Olivia (26 page)

Olivia started to go back to sleep herself when she heard the fire pop.  Thinking that it might need another log of fuel, she started to crawl out of her sleeping bag, casting an incurious glance over at the hearth.

Cheyenne sat cross-legged before the fire, stirring it with a poker.

Olivia’s heart stopped and then kicked painfully back in—ba-BOOM!  She locked her jaws against a scream, but couldn’t quite prevent a smothered sounded whimper.

Vorgullum stopped snoring, wriggled around, then started snoring again.

Cheyenne looked around casually, saw Olivia, and lifted one finger in a sort of wave.

Olivia, now convinced she was not dreaming, crawled carefully out of the pit and wrapped herself in one of the ripped sheets of bedding she’d piled up the previous evening.  She didn’t dare demand anything of Cheyenne, not even in a whisper.  Instead, she snatched up her flashlight, tugged sharply at Cheyenne’s sleeve and stalked out.

She went to the furthest room, the one Vorgullum used for storage, and huddled in a corner.  Cheyenne came a few moments later, carrying a candle and looking around with an expression of mild interest.

“Hello, Olivia,” she said calmly.  “Nice place you’ve got here.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Olivia hissed.

“I need to talk.”

“About?”

“About my man sneaking off to fuck around on me and you just
happening
to be there.”

“You’d better not be implying—”

“Like I care.  It doesn’t matter how you saw him, although I’m sure it was an interesting story.  I just want to hear you tell me he was with another of these furballs.”

“He was.”

“A female?”

“Of course!”

“Don’t assume.  You’re positive it was a female he was fucking?”

“I’m positive,” Olivia said, frowning.  “His back was mostly to me, but I had a really good view of, you know…that.”

“Did he cum in her?”

Olivia blanched.  “I didn’t stick around to watch.”

Cheyenne nodded pensively.  “Okay, well, I’ve been thinking about it, and the thing is, my guy is gone a lot.  I mean, a
lot
.  So if he’s actually meeting up with his girlfriend every time he sneaks out on me, then he is in real trouble.”

“So what are you going to do about it?” Olivia asked.

“I’m going to expose him, I think.  If I can figure out how.”  Cheyenne crossed her arms and tapped one finger against her bicep.  “The problem is, no one is awake at this hour.  I’ve been as far through these caves as I can go without spelunking equipment, and I’ve yet to see any guards posted, even in the middle of the night.”

“Why would they need guards?” Olivia asked crossly.  “We’re at the very top of a mountain, and about three hundred feet deep.  Who would they be guarding against?”

“Exactly.  And this is great as far as my escaping goes, but unfortunately, it’s really bad for exposing the little lovebirds.  I mean, I can make all the accusations I want, but no one’s going to take my word for it.”

Olivia watched while Cheyenne sat herself on a bench and made herself comfortable.  “Do you think I’m going to accuse him for you?” she asked finally.  “Because I am not having any part of getting someone castrated.”

“He is raping me.”  Cheyenne’s eyes were steady and cold and impossible to meet.  “You told me about him and his little fling, so don’t you stand there and tell me that you don’t want to get involved.  You’re sleeping with the fucking King Bat, and you are the only one of us he listens to, so you are goddamn well going to help me now.  You’re going to tell him what you saw—”

“I don’t have any proof!” Olivia whispered furiously.  “And when your guy denies it, mine is going to have to decide which of us to believe, and I am not
that
confident in my womanly wiles!  Besides, even if he did believe me, all he’d do is castrate him, he wouldn’t set you free as a consolation prize!”

“I know that,” Cheyenne said coldly.  “But if my guy is castrated, I’ll be given to someone else, maybe someone who wouldn’t make it completely fucking impossible for me to escape.”

“Escape?!  Jesus Christ!  You come here in the middle of the night talking about castrating people and escaping and you know how sharp their ears are!  We could all be in chains tomorrow because of this stupid little stunt!”

“Not you.”

“Yes, me, goddamn it!”  Olivia crept back along the tunnels to peer in on Vorgullum.  He was still sleeping, one arm thrown out over her side of the pit, snoring into the crook of his arm.  She watched him as her emotions settled, then returned to the storage room where Cheyenne waited, idly investigating the various tools and devices that cluttered up this chamber.  “If you want me talk to him about how you’re being treated—” she began.

“What good would that do?”

“He might give you a new mate if you asked for one.  Well, he might,” she insisted, when the redhead only gave her a withering stare.  “We’re here to make babies.  I don’t think he cares who we make them with.”

“Or how they get made,” Cheyenne countered.  “And even if he cared, which he won’t, all he’d do is ask my guy if it was true.  He’d deny it, and then he’d beat the living shit out of me.  No thank you.”

“But if you could prove your side of the story—”

“If I could prove anything, I could get the son of a bitch’s balls cut off!  Forget it!”  Cheyenne stood up, raking her hair back and pacing around the room until she’d calmed herself down.  “But you have a point,” she said at last.  “And I have to admit, you’re more useful to me as a good slave than someone who makes accusations, so okay, we’ll play it your way for now.  I’m leaving.”

“Good.  Don’t ever sneak back in here like this again.”

Cheyenne looked at her.  “I’m leaving,” she said again.  “I’m going to go back to that bastard’s cave and if he’s there when I show up, he’ll beat me until I piss blood again, so you think about that while you’re lying there with King Bat’s arm around your waist tonight.”

Olivia’s anger continued to simmer, but the words hit hard, and the shame that came with them made her feel sick and hot. 

“I can’t get out of here by myself.”  Cheyenne said, her eyes piercing at her, hard and sharp as knives, unblinking.  “I need your help, damn it.”

Her stomach clenched and churned.

“Do I have to beg you, is that what you have to hear?  Fine, I’m begging.  Help me before he kills me.”

“I…”  She broke, pressing one hand over her eyes in defeat.  “What do you want me to do?”

“Just be there when I need you,” Cheyenne said.  “I have to think about things, plan things.  I’m not going to have a lot of time when it happens, so just be there.  And believe me.”

Olivia could only watch while Cheyenne took her candle and left.  She stood in the empty room for a while, then made her way back to the sleeping room and the pit.  Vorgullum murmured sleepily as she came in close to him, then opened his eyes and blinked at her.

“Go back to sleep,” she whispered.  “It’s too early.”

“I dreamed of voices,” he said thickly.  “Yours and someone else’s.”

“Shh.  There’s no one here but me.”

“I know, but—”  He yawned cavernously, and spooned up against her.  He mumbled something more, then disintegrated into snores again.

Olivia lay awake, his arm lying over her like an accusation.  She didn’t think she’d sleep after that, but she did.  Her dreams were cold and filled with pain.

13

She was wakened a second time by Vorgullum trying without much success to extract himself without jostling her.  She sat up, rubbing her eyes crossly, and he ducked his head in apology.

“I tried not to wake you.”

“I was awake, sort of,” she muttered.  “It was cold in here last night.  Can you try to find some more bedding for us?”

He glanced at the pile of random rags and rough fabric she had removed from the pit the day before, then shrugged.  “Yes, if you like.  If the weather is good, there will be humans in the foothills.”

“Good,” she smiled, dropping back into the pit.  She stretched luxuriously, aware of his appreciative gaze.  “Because I want to try it out with you.  Oh, my handsome mate,” she sighed.  “I wish that you could stay with me all night.  You cannot know how much it hurts me to open my arms and have nothing but your memory to fill them.”

He tightened his belt and looked at her, amused.  “And where was this last night when I had time to tend to you?  Such things I will do to you, indeed.”  He made a final adjustment and tossed his horns at her.  “If you are lonely, there is a gathering of humans in the commons this morning.”  He hesitated, then said, “This mountain is your home.  I forbid my mate no part of it.”

She rose from the pit, knowing just how the firelight would be playing across her naked body, and hugged him.  “You take such good care of me,” she murmured. “I don’t deserve such a fine mate.”

“No, you don’t,” he agreed, and let her slap playfully at his arm before he left her.

She washed up and dressed, donned her climbing claws, and went to the commons.  She recognized Beth, Judith, and the crazy lady with her saucepan, but the other two were strangers.  Beth and another blonde were playing cat’s cradle with a long loop of twine while the other woman watched.  Judith sat next to the crazy lady, watching her reflection in the pot’s copper bottom as she rocked.  All looked up when Olivia came near.

“Hi there!” Beth cried happily.  “We were only expecting four.  Or five, I mean,” she added, glancing at the madwoman.

“I have special permission,” Olivia said.  “He’s tired of baby-sitting me.”

The others laughed.  All in all, a much better crowd than that of the previous day, Olivia thought, and introduced herself.

“Yeah, we know,” said the blonde woman opposite Beth.  “I’m Amy Evans, and this is Beth.  Here we go, Bethie, Moon Gone Dark.  Pull your thumbs.  That’s Judy—”

“We’ve met,” Judith said without looking up.  “Hi, Olivia.”

“And this is Sarah J.”

“Sarah J.?” Olivia echoed.

“I haven’t met her yet, but there’s apparently a Sarah B. around here somewhere,” said Sarah, and stuck out her hand.

Olivia shook it.

“So what shall we talk about?” Amy asked, deftly plucking the string from Beth’s fingers onto her own.  “I’m not really good in social situations.  I’m something of a geek.”

“You bite the heads off chickens?” Sarah J. asked, startled.

“The other kind of geek—Navajo jump, Bethie!  Back into African Sun—the kind with pocket protectors.”

“Computers?” Beth asked, concentrating on the string figure she constructed under Amy’s watchful eye. 

“Nothing so glamorous.  Plain old math.  Statistics engineering.  That sort of thing.  For example, twenty-six percent of all households in America are owned by single people.  Forty-three percent of all single people are women.  Fifteen percent of all single women are aged sixty-five or older, but we can flub with that number because the average age of people who live in apartments in our neck of the woods was about thirty-two and there’s an even more significant flexibility where our income bracket is concerned.  High Hills had one hundred and twenty-eight single-occupancy rooms—”

“Where in the heck are you getting those numbers?” Sarah J. asked admiringly. 

“Eidetic memory.  Keep up.  Statistically speaking, our intrepid bat-men should only have found eight women worth the pluckin’, and yet I have personally seen eleven of us and I believe there’s more.  Keep in mind that, according to the Big Boys Who Know, an unexplained deviation of statistics of sixteen percent or more proves the work of an unknown agent.”

“Unknown agent?” Sarah J. echoed.

Amy glanced up even as she wove new patterns in the string between Beth’s fingers.  “You religious?”

“Extremely lapsed,” Sarah said, clearly amused.  “Are you saying God brought us to High Hills so we could be abducted by bat-people?”

“I’m saying numbers don’t lie.  Jacob’s Ladder, Bethie.  I’d be curious to know how many of us were new tenants.  I know I’d only been there six weeks.”

“Four months,” Olivia said, sitting down.

“Two and a half,” said Beth, “but that’s about average for me.”

“Six years,” said Sarah J.  “I guess that blows that little theory.”

Amy shrugged.  “Just means you were one of the original intended eight.”

Sarah J.’s smile faded.

The string had time to pass from Beth’s hands to Amy’s and back again before anyone spoke, and when someone finally broke the heavy silence, it was Amy, saying, “I told you I was bad at social stuff.  Someone else talk.  Olivia, tell us about your man.”

“Yeah.”  Sarah J. turned toward her at once.  “You can start with his name!”

The other woman’s naked eagerness made her first hesitate, and then lie.  “He hasn’t told me yet.”

“Mine has,” Beth remarked, plucking at the string.  “If you all promise not to tell Maria, I’ll tell you what it is.”

“Do you think she’ll put it in a candle?” Judith asked, a little listlessly, but at least she was including herself in the conversation.

“I just don’t want to give her ideas, okay?”  When she got nods and promises from all of them, Beth lowered her voice and said, “Wurlgunn,” and immediately blushed.  “It means Leaf Storm, like, leaves falling?  Or the way they fly around and blow into stuff, probably, knowing him.”

And Vorgullum meant something like Watches People.  Watched over them, maybe.  It made her wonder if he’d had another name before he became leader.

“I think it’s neat how their names mean something,” Beth continued.

“What does Nogruth mean?” Sarah J. asked.

Olivia and Amy both blanched in unison.  “Long tooth,” Olivia said.

“Yeah, but it’s a pun,” Amy corrected, looking dubious.  “It’s not his tooth that’s long.”

“That liar,” Sarah J. said.  “I knew it wasn’t his real name.”

A moment of startled silence ended in snickers and sly suggestions for new names for each of their mates.  In addition to her skill with numbers, Amy proved the most talented at this game, as well.  Although Olivia knew the language marginally better, Amy was utterly fearless when it came to stringing words together.