by Hettie Ivers
One half wanted desperately to stop myself. To hold her and tell her that everything was okay and that she was safe with me. But the other half clawed at me to continue. To break down her psyche—to pull and twist the strings of her emotions until I’d achieved my endgame. My heart vacillated somewhere in the middle. And my dick wanted it all. Because I yearned to devastate her to the point of total submission—so that she’d let me console her any way that I wanted to.
“Shh-shh, it’s just a dream, Lauren. You’re only dreaming. Everything’s okay.”
She was so disoriented it took her several moments to hear me—to realize that a wolf was no longer snarling at her. She didn’t resist when I lifted her off the ground and settled her into my lap.
“You’re dreaming, Lauren. This is only a dream. You’re not going to die. The wolf won’t eat you.” The last was a lie. I would consume every drop of her.
She stared up at me like I was an alien from another planet as her heart rate slowed just a fraction, her mind working to reorient itself to an entirely new reality. As I listened to her unsuspecting mind, her initial perceptions flattered me. She found me attractive. She liked the way that I smelled. She felt good being held in my arms. Her intuition told her she was safe with me.
Fuck.
My conscience screamed at me to scare her again. To peel my lips back now and bare my canines—to reveal the monster that I still was in my human form and traumatize her all over again. But I found myself drawing her closer instead and rocking her softly back and forth in my lap.
“Why am I dreaming about this?” She asked with a sniffle. “About you?”
I told her the truth. “Because I’m trying to save you.” From me.
She frowned, her expression turning guarded, her eyes on me suspicious. “Why? I don’t know you. Why would you be in my dream trying to save me?”
“It’s your dream.” A partial truth. “Why do you think?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had a dream like this before.”
Thank God for that. My hackles were instantly raised at the notion of anyone else scaring her the way that I had done. Sick. I was sick.
A shiver ran through her body as she released a shuddering sigh, and she turned the question back at me. “Why do you think you’re here trying to save me?”
Oh, clever, clever girl.
How could I resist? “Because I believe I understand the kind of pain you crave in your subconscious, Lauren. And I find that I am beyond desperate to give it to you.”
She squinted up at me, her damp lashes fusing together. “Pain?” Her head shook minutely in the cradle of my arm. “I’ve never wanted pain. I hate being in pain.”
“And yet you’re in constant pain. Aren’t you?”
Reflexively, she continued to shake her head. But then, as I watched, her expression grew puzzled.
“It’s always there. Isn’t it? Just beneath the surface—looking for a way to come out. But you don’t know how to let it out, do you? You’ve only ever been shown how to push it down—to sweep it aside. I can help you.”
My dick grew painfully hard beneath her lush ass as I watched her swallow. I knew that she was digesting the truth of my words when I saw a glimmer of understanding surface in her waterlogged eyes.
“Help me … how?”
“I’ll help you to embrace the pain—so you can feel better. Help you face the fear that’s been chasing you so that you can truly begin to live.”
A faint worry line appeared between her brows, and she averted her gaze. I held my breath, my mouth watering as the tip of her pale pink tongue swept her bottom lip.
“How much … will you hurt me?”
With that one single question, I knew I was done for. My soul lost. My last hope of redemption shattered.
My heart began to race. The beast within flexed, and my arms unconsciously tightened around her. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“On how much pain I think you need to give you release.” A partial truth. “And how much I need to give you.” The whole truth.
She frowned, taking her lower lip between her teeth. “I don’t understand.”
But she would.
The predator in me had been fully awakened, and he only played to kill.
Gently, I laid her on her back on the ground. She didn’t protest. And while her eyes processed my movements, they didn’t dare to question my authority as I tugged the hem of her skirt up and spread her legs apart with my knees.
Her breath caught in her throat and her pulse quickened as my hand slid up between her thighs to touch her where I should have held no claim.
“If I weren’t a monster, perhaps I could hurt you just enough to wake you up inside … flip your reset button and help you to feel again.” My fingers found her wet beneath the thin barrier of cotton that covered what was mine. “But that would never be enough to satisfy my own needs.”
Her mouth fell open and her eyelids fluttered to half-mast as I pulled the damp fabric covering her perfect, swollen pink sex aside. Somehow she found the means to question me then. “Y-your needs? But this is my dream.”
“You don’t want to satisfy my needs?” My fingertips ghosted over her slick lower lips, letting her feel the heat of them as I hovered, poised to attack. Her thighs spread wider of their own accord, opening her sex to me as I lowered my mouth to her ear. “You don’t want to feel the power of arousing me? Of knowing how desperate the beast in me is to take you?”
She made a little mewling sound of relief as I slipped one finger inside her. No resistance. I slid it in and out a few times before adding a second. Her passage was small, her body tight, but the second went in as easily as the first, because she was more than wet for me. She was open. Completely—mind and body.
“You don’t want to taste the power that comes from knowing that you’ve aroused me to the point of hunting you down in my most primal form?” I raised my head up, drawing back so that I could look at her. “To know that I would risk losing my soul just to consume you?”
She gasped as my thumb flicked over her little pearl, and my heart swelled along with my cock when she found the voice to say, “Y-you didn’t answer me.” Her breathing was erratic, and growing shallower as her excitement escalated. “H-how much will you hurt me?”
I felt my eyes shift. A low growl reverberated in my chest. “How aroused are you willing to get me?”
Her caramel eyes widened as her mind made the connection her enflamed body hadn’t wanted to face: the same predator who’d so ruthlessly hunted her down and cornered her in this cave was now finger-fucking her very willing, drenched cunt as she bartered her pain in exchange for his soul.
“I’m scared.” Her tears returned abruptly. “Why—why do you want to hurt me?”
She cried out as I shoved a third finger inside of her without preamble. To prove a point—that I could. Despite her fear, she was still completely open to me. And it was fucking delicious.
“I don’t want to hurt you—not really. That’s only how it manifests on the surface.” My fingers twisted inside of her as I said it, curling at an odd angle to rub her where I knew she’d be tender and sensitive, bringing a pleasure that would hurt her just a little bit too. Her features tightened, and her hips that had been unconsciously rolling up to meet my thrusting fingers stalled. I kept moving my fingers just the same.
“What I want”—I swallowed as my canines fully extended—“what I crave … is to know you—all of you. But perhaps more than that, I want you to know yourself. Fear is revealing. Pain, transformative. Agony and terror are emotions that give birth to truth. They strip away our layers of learned behavior and expose us for who we truly are.”
I watched her process my words, her pupils dilating with recognition, her mind succumbing to acceptance, her body to arousal.
She was mine.
“We can’t accept the brightest light within ourselves until we embrace the darkness that exists on the other side of it.
That’s the origin of faith. It’s what unconditional love ultimately is. Anything less defies the laws of nature. Of physics. Of the very power that shaped and continues to move the universe.”
Her eyes squeezed shut. Her mouth fell open as her hips came up off the ground to meet my invading fingers—taking the pain as she chased the pleasure.
Fucking beautiful.
As soon as her release crested and crashed through her, the shame hit her, and her eyes flooded with tears once more as she bleated, “Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?”
Everything.
I never answered her aloud, but that was the moment I realized it. The answer was so simple. And yet the aspiration so lofty, so impossibly complex and mired with immeasurable obstacles that I’d be the greatest fool who’d ever lived to try and scale them.
But it was the truth. I wanted all of her. Everything. Every smile and every last tear. I wanted to taste the flavor of every emotion that was in her blood as I drew the final drops from her.
19
Lauren
I stood alone on the frozen mountainside, watching the little white wolf die. Again. My eyes burned with unshed tears as more of his blood splattered to stain the snow.
He’d grown bigger, but he was still no match for the larger wolves. There were ten times as many of them attacking him as there’d been in my first visions. And yet, incredibly, the white wolf was fighting back now. Despite his imminent defeat, in between the white wolf’s hair-raising yowls of pain, I could hear his angry, challenging growls.
Why did so many of them have to attack him? Why were they so cruel?
Why didn’t he die?
I heard a gentle voice in my dream telling me to look closer. To listen better. I recognized it as my grandmother’s voice as she spoke her familiar words of advice from my childhood. “Try listening with your inner self, Lauren.”
I closed my eyes and tried to quiet my thoughts and emotions, to listen with my inner self. But I couldn’t. My heart was pumping too fast and my stomach was in knots as I listened to the sounds of the white wolf being torn apart.
What was the point of these awful visions? Why wouldn’t they stop?
Tears spilled from behind my closed eyelids as the white wolf’s cries died down, indicating the inevitable had happened yet again.
Then I heard something else.
It was only a faint murmur at first—a whisper on the frigid breeze that blew through my hair. But slowly, it grew clearer. Louder. It was chanting. Although the words being spoken were in an ancient language I’d never learned, it was a chant that I’d heard before as a child in my grandmother’s house when she’d gathered with the other seers.
I opened my eyes and looked around me. I wasn’t standing on an icy mountainside anymore; I was in a darkened forest. At first, I only glimpsed a handful of seers circling around me as they chanted. Then I looked closer and saw that there were at least twenty—no, thirty. Wait …
I turned in place, remembering more of Granny Nina’s counsel: “To be a good seer, you must learn to see without the veil of preconceived notions blinding you. Sometimes, without even the veil of logic and reason guiding you. To see truth, you have to be willing to abandon everything you thought was fact.”
There were hundreds of them scattered throughout the forest. Thousands maybe. I couldn’t gauge exactly how many, but there were far more than should have been possible. Because seers didn’t stay behind. Seers always crossed over.
Didn’t they?
As I squinted my eyes, I began to make out more than their chanting celestial forms. I began to see faces—and there were some that I recognized.
Granny Nina’s best friend Jolie was among them, circling close to me. Grandma’s seer friends Fedora and Tobias were there as well, walking next to Jolie. I waved to them, and noted that it was a child’s hand that I had lifted in greeting.
I looked down at myself and saw that I was a child in this dream. Strange. When I glanced back up, I noticed that Tobias was frowning at me. He’d always been so fun, so jovial when I’d interacted with him in life as a little girl. He used to indulge my fascination with his accent—reciting Bert’s lines from Mary Poppins and even going up on the flat roof over Granny Nina’s garage to play chimney sweeps with me. But I sensed he was upset with me now. Frustrated.
A new vision of the white wolf being attacked on an icy mountaintop appeared, projected in hologram form over the forest floor for all of us to see. There were even more wolves than the last vision. The pack had cornered him right as he was about to dart inside a cave.
I couldn’t take it anymore. “We have to do something to help him,” I beseeched the seers around me. “The other wolves keep tearing him apart. It’s not fair. He’s only a pup.”
The seers kept chanting. A few glanced in my direction, but most ignored me. As the horrific attack commenced, I felt tears sting my eyes once more.
Jolie gave me a sympathetic smile. Fedora paused in her chanting to say, “This is the past we see, Lauren. There’s no changing what’s past. You see it and accept it. To do otherwise as a seer wastes precious time.”
“But it isn’t right,” I protested. “They’re all bigger than he is. No one is coming to help him. Where are his mom and dad?”
With a grunt of exasperation, Tobias stopped chanting and blurted callously, “White wolf ain’t got no parents, ’an ain’t got no pack. No family. Nuffink.” He squinted his puffy eyes, regarding me as if he thought I was an imbecile. “Bloody ’ellfire, Nina, yor kin don’t ’ave a clue. ’Ow’s she gonna lead me boy Tanner ’an the rest of ’em?”
Granny Nina was here too? I craned my neck and spun in circles, looking for my grandma amongst the seers. Most of the faces surrounding me were unfamiliar. I didn’t see Granny Nina among them.
“Hush, Tobias,” Jolie reproached. “It’s her first lesson.”
“She comes ter us as a child,” Tobias indicted, pointing his finger at me.
“Yes,” Jolie acknowledged with a dismissive, world-weary exhale. “We can all see that.”
Why was I a child in this dream?
“She views herself as a child among seers still,” Fedora spoke out of the side of her mouth through stiff, ventriloquist lips.
“A bad omen’s wot it is.” Tobias’s disappointment in me was palpable. His crestfallen expression when he looked at me felt like a punch to my gut, far surpassing the initial, superficial annoyance he’d projected. “She ain’t ready.”
“Not so,” Jolie countered. “It means her limitations are self-imposed. She is her own obstacle.”
“That may be worse,” Fedora assessed with a grimace.
“The gift is there,” Jolie argued. “Her talents are at hand. The will may be lagging, but it shall follow. I know it. I see it in her.”
“I think it means she’s a pragmatist,” a lady I didn’t recognize insisted in a raspy, smoker’s voice. “After all, she is a child among seers. Am I right?” She looked to the other seers chanting around her for validation. Some nodded, while others frowned and shook their heads.
A tall man with greying hair who was wearing a suit ceased chanting and crouched down beside me. “Now, you see,” he said with a laugh, “this here may be the most critical lesson for you to grasp as a seer.”
“Wossat?” Tobias interrupted. “That we seers dis’gree evry time?”
Several seers laughed, and the grey-haired man waved Tobias off with a good-natured grin before fixing his kind blue eyes on me. “Lauren, we all see you as the eleven-year-old self you’ve chosen to present to us. Yet our interpretations of what it means are different. Visions matter. But the filter”—he flattened his palm against his chest—“ultimately, the filter matters more. Some might say the filter is everything. That’s where we fit in. Where you fit in.”
Jolie dropped to her knees in front of me. “More often than not, the same important visions come to us all. Even non-seers receive them at times. Because each of us
taps the same universal consciousness—to which no one may ever hold exclusive claim.”
“The way we filter those visions,” the grey-haired man continued, “how we digest and interpret them—that is what makes all the difference. It’s what defines us as seers … separates the average among us from the extraordinary.”
“Look up at the sky,” Jolie prompted. “Do you see those dark clouds there?”
I followed her line of sight.
Pointing, she said, “I see an angry bull charging at us from the left side of that large cloud configuration.”
“And I see a guardian angel with wings when I look at the same spot,” the man said.
“The filter is everything,” Fedora chimed in above us, bobbing her head. “We all possess the ability to see. But as conduits, we are not created equal.”
“So how do you know which vision in the clouds is the right one?” I asked.
“Good question.” Tobias gave me an approving nod. “Majority vote is ’ow we do it.”
Fedora cackled. “Definitely not!”
“Tobias, behave,” another woman said with a laugh.
“As seers, there is, in fact, a tendency to seek assurance in numbers,” Jolie conceded. “When many of us are repeatedly hit with the same or similar vision, for example, we take it as a sign that the vision is important. But when it comes to interpretation of a vision, majority rule is often meaningless, and may even impair sound judgment.”
“Eighteen out of twenty among us might see the bull,” the blue-eyed man next to me explained, “and only two might see the angel. But suppose the hearts of the eighteen who see the bull are clouded by fear, distorting their judgment?”
“The angry, fearful mob is usually wrong,” Fedora pointed out.
The grey-haired man nodded. “Yes. And the more personal knowledge we have about a person or situation—the stronger our emotional investment is—the harder it becomes to set our hopes and fears aside in order to sustain a clear, unbiased view.”