Love, Laugh, Lich (Claws & Cubicles Book 1)

 “I mean, there’s no ethical consumption under evil dominion,” I sigh, rolling my eyes at Janice from HR. “The ‘organic’ label doesn’t mean it’s better, it just means it’s more expensive.”

The intern had come around to get everyone’s coffee run orders, and Janice has a problem with decaf tea made with orphan tears.

Janice huffs. “They wouldn’t need to make a distinction between organic and non-organic if there wasn’t a difference.”

“Look, I’m not going to argue, it’s not for me, it’s for Sov— the Dark Lord. I don’t want to just swap something out, what if there’s a, like, dietary reason he needs it?”

Janice rolls her eyes, and doesn’t try to refute that. We’ve had this conversation a dozen times. Sometimes I think she likes being difficult.

Janice heads back to her office and I add my own coffee order to the intern’s list. I used to be able to keep up with the names, but it feels like there’s a new one every week.

Turnover is pretty quick around here; a lot of people do get sacrificed. Pentagram, candles, chanting, the whole shebang. We used to have little going-away parties whenever that happened, but there have been budget cuts. At least the severance package is good.

When the Dark Reign first started here, there were a lot of staff cuts. I was on the chopping block, so to speak. As I understand it, a number of virgin sacrifices had to be made to increase his power.

It’s so funny to think of what things were like then, compared to now. I’d been tied up to the rack, The Dark Lord had come in, let me tell you, he had been the picture of an unhappy customer, mostly because of the company’s slipshod record keeping. Lucky for me, I was an expert in dealing with unhappy clients.

He’d given me a chance that day to prove myself, and though every day he’d say this was the day he’d finally sacrifice me, every day I’d prove useful with managing things.  I think I can pinpoint the moment he decided to keep me close by– I went into his office to drop off some internal reports about an hour before he realized he even needed them.

It’s almost an hour later when the intern returns and makes the rounds to everyone’s desks, getting to me last because he forgot my office-slash-waiting-room had been obliterated and he couldn’t find my borrowed cubicle.

As soon as he sets the cups down on my desk I snatch them up, hurrying down the carpeted hallway.

I don’t like being late with anything, and that’s my main focus as I push through the Dark Sanctum’s doors without knocking, announcing as I come in, “Tea’s here!”

As soon as the words leave my mouth, I can see that I definitely should have knocked.

It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be anything resembling a body under that cloak. Honestly I thought at most he was made of maybe just bones under there, if anything at all, from the way his cloak always flutters weightlessly like it really is only a piece of fabric in the wind.

But he shrugs off the cloak, and he has a body.

A body that couldn’t possibly fit underneath it without magic. He shrugs it off, distorting the rules of physics like fitting a table under a handkerchief.

He’s definitely more than bones. Out of his cloak, he’s broad shouldered and broad-chested and really just broad in every direction. My mind has a hard time grasping how the cloak could have made his body disappear into almost nothing, when his body is so much…everything.

His legs have an animal shape to them, the way you can’t really tell what’s supposed to be the knees on a deer’s back legs. But maybe that’s because I don’t spend a lot of time looking for his knees, rather the shape of his ass before his tail interrupts it.

And my heart stops, like the ground falling out from under me, when he realizes the door is open and turns around.

His face is almost lion-like, or maybe it’s bear-like and I’m just thinking about lions because of the sheer volume of his mane of— hair? Fur? The rack of four large horns?

The hair continues in a war path down his stupidly broad chest, my eyes drag across a still broad, toned, leathery torso, and stop short after his hips. Yeah, why would a Dark Lord have any need for pants?

I don’t know what to make of what I see, but that’s not like any human penis I’ve ever seen. Or any kind, really. There’s a lot going on there, and I’m half caught between a warm spike of curiosity to explore and the sheer confusion of why on earth there would be so many.

“OH MY GODS, I’m so sorry,” I blurt out and duck back out the door. Oh my gods, my gods, I’m so fired.

I swallow and open the door again just enough to stick the tea inside on the nearest ledge, and flee.

I want to crawl under my desk. I end up pacing back and forth in front of Janice’s office for a while, trying to think of what I’d even say to her. I don’t know what I’d even ask her for, maybe some reassurance that I can’t be sacrificed for walking in on the wrong moment?

I walk down the wrong hallway two, maybe three times, I’m so distracted with the aftershock images of the sheer broadness of all that I’ve witnessed. It’s kind of a big change to go from wondering about my boss’s lack of body to his one hell of a body. 

Eventually, I go back to my temporary desk and bury myself in paperwork. The handful of times I would have normally poked my head into Soven’s office to deliver messages and remind him of appointments, I chicken out and talk the intern into dropping the messages off.

I think I spend the next few hours repeatedly burying my face in my hands, on and off. Every so often, my mind sneaks back to what I saw, and more importantly, what I’m not quite sure I saw. I don’t know what I expected to be in an immortal Lich’s lack of pants, but it wasn’t multiple appendages.

I need therapy to bury the image of my boss’s junk deep into the unused parts of my brain. Maybe hypnotherapy. I take an hour or so flitting around the HR department, looking for information to see if the employee health plan covers that.

The end of the work day nears, eventually. People gather up their cloaks and head out into the miasma, saying their goodnights.

“Working late?” Randall from accounting asks as he passes my temporary desk on his way out.

“Just catching up on some things,” I lie. I’ve been watching the hallway to the Dark Sanctum from my position like a hawk. Randall says something encouraging sounding on his way out, I don’t really catch it.

If the Dark Lord’s not going to fire me, maybe I’ll apologize for not knocking, and hope that puts an end to it. I can’t get any work done if I’m all wrapped up in my own embarrassment.

Eventually I summon the courage to approach the door, and then a few minutes later, knock, wait, and open it.

My gaze inches carefully around the room, and for some reason, I’m surprised to see him back in his cloak, a normal-sized floating specter once more, pouring over his spell books.

“Did you get my note to clear tomorrow’s appointments?” he asks without looking up.

“I—yes, the intern brought it by. I’ve rescheduled most of them,” I confirm.

“Very good.”

There’s a note of tired dismissal in his voice. When I hear that I usually ask if that will be all for tonight, and leave him to his experiments. But I don’t move. I can’t. I can’t just ignore what happened this morning.

I try to apologize. Those aren’t the words that happen, though.

“I–I was just checking in to see if you needed anything for your rituals before I left for the day, shivers or sneezes or whatever,” I blabber on, and nearly kick myself for doing so. Somehow saying that seemed less embarrassing than ‘Sorry I saw your dick, er, dicks, sir’.

The head of his cloak turns to look at me, as he straightens up. “…Well, nothing that’s set up for, currently. I’ve put all those rituals off until I can sort out this assassin issue.”

I nod. That makes sense.

At least things seem normal between us. Maybe nudity isn’t an issue when you’re undying. Maybe I can come into the office tomorrow and pretend it didn’t happen.

I’m on the precipice of leaving, when he turns his head back to his books, flipping through them.

“Actually, there is something that would be helpful,” he says, glancing back up. He lifts a heavy tome, flipping through pages of diagrams. “There is a spell that would help me locate how the assassins are getting in.”

I wait, fidgeting with my fingers behind my back as he scans page after page. I take a few steps further into the room, peering around. There’s broken glass on the floor by a window, newly boarded up.

He barely looks up as he says, “I need to trap the essence of a first kiss in this ritual field, so I can distill it down to the vulnerability of the act.”

A kiss. I’ve daydreamed a couple of times about standing on my toes and poking my face into that dark, seemingly empty cowl of his, to see if I could taste that darkness. I don’t know if that counts as thinking about kissing my boss, because I didn’t know he had a real, tangible mouth until this morning. And I wasn’t really preoccupied with the face part at all this morning, considering what else I saw.

“Well. I’ve never, uh, been first kissed, so,” I nod quickly, a touch too eagerly. Foot, mouth, thoroughly acquainted. I’m digging my own grave while standing in quicksand. I don’t think it matters at this point.  “That works.”

Soven gestures with a wave of his black cloak to the shelves, and a number of vials float off the shelves to the ritual floor, starting the preparation.

Then I see his hands, his real hands, come out from within the cloak, moving to take it off. The hood turns to me, and I realize he wants me to turn around. I do so quickly, swallowing. If my heart rate picks up again at the thought of him out of that magic cloak again, well hopefully he can’t tell from across the room.

I wait, averting my eyes as he sheds the cloak again, and by the sound of it, finds some cloth to wrap around his lower half like a grand, draped towel. When I hear him prowling around the room freely, the weight of his footsteps approaching me, I take a deep breath and carefully lift my gaze.

A beast. A few years ago I never gave much thought to what a Lich was, but the powerful form before me begs as many new questions as it answers. The only one that presses on my tongue, however: does anyone else know?

His eyes are molten gold, and burning into me. I shiver with that feeling of slowly being exposed, layers of coverings peeled back until I’m nothing but my skin and my rapid pulse.

My gaze still dips down once the loincloth’s in place, and instantly bounces back up to his horns. I bite down on my lips to avoid making any kind of face in reaction, but my mind is running with the sparse glance I had this morning and the size of the bulge through the sheet.

“Ok. So,” I say, matter-of-factly and as business-like as possible. In an attempt to not to look down again, I try to think about spreadsheets. I need to replace my unprofessional thoughts with professional ones. It’s as I’m staring hard at his face, the gravity of the moment sinks in.

Oh, no, what do I do with my hands? Should they be this clammy?

I shake it off as best I can. It’s just a kiss. It’s not like the first one is particularly important to me, I just never happened to get around to it. It’s not like a big, romantic thing to me. It doesn’t matter where I waste it.

I put my hands on his chest, and push up on my tiptoes, I’m ripping the bandage off, and getting this done.

My mouth meets Soven’s without ceremony. It’s softer than I expected, and that catches me off guard enough to not immediately pull away.

The sharp teeth that jut from his jaws nip gently at my lower lip. We’ve never been so close before, and nose to nose, there’s no guise of mystery when I can feel so much of him against me. I feel like I know him better just by being able to touch him. I can feel his careful intent in the way he moves his mouth against mine with purposeful kisses, the fleeting brush of his tongue to my teeth before I mirror the action.

The longer it goes on, the more I hope it never ends, the more I want from this. I push into the kiss, dragging my teeth along his lip.

My hands are digging into his leathery flesh, grasping for more of him until they’re gripping handfuls of his mane.  As I start to slip from my precarious balance on my toes—I really needed a step stool for this—a large clawed hand curls around the low of my back, pressing me up into his body, holding me steady. My feet leave the floor and I think I lose a shoe, but I’m fighting the instinct to put my hands around his horns and wrap my legs around his waist. I’m fighting that need and, I think, losing as I feel the bulge in the sheet press against my thighs. I find my hand pushing down on his shoulder to bring me up, some shadow of a thought to grind my hips to his. His mouth leaves mine and I feel the scrape of his teeth against my neck.

I gasp, and that’s the sound that breaks this.

It seems to rouse him from our kiss, and he pulls back to his full height, setting me back down, my shoe-less foot touching the cold tile again. His claws rest loosely around my back, caging me in.

His shoulders are like a fireplace mantel, taking ragged, heaving breaths, I realize I’m breathing heavily too.

“So, um, was that what you needed?” I pant. It was what I needed, but I think I might need more in a minute.

Soven’s molten gaze lingers on me a moment, before his eyes flick to the right. “…The ritual floor is over there.”

“…Oh,” I say. Oh. My cheeks warm. “You wouldn’t happen to need any more virgin sacrifices, would you?”