Childe of my Heart ~ Chapter Twenty-six
by Shanyah
 

His heart beeped like a sin detector.

In seek mode three steps ahead, Spike carried a cross-bow and arrows and prowled in the direction of a certain toy store. Spike took a few wrong turns, and his heart slowed to normal. Quick glance at him and Spike backtracked, turned a more accurate corner and stayed on the path of rightness. His ticker beeped towards arrest.

One stall from Rhiana’s Spike paused, his shoulders stiff as cardboard cut-outs. “Whatever it is Xander, I’m gonna be a lot less pissed off if I hear it from you first.”

Xander didn’t think so. He kept his mouth shut.

“Talk to me, Harris.”

There was always a chance that Rhiana wouldn’t be in or that Spike would walk past her stall. Why out himself when Spike might never find out? It was pointless getting Spike heated up over something that had meant less than nothing and that wouldn’t happen again. 

“Fine. Make it worse for yourself,” Spike moved off, reaching Rhiana’s shop-front as miniature cowbells pealed, ‘busted.’

“Good afternoon Master Spike, I am Mistress Rhiana.” She lifted the hatch to her stall and chimed up to Spike, “I trust your boy delivered my messages?”

Spike half turned his head, flicked Xander a cutting glance and suddenly, Xander saw the benefits of confession. “Mi Amo can I, may I talk to you alone…you and I alone?”

“Blew your chance.” Spike faced Rhiana, “You, can speak to me in private.”

Stomach churning, he watched the coffee coloured drape close behind Spike.

*    *    *    *

Nibblet, Fred and Harris didn’t have to wear their maroon bands or regulation gear in the compound, didn’t have to call him Amo or Master in the privacy of their unit. He had never demanded that they lick his boots or die. True they had a tough training schedule, true also that he expected them to behave like any other Earned when out in the Trail. But he hadn’t treated them badly. He’d been fair to Harris, more than fair and had thought it was why they were making strides.

He’d thought wrong; what this woman was saying coated his tongue with oily distaste, burdened his shoulders with humiliation. ‘Fuck me Spike, need you Spike…Spike, you feel so good inside me…’ all of it, the groaning, the smiling and kissing, all a fucking lie because by coming here, Xander had declared him a eunuch.

He glanced at the boy centre-fold standing behind Rhiana. Wondrously made and knew it too from the way he preened in his wee leather shorts. Uncrossing his arms, he pushed away from the paddling horse, narrowed his eyes at the boy. “You’re human,” he said.

The centre-fold didn’t reply.

“You may speak Bertrand,” Rhiana said.

“Yes Mi Amo, I was bred of humans. My parents are Earned by an Advisor, who entrusted me to My Mistress for nurturing.” the boy said.

He was bred and nurtured for use in a dingy room that smelt stale with last month’s sex? Likely story. Bertrand did not have the look of a freebie for customers who sprung a hard-on for him.

“Advisor?” He caught up with the middle of Bertrand’s sentence. “What’s one of those?”

“I’d be obliged, Mi Amo, if we discussed Advisors on another occasion,” Rhiana said, all but doffing her cap at him.

Crafty, he only had to glance at her eyes to see it, fox eyes. “You send a letter of complaint, Xander keeps ‘plaguing’ so you make him a cuppa and let him sample the goods?” He asked.

“I did not provide him with refreshments but sent him back with gifts for you on each occasion. When you did not reject them I assumed you were in agreement with me.”

She’d offered gifts – and Xander took them?

The vein in Spike’s temple wouldn’t stop throbbing and his demon plain refused to quieten. Bundling his fists into his coat pockets, he looked around the storeroom. A door lay on its side under a workbench, heavy oak door that would have deadened sound the way the suede curtain couldn’t. The only lit lamps were the two hanging between the chain fittings, sexy use of lighting that would’ve blinded Harris to anything but Bertrand.

“Are we agreed? Am I to receive recompense?” Rhiana asked.

“You played my boy,” he took firm step towards her.

Rhiana armed herself with a whip from a low hanging shelf. “The wise play, Mi Amo,” she said.

Spike had his forearm depressing her throat and his body pinning her to the wall before she could shake loose the coils of her whip. “Thing is ducks, I don’t share well.” He ground his arm into her windpipe, “how did you get him here. Why him?” He sensed movement behind him and compressed the creaking cartilage. “Do that again and your Amo will be toasting marshmallows in the devil’s fire pit,” he said. 

Bertrand’s creeping stilled.

Rhiana moved her lips, gurgling came out.

Spike lifted the pressure off her throat a little, backed up a small step. “Well?” He asked.

Rhiana crashed her knee into his groin. The demon strength behind her bony joint doubled him over, staggered him back. “Bitch,” he said with a grunt of laughter.

“Famine in the homestead compels a man to pillage his neighbour’s larder. Your boy is famished,” Rhiana struck out with the whip. “His appetite directed him here.”

Her verse lanced his pride, causing him to collide into a chain as he wheeled away from the whip. He wrenched the chain from its fixture and sprinted towards Rhiana, she drew her arm back for another lash. The whip sliced through air and left a blazing track across his face. He hooted, smashed the chain into her face, knocked her nose off centre. A side kick to her temple had her flying into the wall but as he closed in swinging the chain, she scrambled up the wall.

“Come back here you!” He launched the chain at her. It chipped sparks and fragments off the wall, missed Rhiana.

“Go Betrand, find help,” she said from her hands and knees position on the ceiling.

“Bertrand,” Spike jogged backwards, outpacing the human’s race for the door. He stopped to one side of it and smiled when Bertrand skidded to a halt, eyeing the ample scuttle space beside Spike.

Bertrand went for it and Spike blocked the space, leaving room on the other side. Bertrand stepped to that side but not before Spike skipped to obstruct him. Twice more and Bertrand gave up, gaze on the exit that was not to be.

“You tripped my boy up,” Spike sing-songed, wagging his head, “and I am cross with you Bertrand.” He morphed and held his head poised at mid wag, “very, very cross.”

“You must not mark him!” Mistress Rhiana fell off the ceiling with a tinkling of ankle bells.

Up off the floor, Rhiana pushed Bertrand aside and stood in his place, her crooked nose dripping with blood.  “I perceived in your boy a natural flair for meting out pain and ecstasy, Bertrand has a natural flair for receiving both. They are well suited and I permitted your boy to practice his hand on mine for I believed it to be your wish.”

“Xander said that - told you I wanted him to practice on that?” Spike pointed at Bertrand.

Rhiana went closer to her Earned and touched his arm as though to reassure him he wasn’t a that. “You plainly do not know your boy well Master Spike,” she said. “Xander lacks the emotional maturity to unravel his desires or the articulacy to state them. His eloquence is in his silence and it was with his silence that he accepted my tutelage in the use of paddle and cuff. I did not imagine he would be so audacious as to come to me without the approval of his Master.”

Spike’s spleen burst, he was choking on bile. How fucking dare he? How dare Xander take tutelage from Rhiana and where did she get off telling him what his boy needed? He spun to the doorway and tore the curtain aside. “I’m finished with you,” he said.

“Yet I am not finished with you. Your Earned made a liaison with mine. I wrote you of the situation as was my duty to a fellow Earner and made clear my price as is my Earner Right over Bertrand. I am owed recompense Mi Amo, and you need not invite Seventh Ranking intervention for a claim that is easily settled between two Earners.”

Already out the door, Spike stopped in his tracks, hearing again Tresten’s sincere threat. Next time the boy’s misdeeds go unpunished by you, the woman will take the stand.

Cornered, he was cornered by Tresten’s rules, Xander’s bloody idiotic sexcapades and by foxy Rhiana. “You know those one hundred things you want to do before you die?” He asked her. “I’d hop to it.”

Cigarette and lighter in hand, he strode out to the store front, paced, smoked, realised the cigarette was down to its butt when it burnt his fingers. He lit the second cigarette on the butt of the first and stared across the narrow street at the wicker café table and lying cheating Xander: chewing on his lip, hands wedged under his armpits, brown eyes wider than possible.

He’d gone soft over Harris, spoilt him into taking them where there was no scuttle space. And even now, after all he’d heard, he wanted to stand between Xander and the Trail. Wanted to take him home, punish him yes, but not in anger.

Rules and responsibilities, no way out. Dropping the cigarette to smoulder on the floor, he sifted through the stall’s wares, picked out a few and held the drape to the backroom aside for Xander.

*    *    *   * 

The weal marred Spike’s lips, overlaid the scar in his eyebrow and twisted into his hair. It hurt Xander to see that red welt and he lifted his hand towards Spike’s face.

“I’m sorr-”

Thwack!

A ferocious backhand across his mouth that snapped his head back and caused his teeth to cut into the inside of his lower lip. He spat out the blood trickling from the tear, clenched his hands into fists. In his line of work, fighting back was the way to go. He fought to uncurl his fists and to not spit out the cusses along with the blood.

“Was he starkers?” Spike asked, eyes boring into his.

He frowned in confusion.

“Was Bertrand naked when you helped yourself to him?” Spike clarified.

“Yes, Mi Amo he was,” he said.

“Strip.”

Everything he had done to Bertrand, Spike would do to him – recompense. Reconstruction of the crime scene according to the folks on CSI, Xander thought, presenting his back to Rhiana and Bertrand. They were in luck, his backside was his best side.

“See the stand in front of you?” Spike asked, pacing behind him. “Bend over it.”

The stand looked like gym horse – hip high, four sturdy wooden legs and a leather padded back. He bent over it, head hanging close to the tiled floor and butt chilled by the air. He couldn’t come up with inner-dialogue to lighten the mortification. Spike’s voice came at him, steady and without pausing for answers.

“Was he a good boy for you?”

“Did you use a paddle on him?”

“Was he cuffed?”

“Was he manacled?”

Yes, yes, yes and yes, would be the answer. And no, Spike could not be seriously doing this to him; cuffing his wrists to the stand’s back legs and manacling his ankles to its front legs, positioning his behind for optimum spanking. Crinkle of packaging being ripped, heavy footsteps pacing behind him and Spike was asking more questions. 

“You came here how many times?”

“Five, Mi Amo.”

“Five. I sent you for lube, you acquired a playmate makes six fuck-ups. You lost the gifts Rhiana sent me, makes seven. I asked you two fucking times to come clean and you didn’t, makes nine. You obeyed another Earner without my consent, makes ten. She wrote to me, you kept the letters, how many fuck-ups does that make?”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven who?”

“Mi Amo. Eleven, Mi Amo.”

“I count twelve. Four of us came to Dyulin believe it or not and your mess-ups affect four people. What’s four by twelve?”

“Forty eight, Mi Amo.”

“You get forty eight of my best,” Spike said and the paddle fell. Hard.

Straight away he realised that this spanking was different from his foray into S and M with Bertrand. This was punishment, about anger and not play. No safe word here, no warm up and no pleasure as the paddle falls scalded his ass. Left cheek then right cheek, quick tempo. He gritted his teeth, thinking Spike should put his rhythmness to good use, maybe take up bongo drumming. 

“Did you get hard for Bertrand?”

Objection, badgering the witness…and ouch have mercy.

Left cheek, right cheek, “I asked you a question,” terse Spike.

 “Yes, Mi Amo, I got hard.”

“And when you were done with him you came to me?” Four rapid strikes, out of rhythm with Spike’s previous swipes. 

Xander squirmed, both from the strikes and from Spike’s incredulous intonation. “I-I came to you first and you said I needed time to heal-”

“Pathetic. You get four more.”

Spike started on a new pattern, still hitting left then right, but so relentless Xander’s head jerked with every whack, his pelvis banged against the stand, his nails bit into the palms of his fisted hands and his mind cottoned on to how hard a vampire could spank ass.

“You stretched him with dildos…fucked him with a rubber so I wouldn’t know where you’d been?”

“I-I did, Mi Amo. It’s called safe sex. You h-hear all these s-stories…”

“You came home whiffing of latex and you blamed it on the gloves. That’s called deceit.”

The paddle whooshed, sounded like Spike had really cranked his arm back to deliver the spank that caught him unprepared, landing on the back of his thigh. He screamed and got a rapid succession of smacks. He gulped back the screams…and got double fast and double hard. Bastard, he thought, bastard, bastard. Stop. Please Spike, stop. Sweat trickled down his neck, his thighs and buttocks were on fire and Spike swung the paddle like he was good to go all week. Soon, all he could hear was the paddle whooshing, the paddle thumping onto flesh. Whoosh, thump, whooshthump, pain untold.

Then the paddle went quiet and tears stung his eyes. He bit on his torn lip, spiralling towards total panic because Spike was pacing behind him, pacing and crackling more packages open. Dildos and lube, condoms. Worse than Spike hitting him was Spike fucking him angry.

“No,” he said, “No. You do this and it’s rape, Spike, it’s-”

“Don’t you bloody get it? You are Earned,” Spike roared, landing an open-handed sting of a slap on his butt. “The Earned take what they’re given.” 

He felt each cool finger and the flat of Spike’s palm and that personal touch blistered him more than the leather paddle. His muscles jumped, they were trying to jump forward, through his skin and away from Spike. The snick came, lube cap being opened and he was no longer spiralling towards panic but chained in it. He clamped his ass cheeks together, trying to protect his entrance against the assault he knew was coming.

“No Spike – Mi Amo no, no…” Xander pulled on the cuffs, pulled harder when they strangled his wrists. “Get the cuffs off me! Get them…don’t tie me! Please don’t tie, I don’t wan’ this…!”

*    *    *    *

And I do? Spike glowered at Xander’s bright red rear.

He lathered more lube onto the dildo, felt the pit of his stomach plunge to his boots as Xander begged. Sounded young and not in a way he liked to think of him. Child-like pleading, frightened wheezing of an asthmatic caught out without his inhaler.

He glanced at Rhiana and Bertrand. They had their electrified stares on Xander. Out for their pound of flesh, the swine. “Do you read much, Bertrand?” He asked.

Bertrand looked at Rhiana, she nodded and the Genetically Modified Whore replied, “Yes Mi Amo, reading is integral to my training.”

“I’m named after a literary genius. William.” He fished a condom out of his pocket. “Have you read any of Shakespeare’s plays?”

“His works are surpassed by none, Master,” Bertrand enthused.

“It’s not me or your Mistress that got bound up and screwed. It’s you, you’re the wronged party. I’m feeling generous, gonna let you take your recompense. You’re going to do Xander like he did you, give him every ounce of pain and ecstasy he gave you. Here you go,” he brandished the dildo and flipped the condom to Bertrand. “Pain and ecstasy, not one or the other but both spilling from his mouth in equal measure. Make it happen, Shylock.”

Only a fool would attempt to squeeze pleasure from Xander in his panicked state, Spike was confident of this. He stepped aside and stared at Bertrand, favored him with a glimpse of what repayment lay in store for him should he take up and fail the challenge.

Bertrand looked all kinds of appalled. He stayed exactly as he was.

“I will do it,” Rhiana said.

Regard, a fool is born, Spike thought, smirking. “This is a matter easily settled between two Earned, why should we Earners interfere?” Not taking his eyes off Bertrand, he gave the dildo a couple of shakes, “Going once, going twice…last chance Bertrand?”

Very emphatic shake of head from Bertrand.

“You’re sure?” Spike’s smile was all fangs and no amusement.

Small, but definite nod from Bertrand.

“That’s that then,” Spike said to Rhiana. “You’ve had your compensation now fuck off out of here.”

Rhiana tapped the whip’s handle on her palm, corners of her mouth drooped. Spike threw the dildo at a wall, swept up Xander’s boxers and trousers and took the manacles off.

“You’re starting to piss me off, Rhiana,” he said, pulling the boxers then trousers up Xander’s legs.

“I will be paid in full,” she tapped her palm louder.

“Where were you when your boy waived part of the fee? You have been paid, you stupid mare.”

“You cowed him into waiving the fee! Lord Tresten will hear of this,” she said petulantly.

“People are losing their eye teeth to Earn humans. You get given a specially bred boy and you’re going to own up to nurturing him into a coward? You’re a bolder man than me, Mistress.” He picked up Xander’s tunic and unlocked the cuffs, anger rising when he saw the pool of bloodied saliva on the tiles below Xander’s head. “Are you going, Rhiana?”

“Most certainly not. I am owed-”

Leaping stride and he knocked the whip out of Rhiana’s hand, caught it and lashed at the pair. Full strength, well aimed slashes intended to run Bertrand and Mistress off their property quick like. He stayed at their backs until they’d cleared the stall and were shrieking in the market street.

“Any time, bitch. Come and pay me back for that any time,” he hurled the blood-spattered whip after them and returned to the store room.

Slumped over the stand, Xander hadn’t moved, wasn’t talking.

“Harris?” He hunkered in front of Xander and touched the top of his head. “Hey, possum? Not funny.” With thumb and forefinger he lifted Xander’s chin, slackening his grasp as the strength leached from his arms.

Dru used to have these spells, moments of awake dreaming. Glittery eyes restless with rapid movement, not taking hold of his gaze or responding to his voice. Xander was having a Dru moment.

He clasped Xander’s elbows and guided him through a slow rise, saying, “You want to go steady. Stops the blood rushing from your head all at once. Makes you woozy, does that. Don’t want you falling onto your backside now do we, pet?”

Xander’s lips worked, his hands shook. He tottered back from Spike, shuffled forward to him, stopped. Spike pushed the stand from between them and went closer, bringing their chests into contact. Livid with him, he rubbed Xander’s fevered nape, other hand wiping the saliva off his chin then curling on his waist.

“I can see the attraction,” Spike softly fumed, urging Xander’s brow to his shoulder. “Least this time I didn’t lose out to a Chaos Demon, eh?” He raged in low and smooth voice, abandoned in the shabby backroom since the man who’d fetched him here was good as gone. 

CHILDE OF MY HEART ~ CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

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