Welcome to Capricious by Julie Cox, a Texan tale of love and magic. NSFW.
A new chapter appears every Tuesday. This week is Chapter Fifty-Nine.
Chapter 59
Luke watched the storm coalesce out of nothing. The towering clouds swirled, swelling to greater and greater magnitude, and the wind blew around them in chaotic gusts. Lightning played around Sally, dancing through her fingertips and down her arms, to the brown-tipped mounds of her breasts, over her stomach, between her legs. She yelped and wriggled her body, black eyes wide.
“Oh,” she said, “oh what the–oh!” She spread her legs farther apart, as if caught in the middle of a jumping jack. “I’ve never done this right after sex, when I’m aroused, when I’m so aware–holy shit!” Electric lights sparked across her legs, lighting up her skin, almost from the inside out. Luke reached out and touched her; he got a small jolt, not entirely unpleasant. He scooted forward to her and raised his mouth to her clit.
She almost buckled and fell on him but caught herself on his shoulders. She grabbed his horns and tilted her pelvis forward, giving him a better angle to suck and lick her. She tasted sweet, and musky, and her skin was burning hot to the touch. His mouth and hands buzzed with a faint electric hum, very nearly painful, but the sounds she was making were too delectable to even consider stopping. Besides, she was holding his horns, one of his favorite things ever. For that alone he would have endured much worse.
He ran his hand up the inside of her leg and pushed his fingers inside of her. The electric hum that buzzed through him followed, and he felt her muscles stiffen and swell with intense arousal. He had found a rhythm she liked, rubbing her clit roughly with his rolling tongue, and within minutes, it sent her over the edge again. She screamed, and it was far too like an eagle’s cry for comfort. She tossed him away like a rag doll, end over end, several feet away. He watched as the lightning coalesced around her, and her myth-folk form manifested itself physically, completely in the mortal world. Dark brown feathers tinged with lighter penciling swept away from her swelling body; talons replaced legs and feet, and a cruel-looking, curved beak sang out the last of her cries. She raised her wings, and a hurricane-strength wind swept her into the air–and Luke against the wall of the trailer, narrowly missing a water spigot. She rose, screaming, into the storm, held aloft by the powerful winds she summoned around her. Luke watched her disappear over the tops of the trees.
He picked himself up out of the tall grass and stumbled toward the end of the trailer, intending to head for the car. A few steps from the corner he went back for his clothes. Pants and boots on, struggling to turn his shirt right side out and carry Sally’s clothes too, he went for the car.
He half collapsed, panting, into the driver’s seat and leaned over the steering wheel, trying to get his head to stop spinning and his eyes to focus as he turned the ignition.
From the back seat, Charlie said, “I see you managed to get your shirt off.”
“I’m having a moment here, if you can’t tell.”
“Oh I imagine so. Let me frame this for you: you guys head off after the bad guy, there are gunshots and shouting, then a Da Vinci machine and a thunderbird fly off overhead. You come back alone, half naked. Gotta tell you, Luke, you lead one hell of an interesting life.”
“Far too interesting at present. Let me get my head on straight.”
“That’s as likely to happen as me taking up competitive bass fishing.” Charlie studied Luke in the rearview mirror, frowning. He got out of the car, moving slow and careful, and came around to the driver’s seat. “Move over, incubus. I think of the two of us I’m in better shape. What the hell did you do, anyway?”
Luke slid over the center console and buckled himself into the passenger seat. “Not an incubus, those have no empathy. I gave Sally the magical oomph she needed to manifest her thunderbird self.”
“That girl is repressed as hell if she needed so much help.” Charlie started the car and pulled away from the drive. “Where are we going?”
“Back the way we came. Get as close to the mountain as you can, I’ll tell you when we’re near a trail.” He leaned against the door, immensely tired and shivering. He had gone through withdrawal before, in other lives. That was what it felt like, he thought, like his body was lacking something it desperately needed to keep going. He ached all over; he felt faintly nauseous and dizzy. He couldn’t stop trembling, and a clammy sweat broke out on his face and neck.
He wondered distantly what would happen to him if he’d given Sally too much of his own magic. Would he die? Eventually recover? Would his myth-folk self die, the way Alan’s troll-self had died? Not for the first time, he wondered if there was an afterlife for myth-folk–or if, indeed, there was an afterlife for anyone. Life was cheap; he’d seen so many people die, including himself. It was very possible that this was all there was, and that in a few minutes, he might come to the end of his thousands of lyears. No eternal peace, no repose, no better life–just over. Not with a bang, he thought, but a whimper. He wished he could have remembered the rest of the poem.
Huddled into a corner of his own mind, chilled and feverish, contemplating death, Luke felt very small. Very alone. And not a little bit afraid.
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About the author: Julie Cox is the author of Chasing Tail and numerous short stories in Circlet Press erotica anthologies. She lives in Texas with her husband, children, and ever-expanding menagerie of animals on their farm. She runs a small online yarn business and teaches yarn spinning. She has numerous stories published with Circlet Press and elsewhere.
Welcome to Fox Pass, Texas, a small community where the mythical creatures aren’t so mythical after all. Satyr Luke’s comfortable routine is thrown into disarray when he becomes the target of enemies who won’t hesitate to hurt his friends to get to him. Struggling to save his town—and to sort out his feelings for his friend Sally—Luke faces the adventure of a lifetime in Julie Cox’s Capricious.
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