Talulla Rising (28 page)

‘My God, what a thing to say!’

‘Not at all. We modern ladies know how things work.’

‘I’m shocked and stunned. I’m
saddened
.’

‘Oh, I can help you with that. I really can.’

I had to remain playful and calm, a combination of convincing sexual readiness and resigned realism. Not easy, given the loudly ticking clock. If the amputations started I’d be in trouble. Bloody or bandaged or visibly regenerating stumps wouldn’t help. There were of course men who liked that sort of thing (Lauren’s brother had a stash of warped porn: one picture of a woman with amputated legs and two bearded men rubbing their cocks against the big satiny stumps) but Devaz didn’t strike me as one of them.

‘Really, sir, I do think Wilson’s agreement in this matter removes the last obstacle to our happiness.’

Naturally, Wilson, a tall, wiry twenty-six-year-old with red hair and an Adam’s apple that bent his gullet like a little elbow (but who was nonetheless the unit’s arm-wrestling champion) and who’d have to keep lookout while Devaz was with me, had wanted to know what was in it for him. What does he
think
is in it for him? I’d said to Devaz, having momentarily lost patience with the established nonsense. He’s not gay, is he? It’s not as if you and I are getting engaged. The fact was I needed Wilson. Devaz on his own might not be enough. The third guard, Harris, was the best-looking of the bunch, with angelic dark eyes and cruel cheekbones, but he was also, according to Devaz, Wilson and my own intuition, a stickler for protocol and a WOCOP idealogue in the making. It was a shame. I really needed three. Three was the number I’d had in my head from the moment I’d decided what I was going to do.

‘I don’t feel you fully appreciate the risk involved, madam. The
atrocious
risk to my reputation.’

Shower time was the window. The eggheads quit the lab and some fifteen or twenty minutes could pass before I’d be expected to appear, scrubbed, fresh-breathed, wet-haired and smocked, on my cell’s CCTV. Fifteen or twenty minutes of alone time in the camera-free corridor with my armed
voyeur
. Wilson would man the antechamber and send Devaz word if anyone showed up. All I had to do was not lose my temper with Devaz.

Harris the stickler wouldn’t speak to me at all. When he was on duty there was nothing to do but sit or lie in my cell, running through The Plan (which was really just a single idea, an all-or-nothing bet) or fretting about my children or mulling over everything that had happened. Caleb had gone quiet when I told him which
gammou-jhi
it was they were going to sacrifice. After a while, he’d said: If I knew where they were holding him I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Then after a further pause: So I’m glad I don’t know. Sorry.

Mia, his ‘mother’, wasn’t a believer. As far as she was concerned the Disciples were fanatical idiots and Remshi was in the same bracket as Cinderella or the man in the moon. Like all cults Jacqueline’s at first gently discouraged, then frowned upon, then outrightly forbade contact with non-members. A crisis had come. Caleb had broken from Mia. And broken her heart, I read between the lines. Their last fight had been toxic. He’d railed at her for trapping him for ever in the body of an eleven-year-old, for turning him into a murdering monster, for making him hate himself, for robbing him of the chance to die with a clean soul. His last words to her before leaving were that he despised her, that he wished she were dead.
Really
dead. Three days later WOCOP had caught him.

‘Better than nothing,’ Devaz said, when, on the fifth day, without warning, he dropped the established nonsense and dragged one of the blue gym mats out of my cell into the corridor.

I thought of all the times I’d been so close to screaming
Will you just
fuck
me already, for Christ’s sake?
– and thanked the God who wasn’t there for giving me patience.

‘Put your hands out. We don’t have much time.’

The shift into plain speaking unnerved us. I wondered, briefly, if he’d be violent, then realised he couldn’t afford to be: violence would leave marks. Science would know. Science would investigate. Murdoch would find out.

‘I have to leave the com on,’ Devaz said, which conjured Wilson next door, listening. ‘No,’ he added, reading me, ‘just the headphones.’

We were ambushed, somewhat, when it came down to it, Devaz, unlocking the wrists-to-ankles restraints, by my body’s hot aura, by my particular femaleness and personhood, me by lust’s sheer drop and drowning vision: this close to
having
sex, how much I needed it was no joke. The word ‘yearning’ presented itself, fresh and legitimate and surprised. My clit was fiendishly awake and calling the shots, the no-nonsense rep for all the intoxicated flesh and blood, for the whole dumb chorus of desire. Holding on to the plan would be like holding on to a talisman on a peyote’d visit to the underworld. I realised (
as
Devaz was removing the restraints) that we mustn’t lose momentum. Pausing or saying the wrong thing would spook him. Off the back of which thought I worried, suddenly (as I had with Walker; assume Walker’s dead, assume Walker’s – but please God let him not be) that milk would come if he sucked my nipples. The morning’s breast-pump had scored zero but who knew what a human mouth would do? No point mentioning it now. It’d be just the sort of thing to freak him out. Or maybe he’d like it? There wasn’t anything out there a guy might not like. If he did it wouldn’t be Walker’s Dionysian ease but a dreary kink, a secret kept in his psyche like a big rat in a too-small box.

‘Kiss me,’ I said, since it was obvious when we stood face to face that he didn’t know whether some occult prostitutional code prohibited it. ‘Kiss me.’

Kissing surprised him. He’d forgotten its intricate powers. He was unerect when our lips met, but I knew what I was doing, and he was hard by the time we took the first breather. He’d become very quickly intense, his concentrated sexual self, and was balanced now between pornography and all pornography wasn’t.
Wulf
was awake, greedily grabbing through my blood’s blur, wanting the moment for itself. My woozy strategist laboured as if against a powerful drug:
Keep him on the pornography side of the line. If you let it be anything else to him he won’t want to share you and you need Wilson. You need
at least
Wilson.

So I kissed him differently, with scorn for tenderness, and felt him shut something down in himself in response, felt
his
scorn, in fact, for the soft-hearted putz in him that had nearly wasted a tremendous pornographic opportunity. His odour was cinnamonish and his face had a tropical little force field. I got down on my knees, unzipped him, freed his cock. He’d washed, thank God. My
wulf
-sharpened nose at his fly got first canvas and a mild salt dash of urine then a burst of coconut-scented shower gel and melanin and clean pubic hair. He was the sort for shower-gel brand preferences and quality underpants, living in perpetual optimistic readiness for sex, for which the doting mother and sisters had prepared him. His cock was large, uncircumcised and had a downward instead of an upward bend. My look must’ve been too nakedly evaluative, however, because he softened slightly under my gaze. Remedially, therefore, I turned corrupted schoolgirl eyes up to him –
yes, I really am going to, in full, dirty knowledge
– and in steady, sly increments slid him into my mouth.

‘Uh,’ he said.

Uh
indeed, but don’t get too comfy there, hot-shot. It was a fine calculation (as far as calculation was possible through my blood’s giggling urgency) how long to keep sucking him. Long enough so that he didn’t feel short-changed when I stopped, but not so long that he ejaculated – and foiled the plan. And if I kept up
this
performance – oh, I
am
a dirty little girl, aren’t I? – he’d be off in the next half-dozen strokes.

‘No,’ he croaked, when I did stop. ‘Turn around.’ I’d pulled him down onto the mat with me and he’d torn off the condom’s wrapper with his gappy teeth. His face was moist and had new lights on. ‘Turn around.’

Hoist by my own petard: I’d been so convincing in my omniscient slut act that he expected to proceed directly
au derrière
.
Wulf
was ready to give him an affronted slap, not because the area was off-limits, or because going straight there spoke so clearly of sexual selfishness (even if a girl’s got the mental twist that makes it fun there’s
always
so much more in it for the guy) – but because
in that position I wouldn’t be able to execute The Plan
.

‘In a minute,’ I whispered. ‘In here first. Please, just for a minute. Then anywhere you like.’

Nervous calculation in the Devaz eyes. I
was
a modern girl; I knew the modern male math: if a woman was willing to let you fuck her in the ass you didn’t want to blow your load in her cunt. It was depressing how pornography had so emphatically demoted the vagina. The poor old vagina! No wonder the
Monologues
were such a success. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, licking his earlobe while he fit the rubber with trembling hands, ‘you’ll get what you want. Just don’t come yet.’

He looked like a man not confident of his control (mouth open, eyes showing too much white) but with a little manoeuvring I got myself under him and eased him in. Thoughts and questions shot up like gun-startled birds. Would Zoë have got used to my absence? Caleb would have been back in the cage. Full moon nine days away. My children would change, crave flesh and blood, young as they were. Cloquet would have to call Madeline. What would the vampires do for Lorcan? Nothing? Add starvation to his sufferings? What was his reality? A world not warm enough, no scent of his kind but presences over him like cold cloud shadows. Like a careful rape. And I’d just let them. Fuck me, fuck me, oh God Jesus yes that’s it...

Meanwhile, as
wulf
laid shameless grinning claim to my loins, my poor blood-blinded strategist staggered onwards in accordance with The Plan. I’d given Devaz a few preparatory nips mixed with kisses on his chest and shoulders, which he didn’t seem to mind, but I had to be absolutely sure he wouldn’t pull away at the crucial moment. And the only way to guarantee that was to render him incapable of volition. And the only way to guarantee
that
... I worked my left hand around his buttocks and down to his furiously puckered scrotum. A little fluttery stroking with the fingertips.

‘Like that?’ I asked him.

‘Too much.’

I was wet enough to provide my own lubricant. Nimble manoeuvring with my right hand...

‘Are you going to stick your cock in my asshole?’ I whispered in his spicy ear.

‘Oh Jesus,’ he said.

‘You are, aren’t you? You’re going to fuck my nasty little hole—’

‘Please... don’t...’

I slid my moistened middle finger up against
his
nasty little hole.

‘You know I want it, don’t you?’ Faster fluttery ball-stimulation with left hand.

‘Wait—’

‘Deep in my dirty, sweet, tight little—’

‘You’ve got to sto—’

‘Oh, angel, come for me, come for your little whore—’

His universe stopped. He said: ‘Oh, my God,’ with metallic neutrality – and in I went with the prepped finger, all the way up his thank-God empty anus to the hapless prostate. Simultaneously I locked my mouth onto his neck.

‘Ahhgggh,’ he said. ‘Fuck... fuck... fuck... ’

I sucked and bit. As hard as I dared, but not so hard it would be taken for anything more than crazy bitch passion. ‘Ummm,’ I said, still biting, still sucking. ‘Ummmm.’

‘Holy mother of Christ,’ he said, seemingly on the edge of tears.

Then, as his universe reassembled and flowed again and the squandered anal opportunity took fresh hold: ‘God dammit.’

‘Shshsh,’ I consoled. ‘Never mind... never mind. We can do it again tomorrow.’

‘God
damm
it.’

Holding the condom on, he withdrew. He was dazed, not ready for the world. He’d lost his chirrup. His face looked pouchy. ‘You didn’t...?’ he said.

No, I didn’t. And though my strategist was sobbing with relief, the Whore of Babylon was frowning and breathing exasperatedly through her nostrils. This was the downside of The Plan: if it didn’t scratch the
wulf
itch it would only make it worse. At the very last second I stopped myself from saying: Just fuck off and send Wilson in, will you?

‘It’s fine,’ I lied. ‘It’s okay.’

‘No, it’s not. Lie down.’

Good Lord, the man had completely forgotten where he was! Christ knows how many selves I had in play just then, but one of them was struggling not to laugh out loud. However many selves it was,
wulf
was the biggest and loudest of the lot, and delighted to find Devaz sufficiently a creature of the absurd to feel it his masculine duty not to leave a woman unfulfilled. Not that I was capable – once he was down there sucking and licking my clit with touching enthusiasm and surprising efficacy – of anything other than grabbing his head and enjoying the ride (I considered trying to get the finger that had been up his ass into his mouth, for the Sisterhood, for revenge, but didn’t trust myself to do it subtly) but in any case what, other than composure, had I got to lose? If my theory was correct then so far everything had gone according to plan.

And in any case, fuck it, I deserved it.

He did, after perhaps ten minutes, make me come, though I nearly took his teeth out with my pubis in the throes. I felt a little giddy afterwards, and,
moron
that I was, better disposed towards him.

‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘That’s twenty minutes. You should be back in your cell.’

‘Wait,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The shower. I need to wet my hair so they’ll think—’

‘Okay, do it – but hurry up.’

He disappeared. A moment later, Wilson entered. He stood, half-blushing and half-smirking as I fastened my smock. Sexually he was less secure than Devaz, needed clear parameters and someone else to be unambiguously in charge. So for him I’d been clipped and schoolmistressy, annoyed by my needs, manifestly the sort of will he could surrender to for twenty minutes. His mother
hadn’t
doted on him. I doubted he’d had sisters. There was – of course – a pornographied man in him too, but unlike Devaz he wasn’t at ease with it. I could probably have made him fall in love with me, given a little more time.