Peacock Tails #1: A Lesson in Pleasure

by Cassandra Corbin

  She’s been a bad, bad girl...

  The cellar door thudded dully shut; Amalja walked in, and from the look on her face as she came closer, she’d been listening. “I didn’t ask you to lecture her, Gavran,” she tutted drily, walking around Pavlina, studying her. The witch had pinned up her own hair and shed her robe; her breasts were full and dusky-tipped, her hips invitingly ample, her legs long and muscular. She tapped the chain holding Pavlina on her toes. “Mmm. A little too much strain. I’d better do something about that.”

  Let me down, Pavlina wanted to say, but it seemed the spell Gavran had cast to keep her from shifting had sealed her mouth as well. She watched Amalja kneel inside the circle; the witch put her palms to the floor and growled a string of syllables that might have been a wolf’s prayer, and the floor warped beneath Pavlina’s aching feet, fitting itself to her soles, becoming a surface she could stand on solidly. It didn’t change her stance, or take the slack out of the chain, but the peacock felt some of the tension go out of her calves as her weight was better supported. “She looks better already,” Amalja commented, stroking the backs of Pavlina’s thighs, then standing to rub briskly at the younger woman’s flanks and shoulders, sniffing at the place where Gavran had licked her. “Good. Thoughtful of you, Gavran, else she’d be gods know where by now.”

  She sniffed again, sliding her fingers between Pavlina’s legs from behind; they skidded in wetness and Pavlina abruptly found her voice: “Oh—”

  But Amalja had already drawn away, before Pavlina could move or even react properly. With slick fingers she traced the paths of the sigil Gavran had made, making the heat flare up again until Pavlina couldn’t hold back a moan. “Ahh—Mistress, Mistress, please—”

  Amalja broke the contact. “You see? No control,” she decided, moving in front of Pavlina and stroking the young woman’s lips with two still-damp fingers, then shoving them into her mouth. “Suck,” she commanded, “and be quiet.”

  Pavlina sucked obediently, cheeks hollowing as she tried not to whine, as Amalja caressed the flat of her belly with her free hand and reached between the peacock’s thighs again, sliding her labia apart, rubbing only a quick light circle around her clitoris before penetrating her slippery sex with ease, stroking, reaching, oh gods—

  The moment Pavlina began to tense in approaching orgasm, Amalja pulled free again, stepping well back, smiling that wolf’s smile at the sight of her panting in dismay. “Stand still and say nothing,” she ordered. “Weren’t you listening to Gavran? You’re here to do what you’re told. You scrub the floor when I tell you. You do the shopping when I tell you. And for now ... you come when I tell you, too.”

  Pavlina, still breathless with frustration, could say nothing.

  It was going to be a very long evening.

  A Lesson in Pleasure

  Peacock Tails

  Smashwords Edition | Copyright 2016 Cassandra Corbin

  Need more shapeshifting sizzle in your life?

  Check out Cassandra on Goodreads!

  First Published: January 2016 by Featherotica Press, an imprint of Corbin-Andrews Publishing

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Edited by: Juliet C. Andrews

  Cover/Layout by: Kate Phoenix

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Being a witch’s apprentice, Pavlina had long since decided, would never be as exciting as she’d hoped. Being a peacock was much better.

  She closed her eyes and stretched her long neck. The afternoon sun was warm on her plumage; the low-curving oak branch she’d perched on swayed pleasantly in the brisk east wind. Pavlina fluffed her bright blue feathers out a bit to better feel the breeze. Just a few minutes, she promised herself, just a few more minutes—

  Her branch shifted under the thud of a sudden heavy weight. Pavlina’s eyes popped open just in time for her to lock gazes with a large raven; it croaked at her balefully, hissing, before launching off the branch and flapping into the depths of the forest, leaving her bouncing in place. The peacock sighed inwardly and preened a few ruffled feathers back into proper alignment, trying to settle back into comfort again. It had never been unusual for ordinary birds to be shy of her, and if the forest and village were thronged with ravens, she wouldn’t have given it any thought. But, just as she was the only peacock to be seen here, there was only one raven: Gavran, fellow shapeshifter and the familiar of their mutual mistress, the witch Amalja—and since Amalja had been traipsing around somewhere in the forest all morning, there was no doubt of where the raven had gone.

  Damn him. If Pavlina were in human form right now, she’d surely be crimson-faced with irritation; as it was, she just preened until she calmed back down. Let him tattletale, if he wanted; he wasn’t the one who’d been scrubbing floors and washing crockery and digging potatoes since daylight instead of learning the proper magic she’d been promised! She wasn’t shirking, she just deserved a break. Besides, she always kept within shouting distance of Amalja’s cottage and garden; it wasn’t as though anything was going to happen to her right here—

  “Look at that!”

  This time, Pavlina’s wings fluttered as she startled. Hardly anyone came this way with Amalja’s cottage so near, but there were two men standing just yards from her tree. Both were fellows she thought she’d seen in the village, dressed in rough-spun clothes and coats, but one had a slim rifle slung over his shoulder while the other had a crossbow in his hands.

  Hunters.

  Oh no.

  “He’ll look good trussed up for my table,” the one with the rifle said.

  “Marko, your wife can barely boil a chicken—”

  “The King’s table, then. He’d reward me for bringing him such a delicacy.”

  Pavlina hopped off the branch she was on to a higher one, then to another, half flapping and half crawling as she tried to get out of sight; but the oak was beginning to shed its leaves, and for the first time she cursed whatever quirk of fate had blessed her with the unmistakably vivid coloring of a male peacock rather than the proper drabness of a female. She couldn’t fly fast and far like Gavran, and she was so vibrant these two would spot her anywhere, and—oh, gods, Marko had unshouldered that rifle—

  Directly below her, something growled.

  Her pounding heartbeat seeming to shake her whole body, Pavlina scooted close to the oak’s trunk and risked a look down. Amalja had come out of the forest in wolf form, skirting the oak to advance on the men, her hackles raised, the silver tips of her black fur catching sunlight as she bristled. The fellow with the crossbow was backing up, his weapon slipping from a slackened grip. “Marko ...”

  The rifleman was undeterred. “Don’t just stand there, idiot, we’ve got dinner and a trophy right in front of us—”

  “Marko, that’s the witch—”

  Amalja lunged. Marko swung the rifle up, and Pavlina huddled small and shut her eyes tight.

  The gunshot echoed in the air. Pavlina’s tree shuddered as the rifle ball bit into the trunk below her
. Amalja’s snarls became loud and louder, and fabric parted with a distinct long splitting sound, and someone screamed. Pavlina hoped it was Marko.

  Everything grew quiet after that, and Pavlina opened her eyes. The men were gone; Amalja was staring after them, tail twitching, teeth still bared. She licked her chops and glared up at Pavlina with narrow amber eyes, then turned and trotted toward the cottage. A few seconds later, the peacock’s perch dipped as Gavran alighted, nudged her with the tip of his beak, and took off after their mistress. The message was unmistakable.

  She was about to be in trouble.

  By the time, Pavlina reached the cottage—taking her time, trying to delay the inevitable—Amalja and Gavran were already there: the latter lean-bodied as a man, pale-skinned and pale-eyed, saying nothing as he swept past her on the way around the house to the cellar; the former tall, her figure obviously lush despite the looseness of her robe, anger still flashing in her yellowish eyes.

  Amalja stopped Pavlina just inside the door. “Human. Now.”

  Pavlina didn’t hesitate in shifting. She stood naked before her teacher, shoving curly flame-colored hair out of her face as she fixed her gaze on the floor, her burning face surely as flamboyantly crimson now as her feathers had been blue just seconds earlier. “Mistress, I—”

  “What? You’re sorry? You won’t do it again? Bad enough that you slip off and lollygag, Pavlina, but I was shot at because of you.” Amalja raked a hand through her own black hair, scowling, disarraying the silver strands that winged back from her temples. “Sometimes I wonder why I took you in.”

  Pavlina’s view of the polished floorboards blurred. Of all the things to bring up in a fit of temper, Amalja had to pick that—as if Pavlina didn’t already know perfectly well that her role as Amalja’s maid and gardener had only come about because Pavlina’s shapeshifting ability had manifested on her sixteenth birthday. Oh, her parents had managed it well for about a year, but then a fever had taken her father, and without him, the trouble had started. Her mother called unclean and accused of being cursed. Pavlina herself admired by men with leering smiles, but accosted in the village square by former friends demanding to know if she laid eggs now. Being disowned hadn’t even come as a shock; her mother had simply had enough. Pavlina had agreed readily to being apprenticed then, even though by village standards it was years too late, just because Amalja had hoped that a fellow shifter would make a good student. Because—

  “Cry already, Pavlina, you’re woolgathering.” Amalja sighed. Her face had lost some of its harshness; she didn’t sound angry now, merely tired and annoyed. “I understand, I really do. You didn’t ask to be different; I didn’t ask to be, either. And since I took you out of the village, you’ve grown accustomed to being pretty, being admired. I daresay if you took as much time at your housework as you take at brushing that hair, this place would look like a palace.” The witch’s smile was lopsided and brief; she curled her fingers around Pavlina’s chin and lifted her face. “Daydreaming is one thing. Endangering my life, and your own, is another. I honestly don’t know what you expect me to do with you.”

  She’s going to send me away. Pavlina couldn’t keep her eyes from streaming any longer. The very thought made her queasy—her mother wouldn’t take her back, and she had no other family. Amalja’s cottage had been the only home she’d known for two and a half years. “Mistress...”

  “Hush.” Amalja squeezed her chin gently. “Much as I hate to admit it,” she said at last, “it’s at least partially my fault. The gods knew what they were doing when they made you a peacock, and as long as you’ve done the tasks I’ve set, they know I’ve done precious little to curb your proud streak, you utterly vain little thing.” The witch gave Pavlina a tiny shake. “You wonder why I teach you about herbs and gardening, rather than spells and sigils? Why the only magic I’ve taught you has been a few simple household cantrips? Because any idiot can use a smidgen of magic to light a fire or boil water or thaw ice, but real magic—powerful magic—takes self-control.” She released Pavlina’s chin, and wiped her face. “And that, pretty girl, is something you don’t have, or you wouldn’t be flitting out my kitchen window to sun yourself.”

  The witch stood back, appraising Pavlina’s body with such frankness that the younger woman crossed her arms over her bare breasts. Pavlina had been Amalja’s bedmate at times since the night of the peacock’s nineteenth birthday, but the wolf-woman rarely looked so predatory in her natural skin. “I’m not putting you out in the cold,” Amalja said quietly, “not when I swore an oath to keep you. You have potential, Lina, but that conceit needs tempering first, and no ordinary punishment will do that. Instead, I think you need ... a lesson.”

  Pavlina rubbed at her leaking eyes, awash with inward relief. She was being let stay, and for that she could endure anything Amalja wanted to try. “What do I need to do?”

  “Go wash your face and go down to the cellar. Gavran’s waiting, and I’ll be along shortly—and don’t bother dressing, you won’t need it. It’s past time you learned a little of what you put me through. Now I’m going to try your patience.” Amalja’s smile was wolfish and sharp. “And break your pride.”

  The cellar. Pavlina was down here every day to fetch something, usually multiple times; aside from the arcane symbols etched into the walls and floor, and the bundles of dried flowers and herbs hanging from the overhead beams alongside strings of onions and apples, it was utterly unremarkable. Even the shelves were nothing she wouldn’t have seen back at her childhood home, despite the fact that in Amalja’s cellar, pickles and preserves shared space with jars of bat wings and fish eyes.

  The broad wooden table, set up inside the runic circle that dominated the floor and draped with plain linen sheets—well, that hadn’t been here this morning.

  “Here you are.” That was Gavran, standing to one side, sorting through a collection of tiny jars on one shelf. He had lit all the oil lamps along the walls, and their steady light cast a faintly orange glow, giving his ghost-white skin a creamy ivory tone and making Pavlina’s own body look rosy. “I’d started to think you wouldn’t be coming.”

  Pavlina came to a standstill beside the table. Gavran had always been Amalja’s lover and not hers, but now she studied him: high cheekbones, broad shoulders, narrow hips on which his leather trousers sat distractingly low. The mark of Amalja’s ownership was a ring of symbols magically imprinted on the skin around his neck, just visible beneath the tangle of amulets and shiny baubles he always wore—Pavlina bore the mark too, but in physical form, a slim band of engraved silver hugging the base of her throat, a tangible reminder that her agreement with Amalja could still be broken. She touched it, and dragged her gaze off him reluctantly. “...You told on me.”

  In this space—grassy-smelling, faintly damp—her words came out timid and small. Gavran laughed at them, and his laughter had the voice of the raven in it, hoarse and low. “I did, I did.” He turned to face her fully, ice-blue eyes piercing. “Think where you’d be if I hadn’t.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “But you’d look so pretty trussed up for someone’s table. Like this one.” Another chuckle; he came to her side and gently guided her away from the table, to the proper center of the floor circle. “Stand up straight now, lovely,” and the raven shifter swept her arms up over her head, then out in front of her.

  The movement made Pavlina look up, and she spotted a hook set in the beam overhead. It was larger and heavier than the ones that held their hoard of fruits and vegetables, and it wasn’t until she glanced away that she realized Gavran had trapped her wrists, had fastened them into a pair of lined leather cuffs joined by a length of chain. “What is this? How did you do that without my feeling it?”

  In the face of her demanding tone, Gavran merely smiled. “You looked away. You’re easily distracted.” He eased her arms up again, superior height requiring him to stretch hardly at all to slip the chain of the cuffs over the hook, making Pavlina wince as she was forced
to stand on the very tips of her toes. “Don’t worry,” he murmured, running a hand down her back as she whimpered, “you won’t be in this position too long.”

  He took her hair up and braided the red tresses quickly, coiling the braid around her head and weaving escaped strands back in to hold it in place. Pavlina sighed and gritted her teeth; he was gentle as could be, but his hands were work-roughened, and it made having him touch her both intriguing and a little unpleasant. She swayed, already feeling twinges of strain in her shoulders and calves as she tested the chain. Maybe she could shift out of this...

  She could just feel the beginnings of her shape-change tingle down her back when Gavran slipped his hands over her bare breasts from underneath and squeezed, just hard enough to keep her from concentrating. “Oh no you don’t,” he crooned, making a little amused sound; he turned her so that her back was to him, and pressed a kiss between her shoulder blades. “I thought you’d try that. I’d have tried it too, once. But for this exercise, pretty”—he kissed that spot again and licked a thin quarter-circle across her skin, making her nipples tighten—“we need you in proper form.”

  He licked her shoulder again, delicately, and again, completing a circle. He’s painting a sigil on me, Pavlina realized dizzily; he was marking a spell on her with his mouth. With each pass, the dampness lasted for only a moment before the magic behind it sank into her flesh, and Pavlina was suddenly all too aware of every inch of her skin; she felt oddly restricted, heat rippling through her with each lick, sheening her limbs with fine sweat and stirring dampness between her thighs. “Gavran—”

  “Shhh.” He was muttering into her skin now, words that slurred and crackled and only added to the simmering sensation. By the time he lifted his mouth from her back, her nipples felt hard as iron, jutting into his palms, and Pavlina couldn’t keep back a dismayed noise as he pulled his hands away. “There,” he decided, “that should hold you a while.”