Rapture by L.V. Lane

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

Jacob

I NEED TO stop dreaming about the damn fairy with the disposition of a wasp. It doesn’t help that Winter’s pussy creams every time I touch her, making my mouth water for the taste. Waking up with her soft, lush body sprawled all over me was a test against the binding of the highest order.

It is no fucking use. I’ve had my hands on her surprisingly plump ass. I’d willingly take a hundred lashes to put them back on it again. My cock has a mind of its fucking own. If it could have tunneled through my pants and into her hot cunt, she’d have been impaled this morning before I had even woken up.

My mind is dragged back to our dire predicament when I am brought to a small clearing. Here, twenty men stand waiting, clothed in the rough garb of slaves with collars around their throats. A dozen heavily armed orcs stand on the periphery. Where did the humans come from? I do not remember so many slaves passing through the portal.

Are they going to beat me again?

“You are to train them,” the overseer says, just as another man dumps an armful of wooden swords on the floor.

Train?

“To fight?” I ask. He nods. “For how long?”

“All day. Their skills are poor. These are mostly farmers picked up locally. They will be going in first but will last longer with your training.”

My jaw tightens as I take in the disheveled men who stand before me with vacant expressions. I would ask why they fight for filthy orc bastards when they are clearly only going to their deaths, but I already know the answer. Somewhere in this camp will be their womenfolk and maybe their children. They will fight, like me, because they have no choice.

They will fight, and they will die.

Like me, they have no choice in that either.

I want to lift my face to the sky and roar.

I want to skewer the smug overseer on the nearest wooden sword.

But I don’t, because like the broken men facing me, I am likewise trapped.

I’m no trainer, but I know enough of the ways of training from my many years of drills.

I know more than these men.

“Pair up,” I call. “Take a sword, and we will run some practice drills.”

They lumber forward, wary eyes darting between the overseer, the orcs, and me. Their actions are stilted at first. The overseer chuckles about farmers before leaving to go about his business. The orcs watch on, bored.

We stop and start. The men grunt and groan and do not put any heart into it. As the day goes on, they tire, and I begin to wonder how the fuck I will make anything of them.

They are not going to die fighting.

They are going to be fucking slaughtered.

As the sun reaches its zenith, women slaves arrive with food and drink, which perks them up. They stand straighter as they take the offering. Eyes linger, words are whispered, the briefest touches are exchanged. The overseer accompanies the female, slaves making sure they move on swiftly.

As the last woman disappears from view, the men sit and eat, and melancholy descends once again.

I know their hopelessness well, for I have experienced it once myself. It is hard to resist its alluring pull.

“One day at a time, that is how you live as a slave,” I say.

Heads pop up, and wary eyes turn my way.

“I was a slave before,” I say. “When I was but a lad.”

“You are still a slave,” one man points out harshly.

“I do not intend to die a slave,” I say. “And I have spent all of the time between then and now free.”

Free? What do I know of being free? Yet the life of a bound warrior is nothing like that of a Blighten slave. Why is it only now that I see the difference between the two? I could have left the Blood many times while out scouting. It is not talked about, but I know some warriors do. Just as some warriors go on to bond with Breeders or Feeders, and even Blood on occasion.

Some live and die as warriors and yearn for nothing more.

I yearn for more, yet I do not know what that more is.

Choice. It all comes down to choice. If I had the choice, I would dedicate my life to freeing slaves. And here I am with such an opportunity presented to me. Not all the slaves within the camp will desire freedom, and not all will be willing to take the risks needed to achieve it. The bald overseer bastard is well indoctrinated and much enamored with his small power. He would die for his Blighten masters, and he would not hesitate to kill me.

But these farmers and hunters who sit beside me eating mash, they have a hunger for freedom if it also includes the freedom of those they love.

The man who spoke is of similar age to me, with sandy blond hair and bright blue eyes. Wolf eyes, they call them, for all shifters have them. Humans can have blue eyes too, but some instinct tells me these men are indeed shifters. My focus moves through the group as I take in how many have bright blue eyes. Three? Maybe four? Maybe a couple more?

I feel the quickening of my heart as hope rises within me. Not all shifters are fighters, just as not all men are. Many who chose to live in human communities do so because they are tired of the packs naturally warring ways and take on the role of hunters.

But all wolves can fight.

That they chose not to when they were captured speaks of circumstances beyond their control.

It also speaks now of opportunity.

“They had our women and children when we returned from the hunt,” the blue-eyed man beside me says quietly between mouthfuls of the mash. “Not all the men here are mated, but many of us are. The rest have sisters, nieces, and mothers held by the orcs.”

“They are headed to war with the packs,” another man says. “We have no love for the packs but no desire to war with them either. But what choice do we have? I worry for my wife and child while I still live. My worry is a thousand times worse for them once I am dead.”

“I am Dirk,” the blue-eyed man says. “And this is Jim.”

I nod to both men. “I am Jacob,” I say. “And no matter what will come to pass, you are all better served learning how to fight… and the fools have not shackled your wrists.”

All shifters are different in what prevents a shift, but you must bind their wrists to contain a wolf shifter. I see a few eyes widen as understanding dawns.

Then the overseer returns, and we are ordered to resume the drills.

Only this time, the men embrace them with a measure of fire. They are still sloppy. They still have a long way to go, yet I sense they are now going there with a sliver of hope. Looks are exchanged, along with the occasional word.

It is the beginning.

I do not yet have a clear vision of the end.

Life falls into a pattern.

Some days we travel, and I train the men in the evening. And some days, the camp remains in place and I train them all day.

Of a night, I am given leave to wash in the nearby river or stream and return to the cage wagon, where I sleep with my fairy mistress nestled upon my lap. By morning, she is always sprawled out upon me, her lush little body setting my skin on fire wherever we touch.

She doesn’t even complain, in the early hours of dawn before the camp rises, when my hands roam.