Hidden Island Chapter 45, part 2 of 3

Hidden Island
Chapter 45, part 2 of 3

"I am sure Anton has a sideboard somewhere," the angel suggested.

Caine grunted and pushed himself to his feet, then started opening cabinets. The third one he checked was full of expensive liquor. "You sure?" he asked. "It's not beer."

"Wine will be fine," the angel said. "I do not think I can handle anything stronger right now."

Caine made a face expressing his feelings about wine and grabbed a bottle. He didn't bother with the cork. He just smashed the neck against the cabinet. Dark red splashed and ran down the old cherrywood. Caine put the broken bottle to his lips and drank greedily, sucking it through clenched teeth to strain the fractured glass.

He spat out a bit of the bottle and felt immediately better. Of all the odd little things the angel could do nearly effortlessly, this one was the most useful.

He still didn't understand it. The angel described it as a kind of alchemy, somewhat related to the classic water-to-wine miracle popular with demagogues and charlatans who managed to tap into a bit of divinity. There was more to it than that. The angel healed by holding wounds together and selectively speeding up time. Bits of him were aging. He did something similar with digestion, but it was easiest with things the body could process quickly. For some reason, solid foods were more challenging to work with, so he stuck with liquid. For the angel's purposes, the most efficient energy sources were fruit juice, milk, and beer.

Milk had always played havoc with Caine's guts, which even the angel had difficulty alleviating, so he avoided it. He liked fruit juice, but it was expensive. Mostly, he stuck to beer.

The wine was close enough to fruit juice. He didn't like the taste. Whatever this stuff was, it was good as far as wine went. It's much sweeter than usual. He chugged down the rest and spat more glass, then tossed the broken bottle aside and grabbed another from the Old Man's expensive rack.

Someone knocked on the door. He ignored it. Warmth flooded through his limbs. The angel worked fast, but it still took some time to work his magic on this much booze. Between a tired angel, losing weight, and drinking fast, he felt a bit drunk for the first time in decades. It was pleasant but now was not the time. On the upside, the alcohol did a great job masking the residual pain the angel was too busy to soothe.

"Time to go," Caine said.

"No fighting," the angel said tersely. "You cannot afford another serious injury."

"What I'm hearing is, don't get hit," Caine said.

The angel sighed in his mind.

He checked the saber tucked into his belt, unlocked the door, and threw it open, ready to face an army of pirates. All he saw was a pair of nervous maids. "The Old Man's dead," Caine said flatly. "You might want to find a new place to work."

Their eyes went wide. He walked past them.

"They're waiting for you," one of them said. "In the entryway."

"I'm not going to the entryway. Caine paused and gave the nervous young woman a sidelong look. "Thanks. Why are you telling me?"

"My sister works at Merry Mary's," she said quietly. "She said you're... not what the Teach family says about you."

"Tell her I said thanks," Caine said with an appreciative nod. Then he started heading for the stairs. His face felt warm. The alcohol was hitting him harder now. He hoped it would pass as quickly as it came on. He passed other shocked servants. One even tried to tell him he wasn't allowed to be there. He ignored them as they ran off to talk to others. He'd made it down two flights of stairs and was walking down a hallway when a pair of guards stopped him with pistols drawn.

They weren't precisely military. They wore green vests with the wheel-and-dagger crest of the Teach clan pinned to it. Other than that, they looked like slightly cleaned-up thugs. They wore piecemeal armor, mostly thick leather with accents of chain and plating over the significant bits. It was all worn but well cared for. They even wore metal helmets, which was pretty rare on the island. It was just too hot for heavy armor most of the time. Even magistrate soldiers tended to wear light armor around here. These two were expecting trouble, which meant Mary was preparing for something. Caine didn't know if her preparations were for him, her family, or both.

One had a sword, and the other had a bearded axe at their belts, but neither carried shields, which meant they weren't intending to defend the house—not really guards. His guess was they were mercenaries.

"Halt!" the shorter one bellowed.

"Halt?" Caine laughed. You're not the Magistrate, pal. You can say stop." He leaned against the wall to prevent the room from tilting much but tried to look nonchalant.

"You are trespassing; surrender your arms and come with us," the shorter guard said.

Caine bent and put his wine bottle on the floor without taking his eyes off the pair. "I'm here by invitation."

"Whose?" the taller one said with narrowed eyes.

"The lady of the house," Caine said.

"She does not receive visitors at this hour," the shorter guard scoffed. "Surrender your sword."

"You don't know who I am, do you?" Caine said tiredly.

"I don't care if you're the Empress herself," the shorter guard said. He seemed to be the more talkative of the two. “You can come with us, or you can die."

"Not part of the family," Caine rubbed his brow. "Smart of her. Pain in my ass, however. I'm guessing you're new? Hired within the last few weeks?" He slowly and carefully grasped his new sword below the guard and began pulling it from its sheath, holding it by the base of the blade so nobody got trigger-happy.

"None of your business," the taller one growled.

"Just my luck to run into the only two people in the house who haven't been told to look out for me," Caine muttered. His sword cleared the sheath, and he held it in front of him horizontally.

"Look, can you just take me to Mary? I hear many of her boys are waiting for me at the door, and she'll be mad at me if I trash her house."

The taller guard cocked his pistol. The quiet ones were always more dangerous.

Caine sighed. "Fine."

He dropped the sword. Their eyes followed it. Amateurs. As it reached the bottom of its fall, he lifted his foot and used it to catch the sword at the balance point, then flicked it out towards the pair with a short kick.

It wasn't a precisely targeted attack, but the pair reacted with a predictable moment of panic. It was hard not to when a sword came unexpectedly tumbling towards you. The taller one pulled the trigger, but Caine lunged forward and juked left as the blade flew. The shorter one dodged away from the flying sword and tried to follow Caine's movement with his pistol, but after heading left, Caine pushed off his foot and changed direction again. The second bullet tore a finger-sized trench along his shoulder. He felt it, but between the alcohol and the angel, there wasn't any pain. It was like bumping into a door frame.

The taller one raised his hands to catch the flying sword, acting on pure shocked instinct, but had enough money to realize that trying to catch flying swords was generally a bad idea. At the last moment, he changed his mind and tucked his head behind his armored forearms. The blade bounced off his bracers and spun away.

Caine hit him just after the flying sword. The old brawler knew how to throw his weight around even twenty pounds lighter. For a moment, the surprised guard thought the trespasser would rush right past him, but Caine's leg hooked behind the guard's and crashed into him. The other man hadn't recovered from blocking the flying saber, so his arms were raised. Caine's hand grabbed the hilt of the taller guard's sheathed sword like a lever and threw his shoulder into his foe's midsection. Caine's hooking heel took the guard's legs out from under him.

Together, they crashed to the ground with Caine's shoulder right below the other man's ribs.

Leather was some protection, but more was needed. The guard's breath exploded from his body.

Caine didn't stop. His momentum carried him into a shoulder roll over the taller man's spasming form. He rolled to his feet, still holding the tall guard's sword, and stood armed.

In the time it took Caine to flatten his partner, the shorter guard had enough time to frantically back away, toss his spent pistol behind him, and yank his axe into his offhand.

Caine's stolen sword was still in a reverse grip after being used like a handle for extra leverage, so when the axe came down, Caine didn't dodge. Instead, he sidestepped and punched the axe with his crossguard. It was enough to deflect the guard's swing, but the sword was cheap. The blade snapped clean off.

"Oh, come on," Caine muttered. Disgust and annoyance rolled across Caine's face as the shorter guard took a powerful horizontal swing. Caine stepped inside the arc and wrapped his arm around the shorter guard's swing, both the guard's arms against Caine's body. The axe wrapped around and hit him in the back with a thump, but the interrupted swing had been robbed of its power. He was curious to know if the edge had gotten him.

He touched his other hand down the guard's head like a hammer.

The simple nose guard of his pot helm didn't help much when the broken cross guard crunched into his face like a mace. The noseguard bent, and his nose cracked. The next blow split his lips and shattered his front teeth. Without a blade to hold the hilt together, the cross guard of Caine's broken sword finally flew, leaving him holding a wooden handle. He stopped his third blow before it connected, dropped the semi-conscious guard, and tossed what was left of his stolen sword over his shoulder.

He paused long enough to pick up the Old Man's saber and second wine bottle, then continued down the hallway, leaving two broken men behind him.

"Was that necessary?" the angel in his head asked.

"I tried to talk them out of it. You know how I get when someone points a gun at me," Caine muttered.

"I asked you not to get into any more fights," the angel sighed.

"You asked me not to get any more wounds," Caine corrected.

Suddenly, his arm hurt like hell. It wasn't just that the tall guard's bullet tore a fresh, ragged gouge in it. The two deep cuts he'd taken during the duel with Old Man Teach were still only partially healed, and a bullet had just torn through the thick scab. There wasn't much left of his short tunic sleeve. He pulled the scrap free and took a better look at his shoulder. New blood ran in bright streams through the old blood that had dried on his arm. His whole shoulder felt like a giant bruise, and he'd just used it to break another man's ribs and roll over his body.

"You got shot," the angel said calmly. "You got hit. In the back. With an axe."

Caine gritted his teeth. "All right. Point made."

The pain receded.

"I got to find Mary," he grumbled.

At the end of the hall, five more guards came through the door at a run, drawn by the sounds of gunfire.

"Oh, come on!" Caine snarled.

He turned around and ran.

The sun was warm and bright on Belita's bronze skin. The sky was perfectly blue, and all around them, it was full of brightly colored wings and excitedly voyeuristic singing.

She was lying on a flat, warm rock with her knees bent and feet pressed against Sandman's broad chest. His big hands had a hold of her hips, and his thrusts were long and slow.

Everything was perfect. It was a dream, after all. She'd forgotten that, but Sandman's subtle influence kept her dream from collapsing or changing.

Dreams were fickle and prone to wandering as the dreamer's mind drifted from thought to thought, but if a dreamer was invested enough in what they were experiencing, dreams could be indistinguishable from reality.

Currently, Belita is highly invested.

Contrary to popular belief, her romantic experience was not extensive. Her mother had taught her never to be ashamed of sex and to cultivate the power of sexual appeal. "Easy to chase, hard to catch," her mother had fondly said. That philosophy had been tested when those ridiculous stories about her started being published. Now, Belita felt like she was being chased by nearly everyone she met.

She had the luxury of being picky. Until her current voyage, she'd only had four partners. One had been a childish mistake. The next had been the bargain that allowed her to buy the Kestrel. Then, there had been years without, until a fateful day amid an encounter with a flock of sirens that changed her fate and relationship with Sandman forever.

They had only had sex twice. Once, during the siren raid, he gave her the golden rings that adorned her body. Then he was gone, on a mission to teach sirens a better way of life.
In dreams, though, they fucked every chance they could. Sometimes, he was genuinely visiting her while she slept. Sometimes, she dreamed of him. When she woke, it was often hard to tell the difference.

Consistently having dreams of sex, but none was enough to make anyone frustrated. She endured it for a long time, but hiding feelings from a Dreamwalker was impossible. He had been the one who recommended having some fun on her current voyage. At first, she'd balked at the idea.

She still had enough idealistic sentiments of romance that it felt wrong to have sex with anyone other than the man she'd chosen. He'd laughed at her and reminded her that he was having sex with an entire flock of Sirens, for some reason that didn't bother her. She had a hard time thinking of them as people. They seemed more like his pets than anything else, which was weird but made it easy for her not to think of them as competition.

Ultimately, he'd convinced her she did not need to feel restricted because of him. Whatever, and whoever, she wanted, he wanted her to have. In the end, it had been the mission that was the selling point. It might be a suicide run, after all. You might as well wring as much enjoyment out of life as possible. When she'd gotten to Bastard's Bay, she'd already decided to try to live up to her reputation. As outlandish as the stories were, they never came close to what she regularly did in her dreams.

The sandman's cock was as long as her forearm and nearly as thick. In the waking world, fucking him wasn't easy. In a dream, she could take him any way she wanted to. There was no feeling of being stretched to the point of discomfort. No straining or slowly relaxing and easing her body to get used to his sheer size inside her. In the dream, everything was easy. He could plunge to his full depth without hurting her. She wouldn't be sore later.

Still, her senses were heightened as only dreams could do. She felt utterly, blissfully full. Every time he drew back, she could feel his thick cockhead get stuck against the backside of her entrance like her body just didn't want to let him out. Every time he thrust, she swore she could feel the veins on his shaft pressing on her inner walls.

She groaned and intertwined her fingers with the hands on her hips.

"Gods and spirits, I missed ye," she purred. "Ye Cannae be away so long again, aye?"

The sandman rumbled out laughing. "Aye, Captain."

"I swear everything holy; that cock of yours is magic," she said, biting her lip as waves of slow, intense pleasure washed over her.

"I am surprised you can tell," Sandman said, pulling his hips tight against her round rear end as he bottomed out somewhere deep inside her. She felt like he was prodding her behind her ribs. "The spell shouldn't work on you. Not like this."

"Oh, aye. Ye should have been a sex witch like Bella instead of a..." Belita opened one eye.

"Wait. Are ye telling me your cock is magic?"

"Yes," Sandman said, not stopping his long, slow strokes. "It was the most efficient way to pass an enchantment to the sirens."

Belita started laughing. It was challenging, with a cock lodged beneath her lungs. "So we're bespelling me like one o' you’re flying' harem? Do I get to be a part of the flock?"

The eyes of Sandman's skull-like mask were like distant torches through fog. The points of light rolled in their hollow sockets. "No."

"Damn," Belita smirked, then rolled her hips and exhaled as his cock withdrew, leaving her feeling momentarily relaxed and empty. "Ye sure?

Being a happy flappy fuck enslaved person sounds nice."

The skull was prone to shifting and moving in ways that had been unnerving until she'd gotten used to it. She'd never seen it look pained before.

"They are not slaves, and I am not shelling you."

"Why do the other girls get to have all the fun?" she asked with a smirk.

"It is to bond them," Sandman explained as he thrust into her again with a bit more force. Her laughter became a groan as his massive shaft drove the breath from her body. "After being with me, they feel what all the others who have been with me recently feel. For a few days, it connects their sensations and their emotions."

"Oof," Belita grunted once she could breathe again. She smirked at his method of shutting her up, then nodded thoughtfully. "I think I've seen a spell like that before. Bella, the witch I told ye about. She cast something like that on my new navigator. It was like they were sharing each other's skin for a while. Seemed fun, right up until she accidentally lit him on fire."

The Sandman chuckled. "Thankfully, sirens avoid fire."

His thick shaft pierced her again, momentarily driving every thought from her brain. It felt like every wave of pleasure receded a bit less than the one before. The pressure was building.

Sandman's approach to sex felt like a gathering storm. Slow. Unstoppable. Unavoidable. All she could do was hold on and wait for the flood.

"Why the spell?" she managed to ask between cough breaths.

"Sirens squabble constantly," Sandman explained, giving her more force at the end of each thrust. "They share well but wait poorly. I hoped that sharing each other's sensations and feelings would foster empathy and help satisfy them while they were not receiving my direct attention."

Understanding dawned on her. "The ones ye weren't fuckin' would still feel like they were bein' fucked."

"Among other things, yes," Sandman said.

Belita let her head roll on the warm stone beneath her. Her thighs shook, and her insides quivered. This was the beginning of her favorite part when her body started losing control, surrendering to the ceaseless waves. "Clever way of keeping' them in line."

"Somewhat," Sandman said.

"It Dinna work?" she managed to groan.

"Partially," Sandman explained. He seemed indifferent to the blissful torment he was inflicting on the young blond. His rigid cock was a testament to his pleasure, but he was eternally stoic.

The mask didn't help. He was like a machine built to overwhelm her nerves. "Social grooming was already part of their culture. Now, it is even more common and fosters deeper connections. Squabbles stop quickly as they feel each other's emotions. Two sirens at odds with each other almost always begin grooming and touching as a means of apology. They become agitated when they realize they have hurt one of their sisters."

He exhaled slowly as his manhood filled her to the brink again, then left a hollow throb in its wake as it retreated. Her eyes rolled back in her head.

"Sounds like it worked. But?"

"They have figured out where it comes from and do not like being without it," Sandman sighed.

"Wait," she put her hands over her mouth to hide her barely contained grin. "Ye managed tae make a flock of sirens hornier?"

The sandman nodded solemnly as he slowly stroked out of her. "When the spell wears off, they are more insistent than ever."

Belita erupted in laughter. The unexpected tensing and shaking were like a cloudburst inside her. Her laughter became a cry. Her back arched, and her head tilted back. Her mind went white with bliss. His cock filled her again, hard, fast, unexpected. It was like a lightning bolt up her spine. Her hands clenched on his. She pulled herself against him more, not on purpose, but because her whole body was tense and shaking. He pulled out, and the wave of pleasure washed the other way. Warmth flooded her body. She took a long, ragged breath. Her breasts shook, gold rings glinting in the sunlight. "Gods and spirits," she purred.

He thrust again, fast and hard, sending another lightning bolt up her spine. Her feet came off his chest as her legs spasmed and straightened. A garbled sound of surprise escaped her lips as she flailed. Her hands grabbed at the rock, holding on like she was drowning.

Those hard, deep strokes had her lost. She would have thrashed herself awake without Sandman's steady pull on her subconscious. His presence in her dream was like an anchor, keeping her from snapping out of the dream in a puddle of sweat and joy.

So she came. And came. And came. She did not get tired. She did not breathe. She forgot she needed to. Here, there were no limits to what she could endure. The Sandman kept her mind rolling through orgasms for what felt like hours.

When he finally stopped, it took her some time to recollect herself. She'd forgotten where she was and who she was. She felt like her entire mind had been emptied, then overfilled with joy, and now it was slowly leaking out of her again.

Those raunchy penny dreadfuls couldn't hold a candle to the truth.

As she slowly regained coherence, his stillness made her concerned. She felt like his massive cock was pinning her to the stone.

"What?" she rubbed both hands over her face. "Ye all right?"

The prominent witch doctor didn't answer.

She blinked and looked up at him. She was about to speak, but he held a hand up to stop her.

He was looking out on the horizon somewhere.


To be continued