CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE –
Megan point of view
She shot me a mischievous sidelong glance, lips still curved upwards. “Any suggestions for properly baptizing Megan’s reformation to unbridled indulgence?”
Okay I know I bring this upon myself but what the hell is this girl up to?
Marcus’s roguish gaze swept over me in a lingering once-over that would’ve been unseemly in any other context.
As it was, that same frisson of raw, unchecked appetite permeating the very atmosphere rendered the look almost… intoxicating in its unvarnished appreciation of my physicality.
“For a divine creature in decidedly feral spirits this evening…” he mused, tapping one long finger against his chiseled jaw. “I do believe our signature ‘Black Lotus’ would make for an… invigoratingly spiritual first rite of passage, wouldn’t you agree?”
Lilly clapped her hands together delightedly, features awash in the pulsing infinity pattern of the lavender infinity room backdrop.
“You read my mind as always, darling! Two of those devilish concoctions forthwith, if you’d be so kind.”
“Hey now, hang on a second,” I cut in with a note of hesitation, shooting Lilly a sidelong frown. “Are you sure loading me up on ungodly strong booze the second we walk through the doors is the wisest play here?”
She simply shrugged, the darkness rendering her features almost inscrutable through the persistent light shifts. “Who said anything about wisdom tonight, o’ fierce one? I explicitly recall something about shedding inhibitions and indulging your unshackled wild side for once.”
The rebuke, though gentle, still managed to find its mark – pulling me up short and reminding me this was indeed supposed to be an exercise in uncharacteristic self-dissolution, even if that notion felt entirely foreign on a bone-deep level at first.
Marcus reappeared with a flourish, two glass cylinders cradled with ceremonious reverence containing indigo libations bristling with thin, claw-like accents of blackened garnish.
“Two Black Lotuses for the striking company tonight,” he crooned in a voice dense and sultry enough to bond molecular formations. “An elixir of awakening for the bold and beautiful alike…”
He slid the drinks across the bar top towards us with a sinuous undulation of his forearm, the motion profoundly unsettling in how inhumanly elegant it felt.
Lilly instantly elevated her portion in a toast, fixing me with a pointed stare that dared me to balk now.
I held her gaze for a beat – abruptly conscious of precisely how far outside my established comfort zone this entire evening was veering – before scooping up my own drink and clinking the lurid vessels together firmly.
Here’s to shedding shackles tonight,” I muttered in a voice hoarse enough to surprise even myself.
Then, heedless of Marcus’s indecently intimate admiration, I upended the glass in one defiant series of pulls, actively fighting off my body’s instinctive rebuke towards the ungodly mixture of spirits searing its way down my gullet.
To her credit, Lilly didn’t so much as blink at my unorthodox reception of her ceremonial offering.
She simply chinned her glass in that exact inverse of my own practiced motion – long, slow pulls that savored the unfolding ritual rather than profaning it wholesale.
The instant after that final, embittering swallow finished cauterizing my esophagus, it slammed into me with the fury of a velvet-gloved sledgehammer – the viscous potion’s euphoric rushing warmth overtaking any lingering apprehension with alarming swiftness.
“Woah…” I wheezed, careening back against my stool as every nerve ending in my body seemed to thrum with renewed vitality. “That… is some kind of distilled lava you people enjoy around here.”
Lilly’s tinkling laughter joined the hypnotic symphony of sound swallowing the surrounding environs. “Please, you act like I’d let you near anything uncouth or déclassé during your debutante seance.”
She placed a steadying hand on my shoulder, the gesture suffused with a tactile substance that should’ve felt impossibly lurid… yet somehow didn’t.
“That little devil is Lyra’s proprietary signature – a potent ambrosia synthesizing a bounty of rare herbal elixirs and forbidden floral nectars into a spiritually expansive, mind-unlocking tincture.”
I blinked rapidly, the pulse thrumming in my temples as everything crystallized with vivid, rapturous intensity all at once.
The air hung impossibly thick and heady with the perfumed bouquet of champagne vapors and clove musk intermingling until each inhalation left me drunk and weightless.
And the SOUNDS – my God, the sheer symphonic resonance washing over me in waves of subharmonic distortion and ecstatic feminine ululations.
Each staggered beat pattern carved fresh, rippling waveforms along my exposed flesh as though the very music was possessing me on an elemental level.
“Breathe deep, Megan,” Lilly’s husky murmur unfurled in my ear with the sinuous grace of a serpent’s caress. “Allow the Lotus’s ambrosia to seep into your pores and liberate your truest, unfettered essence from its corporeal confines.”
Almost of their own volition, my limbs began swaying in needful syncopation with the rhythms resonating through every fiber and bone in that archetypal, primal repetition of cycles.
Each elemental particle composing my physicality danced along its own unique yet immaculately intertwined route, improvising fresh incandescent arabesques and flourishes with every successively transcendent crescendo.
Some dreamlike stretch of time could’ve passed in that sinuous reverie before Lilly’s fingers tenderly grazed my flushed cheek, startling me back to wakeful presence.
Her expression wavered in my vision yet remained warm and inscrutable beyond mortal ken.
“Our host requests your esteemed presence,” she purred in cadences that oscillated between audible and pure metaphysical resonance.
“He wishes to greet the celestial archon who has so gloriously joined our hallowed dominion this evening.”
She tilted her head meaningfully in the direction of a towering obsidian spiral staircase ornately encircling one of the central support beams.
My gaze drifted upwards, pupils straining to focus on the shadowy, implacable figure awaiting our hushed audience.
“Are you quite sure that’s appropriate?” I heard myself question in a voice scarcely more than wind rustling through brittle, cocooned husks of metamorphosis.
“Of course, o’ resplendent one,” Lilly soothed in susurrant tones, those sinewy fingers of hers coaxing me upright from my perch. “He merely wishes to extend formal reverence and felicitations to you before returning to our indulgent anonymity.”
I allowed myself to be steered towards the spiral inlaid with smoldering insets of amber and turquoise, picking my way upwards with every sinuous undulation of my unfurling accompanying Lilly’s confident strides as though we’d rehearsed this ascent into vaulted mystery a thousand incarnations before.
The indistinct shape atop the parapet steadily resolved into a towering, leonine figure seemingly more aspect of elemental might than mere man.
Immense shoulders tapering into sculpted muscularity and an ageless, patrician visage that exuded uncompromising authority presided utterly over this entire shadowed panorama of blissful dissolution.
“The rising light,” he intoned in a stentorian baritone that resounded within the chambers of my own chest cavity, “Has graced our sanctum with its radiant presence at last.”
Two immense, taloned hands rose from the folds of his ebon vestments to cradle my jaw and cheek with shocking delicacy, tipping my face upwards to fully meet the hypnotic, smoldering depths of his gaze.
“Blessed be this convergence, daughter of stars and decimating fire,” he breathed in an enveloping tenor that seeped into my very bone marrow.
“You shall burn away all accrued cynicism and earthly dross on your path to absolute immolation this eve…”
“Just who the f**CK is this crazy guy?”