The Scholomance (31 page)

She was caught
and she knew it, but with Kazuul’s fantasies eating up her mind, she wasn’t
capable of feeling trapped by him. She looked at him as he bared his black
teeth at her and felt only a throbbing knot of impatience.

He heaved
himself upright, bracing his weight on the points of his claws, so as to bring
his hot eyes on a level with hers. “You have robbed me of my harem,” he growled,
his breath burning on her face and stinking of shadows and blood.

Mara said
nothing.

The demon
grunted through his teeth, twitching the hem of her robe aside to appraise her
feet. “Perhaps I should take you to replace them.”

Even Kazuul’s
relentless carnal drumming could not make this a pleasant prospect, but Mara
did not flinch.

Malavan’s eyes
narrowed. The tips of the fleshy tendrils he grew for hair began to pulse red. “On
your knees.”

So she knelt,
feeling neither dread nor rebellion, but only a tense frustration which she
didn’t bother to disguise from him. In her experience, the best and most
bloodless way of dealing with a bully was to make him feel insignificant. And
because she knew Malavan was not a strong psychic, she did not merely place her
impatience on display for him, but drove it into whatever passed for his
subconscious, stabbing at him repeatedly with needles of her annoyance and
disdain.

It almost
worked. She could sense his determination curdling the longer he held her
stare. In another minute, half that maybe, he might have dropped and slunk
away, but the mind can be an unpredictable target, especially when one cannot
clearly see what one is stabbing. One of her needles sank in too close to the
surface, and suddenly Malavan felt a bilious surge of disembodied humiliation. It
found an anchor in Mara’s projected contempt and turned instantly to fury and
the need to see her suffer for looking on him in his shame.

He reared,
blowing a reptilian sort of roar down at her in hateful defiance, and spread
his thighs. He had no obvious genitals, but as she withdrew from his mind, a
nearly imperceptible crease low on his abdomen buckled outward, releasing a
pungent wash of musk first and then his red, raw-looking phallus,
sharply-tapered and gnarled by veins. The heat of it against her face was a
furnace; the stench, bestial and unclean. Mara looked up between the bone
blades of his claws, silently daring him to make his next command.

He didn’t give
it, but he did think about it. Not because he wanted it—he had no real sexual
urge at the moment, in spite of the lie proclaimed by his jutting cock—but
because he wanted to punish her. She had taken away his Pretty One, and then
Horuseps had come for the others as well: his Sleeper, his Song Bird, even his
Little Laugh. (The flickering images that accompanied these nomenclatures were
too awful to hold and examine for detail, but worst of all was Little Laugh,
whose screaming giggles were born out of some shred of mad awareness.) Now she
dared to face him with disdain, with superior sufferance, with contempt for one
of the Lesser Tribes, and he wanted to cut that haughty shine from her and
replace it with humiliation. He wanted to drag her out before human eyes and
climb her naked back and take his revenge with every whimpering grunt that
escaped her lips.

Malavan’s thighs
flexed. The tip of his angry cock twitched and dripped pale fluid onto the
floor between Mara’s knees. He leaned over her, his fleshy hair burning red up
to his skull now, and more color pulsing at his throat. “Even the mighty
Kazuul,” he snarled, dripping drool onto her robe, “cannot know everything. And
when he has you at last,
precious
, he’ll have my leavings.”

And the next
words would have been his command, she could feel it pounding in his crude
mind, along with every way in which he meant to have her before he left her for
the other students to make use of, but he never got to say them.

“Hold, brother!”
boomed out a good-natured voice. “Hold and give me welcome!”

Malavan yanked
one claw and slammed it down behind Mara, covering her in his heat and stink.
He hissed, his breath rattling in his lungs, through his yellow teeth, onto
Mara’s back.

“No more of
that,” the other said, his cheer heavily tempered by an ominous note of
warning. “Thou art alone at a table set for plenty and I will be fed. Takest
thou whichever end, and I shall have the other. My rod hath not been wetted
since the moon showed her fullest f—”

A sharp intake
of breath, a moment’s stillness, and then Mara was wrenched back by a clawed
hand pulling at her hair. She winced up into a bone-studded, astonished face,
and then was yanked fully off the ground and swung around behind the newcomer’s
muscular thigh by her hair alone.

“Art thou mad?”
this demon demanded, dragging Mara with him as he backed up. “Dost thou not
know who thou wouldst cross with this act?”

Malavan’s mouth
peeled back on a sullen sneer.

The stranger
uttered a long, low, unamused laugh. “And who thou art crossing now?” Suddenly,
he shoved Mara to the floor and stepped on her, pressing her painfully flat as
he lunged forward to strike his chest in challenge. “Who art thou to show me
thy sparking eyes? Drop, worm, else I drop thee, and whet my cock with the
blood of Malavanon!”

Malavan pulled
his claws and dropped into a surly crouch, his gaze averted and his lips tight
together. There was no satisfaction in the sight, not with the demon’s foot
crushing at her from above. Mara groped behind her, caught his spurred ankle,
and tried in vain to shift him as grey light began to explode before her eyes.

“On thy way,
crawling thing. If next I spy thee so, I’ll pull thy limbs and send thee forth
on thy belly as the worm thou art.” But he stepped back and dragged a gasping
Mara roughly up onto her feet. “Art injured?” he asked gruffly, glaring after
Malavan’s retreat.

“No,” she
managed.

“Art violated?”

“What? No!”

He grunted and
released her, still without looking at her. “To thy cell then, or to study. Wander
not these unlit halls.” He gave her a shove to start her going and stalked off
in the opposite direction, snarling under his breath in an inhuman tongue.

Dost thou not
know who thou wouldst cross
…

Mara tipped her
head back, staring up as though she could see through layers of rock to the
theater that crowned them all. Kazuul’s desires rang even more insistently
through her blood, amplified by her thoughts of him, for as sure as she was
standing here and not bent under Malavan’s pumping weight, Kazuul’s mark on her
had saved her.

“Wait!” she
shouted, and the demon, now merely a dark blur deep in the shadowed tunnel,
halted. He did not turn to face her. She thought he drew his hands up into
fists, but couldn’t be sure. Even when she quickly moved to catch up to him, he
did not look at her. “Who are you?” she asked.

The muscles of
his bone-studded back tightened. “A creature not to be toyed with.”

“I’m not. I only
want to know…” But where to go with this, she wondered, circling behind him. And
how hard to push? “…who to thank,” she finished.

He grunted
sourly. “I need no reward for that I maltreat one of his low breed.”

“You were
willing enough to share his spoils,” Mara pointed out. And when he continued to
stand unmoving in the tunnel, she quietly added, “But you don’t need to share
now.”

His clawed hands
opened and closed once, sinews cracking like old leather.

This wasn’t
going very well. Mara knew she was no good at flirting, but she hadn’t realized
she could be this bad. This demon clearly knew more than she did about Kazuul’s
game and how it concerned her, and she was willing to use her body to get his
answers (more than merely willing; perhaps only because he was of Kazuul’s same
breed, but with that damned suggestion still gnawing through her every
subaudible sense, she could even find him desirable). But he wouldn’t look at
her, and he kept his anger like a wall between them, unbreachable.

She touched him,
a light and sensual pass of her hand down his back, parallel to the row of
spikes accentuating his spine. Her intent had been to interlay a suggestion of
her own with this contact—not enough to encourage him to fall on her right here
in the hall, but just to soften him up a little, lower his defenses, ease her
way into his well-fortified mind. She never had the chance.

The demon swung
and shoved her away, hard. Her back hit the stone wall of the tunnel before she
even knew her feet had left the ground, but he caught her before she could
fall. She could see his eyes burning in the darkness, steady even as her head
swam. His face—Kazuul’s face…for a moment, she didn’t know where she was or
with who. Had she gone to him after all? Or had she just concocted this…this
hallucination to protect herself from his relentless subliminal pursuit, as an
oyster makes pearls out of sand? But no, Kazuul’s eyes were green, the sickly
green of a Halloween goblin-mask, and these eyes were yellow.

“Do not touch
me,” he said, but said it softly, as a lover might. His eyes—those gleaming,
furious flames—dimmed and swelled as he moved nearer. “Well do I know the
treachery hidden in thine innocent hand. Do not…” His breath puffed on her
lips. “…dare to touch me.”

Kazuul or not? Dream
or reality? Whose claws were these digging at her shoulders until the sting of
blood drew itself down her arms? Whose mouth came grudgingly to hers when she
pressed her hands behind his neck and pulled? Whose thigh insinuated itself
between hers and pushed her easily up along the wall, all her weight riding on
him?

“Thou art fruit
of the forbidden vine,” he breathed, moving his thigh slowly up and down. “Yet
this we sons of the Second-born have alike to the sons of Adam: We must bite
what is put to our lips.”

And he did, his
sharp teeth scoring over her swollen lips, nudging her chin up, and coming
together with orgasmic bliss on her jaw, just beneath her ear. She felt herself
pierced there, as rapturously as she could be pierced with his cock, and ground
her hips to brilliant climax there on his thigh. She could feel his erection
like a brand against her body and it would take only the quick shift of her
clothes and his and he could have her—right here, right up against this wall,
with a hundred students ready to spill out of their lessons to watch them—but
one thought rose over the candescence of even this desire.

“Who said I was
forbidden?” Mara asked, clinging resolutely to her fading sense of purpose. Their
minds were weirdly joined, though separate. She could see the carnal circus of
Kazuul’s suggestion surrounding both of them. “And why?”

He heard her,
but he heard it as a warning.

He drew back,
his passion melting once more into anger. He looked at her, wanting her so
deeply that it pulsed in him nearly as hatred. Then he let her go and stepped
well away. “To thy cell,” he said. “I forbid thee lessons and order thee to thy
cell until the bells ring for second meal. I order thee.”

Mara, dazed,
oriented herself through a fog of his desire, and hers, and Kazuul’s over all,
and started walking. She could feel him watching her, feel him wanting her, and
before the rock curved and cut him out of her mind, she felt/saw/heard him
throw back his head and roar—a terrible, hungry and unholy sound that ended as
he seized the first human stupid enough to come creeping out seeking the source
and thrust himself inside it.

But she went
back to her cell alone.

*
         
*
         
*

Time alone in
her cell was just what she needed, and if she’d had her head on straight, she’d
have known it at the start. Here, with thick walls on every side, Kazuul could
not slip in at the edge of her tangled perceptions to renew his suggestion, and
without his maintenance, it finally began to die. As her head cleared, her
temper receded under the iron grip of her will. She had to look at the thing
practically: Yes, he’d invaded her, but he didn’t get what he wanted out of it,
and even better, he hadn’t been able to plant his suggestion without her
noticing. She may not be the more powerful telepath, but she did seem to be
more powerful than he knew and that could only be in her favor.

What did he want
with her, really? She supposed it could just be sex, although she doubted it. He
had plenty of women here to choose from if that was the case. On the other
hand, it could be as simple a thing as the male ego, stoked to demonic
fervency: No woman he desired, however idly, would be allowed to refuse him. If
that were so, her best interests would be served by giving in, preventing
further distractions of this sort and entrenching herself in his favor. But if
he did have some ulterior motive after all, it behooved her to keep him
dangling, except that dangling a demon was apt to be a dangerous game.

If only she knew
which way to play.

The oil-slick of
Horuseps’s mind bubbled up into the psychic silence, breaking Mara from her
thoughts. She got up, stretched out her stiff legs, and opened her cell door,
catching the demon with his hand raised, presumably to tap at the lockplate,
since knocking on a solid stone door would be almost silent. She also caught a
faint look of consternation in his eyes, as if being caught with his hand
up—being anticipated—were very vaguely embarrassing to him.

“Do you have
someone else to show me?” Mara asked, thinking this must be it, another episode
to follow last night’s inspection of Pretty Doll. She only hoped it wasn’t
another of Malavan’s harem. She didn’t think she could handle having to hear
Little Laugh in person; hearing her through the demon’s mind had been awful enough.

“I regret to
say, or perhaps I should be pleased to say, that I have been able to account
for them all thus far, but be of some hope. My search is not yet done.” After a
moment, Horuseps rested his hand on his shoulder. “Come to dinner,” he said.