The heated tongue moved back and forth along her cleft, nipping at her clit until she began to quake with imminent release. She fought it, dreading it, knowing that once it began they would not allow it to stop until they were ready to move on. As he moved down her cleft, the high priest shifted his hold on her, spreading the mouth of her passage wide to receive the tongue of the other priest. Two others approached her, flicked their tongues over her nipples and bit down on them as the tongue was thrust deeply inside of her. She gasped sharply, her body convulsing with pleasure. It continued to spasm as the tongue was thrust into her over and over.
The moment the priest withdrew and moved away, the high priest shifted again, burying his face against the tender flesh, sucking her clit into his mouth, teasing it with his tongue. The tremors of her climax, which had began to subside, mounted once more, tearing through her in almost painful waves until she was screaming with the nearly unbearable pleasure.
Darkness began to engulf her before he ceased to torment her.
She was still gasping, trying to catch her breath when they began moving over her again. Her body, heated now to the point of release, was not allowed to cool more than a handful of moments as they continued the ritual unceasingly, teasing her flesh to such sensitivity she felt faint, dizzy. Each time the serpent approached to spear her womb with his tongue, the high priest parted the lips of her sex, opening her wide for them and holding her. Again and again they brought her to culmination, until she was hoarse from crying out, until her flesh quivered and shook without cease.
She wasn’t even aware that the torment had ended at last until she felt her ankles freed from the manacles and her legs dropped limply to the floor. When her wrists were freed, the high priest scooped her into his arms and lifted her.
She hung limply, too weak even to feel much dread as he strode from the circle and lay her face down on the altar. She was dragged back until her feet touched the floor. Her legs were spread wide, her ankles chained again. The manacles were placed around her wrists once more, drawn upward so that her arms were above her head, her cheek resting against the cold stone.
She’d thought that they had wrung every ounce of pleasure from her body that could be had, but as the first moved behind her, parted her buttocks and shoved his cock into her rectum, her body began scaling the heights once more. One after another, they drove into her frenziedly until she gasped hoarsely and came, and still the ritual continued until she lost count of the number of times her body was wracked by spasms of pleasure and fell finally into a deep black pit.
The shivering as her heated flesh began to cool—was finally allowed to—roused her to dim awareness and she realized that she was cradled in Ulrick’s arms. Carrying her to a room with a wide bed, he laid her upon it and joined her. Instead of merely throwing one arm and leg over her, however, he gathered her close against his body, wrapping his arms around her.
“You will displease them if you continue to fight them, little one,” Ulrick said gruffly. “And if you displease the god Nhewa and his followers, you will beg for death before it finds you. Yield to them. Take the pleasure they offer you and be grateful they prefer the elixir of your pleasure to the distillate of your pain.”
“Ulrick?” she whispered, but she didn’t know if he responded or not. Within moments, strangely reassured by the steady pounding of his heart beneath her ear, she sank into oblivion again.
Chapter Six
When she had been bathed the following morning, the priests dressed her in a deep blue gown. She glanced at Ulrick as he took the chain attached to her manacles, but there was no sign of the man who’d shown her gentleness the night before, kindness—empathy when he warned her that trying to fight was both useless and dangerous. Ulrick the hardened soldier/gladiator/slave looked back at her, his eyes filled with nothing beyond the cold detachment she’d grown accustomed to but heat and possessiveness.
Lust.
She swallowed with an effort, struggling with a sense of self-pity and hopelessness. The look should have heartened her, for it could only mean that she was right. She had made some progress with him. Ulrick, drawn by the pleasures of the flesh, was slowly but surely losing his iron control over himself.
Unfortunately, she’d begun to realize that Ulrich was as much in control of her as vice versa. He had only to look at her and her body responded with welcoming heat. His rough possession of her drove her into mindless bliss.
Moreover, she’d seen no more than a glimpse of what she believed to be the soul of a man inside. If she was, in truth, breaking through to him, why could she not see his gentle side more frequently? For longer periods of time?
Was she just imagining he had a softer side that she had some hope of appealing to?
When they had left the temple behind and set out across the plain once more, she remembered the words he had spoken to her the night before, the way he’d held her.
That hadn’t been imagination. It hadn’t been a dream.
She didn’t think.
Pushing aside her doubts, she considered the ‘warning’. After replaying each ‘session’ in her mind, she realized that she’d struggled every time she’d been handed over to the priests. Every single damned time, despite her own certainty that fighting them was a very bad idea.
She’d thought the binding and the attempts to screw her to death were part of the ritual, but it seemed that Ulrick had been warning her that it was her own actions that had precipitated the severity of her offering.
She hadn’t given willingly so they’d forced her to offer and punished her by prolonging her offering until she was about ready to expire from giving.
That was what it sounded like he was saying anyway.
And, possibly, that they might decide to torture her with pain rather than pleasure if she continued to fight them.
A cold, sickening dread invaded her at that thought.
She didn’t think she could handle hours of pain in the place of the hours of pleasure—not when she could barely endure the pleasure for that length of time, when it felt like they’d drained her almost to the point of separating her soul from her body!
To her surprise, Ulrick pulled the beast to a halt as soon as they’d entered the forest at the edge of the plain. Her belly tightened with a mixture of dread and anticipation as he turned her to face him. Grasping the edges of the robe the priests had placed on her at the neck, he ripped it in two from neck to hem and then removed her manacles and shoved the sleeves from her arms.
Confused and unnerved, Brandi could do nothing but gape at him as he removed the tattered robe, wadded it into a ball and looked around as if for a place to pitch it. Finally, he merely shoved it into the pack on the beast’s rump. Without a word, he settled her with her back against his chest once more, guided the beast off of the trail they’d been following and headed deeper into the woods.
More confusing, he abandoned the almost leisurely pace he’d set as they’d crossed the plain and urged the guak to a pace that became more hazardous the deeper they penetrated the forest because of the thicker vegetation.
Anticipation pounded through Brandi for a while—until it finally occurred to her that he either had no intention of stopping soon or he wasn’t looking for a place to stop at all.
Apparently, the latter was true, because when hunger began to roil in her belly, he simply answered the call by handing her a small piece of the bread-type food from his pack and kept going. She had no idea whether he simply stumbled upon the stream they found several hours later or if it had been his destination all along. Whatever the case, he halted the beast and slid out of the saddle, carrying her with him.
Releasing her once she had her feet under her, he led the animal to the stream and stood watching while it drank its fill.
Brandi stared at him blankly for several moments and finally looked down at her wrists—free of the heavy manacles—and then around at the alien forest.
A wave of hope, fear, shock, excitement … a
nticipation rolled over her with the force of a tidal wave.
She could escape!
The adrenaline flow from her thoughts and impulses was so heady she felt like she might pass out as it drained away almost as quickly with the reflection that she didn’t have a hope in hell of escaping even if she wasn’t chained.
Truthfully, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d found herself in the same situation in an Earthly forest. She would’ve been just as lost and out of her element and clueless about how to survive alone. The only difference was that, on Earth, she would’ve had some hope of finding people that might help her.
Here, there was no chance of that.
Sighing, she looked around again and finally moved behind a tree to relieve herself and then to the water’s edge to bathe off and refresh herself after the long ride.
They ate in silence. Brandi was almost too tied to eat at all, and certainly too tired to try to think of anything to say. He allowed her to doze for a little while after they’d eaten before he drew her to her feet and led her to the beast once more.
She struggled, briefly, to stay awake when they set off again, but finally gave up the effort, settled as comfortably against Ulrich’s hard form as she could, and slept. She woke when the beast stopped, lifting her head with a jerk and looking around fearfully.
She saw that they were still in the forest, however, and relief flooded her. Wordlessly, Ulrick slid from the saddle and then pulled her down and set her on her feet. He removed his pack and bedroll from the animal then. Dropping both to the ground in the small clearing, he led the beast away. Brandi watched him a little dazedly, still too drugged from fatigue to manage to put two consecutive thoughts together. Finally, when he didn’t reappear immediately, she looked around and then simply wilted to the ground, tempted to curl into a ball on top of the leaves. She was half asleep when he returned. After nudging her with his foot to rouse her, he moved away, collecting his pack and pulling what was left of the loaf from it. When they’d eaten, he led her into the woods and allowed her to relieve herself and then led her to a stream. Reflecting rather morosely that there’d been a time when she was the next thing to germ-a-phobic and wouldn’t have touched anything not sterilized—let alone something she was standing in—she drank as much water as she could hold, bathed, and then struggled out of the stream.
They wandered around briefly. Brandi had just decided he’d gotten turned around and lost when he stopped to examine an enormous tree that had thick, knobby, exposed roots. “Wait here.”
Brandi blinked, unnerved by how quickly he disappeared into the brush, particularly considering his size. Thankfully, he returned only a few minutes later carrying his bedroll and pack.
“Where’s the … uh … animal?” Brandi asked blankly, surprised enough to see him return without their ‘ride’ to speak directly to him.
He flicked a frowning glance at her. “They will see the guak’s heat. I have left him near the stream in the hope that they will discount him as a forest creature and not connect him to us.”
Brandi’s jaw dropped. She stared at him blankly as he approached the tree and then carefully spread the pallet beneath the cave-like roots, struggling to ‘interpret’ what he’d said since it made no sense to her at all.
Guak, she supposed, was what the beast was called, but what ‘they’?
It sounded like he’d suggested they were hiding from someone. She just didn’t know who or why—and that bothered her because she also didn’t know how scared she should be that ‘they’ might find them.
Shivering, she glanced around at the deepening gloom that was enveloping the forest as the sun set. “They?”
Instead of answering the question, he gestured for her to come to him.
She responded automatically, but she thought she would have even if she’d had time to think it over. Ulrick was physically intimidating, but at the moment that was just what she wanted because it made her feel safe.
He lay beside her on the pallet, pulling her closely against him. She didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry that he made no attempt to couple with her.
Wide awake now, Brandi lay scanning the woods within view until it was too dark to see. “Do you think they can see our heat?”
He didn’t respond for so long that she’d begun to think he might have fallen asleep. “It is to be hoped that they cannot.”
Shivering, Brandi huddled a little closer to Ulrich. “What happens if they see us?” she asked in a shaky voice.
That time she sensed his hesitation in responding. “Nothing good will come of it.”
Brandi swallowed with an effort, torn between the desire to know exactly what the threat was and the certainty that she wasn’t prepared for whatever it was and wouldn’t be no matter what he told her.
It seemed certain he didn’t have any intention of telling her.
“Have you met a lot of humans? People like me … from Earth?” she asked after a few moments, wondering how else he would have learned the language so well.
He shifted away from her, pushing her to her back and staring down at her. “I have never met one such as you.”
His voice was almost caressing. She would’ve thought that was pure imagination except for the fact that he lightly brushed his fingers along her cheek when he said it.
isHBrandi blinked at him, but she discovered it was impossible to bring his image into focus well enough to judge his expression. “But … you speak English so well.”
She had the sense that the comment had surprised him. He made a scoffing sort of sound, threaded, she thought, with amusement. He cupped one hand around her neck, rubbing a spot on the base of her skull.
“Your chip was synced to mine when I bought you.”
Chip? She had a fucking chip in her skull?
Wait! He had one, too?
“So there can be no doubt a slave understands his master’s orders, they are implanted in all slaves.”
Brandi stared at him blankly while that sank in.
And then she remembered he’d told her he was a slave, had been—and he’d bought his freedom.
She frowned. Wouldn’t they all have to have them, though, if the masters needed the chips to make the slaves understand them? Pretty much everyone on this world of masters and slaves and religious nuts that didn’t have any qualms about chaining their sacrifice down if they showed any inclination that they were reluctant to give?
And where had the chips come from? And the knowledge to make and implant them?
When had they implanted a chip in her?
She supposed after a moment that it must have been done as soon as they’d taken her but it was disturbing that she didn’t have any memory of that event at all—disturbing because there was no telling what else they’d done to her.
“You were … born on this world?” she finally asked tentatively.
His entire attitude changed. The softness, if she hadn’t just imagined it to begin with, vanished. “I was not born … at all.”
* * * *
It was still dark when they rose and ate—from another loaf of the alien bread—and then resumed their journey. Disoriented and confused, Brandi struggled to kick her mind into gear.
She couldn’t detect anything around them or about Ulrich that suggested danger, or trouble of any kind, and yet they had deviated so far from the routine they’d established from the time they’d left the slave auction that she was convinced something was up.
She just couldn’t figure out what that might be.
As she became more alert, it occurred to her to wonder if it was nothing more than that Ulrich was pissed off about her prying questions.
Naturally enough, the moment that occurred to her she was instantly diverted to trying to puzzle through it again. She’d fallen asleep trying to figure that one out and was no closer to understanding now.
Because it didn’t make any damned sense!
He certainly wasn’t hatched!
Living things—
larger, complex organisms—were born!
Was he saying he was a machine?
She didn’t believe that! He was mammoth—everything about him and on him!—and he was hard—but it was the tensile hardness of muscle—biological materials, not metal.
Maybe it was … a lie someone had told him? Some sort of superstition? Dimly, she thought she recalled old Earth superstitions where gods and people were created in other ways—like Eve being made from Adam’s rib. Mud figures brought to life by the breath of some god. Someone springing from the brain of Zeus? Something like that.
Was that it? Did that explain such a statement?
She decided it seemed likely—more likely than the possibility of him being an android—which still didn’t actually tell her anything.
Like—had he been captured from another world and brought here like she had been?
It didn’t matter. She told herself it didn’t, at any rate. She was just trying to understand what made him tick so she could use it to her advantage.
She wasn’t making a hell of a lot of headway, she thought glumly, not that she could tell, anyway.
She’d thought she was in a fair way of taming him sexually, thought she’d glimpsed light at the end of the tunnel and the possibility of a better future. Now she wasn’t nearly as convinced.
And it unnerved her that she felt like something had changed radically and she didn’t understand what it was.
Maybe he’d done something and they were being pursued? Or he thought they were?
Inwardly, she shook her head.
Even if that was true, she wasn’t going to figure that out.
He might have done something, but she’d been preoccupied ‘giving’ to the god Nhewa and had no idea what he had been doing while she was making sacrifice of blood, sweat, and tears—sweat and tears anyway—to ensure a safe journey, and she didn’t think he was going to tell her.
They followed a similar pattern of travel, eating, and rest for two days. On the third, they reached the edge of the forest and were confronted by rocky outcroppings that inclined sharply toward a mountain peak concealed by thick clouds.
Alien Slavers II: Breaking Brandi Page 7
