One Pill a Night to Keep the War God Alive novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Cool Hands
His fever rose after the first pill, and her cool hands brought him down, and then to a kiss she said was hers, not the cure's.
On the second night, the guards at the Thunder Hall door tried to stop her.
"He said you weren't to be let in," said the older one.
"Did he say it before or after the first pill?" said Zhiyi.
The guards looked at each other.
The door opened from the inside, and a white tiger put her head out and shoved Zhiyi through it with her skull.
"Traitor," said Lei Juehan from the bed.
He sat bare to the waist with his elbows on his knees and his head down.
The fever from the first pill had come back with the lamp, and a sheen of sweat ran down the black fern on his chest.
It had cleared one finger-width, and that was all.
"I told you to leave the mountain," he said.
"You told me to leave before the twenty-first night. It's the second."
She set the furnace down and lit it.
At the hour of Zi, she rolled the second pill out of the fire and bit off a crumb.
Her fingertips prickled, and a spark jumped to the furnace leg.
He watched her do it.
"Why do you taste it?"
"So I know what it'll do to you."
She crossed the stone floor with the pill on her palm.
This time he took it from her hand without touching her skin.
He swallowed, and the second finger-width of black went pale along his ribs.
Then the fever rose.
It came up through him in a wave, and she watched his hands close into fists on his knees.
The stone floor under his feet began to steam.
"This is the part where they run," he said, with his teeth set.
"Do they?"
"Everyone does. The room gets hot, and I get..."
He stopped.
"I get hard to be near," he said instead.
Zhiyi dried her hands on her apron and sat down beside him on the bed.
"Hold still," she said.
She laid her palm flat on his chest, over the scar.
Her hands were always cool, from years of Snow-Lotus work on burned beasts.
They were the one thing in the hall that did not hurt him.
His chest rose in a shuddering breath.
"Better?" she said.
"Yes."
He said it like a confession.
She moved her palm slowly across his ribs and up to his collarbone, and she felt the heat bleed out into her skin.
Under her hand his heartbeat was hammering.
"The pill is the cure," he said roughly. "The rest isn't."
"You can hand it to me and leave, Zhiyi. I'll take it from the doorway."
It was the first time he had said her name.
"I know," she said.
"Then why are you still touching me?"
She considered it honestly.
She was twenty-six, and in all that time she had never had room for a lover between the furnace and the kennels.
She had never met a man who looked at her palm.
"Because I want to," she said. "And I'm not leaving."
His eyes lifted to hers, and they were not tired anymore.
"No one has touched me in sixty years," said Lei Juehan. "I don't know what I'll do."
"Then I'll go slowly."
She leaned in and kissed him.
His mouth was burning and almost shy.
He kept his hands on his knees, a man told not to touch the porcelain.
She kissed the corner of his mouth, then his jaw, and felt a sound go through him that he didn't mean to make.
"Is this part of the cure?" he said against her lips.
"No."
She drew back far enough to look at him.
"It's mine."
His hands came off his knees.
They went to her face first, rough with callus, and held it.
He kissed her back, slowly and thoroughly, with all the patience of a man who had four hundred years to learn how.
She slid her palm down his chest and felt every muscle under it jump.
"Show me," he said, rough. "Show me what you do for the fever."
So she did.
She pushed him back against the pillow, and he went down with his eyes on her face.
She slid her cool palm down his stomach, untied his trousers, and wrapped her fingers around his hard cock.
The thick shaft was burning hot against her cool hand, already leaking a wet bead at the tip as his breath broke.
"Zhiyi."
"Look at me."
His hands fisted in the blanket as she stroked him from root to tip, her thumb circling the swollen head.
The black fern on his chest flushed red and ran gold at its edges while he fucked up into her cool fist.
When he came, it was with her name in his throat and his head thrown back, hot ropes of cum spilling over her fingers and his stomach.
He lay shaking afterward with his arm over his eyes.
"I'm sorry," he said hoarsely.
"For what?"
"I'm the war god. I should have had more control."
"I'm not sorry at all," she said, wiping her slick palm on her apron before kissing his wrist.
He lowered his arm.
He looked at her for a long moment, at the flush in her cheeks and her hair coming loose from its ribbon.
Then he reached for her.
"Your turn," said Lei Juehan.
He was not clumsy.
He turned her under him with one arm, careful of her weight, and tugged the green robe off her shoulders.
His hands were hot on her bare breasts and her hips, hotter than the lamp.
She gasped when his callused palm slid between her thighs and found her wet through her shift, and he stilled.
"Don't stop," she said.
"I'm learning."
"Then learn faster."
He laughed, low in his chest, the first she had heard.
His mouth closed hot over her nipple while his fingers parted her wet folds and circled her swollen clit.
He stroked her slow at first and then surer, sliding two thick fingers deep into her wet pussy until her back arched off the stone bed.
On the floor, the tiger lifted her head.
Zhiyi came hard under his hand with her fingers knotted in his hair, her pussy clamping tight around his knuckles.
Afterward she lay with her cheek on his hot shoulder while he stroked her back.
The fever had gone down, and his skin was only warm.
"This is not in the Sect Master's orders," he said into her hair.
"No."
"I would like it to be in mine."
"You don't give orders in this bed," said Zhiyi, and he laughed again.
Near dawn she slept, and woke to the sound of boots in the courtyard.
Two apprentices of the Hundred Herbs Hall stood outside the Thunder Hall door.
"Hall Chief Kuang sends his regards," one said when she came out. "We've taken your thunder-ginseng to the audit room for inventory."
"All of it?"
"All of it. It will be returned when the audit is finished."
Zhiyi did the arithmetic.
Pill three needed one root, and the audit would take longer than a day.
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