Savage: an Adult Dystopian Paranormal Romance: Sector Seven (The Othala Witch Collection)

by Conner Kressley

  Sleep came quicker than I’d thought it would. Even with the way my bones were aching for relief and my eyes were heavy with drowsiness, I didn’t imagine I’d pass out the instant my head hit that lumpy cotton pillow.

  I did, though, and what happened next changed everything.

  When visions come to me in my dreams, they feel more real than my waking life. It’s hard for me to tell at first whether I’m awake or not, whether any of it is real or not. I still can’t ever be sure how reliable the visions are. I’ve seen things in dreams that never came to pass, just as I’ve seen things that happened the very next morning or while I was sleeping that very night.

  But this vision, the vision I got on my first night in the Outpost, was unlike any I had ever had before.

  I was lying on a bed, a different bed than I had fallen asleep on. This one was softer, larger, and lower to the ground. My surroundings were bright:; stone walls lit by enough glowing torches to send shadows dancing around me like ghosts in the distance.

  My entire body was shaking, my heart was racing, and my skin was slick with sweat. My eyes gained focus, adjusting to my new surroundings quicker than my mind had. Wherever I was, it was a place I had never been before. Still, something inside of me felt at home, felt at peace.

  And then he entered.

  A tall man with tanned skin and long black hair that flowed down his back was standing before me, lingering in the doorway and swallowing me up with his piercing blue eyes.

  He was completely naked save for a brown loincloth covering his midsection. His taut, firm chest and abdomen were glistening with sweat. His face, as gorgeous a sight as I had ever beheld, was striped with what looked like red paint over his eyes.

  My heart skipped a beat ridiculously as he walked closer to me, his body moving as fluidly as water.

  “You are as bright as the sun, my love,” the man said, and his voice was a song I had never realized I had been hearing my entire life. “As bright as the stars, my Starla.”

  Again, my heart skipped a beat. He’d said my name. He was speaking to me, speaking about me.

  Visions about myself were rare, and visions like this were nonexistent. There were no horrible sights, no impending doom or horrific catastrophe. This was good. This was sweet. This was amazing.

  “Come closer,” I heard myself—the me in the vision, anyway—purr at the man. He grinned, bright white teeth against tanned skin. His muscles rippled as he settled over the bed.

  I had never been this close to a man this nearly naked. In fact, I had never been alone with a man I wasn’t related to.

  In a way, I still wasn’t. This hadn’t happened yet, if it was going to happen at all. Still, it felt real. It felt realer than real. And I was definitely okay with that.

  My chest tightened as he looked down at me, my breaths quicker and much more shallow. He was big, broad and well-muscled, and not an inch of him went to waste. With arms corded in muscle and hands that I somehow knew were deft and capable even in this state, he was a true vision.

  Which made sense, given that I was living a vision at the moment.

  As my eyes drank him in, I suddenly realized that that small brown stretch of cloth was the only thing separating me from the fullness of his body and, though I didn’t know him, though I had never seen him before this very moment, something carnal deep inside of me wanted to eliminate that separation.

  I found myself leaning forward.

  “Asis,” I said, swallowing hard. The name felt familiar as it fell from my lips, like a name I’d said before, like a name I’d come to love and rely on. “The world is on fire. You know that. Is it really okay for us to be happy at a time like this?”

  He leaned forward, and my heart leapt as I caught his scent: the musk of sweat, and the slightest hint of something sweet.

  “My love,” he said, his eyes possessing me with their brightness and fervor. “The world has always been on fire, since its very inception. It is only for the happy that it keeps itself from burning away.” He practically lunged forward, wrapping me with his strong arms and pushing me back down against the bed.

  I fell backward happily and without a fight. He pressed salty and welcoming lips against mine. The warmth of him settled over me, and I felt my body rise in response.

  All the kisses I had ever shared in my waking life had been chaste, the product of curious children or too-polite courters. They had never broached my surface. This was something different. This kiss was deep and real. In one swoop, it pushed past my paltry defenses and left me a shuddering mess on the mattress, shaking and desperate for more.

  These reactions were nothing I was used to. I had never experienced my nipples hardening with excitement before. I had never felt my legs part as if of their own will as he pressed himself closer to me. I had never experienced such an ache for release or such a true and honest connection.

  The me in the vision knew this man. She was comfortable with him. She loved him. I knew that as well as I knew my own name. Still, something about it seemed crazy. The red paint across his eyes, the scant way he was dressed, the caves with their abundant light—they all told me one thing. This man was a Savage. He was my sworn enemy, one of the people I had given up the rest of my everyday life for the chance to fight. And here I was, definitely not fighting him.

  I couldn’t imagine a world where I would allow that to happen. It seemed as fictional to me as the stories my mother used to tell me as a child, stories of a world before the fall, without Regents and Sectors, stories of a world without Ravagers or Savages or walls to keep us all apart and safe.

  It was a fairy tale, but nothing in my life had ever felt more real.

  I gasped as he removed his loincloth and I felt the proof of his arousal against my leg. An inevitable moan escaped my lips, and he grunted in response.

  My feet came together as I clenched my legs and pulled him nearer to me. I wanted him inside of me. I wanted to know how it would feel to have him closer to me than any man had ever been, and I wanted it right now.

  Unfortunately, the me in the vision had other ideas.

  “Stop,” she said, pushing him backward.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as he dutifully obeyed her command.

  I found myself sitting upright, my heart still racing and my body still aching for his touch.

  “I’m sorry. It’s not you;, it’s just–”

  “You don’t have to apologize, my love,” he answered as he stood and wrapped the cloth back over the lower part of his body. “The events of the last few days would have shaken anyone. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for the cracks to start showing.”

  He walked toward me and took my face in his nimble hands, hands that brushed fresh tears from my cheeks. “But know this, my love. The world will not always be so harsh, and the danger you’ve found yourself in will be beaten back. I promise you, or I promise to die trying.” He leaned down, kneeling in front of me so that we were face to face. “And you will be happy again, love. We will be happy together, and I will avenge his murder, Starla. It’s what your father would have wanted.”

  Chapter 5

  I woke up quickly, my body pouring the same sweat that I’d experienced in the dream. None of that mattered, though. For all the titillating details this particular vision had to offer, my mind could only rest on one of them.

  And it had nothing to do with rippling muscles or tight stomachs, or faces that were literally the stuff of dreams. No, I couldn’t afford to think about the tidal wave of attraction and love that had swept through me for the majority of my glimpse into a prospective future, because the only thing that mattered about that dream, the only thing that mattered in the whole of the world as far as I was concerned, were the last words that Savage sex god had spoken before I was pulled back to the land of the conscious.

  It’s what your father would have wanted.

  The words cut through me like a knife and stole any possible rest from what was left of the night. Telling
me that something was what my father would have wanted implied that he couldn’t actively want anything, that he—like Chester, if my visions were to be believed—was dead. And that wasn’t something I was willing to entertain anytime soon.

  Since the death of my mother, my father was all I had in the world. Leaving him was the hardest thing I’d ever done, the hardest thing I would ever do. No wound inflicted by a Savage or a Ravager could ever cut me deeper than the look on his face the night he’d realized I would be leaving him.

  If there was even the smallest of chances that my vision might come to pass, that my father would be taken from me as cruelly and needlessly as my mother had been, then I had to do everything in my power to stop it.

  My powers had never been of much use to me. They were unreliable echoes in my head that did nothing more than weigh me down with questions I would never be able to answer. Maybe this would be the exception, though. Maybe, for once in my life, the ability my mother had passed down to me would serve as something more than a troubling nuisance. Maybe I could use it to save my father, and, if fate was kinder than I’d ever thought it might be, perhaps I’d find something else as well, something like the sensation I’d had last night.

  And that was why I was here now, pacing out in front of the men’s facility, waiting for the sun to rise, and hoping to get the answer I wanted.

  Thankfully, Marshall Weston was the first one to emerge from the ramshackle building. He didn’t seem surprised to see me as he strode through the door, his face showing more signs of wear and age than I remembered from the day before.

  He looked me up and down, squinting in the quickly brightening morning sunlight as he lit the tip of a cigarette that had been in his mouth since the moment he’d stepped out into the street.

  “Why am I not surprised?” he asked, shaking his head.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. He chuckled, watching me walk up toward him. My bags were packed and were sitting on the ground beside me, but, if he thought I was a quitter, he was wrong.

  “You know the law, don’t you, little girl?” he asked, then took a deep draw from his cigarette and blew smoke right in my face.

  A wave of nausea surged in me as I waved the smoke away, making a horrible face.

  “No. You don’t understand, Marshal,” I started, then swallowed hard, gearing up to explain everything.

  “Never do, it seems,” he answered lazily. “But that doesn’t stop the likes of you from trying to inform me, does it? Every year, there’s a least a handful of you guys. You get one look at the place, maybe stay a night or two, and then you decide that things aren’t quite as romantic as you might have pictured them. You get homesick, and you start dreaming about the kind of life that people like us afford to the people you left behind.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing,” I answered quickly. “I mean, it’s not like that.”

  “You’re damn right about that much,” he answered, then took another draw before he tossed the cigarette on the ground. It flickered a little before it disappeared under his boot. “You see, things have changed in recent years, little girl. Kept getting more and more dropouts, more and more deserters. The Regent didn’t really cotton too well to that, so he closed up a loophole in the law. Once you’re in, you’re in. Simple as that, and there’s no getting out. Done and done, I’m afraid.”

  I sighed heavily. He wasn’t getting it. “I don’t want to leave, Marshal. This is what I feel like I was born to do. It really is. I don’t care that this place isn’t the way I thought it would be. I don’t care that it’s dirty and full of nasty men who can’t so much as make conversation. I don’t even care that it’s dangerous.”

  “And yet you’re all packed up,” he said, looking down at my bags.

  “Because something has come up,” I explained. “Something has come up with my father, and I need to get back home, but only for a little bit.” I smiled. “Then I’ll be back.”

  “Oh, is that right?” he said, narrowing his eyes at me as his left hand went to the twirl of his mustache. “And how, pray tell, would you know that?. In case you’ve forgotten, communication devices are expressly forbidden within the Outpost, as is sending or receiving word from the Sector without written permission from either me or the Regent. Now, I know I haven’t said yes to you calling your daddy. So, unless you happen to have the Regent of the Sector in your pocket, it looks like you’ve been breaking the law.”

  “That’s not how it happened,” I said nervously.

  I never liked to come out and tell people about my special abilities. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of who I was or what I could do. It was just that my mother had always warned me about those who might wish to use my gifts for their own means or otherwise exploit me in some way. She had been through that more than once in her life, and she hadn’t wanted that for her only daughter. I understood that about her. I loved that about her. But my father was in trouble, and, if it came down to protecting myself or him, there wasn’t even a contest.

  “I’m a witch, Marshall Weston,” I said flatly, nodding at him firmly as if to further drive home the point.

  “Is that right?” he replied. His tone was both unimpressed and frankly uninterested. “Been a while since we had one of your kind in our ranks. I thought most of y’all had died out, to be honest.”

  “I think that’s right, sir,” I said in a low mumble. Witches had been thinning out in number for the last few generations. Like the vegetation within the Sector (and apparently the Outpost), the magic that had once been impossible to ignore was now little more than a fairy tale. “Be that as it may, you’ve got one now, and I’m not going anywhere.” I shuffled. “At least, not permanently. Visions are my gift. Sometimes they’re accurate, and sometimes they don’t ever come to pass.”

  “How’s that different from–”

  “Guessing?” I finished his sentence. “It’s a lot more stressful, for one thing. And secondly, it means that I have a duty to try to prevent horrible things from happening, if it’s at all possible. I saw my father die last night, and there’s no way that I can–”

  “Funny that you should mention duty,” he said, folding his arms over his chest. “Because, last I checked, that duty you’re going on and on about is supposed to be saved for us. You remember, the people you made a damn vow to.”

  I took a deep breath, my heart pounding. Why was he being so hard to deal with? Why was he so unaffected by all of this? This was my father’s life, for Sector’s sake. Couldn’t he at least feign sympathy?

  Still, I knew better than to bust out a smart mouth in front of my superior officer, especially when I was asking him for a favor. My father had raised me to be smarter than that.

  So I took a deep, steadying breath and set my jaw.

  “Of course you’re right, Marshall,” I answered as calmly as I could. “And my duty is to you. I swore it when I was accepted into the Roamers, and I’ll swear it every day from here on out if that’s what it takes. But my father is in danger. He might die, and, if I can stop that from happening–”

  “You can’t,” he said flatly, shaking his head. Then he lit another cigarette.

  “Marshal, I–”

  “Stop!” Marshal Weston said, holding a palm out to shut me up. “I’m not interested in whatever you’ve got to say, and I sure as hell don’t care about any of the excuses you’re fixing to lay out in front of me.” He took another long draw. “I’m guessing you don’t have any papers with you to verify your claims of being a witch.”

  I shook my head. “My mother wanted to protect me.”

  “Of course she did,” he answered with a sigh. “I’ll call in later today, and get somebody in the Sector to go take a look at your father. I can’t relay any messages between the two of you, but I’ll make sure my guy tells him to keep himself on a tight leash. That way, you can lug your crap back to your room, get out here in time to be trained, and I won’t have to listen to your munging on and on about superpowers and alte
rnate futures.”

  He dropped the cigarette and stomped it out, just like the first. I was beginning to wonder just how many of those he went through in a day.

  “That way, both of us win.”

  “But, Marshal,” I started. “How would I–”

  “You ain’t leaving!” he said sharply. “Couldn’t do it if I wanted to. Direct orders from the Regent. Best I can do is get the message out for you, and, little girl, that’s more than I’d do for a lot of men out here. So, if I were you, I’d throw that shit back into my room and get my ass in gear before the rest of your peers get down here and start in on you about blubbering like some princess who’s lost her crown.”

  “Marshal, if you would just–”

  “I will not just!” he screamed. “Now, get! Do you hear me? Get!”

  I turned, shaking my head and swallowing hard as I started back toward the facility.

  I couldn’t let this stand. Telling my father to be careful wouldn’t help anything. I had no idea what was coming for him. So how could he?

  I needed to get to my father, which meant one thing.

  I was going to have to break out of the Outpost.

  Chapter 6

  By the time I made it back out onto the main drag of the Outpost, pretending I hadn’t just gotten reamed by Marshal Weston, the rest of the Roamers had poured out onto the now sunlit street. Since the few women wamong the Roamers hadn’t returned yet, I was still the lone hen in a coop full of roosters.

  That didn’t earn me any special treatment, though (not that I was looking for it). I was subjected to the same training as Chester, the same training as all the ‘“piss ants”’ who had been in the Outpost less than an entire season.

  It started with geography, where Marco taught us about the layout of the jungles that surrounded the Sector. Turned out they were bigger and more sprawling than the stories I’d heard about as a kid had led me to believe. As he sprawled a hand-drawn map out onto a desk in the same hollowed-out saloon where I had met Marshal Weston yesterday, it became clearer than ever to me that danger existed all around us out here.