I hadn’t noticed him pulling at my panties until they were at my knees. In one quick motion, he rid me of them. Then his fingers traced the flat skin of my abdomen, playfully tickling my stomach before he moved down. His hand reached my lower lips skillfully, and his forefinger found its way inside of me.
I groaned again, and clenched tightly around him. Blissful shivers ran up his body, and I had to hang on tight to steady him. Moving his hand, another finger found its way inside of me and I opened, making room for it.
His lips moved from my breasts, to my neck, and then to my mouth,; dotting it with sweet kisses. I had never been more lit up than I was at this moment. My hands traveled down the hardness of his flat stomach, brushing against the soft hair that ran down from his navel. I found his belt and loosened it, slid his pants off and gasped as I felt his massive hardness in my hands. My fingers dug and pulled at his thick sac until I was holding all of his manhood in my hands.
I moved around and behind him, seeing for the first time his glorious backside. It was gorgeous and beautifully sculpted, just like the rest of him. I turned him around, pushed him onto the bed and looked down at his beautiful naked body. Spreading his legs apart, I moved between his knees and let my tongue begin to trace his body.
I started at his carved chest, biting and pulling at his nipples as he grabbed the edges of the oversized bed. I nibbled at his wonderful, masculine stomach, stopping at his navel and tracing it in slow, soft circles with my tongue. He was exposed to me now, completely naked, completely vulnerable, and completely capable. His shaft filled my hand nicely as I moved up and down it. He grew against my palm, bigger than his height and weight would have led me to believe, and I moved all the way down it, cupping every inch of him with care.
Asis grazed the back of my head and pulled it quickly toward his face. He kissed me once again and then pulled away, looking me right in the eyes for a moment before he moved fully onto the bed and pulled me onto it with him. I knew what he wanted, and, as if to say I wanted it too, changed places with him—me below, him above—and guided him into me.
I moaned loudly as he filled me,; stretching me well past what I had imagined my capacity was. His shaft drove into me softly but, like a dog who had just gotten a taste of something he liked, it pressed harder and quicker as it disappeared into my warmth.
He kissed me again and I enveloped him, clenching tightly against his manhood and feeling the way it pulsated inside of me. This was it;, this was the moment I had waited for. He had filled me, body and soul. I was his, and he knew it.
He bit at my lip, and I shrieked in delight. He grunted happily and thrust into me again, harder than before. I drew up my legs and wrapped them together behind his back, granting him more leverage and a better angle. He thrust in again, and this time, I thrust up to meet him. It was a glorious mingling of intentions.
I shivered when the climax hit me. It wasn’t until then, with my body tingling and shaking with the sweetest satisfaction I had ever known, that I realized that all the other orgasms I thought I’d had were nothing but precursors to this.
And then the whole thing started all over again.
I was back at the beginning of my vision. Asis was above me, kissing me hard.
It went on like that for what seemed like a blissful eternity.
And then I was gone again.
When I woke, I found myself lying on the ground, staring up at the now star-filled night sky.
My body ached joyfully as I turned to see Asis lying next to me.
He was waking up as well, and as he did, a wave of something like coyness fell over me. He had seen everything I had seen. He had felt everything I’d felt. For the first time since I’d begun having visions, another person knew what I had experienced—but why did it have to be him, and why did it have to be that?
He looked over at me, something nearly indistinguishable flashing
“It was just a vision,” I said, panicking. “It wasn’t real.”
“Not yet,” he answered, and stared at me as though he was seeing me for the first time.
“You’re awake.”
Looking up, I saw Alma standing nearby. Her hair was different than I remembered it being earlier, longer somehow.
“We were afraid you’d never wake up,” she said.
“What are you talking about, Alma?” Asis asked, leaning up, careful not to look at me.
“It’s been a while, brother,” she said, setting her jaw. “The two of you have been unconscious for almost a month now.”
Chapter 13
“You can’t be serious,” Asis said, walking back and forth beside me.
Alma had moved us into the largest housing structure in the tribal area, where the three of us were supposed to wait for the Shaman to come in and speak to us.
Of course, Asis wasn’t taking things as well as Alma might have hoped.
“You need to calm down, brother,” Alma said, looking from Asis to me and back again.
“I will not!” he responded, shouting loudly and forcefully enough that it reminded me of some of the more passionate moments of my vision. Though, I suppose it was our vision now, seeing as how Asis had gone along for the apparently month month-long ride with me. “This is unacceptable.” His hands were balled into fists at his sides. “This was an assault, a magical assault perpetrated by her!”
He jabbed a finger in my direction.
“What?” I asked, heat rising into my cheeks. “You’re blaming me?”
“Who would you suggest I blame?” he said, then his teeth ground together. “It was, after all, your touch that threw me into a month-long coma.”
“And me!” I “I was in that damn coma too, in case you’ve forgotten. Why would I purposely perform magic that would steal a month from both of our lives? I didn’t do this on purpose! I wouldn’t have thrown us into an endless loop of—”
My voice trailed off as I remembered what sort of endless loop I had found myself in.
Asis looked at me, swallowing hard. Undoubtedly, he had remembered too.
He took a deep breath before he spoke. “You need to—”
“No, son,” a booming voice came from the entrance to the tent. I looked over to see a hulking man with an ornate red and gold headdress of horns and plants standing in the doorway. “It is you who should listen to what she needs.”
“Father,” Asis said, stepping backward, a bit of hesitation creeping into his voice. “I’ve been compromised, Father. It was not my intention, but—”
“I’m well aware of the situation, Asis,” he said, moving toward us. As he neared, I could see the family resemblance. They had the same eyes, the same strong jaw, and the same snarl. “While I was off dealing with the Roamer insurgence, you fell into a magically induced slumber.”
My throat tightened. Roamer insurgence? He must be talking about the female Roamers I’d heard about during my solitary night in the Outpost. What had he done to them?
“As I said—”Asis swallowed, blinking hard. “It was not my intention to—”
“Your intentions do not interest me, son,” his father said, snapping at Asis. “Not nearly as much as your results.”
Something fluttered inside of me. I felt a connection to Asis, and his father reaming him didn’t sit well with me. In fact, I wanted to give the old man a piece of my mind, and I might have done that if everyone else in the room hadn’t been treating him like he was some sort of incontestable deity.
“I left you here in my stead,” he continued, his dagger-like eyes cutting over at me and then back to Asis. “I handed the reins of our people to you, trusting that you would do what was necessary to honor our family name. And what did you do? You brought an indescribably powerful seer into our lands and set off a chain of events that has torn our way of life completely apart. And you did it all right before the longest nap in recorded history.”
“Torn apart your way of life?” I asked, my eyes growing wide with shock.
“My word
s were not for you, witch,” the Shaman said, venom filling his voice. “You may share a connection with my family, given that magical blood flows through you, but you are still a Sector child to me. And I am not convinced that what you’ve done wasn’t done purposefully.”
“Forgive me, Father,” Asis said, nodding to his obvious superior. “What I have done, while not maliciously intended, is unforgivable. I have failed you and my people, and can only ask that you might one day find me worthy of your trust again. But if I might ask what you mean, Father? Please, tell me what’s happened while I’ve slept.”
“The world,” his father said, the snarl still firmly in place on his lips. “The entire world is on fire, and she’s to blame.”
“I most certainly am not,” I said, unwilling to take this any further. “I was taken by your son, sir. I was kidnapped, and what happened to us was not within my control. Now, tell me what—”
A loud and horribly familiar scream erupted outside the tent. I swallowed hard as I rushed toward the entrance.
“Stop!” Asis’s father screamed at me, but I didn’t listen. He might have had some sort of sick hold over his children and the other Savages here, but I was neither of those things, and I wasn’t about to take his garbage.
I pushed past him with both hands, but he didn’t move much. I wasn’t as strong as I had hoped. What I was, though, was wiry. So I slid past him and moved outside.
There I saw a huge cage on a caravan, held up by a bevy of Savages as it was marched away from the tent I was standing in front of.
A person was standing in the cage, the person I had just heard screaming. He was tall and thin, and, more than that, he was filthy. His stringy hair was caked with dirt, and his clothes were wet and muddy.
Then he turned, and my breath caught in my throat.
It was Chester.
Chapter 14
I rushed the moving caravan, still hearing the Shaman yell from behind me to stop. I couldn’t stop, though. I wouldn’t. After what I had been through, I had so many questions. After all, I’d lost an entire month from my life, a month described by the Shaman as the time when an entire way of life had been torn apart. I needed to get to the bottom of this, along with answering a myriad of other questions.
Even if that hadn’t been the case, though, even if Chester wasn’t very likely to have the answers I sought, he was still someone who deserved saving. I wouldn’t have called us friends, exactly. I had only known him for a day, but, in that single day, he had saved my life. He had beaten back a Ravager who would have undoubtedly turned me into finger food. I owed him this, assuming it was even something I could do.
“Chester!” I yelled, ignoring the pleas of the Shaman.
As he continued to yell, the Savages around me began to take notice. They turned, seeing a disheveled woman whom the Shaman had addressed as one of the most powerful witches in the world and running through their ranks. It shouldn’t have surprised me that some of them flinched away from me. I must have been a fearsome sight. Still, the idea that anyone was afraid of me was laughable. I might have been a witch. I might have even been a very powerful one, at that, but I had no control over my abilities. With no idea how I had managed to throw Asis and myself into our sensual, month-long ecstasy loop, I had absolutely no way of repeating it and certainly no control over any offensive abilities that I might have. I was a work in progress, stifled by the necessary paranoia my mother had felt during her life and the methods she had used to ensure that I was never found out as a witch.
Because of that, I had never learned how to use my abilities. I had never known what any of it meant, and that might very likely prove to be my undoing.
“Starla?” Chester said, turning back to me. He clasped the wooden bars and shook them hard. “Starla, I knew you weren’t dead! You’ve got fire in your eyes—that’s what I told them! I said if a piss ant was gonna make it out here, it was gonna be a piss ant like you!”
“I’m going to get you out of there!” I promised, though I had no idea how I was going to pull that off. At this point, all the Savages who weren’t pissing themselves at the sight of me had encircled me. They closed me off in a loop of tanned muscle, red paint, and angry expressions.
“It’s okay, Chester!” I screamed, though I couldn’t see him anymore. “It’s going to be okay!”
“Is that so, girl?” the Shaman asked.
He broke through the crowd, though “breaking” wasn’t really the right word for it. Everyone else moved in anticipation of his advancement, creating a path just for him. He looked even larger as he neared me, Asis and Alma flanking him at either side.
“Is that a vision talking, or are you simply guessing?” he went on. “Either way, the prophecy seems unlikely, given all that’s happened during your sleep.”
“What are you going to do with him?” I asked, ignoring his words about all that had happened. I did need to know what the “all” in question was, but saving Chester’s life seemed more important to me now.
“He trespassed onto our lands,” the Shaman answered. “What happens to him will be the same thing that has happened to all who have done that in the past. He must pay for his crimes.”
“You’re going to kill him?” I balked. “You’re going to murder him just because he happened to cross some territorial line?”
“We are not your people, Roamer,” he spat back. “We do not execute those who choose to wander freely, though I do wonder what you think would happen if one of our kind was to cross over the great wall separating our peoples.”
I didn’t have to think about that. I knew exactly what would happen to a Savage who tried to cross back over into the Sector. I had seen it happen before: they were killed in plain sight of the crowd, and their bodies were tossed back out into the wilderness as a warning to any others who might have similar intentions.
I had thought it was right, back then. I had thought that the wall was something to be upheld, that it was important to keep these boundaries up. Now, seeing Chester on the flip side of the issue, I began to wonder just what I had been thinking all those years.
“Then what?” I asked. “What will you do with him?”
“We will set him free, of course,” the Shaman answered. “We’ll strip him of his supplies and weaponry and leave him in the jungle.”
“Are you insane?” I asked in a voice loud and sharp enough to draw gasps from the crowd. “That’s the same thing as killing him. He’s not prepared to survive out in that jungle without provisions and weapons. The Ravagers will make easy work of him.”
“Probably,” the Shaman said, shaking his head. “That is, if the scrawny thing doesn’t starve to death first. But if your people are so arrogant as to not properly train even their warriors to live in the surroundings in which they find themselves, then the blood of those warriors is not on my hands.”
“He just started!” I yelled. “He’s brand-new! There’s no way he could have learned all the things he needs to know yet!”
“A technicality, and one that’s not my business,” the Shaman said, waving me off with a dismissive hand.
I swallowed hard, realizing that I was in a tough spot. If I allowed this to happen, then Chester would be dead in a matter of weeks at the most. This jungle was so large and confusing that only the most seasoned of Roamers would be able to find their way around. And Chester was definitely not seasoned.
Then an idea sprouted in my head. It went against everything I had ever been taught, but so did allowing an innocent man to die. So there was really no winning. In the end, I decided I could live with myself more easily if I did everything in my power to help Chester. So I leveled my gaze at the Shaman and said, “You want what I can do.”
“What?” he asked. “Do not make assumptions about what I do or do not yearn for, girl.”
“Maybe ‘want’ wasn’t the right word,” I replied. “Maybe you need what I can do.”
I saw recognition pass through his eyes, and knew I was on th
e right track.
“That’s the only reason Asis would have brought me back here. You might act like this is what you would have wanted after the fact, but a son as obedient as the one you have would never make a move unless he thought it would match his father’s will.” I moved closer. “So, what is it? What sort of noose is tightening around your neck that you think I might be able to loosen?”
“You speak nonsense,” he growled back, his face reddening with anger.
“Most of the time,” I conceded. “But every once in a while, I hit on something that’s more or less truthful. And I’m pretty sure this is one of those times. So, tell me, Shaman, what is it that you need my help with?”
“There is a sickness,” Alma chimed in from behind him.
“Silence!” he roared, but Alma was having none of it. Presumably, she wasn’t as obedient as her brother.
“No, Father,” she answered demurely. “I’m sorry, but no. Starla is correct. She was brought here for a reason, brought by the Maker to save us. But how can she if we do not allow her to help, to share of her gift and guide us?” She moved past her father, settling between us, an act that caused him to bristle silently. “While it is true that the grounds have been yielding their treasure to us, our personal health has not been as fortunate. Half a spin ago, a plague began to run through our people. It was slow at first, but then it sped up. Within a moon’s turn, half of our population had been decimated, and that hasn’t slowed. No one is safe from infection.”
She looked over at her father, and I realized what she meant. Her own father, the Shaman of his people, was dying. “Regardless of their birth, station, or integrity. This sickness attacks without measure or prejudice. And, if something is not made to change, our entire race will die out by the next turn of the moon.”
My heart broke, though I couldn’t exactly figure out why. These people had basically kidnapped me. They had held me against my will, and now they were blaming me for something I had absolutely no control over. Still, they were people. They were mothers and sons, fathers and daughters. They didn’t deserve to die.
Savage: an Adult Dystopian Paranormal Romance: Sector Seven (The Othala Witch Collection) Page 8
