Bee sat back and started to undress, pulling off his shirt to reveal a hairy chest and arms that were faintly muscled. Elaine reached up and stroked his chest, so different from her own hairless body. Daria would have hairs on her chest, even if they were difficult to see with the naked eye. Her boyfriends might have realised the truth and then fled in horror, terrified of the thought of being close to a werewolf who might assume wolf form at any moment. Daria had better control than that!
“I...” she started to say, and then stopped. “I...”
“Hush,” Bee said, as he pulled away the rest of her dress. She was naked, apart from a sheer pair of silken panties Daria had given her; naked and exposed to his gaze. Elaine found herself flushing again, suddenly realising why so many girls in the Peerless School had used magic potions and glamours to enhance their appearance. A single negative comment when she was exposed would have been far more crushing than any barbed comment from Millicent. “It’s going to be fine.”
He removed his own trousers, revealing his manhood. Elaine stared, finally understanding some of the private conversations between girls at school. Bee’s penis was massive to her eyes, something that helplessly drew her towards it. And yet the thought of that thing trying to go inside her was different to accept. One of the books she’d absorbed noted that the male sexual equipment was never as varied as it seemed when erect and ready for action, and yes – it could go inside her without problems. Some of the other books contained detailed instructions that made Elaine blush when she realised that the knowledge was there, ready for her to use. And a handful contained information that even she recognised was inaccurate.
Elaine reached out towards Bee, feeling a strange mixture of emotions as she took his manhood in her hand. It was huge, and yet it squirmed in her hand, seeming to leap forward of its own will towards her thighs. Touching it felt almost natural and yet it was almost also like touching a spider, or something else that triggered the deeper fears in the human mind. Some of the books seemed to speculate endlessly on the precise nature of sexual desire, but they never seemed to agree with each other. Women could not both be sexless creatures, knowing nothing of sexual desire, and also carnal beings whose lusts were so powerful that they had to be kept under control. The two statements were contradictory. Both had probably also been written by men.
Bee’s hand slipped between her legs and touched her gently, before he started to stroke around her. Elaine gasped, feeling an unearthly tingling running through her body, even though he felt clumsy compared to the times when she had played with herself. He didn’t know precisely where to touch her for greatest effect, she realised, as more knowledge poured through her mind. Boys believed a great deal of nonsense about girls; girls believed just as much nonsense about boys. The two sexes, it seemed, had never bothered to just talk to one another. They just made assumptions based on their own bodies, or beliefs that had never been properly challenged.
Elaine felt her legs open as Bee positioned himself for entry. She reached forward, as the books advised, and took control, guiding him into her virgin vagina. He seemed to surge forward and there was an odd moment of discomfort, discomfort that would have been worse if she hadn’t listened to Daria and taken the Modest Maiden potion before coming to Bee’s apartment. It felt so strange, at once both exciting and terrifying, to feel something slipping inside her. Bee’s breathing was growing faster as he seemed to pause, just for a long moment, and then started to thrust inside her. There was another sensation of discomfort, followed by a burst of pleasure that surprised her...and then led to a second burst of pleasure as Bee moved faster and faster. He’d lost control, if some of the books were accurate; he could no longer stop even if Elaine wanted him to pull out. She felt a tidal wave of pleasure, perhaps boosted by the potion, as he thrust faster and faster...and then she felt something hot and warm bursting inside her. There was a final wave of pleasure and she found herself pulling her to him, trying to keep him inside her. It no longer felt like a terrifying intrusion, not even slightly.
Daria had told her, time and time again, that having a boyfriend was the greatest thing in a woman’s life – and that boys felt the same way about women. Elaine hadn’t believed her, not until now, not until she’d realised that sex could be for more that procreation. Some of the books hinted at what happened when virgins discovered sex for the first time, others seemed to vie to outdo one another in emotional descriptions of their first times with a person of the other sex, or even the same sex. Elaine wanted him to have sex with her again and again and again...
...And yet, it wasn’t really like her, was it?
The thought bothered her as she looked up and saw Bee smiling back at her. He seemed to be glowing with light, no longer even remotely a stranger. Of course he wasn’t, Elaine told herself; he’d just been inside her. There was no point in moving to conceal the gap between her legs, not any longer. Or in getting dressed...
But did he really love her? And did she love him?
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“But I’m a virgin!”
Daria broke down into giggles. “I hate to break it to you,” she said, “but you’re not, not any longer. I can smell him on you.”
Elaine flushed. She hurt, just a little, between her legs. The knowledge within her mind suggested that the first time was supposed to hurt a little for women...and the Modest Maiden had merely ensured that she didn’t feel the pain while Bee entered her for the first time. Some of the authors, the ones who acknowledged that women could have sexual feelings, had noted that it was easier to have sex if the woman was wet, her own body producing the lubricant to make it easier for the man to thrust inside her. But it took time for the man to learn how to encourage her body to generate the lubricant and the potion hadn’t been a perfect substitute.
She tried to change the subject, quickly. “How much of him can you smell on me?”
“Let’s see,” Daria said, taking a deep sniff. “Lust, admiration, desire, fear...”
Elaine blinked. “Fear?”
“Guys are just as scared on their first time as girls,” Daria said, with a wink. “Even after they become more experienced, they are still sometimes scared when they meet a new woman. The mere act of having sex, either by entering or being entered, renders a person vulnerable to colossal emotional harm. If you’d told him that he was too small...”
“He wasn’t,” Elaine protested, and then flushed again. “I...”
“You can tell me all about it,” Daria said, with a leer. “Did you have a good time or what?”
“A very good time,” Elaine admitted. “And yet...did I do the right thing?”
Daria leaned over and patted her head. “What makes you think that there is a right thing? You had sex with a guy you like and who likes you, instead of a guy who has pushed you into going to bed with him or a guy your parents selected for you and you only met on your wedding day. There’s no prospect of him having given you a child – you took the potion to prevent that – and you’re hardly of aristocratic blood. You don’t even need to worry about the prospect of giving your hubby an illegitimate child.”
She shrugged. “Welcome to the wonderful world of men,” she added. “Look on the bright side. No one can use you as a virgin sacrifice any longer.”
Elaine shivered as Daria’s words unlocked more books within her mind. There were spells that involved virgins – and children – being murdered to feed the darker gods, or summon demons, or merely boost the sorcerer’s power. Each spell lay within her mind in precise detail, some of them presenting a dreadful temptation. She could jump right up through the different levels of magicians if she offered her firstborn son to the demons...
She pushed the thought away, angrily. “I suppose you’re right,” she said. “Does he love me?”
“A word of advice,” Daria said, with brutal frankness. “Young men confuse lust and love quite badly. He may want to build a relationship with you that results in you both being sealed after y
ou develop true love for each other. Or he may only think that he does and in reality he hasn’t quite fallen for you. Guys are...S-T-U-P-I-D.”
“I have never had any problems with that type of spelling,” Elaine said, remembering one particular trader couple who had come to the orphanage to find someone to adopt. The woman had said that Elaine wasn’t very P-R-I-T-Y. Maybe that was true, but she did know how to spell pretty. “So...what do you think I should do?”
“Have fun,” Daria advised. “What do you want from all of this? Sex? I’d say that you had it – I’m sure he’d be happy to keep having sex with you for as long as you wanted. Love – in that case, work on seeing him outside his apartment, with his clothes on. Get him to take you around the city and see all the monuments. Have a swim with him in the public baths, or go watch a stage show...I think they’re still playing The Artful Apprentice at the Odeon.”
Elaine had to smile. The Artful Apprentice had been written shortly after the First Necromantic War and told the story of a young magician who had never listened to his master. Eventually, after a long series of humiliating mishaps, he’d managed to turn himself and his wife into snakes, whereupon his master had banished him to the forests outside the city. The play was deliberately written to be amusing, but also educational. Magic could be very dangerous when the sorcerers didn’t bother to think through what they were doing first.
“Or there’s the Perverted Pant,” Daria added. “Maybe not the kind of play to take someone to see unless you know them very well. It...isn’t exactly clean.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Elaine said, tightly. Even now, after discovering that sex could be fun, there were limits. What sort of person would have themselves transformed into female clothing so they could be worn, without the wearer knowing that they were carrying a voyeur around with them? And what sort of fool would rely on someone else to get him out of his perverted idea of fun when it stopped being funny? “I don’t think Bee would like that one.”
“Ask him,” Daria said. She grinned. “And while you’re at it, you might want to see if he has any skeletons in his closets. A wife back home, another girlfriend, a set of particularly nasty fetishes...men like to think that they have secrets and they’re harmless. Most of the time they’re wrong.”
She shrugged and changed the subject. “There are some advantages to being a werewolf,” she admitted. “You can generally tell what someone likes – or doesn’t through their scent and involuntary reactions. I knew a guy who was...rather brash, although a fairly decent chap. He didn’t know that I was a werewolf, but he never liked putting his cock in my mouth – and it took me weeks to realise that the whole prospect of it terrified him. I might have bitten down hard and removed his cock.”
Elaine winced at the thought. If women were penetrated, it opened them up to the man’s penetration, but the men were vulnerable to losing their most important organ. There were spells – not exactly forbidden, but frowned upon – that placed teeth within a female vagina, one of the nastier tricks in the darker tomes. Someone like Millicent would probably have considered it a huge joke.
“So,” she said, finally. “What did you do?”
“I just had sex with him instead,” Daria said, with a wink. “He was a good guy, even though we were hardly soul mates. But if he’d known that I was a werewolf...”
She shook her head. “I don’t think it would have mattered to him that much,” she admitted. “He would have had the same reaction to any set of really sharp teeth.”
Elaine nodded.
“I suggest that you go wash, thoroughly,” Daria ordered. “Trust me; your stench wouldn’t just be obvious to werewolves right now. There are magicians who will know exactly what you did last night.”
“Understood,” Elaine said. In truth, she was still confused. Did Bee love her? Did she love Bee? Or were they both just driven together by hormones? Was this sort of confusion natural when sex was involved? “And after that...”
“I think that we will have visitors,” Daria said, sniffing the air. “I suggest you hurry.”
***
Elaine had never spent long in the shower, a habit that had been hammered into her at the orphanage. Each child was given five minutes of water to wash, after which they were expected to be clean, having washed away all the soap. The matrons had punished any of the children who took longer than five minutes, or emerged still dirty. Even now, even with water relatively cheap in the Golden City, Elaine still needed less than ten minutes to wash herself – and study her body in the mirror.
She looked...older somehow, even though there was no single change that she could identify. There were a handful of marks on her skin where Bee’s hands had torn at her, and a whole series of bruises from where the torturer had lashed out at her skin. Dread had provided some basic medical care – stripping off in front of him had been embarrassing – and the damage was well on its way to healing, but it was still visible. She was mildly surprised that Bee hadn’t commented on the bruise. Perhaps he’d thought that they were natural...
...Or perhaps he’d thought that they’d come from her master. It wasn’t unknown for apprentices to be beaten by their masters, even though Miss Prim had never lifted a hand to Elaine or to any of the other girls in the Library. Maybe Bee was beaten by the Empress of the South...she giggled at the absurd thought, although she suspected that Bee hadn’t been a virgin when he’d met her. Perhaps the Empress’s reputation was genuine and she’d seduced him before sending him out on her service.
There was a faint bloodstain on her legs, all that remained of her maidenhead. She washed it away with warm water and then scrubbed her legs clean, feeling a whirlwind of conflicting emotions. She’d enjoyed herself and yet there was a feeling that she hadn’t quite done the right thing. Perhaps it was a form of sexual buyer’s remorse. There would never be a second time that she lost her virginity. Some spells offered her the chance to restore her maidenhead, but it wouldn’t be the same. She’d lost something – innocence, perhaps – when she’d opened her legs and invited Bee to enter her body.
She finished washing and dried herself with a simple spell, pulling on her bathrobe as she left the washroom. Outside, a small party seemed to have gathered around the table, led by a man it took her a long moment to recognise. Inquisitor Dread had put his robes aside and settled for donning the brown and yellow robes of a part-time worker. Cass and Karan wore the same civilian clothes they’d worn before, but there was something about them that made them seem even less like Inquisitors. Princess Sacharissa looked utterly unlike a princess in a light green dancing dress, but it wasn’t her that caught Elaine’s attention.
There was a small dark-skinned man, wearing a grey uniform, who seemed uncomfortable so close to the Inquisitors and Daria...Daria’s face was caught between human and wolf forms, covered in fur and bristling with sharp teeth. Elaine stared; some werewolves could hold themselves in the midst of the transformation, gaining skills that combined both those of human and wolf, but she’d never seen it before. A wolf-man would be a very dangerous enemy.
Daria relaxed and her face slid back to normal, the fur slowly fading into her skin until it became almost invisible. “Your friend here wanted to know if I could be a Limbo,” she said, as she smiled at Elaine. “I can...if not for very long.”
“I understand that you had a good evening,” Dread said, to Elaine. The two bodyguards grinned at her behind Dread’s back. They’d probably been watching...strange how that had never occurred to her, even as they’d been undressing. “I trust you didn’t tell him anything too important?”
“I believe you already know,” Elaine said, tightly. The bodyguards were there to spy on her as much as protect her from whoever wanted the knowledge in her head. “Or didn’t you bother to watch me last night.”
“You were very good,” Cass assured her, her bright eyes wide with innocence. “If that really was your first time...”
Elaine flushed, feeling magic flickering around her. Bu
t Cass would have little trouble beating her in a fight, even with the technique that had caught Millicent by surprise. It was quite possible that dozens of sorcerers had already reinvented it...or that the Inquisition used the technique themselves to deal with dark sorcerers. They might well have kept it to themselves, using the story about Inquisitors being the most powerful magicians in the world to hide its existence.
“That will do,” Dread said, as Daria started to hand out glasses of juice. She took a special pleasure, it seemed, in giving the most childish container to Dread, who seemed not to notice the implied sneer. “We have work to do.”
He tapped the table, effortlessly taking charge of the meeting. “You already know most of the people here,” he said, to Elaine. “This” – he nodded to the dark-skinned man – “is Cat. He does have a real name...”
“But using it would be a dangerous weakness in my line of work,” Cat said, in a whispery voice that had to be partly an act. Elaine saw the pale skin around his neck and realised, with horror, that he’d once worn a slave collar. “I prefer to be known as Cat.”
“Cat was once one of the most masterful sneak thieves in the city,” Dread said, remorselessly. “He burgled thousands of houses, stealing thousands of Crowns over a period of three years before he was caught in a sorcerer’s booby trap. The Sorcerer Balthazar had never bothered to construct the standard wards around his house; instead, he set traps throughout the building, waiting to see who would blunder inside. He was in the middle of a long-running dispute with the Sorceress Morgana at the time.”
Elaine smiled, remembering the two magicians. They seemed to spend half of their lives as lovers and the other half fighting savagely against each other. Miss Prim had once complained that they’d even had fights within the Great Library, despite all the wards designed to prevent violence inside the building. Everyone knew their story – and everyone feared getting caught up between them.
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