Defiant Necromancer (Book 2 stubbed)

Miranda looked at the necromancer with new eyes, calculating advantages and disadvantages.

“I did think of something you can do for me,” Tybalt said, oblivious to her direction of thought. “You could apologize for… my mother.”

She swallowed. “You still… No, I understand. Well, I, um - I’d really rather not die.” She allowed her lips to curve in a small smile. “I’m happy to apologize. I wronged you. We wronged you. As a family.”

“I never threatened to kill you,” the necromancer pointed out.

You didn’t have to. You killed a man in front of me.

“If you don’t need healing, I could serve you in some other way,” she suggested, ignoring what he’d said. He raised an eyebrow at that, so she went on. She was even more keenly aware, as she spoke, of her nakedness. She made a silent effort and pulled her hands away from covering her breasts and her sex, where they had naturally settled. Her new position put the pale, delicate curves of her body on better display.

You like that, right? Miranda thought, carefully observing where his eyes glanced, a hint of triumph running through her now.

“I know you… had a thing for me, since we were children,” she said quietly. “You have my… congratulations on your triumph with the Fort. It seems as if I’m your prisoner now. So, I propose a deal. If you keep me alive and treat me better than your other prisoners from this fortress… I’ll be your woman.”

“Incest? You’re my half-sister.”

“N-no.” She swallowed, and her shoulders sagged.

“No? What do you mean, no?”

She thought for a moment but could not come up with any alternative. She was going to have to admit it. A truth she had intended to take to her grave.

“My mother told me, after I had come into my powers… I am not truly our father’s daughter. I’m actually the product of an affair she had with another nobleman.”

“A bastard,” Tybalt said, seeming to relish the word.

“Like you,” she pointed out.

“Yet you still inherited our - my - father’s class.”

“Yes, it runs in the family. Mother is his second cousin. Her father had the nature mage class too. My inheriting it was a pure matter of luck. Sometimes it skips a generation. All of which makes me your second cousin once removed… or maybe your third cousin. I’m not sure which. Either way, it’s… not really incest. We could have legally gotten married if we had wanted to, and if it was something our family wanted. If the truth was known.” She hated that she was trying to sell herself to him. She felt low and pitiful. But if it would keep her alive and treated well…

“So I was the real heir all along.” He shook his head, his face contorting in a twisted smile. “How fucked up is that? He treated me like garbage, your mother looked down on the bastard, kept me away, and all along, you—”

“Yes. Yes. I’m… I’m a bastard. You don’t have to…” Her voice had become very small. “Actually, that was the whole reason why we - why I - treated you so poorly. You were a threat to my inheritance. If our father - well, your father - ever figured out the truth, or you somehow awakened a class later… and you looked just like him!” Her voice became defensive. “You’re a man, you’re his real son, and you look just like him. It put you at an advantage. There was no denying who your father was. We had to keep you and your family away as much as we could.”

Tybalt gritted his teeth. “Forget about that. You called my mother a whore. I came to you for help. She died, because you turned your backs on her.”

But Miranda thought she could feel Tybalt coming around to her idea. He was already shifting from arguing about how horrible they’d been to him as children into anger over his mother.

“And I’m so sorry for that,” she made herself say, taking a step closer to him. “I can’t bring her back, but I knew it was wrong even back then. We could have helped, and we didn’t. When I heard your mother had actually passed away, I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. I know I was a bitch. I was a stupid, jealous bitch who was afraid you would take her family, her inheritance, and her whole life away from her. I was afraid that my mother would be thrown out on the street for adultery, and I’d be in an orphanage or a whorehouse or worse. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Tybalt.” She didn’t mean much of what she was saying, but she managed to bring tears to her own eyes anyway. “I’m happy to spend the rest of my life making it up to you. However you want. I’ll serve you in bed. I’ll cook for you. I’ll kiss your feet. I’ll… I’ll be your slave.”

“You’ve turned very shameless very quickly,” the necromancer observed. His eyes seemed to dart to the side, where the bed was, though Miranda wasn’t sure if he was thinking about sex or about the man he’d just killed there.

“I don’t deny it,” Miranda said. “It’s shameless of me to ask for anything. Just… I know I owe you something. I helped ruin your life and your family’s lives. But I can change. I just need time to… improve my ways and make up for what I’ve done. You could teach me, help me.” She looked up at him expectantly, bending forward slightly in a way that she thought might accentuate her relatively modest chest. “You’re not a cruel person. I know that. And I didn’t kill your mother. Not really. The cancer did that. I only insulted her.”

Tybalt looked stung by something she had said, angry, and Miranda thought for a moment that he would strike her down where she stood. But a few other emotions flickered over his face. He took a deep breath, and his expression calmed.

“You keep talking like you’re afraid I’m going to kill you,” Tybalt said. “Making excuses. Trying to avoid blame. But regardless of what you say, I have no intention of engaging in any violence toward you. So stop worrying about your life and be your real self, please.”

“Maybe I just want your forgiveness,” Miranda replied. “Or the chance to earn it, over time.”

She thought she had struck on just the right combination of words.

“Well, I’m willing to consider it,” Tybalt said after a moment, swallowing. He didn’t look nervous, but a hint of uncertainty had crept into his voice.

Not a definite yes, but not a definite no either.

Miranda knew what she had to do to seal the deal. She swallowed, then nodded, stepping closer. She was helpless, she reminded herself. She couldn’t back down, having brought up this idea. She didn’t have any real choice. She would have to leave a favorable impression on him, show her eagerness to please. The slight ache in her cheek from where he had slapped her was a quiet reminder that if she tried to fight him, it wouldn’t even be a fight. He would just easily overpower her. She still couldn’t reach the power inside her to even muster a single vine into growing.

She could have surrendered with dignity, she could fight and certainly die, or she could submit to him, do basically what she had been ready to do with Geta anyway, and wait for her chance to sabotage him… or at least escape. Or benefit from his success. But that last idea was one she expressed to herself very quietly, because it implied that she was a very low kind of woman.

In any case, after what had happened to Geta, she guessed this was going to be a long game. If Tybalt was removing the noble officers in charge of this bunch of men, they would surely lose their structure and break down against his army. It was clever, actually. She could acknowledge that even while quietly hating him.

If he was winning, that just meant that she would have to be convincing for longer.

“Can we close the door?” she asked quietly. “I am completely nude.”

“It’s not something we need to worry about,” he replied indifferently. “No one will walk by.”

That confirmed that he had some degree of control over at least part of this fortress already, without Miranda having even overheard any fighting. Even though this section was the officers’ quarters. He was just as formidable as she had been guessing.

She stepped in close, almost intimately so, then reached up and softly stroked his long, dark hair.

“You have beautiful hair,” she said, her voice honeyed. “Better than mine.”

He just raised an eyebrow.

Right, she thought. Get to work.

She stood on tiptoe and planted a firm kiss on his lips. He barely reacted to her, and as she pulled back, she saw that he was frowning. She swallowed again. This wasn’t going to be easy. Seducing someone who hated her, who probably wanted her to fail at seducing him, wanted any excuse to reject her and push her away.

She tried to put all real world considerations out of her mind for a moment. Those wouldn’t help. She bent her neck and began planting kisses along his throat. Despite being a necromancer, he didn’t smell like death or anything. Just a slight, healthy sweat smell. It was kind of good… until she realized it was a similar smell to his father’s.

Fuck, don’t think about him, what’s wrong with you?

Miranda reminded herself that she had been basically in the right head space for this right before Tybalt appeared. She also remembered exactly what she had been doing when the necromancer showed up. She reached down and felt for his manhood.

Oh. It was noticeably larger than the one she’d been touching just a few minutes ago. From the way it felt, it wasn’t even fully hard, but…

“Oh?”

She looked at Tybalt and realized she had spoken her thought aloud, raising a question.

“It’s just big,” she said, hoping he would react positively.

“Uh huh.” His expression turned bored. “I hope you don’t think flattery is going to help you.”

“Can we, um…?” Miranda gestured at the bed, then made the mistake of looking at it.

Geta’s body lay there still, reproaching her for what she was about to do.

Before she could get too good of a look at the corpse’s present condition, Tybalt yanked one of the bed covers over it and then tossed both cover and body onto the floor. Only a small bloodstain remained as a reminder that a man had died in the bed.

“Thank you,” Miranda said. And she meant it.

Tybalt sat down just to the left of the bloodstain, and Miranda quickly straddled him, rubbing her bare womanhood against his clothed shaft, which was growing harder despite the cold disdain he regarded her with.

It really is big, she thought. She wasn’t sure if she should be excited or afraid. Probably afraid. Tybalt was surely going to treat this encounter as some form of punishment, and her mother had told her the first time was supposed to hurt anyway.

She rubbed his manhood with her hand and felt a little thrill of excitement at the touch. That was going to enter her. Even if the person was one she loathed, she had already been intrigued by that possibility before. There were stirrings inside her. She wanted sex. She didn’t care that much about who it was. She reached for his waistband, thinking she’d slip her fingers under his pants and touch it more directly.

But he seized her wrist.

“Not yet.”

Miranda nodded obediently, trying not to smile. “Not yet” was about as far from “No” as she could have asked for. She was winning this battle.

She raised herself up higher in his lap, caressed his cheek, and began kissing his neck again. Soft, sweet kisses, like she loved him. As her mouth worked its way down his body, her fingers unbuttoning his shirt, she allowed her womanhood to slide down over his hardness.

She stiffened slightly as her lower lips settled over his manhood, only separated from her by thin clothing.

That feels… nice. At some point, he was going to pin her down and force her, probably, but right now, the sensation between her thighs told her that this wasn’t going badly. A part of her wanted to suppress the nice feeling - it would feel wrong to enjoy this, when it was with him - but she told that part to be quiet. She had to play the role. Had to be what he wanted.

What he wanted would be soft, submissive, eager, and fuckable.

She softly slid up and down it, the cloth slightly rough against the softest patch of flesh on her body. She looked down in slight surprise and realized she was leaving a trail of moisture on his leg. She had seen trails like that often enough in her father’s garden, but never from a human being.

It looked like something that would come from a snail.

Her face grew a little hot with embarrassment.

Is it supposed to be that way? she wondered. It seemed disgusting to her, but she saw Tybalt had followed her gaze, and his expression didn’t show any particular displeasure. She knew he had gotten around a bit back in Greentear - the local women looked at him in a certain way, she had seen, and she had subsequently put together what that meant - so she guessed this was how she was supposed to be reacting.

If I was enjoying it… which I’m not.

She realized that she was in conflict with herself. The practical part of her mind had told her, very quietly, to try to enjoy what she was letting him do to her, because she would probably need to do it more than just this once. The defiant part wanted to, well, defy Tybalt by not enjoying it.

His fist suddenly wrapped itself in her hair and pulled her up to his head height again. His grip was a little bit painful, but his mouth was on hers before she could speak any words of protest.

Tybalt’s lips caressed hers, capturing her upper lip between them and lightly sucking it. Without really meaning to, she opened her lips, and his tongue went inside her mouth, playing with her lips and tongue in a way that felt much better than Geta’s fumblings of a few minutes prior. His other hand grabbed her ass and caressed it, pulling it a little harder into his shaft.

Oh, that feels good.

“Mm…” The pleased sound escaped Miranda’s lips without her having to force it.