Jumlin's Spawn (12 page)

Elfie left her own clothes behind and picked up
Oliver’s coat. She pressed the soft cloth coat to her nose to
inhale Oliver’s distinct scent: a soft mix of humanity and
masculine cologne. It brought tears to her eyes as she felt
Yancey’s hand brush her arm. He had extended his palm as a request.
She understood and passed Oliver’s jacket along to him. Yancey
wrapped the coat up in his arms, as he would have the man. He held
it to him. Once again, Elfie couldn’t help sensing an impermeable
bond she could never fully share.

“Stop it,” Yancey said sharply.

“Stop what?”

“You know what,” he said, towing Elfie and the jacket
with him up into the bed.

She leaned her head against Yancey’s shoulder. She
found the sigh she exhaled deep inside her. “I walked away from you
guys a year ago. But now the thought of losing Oliver –”

“We’re not losing anyone!” Yancey said staunchly,
pulling her into his arms to run his hands over her shoulders.
“Anyway, the reason you could walk away is because you knew you
could always come back. Now, well, the situation is different.
Besides, stop thinking too much. Get some sleep. We’ll need
it.”

She coughed out a crooked laugh. “You don’t want to
sleep, and you know it.”

“No, but I thought maybe you did,” he said, rolling
her onto her back. He held her arms down above her head and leaned
down to bite her shirt hem between his teeth. He pulled it up.
“What was that about captive bride?”

“I’m not captive if I want to be here,” Elfie said,
with a defiant little smile.

“Maybe you want to be here, but you want to be
captive too,” Yancey said, grinning, as he leaned down to blow
softly over her right nipple.

She gasped at the sensation. “For a bisexual guy,
you’re really hot for girls’ tits.”

“I’m hot for yours. I always have been.”

“Since when?”

“Since I met you,” Yancey said, laughing hotly. He
ran his tongue around her right nipple and then licked it greedily.
“So has Oliver. That’s the way it is with guys.”

“How would you know that Oliver thinks about my
tits?” Elfie murmured, trying hard to focus on the conversation
amid the heat burning in her blood.

“We’ve talked about doing you a hundred times,”
Yancey whispered, his own voice growing rough and faraway as he
tongued her left nipple to wetness and then blew across its
surface. “Maybe a thousand. Talked about what we’d do, how we’d do
it --”

Yancey reached up and around the back of Elfie’s
panties, grasping their crotch and yanking them down.

He pushed a knee between her legs to spread open her
thighs. “Kinica…” he murmured into her throat, licking tenderly at
her skin. “Sogya…le.”

“Is this captive enough for you?” Elfie whispered
back, with a grin.

“You’re not captive at all,” Yancey moaned back as he
thrust his cock into her burning, wet hole, “and now I’m going to
fuck you.”

Yancey’s cock dragged out of her a scream that almost
sounded like pain. The pleasure pulsing through her couldn’t be
vented by tiny lovemaking coos. The pleasure came not just from
within, but from the world around her, a satiation at the deepest
level. Something compelled them to do this.

Elfie grasped out at Oliver’s suit coat to draw it
near her, so they could feel his presence.

Yancey’s reddened face and glassy eyes betrayed his
state of mind. Passion had him in its teeth. He thrust faster and
harder, his mouth claiming her right breast again, his tongue
swabbing wetly over her nipple. As he continued fucking, he reached
under to rub his finger through her soaking wet slit until he found
her swollen clit.

She gasped hard as he touched it. She lurched up to
close the slender distance between them. Pleasure swept through her
like a moving ridge. She drove her face into Yancey’s muscular
brown shoulder. He tenderly nibbled at her throat.

She saw the pattern of light pulsing in her eyes; she
surfaced enough to hear his pounding heart beneath his chest, feel
it drumming gently against her cheek; the light strobe through her
eyes began to keep pace with the cadence of his heart.

The cadence, the heartbeat, the quieting of her blood
in its aftermath, and she felt herself dreaming.

“Bright light,” a voice said in her dream.

The light flashing in her eyes, in that moment of the
dream, was trapped inside a shielded container. She gazed in at its
fractured phasing over the item inside.

“What?” she asked Oliver in the dream, just as she’d
asked him that day three years before.

“I said, the light is really bright.”

“The argon laser electric discharge is pretty
powerful,” she said, laughing. She removed her work glasses, and
then shut down the argon laser. “I warned you, there may be
significant damage done to this artifact.”

“I know. I accept that. It’s just an experiment to
see if we can stop the corrosion going on with the Dani artifacts
given to us by a benefactor. I picked one of the less important
ones to test. All we could think of was the argon laser.”

“Looked like a medicine stone to me,” she said.

“It was. A black argillite stone but, like I said,
not a particularly important one. We can sacrifice it in the
interest of saving the rest.”

In her dream, Elfie opened up the container and
pulled out the capsule into which she had earlier placed a Papua
black argillite stone, well-polished by geologic processes. She
uncapped the container and poured the contents out onto a sterile
dish. It was fine rubble. Very fine rubble.

“Well, that didn’t turn out so good, did it?” Oliver
asked with a broken grin.

She shrugged. “I did warn you.”

Oliver sipped at his fast food cup. “It’s okay. I
expected the worst from something being zapped by lightning in a
box.”

Lightning in a box, Oliver had said…Oliver himself
had said it.

It dragged her back out of the dream and into the
night at hand. She pulled herself onto the edge of the bed. An
already awakened Yancey stood at the window where he stared out at
a white-gray sky. She knew she must have betrayed something with
her eyes, because he immediately took a step toward her.

“What?” he asked.

“I know what it is,” she said.

“What what is?”

“I know what our lightning is. Oliver called it that
himself. The lightning is the argon laser.”

Chapter Five

Her quickened breathing clouded up the night around
her.

The evening had closed in on them like a tiny room of
darkness that blocked out the day. They stood in the midst of the
most rural Badlands outreach. Nowhere felt colder than the distant
Badlands at night. The whistling of wind and the bluster of night
combined to chill her to the bone.

Before them, close enough to see inside, the seven
mouths of the Angel Caves glowed defiantly through the darkness.
Their gauzy lace of light wove around each obsidian wall. The
effect reminded Elfie of bad and broken teeth snarling back at them
through open mouths, ready to devour. The howl of the wind might
have been coming from those open mouths. Even the crisp sound of
Severin and Yancey’s nearby conversation buffeting back forth could
barely be heard above the howl.

The scream of shifting gears finally overtook the
wind. Elfie looked down to see Oliver’s jeep, driven by a young
Sioux, lurching upward to the roughly even shelf below. The jeep
shuddered to a stop. The young Sioux man climbed out, took up the
bicycle that had been mounted to the back rack, then rode off away
toward the distance.

“Shouldn’t he drive the jeep up here?” Elfie asked
the two men.

“We must have as few people as possible with us,”
Severin explained.

“Besides,” Yancey said, “the road up here is a steep
path that plummets off both sides. Only someone who knows that jeep
can drive it up these hills, especially with the generator rigging
in back. Remember the drive up to the first campsite?”

Elfie smiled at the thought…it had only been a day or
so ago, and yet, it seemed like a year had passed between that
night and this one. “Yeah, I see your point. Especially in Oliver’s
jeep.”

Yancey nodded and shared a saddened smile.
“Especially in Oliver’s jeep. I’ll drive it up here before Severin
heads into the caves.”

As if on cue, Severin pulled out his boot knife and
drew a pattern in the soft sand. He drew a forked shape with
several prong lines branching off. “This is the Angel Caves system.
Here we have the heart of the cave, the heart of the spawn, at the
center.”

“Is that where Laughing Bear lives?” Yancey asked,
his voice only twisting a little, as if to quell his sarcasm.

“Yes. Destroy the caves, and we kill him,” Severin
said. He tapped the end of the stick at the far right side. “I’m
going in first to lure Laughing Bear here. I evaded him once, I
escaped his control, and he will be more concerned with my entrance
than with yours.”

“Will he remember you?” Elfie asked, still hugging
herself against the prevailing cold.

Severin looked up, his eyes seeming to convey the
importance of his words. “Laughing Bear forgets nothing.” He moved
the knife’s point toward the left. “Elfie, you will be here. Oliver
will respond to you the best. You’re a woman. He’s still your
friend, but he’s also now compelled to breed for his own. It’s
something he cannot resist without great practice.”

“She can’t go in by herself!” Yancey snapped.

“She has to,” Severin said. “Oliver won’t be drawn to
you as quickly. The part of him who is your friend will be, but
he’s been driven by a more primal need from within.”

“Besides,” Elfie said to Yancey, “you need to drive
the jeep, remember? Like you said, can anybody else get that jeep
up the steep incline? Especially with the generator in back?”

“If necessary,” Severin said to Yancey. “I’ll die so
that she’ll live. So that they’ll both live. As would you. But
there’s a very important thing you both must do. All of you, the
three of you, as soon as you are all free of the caves, you have to
run for cover to the Willow Peak cottage, where you were when I
found you. I can save myself. I’m the only one who can. Don’t wait
for me. Get in the jeep, keep driving and don’t look back. Promise
me.”

Yancey deliberated for a long moment. “We’re supposed
to just run and abandon you?”

“You won’t be abandoning me,” Severin explained, “and
unless you promise me, we can’t go forward.”

Yancey looked toward Elfie. Elfie shrugged and tried
to smile.

Finally, Yancey nodded his agreement. “Okay, we
promise.”

Severin pointed away from the caves. “You had best
drive my dirt bike down to the truck. We need to act soon.”

Yancey’s cranky glower turned away from the other two
people and in the direction of his task. “All right,” he said,
advancing first toward the dirt bike, but then turning back sharply
to pull Elfie toward him and plant his lips firmly over hers. He
backed off to grumble into her face, “Be fucking careful.”

“I will,” she said. “You, too.”

Yancey turned in Severin’s direction with a look of
gratitude. “Thank you.”

Severin nodded. “Time to go.”

The high-pitched shriek of Severin’s dirt bike as
Yancey gunned it down the hill sent a shudder through Elfie’s tight
nerves. Her hands, so cold they were numb, had been stuffed into
her pockets. She didn’t know if the numbness came solely from the
night chill or had been helped along by her general state of
terror.

“First,” Severin said, “you must try to lure him
toward you. You’re a woman. You know how I mean.”

“Oh my God,” Elfie said, now fighting the twin rising
tides of embarrassment and nausea caused by terror. “Yeah, okay. I
lure Oliver toward me. What else?”

“Don’t let him touch you. You will want him to touch
you more than you want to breathe. As unlikely as that sounds,
given the situation, just trust me. You must resist that urge. Try
to convey to him, in a way that only Oliver will understand, what
we’re trying to do.”

She shut her eyes, breathed in, taking in the words
that had been given her and finally murmured a soft agreement.
“Okay. Then what?”

“When you hear Yancey at the mouth of the cave,
connecting the generator, you’ll know the moment is near. When you
see me pick up the argon laser, you must grab Oliver and drag him
with you as fast as possible toward the jeep.”

“When do we do this?”

“Now,” Severin said, leaning over to lift the argon
laser contraption into his arms.

Elfie fought to slow her breathing. She felt
light-headed already. She swallowed an infinite dryness. “Are you
clear on how the laser works? It’s very simple.”

“Yes,” he answered. He motioned her toward the
leftmost cave. “I’ll enter the right-side cave mouth, but all the
cave passages converge, as I showed you.”

“I remember,” she said.

“Then start walking now. You’ll see nothing, but keep
walking forward. We’ll stop walking when we can see each other
again. When the cave strands converge.”

As Elfie moved forward, she couldn’t see a thing, but
not because of the dark. The lustrous glow created an illuminated
cloud of fog that enveloped them. She could hear a far-flung gaggle
of wrawls, like a hunting pack snarling in the distance. All at
once, it felt as though the hands of fog had uncovered her eyes,
and she could see
something
beyond them.

The something, at first, appeared to be sparkles in
the cave walls, but then the illumination grew brighter, until she
could see the heptad of cave arcades merge into a singular
space.

At the center, something robed in a blend of black
fire and feathers dangled as if weightless above a pit. A huge
black angel, at least eight feet tall, its wings folded in. In
shock but also at the sight of Severin, Elfie stopped dead in her
tracks.