Free Awaken to Pleasure by Lauren Hawkeye Page A

ventured onto the plains even more rarely than humans did now…they had little need to, after all.
    Almost there. Just a few more steps and she could step into the relative cool of Gale’s Groceries, the only building for miles in No Man’s Land. It was run by a man who was neither human nor witch, but something else entirely—she’d never asked what.
    “Ouch!” Stepping on something that protruded out of the sand, Moira went down on all fours, hard. Cursing loudly, she rubbed her right ankle, which had taken the brunt of the fall, before turning to glare at the item that had made her trip. It was a tarnished silver bottle of some sort, or a lamp, and it looked old. Set deeply on one side, surrounded by delicate engravings, was a deep blue sapphire gem that glinted brighter than all of the tiny grains of sand put together. Moira’s annoyance quickly turned to curiosity. Even though it was pretty, she suspected the trinket had no real value, but it might pay for her sack of rice. If she could trade this shiny little bottle for food instead of spending some of her hard-earned and well-hoarded coin, then she would. So she tucked the object into the long folds of her cloak and staggered the remaining few feet to the store, stumbling a bit on her now slightly twisted ankle.
    “Hiya, Moira.” Gale Grocer, the owner of the store, greeted Moira as she entered the tiny shack. Though Gale was always friendly enough to her, there was something about the reedy little man, with his oiled black hair and his nervous twitch, that didn’t sit quite right in her gut…something beyond the lizard-like tail that slithered on the floor behind him.
    But she had braved the plains to buy goods, not to make friends, so she figured the man selling them was of no concern to her.
    “What can I do ya for?”
    She ignored the deliberate entendre in the man’s greeting, though she inwardly shuddered.
    Moira liked sex. She liked it a lot. But she’d stick to humans.
    “A drink of water would be great, for starters,” she told him tartly, shifting her weight to relieve the pressure on her ankle. “And a sack of rice. That’s it.”
    Gale’s face fell a bit beneath the pencil-thin mustache that Moira imagined he shaped painstakingly in front of a mirror every morning. “Rice? That’s it?” He filled a clay cup with grayish water from a bucket and passed it over the counter. “What you coming all the way out here to get rice for? Don’t they got any in that fancy store over in that haven village of yours?” He leered a bit and Moira knew that he was flattering himself, thinking that she’d come all this way to get a look at him. She struggled to keep from wrinkling her nose in distaste and instead gulped at the slightly stale-tasting water.
    “I have my reasons,” she informed him flatly, with no intention of revealing what those reasons were. “Just give me the rice, Gale.”
    The man pressed his lips together sourly and hauled the woven sack onto the counter with a grunt. It bore an upside-down pentagram, a mark that made Moira shudder—this rice had been supplied by the witches rather than grown under a dome. That fact alone almost made her refuse it.
    They all hated the witches for stealing what had once been their world, but not all of them had seen firsthand what horrors they were capable of.
    The younger ones, the children…they had no idea. And Moira would do everything in her power to make sure that it stayed that way.
    Her fingers curled over the coarsely woven bag, a shudder passing through her as she imagined tendrils of dark power woven right into the bag, grown right into the food.
    She wanted to refuse the rice provided by those who had murdered her family.
    But those same innocent children had mouths to feed. Bellies that could be filled with this rice.
    “That’ll be five coppers for the rice, and a tin for the water.” Gale’s expression dared her to challenge his charge on the water, which any decent soul