by R. Lee Smith
It was done in less than a minute.
Sudjummar staggered away from her, hit the opposite wall of the tunnel and sank down its rough surface, clutching at his groin. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I don’t know why…I’m not like that. I’m sorry.”
Olivia picked up her screaming baby and tried to quiet him, too ashamed to speak. Even if this doesn’t kill me, she thought, it’s going to kill him.
“It won’t happen again,” Sudjummar was saying.
And no. It would not.
2
Logarr emerged from the shadows as she left the forge three days later. “It is time,” he said calmly.
“I’m not meeting with you.”
He gazed at her, neither surprised nor disturbed. “Then I will challenge your mate,” he said.
“I’ll tell him to concede to you and I’ll refuse you.” She lifted her chin, glared at him. “I’ll go the women’s tunnels and I won’t come out again until Vorgullum comes back and puts an end to all this.”
He smiled. It was not a threatening or unpleasant expression, much as she wanted it to be. It was just tired. “As you like it, Olivia,” he said.
“And you’ll leave me alone?” she asked suspiciously.
“No.”
“What are you going to do to me if I don’t come to you?”
“Something like this,” he answered, and before she could do more than flinch, he reached up and tapped her on the forehead with one claw.
Just a tap. Hardly worth noticing. If she’d been asleep, it wouldn’t have even woken her up. She started to ask him what on Earth that had been meant to do and didn’t. Couldn’t.
She couldn’t move, could only watch him approach her until she could feel the heat from his body. She made a conscious effort to do something, anything, even blink her eyes, but her body was not her own.
Logarr spoke, his eyes locked with hers and strangely sad, far removed from the things he promised her. “You will come to me, Olivia. Your thighs will open around me. Your body will ache and tremble where I touch it. I will taste your sweat and caress the secret places within and without. I will have you, Olivia, possess you, consume you. And I am sorry. I wish that it had been anyone else, anyone.” His finger brushed at her slack palm. His eyes dropped to look at it and for the first time, his voice faltered. “I still remember the way you smiled at me…the way you reached out your hand…”
She tried to scream, but all she managed was a soft sigh as she pushed air uselessly between her open lips.
“Do not resist me,” Logarr whispered, kneeling before her in the empty passage. She couldn’t see him, but his voice invaded her completely, almost as though it originated in her mind. “Do not resist her. You can’t win. Believe me, I know.”
His hands caressed her ankles, slipped up her legs, over her thighs, her hips. Her skirt pooled over his wrists, tickling her where the hem lightly kissed her. She wanted to struggle and could not move, wanted to moan and could scarcely continue to breathe.
“I told you my name and you did not understand it.” His hands eased between her thighs, slipped up to cup her buttocks. “What is logarr, Olivia?” He flexed his arms, shrugging her legs up over her shoulders. “What is logarr?”
Your name! she thought, frozen and staring, feeling nothing but his hands caressing her hips, his breath warm on her bare pubis. Your name, please, I can’t think!
“Perhaps this will clear your mind.” He pulled her forward. The wedge of his snout pushed her thighs even further apart. He licked her, his tongue slipping through the petals of her pussy, sliding back and forth slowly while she stood motionless and insensible. Then his tongue stabbed up into the core of her, and she was freed enough from his spell to rock against him.
He was right, though. It did clear her mind, cleared it of all but screams of pleasure, even if the only sound she could make aloud was slow, measured breathing.
“Now,” he murmured. “What does logarr mean?”
River, she thought.
“That’s right.” He bent his head again, catching her clit between his lips and lashing at it with his tongue until even her frozen throat released a breathy groan. “And who do we know from the river, Olivia?”
Bahgree, she answered.
“Very good.” He pressed his mouth to her pussy again, drinking the ready oils of her body’s hunger and making certain she could hear the shameless, unlovely sounds she made.
You’re…not…Bahgree? she thought, desperately trying to put force into the statement, but ending it on a shaky question.
He paused, licked his lips. “Do I look like a water woman?” he asked, bemused. “Even remotely?”
Then…what..?
And suddenly he sucked in a deep breath and put his mouth tight against her sex and exhaled, pouring something thick and searing with heat deep into the secret heart of her, where it immediately sent out waves of throbbing need. Logarr withdrew slightly, rubbed his tongue once, expertly, against her clitoris, and then set her down on unsteady legs.
She promptly folded up on the ground with both hands writhing against her aching sex.
“I am not the Great Spirit,” Logarr told her, moving away. “You don’t have to be willing for me to use you. Don’t fight me. She’ll make me hurt you if she has to. Please, Olivia. Just…Just let me do what must be done.”
She rolled onto her stomach, grinding out a moan of agony as his footsteps receded into the darkness.
Listen, her mind said firmly. If someone were to come along right now and see you, they’d think you’d been stabbed. Go home. Go to Logarr. Go jump off a cliff, but stop thrashing around like a worm that’s been cut in half!
Good advice. Excellent advice. Olivia pulled herself up with the help of the wall and went back to the forge in a daze. She plucked the hammer from his hands as Sudjummar bent over a cook pot, turned him around and flung him backwards on the anvil. He tried to say something and she did a thing she had sworn never to do again: Olivia brought out a spear of her power and impaled him with it to shut him up and make him fuck her.
There was no kind way to describe the use she made of him. She raped him, driving against his insensible body for hours before giving up with a scream of rage as she realized she could not be free of the sexual storm that churned inside her. She ran from the forge, leaving him crumpled in a heap at the base of his anvil; she ran to the room she used to meet with the Great Spirit and she did the second thing she would not have imagined possible of herself.
She called for the god.
And he did not come.
Shaking with need, both hands twisting furiously between her thighs, Olivia stared in disbelief at the dark cavern and screamed again. The pain was so intense, she was aware of nothing else. She leaned into the wall, gasping for air that did not even half-fill her aching lungs. I could die, she thought. I could really die.
She broke, and the instant she did, before she could even try to think of how she was going to find Logarr’s lair among the mountain’s many tunnels, a spark lit in her mind like a beacon, throbbing as she was throbbing, pulling her effortlessly in. She had no idea where she was going, but she went. Eventually, she turned into a private passage and climbed, not even thinking of her spikes, up the narrow entry chute.
There were two or three candles glowing from the sleeping room. Olivia half-walked, half-staggered in to him.
The driving urgency that had gnawed at her since their earlier meeting ebbed away as Logarr came naked to meet her. Olivia didn’t wait for him to crack her defenses this time. She opened up the full force of the power inside her and threw it all directly at him.
In the back of her mind, she had suspected it wouldn’t have any effect on him. She was astonished when he rose bodily into the air and was thrown into the wall. He landed hard, but kept his feet and looked at her in amazement.
More than amazement, Olivia discovered uneasily. Hunger.
“Come on, then,” he growled, his eyes smoldering wit
h desire. “Half the fun of mating is the chase.” He threw out his hands and, as before, all of that energy came crashing back into her, a thousand times more powerful. There was no sensation of flight, but she must have flown anyway because her back struck the wall and she was pinned there, suspended a good three feet over the floor.
Logarr took two running steps and leapt. His body slammed once, hard against her and she felt another galvanizing blast of pleasure. His claws sank easily into the stone. To her fevered mind, he seemed to be melting it. He dug one hand into the wall and put the other on her left breast. He heaved himself up and shoved his groin against her so that she screamed and locked her legs around his waist. Though she tried, she couldn’t get her hands between them to remove her clothes, not even enough to pull her skirt out of the way. When she had frustrated these efforts, she resorted to beating and scratching at his back, almost in tears. He ignored that, too, now grinding his hips against her with torturous lassitude, his erection pushing her skirt hellishly against her throbbing sex.
“It would seem the chase is over. What say you, Olivia?” He stroked her breast, nibbling at her throat, but his eyes were tired. “Are you willing yet?”
The last shreds of her self-respect blew away and she found herself pleading with him, begging him.
He drew back enough to pull her skirt up, rubbing his palm against her damp sex, thrusting inside her and teasing at the burning nub of her clit with his thumb. “Very willing,” he observed. “Open to me, Olivia.”
She spread her thighs until her hips ached, thrusting at him and screaming, lost to all but the primal need to get rid of the swirling, seething power that churned itself into frenzy deep inside her. There was no way to vent it, no means of channeling the force through and out of her, as she did with the Great Spirit. She could not concentrate through the storm of sensation enough to remove herself from her body. She was caught, she was lost, she was his.
Logarr spread her labia with his fingers and pushed the head of his cock inside her. Still suspended, he rocked forward, sheathing himself in one powerful thrust. Immediately, Olivia bucked against him and began to cum—a hateful, ruthless wind of climax that blew her before it mercilessly to the next, never allowing for release. She was aware of nothing but the heat and pain of their union; she did not know that she had been cracking her head steadily against the wall with each thrust until he cushioned her with his hand.
After an undeterminable length of time, his steady pace grew somewhat ragged and she knew what was coming. He held her immobile, simultaneously straining upwards. She opened her mouth, moaning with pain and pleasure in equal amounts, thinking that he had to be ripping up through her womb, that he was killing her.
Logarr locked hard into place, spending his gallons of hot seed inside her, not moving even to breathe. It was power, pure power, and it silenced Olivia even as it drowned her.
He let out a gagging gasp and sank back when it was done, and if he had not been securely sunk into the wall he would have fallen to the floor. Strengthless, she fell with him, still sheathing his now-flaccid member. After several long minutes, he brought up his arm, gathering her against him with ridiculous tenderness, all things considered. He even stroked her hair. “We’re done for now. You have a little more time to find release, but it will be a far more dangerous flow, so beware of who you choose to lie with.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” she stammered and burst into tears.
He seemed genuinely distressed, rubbing her back and shoulders. “I can’t answer that, Olivia. I am as much a tool as you. The Water Woman demands that the eyes of the Great Spirit be blinded, and that, somehow, is what we are doing.”
She started to ask another weepy question, but he silenced her, climbing down the wall and setting her on her own feet.
“I was twenty-four years old when I left for my Journey,” Logarr said, reaching down for his belt and loincloth. “An old rite…mostly forgotten. Pointless. But Vorgullum had just become tall and he was younger than me, you know, and I had it in my head that the old leader had sired me. I was bitter and angry and foolish most of all, and I went on a Journey because it was all I could think to do to make Vorgullum bend his neck to me. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I think it was the spite that attracted her because I had not been out of the mountain long when I had a sense of being drawn. I did not resist. It is a flattering thing to know that spirits see you, want you, when you are young and know no better.” He paused, eyeing her. “And I am done with storytelling for now. You have no time for it.”
“What did you mean when you said you were blinding the eyes of the Great Spirit?”
“I won’t tell you. Not now.” He turned away to dress. “I said you had more time tonight, but that doesn’t mean you should waste it by asking me questions you know I won’t answer.”
“What are you putting in me?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I can only tell you where I got it, but not tonight. Meet me again in three days,” he repeated, turning away from her. “And I will tell you of the River.”
Olivia stumbled out of the room, down the chute, and into the tunnels. She orientated herself with some difficulty, and set off. She reached the mainway just as she was beginning to feel undeniably aroused, but not uncomfortably so. She turned towards the commons by reflex, then jerked herself around. None of the lanterns lining the tunnel walls were lit and that meant it was night. No one would be in the commons; she could think of nowhere to go except home and she was afraid to do that, afraid that this awful power would not just hurt Sudjummar this time, but kill him.
So she walked, aimless, only struggling to keep moving as the first cramps and flashes of heat began to rock through her body. The thought that she might die here, alone in the tunnels, burnt from the inside out by her own raging power, rose in the back of her mind and would not be dislodged. But wouldn’t that be better, really? Wouldn’t that be preferable than to kill a tribesman?
Her vision had already started to cloud when she passed the baths and her feet, moving almost of their own accord, pulled her in. She was on the verge of falling when there came a massive splash and Doru’s broad body exploded out of the largest bathtub in a spray of hot water and steam. He rubbed at the base of his horns, humming under his breath, then dunked back under.
Olivia’s feet were walking her calmly towards him. Olivia’s hands were peeling away her clothes in jerky, agonized movements.
Doru splashed up again and scrubbed at his fur, chanting in thickly-accented English about devil-women with skin the color of mocha, entirely unaware of Olivia creeping up behind him in a haze of sexual sickness.
She laid her hand between his wings.
He let out a roar and snapped both wings straight out, knocking her sprawling over the wet stone. She landed on her back and curled up away from him, rubbing in agony at her sex. She could scarcely see anymore.
“Jesus Christ, you scared me!” Swift silence, spray of water and clatter of claws on stone. “Olivia, did I hurt you?”
He touched her.
Her power, a sullen, smoking volcano, erupted. Whatever else he had intended to say was consumed in an instant. His hands were on her, his body was against her, and then he was in her and all was relief.
He thrust six times in rapid succession. That was all it took. He came hard and she came harder, venting all the force denied her in her union with Logarr. He rocked back from it, his whole body brick-hard beneath his damp pelt, and she dropped beneath him, her powers utterly depleted.
She thought he would fall over her, broken, since that seemed to be the going pattern. She had enough presence of mind to be surprised when he shook himself off and lifted his head. His eyes were still a little dazed, but they focused. He gathered her up and rocked back on his knees, cradling her carefully in his huge hands as he lowered his mouth over her breast.
“Ohhhh,” she breathed. Her hands fluttered up to brush lightly across the back of h
is head as he teased her nipple erect, rolling it between his teeth, sucking first gentle than hard, finally biting down so that she arched into his mouth and cried out with pleasure. He licked at the smooth skin between her breasts, put his mouth against the hollow of her throat and thrummed, hardening again inside her.
“Doru—”
“Hold on to me,” he murmured, and cupped her bottom with one hand and her hip with the other, pressing his thumb against the swollen nub of her clitoris. “Let me move you.”
She snaked her arms through his horns and fell back, abandoning herself entirely to his control. Her eyes were closed, locking out all the world to lavish in the sensation of blinding pleasure as he moved her, now fast, now slow, now up and down and in circles, and all the while his thumb pressed and rubbed in the most fantastic patterns.
She flung her legs out at the moment of orgasm and hung suspended, coming in endless waves of ecstasy, undulating helplessly against him and sobbing with the pure pleasure of release. Then she let go his horns and dropped back into his hands and he cradled her against his chest for a moment, still rocking gently, keeping her at that height of sensation.
Then, slowly, he began to lift her off him.
“No!” she whispered, arching back at him in something approaching desperation.
He laughed quietly. “Trust me.” He pulled her apart from him and she shuddered and came even at the feel of his withdrawal. Then she was turning in the air and he entered her again and twined his arms through hers to pull her back against his chest. Unable to touch him, she could only ride the air, her breasts aching, as he moved and moved and moved and suddenly she came again and he bent around to swallow her screams with a kiss.
Now he released one arm to reach around and rub gently at her clitoris, still thrusting hard inside her. He was swelling, his rhythm breaking, his breath coming harder and in tatters as he neared climax, until finally she felt his seed like fire burning in her womb.
He exhaled slowly, lowered himself to his knees and gently set her on the ground.