Chapter 15

Béla opened her eyes. The little stretch of sky high above them was light blue.

'It must be morning, ' she thought, shivering. Dew had fallen sometime while they slept, curled up together. Her legs and torso were covered with a furry substance that stuck to her cold, damp body. It itched horribly, and she suspected she knew what it was.

Deciding not to get hysterical about something that wasn't really hurting her, she looked around to find that the fire was out. She nudged Jake, anxious to get this day started and over.

"Wake up!" she growled. "It's daylight!"

Jake grumbled as he stretched cold, sore muscles into use, shivering in the cold.

"We have to figure out how to get you out of here, Jake," Béla was saying as she roused him to his feet. "We can't live down here like this."

Jake reached over and, picking up a piece of uneaten rabbit, began to bite into it. A swarm of tiny red ants crawled onto his hand.

"Damn!" he swore as he shook his hand, trying to get the ants off.

The cold piece of meat flew into the air and landed some distance away. Jake brushed the ants off with his other hand.

Béla shrugged and held her arms out from her sides, presenting her cold, bare body for his inspection.

"They're everywhere," she said mournfully, raising her arms and turning around, displaying the fact that her naked body was swarming with ants while trying to act bored about it.

Jake looked at Béla with pure disgust. She was covered with ants; the dried blood and grease on her body had attracted them to her during the night.

"But," she continued, "their biting keeps me warm." She tilted her head at him and smiled with a helpless, 'Please rescue me, ' look in her large, dark eyes.

Jake didn't say anything. Disgusted, he began brushing ants off of Béla's slim, naked body. As he brushed lower on her body, she spread her legs wide so he could get at the little critters that had crawled up between her legs. She closed her eyes and hummed to herself, enjoying his attention.

"Don't stop now," she suggestively complained as he finished knocking the ants off her legs. "That feels nice."

"How can you just let them just crawl all over you like that?" Jake asked, reprimanding her like a child.

"I like it," she said, talking in her little girl voice. "It makes me horny."

"I don't know of anything," Jake said, snorting, "that doesn't make you horny!"

"Well, you know," she said, in a mock condescending voice, "up until just recently, it was normal to have bugs crawling up your ass."

'Recently? Not in this century!' Jake thought to himself. 'I forget that she's probably lived in some pretty squalid conditions before – not every society has been as obsessed with personal hygiene as we are... ' Jake looked at her, only mildly disgusted now, realizing that she really didn't think bugs were a big deal.

Béla flew up to the mining shack with a backpack full of empty water bottles draped around her neck. After she refilled them from the water pump there, she washed in the freezing water as best as she could.

Remembering an old Iroquois trick to make bathing in cold water more tolerable, she pumped the handle up and down while swallowing as much water as she could manage as she rinsed the remaining blood, dirt and ants out of her hair and off her body.

Feeling really refreshed, she draped the heavy backpack around her neck, remembering to pack Jake's hunting knife this time. Nearby, also swarming with ants, lay the remains of her argument about whose rabbit the previous night's dinner was. The great sand cat looked much smaller now, lying dead on the ground, than it had when it had jumped her last night while she'd been happily gutting the little rabbit she'd caught and she was glad she'd had the knife, as she'd quickly discovered that teeth and nails weren't enough to get through the thick fur around the great cat's neck.

She smirked as she thought about skinning the animal and dropping it over the side of the deep gorge for Jake to cook on his little campfire. She could just imagine how he would react if she presented him with such a gift.

'He would probably shit bricks, ' she thought, remembering a colloquialism from when she'd first met ... She shook her head, bringing her mind back to the present, recalling the savaging the cat had done to her breasts and belly, and the resulting passion between her and Jake later that night. To present him with the animal that had clawed her would have been immensely satisfying, but, even dead, the animal looked to weigh as much as she did, and the task of skinning and cleaning a beast that size seemed daunting.

She shrugged and turned away, deciding that, if she needed to, she could come back. If she did need to skin and clean the cat, it would have to be today; the meat would quickly begin to rot under the hot sun in this wilderness. With a sigh, she pressed her shoulders forward and began to run, then jumped as high as she could as her wings formed. Two beats of her magnificent wings got her airborne so that her breasts and belly were no longer brushing against the shrubs that flowed beneath her, though she almost took a dive, tits and face into the dirt, when the heavy pack around her neck snagged on a bush. The rapid movements of her wings controlled the speed of her breathing, but she still managed a quick sigh of relief when she got high enough so she wasn't worried about crashing into the ground again.

'Jake's chasm', that was what she'd begun to think of it as, quickly appeared ahead of her, and she dived into it, holding her wings together behind her, an excited yell escaping her mouth as she began to plummet downward.

Jake heard her distant 'yaa-a-a-hoo!' echoing down the cliff walls as she dove over the side of the chasm and began free falling down to where he was. He realized that, while he couldn't remain trapped down here forever, Béla was having a really great time exploring her new freedom of flight.

He had pretty much figured out a way in which Béla could lift him out of this pleasant little death trap. When she landed, he told her, and asked for her input. It was her strength, after all, that would be used to get them out.

Béla liked the idea, but didn't care for the blood-sucking part, still a little self-conscious about her vampiric use of his blood. The biggest hitch in his plan was that they needed rope to make the harness that would enable her to carry him beneath her. In this respect, Jake was really surprised at her contribution. She knew how to make rope out of grass.

"Is there anything you don't know?" he asked, surprised. "No. Don't answer that."

"Well," she said, answering anyway, "no, probably not. I've been around some little while, you know." She sounded pretty smug.

They spent the next couple of hours pulling the tall grass that grew at the base of the cliffs. Then Béla started to weave it together. They were both disappointed with the results.

First, it took a lot of grass to make a very short rope, and, second, when they pulled on it to test its strength, it came right apart.

"Well, maybe I can't make rope!" Béla whined, disgusted and sucking on yet another cut on her fingers. She had seen it done before. She simply didn't know what she was doing wrong. "I guess I spent too much time being a goddess and not enough time learning earth craft."

"Being a goddess, huh?" Jake laughed at her words. "I can just imagine you picking and choosing who would worship you each night when you retired to your chambers."

Béla smirked and looked at him. "Yes, absolutely. The most viral men with the biggest, um, you know..." Her smirk turned into a wide grin as she watched Jake grin, feeling in her mind that he would really like to have seen that.

"So the Target Culb isn't your first time establishing a mass orgy environment, huh?" It was Jake's turn to smirk. Béla laughed at his response.

"No," she laughed, turning away slightly as though embarrassed. "But, so far, this time my worshippers haven't decided to included bloodletting in their ritualistic rape. The last time, someone decided that my 'life essence' might be useful in blessing their crops."

"Maybe if you blessed the grass with your 'life essence', it would take strength from you and become strong, stout rope!" Jake laughed, remembering a dream he'd once had of sacrificing twenty virgins and collecting the blood from their headless bodies for his queen to bathe in.

Béla looked at him with a really strange expression on her face, almost as though she'd just shared his vision. "That's not very funny ... I've seen grown men slaughter their virgin daughters for their blood because they believed stuff like that. As a result, I encouraged their young daughters to have sex as soon as possible – to celebrate life and growing things. And even then, one in three girls never reached their twentieth year."

"What killed them?" Jake asked, curious, "If their fathers didn't, I mean."

"Giving birth, disease," Béla mused, sitting down beside him, "and Romans – pretty much in that order."

"You've had to leave a lot behind," Jake said, pulling her against him and feeling sympathy for her long and probably tragedy-filled life.

Béla didn't reply. Instead she gazed down the long, narrow gorge, her eyes unfocused, unwilling to consider that one day she would have to leave Jake behind.

Jake sat, watching her for several minutes as she lay silently in his arms, wondering where she'd gone inside her head.

"You know," he said, finally, "actually, and I'm reluctant to bring this up for fear of being abandoned, but, you aren't stuck down here. You could go get a rope."

Béla blinked several times, then frowned as though trying to remember something.

"What?" she asked, then remembered what he'd said. "Where would I find a rope? Besides, I would have to walk. I can't fly and carry my clothes. It could be days before I got back."

"You could wait until dark, then fly to the cabin where we stayed. There was rope in the tool shed," he told her. "That, for you, would probably be about an hour each way."

She agreed. It might work. She promised to find a rope somewhere!

"So, what shall we do until it gets dark?" she asked him, raking a fingernail down through his chest hairs. "If I fly over the trails in the daylight, someone might see me."

"Well," Jake mused, looking down into those mischievous dark eyes as she grinned up at him. "Can you think of anything?

"Ow!" Jake yelped as she bit his nipple.

Grabbing her hair, he pulled her head back and gazed down at her face. She was laughing and there was a spot of blood on her teeth.

His blood!

"Vixen!" Jake accused her, then pulled her against him and kissed her fiercely on her blood-reddened lips. "You know, I wanted to talk to you about those bite marks you keep giving me, and I got some scratches on my arm the other..."

Béla bit his lips and sucked his tongue into her mouth, biting it and sucking it as though to milk the blood right out of it. She was positively radiating lust as he returned her attentions, biting on her lips, then her tongue as he tried to kiss her more deeply. As Béla seemed to be winning the amorous biting match, Jake tried to pull away to protect his face from her much too playful sharp little teeth, then stopped suddenly. Béla had his lower lip trapped between her upper and lower teeth.

"... 'et go..." he murmured, unable to form complete words with his lower lip stretched out like that.