Mark of the Huntress (The Amazon's Pledge Book 2)

by Sarah Hawke

  I hissed though my teeth as my cock continued to swell. Valuri was aiming the tip directly at Kaseya’s face, and Ayrael had swept behind her sister to hold her in place.

  “His emasculation is your liberation, sister,” Ayrael said. “When his tainted seed and corrupted blood spill across your cheeks, they will wash away all your sins. You will finally be free to start anew.”

  “This is sick, Val!” I shouted when the magical clamp began tightening around the base of my cock. “This isn’t right! This isn’t you!”

  “I am a new me, reforged in pain and fire,” she said, stroking me even harder. “I’m not the same girl you met on Raven’s Bridge all those years ago.”

  My heart skipped a beat. Raven’s Bridge…I hadn’t met her on Raven’s Bridge. We had already known each other for months before we’d teamed up against a renegade wizard and his cabal of charmed cronies. It had been one of our greatest victories together. We had caught the idiots completely by surprise by pretending that she was my prisoner and—

  The truth hit my like a brick across the nose. I managed to keep myself from gasping, but my sudden burst of hope echoed through Kaseya’s collar and made her brow furrow in confusion.

  “I guess not,” I croaked. “That girl wasn’t trapped by Senosi dogma. She could still think for herself.”

  “The truth isn’t a trap, Jorem,” Valuri replied. “It is the key that will set you free.”

  She began stroking me even harder, driving me towards a climax. I kept my face clenched as if I were trying to fight it, but deep down I let myself go. It was conceivable that she was being a sadist and trying to trick me into castrating myself, but I didn’t think so. I remembered what we had done on Raven’s Bridge—I remembered the trap we had set and the “key” we had used to spring our ambush. If she had done the same thing here, Kaseya and I might still have had a chance of getting out of this alive.

  “No,” I gasped as my climax approached. “Val, please!”

  “Do it!” Ayrael demanded, her hands clutching around her sister’s face. “Redeem yourself in the eyes of the Inquisitrix!”

  Valuri pumped me over the edge. I spilled with a panicked roar, splattering Kaseya’s upturned face with a thick barrage of seed. My blood, mercifully, did not follow. The cock ring didn’t budge; its blades remained firmly retracted. Valuri had already disabled it.

  “What?” Ayrael gasped, her sadistic delight morphing into confusion. She shoved her sister onto the deck and leaned forward to check the device—

  At which point Valuri sprung her trap. Her booted foot whirled out from behind me, kicking Ayrael in the chin and knocking her flat on her backside. Before the amazon could recover, Valuri drew the twin crossbows from her hips and fired. The bolts struck Ayrael squarely in her breastplate, easily piercing the tough leather at such short range. She shrieked in pain, and as blood spurted from her wounds I heard the distinctive whirring click of the crossbows’ automatic reloading mechanism snapping more bolts into place. Valuri fired off another pair of shots barely a second later, but Ayrael had already dove out of the way. I honestly thought she might charge straight at us despite her injuries, but instead she dashed back up the stairs and onto the upper decks.

  “To arms!” she shrieked. “We are betrayed!”

  “Shit!” Valuri hissed while her weapons reloaded. “We need to get off this bloody ship!”

  Whirling on a heel, she took aim with her right crossbow and shot the rope binding my hands. I tumbled to the deck and grimaced in pain when I tried to move. My arms felt like I had just dipped them in lava.

  “You can cry about how much it hurts later,” Valuri scolded, drawing a knife from her boot and slashing Kaseya’s restraints as well. “Right now you need to blast us a way out of this ship!”

  I clenched my jaw and reached out to the Aether. Concentrating on channeling was hard enough even when my muscles weren’t melting, but after a few moments I managed to flood my body with restorative energy and numb the worst of the pain.

  “We cannot allow my sister to get away,” Kaseya said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “She must pay for what she has done!”

  Valuri had already raced over to the door and fired several shots up the stairwell. A gurgling shriek echoed down from above, and an armored man clattered down the steps. He landed next to us, a crossbow bolt jutting from his neck and a pool of blood gathering around his corpse.

  “There are twenty Vorsalosian soldiers up there!” Valuri warned, pressing herself against the doorframe for cover. “We can’t take them all!”

  “I can,” I said, my fingertips crackling with energy. Striding forward, my naked body sheathed in a protective mantle of pure Aetheric force, I unleashed a cone of flame directly up the stairwell. I continued moving step by step, my vision clouded by sulfurous smoke and my ears filled with horrified screams. A barrage of crossbow bolts greeted me when I emerged onto the top deck, but they all deflected harmlessly off my spell armor.

  “Jorem, what the hell are you doing?” Valuri called out from behind me. “Are you bloody insane?”

  I ignored her. Even though I couldn’t actually see all my opponents through the growing clouds of smoke, I unleashed a fiery barrage in every direction I heard movement. Every blast rumbled with the intensity of a thunderbolt, rattling the ship and eventually splintering the masts to pieces. Once the sails were completely immolated, I turned and focused on the last voices I could make out—

  At which point a biting, dagger-like pain stabbed at my chest. My concentration faltered, my spell armor vanished, and I collapsed to a knee. The Aether, it seemed, had already had enough of me. I had overchanneled its power, and now I was paying the price.

  “Ahh!” I cried out as a crossbow bolt streaked past my head. My vision threatened to blacken entirely before a pair of arms grabbed onto me and yanked me back down the stairs to the lower deck. My eyes stung from the smoke, and my nostrils flared at the stench of scorched flesh. But eventually I was able to make out Kaseya’s body looming over me protectively.

  “We’ll drown or suffocate if we stay down here,” Valuri called out. “You have to blast open the hull so we can escape!”

  “I can’t,” I said through clenched teeth. “I can’t do anything.”

  “Well, then fuck it,” she hissed. “I guess we’ll go through.”

  I dropped to a knee as the two women raced around the deck, Kaseya to retrieve her weapons from the captain’s quarters and Valuri to find anything else remotely useful. The ship lurched and creaked—if we had been out in the middle of the ocean, we all would have been doomed. Since we were only in the river, we still had a chance to swim to safety. Maybe.

  “Can you walk?” Valuri asked as she removed her red cloak and tossed it over my shoulders. .

  “Yes,” I croaked, biting my lip even as the pain of overchanneling slowly faded. I hadn’t stressed myself this hard this quickly in a long time, and I had forgotten just how much it hurt.

  “Then come on—we’re leaving.”

  With the two women at my side, we rushed up the stairs through the smoke and sprinted for the edge of the boat. I half expected Ayrael to be waiting there for us, bleeding but ready to cut us down before we could flee. She was nowhere in sight, however, and the rest of the crew was either dead or already in the water themselves.

  We lunged off the edge. The river was choppy thanks to the gusty winds, and the glint of the afternoon sun on the waves was almost blinding. But once I saw that Kaseya and Valuri were next to me, I just put one arm after the other and focused on reaching the shoreline. Freedom had never felt so far away.

  ***

  The swim was mercifully easier than I expected, though I still slumped against a tree in exhaustion the moment we were out of the water. Off in the distance, the Vorsalosian ship was little more than a brilliant pyre sinking below the horizon.

  “Maybe you should consider listening to me next time,” Valuri panted, her black hair plastered across h
er face. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “What the fuck was I thinking?” I growled back. “You poisoned me! You tied me up and put a clamp on my cock!”

  “For one, I didn’t tie you up,” she corrected. “For two, I disabled the ring before I put it on you. And for three, that poisoned dart saved your life. How could you be stupid enough to walk into trap like that? Haven’t you learned anything?”

  “I was trying to save you! You would rather we left you to Ayrael?”

  “I would have rather you busted me out of the dungeon a few months ago. But apparently that was too much to ask.”

  I continued panting as I glared at her, trying to figure out why in the abyss I had risked my life to rescue her in the first place. “If you weren’t really working with Ayrael, then why didn’t you help us battle her at the docks?”

  “Because I was tied up and didn’t have my weapons,” Valuri said. “She didn’t completely trust me yet. I had to poison you first.”

  “Still, the three of us could have—”

  “The three of us would have ended up dead on the pier,” Valuri interrupted. “You’ve seen that woman fight. She’s a bloody force of nature, and that’s before she’s fed on magic recently.”

  “We should track and pursue her while we can,” Kaseya said. Unlike us, she wasn’t even breathing heavily. Her eyes were focused on the horizon. “Ayrael’s injuries were serious. She could not have gotten far.”

  “She’s already gone,” Valuri said, shaking her head. “And if she isn’t, we still don’t want to find her. Not until we’re a lot better prepared.”

  Kaseya turned. “Ayrael is not invincible.”

  “Are you sure? Look, I appreciate your confidence, but you don’t know what she’s capable of.”

  “She is my sister!”

  “She was your sister,” Valuri corrected. “Now she’s a Senosi Huntress who mastered every single trick the Inquisitrix taught her in just a few months. Once she feeds, she’ll be patched up and back on our trail before sunrise, I promise. We need to get the hell out of here as quickly as possible.”

  Kaseya glared at the other woman for a long moment. “You are afraid of her.”

  “Of course I’m bloody afraid of her! I’ve seen what she can do first-hand.” Valuri snorted and crouched down next to me. “This little ruse was the only way I could get her guard down long enough to escape. Do you really think I set all this up just for fun?”

  “You certainly looked like you were having fun,” I muttered. “Even if you weren’t confident that we could beat her on the docks, we still could have run. She wouldn’t have been able to chase us through the whole city.”

  “I doubt we would have made it that far.” Valuri stared at me for a minute before her lips curled into a lop-sided smirk. “Besides, I owed you a bit of revenge. And it actually was pretty fun to put that ring on you and watch you squirm. Ayrael applauded the idea, and I was reasonably confident I could sabotage it correctly.”

  “Reasonably confident?” I hissed. “You mean you weren’t sure you’d actually disabled it?”

  “Sure enough to take the chance,” she said with a shrug.

  I scoffed. “Unbelievable. You haven’t changed a gods-damned bit.”

  “No, but that’s exactly why you love me.”

  Valuri leaned in and kissed me. I was tempted to throw her off, and I was even more tempted to choke her. But instead I kissed her back, and her tongue swirled together with mine so easily and so comfortably it was like she had never left.

  “We need to go,” she whispered when she pulled away.

  I licked at my lips and glanced past her shoulder to Kaseya. Just like with Silhouette, I reflexively felt guilty for touching another woman in her presence, but the amazon wasn’t even looking at us. She was staring off towards the burning ship, her blue eyes glazed over.

  “We’ll figure out a way to stop Ayrael eventually,” I said. “But Val is right—we should head back to Highwind and regroup while we can.”

  “I will follow where you lead, Maskari,” Kaseya said. “I will never break my vow.”

  She abruptly turned and strode deeper into the forest, her bow drawn and nocked. Valuri cocked a black eyebrow in her direction.

  “Once we’re safe, you really need to tell me the story about your redheaded love slave.”

  “She’s not my…” I sighed. “It’s complicated.”

  “Uh huh,” Valuri murmured, her eyes shifting to my crotch. “When were you planning on taking that off, by the way?”

  I groaned in disgust when I belatedly remembered the metallic band around my cock—and the fact that I was buck naked aside from Valuri’s cloak.

  “Son of a…” I grabbed the ring and channeled a spark of Aetheric energy into my fingers. I didn’t want to burn or electrocute myself, but couldn’t think of any other way to remove the damn thing.

  “Don’t be an idiot—I’ll take care of you,” Valuri said, stretching out her left hand. A pair of long, serrated blades unsheathed from inside her gauntlet and extended beyond her fingertips. Having seen her Senosi “tiger claws” in action many times, I had no interest in allowing them anywhere near my crotch.

  I grabbed her wrist. “I’ll take my chances with magic, thanks. You’ve done enough for one day.”

  “I could do a lot more,” she teased, retracting her claws and touching my wilted shaft with her free hand. “We were so rudely interrupted earlier.”

  I shook my head in wonder as my cock stiffened in her fingers. We had barely escaped death, we were on the run from an insane, nearly unstoppable amazon…and all I could think about was how easily she could tug me to climax again right here and now. I knew she wouldn’t, of course—she just wanted to torment me. Apparently we were going to pick up exactly where we had left off before she had been captured.

  Snickering at my erection, Valuri abruptly removed her hand and gestured deeper into the forest. “Come on. We wouldn’t want your pet to get too far away.”

  I sighed and bit down on my tongue in frustration. This was going to be interesting, to say the least. I doubted there was a single man in history who genuinely wanted his lovers to meet one another. I wasn’t worried about Kaseya and Valuri gossiping behind my back while they discussed my inadequacies, though; I was worried they might actually try to kill one another. Valuri had a singular talent for getting under people’s skin, and Kaseya would be an easy target. They were a match made in the abyss.

  Grimacing, I grabbed the cock ring and blasted it with Aetheric energy. The sparks hurt more than I liked, but the device did eventually fall off. I whispered a silent prayer of thanks to any god that might have been listening, then cursed them all a second later when I remembered that I was cold, wet, and naked. Apparently Valuri wasn’t the only one who enjoyed tormenting me for no discernable reason.

  “Bloody hell,” I murmured, dashing off after the girls as fast as my bare feet could carry me.

  5

  The terrain on the western side of Highwind was far rockier than in the north or east, and trudging through the sparse forest and around the massive, craggy hills would have been annoying even if I had been dry and properly clothed. Considering I was wet and naked, the trip was a bloody nightmare. I sheathed myself in a thin Aetheric barrier, mostly to protect my feet, despite the fact it was a constant—and annoying—drain on my attention.

  Kaseya was as sympathetic to my plight as Valuri was amused by it. My old “friend” snickered or outright giggled every few minutes, and I spent at least half my time fantasizing about my inevitable revenge. Almost every scenario involved some combination of my cock, her ass, and a set of strong amazon hands holding her down in the dirt.

  A few hours later, after we had put several miles between us and the shoreline, I called for us to set up camp. Night had already fallen, and stumbling through the dark forest was as likely to get us lost as anything. We were probably still at least twenty miles away from the city, enough that we wo
uld have to spend most of the next day walking regardless.

  “Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and bump into a merchant caravan tomorrow,” Valuri said when I sat down on a stump and pulled her red cloak as tightly around my body as I could. “Or maybe we’ll find a cabin with a hermit who’ll take pity on you. You just better hope his boots and trousers fit.”

  “We should stay as far off the road as possible,” Kaseya said. “Ayrael is an expert tracker.”

  Valuri grunted. “It was a joke, girl. You do have a concept of humor on that backward island of yours, don’t you?”

  “Yes, though I fail to see what is amusing about our situation. We narrowly escaped with our lives, and Jorem is incredibly uncomfortable.”

  “Oh, poor baby,” Valuri teased. “Maybe his slave should go kiss him and make it better?”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I growled. “Can’t you stop being a cunt for five bloody seconds?”

  “I could, but what would be the point?” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “The way I see it, you left me to suffer for three months. The least I can do is watch and laugh while you stumble naked through the forest for a few days.”

  Kaseya scowled at the other woman. “You are a truly unpleasant individual. I cannot understand why Jorem harbors so much affection for you.”

  “We can’t all be all be tall redheads who bend over on command,” Valuri replied tartly. “Did he even ask for your name before he slapped that collar on you and jammed his cock in your mouth?”

  “Enough,” I said, glancing between them. Kaseya seemed more confused than irritated at this point, though I knew it wouldn’t be long before one transformed into the other. Valuri had been sniping at her all day, and eventually the dam would burst. “Look, it’s late and we’re all exhausted. We should try and get some sleep while we can.”

  Kaseya’s eyes latched onto me, and I swore I could feel her reaching through our bond. “I will sweep the perimeter and ensure we are not disturbed.”

  “You need rest too,” I reminded her. “I doubt your sister gave you a chance to relax on that ship.”