by Loki Renard
“Aw,” Addie said with mock sympathy. “Is having a prisoner difficult for you… diddums…”
Adam’s hands went to his waist. In one quick motion, he loosed his belt and slid it out through the buckles with a snap that crackled through the air.
Addie’s eyes went wide, but instead of apologizing, or even falling silent, either of which would have stopped the situation from deteriorating, she kept arguing. “So it’s as simple as that? You fuck me and you own me? You don’t even know me!”
“We know you well enough, Addie.”
“Well, I don’t know you,” she flung back. “And I don’t want to be yours. Either of yours. I want to go back to my college.”
“No, you don’t,” Armel cut into the argument. “You know you don’t, Addie, there’s no point lying to yourself. This is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to you. It’s the most interesting thing that will ever happen to you, probably. You’ve found a community most scientists will never get to study. And you get to live in it. Don’t tell me you want to go back to the stuffy college you ran away from. I don’t believe it, and I don’t think you do either.”
“You don’t know what I believe!”
“You believe that fighting will get you out of having your bottom spanked,” Adam said, advancing on the hapless young woman. “You’re wrong about that.”
Addie tried to take a step back, but Armel kept hold of her blanket and all that her attempts to flee got her was naked. The blanket fell away in his hand and Adam took hold of her squirming, curvaceous body, lifting her under his arm and dropping her down on the couch that Armel had recently vacated. She landed face down, Adam’s hand on the back of her neck as he lifted the belt high in the air above her squirming bottom.
“Please!” She gasped the word. “Don’t!”
“Oh, the brat doesn’t want her butt whipped now?” It was Adam’s turn to sound vaguely sarcastic. “You were so brave a second ago, Addie.”
Before she could reply, he snapped the belt down across her backside, catching her cheeks with a stroke that made her squeal in a high pitch. Armel admired the way the belt left a thick pink mark across both wriggling rounds, noting how it was slightly darker on her right cheek, the furthest one away from Adam.
“I thought I explained your situation to you,” he said before landing another one of those stinging strokes. “I thought you understood how things work around here.”
“This isn’t fair!”
“I never said it was going to be fair,” he said, holding her down against the cushions as her butt wriggled back and forth under the sting of the lash. “This isn’t about fair. This is about you understanding that we’re not playing here. And maybe, if you think long and hard enough about it, you’ll realize that this is good for you too.”
“How can this be good for meee!” Addie’s sentence tailed off into a squeal as the belt landed again in a snapping motion low on her bottom.
“Nobody does this to you, do they? Nobody tells you when you’ve gone far enough. When you have to stop. But we will, Addie. We’re the limits you’ve been looking for your whole life.”
To Armel’s surprise, it wasn’t the belt that made Addie burst into tears. It was those words, delivered in a tone of deep care that made her start to sniffle against the couch—and once the dam broke, it broke fully. In seconds she was sobbing, not from physical pain, but from what looked to Armel like an intense catharsis. He sat down next to her on the couch and cradled her head in his lap as Adam sat on the other side of her and lifted her body over his thighs so she was still in a vulnerable position, but one that allowed Armel to stroke her hair while Adam rubbed her bright red bottom.
As much as Addie might have dreamed of this moment, of finding the limits she’d clearly been deprived of her whole life, it was a painful wall to bump up against. Her ego was bruised, but her hopes were high. She no longer had that harsh wall of sarcasm and attitude up and instead she was open to them in a way she’d probably never been open to anyone.
They held her until the tears began to abate a little, and then she squirmed up and sat between them, still completely naked, and sitting rather gingerly thanks to her striped bottom.
“It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it,” Armel said gently.
“Yes,” she sniffed, rubbing her nose on the back of her hand. “It really is.”
“I know this isn’t easy,” Adam said, speaking for the first time since he’d laid the belt down. “I know it’s going to take some practice on your part to adjust to a new way of living.”
“Yeah,” she mumbled almost under her breath. “I don’t know if I can.”
“You can,” Armel said, rubbing her thigh encouragingly. “We’ll help you.”
“Help me,” she said. “With belts, huh. Some kind of help.”
“There’s the attitude,” Adam said warningly, though there was some warmth in his tone. “Can’t help yourself, can you, brat.”
“I’m helping you to help me,” she said with a watery little smirk.
Adam leaned across and pressed a kiss to her lips. “You’re incorrigible,” he said affectionately.
Having seen the little display of intimacy, Armel was surprised that his jealousy was not aroused. It was sweet and warmed his heart to see Adam show Addie a little softness and tenderness.
They sat together a little longer as a threesome, Addie leaning against Armel, his arm over her shoulders, her legs over Adam’s in a position that Armel figured must have been the most comfortable for her butt.
* * *
Addie was sore, and somewhat subdued—but more than sore, she was flush with curiosity. Adam’s treatment of her had been tough, but she supposed he probably thought it was fair. Now that her tears had been cried and soothed and she found herself back between the two strangest men she ever laid eyes on, the questions were rising in her again.
“So, uhm…”
“Yes?” Adam and Armel answered her simultaneously.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Just one?” Adam smiled as she shook her head. “Sure, go ahead.”
“How does it work? The transformation? How do you turn from one thing to another?”
“I don’t think either of us is going to be able to answer that in a way that will satisfy you, Addie,” he said. “It’s just something we can do. An ability, or maybe it’s more like a sense.”
“Sight, smell, touch… and wolf?” Addie squinted at him. “You’re right, that’s not satisfying.”
“According to legend, it’s a spirit that lives in us,” Armel added. “It transforms the flesh when we call upon it.”
“A spirit?” Addie cocked her head. “That doesn’t sound very scientific.”
“It’s not scientific,” Adam cut in. “It’s something beyond science.”
“Nothing is beyond science,” Addie said confidently.
“Then you explain to us what it is,” Armel said, tickling her midsection lightly. Addie giggled and swatted his hand away.
“Well, I would have to study it first,” she said, meeting Armel’s gaze, and then Adam’s with a playfully suggestive intensity. “I would have to study both of you deeply. Is the spirit sexually transmitted? Will I turn into a wolf-bear?”
“It’s different for different shifters,” Armel said. “The bear spirit is usually passed down through the mother, because the bear mother is the one who raises the cubs. There are exceptions… but they are rare.”
“In wolves it is passed through the blood,” Adam added. “Formed in the womb, or given later in the form of a bite that lays the bloodstream bare.”
“You were naturally born,” Addie guessed.
Adam nodded.
“And the rest of the pack?”
“Most are now natural born wolves,” Adam said. “It was once the practice to take brides, bite them, and force them through the change of spirit. It was dangerous and many died. We do not do that anymore. It takes a certain breed to und
ergo the transformation, and there’s no way of knowing if someone will survive it before it happens.”
“So you’re dying out,” Addie said. “Natural born wolves are rare and there’s nobody around here to bite and turn even if you wanted to, which you don’t seem to. And the bears… something tells me there aren’t many mama bears left out here either.”
“Right on both counts,” Adam said.
“So… why me?” She looked into his eyes with curiosity. “Do you want to bite me, infect me?”
He ran his tongue over his teeth, the sharp canines suddenly rather prominent. “The thought had occurred,” he admitted.
Armel’s low growl and suddenly stiff posture strongly suggested he was not on board with the idea.
“Nobody takes her,” he said firmly. “She must remain pure.”
Adam looked over Addie’s head, and Addie could feel the tension growing between both their powerful bodies.
“Pure? She is not pure,” Adam said in a husky drawl that made Addie’s tummy quiver. “There is nothing pure about her, and whatever there was has been defiled by our bodies surging inside her. She is taken. She is my mate. She is mine, and if I wish her to take my form, I will not ask your permission.”
“You are going to make me like you?” The question emerged between suddenly dry lips, as a very strange sense of fear crept over Addie. “Is it safe?”
“Safe? That very much depends on your definition of safe. It is painful, and there is a fever that will take you to the very brink of death. The first time you change, when your bones crack and re-mend themselves, it is pure agony.”
Adam spoke in a soft, intense rumble that made Addie’s pulse quicken and her palms sweat. It sounded awful, but there was some dark allure to the rite of passage that could turn her from a typical human to a beast. For a moment, she allowed her fear to overcome her curiosity. “I don’t think I want that,” she said, shrinking away from him.
He smiled and dropped a kiss on her cheek. “It won’t be your choice, sweetheart.” He said the words with a sweet sadism that made her want to hit him and fuck him at the same time.
“It will be over my dead body,” Armel growled. “Stop teasing her, Adam. You have never allowed any shifter to make another, not in all the years you have been alpha. You will not do it to Addie either.”
“What about you?” Addie turned to Armel. “Don’t you want me to be like you?”
“I don’t need you to shapeshift to be like me,” Armel said, his deep brown eyes two pools of adoration she could have easily fallen into. “I don’t need you to change a thing.”
Adam let out a blunt laugh. “He means he can’t change you. His hair might be girly, but he’s no mama bear.”
“Is that true?” Addie looked at Armel.
“In a way, yes,” Armel admitted, shooting a dark look at Adam.
“Why not?”
“Because the spirit is not controlled by any desire,” Armel said. “There is a choosing, and the choosing is not done for the convenience of men or their wishes. It is something deeper beyond this world.”
“But if I am your mate, then I have the capacity,” Addie said, confused. “I must have the capacity to be either wolf or bear, or both.”
Adam chuckled. “Nobody is both, Addie.”
“Why not?”
“Is a person with multiple personalities a happy one?”
“I guess not…”
“A shifter with more than one spirit is even more wretched,” Adam said. “You have to know who and what you are. And what you are is a delicious, tender little human morsel who will remain such as long as you belong to us.”
So he wasn’t going to change her. That had just been something he’d said to tease her and annoy Armel. Addie felt oddly disappointed.
Armel nodded in agreement. “Being human is a gift too,” he said as her face fell.
“The gift of being a snack for either one of you in your super power animal forms,” she pouted. “It’s not fair, you say I am your mate, but I don’t get to share either of your worlds. I am going to be forever on the outside.”
“You only just discovered what we are, Addie,” Adam said. “It is not as magical an experience as you might think. There are hardships to be endured. There is suffering. The wolf shifters must battle their animal instincts constantly when they are outside the pack. That is why so few of them leave, and so few new ones are made. You are thinking of this as a power, but our history tells us that it was originally a curse.”
“A curse?”
“To live as a beast, yes,” Adam said. “There is power in our animal form, but it separates us from full humanity in many ways. You already think me inhuman at times. When I claim you, tell you that you are mine. When I punish you for disobeying me. But all that is natural to what I am. I am not human, Addie. Neither of us is.”
She hung on his every word, her breath held, her heart fluttering as he spoke with an intensity that drew her in. She could feel the tragedy and the joy of his condition in his voice. There was strength and pride in it, but there was also yearning too. These people were outcasts from the wider world, hidden away because of the need to protect themselves, and the knowledge that they would not be accepted for what they were anywhere else but the most remote Alaskan plains.
“Adam and I do not agree on that,” Armel added. “The spirit of the bear is not a curse, but it is a responsibility. It means we are tied to the land, to the places where our ancestors have roamed. It is part of us. You can come and go. If we leave, there is a pain in our hearts that does not abate until we return. We have power, yes, but the power is local. I will patrol these lands until the day I die. That is my blessing, and my duty.”
“Huh,” Addie said, wishing she had a pen and paper to write everything they were saying down. It was fascinating, so interesting that she almost forgot how annoyed she was that they were both saying she could never be like them. “Wow,” she said. “I have so many questions. And my questions have questions.”
In spite of her sore butt, her still-sticky inner thighs, her nudity, she was not concerned with her physical state. This was an opportunity to study a kind of people who had never been studied. But she felt sad at the notion that it would be study for the sake of study. The world would never believe anyone who went missing on a field trip and came back babbling about werewolves and werebears and whatever else might lurk up this far.
“I will make a deal with you,” Adam said, his eyes sparkling in a way that made her grin.
“I like deals,” she said. “What’s the deal?”
“If you are good, I will answer your questions,” Adam said. “If you are disobedient, you will be spanked and have to wait for your answers.”
Addie’s jaw dropped and she let out a little gasp, half playful, half serious. “That’s cruel!”
“It’s going to be effective,” Adam smiled.
“You won’t do that to me, will you?” She turned to Armel, who ran his fingers through her hair and shook his head.
“I do not speak of the rituals of the bear. Our secrecy is all that protects us and we are forbidden to discuss it with anyone outside the clan.”
Addie tilted her head to the side and tried not to be hurt, though she was. “But I know your secret now, at least, some of it. I have seen you become a bear.”
“That is just the beginning,” he said. “The rest is far harder to explain, or understand.”
“She will ferret your secrets out, Armel,” Adam said with a smile. “That is all this one does.”
Addie watched as Armel’s face grew solemn and closed. He became uncharacteristically silent. It was almost as if some light had gone out inside of him. The very idea of her knowing the hows and the whys of his existence was enough for him to transform to some kind of masculine stone.
Refusing to answer more questions was the most hurtful thing Armel could have done to her. Her curiosity was all she had; it was all she was allowed to have. Her freedom had
been taken, her body had been claimed, even her spirit seemed to be charmed… but her inquisitive mind was still there—and Armel was going to keep himself from that part of her.
“So you think you can have me and not tell me anything about yourself? You’re even worse than him,” she said bitterly. “That’s not fair, Armel.”
“You should get some rest,” Armel said calmly. “You’re tired and crabby.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re…” If her ass hadn’t been so sore she would have had a lot more to say to Armel. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”
They didn’t stop her from leaving, so she had a quick bath then went and curled up in Adam’s bed. It smelled of the three of them and the sex they’d had. In spite of her anger, she found the scent somehow reassuring. She wasn’t tired. She was confused, and scared and sad. Armel and Adam desired her. More than that, they’d claimed her. She was essentially their prisoner, though Adam was being more up front about that than Armel was.
She had thought Armel was the nice guy, but she was starting to think maybe he was just the one who knew how to make things sound a little better than they really were. Adam didn’t bother sugar-coating anything. At first she’d thought of him as a domineering ass. Now he just seemed honest.
“Addie.”
She didn’t have to look to know the owner of that deep, steady voice. It was Armel, standing in the doorway.
She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. She didn’t want to speak to him. What was the point? He didn’t want to tell her anything about himself. He just wanted to possess her.
“I know you’re not sleeping,” he said softly. “And I know you’re angry at me. I don’t blame you. I wish I could tell you more, but I made a promise a long time ago and I like to keep my promises.”
She rolled over and looked at him over the edge of the blanket. “Fine,” she said. “Then promise me you’ll help me go home when the snow melts.”
He was silent for a moment. A moment too long as far as Addie was concerned.
“Go away, Armel,” she said, turning back over.
