Chapter Eight

 

 

 

It took many weeks alternating between the glass coffin on weekdays and the rope web on Fridays and weekends before she realized her muscles unknotted when she had to pull on the latex bodysuit.

Bell still had to puppeteer her into the funhouse, but the web was far more comfortable than the coffin. It was a chance to not suffer prickly legs on her skin, spiders hiding under her hair, paralysis and shut-in panic attacks, nor the weakness that followed her days in the red tent, when desire intensified into a whirlwind behind fear’s wake—because the Creature was tender, because his feed kept her close, because his warmth called to her, because he was just as good without the sex demons’ influence.

As soon as the funhouse closed for the evening performances, her bindings loosened and the funhouse prisoners were released from their torment. ‘Release’ was a relative term, of course. The victims capable of walking aided those who couldn’t, carried them on stretchers back to the semi-trailer. Elizabeth helped. Even Hank wouldn’t tell her to shove off when he was the one with extremities loosely sewn on where they’d once been firmly attached.

In the trailer, she endured their cries and screams as she wiped away blood and pus, wrapped burns and rotting flesh in bandages. Whenever she’d been sick or injured herself, Elizabeth had always felt better when clean and cared for. Despite mild mysophobia, she’d applied that principle to the Bishop children with success, and the prisoners were no exception.

Aside from two of the prisoners, most were in their late teens through mid-twenties. After the third weekend, the prisoners started coming to her as though she was some kind of Wendy figure and they were her Lost Boys—albeit with filthier vocabularies. It was a role she was much more comfortable in. They were adults, but they were still young. They missed their mothers.

Hell, Elizabeth was well into her thirties, but she missed her mother’s daily phone check-in. Charity hadn’t done that with her other daughters. As frustrating and deflating as it had been, it had meant that Charity had still cared enough to worry.

None of the prisoners found out what she did with the Creature. The Creature had no reason to share the information with Bell’s allies, much less his enemies, and none of the prisoners ventured beyond the line between the funhouse and the semi-trailer. Elizabeth wasn’t positive, but she didn’t think the prisoners were allowed free movement through the circus, whether limited by Bell’s magic or because of aggressive ostracism from the cast.

Between the prisoners, the funhouse, the red tent and her own tension with the Arcanium cast—plus her fears about what was happening among the people of her old life outside Arcanium—her small RV clinked like a distillery transport truck from leftover whiskey bottles whenever the circus picked up stakes and moved.

Bell stayed true to the word that accompanied his gifts. But the more she poured down her throat to calm down and knock herself out most nights, the more she wished he’d just let her have the hangovers, because that, at least, was suffering she’d earned.

 

* * * *

 

Her view in the funhouse never changed. Always the same kinds of people creeping down the hall worried about what was coming, what might emerge from the shadows or jump out next to them. They were indistinguishable in the dark, screaming the same, posturing the same, crying the same, whether young or old, male or female, in groups or alone.

But the man didn’t hug the walls or dart his gaze from side to side to check baseboards and corners for hidden haunts. He didn’t anticipate the boarded-up door next to him might conceal some shocking tableau. His gait was smooth, slow, casual. Leisurely.

He wore a trench coat that wouldn’t be out of place in a noir detective movie. His leather shoes gave off a polished matte shine from half a corridor away, and a fedora perched at an angle on his head. A suit and tie beneath the coat completed the unlikely ensemble. In a world of leather and latex that often mingled with the medieval and bohemian, ‘unlikely’ was a difficult standard. He would have been more unlikely in tails and a top hat, but his sartorial choice and nonchalance still roused Elizabeth from the near-trance state she’d settled into.

He took his time approaching her, unfazed by the screams around him from the guests, the prisoners and the funhouse music. The dim light concealed most of his features, and the fedora obscured the top half of his face, but underneath, a slight grin curved his mouth.

She curled her fingers into fists around the closest part of the rope web she could reach. She wasn’t even sure what disturbed her, but though her oversensitive instincts had been considerably dampened in Arcanium by an overabundance of wrong, ice slithered down her spine the closer he came.

The web rocked forward, bringing her with it, and Bell’s magic pulled the scream from her.

Wailing, moaning, strobe lights, a woman with filed teeth and wearing S&M gear masquerading as a spider costume… Under such circumstances, the most unflappable of men were usually flapped. But the man stood there, staring and smiling at her with his hands in his coat pockets and face half hidden. All he needed was a toothpick to chew and a gold badge to flash to complete the image.

Eventually, she ran out of breath. She brought her teeth together in a sharp bite that clicked through her skull. Baring her teeth and hissing were the only other things she could do, but they didn’t faze him any more than the scream.

His face wasn’t two feet from hers. At this distance, she should have at least seen a glint in his eyes, but everything above the flare of his nostrils was black. He didn’t resemble the Gentleman, who literally had no facial features. Of everyone in Arcanium, he reminded her most of Bell—appearance inescapably normal, but with some undefinable quality as far from normal as possible.

What the hell are you looking at?

“I’m looking at you, pretty Spider.”

The man standing still and silent was bad enough. When he spoke, it was worse. And she still didn’t know why, except he wasn’t supposed to be here like this. And if he wasn’t supposed to be here, Bell had to know.

“Don’t bother screaming for him. He’s not looking this way.”

Five teenagers crashed into the corridor. From their haste, the Gentleman was probably chasing them. Elizabeth held on to that. The Gentleman was coming.

The teenagers stumbled down the corridor, laughing, catching their breath, pushing each other, one guy’s arm around his girl to protect her.

Elizabeth wasn’t in the shadows, not with the man still in front of her, which kept her web pitched forward. She’d lost the element of surprise, so the teenagers were more curious than anxious as they approached.

She thrashed against the ropes that bound her. One of her secondary arms actually managed to loosen its rope shackle enough for her to slip it out, and she reached out to scratch at the man with the acrylic claws that capped her latex gloves.

The man quickly stepped back, but if she’d caught him by surprise, he showed no sign.

As soon as she determined she couldn’t reach him, she brought her freed hand back to pull on the ropes binding the others, but the only one she could loosen was her other secondary arm. Bell had anchored her primary limbs much better. Those ropes wouldn’t budge.

She freed her other secondary arm just as the group of teenagers reached her. She was already in the strobe light, but their presence triggered her need to scream. She reached for them with her secondary arms, scratching and grabbing at their shoulders. The girl screamed higher and louder than Elizabeth, jumping back against her boyfriend. The other boys edged out of the way, laughing, though Elizabeth could tell she made them nervous. Perhaps because they’d seen her slip her bindings, and maybe she would come after them the way the Gentleman had.

Except the Gentleman didn’t follow them around the corner. He didn’t come after the man still standing there against the wall, the teenagers scattering and scurrying around him as though he were a rock in a river, as though they didn’t see him but somehow knew to avoid him.

Even with her long arms and her claws, she couldn’t snag anyone’s shirt or jacket to use them as a shield or plead with them without words that she needed help. She gnashed her teeth, rabid froth building up over her lips.

It didn’t convince the teenagers to stay. They ran, leaving her alone with the man, whose smile only widened. She screamed again, this time in frustration, but still the Gentleman didn’t come.

The man slid his feet forward until he was just out of reach. She could brush the open sides of his trench, but she couldn’t snag the fabric.

Then he raised his hand.

Her secondary arms flew back to the rope web. The bindings didn’t close around her elbows again, but she still couldn’t move them, nor could she reach for him with her prime arms, limited though that reach was. All eight of her limbs were pinned to the web, held there by nothing.

He came closer to her now.

And there was the hyperventilation, late but expected, wholly reasonable. She opened her mouth—whether to scream or bite was anyone’s guess at that point, neither off the table—but at his leather-gloved touch on her chin, her jaw locked.

He cocked his head, eyes still obscured in darkness, as he ran the tip of a finger over the points of her teeth. “I thought he’d run out of worthy ideas after the carousel and the twins, that he’d lost his poetry. But this house, and now you…” He hooked his fingers under the edge of her latex mask, pulled it over her head, somehow as intimate as removing the top half of her suit.

He came so close that she thought he would kiss her, that he kept her mouth open like this to force himself as deep inside her as he wanted without having to fear her bite. But all he did was smooth his palm over the death’s-head moths while she trembled so hard the ropes made a soft humming noise.

“You intrigue me, pretty Spider. He doesn’t have much imagination, but he has excellent taste.” He bent to whisper in her ear, as though telling her a secret. “We’ll have such times, you and I.”

The man withdrew, continuing into the rest of the haunted funhouse without a backward glance, not even when her locked jaw and her limbs were released from their invisible bindings. The web rocked back into the darkness, but that didn’t stop her from thrashing against the rope like an animal caught in a trap. Too many minutes passed before she accepted either no one was coming or no one thought the man was worth the chase.

“What disturbs you, Spider?”

Elizabeth jumped, already on edge to scream. It was her constant soundtrack in this godforsaken funhouse. No shame adding hers to the chorus, even when it wasn’t scripted.

The Creature clung to the acoustic tile of the ceiling. He should have weighed too much for the plaster and pulled the whole structure down with him, but something else kept him attached other than claws. She was in no state to ask what.

“When the quality of your fear changes, when it becomes unbearable, I sense it from all the way across the circus.” He climbed onto the web headfirst from above, unsettling her. “It cannot be a small thing that frightened you if the fear still lingers like smoke.”

The Creature touched her moving lips, her attempts to even just mouth words. Bell’s magic thwarted every effort at coherence. In the funhouse, she was more beast than he was, and his fingers on her lips reminded her of the man. She turned her face away.

The gesture presented her neck, where he was more than happy to redirect his interest.

“Was it the Gentleman who stalks the previous hall? He sows fear and paranoia to heighten a visitor’s funhouse experience, but he does not intend to trigger such sensations in you.”

Elizabeth shook her head. The Gentleman’s absence had concerned her more than his presence.

He brought his mouth to her neck, brushing his lips over her skin. “Shall I take the fear from you?”

An entire haunted funhouse to feed upon all day, and you want me now?

As though he’d heard her thoughts, he said, “On the roof, I take the scraps that seep through the ceiling, what escapes from the entrance and exit. The Gentleman feeds on all kinds of fear, but the rarest meat I crave is terror, not a mere adrenaline rush for a thrill. Bone-deep fear fades fast among the rest of the cast, and the crew is soulless, nothing of substance. You’re the richest thing to walk through the circus since my arrival. I would stay in your web every time Arcanium opened its gates if Bell believed it would serve his circus. As it is, I cannot linger forever, but I can linger for a time. May I feed?”

He always asked. It seemed a strange thing to have to ask to take a person’s fear away. It wasn’t like the sex demons stealing life through seduction or the clowns eating whatever intestines they could get their hands on. It wasn’t Bell granting wishes helter-skelter. The Creature was hardly as invasive as a vampire or an incubus. He didn’t break the skin, didn’t drain her energy, didn’t muddle her mind. Yet he always asked.

And Elizabeth couldn’t explain to him why she needed that so much.

But she shook her head. When he rescued her from the glass coffin, she yielded to his appetite because he took away fears she knew were completely irrational. She hadn’t had so much as a rash from the tarantulas’ hair, and no matter her position, the spiders exhibited no signs of agitation or aggression. Her phobia was the only thing to trigger such a continually violent reaction, and even that had begun to subside—probably because the fear of Bell’s untrustworthiness had faded.

The strange man who had since disappeared… She didn’t want to stop fearing him. Fear had a purpose. The only problem was when it went too far, and she had a sinking feeling this wasn’t too far.

The Creature paused then lowered his head. “I thought… Never mind. I will return to the roof and leave you to the fear you choose.”

She stopped him with a hand on his leg, another on his shoulder.

“You wish for me to stay?” He did not resist as she drew him closer to her, his leg overlapping with hers and his wings fluttering to adjust to the angle of the web. “I was allowed to enter to lighten the load of your fear. If I am not to feast, I serve no purpose and distract you from yours.”

Her stomach twisted even as she curled her secondary arm around his waist to urge him against her hip.

She shouldn’t be doing this. Sex in the red tent was morally ambiguous enough. There, it arose from the relief he offered, the closeness that relief required, the magic the sex demons sent out into the air. That was all it was, and that was why it stayed in the tent.

This wasn’t the red tent. She shouldn’t be doing this where this week’s Man Doll or werewolf could run beyond his assigned corridor, catch her close to a cast member, and call her out on her hypocrisy.

Then there were the guests—guests who wouldn’t know what to make of a winged gargoyle of a man with his lips to the throat of the Spider. Elizabeth recognized the irony, but in the urgency of the moment, she doubted those passing through the funhouse would. It certainly didn’t follow the funhouse theme of torment and despair that was fun for the whole family.

Yet Elizabeth’s eyelids fluttered as the Creature drank from her neck nothing that had to do with fear.

Shouts coming from the Gentleman’s corridor warned her that guests would hear the Creature’s low growl before they would ever hear her scream.

The Creature responded to her sudden tension with humming laughter. He nuzzled her neck, then ducked under her arms, climbing behind her. With her prime arms and both legs fixed to the web, he had to take care not to strain her limbs, but he manipulated the flexible web and slithered up to settle behind her, with his body cradling her rather than the rope.

The sensation of his hips flush against her ass and the slighter flanks of her secondary legs short-circuited her brain for a moment. But her slim build couldn’t hope to adequately hide the Creature, not even with her extra limbs and the darkness working on his side.

Then his mouth was against her scalp. She had never adjusted to how sensitive it was. She could practically feel each crease of his lips at the base of her skull. He didn’t feed, just breathed her in. He slid his hands up her abdomen to cup her breasts at the moment the funhouse visitors careened around the corner, with assorted shrieks and cries of frightened delight.

Elizabeth twisted her neck to try to warn him with sounds if not words, but he smiled, caressing her nipples through the latex until they were visible through the bodysuit.

She shifted, all too aware of his cock against her ass. He wasn’t hard yet—he had a strange way of becoming aroused all at once instead of gradually—but the heat of his mouth along the back of her neck and the possessiveness of his hands sliding back down to her abdomen as the visitors came toward them suggested desire just as well.

Elizabeth closed her eyes at the gentle, wet pressure of his tongue over the contour of her ear.

The web rocked forward, the strobe lights intensifying, and she opened her eyes wide as the next scream was wrenched from her throat. She curled her secondary fingers, swiping at the guests to get them away from her as soon as possible.

However, though they shouted and raised their arms to protect themselves from her claws, their gazes remained on her. Nothing seemed to rest or fix itself to the Creature, who rested his head on her shoulder and laughed too low for her to hear. She only knew by the vibrations. He stroked her belly, then brought one large hand between her parted thighs, drawing her scream to a higher pitch than it had started. The visitors didn’t seem to notice as they continued through the house.

The Creature used the momentum of the web rocking back to press the heel of his palm, broad and firm, against her clit.

“A creature like me knows how to hide. I can fly the skies in broad daylight over a crowd without anyone noticing.”

But they can still see me. They could still see the way her nipples showed against the latex more obviously than before. The flush in her cheeks and the flutter of her eyelids. The parting of her lips in a way as far from frightening as even a fearful woman could imagine. The cant of her body into his touch. And if someone were there, they would hear her gasp, the creak of the latex, the groan of the rope.

With his free hand, the Creature followed the path of the zipper between her breasts up to her neck. He wrapped his long, massive fingers around her thin neck, squeezing just long enough to make her tense so he could sip her fear with his mouth against her cheek, curling his tongue to catch the gasp.

Then he slowly drew the zipper down.

No. I draw the line at being naked. She squirmed harder, shaking her head.

“They see more in the coffin.” He nudged her cheek with his nose. “Trust me.”

Elizabeth twisted to look at him, to search his face when his opaque eyes gave her nothing. She didn’t know why she still expected the worst of him, because there wasn’t a time in Arcanium when he had done anything unkind, wicked though he appeared. And in this place, she should have already figured out that nothing was the way it appeared.

He quickened his rhythm against her clit but relinquished the zipper to guide her mouth to his, the more pointed tip of his tongue deliberate and coaxing over hers. Screams of horror, pain and misery were the soundtrack for a sweet domination of a kiss. He wasn’t always gentle, but even when he was, he commanded her as though he’d always been meant to. Asking for permission didn’t diminish the way he kept an invisible collar around her throat that he could hook his finger through, and her entire body would relax and follow.

Kind though he was, she’d give a primary limb to deny him. God forbid she grow comfortable in Arcanium, heat and soften with lust in this torture chamber. But she did.

Still holding her mouth with his kiss, he brought his fingers back to the zipper. The click of its teeth seemed deafening despite the cacophony of the funhouse. It wasn’t a sound one expected to hear in there, and the one time it had happened before, the Gentleman had come to scare the perv away. The Gentleman didn’t come this time.

To her mortification, she found herself curious what would happen if he did, if the being that had acted as her informal bodyguard were to walk around the corner and witness the Creature pulling the zipper down between her breasts to her navel. The latex clung to her skin, but physics was physics and the material was skintight. Without the zipper holding the two sides together, the strain eventually parted the suit between her breasts, exposing the heart tattoo and a portion of the mourning corset.

The Creature pulled the zipper down farther, to the partial mandala then past the piece of fabric that was the only thing protecting her from zippering and unzippering over sensitive places. He insinuated the hand rubbing over her between the open latex and pushed the fabric away, leaving her completely bare in a thin triangle from neck to cunt, her breasts just holding the latex on and only his hand covering her folds.

If people couldn’t see him, they’d be able to see her folds without his hand visibly in the way, which moved the two of them beyond sexy and into the realm of indecent.

“Trust me,” he whispered.

More shrieks from the corridor, a warning. And he was still fingering her for the world to see. He had to remember how she was when he first encountered her. She didn’t want to be seen like this, didn’t want to be blamed for it. Yet her cunt grasped at nothing in a silent plea.

As the new mass of guests rounded the corner—a good dozen people crammed into the thin hallway—he grew hard between all four of her legs. Her secondary set had no shame, spreading higher and wider as the bindings allowed in reaction to the press of his thick cock against her. Their unique angle enabled her to clasp his waist with her knees. If they’d been free, she would have been able to wrap them around him, holding him flush against her while her prime set parted for him. But the bindings kept her anchored.

And God, the people were coming closer, laughing and pushing each other into the walls as the Creature brought his cock to her folds, still keeping her arousal urgent, his thumb massaging her clit under the hood and his mouth making love to her neck.

Her body didn’t care at this point whether she was panicking or aroused or both. If anything, her brain seemed to be treating pleasure as a panic attack, ramping its intensity up with disquieting speed.

The visitors were coming, and she was this close to doing the same, with just the head of his cock slickening itself at her entrance and his tongue against her pulse.

As the web rocked forward, the motion pushed the Creature into her.

Elizabeth arched, her cry of pleasure roughening into a scream once she faced the visitors, local college boys from wherever the circus had put down roots. The Creature thrust into her, slow but powerful. She fought against her bonds to conceal the motion, even as she moved her body to take him in at the same rhythm, shook her head against the first signs of impending orgasm.

Most of the college boys had recoiled at her scream, surprised exactly like they should have been and moving on without interest.

But two of them didn’t.

Through their pupil-dilating fear, something just as primal distracted them from her claws and teeth, from the spider legs and spiderweb. Their eyes glazed as her latex slipped just a little bit more, catching on her nipples, showing a considerable amount of cleavage and tattoo ink. The boy on the right’s jaw seemed to unhinge, his mouth a dark hole, as he regressed back to the caveman that seemed to reside within every man—or else Elizabeth had always been good at bringing it out of them.

The Creature moved his lips to just below her ear, a place that, if properly stimulated, could render her a wordless puddle of melted lust—a place Dez had often wielded to quell any reservations. She didn’t think she could clench more strongly around the Creature’s cock, but his kiss and the boys’ slack-jawed entrancement certainly challenged her to try.

At least the boys didn’t try to touch her the way some of the others did, nor did they grab at their crotches as though the darkness would forgive them. They just stared, almost drooling, as she tried to play the part of the Spider Woman and hide the fact that a monster was inside her, stroking her into an orgasm that swelled and released like the flow and ebb of waves. Just when she thought it was over, he shoved into her again, stroking over the spot that sparked like licking a battery and which kept her coming, over and over and over again in an impossible loop.

She screamed with all the ugliness she had inside of her, shrieked so hard that the two boys had to cover their ears. She clawed at them with her free hands, kicked and struggled against the bindings with renewed fervor, anything to conceal what was happening to her, but also to try to outrun the pleasure, outrun the Creature, though they were both bound—her to Bell’s web and him by her.

The latex couldn’t hold. The sides of her bodysuit snapped past her breasts.

The boys lowered their hands from their ears, as though being able to hear would help them see her better. The ones who had started down the hall but had been waiting for their buddies now wandered back to her, hypnotized. The collection of them looked like nothing more than zombies, with her as the main course.

This time, one of them reached out to touch her.

“Yowch!” He jerked his arm against his T-shirt. Two sets of claw marks appeared, blood welling into the tracks. One of the tracks, the shallower set over his hand, came from her. The other set were deeper and across his forearm.

The Creature had stilled inside her, his growl low and steady against her shoulder. His claws held little shreds of skin underneath. But given the frantic direction of the boy’s gaze, the Creature still hadn’t made himself seen.

“How’d you…?” Confusion shifted into wariness. Eyes wide from desire narrowed in suspicion.

Well, it was a haunted funhouse.

Now the boys showed definite signs of being freaked out, though still enraptured by the sight of real breasts. In full latex, she could have been animatronic, but the very real way her breasts moved and the glimpse of her tattoos reminded them that there was a human being underneath the shine—or at least a body. Who knew how much ‘human’ made it through their brains?

She needed some serious bodily autonomy here if guests were going to start thinking they could touch her. She would bet none of them tried to touch the freaks in Oddity Row like this, but somehow she was open season because it was dark and secluded?

If Bell heard her thoughts, he still didn’t release her from her spiderweb.

This time, however, the Gentleman came around the bend. With preternatural silence, he crept through the corridor, reached for the boys with his unnaturally long fingers.

Not a lot of things could convince boys their age away from free boobs, but a faceless monster grasping for their heads was one of them. The Gentleman chased them with his slow stride around the next corner.

The Creature kissed her in that place under her ear as the Gentleman made his way back.

She still wasn’t able to speak, and it wouldn’t have been kind if she had. Trust me, my ass.

Whether she melted under the Creature’s kiss or not was irrelevant. Now the Gentleman could see what the boys had seen. No eyes or not, the Gentleman could clearly see, because he tilted his white, skeletal, alien, faceless head in a universal gesture of male appreciation. He didn’t appear to show any other pointedly male signs of appreciation, but she tensed against and around the Creature as the Gentleman brought the sides of her bodysuit in to cover her breasts again.

He didn’t linger, except in his natural slow-moving way, as though every part of him needed to catch up to his brain’s commands.

The Creature licked her racing pulse. “I know what you must believe of me, my demonstrative woman. But they could not see where I touch you now, where I enter you. I promise you, little Spider.”

Elizabeth shook her head.

“Do you want me to stop?” He ran his teeth over her scalp in a feral caress, used the base of her neck to find a grip as he thrust into her.

She shuddered, wrapping her fingers around the rope web again. One stroke after another, inside and out, made the rigid pole of her spine ease and her body welcoming to him again.

He drank from her as he came with his teeth in her skin like a vampire, though he didn’t break through. In the warmth that followed and the sudden release of her fear, she couldn’t help but writhe in the bindings, grinding back against his cock and into his palm. There was nowhere he wasn’t, and he angled his cock to bring the sparks behind her eyelids again. She bore down as though to lock him inside her. Her orgasm made his fingers even slicker over her clit as he finished her off.

“I’m sorry,” he gasped as soon as he parted his teeth from her neck. “I thought I could control it, but so close to you, it is so easy to just breathe in…”

Elizabeth reached behind her with her secondary hand and brushed her palm over his hip. She was more irritated by the boys seeing her when she didn’t want to be seen than she was by an accidental reprieve in her anxiety. He didn’t drink it all, not even close, and he’d stopped as soon as he realized he was doing it. Getting her gawked at was the betrayal, but she couldn’t explain that while she was still a spider in Bell’s web.

Her post-orgasm tension didn’t go unnoticed. He withdrew his fingers from her clit and his cock from her cunt then replaced the flap of fabric, as though that would adequately absorb anything coming out of her. Walking in her latex was going to be a special kind of uncomfortable. Everything zipped up as though nothing had happened, but she knew it had. The Gentleman knew. The boys knew and would remember.

The Creature tasted his fingers over her shoulder but took no relish in the act. “I thought I could ease your fears without drinking them. But it seems I cannot ease them through the feed, nor by giving you the respite from it that you ask for. I don’t understand, Spider. I don’t understand what you want of me—why you call for me, burn for me, then turn cold as a north wind while still against my body. I am not ignorant of human ways, yet you are incomprehensible to me.”

She closed her eyes and turned her face from his. He ran his thumb over her jaw.

“Do you call for me at all?” he asked, almost too quietly for her to hear.

When she didn’t respond, he crawled back up to the ceiling. The warmth he’d left behind in her body cooled, though her face flushed in shame long after his wings had passed out of view.