Ninth Orb

by Kaitlyn O'Connor

  He’d never particularly found humans appealing, but the face wasn’t particularly hard on the eyes. Grimy and covered in soot, but if it were cleaned off— he refused to pursue that thought.

  She was short and plump, he decided—fine for a meal if he’d had a taste for human meat—which he didn’t—but not much of a match for a man to ride. Lifting her skirts, he peaked beneath them and discovered she had a matching red thatch at the juncture of her plump thighs.

  Well, half blind as he was now in this damned human form, he shouldn’t have any problem finding his way!

  His cock agreed.

  Not that he could afford to let his cock have its way. Releasing a huff of breath, he tossed her skirt down again and focused on her plump bosom—bountiful, he decided.

  All in all, he was a bit disappointed because he really couldn’t find anything the least bit repellent about her.

  And those damned breasts were making his hands itch and his cock twitch.

  Heaving a sustaining breath, he dragged his gaze from her with an effort as the suspicion wafted through him that the damned woman was bouncing her breasts at him like that just to bother him.

  After glancing around, he finally settled his bare ass on the floor of the cave to think. It wasn’t easy when he discovered that the frail human skin didn’t protect him nearly as well as his own skin would have. The floor was icy and hard, and covered with pebbles that bit into his tender flesh uncomfortably, but at least it distracted him from his fascination with those soft, heaving globes of flesh the woman had spilling out of the neck of that thing she was wearing.

  He could reverse the spell, he realized as soon as he turned his mind to it. As long as he kept his wits about him, he could undo the damned marriage.

  Unfortunately, now that they were both human they were going to have to travel as humans did and that meant he was going to be stuck as a human far longer than he liked.

  “Well,” he muttered to himself, “there’s no time like the present to get to it!”

  Pulling himself to his feet, he left her lying in the entrance of the cave and went to see what he could collect for the trek they would have to make to find someone to reverse the damned spell. He’d need some of his gold, he decided, trying to ignore the irritation it cause him to think of parting with any of it. Humans used it to buy things, though, and he was sure they would need some.

  He was looking for something to carry a bit of his gold in when it dawned on him that, being human, he was going to need a weapon to protect his gold. After all, he had none of the weapons natural to him in this form. A sword, he decided, mayhap a knife.

  It occurred to him while he was searching his treasure for the items he’d thought of that the damned humans had been to his den. The bastards are liable to come back while I’m gone and steal my treasure!

  “Bastards! I bet that was the plan all along!”

  He would just have to figure out something to do to prevent that.

  * * * *

  Isra felt as if she’d been run over by a cart when she swam toward consciousness. In point of fact, she was in so much pain and so dizzy it took her more than a few moments to collect her wits and realize that she’d been in mortal danger just before she’d blacked out. Even as fear began to pour through her, though, it didn’t lend her the surge of strength and agility she wanted and needed. It was a struggle to push herself upright and she was panting by the time she managed to gain her feet and look around for the dragon.

  Tentative relief flickered through her when she saw no sign of the dragon. Deciding he’d thought she was dead and left, or maybe flew off because of the men, she limped from the cave as fast as she could and peered around for her tormentors. Just as she decided she might actually have a chance to escape, a man landed in front of her, swearing in pain from the rocks he landed on barefoot.

  She stared at him blankly for a long moment, her jaw slack with surprise, too shocked by all the naked flesh for her mind to assimilate the newest threat right away, but naked connected fairly swiftly in her mind with rape. Uttering a shriek, she dashed past him while he dancing on one foot examining the other.

  The wind, her, and her panicked heartbeat were roaring so in her ears that she felt as if she was almost flying across the mountain ridge and yet she’d barely managed a few yards when she was tackled from behind. The collision slammed both of them against the hard, rocky soil, but Isra was too panicked to feel the pain. “No!” she screamed. “Don’t rape me! Let me go!”

  “It figures,” the man growled, sounding oddly satisfied. “They’ve saddled me with the village idiot! Woman! I’ll have you to know I’ve no interest, at all, in fucking you!”

  Shock flickered through her and then disbelief, and then anger at the insult—insults!—and then more disbelief. It was precisely because she wasn’t the village idiot that she’d leapt to the conclusion that he had ravishment on his mind. If he didn’t, why was he naked? And what was that thick, long thing trying to worm its way into her cleft? “Why are you on top of me then?” she demanded with an indignant grunt, trying to ignore the stiff rod prodding the cleft of her buttocks.

  He eased off of her enough to roll her onto her back. The moment he did, Isra screamed and began batting at him with her hands, trying to shove him off. He grabbed her wrists and dragged her arms over her head, manacling her hands to the ground.

  “Be still!” the man growled.

  “The dragon!” she gasped frantically. “He’ll come back and eat both of us! Let me go! Please! I don’t want to be raped and devoured!”

  He stared at her with a strange look for a long moment. “You needn’t worry about the dragon eating you,” he said dryly. “I am the dragon. And I’ve no interest in eating you either! That certainly wouldn’t solve my problem!”

  Isra gaped at him, more horrified to realize the man was quite mad.

  This could not be happening. First the villagers, then the dragon, and now she was pinned down by a naked madman!

  “Help!” she cried out desperately, knowing no help would come. “Help! Somebody help me!”

  “Cease woman!” he bellowed.

  She began bucking beneath him, trying to throw him off, screaming as loudly as she could manage given the fact that he was crushing her with his weight.

  Unfortunately, she had her eyes closed. She didn’t see it coming, had no idea what he had in mind until she felt his mouth settle firmly over hers. A jolt of shock traveled through her. She broke off mid-scream, too stunned even to think and while she lay frozen in that state, sensations bombarded her from every direction that were unlike anything she’d ever felt before. Instead of merely being aware of his weight upon her, she became acutely conscious of every point where the pressure was most pronounced and where it wasn’t. She felt the thickness of his cock along her thigh and the weight of his hips and realized it was pleasurable, not uncomfortable as it would have been if she’d felt his full weight. She felt his belly pressed lightly against her own and only light brushes of his broad chest against her breasts with each panting breath she took.

  Abruptly far more aware of tendrils of pleasure stirring within her than anything else, a strange lethargy fell over her. Thought, even the disjointed efforts of her survival mode ceased altogether, her mind shifting to assess with the most primal part of her mind.

  The sensation of falling swept over her even though she was firmly anchored to the ground by his body. A wave of disorientation followed as if she’d downed a pint of ale in one draught. On the heels of that, a devouring heat seemed to rise between their two bodies and then she felt as if it poured inside of her and began to race through her veins, making her heart trip over itself, making her feel, suddenly, as if she couldn’t get enough air.

  A tentative alarm was raised, but she felt no sense of threat. The movement of his mouth and tongue on hers spoke of desire burgeoning just as it was blossoming within her. She sensed, though, right or wrong, that he was almost as surprised at the effe
ct she had on him as she was about his effect on her.

  She didn’t think his objective had been more than a desperation to silence the high pitched screams and yet the moment his mouth had settled firmly over hers it had jolted both of them.

  She liked the feel of him pressed against her length. She enjoyed the contact of their mouths even more. His taste and scent engulfed her in a pleasurable wave and she found her entire being responding to him with a will of its own. She didn’t merely surrender. She kissed him back, finding more pleasure the moment she stroked her tongue along his in an intimate caress.

  She was drifting closer and closer to exploding into flames when he stopped kissing her almost as suddenly as he’d begun. Lifting his head, he stared down at her with an expression she found impossible to decipher in her state, but a sense of vast disappointment washed through her.

  He swallowed convulsively several times, looked as if he was struggling with the urge to kiss her again and finally spoke. “The ceremony the old man performed was magic—an ancient dragon joining ritual. You sealed it with the mingling of our blood.”

  Isra stared at him blankly, unable to decipher anything he’d said for several moments. Finally, her mind seemed to shift into gear, however. She turned his words over in her mind and still couldn’t sense of them. “I didn’t! How could I have done that?”

  His lips tightened and his brows descended to form a scowl. “You did! There is no other way this would have happened! The pike you stabbed me with already had your blood on it.”

  Isra frowned, trying to think what he might be talking about, but it was made difficult by the fact that she’d been so thoroughly terrorized she hardly knew what she was doing at the time. Beyond that, she’d been battling the dragon.

  “You’re saying when I stabbed the dragon with the pike …?”

  He ground his teeth together. “I am saying when you stabbed me with the gods damned pike … while I was minding my own damned business I might add … you mingled your blood with mine and sealed our fate, wench! I am doomed to remain human until and unless we can get the spell reversed and we are bound together until that time! We must go together and find someone who can reverse the spell!”

  JA’RAEL’S LIONESS

  By

  Kaitlyn O’Connor and Nicole Ash

  Copyright Nicole Ash January 2013

  Artwork by Eliza Black, copyright January 2013

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

  Chapter One

  Like everyone else, Elise was grateful to be alive, grateful the computer had found a habitable planet to set down on. She had probably reminded herself of that fact every single day over the past two years since their ship had negotiated a landing on the planet of Tor, now arbitrarily renamed New Earth by the interlopers, of which she was one.

  It wasn’t Earth. It was close enough to sustain dispossessed Earthlings, but it still missed the mark by a long shot--at least, old Earth, in the days before their home world had entered its death throes and begun to try to annihilate the parasites poisoning it.

  She remembered. The golden age had been before her time, when civilization had reached a technological peak that guaranteed comfort for perhaps half the world’s inhabitants. The economy and the ecology of the world had been reasonably stable then, according to what she’d learned in school, but even when the golden age had begun its decline and decay, the Earth hadn’t been half bad. There were a lot of days when one could see beautiful blue skies, plenty of days when it felt good just to go outside. There’d been enough food, enough water, luxuries that could still be bought. There’d been leisure time. There’d been entertainment and time to enjoy it.

  Earth had become wildly unstable long before the meteor hit it, however. Like everyone else, she’d clung to life by the skin of her teeth, just trying to survive while nature wreaked havoc, destroying pretty much everything man had built.

  Tor was stable, but it wasn’t like Earth in any period that she knew of, or had even read about. The gravity was roughly the same, the size, the components that made up the atmosphere, but it was closer to its sun than Earth had been … which meant that it was hot in the winter, and hotter in the summer.

  Within the first week of landing on Tor, pretty much everyone had disposed of most of their clothing. They had brought all of the technology they could cram into their ship, and all the knowledge, and all the supplies, but it still took human labor to build, to hunt and grow food, and that meant exposure to the heat and humidity of Tor--New Earth.

  Elise couldn’t help but think it ironic that they’d traveled light-years only to find a world that was just about as fucking miserable as the one they’d left.

  She shook the thought off. “I’m grateful to be alive,” she muttered, wondering where the other evacuees had ended up.

  They’d left Earth like viral spores, climbed aboard ship with no destination in mind, programmed their computers to find a place to live and scurried into their hyber units. A dozen different ships could have landed on Tor and they might never know it. They’d become ‘cave’ people, primitives, eking out an existence on a world not their own.

  They were lucky the Torrines tolerated them, especially since, like children fearful of the dark, they’d established their colony within spitting distance of one of the larger Torrine cities. Because, despite the fact that the Torrines didn’t make any bones about the fact that they weren’t thrilled to have them, it gave the Earthlings comfort to be near civilization, even if it wasn’t theirs.

  Spying a fallen log and the ‘shrooms’ they’d discovered were not only edible, but pretty damned good, Elise dismissed her internal complaining, feeling a surge of relief as she moved quickly to the log and knelt to pick them. It looked like enough to fill her basket. Once she’d gathered her quota, she could retreat to the habitat and cool off.

  There were poison shrooms among them, but she knew the difference. Not that it mattered, really, except that grabbing the wrong thing would mean she hadn’t filled her quota and she’d have to go looking again. They never ate anything until they’d run it through the analyzer and checked it carefully, so she didn’t have to worry about making everyone sick--or worse.

  Lord help them if the thing ever malfunctioned, or just wore out!

  It was beginning to look like technology, for them, was going to become a thing of the past, though. Unlike some of the ships, theirs hadn’t boasted the most desirable balance of necessaries. They had three doctors (all specialists who knew virtually nothing beyond their field), but no nurses, a half a dozen engineers, but only one electronic repair technician, mechanics--but few things in need of mechanics, growers, but very little farming tools, equipment, or even plants or seeds. She was a teacher, one of a dozen, and there were only two children above the age of infancy, and one of them, the nineteen year old, couldn’t actually be classified as a child.

  She should’ve known she was in the wrong line. She was always in the wrong damned line!

  Or maybe not. Maybe it had been preordained that she end up just where she had just by being who and what she was, a world class procrastinator and terminal optimist.

  Their ship could have been named the USS Misfit, the USS Leftovers. Or maybe the USS Dumbshits Who Thought it Would All Blow Over and They Wouldn’t Have to Leave.

  Elise paused in her task, arching her aching back and rubbing it. It occurred to her after a moment that her foul mood wasn’t just the heat. She was dog tired and hungry to boot. No wonder she had opticalrectumitis!

  She studied the shrooms speculatively, but as hungry as she was, she didn’t quite dare try them raw. It was one thing to have a good opinion of one’s knowledge and something else entirely to stake one’s life on it.

  * * * *

  In general, Ja-rael didn’t especially look forward to the annual trade fair on To
r. Unlike his own world, Meeri, the weather on Tor was miserable and he was generally so worn out from the heat and humidity by the second day of trading that all he really wanted to do was unload his beasts, take whatever he could, and head home. This time, however, he was on a mission.

  This time he intended to come away with something he could use to barter for a mate.

  He had to do something or the fire in his blood was going to eat a hole in his brain and leave him dangerously, savagely insane.

  He’d known when he had decided to become a healer that he would never be a rich man. The way of the physician was only taught to those who were willing to dedicate themselves to helping any in need and that meant settling for what they could afford to pay. He did not regret it. He had never regretted his choice, but there were very few who could afford to pay much for his help, and many who could afford nothing at all. He had been forced by his own needs to supplement his livelihood by spending much of his time trapping the narlo for trade with the Torrine, who valued the beast far more than the Meeri.

  He’d been appalled when he had finally woken to the fact that he was halfway through his prime breeding years and still had not taken a mate. Every year that passed reduced his chance of producing any female offspring at all and if he were not careful he would find himself beyond his prime altogether, and he might not even have a male child.

  Of course, there were always exceptions. He knew of several males who had mated late and still managed to produce offspring--male, of course, no females--but they were fortunate even in that. The females were hard to convince to produce at all, and they completely lost interest in their mate once he passed his prime years when he would produce the strongest, healthiest of offspring.

  He had never liked to trust to fate, however. The odds were against him that he would be one of those rare individuals who managed to produce a late cub. Beyond that, he was sick to death of his own company, and even sicker of the company of the other single males, who did very little beyond complain about the cost of acquiring a mate and the lack of interest the females displayed in them even when they managed to get one.