Chapter 5: Taken in the Dark
The thread-gate sang at dawn.
Sylvara felt it first, her antennae snapping upright as the silk tightened against violent intent. She was on her feet with a cry before the gate itself began to smoke, her enchanted strands burning gold where the council's crystal-lances pushed through them.
"They're cutting it. They're cutting my gate!"
The den erupted. Kira was already moving, her hunting knife out of its sheath and her shoulder set against the narrow entrance. Vexis clawed her satchel open for anything that burned. Elara grabbed Tim's wrist, her knuckles white.
"Back door. There's no back door," she said, and her voice cracked on it.
There wasn't. Kira had chosen the den for its single approach, and now that choice became a trap. The gate tore with a sound like a ripped sheet and the first councilman came through wreathed in violet light, and behind him four more, and behind them more still, and the whole ridge face filled with armored bodies.
Tim never reached the entrance. Crystal-lance light struck him in the chest and his legs went to water. He went down on the furs he had shared with four women and could not make his arms obey him.
"Don't touch him!" Kira's roar shook the stone. He heard her blade meet something, heard a man scream, heard the wet sound of steel parting flesh. He heard Elara shriek his name. Then boots, many boots, and the crunch of bodies piling onto one wolf-woman, and a lance-butt driving into her skull with a sick crack.
He was dragged out by two men gripping his arms, his toes plowing furrows through the dirt. In the gray dawn light he caught one last look backwards: Elara on her knees, held by two councilmen, her face a ruin of tears; Vexis with a lance leveled at her breastbone, her claws spread wide, going still; Sylvara crouched over the shredded remains of her gate, gathering its broken threads to her chest like a dead child.
Kira was face-down in the bloodied dirt, but she was not dead. Her amber eyes found his as they hauled him past, and she howled, long and raw, the sound following him all the way down the goat track.
Then the lance-light took him again and the world went dark.
The council kept him in a warded chamber beneath their hall, windowless, its walls etched with harmonic script that hummed against his teeth. They fed him well. They were courteous. A woman in formal robes visited weekly to measure his resonance and record his dreams, and told him the realm was grateful, that placement was an honor, that in time he would come to accept his role.
He asked about the women every week. She never answered. Once, he got his teeth into a guard's wrist, and for his trouble they doubled the warding and left him alone with the humming for a month.
He did not know if Kira had lived. He did not know if the others had been punished for him. He carved marks into the stone floor, one per day, until he lost count in the two hundreds and the marks turned to madness and back to marks again.
He escaped on a night when the warding-script flickered during a thunderstorm, the harmonic lattice stuttering on some deep pulse he could feel in the stone. Six months of watching for that flicker and it came, one plate going dark for three breaths. He broke the finger of the man who came through the door, took his keys and his knife, and ran.
He ran through rain all night and all the next day. He did not go to the village. He went up.
The goat track nearly killed him. His body was soft with confinement, his legs shaking, and twice he fell to his knees in the wet scree. He climbed anyway, past the treeline, past the ivy, up to the ridge where his wives waited, where Elara called him home.
He came over the last shoulder of rock in the gray light before dawn, rain streaming down his face, and stopped dead.
The den's entrance glowed with firelight. And the valley below, the village, everything else, fell out of his head, because he could see in, and they were all there.
All four of them. Alive. Naked.
Kira sat on the furs near the fire, her shoulder healed but scarred, a fresh mark of ownership bitten into the curve of her neck. Vexis lounged against the wall, her garnet nipples stiff, her tail curled loosely around the ankle of a man Tim had never seen.
The man was young, broad, dark-haired. He lay back on the pelts in the center of the den like a king. Sylvara knelt at his side, her wings folded, kissing his stomach while his hand stroked her antennae. And Elara, his Elara, was astride his hips, her enormous breasts swaying, her plush hips rolling down onto his cock with the same desperate rhythm Tim remembered against his own body.
"No," Tim said. The rain swallowed it.
Elara was moaning. He knew that moan. He had pulled it from her himself, again and again, on this same floor, and now it poured out of her for another man's cock. She rode him deep, grinding her clit against his groin, her head thrown back, her honey-blonde hair plastered to her sweating shoulders.
"That's it," the stranger groaned, his hands full of her ass. "Gods, you're soaked. Ride it."
"I'm close," Elara gasped, and her voice was ragged and wanting, the voice she had used only for him. "Fuck, your cock is so deep."
Tim's legs gave. He caught himself against the cold basalt outside the entrance, ten feet from the firelight, unseen in the dark and the rain. Vexis leaned over and took one of Elara's swinging nipples into her mouth, and Kira growled low in her throat, approving, the sound she used to make for him.
He should go in. He should shout. His hand closed on the knife he had stolen and did not move.
Sylvara lifted her head from the stranger's stomach. "He's going to finish," she said softly, dreamily, her antennae fluttering. "I can feel it in the thread."
"Then don't waste it," Kira said.
Elara whimpered and sped up. The wet slap of flesh filled the den, and Tim stood frozen in the rain watching her take another man to the root, watching her belly tighten, watching her start to come, her face twisting with pleasure he had taught her, given freely now to a stranger who moaned and bucked beneath her.
"Wait." Her voice cracked. She had stopped moving, still seated to the hilt on the stranger's cock, and she was staring toward the entrance, into the dark and the rain.