Shadow Girl (22 page)

‘Yessss,' groans Viviane, her eyes feral.

‘Yes, who?' presses Jenny, pulling up her hair again.

‘Yes . . . Yes . . . mis . . . mistress.'

Another moan, deep and throaty.

‘Good. That's how you'll address me now. Though
maîtresse
will do too. Understood?'

‘Ooooh,
oui
. . .
maîtresse
.'

Viviane bites her lip as though it were a strawberry to be crushed. She seems right back on the brink.

‘And after we're done here, you'll tell all your men to take direct orders from me. And you'll write down a few spells for my benefit. Is that clear?'

‘AaaahOwww . . .
Ouiiii maîtressssse
. . . Aaaah . . .'

Her moans rise like an asymptote and, with another wet discharge and wild hip jerks, she comes loudly in Jenny's lap.

Jenny reclines in her seat, gloating.

‘I'm going to enjoy having you as my slave. You've already got the collar. I might add the leash. Purely for effect.'

She wraps her hands around Viviane's head and draws her in.

‘Now eat me, bitch!'

Her lips are a wonderful blend of dew and moonbeam and wild berries. He could spend all morning like this, tasting from her unspoilt sweetness. He has not felt so relaxed in a long time. So peacefully in tune with the world around him. Pleasure uncoils through him in long wisps when his tongue meets hers. He has wrapped her in his arms and she feels so small, so fragile, with her face tipped up to his. She might crack like an eggshell if his embrace tightened.

With a last flick of her tongue, she breaks the kiss. ‘I want to know,' she breathes. ‘I'm sure I will die if you don't tell me. If you don't teach me.'

She seems so vulnerable in his arms and her beautiful almond eyes are so wide, so guileless, so innocent. He can see into her. He can see the tenderness. The youthful love. The hope. Though beyond those he can also see the mist, the countless shades of grey. He dares not probe there for fear of what he might find.

She offers back her lips and as he drinks from her fragrance, he feels his robe parting and her palm pressing against him. Pressing, rubbing slowly through the cloth to stir his blood. Her tongue is light, auguring without giving. He is hard as a buck's antler and her hand has slipped inside his pants. He sighs. Her touches are a whisper in a warm breeze, refining the meaning of slow tease.

Yes, she is so pure, so angelic and yet so artful in the way she baits him, playing astutely with her tongue, with her ghost fingers. She brings him close to paradise — slowly, for her murmurs dissolve with each surge of his loins. And keeps him hanging there, on his promise cloud, in thrall to her gifted brush work.

He is numb with desire and has begun to moan. To moan words of magic. Strong magic, white magic. Sundry tones of grey magic. The old lore is leaching from him. Slowly, inexorably, to the rhythm of her baiting hand.

Her lips withdraw.

‘I want more,' she husks into his ear, ‘I want all, all of it.'

And her velvet moves keep him on the brink. Keep him seeping, secreting his secrets. What's a little more seeping, a little more disclosure when you can forget the world and wrap yourself in a caress?

He loses himself in her dew and her moonbeam freshness. Gives up more of his moans, more of his dark knowledge.

He can hear and smell her thoughts, sweet-scented, irresistible like her tongue and fingers.

You will give me everything, for you cannot break this kiss. You cannot even move
.

She sounds so innocent in spite of the words, and her feathery fingers are lacing such a soft web. He cannot deny her. He should pull away, he knows, but delays the time when he will do so. And delays a little more. And allows her to bind him further with each weave of her hand, each brush of her lips. He stands there, powerful but helpless, caught like a king stag in a willow's branches.

‘See,' she teases, ‘you cannot move. And never will again. You will stand there in the forest like a wisp of your former self. A handsome irrelevance.'

Something in him is unsettled.

‘But,' he says, ‘I thought you loved me.'

‘I do and I don't,' she laughs. ‘I'm yours and I'm not. For what is love? A moon ray playing on a lake. A shadow flitting past a tree. A bird on the bush and one in the hand. It is there and it is not. Now you see it and now you don't. It should be there but never was. The eternal paradox. So like love, I play, I flit, I hop like a thrush. I am inside and outside, in your heart and in the wind, in fire and ice and earth and sea. I'm here and everywhere. I am the universe. I'm too fast for you. I am better than you. And so, tasty object of my elusiveness, you must make way, and let me rule.'

His heart panics. He cannot give in like this. He cannot let her consign him to love's oblivion. To the dungeon of her dreams.

But her lips are locked upon his and her hand is hard at work, kneading him. And he feels his magic draining and he cannot move, he cannot. The strength is sapped from his legs and he sinks into the tall grass.

Her breasts have grown. Her hair has lengthened to snare his arms.

‘You are no match for me,' she boasts, parting her split skirt and steering his cock between her legs, ‘for I have all this hunger inside me. All the lust of Creation.'

She swallows him and he gasps at the magnitude of the pleasure swamping him.

‘I'm here and not here. Loving you and not loving you. Having you and not having you.'

She is working him skilfully and he groans under her hips. Here and not here — the words are echoing in his head. Her silhouette blurs, and shivers, and splits. One Viviane spurring him on with virtuoso pelvic moves, another one rising and standing over him. Watching him getting laid. Her eyes mocking.

‘I'll leave this one to finish you. I have more important things to do. I have the whole wide world to convert. To fashion as I wish.'

She vanishes, leaving her smile floating behind her. But the other her is going wild. Grinding him into the grass. Riding him to death. ‘Kiss me, kiss me,' she says hoarsely, bending over him to leak a charm in his ear.

The pleasure rises, fast, stark, unstemmable.

Then something in him rips and he explodes with a stag's roar.

He snaps out of his dream. His pulse is racing and his thoughts are spinning. There is a huge knobbly thing in his face, so close it is blurred. He stares at it for a full five seconds, then realises with a shock it is Karadeg's potato nose. He sits up a trifle too fast and bumps his own nose into the appendage. Then proceeds to stand up rather too hastily and knocks his head into the flat stone above him.

‘Why the hell were you sitting on my chest?' he grumbles, massaging his skull.

‘Hey, no need to be rude,' retorts Karadeg who, having been sent rolling into a corner of the stone shrine, is staring at Yaouen upside down, with his butt crowning his head and his head framed by his legs. ‘You were hyperventilating and then you made a sound like someone had stepped on your pet rat's tail.'

‘I don't have a pet rat.'

‘So I thought I'd check. Just in case you went all cardiac on me and needed mouth-to-mouth. I've decided to take my HOWLISH responsibilities seriously.'

‘Do me a favour, Karadeg,' sighs Yaouen. ‘Promise never to mouth-to-mouth me. Even if I'm rasping my last.'

‘That's gratitude for you. No wonder you don't have any friends.'

Yaouen chooses to ignore the remark — though something puzzles him.

‘Did I really squeak in my sleep?'

‘If you want to know, it was more of a cross between a croak and a squawk.'

‘Funny, it was playing more like a roar in my dream.'

He crawls out from the stone shrine and stretches his arms. Inspects the clearing around him. The sun is already high in the sky. It must be close to midday.

‘I've got to talk to Jenny.'

‘What about breakfast?'

‘Too late for breakfast. But I could do with a spot of brunch. Pheasant eggs on croissant for me thanks. With truffle chips.'

Karadeg looks peeved.

‘I'm a sidekick and help, not a bloody cook.'

‘Comes with the job. But tell you what, we'll go forty-sixty on this one. You get the eggs and truffles and I'll teach you how to turn bananas into puff pastry. How does that sound?'

Karadeg scowls at him. ‘That sounds like goose-poo. We don't have any bananas.'

‘Let me worry about that. Would you like me to turn you back into a pig, to help you sniff out the truffles? Wholly optional. But this might be an appealing proposition, now that you are a member of the Order of the Smiling Boars.'

Karadeg shoots him a foul look then slouches away.

As the Korrigan vanishes behind a bush, Yaouen unties his neck scarf, wraps it around his hand and holds out his arm. He gives a shrill whistle. Moments later, a hawk alights on his fist.

‘
Salut l'ami
,' he says, smiling. ‘I need you for a quick Hawkie-Talkie.'

He steps back inside the shade of the stone shrine; kneels on its grassy bed; pats the bird's beak, three times. There is a deep buzz, like that of an approaching bumble-bee. The bird freezes. Its eyes sparkle with a strange light and then release two bright beams. A few steps from the bird, the twin rays meet into a single point.

The dot expands to a halo.

‘Come in, Jenny,' he says. ‘Please come in.'

A form coalesces in the centre of the bright haze. A woman's face. Soon, Jenny's features are floating in midair. Her voice tinkles across the stone shrine.

‘Glad to see you, my lord. I was hoping you might call.'

‘Everything's going well at your end?'

‘Tediously uneventful. Sandra and I are in serious danger of turning into couch potatoes, of the extra curvaceous variety. Without the help of a single spell. All we've done over the last twenty-four hours is sleep, talk and gorge on the local charcuterie.'

‘It must be of rare quality, because you're radiant.'

‘The local moisturisers also help.'

‘Is that what made your face bloom like that?'

‘That, and the halo distortion I suppose. Your own nose looks much bigger from my end.'

Yaouen briefly checks his nose, to make sure it has remained the same size.

‘I'm starting to get bored, by the way,' says Jenny. ‘Only got out yesterday to buy some food.'

‘I take it you won't be against a little leg-stretch then?'

‘Sounds great. What did you have in mind? A hike around Vannes?'

‘Something further afield. I need you both here.'

‘You do? Didn't you say it was risky for Sandra to —'

‘Is she listening to this?' he cuts in.

Jenny's face turns towards the stone on the right. She appears to be scrutinising its grain.

‘She's fast asleep,' she says, lowering her voice. ‘I can hear her snore lightly. Must be all that good fare. You can talk freely.'

‘Well, it sounds bizarrely over the top but I've uncovered a plot to create an instant army of wolf-girls with succubi powers. They are supposed to overthrow men everywhere, starting with Paris. That's what the big nude is all about. It boosts female libido and turns women feral. And the statue will be activated tonight from the Manec cromlech, during full moon.'

‘A plot to overthrow men everywhere?' giggles Jenny. ‘Talk about far-fetched. Who could possibly want to entertain an idea like that? When for millennia the world has been ruled by benign if slightly hairy paragons of wisdom, subtlety, fairness and minimal body odour?'

‘In spite of that halo distortion, I seem to detect a certain amount of sarcasm in your remark.'

‘I wouldn't dare, my lord.'

‘And did you ever have reason to complain about my body odour?'

‘You're the exception that confirms the rule. Besides . . .' She looks him straight in the eye. ‘You know I've always been deeply attracted to your pheromones. And I know you haven't been insensitive to my charms either. If only you'd allowed yourself more spontaneity.'

‘Spontaneity can be overrated. If I'm not mistaken, you have a long history of spontaneous relationships. Remember where that got you?'

‘Ouch, my lord. Bringing up the past like that is a bit unkind. You know I've reformed my ways — mostly — and sworn allegiance to you for getting rid of that scaly bottom.'

‘Yes, I'm aware of that. Though I'm also aware that your choice in the matter was perhaps limited. Just remember that, should you renounce your vow, you'd find yourself back in the sea in two shakes of a fish tail.' He pauses. ‘Anyhow, this is not what I wanted to discuss. I need your help. I think Sandra is compromised.'

‘Compromised? What d'you mean?'

‘I've had a vision. Sandra is not Viviane, as I thought. Or rather not
all
of Viviane.'

‘I'm not sure I follow.'

‘She's only half of her, or something like that. Some sort of distorted self. Which might explain her amnesia. And what I felt in her back in Sydney.'

‘And what did you feel?'

‘To put it bluntly, an inordinate appetite for sex.'

‘With respect, it seems to me you also score highly in that department. Given your own commanding display in the hotel room. A three-day lust fest, was it?'

‘It's not the same.'

‘Of course not, my liege. I totally understand that it's okay for men to act on their compelling urges, but not for us girls. A pre-ordained duality.'

‘Are you being sarcastic again?'

‘Heavens forbid.'

‘Listen, there was something more in Sandra. I felt it clearly. Like she was addicted, or possessed. A slave to some sort of demon, though the thing was not external to her.'

He looks away from Jenny's floating face. ‘I knew her well. Some need in her has been exacerbated beyond measure.'

‘And what would that be exactly?'

‘A submissive tendency.'

‘And that's bad? I have known plenty of people who take immense pleasure in being submissive. There was Jean-Paul and Madeg and Jack and Jill and —'

‘I'm sure you have. But she was never like that before. More the opposite. Ambitious, though never too obviously dominant. She was clever, sensual, and knew how to use her female ruses to get what she wanted. I speak from experience, as you know.'

He pauses.

‘Viviane must have split into two polar extremes when we time-jumped. One side of her bent on world domination. The other quite literally a shadow of her former self. Purposeful on the surface but with a consuming need to submit, given the right trigger. The ultimate closet submissive.'

‘I've known plenty of closet submissives too but I won't bore you with the list.'

‘Don't.' He puts a finger to his temple, to help himself focus. ‘Perhaps the presence Viviane left of herself in my prison had something to do with the split. I'm just thinking aloud here, forgive me. That could account for it. Maybe Sandra, or rather her demon, is the ghost of the dominant Viviane. Her inverted side.'

Jenny is looking at him amusedly.

‘Are you sure about this? It all sounds rather far-fetched and hypothetical.'

‘My visions have never let me down in the past.'

‘Far be it from me to doubt your visions, my lord. So if I follow, you're saying there is another Viviane running around somewhere. A controlling nutcase.'

‘Exactly. And she is almost certainly behind the whole feral-girl thing.'

‘And you think she'll be at the Manec cromlech tonight?'

‘There is a very good chance of that. A 99.9 per cent probability to be precise.'

‘Which is why, I suppose, you want me to come over with Sandra. You want to reunite the two sides of Viviane to stop the nude activation.'

‘Well, I have a strong suspicion it would make my job easier. Viviane was ambitious, but not
that
ambitious. If she's whole again, she'll see the folly of all this. Besides, I can always stop her if she doesn't see it my way.'

‘I wouldn't be quite so sure if I were you.'

Yaouen looks at her with some surprise.

‘What I mean is,' Jenny hastens to add, ‘it is still all conjecture at this point. And things don't always work out according to plan.'

‘Let me worry about that.' His eyes drift to the big stone at the back of the shrine, then return to Jenny. ‘Here's what we'll do. You and Sandra will make your way to the cromlech. There's an old tavern in the middle of it. Go in, order something and wait for me.'

‘My lord?'

‘Yes?'

‘Rumour has it there's going to be a nude show there tonight. Some sort of special cabaret event.'

‘A what? How do you know about that?'

‘Just something I picked up while out this morning.'

‘I thought you'd been potato-couching all day.'

‘I only popped out for a tick. I'm a sucker for a fresh baguette. So crisp on your tongue it makes you tingle with pleasure.'

‘Who told you about the event?'

‘No one. The girl at the bakery was a fairy, I'm sure. She didn't notice me coming in and I overheard her talking to someone in the back room. Mentioned a special show in Karnag tonight. I definitely heard “Manec cromlech”, “cabaret”, “nudes”, “spunky guys” . . . Said something about being asked to help too. She sounded quite excited, in spite of the hushed voice.'

‘How can there be a show in that place? It's rather on the small side.'

‘Perhaps an underground venue.'

‘And when exactly were you planning to tell me this?'

‘I knew you'd be calling.'

Yaouen holds her gaze for a moment, then looks away to do some quick thinking.

‘Fine. This does not change anything. Make sure you get in and mingle with the crowd. We'll use Sandra to draw out the other Viviane. And don't worry about a thing. I'll be watching over you two like the apple of my eye. I'll only make contact when necessary.'

He taps on the hawk's beak three times, like before. Jenny's face begins to fade.

‘I'll send Morvarc'h to pick you guys up. He'll take you directly to the cromlech. Good luck.'

‘You too, my lord. Be careful.'

The light beams vanish without a trace and the hawk thaws back to life.

‘Thank you, my friend,' mumbles Yaouen, crawling out of the shrine and raising his clothed fist to the sky. The black pool of the bird's eye is fixed upon him.

‘What is it? You seem troubled. Something you saw in Vannes, was it? Something not quite right. Yes, I sensed it too.' He looks deep into that stern pupil. ‘But I have no choice. There is no other way.'

The hawk tilts its head in silent acknowledgement. Then its body dips, its wings flick up and it pushes off the fist. Seconds later, it is high in the sky.

‘No damn short cut,' whispers Yaouen, watching the shadowy line dwindle to a dot. ‘I'll have to travel that dark path. Wither away to get reborn.'

He gives a small sigh.

‘How bloody typical.'