Night of the Wolf Read Free Page B

He tried to pull away. She caught his head between her thighs, his hair in her hands. He found himself wanting to drink her dry. He tried.
    She was swollen, normal; wolves also did this. Other things were not so normal. She heated like a branch charring in a fire until she seemed one burning with fever. Her heart thundered. It went on and on until she reared up and shouted, “Quench me! Do it now!”
    “Pain,” he said. The unpracticed word was almost a snarl.
    “By all the gods!” Her body shuddered; her nails dug into his back, scoring his skin. “Do you think I give a damn about pain?”
    But she did. He found out when he forced admission to her intimate domain.
    She fell back, biting the side of her open hand so as not to scream, her body suddenly drenched with perspiration.
    “Wait,” she whispered, placing her other hand palm open against his chest. She was breathing rapidly, deeply, not quite panting. “The sacrifice is a good one. I feel the blood. He takes his tribute, the male spirit, the bull of the woods. A woman’s pain, her terror, her blood belong to him. I have given him mine, as I was chosen by lot to do?’
    Maeniel, now more man than he had ever been, tried to draw away. His mind chased the words through the blind pathways of his brain and couldn’t find them. He wanted to say, “No more, you’re hurt, bleeding. Your god should be content.” But he couldn’t fashion the thought into speech. “No,” was the only reply he could manage. He tried to free his member from her body.
    She embraced him, pressing his lips to hers. Her teeth met through his bottom lip.
    Red rage wiped out all wolf and all humanity. For a second he was, as she wanted him to be, a conscienceless primal being. He completed the act of penetration brutally, vengefully, finally.
    Her skin went cold, her heartbeat faltered. For a moment he thought he’d killed her, but then she stirred. She wept, but her skin was warming faster and faster. Seemingly almost against her will, a deep throbbing began. “Oh, no,” she sobbed. “It will hurt. I can’t stand it again.”
    “Not now!” he said.
    For a moment she was balanced perfectly between pleasure and pain, then pleasure tripped the scales and they were both caught up in a firestorm of mutual desire that burned away caution and hesitation.
    They explored each other’s bodies passionately, constantly, with unceasing energy, as the night wore on. The moon set and then the Pleiades. All that remained were the cold, lonely stars when the dawn wind began to blow.
    She was melting with exhaustion when she surrendered to him for the last time, the final pulsations of her body drawing him into flame. She lay in the ferns, a rag of flesh, breathing the deep, strong inhalations of sleep.
    He found another, a man, also sleeping, clutching a half-full wineskin and wearing a woolen mantle. He woke when Maeniel took both. A blow of the gray wolf’s fist returned him to the arms of Morpheus.
    She swallowed the wine without waking, snuggled under the mantle. He found a bay tree nearby and crowned her with the victor’s laurels. The mist was a silver glow among the trees as he left her for the sun to find.
    Memory faded. Over the mountains the sun was sinking into the clouds. The wolf circled the lake, then trotted down the falls themselves, breasted the water in the lower pond. Helpless, his head clearly outlined against the perfectly still water, he invited attack if any huntsmen were concealed in the trees. None came.
    The wolf reached the shore, puzzled. Men were vengeful creatures. The wolf was sure they would greet him here. But no. He reached the soft, beige sand beach at the edge of the lake, loped out of the water, and shook himself dry.
    He owned them his superiors in cunning and, for that matter, in cruelty. He couldn’t imagine what they might be planning. Some incomprehensible madness like the one that had taken her?
    Guilt. A feeling known by dogs and wolves as well as