Reluctant Mates - 21 Paranormal Romance Stories (Werewolf, Vampire, Minotaur and Monster collection) (27 page)

My feet left the ground. I tried kicking my captor, but his body was so hard that my feet both bounced off what I assumed to be his stomach, my toes hurt like they were jammed. And then, I was tossed over a massive shoulder, like a helpless rag doll. Branches whipped against my bare thighs as my hands thumped, limp, against the massive, hair-covered back of who – or what – had taken me.

I kept screaming, kept kicking and punching, to absolutely no avail. My captor said nothing. No shushing, no attempts to restrain me, nothing. He just let me hang over his shoulder as he tromped through the woods.

The last thing I remember were Kalak’s words echoing in my mind, calling for me, shouting in the darkness. He would come. I knew it. I knew that if he were still alive, he would come. Tired, confused, terrified and hopeless, I felt consciousness fade, and then the world went black.

*

I
blinked, trying to make sense of where I was, but saw nothing, and no one, familiar. I was submerged in a shadow, within some kind of shelter. Outside, the sun burned with mid-day heat. There were no trees in the chunk of space I could see through the opening, only dirt.

Dirt? Must have been months since I last saw dry, brown dirt, I thought. Where on Earth am I? Was the whole thing a dream? I rubbed my eyes, and then my pounding temples, and leaned back.

Bars. Hard, dry, rough-cut bars. Suddenly, everything flooded back – Kalak screaming, my prone body draped over a massive shoulder, pounding away on a powerful back covered in coarse hair. And it all ended in a cage. For a moment, I despaired. In an alien place, trapped, and alone, my terror got the best of me. I began to imagine all the most horrible things possible happening. Torture, beatings, I feared, but worst of all was the idea that I was a slave to that horrible man – that I would live and die the rest of my days breaking my back in a diamond mine for some awful warlord.

I wept softly at first. Then a little louder, and before long I had thrown myself on the ground and just sobbed.

“We are both refugees, girl.” A voice, so deep that it rumbled my insides, said from behind me where I’d not bothered to look. “We are both refugees in a terrible world. Don’t weep. You’re safe here. For now, anyway.”

“Wh-who...?”

“I am called Boros. You have heard of me, I have no doubt.” He looked at the floor of the tent and ran his fingers through an inky, black mane that framed a hard, old, weather-lined face. Like all the other beastmen, he was nude, and just like the others, the muscles of his back, arms, shoulders and chest were round, thick and hard. “I have certainly heard about you,” he said, “you’re a bit of a legend. Most of us didn’t think you actually existed. Just thought it was more of Kalak’s baseless bragging.”

As much as the other beastmen speaking at all surprised me, this one’s eloquence and cadence took me completely by surprise. If Teddy Roosevelt had been a beastman, I thought with an inward giggle, this was him. I shook my head to clear the image.

“Why are we up here out of the forest? Where the hell are we anyway? Why were there slaves? What’s going on? Why am I-”

“Calm down. You’re just in that box because there was nowhere else to put you. The door’s open. Leave if you want.”

Pushing off the floor, I took a long look at Boros, searching his face for some sign he was lying, but found nothing. His gaze was cool and collected. The door, as he said, opened when I pushed. A draft brushed across my chest, which I noticed was as nude as the rest of me. My furs were piled up in the corner.

“Okay,” I said, moving cautiously closer, “that’s one question out of the way.”

“Which one do you want answered next?” His legs, thick and muscled, were splayed out in front of him. Good for me the place was rather dark, because when I saw what was hanging between them, my eyes widened. I thought Kalak was the only living thing with a cock that big. Apparently not.

“Whichever.” I said.

“Well you’re here because I’m here. Would you rather have been left for the diamond man to find? Your little stunt back there – or I guess it was Kalak’s stunt – put a lot of things in motion.”

“But Kel... he said you were one of them.”

Like he had said, Boros had tattooing up both sides of his neck, in lines so thin they looked like silver spider’s silk.

“Which one’s Kel?”

“The shorter of the three you fought. Darker hair, leaner.”

“Mhm. And did he tell you who else was with me?”

“He said my friends were there. And he said there were others of his kind chained at the neck. And the man who brought us – who brought me – to the beastmen in the first place.”

Fire raged behind Boros’s eyes. Something I said put it there.

“If not for him, we would live still as our ancestors did. We would be free.”

“Wait, ‘we’? I thought you were with that guy.”

I moved closer to him again. He had a familiar look that I couldn’t place. There was something in his eyes. A particular glint or maybe the way rage twisted them, which I was sure I’d seen before.

“With him? In a way.” He clinked his fingernail against an iron cuff around his throat. “You freed me just as you freed the rest of them. My sons and I ran up here, then reconsidered and went back. Raul called us his ‘elite guard’ but all that really meant was ‘thug’.” The beast shook his head, black mane catching the sliver of light that reached across the tent.

“I have done awful things. All of them to protect my people. One by one, he murdered them. What that monster did to Kalak’s people with poison, did to mine with bullets.”

As he spoke, I found myself staring at Boros, watching his movements, watching the lines of muscle contract and flex in his chest, and around his neck. A few moments later, I realized that he’d said a name.

“Raul?”

He nodded. “That’s his name. The diamond miner. And, Raul is why you’re here. I need Kalak. I can’t do what must be done without him. And I can’t get him without you. So, it’s very lucky that I found you.”

Outside, something rustled against the tent.

“Come.” Boros rose, took me by the hand, and dragged me out into the open air. The sun kissed me with its warmth. The air up here, on what seemed to be a small plateau rising above the forest, was lighter, smelled of rocks, dirt, and sky.

“Where are we going?”

He shoved me through the tent’s opening. When he did, the heavy, thick cock that hung between his legs brushed my naked hip. I couldn’t believe myself, but as soon as I felt that, a strange urge overtook me.

“Boros, I-”

“Enough.” He said. “No more words. Kalak’s people aren’t the only ones who have suffered.” Boros’s hand was much rougher than Kalak’s, or any of the others, when he touched me, when his palm stroked up my belly. “And his men aren’t the only ones with needs that have gone unmet for a long, long time.”

His fingers lingered around my navel, tracing a circle and then a trail upward, between my breasts. “Tok, Lok,” he said. “Come. I know you’re there.”

From either side of the tent, two other beastmen shuffled. They seemed identical. Both slightly shorter than Boros, both slightly thinner, and both with kind faces, although like Boros’s, lines marked them and collars bound them. The same spidery, delicate tattoos glittered silver in the sun, running up their necks and behind their ears. As I watched them move near me, terror clenched my stomach.

So did lust.

“Do not be ashamed, my sons. There is no room for that. “Enjoy her. There is much to do. But, for now...”

“But wh-what about Kalak? Won’t he-”

“I said I need him, not that I like him. And what better way to get him than to hold you hostage?”

“B-but how will he know I’m here?” I swallowed hard when the first pair of rough, hair-covered knuckles dragged across my neck and down my back. A shiver crawled over me, through me. “And how do you know he’d even bother coming to save me anyway?” Just thinking that made my skin crawl.

“Oh, I know,” Boros said. “If I know anything, I know Kalak. Remember, girl, that we are not your kind. No matter how much you might like to think you’re the same. Things work differently in our world. You’re just here for the ride.”

“Kalak’s not – no, I mean, that isn’t true, I-”

“Listen to you.” He said. “Filthy, small, pretty. Listen to what you’re saying.”

As he spoke, I watched the cords move in Boros’s neck. The fingers on the top of my back, between my shoulders, stroked lower, almost to my ass. The other one, either Tok or Lok, stepped close, sliding his arm around me and pulling me back against him.

Boros was tall, and muscular, but somehow more feral than Kalak or his sons. He had a pinched face, brutish looking and savage. What I thought had been a spider’s web tattoo was actually a series of strings crisscrossed barely under his skin. Silver lines, sparkling, crawled up his throat and over his jaw. They stopped level with his mouth with a bizarre pointed pattern, and wrapped around to the back of his head. With a broad nose, wide-set eyes that were a curious purple color and teeth that were either filed to points or grew that way naturally, he was a fearsome thing to behold. At the same time, there was something about him, something desirable, something animalistic, that I couldn’t deny, especially not while I was staring at him.

“You are...” He began, but did not finish.

Boros shook his head and turned away. “I’ll return. Not too long.”

When he disappeared back into the shadows where I awoke, the hand on my belly slid up and cupped underneath the swell of a breast. The hand on my back moved back up, grabbed a handful of hair and wrenched my head in a half-circle to face him.

He was terrifying. He had yellow-gold eyes, but otherwise, the exact same face as Boros, and the beastman’s lips curled to reveal the same fearsome teeth. And yet, no matter how awful, how powerful and overwhelming, I couldn’t take my gaze away.

I turned, trying to ease the strain on my neck, but when I did, a rod of hot, tempered iron pushed against my leg from the other direction. Pulling a breath between my teeth, I moved my eyes, trying to look down, to see what it was that warmed my entire thigh, but Tok – or Lok, I still wasn’t sure – refused to allow it. I couldn’t see, no matter how hard I tried to wrench or twist, the cock stroking back and forth, somehow rough and smooth at the same time, against my leg.

The one behind me breathed hard – steamy, musky, manly breath – and sent a shudder down my belly.

“Tok?” he said. “Tok jelka je-et. Telka je-et.” He twisted my hair around his fist and jerked me backwards again, against his body. That’s when I felt the second cock push on me, between my thighs and brush between the folds of my sex. In spite of the tremendous terror that coursed through me, I let my knees droop just a little, so I could stroke against him, so I could feel that rock hard, solid thing slide between my pussy lips.

I couldn’t believe what I was doing. But then, just like Boros had said, they were different. I was not one of them. Although, what he didn’t know, is how hard I was trying to become one.

When I slid all the way down the length of Lok’s prick, the one between my thighs, Tok smiled as he watched my face contort before he grunted something back to his brother. Behind me, the beastman pushed his hips forward, sliding that delicious cock along my slit before he pulled back and twisted his hand again, shooting prickles all through my scalp and making me gasp out loud.

“Why – ah! – why do you keep pulling?” I twisted against his grasp on me, trying to wrench myself around and away from him. The way he yanked was unlike anything I’d experienced. When Kalak or any of the others had done that, there was no sense that I was in any danger. These two were nothing like the others. Feral, huge and frightening, yes, but more than that, I think it was the way they spoke.

Both of them shared a moment’s worth of laughter, and then became very serious again. Finally, I was able to turn my head enough to see Lok. He was, just like his brother, almost identical to their monstrous father. Whereas Kalak, Kel, Malak and Krizik had kindness behind their eyes, or at least a little softness, these beasts had only cold, desire.

Fires, burning from behind their eyes, were awful to behold. And yet, I couldn’t stop staring. Something about their guttural language and completely inhuman visages made a warm, slick trickle squirm out of my cunt. I wanted them. I wanted one of them, then both of them, to slam their cocks inside me, let me feel myself collapse against their terrible bodies. I wanted them to destroy me, to pin me between them, one in each hole.

Then, Kalak flashed before my eyes. Kalak and Kel and Krizik and Makel. They were my people, Kalak was my lover. I was his.

“Let me go!” I pulled again and stomped down hard on the top of Lok’s foot. As good as his cock felt, I needed away from him. My first stomp made him grunt in pain, and made his brother almost double over laughing.

“Lok, jalak kor! Jalak kor!” He shouted, pointing and bellowing. When I stomped again, he laughed even harder. At least until I did it a third time, and broke his brother’s grasp first on my hair, then sloughed off the hand around my midsection. I spun on my heel, and jumped up on my tip-toes to drive my forehead into the brute’s nose.

Tok howled then, although I missed his nose, and struck him below the eye. Great, hairy hands clutched a growing goose-egg swelling up on his cheek. Immediately, both of them stopped their stooge-act and their faces taut.

I ran.

Just once, after fifteen or twenty steps, I allowed myself to look back. One single glance to make sure they were behind me. They were staring straight at me, eyes full of purpose, and then they were off, dashing after me.

“Boof!” Air rushed out of my lungs as I struck some tremendous object in my path that I hadn’t noticed before.

I hit the ground. Hard. My knees struck first, and then I flopped onto my back, coughing and sputtering through a cloud of dust. When it finally settled enough for me to see what had happened, the laughter was back. Those awful creatures, grunting their amusement, reached down at the same time, took handfuls of hair and yanked me to my feet.