Mariette And The Cowboy (Western Night Series 2) (70 page)

“You… you’re the Bear Spirit, are you not?” The girl asked slowly, not unlike a prowling cat feeling over what might be unsafe ground.

“Great Bear Spirit, please,” the silver-haired man responded, barely able to prevent himself from laughing outright. “If you insist on maintaining the formalities of Medvedevo, you might as well do it properly, right?”

“What… what is this place?” Anya queried, her eyes flying over every feature of the room. “What
exactly
are you?” Then, having remembered what had brought her there, the girl felt her determination return. Taking a deep breath and allowing her eyes to meet with his, she finally said “What is the meaning of all of this?”

“This place,” the so-called Great Bear Spirit said, “is my not so humble sanctum. Please, don’t be ashamed to sit down. You’ve been through a lot. I’ve been there, I know.” He smiled, but not in an insulting manner, as one might expect from the situation. Feeling her knees barely hold her up, Anya obliged his request, letting her tender buttocks kiss the cold stone floor. With a gesture, her host invited her to come and sit on the rug, but she refused the offer with a gesture.

“Suit yourself,” the man said, “I might just have to help you get warmed up later, huh?”

Teeth clenched, Anya said nothing, merely staring into the man’s icy blue eyes, so similar to her own.
If I don’t show fear,
she reasoned,
maybe he won’t see just how defenseless I am.
However, even she knew how much of a lie her display was. The girl was completely at her host’s mercy, and there was nothing she could do about it.

“As for me… you could call me by the name your people have given me, and you would not have been too wrong. Most of it is true, aside from the spirit part, as you can clearly see. I am unmistakably great,” he smiled as he said that “and I do turn into a bear when I so desire.”

“Or by night,” the man continued, the smile wiped from his face almost immediately. “I almost always turn by night, practically every time.”

“Alright,” Anya interrupted, just barely grasping what it was that he was saying. “What you do, the turning thing, is it some sort of
magic
?”

“I don’t know what it is, girl,” the man responded, still deathly serious. “What I do know is that it’s hereditary. My father had it, as did his father before him. Which brings us,” the Bear Spirit’s disposition seemed to improve drastically, “to the matter at hand”

“You see, girl, the Gift, as we call it, it feeds on strength. Having a Gifted parent is mandatory, but even with the best breeding in the world, nothing can guarantee that a shifter’s offspring will grow up to become a shifter. Unless the child is brought up to be strong in the wild, the wild will not be strong in the child. Do you understand?”

Slowly, Anya nodded. What he said did make a weird kind of sense, but it wasn’t exactly clear what he was getting at. What she did get, however, was the magnetic allure of the man who sat before her. There was no rational reason for it, she knew, but his unusual appearance, coupled with something she could not put her finger on, a kind of primal attraction, made her feel drawn to her host.

“For that reason alone, my ancestors have decided to move back here, to the land that birthed us so long ago. Exhausted from our journey, we discovered this place, the mountain palace that supposedly housed the noblest of our people in the past, and it was completely empty. Stuck here as they were, without any food or real source of heat, they begged the land for help – and it listened!”

“Within an incredibly short period of time, the winds died down, and a flock of birds, too willing to be slaughtered for it to have been a coincidence, flew in through this opening behind me, saving the lives of my family and changing their lives forever. In the following decades, life was good. Our people married your people, and everything appeared to be developing just the way it should have.”

After a surprisingly long period of silence, the Great Bear Spirit continued his story “the next generation showed promise, but soon completely failed our expectations. Out of hundreds of potential shifters, none grew into the Gift. It was a disaster. The survival of the species was in question, and the solution seemed beyond our grasp.”

“Then, just as extinction seemed imminent, a young shifter came to my ancestors, a descendant of one of their own, thought lost decades ago. Apparently, the child survived in the harshest parts of the land, and the Gift came by itself. The answer was clear: we had to live hard again, and we needed breeding partners who could handle our way of life.”

Barely taking all of this in, Anya’s jaw almost hit the floor when she was close to realizing what he was getting at.

“A plan was put into motion then and there. The few of my kind that still bore the Gift retreated back to the mountain. They posed as the spirit that protected your people, providing food and tolerable weather conditions in exchange for what they needed most: breeding stock for the few males that still weren’t decrepit enough to breed.”

Eyes wide in disbelief, the girl couldn’t do anything other than stare into the man’s eyes as he revealed that her ancestors’ entire way of life had been a joke.

“Yes,” the man posing as the Great Bear Spirit confirmed, “the ordeal you had to face was nothing more or less than a simple test of survival.” Carefully, he allowed his mouth to widen, forming a smile. “And you’ve performed admirably, my darling girl.”

Then, as swiftly as he finished his story, he rose to his feet, displaying his rippling muscles in a way that enflamed the girl’s passions even more than listening to him speak. She didn’t want to be aroused by him so much, but she was. There was no denying that; Anya wanted him with all of her being.

Approaching her carefully, not unlike a predator stalking his prey, the silver-haired man’s manhood rose up almost as swiftly as he himself did. Shocked by the previous revelation, the girl wanted to reject his advance, but the small puddle of translucent goo she left of the now warmed up floor proved her desires were altogether different.

“You were beautiful out there,” the bear-man said as he continued his predatory stride. “The way you defended yourself against the wolves, the way you maneuvered me into that trap… it was perfect.” Now standing right over her body, he showed signs of heavy breathing. The desire was evident, yet his speech was impeccable.

“You are perfect,” the supposed Protector of Medvedevo said, before finally letting go of his inhibitions and covering the girl with his own body like a landslide. Now a whirlwind of motions and sensations, his hands gripped, squeezed and caressed every sensitive and not-so-sensitive part of her body.

No longer in pain due to the immense arousal she was fighting for the last several minutes, Anya merely moaned softly, making her desire known to the silver haired man.

Clearly taking the hint, the supposed Great Bear Spirit took control of himself slightly, grabbing the girl by her things, before spreading them apart, and penetrating her mercilessly with his throbbing member.

It’s so good,
was the only coherent thought she managed to form before instinct took over, leaving her with little more than savage lust, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. Sensually, Anya let out another long moan, letting her partner know just how deep it was that he was touching her.

Visibly pleased, the man decided to give even more, pulling out almost completely, before jamming himself right back into her. Again and again he did this, faster, deeper, and more powerful than before, until all that the girl could perceive were the two of them, joined in one primal, glorious act of unity.

With each thrust, the electric buzzing originating from Anya’s abdomen incrementally spread itself over and through her body, and in doing so, choked any traces of rationality that still ruled over her. Like an animal in heat, the girl growled as the shifter ravaged her mercilessly, asking for more in a way that spoke louder than words ever could.

Reacting to the changes in her attitude, her silver-haired partner’s approach changed as well. The look of controlled passion he had up to that point soon gave way to another expression, more akin to that of a predator than a lover. Eyes wide and displaying an overly sharp row of white teeth, the man looked like he wanted to eat her as much as have his way with her.

Perhaps that wouldn’t be so bad,
Anya’s rational side managed to sneak another thought into her head, before the tide of sensation drowned it out again. Moment by moment, thud by thud, the pleasures she experienced grew more and more intense, until finally, everything faded to white, consumed by an orgasm most women only dream of.

For a good while she floated like that, immersed in an unending tide of sensation, with only the vague shade of her lover to keep her company. Then, as the images and sounds became clear again, so did the person she made love with, only this time, he did not resemble a human being anymore.

Hunched over her body, holding Anya by the waist, was now a massive, white-haired humanoid creature that resembled something halfway between man and bear. While obviously inhuman, the thing still appeared somewhat attractive, with its mostly human face, and fine, silvery hairs strewn over its muscled body.

Speaking of muscles, they still contorted and strained, showing no signs of stopping or slowing down, as the beast still thrust and pumped its fully erect phallus in and out of Anya’s body. Shocked and awed as she was, the girl was in no shape to reach climax under these conditions, but the Great Bear Spirit apparently had no such problem. Within seconds of being sighted in this state, he exploded into her abdomen, roaring all the while.

For a short moment, the bear-man grew larger, assuming a shape almost identical to the one he wore when they first met, before quickly shifting back into his human form. For a little while, the man seemed tired, but, having noticed the terrified expression of the girl’s face, he immediately resumed his pace.

Initially unable to enjoy this second round, Anya’s instincts soon took over again, her attraction to this man overpowering all other emotions that vied for control over her. Over the course of seconds, her pleasure grew again, until it matched what she felt right before her previous orgasm.

Hearing his Offering moan again, the Great Bear Spirit sped up even more, pummeling the girl’s insides like the merciless beast he was.
You are mine,
his body language spoke,
and what is mine deserves a whole lot of this
.

Now shaking with every move, Anya could feel the coming of another climax, by the looks of things even more intense than the previous one. Like a shrieking snowstorm, it came without warning, leaving nothing behind but a pair of barely moving, exhausted bodies.

“You,” he tried to say something else, but the sudden shortness of breath he was experiencing cut that sentence short. Forcefully, the man pulled out of her, causing yet another moan to escape the girl’s opened lips. “You can have this every day, you know,” he finally said, still gasping for air between every couple of words. “All you need to do is stay here with me.”

Instead of answering, Anya merely smiled, displaying her own distinctly predatory grin.

                                                                                    ***

Serenely, Anya sat on the ledge of the open wall from the mountain palace’s main room. For well over three months now, every other evening began with a distinct ritual of hers: she would sit here and observe the villages, taigas, and everything between them. It offered a new perspective on place she grew up in, and with it came a distinct realization of how little she used to know.

But now everything is so much different,
the girl thought, letting her gaze fly over everything, from left to right. Medvedevo was somewhere to the far right, she knew, but locating it precisely was difficult from here.
Everything appears so insignificant from up here,
she pondered, as she did every day. Indeed, when she was up here, it appeared as if the only people in the world were her and Yegor. It was the two of them, the prey animals, and the endless white that surrounded them.

Ah, Yegor, how you’ve changed my life,
Anya mused, still trying to discern the exact place where she managed to best he so-called Great Bear Spirit in his own game.
It was fun in its own way, running for my life like that, trying to bait him into that one place…
the memories rushed into her head, exaggerated as always. The distance she had to traverse seemed greater, the wolves appeared more numerous... the bear more ferocious.

Speaking of Yegor’s beast form, the girl had finally managed to get used to it. It took a good while, but at the very least, she stopped freaking out whenever he’d shift.

“And I thought I’d never get over it,” she spoke aloud, enjoying the rippling effect the place lent to her voice. “In fact,” Anya continued, “I think I might be starting to enjoy it somewhat.”

Turning around, the girl hoped to find her lover behind her, ready to pounce, as he sometimes did when he’d hear her talk to herself. Sadly, this time he was still out. It was his turn to hunt today, an event she abhorred but accepted as a necessity.

“We both have to remain who we were before moving to the mountain palace,” she remembered him say to her a good while ago. “If we lose sight of what is, then what will be cannot possibly turn out well,” he would often comment as well. Although it sometimes led to less than amusing things, such as her spending every sundown alone and bored, it also made her amused in its own unique way.