Olivia Read online

  She followed him to the entry room, and across it, to the hole dropping away from the far wall, where he gathered her up in one arm for the descent. She held on to him as he contracted his wings and found a claw-hold on the rock, and then they were moving down through the tight passage, away from his lair into blackness. “When you learn how to climb,” he grunted, “you may come down alone. Save the skin on both our backs.”

  The implication—that she would one day be allowed to come and go at will—was an encouraging show of trust in her, but she could hear his claws and talons scraping as they hooked into the rock, and if that was what it took to get around on her own, her and her human fingers were sadly out of luck.

  He climbed out of the chimney set her on her feet, but kept a grip on her wrist even after she turned her flashlight on, letting go only when she took her first steps down the short, low-ceilinged tunnel to the intersection that lay at its end. He watched while she aimed the light up and down the wide corridor in which she found herself, noting a number of chimney-like openings and side-passages in both directions, all of them identical to the one in which she stood. When she finally looked at him again, he showed his teeth in what he no doubt thought was a comforting smile and led her onward.

  All she could think as she followed him through the maze of tunnels was how glad she was that she hadn’t tried to escape. It was all too easy to imagine these twisting caves going on forever, but they did widen into a kind of antechamber after a while, and through a curtain of rock like melting wax, she could see light.

  Not candles, not even a fireplace, but white light, daylight, shining down in beams to illuminate a much bigger cavern. Olivia started walking faster, dry-mouthed with the anticipation of seeing a blue sky above her, seeing sunlight on her skin, but her captor’s hand came down on her shoulder.

  “Please,” she said, catching at his wrist. “Please, I want to see it!”

  “You will. These are the commons,” he said, moving ahead of her to look tensely around the cavern. “No one will be here tonight save for those of us…with those of you. And we appear to be the first.” He hesitated, then looked back at her. “Would you like a bath?”

  Olivia tugged at the neck of her shirt for a self-conscious sniff, saying, “I washed when I woke up. Am I bad?”

  He smiled at her again and came back to take her hand. “You’ll like the baths,” he promised, and led her back into the tunnels.

  It was a much longer walk, and although she thought several times that she could hear voices or even footsteps in the adjoining passages and chambers, they saw no one. And that was just the way he wanted it, she thought, watching his eyes dart this way and that, his wings fanning out from time to time as though to hide her from view in the empty tunnel. The floor was not as even here as it was in his personal chambers, and she stumbled several times, catching at his arm until he finally took her hand and held on to her.

  “It won’t always be this difficult,” he said.

  He wasn’t very convincing, but she let it go without argument because all at once she realized that she could see again, that beyond the beam of her flashlight was more light, illuminating a bend in the tunnel ahead with the promise of sunlight, perhaps an actual opening, perhaps sky! Olivia began to walk faster.

  His hand tightened on hers. “Take care.”

  “I am,” she said, and promptly tripped over a slight rut in the floor and pitched forward. Her captor’s quick reflexes and powerful grip prevented any serious injury but she still gave one knee a good crack on the wet rock.

  Very wet. Maybe it was raining outside. Fresh rain, falling out of the open sky. Olivia righted herself, rubbing her knee and waiting for another patient, parental rebuke.

  “Are you hurt?” He was very good about keeping the laugh out of his voice.

  “I want to see the light.”

  He nodded and motioned for her to continue on. “Do not run and watch carefully where you go. We are near to the depths.”

  Olivia picked up her flashlight and limped onward, making sure that she went very carefully and with great dignity. They came to the bend in the tunnel, turned, and there, brilliant rays of pure sunlight transformed the dank cavern that opened at the end of it into a chapel of magnificent rock formations. She couldn’t stop the happy cry that flew out of her, any more than she could stop her feet from running forward into the light, those beautiful, beautiful beams of—

  She stopped short.

  “What are those?” Olivia asked, her chest tight with confusion that was still trying to be wonder.

  He said a word, sounding pleased and proud, and the word didn’t really matter because she knew what they were. All along the walls, high up where the cavern ceiling flowed down like racks of bacon into the walls, ledges had been cut for wide, curved metal plates, polished to a high shine. Mirrors, bringing light down from other mirrors, out of sight, through God alone knew how many cramped shafts and corners. When she put out her hand to catch the light, her skin stayed cold and sunless.

  Her captor was watching her, frowning.

  “I thought it would be real,” she said, and let her hand drop. “Where are we?”

  “The Deep Drop,” he replied, and led her across the cavern. The name was unnecessary. The whole of this wide room was nothing but a ledge at the top of a vast chasm, with stalactites dripping down like teeth into the gaping throat at their feet. Apart from some intermittent dripping, she could hear nothing, and not even the mirrors could show her the bottom.

  “Is it safe?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer right away. When she gave him a startled sort of stare, he shifted his wings and said, “When I was very small, the older boys said the depths were full of hungry spirits.”

  She looked down into the blackness and a cold wind breathed gently back at her. “Are they?”

  “No.” He shifted again, rubbing at the base of his horns. “But if any place was, it would be here.”

  She stared at him again.

  He shrugged, somewhat self-consciously. “Bad things happened down there once, but all it is now is the place where the baths are.”

  “The baths are down there?” Olivia stepped back from the ledge even as she craned her neck to peer into the depths. “How are we supposed to get all the way—oh.” She looked at his wings and her stomach seemed to shiver. “I don’t think I’m going to like this part.”

  He gave her another of his small smiles, touched her cheek with a kind of sympathy, then scooped her up into his arms.

  And jumped.

  She didn’t mean to scream. She knew she was perfectly safe in his grip and that they were not plummeting through space to the solid rock floor below even half as fast as they would be if he didn’t have wings. No, she didn’t mean to, but she did, and right in his ear, too. He landed with a thud that might have been more graceful if her added weight and involuntary scrambling was not putting him off balance, but he didn’t chastise her, only held her gently until her whooping gasps had calmed and her death’s grip on his neck had eased. At last, she’d recovered enough that she was able to mumble a shame-faced apology, and he set her down, turning her toward the wide mouth of a tunnel.

  She saw light ahead, yellow light from candles set all along the walls ahead in unappealing lumps anywhere there was a jut of rock wide enough to hold one. Now he let her go before him, tapping her shoulder to indicate turns whenever they came to one of the few forks, and soon they had come to a low-roofed cavern pocked with pools of lightly steaming water. More of those fat, foul-smelling candles were arranged high on the walls, casting flickering eerie light over the otherwise empty room.

  “Oh wow,” she blurted, forgetting her English. “You have hot springs!”

  “A bath,” he corrected, watching her with faint pleasure.

  Olivia knelt by the side of one of the pools and dipped her hand inside. The water was white, opaque when she cupped it in her palms, smelling strongly of earthy minerals when she splashed it
up against her face. It wasn’t as warm as she’d liked her baths back in her nice, normal, human days, but it was hell and away warmer than the water that trickled down the wall in her captor’s bathroom. Eagerly, she stripped off her clothes, slipped her legs over the edge and slid in up to her neck, moaning at the welcome warmth as it enveloped her.

  He came in beside her with a low grumble of satisfaction. He turned to her, the water lapping at his chest, and smiled, showing his teeth. “My Olivia,” he said huskily.

  She closed her eyes, arching back to wet her hair. “Mmmm,” she replied.

  She sensed rather than saw his interest pricking when he heard that. She heard a low thrumm escape him, a sound which seemed to surprise him some, and then he retreated to the far side of the pool where he could watch her.

  “This is so nice,” she murmured, spreading out her arms and legs so that she could float. Her body bobbed on the surface of the water, her fingers and toes bumping against the walls. She turned her head and saw him standing, staring at her body as milky bubbles burst against her skin.

  He lifted a hand out of the water and brushed it over her thigh.

  “Mmm,” she said again, closing her eyes.

  He thrummed again and bent to nuzzle her neck.

  She twitched, started to sink, and tried to straighten and drop back into a standing position.

  He caught her leg as she sank into the water, pulling her closer to him. He hummed into the thin skin of her throat as his hard shaft brushed her thighs, caressing her in one of his clumsy sweeping strokes just once before he put his hand against her sex and rubbed at her. “My Olivia,” he murmured.

  The heavenly comfort of the hot springs made it impossible for her to resent this. She hummed again instead, opening her legs a little wider and wrapping them with weightless ease around his hips. He turned, pushed her back against the wall of the pool and thrust inside her. In the blissful grip of all this warm water, even that felt surprisingly good. Buoyant in the bath, Olivia rocked, water lapping in warm sheets over her breasts, splashing at her shoulders, beading on her face. She slid her arms around his neck, flexing her fingers through his spiky-wet pelt in time with his thrusts, and he bent at once to press his brow to hers. The mating hum that issued from his throat was hoarse and restrained, blowing in tense puffs against her lips, scarcely audible.

  He was afraid someone was going to walk in on them. For some odd reason, this evidence of modesty struck Olivia as very funny. She was no exhibitionist herself—she hadn’t even liked kissing in public with either of the men she’d previously taken to her bed—but this hulking, horned, claw-handed creature’s shyness tickled her. She laughed, not trying to be loud but only laughing, and he sent a swift, worried glance over his shoulder at the empty doorway. This only made her giggle again, which so unnerved him that he started to back up.

  Oh, but she didn’t want to ruin his mood, especially when he was doing something nice for her. Not the sex, he did that every night, but taking her out, letting her meet people, giving her a warm bath…the nice things that mattered. Olivia reached down as he drew away, gripping firmly at the base of his shaft and giving him an apologetic little squeeze.

  It startled him. One of his hands slipped from her thigh, but the water held her up. She tightened her legs, pulling herself down along his length until she was once more snug against his hip. She wrapped her other arm around his neck and smiled at him.

  The smile seemed to startle him, too. He forgot to hum at her for a few breaths, and when he started again, it was little more than a rasp of sound in the echoing cavern. Hesitantly, he put his hand back on her thigh, and when she began to move, rolling her hips in the same deep, slow pace he liked to use, he shivered a little.

  “Does it feel good?” Olivia whispered.

  He touched the side of her face, thrummed huskily, stared. The water splashed between them in steady waves, sloshed over the lip of the pool, made puddles all around them for the light to dazzle across.

  “I think it feels good,” she told him.

  It was the first time she’d said anything at all about the sex they shared. Three startles in one night had an eroding effect on his self-control. His claws flexed at her, blunt points digging at her thigh, pulling her tighter to him. She didn’t mind; the water was warm and his hard-swollen shaft even hotter as she swept easily back and forth, up and down, over and around.

  He hadn’t checked the doorway in quite a while.

  Olivia laughed again, reaching back to catch the lip of the pool for leverage so that she could pump her hips at him a little harder. It raised her up some, water falling like a black veil away from her breasts, leaving them naked and shiny in the open air, her nipples swelling in the cold, beads of water shaking free at every bounce, and there he was, gazing raptly right past them at her face, only her face, mesmerized.

  She started to cum, not in a bright burst of friction, but in a rising wave, like the tide coming in against the shore. She could feel it starting, feel it cresting, and then it crashed down, driving her under and bearing her up again, propelling her before it until she hit whatever beach there was and it could wash over her for good and all and then recede. She sagged; he caught her, and he must have cum with her unnoticed in the heat and the wave because she could feel him softening even as he leaned back against the side of the pool, wide-eyed and breathing hard.

  He looked at her for a second or two as she found her feet, then showed his teeth in a shocking grin and said, “I can’t believe we did that in a bath!”

  She laughed at him. “You started it.”

  He snapped one wing in a shrug and rubbed his face, still grinning, then leapt from the pool in a spray of water. He shook himself off, beating his wings so fiercely that the two nearest candles went out. “Stay here, Olivia,” he said good-naturedly, and went into a connecting chamber.

  She climbed out of the bath and waited, dipping her legs in the water, leaning back on her hands and humming under her breath. She could hear him moving around close by and it wasn’t long before he came back to her, dressed in a fresh loincloth and carrying new clothes for her.

  ‘Clothes’ was perhaps too generous. Someone had cut apart a blanket and sewn it together as a skirt, and made a quilted tunic of a sort out of an old sleeping bag. They looked ridiculous, but she knew they must have taken a great deal of time and work on someone’s part. And really, they were quite soft and comfortable, besides being warm, so she managed to thank him without sounded too sarcastic.

  While she dressed, he gathered up their old clothes and gave them the kind of offhand toss toward the other chamber that spoke of a man who never had to wash his own laundry. He came back to her, gave the hot spring a final smirking glance, and then led Olivia to a nearby bench. He sat her down before him, brought out a carved wooden comb, and began to brush out her hair.

  “A hot bath, new clothes, and my mate tending to me,” she murmured, dozing in his lap while he coaxed the tangles from her hair in long, even strokes. “Ask me now if I am happy.”

  “Are you happy?” he asked seriously.

  “I am killed with happiness.” It was a play of words. The sounds for ‘killed’ and those for sexual climax were very similar.

  He laughed and paused to squeeze her shoulders affectionately. “My clever Olivia,” he said. “My clever, beautiful Olivia! You will see them snap their teeth at me in envy. I will feast upon their praise.” He stood her up and had a long look at her. “They will see the woman who is my mate.”

  It was impossible not to feel at least a little flattered when he said it like that, with such vehemence and pride. She flushed and smiled and posed for him until he took her arm and took her back down the corridor.

  She had to be carried up the wall of the chasm he had flown through, then led back through the maze until they came again to the mirror-lit Commons. They were no longer alone here; in the quiet, she could make out the deep, rumbling voice of one of his kind, although she could not m
ake his words.

  Olivia’s captor put her down, patted her arm, and nudged her ahead of him. It wasn’t as big as the cavern he’d had to fly down to get to the baths, but it was plenty big enough, with passageways leading in and out from all directions. Stone benches and tables made a number of slightly more intimate spaces out of a cave roughly the size of her high school gymnasium, and there were three or four fireplaces large enough to lie down scattered around, although none of them were lit at the moment. Cardboard boxes, wooden crates, and a couple plastic coolers occupied the shadows at one end of the room, an impressive amount of fire-fuel had been stacked at the other, while in the center, a large, flat-topped rock rose imperially over everything. There were two people here, one a creature like her captor, the other a human woman sitting silently on a bench.

  Olivia’s captor called to them. The winged creature looked around at once, but the woman took no notice. She wore a ragged nightgown and clutched a saucepan in both hands. She continued to sit and stare at the wall without expression, even when Olivia offered her a tentative smile. She was faintly familiar. And then Olivia realized this was the same hysterical woman who had been grabbing on her that night in the parking lot, the one who had tried to run.

  “This is my Olivia,” her captor said.

  The other creature looked Olivia over with a bleak and disinterested eye. “She seems lively enough,” he said at last.

  “Thank you,” she said, not knowing whether to be amused or annoyed.

  The other creature actually jumped back, one hand rising up to smack against his chest just like she’d sprouted a second hand in front of him and sang My Mammy in two-part harmony. “She speaks!”

  Olivia’s captor puffed up, but made a modest waving gesture. “She learns because she is clever. My Olivia is a civilized creature.”

  The other sighed and glanced back at his woman. “This one does not speak, not her own tongue much less ours.”