Page 51 of Warped

I turn my eyes back to the other screen to check the progress of the ritual. Elaine and her guys are no longer mating, but it seems they are not quite finished with her yet. I look closer, to see what they are doing.

Elaine is kneeling in the middle of the bed, her face uplifted. A trickle of semen has run from her bottom lip, forming a straight line down the middle of her chin. One of her mates is supporting her from behind while the other is using a device that looks like a small flashlight to illuminate the dribble on her chin.

“What are they doing?” I ask.

“That’s a shadowtat machine,” Rek explains. “It takes any fluid that’s on the surface of the skin and turns it into a tattoo…”

He touches the purple design on his upper arm.

“Every warper gets one of these when he becomes a full member of the Warpers Guild. We use paint to draw the pattern, then we use a shadowtat machine to make it permanent.”

He gestures toward the screen and smirks.

“But with the bonding ritual, a different kind of paint is used.”

“Cum?” I whisper.

“That’s right,” Traven says. “The warpers mark their bonded mate with their seed, and they use the shadowtat machine to make the mark permanent, just like the bond that ties them together. That mark lets all the other warpers know that the person wearing it has been claimed, and her body is off limits to everyone except her chosen mates.”

Then Traven does something totally unexpected.

He reaches down between my open legs and dips the tip of his finger inside my pussy again, gathering a small amount of the stuff that’s oozing out of me. His stuff and Rek’s stuff mixed together. He brings the soiled fingertip up to my face and taps it a few times on my cheek, drawing a row of dots along my skin.He doesn’t explain why he’s doing it, and he doesn’t have to. I understand perfectly.

Tonight, I am his chosen mate. His and Rek’s.

Tonight I belong to them, body and soul.

CHAPTER 21: BINX

“I’m coming to get you, Bianca…”

The message sends a shiver up my spine, and it’s not the good kind of shiver. The words seem to be whispered not into my ear, but within the very center of my brain, and they are accompanied by the distant howl of a wolf.

Somehow, I know that the whisper and the howl are the same.

The landscape through which I am running is dark—dark hills and valleys cloaked in a faintly luminous fog. The terrain seems to shift and writhe beneath my feet, and no matter how fast I pump my legs, the ground keeps pulling back to where I started, like I’m running in place on a treadmill. Is this some kind of earthquake?

I stumble and fall, but the ground yields beneath me, soft, not like mud or loosely packed soil, but like flesh, warm and smooth. The land is not land at all, but a mass of tangled bodies, immense and writhing. An orgy of titans, their muscles like dark mountains shifting behind the many layers of fog.

“I’m coming to get you…”

Once more, I hear the howling, but this time it is closer than before. It is not the cry of some wild animal, not a wolf or coyote, but the baying of a hound who has caught his quarry’s scent.

I run as fast as my legs will carry me, down the slope of a gigantic buttock, up the valley of a spine. It is no use. The fog closes in around me so thick it feels like I’m running underwater.

The hound cries again, much closer now.

I know I shouldn’t look, it will only slow me down even more, but I can’t help myself. I turn to face my pursuer. The hound is loping after me, a great shadowy beast with gleaming fangs and glowing eyes. Behind him, following close on his heels, are three men. His keepers. Two of them I don’t recognize, but the third one is Stanley. My ex. The rotten piece of shit who got me into this mess in the first place.

“You might as well give up, Bianca!” he yells. “It’s already too late…”

The fog isn’t fog anymore. It is smoke, thick and choking, laced with drifting ashes like flakes of black snow. The giants’ bodies erupt around me. Breasts gushing fountains of molten lava. Phalluses ejaculating rivers of fire.

The hound leaps.

I wake up.

The bedroom aboardthe Nomadis dark. No wall-imager illusion of a castle bedchamber. No crackle of a fire burning in an imaginary fireplace. That’s probably for the best, considering the nightmare I was just having.

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