by R. Lee Smith
“Wait,” she said.
He tensed, his claws flexing in the exposed flesh between her vest and skirt. “Why?”
“Can you try to be gentle just once?”
He swept one brow upwards. Otherwise his expression did not change.
“You hurt me,” she explained. “You hurt me a lot. I spend half the power you build in me just healing the damage you do.”
“You are ill-formed for coupling,” he stated, still without altering his features or the grip of his hands.
“No,” she countered. “I’m not. You are ill-schooled in tenderness.” As his gaze began to darken, she reached up and unfastened her vest, drew it slowly free of her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. He watched closely, obediently permitting himself to be distracted, but his eyes when they returned to her face had not softened in the slightest.
“You suggest the fault is mine.”
“The fault is yours,” she agreed, ignoring the warning in his voice as she put her hands over his. “But it can be corrected. I can teach you, I think, if you’re willing to learn.”
“I know all there is in all the universe,” he said, but did not resist as she helped him to unfasten her belt. The skirt whispered over her thighs and lay in a drift over her ankles, but he spared her naked pubis only a glance before glowering up at her. “Certainly, I know all there is to know of sex.”
“You didn’t know a woman could be on top,” she pointed out.
His eyes narrowed. “For a female so concerned with hoarding the time left to her in this mountain, you are brutally free with mine.”
“If you’ve got something better to do, by all means dismiss yourself,” she countered, and took her shirt off as well.
He frowned, and Olivia saw the air around him waver slightly, like the air above a hot highway. “Would it surprise you,” he said, “to know that I am easily capable of taking what I want, however I want it?”
“Not in the least,” she said. “But in words of one syllable or less: If you please me, I will please you. In other words, you may be able to take me how and when you want, but I won’t reward you by helping you cum. Of course, you might not mind being denied such a triviality.”
He rocked his head back and considered this. “Very well,” he said at last, his jaw scarcely moving. “Proceed.”
“The object,” she explained, running his hands up to cup her breasts, “is to give me pleasure.”
“Easily accomplished,” he said curtly and started to lower his hand to her belly.
She caught his wrist. “Oh, it’s accomplished, all right. But it isn’t real, and so it isn’t pleasurable. It’s a purely physical response with absolutely no emotional or even sexual basis. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s one of the things you do really, really wrong.”
His frown deepened ponderously. “I see.”
“Don’t get mad. Put your hands here. Be gentle.”
He obeyed, not without a low grumble of impatience, rubbing the ball of his thumb over her nipple until it hardened. He checked her face for approval, grunted to himself, and leaned forward to sniff at her flesh. The first experimental touch of his tongue was fire; she shivered and arched into his mouth as he traced the swell of her breast with the very tip of his tongue, lapped at the smooth valley between them, then moved to the other and repeated his treatment.
“That’s very good,” she whispered, running one hand between the massive sets of horns that crowned his head.
He growled, still licking. “I am not deceived, woman. This is nothing but your petty vengeance.”
“Vengeance?”
“To occupy me thus while your scent of season torments me.” He glared up at her from between her breasts. “Only one of Bahgree’s daughters could be so spiteful.”
“You can always move lower, you know.”
“Lower.” He frowned at her sex and then at her, his eyes beginning to smolder again with anger. “Do you ask me to kneel now?”
Olivia resisted the urge to roll her eyes and went to the bench instead. She lay down on her back, her thighs opened and the pink of her pussy exposed to him. “There,” she said. “Now you can kneel and still be on top. Happy?”
He did not reply. His stare was fixed and burning, and every breath came with a thrumm of lust. When he finally moved, it was with a snarl and a predator’s lunge. He went to his knees without hesitation, shoving his snout against her hard enough to scrape her back on the bench. He growled again, his breath blowing hot into her body, and then rose over her, gripping the brand of his cock in his fist as he caught her thigh.
She put a hand on his chest and gave him a jolt of power to get his attention. “Gently,” she said.
The Great Spirit looked at her for a long time without moving. Then he dropped back on his haunches and put his hands on his thighs. He studied the V of her legs with brooding intensity, but not, she was relieved to see, obvious anger. At last, he reached up, slipped one hand between her thighs and parted her labia with his thumb. He considered her sex carefully, then leaned very slowly forward and touched his tongue to her inner folds.
Olivia closed her eyes and sighed as a lick of flame shot up through her body. She could sense him watching her, and then his mouth was on her again, gaining confidence as he explored her. She could feel him thrumming as he lashed at her, now sucking, now lapping, now biting very gently, but always open to her whispered praise and preferences. When the tip of his tongue rubbed against her clitoris purely by accident, her sharp cry was the only thing that stopped him.
He drew back, cocked his head at her, and then peered closely at her pussy. He touched her, rolling her clit lightly beneath his thumb as he had her nipple, watching with great interest as her hips bucked and her breath shortened. “Interesting,” he said, and bent once more to taste. His arms shrugged under her thighs, lifting her slightly from the bench and giving him the leverage to hold her still as he teased her. Her hands found the tips of his highest horns and she gripped them, shuddering and kicking with mindless pleasure. His mouth moved at once to penetrate her, tasting the juices of her release.
“I think,” she gasped, “you’ve earned your turn.”
“Silence, woman. I will tell you when I wish to proceed.” He took a breath, exhaled a bolt of flame and ice directly through her to her womb, and then went to work on her clitoris again.
Olivia’s conscious mind dissolved into a crescendo of screaming pleasure. She writhed against him wildly, yanking on his horns to no effect, scarcely aware of her own voice as she knocked echoes from the walls.
At long last, he lifted her from his shoulders and lowered her down the hard length of his body, licking his lips with great satisfaction. “I enjoyed that,” he murmured. “Do you know how long it has been since I have enjoyed a thing?” He fit her against the burning head of his shaft and she sheathed herself on him with a hot cry. Cradling her in both arms, he bent until she touched the floor and then took his weight upon his arms and began to thrust into her, his eyes narrowed and golden with pleasure.
Olivia fell upwards and out of her body with a sense of real reluctance, taking the knot of sexual energy coiling inside her and turning it against the god. He had been very gentle, and he’d definitely earned his reward. It was all about compromise.
Olivia manipulated his sensations, watching the two flames far beneath her growing in brilliance. She began the laborious process of his climax, but on a whim, she drew back and sent a thought: I want to try something.
“You have earned my indulgence. Do what you will, Olivia.”
She gathered her power and shaped it, not into a probe, but into something like a net, and lashed out with it.
There was a sudden exceptionally powerful impact. The only comparison in her experience was of once reaching out and touching a wire she had been too young to recognize as part of an electric fence, of feeling the electricity like a club thumping down on the back of her neck. Catching the core of the Great Spirit w
as like that, at once intensely physical and entirely intangible.
She could feel him now, both moving in her physical puppet and in her spiritual trap, and the sensation was enough to bring her to jarring orgasm in both places. She rocked back and just hovered, feeling the shock of this strange dual climax, feeling the heat of the god blazing throughout both cores.
He was gasping in rough tandem with his thrusts, apparently just as surprised as she, and suffused with aftershocks of her own sensations. “How… AAAGHH…are you doing this?” He threw back his head and thundered a primal scream as he came ferociously to climax.
Olivia rocked with the force of its reflection, swam dizzily back to her senses, and then fixed both spirit hands into the imprisoned radiance of the god and beamed a wordless command of pleasure at it.
His roar seemed to shake the mountain itself, and seeing this was a god, she supposed that might be possible. He came again, hard enough to rock her physical puppet frighteningly close to the point of death.
Wow, she thought, more than a little in awe of herself.
“Enough!” he shouted. “Release me! I am hurting you!”
Olivia drew her thoughts like a knife between them and felt the essence of the Great Spirit snap back into his control. His light fell back from her at once and she began to flood her bruise-colored body with healing light until it was safe to return.
She opened her eyes and saw the Great Spirit staring at her with an expression she might have called superstitious terror if it had appeared on anyone other than a god. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“I am not harmed.” He drew back from her and gripped her shoulders. “But I could easily have been. How were you able to do such a thing?”
“I have no idea.” She started to speak and stopped herself.
His eyes narrowed. “What is it?”
“It felt…really good. It felt like cumming all over again.”
He tipped his head back slightly and regarded her with open apprehension. “So,” he said. “This is how my power translates through the daughters of Bahgree. I have been more right than even I knew to fear it.” His gaze drifted over her towards the wall. “Kodjunn, my host, means to return on the day Urga comes into her season. I will meet with my mate in our coupling place of ancient time. And then I will come to you, Olivia. It is time for our journey to begin.”
He released her shoulders and stood up.
Olivia sat up, her heart hammering in her chest. “On the day Urga comes into season?” she echoed. “How long is that? Where is she now?”
“She is still thick with child. You have a little time yet. I suggest you use it to make your farewells.” He brought his gaze back to her with some effort. His expression was fraught with concern. “I had meant to wait longer. Now I dare not. If Bahgree learns of your strength, she will break this mountain apart to find and destroy you. I think she has lost her one chance at defeating you, and wasted it to blind my eyes. That alone will infuriate her. You will stay here with me, Olivia, until Kodjunn’s return.”
“What, here in this cave?”
“Here,” he agreed, and paced restlessly to the mouth of the tunnel, lighting the darkness as he peered out at it. “It is the only way I can be certain of your safety.”
“No.”
He tipped his head to one side and narrowed his eyes at her. “I am not asking, woman.”
She turned away deliberately and started dressing again. “You have the whole rest of eternity to keep me. I want the next two weeks.”
“I do not care what you want.”
“Believe me, I know.” She bit down on the rest of that pointless mood, and tried a more conciliatory tone. “Give me the next two weeks to finish doing what I need to do here, to say goodbye to my friends. If anything happens, if I feel that I’m in any danger from Bahgree, I’ll come straight here.”
He flexed his talons in the rock. His horns lowered with obvious menace. He closed his eyes and thought deeply. “I accept this,” he said grimly. “In the spirit of compromise.”
She softened her voice. “I appreciate that.”
“Hm.”
She touched his arm. “I do. Thank you.”
He fixed his gold eyes on her again. “I give the night to you. Come to me again at dawn.”
She fought to keep her expression neutral. “I have to sleep sometime,” she explained evenly.
“That means you will not,” the Great Spirit answered, looking away. “How frustrating it is to be with you. You submit to me only when I do not dominate you. It is my right to rule over you, it is your privilege to be ruled.”
She meant to sigh and say something persuasive. To her dismay, what she said was, “If you want blind obedience, get a dog.”
He nodded, unoffended, unsurprised. “You,” he said thoughtfully, “do not want to lie down with me. You do so only to keep me in good humor.” He glanced at her with a small, crooked smile. “It is a sacrifice and sacrifice pleases me. I will be patient.”
“Thank you.”
He nodded, then gave her a hard, formidable stare. “But know this, Olivia Blake. I indulge you in this fantasy of free will because it is harmless and it makes you happy. You warn me not to own you? I own you already. You are free only because I allow it.”
She cocked her head to one side, studying him. “I’m going to ignore that because you were so gentle today, but for future reference, I don’t appreciate being scared into blind obedience.”
There was a pronounced silence.
“Ignore me,” he echoed.
“I don’t like to be threatened.”
“You’re going to ignore me.”
She sighed, exasperated. “It’s too hard to ignore you. I’m just going to ignore your threats.”
He took a deep breath, held it, and released it without striking at her, despite his very plain desire to do so. “So be it,” he said finally.
She didn’t want to leave like this. Olivia turned away from the doorway and came back to him. She cupped the back of his neck, pulled herself up and kissed his unyielding mouth. “You are being very patient with me,” she said. “And you were very gentle and very, very pleasurable.”
One corner of his mouth lifted very slightly. “Hm.”
“Very,” she repeated.
He threw back his head and growled out a long-suffering sigh. “You are dismissed, Olivia. I am not angry with you. Return to me…when it pleases you to do so. As you have said, I shall have all of eternity to enjoy the reward of your body. I suppose I can wait a little while longer.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
FAREWELL
1
Olivia spent the next day in the women’s tunnels, working holes through her new bear teeth with a metal awl. She broke two of them, but the rest came out all right and made a pretty impressive, if surprisingly heavy, necklace. She received several admiring and envious glances as she put it on (she suspected most of the glances had more to do with the man who had given her the teeth than for the trophy itself), and after that she had nothing to do except sit around being in season and on Horumn’s nerves.
She tried to make herself useful, but Horumn had no patience for her and Olivia, her thoughts already morbidly fixed on the journey she was soon to take, gave her no reason to want to be. After she was thrown out of the cooking space, she went to the clinic, but Tina and Tobi were absent, no doubt catching up back in their own lair. The conspicuous absence of the other humans—particularly Amy and Sarahjay, who had always been good about helping out with women’s work—made Olivia think there was a feast in progress back in the commons, but she couldn’t risk attending while there was the slightest chance she was in season. At last, desperation drove her to try Cheyenne’s company, but the other woman lay as still as if she were in a waking coma, her mouth open and dark eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. Examining her for sores was too much like moving a corpse, and the clammy feel of Cheyenne’s naked flesh made her own skin crawl. Olivia made a token att
empt at conversation, but it seemed obvious that she was being drugged with whatever Horumn gave to Victoria, and so she withdrew to her own lair in the women’s tunnels.
The next morning, Olivia figured her season had to be over. She went immediately to the baths, discarded her well-worn bra and rabbit-fur skirt for a T-shirt and leather breeches, and emerged feeling distinctly better, as well as warmer. Her good mood lasted just long to arrive at the commons. There, she found Doru crouching over a dazed-looking older male who had both hands clasped to his blood-matted scalp.
“What happened?” she asked anxiously. And was it about me?
“Unar here tried to challenge Sutung for Sarahjay,” Doru said mildly. “Without her permission.”
“She fought him?”
“She got her spear first, but yes, she fought him.”
Olivia looked past him at a scowling Sarah J., who stood close to Sutung with the spear in question gripped in her fist. Sutung didn’t seem as though he had quite decided whether to be impressed or disturbed by this turn of events, but he had his hand on her shoulder.
“Is he going to be all right?” she asked.
“Tina says so. He just needs to sit still for a night. And remind himself repeatedly that she could have given him the tip through his heart as easily as the butt to his head,” Doru added pointedly, and the older gulla grunted and gave a grudging nod. Satisfied that all was well, Doru straightened and faced her, smiling. “And you.”
Olivia smiled back, her heart beginning to lift. “Me?” she teased.
“I’ve been thinking about you all day.” He turned and summoned his spear as if by force of thought alone. “Let’s go hunting.”
She blinked at him. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
“Too bad. Your tribe is hungry and I have enough problems trying to feed them without leaving you behind me with one challenge already hanging in the air. I want you with me tonight.” He slipped an arm around her, took several steps towards the chasm entry, then stopped short and looked down at her. “Unless of course, you really mean not to?”