Total pages in book: 48
Estimated words: 44088 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 147(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44088 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 147(@300wpm)
“It’s good for you to climax,” he says as he works on the fire. “Burns negative energies in the body, clears the way for healthier ones.”
“So that was just about… health?”
He raises his head, catching my eyes with his golden gaze. “What did you want it to be about?”
“I don’t know,” I squeak, taking refuge in my blushes. I am glad for them, because they make it easy to hide my filthy thoughts and my less than stellar intentions. I lower my head and hide my face and hope like hell he didn’t see too much inside my head. I hope he was focused between my thighs.
He guts and skins the rabbit-like creatures with a practiced hand and a very sharp blade. It takes about fifteen minutes for the smell of cooking animal to fill the air and make my mouth water.
Kail is an excellent provider and protector. I am very lucky he found me. Had it been another of his kind, I might have been killed on sight. Or I might have been ravaged against my will and then killed. Or I might have been dragged across the country, being repeatedly ravaged. Point being, there’s not that much mercy in the universe, but Kail is showing me mercy and I know enough about life to be grateful for that.
Kail
I watch as the human eats the food I caught and cooked for her, making sounds and claims of gratitude. They are genuine. She is hungry, weak, and vulnerable.
I did not merely bring back rabbits. I also brought back a sturdy, straight sapling that I intend to turn into a spear. The area ahead is well known for large feline predators. I do not intend on becoming their prey.
“We are about to enter a dangerous region,” I tell her. “You must stay very close to me as we pass through it.”
She nods, more concerned with her ongoing embarrassment than the information I am imparting. In many ways, humans prefer death to humiliation. It shows in some of their brutal and perverse treatment of prisoners.
The humans have caught our kind before, charging them with crimes they believe to be valid. Crimes like living in our native lands and attempting to defend them from the colonizers. When it comes to humans, there is no crime greater than occupying territory they intend to steal.
Rage flashes through me. I work to suppress it. I do not want to frighten the one before me. She is human, but she did not come here with military intent. She is just a woman — not that the humans showed our women and children any mercy. Does she know that? Is she aware of the crimes her species has committed against mine? She does not seem to know anything at all.
My feelings toward this human are as complex as they are intense. I want to punish her for the sins of her people. I want her to make amends for their crimes. But I also want to protect her, even from my own brutish instincts.
Humans are animals, and that means they can be tamed and trained. If I make her mine, if I bend her to my will, then she will be absolved of the responsibility belonging to her people.
That is what I tell myself as I carve my spear into a sharp point, taking care not to weaken the tip too much by making it too small. This is an instrument to be used against an apex predator. I need to focus on the dangers that will assail us from the exterior. I cannot waste my time and energy being distracted by hating humans. Not if I want to survive. Certainly not if I want her to survive.
She sleeps near me that night, attempting to wriggle closer to me in the shadows of the evening. I can smell her arousal. The orgasm she strummed out in front of me is not enough to satisfy her. She needs cock, and like any female animal in heat, she has selected the cock she wants.
Mine.
It gives me some pleasure to deny her, though I do not enjoy denying myself. I remind myself that I am merely waiting until the time is right, until my flesh inside her has meaning beyond the sating of simple lust.
Tonight, I feel her squirm and wriggle and I take satisfaction. And sleep.
The next day, we travel through the boulder lands, right to the very edge of the next distinct biome. I feel a chill. My people believe this to be a cursed land. In distinct opposition to the boulder fields that grow with lush grass amid the rocks, my human and I now stare across a vast white plain.
“Is that sand?”
It is not sand.
“These are fields of bone.”
Bleached by the sun and crushed to powder with age and the passing of predators and prey alike, occasionally dotted with the great bone constructions of mega creatures long extinct, rib cages and leviathan skulls provide the only shelter along what was once a riverbed but is now bone dry.