Defiant Necromancer (Book 2 stubbed)

Tybalt and Kistana landed beside a hut and a humble plot of land.

Just at the edge of sight, another hut was visible, with a plot of land fenced in around it, and then trees.

Everywhere, the products of the soil bloomed.

Looks like they’re growing tomatoes here now.

“What is this place?” Kistana asked, looking around, confused and seemingly fascinated.

“The village of Greentear,” Tybalt said quietly. “It’s where I’m from.”

“You wanted to show me your home?” she asked, eyes widening.

He frowned and shook his head. “Not really. This place isn’t exactly special. It’s mostly full of bad memories. Come on, let’s walk before someone comes out of one of these huts and recognizes me.”

He and Kistana cut through the closest plot of land and into the trees.

Tybalt spent the next ten minutes finding his way. When he had a good idea of their orientation relative to his true destination, he teleported them again, a much shorter distance.

This time, they landed in a place with no huts nearby, an open plain. They started walking again. The necromancer felt Kistana’s eyes fixed on him, but the catgirl was unwilling to question him, so the walk proceeded largely in silence.

Tybalt figured that reaching their destination would be quicker than explaining, so he just upped his speed slightly. He knew Kistana wouldn’t have trouble keeping up with him or outpacing him if needed.

Finally, they crested a hill, and they got a view that took Kistana’s breath away.

There it is, he thought, smiling as she gasped, looking straight down the hill into the field below.

A field full of hyacinths.

The flowers were a little past their period of most beautiful blooming - the sun had taken some of their vitality away - but as the catgirl stared down into the meadow, that didn’t seem to matter to her.

“What do you think?” Tybalt asked finally.

“This place is beautiful,” Kistana said, voice trembling. “It’s—” She looked at him, bit her lower lip, and seemed to be holding back tears—“This place is just like my dream, the flowers are just like she - like my Mom described them. You remembered. No one - you remembered something that wasn’t important at all. Why did you…?”

“I could tell it was important to you.”

“No one remembers things that are only important to me, though.”

“Is that really true, Kistana?” Tybalt asked, taking her hand.

“It… was,” she said slowly. “But with you and the others… no. Not anymore. Vidalia is always taking care of the rest of us, and you’re so… so…” She shook her head. “I’m not the best with words, but thank you.” She stepped in close to him, pressed her face into his chest, and began to nuzzle against him, a low purr rolling from her throat as she rubbed her hair against his shirt front.

The words “thank you” triggered a small rush of blood to one of Tybalt’s extremities as he remembered the previous night, and the smell and feel of Kistana against him did nothing to combat that flow.

“You were saying that a lot before,” he said quietly.

Kistana looked up at him, her face slightly red.

“Dero said you would enjoy it,” the catgirl said after a moment. “Did you?”

“I did, but you didn’t need to say it. That was just…”

It was just hot and satisfying and made me feel great, but…

“If it pleased you, then it was necessary as far as I’m concerned,” Kistana said, her tone a strange mix of dutiful and very willing.

“I don’t want you to do things just to please me,” he said, not sure even as he spoke if he entirely meant it. “I have every possible flavor of woman. You should do the things that please you. I get something different from each of you, anyway.”

“But I want to do things to please you, Tybalt,” she said earnestly. “You chose me over all the other women in my tribe, who would have been grateful to bear your children. That meant something. I would have contented myself with being your bodyguard… or your mistress. Whatever place you wanted for me. I would have been happy killing monsters to show I was strong enough to protect you, and standing by your side as you performed great deeds for our people. A position of honor that would have satisfied me, even if, somewhere inside, I had begun to yearn for something I couldn’t name. But you chose to… honor me beyond that, even though I didn’t ask for it. All of that means something. More than anything, now that you’ve claimed me, I want to be a good wife. I have to please you. I would even do things I didn’t like to please you. It means everything.”

“You please me by existing as yourself, Kistana,” Tybalt said, his throat suddenly unexpectedly tight. He kissed her on the lips, and she reciprocated eagerly, her hands pulling him to her and wandering down his back and side as if she thought he was trying to tilt their outing toward sex.

Reluctantly, he pulled her hands away before she could start anything.

“You know what I meant, right?” he asked.

“That I am pleasing to you,” she said a little woodenly. “Just as I am. But Tybalt…”

“What?”

“That doesn’t make sense. Results take effort.”

“You made the effort, and you’ve got the results.”

“Ongoing results take ongoing effort.” She sounded as if she was reciting something I’d learned by rote. “I have to think about how to keep this situation stable. It would be easiest if you would tell me sometimes how best to please you, and let the others guide me when they have ideas that you wouldn’t come up with yourself.”

“Kistana, I love you, and you’d have to make some serious efforts in the other direction to change that. You don’t have to keep earning my love by trying to outdo yourself with displays of devotion.”

“All right…” She sounded like she either didn’t believe him or expected he would quickly come to regret his words.

Tybalt shook his head. Silly cat. He would just have to show her over time.

“The only thing you and I both have to do is protect our family,” he said.

“You can count on me for that,” Kistana replied instantly, smiling.

“I know.”

I can always count on you.

“What would you like to do now?” she asked.

“I figured you would want to frolic in the meadow,” he replied. “After that, there’s a pond over there.” He pointed beyond the flowers. “Maybe we can catch some fish.”

The catgirl lit up, hugged him tightly, and then leaped headlong into the field of flowers and began to play.

***

Dinner with the others was the fish Tybalt and Kistana had caught - mainly Kistana, with her superhuman hunting prowess and her power to materialize specialized weapons for any situation from her aura.

Afterward, he spent the night with Kistana, resetting the schedule his wives had established after the free for all of the wedding night.

She seemed a little contemplative as they drifted to sleep. He asked her if there was anything wrong, but she just said she’d had a great time pleasing him that night and the previous one, she had loved their date, and she was very happy he had taken her as a wife.

It wasn’t quite an answer, and it seemed to be walking back some of their conversation from earlier that day, but he accepted her words and didn’t ask what she was really thinking about. If it was important, she would bring it up eventually. Or he’d figure it out. His catgirl didn’t have a lot of secrets, he’d already realized. She was refreshingly direct, with him as much as she was with herself.

So they cuddled, their naked bodies tangled together, and slept.

In the dream, he met Vidalia.

“Hello little vixen, nice meeting you like this,” he said dreamily. This dream felt like a loopier one, without the sharp edges that Vidalia’s powers could sometimes produce. “Are we going to visit Samara? Or looking into the future?”

He thought he remembered a conversation they’d had about going to the paladin again. It had been a few days since their last encounter with her.

“Well, this is about Samara,” Vidalia said, frowning. “I wanted to tell you, I’ve lost the ability to connect us to her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. I can’t make the connection.”

“Is she dead? Or protected?”

Tybalt felt a strange mix of guilt and loss at the idea that the paladin might be dead. If she was, it would probably be because they had infiltrated Samara’s dreams, and her superiors had found out and determined she needed to be eliminated.

And he had been looking forward to meeting her in person.

Yes, he was married, and he loved his wives.

But Samara still had her own appeal.

“Protected,” Vidalia said firmly. “It’s a different feeling, trying to connect to a dead person versus trying to reach for a living person and being blocked.”

That didn’t make the necromancer feel much better.

“Well, as any man who spends any time chasing skirts knows, you win some, you lose some,” he said. “But I would have hoped she wouldn’t have told anyone about our encounters and sought protection. She seemed content to continue being seduced. I felt you and I had a real connection with her. And if she told the wrong person… the Divine Trust may be torturing her even now, pulling information about us from her writhing body even while they ‘protect’ her from us.”

A connection is one way to put it, he thought. We infiltrated her dreams and turned them into sexual fantasies. I allowed myself to believe that she liked it, because she participated. Begged for me to breed her. Said things most women wouldn’t say to their husbands or their lovers, or even confess to their closest friends. But even if she enjoyed them at the time, in the light of day, such adventures can take on a patina of shame.

“I suppose it’s natural she’d want to defend herself against psychic invaders,” he continued after a long moment.

“She wanted your invasions,” Vidalia replied instantly, having been intensely watching Tybalt’s face. “Don’t let yourself doubt it for a second. She wanted them badly, and from you specifically. Remember, by the time we’d been with her for a little while, she was literally begging for your attentions. Yes, she took a vow of chastity. But I think most of the women who make vows like that secretly wish for a man to climb over the barrier they’ve raised and take them. The ones who don’t prefer women, anyway.”

“Taking a vow of celibacy if you really feel that way is something I can’t pretend to understand.”

“Well, I understand. You’re a man, so you know your role better than you know ours. And you play it well. If she was truly distressed by the things you did to her in the dreams, she would have woken up in the middle of them, not kept sinking deeper and falling further under your spell. I think it’s inevitable she’ll return to you, wanting more of what you gave her. If she can’t find you in the dreams, she’ll want the real life version. Until then… well, you know, the rest of us will make you feel better about ‘losing’ her.”

Her voice had turned sultry by the end, and her clothing vanished as she finished that last sentence.

Yes, Vidalia would make him feel better.