by Dawn Steele
“Is she out?” his father said.
“Yes,” Kyle said shortly.
“Way to go, bro,” Caleb said. “She’s quite the catch. I wouldn’t mind fucking her myself if she weren’t meant for – ”
“Shut up!” Kyle said fiercely. If he wasn’t holding Jessica, he would have launched at his brother.
“Enough, both of you,” their father admonished. “Kyle, bring her to the sanctum.”
Kyle hefted the limp Jessica in his arms. She was quite a weight, but he had a strength that belied his lean frame. His chest quailed at how helpless she was. Her head lolled back upon her neck and her long dark hair dangled from her scalp. But she was still so beautiful to him.
Caleb was observing him shrewdly and Kyle quickly averted his gaze from Jessica’ face.
“Come,” Jericho said.
The brothers followed him to the sanctum, which was a handsome oak-paneled study surrounded by shelves and shelves of books, some of which were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. All this . . . to be his and his brother’s one day. There was a central map table in the room. Jericho swept it aside.
“Put her down.”
Kyle obeyed and braced himself for what must happen next. He hated this part. He had been party to it since he was eighteen, and he had always thought the act extremely demeaning to the victim. But it was a tradition that had to be followed like everything else and it was up to the Alpha of the clan to perform it.
He laid Jessica as gently as he could on the table. She was completely out. He hoped she wouldn’t remember a thing.
“Take off her underwear,” his father instructed him.
Kyle flushed. This was too intimate and intrusive. Jessica was a modest girl who trusted him and liked him well enough to share her body with him, and now he was betraying her trust in this shameful manner. But he had no choice.
Or had he?
“What’re you waiting for, brother?” Caleb said.s
Jericho eyed Kyle.
“Is anything wrong, son?” he inquired in a mild tone, and Kyle could sense the underlying suspicion in it.
With his family playing watchful hawks and with his brother ready to pour fuel on the fire of his unease, Kyle couldn’t very well admit that something was wrong.
He composed himself and said nonchalantly, “Nothing’s wrong.”
Jessica lay there, so vulnerable and completely at their mercy. Feeling as though he was about to commit an act of desecration, Kyle lifted her skirt and hiked it above her waist. She wore sweet white cotton panties. Her dark pubic thatch could be seen through the hazy material. Beneath it lay the pussy he had worshiped in the shower yesterday with his deftly flickering fingers.
He took a deep breath, aware of his brother’s cunning eyes on him, and pulled down her panties. Her glorious pussy was revealed as he shimmied the cotton scrap down her legs. He slid them off her heels and reverently folded them and put them on an armchair.
“Have you taken your liberties with her yet, brother?” Caleb inquired.
“No,” Kyle replied shortly. What he and Jessica did was none of anyone else’s business.
Caleb smiled. “Then you wouldn’t be averse to me taking a few liberties.”
He moved towards Jessica. Before Kyle could stop him, Caleb stubbed his fingers into Jessica’s snugly folded pussy leaves.
“So soft,” he said hungrily.
“Damn you!” Kyle launched at Caleb, who registered surprise. He pulled his brother off Jessica’s helpless body and wrestled him to the floor.
All over his body, the need for change took charge and he felt his body transforming. His torso and limbs lengthened and thickened, ripping his clothes and shredding them into ribbons with sharp k-r-a-a-a-c-ks. Caleb responded by transforming himself.
“Stop it!” Their father’s voice was stentorian.
The two brothers were beyond care. Both of them were in their towering bear forms now. They launched their hulking bodies at each other, clubbing each other, trying to get the advantage. Kyle was the bigger of the two but Caleb was slick and wiry. They crashed into the shelves and a dozen priceless tomes fell to the floor.
Kyle drew back his paw and struck his brother in the muzzle repeatedly. His brother retaliated by swiping back at every part of him he could get his paws on. Kyle kicked out and cuffed his brother. So ferocious were his pummels and roars that he failed to register the huge dark shadow behind him.
Jericho, the Alpha, let out a mighty bellow. The glass on the windows shook. The huge great black bear which was his father seized Kyle and threw him off his brother and against the wall.
“Cease this!” the black bear thundered.
Kyle crashed against a low table. The force juddered the entire wall and the plaster cracked. Oil paintings commissioned specially for the study splintered off their hooks and fell onto the floor. Kyle barely felt any pain.
He sprang to his feet, but his father was there with a right hook which caught him on the jaw.
“Stay down.”
“Not until he apologizes.”
“You dare defy me?”
Kyle growled. But defying his father was beyond him. His father was far stronger. One day, he would be as strong as Jericho, if not stronger, but today was not the day. Still, he was incensed enough to want to fight his brother again. Caleb was climbing to his feet and spitting fur out of his mouth, a very human gesture.
The door of the study swung open. Two of his cousins, Abel and Mira, were in their bear forms as they raced in. They immediately saw what happened.
“Seize him,” Jericho thundered, pointing at Kyle. “He has compromised the Gathering. He cannot be trusted to see this through. Lock him in the north tower until I decide what to do with him.”
“No!” Kyle roared.
His cousins charged him. Kyle decided to go for broke. He fought back, clubbing and clawing and biting. Fur flew and massive paws swiped faces, gouged eyes. More werebears flooded the now crowded study. It finally took five of his cousins to bring Kyle down.
He didn’t want to transform, but they held him down. His limbs flailed and he fought them with every ounce of his strength. His father, now in naked human form, appeared in between them with a large hypodermic syringe in his hand. It was filled with a clear liquid which Kyle knew to be a tranquilizer.
The needle jabbed him.
“Don’t hurt her,” Kyle managed to gasp before his veins burned with the overdose. Then his vision turned cloudy and his world went dark.
His last sight was that of his father’s grim visage, which clearly said: You are not worthy to be my successor. Or even my son.
WAKING
Kyle woke up naked and with a splitting headache. He took in his surroundings. He was on the cold stone floor in what was obviously the north tower of the Enclave.
The towers were specifically built to contain werebears and other enhanced were-folk, which might or might not be prisoners of the clan. The towers’ walls were very sturdy, and he was in a cell fronted by a titanium-reinforced grate which could keep an elephant in. He had been here before, of course, but on the other side of the grate.
Now his status was obvious. He was his father’s prisoner. A fallen werebear once poised to be the Alpha, successor to his father. Now he couldn’t be trusted by any of his clan members because he couldn’t rein in his emotions where the human girl was concerned.
It was as his father said. He had been ‘compromised’.
He wondered what had happened to Jessica. Everything was going wrong now. Nothing was going by rote.
He remembered what happened at the last Gathering which occurred one year ago.
His father had selected the virgin, a nineteen-year-old college freshman named Alison Korin from the website. Jericho used his charm to lure them in. He was still a very handsome man, and many college girls were smitten, especially when they were wined and dined with great fanfare. It was usually a girl’s fantasy to be courted by a rich man, and the
y were willing to make concessions about his age.
The search for a virgin could not start too early, because there was the chance the girl might get to know the hunter too well and start dropping too many hints about who he was. And many girls who started as virgins did not stay virgins, which made it doubly difficult. The search could not start too late either for obvious reasons.
So the hunt had to start at the right moment. Not too early, not too late, but just right, like the story of Goldilocks and her three bears. Only here, there were a whole lot more bears involved. A hell of a lot more bears.
Kyle went to the grate and tested it. The metal was forged in a crisscross and everything was controlled by a computer code. Even if he shifted to his bear form, he would not be able to destroy the grate by sheer physical force.
He needed to find a way out.
Jessica’s life was at stake.
And possibly his own, if Caleb had his way.
WAKING PART TWO
Jessica awoke on a very plush, comfortable bed. Her head felt like a lead ball, but the mattress was so spacious and accommodating that she never wanted to get up. She had only read about beds like these, costing thousands and thousands of dollars. These beds anticipated your every movement and molded themselves to fit around your body so that you’d get the best rest possible.
She opened her eyes groggily. She was in a bedroom. A mauve frilly canopy tented her four-poster bed. She looked down at herself. She was still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, but it was morning now. The sunshine streamed through the windows and birds twittered outside. The windows were protected by a patterned iron grill which threw pretty floral shadows onto the bedspread.
Where was she again?
Ah, yes. The dinner party. Meeting Jericho. All in all, a charming, enjoyable affair. Jericho had made her feel so much at ease. There was tension between the two brothers, yes. But she thought that was nothing more than normal sibling rivalry.
But she had classes! She couldn’t afford to miss too many of them. She was on a scholarship and they didn’t take kindly to that.
She got up. Her mouth felt grimy. She padded to the attached bathroom to wash it out. There was a toothbrush and toothpaste there. Jessica brushed her teeth and made herself presentable. She wondered where Kyle was.
Once she was ready to go out into the world, she went to the door. To her surprise, the knob would not budge.
She tried it again, thinking something had jammed. But the door still wouldn’t open. No amount of pushing and shoving would move it.
Where was her purse with her cellphone? She could call Kyle and tell him she had been locked in by mistake. But her purse was nowhere to be seen. She searched for it – on the bed, in the drawers, under the bed, in the closets. Her unease was mounting.
It was in one of the closets that she found something which struck terror in her heart.
THE VIRGIN
The specifications were for the virgin to be around eighteen to twenty, according to the Elders. Who made up those stupid rules anyway? Kyle wondered.
He remembered the passage in the old language, like a canto out of The Divine Comedy.
A virgin ripe and plump,
A tender morsel thus,
Past eighteen years of age and not exceeding a score,
Warm of flesh and big of bone,
And step must she must across the Portal
Of the Mighty Enclave,
Of her own will, unfettered,
And fed alive to the Slumbering Beast,
Or dire tidings will befall.
As a child, Kyle had only heard stories about the Slumbering Beast.
“It has horns like a stag and it carries the weight of the world on its shoulders,” his grandmother would say to scare them into behaving. “It has teeth like a shark’s and it crunches upon the bones of children.”
“The Beast is very real,” Jericho would intone solemnly. “And we, the Atreides, have a very important task to contain him. You will understand how when you are older.”
“Is the Beast the devil?” Kyle whispered, truly frightened. At that time, he had been a lot closer to Caleb.
“No one really knows, son. Perhaps it is older than the devil himself, and what is the devil after all but a creation of religion and myth? All we know is that he must be appeased, and appease him we shall.”
No one had ever seen the Beast either, to Kyle’s knowledge. Except for, as the rumors went, his mother. And she had gone stark, raving mad before she killed herself.
He eyed the grate desperately. Surely there must be a way out of here.
THE NECKLACE
Jessica reached inside the closet, which was divided into three shelves. The closet was empty but for an assortment of clothes and a lapis lazuli necklace in green, bronze and purple.
She remembered this necklace. It was on the neck of Emily Watson, the plus-sized teenager who disappeared and was never found again.
Her premonition told her that she was in serious trouble.
But what did that mean? What about Kyle? Was he a party to all this?
With a sinking dread, she realized that none of it had been real. Who was she trying to kid? Why else would a phenomenally handsome young man with a billionaire father be interested in her otherwise?
Lyla had a right to be suspicious. After all, billionaires and their sons could have their kinks like everyone else.
But oh, Kyle . . . Kyle!
She loved him. No, she corrected herself, had loved him. Why did he do this to her? Was everything he said to her all a lie then?
Within her chest, a visceral pain spasmed. She almost gasped out loud at its intensity. The pain expanded, and she sank to her knees. Her eyes blurred with tears. She didn’t know which was worse – Kyle’s betrayal or the fact that her short life might be terminated prematurely.
She ran to the window. The iron grill prevented her from throwing herself out of it.
She was trapped.
ALISON KORIN
Kyle clung to the grate, testing it for deficiencies.
There were none.
They had not given him any clothes. The keeper of the north tower was a kinsman named Claude. He was known to be unusually cruel to his prisoners, who were usually other werefolk or humans unfortunate enough to be caught in the web of the wearbears.
But Kyle was an Atreides, and Claude would do well to tread carefully where he was concerned. The tide of favor could swing at any moment.
“Claude?” Kyle called. When there was no answer, he banged the grate. “Claude? I know you’re out there! I need to talk to you.”
He listened. There were no sounds in the entire north tower. He was alone. Maybe Claude had gone on a cigarette break. Or maybe everyone was preparing for the Gathering.
Oh yes, the last Gathering. The memories came tumbling into his head, as vivid as they had happened yesterday.
*
Alison Korin had entered the Enclave out of her own free will, invited to dinner by Jericho. Kyle sat there at the dining table with his brother in the exact same positions – to his father’s right and left. The triumvirate had been formed, the ceremony begun.
Alison Korin had been loquacious. She wasn’t as pretty as Jessica, or as humble and sweet. Kyle played the part of the elder son, making polite dinner conversation and asking questions to show how interested he was in their guest. Caleb had been his usual self – charming, boyish, sometimes sarcastic. Sarcasm was bred in his bones.
Alison did not suspect a thing. She drank out of the goblet like a good little girl.
Tick tock tick tock.
They retreated to the family room for coffee, and Alison fell asleep on the couch, as expected.
“Bring her to the sanctum,” Jericho intoned.
Kyle had not felt any connection to Alison. He didn’t know her, didn’t find her that interesting or beguiling as a person. He didn’t feel anything for her. In his mind, he had compartmentalized her as
THE
SACRIFICE
and it wasn’t good to get too involved with sacrifices.
He hadn’t realized then he would be breaking the rule exactly one year later.
Caleb carried Alison to the map table in the sanctum.
“Spread her legs,” Jericho said, gloving up.
“With pleasure,” Caleb said.
Kyle watched, emotionless, as his brother pushed Alison’s skirt up and pulled down her panties. Caleb arranged her legs so that they were bent at the knees and her pussy was well displayed. It was a very demeaning position, akin to a gynecological examination without stirrups.
Jericho’s hands were covered with surgical gloves. He opened a vaginal examination kit wrapped in green cloth. Kyle knew that he had to learn to do this one day. Jericho smeared a small duck-billed speculum with gel. Carefully, he inserted the tip into Alison’s pussy hole. This was the most difficult part because he could not afford to tear her hymen.
Once the speculum was in, he opened it up. He then took up a torch and shone it into the opening.
“Observe,” he instructed his sons.
They dutifully crowded around him like medical students.
“Her hymen is still intact. She is a virgin.”
Kyle noted the slit-like opening called the ‘os’ in the hymen, which was unimpeded. Non-virgins would have a much larger ‘torn’ opening.
“She’s a candidate then,” Caleb said eagerly. He was too bloodthirsty, Kyle thought.
“Yes.” Jericho withdrew the speculum and snapped off his gloves.
They let Alison sleep off the effects of the drug. When she awoke in the morning, she had no recollection of what happened.
