Vargr Read online

  She smiled, showing her teeth, daring him. “And if I say no again?”

  That he wanted a contract, well it was silly, but nothing about this beaster was quite normal. Anyone else, from his words, would’ve taken her without asking.

  Vargr growled, actually growled.

  “Ooo. Look at this.” The ankle chain was only hooked to itself. She reached for that hook, and he snagged her wrist in his hand, dragged it to the notepad.

  “Sign!”

  “Fuck, no.” She narrowed her eyes as she regarded him, daring him because she liked the feel of it. The anger she’d brought forth amused her. “No.”

  He pulled on her wrist. She resisted.

  “Arhh!” Swearing, he flipped her over onto her stomach in spite of her kicks and clawing at him, straddled her with enough weight to keep her in place. Then he dropped the notepad, pulled her hand to it, shoved the pen into her fingers. His great fist wrapped about her nape below the collar.

  “Sign, or else.”

  My, my. The or else sent lust shimmying down her backbone.

  This was, most particularly, the reverse of what she wanted and yet she enjoyed this situation he’d put her into, to infinity. So fucking hot to have him kneeling over her. The man-beast had been stirred from his complacency.

  That he was going to fuck her after this, well, her objections had evaporated. She wriggled and got nowhere.

  “Is this what you call voluntary, you asshole?”

  “Is now,” he said harshly, breath sifting over her neck. “Is now, my smarmy little bitch.”

  “Fuck your logic.” She chuckled then let out a long sigh that spread the heat he’d conjured to her intimate parts, made her so damn wet, and she arched and felt the length and hardness of him behind her.

  His fingers massaged the back of her neck. “Hmmm. Do it now.”

  Entranced, she watched him move her fingers until the pen touched the page.

  Of course she’d given away her enjoyment of this with that laugh. Still…

  She watched her hand move under his grip, wished she could lean in and nip his wrist, lick along his fingers.

  Cyn swept her tongue over her lips. The scent of him so close… it was so overwhelmingly male.

  She signed. A scrawled Cyn manifested on the page in grandiose swoops as if she performed elegant calligraphy.

  “Good.” He took the pen from her, his hand brushing the inside of her fingers. Another frisson of heat livened her. Then he backed off and let her sit up. In his eyes, she saw the burn of raw, unadulterated lust. “Very good. Obedient girl.” Then he turned and placed the notebook on his pack.

  “Obedient?” she drawled, half-ready for another round of defiance.

  His large fists clenched and unclenched then he smiled. “Very. I liked it. Even your bullshit. You like being held down?”

  He wasn’t as dumb as she’d thought. “Never.”

  “Sure you don’t, babe.” He walked over until he backed her into the column and had one leg either side of her.

  Man, he liked taunting too.

  She put her hand to his ankle and caressed him, circled it partly, marveling at his size. A sudden craving took away the breath from her lungs as she looked up at this towering male—a craving to yield her body to whatever he might wish to do to her…

  God, was it ever that. She spoke, voice rasping, “The Lure is almost gone.”

  “And we need that now, don’t we? You’ve been so bad. What will I do to you.” Rhetorical question, and threat leaked from every word.

  She gulped and decided she needed him, naked. Doing stuff to her, before she came from thinking about it. Night was surely falling outside—the stars, she imagined, fading and tumbling from the sky. Meteors flaming. Moons destructing. The universe was about to implode.

  Vargr leaned down and hooked her collar with one finger. He pulled her to him for a kiss that rendered her instantly deaf, blind, and shuddering for breath, then he stopped to whisper against her lips, “Strip for me, so I can fuck you.”

  He released her and backed away, enough distance to give her room, enough to still dominate the space.

  Cyn remembered to inhale, then she turned, still sitting up on her knees. She edged her leggings lower, first one side then the other, allowing her underwear to roll down, just… enough. Feeling the cool air on her slickened bared skin, she swore her swollen lips separated as she imagined him looking there.

  From behind her, a faint growl said she’d found the right gesture.

  With the ankle-attached chain dragging over the floor, she went to all fours then waggled her ass, rotated it, letting him see what she had to offer between her legs.

  She angled her head to see him.

  This is when she needed a heavenly choir to sing, with the voices echoing faintly across this immense space like a space opera reaching its battle climax, as he undid the buttons on his pants, pulled them down, and shucked them, kicking them aside.

  She’d always had a good imagination.

  But she’d never imagined what was in his pants. His cock was more than impressive; the word stupendous came to mind. It had knobbles. It had bumps. Blue motes danced and swirled on the skin.

  She was sure it must rival stone for hardness.

  Holy fuckedness, she said in awe in her mind then almost out loud, except he distracted her, for he’d kneeled behind her with that destructive weapon aimed at her pussy. One hand pulled at her butt to position her and to thumb her open. She whimpered in staccato gasps as he leaned in to slowly slide the head up and down her slit. To push at her. To shove.

  “Fuck.” She braced herself. Desire soared, overwhelming her.

  Groaning, with her hands flat to the floor and her butt pushed high, she wished he’d grab the collar at her neck, hold her in place, and thrust that cock fully into her. And was afraid he would.

  Because that might break her in two.

  “Like it, hmmm?”

  “Never!”

  “Liars get punished.” He poked at her and entered her with barely a spit’s worth of dick. “And teased.”

  Hardness verified. She moaned and lowered her head, feeling every part of this contact. The communication of heat between them was scintillating. Slippery, he rocked into her again.

  Her wetness welled, her lower lips parted and swelled, making the touch of him electrifying. Hot. Her entrance tingled with a thrill that thrummed higher. Her nipples popped outward, and then… then he pushed another small distance inside her, his cock barely in, and… he stopped.

  Letting her adjust to him, but she wanted more.

  Her mouth fell open.

  She panted, wet her lips with her tongue, and waited for his next exquisite move.

  “More.”

  “Say please,” he murmured to her ear, and biting her neck, here, there.

  She arched.

  Her pussy clenched onto him, hard, then relaxed, then clenched in yet again. A sigh escaped her that was half a gurgle. Her eyelids quivered as she appreciated how he was almost there, inside her. Thighs tense, she rocked back but it did not make him penetrate her further. Fuck me. Please.

  She whimpered and gave in. “Please!”

  With a long, hard thrust, he entered her fully, and all she could muster was a higher arch of her back and a strangled gasp. And that sense of the forbidden, of wrongness, returned but only for a flighty second that was gone in the next rupture of breath, the next massive thumping spear of him forging inside her that rocked her forward. She collapsed onto her forearms, took whatever he gave her, her own wetness leaking from her with each stroke, lubricating the sex, his breaths following hers, both of them rushing toward climax.

  The ram of him into her, over and over, body thumping into body, the liquid sounds of sex, it obliterated all thought, all sense of self.

  She was utterly his in this filthy moment in time.

  Chapter 8

  Vargr paused at the end of a stroke, buried deep inside Cyn. He was torn by
the need to see her come and his need to fuck until completion, and also thinking about working his thumb into her octopus-decorated asshole. What a temptation. His lips twisted. Next time. He swiped away the sweat on his face and withdrew then thrust again, jamming himself as deep as possible, hearing her sweet cries. The collar on her neck made it easier to bite her shoulder, so he bit her there, tasting her as he fucked her. He drew himself upright, took a claw-hold on her hip and ass that would surely bruise, but she only tightened her pussy onto him and buried her face deeper in her forearms.

  He smiled, filed away—that she liked some pain then he let the rhythm of sex dictate what it willed. Pistoning in, fucking her forward, he heard the shift and rattle of the chain on the floor and her frantic noises of pleasure and submission. Then she stilled and shuddered. The arch of her back deepened. She stiffened, choked out a noise.

  The girl was coming.

  The tight spasming of her pussy onto his cock sent him over the edge.

  Jaw clamped, eyeballs straining, he penetrated her until they were indivisible, skin to skin, one creature. His cock seemed ready to burst and pulsed one, last… time. The roar of an orgasm thundered through him, and he stayed there a while, letting his balls empty into her, every last drop. A strange foreboding skittering in his bones attracted his attention but lessened and died. The walls shook with the roll of a heavy storm as he bowed over her, lifting her to him, stroking his hand down the front of her, cupping her breasts, squeezing and owning, one then the other. He gripped the top of her thigh.

  “You came, didn’t you?” He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it, felt a final shudder take her that squeezed his cock.

  Cyn paused in her panting, swallowed. “Yes.”

  “That makes you mine for sure, seals that contract.” He was only half-joking. Next time he would make her come for him, maybe in front of him, and there would be a next time.

  She didn’t answer but he lowered them both and lay on his side spooning with her, making himself familiar with the intimate feel of her skin, the warmth of her, her shape.

  Mine. Never thought he’d feel this way about a female. But there it was.

  It is the Lure. Mixed up with the sex.

  He kissed between her shoulder blades and decided not to believe himself.

  After a long silence only punctuated by their breathing, Cyn whispered, “Did you feel something?”

  “Definitely.” Vargr chuckled.

  “I mean something odd.”

  “Like a disturbance in the force kind of odd?”

  “I remember that saying. Yes.”

  There had been something. “Like Armageddon is coming? Cue the shark music? That?”

  Cyn shifted in his arms but didn’t answer.

  This was a time of Ghoul Lords and the end of days, of people and animals crossed with nanomachines, all sorts of crazy shit. “We probably imagined it,” he said quietly.

  Or it was something to do with the Lure and having sex in the middle of an ex-warehouse where every sound echoed. Which was when he saw the writing across her nape, in small black capitals: MAELSTROM INC, with two symbols above.

  Gently, he ran his finger beneath the word, stirring the small hairs. Had he seen this before? He was certain he had.

  Goosebumps sprang up on her skin. He smiled when she shivered.

  Chapter 9

  Sunlight bathed the gory plain, illuminating the remains of the previous day’s meal. Bones, skulls and gobbets of human flesh lay in steaming piles. So very pretty.

  The Ghoul Lord, Avidex, flapped his head sails and glided on many tentacles closer to the edge but stopped short of where the top floor fell into the void. The stump where one tentacle had been cut away seethed under the healing light.

  The dark nights when they lay mostly dormant had given rise to a plot, a vague plan, a need for retribution.

  Every new planet had its challenges. This one had been sweet until that prey had hurt him.

  Avidex contemplated the situation from within the mind of one of their human minions. The creatures from this planet thought through the solutions to puzzles with more local knowledge than they possessed.

  Eat, breed, own, kill the threats, bask in the light and heat of a young sun, then travel to new pastures on the solar winds of the universe, or hitch a ride on a passing starship… these were the priorities of his own kind.

  The prey that had severed one of Avidex’s limbs was a threat, he decided, looking out through the male human’s eyes at his own, wounded form.

  She, for it had been a she, had been delightful, until she had chosen to writhe loose, and stab with the knife. To cut off a limb was punishable by death. Not that she wasn’t going to die anyway.

  I will bring her back here and devour her properly this time.

  Sampling the strange sexual emotions humans succumbed to when probed was one of his fetishes. This one would be consumed more slowly than usual to allow for the proper appreciation of pain, revenge, sex, and the marvelous taste of blood flavored by fear.

  Yes. Oh yes.

  When stirred, this guard that he chose to label Pet Human One, or PHO, suggested various methods to catch her. The easiest, the tried methods, would do.

  I shall gather a pack of rippers, what humans call stinkers, and four of our possessed humans, and I shall track her down.

  This human knew her from before their invasion of Earth. Was he a friend? Avidex was unsure if friend was the correct term. They were… close. She would perhaps hesitate at the sight of a known face, and her fear would be greater when she found herself betrayed.

  You are ideal. He laughed and made the human rub his hands together, watching partly through its eyes, partly through the facets of his own large and wondrous eyes.

  At Avidex’s command a pack of rippers assembled, showing their eagerness—their plethora of white, spiny limbs jittering as they jostled to be chosen.

  To chase, to feed, to kill, to drag the girl back to the top to be tortured and rendered into a pile of blood, bones, and flesh. Yesss.

  Good little rippers. He would suck her dry then throw her quivering, whimpering, limbless torso to the rippers to perforate before her death was enacted. A tentacle lost to the void below was no minor matter.

  Under instruction, the four humans explored the lean-to where she had survived the years and scraped up her residual molecules into a scent ball. Skin cells, spit, hair, whatever she’d left, even a few droplets of blood.

  Feed, my little ones.

  While still inside PHO’s mind, Avidex lowered himself and held out the scent ball for the rippers to sniff with their proboscises. After this he very carefully squeezed the stump of the lost tentacle, separating off a squirmy worm of his essence. He fed the worm into PHO’s left nostril, inhaling and feeling the yummy pain as the Avidex-worm wriggled through the septum separating nose from brain. Inside PHO’s brain, Worm curled up.

  Now he would have the very best, high-definition recording of her capture.

  “Oh, joy of joys.” They made PHO clap his hands. “Go and find her, my children. Go hence!”

  Avidex withdrew into his own mind and watched with pleasure as the human bearing Worm, the other three humans, and the scampering rippers, headed toward the edge.

  Banzai! Gung ho! Yippee-ki-yay, motherfuckers! Avidex rather liked using the terminology of whatever planet they’d captured.

  This would entertain him while they went through the final phase of exterminating the humans and breeding new splendiferously large and fertile queens.

  Chapter 10

  The journey back to Vargr’s tribe, the Mercantors, began with crossing the footbridge in the middle of the night, but only after he checked above for snipers. Cyn checked too, peering upward, squinting as if that’d make her night vision work better. If she’d seen anything move, she’d have been tempted to yank Vargr’s gun from its holster and blast away.

  This bravado baffled her at times. As had her reaction to sex with this
gargantuan, if hot, beaster. Was she always this nuts?

  She’d been pondering this and had no good answer. She didn’t know herself that well. Self-preservation had definite pluses, but going full throttle at everything seemed attractive too. What use was life if she fucked it up and went for dull average?

  There was that.

  Thinking back to his sparkly, rock-hard—with knobbles—dick, made her want to slap herself. Had she been a nympho in her prior life? What happened to dates and making out before jumping into bed?

  “Psst.” He squeezed her hand to remind her to follow, and she jogged after him. This footbridge was not the quietest.

  Still, nothing stirred above. The soft roar of water somewhere ahead would be muffling the sounds from their boots.

  “There was a storm,” Vargr said.

  The air smelled moist and exciting. Rain hinted of the future, of freshness, of nature renewing. The rain was fudging the facts. A bit of thunder and lightning to spell out DOOM on the sky would’ve been more accurate.

  Whatever effect the sex was supposed to have, her head was clear of the Lure. As for feeling permanently attached to him, of that she had doubts. The sex had undeniably been great, but then who wouldn’t think that after five years living in a mind fog? That contract was pure BS and as binding as any promise made under duress.

  A lean, hungry-looking dog met them halfway and trotted alongside. Five years without a human owner would do things to a dog’s idea of who ruled who. Lap dogs wouldn’t be likely to have survived and dogs couldn’t open cans.

  “Wanta eat us, boy?” Vargr asked it, clicking softly as if that was some sort of dog language.

  He merely eyed them with his tongue lolling out.

  “Are there many dogs still alive?”

  He glanced at her. “Keep moving. Not many that I’ve seen. There are more cats. I give them some food if I have any and if they’re friendly. When we reach the other side, I’ll find him something.” He nodded ahead. “Take care not to slip.”