by Mary Calmes
“Simon?”
I had to try.
So I explained about Leith and who he was and what I was to him. I explained about what I knew and where we had to go and how I knew the only way for us to get home. As I watched her, studied her face, it hit me what Raphael had meant. My natural gift was this: I was honest. Everyone knew that if I could help it, I didn’t lie. They knew that if I was their friend, I would do whatever I could. So when I changed everything for Jess Turner, between where she was and what she knew of me, she accepted instead of screamed. I watched her shudder, saw her make up her mind to trust me, saw her nod, and felt her warm hand clutching mine.
“I want to see my kids.” She sucked in her breath. “Promise me I can see my kids.”
“If you listen to me, you can see your kids.”
“What do I have to do?”
“We have to make a plan, and we’ve got less than two weeks to bust out of here if we want to get home.”
“Simon,” she said shakily, “honey, I don’t think I can last even a week here.”
But she would have to, because we had to watch and plan and figure things out. There were items to collect and people to talk to. Nothing could be done overnight. “You have to be strong, Jess.”
She nodded fast.
I was counting on her to inform the others, tell them we were making a break for it. She said she knew where Chale was. She would talk him into coming with us, though she didn’t think it would take much convincing on her part.
“When we get home, I want to talk to Leith myself, all right? I want to thank him for saving me from that horror out there.”
“Yes, honey.”
She took a deep breath. “Okay.”
“Okay. You trust me?”
“Of course, Simon, always.”
And as she walked away from me, I had time to think about that. Why did people always end up trusting me?
I HAD the freedom that no one else had, so it fell to me to use that power wisely. During the day I wandered the ludus that belonged to Leith. I slipped outside with Saudrian’s servants when they came to bring food for the champion, and even when I was found and chased back, no one dared raise a whip or a hand to me. They knew who I belonged to, and their fear of Leith was greater than my transgression.
I checked every room, watched all the comings and goings, stood at the windows and looked out at night. I had worried about wild animals, but there were none. It was a vast, barren wasteland, and the only thing that could kill in the desert was thirst. But ten miles was nothing, not really, easily done in an eight-hour period, or even faster, depending on the speed the others moved. I ran five miles a night three times a week at home; I was just worried about the people I was dragging along with me.
I found paper, a quill, and ink; I recorded events, made note of when guards changed, how late and early it was when people ate, drank, and went to bed.
Jess was ready to go, frantic to leave, her panic, more than anything, making the decision for me. When I told her it was time three days later, she had to clutch at my arm so she wouldn’t fall. She was so thankful, and I realized that I could not be any more careful; there was only so much I could plan for.
We were all going to meet that night on the side of the manor house that led to the outer wall. I would lift the key from Leith and unlock the gate so we could run. Everyone had to bring their own water, and we would leave as soon as it got quiet and dark. We would be moving fast, but ten miles was a distance that was possible in one night for me and, the consensus had become, for most everyone else as well. I had tried to think of a better plan, but I really didn’t think there was one. Waiting had given us the time to talk to everyone, spread the word to every human there of our escape plot. It also let me formulate a plan to try and save my friend Kenny.
I left Leith’s room, as I did daily, wrapped in a toga that looked like it was made of raw silk and was not the dusky-brown color of everyone else’s, but a pale red. The color afforded me a luxury that others didn’t have: free rein to walk everywhere within the ludus. I still couldn’t go out, only once having slipped out with Saudrian’s food-bearing servants, but I could go anywhere else.
I found Chale, and he pointed out Kenny. The transformation was terrifying; he looked like a creature from a nightmare. But I had, I felt, one chance, and so I lingered, lounging in a chair under the shade provided by the second story of the manor house.
When I saw Leith crossing the courtyard from training all day—I had watched for a while from the upper balcony—I rose and sprinted toward Kenny. The wolf that he was turned on me, snarling, and I heard my warder yell at the same moment I grabbed my friend’s arm.
Kenny howled in terror, and his fangs slashed at my bicep as he tried to twist free. I was afraid he was going to bite my arm off, but in the same second I prepared to release him, realizing that my plan had failed, he released a bloodcurdling scream.
We fell together in a tangle of limbs, rolling hard in the dirt, before my brain finally registered that it was a man who was wrestling with me and not an animal. I scrambled back and he twisted around, getting his knees under him, freezing seconds later as he blinked at me.
“Kenny,” I said, seeing the armor hanging off his very human frame.
He was panting, chest heaving and eyes wide as he stared at me.
“Kenny, buddy,” I soothed him, “you’re gonna be all right.”
His pupils were dilated, and he looked like he was feverish.
“This is all just a nightmare that we’re living through. Come over here to me.”
It took him only a second to make up his mind. He yanked everything off of him until he was naked. Moments later he was trembling in my arms.
Leith reached us, lifted Kenny by the back of his neck away from me, and hurled him away like he was throwing away a piece of trash. When he landed, dazed, winded, not moving, my warder went after him.
I ran at Leith, leaped, and landed on his back, arms and legs wrapped around him, and immediately started kissing up the side of his neck. He stilled in his lunge toward a terrified Kenny and took a step back. The onslaught of my affection, my hands under the breastplate on his sweat-dampened skin, my tongue in his ear, my teeth tugging on his earlobe, made his step falter. When I slid off his back, he turned on me. I walked backward, and he followed.
Others called to him, and he answered absently, hungry eyes locked on me as I began yanking at the toga, freeing myself from it. I should have been embarrassed, flaunting myself, but I was saving my friend, so it was worth it. Leith let loose a volley of words, and Jess was there in seconds with three other women, one with the same piece of cloth everyone else wore, ready to wrap Kenny up.
Jess was crying as she grabbed hold of him, and he fisted his hand in her hair so they couldn’t get separated.
“Keep him with you,” I called out to her before Leith’s towering frame cut off everything but him from my vision.
“I will,” she yelled back. “I won’t let him out of my sight!”
“Find Dan!” I directed her, my last order before I turned and ran.
I heard Leith growl behind me, and I sprinted down the dark, prison-cell-lined corridor toward the bath. As I rounded the corner, I felt his hand slide along my back, but I made it to the worn stone room and leaped, stretching my body out and hitting the warm water like a spear. I dove deep under the water, hit the bottom, and kicked off, breaking the surface half the length of the pool from my voracious lover.
He was tearing his armor away, hurling it into the wall, the door, uncaring where it hit and fell. When he was naked and heaving, he dove into the water, and I swam hard to the edge and climbed out. I saw his blond head bob up where I had been moments before. He pounded his fist into the water and yelled. I grabbed the cake of soap he had thrown at me a few days ago and threw it at him.
Silence.
The confusion was evident and endearing.
“Wash,” I told him, shaking out my hair
, grabbing one of the cloths from the pegs in the wall behind me and drying myself off.
We did not speak the same language at all, but he understood and so cleansed his massive frame from his hair to the soles of his feet. It took a while, and I was chuckling by the time he came out, his skin pruney and scrubbed clean. I pulled two cloths for him from pegs on the wall and led him from the room and down the long hall to his private quarters. He held my hand, his fingers laced in mine as I tugged him over to his bed. I dried his hair, which he really liked, from the rumbling purr that emanated from deep within his chest. I made him lie back, feet on the furs, and I wiped away all the water. When I eased his thighs apart, on my knees between them, he lifted his head to see what I was doing.
“This is gorgeous,” I told him, lifting his heavy cock in my hand, wrapping my hand around the base before I opened my mouth and licked the huge head.
His groan was deep and loud, and when I lowered my mouth over him, taking in as much of him as I could, I instantly felt his hand in my hair. I pushed it away, knowing he’d gag me if he was in control, and used my other hand to touch his balls. He jerked under me, and as I made everything wet with saliva, licking and sucking, using my hands, coating him, he came apart. Moments later he was shuddering with his climax, emptying into my mouth as I swallowed and swallowed, taking all he had to give me.
I rose over him after long minutes, when I was certain he was completely spent, and he watched me with narrowed eyes. Gently but insistently, I urged him to his hands and knees, and he let his head hang down as he shivered in anticipation.
The oil was beside the bed, but I wasn’t ready for that yet. Instead, I leaned forward and parted his cheeks. His breath caught as I swiped my tongue across his puckered entrance, licking and sucking before I slid inside. His garbled words were raspy and broken as I plunged in and out, pushing saliva into his silky channel, before I added a finger.
His groan was fierce as he moved his knees further apart, inviting me, pushing back on my finger, trying to get it in deeper. I added a second and a third before withdrawing them to his stifled, desperate pleas. I leaned down, dragged my hand through the oil beside the bed, and then thrust the three fingers back inside of him to a gasp of startled pleasure. When I removed them, replacing them instantly with my cock, he dropped his face into the bed, muffling his yell.
His ass was big and firm and tight, not the one I was familiar with, but gorgeous just the same. As I thrust inside of him, I felt his muscles squeezing around the length of me, the pressure strong, pulling me in deeper. I leaned forward, my chest plastered to his back as I reached for his hand to guide it to his own hard, leaking shaft. Immediately he started jerking himself off, and I straightened behind him, fucking him hard as his yell filled the room. I felt the convulsion tear through him as I found my own release.
I stayed where I was, my groin plastered to his ass, and when I tried to ease back, he reached behind him to hold me there. I stroked over the small of his back gently, then down one taut cheek. He shivered with the contact.
“You don’t remember, but your body does, and even though it’s changed, it still knows me, knows my cock and loves having me buried inside,” I told him, my voice gravelly as I gently slid from his body.
He flopped over on his side and looked up at me with heavy-lidded eyes.
I walked to the opposite side of the room, poured him a cup of what passed for water, and brought it back to him. He drained it in one gulp. When I took the cup from him, I turned to go get him some more, but his hand slipped around my wrist.
“What?”
He pulled me down onto the bed beside him and pressed my hand over his heart. He then covered it with both of his.
I nodded, bent, and kissed him. “I love you too, baby. Just remember that tomorrow when you wanna kill me, all right?”
He looked confused, and I had no doubt he was. I was not looking forward to breaking his heart.
IX
THE FIRST part was easy. I had checked with Jess and Chale the following morning, after Leith left, and found everyone in pretty good spirits. Kenny looked better; they had found our boss, who could not stop apologizing to me. I had been right after all—the hotel was weird—and we were all a go for that night.
It was maddening, the waiting, and that night after Leith had drifted off to sleep after we made love in the bathtub, I stole the key from my massive lover. I lifted the chain up over his head, untangled it from his mass of dirty-blond hair, and hauled ass back down the hall.
I found Jess, Chale, and Kenny crouched in the kitchen, and when we went outside, everyone, all the people who were still people, were kneeling along the edges of the courtyard in the darkness. I saw a lot of what looked like animal-skin wine flagons, but I knew they were filled with water. Jess wanted to head up to the cave to recover the Evian bottles, but I told her we couldn’t risk it. Besides, even though Raphael had been right and it was hot, it was nowhere near desert hot. I had lived in Phoenix for a while, and the temperature was nothing compared to July in the Valley of the Sun. If the kyrie was right and ten miles was all it was, we would make it easily.
I used the key to get everyone out, a stream of people, and Chale went out in front, walking east, around the side of the manor house and out into the open. He was leading; I was bringing up the rear. When the last person was out, I followed, not locking the gate, putting the chain with the large key on it around the lock, making sure Leith could get out the second he realized I was gone, wanting him to see it there immediately. I had a terrible urge to go back in and wake him up, to get him to come with me, but I knew there was no way to make him understand.
I caught up with the others, unable to stop some from running, even as I saw Jess.
“What if they catch us?”
“What if there’s something really scary out here?” I suggested to her.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Simon, I didn’t even think of that.”
“Yeah, I know,” I told her. “Just keep moving.”
“It’s only ten miles,” she reassured me.
“Which is, like, nothing,” I agreed. “At home, we walk that easy, and probably walking though the Tenderloin is scarier than this is gonna be.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe,” I agreed.
She took my hand, and we began jogging.
THERE IS no way to curtail the desire to run when you’re scared. So we ran in bursts of frantic adrenaline that crested and ebbed the whole night. When we saw nothing, heard nothing, mile after mile, I got scared.
I was terrified that I had trusted a kyrie with my life. I became breathless thinking that Leith had not even noticed I was gone, would not at all, until it was too late, and I would end up abandoning him in a hell dimension. Worst of all was my terror that he wouldn’t even care that I was gone and would simply take another man to his bed. That thought lasted a good hour and a half before Jess asked me if I had been sniffing glue.
I told her I probably still had a concussion.
She told me I was just stupid and that I couldn’t blame head trauma.
“Maybe none of this is real, and I’m in a coma.”
She shrugged. “Maybe we’re all dead already and this is hell.”
“This is hell,” I assured her.
“I am so not up for some freaky existential debate about what’s real and what isn’t,” she snapped at me. “Get it together, Kim, we’ve got people to lead to the Promised Land.”
“Now I’m Moses?”
“An Asian version… yeah.”
The banter was not helping.
Dawn broke and we stopped. Everyone sat down and drank water. Some of them lay down, and that was when we heard the horns.
Hunting horns.
I figured there would be dogs next, the baying that there was in every movie I had ever seen, but it didn’t happen. But we were at the bottom of a hill, and up on the crest, we saw the chariots.
“Christ, it is like Moses,” Jess
said, exhaling sharply.
There were screams and cries as everyone got on their feet, running, terror pulsing through the crowd, propelling them all forward at the same time in a stampede of fear.
I saw Saudrian in one of the chariots and identified Leith beside him. Hard to miss them—they were both huge, both their heads covered in metal helms, the only difference being that one was carrying an ax and the other a sword. I shivered where I stood.
“Come on!” Jess yelled at me.
We started to run, and I saw the chariots begin down the hill as I checked them over my shoulder. They were leading the animal-people hybrids, wolves, lizards, and the bears that I had seen the first day but not since. They were apparently used for tracking and hunting.
“Ohmygod,” Jess yelled beside me, realization hitting her. “Leith—he doesn’t know you’re you, doesn’t know who he really is, and so right now he’s thinking that you tricked him for the key.”
“Yes,” I agreed as we ran.
“Simon, he’s gonna kill you!” She started to cry.
“Only if he catches me.”
She screamed and rushed by me. I caught up to her, and we ran together fast. I heard Chale scream from up ahead and would have yelled at him to jump if he hadn’t just gone ahead and done it.
I stumbled for a moment, overwhelmed at the trust, overwhelmed that he would just do something so ridiculous, so counterintuitive as to leap off a cliff into an abyss on just my say-so. Who the hell was I to inspire such faith?
No one stopped. They simply streamed over the edge like lemmings, and when I saw Kenny run as fast as he could and leap, arms stretched wide like he was free-falling into a pool, I went down.
Jess stopped, but I slapped her hands away and told her to run.
“No,” she told me, grabbing my arm, lifting with all her strength. “Get the fuck up!”
It felt like one of those bad dreams, how sometimes you can’t move, but I rose and shoved her forward. “I can’t go without him anyway. Run!”
