Olivia (20 page)

“I’ll send someone in shortly with food for you,” Vorgullum offered, patting her arm.  “You should be expecting two others.”

Only two?  Olivia opened her mouth to protest, saw his eyes narrow, and said instead, “Thank you.”

He nodded once, turned…rubbed at the base of his horns, and then came back and bumped his brow up against hers.  “It won’t always be this difficult,” he murmured.

“And change takes time,” she agreed, and thought she managed not to sound too bitter about it.

Vorgullum stepped back, nodded to the gulla guarding them, and left her without another word.

Cheyenne was watching, her face twisted in a singularly unpleasant mixture of amusement, anger, and contempt.  Looking at her made it hard to remember just how badly she’d wanted another human-meet, but—

I’m coping, damn it
, Olivia thought, and started walking. 
I’m coping and this is how I cope, so nuts to you
.

“Does he rub your feet after a long day?” Cheyenne asked acidly, once she’d come close enough to hear.

“No,” Olivia replied.  “But he lets me wander around the caves at night when I can’t sleep.”

She took a peevish sort of pleasure from the look that jolted across the other woman’s face at that, a sort of
See what happens when you play nice?
satisfaction, but it didn’t last.  It was hard to play nice with a man who hit you.  She guessed Cheyenne was coping too.

“How are you doing?” she asked, which was the closest she could come to an apology without admitting how spiteful her words had been. 

“I’m being used as a sex slave by a subterranean monster, thanks for asking.  How are you doing?”

“Fine.”  Olivia glanced back at the empty doorway, and then at the mouth of a certain short tunnel.  A smile twitched at her lips, but the embarrassment was still very real.  She looked back at Cheyenne.  “Was your, uh, guy with you all night?”

Cheyenne frowned.  “Why?”

“Just curious.”

Cheyenne waited, still frowning.

“I think I saw him last night,” Olivia admitted.

“So?”

“He wasn’t exactly alone.”

Slowly, Cheyenne’s eyebrows rose.  “You’re kidding.”

Olivia could feel herself blushing.

“You’re not kidding.”  And, unexpectedly, she started to laugh.  “Oh for God’s sake!  And I can’t even tell anyone!”

“Why would you want to?” Olivia asked, surprised.

“Oh, it would just be really nice to watch him get his balls cut off.”

The little smile that had been tickling at her lips as she’d watched the redhead laugh now fell entirely away.  “What?”

“Yeah.”  Cheyenne wiped at her eyes, shaking her head and still chuckling now and then.  “My ‘guy’, as you so delicately put it, is pretty high on the totem pole around here and they don’t know I speak bat-ese, so I hear stuff.  There’s been a lot of talk ever since we had our first get-together, a lot of bad feelings stirred up by all the bats who didn’t get a human sex slave and apparently don’t have a lot of other options.  I don’t know how it used to be, but I happen to know that it is now extremely forbidden to make a baby.  I don’t believe it.  That nutless wonder, sneaking around on me.”

“Hello!”

They both turned as another woman came in with her captor.  The gulla said a few quiet words, brushed at her cheek in an embarrassed way as he looked around the cave, then sent her ahead and left them.

“God, it’s unbelievably great to see ya’ll,” the woman said, sounding flustered and friendly all at once.  She was small, young-looking, Asian, with an unabashed Southern lick to her speech.   “My name’s Anita Chen, I’m thirty-one, I’m from Arkansas, and I used to be a bank teller before I became a harem girl.”

“Hi, I’m Olivia, and I used to be the front office receptionist in that dinky little office complex on Apple Street.”

“Hi, I’m Cheyenne, and I used to be free.”  Cheyenne brushed back her hair with a sour glance to one side.  “No one knows who that lady is, but we suspect she used to be a chef.”

“Poor thing.”  Anita looked at the madwoman.  “She only lived but three doors down from me, I think.  What a weird thing to want to bring with you.”

“What did you bring?” Olivia asked.

Anita shrugged self-consciously.  “I brought a spare pair of socks and a bag of snack-size candy bars, some soap, all my cross-stitching stuff, and my cell phone.  Don’t bother asking for a candy bar, because those suckers were gone the first day.”

“Cross-stitching,” Olivia said admiringly.  “I bet that passed the time.”

“I’m on my third project already.  He makes ‘em little stick frames and puts them up around the walls.”  Anita rolled her eyes, pretending exasperation but plainly very pleased.

“Any reception on that cell phone?” Cheyenne asked.

“Are you kidding?”  Anita laughed.  “I keep it anyway.  It’s got some pictures on it.  You know…special ones.”  She gave another little laugh, this one to disguise some pretty unpleasant-looking emotions.  “Dumb me.  The battery will be dead in a few days no matter what I do.”

“I brought a photo album,” Olivia said tentatively, unsure whether this would be a sore point, in light of the whole phone thing.

They looked at Cheyenne.

She looked back at them.  “God, you guys blow my mind,” she said after a second or two.  “I brought a teddy bear.”

Anita smiled.  “That’s kind of cute.”

“You think so?”  Cheyenne made a visible attempt to rein in her anger and said in a tight voice, “It wasn’t a childhood toy or anything, just some dumb thing I got at a Christmas party last year and hadn’t gotten around to getting rid of.  I don’t even remember getting it that night, I was so fucking stoned, and I could just kill myself for it now because I had a fucking gun in the first drawer of the same fucking nightstand where I kept the stupid bear, and if I’d had my head on even a little bit straight, I wouldn’t even be standing here now.”

“Prob’ly not,” Anita agreed with remarkable mildness.  She sat beside the madwoman and brushed back her hair.  “You’d have been killed right on the spot, and honestly, if you’re gonna be the kind of person who’s gonna harp on all the time about fucking this and fucking that, I’d just as soon not get to know you.”

Cheyenne stared while Olivia looked uncomfortably from one to the other of them.

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Anita continued, now straightening the hang of the madwoman’s ill-fitting clothes, “these people are definitely comparing notes when it comes to us humans.  Your bad attitude is everyone’s problem and I’m trying hard to get along with my guy.”

The redhead gaped for a second, then shoved herself off the wall (Olivia shot a glance toward their guard in time to see him rise to his feet and reach into the shadows for spear) and snarled, “Oh, I am so sorry I have such a bad attitude about being held captive by fucking bat-monsters!”

“Life is tough all over down here, darlin’.”  Anita looked past her and raised her hand as a girl, presumably their last arrival, entered and was released to their company.  “I ain’t impressed just because you can throw the loudest tantrum.”

Cheyenne balled up a fist and the gullan guard sprang forward, the spear actually making an excited little whoop of its own as he swung it up and ready for use.  The gulla himself didn’t say a word and that silence, his intense and somehow feral focus as he aimed the killing head of his laughably prehistoric weapon unerringly at Cheyenne’s heart, made them all jump back.  The new girl, who was halfway across the cavern with her arm up to wave, even gave a little scream, but he paid her absolutely no attention.

“Stop it!”  Olivia grabbed at the redhead’s shoulder and shook it once, hard.  “Just stop it!  What is
wrong
with you?”  To the gulla, in his language, she called, “There’s no trouble here.  Please, you are frightening us.”

He stopped, but kept the spear up and sighted, his arm steady and poised to throw.

This was going to sound just marvelous when Vorgullum heard about it at the end of the day.  So much for coming together in trust.

“I said,
stop it
!” she said, and it was a whole new tone, one she didn’t think she’d ever used before in her life.  One she didn’t even think her mom had ever used.  The others jumped again, not as hugely as they’d done for the gulla and his spear, but definitely with feeling.  They looked at her and Olivia was grimly pleased to see Cheyenne color up a little, even if she didn’t drop her eyes, or her fist.  “If you want to spend the rest of your life chained up in your lair, by all means, keep doing what you’re doing, but if you ever want to come down here and see another human face, you better lose the chip on your shoulder and start giving them a reason to think letting us meet is a
good
idea.”

Cheyenne thought about that, her eyes burning and lips pressed white.  The gulla across the room watched as she slowly uncurled her hand and lowered her arm.  When she backed up to a bench and sat down, so did he.

“That’s the last time I do that,” Olivia said, no longer The Voice of Authority, but still cross.  “If you’re not going to watch out for yourself, there’s no reason I should.”

“Um, hi?”

Introductions were made as the new girl found herself a seat, and they all ended up recapping their former occupations and what precious possessions they’d brought with them.  Even Cheyenne muttered something about the teddy bear, leaving out the bit about the gun.  The new girl listened very intently, as if she thought there might be a short quiz at the end of the day, and then said, “Well, I’m Liz, I’m twenty-one years old, I worked at the Burger Barn, and I brought my purse and, like, half the contents of my bathroom cabinet, so if any of you need change for the phone or some dental floss, let me know.”  She paused there to look back over her shoulder at the gulla guarding them.  “I have one of those,” she said.  “But he won’t tell me his name.  I just call him Needles, because he seems to think he was put on this Earth to poke me.”

The earnestness of this last comment, coupled with Liz’s sweet, childlike face, took them all by surprise.  After a short, startled silence, Cheyenne started to laugh, and the others joined in, all but the madwoman, who simply sat and hugged her saucepan.

“Needles?” Anita echoed.

“Mr. Needles, if I’m feeling snotty.”

“So this is what you naked bats do together?” boomed a familiar voice.  “You squeak and chatter!  Oh, your ancestors should strike you down for your offending faces.  Olivia!  What are you doing here, with these ugly creatures?”

“Hello, Murgull,” Olivia said, with a small smile.  “How are you this evening?”

Murgull ambled into the flickering, golden light of the common cave, casting a baleful eye on the group of women.  Shadows pooled in the ragged valleys of her ruined face, and her eyes gleamed from the center of this devastation like lava pools.  She showed the ragged, yellowing stumps that were what was left of her teeth in a snarl, and flapped her good wing in a sour shrug.  “Evening, morning, sun-up in the spirit-world for all it matters to old Murgull,” she said.  “Her teeth ache, her bones ache, her flesh aches.  All of old Murgull is reminding her how short a span is given us, and Murgull’s time is almost up.”

“You are too terrible to die,” Olivia said.

“Ha!  Too mean, too ugly!”  Murgull gave out that low pitched, witchy cackle and patted coquettishly at the scarred half of her face.

“What brings you here?” Olivia asked.

Reminded of her purpose, Murgull’s heavy brows drew together like thunderheads swelling for a storm.  “Old Murgull is looking in on little brown maggot, eh?  No season comes to that one.  Old Murgull is thinking maybe she should have a sniff.  Off goes Murgull, but does she get there?  No!”

Murgull stumped over and dropped an enormous satchel of food in Olivia’s lap.  She put her hands on her ample hips and glared at them all.  “Big brute catches Murgull’s arm.  ‘Feed the humans,’ he says.  Feed old Murgull?  Oh no, just crawling, chattering maggots.  Hah!”  She glanced at the madwoman, then hunkered down with some effort and peered into the blank, serene eyes.  “Should have eaten the food myself,” she grumbled.  “Maggots deserve no better than bones.”  She looked at Olivia.  “This one is full of stars,” she said softly.

“We know.”

“Pity her.  A naked frog alone in her own little brain.  Pity her mate.  No friend, no talk, no happy times making sparks in the pit.  Just clean and feed and dress the frog.  Pity them both.”  She grunted, shrugging.  “Pity is cheap.”

Old Murgull straightened and examined the other women.  “Well?” she demanded, exasperated.  “Eat the food!  Murgull brings food and you gape at her with eyes like bugs!  Great, fat fools you are!  White and lazy, with no wings and naked, slimy bodies.  You are like frogs some cruel foot has stepped on!”  She turned and started galumphing out, grumbling under her breath.  “Ugly, pasty, bloated leeches.  Give them old Murgull’s blood, poor Murgull.  Less precious than Murgull’s time.”  Her mutters faded with distance, and were gone.

They all stared at the doorway in respectful silence.

“What,” Liz said wonderingly, “was that?”

“That was old Murgull.”

“She sounds just like my mom,” Anita said, awe-struck.  “Gosh, if she could do it in Chinese, she could be my grandma, too!”

“Little brown maggot,” Olivia mused.  “Now who would that be?”

“Maria, maybe,” Cheyenne remarked, biting into an apple.  “She’s Mexican or something.”

“No, they call her the Mojo Woman,” Anita put in.  “My guy talks about her all the time.  She’s always going on about the bad mojo she’s going to put on this guy or that one.  Freaks them out.”

“Could be my roommate,” Liz offered.  “If they took me, they probably took her.  Karen’s blonde, but she’s awfully tan.”

“Heck, I’m tan,” Anita said, holding out her arms and giving them a dubious frown.  “Maybe she meant me.”

“No, because she left again,” Olivia pointed out.  “Anyway, she could have meant just about anybody with brown hair.”

“What was she talking about, sniffing?  Or that other word, season?  I mean, what…”  Anita looked back at the empty mouth of the commons, then at the gullan guard watching over them, and finally at Olivia again.  “What are we really doing here?”