The Prisoner's Release and Other Stories (41 page)

He pulled it out again, feeling his blood quicken as he slid back and forth. Reaching under the wolf for Streak’s dripping member, he closed his paw around it and stroked firmly as he moved his hips. He pushed his knot into the wolf again and pulled it out, with some difficulty as his arousal mounted. His body shuddered with desire, the scent of Streak’s musk mingling with his own as they rocked back and forth together. Beneath him, Streak panted and whined softly, and as Volle felt the warmth in his sheath grow along with his knot, he squeezed the wolf’s shaft and pumped it harder, pressing to force his knot through the tight tail hole.

With the slick oil helping, he pushed abruptly into the wolf. The pressure on his knot made him yelp, made him thrust as much as he could into Streak now that he could no longer pull back out, and made him pant and moan and clutch the muscular body below him tightly as his nerves sparkled with his release, and he felt the seed rush out of him into his lover.

Streak’s rear clenched around him, holding him and pulling him forward as the wolf’s body tightened with his own climax. Warm seed spurted over Volle’s paw as it pumped, slickening his grip on the long, hard member. He kept stroking until the rush of seed slowed to a trickle, bringing his other paw down to squeeze the large knot at the base of the shaft.

Streak yelped and wriggled at the teasing, and looked back with such a desperate, pained expression that Volle had to giggle and release him. The wolf gave him a sloppy lick and then collapsed to the bed, his trapped tail wagging between them as Volle lay atop him. “You feel really good inside me,” he murmured.

“
You feel really good under me,” Volle replied. The heaviness he’d felt in worrying about the wolf and his future had remained at bay, and as he nuzzled Streak’s ears and gave them a soft lick, he started to wonder if he’d been worried for nothing. “Do you really want to come to the farm with me?”

Streak laughed. “You picked now to ask me that?”

Volle relaxed further, laughing along with him. “I wanted there to be no chance you’d say no.”

“
Did you think there was?”

“
I didn’t give you much of a choice.”

“
Silly fox.” Streak turned his head, looking at Volle out of his left eye. “I made my choice. There’s nothing I miss back home, except the things that are already gone.”

“
But you barely know me.”

“
I know you, fox. As well as you know me. You’re a good person, you’re loyal, and,” he wriggled his rump, tugging at Volle’s shaft, “you’re gorgeous.”

“
I’m
gorgeous?” He hugged the wolf. “I’m skinny, I’m…”

“
Hush. I love you, fox.”

Volle kissed the white ear. “I love you too.”

He realized as he said it that that was what he’d been overlooking in his worry about the future. There would be no danger for Streak, not like there had been for Ilyana. The only danger would be old age, or boredom, and those would not be so bad. Streak had grown up on a farm, and he was used to it. Volle would just have to get used to a slower pace of life, to living without looking over his shoulder or worrying about every action he took. That, he could do. With Streak by his side and no need to worry about him, he could face life with his muzzle held high. Even on a farm. Even with his old memories
tugging at him, his friends back in Divalia. He couldn’t go back, so he would have to put them out of his mind.

Streak was saying something. “What?”

“
I said, do you think you can be happy with a plain farm wolf? I know I don’t know much about how to act around a Count.”

Volle grinned and pushed himself in further before working his knot out. He rocked back on his knees, and let the wolf turn over on his back. Streak smiled up at him as he climbed over the wolf on all fours and dropped onto him. “Tonight’s a good start,” he said.

Streak laughed and kissed him, and Volle felt his worries melt away again. “Really?” the wolf said.

He sighed and let himself relax, wrapping his arms around the strong white chest. “Really,” he said, resting his muzzle against Streak’s as the wolf hugged him back. The white-furred arms around him were warm and strong. They felt safe. They felt like home.

FOR LOVE OR FAMILY

1: The Birthday

I was in the Jackal’s Staff because I wanted to be, plain and simple. I knew what it was, and I knew that Kigi and Rashi had gone on their fifteenth birthdays, because they’d told me so. After I’d been there for about ten minutes, looking around at the all-male clientele and the lone female in the room crooning up on a low dais, I felt like an explorer in a foreign land. I was excited, and if I hadn’t known my brothers were playing a joke on me, I wouldn’t have even considered leaving.

They had been here, but probably not on their fifteenth birthdays; they’d sat at a table, had some free wine, and then slipped out. And they thought it’d be funny to send in their youngest brother, who’d kissed exactly one non-relative in his fifteen years. It was the latest in a sporadic series of jokes at my expense, which I bore with the patience of a brother. They were waiting outside for me, no doubt snickering, and it had taken me all of three minutes to figure out that they had lied about their experiences here. Oh, they’d described them well enough, and I can’t say how I knew, but I just felt it in my gut.

Okay, I can say how I knew: because I knew how I was feeling, and I knew neither of my brothers felt that way. Not about males, anyway. Kigi had grown into a young lupine heartthrob, so that everywhere he went outside the palace, a gaggle of young bitches stood nearby and giggled. Inside the palace, he usually had one on his arm—Canis knows where he found them. Maybe they lived in the walls with the rats and only came out when he lured them with his masculine musk.

Rashi, a year younger, was scrawnier but taller, and I remember wondering a few years back whether Kigi had pulled his head away from his shoulders one day when I wasn’t looking; that’s how quickly he sprouted. The girls didn’t tag after him as they did around Kigi, but he pursued them relentlessly, and as he was usually around Kigi, he never had any trouble finding one.

And what’s more, they talked about girls constantly. And I mean,
constantly
. My sister Kira and I shared one room of our quarters while they shared the other. When they came of age, they wasted no time bringing girls back to it. Most nights, one or the other of them sprawled out on the floor between Kira and me while the other went at it with some young bitch. And come first light, they were back in their room talking loudly enough that Kira and I could hear, comparing notes and ranking their experiences.

And whenever I could, I joined in their talk, adding my observations about whether the one with the dark eyes liked Rashi or Kigi, or whether this other one was chewing skerroot to make her fur lighter. But my contributions were crafted for my brothers, for things I knew they cared about, and they were never things that I cared about.

The things that I cared about were why I always wanted Rashi to pick burrs out of my fur after a romp in the garden, but wanted Kigi to be the one to carry me inside. Why I could sit and look at Kigi with his harem for hours on end and never get tired of the way his muscles moved under his short fur, or the glow of his blue eyes, but my favorite nights were the ones when Rashi lay on his back on our bedroom floor and told me and Kira about how he and Kigi had snuck into the kitchens after hours and gorged themselves on cake, or had found a difficult way to get up on the roof of one wing of the palace, from which you could see the walls of the city, or had seen an actual southlander in the local pub.

I knew that by their thirteenth year, both of them had been interested in bitches, because I knew their histories by heart. But at my thirteenth year, I had no interest in any of the things they did. I thought it was just because I was a trailer (I heard that enough from my trainers—“Cef is just a trailer; he’ll catch the rest of the pack eventually”—though never from my tutors, and the trainers all told me Rashi was a trailer too), but then I realized that I was interested in bitches, just not the same way my brothers were. I was interested in how my brothers acted around them.

And two months into my fourteenth birthday, I convinced one of my friends, a bobcat named Wix, to show me how his privates were changing, in return for which I showed him mine. We progressed from looking and touching to sniffing and licking, and then he got nervous and claimed he’d forgotten that he told his parents he’d be back early, and he practically leaped into his clothes and ran off. And the next day, he acted as though none of it had happened, so of course I followed suit and didn’t tell him about stroking myself until my body snapped inside, nor about the sticky, musky mess on my paws afterwards. But it didn’t take me long to connect it to the noises Rashi and Kigi made in their room, and to their inexplicable new use of the word “come.”

Growing up with three brothers and a sister in a small apartment left me little time for self-exploration, but once I had a reason to, I got time alone to myself. I found that I didn’t need Wix to get a tongue on my sheath, that the white stuff tasted salty, and much better fresh than licked off my paws, and that in all the times I was doing this, I rarely thought of a girl there with me. I didn’t picture my brothers, of course—that would be gross—but I had a few favorites among the guards, and when they failed, heroes from childhood stories like the great wolf Granzer, who had single-pawedly held off the jaguar king Criven and his army at Vista Pass, or even the famous vulpine archer who’d freed the poor farmers from the tyrannical reign of the cougar king, back before the Bishop Mikan installed King Carod on the throne and began the Circle (here, at least; the cougars still ruled over in Ferrenis).

And I knew that when my brothers had stepped into the Jackal’s Staff, it was mostly out of curiosity, not about the muzzles and paws of non-lupine species, but about whether gay males acted any differently from straight males. They hadn’t felt shivers at the thought of buying a service there, probably hadn’t even brought enough money to pay for one.

I had. I felt in my purse and rubbed the silver coins against each other, the metal cool against the soft pad of my paw. When they’d told me about this place, how it was so cool to be with another species and I had to try it, it had all sounded so plausible. Or else I’d ignored the lie in their voices because I wanted so badly to be with another male, of whatever species. Of course, the females they’d been with had only been wolves, but Kigi said he’d had a blow job from a raccoon (he didn’t have to explain to me what that was, not after some of their conversations), and Rashi said he’d been inside a fox, actually mounted him. I wanted to ask him how that worked, how it felt, but I didn’t dare let on how interested I was. I just shrugged and said, “Sounds cool. I’ll do it.”

Again I fought the urge to go back outside. It was what they wanted, so I wanted to make them wait as long as possible. If I lingered, though, they would know I’d bought a service here, and that might potentially be more damaging to my reputation. A gay cub, even with three older brothers, was not ideal for a landless peerage, and my father did not own land, but had been given the title of Lord Fardew along with his commission as Minister of Defense and Intelligence. We would remain a noble family, but after my father’s commission was ended, our best chance of regaining a title would be to marry into it. And a noble bitch was unlikely to take a gay husband if she had another choice.

I think Kira knew, but she didn’t tell. Maybe she hoped I’d grow out of it, or she was too busy attending social events with young noble male wolves. None of the others knew, of course. But they might if I stayed too long.

It didn’t seem like I’d have a choice. I was already half out of my sheath from the musky scents in the air and from my own anticipation, and the madam was coming across the floor to me. No, wait; the white cougar was male. I caught his scent, which belied the pink-dyed muzzle and feminine dress and gait. He was smiling and purring as he stopped in front of me.

“Evening, sweets. I’m Tally.”

“Cef.” I met his extended muzzle with mine.

He brushed my whiskers. “Welcome to the Jackal’s Staff, Cef. First time?”

“No,” I said stoutly.

“All right then,” and he grinned as if he could see right through the lie. “What would you like?”

“A cup of wine,” I said, stalling.

“One of our servers can get that for you,” he said. “Are you here to meet up or to hire one of our experts?”

Experts
. “Hiring,” I said. “The wolf or the fox, whichever’s free. I mean, available.”

“We don’t have a fox on staff,” Tally said. “Richy’s available in about half an hour.”

I’d just assumed they would have one of every species. “Well, who’s available now?”

He grinned. “Alicar, a bobcat; and Terry, a bear.”

Neither of those sounded particularly appealing. “I’ll wait,” I said. “I’m not quite ready yet anyway.”

“Richy is five silver,” Tally said.

“Oh. Of course.” I took the silver out of my purse and dropped it casually into his paw.

He smiled. “Thanks, sweets. I’ll tell you when he’s ready. Have a seat.”

I padded to an empty table, surveying the room one more time as I sat down. Plenty of the customers were looking back at me, too. I affected not to notice, arranging myself in the chair and trying to look bored.

It wasn’t five minutes before someone was dropping a note on my table. I looked up at a slender squirrel. “Some wine, sir?”

“Please. What’s this?” I picked up the note.

“From the rabbit.” He indicated a portly rabbit sitting a few tables away, smoothing his ears down. “I’ll be right back with your wine.”