by R. Lee Smith
Behind him, Wurlgunn cleared his throat and raised a hand at Beth. “I killed the other one.”
“You big, strong hunter, you,” she said, plainly surprised.
He lowered his hand slightly. “To say truth, I didn’t mean to. I was supposed to be flanking it for Doru, but, um…”
“He crashed into it,” Doru remarked, preparing another spit.
Beth smiled. “I’m sure you crashed bravely, lover.”
“I nabbed this chest of thumperjuice for you, Liz,” called a hunter, in thunderous mockery of Vorgullum.
“Give me the first trophy, my mate,” she called back, holding out her hands. He tossed her a beer and she popped it open and pulled a long swallow out of it. “Oh, noble hunter,” she sighed, and passed the can into the eager hands of Karen, on her right.
“I have no idea what these are,” said Karen’s mate, Bodual, offering her the package of hot dogs. “But I got them for you.”
“Gross,” said Karen, and had another drink of beer.
Amy sat down on her mate’s lap and put his arms around her waist possessively. “And what did you bring back for me, my proud hunter?”
He smiled self-consciously. “Only myself, little Amy,” he admitted.
Amy wiggled on his lap. “Let Olivia have her elk, you can use your mighty spear on me!”
He stood up and slipped his arm around her shoulders, both of them leaning into one another with a natural ease and quiet pleasure that drew far more envious eyes than Vorgullum’s boasting. They left together, his right wing half-unfolded and curled protectively around her.
Olivia put her spit over the coals and listened to the fat pop and sputter. The smell of meat roasting began to rise as the hunters found their mates among the assembly and settled down, each telling dramatic tales of daring, and each sounding as though they had all managed to nearly bring down some fantastic game, if not tonight, at least at some point. Bundel and Lorchumn left together, raising their hands to Vorgullum and Olivia on their way out.
Vorgullum offered Olivia a can of beer, but one sip made her screw up her face, so she passed it back. He took two swallows, and then gave it away. “I thought you humans liked thumperjuice.”
“I used to.” She turned the spit impatiently and inhaled the scent with longing. “I guess I just forgot how nasty it tastes.”
Two females, Crugunn and another, came up to ask Vorgullum how his kill was to be portioned out, both of them flirting outrageously, but “Prepare whatever remains from this feast for our winter stores,” was his only response. Crugunn rolled her eyes at Olivia with a sigh as she walked away, plainly unsurprised. The other female seemed more genuinely disappointed by this rejection. Both went to work without any sign of umbrage that they had not been invited to share the feast.
“They should have some,” Olivia said, watching Crugunn strip the rest of the hide from the butchered elk with a few expert cuts and one mighty heave.
“They can have the offal,” Vorgullum said distractedly. A glance back at him showed his attention had slipped somewhere beneath her clothes, where his imagination wandered at considerable leisure.
“Want to leave?” she asked wryly.
“I do, but I’m starving. For some unexplained reason, I keep missing meals,” he added, throwing her a dark look. Then he reached out, took her by the waist and pulled her tight against him. “But after I have had my fill,” he growled into her ear, “I will take you to my lair and fill you full. And if I have to tie you down to keep you from having your pitiless way with me, I will. I—”
His grip on her tightened briefly, and then he released her and stepped slightly in front of her, his wings fanning out without unfolding.
A male gullan she did not immediately recognize had approached during their embrace. Now he raised his hand in a salute and hunkered down before them. “A word with you, Olivia?”
Vorgullum’s ears pricked and he glanced from the gulla to Olivia, looking at once surprised and faintly pleased by the request. He brought his wings back in and sat down.
Somewhat apprehensively, Olivia took a step forward. “I…Of course. How can I help you?”
“My name is Thugg. You must know my mate, Victoria, very well,” he added dryly. “She speaks of you so often.”
Yeah, I’ll just bet she does, Olivia thought, and said, “I know her.”
“She’s had no blood in all the time she’s been here,” Thugg said, his eyes narrowing. “No blood and no seasons, and Murgull swears to me she hasn’t sparked. I begin to wonder if she might be too old to bear young.”
Olivia looked away, hunting for Victoria in the crowd so she wouldn’t have to meet Thugg’s eyes. She hadn’t spent much time with Victoria, but it didn’t take much time to know that, plastic surgery and hair dye aside, that lady couldn’t possibly be a day under fifty.
“I see her head-fur coming in grey,” Thugg was saying. “But what of that? Most the humans I see here have many colors in their fur. Look at Doru’s Tobi, for Urga’s sake.”
“I’m not sure I know what you want me to say,” Olivia hedged.
Thugg tapped his talons against the stone floor as if thinking how best to phrase his next words. “Will you ask her if young may come of her or not?”
“Haven’t you asked her yourself?”
Thugg bared his teeth in a sneer that would have done Horumn credit. “That one,” he growled. “I have not. I speak to her as little as I can. She is ice, cold and hard and unyielding.” As if to cushion the hostility of his words, he added, “I’ve met enough humans to know that she’s different, but she’s bound to bite the person who asks her such a thing and I have to live with her.”
“All right, I’ll ask.” She glanced at Thugg sympathetically. “But she’ll probably chew my head off.”
Thugg growled and nodded. “Doubtless. But that is nothing compared to what she’ll do to me when she learns I had you ask her.” He rose and tossed his horns, eyeing Olivia with naked envy before turning and striding away.
“Ha,” growled Vorgullum, popping the top on his second beer. “My wise Olivia. My tribe comes to you for advice. Snap your teeth at me, Thugg. Ha.” He chortled, took another two swallows, and passed the can on.
“What will happen if she is too old?” Olivia asked, thinking not of Victoria, but of young Beth.
“That depends on many things,” Vorgullum replied. “And I would not want my answer to taint your reply to me.”
“Are you suggesting I would lie about something like this?”
“I think you would,” he said carefully, “if it meant you could do better for your friends.” When she opened her mouth to protest, he said, softly, deliberately staring straight ahead, “Will you tell me now that you hold no secrets from me?”
She shut her mouth and stared at the spit of meat in her hands, her appetite gone. At last, for want of something to bridge the gap between them, she asked, “Did you really kill this elk by yourself?”
He nodded, relaxing slightly, and said, “And Wurlgunn really did kill his by crashing into it. My aching eyes, I couldn’t believe it. ‘Fly behind him,’ Doru shouts. ‘Surround him.’ And Wurlgunn swoops boldly down at full speed directly into the thing’s head. I heard a splintering crack like a tree falling and they both went down. We all thought his head had finally been broken, and we landed hard, but suddenly, he sits up, fumbles for his knife and stabs the elk in the side. The damn fool could have torn his wing or broken his back, but there he is, sticking his little knife in the dead beast while the rest of us stand back and try to pick out which of the two of them is the biggest, dumbest animal.”
“Poor Wurlgunn.”
“His head is a big, empty space, occupied by a few, rattling little rocks,” Vorgullum grunted. “I tried to give mates to the fittest gullan, but when I look at him, I think of a lair full of stumbling, bumbling babies and just cringe. Can you imagine? Walking into walls and dropping off chasms? Learning how to fly?” He shuddered, and reac
hed into the fire for a skewer of meat, hissing with satisfaction as it spit hot fat at him.
Olivia looked at him for a moment, trying to imagine a child born to both of them. It would be more gullan than human, she guessed, but it might have her human eyes instead of his whiteless ones, her human face instead of his snout. She imagined herself pregnant, laboring, delivering, even nursing, but couldn’t quite picture the child. It remained an emptiness in her mind, an emptiness that seemed to spread in a vague, echoing way all through her.
“What are you thinking?” Vorgullum asked, tearing a bite-sized piece of elk from the spit with the very tips of his claws.
“I think I want a baby,” Olivia said, not without some surprise.
He looked up, his dinner sizzling and utterly forgotten in his hands.
Olivia frowned, lightly touching her own chest as if she thought she could gauge the depth and meaning of this subdued yearning from her heart. Slowly, she nodded. “I do. I want a baby.”
“Heartless woman,” he said, giving the spit in his grip an anguished look. “I want to eat, curse it!”
“So eat.”
He didn’t. He continued to stare at her while the meat cooled untouched and dripped its juices down his wrist. One minute. Maybe two. And then he threw it back into the fire.
A great many of the hunters remaining in the commons let out a chorus of groans when he stood up, but beneath their teasing, Olivia could hear real frustration from more than one throat. “For pity’s sake, woman!” one of them called. “He’ll be useless in the morning!”
“Are we going to see you for the second hunt?” Doru asked mildly, setting the last spit.
Olivia reached up behind Vorgullum’s back and scratched lightly at the sensitive patch of skin just between his folded wings, where Murgull said such touches had the best effect. Vorgullum, caught unawares, arched his whole back hugely, his wings snapping out and hips bucking forward.
“That would be a ‘no’,” Doru mused.
Vorgullum seized Olivia’s arm and propelled her rapidly ahead of him out of the commons as laughter and howls chased them. “You’re driving me mad,” he told her. “I’m going to starve away to a stick and a scrap of fur and will you be satisfied?”
“I certainly hope so.” She reached back to cup him through his loincloth as they walked, giving the solid bulge she found a friendly squeeze. “And so will you.”
“Again, with you! Again, and right here in the mainway!” he growled, and caught her wrist, walking with her just a little faster until they reached the chimney to his lair. There, he pushed her into the shadowed chute, crushing her to the wall with his body, and pulled her thighs up fast around him. His hips ground against her, letting her feel him as he hardened through the layers of their clothing, and all the while his black eyes bored down into hers. “You will be the end of me and you are not even a shadow of sorry, are you?”
“Are you?” she countered, pushing her hand between them to firmly grip and stroke his stiffening cock.
Vorgullum’s neck arched, his eyes shut tight as he hissed in breath and let it out as a ragged thrumm.
Voices in the mainway. He swore again, stabbing a glance behind him before he caught her up and climbed with her into the private dark of his lair. He took her no further than the wall beside the chimney, though, not even to the bench which she knew could only be less than a dozen steps away. No, he got rock under his feet and then he put rock behind her back, at once resuming those slow, strong, thrusting movements while he hummed against her neck.
Her fingers slipped along the knot of his loincloth, and his came at once to the ties of her shirt. It brought a strange sense of synchrony to their play, to tug at his belt and feel her own clothing gently pulled and loosened. Claws gave him the advantage with unfamiliar modes of clothing; in moments, she was bare from neck to toe, and all she’d managed to get away was his belt pouch. Laughing, she gave up and cupped his head in her hands instead, pulling his mouth to hers.
All his body stilled as she kissed him. Concentrating, no doubt, on just how it was done. When she broke the kiss at last, he took it back with confidence, nipping at her lips and thrumming as he breathed for her. And while he kissed her, he did nothing else at all, but when, after thorough exploration, he concluded, he lifted her easily into his arms and carried her to his pit.
In that perfect blackness, every sound became its own dimension, every touch struck echoes beneath her skin. When he lay down beside her, she felt each soft point of his fur like a hot pin driving over her and into her and through her to her very core. His fingers found her in the dark, caressing briefly at her hip before piercing her, driving himself in so deeply that his palm ground with exquisite force against her clit. Olivia gasped, then sucked in breath and hummed it out, raggedly and too high, she thought, but it was all the encouragement he needed to work faster, harder, saturating the air around him with the wet sounds of her greedy body and the heady perfume of her pleasure.
“Heartless woman,” he growled, a thrumm in every word. “Do you know what they say about me? Do you know what they’re saying right now?”
“How much they wish they were you,” she panted. Olivia reached down, taking hold of the hard shaft that throbbed between them and began to stroke him firmly. He shivered, pumping into her fist, breathing in coarse, hot pants. At last he reared back, shaking her off like water only to seize her hips and bury himself hard and fast inside her. She muffled a swift scream against his chest, then gathered in the heady scent of him as the pain receded to be replaced by welcome heat and the thrill of his tight, fast friction.
Unexpectedly, he bent and licked at her breast.
Olivia arched with a cry of surprise. She’d never thought of her breasts as particularly sensitive before, but they reacted to his tongue as if to an electric charge after all these months ignored. His mouth moved on her as fiercely as his cock moved inside her, and it was through a haze of moaning pleasure that she reached to claw again between the base of his wings.
They snapped out at her touch, knocking some unseen and half-remembered jug of water crashing to the floor, almost unheard beneath his bellow. Then he was driving at her with abandon, his claws digging at her thighs, bringing pain to illuminate the pleasure forking out from her like bolt after bolt of carnal lightning. She was dimly aware that she was shouting, sound bursting out of her, shoved out of her, with every thrust, and it wasn’t at all the sort of thing she had ever believed herself apt to say during lovemaking, but a frenzied, gullan roar of, “Fuck me! Yes! Oh, fuck me!”
They could probably hear her all the way back in the commons.
Olivia shut herself up the only way she could, by seizing Vorgullum in both hands and biting down hard on his shoulder, just exactly where he liked to press his thrumming mouth during what he considered foreplay.
He howled, withdrew, slammed back as deep as he could go, and she felt his seed batter at the wall of her womb in a spastic fury. Then he dropped, crushing the breath from her body with the full, sudden weight of him.
They lay there, scraping one another’s ears with the sound of panting and the shocked sort of silence that always seems to follow the best and wildest bouts of sex. She knew he had begun to come back to himself when he remembered to shift a little, let her breathe.
“So,” she said, before he could anything stupid, like ask if she were all right. “It was a good start. Are you ready for more?”
“Heartless woman,” he growled and, to her laughing surprise, fell over her again.
17
Much later, Vorgullum reached out one foot and prodded Olivia in the ribs. “Tell me,” he said lazily. “What is it about a good hunt that sends everyone tumbling backwards into bed?”
“You flatter yourself,” she told him. “After five days of mourning for Lorchumn and Judith, we all needed some release.”
“Truth.” He crunched up one wing painstakingly and rolled onto his side so he could scratch his stomach. “I h
oped he’d return with a new mate.”
“He knows, but he wasn’t ready.”
“It is soon,” Vorgullum agreed. “And his grief must still be strong, but I wasn’t thinking just about breeding. It would have given him someone to hunt for, and a reason to keep coming home.”
“Eventually, perhaps, but first it would have given him another frightened, hysterical woman he couldn’t communicate with. That is not what he needs to help him heal.”
“Hm.” He lay there quietly, thinking about that. “Perhaps I should permit him to take a gullan mate.”
“When you forbid all the others?”
He grunted again, thought some more. “I could order a woman to meet with him in secret. One I can trust not to catch his spark.”
“If he was ready for that, he wouldn’t need you to make such arrangements,” Olivia pointed out.
Vorgullum dismissed that with a flap of his hand. “Lorchumn doesn’t know what he needs.”
“And you can’t solve the entire tribe’s problems with sex.”
“Yes I can,” he said, and rubbed idly at her naked hip. “What is the matter with Kodjunn?”
“With who?” she echoed sleepily.
“You must know him, the way you stare…His mate has red hair with a dark stripe down the center.”
“Kodjunn?” she repeated, becoming a little more alert. “Is that his name?”
“I don’t know what to do about it,” he murmured. “They don’t get along, that’s no secret, but this goes well beyond that. He has to set a watch over her whenever he leaves his lair, and now I hear he is locking her in the women’s tunnels. All the other humans have settled…to some degree. All but that one.”
“He’s not a good mate to her,” Olivia began hesitantly.
He snorted. “She’s not a good mate to him. Great Spirit, but the things she has done to him! Her very first night in this mountain, she threw a lit lamp at him, tried to suffocate him with bedding, and beat him with the fire poker. She missed his eye by a hair’s breadth on that one, and he was unconscious nearly two days. And that was just the first night!”