Page 53 of There's No Place Like Oz

Two.

There are two?!

Dorothy’s distant scream was the last thing I heard before the venom hit me square in the chest. My body began to freeze, one muscle at a time.

And then the webs. I was wrapped in a white sticky mess in an instant, and the battle had truly been lost.

Though I couldn’t move, I knew I was being carried somewhere. Next would be the darkness of a beast’s belly, and I mentally prepared myself for the pain of it. My consciousness wouldn’t die, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be torn apart and digested alive.

I did my best to channel Crowe, hoping to find his consciousness somewhere in the night, but our connection was silent. Perhaps they’d been carried off elsewhere. He was in my same boat, but Leon, Tobias, and Dorothy wouldn’t stand a chance against arachnid stomach bile.

I attempted to wiggle my fingers, but I was fully paralyzed, from the crown of my head to my feet. A familiar feeling. Too familiar.

The arachnid’s bindings began to retract, and I found myself standing in a dark room like a statue. A flicker of light caught in the corner of my eye. It illuminated the spider webs in the corners and down the walls. Sandstone was coated in silk string so thick, the once softly colored tans and deep red iron ores vanished behind its veil. I couldn’t move my neck to get a better survey of the area, but as the spider at my feet was withdrawing its webs, I knew full well I was simply being stored for later in the Sa-Nakht’s feeding room.

How many of these spiders did she have now? I should have expected as much. Without me to play muscle for the dainty little witch, of course she would ramp up her guard.

Though it was ironic—comically so—that the only reason I knew where she was holding me was because I’d once been the man who put people here. I’d brutalized Sasha’s prisoners, her enemies, and even her friends, and I’d locked them in this room to be digested by monsters. At times, I’d been tasked with holding her victims still so Sasha could play her games in their flesh, and at others, I’d fed them personally to her young Sa-Nakht. It took magic to hold me when the roles reversed, and I’d angered her enough to reach the feeding block. But up until that point, I was Sasha’s muscle and marionette.

The heavy iron door opened, and the room filled with more gentle orange fire light. Soft light… and the ginger from hell.

Sasha entered the room, carrying herself on soundless steps. She looked exactly as I remembered her, not a single day aged despite having been alive for well over half a millennium. Her hair was perfectly straight, tinted with the color of a flickering flame. It streamed down her back, almost reaching her waist, while long bangs framed her citrine eyes. Her stature was slight, but her posture was proper, and she looked nearly harmless in her sensible flats, her silk button up, and the knee length pencil skirt that hid the top of her dark thigh high stockings,

A beauty with a devil’s heart: that had been my first impression of her all those years ago. At one point, I even thought myself lucky to get to bed such a woman. My tribesmen and women were simple and primitive—something I’d not appreciated back then—and this woman was sophisticated, careful, and astute. To leave a world of cannibals to a world of red wine had felt like great fortune, up until I learned that the red wine was blood, and her affinities were of the same violence. At least the Naraka had ritual to justify our kills.

“If you love him, let him go, for if he returns, he was always yours. And if he doesn’t, he never was. That’s what they say, isn’t it Talos?” She blinked up at me with her near invisible strawberry blond eyelashes. “And here I thought you hated me after all those awful words you said. I suppose removing your tongue was all I had to do to remove that hate from your heart.” A delighted smile graced her pink, softly painted lips. “And you brought a friend. Several even. Imagine you, of all people, havingfriends. That would have been impossible for the Naraka man who feasted on his own bone marrow with me, before I gave him immortal flesh and turned his skeleton to tin. It’s almost like I’ve fixed you with every cut and break I’ve made.”

She placed a single finger on my chest and drew a line down my sternum. “I’ve missed you truly, my big, strong mountain.” Her touch freed my nerves, not needing magic ointments or lotions when the source of the antidote shared skin-to-skin contact. She continued downward to my waistband, then she dropped to her knees. She grinned up at me while she traced the outline of my cock. “We have so much to catch up on, Talos.”

I’m sure we do.

I knew she had access to my mental channel, so I made a point to regulate my thoughts carefully. I revealed nothing, and I remained as still and quiet as the statue she’d wanted me to be.

She undid my pants and nudged them down. Her face lit up as she traced the barbells that pierced a metal ladder along the underside of my full length. “I’m so sorry about the paralysis, but this will be much more enjoyable if you don’t move. I just can’t trust you to hold back anymore, so we can save the rough play for your little entourage.” She lifted the edge of her skirt until her garter belt was visible. She pulled a small knife from the lace and ribbon. “When’s the last time someone was able to make you come, Talos?” Her grin could only be described as cat like. She touched the perfectly sharpened scalpel to my leg. “I wonder if you even can anymore.”

Sasha slipped her tongue on the underside of my cock, and she pulled the tip into her mouth. When her touch freed my body from paralysis, any illusions of arousal were completely shattered. She pulled away from my flaccid dick with a huff.

“Did someone borrow my toy and break it?” She pouted with more animosity than sadness. “Oh, no no no, that won’t do.” She stood, drawing a line up my torso with her blade. The pain from being sliced so shallow barely registered. I kept my mind blank as I felt her clawing at my thoughts. “That won’t do at all. It sounds like you need a reminder of who you are and who you belong to, my Tin Man.”

Chapter 41

Again, I found myself in a cell. So unoriginal. Kidnap the enemy, put them in a dark room, tie them up. The only difference was that this time, I had company, and I couldn’t help but think that the witch of the South had already made an egregious mistake.

Spider webs tightly bound my wrists to Crowe’s, who sat back to back with me on the dungeon floor. Tobias, Talos, and Leon were nowhere to be seen, but while I could never be certain that Crowe likedme, I was extremely certain that Crowe didnotlike the witches, so between his immortality, his strength, his eternal grudge, and the fact that I was apparently the only one who could actually end a witch’s life, I was in a pretty safe position, all things considered. It was almost a little comical to think that the more heartless brutality he showed me, the more I trusted him.

Be that as it may, being alone with him with no one else to rely on or keep him in check still had me feeling unexplainably tense. I’d had Tobias with me from the first time I’d met the scarecrow on his crucifix, and even throughout our travels, there was never someone far away. That shouldn’t have made me so nervous, but it did.

Crowe shifted in our bindings, as if testing the strength of the webs. “These ropes must be enchanted.” He grumbled when there wasn’t the slightest give. “Do all your limbs work?”

I wiggled my fingers that were tingling from the tightness, then I nodded. “Circulation isn’t completely cut off, but it’s close. Everything else works though.” I squirmed against him, creating friction between our skin, but doing nothing to the threads. “Can’t you, like, dislocate your wrist or pull your arm off or something to get out of this?”

Crowe sighed. “Doesn’t work like that. I need some sort of tearing leverage or sharpness to sever a limb, just like you would. The only actual difference between our bodies is that yours will bleed out and die after, while mine is magically forced to reassemble.”

Well, so much for that idea. I sank back against him, accepting the hopelessness, but still trying to keep myself from panicking. “Do you feel pain when you come apart like that?” I asked, wanting to both distract my mind and to take advantage of this rare moment to better get to know him.

“Of course I feel pain. I still have all my nerve endings. Did you spend this whole journey thinking every time I touched you, I was just numbly feeling around?” A scoff. Maybe even genuine offense. “Rich.” He chuckled darkly. “So when I threatened to fuck you, you thought I would do such a thing for onlyyourpleasure?”

Memories of that evening at the waterfall rushed back to me, and I was embarrassed knowing he could now, in fact, feel the heat filling my body just from the recollection. I wondered if watching me had made him hard. “I-I suppose I just don’t totally understand how the witch’s magic works.” I fought the urge to point out the way his phrasing implied he would still be doing it formypleasure as much as his, but I thought better of it, and just stored that little admission in my heart for later.

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