Olivia

by R. Lee Smith

A tiny chill sank into the base of Olivia’s spine as she recalled the Great Spirit telling her this was how his essence had passed into Somurg. She thought of pregnant Urga floating down over her, into her, as she strained on the birthing bench, and how the goddess had risen slender and emptied to look back at her.

  “These children, her children, she has blessed with health. All others, she has cursed to carry the full weight of both parents’ weaknesses. Barrenness, infirmity, withered limbs, foolishness, blindness, foaming fits.” Logarr turned his head suddenly and spat. “‘Let no young come save through me,’ she said, and so, among all our people upon all this world, there are but twelve born each year free of this hell which consumes the rest. Our race began to die. The gullan raised their voices in desperation to the Great Spirit, and he went before Urga and commanded her to remove her curse. She refused and so long as Urga’s refusal stood, the Great Spirit left her. For years, he did not talk to or touch his mate, and for years, all the world was barren.”

  Logarr fanned his wings, staring into the fire. “It frightens me to think how close my race must have come to death in that hour. It must have frightened the Great Spirit as well. He summoned Urga out of the sky and commanded again that she relieve her evil. Again, she refused. So he beat her. Badly. And finally, Urga submitted.

  “She did not remove the curse,” Logarr said. “But she did devise the cure. She gathered up all the waters she had beaten out of Bahgree in their last conflict and poured them into a pool that stands outside of time. She told the Great Spirit to give Bahgree’s power back into a human vessel and so make it possible for those offspring to belong to this world. And then, in her fury and her jealousy, she spat out a portion of her own power into that pool, so that the sum of its strength would be greater than his own. And then she returned to the sky and left the Great Spirit before a pool that seethed with enough power to destroy even him. She left him, and the evil shade of Bahgree twined eagerly beneath his hand. The Great Spirit could not unleash her on the world, and so he chose instead to watch all the children born to gullan wither and die.”

  “Bahgree’s power has only to return to a mortal body,” Olivia said. “Not necessarily to her.”

  Logarr shrugged listlessly. “It will make very little difference if Bahgree has the opportunity to enter you. Even powerless in the way of gods, she is capable of much.”

  “Are you putting her into me? Is that what you’re doing?”

  “No. The scope of what I am doing is beyond me, but that much, I think, I would know. But through me, she knows at last which mountain contains the Great Spirit’s intended vessel and so she was able to pour herself in and seek out your metal-maker. No, Olivia, I am not giving you to the River Woman, but I’m doing damage enough.”

  She stood and took a small step towards him.

  He turned away. “In thirty years,” he said, facing the dark wall, “you were the only person to take my hand. Do not forgive me, Olivia. I don’t think I can survive that. Just go. And don’t…don’t ever touch me again.”

  10

  Olivia returned to the cavern where the Great Spirit awaited her. He was still standing exactly as he had been when she left him—facing the open doorway, arms crossed, horns lowered.

  “You are done with Logarr?” he asked curtly.

  “I’m done.”

  He unfolded his arms, crossed swiftly to her and put his hand up her skirt, thrusting one finger deep into her body. He growled, scowling over her shoulder at the wall. “So. More potent than anticipated. The ages have indeed strengthened her.” He withdrew his hand, looked around at the bench and said, “Enough talk. It is time to begin. You may lie down, if you wish.”

  Olivia felt her temper fraying. “Don’t you even want to know what he said?” she demanded.

  “What he said—” The Great Spirit took her arm and pulled her toward him. “—is not what will kill you if it is not answered. Lie down, woman.”

  “You don’t even care, do you? You don’t care about anything as long as you get to fuck!”

  His eyes narrowed. He touched his claw to her forehead.

  The feeling of spiritual invasion blanked out any other sensation. She fell back, vaguely aware that he had caught her, and closed her eyes, trying to force his alien presence out of her brain. She felt a distant thump as she was set none-too-gently on the bench and then a flare of pain and heat as he penetrated.

  Abruptly, the sensation left her and she fell painfully back into her body, gasping as the rush of blood and beating of her heart crashed into her, screaming as the Great Spirit’s blistering cock tore her open and burned her with the endless acid of his cum.

  “There,” he said evenly when her screams receded. “Now I know everything. Does that console you?”

  Olivia couldn’t answer. The power that Logarr had implanted in her was spinning out of her wildly, making her body come alive in ways she could scarcely comprehend. The male entity working methodically inside her did not absorb the power as much as overwhelm it with his own, devastating her with the need to climax. The Great Spirit listened to the tiny, frantic cries that escaped her, realized the source of her distress, and made a noncommittal grunt. His hand dropped to form a complicated caress over her belly.

  Suddenly, every thrust elicited a galvanizing orgasm. Olivia let out a volley of torturous shrieks, writhing and flinging herself at him as he continued to undulate and watch her. Her body was climbing towards an inhuman register of pleasure beyond the physical ability to contain it. Olivia beat her fists hysterically at his face and chest, but none of the blows seemed to be landing.

  His hips pumped. His hard belly slapped against hers. He continued to ignore her efforts to dislodge him, and he continued to wrack her body with orgasms until the shockwaves of pleasure became a single scream of pain.

  “Now,” he murmured, and ejaculated once, bringing her to a violent, ranting climax as a kind of coarse harmony.

  Olivia seized two handfuls of thick hair, let out a harsh cry, and fell back against the bench. The last thing she heard was a rumble of contentment in the Great Spirit’s chest as he raised her hips to bury himself even deeper. Then, oblivion.

  11

  Olivia came around to the comfortable grumbling of the Great Spirit and the sensation of pain as her back rubbed steadily against the stone bench. Disorientation momentarily overweighed annoyance; she checked her watch first. It was half past three in the morning, which was impossible, as she hadn’t even gone to Logarr until a quarter of six. This meant it was tomorrow at the very least and was probably even the day after.

  Now she was annoyed. Olivia smacked her palms into the god’s shoulders as hard as she could and snapped, “Get off me!”

  The cozy rumbling ceased, although the steady rocking did not. The Great Spirit lifted his head just enough to see her face and gazed at her coolly.

  “I mean it,” she said tersely. “Get off!”

  He growled warningly in the back of his throat, but he threw three quick, hard pumps into her, ejaculating each time, and stood up.

  Olivia sat up slowly, feeling a thousand aches, withdrawing from her physical self long enough to convert some of his energies into healing for her battered womb and worse, the wounds that came from ceaseless rubbing against the stone bench. She ran her hands experimentally over her back, wincing as she felt the raised welts of raw flesh slowly mending. There was blood on the bench behind her, blood in tiny trickles that ran all the way to the floor. This was the Great Spirit, whose divine love for all creation ended as soon as it was possible for him to fuck an unconscious girl until her back flayed.

  He was watching her, trying to be patient in case she should change her mind and agree to fling herself on her back. When she glared at him, he apparently misread her fury as passion of quite another kind, and held out his hand expectantly.

  She smacked it away.

  The Great Spirit studied his arm at the new angle where her blow had left it, and then looked at her
, his expression thunderous. “Did I not spare your life, woman?” he demanded. “Did I not spare the lives of the mortals you surely would have destroyed with your union? Am I not entitled to some measure of gratitude?”

  “I should be grateful?” she demanded, and pointed furiously at the blood staining the bench. “Do you see that?”

  He spared it a glance. “You healed.”

  “It still hurt!”

  “What is pain to an immortal?” he asked, rolling his shoulders in a shrug. “It is done, it is forgotten. Quarrelsome woman, to snap and rail at phantoms of injury you can no longer feel!”

  “Excuse me if I think that’s just a little more important than you getting your endless rocks off. And what about Logarr?” she demanded. “Isn’t he one of your children too? Couldn’t you have taken five minutes out of fucking me to save him from Bahgree?”

  “He is beyond my power to save,” the Great Spirit said coolly, watching her. “He was no Mojo Woman, to invoke what he did not understand. He opened to her and lay with her willingly.”

  “He didn’t know! You said you knew everything he said to me, how could you have missed that?”

  “Ignorance is not innocence.” His molten eyes narrowed slightly. “And such is your concern, woman, that you would rather stand and vent your rage at me than wonder what harm the River’s influence might even now be inflicting upon myself. Did you never think that the copulations of the past night and day were no pleasure to me, but a sacrifice? A pain of my own, and far more damaging than any fleeting and insignificant spill of mortal blood.”

  She drew back and looked at him, one hand falling unnoticed to her belly and gripping there, as if she could cup and hold the parasite of Bahgree’s power even after she had already poured it into him. “Was it?”

  “No,” he said. “But it might have been and you never thought to inquire. It would seem your outrage is far more precious to you than concern. Remember that when next you are tempted to revile me for my lusts.”

  She could feel heat crawling in her cheeks as she ducked her eyes away from his piercing stare. After a long, heavy silence, she said, “Is it hurting them? The men that I’ve…gone to?”

  “Bahgree’s magic was of a most particular sort, meant to shield the light of your soul from my perception. It has washed in, as the tides wash over the shore, erasing all marks, and washed out again. To a mortal without the means to translate divine energies, such a tide can easily prove deadly, yet you have chosen your victims well. They have survived and Bahgree’s fell waters can do no further harm to them. Of course, I am now blinded to them as much as I am to you, but this is no great sufferance.” He regarded her while she breathed a low sigh of real relief, then held out his hand again.

  She looked at it, and then at him.

  “It is not yet day,” he said. “You have passed the night in my company and may as well pass the last hours before dawn.”

  “What is wrong with you?” she exploded. “You’ve had me all night, mostly without the inconvenience of holding my interest. Anyone else would be satisfied with that!”

  “It isn’t in the nature of an incarnation to be satisfied.”

  “Beyond the obvious, I suppose,” she added caustically.

  “The obvious?” he echoed, his brows drawing even further together as he sensed an insult. “Explain yourself, woman.”

  “Satisfaction,” she snapped, and then paused in the act of adjusting her clothing, eyeing him with a little caution when his apparent confusion only deepened. “Satisfaction with…sex. You know. When you finish.”

  “Finish?” He gave her one of his short, irritated laughs. “What finish is there to be had in sex? Enough of this! Your oath is still mine and I am done with placating your human pride! Down upon your back, woman!”

  Olivia straightened, her surprise overshadowing her annoyance with him for the moment. “You’re kidding,” she said. “You’ve got to be. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never…cum?”

  He was still cross and the question appeared to anger him further. “Come to what?”

  “That’s amazing,” she said, staring at him. “That’s…actually kind of sad.”

  He tipped his head slowly to one side, looking as though he might easily work his way up to being offended.

  “I mean…don’t you have pleasure?”

  “Of course there is pleasure!”

  “In release?”

  He tossed his massive crest of horns. “In the act. What is there in release but the substance of my divine seed? This is a pointless conversation.”

  “I can’t believe you’ve never cum.” She struggled with the concept while she rubbed her back. “You’ve been with a lot of women.”

  He grunted at that, with some bitterness and some humor and not enough of either. “So you say. There has been for me but Urga, and briefly Bahgree and some few of her daughters.”

  “Few? Some few? That isn’t exactly what I heard.”

  “The term is subjective,” he acknowledged. “To view the species as a whole, I have taken a percentage scarcely worth the mentioning. And for them,” he added pointedly, “there was little concern with trivialities.”

  “Trivialities,” she repeated, unable to keep her expression from showing her astonishment, even as she was aware of the god’s growing impatience. “Most people would say cumming is the whole point of sex!”

  “Sex is the point of sex!” the Great Spirit snapped. “Possession! Penetration! The storm and the fury of it! There is no finish!”

  “Isn’t Urga interested in…that part of sex?”

  The Great Spirit drew in a snarling breath to answer, and then abruptly sighed and merely looked down at her. He took two broad steps and dropped onto the bench she had just recently vacated. “Urga,” he said, and bared his teeth at his shadow on the floor. “Urga is a part of me, nothing more than a buried aspect of a subconsciousness I expelled ages before her birth. She is not an incarnation as I am, but rather, a shadow of my young self. As such, she possesses great power and will, but no great depth.” He paused, his eyes narrowing as he studied her. “You may not believe I have depth.”

  “I suppose you must,” she admitted. “You’ve asked me to go on a quest for you.” So that she could become immortal and he could keep fucking her. As depth went, it wasn’t exactly a well, but it was there.

  He first seemed startled, then pleased by that thought. “Urga, however, exists only to breed by me. She has no other thought, no other desire. She enters her season, comes to my arms, and we couple. At the moment, the exact moment,” he repeated harshly, “that she has my seed, she vanishes.”

  Olivia considered her next words, fairly certain that things could not be answered as simply as she suspected.

  The Great Spirit, watching her, curled his lips in a rueful smile. “So simply withhold it, hm? You’ve been beneath me enough to know that I can spend seed as easily as crook a claw.”

  “The thought had occurred.”

  “And so it is clear you still do not understand my nature. It is like breathing, Olivia Blake. You can choose to take a breath, choose to hold it a while, choose to release it as a pant, a sigh, a word or a whistle, but whether you choose to or not, you still have to breathe. And if you do none of these things by choice, you will breathe anyway, do you see?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. So try to imagine how it is with me. I must wait for her all that while, and mere minutes after she arrives, she is gone.”

  “Minutes?”

  “At most.”

  Olivia wasn’t exactly warming up to him, but she found a tiny kernel of sympathy for him all the same. “Why don’t you just find another woman?”

  “Urga exists to bear my children,” he said curtly. “It is her purpose and hers alone. In her mind, all those who lie with me seek to rob her of her sole function, and she would take a terrible revenge.”

  “She knows about me,” Olivia argued. “She was the one who told me I had
to submit to you. I don’t think she cares that much.”

  He gave his horns a toss and glowered at her. “Urga knows that you and I must have union, but she does not like it. If my will were a little weaker, or hers a little stronger, you would be killed in the most gruesome manner that she could imagine.”

  “Have you tried to take another lover?”

  “Several.”

  “How can she stop you?”

  “She doesn’t stop me,” he answered vehemently. “Urga is mother to all gullan. It is through her body that all souls must pass. It is but an idle thought to take back one of those souls. If I lie with a female, Urga knows, and Urga kills her. If I possess a male’s body to share his passions, Urga kills them both. And if I dare to seek out one of Bahgree’s get—”

  “You made her,” Olivia interrupted. “Make her stop.”

  He buried his face in his hands. For a long time, he said nothing, only sat there, breathing slow. “Olivia,” he said in a muffled voice. “If you insist upon asking questions, I must insist you listen to the answers. Hear me again. Urga was part of me once, but was expelled. I am her mate, and she obeys me, but she is my shadow, my equal in power. I cannot force her obedience.” He straightened suddenly and pierced her with his stare, saying, “But as you were told this night, Bahgree’s essence has become a power greater even than my own. When you have consumed them and are made immortal at my side, then you will challenge Urga and defeat her. Then you will be my mate and, if you like, I will take many lovers.”

  “How very considerate,” she said.

  His gaze turned briefly dark, but he chose to forgive the sarcasm. “I have answered all your questions. Lie back for me now.”

  “Are you serious?” she protested, mentally wincing at the whining quality of her words. “It’s nearly dawn!”

  “It is hours until dawn,” he countered, drumming the fingers of one hand on his knee. “You have nowhere else to be, you have sworn to be my consort, you require my seed to strengthen your power, and if you do not agree at once in spite of these reasonable arguments, I will throw you down and take you anyway.”