2. The Foxen #2
I stared at her, unable to comprehend what was going on.
This had to be the right place, didn’t it?
I’d stayed on the path, and it hadn’t branched.
Had General Xilsatra been mistaken about where the foxen had laired?
Perhaps it hadn’t come to the temple at all.
It might have hidden in the woods—but if that was the case, these people were in grave danger.
This was surely the most defensible location in the area.
When General Xilsatra moved his people in, they would surely drive the foxen here.
“Hail, well met!” I called out to the fae woman, walking closer to her. “Is your master here, madam? I come with news from the Army.”
She didn’t stop sweeping, but she turned her face towards me. Dark lashes swept down over glassy eyes. When they lifted again, so did the corners of her mouth, the expression like someone pulling up the curtain of a stage.
The wind shifted, cold and wet. The scent of sewage hit me full in the face, making me gag. I reeled back, an involuntary motion, reacting to the reek and horror with the same instincts that had me moving across the ring in a swordfight.
The woman was living, but she wasn’t alive, not in the sense of there being a person present in her body. Whatever pieces of her soul remained were enough to animate her, holding her together like a creature on the vivisection table so that the foxen could eat her at its leisure, bite by bite.
More than three tails. At least five, I thought with rising dread, backing away from the living corpse. I have to get out of here. I have to… to…
All at once, the sight of the smiling woman scraping at the ground with her broom didn’t seem quite so bad.
She was a pretty thing, her cheeks round and with plump hips, the kind that are nice to hold onto while you bounce a woman on your cock.
Out of that dress, she’d be lovely indeed, and who needed intelligent conversation when it came to fucking?
That vacant expression wouldn’t matter much if she had a cock in her mouth…
No no no no no, some voice started shrilling at the back of my mind.
That piece of me started frantically clawing down every barrier I usually kept up between my allure magic and the world around me.
I wavered as some of the strength of the magic affecting me eased off, sweat breaking out over my whole body, my gut churning with nausea.
How could I think something like that? How could I— How could—
Run, instinct screamed at me. I let out a moan of fear, unable to move.
“Welcome, traveler,” a woman crooned behind me, her voice the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.
My lashes fluttered even as acid burned the back of my throat.
Ease and eagerness sank into me with equal measure, an overwhelming desire to please that I remembered well from my lessons in allure magic.
“An allure mage ought to know what their geas feels like,” my tutor had told me with a flinty gaze.
“You ought to know how mindless it feels. How the opportunity to kiss their boots is a gift from the gods.”
A light hand brushed against my shoulder, petted the nape of my neck. I turned like I was in a nightmare, knowing what I’d find and yet unable to resist.
She was as lovely as the sunset, with red-orange hair tumbling across her shoulders and slanted eyes in her sharp-boned face.
Red lips curled up into a vulpine smile.
Her creamy skin was bare onto her chest, the soft globes of her breasts perked high by her dress and the barest edge of pink aureola showing beneath the lace edging.
Gods, she was the most stunning woman I’d ever seen, and she was touching me, her long nails scratching gently along my spine and her forearm resting against my chest. I could have stared at her forever, fallen into those grass-green eyes, let that sweet-scented red hair hide my face from the world—
Dark brown curls shorn short. Hazel eyes. The pain on his face when he’d told me what he needed from me.
I still couldn’t stop myself from leaning closer, drunk on her allure, my whole body shuddering when her soft body molded to mine.
“You know what I am, don’t you?” she asked in a sultry purr. “You know what I’ll do to you, and you can’t help yourself, can you?” Her hand slid down and cupped my groin. My cock was stiff in her hand. “Good boy.”
She pressed her lips to my pulse and moaned as my allure poured into her. She didn’t fight it. She didn’t know to fight it. I wanted the same thing she did right now, after all—wanted her to love me, to take me, to fuck me.
In a corner of my mind, I built the walls I always built around my allure, the ones I sustained day after day after day.
But this time I built them to keep the allure out, to keep this one tiny part of myself sacrosanct.
As I’d done all those years ago with my teacher, I gave the rest of myself over, let her magic make my body and will soft and supple, and in the burning-bright vibrance of our two allures combined, I stole away one tiny piece of myself.