by R. Lee Smith
Smiling, Olivia left them alone and went to deal with Victoria.
The other woman made a bitter production out of having her reading time interrupted when Olivia asked for a moment of her time, making a point of slapping her Hunter’s Digest down and drawing as much attention as possible. There was no shortage of little bench-lined alcoves in the commons, although finding one out of easy eavesdropping range was a tricky thing with so many people here, and it was with an audible sigh of relief that Olivia was finally able to find a seat and rub gingerly at her bandaged feet.
“I’ve been asked to speak to you,” she said.
“Naturally.” Victoria folded her arms in that upper-class, waspish way—fingertips tapping lightly at her slender arms and back as straight as a ruler. “You wouldn’t go through all this bother just to socialize.”
“You know the gullan have a highly developed sense of smell, right? Well…” Olivia felt a blush crawling up the sides of her face like flames. “Well, so they can…smell you when you…you know.”
“No, I don’t know,” Victoria snapped. “What are you talking about?”
Well, she’d known this wasn’t going to be an easy conversation. Olivia took a deep, stabilizing breath and started over. “The thing is, your mate has noticed—”
“My mate!” Victoria echoed, shrilly enough to halt conversation all around them. In the far corner, Doru looked around. “I don’t have a mate, you degenerate little whore! I am being held captive by a hideous, perverted monster and I have no intention of standing here and discussing him with you!”
Olivia took a deep, cleansing breath, aware that Doru was striding silently, menacingly towards them, spear in hand. “—have noticed,” she continued, “that you haven’t had a menstrual period yet.”
“That is absolutely none of your goddamned business!” Victoria spat. Blotchy color had begun to bleed in high along her cheekbones. “I refuse to stand here and discuss my private medical life with a…with a secretary!”
Doru had stopped, unseen, just behind Victoria. He cast an expectant eye at Olivia, and she shook her head very slightly. He stared inscrutably at Victoria’s back and did nothing.
“Well, the fear is that you might be…you know, a bit too old for—”
“How dare you!”
Olivia waited for a few seconds in the hopes that the other woman would calm down, and when it became obvious that waiting wasn’t going to help, she sighed and said, “Look, I understand this is pretty personal and I’m sorry. It’s just obvious that you’ve had a little work done and—”
“You little bitch-whore!” Victoria whipped her arm back for a slap and Doru caught her wrist. The human actually staggered with the aborted momentum, then turned, blinking in shock at the huge gulla that had, from her view, materialized as if by magic.
“I have never,” Doru said now, slow and thoughtful, “ever in my life struck a female, but I think I am going to strike you now.”
“Please don’t,” Olivia said softly.
Doru eyed her almost without emotion, then returned his gaze to Victoria, who did not even try to struggle free of his massive hand. “I believe Olivia asked you a question,” he said. “Answer it.”
Rage had taken a cadaverous effect on Victoria’s features. Paled by fury, her eyes appeared sunken and too dark, her lips pressed into blue slits, and the shadows of her unkempt hair cut across her face like claw marks. She did not merely look old, but haggard, trollish. She said nothing.
Olivia waited while everyone in the commons watched them. “Fine,” she said at last, and sighed again. “Okay, that’s all. I’m sorry I disturbed you, or… whatever. You can let her go now, Doru.”
“Kick her ass, Doru,” Tobi called helpfully.
Victoria turned her scathing glare on Tobi and opened her mouth.
That was as far as she got before Doru heaved her by her wrist alone into the air over his head, grabbed the neck of her crude clothes, and shook her hard, once and twice. “Say it,” he growled, his voice scarcely audible. “Say anything and give me a reason.”
“Enough,” Olivia said. “Put her down. Now.”
Doru dropped her; Victoria’s feet struck the ground, buckled, and sent her flat on her butt on the stone floor. She gaped up at him while he glowered down at her, horns low and teeth exposed.
“Doru, enough.” Olivia put one hand gingerly on the vast expanse of his chest and he permitted himself to be pushed back. She reached out to help Victoria stand. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she said.
Victoria sneered at her empty hand and smacked it away. She stood slowly, ran her hands down the sides of her rumpled leather jerkin, then marched with great dignity from the cavern towards her chambers. At the doorway to the main passage, she stopped and turned around. “You are all whores,” she announced. “You are all whores who fuck animals. And you!” She pointed at Olivia. “You are the foulest slut of them all, because you like it!”
The gullan in the room cast curious glances at the humans, clearly hoping for a translation as Victoria concluded her speech and took herself away.
Olivia rubbed at her eyes with the heels of both hands and sighed.
“Fine,” Tobi called irritably. “I’ll kick her ass.”
“You’re not helping, Tobi.”
“It’ll help when her ass is kicked!”
“Hush now,” Doru said simply, still gazing at the empty doorway Victoria had vanished through, and Tobi turned her back on him with a grumble and twirled her training spear.
“You’re not having a good day, are you?” Amy called, smiling faintly.
“Oh, it’s about to get better,” Olivia said with a sigh. “Now I’m off to see Cheyenne.”
Doru had been moving away. Now he turned back, his face set resolutely. “Not alone, you’re not.”
“Why not?”
He met her challenging eyes with an expression of thunder and fire. “The leader’s young belong to the entire tribe. It falls to me as much as any other male to protect them.”
“Oh, have it your way.” Olivia stalked from the cave, and he followed her like a shadow. “Honestly, you act like you think she was going to jump up and attack me or something,” she added when they were well away.
He stopped suddenly and dropped one massive hand over her shoulder, yanking her back and spinning her to face him. His eyes were blazing, but his voice was very calm and even as he said, “What are you playing at, Olivia?”
“What do you mean?”
He tossed his horns hard, cutting the air in a curt whistle. Before she could think to move, he had hooked one claw around the loose neck of her robe and pulled it into a taut V, exposing her throat (and, thanks to the gullan design of this backless robe, exposing much of her chest as well). “That’s the mark of a human hand, or I’ll eat my own wings.”
“I fell down.”
His eyes narrowed, but burned just as brightly. “I see. Tell me how you managed to drop your iron claws, step on them, slide on them, and throttle yourself half-killed in the process.”
“I didn’t have a plan!”
“No.” He leaned back, his tone softening even if his stare did not. “Oddly enough, that much I believe. But someone surely put a hurt on you, and for the life of me, I cannot imagine why you’re protecting her.”
Olivia looked at him, expressionless. “What are you suggesting? That I strangled myself so Cheyenne could escape?”
“That wouldn’t make much sense, would it?” He released her robe and watched her straighten it. “But then, there’s a lot about that night that never made sense to me. What were you doing in the depths anyway?”
“I wanted a bath.”
“You were nowhere near the baths when Kodjunn found you.”
“I got lost.”
“Well, that’s easy enough to do, I suppose, especially since you climbed down the Deep Drop by yourself after dark without any kind of a light.”
“I had a light!”
; “What happened to it?”
She had no idea. She’d had it until Cheyenne had hit her, and after that… “I dropped it.”
Doru folded his powerful arms and leaned back, fanning and half-unfolding his wings so that he appeared as large and menacing as possible. “And by no means would it be the second light the beast had with her when she fell?”
She was blushing. She knew she was blushing. Damn him. “No.”
“Well, those human lights are such useful things to have,” he mused. His eyes on her stayed hot. “Let’s go look for the one you lost together. I can follow your scent well enough if it’s fresh. I can follow hers too, but of course, I’m not going to find hers down there, am I?”
To that, she had no answer at all.
He searched her face, grimly satisfied with what he saw, and quietly said, “You can hardly see them yourself, but I can’t fathom how Vorgullum is missing the blood pooled in the corners of your eyes. No one gets that falling down. Someone choked you. Someone nearly killed you. And there are scratches on the little beast’s face and arms. Did you make them, Olivia?”
“No,” she said automatically.
“So be it.” He straightened and tightened up his wings with a few angry snaps. “You obviously think you’re saving her, and she would surely need saving if her part in your wounding were known. But what are you saving her for? So she can try again, and perhaps succeed? Olivia, what would have happened if that beast had made good her escape? Think. Even assuming she had survived the climb and found helpful humans somewhere in the wild. What would happen to us?”
“No one would believe her if she told them about you,” she said, but her reasoning had no strength, and why should it? She’d argued against it too effectively when just that claim had been made by other women.
“They might. Long enough, at any rate, to fly up here in their metal cars and look for us.”
And Olivia was confronted once more with the vision of gullan shot down by faceless army-guys of the sort that always showed up in the last frame of any movie to deal with the bad guys. And for the human captives? Rescue for some, she supposed, but what about her? Her, with a bellyful of baby gulla.
She moved around him very deliberately and continued down the tunnel to Cheyenne’s cave. “I appreciate your concern,” she said. “But I fell down.”
“Onto your own hand?” He snorted. “Was this before or after you stepped on your own spikes?”
“If I hadn’t been so stupid as to try and go down to the baths by myself in the first place, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Which,” she added, “is beginning to sound an awful lot like an accusation.”
“Are you trying to scare me, Olivia?” He barked out a hard laugh. “A man can’t be scared after he’s coupled with Chugg!”
She tried to keep a straight face and failed.
His voice lowered, even if it didn’t quite soften. “I tell you all this for your own sake, and for the sake of the other humans. You understand that if you died, most of what binds we gullan to our little mates would blow apart like smoke in a storm.”
Olivia rolled her eyes and tried to turn away. He turned her right back.
“You think this is more of that worshipful Olivia-is-always-wise nonsense that Vorgullum is so fond of flinging about, but stop and think. There are damn few humans willing even to play at friendship with their mates, and most are little more than…I don’t know the word. Those animals you humans sometimes bring on hunts—you feed them and work them, and keep them chained to trees when you’re not using them.”
“Pets,” Olivia said numbly.
He repeated the word, testing it and finding it good. “Most are pets. Willing pets, if you can imagine that. Only after Olivia came out of her cave did they start to wake up, to learn our words and show any interest in our ways. Great Spirit, do you think Gormuck would have made any effort to bring his Liz out of that madness she had after Judith died if you hadn’t been trying as well? And between us, I think it was your words more than his that did the trick.”
Probably. Her threat to tell Vorgullum about Liz’s pills. Olivia turned away and kept walking. This time, he settled for following her.
“Do you think we would allow Thugg’s bitter little bitch-mate to walk around freely, much less open her poison mouth, if not for your continued efforts to reason with her? And Mojo Woman. Do you think she lives because we fear her? Well, some do, perhaps, but I am not one of them, not by a spear’s throw. With damn few exceptions, none of the females make any effort to be happy. Karen hates Bodual, Sarabee sits and cries all day, Carla—”
“And Tobi?” she interrupted, sending him a swift and (against her will) troubled glance. “Are you having problems with her?”
“With Tobi? My Tobi?” He sounded honestly surprised. Then, without warning, he broke out laughing. Real laughter, neither angry or strained, but the rolling, good-natured sort of laughter that so perfectly fit his massive frame. “My Tobi?” he said again, and shrugged. “A little, in the beginning, but surely no worse than could be expected. No, we have no hot claws between us, but if things were different, I never would have tried to take her for my mate.”
They had nearly reached Kodjunn’s chambers, and Olivia was slowing down, not only out of deference to her throbbing feet, but to give the conversation a chance to play out. “Why? Is something wrong with her?”
“Nothing’s wrong with her. She is my healthy, strong, clever, cheerful, fine, young Tobi. She…” He snapped his teeth absently, his brow furrowed as he sought words. “I don’t know if you can understand this,” he said hesitantly. “Tobi does not enjoy the act of coupling.”
Olivia briefly considered falling down and goggling at him in shock, decided that he wouldn’t get it, and refrained.
“This isn’t the sort of thing a man tells a woman…but what the hell, I told you about Chugg.” He stopped walking and looked at her, his eyes gleaming in the near-blackness. “So I’ll tell you how it is with my Tobi. First, you ought to know that I didn’t find her. The female I brought out of the hive was that one you call Ellen. And let me tell you, even as serious as the whole business was, if I had been the one to find Tobi, I would have left her sleeping in her den. I ended up with Tobi because she knocked Mudmar in the head and ran off while we were getting ready to fly, and I went after her. When I got back, Mudmar had flown off with Ellen like the sneaky little snake that he is—it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch—and I was left with Tobi. Believe me, I was truly unhappy about it. Tobi is such a scrawny thing…I didn’t want her to be afraid of me. More than that, I didn’t want to break her.
“That first night, thoughts of mating were foremost in my mind and about the last thing my body wanted. She lay in my pit like a sack of mud with her head still thick with Murgull’s tharo. I sat there all day and watched her, keeping up my courage with thumperjuice, to the effect that by the time she woke up, I was busy being sick. She tried to run, made it as far as the mainway, and fell down. I carried her back to the pit, not exactly at my best, and passed out. She thought I was dead and actually—” He laughed again, softer this time, smiling. “—ran for help. I like to think that wasn’t just the tharo. Once she got someone in to see to me, of course, she just ran. Vorgullum had to post a guard outside my cave to keep her in while I recovered. The third day, when both our heads were clear, I decided it was soon enough. I went to undress her. She fought me.” His smile broadened with something like pride. “Fought like a she-bear. You would never think it to look at that skinny snake’s body.” His smile faded, and then he shook the memory away.
“And once I had her pinned down, I couldn’t think of what to do with her. If I eased back on her legs, she kicked. If I released her arms, she punched. If I bent too close, she bit. My fierce Tobi. So I had to sit on top of her for all the hours of daylight until she finally came too close to sleep to throw me off or beat at me and I settled for lying there beside her.
“The next d
ay, I was determined. I taught her the words for stop and for yes. Then I went to undress her again. Five days she told me stop. On the eighth day, she came naked to my pit. I came naked to the pit. I touched my Tobi. Then she told me stop. Fine. Fair. And five more days of this. And finally, finally!” He tossed his horns and spread out both arms in a pose of triumph. “I thought it was good. For both of us, I mean. And each time after when I called to her to lie down with me, she came willingly. And lay there.” Doru’s step slowed. He looked straight ahead. “Just lay there.”
Olivia could not reply.
“But she was good company, and clever, and I taught her our words as fast as she could learn them, because I knew her season was coming and I needed her to be ready. On the day I explained to her of a female’s season and of coupling, she narrowed her eyes at me and says, ‘Seasons make baby?’ I admitted that was the way of things. My Tobi…”
Doru trailed off and Olivia looked up at him, piercing the darkness as best as she was able. He was still smiling, but his eyes were full of pain. “My Tobi said, ‘Season comes, Tobi fuck you. Never again.’ And that was it. All I tried to teach her of patience or pleasure or…or love…” He walked along, his head bent, staring at his feet as they paced through the tunnel.
“Tobi has had three seasons since we brought you to Hollow Mountain. This last, when I scented it starting, I said, ‘You are in season.’ She hadn’t enjoyed hers before, but we had made a little friendship between us and I had heard there were…well, things you can do to give a human pleasure. I thought…never mind. She put down her book, she lay back, she pulled up her covering, and she said, ‘Fuck away.’” Doru’s mouth twisted as he clumsily repeated the English words. “And she did this—” Doru reached out and drummed his claws rapidly on the wall. Then he just stood, his head down, breathing hard. “So I left. I sent Gullnar’s Tina to stay with her until her season was done. I would rather have a friend, a true friend, than a mate who does this—” He drummed his claws again. “—when I come to her to couple.”