Beast of Dreams

by Cynthia Williams

  “Has he raped her yet?”

  “No, but soon,” Sirus said, feeling pain knife him through his chest at the thought of not reaching her in time. He fought for control, knowing that only a clear mind, one able to set a trap for her attacker, would save Amanda now. Karrick watched the struggle of emotions that came over Sirus’s face as he suppressed his fear. After a moment, only the cold look of hate in Sirus’s eyes betrayed his depth of feeling.

  Sirus turned away from Karrick and pointed to the grassy field covering most of the expanse between them and the makeshift shelter. His voice sounded thoughtful as he said, “We can lure him out of there and then attack him. I’ll take the front and you come from behind the hut to get him from the rear.”

  “Good plan, but I want to be the one he sees first,” Karrick insisted.

  “Karrick, I can appreciate that you want to kick his ass, but I’m used to dealing with scum like him and I know what works. Think about this, too. Imagine the distraction I’ll create if he sees me. He’s not expecting a human male with night-vision goggles to be walking up to his lair.”

  “I see your point. I suppose you’ll make some noise and he’ll come out to see what’s going on. When he comes out, I’ll work on getting him from behind.”

  “Now you’re thinking,” Sirus said approvingly.

  “Just give me a chance to get back there, first.”

  “Fine, but I have a few toys to give you that might help,” Sirus said, and then divvied up some of the weapons he was carrying and gave a few of the simpler ones to Karrick, showing him how they were used.

  Sirus watched as Karrick bounded off silently to circle behind the makeshift hut. While Karrick worked his way to his destination, Sirus set up some diversions. Sensing that Karrick was in place, Sirus walked toward the hut, making as much noise as possible stepping on twigs and slapping his hands against tree and bush branches.

  * * * * *

  Shodan blew warm air on Amanda’s oiled flesh and watched her shudder in reaction. He knew she was feeling the same sensual heat he had felt previously when he’d used the oil on himself. He got up and walked around to the other side, so he could see the reaction on her face from his attentions.

  He grasped a large handful of her tawny curled hair and noticed how soft and silky it felt in his hand as he used it to tilt her head up and gaze into her eyes. Beads of sweat covered her brow and her dark green eyes looked back at him with a mixture of lust and icy contempt.

  Amanda watched Shodan’s pale blue eyes narrow in a face that was cruelly handsome. He yanked her head back farther, so that the angle was painful. She sneered at him and spit into his face.

  Shodan was shocked but pleased that she still had it in her to resist him to this degree. He was tempted to slap her face but decided that it would be more brutal to respond in a sensual manner.

  He rubbed his face against her hair to wipe the spittle from his face and then, using both hands to force her head still, he claimed her lips with his, licking her soft lips and then slowly penetrating his tongue deeply into her mouth. He felt her try to bite him and yanked painfully on her scalp to make her stop. When she ceased, he again thrust his tongue deeply into her mouth.

  He drank his fill of her and then pulled back to look into her face. “There will come a time when you will beg for my touch, Amanda,” he said in a harsh, raw voice.

  “If I get through this tonight, it will be because I fantasized you were Karrick, and no other reason. You only make my flesh crawl,” Amanda said, her tone contemptuous.

  Karrick’s name on her lips infuriated him and he slapped her viciously across her face. A sharp wedge of satisfaction filled him when he saw the red mark on her cheek. “I was going to make this good for you, Amanda. The pain I would have inflicted on you would have only been the amount that makes sexual pleasure a heightened experience. If you wish to fantasize that I’m Karrick, then do so, but I think you’ll find that the pain you earned for calling forth his name will be unbearable.”

  He got up, intending to find the leather whip he’d stolen from the pack’s herd master, who used it to manage the Husker Boars that the pack was attempting to domesticate. He found the whip and was about to lash Amanda across her buttocks with it when he heard the unmistakable noise of someone or something heading toward the hut. He walked over to the table and picked up Amanda’s blaster. Whip in one hand and the blaster in the other, Shodan walked to the entrance to investigate.

  * * * * *

  Karrick silently stepped across the brush, trying to move as fast as possible to get behind the hut, yet not alert Shodan too early to his presence. He got in place just as he heard Shodan tell Amanda that she would come to beg for his touch. When she told Shodan that she would get through the night only because she would be fantasizing about Karrick, he was proud of her. Yet a shiver of terror ran up his spine for her because he knew that Shodan would transfer his anger of Karrick to her and harm her.

  He was not surprised when he heard Shodan’s reply to her and could only hope that Sirus would hurry and capture Shodan’s attention before he carried out his vile threats.

  Karrick looked down in the moonlight at the two weapons he held in his hands from the small stockpile Sirus had brought with him. One was a grenade that delivered a colorless, odorless gas that instantly rendered whoever breathed it unconscious. All he had to do was pull the tab and throw it. The other was a disposable stun gun, one that had twenty charges left in it. It would knock whomever it hit unconscious and would not kill him, unless the person was already quite ill or infirm.

  * * * * *

  Sirus had saved the deadlier weapons for himself.

  Sirus walked stealthily now, his purpose to capture Shodan’s attention already fulfilled. Now his intent was to baffle the wolfan so he would not be able to pinpoint his location. He fired off the series of wee bombs he’d set up, which did nothing more than explode in small puffs of air, moving whatever small matter was nearby a few centimeters at most. The weapons were not themselves dangerous, but gave an excellent diversion in that the series of small explosions mimicked the sound of someone moving through the brush.

  He smiled as he watched Shodan take off after the sounds, expecting to catch whomever or whatever was moving through the vegetation. Sirus’s predatory instincts, usually muted in the mundane routine of everyday life, kicked in full force. He savored the feeling of the hunt that was about to begin.

  Karrick heard Shodan run off toward the first set of exploded wee bombs. As per their agreement, he stayed to the south, cutting off any possibility of Shodan retreating from that area.

  Sirus then set off the second series of wee bombs and watched in satisfaction as Shodan headed off in that direction. Little did Shodan know it, but a third and final series was set up on the other side of a fairly large pit of quicksand, something that Sirus thought would be poetic justice if the wolfan managed to fall into it. According to Karrick, Shodan had faked his own death earlier, making it look like quicksand was the cause of his demise.

  Sirus stalked his prey, ever watchful of that moment when the tables could turn and he would be the one hunted.

  Such a moment happened next, when instead of heading toward the third set of expelled wee bombs, Shodan backtracked and investigated the area where the second set had gone off. Sirus knew the wolfan would smell the faint odors of explosives, despite the sales pitch from standard humans that it was ‘odorless.’ To wolfan and other subspecies, there was no such thing as odorless, only masked odors.

  His assumptions proved correct when Shodan spent an instant lifting a small handful of grass from the area of the explosions and sniffing it. Sirus watched him turn his hand over and let the grass fall to the ground with a look of speculation on his face. Shodan quickly looked around and then crouched down to sniff the ground nearby. Keeping low to the ground, the wolfan began following the elaborate scent trail Sirus had set up. Sirus had moved around earlier in as many directions as possible and back
tracked heavily over his own steps. He hoped it would make it extremely hard for the wolfan to track him, since he had essentially left his scent everywhere.

  Sirus reviewed the weapons he had with him, debating which to use next. One of the difficulties of using anything with deadly force was that the weapon could as easily kill a friend as a foe. This was why he had given the non-lethal weapons to Karrick, whom he judged to be inexperienced.

  Sirus had a gun that would shoot poisonous darts that instantly paralyzed the victim, and if the antidote wasn’t administered within an hour, the victim would die. He rejected it because he knew his aim simply wasn’t all that good at night, even with the night-vision goggles. He was worried he might hit Karrick, or even Amanda, if she were to come running out of the hut. He would only use it if he could get within close range.

  He also had an electronic neutralizer, which would instantly shut down anything that ran on electricity or used static charge. He discounted using that since he knew that the wolfan likely only had primitive weapons.

  Finally he settled on using a stun ray ring. The ring was flexible so it could be folded down into an inconspicuous size. Once unfolded, the ring had a diameter of about one meter. The explosion of stun rays would knock everyone within a half kilometer unconscious for ten to twenty minutes, except for whoever was inside the ring when the weapon went off. He felt the risks to Amanda and Karrick would be minimal, and having understood some of what the wolfan was putting Amanda through, he felt it would be a blessing at this point if she did find unconsciousness.

  The stun rays caused a sensory nervous system disruption by overwhelming the target’s brain and nervous system with an overload of low level electrical energy. The rays were directional in a complete circular pattern from where it originated. Everyone in the zone of attack would survive, though they’d experience a decreased level of physical coordination for about five to ten minutes afterwards.

  Switching on his personal force field unit just in case, since he never completely trusted any weapon, Sirus pulled the pin from the stun ray ring and waited for the count of ten. He sensed the blast as a vibration through the ground underneath his feet, although he didn’t actually hear anything.

  He turned his force field off and then went looking for Shodan. He had a ten-minute window before the wolfan might wake from unconsciousness. He also wanted to find him before Karrick did, because he didn’t agree with the wolfan philosophy of exile as a means of punishing criminals. Sirus’s fundamental belief was that there were just some people better off dead, and Shodan fit Sirus’s criteria for that list.

  He figured that the garrote wire hidden in the lining of his left boot would do the job, if he was unable to kill Shodan with his bare hands. There were ways he knew of to kill a man and leave no outward marks. He intended to make the wolfan’s death look entirely natural on the surface of it. He was prepared to explain that the wolfan was one of the very few who were hypersensitive to the effects of stun rays, and that this was the cause of death. He didn’t care if he was believed or not. Shodan was an animal and he had hurt Amanda. At least no one would ever again have to fear that the wolfan would rape an innocent woman.

  As Sirus had told Karrick earlier, he did not have a wolfan’s olfactory abilities. The elaborate scent trail he’d set up was even more difficult for him to decipher than for Shodan, but what he did have was the ability to use the night-vision goggles to tune in on infrared heat. Sirus scanned the area and headed toward a bundle of heat lying low to the ground. As he closed in on it, he quickly discovered that it wasn’t Shodan, or even a life form at all. It was simply a heat vent and as it turned out, one of many. Sirus remembered now that Amanda had remarked on the possibility of a large network of mineral springs in the area just prior to her disembarking the shuttle. Cursing the unexpected difficulty, Sirus backtracked to where he last saw the wolfan and deciphered every visual and olfactory clue he could, and after ten more minutes, found him.

  Sirus examined the wolfan and determined that he was still out cold. Next to the wolfan were the plasma blaster he’d given Amanda ten days ago and a whip. His face tightened when he imagined the wolfan using the whip on his niece, and any mercy he might have felt dried completely up. He pocketed the blaster and kept the whip out, thinking he might have a use for it later on the wolfan, if it somehow survived what he had planned for it in the next few moments.

  Just to be sure Shodan was still unconscious, he aimed a hard kick at the wolfan’s crotch. The wolfan rolled over with the force of the kick and not much else. Satisfied, Sirus moved in close and applied his fingertips with increasing pressure to the wolfan’s jugular veins, cutting off the flow of blood to its brain.

  “Sirus…” a somewhat garbled voice spoke.

  “Go away, wolfan,” he said to Karrick. He saw that Karrick half-walked, half-crawled to where he crouched over Shodan.

  “Sirus…wrong…don’t do this…”

  “It’s not wrong, Karrick, he’s an animal and I’m merely putting down an animal that’s become dangerous.”

  “Other ways… Exile…”

  “And take a chance that he’ll attack Amanda, again? You know he won’t stop. He’s sick, Karrick, a sick animal that needs to be put down,” Sirus explained patiently.

  “If you kill, you become…like him.”

  “I’ve killed and I’m not like him, Karrick. He’s not my first, and likely not even my last.” He watched in interest as Karrick pulled himself together, fighting off the after effects of the stun rays.

  “Sirus, did you research this planet? There are places on this planet that will make every moment of his life a living nightmare.”

  “God knows I listened to Amanda go on enough about the planet in the last weeks before we landed. Yeah, I know some of it.”

  “There are places I know of where worms feed on the flesh of any warm-blooded animal they can find. There are reasons the Conglomerate left Eridani to the wolfan, Sirus.” Karrick could see he’d caught Sirus’s interest.

  “There are some spots I’d love to send this asshole to. Are you promising that you’d exile him to such a place?”

  “Yes. You have my word on it.” Karrick waited patiently while Sirus made up his mind. He hoped that it wouldn’t take too long; Shodan was lying pretty still.

  With some reluctance, Sirus let go of Shodan’s neck. A minute later, as the wolfan began to stir, Sirus looked at Karrick, his eyes flat and emotionless. “Just so you understand… If she tells me that she wants him dead, nothing will stop me. Not your pack laws, not your ethics, not even the promise of the hell you say you’ll send him to,” he vowed.

  “I understand and I’ll stand aside, if that’s what Amanda wishes.”

  Sirus used the wire to secure Shodan’s wrists together behind his back and, using his foot to force the wolfan’s back to bend backwards to an almost unnatural degree, brought the wolfan’s ankles up to its neck and used the whip it had been carrying to secure its ankles to its neck.

  As Karrick watched, he saw a cold ruthlessness harden the man’s features. This was no ‘cuddly uncle,’ he thought. Amanda’s earlier recounting of her uncle had him envisioning someone who was tough but often indulgent of his niece. Of the love the man felt for her, he had no doubt, but he wondered if she really understood how dark Sirus was inside.

  Sirus raised an eyebrow. “Someone comes…I think that they’re your pack mates.”

  Karrick heard nothing and wondered how Sirus could hear what he could not, but then remembered that he could sense emotions from others. Moments later, he began hearing soft rustling movements and after a few minutes, saw Carson and Nathan approaching. “Those are my brothers,” he told Sirus, then called out to the two younger wolfan, letting them know his exact location.

  Nathan ran forward and Carson followed at a slightly slower pace. “Some of the kids thought they saw a shooting star but when we questioned them about it, we realized a ship must have landed,” Nathan explained.


  Carson joined him and added, “We grabbed the aerolift, figuring it must be Amanda’s uncle’s shuttle, and if so, there might be some kind of trouble.”

  Nathan looked down and walked over to look at the wolfan trussed up in wire. “Jeez, it’s Shodan.”

  Carson elbowed Nathan out of the way to get a good look as well. “Shit, yeah. That’s Shodan.”

  “That fucking Mordock. He swore up and down Shodan was dead.” Nathan seethed.

  “They’re dumb fucks, Murin and his brother Mordock, both. We should’ve known better than to listen to those dipshits.” Carson supposed. “Nice job trussing him up. I assume you’re Amanda’s Uncle Sirus,” Carson said, offering his hand to Sirus. Sirus shook his hand and introduced himself to Karrick’s brothers.

  “What the hell happened?” Carson demanded.

  “Shodan decided to kidnap Amanda,” Karrick answered.

  “God, is she okay?”

  “Yeah. She’s in the hut back there.”

  Carson was about to say more but stopped when he saw the look Nathan gave him, telling him to let it go. “Hell, let’s get this asshole out of here. We brought the aerolift, thinking this was an emergency. Might as well use it to take him back. Uh, Sirus, you want a lift back to your shuttle, first? We can stop there, get your stuff, and then take you back with us to the compound.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Sirus said, smiling. “Help me haul this piece of shit back to your lift, will you? I understand that Karrick intends to exile him to a place where he can be eaten by worms.”

  Carson and Nathan laughed and after telling Karrick they would be back in several hours to pick him and Amanda up as well, the three left carrying the trussed wolfan between them.

  * * * * *

  Karrick stepped inside the hut, the candles still burning and Amanda still tied up in the bonds Shodan forced on her. He heard her low moans and the guilt knifed through him that he couldn’t get here sooner, before Shodan touched her and put her through so much abuse.