The Care and Feeding of Griffins by R. Lee Smith Page A

know if she’d succeeded or not.  Everything was perfectly black, but that was no guarantee of anything.  This was a dream, after all.  There was no sleeping bag, no baby griffin, nothing but whispers and phantom hands, and that made this a dream.  For such things, it really didn’t matter if she could see or not.
    One of the whisperers, still soothing her in its urgent, eager way, moved its hands from her shoulders to her breasts, and dream or not, that was a little too familiar for Taryn.  She pushed out, but touched nothing but cold air.  She tried to roll away, and the hands cupping her breasts suddenly solidified, pushing her firmly flat even as she was whispered at to be calm, be still.
    “Please,” Taryn began, and the voices instantly seized on the word.
    “ Please!  Please, be still!”
    Something swirled around her, and never mind that her back was pressed solidly to the ground, she felt her entire upper body constricted as if in a huge, unseen and frozen hand.  “Be still,” that something whispered, directly in her ear.  “You have come and will be repaid for your offering, but you will be still.”
    Taryn struggled, and that fist clenched even harder, too tightly for breath .
    “ Be still,” the voice whispered again.  “Or die.  Yes.  That much we remember also.”
    And just like that, the pressure enclosing her was gone.  Taryn sucked in air in a seemingly endless gasp as suffocation-stars exploded behind her eyes.  She could feel the lips of the whisperer nibbling a leisurely trail down her throat, but was too weak to try and wave it away.  Her teeth chattered, whether from the cold or the shock, she couldn ’t tell, and it seemed to take a long time before she could bring herself to shape words. 
    “ What…”  She coughed on frozen air and tried again.  “What are you?”
    “ We are who was and who remain.”
    “ Still we remain.  We wait—”
    “ As you wait.”
    “ For someone to love.”
    “ Let us—”
    “ Let us love—”  A sigh tickled at her breast and cool lips closed around her.  The voice whispered on, separate from the gentle ministrations of the phantom mouth at her nipple.  “Ah, so young.  So warm!”
    Icy fingers slipped along her thighs.  Cold pressed intimately against her in a kiss and one word was spoken suddenly in countless greedy voices:  “ Virgin .”
    Taryn pulled her legs together fast.  She met no resistance, only that freezing spot of air, but the mouth at her sex continued its easy exploration of her most secret self.  She kicked, and hands now extremely solid caught her thighs and pressed them down and open.  She tried to push at the thing that suckled her and her hands passed through another chill mist and touched only her own breast.  The nipple that had known the kiss of the phantom whisperer was stiff and cold as a chip of ice.
    Whoever lay with her sighed, both of them at once, as her fingers rubbed at her naked breast, trying to warm it.  “Pleasure, yes!”
    “ Pleasure yourself and let us—”
    “ Remember—”
    “ How it was—”
    “ How it felt.”
    She felt the slide of flesh move up through her thighs, hands slipping around to cup her bottom as her private self was gently parted with an icy tongue.  Taryn sucked in breath to cry out and lips pressed down on her in a kiss.  She could feel breasts now, rubbing lightly at her own as her mouth was invaded.  She couldn ’t push them away, couldn’t kick.  She bit helplessly, but the tongue that flicked so hesitantly at hers remained.
    “ Yes,” one of them sighed.
    “ No!” she cried.  She tried again to bring her legs together, but the phantom who lay between them simply faded to freezing mist and then opened her again, wider this time.  The kiss that renewed itself was stronger, more demanding.  The cold that slicked inside her with such tender licks shocked even the notion of mere dreaming from Taryn’s mind.  Panic began to sting at her.