The Witch's Want Ch. 07

But she found herself being held fast as Hunter pulled her backward a little bit so that her hip was against his manhood and it surprised her a little that there already seemed to be something of a resurgence happening there again.

"Hunter?"

It was all that she had the chance to ask, because he pulled her back a little more and for some reason, she felt trust in him, rather than the natural human fear of falling over, since he held her very tenderly.

The fingers of his right hand slipped into her hair and he cradled her head and his lips brushed hers very softly as he spoke the truth, "I don't want to let you go, Savannah."

"I'm not going anywhere, Hunter," she whispered once she understood what he meant, "I need to be right here with you. I was only going to pour us a bath."

"I know that," he said, "I just suddenly felt that I was going to be missing the feel of you against me. It's not like me -- well, up to this point, but I -- I just couldn't let you go yet."

She kissed him as softly as she could, "Then don't let me go."

His lips sealed themselves over hers and they sighed as his left hand touched her breastbone and began to slide down the front of her slowly, his fingers taking in the little speed bumps of her stomach before they drifted lower on her hard belly. Savannah leaned back even more and reached back with her right arm so that she could hold his thigh against her bottom when she felt his fingers begin to toy gently with the soft folds of her lips.

Hunter lifted his lips from hers to give her the room to gasp quietly before she moaned into his mouth.

"Oh Hunter, that's so nice," she whispered, "but you're running out of me and -- "

"Shh," he sighed, "I don't care. I don't get to do something like this every day."

All that Savannah could do was to whimper to him and lean against him more when she thought that her knees might fail her. She moved slightly and she sighed once more when she realized that one of her nipples was against one of his. Other than the warm presence of his chest, there was little feeling of it to her, but she thought it was a nice thing nonetheless.

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The phone at the front desk began to ring and the bored clerk picked it up. The male voice on the other end had called to request room service and was transferred to the kitchen where he placed his order and his request for when it was to be delivered, if possible.

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This was all about metaphysics, she told herself. It had taken forever to manage to get the bathwater, Hunter, and herself in the same place at the same time, that place being the bathtub itself. But here they were, half-covered in bubbles, and Savannah was happy. She'd never tried to bathe a man before and found the experience to be a very enjoyable pastime. Besides, she thought, it was a lot of fun to hold herself to him -- as slippery as they both were at the moment so that she could slide her lips over him now and then.

"So why were you having trouble with your security business?" she asked him, "What's been going wrong?"

"I have the permits to get a lot of the right kind of contracts," he said, "but there's only one of me and I have to sleep sometime, and I can't handle the phones when I'm in the field very well. At the moment, I sure can't afford to employ anyone for that either."

She looked at him, "The right kind of contracts?"

"Uh-huh," he smiled as he wondered at himself. He'd never even be having this conversation with anyone other than his banker, normally.

"I can provide a lot of services, from intelligence gathering to the kind of protection where the client wears a ballistics vest and I'm there seriously armed. I'm not talking about escorting a singer through her adoring fans. Why do you ask?"

"I dunno," she smiled, "I think that at the moment, I'm more of an adoring fan myself. I just wanted to know, that's all. What would you need to make a go of it?"

He shrugged as he stroked her thigh for a moment, "People and money. I'll never get anywhere if I don't at least have somebody in an office somewhere near the phone and able to look stuff up when I call and to take calls for me. I also need somebody that I can trust so that there's more than one of me. I was spread paper-thin on the jobs that I did manage to land."

She set her thoughts aside for the moment as he began to work on his own metaphysical problem; that being the application of the water, the loofa that he'd discovered, and the soap to her breasts. They weren't dirty, he grinned to himself, but he sure liked the sounds that she made as he washed them for her.

He chuckled to himself and she asked him about it.

"I was just remembering a line from a Disney book that my mom used to read to me out of when I was little. It was a variation on the theme of the race between the turtle and the hare. Goofy kept saying that steady and slow was the way to go, and given what I'm doing here ..."

"And gently," she said, "Don't forget gently."

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With the dinner done, they were on the bed side-by-side while he tried to make sense of things as he scribbled things down. They were looking for plausible reasons for what they'd both felt to cause them to come to this town with little more than that feeling. They'd already turfed the phase of the moon, among other things.

"I even knew it when I passed the store," he said, "That sense was in front of me, then it was beside me for a second, and then it was behind me because I'd passed the place."

"Me too," Savannah said, "Though it was slower because I was on foot. You ever have anything like this before?" she asked as she rolled onto her side to look at him again.

He shook his head. "No, never in my life," he said as he began to trace some of the features of her body with his fingertip. He liked the way that it made her smile. The notepad that he'd been writing on slid off the bed and onto the floor.

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Farah sat and listened to him in her helmet speakers as they rode, with Ur-Nammu answering her questions about what he knew had happened before his death. There was a religion here that she'd never heard of before she'd met him and it made her wonder how it was that there could be such similarities to what she knew as Wicca and yet there even more elements which related to self-governance. Farah knew that as with anything, there was enough here for a lifetime of study, but it had surprised her to hear him chuckle and tell her that he hoped that it wouldn't come to that, since at its heart, it was also earth--magick.

So they discussed some of his memories of the people who'd been important in his life. Ur-Nammu had been against it at the outset, but she told him that they had a way to go, and so he'd agreed, but only if they could turn it into a bargain where she had to do the same.

When they finally got to bed in the motel after a long hot shower, they decided on just quiet things between them, since Farah wasn't used to riding. So she found herself lying in any of the ways that he moved her body while he amazed her with how well he could make her tired limbs and body feel with those hands of his. She stayed awake as long as she could, but it wasn't all that long before she slept.

Ur-Nammu looked down at her with a soft smile. He doubted whether she could imagine how he felt, but that didn't matter. He was happy and content just to look at her. When her hand looked as though it was trying to reach for the covers, he pulled the blankets up and the light clicked off with a wave of his hand.

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Hunter and Savannah stayed like this for two days. Whenever one woke up, they'd always find the other one either in the bed, or at the window, since they'd found that they could see the store from there with his binoculars. Sometimes, they'd go for a walk and pass by, but there was never anyone there or any sign that anyone had been there.

"Nobody and nothing," he'd said as he'd checked the hairs that he'd tacked to the doors at their openings to show if anyone had been inside. "And yet this feeling is still here," he muttered.

"How long will you stay to find out?" Savannah asked.

"Another couple of days," he said, "then I'll leave if nothing happens."

"No you won't, Hunter," she smiled, "You're stuck here the same as me."

"What will you do?" he asked her.

"I dunno," she smiled, "I'm just glad that you're here too."

He smiled back and they walked off to get breakfast.

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On their way back, Farah decided that she liked traveling on his motorcycle, overall. But she liked a long trip in his truck more. The visit with his mother had gone well, and the older woman was happy that her son had someone now.

"I try not to make a big deal out of it or anything," she'd said to Farah in a private moment, "But when he was attacked and in the hospital, well, I didn't know until a day or two before he was released. I went to see him, of course, and the doctors told me that they really didn't know how he'd survived.

The thing is," she said, "that he's changed a little. I don't know what it is, but he's a little different from the way that he used to be. He calls me once a week, and he always tries to make sure that I'm alright, you know?"

"What's changed that you see?" Farah had asked.

His mother shrugged, "I was lucky if he called me for Christmas or Mother's Day before."

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There was a change on the morning of the third day. Savannah woke up and found him lying on his side beside her. The expression on his face was a little troubled.

"What is it?" she asked.

He shrugged, "Just close your eyes for a minute," he said, "You tell me."

She closed her eyes, wondering what he was talking about, but it didn't take her long at all. "It's moved!"

He nodded, "I've been up for a while now. I felt it right away, and I got dressed to walk to the store there. The feeling is off to the East now, but not too far. As soon as I turned that way, it stopped and disappeared. I think I'm going crazy from this, Savannah. I came back here to tell you, but you were still asleep so I've been waiting for you."

She was surprised. "Why would you wait for me?"

He looked at her as though she'd grown another head. It made her laugh and she hugged him. "You and me, Hunter. I think we're both nuts. Let me get dressed and we'll go, ok?"

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When she was ready, she found him sitting with their knapsacks, hers and his. "What's this?"

He shrugged, "I don't know what's next, Savannah. I figured that it might be better if we've got our stuff."

On their way out of the hotel, he led her to his truck. With their gear stowed, they drove slowly to the bistro, grabbed some take-out coffee and drove in the direction of the bookstore, but passed it to head in the direction that they were drawn, stopping to confer whenever the road twisted. Hunter had done this on purpose, wanting to see if what Savannah felt was the same as what he did. Before long, they were looking at a driveway leading off into some woods. They looked at each other and shrugged.

The driveway led them past a house where there was nobody at home. There was a barn as well, but the sense kept them moving past it until they'd run out navigable surface. From there, they went ahead on foot.

After ten minutes of walking through a field of conifers, they were looking at a low hillside. About two-thirds of the way up that, they saw an opening. It was bigger than it looked because of a boulder which stood in the way, though a person could squeeze through. They stood looking at each other.

"What do you think?" she asked.

"I don't want to go in there for anything, right now," Hunter said with a scowl, but after a moment, he took his pack off to set it down and began to rummage through it.

"But I'm going to, if for no other reason than to put this to rest."

He grimaced, "I'll probably end up right up to my ears in bat shit." He pulled out a long heavy flashlight and Savannah's eyes widened a little when he removed a pistol as well. He cocked it, set the safety on and stuck it into his waist band at the small of his back.

"Wait Hunter," she said, "I'm going in too."

He watched her pull a coil of mountaineering rope out of her pack.

"A regular Mountaineering Weekly poster girl, you are," he smirked.

She gave him a smirk as she tied one end of it to a small tree. "Sure."

Then she pulled out her own flashlight and they stood together at the entrance, trying to block out enough of the daylight to hopefully see a little way inside.

"What's the gun for?" she asked in a whisper.

He answered honestly, "I don't know."

"Good enough," she grinned, as she took hers out of her pack.

They shucked their packs on and slipped carefully inside, looking at the floor of the cavern with a hope to find solid footing and not bat waste. But the floor there was just what it appeared to be, a solid stone surface. For the first thirty feet, it was going well, but then the light which had been filtering in behind them faded away. They turned around and found the opening gone.

When they backtracked, they came to a solid rock wall with a piece of rope at the bottom where it passed through.

"What the hell, ..." Hunter whispered. They looked at each other for a moment before they noticed that the air around them seemed to swirl, though there was no breeze. They heard whispers all around them but the beams of their flashlights showed nothing.

"What do we do now?" Savannah asked, after making sure that the rope was intact, though the wall was impenetrable.

Hunter snorted quietly, "Well for the moment, I'd suggest that we turn off one of our lights to save it for later. Then, since we can't seem to go back, I think that we'll have to go forward and hope that there's another opening someplace."

"The nearest way out is many leagues from here," a male voice said slowly, "and there are always many dead on these roads. Not all are harmless."

They shone the beams of their lights around frantically, since the voice seemed to come from no one direction. Neither of them were scared, they were more startled at the voice and its tone -- and the way that it seemed to sound a tad slow and carefully spoken. They saw no direct threat to them at all, but that still didn't stop the hair on the backs of their necks from prickling.

"We can wait," a female voice said, "until you are calm. Nothing can be gained if you feel panic."

"I don't feel panic," Savannah said quietly as she pulled her pistol.

"Wait a moment then anyway," another voice said.

Hunter and Savannah heard about the most incongruous sounds that they could have imagined. Somewhere, just out of their sight, a horse stamped its hoof and snorted. They looked at each other to be sure that they'd heard it.

Something began to appear out of the swirling atmosphere of the cavern. Hunter felt Savannah's hand against his arm. When he looked over, she pointed, "There. See them? The horses?"

Before he could answer, they were looking at dead horses standing, looking like nothing more than dried skins stretched over skeletons which stood on their hooves and were animated somehow. But the longer that they looked, the more they saw that the hides were not empty and were filled with the bulge of tissue over the bones. They didn't appear to be static at all, they moved a little where they were tied, and the shapes seemed to flicker slowly, showing a living horse one moment and then a corpse the next, with holes in their hides which seemed to grow and shrink at the same time, depending on where one might be looking at them.

"I see them," he whispered, but I don't believe any of this shit for a second. If one of those things starts to talk right now, I'll know that there was something in the breakfast that we didn't eat."

"Now I wish that we'd had breakfast," she whispered back, "just hearing you say that's made me hungry."

They heard one of the voices chuckle for a moment, "There can be no doubt now, husband. These must surely be the ones."

"The ones for what?" Hunter asked.

"Your weapons there," the male voice said, "You are in more danger from them than we."

They stared as they saw three people walking toward them from where the horses were tied. The dank cave began to smell of warm and well-worn leather. No surprise there, Savannah judged, they were all covered in it. They were also all covered with blades.

Everywhere that they looked, on the women at least, they saw the hafts of swords protruding from scabbards both at their sides or showing over their shoulders. Even their boots showed the hafts of several daggers or throwing knives each. The large man had only a sword and a dagger showing.

"It was the coffee," Hunter said with a smirk, "Miss Dairydale must have poisoned it."

"I told you that you ought to have at least suggested to her that you go out back together," Savannah said, rolling her eyes, "I would have waited while you bopped her up against the wall quick. She'd have felt a lot better, and we'd have gotten more coffee for nothing -- once she'd figured out that her legs could still work."

Though he was faced with the strangest sights that he'd ever seen, Hunter snapped his head around to stare at Savannah. "You'd have let me do that? I mean, I wouldn't really have wanted to, necessarily, but seriously?"

"Sure," Savannah smirked, "Sometimes you gotta make an investment. We'd have gotten coffee out of it and maybe free food. Besides, you've got me. Just how much fun could she be after you've had me?"

"That's true," Hunter nodded seriously, keeping his pistol leveled and trying to determine which one of them might be the greatest threat. "Are you saying that I'll be expected to make an investment like that with you one day?"

She shrugged, "I dunno, there may come a time when we'll want a man incapacitated just like that girl would be. You can't always bash people over the head or shoot them. If there's one thing that I know about us, Hunter my dear friend, it's that there's not all that many who can go much of a distance with either of us."

The two women began to laugh and one of them held up her hand. "Oh, stop. We see that we have summoned the right ones in you."

Savannah and Hunter lowered their pistols in amazement. "Summoned?"

The woman with long reddish hair chuckled and shook her head in some amazement of her own. "She speaks just as Fox would, in exactly the same way with her words. You cannot know how good it is to hear words like that, my friend."

"I'm not your friend," Savannah growled.

"Exactly the same," the woman smiled, "even now."

"Alright," Hunter said, ignoring the others for a moment, "this is how I see this. We can't go back for some reason, and we've got these things here in front of us. We're wasting time. I think that we ought to just ignore this noise -- whatever the cause, and try to find some way out of here."

"But he says that it's a long way to another exit." Savannah said.

"Who the fuck is he?" Hunter demanded, "This is all just holograms or something. Look," he walked right up to the man and reached out to pass his hand through the illusion that he suspected. His hand stopped as it touched the leather cuirass and the face above it smiled.

"If we are finished with this," the man said, "we are in agreement, you and I. We waste time." He pushed Hunter aside gently and looked at their packs. "Do you have food in those?"

While Hunter stared, Savannah shrugged, "I've got a few granola bars." She reached around to one of the side pockets and pulled out a package to hold it out to him. To their amazement, he took it from her and stared at the wrapper.

"This picture," he said, "This shows what is inside?"