There was nothing else for it. Steeling herself, she bit the bullet and opened her door.
“Fucking hell’s bells with knobs on top,” she hissed as the cold didn’t just hit her but went for full-on actual bodily harm. Her nipples were so hard she could hang coats on them.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay,” she told herself as she twisted in her seat, automatically keeping her legs together because of her short skirt, and wriggled out of the vehicle.
Only to step in an ankle-deep puddle.
She screeched, offloading a few colorful curses into the air that would have made a sailor blush, and leapt away from the offending body of cold water.
“Great. Just fucking great,” she grumbled, reaching out to push Bertha’s door shut.
Phone still in hand, torch on to light the way, she looked back the way she’d come. She’d passed a town not five minutes ago. Someone must be there who could help her. Surely?
Wrapping her thin blazer around herself, she started to walk back along the road. The boughs of the trees creaked in the wind, making her bite back a shriek and scuttle quickly to the middle of the road.
Then she laughed at herself.
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Kelly, get a grip. You’re not in a horror film. No monsters are going to come out of the shadows and chase you through the woods.”
She hoped.
Karak the Terrible was accustomed to people fearing him. It was a boon in his line of work and made his position as Captain General of Dread King Batak’s armies a lot easier.
What it did not make easier was securing the services of a prostitute.
“We’ll do you for a couple of coppers, handsome,” the large-figured madam said flatly to Graal, her expression hardening as she cast a glance over Karak’s much larger form and more brutal visage. “But ’im? Four silvers, and that’s just to get a whore in the tent with him for a blowy. Five if ’e actually wants to fuck ’er.”
“Oh, come on,” Graal wheeled with his most charming smile. “He’s not that bad. Just a little grumpy.”
Karak grunted, appreciating Graal’s efforts on his behalf. They’d been friends since they were whelps abandoned by their mothers near the orc camps, but where Graal’s good looks, long silver hair and pointed ears obviously came from an elven mother, Karak must’ve been birthed by a cave troll, or an ugly giant… he wasn’t sure which. Whichever, his father had either had balls of steel, been blind… or both. He was going with both and a side of insanity.
“Three coppers for you, and five silvers for him. Final offer,” the madam said, folding arms thick enough to tie smaller orcs into knots. She was a rare female orc, and ran all the girls in the army camps. No one fucked with her, or fucked with her, not even Batak, the Dread King himself.
There was no sense arguing, not when Mildas got that look on her face. And besides, Karak just couldn’t face having to ignore the stench of fear from a female as he rutted on her.
He knew some orcs got off on that, even going so far as to hunt down faerie or elven females from the enemies’ armies, just so they could fuck something small and delicate that was terrified of them. It had never done it for him. His reputation as “the terrible” was based on his exploits on the battlefield, rather than those in the bedroom.
“Don’t worry about it,” he grunted at the imposing female. “I got too much to do, so sort pretty boy here out.”
He sensed more than saw her sigh of relief. Motioning to Claw, his battle-hound, he turned to go.
“Hey, brother, wait up.”
Graal cut off his escape, a frown of concern on his unscarred face. Even though he’d been in all the same gnarly battles as Karak, somehow he’d managed not to get his face busted up. Karak, on the other hand, had a face that seemed to call to every single blade on the battlefield, as his many scars testified. But try as they might, none of the enemy had ever managed to kill him.
“What?” he snarled. “You got pussy waiting, soldier. Hop to it.”
That wasn’t jealousy in his voice when he spotted the pretty little whores waiting for a chance to ride Graal’s cock, giggling and blushing as the handsome orc warrior winked at them. No way, not jealousy at all.
“You’re such an asshole.” Graal punched him in the arm, grinning wide so his tusks were on display. Karak puffed himself up with pride. Graal’s tiny, pretty-girl tusks were nothing compared to his. He could slice through bone like butter.
“Yeah?” he growled in reply. “And? More to the point, are you aware that you just struck a senior officer? A general, no less, in our glorious king’s army?”
“You done stroking your ego?” Graal asked, his expression unchanging.
Karak flashed his teeth in a ferocious grin. “Maybe. I can keep going if you’d like?”
“Please don’t. And you’re still an asshole.” Then the grin dropped from Graal’s face and he looked at Karak in concern. “You sure you’re all right with this?”
Karak bit back his sigh. “Seriously. Go fuck the fan girls. Some of us have more pressing concerns, like patrolling the northern border.”
The smaller orc threw back his head and laughed. “Seriously? You’d rather go patrol in the cold and the damp rather than let me persuade one of these ladies to let you have a sniff of her pussy? Brother, that’s like watching blood drip off a dead faery.”
Watching blood drip off a dead prisoner would be infinitely better than watching Graal try and sweet talk a wary whore into fucking him, so Karak just shook his head.
“It might be all quiet that way on,” he rumbled, his rockslide voice deeper than normal. “But quiet places only stay quiet when someone is watching them. If those fucking elves discover we’ve taken our eyes off the ball, they’ll be all over us like a bad rash.”
“Ugh, yeah, good point,” Graal agreed. “Okay, you go do patrol. I’m gonna take one for the team. Or three.”
Karak threw a curse at Graal’s retreating back before turning and stalking from the camp.
Claw, his war-hound, pushed off from the ground to follow. Like him, it was an outcast. The mutant offspring of a kregas hound, a wild dragon, and a nightmare, the hulking hound was half covered in fur, half in scales and had a drool problem a cave troll would envy. Karak didn’t care, not even when the creature insisted on sharing his bedroll on cold nights. Claw was the best damn war-hound this side of the Dark-Elven passes and twice as deadly, so he could deal with a little drool for backup like that.
It didn’t take him long to leave the camp, nodding to the sentries on guard as he passed them. The blackened and gnarled trees of the Wasted Woods rose up around him, watching him. But even the cursed dryads who controlled these trees knew not to mess with Karak the Terrible. He wasn’t above coming out here with a handful of flame-throwing spells and a war axe to chop the fuckers back.
The northern line ran just under a series of foothills, who themselves sat in the shelter of the cursed mountains that dominated this landscape. It was an odd area, one that had been fought over many times, in many wars, for many years. Not because it was strategically significant but more because it was one of those areas of land that was just there. Scrubland, wasteland, call it what you wanted… it was an area where nothing interesting happened but that needed to be patrolled and protected anyway, especially when the mists were up as they had been for the last couple of weeks.