CHAPTER TEN | Dalk
The vaklok was due to begin at dawn, so Zoren, Oxriel, and I rose early to prepare. Not that there was much to prepare besides sharpening our blades and checking our spears. We had nothing else with us to bring or use in the vaklok, whatever the event might entail.
We were quiet about it, all three of us, despite the new women’s promise to be up before dawn so that they could watch us compete from the beginning. I heard some soft rustling in the cave where Tilly and Fiona slept, and based on their usual sleep schedules and the lack of sleepy stumbling and quiet-loud, grumpy-cheerful human cursing, I assumed that movement came from Tilly, not Fiona. Or maybe Nasrin, though her cave was deeper into the mountain and that made it more difficult to catch her sounds.
Soon the noises intensified, not in volume, but in quantity. The sound of heavy claws on stone told me Grim was up, and not long afterwards he came into our cave with Valeria. I ground my fangs together at the thought that he’d had to come through Fiona’s sleeping quarters to get out here. Unlike him, I had no reason to walk through that inner cave. Not unless I was trying to reach Valeria and Grim’s cave beyond, or Nasrin’s.
After Valeria and Grim came Tilly, difficult to see at first because she was so much shorter than the both of them. She was one of the few new women even shorter than Fiona. Nasrin came next. They all wore their human garb, their cloaks fastened up to their throats.
Well, all except Fiona, who was not there.
At first, no one else seemed to notice her absence. I was not sure how that was even possible. The lack of her, the hole she left, felt more fully formed than the presence of any other person.
“Where is Fiona?”
I felt immediately foolish for asking it. I knew where she was. She was in the sleeping cave she shared with Tilly. If she’d gone further into one of the other guest caves, the others would have noticed her.
And if she’d come through here, I would have noticed her.
No, what I was really asking was not Where is Fiona but rather Why is she not here?
As I said. Foolish.
But foolish or not, the question had its answer, not from any of the new women standing before me but from Fiona herself, her voice filtering out of the other cave in a sleep-thickened croak.
“I’m coming!” she called, the words immediately followed by the sound of stumbling, which in turn was followed by a half-swallowed cry of dismay and the sound of a small female body hitting stone.
My feet moved before I could even command them to.
“I’m pretty sure she’s OK, Dalk,” Valeria said from behind me. I scoffed at her, this leader of the new women who would not even deign to check on one of her own! I ignored the fact that Valeria was potentially correct, especially when the harried cry of, “I’m fine!” floated out of the sleeping cave. Fiona might have hit her head. She would not know if she was fine or not.
I would check. And I would be the one to decide.
No one followed me, but I was scarcely aware of that, because once I emerged through the narrow tunnel of stone all I noticed was her.
She was flat on her back on the floor beside one of the large Deep Sky beds. That position, with the back of her head on the stone and her arms splayed out beside her, made me think that maybe she really had hit her head. I hurled down my spear and crossed to her in three furious steps. My heart felt as if it had lodged itself in my throat like a stone.
The sound of my spear hitting the floor seemed to have gotten Fiona’s attention, because she lifted her head with a questioning look just as I reached her side and hurled myself down onto my knees.
“Dalk?! What are you-”
She neglected to finish her question, choosing instead to try to roll sideways and away from me. But she was no match for the reflexes of a Sea Sand male. I snapped my hand down against her shoulder before she could get to her feet, pinning her in place on her side, her back to me.
“Dalk!” she snapped, beginning to wriggle. I ignored her complaints and buried the fingers of my free hand in her hair, probing for the injury.
Like I’d dealt her a death blow, when my fingertips met her scalp, she went instantly silent and still. This only worried me further, because she was not typically the quiet sort, and perhaps the blow to the head was suddenly catching up with her. A quick glance at her face told me that at the very least she was not unconscious. Her eyes were wide open, staring at the bed ahead of us, a red stain creeping into her cheeks.
“What are you doing?” she finally said in a choked whisper. My fingers, being oh-so-careful with my claws, brushed behind one of her strange little ears and she shivered violently.
“Checking for a wound,” I grunted. I’d never actually touched her head like this. I didn’t know what her skull normally felt like. But there was no wetness of blood, and no obvious points of swelling that I could determine.
“Oh,” she said. Another quiver went through her body. That could not be a good sign. Normally, the new women only shook like that when they were cold. But it was warm in here, the fire crackling.
“Where is it?” I finally bit off, furious at myself for not being able to find the injury on my own. “Where did you hit your head?”
“I didn’t!”
Something pale flailed at the edge of my vision. I turned to see her kicking her leg at me.
“I didn’t fall flat on my back! It’s not like there’s an ice rink in here!” she said, sounding almost offended. “If you absolutely must know, I got tangled up trying to put on my trousers and fell on my knee. And then I just had this, like, ‘Why, God?’ moment and I flopped down on my back so I could fully appreciate my own clumsiness. Just stew in my own self-pity for a nice, long moment in private.” She emphasized that last word – private. “There. Are you satisfied?”
I did not answer her question. I gently released her head and let it go back down to the stone. She moved as if to rise, but my claws shot out, fastening around the ankle of the foot she’d been waving in the air.
She kicked wildly, and I grunted, tightening my hold on her ankle, my other hand going to the back of her thigh so I could better see her knee.
The first thing I noticed was that, though she clearly had fallen onto her knee, the injury did not seem to be a bad one, even for her vulnerable body. The skin was slightly scraped, reddish and inflamed, but there was no active bleeding.
The second thing I noticed, which made a bizarre hot-cold feeling snap down my spine, was that her leg, from tiny human toes to hip, was completely bare.
I froze with something that almost felt like fear but wasn’t. The hot-cold sensation came back, more powerful this time, bleeding out from my spine into my limbs, my tail, my groin. I was not breathing normally. I could tell, could hear the uneven labour of it, but could do nothing to stop it. Just like I could do nothing but stare at my big, dark hands on Fiona’s slender leg. That gaze roved over her, completely unbidden, following the gently curved lines of her calf, her thigh, with that little red knee in the middle of it all.
Her other leg was bare too. The only part of it that was hidden was her ankle and foot with the tangled heap of the leg-coverings she called trowzers. My heart was still in my throat, though it no longer felt like a stone, but rather a brazelbird. Practically vibrating with wings that beat too fast and too hard.
In silence, my sight stars followed the paths those legs created to their inevitable conclusion, to the apex between them. Her cunt.
She had on a sort of loincloth, but a tiny one, tight to her body, moulded to the supple shape of her hips. The only other thing she wore was one of the tight human tunics, sleeveless, revealing the inky shapes on her arms and the rapid rise and fall of her chest. Her chest with the curves of those breasts, soft and small and plump, with hard little nubs at the centre of each that made my tongues slam against the back of my fangs so hard it felt like I’d been punched in the jaw from below.
I did not ask her how her knee felt. I did not ask her any useful sort of question at all. I looked at her, half-exposed and entirely destructive in her beauty, and, in a haze, still feeling like I’d been hit, I asked her, “Where are your clothes?”
“Well I was getting there, wasn’t I?” she said in a huff. She shook the leg that I was not holding, making the tangled trowzers rattle meaningfully around her ankle. “Plus, I am wearing some clothes! I’ve already got my top and my knickers on. This is basically what the Sea Sand women wear all day, anyway. They just wear a long sleeveless tunic and loincloth thing. So by those standards I am fully dressed!”
She was right, of course. But I was used to seeing Sea Sand females more exposed than new women. Fiona was usually bundled up some way or another, to either protect against the bright sun of the day or the cold of the night. Sometimes she just wore her tunic without her cloak, but I’d never seen her like this, with her legs bare, her cunt one slip of a stray claw away from being seen. And why in the cursed span of the Sea Sands was her loincloth so blasted small?! Sea Sand loincloths were fashioned from soft, durable dakrival hides. Hers was far thinner, the fabric looking like a mere glance could tear it.
If a glance could have torn it in that moment, it would have been mine.
“You can let go of my leg, now,” Fiona said, giving her leg an experimental jerk within my grip. Instinctively, my fingers tightened around her ankle and her thigh. The contrast between those two places made my head buzz. The delicate, hard bone of her ankle against the malleable flesh of her thigh, both spots covered in skin so soft I simultaneously worried for her and wanted her. Wanted her in a driving, wind-whipped, desperate sort of way. I wanted to feel what it would be like to stack all my hardness against all that softness. Stretch my body over hers like a blanket, like a shield, and feel how she gave way beneath me, to me. To feel cool, smooth fingers on my hide. And a hot, wet channel squeezing tightly around my –
“My leg, Dalk.”
Fiona jerked her leg again, and this time, I let her go. Perhaps she was surprised I actually listened, because her foot hit the stone with a hard thwap of sound and she inhaled sharply, like she had not anticipated the fall.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Am I?” She scrambled up into a sitting position and hiked her knee up closer to her, her little foot flat on the stone. “I didn’t think I was!”
“You weren’t a moment ago.” I knew she hadn’t been. I’d checked. But all that wiggling and pulling must have opened up a tiny scratch, made it just wide enough to weep blood. She frowned down at her knee, watching the red bead up.
It was barely a cut. Not even enough blood to well up and roll down her leg in a narrow line. It just glistened, as bright and red as axrekal poison.
And like a doomed man, I knocked her hands away from her own leg, seized her knee between my claws...
And licked it.
Tension moved through her body like a hide being unrolled. Not all at once in a great slam of shock, but slowly, wave-like, her muscles drawing tighter and tighter beneath my fingertips as I tasted her wound. It was barely a wound at all, but even just that tiny little smear of blood on my tongues was explosive, sending me headlong into delirium. It did not taste like Sea Sand blood. It tasted bright and sharp. It reminded me a little bit of some of the scents on the human ship and Valeria’s shuttle. The tang of metal so unlike ablik.
But there was not much of it. And once that little bit of blood was gone, cleaned away by my greedy tongues, there was only skin, her skin, raw at the knee, whole and smooth and sweet just beyond it where her thigh began.
She did not tell me to stop.
I told myself to stop, but it seemed to do no good. My tongues were on her, my mouth, my lips, my fangs grazing her until she made a timid little “Oh!” sound that sent my heart slamming down through my body and directly into my cock.
A new scent grew rich in the air, and I noticed with an internal groan that I’d sucked and licked my way nearly to the top of her leg. If I withdrew my mouth from her thigh and extended my tongues as far as they’d go, they’d be able to touch her cunt through that infuriatingly thin slip of fabric. Damp fabric, I realized, spying wetness there, smelling it, a convulsion of hot desire wracking my limbs. I growled without even realizing I’d done it, and Fiona gasped, which brought my gaze up to her face for the first time since I’d lost my mind and licked her. Licked her!
Her chest rose and fell with fast, shallow breaths. If I was not mistaken, the points of her breasts looked harder now, pebble-like beneath her tunic. Her lips were parted, her eyes wide-open, her cheeks flushed crimson.
She was so lovely it somehow seemed unfair. Somehow almost cruel.
My fangs grazed her skin again and her muscles lurched beneath my mouth. But still, she did not tell me to stop. She did not pull away. She panted and watched me with eyes so wide and guarded and yet also unafraid.
I was afraid. Afraid that if I did not keep going, if my tongues didn’t reach that sweet, secret place beneath her tiny loincloth, then I would die. Perhaps it was dramatic, an exaggeration brought on by blood and lust and a whole host of other feelings I could not untangle. But it felt like fact in that moment, bone-hard and certain. If I did not taste her now, I would stop breathing and die. Something vital inside me would cease working, maybe even cease to exist. My heart or my lungs or my brain. All of it, gone in an instant, leaving my body in a useless heap on the floor of this strange cave in a strange land between the thighs of a very strange female.
Ah, that’s a fine thing for a warrior, I thought with some bitterness. To be one of the great Gahn Fallo’s strongest fighters, and to be killed not by a blade, but merely killed by wanting.
Perhaps the process had already started. I could feel my heart beating, not in my chest, but in my hands and in my head and in my cock. Fiona stared and so did I, our eyes meeting above the endless stretch of her miniscule body as my tongues twitched higher, higher, so high I was certain that now, she’d pull away. Now, she’d tell me no.
If she told me to stop, I would do it.
And then I would die.
But she didn’t. The only thing she did – a tiny thing, no more than a flicker of movement that maybe even she herself was not aware of – was to part her legs. Just a little more.
My throat locked up. My tongues darted forward. I’m saved, I thought. Saved and ruined. All at once.
But I thought it too soon because before I could scrape even one of my tongues against her loincloth, two things happened in blindingly rapid succession.
The first thing was Oxriel’s voice calling through the cave, saying that the vaklok was due to begin and it was time to go.
The second thing that happened was Fiona drew up her leg and kicked me in the face.
The new women were small, and they weren’t strong, but she’d managed to wind up quite a bit of force in her leg and when her foot connected, it hit my mouth hard. My fangs split my lower lip from the inside, and I rose up higher on my hands and knees, surprised and more than a little disoriented to see a drop of black blood splatter downward onto the white skin (white but reddened by my ravenous attentions) of Fiona’s thigh.
“Oh, God. Oh my God! I’m sorry!” she cried. She wiped my blood away from her skin then yanked her leg-coverings up over herself. I watched her cover herself, hide her legs and her cunt in another layer of fabric, and then I spat more blood on the stone.
“Yikes! That’s a lot of blood!” Fiona said, now on her feet, her hands rising to the sides of her face like it was her own cheeks that were bleeding and she was trying to stem the flow. “How did I even do that?”
“You didn’t,” I grunted, rising to my own feet. At least the surprise of the kick and now the slight pain in my mouth was taking away from the hardness at my groin. Sort of. “You are not strong enough to make me bleed just by kicking me. It was my own fangs that cut me.” I pressed my thumb against my lip, folding it downwards to that she could see the inside of it. Her face went white and I spit again.
“Dalk, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do that,” she stammered fretfully, looking like she wasn’t sure if she should come closer to me or move further away. “I just... Ox surprised me and I thought someone was coming and I...”
“Why do you call him that?” I hissed, already blaming Oxriel for what had just happened. Or, I supposed, what hadn’t happened.
At least I didn’t die like I’d thought.
I grabbed up my spear from where I’d thrown it down before, squeezing it, and it felt good in a grim sort of way to hold it.
“What?” Fiona blinked and frowned. “Why do I call him Ox? I don’t know. It’s just a nickname. It’s shorter than Oxriel. Why does that matter right now? I just split you’re freaking lip open!”
“It was my fangs,” I said again.
“Yeah, but I’m sure the kick to the face didn’t help!” Fiona snatched her cloak from the bed and slammed her hands into it, snaking her arms around until her fingers popped out through the narrow cuffs. She fastened the cloak up to her chin with a violent vrrrp sound then stormed towards me. “Let me see it again!”
“No,” I grunted, spitting blood for the third time. “It’s just a scratch.”
“Scratches don’t bleed that much!” she countered fiercely.
“True,” I said, unable to deny that. “Your knee barely bled.”
“Yeah... Speaking of which... Why... Why did you...”
Why did I lick her like a starving beast who’d come upon a bone?
What could I say? Truly, what could I say? I saw your legs and your skin and your blood, smelled your cunt, lost all grip on sanity and wanted to eat you all up?
Unlike men such as Gahn Thaleo, Sea Sand males tended to be blunt and forward. We did not lie often. All of us would prefer to give and to receive a hard club to the face than a gentle knife in the back.
But I decided that, in that moment, honesty would not serve me well, so I took a deep breath and stiltedly uttered, “I was... cleaning your wound.”
“Cleaning my wound,” she echoed flatly. “With... your tongues...”
“Yes.”
“But... there’s Vrika’s blood. And not to mention we have first aid kits! Plus you...” She faltered, then grew almost angry. “You went way higher than just my scraped knee!”
“Did I?”
Another lie. As if I had not known where I was. What I was this cursedly close to tasting.
“Of course you did! You were all the way up my leg, nearly at my-” She halted, face more red than I’d ever seen it. “Never mind,” she said suddenly. “We don’t have time for this.”
She grabbed at something else that was lying on the bed – it looked like more of that human pay-pur – then she shoved past me out into the cave beyond where the others waited. I followed close behind her, my knuckles cracking around the shaft of my spear. Her taste but a mere memory already – washed away by my own blood in my mouth – I left the caves with the others and headed outside for the vaklok. I blackly hoped that whatever the first round of the event proved to be, I’d at least get the chance to beat another man senseless.
And even if there was no fighting in that first round...
Maybe I would do it anyway.