Charlotte Boyett-Compo- WIND VERSE- Hunger's Harmattan (20 page)

She came over to him and took the book out
of his hands. “No, I did not know that,” she said, putting the book aside.

“They were called pterodactyls. They looked
a bit like…”

She gripped his wrists, pressed them down
to either side of his head and then put her right knee on the settee. She swung
her left leg over him and stretched out along his hard length.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“What I was ordered to do by my mother,”
she said, writhing her lower body against his.

“And what was it she ordered you to do?” he
asked, his voice gruff.

“To make use of your steely shaft.”

His dark eyebrows shot up. “She said that?”

“In those exact words,” she answered. She
lowered her head and nibbled on his chin. “With her blessing.”

“Huh,” he commented.

Shanee pushed up on her knees as she
straddled him and pushed the elastic top of his pants down until she could free
his cock—already hot and already hard. She caressed him with one hand while she
ran her other under his heavy balls.

“You’re not playing fair,” he said, and
with one wave of his hand, her uniform was gone.

“You are a naughty boy,” she said,
grinning.

“I was a preoccupied boy. I was reading
about pterodactyls and it was very interesting,” he said.

She removed her hand from his cock and
reached for his wrist, bringing his hand to her breast. “I got your pterodactyl
right here, Lord Scholar, and it is interesting.”

He molded his palm over her breast,
squeezed her lightly and plucked at the nipple. “No, milady. This isn’t a
pterodactyl. This is definitely a triceratops. Wanna know how I know?”

“Aye,” she said, licking her lips. “I am
aching to know.”

“Because it’s horny and it’s feisty,” he
said, and he moved both his hands to her hips.

He lifted her and sat her down on his
erection.

“Oh baby,” she said. “Now that’s a steely
shaft.”

He was a rock-hard missile enveloped in
velvet as he slid in and out of her, easily lifting her hips and lowering her
as though she weighed no more than a feather. The smell of his juices mingling
with hers added to her need. His cock was so deliciously long and wonderfully
thick in circumference that it completely filled her and began to satisfy the
ache that pulsed between her legs.

“You can be a bit rougher, you know,” she
said, flinging her long white hair behind her.

“Like this?” he asked, slamming into her
with force.

“Even harder, Lord Scholar,” she taunted.

He thrust upward with his hips as he pulled
her down onto his cock with enough strength that her eyes flew wide.

“Aye!” she said. “Like that!”

She was riding his hard shaft, her breasts
bouncing as his fingers dug into her hips. Her head was thrown back, her eyes
closed, her hands wrapped around his forearms. She could feel the sweat
glistening on her face and feel it beading along the creases where their bodies
met. Lowering her head and opening her eyes, she stared into his and quivered
at the raw need sparking red flares in his amber eyes.

“You are my woman,” he said through
clenched teeth.

“I am,” she agreed as the first faint
ripple of delight wriggled through her sheath.

He felt her body tensing around him and
knew at the exact moment her climax began because it grabbed him with such
force, her muscles contracting around him with such intent it almost hurt.

Tremors of delight shot through her as the
quickening suddenly came fast and furious, followed speedily by his own climax
that had him pounding upward against her with enough force to make her gasp.
Grunting with each thrust, he finally stilled as her last quiver drained him
and he relaxed.

Allowing her to slide down his spent body,
he held her against him until they were both ready to move apart, each still
breathing heavily.

“I’ve got to round us up a meal,” she said
as she climbed off him.

“I’ve got reading to do.”

She reached over and took up his book then
handed it to him. “Dinner in twenty,” she said.

He nodded as he opened the book to the
place where he’d left off. Out of the corner of his eye he watched her as she
headed for the food prep area of their quarters and smiled. It felt good, it
felt right and it was beginning to feel like the home he’d never had.

Chapter Eleven

Ailyn awoke in the middle of the night and
lay there for a moment trying to figure out what had torn him from his sleep.
Since leaving Theristes behind, he had been sleeping like a baby at night with
Shanee curled in front of him, his arm around her. Now he lay on his back
staring up at the ceiling and feeling his heart racing.

He listened but heard no sound that might
have disturbed him. The quarters were locked down for the night—he’d made sure
of it before coming to bed—so he knew no one could have entered without setting
off the alarm. Shanee was lying on her side with her hands tucked beneath her
pillow and the steady rise and fall of her chest told him she was fast asleep.

He folded the covers back and sat up
gingerly so he wouldn’t disturb his lady. As he started to swing his legs from
the mattress, he got the first whiff of a tainted, acrid smell that made the
hair on his arms stir. He frowned, loathe to put his feet to the floor.

“Ailyn, what is that stink?” Shanee said,
turning over to face him. “My eyes are burning.”

The smell was intensifying and the sharp,
musky odor was suddenly so overpowering it started a violent headache in Aliyn.
He tried to place the smell—knowing he’d encountered it before—for it was
settling on him like a wet blanket.

“Ailyn?” his lady questioned and started to
fling aside her covers.

“
No
!” he yelled at her and vaulted
from the bed. The origin of the stench had finally come to him and he was out
of the sleeping chamber like a shot. “
Stay here!”

The lining of Shanee’s nose was beginning
to burn fiercely and her eyes to water. The smell was so powerful she could
barely draw breath. Ignoring his order, she tossed aside the covers and stood
up, padding around the bed in her bare feet.

“Ailyn? What is it? Is something on fire?”
she asked.

There was a faint blue glow in the living
area and she could hear Ailyn bumping into the furniture and cursing. Just as
she reached the doorway of their bedchamber, the lights in the living area came
on.

“Shanee, get back!”
her husband shouted and she saw him sailing through the air toward
her.

In slow motion she saw him land in front of
her, skidding across the carpet with the three-feet-long creature whipping in
his hand. She stared in horror at the broad triangular head, the slender body
striped green and molten silver, the tubular two-inch sharp fangs that were
buried in Ailyn’s forearm. She watched a glowing blue ooze drip from the wound
as the viper’s vertical pupils shifted to her.

“Get back,” Ailyn warned. He was shuddering
as he managed to grasp the snake’s head with his other hand and twist it from
its body, leaving the ghastly fangs still buried in his flesh. Tossing the rest
of the evil thing across the room, he struggled to get to his knees but he
couldn’t. Neon blue streaks of venom splattered against the wall and ran down
it where the headless body hit, the death throes of the creature spraying the
deadly toxic in flowing arcs.

“Ailyn!” Shanee screamed, finally galvanized
into action when she saw the foam at her husband’s lips. She reached for him
but stopped as his glazed eyes speared her.

“Get…back,” he whispered and collapsed,
convulsing violently.

Shanee knew there was nothing she could do
for him. “Vid-com!” she yelled, and when the screen pulsed into life, she
shouted for a medivac team. “Hurry and be careful. My Reaper’s been bitten by a
ghoret!” She knew that one drop of the viper’s venom could cause serious
problems for a humanoid if not outright kill. She glanced at the two cybots
that were standing against the wall and started to activate them.

A loud knock on her door startled Shanee.
“That was quick,” she said as she jumped over Ailyn’s prone body, hurrying to
let the medivac team in. She punched in the deactivation code for the alarm
system then yanked the door open.

“You got here quick…” she started to say a
second before a thick, oily mist hit her squarely in the face. She choked on
the vapor and staggered back, already beginning to feel the cloying hand of
unconsciousness reaching up for her.

* * * * *

Ailyn was delirious for over a week,
strapped down to a table on his belly as he writhed in agony. Locked in
excruciating pain as the venom attacked his nervous system and his blood boiled
in his veins, the Reaper’s flesh was speckled with pockets of pustules that
formed then broke open on his body. His body temperature was acutely high. His
throat was parched, his gasps ragged as he tried to draw air into his
superheated lungs. Though his revenant worm was striving to produce its own
toxin to combat the ghoret venom, Ailyn was lost in a hellish world from which
he feared he’d never escape.

He fought the double-braided
titanium-hafnium shackles that kept him unable to move and cried out as fresh
anguish stung his skin while burning pus ran from the enflamed areas of his
body. The stinking excretions pooled under his helpless body to eat at his
belly and chest.

“Please,” he begged, but though he knew he
was not alone in his fiery prison, no one came to help him. Not one drop of
water was given to ease his dry mouth. Not one milligram of tenerse was
administered to stop the pain of withdrawal and no Sustenance was provided to
hold at bay the Transition that threatened to erupt at any moment. When it
came, he nearly went mad with the inability of his body to change as it should,
his limbs held forcibly in place so he was forced to writhe in unrelenting
torment as his sinews tried to stretch, his bones to elongate, his organs to
transform. All that changed without ungodly torture was his face, hands and
feet and even those hurt far more in Transition than they should.

Another four days passed in a haze of
nearly unbearable pain. As slow as he’d been to Transition, he was that quick
in reverting back, whimpering with the change that came so rapidly he had no
time to adjust.

“It’s safe now to harvest,” he heard
someone say.

He barely felt the scalpel cut into his
flesh, drag down his back over his kidney but he did feel the tearing, brutal
hurt that came as his parasites were pulled out of his body in clumps.

“They’re not dead,” he croaked. “Leave them
be.”

The revenant worm queen buckled and ran
beneath his skin under his belly to hide to keep from being extracted but She
was in no danger. It was the little ones, the fledglings, that were wanted, and
when She realized that, She quickly healed his wound and continued to fight the
ghoret toxin while gearing up to reproduce more spores inside him.

In a fog of agony, he saw the nestlings
being dropped into beakers and placed on a shelf across the room in which he
lay. His wavering vision saw faceless people moving about doing things he could
not fathom and began to realize they weren’t people after all but cybots that
were completely without features.

How long he lay pleading for some kind of
assistance he did not know. Gradually his pain began to subside, his elevated
temperature to cool, his involuntary spasms ceasing. He became aware of
conversation somewhere in the room and though he tried to lift his head, to
turn his face toward the sound, he was too weak, too drained to do so.

All he really wanted to do was die.

* * * * *

“We know damned well who took him and why,”
General Strom told Shanee. “We just don’t know
where
the hell they took
him.”

Sitting beside her mother, Shanee’s eyes
were swollen and she was far too pale but her facial expression was hard as
flint. “When I get my hands on that bitch, I’ll rip her heart out!” she
declared.

Arch-Counselor Sebastian Euphrates nodded
from the vid-com screen. “And it would be well within your right to do so,
Colonel.”

“Do we know how Jost bought it?” Strom
inquired.

“According to the forensics team, Jost was
poisoned,” the arch-counselor replied. “It was a slow-acting nephrotoxin that
would have caused an excruciating death.”

“And still no sign of the younger son?”
King Gabriel Leveche inquired from the other side of Shanee.

“It’s like they all three—Harmattan, his
mother and brother—fell off the face of the planet,” Strom reported. “I’ve got
all my Guardians involved—pulled them off every other case—but there hasn’t
been any intel at all.”

“They were waiting for me to call the
medivac team,” Shanee said. “They sprayed me with the pairilis mist then took
Ailyn. If only I’d not listened to him about activating the ’bots. They would
have prevented all this.”