by R. Lee Smith
“I’m going to freeze!”
An evil chuckle preceded his lascivious reply. “Then I will take you into the dark and warm you, woman.”
She got up and stepped into the skirt, for which creation all of two rabbits had died and that was being damned generous. It came with a belt of highly polished metal pieces, ostentatious as hell, but she supposed nothing else would scream his name quite as loudly. “This is part of your plan, isn’t it?”
“It is but a small part,” he said modestly. “I, on the other hand, possess a very large part…and a moderate role in the plan as well.”
The bra was nowhere near the right size for her, but she managed to get it on, even if it did squeeze her into the dreaded quadroboob. He paused to admire her anyway, with what seemed genuine satisfaction.
“Now you come with me,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“We are going,” he said, “to take those clothes right off you.”
He led her out of the forge, down a series of lengthy passages, to the baths. It was actually crowded this morning, more than she had ever seen before; she wondered if it were due more to Vorgullum’s absence and a general relaxing of the strict schedule he kept them under, or if the gullan were endeavoring to groom themselves in the spirit of the chase.
Sudjummar slipped into the alcove and returned with two large towels and a blanket. He spread the blanket out next to the only empty bathtub, and set Somurg down. “Behave yourself,” he said with mock sternness.
Somurg goggled at him, then stuffed a handful of blanket in his mouth and drooled busily.
Sudjummar turned to Olivia and caressed her shoulders before deftly unhooking her bra and setting it down where it wouldn’t get wet. He didn’t bother to look around, or gauge the reactions of the others. He knew exactly what message he was sending, but only Olivia could feel the reactions he provoked. Still, it was a bath, the least likely place for any gulla to be overcome with lust, and the power’s urgings weren’t as strong as she’d feared. Olivia was able to almost relax, and when she was naked, he put his arms around her waist and lifted her into the tub.
Only after she was settled did he unfasten his belt-pouch and loincloth. But before setting them aside, he opened the pouch and removed a comb. Sliding into the hot water beside her, he gathered in her in very close and began to comb her hair.
Hot water did what only hot water can do when it isn’t readily available from a tap. She could feel her whole body soaking in the heat, opening to pleasure like the petals of a flower opening to the sun. She leaned against his chest, closed her eyes, and just let go.
“I like this plan,” she murmured.
He hummed at her, a low mating thrumm, scarcely audible over the sound of gullan speech and splashing. His hands wrapped through her hair experimentally, smoothing out the tangles and combing it into health with long, measured strokes. “This is so incredible,” he was saying. “So long and soft…like nothing I’ve ever seen. Does it hurt when I do this?”
“No. Do that.”
He began to play with her hair, separating and plaiting the tresses, only to comb them back out and stroke it out clean and straight. At last, he was only lifting his claws through the thickest fall, fascinated by the way her hair poured out over his hands.
She turned to face him, shaking her hair gently out of his grip. “Enough,” she whispered. “You’ll have me melting over you like wax.”
“There’s an interesting image.” His eyes gleamed.
And it must have been, because that flare of heat and power coiled deep inside her, much more insistently than it had before. She leaned forward at once, pulling out of his grip in an effort to control it.
Sudjummar apparently took the quick motion as a sign that she was done with her bath. He jumped from the water, shook himself off, then reached down and lifted her out to stand beside him. Again, he refused to allow her to dry herself, but ran a towel thoroughly over her body.
The power was growing hotter.
Sudjummar was dressing her, still in full view of the other males. He dried and combed through her hair a final time, then released it with reluctance and collected Somurg. Making certain that every male in the baths could see him with Olivia at his side and her son in his arms, he led her from the room.
“That went well,” he said cheerfully.
I’m going to rip his loincloth off with my teeth, she thought, and couldn’t keep from visualizing just exactly that. She felt like her innards were boiling. She was shaking from the effort of keeping her power contained. In a moment, a very short moment, she was going to lose that battle.
“Sudjummar,” she managed to say.
He glanced at her, executed a flawless double-take, and stopped dead in the tunnel. “What’s wrong?” he demanded. “I can get Tina.”
He opened his mouth, presumably to bellow for a healer, and Olivia grabbed a handful of fur and yanked his mouth down against hers. He had never been kissed before, obviously, but she didn’t let him break away. She kissed him until she was sure he wouldn’t ask questions, and then she caught his hand and pulled him away from the lit tunnel, down a narrow winding passage, to the welcoming blackness of an empty room.
Sudjummar released her just long enough to unsling the pack from her shoulder and set Somurg on it. Then he was groping after her in the dark, but she could see him just fine; the power pulsed hungrily insider her, burning in her eyes so that the light of his life-force and even that of little Somurg glowed brilliantly through the black.
“Where are you?” he whispered. “Oliv—”
She fell on him, shoving him hard against the wall and pressing herself tight against him, as if she were trying to satisfy the power in the most direct fashion—by crawling bodily inside him. His arms came around her at once, trying to embrace her, to caress her, but she didn’t want caresses.
Olivia hooked one leg around his hips and ground against him furiously, trying to unhook his belt with both hands. That this would be best accomplished if she were standing back from him never entered her mind. With a frustrated growl, she found the edge of his loincloth and pulled it loose enough to slip her hands inside. He was hard, he was hot, he was blazing in her mind’s eye like flame.
Power swelled, cramping furiously through body and soul alike, and finally surged free. She howled, but there was no fear or even pleasure in the sound, only relief. It was finally out and it felt so good, so strong, so divine, that no part of her was left to feel concern for the unsuspecting man it snared. Sudjummar’s body jerked hard, every muscle like steel, and then she was thrust up against the wall and deliciously split up the middle. After that, she knew nothing but the pounding of her sweat-slicked body and the hot musk of his pelt and the dizzying echoes of his climax becoming hers provoking his.
She wouldn’t draw this out. No, no matter how good it felt. The Great Spirit might not care what happened to the people who suffered his spark, but Olivia did. She’d hurt Bodual; she would not hurt Sudjummar.
Now that she had done it once, she found she could easily distance her mind from her body and see the hooks that held him to her. She could free him any time she wanted, and she would (but oh it felt so good). Still, she hesitated, watching their energies boil together with the fury of their coupling, feeling the somehow unimportant sensations of his thrusts. The power was there, pumping steadily out of him, building up inside of her, ready to be used.
But how? For what?
Olivia dropped back into her body and gathered some of the power. She didn’t think about how she was going to do it and so it was easy, like flexing a muscle. It also felt good to do this, maybe not volcano-good, but better than the sex that was putting the power into her in the first place. She held the power for a moment, feeling it pulse in time to Sudjummar’s thrusts, and then probed at him with it.
He arched violently, slamming his claws into the wall and shoving into her as if he did in fact intend to drive her through the wall. T
he constriction, the weight and musk of him, the feel of his hot seed battering at her; Olivia lost herself to wave upon wave of climax both physical and intangible.
She clenched her hands on his shoulders, concentrated, and did it again.
So did he, exactly the same way.
Olivia began to braid together tongues of power for a third attempt, then saw with her mind’s eye that Sudjummar was in tremendous pain. Reluctantly, she released her half-formed probe and unfastened him instead.
He rocked back, slammed forward, expelled explosively inside her, and then dropped flat on his back with a crash and a groan.
Olivia fell to her knees, now blind in the dark, and crawled across him until she found his wing, trying to trace it with her hands, certain she’d broken it. “Are you hurt? Oh my God, what have I done to you?”
“Not sure.” She felt the leathery slide of his wings over stone and he struggled to roll over and then to stand. He made it to his knees and then his hand closed over her shoulder, forcing her to face him as if he could see her in the dark. “Now, you say your human mate would leave you and expect you to be celibate?” He sounded incredulous.
Nervous giggles bubbled out of her. “That’s right.”
“That’s appalling. Great Spirit, my brother told me about you and I did not believe him.” He leaned on her heavily, finally got his feet beneath him and slowly straightened. “I need to sleep.”
Olivia led him to the wall and leaned him against it, and then got back to her knees and crawled over the floor until she found her bra and Somurg. “I think you broke your belt,” she said.
“That’s not all I broke.” A short pause. “Where is it?”
She placed the pieces in his hands and he felt them experimentally.
“I’ll have to tie it on until we can get back to the forge. This wasn’t part of the plan. I was supposed to be showing you off in the commons by now.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry! I’d thrash with you on a hot rock anytime you asked!” He paused again. “But don’t ask me again just yet.”
She got an arm under him, holding Somurg against her chest and carrying her pack awkwardly over her shoulder. She was nervous about touching him, but the power, fed, remained quiet. “Not yet,” she agreed, daring to slip an arm around his waist. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
3
She stayed with Sudjummar all day while he slept, but hunger eventually drove her out. Hoping to avoid a resurgence of the power, Olivia went to the women’s tunnels, arriving in time to share the last pot of stew with the tribeswomen before the kitchens were cleaned for the night. Then, feeling guilty for spending so much of her day in isolation, she took herself to Tina’s clinic to see if Dark Mountain’s resident physician needed an assistant.
She didn’t honestly expect to find anyone there so late (the reflecting mirrors in the women’s commons were all dark, and Thurga was going around even now to put out the lanterns and candles in the tunnels), but to her surprise, she found Amy and Tina bent over Liz while Horumn taught them gullan massage techniques. Liz seemed happy enough as she chatted away under the three of them, but the glance Tina gave Olivia was an ominous one. Suppressing a shiver of dread, Olivia waited at the doorway until the lesson ended and Tina trotted briskly over to say, “How’s your head?”
“Fine. What’s the matter?”
Tina took Olivia’s arm and propelled her bodily out of the clinic and into the tunnels. “She’s going to lose the baby,” she said without preamble.
“What? Why? I thought—”
“The baby is perfectly healthy, as near as I can tell. Liz is not. She started having contractions last night, out of friggin’ nowhere. Her blood pressure’s good, no fever, she’s alert, but if she stands up for more than a few minutes…” Tina shook her head and glared over her shoulder. “I think we got them stopped for now, but she’s only six months along. If she’s got a problem with her works, it’ll only get worse as the baby gets heavier.”
“Can we do anything?” Olivia asked.
“Here?” Tina demanded, and bared her teeth like a gulla. “If we were home, I could at least ease the contractions off with a tocolytic like levonal, but of course, if we were home, we could just let it happen and give the kid a fighting chance in an incubator.”
“But of course,” Amy added, coming up to join them, “if we were home, you couldn’t do a damn thing, because you’re not an obstetrician.”
“What should we do?” Olivia asked, looking from one to the other.
“There is nothing to do, except wait.” Tina slammed her fist into her palm hard enough to make a few of the other gullan heading off to bed jump and stare at her. “God damn it!”
“Do you know how to administer levonal? I mean, if you had some?”
“Yeah, if I had some, but what’s the friggin’ point of what-if games?” She started to say more, saw Olivia’s face, and broke off. Tina stared at her, then softly said, “Want me to spell it?”
“Please.”
Tina did, added, “You can use ritodine or nifedipine in a pinch, but levonal is the only one I can think of designed for long-term use. Remember syringes. Lots of them, because she might need a lot of injections and I am not set up to sterilize needles.”
“I’ll do the best I can. Amy, can you take Somurg?”
Amy put out her hands and grimaced as the baby promptly socked her in the jaw. “Damark doesn’t know what fun is until he gets it in stereo,” she muttered. “So, you’re going to knock over a pharmacy, huh?”
“No, she’s knocking over a hospital,” Tina corrected. “And I hope you know those things are pretty well-guarded these days.”
“What are my odds of pulling it off?” Olivia asked, trying for a smile.
But Amy didn’t return it. “It’s fifty-fifty, kid,” she said. “You either will or you won’t, but you’ve got some guts and that ought to count for something. Godspeed. Or, you know, whoever.”
Olivia left them at that, running back through the mountain as fast as she dared go over the uneven rock. Vorgullum hadn’t left many hunters to sustain his tribe in his absence and she knew there would be regular night hunts, but if it was dark already, she needed to hurry if she was going to catch them. A male moved to intercept her when she entered the commons, but she shoved him out of the way with an impatient, “Not now, dammit. Doru! I need you.”
He pushed through his gathering hunters at once, spear already in hand. “What’s the matter?”
“I need you to take me to the nearest human hive. Tonight. Now. Someone get me a backpack.”
“What do you need? I’ll go alone.”
“You can’t, there’s no way you’d know what to look for.” And because they were now surrounded by concerned gullan faces, she told him why, keeping the explanation brief.
Doru listened and nodded once at the end. “She’ll lose the baby,” he said, and rubbed at the base of his horns. “A hard thing.”
“She might not lose it if we can get this medicine.”
He looked at her with a gentle blend of sympathy and gravity. “If the earth wants her, the earth will have her. That is life.”
“If the earth wants her, the earth is going to have to work for it,” she shot back. “That’s Olivia. Now are you going to carry me, or do I have to find someone else?”
He handed his spear to the nearest male and took the empty backpack. “As you command. Let’s go.”
4
Doru banked and dropped out of the sky to land on the roof of a Shop-Mart. He set Olivia on her feet and crossed cautiously to the edge of the building and looked down at the lights of the small city. “I don’t want to offend you, but do you know even roughly where we are?” he asked.
“I haven’t got a clue. I know we left the Cascades behind us in the move, so I’m sure we’re in Canada somewhere, or maybe Alaska.” She joined him and looked out at moving cars and streetlights and crosswalks and a thousand other relics
of a world she had long since left behind. “If you’re asking me what town this is, no, I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know where you are, how can you hope to find this magic medicine? This is big hive, Olivia.”
“Help me find a ladder.”
“A what? Why?”
“Do you see that thing down there?” She pointed at a bank of telephones standing against the face of the Shop-Mart. When he nodded, she said, “There’s a book there that can tell us exactly where the medicine is if I can just get down to it.”
He stared intently into her eyes, then looked at the telephones and nodded grimly. “Stay here.”
Before she could protest, he crawled down the wall, raised his fist, bashed out the light of the Shop-Mart sign and then dropped easily to the ground. A moment later, the beating of his wings heralded his appearance and he snatched her up under one arm and swept rapidly away.
Six blocks later, he touched down on the roof of an apartment complex and handed her the telephone book with a length of linked cable still dangling from the spine. He hunkered down before her and watched with interest as she flipped impatiently through the Yellow Pages. It wasn’t long before she stabbed her finger down with a triumphant, “Eureka!”
“Who?”
“Midvalley Midwifery,” she told him. “A subsidiary of Midvalley Physicians and Obstetrics. Right next to each other.” She repeated the address to herself several times, then bent over the roof and peered down the parking lot of the complex until she found the name of the apartments. She flipped through the phone book again.
“Now you know where it is?”
“Not exactly, but bear with me, Doru.” She located the map in the front of the phone book. “Okay, we’re on Fourteenth and Walnut. We need to be on Sixth and Cedar.”
“Let me see that.” He plucked the phone book out of her hands and turned it right side up. That alone surprised her. “Where are we, do you know?”
She found the cross-streets on the map and pointed.
“And where is this medicine?”