by R. Lee Smith
He waited. One ear flicked.
“I don’t know,” she mumbled. “Weird and deviant.”
He laughed. He actually laughed. “Some would agree with you, certainly. I would have, not long ago. But now I know we are not so different.”
“Yes, we are.”
“Then you have never wondered.”
“No,” she said and to further prove it, defiantly added, “Wondered what?”
His head cocked. “And I should just say it, should I?”
“I guess you’d better,” she shot back, “because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do.”
“Well, I don’t.”
He blinked slowly, like a cat, then leaned close and calmly said, “Have you never wondered what it would be like if I mounted you?”
She stared at him. After a moment, she remembered to laugh. After another moment, unable to meet his steady gaze, she looked away.
“Well?” he prompted.
“Well, what? You don’t honestly expect an answer, do you?”
“I do.”
She forced another laugh, refusing to look at him. “Then my answer is no. No, I can definitely say I haven’t.”
“Never.”
“Never!”
“I have.”
“Good for you,” Nona said, staring fixedly straight ahead and ignoring the volcanic heat in her face and…and elsewhere.
“I have often imagined how it would be to hold that smooth body tight against my belly. To see the ripples in your furless flesh as I strike against you. To hear your human howls of pleasure. I have caught your glance a thousand times and seen the color come to your cheek as you look away…as you do now.”
“I do not,” mumbled Nona and peeked at him to prove it.
It was a mistake. His gold eyes gripped and held hers. “And there is the color,” he observed. “There, the catch and quickening of your breath. Are you certain you have never looked at me and imagined my body hot against yours? My weight upon your back? My breath panting on your shoulder?”
Nona stared at him, her mouth slightly agape and fillings aching in the chilly air.
“Have I insulted you?” he asked, unconcerned.
Her mouth worked, but in silence.
“Because I would apologize if I insulted you,” Nakaroth said as he leaned over her, slipping one hand swiftly beneath her fur-blanket, beneath the waist of her pants and her panties.
It was the shock of it, it had to be. She gasped, but didn’t hit him; sat up fast, but didn’t grab for her knife. He just stared at her, smiling, as his hand stroked over her belly and between her thighs. His fingers parted her, rubbed lightly, then probed inside her, sparking an impossible plume of heat that stabbed and twisted in her like a killing thing.
“…but I see that I did not,” Nakaroth concluded. He drew his hand out, letting the moon boldly illuminate his wet fingers before he licked them clean. His gold eyes were white in the moonlight, bright enough to burn hers when she tried to meet them. “Do you have your knife?”
“I…What? Yes,” she managed at last, pushing the swaddle of leathers that was her pillow back to reveal it.
He was waiting for something, but she didn’t know what. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, certainly couldn’t think. Her body was already completely out of her control, completely under his. When he leaned closer, invisible strings pulled her head back and exposed her throat to his wolfish kiss. Someone else put her hands on his body, forcing her fingers down through his thick winter pelt to stroke at his scars. When he got up and moved behind her, it was someone entirely separate who rocked her forward onto her hands and knees, someone else who let him pull the blanketing fur out from between them and toss it indifferently away.
She could have struggled. She didn’t. She didn’t scream or swear or say one word of protest. Her mind was a snowstorm, whirling in constant, chaotic motion, but remaining perfectly blank. She felt frozen air as he tugged her clothes down—coldest on her wet pubis—but not for long.
His fur was thinnest on the inside of his flanks. She could actually feel the smoothness of his skin as he straddled her, trapping her inside his muscular thighs. Then the coarse brush of his pelt on her bottom. And then the hard, slick heat that pierced her.
It didn’t hurt. That, too, was a little shocking. She’d always heard the first time hurt, and sometimes even the second and third time. She was supposed to tear, she was supposed to bleed. His penetration was an overwhelming scream across every nerve in her body and every synapse in her brain, but there was no pain in any of it. He plunged upwards, pushing against tightness but no more than just a hitch of resistance, and then he was in her, he was actually inside her, and he didn’t stop until his hips bumped soundly against her bottom.
Nona gulped air convulsively, swallowing the first impulsive cry that tried breaking free of her. She was successful in silencing herself, but not Nakaroth. He groaned, pressing the flat top of his head between her shoulders and breathing against her back, otherwise perfectly motionless. She could feel her heart beating hard. She could feel his pulse as well, pounding inside her. It made her own loins throb, made them burn. She let her head drop, looking in shell-shocked disbelief beneath her for the steam that had to be rising from her, but there was nothing. Nothing but her own legs, slightly spread, and his surrounding them. She could see the moon’s white light outlining the dimensions of his shaft, follow its shape upward and into her. Into her.
Nakaroth’s head raised and his hands came down to cup her shoulders. He pulled his hips back and thrust forward. She felt him slide back and then push into her all over again, shoving a great cloud of heat before him to bloom out in her belly. She lost the strength in her arms, dropped forward and landed scrabbling at folds of musty pelt over stone. She couldn’t see him anymore, but she couldn’t help but feel him. His thrusts were steady, slanting, neither fast nor slow, and without any obvious consideration for her in the form of caresses or kisses, but only the driving power of his body.
And was she offended? Could she really pretend to be offended when this heat was in her, burning hotter at each stroke? Was it offense that shot through her suddenly in this blinding, gut-cramping rush? Was it offense that made her surge back at him, biting her lips to keep screams inside her where they belonged while she shook and writhed?
Nakaroth didn’t speak, but he groaned when she came, and his movements after that were rougher, faster, rocking her in curt shoves she scarcely felt at all. One of her hands groped back and caught a fistful of his fur. She yanked mindlessly, struggling to pull him deeper, and never was there a single thought or sound.
Nakaroth’s teeth scraped at her neck. His powerful arms wrapped her, crushed her. His claws pricked at her skin. She felt his legs shift, and then he was striking impossibly deep, filling her beyond the limits of her body, filling even her soul. She gathered in folds and folds of the musty fur to form a pillow to scream in. Her hand struck her knife and sent it skittering across the stone. Nakaroth leaned over to catch it and move it back within her reach without ever breaking rhythm.
No sound. Only her breath, a little more ragged than usual. Anyone listening might think she was crying. She raised her head, seeking Heather, but the other woman lay exactly the same, just a peaceful little lump under Burgash’s arm. Only sleeping Heather and sleeping Burgash and beyond them, the eyes of dozens of watching wolves, some hunched and panting, their hands fast at work as they stared with haunted eyes at the place their two bodies joined.
And she didn’t care. She couldn’t care. She closed her eyes and they ceased to exist. Her world was cold stone and hot breath and Nakaroth.
She came harder and faster than she ever had on her own, came the way she’d only read about, burying hoarse screams in folds of fur and scratching at the stone in an effort to keep quiet. Nakaroth’s arms tightened at once. His full weight bore down on her, pushing her into the ground as his movements quickened,
roughened…and stopped. His hips strained against her, shuddering. The thinnest hint of a whine broke through on his next breath. He shuddered again, harder, and now she felt it—a bloom of heat, a quiet thing, of hardly any consequence.
The flat top of Nakaroth’s head came to rest between Nona’s shoulderblades. He panted, sending short, warm puffs of air through her threadbare sweater to cool on her skin. His flanks shivered now and then. He kept his arms tight around her for another minute or maybe two, then placed a bracing hand on her back and broke them apart.
She lay down, cold and impossibly small and separate, and stretched her out suddenly stiff legs and aching knees. She could feel his semen trickling out between her thighs and onto the ground. ‘Marking his territory,’ she thought, her first clear thought.
Nakaroth draped the pelt over her. Under its cover, she reached down and pulled her pants back up. He lay down beside her, chuckling in a weary, self-satisfied way. “A good hunt,” he murmured and licked her bare throat. “My finest hunt. But I have one more to run, I think. Tomorrow.”
She asked no questions.
His arm snaked under the blanketing fur and over her waist, pulling her back against his bare body. A proprietary embrace. Her flesh crawled at the contact, but everywhere else, it still tingled. She wanted to throw off the fur and run until her heart exploded and she didn’t have to deal with any of this anymore. She wanted to turn her face into Nakaroth’s warm body and feel his heart beating as he held her. She wanted to know what she wanted, the way she always had, all her life.
Leila was right. The world was full of gophers. They burrowed up under you, undermined the foundation you built everything on. By the time you knew they were there, you’d already fallen.
20. A Last Hunt
Kruin woke inexplicably restless. Not tired, only…apprehensive. The sky, no more ominous than it had been yesterday or the day before, nevertheless felt charged with storms. The wind, clean and clear, tasted of shadows. He gathered his hunters, but did not join them. He set off alone in search of whatever it was that bit at his heart, ranging further than was perhaps wise for a lone wolf, until he found himself nearly at the borders of the Serpent’s Marsh.
He would have turned back—while the serpents themselves slept in winter, the manticore and marsh-cats who stalked the high branches of the swamp-trees did not, nor did they hesitate to add lycan to their diet should one unwisely cross their path—but there, right on the edge of his good sense, he found tusker tracks. Not just any tracks, but of such a size that it could only be that self-same boar that had wandered into his territory the same day as Nona and her humans…had that been the same day? It seemed to him that it had, but his memory of that time was beginning to fray. Here it was again, however, and nearly fresh.
He considered sending up a hunt-howl. The risk had not lessened any in the thousand days since he had first sniffed out this particular prey, yet Kruin felt his blood stir some at the prospect of taking such formidable prey alone. To bear such a prize back to High Rock, to add the polished tusks to those already strung around his neck…vanity, yes, but more than Kruin could resist.
He followed the tusker tracks some three leagues through the snowy forest, over ice and under dripping branches, only to emerge, chilled through and sore, to find Nakaroth holding the thing by its hind legs, patiently bleeding out the carcass. Kruin snarled and crouched down, scooping up a palmful of snow to rinse his mouth. His second flicked an ear, acknowledging his presence. Otherwise, his full attention was on his kill.
“You sent your party on?” Kruin asked finally, once irritation faded enough to show him only Nakaroth and no other hunters.
“I took this one alone.”
“Oh?” Kruin watched Nakaroth lay the beast out, carefully polishing the impressive tusks with a rough stone. More vanity, perhaps, although Kruin could think of a better reason for his second to make a trophy hunt. “You mean to ask me for a mate.”
Nakaroth’s tail wagged once. “I do.”
“Mika?” he guessed, without much hope.
“Nona.”
The winter wind gusted once, chilling him, howling low in the trees and reminding him, in some strange way, of Nona’s sad, sweet song about seasons and the changes that must be. This was one of them. He had resigned himself to it, and yet…
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I wish it.”
Kruin’s claws flexed on the hard, cold ground. “And does she also wish it?”
“Yes, although she would never admit it.” Nakaroth’s lips stretched in his rare, toothsome smile. “But she will have me. I will take a mate and you, lord, will gain a strong bitch for High Pack.”
“Two.”
“Heather, yes.” Nakaroth flicked an ear, then looked up at him with interest. “Will you have her for your mate?”
“Why would you think so?” Kruin asked, taken aback.
“It would simplify matters.”
“Simplify?” Kruin echoed, his confusion nudging over into anger. “I have no desire for her and she certainly has none for me, not for any of us!”
“She needs a hunter. A den.”
“Enough! I will not force her to take a mate she does not want merely to simplify the feeding of her!”
Nakaroth turned his attention back to the tusker, now cleaning and polishing its hooves, which were not trophy-parts.
Kruin watched, his ears slowly folding and flattening the longer this unnecessary task went on. “You do not approve?”
“My chief-lord’s decisions are not for me to approve.”
“Tell me your thoughts.”
“My thoughts.” Nakaroth paused to inspect the point he had shaped on the tusker’s forehoof, then rolled the beast over and started in on the next one. “I think on this matter, I should be silent.”
“I say you will speak.”
“Then I say this is not Sliver Moon or Low River or even Dark Water. I say this High Pack. Only the strongest receive the honor of packbond here, my chief. The Fringes must prove themselves with Full Hunts and trophies, but you will take in a human who will not even use a stone-thrower?”
“There are many kinds of strength,” Kruin countered. “My Sangar is no hunter, but through her wisdom and healing ways, High Pack’s wolves are all made stronger.”
“Shall Heather be a healer then?” Nakaroth asked with the faintest tinge of derision. “She, who ran at cries of pain and the splash of blood? She, who cannot even bear to butcher a good, clean kill for cooking?”
“She has seen enough blood. She wears her scars with honor.”
“Who in this land has no scars? Shall they all be given dens? Heather needs a mate,” said Nakaroth, standing to put their eyes on level in what was nearly a challenge-stance.
Kruin closed the distance between them in a single long stride. “Because Heather will stay with the one who feeds her,” he snarled, “and Nona will stay where Heather stays.”
Nakaroth flattened his ears. “These are not my words, my lord.”
“But they are your thoughts. Do not deny it and do not dare to tell me Heather must be claimed to secure my rule. I protect my own and I fear no challenge.”
“Neither do you foolishly invite it where it can be avoided,” Nakaroth retorted. “If you give dens to the humans, if you feed and protect them and ask nothing in return, if you make a gift of an honor that others must earn—and fail to earn, after years of striving—there will be challenge, not by one wolf but by five, ten, a thousand! High Pack will survive it. You and I may not and, without doubt, your law of many changes will not. The old ways will return. Not merely the law of your father or his fathers, but the very oldest ways. The way of the Wolf,” growled Nakaroth as Kruin frowned. “Your rule will go to the strongest and who is strongest, my lord? Who, now?”
Kruin did not speak the name, but he could not help but imagine Vru upon the raised rock, blood bites at the back of every female’s neck. No Sakros—the old had no place in Vru’s
pack. No Sangar—wolves had no need of healing ways and no use for lamed bitches. No Basharo—no cubs but those of the Alpha. Where it might go from there, he did not know. Few chiefs would welcome a return to the oldest ways, but chiefs could be challenged and there were always some for whom the law of the Wolf seemed best.
“Yes, my lord,” Nakaroth said, pushing his muzzle within a hair of Kruin’s own. “I want Heather mated for your sake. And for hers, as little as you may believe it, for I have thought on it and I can see no other way to bring her safely into this pack.”
“No other way but to have her taken against her will,” said Kruin coldly.
“I have not said so. I merely say she needs a mate. For all my liking matters, I should like to see her courted, gently wooed and patiently won, but—” Nakaroth made a point of looking around at the watching forest. “—this is not that land.”
And the lycan were not that people.
“I know she fears us,” said Nakaroth, putting space between them once more and tipping up his chin in a token show of submission. “But I think she knows, in her mind if not her heart, that she does not need to. Perhaps when she sees Nona claimed—”
“I have not said that I will hear your claim, wolf.”
Nakaroth gave a little more ground, showed a little more throat. “I want this, my chief,” he said softly. “I want her. She wants me.”
“Enough to mate to you?” Kruin asked, making his disbelief plain.
Far from bristling, Nakaroth actually smiled. “Enough to mate with me.”
Kruin’s ears went up with an audible snapping sound.
Nakaroth turned and bent to haul the tusker onto his shoulder, pretending not to see his chief’s shock. “It was witnessed. The Fringes can be reckless, but not so foolish, I think, as to pursue a bitch I have mounted. You’ll have no more trouble over her. Once Heather is claimed, there will be no more trouble at all.”
But there would be cubs, lycan cubs of human getting, a thought so deviant that he should want to vomit it out, but he did not. He closed his eyes, the better to hear the song of Endless. Nona’s name was there, as it had always been there, but he could not hear her cubs. He heard his own instead and none were louder than those names he could not remember.