She continued to give him so much pleasure during their mating it made it difficult for him to contain his seed until she wanted it. She pulled his tail not only to stimulate him to mate with her, but throughout the mating as well, massaging it as if deliberately seeking his pleasure. Several times he had thought she would not take him into her body but would keep him as a Consort only. Only the thought that perhaps she was testing him, seeing if he was worthy of studding, and his desire to be all that he could be for her and not to be held in the lower class at a distance from her, gave him the strength to withhold. Yes, he had had to bite his tail the first time, and she had not allowed him that control, demanding that he control himself through strength of will alone. She was demanding, in that way, always testing him, pushing him further, taking more from him, but his wishes were greedy too. He wanted to be inside her. He wanted her to choose his seed out of all. Naturally, she would test him if she was to give him that honour.
Last night she had been particularly creative in her trials of pleasure, teasing his maleness with her mouth! He thought he would die, he thought releasing then would almost have been worth not being a stud, so tempting was it. But the memory of how her warm, wet breeding channel seized his flesh and wrung his seed from him was too sweet, he knew he could not live without it, and he must withhold. And when he did, Goddess! What a reward! She had dragged him down to mount her! Such a thing was... forbidden. Dirty. Illicit to even think of it. It was perverse, reprehensible. His blood heated at the thought and his maleness swelled.
No! Just because Gruth had allowed it once, did not mean she would ever do so again. He must not dishonour her by desiring it. It was enough, more than enough, for him to be mounted in the natural way.
He tried to cool his blood. If they were home, with a tribe, with domiciles already built and food in plenty, yes they could spend days tied in mating, but they were not. Here the food was scarce with little to offer, and they lived in a cave with no furnishings or comforts. When they mated, they did so on hard stone, always with the fear that their captors would find them and lock them in cells again. Gruth was growing thin and weak, slow, even more of her bones showing under her bald skin. His scent was all over her, but she had no pelt to mark him with, except between her thighs. She generated scent enough to soak him when they mated, so he hoped it was enough. He would try to ru b it into the pelt on his chest next time, just in case.
He almost regretted that his priming had come now, when there were no soft, safe places for them to lie on, and no other consorts to bring them food, when Gruth slept longer after every mating. He knew they would have to do better if they were going to survive. He needed to find a more plentiful, reliable source of food, and furnish their cave with soft things. It may not even be safe for them to stay there much longer if they were still being hunted. If they had to move again, Gron did not know where to take them. He knew nothing of this land. He had led them away from the hunters, which meant that now the water they had was thin, and he had neither seen, nor heard, nor smelled any animal in these woods. If they were to survive, they would have to find a place that other life had already thrived, and learn from them. They would have to leave the forest, and he knew not which way to go.
He had a duty to her, he knew that. It was the only thing that made him get up at morning and sleep at night. If he was going to fail her, he would die in the attempt. He was well aware that if they were to starve, she would starve first, and if they were to freeze, she would freeze first. If they were to die, she would die in his arms while he watched, and it was that vision that would make him stand every day no matter how weak he was, and find food for her no matter how hopeless it seemed.
Gruth stirred awake, and he slipped his arm from under her head, springing up to bring her one of the root-plants she had found yesterday. They were bland but tolerable, and to his stomach at least they bought them time to look for more. He had noticed she ate less than he, but then she always had, and perhaps her stomach was slower to digest the alien food. She ate now with no enthusiasm, but she finished most of the root and seemed satisfied.
He looked out at the forest while she ate, but still saw no sign of their pursuers. There were no animal scents on the wind, no calls sounding in the trees. It was as if the forest was not really there. It made Gron suspicious but what could he do? Perhaps if they moved higher, he would be able to see more. That would be where he led them today.
Gruth approached him from behind, running her hand down the fur on his back. He stilled his tail in case she wished to pull on it again and initiate mating, but her hand stopped before reaching it. It flicked involuntarily, perhaps in frustration, perhaps to attract her attention, but Gron moved quickly away out of the cave mouth. If Gruth did not want to initiate mating, then they should begin looking for food. They would need it.
Chapter 20
Ruth followed Gron out of the cave, and as usual, they walked down in the direction of the stream. After they had both drunk from it and washed the cave dust off themselves, Gron then turned them uphill, and began walking purposefully that way. Ruth just followed. She didn’t know anything about surviving in nature so she could do nothing but trust him. As they walked, Gron kept looking over his shoulder, or up at the tops of the trees. She didn’t know what he was doing, but she looked where he looked nonetheless. The roots they had eaten for breakfast kept them going for maybe an hour or two, after which they had to graze on the nuts they could pick up as they went.
Eventually the forest around them changed, one kind of tree giving way to another. Instead of the oak-like trees with massive leaves, or the shorter pine-like ones with the nuts, more and more of a very thin black tree with spines instead of branches could be seen around them. These trees were very tall, so that you almost couldn’t see the top in most cases, but had no leaves or nuts or fruit at all. They looked like the world’s angriest cacti, like an evil witch had cursed them, like they should be guarding Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
It only took ten or fifteen minutes of walking before the spiny trees were growing so thick they couldn’t walk between them. At a loss, Ruth looked around, but she didn’t see anything useful. Whatever this tree was, it had totally dominated the area, choking out anything that lived in its midst. Gron seemed particularly frustrated by being stopped, and he kept looking up at the trees and testing the spines. He gestured for her to stay where she was then, as Ruth watched, Gron seized two of the higher branches, and began to pull himself up into the maze of spines.
Ruth didn’t know what he was doing, and she didn’t like being left alone, but she trusted him. She folded her arms around herself and tried to keep him in sight as he fought his way up, his tail curling around the giant needles to anchor him. She soon lost sight of him, his form broken up by his dark fur among the black spines and dazzling beams of sun.
A minute or two later she heard him coming down, and watched as he dropped the final few feet. He certainly was nimble. She couldn’t tell if he had found whatever he was looking for, but his hands were empty of anything they could eat. He began leading them back the way they came, as the spiny trees made the direction ahead of them impassable.
They rejoined the stream and had a drink and a quick rinse. Gron seemed to be drinking more than usual, and when she looked at him she saw as he reached into the water that he had an angry-looking wound on the inside of his bicep where she hadn’t noticed it before. She quickly seized his arm and pointed at it questioningly, but he gently brushed her off. He couldn’t tell her what had happened, after all, but he didn’t seem worried, so she had to believe that he didn’t want her to worry either. Nevertheless, she grabbed his arm again and he stood still while she examined the injury. There was a small, dark puncture wound in the middle of a dark red scratch that looked inflamed, and thinner red lines were spidering out from it. It did not look good by any means, not to her. He must have been pricked by one of the spines on those damn trees.
Ruth made sure they did not daw
dle on their way back to the cave, which was a good thing because Gron was already swaying on his feet before they got there, and collapsed heavily on the bed of leaves as soon as he could, his breathing laboured. Ruth knelt by his side, her hands fluttering over him, not knowing what to do. On the surface of her mind, she believed this was just a fever, a reaction of some kind and he would be a little out of it for maybe a day or two but she would take care of him and he would be fine. He was still conscious and moving around after all, he seemed lucid. What she didn’t want to think was that this was serious. The wound on his arm had grown, the centre now a worrying dark purple, the dark red lines reaching further out, up under his arm and beginning to crawl up his shoulder. It looked like blood poisoning.
Ruth desperately wondered what she should do. Suck the poison out? Was there even any poison? Would it kill her to do so? Was it too late? She couldn’t even bring him any water. If he was only sick for a day or two, they could probably survive. Any longer than that and she may well run into problems of her own. She knew how to get to the stream, how to get the nuts and the water-roots, but that was it. She couldn’t travel without him, couldn’t climb trees or break them open for that nut-sap inside. She didn’t want him to recover and find her half-dead, and he would need food and water.
She felt his forehead and he definitely had a fever. At a loss for what else to do, she raced outside and gathered as many leaves as she could to make him more comfortable, calling back to him what she was doing so he would know where she was. When she was done, she licked the wound experimentally, returning to her idea of sucking the poison out, and she thought she could taste some foreign bitterness that hadn’t been on his skin before. Shit. She decided she had to try so, lowering her mouth to his arm, she secured her lips around the puncture wound and sucked. He immediately grunted in pain and pushed her off him more roughly than he had ever touched her before, falling loosely back onto the leaves, panting. He was sweating a lot now. She guessed by his failure to regulate his strength around her, that he was starting to lose touch with his surroundings as the fever set in. She didn’t think she could suck the poison out, not enough to help him, because the wound seem to have swollen shut around it, and if it hurt him enough that he tried to fight her off without realising who she was, he could seriously hurt her.
She had nothing for a tourniquet, nothing even to amputate his arm, like they might have done in a film. She didn’t want to believe that she was capable of maiming him in that way, but she would have done it if it saved his life. She crawled round to his head and lifted it into his lap. She stroked his hair and spoke to him, telling him meaningless nonsense about how he would be okay, knowing he didn’t understand it but thinking he might be soothed by her voice nonetheless.
Time passed and Ruth fretted as Gron grew delirious. He thrashed and swung his arms, talking and shouting in his own language, sometimes angry and sometimes desperate. She shushed him and stroked his hair and sobbed. She couldn’t help crying, seeing him like this and worrying that he was going to die. She couldn’t stand to see him in pain, he was too important to her, this sweet face that had protected her and made love to her and carried her through the treetops on his back. She needed him. She needed him to be okay, so she kept repeating that, over and over, realising eventually that she was talking to herself more than to him, but not stopping.
It grew late, and she could feel that her body expected her to be asleep by now, though of course she had no way of telling the time. Ruth couldn’t sleep though, not now, not when she felt he might slip away from her at any second. As long as she was watching him, she felt like she could fight, like what she wanted mattered. If she gave up and slept, it felt like she would be abandoning him, and she couldn’t do that, so she stayed on her knees and rocked over him, holding his head between her palms as his fevered flush drained to frightening pale and his body grew still. He was unconscious now, no longer thrashing or crying out. He was as still as a log, but she kept rocking and murmuring to him as if she was trying to will life back into him. She probably looked insane, like she was the delirious one, mad with grief, but she didn’t care. She had to do something.
The lines from the wound on his arm covered his neck now and were creeping over his jaw, scarily dark against his sickly pallor. She kept stroking her hands over them as if she could simply brush them away, the way he would brush the hair from her face at night. She touched every part of his body that she could reach, scratching her nails into the fur on his chest because she knew he liked that, tracing the healthy veins on his other arm, feeling for the fragile, weakening pulse in his neck.
It was the middle of the night. She had never seen a moon on this planet, but the sky was awash with stars. The forest was deathly quiet, only a thin breeze stirring the large fronds every now and then. The only sound was her relentless whispering over Gron’s still and silent body. She’d stopped paying attention to what she was saying; now it was mostly begging him to stay and praying to God to find them on this alien planet and save him. Did he know he was dying? Had he known that when he was still conscious? She hoped not. She didn’t want him to worry about leaving her alone in his final moments.
Movement at the cave mouth snatched her out her reverie, her face whipping up with a gasp. Three of the little green aliens who had captured her stood just inside the cave, with more outside.
“No...” she groaned, “Oh no, no, no,”
She took in their appearance. They were all wearing silvery jumpsuits with some kind of logo on the chest. They all looked armed, with various belts and holsters strapped irregularly over their bodies. The one on the right was holding what looked like a rifle of some kind, and her panicked eyes picked out knives and handguns. The one in the middle had a short black stick that looked like a cattle-prod, and the one on the left had one of the longer pronged javelins like the aliens at the cell. Their skin was green and pocked, with large eyes and wide mouths. They looked like toads.
Ruth shuffled back but did not take Gron’s head out of her lap, holding out her hand as if to keep them away.
“Get out! Get out of here!” she found herself screaming hysterically. This was a private moment, and if they took her away from Gron and she wasn’t there when he died, she would rip into the little green things with her bare hands and eat their little alien guts for breakfast.
The one in the middle held out its hands in a placating gesture.
“Please,” it said in croaky English. “We’re here to help.”
Chapter 21
“What? How can I understand you?” Ruth managed to get out after a minute of mental flailing. She kept one protective arm across Gron, one still held out to keep the aliens at bay.
“We have calibrated our interpretation interface to your language. It is not perfect, but as you do not have an interpretation implant, this is the best way to communicate with you. We were not sure it would work.” The alien took a tentative step forward as it made this speech.
“Stay the fuck back,” Ruth snarled. “Don’t think for a minute I give a shit about what you have to say. You abducted me from my home and kept me in a cell. If you don’t leave right now, I’m going to beat you into guacamole.”
There was a pause among the aliens, presumably while her threat translated, and she noticed the one with the javelin and the one with the rifle look at each other and adjust their grips on their weapons.
“I’m afraid we cannot leave,” spoke the middle one carefully, and Ruth guessed it must be the leader. It indicated Gron and said, “He is dying, and we must take him back to our ship and heal him. We cannot afford to let him die.”
Ruth felt her chest clench to have it confirmed like that, and she gripped Gron tighter, her knuckles turning white in his fur. They would never take him from her.
“Why? Who is he to you?” she demanded.
“The creature you are holding is a member of an endangered species, a species we have been trying to save from extinction. I can explain more la
ter, but we must act now to preserve his life. His kind cannot afford to lose even a single member. He is too valuable to our efforts to let him die here.” The alien took another step forward and Ruth hesitated.
“Heal him here, in the cave,” she said.
“Our medical facilities are on our ship.”
“What are you going to do with him afterwards? Are you going to let him go?” Ruth almost tried to pull Gron back away from the aliens, but she couldn’t shift his bulk even an inch.
“We will return him to his kind. I can explain everything to you later, but now we must hurry. I know you have been hurt by my kind and you do not trust us, but he will die very soon if you do not let us help him.” The alien almost sounded sincere, or maybe that was an effect of the translator. “You must understand, I am not prepared to lose him because of you. We will take him by force, and we will leave you on this planet to survive or die on your own. We want to keep you two together, but we were not expecting you, and you were never a part of our plans.”
Ruth felt Gron’s weak, erratic heartbeat under her palm. She knew he was dying. Apparently now she had a choice about it. She could give him back to the people who had abducted and imprisoned them. Apparently they wanted to save his life. If she went with them, they would keep them together, and he would survive. If she didn’t agree, they would fight her for him, and she would lose because she was outnumbered and unarmed, and then be left behind to die. She had thought she would rather die free than live in captivity, but she didn’t think she could say the same for Gron. She couldn’t even make that decision. If they went back into the cell, at least they would be together. If he hated her for it, at least he would be alive.
Ruth's Bonded (Ruth & Gron Book 1) Page 11
