the Forbidden Forest slanting sideways as he laid her down upon the mossy ground. Only a spray of stars upon the velvet carpet of the night that coiled around her, blanketing her in eerie shadow.
His jacket had fallen beside them and now he stretched it out upon the mossy loam, pulling her gently atop him as he settled back against the fine silk. Hermione's fingers traced the cruelly sharp line of his cheek and then the equally defined slope of his jaw. Liquid sapphire eyes stayed fixed upon her face as she drew the edges of him. Her fingers trailed the seam of his swollen lips and he shuddered beneath her, lips parting to admit the tip of her index finger. Delicious heat swirled within her as his tongue circled the digit, a promise she could not quite comprehend within his hungry stare.
Hermione's knees dug into the damp earth beneath his coat as she lowered herself to hover just above his parted lips.
"Why am I here, Tom?" Her voice was different. Breathy and languid in ways that made it seem entirely foreign. As if another girl entirely had asked the question.
Tom kept his molten stare fastened on her as he dragged a nail down the line of her jaw, mirroring her previous exploration.
"I can't entirely say," he murmured. "Perhaps it was the dress or perhaps that you so very clearly wished to be alone."
"But you didn't leave me alone."
"No," his thumb brushed across her lips, pulling her bottom lip down as it passed. "I did not."
She needed to keep him talking. No matter what he was doing to her nerve endings. No matter how badly she wanted to tear every lick of clothing from both of them and discover how exactly she could sate this ache between her legs. The more they talked, the higher the moon rose and she needed time on her side.
Hermione stole a messy kiss that turned her vision blurry before forcing more words out in that voice that could not possibly be her own. "What do you want with me?"
He frowned up at her, his dark brows knitting together for a moment. "Only what you will give me. I would not take what you did not offer willingly."
That she immediately deduced, was a lie. But she supposed he didn't intend the statement to include her life. It was clear he was talking about more innocuous matters such as Hermione's position atop him, enchanted cobweb skirts bunched at her thighs.
"If I am to give you my… virginity," her cheeks heated at the admission, "then I feel it is only fair I know more about you."
Tom stared up at her, agog. "You've never…?"
"No," she admitted sharply, moving to swing her leg so she could remove herself from what had instantly become a horribly awkward situation. If she weren't trying to save her own life, she'd be fleeing into the forest at top speed and praying she never saw his painfully handsome face again.
He caught her hips firmly, preventing any such escape. "I apologize, I don't wish for you to be shamed or embarrassed. I had simply made the assumption that a girl who can kiss as fiercely as you must have entertained other suitors."
Once again she was struck by his vernacular. Something about the cadence and word choice harkened back to another era. Hermione forced herself to relax against him. To let the shame of her inexperience fade. "I am not the most trusting person and I have yet to find a suitor that I believe is… right for me."
"And yet you are here with me." It was an echo of his earlier observation, but so much more charged with all that had passed between them since.
"I do not trust you."
"Good," he murmured, a finger trailing from her jaw to the edge of her bodice. "You shouldn't trust me at all."
She trembled at his light caress, but held as steady as she could. "So will you tell me something about you?"
"Will you let me have you?"
Just the timbre of his deep voice as he uttered those words assured her surrender. But she would not let him know how flimsy her resistance had become despite knowing he was not quite mortal and planned to use her in the most foul way.
But the boy staring up at her didn't seem a murderer; he seemed lost, desperate for her in ways that could have been alarming, but were instead empowering.
Hermione dipped her mouth to his ear, "tell me about yourself and I'll tell you how much of me you can have."
She felt rather than heard him swallow. Then he started speaking, dulcet baritone rising steadily above the restless hum of the forest. "I was born to a father who feared me and a mother too weak to care for me. I was raised in an orphanage until I turned eleven and entered Hogwarts. I was both a prefect and Head Boy, but faded into relative obscurity upon graduation. I had plans for my life. They never quite came to fruition. In desperation and stupidity, I ruined my life and any possibility of a peaceful afterlife. But that's what I exceed at most of all, Hermione. Ruining things."
Once again she felt the stirrings of a memory she ought to recall, a feeling that his story was not so foreign to her. But the edges were still too frayed and she could do nothing but shake her head and cast the feeling aside once more.
"You're not so old," she observed instead.
Tom let out a bitter laugh that crawled down her spine and chased away a portion of the heat. "Don't believe everything you see, Lady Cobweb. Looks can be deceiving."
But his image didn't flicker, not even when she cast a wandless revealing spell upon him. He was exactly as brutally handsome as he'd been before, but perhaps sadder now.
"Why do you want to return to this world? What's left for you to do here?"
He blinked up at her, eyes darkening from sapphire to cobalt in an instant. "It has little to do with this world and much to do with where I currently reside. As I mentioned, I destroyed any possibility of my soul finding peace when I… well, when I was young and impetuous. So when parts of me passed along into the next world, we were not united in a place of quiet harmony, but rather boundless agony. You see, Hermione, I have been in Hell for several years now and I will do anything within my power to escape it."
And now that she knew, Hermione could see it in the lines of his face, the tension that never quite escaped his jaw, the darkness that descended behind the luminous glow of his eyes. He had suffered—infinitely and truly. She pressed a despairing kiss to the corner of his mouth.
He didn't plan to kill her out of any malice. Not really. He was going to kill her because she was his only escape from Hell itself. She supposed that really didn't make it any better, but it certainly made it easier to understand, to rationalize away until she could almost forgive him the impulse.
Not that she could truly forgive him for luring her out here, seducing her and sacrificing her. That wasn't the sort of thing that was ever forgiven no matter how strongly connected she felt to him.
She barely contained a sigh.
Godric, she wished this evening had played out differently. How she yearned for a reality where he was simply a handsome stranger leading her on an intoxicating adventure through the forbidden. Where he was the type of boy she wouldn't regret. But he wasn't even a boy.