Olivia Read online

  She left the entry room before her owner could come back and find her there and wandered the twisting halls and echoing rooms of her new home, crying when she thought of it, but mostly just staring into space. She read one or two of the magazines. She polished the hubcap with the loose sleeve of her t-shirt. She added a log to the fire when the coals began to die out (it wasn’t a wooden log, but a very heavy, densely-compacted mass that seemed more like dried muddy moss, maybe peat, she didn’t know). In a dark corner of the storeroom, she discovered a host of curious treasures packed away in a Coleman cooler: a ball of string, a Rubik’s cube, an empty whisky bottle, an Etch-a-sketch, and several primitive toys, including a wooden board carved into a rounded triangle-shape, into which fifteen shallow holes had been bored in a pyramid arrangement. A small leather bag next to this board held fourteen dull river rocks, just the perfect size to sit in those holes.

  Olivia sat down by the cooler and puzzled the game out in a fugue of unhappiness. She began at one corner, using one stone to jump over another into the hole, removing the stones as she jumped them, attempting to leave only a single stone on the board. When, eventually, she managed to accomplish this, she tried to jump stones so as to leave one in each corner. She was still working at solving this when she heard her name being called.

  “I’m in here,” she called, resetting the game.

  He came in, carrying an old wine jug. He set it down and hunkered beside her, watching her play. After a moment, he placed one finger deliberately on the board and spoke in his language.

  She repeated his words, but distractedly, slurring them together.

  He corrected her, tapping at the board to draw her attention, and when that earned him another half-hearted effort, he took the game away.

  He looked at her, the wooden board in his clawed hand, and waited.

  She tried. The low, rumbling speech of the monsters did not want to work in her mouth, but she tried, and he very patiently and implacably corrected her again and again until she got it right. At last, he nodded. His lips moved on his snout in a small but clearly recognizable smile, but it had very little true humor or happiness in it. He gave the game back and left her.

  She didn’t want to play anymore, but after several minutes of sitting there, she found herself looking at the stones anyway, picking them up, moving them. The world just kept turning and there was nothing else to do.

  4

  Her watch kept faithful track of time. It was just past ten at night when her captor returned. He found her in the sleeping room, sitting in her alcove with the last of the sweet tea and the Rubik’s cube. She’d had one once, years ago, and had never been able to solve it. She didn’t think she was going to solve this one either, but it passed the time. The monster with no name stood in the doorway, watching her twist blocks of color this way and that without expression. He looked tired.

  “Olivia,” he said at last.

  She pretended not to hear him, working harder at her toy.

  “Olivia.” He gave her a command in his language, pointing at the Rubik’s cube. Playtime was over.

  Olivia set it down reluctantly, there in her alcove. She pondered briefly what had happened to its owner, but decided to save the asking of that question until she thought she could live with the answer. This was her toy now, and that had to be good enough.

  He took a seat on the stone bench nearest to her alcove, unwrapping dinner and laying the food—more bread, a handful of mushrooms, and a hunk of cooked meat—out beside him. He glanced at her, hesitated, then made a little room and beckoned to her.

  She didn’t want to sit with him, and he must have seen it in her eyes, because he beckoned again and this time, pointed. His shadow on the wall behind him flickered with the coals, almost seeming a separate, breathing entity. His horns spiked out, devilish and menacing.

  “Olivia,” he said again. His arm lowered. He looked at her as she fought not to tremble, and then said, softly but firmly, “You are mine.”

  She was, wasn’t she?

  Olivia sat on the bench and picked up a mushroom.

  He said a word.

  She repeated it dully and took a bite.

  He said another word, exaggerating the eating motions.

  She repeated it around a mouthful of mushroom, wondering if he was going to teach her all the way through the meal.

  He did indeed intend to.

  Olivia repeated what he said, although she had no idea what she was saying. But she was his, and if this was what he wanted to do with her…well, it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

  When the meal was finished, he sat back and just looked at her for a while. The firelight turned his dark eyes red. He got up and went to the place where he kept his spare loincloths, digging through them to retrieve a small and much-used terrycloth towel. He held it out, said a word, then mimed scrubbing his face, and held it out again.

  She took it and a candle and went to wash. She found her way down the right tunnel, relieved herself into the canal, then cleaned as much of her body as she could reach with his stinging soap. When she was done, she smelled a great deal like he did, earthy and strange.

  She started to dress again, realized the futility of that action, and felt her dinner immediately congeal into a hard, greasy lump in her stomach. She bunched up her clothes, picked up her candle, and made herself walk back into the sleeping room and stand naked before him.

  He looked at her, then away. His head bent.

  Time stretched and stretched and would not break.

  In silence, he began to undress.

  5

  Olivia put the candle out and set it on the bench. She put her clothes in her alcove, fussing with and folding them, anything to delay what was coming. At last, unable to put it off any longer, she stood and turned around.

  He straightened up and faced her. Red light from the coals burned on his black hide, caught the angles of his leathery wings, and turned his gleaming claws and talons to flame. His pelt rippled down over suggestions of muscle, thicker at his forearms and shins, thickest of all at his groin. His penis, a long, thick hairless organ dangling from the heaviest thatch of fur, stirred in her such a swelling of horror and despair that for a moment, she thought she would faint.

  Olivia jerked her eyes away, biting back useless pleas, and saw him studying her body with the same trepidation and unease.

  Startled, she looked down at herself. She didn’t work out as often as she should, but she took pretty good care of herself and had always been proud of her slender waist and soft curves. Her breasts were not small and jutted out like they should. Her hips were lean, but not boyish. She had naturally smooth, almost hairless skin, although she didn’t tan worth a damn and was in fact white enough that she almost seemed to be glowing in the darkness.

  She wondered how she must appear to him—a small, bald, wingless woman. Flat-faced, defenseless, and utterly unsuited for the life he led. Ugly.

  She looked up at about the same time he finished his contemplation of her body, and their eyes met.

  “Come here,” he said quietly.

  She told her feet to move. They simply stood there, rooted to the spot.

  He tried diplomacy. “Come here, please.”

  She unlocked her knees and stumbled forward, stepping into the pit to join him. They stood spare inches apart, looking at each other.

  He reached up, put a hand on her arm and rested it there, studying her. She smiled timidly, trying to quiet her leaping stomach. He brought up the other hand and caressed her hip.

  Olivia began to cry again.

  The hand that was not exploring the lower curves of her body came up to brush at the tears. He seemed almost embarrassed for her, fanning out his folded wings slightly as though to shield her.

  It took less than a minute to get herself under control. She wiped her eyes dry, unable to meet his gaze, shivering. She looked down, saw his club-like penis half-erect, and looked away, cold with panic.

&nbs
p; “Olivia,” he said, not with desire, but gentle all the same. “Come here, please.” He said something more, in his deep, grumbling language, but she couldn’t understand.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t as though he were giving her a choice. She inched another step closer. He closed the distance with a step of his own. She felt heat and hardness pressed against her thigh.

  He touched the tip of one finger to her breast, brushing almost curiously over one fear-hard nipple. He traced the line of her jaw, her lips, her nose, her brow. He combed his claws through her hair. He outlined the contours of her back and buttocks, explored her ribs and the jumping muscles of her abdomen.

  He hesitated, then knelt and pulled her down with him. She rolled instantly onto her belly, but he didn’t try to turn her. He just kept stroking her back. She could feel the weight of his stare.

  He’s not going to do anything, she thought, and never mind his erection. Nothing was going to happen here. Nothing.

  He made a humming sound, very low, right at the edge of her ability to hear it, and she felt him combing her hair over one shoulder. He bent, his breath hot on the back of her neck, and hummed again, toneless and so deep. She locked up like a fist, expecting him to lick at her, but he just moved a littler lower down, humming at the space between her shoulderblades. His hand, petting her in those long passes, moved lower, over her bottom, to cup her sex.

  She jumped. Her legs were already together; tightening them up only trapped his hand against her. He hummed again, rubbing his fingers up and down along her folds. Up and down, nothing more, and she couldn’t stay tense forever. As her thighs unlocked, the creature hummed louder, shifted again, and finally touched his mouth to the back of her neck.

  He didn’t do anything then, not even hum. He was motionless except for his hand. His breath was steady, hot, and shallow. After a moment, he opened his lips a little and grazed his teeth across her, humming once, raggedly.

  This was going to happen and she didn’t want it to happen like that, feeling fur on her back and teeth on her neck. Olivia, trembling, rolled over and made herself lie flat, her hands digging at the bedding.

  He waited until she had settled herself, content to watch her. His eyes had taken on that smoky, unfocused look of arousal, strangely comforting in its familiarity. When she was quiet again, he slipped his hand back down between her thighs and found her sex. He stroked once, twice, and then probed between the lips of her labia. Her thighs clenched once, instinctively, and he hummed at her and waited, not moving, while she tried to relax. As soon as her muscles unlocked, he penetrated her with his finger, slowly but deeply. She could feel the blunt pebble of his claw pushing at her, cooler and smoother than the rest of him, as he worked his finger back and forth and finally withdrew.

  His face was a mask of determination and unhappiness, but there was heat there too, and that heat increased as he brought up his hand and breathed in her scent. He looked at her in the firelight for a long time as she shivered, and then he reached for her.

  Again she bit back a strangled wail of fear and misery, but again, his hands on her stroked and petted until she relaxed to him. She jumped when he touched her breasts and after a slight hesitation, he touched them again, rubbing his palms slowly across her until the friction raised her nipples painfully erect. There was a warmth kindling in her belly, familiar and wholly unwanted. She did not desire this creature, but discovered to her horror that the body doesn’t always need desire. She thought nothing could be worse than being taken by force, but that was before she realized that he would not have to force her.

  She moaned, and it seemed to her ears that the sound held more of arousal than of dismay. He heard it too, and his voice rose with hers in a powerful thrumm. He moved his hand between her thighs and she parted without conscious thought, feeling only the hot throb of physical want. His wings snapped out above her and then the hard/soft weight of his furred body was on her and the hot, slick steel of him was pressed hard against her.

  He braced himself on one powerful arm, lightly cupped her hip in his other hand, and cautiously pushed inside her. Olivia locked her jaws on a scream of pure panic, and made no sound as she felt every slow inch of his cock filling her until she thought she would split open. Back and forth, he moved, testing her as he had with his finger, forcing himself in deeper and deeper until at last, their hips met. He lay sheathed and, for a moment, that was all. She was not a virgin, but nothing in her limited sexual life could have prepared her for the sheer size of him, or for the sensation of his powerful body and soft pelt rubbing over her breasts and belly as he began to move.

  Warily, he thrust at her, working the full length of his cock slowly in and out with growing confidence until her body rocked with him. When he seemed satisfied that she would neither struggle nor start crying, he lowered himself from the rigid position he’d held above her, letting her take his weight. She didn’t fight it, and soon he lay tensely atop her, all his body clenching and flexing with the force of his movements. The strange bulge and soft down of his bestial cheek pressed against hers; his breath came in thick, thrumming pants against her ear and shoulder. His hand on her hip never moved.

  Olivia lay rocking, hearing only the blood rushing in her ears and the low, growling hums of the thing that mated with her. It took a long time, long enough for her to feel the heat of her traitor body as his thick, hard organ stroked relentlessly inside her. It was physical, purely physical, but it was impossible not to feel, like the friction of his pelt lightly rubbing at her nipples, like the muscular flex and heave of his body crushing against hers. She could feel, as if from a great distance, her own muscles gripping and shuddering as she came, milking an immediate spastic jet out of him. He groaned in her ear, pumping at her just a little harder, a little faster, as her climax receded, and then he arched and came for real, filling her with the hot splash of his cum.

  He lay on her, breathing hard, not speaking. Finally, he pulled free of her and to one side, his gaze brooding on the wall above her head, looking pensive and a little relieved, as if he were thinking, Well, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

  Olivia rolled onto her side and buried her face in a sleeping bag, breathing in torturously slow breaths until she was positive she wouldn’t cry.

  “Did I hurt you?” he asked. His voice was dull, emotionless.

  She shook her head, her throat too tight to speak.

  He reached out to touch her arm, and when she didn’t throw him off, he rolled close against her and wrapped her in a wing. “I am…not bad, Olivia,” he said quietly.

  And maybe it was even true, but it didn’t matter, really. She was his. And this was just the way it was.

  CHAPTER THREE

  REFLECTIONS

  1

  Once, in another life, when Olivia had lived in the real world without monsters, she had gone to college and taken a sociology class because word was the teacher was a flaky old hippie who gave easy credits. The teacher was indeed something of a soft touch, and a flake, and a hippie, and to illustrate his various points, he liked to use the characters of Gilligan’s Island as the ideal working model of sociology in action.

  “This show,” he used to say, “is a completely accurate depiction of the reformation of civilization. Note the importance of class in social structure. Note the use of gender roles. From a sociological and psychological viewpoint, this is pretty much we could expect to see if seven people were isolated from culturally-enforced standards of behavior.” Whereupon some jackass would invariably ask if that meant that seven people stranded on a tropical island would build a working radio out of coconuts and meet the Globetrotters, and the class would bust out in a more or less serious debate on whether or not the Professor was having it off with Ginger or Mary Ann or both or, heck, Gilligan.

  Olivia found herself thinking back on that class quite often in the first days after her capture. Not about Gilligan’s Island (even the slaves of cave-dwelling bat-monsters had some
standards), but rather on the subject of what her teacher had called ‘instinctive sociological reversion’. Essentially, he had put forth the idea that when separated from the security of the familiar, any individual will fall back on the same behaviors which were instinctive to his or her primitive ancestors and which lie more or less dormant in civilized society.

  Example: A front-office receptionist named Olivia Blake, twenty-four years old, college-educated and reasonably independent, has been essentially removed from the planet Earth and set down in a cave with a monster. There’s no phone, no lights, no motorcar; not a single luxury. Like Robinson Caruso, it is as primitive as can be…and this time, there are no coconuts.

  In the movies, this would be young Olivia’s cue to devise some sort of daring escape, probably killing her captor in the process, although he would keeping popping up sporadically like some demonic Billy Bop’em doll, until she finally, what? Dropped a giant satellite dish on him? Shot a rusty cannon at him? And then she would stand triumphant on the side of the mountain with the wind in her hair and utter some unbelievably bad-tasting joke (“He had to catch a call,” in the case of the dropping satellite dish, and maybe that old tried-and-true, “He’s fired,” in the event that she went along with the cannon). Ideally, she should also have a good-looking guy under her arm, but in any case, she would definitely have all the other captive women in some state of undress scrambling for their freedom down the mountainside before her as the music swelled and the end credits began to roll.

  This was not the movies.

  Olivia was caught and most of the time, she didn’t even care. She knew she should. She even wanted to. But when she did care, the feeling came with such a splintering sense of anguish and loss that some vital part of her simply couldn’t bear it, overloading like an emotional circuit breaker and switching her off into disconnected darkness once more. It was better to just go along and make the best of things. It wasn’t a heroic way to think and she knew it, but it was the only way she had to cope.