Page 25 of Foxin’ Around (Mated to the Monster: Season 3)
Chapter
Twenty-Four
S yrix groaned, his head lolling as a piercing pain pulsed within his head. He felt terrible and the smell of roses still clung within his sinuses, but now the perfume was mingled with a putrid smell of decay. His eyes cracked open, and he shuddered with a strange weakness. It was a miracle that he had not fallen to the ground, but that probably had something to do with the metal cuffs and chains securing him to the wall. The chain scraped against stone with his every movement as he shifted his legs, but gradually he got his legs beneath him and stumbled to his feet. That was not to say that he did not almost collapse again with the dizziness that assaulted him, but he fought against it and looked around him.
His eyes skimmed the dark walls and then dropped to the floor where the source of putridity greeted him. His throat constricted at the sight of piles of bones and the remnants of bodies in various states of decay strewn across the floor. To his right, a woman’s partially demolished face stared at him vacantly, her ruined expression frozen in an expression of terror.
He tore his gaze away, focusing instead on a thick mass of shadows deeper in the recesses of what appeared to be an underground cellar of some sort. The walls were stained with so much blood that it made him sick, but the brick walls and the numerous chains anchored to them, identical to the ones he wore, set it apart as something different than a lamia’s subterranean nest. A pair of yellow eyes opened amid the shadows as a particularly dark segment uncoiled and shifted toward him.
“Feeling poorly, are you, little fox?” a soft voice hissed.
He froze, the fur on his scalp and along the length of his tail prickling with unease. Somehow, he had fallen into the enemy’s territory. He did not understand how it happened. One moment he was arranging the roses to surprise his mate and then?—
“Rosa nocturnum,” the lamia commented with a raspy laugh. “Your magic may be strong, but even the greatest capabilities cannot save one who is too proud to acknowledge that nature can overcome even you. And to not challenge an ancient one,” she hissed menacingly.
Coldness filled his belly. The most ancient creatures, whether fae or monsters, possessed a lethal cunning. He had badly underestimated what he was up against and now the price was his to pay.
“What… have you done… to me?” he rasped between labored breaths.
Aside from the condition of his head, he was slowly becoming aware of a weakness that followed the path of a painful fire coursing through his torso and limbs.
“Venom,” she replied, her voice dropping to a thoughtful murmur. “The natural toxin of the rosa nocturnum did quite a lot. You can thank that lovely plant for the side effects. One little scratch from its thorns makes its victim highly susceptible to suggestion.” Sighing heavily, she drew up on her coiled tail. “It was not intended for you, of course. If you had left well enough alone, I would have continued to leave you undisturbed and living peacefully in your territory. I do not have a taste for men, after all, and a private, territorial fox has well served my purpose for keeping the undesirable far from my nest. But you just had to step into the trap that I had prepared for her—my little sweet piece of meat.”
Syrix swallowed thickly as the icy manifestation of his fear sank deeper into him. “But why her? Lamia have always shown a preference for devouring children and for acquiring adult males to satiate both terrible appetites.”
The lamia laughed and slid from the shadows, her skin and scales myriad shades of green and brown and her long, dark hair falling in six braids around her shoulders, two of which dangled in front of her bare breasts. She peered down at him, a sly smile on her face.
“It is true that a number of my sisters prefer the challenge of hunting, fucking, and devouring men but it is really not so different. We are well-equipped for it, you see,” she murmured as she rose a little higher and gestured to her genital slit. It gaped open with a shift of her muscles, from the top, a long shaft slipped out, capturing his attention. “Much like crocodiles and hyena females with their pronounced clitoris, lamia enjoy being similarly blessed with our own pleasure barb. We will trap males to breed and so they enjoy the pleasure of penetrating us, but when we feed, the real pleasure comes from penetrating them as we prepare to devour them.” She cocked her head, a cold smile visible on her lips. “Are you intrigued, little fox? Do you wish to see if you can breed more successfully than the males who once inhabited this cabin before I destroy you and release the last remnants of your magic’s hold on this forest?”
His lips twisted with revulsion, and she laughed again.
“Yes, that is exactly my thought,” she chortled, her tail twisting around her. “Adult males have a foul taste to them that ruins the palette for months before it fades. I would sooner eat a beast than consume an adult male. The flesh of adult females, however,” she hummed with obvious pleasure, “it is nearly as sweet as that of a child and their bodies far more amusing to satiate myself with in other ways. Whereas with males—it just disgusts me to think of them that way. Thankfully, the pair of fools that I came upon dwelling in these woods were useful to me in acquiring what I need. They had perverse tastes and had been locking hapless females down here for quite some time. The fall of their world just gave them more freedom to pursue that particular vice.”
Syrix froze as the full ramification of her words hit him. She had not arrived in pursuit of Krystal as he had assumed. She had been there the entire time, before even he arrived to the forest. Had she been drawn to the evil of the Mallory cabin? If so, she clearly took advantage of it, settling her own taint deep within the bowels beneath the cabin as she feasted. But that meant that it was his magic that unwittingly brought his mate into danger. It was his fault.
“Does hearing this disturb you?” she queried, her head tipping inquisitively as a cruel smile spread across her face. “Do not waste your sympathy on things that do not matter. The females served their purpose and I was far kinder fate than their end at the hands of those males. I made sure that they were envenomated and feeling nothing but pleasure in their final moments.”
“You killed many,” he growled, and his fury rose when his statement was met with laughter from the creature.
“Naturally. There was a nice little number of them when I arrived, and so I allowed those males to live for a while, expanding their little collection for me, until I grew tired of their presence and decided that I had other uses for them.”
Drawing back her coils, she gestured back behind her and Syrix stared at the eggs that filled the darker recesses of the cellar where the lamia had been coiled.
“I had eaten well and had a ready supply of food still available to me chained to these walls, so it was only natural that I make the choice to briefly overcome my revulsion so to breed and bear my daughters. Are they not lovely?”
They were not. Each pale, muddy green egg was nearly large enough to contain his mate if she merely crouched down, and translucent so that he saw the hatchlings, each of them already resembling half-grown females in their upper torsos. They twisted in their eggs, their mouths gaping as they pressed along the skin of the shells which bulged and shifted with them. The lamia gave them a fond look, a thoughtful smile on her lips.
“They are hungry and nearly ready to enter the world,” she observed. “One more is all it will take. And this last feast will be even more glorious as I savor your despair. You will watch as I fuck your female repeatedly among them, driving into her sweet cunt so that her nutrient rich bodily fluids splatter on them. She will writhe and scream on my barb, but I will not let up until her nectar has coated each and every single one of them. And then… then I will feed and spray her blood everywhere so that they may consume that as well while I gorge myself on her flesh. And all this I shall do while you watch, and unlike the others, she will know great pain so that your suffering will extend further for your interference.”
Pain lanced through him, driving a blade of agony through his heart at the lamia’s cruel words. She spoke this way as part of his torment, he understood that, but he also knew that she spoke true as to her intentions. Syrix’s head bowed with the weight of grief that her words conjured within him, and within the privacy of his heart he mourned heavily, his heart breaking as grief encompassed him. His future had not only been stolen, but the lamia was determined that his mate would die and suffer terribly.
And then, you little fox,” she rasped, drawing near to him, the tip of her tail nudging his chin and forcing his head up so that he had no choice but to meet her eyes. “Then you will die. My children will devour you and whatever is left of you will remain to rot right here on these chains.”
Her tail dropped away as her cold laughter filled the space around. His head fell, his eyes closing in grief, wishing to block out all reality and surrender himself to unconsciousness where he might be comforted by the memory of his mate, but the lamia’s laughter allowed him no such peace.
“Poor little fox,” she murmured, and her lips brushed his cheek, her breath brushing over his skin as she trailed her lips toward his neck. “Now you see that ultimately it is I who have won. But first, to finish this game, I just need a bit of your magic.”
She struck, her fangs sinking deep as fresh agony burned through him and awakened once more in his veins. Pain and sorrow were all he had… and a prayer that his Krystal would survive what was to come.