Olivia (103 page)

Desperate, Olivia slashed out with both hands and caught the thin fur on his face.  He hissed, released her, caught her again and yanked her off the bench only to turn her around and push her flat again, belly-down.  Her breasts pressed painfully against the cold stone.  The lip of the bench dug into her belly when he lifted her from behind and this time he pierced her with the head of his engorged member and shoved hard.  She clawed vainly at the stone, believing in her terror that she could hear steam hissing from their bodies as he sank himself by painstaking degrees deep inside her.  At last the hard plane of his flanks slammed home against her bottom and he crouched, breathing hard, perfectly motionless for exactly ten beats of her pounding heart.

Then he reared back and slammed into her again.  Her cry was crushed against the stone.  He yanked her hips back, shifted her slightly to an angle and began to pump his hips in ruthless rhythm, grinding her against the bench and slapping their bodies together with brutal force.

And with every thrust, she came in agony.  Every slight movement of the thick organ driving at her intensified the scathing sensation that wracked her from within and it seemed she had no outlet for it.  Orgasm after orgasm battered her, but there was no sense of release.  There was nothing of pleasure, nothing even of physical sexual response, only this great, churning, burning, battering, thrashing chain of explosions and the silent shrieking of her fear. 

Logarr’s breath was coming hot and ragged, burning her back like the steam from a vent.  The hammering action of his hips increased until he was throwing himself at her in a frenzy, splitting her in half along the great wedge of hot iron he fucked her with.  Without warning, he threw back his head, wrenched her hard against him, arched rigid and fast inside her and drove a torrent of something acid-hot into her.  For one terrified instant, she thought the battering force of his seed had punctured the wall of her womb; the heat of his cum struck and slashed through her until it seemed to suffuse her entire body.  A jet of it, gallons of it, thick and hot and horrible with animal pain.  It emptied into the core of her for eternities and he was immobile throughout, not even breathing, until it was done.

Logarr made a sound of tight agony and fell atop her.  He was shaking.  His chest ground against her as he gasped in swooping lungfuls of air, but gradually, his breath evened out.  His thighs unlocked.  He slid back, stood up.

Olivia lay stunned.  She could not move, could not speak, was conscious of drool snaking out the corners of her mouth.  The sensation of unrelieved climax was mingling with the heat of Logarr’s strange seed, and receding back into her womb.  She heard rustling as he fastened his loincloth.

“Are you awake?” he asked.  His voice was steady, but tired.

She made a sound.

“Good, because there is something I mean to say to you, and I want to be certain you understand.”  He paused.  “Do you understand?”

“…yes,” she managed.

“You are weak.  That will pass.  I have put a power into you and in order to translate it, you must get it out of you in the same way it got in.  Soon.  Or else you may die of it.”

“What have you done…to me?” she whispered helplessly.

“I’ve made it difficult,” he replied, and that weariness was back in his voice.  “I can’t make it impossible, I don’t think anyone can do that, but I have made it more complicated.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I will tell you everything, but not tonight.  I am done with you for now.”  He came back to help her to sit up.  “But I am commanded to couple with you again,” he said.

“Why me?”

“You will know the answer another time.  What is important for you to understand is that I will fight your mate to claim you if you do not come willingly.  Thugg was convenient.  I knew you didn’t want him.  But I will fight Sudjummar if I must, and I may have to kill him to defeat him.”

The strength was seeping back into her bones but she held onto him while he smoothed down her skirt with his claws. “Who?” she gasped.  “Who commands you?”

“I have told you all I intend to tell you for now.  You will learn a little more each time I am with you.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, and you can do it in secret.  What we do in the grip of this power carries no scent.  No one will know, tonight, that I have been inside you.  In fact, they will think they know that I have not.”

“What if I don’t want to know any more?”

“Then I won’t tell you,” he answered.  “But I will still have you.  There is a hand upon me, Olivia.  I am not allowed to refuse, but I am sorry it was you.  Please believe me.  I would have given my last breath if only it had been anyone…but you.”  He put his hand on her arm and led her out again, down the maze of narrow passages and thick walls, to the common cave.

Thugg was sitting down while Thurga ministered to him.  He looked uneasy and depressed, but his injuries, while ugly and doubtless painful, were not serious.  Next to him, holding Somurg and exchanging a few tense words with some of the other males, stood Sudjummar.  He looked around at the first whisper of Olivia’s name, his hackles raised and a growl in his throat, but Logarr did not acknowledge the threat in either the sight or sound.  He walked Olivia over to the smith and released her arm.  “Your mate,” he said simply, and left.

Sudjummar watched until Logarr was gone, then gave her a pained glance and looked away.  “I should have been here.”

The words had no immediate meaning for her.  She could scarcely believe it, but she was beginning to be very aroused. “Is that what you think?” she said at last.  “Look at Thugg.  That could have been you!  I don’t care about Logarr, I care about you!” 

“You don’t…blame me?”

Blame you, I’m going to destroy you
, she thought desperately.  “It doesn’t even matter to me,” she assured him, and drew him down for a private embrace.  She had to stop herself from fidgeting.  She could not believe how horny she was.  “But if you require a show of proof, I can provide some.”

He drew back and looked at her in frank astonishment.

“I had to yield,” she said, for his ears only.  “But only as far as the other room.”  Louder, as much for the benefit of the crowd as for him, she added, “But you, my mate, you I will yield to gladly, passionately, and as often as you demand.  In fact, I eagerly await your demand.” 

Every second that Sudjummar spent just looking at her was its own hell of crumbling willpower, but at the end of it, he smiled his crooked smile.  And while she fought not to leap at him or thrust her hand up her own skirt, he finally shifted Somurg to the crook of his arm so he could put his hand around her hip.  “Far be it for me to deny a female in such obvious pain,” he said.  “Come to my pit, my mate.”

He had no idea how much pain she was in.

Sudjummar led her away from the commons towards the forge, murmuring something she could not bring herself to hear about how he was sorry and what to do if it happened again. Olivia tried to keep pace at his side, but they hadn’t walked more than a few minutes before she started having hot flashes and twinges of knife-bright pain, a hundred times worse than anything she had felt trying to control the Great Spirit’s spark.  Logarr had said something about getting this power out before it killed her; she realized all at once that he meant exactly what he’d said.  Caught on the edge between lust and panic, Olivia pulled him with her into the first dark tunnel she saw.

“Are you insane?” he asked.

“Yes!”  She took Somurg out of his arms and set the baby down.  He fussed, but she was beyond caring.  “I need you right now!”

“Anyone could walk by,” he protested.

She tugged blindly at his belt, not bothering to remove his coverings but only to loosen them.  He wasn’t hard yet and he was still trying to reason with her, but one bolt of the Great Spirit’s spark solved both problems.  He shoved her up against the wall with a mindless snarl as Olivia yanked her skirt up, and then he was inside her and whatever it was Logarr had poisoned her with flared out and emptied into him. Sudjummar roared in her face and tried to flinch back, but the power had him and drove him on in a fever of sexual action. 

There was some pleasure, and there was much lust, but most of what Olivia felt was simple relief.  She held onto him as he bucked and thrashed against her, her eyes closed and her teeth bared, and just let her body achieve its own fulfillment as her power achieved release.

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!