The Bid

by Jacquelyn Frank

  Hanna took a breath and then exhaled in a soft, hot stream across the head of his cock, making it bounce in an eager twitch of anticipation. He stared down at her, completely transfixed as she purposely licked her dark lips. She now knew what her mouth did for him visually, and she wasn’t holding back a single trick of temptation. Not while her bottom still burned with the feel of his hand. There was more than one way to make someone burn.

  Hanna was close enough that he could imagine the lightest brush of her lips against him, except he knew she wasn’t quite close enough because when he oozed a heavy drop of pre-ejaculate it landed on her chin instead of her lips. She laughed soft and sultry, her pink tongue flicking out to nab the salty fluid below her lip. Vejhon groaned as if he were being tortured, especially when she hummed her approval at his taste and swiped at her chin with a finger so she could suck on it to obtain every last bit.

  “Gods, Hanna! You’re killing me,” he gasped roughly.

  “But it’s such a sweet death,” she countered, finally reaching forward to touch her tongue to the head of his cock. His blood roared in his ears, not to mention everywhere else, making him pulse hard against her lips as she used her tongue to draw him between them. When she fully closed her mouth around him it was as though a haze had fallen over his vision. He tried to blink it away quickly, unwilling to miss even an instant of the sight of her sucking him inch by inch into her hungry mouth.

  Dark, dark lips closed over him, and within her mouth her tongue flicked and teased along the ridge demarcating the head. Then she reached to close a hand around his shaft, helping to guide him deeper into that warm, wet, sucking haven. True bliss. True blinding bliss, Jhon thought as his new senses seemed to suddenly abandon him. Sight, sound…all he could do was feel. His fingers dove deep into her hair, grasping it up into tight fists until one of her jeweled catches popped off and pinged onto the floor somewhere. His hips surged forward into the growing rhythm of her mouth and the guiding slide of her hand. The rasp of his breathing echoed everywhere, along with the sound of his own pulsating blood.

  Vejhon felt ready to burst out of his own skin, his cock aching with how incredibly hard he was. The mad urge to sob screamed over him when she sucked him deeply down the back of her throat just as she raked her nails gently along his scrotum.

  “Hanna! Stop or finish! Now!”

  His bellow of command penetrated her haze of delight just long enough to make her comprehend his point. She realized by the curt way he said it that she didn’t have time to dally over her choice. She set him free with one last draw and a little pop of sound. The instant she did, he turned her so hard and so fast the floor burned her knees. He pushed her onto her hands, then lower as he raised her bottom high before him. He was going to forget. She knew it instantly. But she had no time to remind him as he plunged deep inside of her, searching for a seat in a single thrust. It failed, of course, and she could hear the grind of his teeth right before he blew out a violent breath and growled a chain of curses.

  The lockdown of the muscles inside her nearly caused his head to explode. He had trained for a lot of endurance markers in his time, but what he went through to keep his act together for that next minute beat them all hands down. By the time he had the access to her depths that he had wanted all along, he was drenched in sweat and shaking from the effort. He reached forward and clamped a hand down on the back of her neck and jerked her the rest of the way onto his stone-hard cock. If she made a single sound, he was oblivious. He let his hand rake down her spine on his way to grasping both her hips for counterforce.

  “Hard. Fast!”

  He heard her demand somehow, but it didn’t matter because he was already way ahead of her. He withdrew and began a plunging cadence into her that immediately took on a force of its own. She braced against him, but eventually her knees came up off the floor with each connecting crash of their bodies. He was so thick and full inside of her and she felt like she was going to burst apart. The position neglected both of her sensitive clits, but as he neared climax he reached for her. He needn’t have bothered. She felt his orgasm rushing up on him and the pitch he took into her body combined with his frenetic pace set her shaking.

  She came because he did, because they were connected like that now. She moaned in deep, long coughs of pleasure as fire raced through his body and jetted into hers. She heard him roar, the primitive sound all cat as it echoed off the walls of the empty room. She wanted to answer, but she could hardly keep a breath or stay steady. At least she stayed conscious. At least this way she could feel him gathering her close and rolling over until she was sprawled over him as he lay back along the floor. Her dress shimmied halfway down her body and he smoothed it over her backside in assistance.

  “The damn door is open,” he groused when she queried him with a lifted brow of amusement.

  “Now you’re worried about that?”

  “Now I realize it,” he countered with a chuckle. “I was distracted right up ‘til then.”

  “Mmm,” she agreed with a pleased sigh as she nestled her cheek against his chest. “People rarely come up here. My offices are here and the storerooms. I come to this room to think or calm down when I am peeved. It helps to see the size of the city, to see what I am partly responsible for.”

  “Why put that pressure on yourself?”

  “Because it’s true. The votes I cast in the Chamber of Masters change people’s lives, sometimes for generations. Hopefully for the better, but I have seen what badly conceived laws can do, and how hard it is to get them reversed after the fact. Every last one of the Masters should feel that pressure, but I know they don’t. So many look on it as a boring duty of their station they are forced to attend to. Between them and the ones who would abuse the power given them, those who take these matters most seriously are double burdened. When I look out there, I have to be certain I see everything.”

  “The big picture.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me something?”

  “Sure.”

  “What did Asha do specifically that has you so upset with her?”

  Hanna sighed the weary sigh of a much-put-upon guardian. “She instigated a fight. She was out with friends, crossed paths with a rival House, and broke the laws of the Feud moratorium. Frankly, she is lucky I am the one who banished her. An act of feuding can get the entire House banished from the cities for fifty years. However, in this case, she was a lone female facing down six males. She beat the hell out of them, so you can imagine they didn’t want to press charges and announce the fact to the world.”

  “Of course not,” he chuckled, very familiar with the male ego.

  “But the worst part about what she did was that she showed off her speed and agility. She accessed her cat to draw out the savagery she needed and the extraordinary strength she used. Jhon, she might as well have shifted into the Otherside right there in public.”

  “I can see why that would upset you.”

  “The only saving grace sometimes is that we in this House remember the massacre of our people far easier than anyone else does. The Apocalypse took care of that, really. We are now just a vague reference in the history books, not even worth a lesson in the city schools.”

  “Then why so much fear, Hanna? Why would anyone ever connect a young woman who fights like a demon with a race of beings long thought extinct, if they are even thought of at all? It is far more likely they think your House trains for all eventualities, especially when the Feuds are, from what I am gathering, so recently ended.”

  “Eight years past,” she agreed. “And I know you are right, Jhon. But so am I. Erring on the side of caution cannot hurt, but carelessness can.”

  “I realize that.” But Jhon couldn’t help but think of all that her family had given up in the process. They no longer lived in the jungle homes that protected them, no longer lived with the wild things, and were forced to live side by side with a society they feared every minute instead of living and running free. Even th
eir right to live in the world of people had, in essence, been taken from them, because of their fear of being hunted. Perhaps if they had remained hidden in their original homes after the massacres, they would not have lost the ability to shift out of the Otherside.

  Fear had its place, but what she spoke of was paralysis. Any warrior who froze in fear was as good as dead in the end.

  “I think,” he said instead, “it’s time you showed me what you look like as you change to the Otherside.”

  She lifted her head and laughed. “I think it’s high time I tended these wounds. Then we can go play with my brothers and sisters.”

  Jhon made a face. “I’m not sure I want to. Playing with them is how I got like this in the first place. And might I say they don’t exactly play fair. Some of those cats are almost twice as big as I am. Nine to one was extremely unfair.”

  “Come on,” she laughed as she climbed off of him and offered her hand down to him. “Get dressed before I start to ravish you again.”

  Vejhon paused in rising to his feet, seeming to think about that possibility.

  “Forget it. Not until after you get bandaged up,” she laughed.

  “You had three days to do it,” he groused. “You could have done it then.”

  “We do nothing different than the way it happened the first time for fear of altering the process. You came awake and for that I am very glad.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  14

  Jhon had no idea what he had been expecting really, but it wasn’t what he saw. He stood in the rear gardens, the area Hanna liked to call “the enclosure.” There wasn’t very much enclosed about it. It was a run that started in the enormous family room in the House, passed through a large conservatory with a perfect replication of a humid, tropical atmosphere, and then opened up into acres of free-growing gardens. The grasses, shallows, and brush in this area grew thickly and without rule, since no gardeners were allowed to tame it in any way. This was where Hanna’s family ran free, or as free as they could with eventual walls to cage them.

  To the guards and the neighbors, Hanna had the most exotic collection of wild bellcats anyone had ever dared to gather as pets. It was considered one of those fashionable eccentricities of the rich. Hanna had amused Jhon with stories of other Houses trying to imitate her collection, only to find themselves in over their heads and asking Hanna to take the creatures off their hands. In those instances she would ship the animals back to the wild. She was saddened enough by her family’s captivity. She would hardly wish to perpetuate it against wild things.

  Jhon enjoyed the open air and wildness of these gardens. He stood with two large cats on either side of him, both females and both leaning their heavily heated bodies against his legs. Felina and Sylvi. Hanna’s sisters. Felina had a darker gold coat, the shaggy length of it spotted with streaks of beige and rosettes of tan. The texture was as soft as clouds. Sylvi was covered in gold and white fur, but hers was short and close to her lithe, light skeletal structure and felt like the dense bristles of a good brush. Sylvi was a light and spry smaller cat, made for the chase and the ability to run her prey to the ground, unlike Felina, who was muscular and heavy, made for the hunt and battle.

  But as unique as all that was in its own right, none of it compared to the amazing sight of Hanna shifting into the Otherside. She had come out amongst her crowding family, speaking to them as if they had actual points to make to her. When he questioned that she laughed at him.

  “Of course I can,” she had laughed, patting him on the shoulder as if it were a silly concept that she couldn’t talk to her own family…and he supposed it was. “Soon you will figure out how to do it as well. We can sense thoughts with power behind them. It’s easier among family and animals, but with people, too. A highly emotional thought will radiate like…like a marquee. It announces itself.”

  “You can read my mind?”

  “Better now than before, but not like a book or conversation tool. Only things you focus and project, or project with emotions like shock, delight, or fury. You act like a burst transmitter, and if I’m awake and focused, I should catch it.”

  “Good to know, really. I think we need to go over all of these new details a little more thoroughly.”

  “Ideally, that was exactly my plan. However, you are the one who keeps injecting sex and lust into the whole thing, messing up my good intentions.” She’d grinned when he had growled softly in agreement.

  After hearing how hard it was for her family to move freely through the shift, he had expected Hanna’s shift to be difficult and maybe even traumatic. Instead, she had simply found an open space in the family room, taken a power step or two for a push off, and then leaped forward with arms outstretched through the air. As if she was trying to launch herself into flight, actually. But as she hit the arc of her jump a golden line of light appeared at the tips of her fingers and widened rapidly to accept the size of her body as it passed through.

  Except when she came out on the other side of the light just as fast as she went into it, she wasn’t Hanna the woman any longer. Appearing front paws first, finishing her leap, was a sleek gold and black coated cat with stunning outset eyes of bellcat green. Left behind to fall to the floor, as if it had all suddenly fallen from her body, was her silky brown gown and the jeweled clasps she used to bind her hair.

  Astounded by how fast and easy the change appeared to be, and by the nature of the rift she had seemed to pass instantly in and out of, Vejhon had crouched to touch the dress for a moment. Hanna grew quickly bored with his examination, though, and she’d let him know with a head butt in his side powerful enough to knock him over. She was changed now and she wanted to romp and show off. And frankly, he had wanted to watch.

  So they were in the gardens. Hanna was playing with her brothers and sisters in some sort of game of bellcat tag that involved a lot of chasing and sudden tackles. They ran full bore after each other, and then into each other, tumbling over the ground. He noticed the males would get into scuffles sometimes, asserting dominance.

  Hanna was truly beautiful as a cat. That gold-black fur coat accentuated her muscular body with gleams of light and shadow. Then, if she rolled over, golden rosettes spotted her underside and were just blended enough into the black that you couldn’t see them unless she went belly up. Jhon had no doubt it was Hanna. Her eyes were exactly the same, sharp and honest and full of that thoughtful intelligence. Her claws were tipped with her favored polish, a detail that made him chuckle. What really fascinated was the long sweep of her tail and the way it always found a place tucked or curled around her when she sat, an act of refined elegance…and how much it reminded him of how neatly she kept her hair against her body.

  He figured he now understood why they called it the Otherside. They entered into some sort of dimensional gateway and came out on the other side transformed. The concept intrigued him and he looked forward to learning how to make that passage himself. He wanted to know what it felt like, what it looked like, from the perspective of one who changed. Again, his curiosity reared up voraciously as he tried to think of what could possibly allow this family to make that passage, and why some of them could not. Hanna claimed it was an issue of inbreeding and genetics, and maybe it was, but it almost seemed too select, too purposeful to Vejhon. It was as though they were being denied permission to use the shift until a certain condition was satisfied. Like the taking of a mate outside of the family who could be brought over to the Otherside.

  And what made his type able to be transformed and no other? Was it the physical details, or was it because he came from Wite? Was there something genetic within him that allowed his body to make this drastic change? Hanna said he had died, and he had no doubt he’d come close to it with those wounds, but what if it were more like…a coma? Or a metamorphosis state? It was clear by the functions of his body and the fact that he bled that he wasn’t dead. If nothing else, he thought with a grin, his sexual appetite alone proved he wasn’t dead. />
  All this intrigued him. He’d never had a penchant for anything but soldiering, and he’d loved what he did for a living, but what he was seeing here was enough to make him want to devote total time and energy into learning everything he could about it. There had to be explanations. He knew others in her family—maybe even Hanna herself—had probably tried to learn them, but he also felt his was a unique perspective. He was practical and partial to logical points that didn’t have fear or the dire love of a family attached. Nor did he have the reverence of over a millennium of heritage when he watched the change Hanna had made. She did. They all did. No doubt they all knew every story, every ounce of awed history attached to their long-lived line. Their fight for survival had imbedded it in them.

  He would have no such partiality, no such prejudice. And while he was no scientist, he was a tactician. He knew purposeful maneuvering when he saw it, and the Otherside was being very purposeful in its manipulation of her family…as though it in itself were a consciousness in control of them.

  Hanna ran toward him, the muscles of her fierce and powerful physique rippling all along her big body. When she opened her mouth he saw the pink of her tongue settled behind enormous canines and rows of equally intimidating teeth. One bite into someone’s neck and those long, ivory teeth would puncture all major arteries on both sides. One strong shake of powerful neck and body muscles and the cat could disconnect a victim’s head right from its spine.