2. The Foxen #3
Her tongue ran along my pulse as she started humping herself against my hips. I shuddered, eyes closing. My hand closed around the hilt of my knife.
Agony lanced through me as the foxen sank her teeth through my throat and into my soul.
The instincts I’d walled off from her control moved me, the centuries of training requiring no conscious thought.
My hand swung and my knee came up, and then I drove my heel into her bare foot and my knife into her back.
Steel skidded over bone and bones snapped under my boot.
The foxen reeled back with a high-pitched animal shriek.
Something in me tore, the pain so overwhelming that I collapsed, clutching my neck and sobbing.
No blood wet my hand. She’d bitten my soul—she’d bitten me, ripped out the throat of my soul—
The swish, swish, swish of the broom on stone didn’t stop. The foxen chewed and swallowed, her lips pulled back in an animalistic snarl, showing sharp fox-teeth. Saliva dripped out of her mouth to spatter the stone.
“Ohhh, wicked boy,” she breathed, her eyes bright with something more akin to insanity than any passion I’d ever experienced. “I’m going to make it hurt.”
She ripped the knife from her back with a sharp bark of pain. Reality ran like watercolor around her, limbs lengthening and skin darkening, and then it was the general standing there in a woman’s dress. His tongue swept across his wet mouth.
“My loyal soldier,” Xilsatra said in a low voice warm with approval. His fingers hooked into the top of the lace bodice and yanked, tearing the cloth and baring his smooth brown skin.
I shoved myself backwards like a frightened, broken animal.
I couldn’t stop staring; staring and sobbing, the pain spreading through me like cracks in ice, spiderwebbing through my entire body.
I could feel the balance of my agreement with General Xilsatra, knew the thing in front of me wasn’t the General of the First Army, and it didn’t matter.
The foxen’s allure battered me like a tidal wave, far worse than anything I’d expected to face.
That feeling ate at my sanity. I loved him, needed him, ought to do whatever it took to please him—
He stripped off the ruined cloth of the dress as he came, until he was nude and erect, his cock like a hound’s and the flicker of motion behind him all I could see of the foxen’s many tails. “Good boy,” he said again, and lunged for me.
My head struck the stone and the breath fled my body as razor sharp teeth and claws sank into my very being, tearing and biting.
I screamed—could feel myself screaming, my breath ripping at my throat—and yet it was as much in ecstasy as in agony.
He wanted me, needed me, and I loved him, loved him, loved him—and with every dram of power I possessed, I drove my allure geas into him and demanded that he love me back.
The foxen yipped and tried to reel away.
I grabbed onto it and clung to it with numb arms as it writhed in my grasp.
I knew what it wanted, had felt what it wanted me to feel, and so I poured everything I had into making those feelings a reality.
The foxen wore General Xilsatra’s face, and so I thought of it as if it were the general, taking all my attraction for the strange, intense, honorable man who’d sent me here to die and reflecting it onto the monster I held in my arms.
Love me, want me, kiss me, fuck me, I demanded of him, every feeling the foxen had forced on me reflected back with the vicious strength of my will behind it.
I imagined it: hazel eyes hazed with pleasure, brown skin flushed in passion, his handsome voice roughened with need.
My hips against his. His teeth sinking into the muscle of my throat as he took what he wanted from me.
I bared my teeth and kissed the mouth of a monster and demanded that he give me everything he was.
The foxen stopped fighting me and started squirming beneath me. Its body shifted into its natural form, the reek of musk filling my lungs and mouth. Pleasure shuddered through me, redoubling as claws raked across my back with the heated need of a woman desperate for release.
I was dying and I was bleeding and I had no sanity left, but my body moved of its own accord.
As I screamed love me, love me, love me into the soul of a monster and as it screamed it back, our bodies shuddering with need and ecstasy, I reached up and I made my hand into a fist like I’d been trained to do and I put my knuckles through the face of the creature I’d come to kill.
Bone splintered and gore splattered. I fought in armor. I could wield a greatsword. I was fucking strong, and as I wept and moaned and pled for myself to stop, I did it again—again—again—
The sudden release of the allure geas left me reeling. I gagged on my own saliva, retching on the taste of musk. Fat drops of rain fell from the sky. They struck me like arrows, piercing me, and with a moan of pain, I collapsed to the unforgiving stone.