“The strength of the energy behind it, maybe,” Yancey said. “I don’t know. The erotic energy around here is certainly palpable. And no, I can’t believe I’m talking about energy like it has a mind of its own, either.”
“What about one of the artifacts?” Elfie asked. “Like maybe light streams through it at a certain point and triggers something?”
“Yeah, maybe the sun hits a certain place on the staff and then it all just springs open?” Yancey asked with a smirk. “Don’t be silly. This isn’t Raiders of the Lost Ark, Elf.”
“Well, my idea isn’t any sillier than palpable erotic energy,” she replied.
“You’ll have to think of what it is by nightfall,” Severin said. “You’re the Wakinyan. You’re the only ones who will recognize it when you see it. I have to go underground before sun up.”
“Wait a minute, where in hell are you going?” Yancey asked in a harsh voice. “We have to go get Oliver right now. He’s in there by himself. Alone. Without us.”
Severin shook his head. “We can’t go now. We have to enter the cave just before dark. There’s no other time we can do it. And I won’t survive in direct sun.”
“I understand why you have to wait,” Elfie said. “But why do we? We could go in there now.”
Severin looked at them fully, solemnly. “I have to go in first. I know the way.”
“Like you say, we’re the Wakinyan,” Yancey said, “so this isn’t your battle. If you tell us what to do – ”
“I can’t tell you enough to protect you. If we’re going to save Oliver, I have to enter first; I’m the only one who can,” Severin said. He lowered his voice into a soft, thoughtful sound. “There was a time that someone went before me. I’ve always known I would do it for someone else, for some better cause, at some other time. Now, I know who and when and why.” He pulled a small pouch from his pocket. “There’s something you could do for me, though.”
“Of course,” Elfie said.
Severin handed the pouch to her. “My dad was a Wicasa Wakan. He always wanted me to follow him. So he gave me his wasicun, what white folk call a medicine bag.”
“From the age of the deerskin, it looks very old,” Elfie said.
“It had belonged to my grandfather, too,” Severin replied. “I’d like it to be given to my son, Chaske, should I…well, let’s say, should I continue the journey tomorrow. Chaske lives in a home southwest of Angel Peak. It can be seen from there.”
“It’s not far from my home. I know where it is,” Yancey said.
Severin nodded toward the deerskin pouch. “Handle that for me?”
“Of course,” Yancey said. “I’d consider it my duty. You know that.”
Severin looked up at the sun reaching farther across the sky. “I have to leave now to go underground.”
“Severin,” Elfie said, reaching out to touch his shoulder and stop him a moment, “you said before that humans have been rescued from the caves.”
Severin smiled thinly. “They have. If they remain human enough.”
“Will Oliver be human enough?” Elfie asked, as if half afraid of his answer.
Severin looked kindly at her. “I hope so. I’ll see you both at dark,” Severin said, nodding toward Angel Peak, “up there.”
Yancey and Elfie watched as the man descended toward Willow Wash, then beyond the compound wall.
****
A quiet settled around them. Elfie leaned her head against her hand, combing fingers into her hair. She glared up accusingly at the sun. “Why in the hell am I tired? Oliver is in there and I’m tired. How can that be?”
Yancey’s hands settled on her shoulders from behind. He deposited a kiss in her hair. “Because you haven’t had a full night’s sleep in days. The body needs what the body needs. C’mon, let’s get some shut-eye. We can’t do anything for Oliver now but take care of ourselves.”
Peace and quiet reigned over the house again. Elfie pulled the shades closed, because she didn’t want to be reminded of the grounds outside and all that had recently happened. She turned right into the bedroom. The bedroom had become a profoundly special place for them, just hours before. The king sized bed remained as they had left it.
Yancey had followed after her. He freely shucked his blue jeans and tossed them aside. He stood there, as always, in full commando mode. Not surprisingly, given the energy of the place, Yancey already sported a growing erection. He grinned back at her when he caught her noticing it.
Elfie had never been all that shy around Yancey and Oliver, but it still felt odd to strip in Yancey’s presence. She turned her back to drop her slacks. She retained her shirt while doffing her bra from beneath. She reached over to pitch the shed clothes on the bedside table, only to find Oliver’s suit coat still draped over it.
Elfie left her own clothes behind and picked up Oliver’s coat. She pressed the soft cloth coat to her nose to inhale Oliver’s distinct scent: a soft mix of humanity and masculine cologne. It brought tears to her eyes as she felt Yancey’s hand brush her arm. He had extended his palm as a request. She understood and passed Oliver’s jacket along to him. Yancey wrapped the coat up in his arms, as he would have the man. He held it to him. Once again, Elfie couldn’t help sensing an impermeable bond she could never fully share.
“Stop it,” Yancey said sharply.
“Stop what?”
“You know what,” he said, towing Elfie and the jacket with him up into the bed.
She leaned her head against Yancey’s shoulder. She found the sigh she exhaled deep inside her. “I walked away from you guys a year ago. But now the thought of losing Oliver –”
“We’re not losing anyone!” Yancey said staunchly, pulling her into his arms to run his hands over her shoulders. “Anyway, the reason you could walk away is because you knew you could always come back. Now, well, the situation is different. Besides, stop thinking too much. Get some sleep. We’ll need it.”
She coughed out a crooked laugh. “You don’t want to sleep, and you know it.”
“No, but I thought maybe you did,” he said, rolling her onto her back. He held her arms down above her head and leaned down to bite her shirt hem between his teeth. He pulled it up. “What was that about captive bride?”
“I’m not captive if I want to be here,” Elfie said, with a defiant little smile.
“Maybe you want to be here, but you want to be captive too,” Yancey said, grinning, as he leaned down to blow softly over her right nipple.
She gasped at the sensation. “For a bisexual guy, you’re really hot for girls’ tits.”
“I’m hot for yours. I always have been.”
“Since when?”
“Since I met you,” Yancey said, laughing hotly. He ran his tongue around her right nipple and then licked it greedily. “So has Oliver. That’s the way it is with guys.”
“How would you know that Oliver thinks about my tits?” Elfie murmured, trying hard to focus on the conversation amid the heat burning in her blood.
“We’ve talked about doing you a hundred times,” Yancey whispered, his own voice growing rough and faraway as he tongued her left nipple to wetness and then blew across its surface. “Maybe a thousand. Talked about what we’d do, how we’d do it --”
Yancey reached up and around the back of Elfie’s panties, grasping their crotch and yanking them down.
He pushed a knee between her legs to spread open her thighs. “Kinica…” he murmured into her throat, licking tenderly at her skin. “Sogya…le.”
“Is this captive enough for you?” Elfie whispered back, with a grin.
“You’re not captive at all,” Yancey moaned back as he thrust his cock into her burning, wet hole, “and now I’m going to fuck you.”
Yancey’s cock dragged out of her a scream that almost sounded like pain. The pleasure pulsing through her couldn’t be vented by tiny lovemaking coos. The pleasure came not just from within, but from the world around her, a satiation at the deepest level. Something compelle
d them to do this.
Elfie grasped out at Oliver’s suit coat to draw it near her, so they could feel his presence.
Yancey’s reddened face and glassy eyes betrayed his state of mind. Passion had him in its teeth. He thrust faster and harder, his mouth claiming her right breast again, his tongue swabbing wetly over her nipple. As he continued fucking, he reached under to rub his finger through her soaking wet slit until he found her swollen clit.
She gasped hard as he touched it. She lurched up to close the slender distance between them. Pleasure swept through her like a moving ridge. She drove her face into Yancey’s muscular brown shoulder. He tenderly nibbled at her throat.
She saw the pattern of light pulsing in her eyes; she surfaced enough to hear his pounding heart beneath his chest, feel it drumming gently against her cheek; the light strobe through her eyes began to keep pace with the cadence of his heart.
The cadence, the heartbeat, the quieting of her blood in its aftermath, and she felt herself dreaming.
“Bright light,” a voice said in her dream.
The light flashing in her eyes, in that moment of the dream, was trapped inside a shielded container. She gazed in at its fractured phasing over the item inside.
“What?” she asked Oliver in the dream, just as she’d asked him that day three years before.
“I said, the light is really bright.”
“The argon laser electric discharge is pretty powerful,” she said, laughing. She removed her work glasses, and then shut down the argon laser. “I warned you, there may be significant damage done to this artifact.”
“I know. I accept that. It’s just an experiment to see if we can stop the corrosion going on with the Dani artifacts given to us by a benefactor. I picked one of the less important ones to test. All we could think of was the argon laser.”
“Looked like a medicine stone to me,” she said.
“It was. A black argillite stone but, like I said, not a particularly important one. We can sacrifice it in the interest of saving the rest.”
In her dream, Elfie opened up the container and pulled out the capsule into which she had earlier placed a Papua black argillite stone, well-polished by geologic processes. She uncapped the container and poured the contents out onto a sterile dish. It was fine rubble. Very fine rubble.
“Well, that didn’t turn out so good, did it?” Oliver asked with a broken grin.
She shrugged. “I did warn you.”
Oliver sipped at his fast food cup. “It’s okay. I expected the worst from something being zapped by lightning in a box.”
Lightning in a box, Oliver had said…Oliver himself had said it.
It dragged her back out of the dream and into the night at hand. She pulled herself onto the edge of the bed. An already awakened Yancey stood at the window where he stared out at a white-gray sky. She knew she must have betrayed something with her eyes, because he immediately took a step toward her.
“What?” he asked.
“I know what it is,” she said.
“What what is?”
“I know what our lightning is. Oliver called it that himself. The lightning is the argon laser.”
Chapter Five
Her quickened breathing clouded up the night around her.
The evening had closed in on them like a tiny room of darkness that blocked out the day. They stood in the midst of the most rural Badlands outreach. Nowhere felt colder than the distant Badlands at night. The whistling of wind and the bluster of night combined to chill her to the bone.
Before them, close enough to see inside, the seven mouths of the Angel Caves glowed defiantly through the darkness. Their gauzy lace of light wove around each obsidian wall. The effect reminded Elfie of bad and broken teeth snarling back at them through open mouths, ready to devour. The howl of the wind might have been coming from those open mouths. Even the crisp sound of Severin and Yancey’s nearby conversation buffeting back forth could barely be heard above the howl.
The scream of shifting gears finally overtook the wind. Elfie looked down to see Oliver’s jeep, driven by a young Sioux, lurching upward to the roughly even shelf below. The jeep shuddered to a stop. The young Sioux man climbed out, took up the bicycle that had been mounted to the back rack, then rode off away toward the distance.
“Shouldn’t he drive the jeep up here?” Elfie asked the two men.
“We must have as few people as possible with us,” Severin explained.
“Besides,” Yancey said, “the road up here is a steep path that plummets off both sides. Only someone who knows that jeep can drive it up these hills, especially with the generator rigging in back. Remember the drive up to the first campsite?”
Elfie smiled at the thought…it had only been a day or so ago, and yet, it seemed like a year had passed between that night and this one. “Yeah, I see your point. Especially in Oliver’s jeep.”
Yancey nodded and shared a saddened smile. “Especially in Oliver’s jeep. I’ll drive it up here before Severin heads into the caves.”
As if on cue, Severin pulled out his boot knife and drew a pattern in the soft sand. He drew a forked shape with several prong lines branching off. “This is the Angel Caves system. Here we have the heart of the cave, the heart of the spawn, at the center.”
“Is that where Laughing Bear lives?” Yancey asked, his voice only twisting a little, as if to quell his sarcasm.
“Yes. Destroy the caves, and we kill him,” Severin said. He tapped the end of the stick at the far right side. “I’m going in first to lure Laughing Bear here. I evaded him once, I escaped his control, and he will be more concerned with my entrance than with yours.”
“Will he remember you?” Elfie asked, still hugging herself against the prevailing cold.
Severin looked up, his eyes seeming to convey the importance of his words. “Laughing Bear forgets nothing.” He moved the knife’s point toward the left. “Elfie, you will be here. Oliver will respond to you the best. You’re a woman. He’s still your friend, but he’s also now compelled to breed for his own. It’s something he cannot resist without great practice.”
“She can’t go in by herself!” Yancey snapped.
“She has to,” Severin said. “Oliver won’t be drawn to you as quickly. The part of him who is your friend will be, but he’s been driven by a more primal need from within.”
“Besides,” Elfie said to Yancey, “you need to drive the jeep, remember? Like you said, can anybody else get that jeep up the steep incline? Especially with the generator in back?”
“If necessary,” Severin said to Yancey. “I’ll die so that she’ll live. So that they’ll both live. As would you. But there’s a very important thing you both must do. All of you, the three of you, as soon as you are all free of the caves, you have to run for cover to the Willow Peak cottage, where you were when I found you. I can save myself. I’m the only one who can. Don’t wait for me. Get in the jeep, keep driving and don’t look back. Promise me.”
Yancey deliberated for a long moment. “We’re supposed to just run and abandon you?”
“You won’t be abandoning me,” Severin explained, “and unless you promise me, we can’t go forward.”
Yancey looked toward Elfie. Elfie shrugged and tried to smile.
Finally, Yancey nodded his agreement. “Okay, we promise.”
Severin pointed away from the caves. “You had best drive my dirt bike down to the truck. We need to act soon.”
Yancey’s cranky glower turned away from the other two people and in the direction of his task. “All right,” he said, advancing first toward the dirt bike, but then turning back sharply to pull Elfie toward him and plant his lips firmly over hers. He backed off to grumble into her face, “Be fucking careful.”
“I will,” she said. “You, too.”
Yancey turned in Severin’s direction with a look of gratitude. “Thank you.”
Severin nodded. “Time to go.”
The high-pitched shriek of Severin’s
dirt bike as Yancey gunned it down the hill sent a shudder through Elfie’s tight nerves. Her hands, so cold they were numb, had been stuffed into her pockets. She didn’t know if the numbness came solely from the night chill or had been helped along by her general state of terror.
“First,” Severin said, “you must try to lure him toward you. You’re a woman. You know how I mean.”
“Oh my God,” Elfie said, now fighting the twin rising tides of embarrassment and nausea caused by terror. “Yeah, okay. I lure Oliver toward me. What else?”
“Don’t let him touch you. You will want him to touch you more than you want to breathe. As unlikely as that sounds, given the situation, just trust me. You must resist that urge. Try to convey to him, in a way that only Oliver will understand, what we’re trying to do.”
She shut her eyes, breathed in, taking in the words that had been given her and finally murmured a soft agreement. “Okay. Then what?”
“When you hear Yancey at the mouth of the cave, connecting the generator, you’ll know the moment is near. When you see me pick up the argon laser, you must grab Oliver and drag him with you as fast as possible toward the jeep.”
“When do we do this?”
“Now,” Severin said, leaning over to lift the argon laser contraption into his arms.
Elfie fought to slow her breathing. She felt light-headed already. She swallowed an infinite dryness. “Are you clear on how the laser works? It’s very simple.”
“Yes,” he answered. He motioned her toward the leftmost cave. “I’ll enter the right-side cave mouth, but all the cave passages converge, as I showed you.”
“I remember,” she said.
“Then start walking now. You’ll see nothing, but keep walking forward. We’ll stop walking when we can see each other again. When the cave strands converge.”
As Elfie moved forward, she couldn’t see a thing, but not because of the dark. The lustrous glow created an illuminated cloud of fog that enveloped them. She could hear a far-flung gaggle of wrawls, like a hunting pack snarling in the distance. All at once, it felt as though the hands of fog had uncovered her eyes, and she could see something beyond them.
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