by R. Lee Smith
But his star-filled eyes seemed to soften, even if nothing else about him did. “Accepted,” he said, and let her feel his sincerity. “We immortals live too long to carry grudges. Good night, precious. You are always first in my heart.”
She went, forgiven, and tried not to hear the limp smacking of the twitching woman’s hands as they rose and fell against the stone.
* * *
Mid-day already, or mid-night, depending on one’s perspective. Mara walked the halls of the lyceum, trying to think about the Masters who taught there, about what or who might be hidden away in the rooms below the theaters, about Horuseps and his word of honor…about Connie. She couldn’t quite manage to bring any of it into focus. Kazuul wanted her.
This was not an idle thought. His wanting itched in the back of her mind in what he no doubt believed to be a subtle suggestion. She wasn’t sure when he’d planted it (it had surely been subtle enough at its seeding) but she suspected he’d gotten her during the morning meal. At least, she was confident it had not been there when she and Devlin went into the roar and press of the dining hall. In the midst of that noise, a little psychic dart might have easily escaped her notice, although it was several hours before her irritation at this unshakeable fixation caused her to hunt down the source.
A psychic seed, and a much better one than anything she’d ever planted. He’d slid it in into her as easily as his broken spike beneath her pillow, and it was having much the same effect, except that she was awake now, awake and still dreaming his dreams. It had been easy enough to find, despite his obvious skill and power. He’d been apparently unwilling to risk piercing the Panic Room and drawing her notice, and so had hidden the suggestion in the Mindstorm instead. It was a good hiding place, all things considered, but once she’d known to look for it, it was only too obvious where it had to be. No, finding it was easy. Uprooting it was another matter.
Mara sat by the pool in the central cavern of the lyceum for what felt like hours, her body switched off and staring while she circled the damn thing in her mind, trying to pry it out. No good. He’d put it into her as deeply as he himself obviously planned to be once he’d worn her down. She was just going to have to live with it until it died. None of hers had ever lasted longer than ten or twelve hours. His, Christ, who knew?
In the meantime, he wanted her. As with his ‘subtle’ assault of the previous night, he bombarded her with half-grasped images of lust and violence. His breath on her neck, his claws tearing at her hips, the phantom flood of his seed filling her—even awareness of the interloping suggestion could not counteract its effects. Unceasingly throughout the day, he made his wordless demand and succeeded, not so much in making her want him, but at least in making her want someone.
She wandered in and out of classrooms in a daze of distraction, infuriated each time she caught herself merely going through the motions of the search. She sensed, or thought she sensed, a kind of sly amusement in the Masters she interrupted at lessons, which only made her temper flare dangerously close to the edge of her control.
Kazuul. He had made her the butt of some joke and he would not be satisfied until the whole mountain laughed. Well, Mara had never been renowned for her good sense of humor, but everyone who knew her knew better than to cross her. By God, he was going to learn too.
But not until this suggestion died away. Mara worked her way to a bare stretch of wall and leaned against it, one hand rubbing restlessly at her stomach, which was not what she wanted rubbed. She shut her eyes and scoured the Mindstorm with her stare, seeing herself behind the idiot flashes of color and sound cast off by the students of the Scholomance—herself in ecstasy beneath Kazuul.
“Having troubles?”
A Master’s voice. Not the dark silk of Horuseps or the rolling thunder of hated Kazuul, but the cracked granite of Malavan. He came out of the shadows in his hunched, stalking way, his eyes level as a cat’s, furious. Mara started walking; he cut across her path. She turned around; he lunged and drove the tip of one long claw through her robe and into the rock, striking sparks to prick and burn at her bare feet.
She was caught and she knew it, but with Kazuul’s fantasies eating up her mind, she wasn’t capable of feeling trapped by him. She looked at him as he bared his black teeth at her and felt only a throbbing knot of impatience.
He heaved himself upright, bracing his weight on the points of his claws, so as to bring his hot eyes on a level with hers. “You have robbed me of my harem,” he growled, his breath burning on her face and stinking of shadows and blood.
Mara said nothing.
The demon grunted through his teeth, twitching the hem of her robe aside to appraise her feet. “Perhaps I should take you to replace them.”
Even Kazuul’s relentless carnal drumming could not make this a pleasant prospect, but Mara did not flinch.
Malavan’s eyes narrowed. The tips of the fleshy tendrils he grew for hair began to pulse red. “On your knees.”
So she knelt, feeling neither dread nor rebellion, but only a tense frustration which she didn’t bother to disguise from him. In her experience, the best and most bloodless way of dealing with a bully was to make him feel insignificant. And because she knew Malavan was not a strong psychic, she did not merely place her impatience on display for him, but drove it into whatever passed for his subconscious, stabbing at him repeatedly with needles of her annoyance and disdain.
It almost worked. She could sense his determination curdling the longer he held her stare. In another minute, half that maybe, he might have dropped and slunk away, but the mind can be an unpredictable target, especially when one cannot clearly see what one is stabbing. One of her needles sank in too close to the surface, and suddenly Malavan felt a bilious surge of disembodied humiliation. It found an anchor in Mara’s projected contempt and turned instantly to fury and the need to see her suffer for looking on him in his shame.
He reared, blowing a reptilian sort of roar down at her in hateful defiance, and spread his thighs. He had no obvious genitals, but as she withdrew from his mind, a nearly imperceptible crease low on his abdomen buckled outward, releasing a pungent wash of musk first and then his red, raw-looking phallus, sharply-tapered and gnarled by veins. The heat of it against her face was a furnace; the stench, bestial and unclean. Mara looked up between the bone blades of his claws, silently daring him to make his next command.
He didn’t give it, but he did think about it. Not because he wanted it—he had no real sexual urge at the moment, in spite of the lie proclaimed by his jutting cock—but because he wanted to punish her. She had taken away his Pretty One, and then Horuseps had come for the others as well: his Sleeper, his Song Bird, even his Little Laugh. (The flickering images that accompanied these nomenclatures were too awful to hold and examine for detail, but worst of all was Little Laugh, whose screaming giggles were born out of some shred of mad awareness.) Now she dared to face him with disdain, with superior sufferance, with contempt for one of the Lesser Tribes, and he wanted to cut that haughty shine from her and replace it with humiliation. He wanted to drag her out before human eyes and climb her naked back and take his revenge with every whimpering grunt that escaped her lips.
Malavan’s thighs flexed. The tip of his angry cock twitched and dripped pale fluid onto the floor between Mara’s knees. He leaned over her, his fleshy hair burning red up to his skull now, and more color pulsing at his throat. “Even the mighty Kazuul,” he snarled, dripping drool onto her robe, “cannot know everything. And when he has you at last, precious, he’ll have my leavings.”
And the next words would have been his command, she could feel it pounding in his crude mind, along with every way in which he meant to have her before he left her for the other students to make use of, but he never got to say them.
“Hold, brother!” boomed out a good-natured voice. “Hold and give me welcome!”
Malavan yanked one claw and slammed it down behind Mara, covering her in his heat and stink. He hissed, his breath r
attling in his lungs, through his yellow teeth, onto Mara’s back.
“No more of that,” the other said, his cheer heavily tempered by an ominous note of warning. “Thou art alone at a table set for plenty and I will be fed. Takest thou whichever end, and I shall have the other. My rod hath not been wetted since the moon showed her fullest f—”
A sharp intake of breath, a moment’s stillness, and then Mara was wrenched back by a clawed hand pulling at her hair. She winced up into a bone-studded, astonished face, and then was yanked fully off the ground and swung around behind the newcomer’s muscular thigh by her hair alone.
“Art thou mad?” this demon demanded, dragging Mara with him as he backed up. “Dost thou not know who thou wouldst cross with this act?”
Malavan’s mouth peeled back on a sullen sneer.
The stranger uttered a long, low, unamused laugh. “And who thou art crossing now?” Suddenly, he shoved Mara to the floor and stepped on her, pressing her painfully flat as he lunged forward to strike his chest in challenge. “Who art thou to show me thy sparking eyes? Drop, worm, else I drop thee, and whet my cock with the blood of Malavanon!”
Malavan pulled his claws and dropped into a surly crouch, his gaze averted and his lips tight together. There was no satisfaction in the sight, not with the demon’s foot crushing at her from above. Mara groped behind her, caught his spurred ankle, and tried in vain to shift him as grey light began to explode before her eyes.
“On thy way, crawling thing. If next I spy thee so, I’ll pull thy limbs and send thee forth on thy belly as the worm thou art.” But he stepped back and dragged a gasping Mara roughly up onto her feet. “Art injured?” he asked gruffly, glaring after Malavan’s retreat.
“No,” she managed.
“Art violated?”
“What? No!”
He grunted and released her, still without looking at her. “To thy cell then, or to study. Wander not these unlit halls.” He gave her a shove to start her going and stalked off in the opposite direction, snarling under his breath in an inhuman tongue.
Dost thou not know who thou wouldst cross…
Mara tipped her head back, staring up as though she could see through layers of rock to the theater that crowned them all. Kazuul’s desires rang even more insistently through her blood, amplified by her thoughts of him, for as sure as she was standing here and not bent under Malavan’s pumping weight, Kazuul’s mark on her had saved her.
“Wait!” she shouted, and the demon, now merely a dark blur deep in the shadowed tunnel, halted. He did not turn to face her. She thought he drew his hands up into fists, but couldn’t be sure. Even when she quickly moved to catch up to him, he did not look at her. “Who are you?” she asked.
The muscles of his bone-studded back tightened. “A creature not to be toyed with.”
“I’m not. I only want to know…” But where to go with this, she wondered, circling behind him. And how hard to push? “…who to thank,” she finished.
He grunted sourly. “I need no reward for that I maltreat one of his low breed.”
“You were willing enough to share his spoils,” Mara pointed out. And when he continued to stand unmoving in the tunnel, she quietly added, “But you don’t need to share now.”
His clawed hands opened and closed once, sinews cracking like old leather.
This wasn’t going very well. Mara knew she was no good at flirting, but she hadn’t realized she could be this bad. This demon clearly knew more than she did about Kazuul’s game and how it concerned her, and she was willing to use her body to get his answers (more than merely willing; perhaps only because he was of Kazuul’s same breed, but with that damned suggestion still gnawing through her every subaudible sense, she could even find him desirable). But he wouldn’t look at her, and he kept his anger like a wall between them, unbreachable.
She touched him, a light and sensual pass of her hand down his back, parallel to the row of spikes accentuating his spine. Her intent had been to interlay a suggestion of her own with this contact—not enough to encourage him to fall on her right here in the hall, but just to soften him up a little, lower his defenses, ease her way into his well-fortified mind. She never had the chance.
The demon swung and shoved her away, hard. Her back hit the stone wall of the tunnel before she even knew her feet had left the ground, but he caught her before she could fall. She could see his eyes burning in the darkness, steady even as her head swam. His face—Kazuul’s face…for a moment, she didn’t know where she was or with who. Had she gone to him after all? Or had she just concocted this…this hallucination to protect herself from his relentless subliminal pursuit, as an oyster makes pearls out of sand? But no, Kazuul’s eyes were green, the sickly green of a Halloween goblin-mask, and these eyes were yellow.
“Do not touch me,” he said, but said it softly, as a lover might. His eyes—those gleaming, furious flames—dimmed and swelled as he moved nearer. “Well do I know the treachery hidden in thine innocent hand. Do not…” His breath puffed on her lips. “…dare to touch me.”
Kazuul or not? Dream or reality? Whose claws were these digging at her shoulders until the sting of blood drew itself down her arms? Whose mouth came grudgingly to hers when she pressed her hands behind his neck and pulled? Whose thigh insinuated itself between hers and pushed her easily up along the wall, all her weight riding on him?
“Thou art fruit of the forbidden vine,” he breathed, moving his thigh slowly up and down. “Yet this we sons of the Second-born have alike to the sons of Adam: We must bite what is put to our lips.”
And he did, his sharp teeth scoring over her swollen lips, nudging her chin up, and coming together with orgasmic bliss on her jaw, just beneath her ear. She felt herself pierced there, as rapturously as she could be pierced with his cock, and ground her hips to brilliant climax there on his thigh. She could feel his erection like a brand against her body and it would take only the quick shift of her clothes and his and he could have her—right here, right up against this wall, with a hundred students ready to spill out of their lessons to watch them—but one thought rose over the candescence of even this desire.
“Who said I was forbidden?” Mara asked, clinging resolutely to her fading sense of purpose. Their minds were weirdly joined, though separate. She could see the carnal circus of Kazuul’s suggestion surrounding both of them. “And why?”
He heard her, but he heard it as a warning.
He drew back, his passion melting once more into anger. He looked at her, wanting her so deeply that it pulsed in him nearly as hatred. Then he let her go and stepped well away. “To thy cell,” he said. “I forbid thee lessons and order thee to thy cell until the bells ring for second meal. I order thee.”
Mara, dazed, oriented herself through a fog of his desire, and hers, and Kazuul’s over all, and started walking. She could feel him watching her, feel him wanting her, and before the rock curved and cut him out of her mind, she felt/saw/heard him throw back his head and roar—a terrible, hungry and unholy sound that ended as he seized the first human stupid enough to come creeping out seeking the source and thrust himself inside it.
But she went back to her cell alone.
* * *
Time alone in her cell was just what she needed, and if she’d had her head on straight, she’d have known it at the start. Here, with thick walls on every side, Kazuul could not slip in at the edge of her tangled perceptions to renew his suggestion, and without his maintenance, it finally began to die. As her head cleared, her temper receded under the iron grip of her will. She had to look at the thing practically: Yes, he’d invaded her, but he didn’t get what he wanted out of it, and even better, he hadn’t been able to plant his suggestion without her noticing. She may not be the more powerful telepath, but she did seem to be more powerful than he knew and that could only be in her favor.
What did he want with her, really? She supposed it could just be sex, although she doubted it. He had plenty of women here to choose from
if that was the case. On the other hand, it could be as simple a thing as the male ego, stoked to demonic fervency: No woman he desired, however idly, would be allowed to refuse him. If that were so, her best interests would be served by giving in, preventing further distractions of this sort and entrenching herself in his favor. But if he did have some ulterior motive after all, it behooved her to keep him dangling, except that dangling a demon was apt to be a dangerous game.
If only she knew which way to play.
The oil-slick of Horuseps’s mind bubbled up into the psychic silence, breaking Mara from her thoughts. She got up, stretched out her stiff legs, and opened her cell door, catching the demon with his hand raised, presumably to tap at the lockplate, since knocking on a solid stone door would be almost silent. She also caught a faint look of consternation in his eyes, as if being caught with his hand up—being anticipated—were very vaguely embarrassing to him.
“Do you have someone else to show me?” Mara asked, thinking this must be it, another episode to follow last night’s inspection of Pretty Doll. She only hoped it wasn’t another of Malavan’s harem. She didn’t think she could handle having to hear Little Laugh in person; hearing her through the demon’s mind had been awful enough.
“I regret to say, or perhaps I should be pleased to say, that I have been able to account for them all thus far, but be of some hope. My search is not yet done.” After a moment, Horuseps rested his hand on his shoulder. “Come to dinner,” he said.
“What, now? The bells haven’t rung.”
The bells rang.
“Come to dinner,” Horuseps said again, when Mara finally looked at him after giving the rock above her a scathing stare.
“No,” she said. “And you can tell Kazuul for me that if he wants to replant his adolescent suggestion, he can come do it in person instead of shooting me in the back in a crowded room like the consummate coward that he is.”
Horuseps twitched his long eyebrows almost straight out, but smiled. “I’ll tell him no such thing. I like my innards where they are. And he didn’t send me.”
