Olivia (8 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “I won’t do it again.”

He flinched and looked at her, then pushed himself suddenly up and out of the pit.  “Do you think that I would
punish
you that way?” he asked, his deep voice pulled thin by pain.  “You were…ready.  It was your…time!  It was your…”  He gestured awkwardly towards his nose, then snarled something in his language and stalked away from her.  He reached the fire, scraped his talons across the hearth, and then leaned against the wall and just breathed for a while.

“It’s all right,” Olivia said softly.  “You didn’t…didn’t mean it.”

“I did.  And it will happen again,” he said.  He didn’t look at her.

Her heart sank a little.  Only a little.  She said, “I’m yours.”  And heard herself laugh.  “I’ll cope.”

She saw the glint of one eye as he glanced at her.  He shook his head and stared at the symbols on the wall over the fireplace.

“I just need some time, okay?  A few days.  Please.”  Her thighs tightened around her ungainly menstrual belt.  “Please.”

“I will give time,” he said.  He turned away from the markings on the wall as he would from accusing eyes and came back to her.  He lay down as far from her as the confines of the pit allowed and did not look at her.  It was hard to look at him, harder still to look away.  “But it will happen again.  I will try to…give you words.  I will try to make you ready.  It will happen again and I…will hurt you again.”

“I don’t hate you,” she blurted, and was a little surprised to realize she meant it.

He opened his eyes and looked at her for a long time without expression.  Then something in him seemed to let go; he did not soften, exactly, but something about him relaxed, the way that exhaustion can slump a man’s shoulders or a good old-fashioned crying jag can loosen up a lady’s proud back.  It wasn’t a good look.  In many ways, it was the worst, worse even than waking up in her bed and seeing him leaning over her for the first time.  It was his own, ‘Horror is,’ and his own hopelessness.  It was naked and awful and she supposed she was as responsible for putting it there as he was for her own.

CHAPTER FOUR

PEOPLE

1

Olivia’s watch battery died a few weeks later.  She wasn’t sure exactly when.  She had looked at it once while waiting for lunch, and it had been just after two a.m.  When she’d looked at it again shortly after her captor (still nameless after all this time) came home, its digital face was empty and dark.

“Oh damn!” she cried in utter dismay.

The hulking figure of her captor looked up sharply, realized she was not addressing him, and returned to the task at hand—laying out the last meal before bed.  “Olivia,” he said disapprovingly.  “Speak in a civilized fashion, please.”

By civilized, he meant to speak in his language, not hers.  English had become one of those things, like television and sunrises, that belonged to the past.  He would allow a brief relapse now and then, but his tolerance was thin and she really didn’t want to know what he’d do if he decided he had to punish her.  No, he’d never laid a hand on her (unless one counted the day of the attack, which Olivia tried not to think about at all), and he’d never raised his voice at her, but there was a hardness in him and not too deeply buried, a coldness in his eye when he sat and stared into the embers at the close of his day.  Maybe it was the Stockholm’s talking, but she’d come to think of him as someone who might possibly be a good man…just a good man who wouldn’t hesitate to put her in a hard gag if she persisted in speaking English.

But it helped.  Even on the most frustrating days, she had to admit that not having any alternatives sure sped up the process of speaking bat-ese.  His patience was tireless when it came to helping her find names for things, and it seemed that nothing embarrassed him (although
she
was certainly seven shades of mortified when he’d followed her into the bathroom and turned that into a language lesson), but he had so far refused to teach her any swears, so she didn’t have much of a choice when it came to repeating her mild but heartfelt expletive.

“It’s not important,” she said instead, her standard catchall phrase for things too impolite to repeat.  And it was true, wasn’t it?  Time was like English; it belonged to her old life and may as well be dead.

“Then come and eat,” he instructed.

She came and sat on the other side of the bench.  Dinner was bread, mushrooms, and rubbery strips of boiled meat that came from a beast her captor had called
rua
—a great beast, he’d said, as heavy as two men, with horns as long as a man’s arms and hooves as large as an open hand, which sounded very fierce right up until he imitated the sound of its calls and she realized he’d been describing a common cow.  And why not?  Many of the farmers in the foothills released their cattle to free-range, leaving them to their own devices until it came time either to calve or slaughter them.  Her captor had remarked once that they didn’t prey too heavily on the cattle, even though it made an easy hunt, because the only thing more dangerous than a drunk human was a suspicious one.

He was usually full of interesting asides like that.  Knowing how lonely she was wont to become during her empty hours, he always made an effort to engage her during their few moments together, and he seemed to think there was no better way to immerse her in his language than to lecture her on whatever she happened to be looking at or touching at the time.  But not tonight.  He stayed subdued throughout the meal, heavy in thought, intently studying her as she ate.

“Is something wrong?” she asked at last. 

“Olivia,” he said, then frowned and did not continue.

She waited, her meal consumed, her hands folded in her lap.

At last, he shook his head, and said, “Wash yourself, please, and come to the pit.”

The words rang in her mind, but not with the same impact they once had.  All the while she had been menstruating, she had slept fully dressed and he had accepted that, lying close beside her and making no demands.  But she sensed a watchfulness in him and when she was through bleeding, she had gone to the pit naked and did not resist him when he rose over her.  When he was done, he had touched his brow to hers (his short-faced snout pressing uncomfortably against her and the tips of his horns scraping on the rim of the pit behind her) in a gesture that was almost an apology, except for the hard, cold look in his eyes when he did it.  And then he’d rolled off and lay there like he always did, with his hand on her hip and his wing blanketing them both. 

“I did not want to hurt you,” he’d said.

“I know.”

“You don’t know,” he’d argued, sounding faintly irritated with her.  “But it is true.  It was your time.”

She’d known a few more of his words then, but his meaning still eluded her.  He must have seen her confusion, because he’d growled under his breath and got up.

“It’s okay,” she’d said again, a little timidly.  “You don’t have to—”

“I must explain this!  It will happen again!”  He paced away from the pit to the fire, stared into its dying light, and then swung suddenly back to face her.  “Your moon was new,” he said, just like that meant anything, and he said a few more words she couldn’t grasp.  He paced, growled, then cupped air in his hands and brought it to his face, breathing in deeply, loudly.  “You were ready.  You made
me
ready.”

She got it then, much as she tried not to.  She’d gone into season, in heat like a dumb bitch-dog, and he, this inhuman beast-faced thing, had smelled it.  Smelled it and reacted. 
Rutted
with her.

His triumph at seeing her understanding was short-lived as soon as he also saw her horror.  He took half a step back, head cocked, uncertain how to respond.  “It will happen again,” he said finally.

Yes.  Once a month, in fact.  Once a month for the rest of her life.

“But do you have to—”  Tears cracked in her throat, forcing him back another half-step.  She ground her palm into her eyes, pushing all that useless girly hysteria back inside where it could do no harm and tried again.  “Do you have to be there?  Do you have to—”

“Yes,” he said.

“Can’t you leave me alone then?” she pleaded, louder.  “Just for then!  I’ll do whatever you want—”

That hardness, shining out of his eyes, and nothing more.  He folded his arms across his chest and watched her, the way the gods watch mortals scrabbling over the distant Earth, unmoved.

“Damn you, it hurt!” she’d shouted, only very vaguely aware that shouting was not a good idea with this man in any mood, this mood least of all.  “Didn’t you see what you
did
to me?”

“Yes.”  His voice did not rise.  His gaze did not soften.

And she’d cried, with him standing over her and watching her do it, but that was his final word on the subject.  She’d tried to bring it up once or twice since, and had succeeded only in bringing out that hardness where she had to see it, appeal to it, and feel its cold and pitiless light burning back at her.  She couldn’t live with that.  With everything else, yes, but not with that.  So she let it go and went naked to his bed every night and told herself that she was coping.

Now Olivia stood in the washroom, mentally and physically bracing herself for the act of endurance that awaited her in the next room.  She no longer dreaded it, only regarded it with a faint, tired sort of resentment, the way she’d once felt about doing housework.  Oh, he could make her cum once in a while, but she didn’t attach much significance to that.  It wasn’t like he was trying.

When she came back to the sleeping room, he was standing naked in front of his hearth, red light outlining every muscle, the point of each talon, the curve of his horns.  Nerving himself up, she supposed, for his own housework.

She undressed, stepped into the pit, and lay down to wait for him.

It was a surprisingly long wait, and when he finally joined her, all he did was rest one hand on her stomach.  She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel his breath on her cheek and knew that he was looking at her.  Staring at her.

“Olivia,” he began at last, “You speak very well now.”

“Thank you,” she said, puzzled.  He never spoke to her during sex.  Afterwards, sometimes, but never during.  Even the night he’d spent teaching her all the right words for what he did, what he used to do it, and where he put it when he did, he’d waited until after.  She braced herself for bad news.

“I want to bring you before the others soon.”

Others.  Did that mean others of his kind or of hers? 

“How soon?”

“Tomorrow, perhaps.”  He hummed distractedly, moving his hand a little lower, but then stopped.  “Are you happy with me, Olivia?” he asked.

She was too stunned even to laugh.  Was he serious?  He wanted her to be happy?  What was she supposed to say?  He told stories, and taught her riddles and other little plays on words in his language, had even sung to her once or twice in a self-conscious way.  She supposed if laughter was happiness, then she had been happy. Still, the horror of that first night had a way of coming back during all the hours she spent alone with nothing to think about except whether or not her parents believed she was dead yet.  It was there when he moved inside her, his hot breath coming in grunts and growls against her cheek, while she thought in despair of her next season and how it would be when he was roaring and clawing and battering at her.  It was there when she thought that she was all of twenty-four years old…with all the rest of her life ahead of her.

“I’m not unhappy,” she said at last.  “You are patient with me.”

He removed his hand from her belly and regarded her.  “Is that all?”

She looked back at him helplessly.  “I am yours.”

“Mine.”  His teeth glinted in the firelight.  He touched his brow to hers, smiling against her cheek, where she could feel it.

Pleased with her.  Proud of her.

“Surely I was led to you,” he murmured, stroking his hand once down her hair.  His short, blunt claws tugged at the snarls that always seemed to be there, no matter how many times she combed it out.  “Surely you were meant for me.  My Olivia.”

She tried to smile for him.  He didn’t see it.  She reached up and rubbed at his shoulder instead, and he thrummed softly against her skin.  “Are you happy with me?” she asked.  It seemed like a far more important question.

“Yes,” he said at once, and nuzzled at her again.  “I didn’t think I would be.  I had never been so close to a human before that night…that first night.”

He’d never once mentioned that night.  Neither had she, she realized.  To her surprise, he went on.

“I tried to think of it as a hunt for as long as I could.  When we came with the
tharo
…it was no hunt.”

“
Tharo
?” she echoed.

He pantomimed pouring something, then rolled away from her.  “We put the
tharo
into the boxes, the humming boxes.  It went from there into the air you breathed.  So that you would sleep.”

The revelation did not exactly rock her.  Olivia could well remember that feeling of syrupy calm as she’d stood out in the rain that night.  She’d always known she’d been drugged; she’d never given any thought to how.  But yes, okay, it was still July, and High Hill Apartments didn’t come with central air conditioning, and even though the rain that night had brought a welcome dip in the sweltering heat, it had still been oppressively muggy.  She could remember coming home from work, mere hours from waking up in the night to a monster, carelessly aware of all the air conditioners sitting in the windows and humming away.  Staring up at the cave ceiling, she saw it again, at night this time, as these shadowy creatures crept along the balconies and walkways, pouring glowing liquid into the window units out of wine jugs and pop bottles, and then retreating to the parking lot below to watch the lights go out.  Just waiting.

“I did not choose you to be mine when I took you from your room,” he said, looking down at her again.  “I chose you because you saw me when we stood together outside.  You saw me,” he insisted, and stroked her hair again.  “And you were mine.  Yes, you make me happy, as much as holding you here in this evil way ever can.”