The Twilight Hunt Chapter 2 - Mistletoe

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Max let himself drop into his chair, more than a little exhausted, as beads of sweat dripped down the man’s brow. The droplets of hard-earned moisture, the salt of his labor, glided down his forehead and dripped over his cheek before falling to the ground like tears. The large man lifted a bottle of water in his hand to his lips, taking a long drink from it. He had been up for… what? Fifty hours or so by now? Something like that. He blinked the tiredness from his eyes, letting them fixate on the messed up mattress where his latest victim was lying motionless, a soft whimper coming from the unconscious woman with each breath.

He wiped his brow. It had been nearly ten hours that had gone by like minutes since he had started working on her… he didn’t have time to spare with such a short time limit. Max actually felt sorry for the poor young woman. Margret was a lovely thing, a beautiful woman, and a prize worth having. She deserved someone who would take his time with her, using her sensitive young body like a precious instrument. That was how Max preferred to work - to take his time and do it right, to break her down and build her back up into a perfect slave. Unfortunately, that took time… and time was precisely what Astrid had decided he did not have. Instead of working like a surgeon, he needed to be a butcher. Instead of an artist making a sculpture, delicately chiseling away bit by bit from a marble block, he had just needed to smash her.

So he had.

It wasn’t fair, to her or him… but he’d agreed to take Mr. Root’s gold, and his commission with it. That meant he needed Astrid. That meant he needed to complete this challenge. A deal was a deal.

He looked down at the pale little Icelandic redhead tied up on his bed. He hadn’t touched her for a few minutes now while he recovered and he was fairly sure she hadn’t moved at all; the shallow rise and fall of her chest was the only sign of life in the broken girl. It was like her whole body worked not to agitate the welts on her skin and the bruises that were lurking below the surface… even unconscious she was trying to protect herself. Her head hung over one side of the bed. It was bruised, unfortunately… he tried not to bruise the faces of his prey too badly usually. It was bad for merchandise. Then again, she wasn’t going to be sold, so it didn’t matter that she had a black eye and dark bruising on both cheeks, or that her face was slick with a sticky mix of spit, piss, and cum that streaked her face and her hair. The makeup she had had on when he grabbed her was long ruined, the lipstick smeared off of bruised lips, and her breathing had a raspy sound to it… her throat was doubtless just as bruised and sore as the rest of her face.

Her tits weren’t much better. She had lovely tits, large for her frame and, he was delighted to see, very sensitive as well. During the night, Max had taken full advantage. Bruises, bite marks, and cigarette burns covered them now, along with plenty of welts… he didn’t have any of his tools with him so he’d needed to use his belt. Less than ideal, but if he hit hard enough it still made lovely marks. Her sweat and some of his seed rested on those swollen orbs, both deposited directly and dripped on from elsewhere, and her nipples looked like cherries from how raw and swollen they were.

Perhaps inevitably, her pussy had suffered the worst. It had been hours now… the most spectacular of the bruises were just starting to blossom, and her main hole showed all of them. Her thighs were more black and blue than they were flesh-toned, and both those thighs and the mound above her wrecked cunt had more puffy red burn marks from the cigarettes. Welts and bruises covered her ass as well, along with several more burns. He hadn’t had time to play around… he had gone right for her with the belt to start, even before he had fucked her.

Cum leaked from the bruised slit but the hole still looked tight. It wasn’t gaping… instead, it had been all but swollen shut. He knew that if he put his fingers in her right this second she would feel tighter than she had been when he’d started… as swollen up on the inside as she was on the outside. To the bound woman, her hole would feel more like a raw wound than a part of her after what he had done to it… a feeling that would probably last forever if Astrid’s intentions for her went the way he expected.

Max sighed. He’d done it. It had been an exhausting night and he had needed to largely brute force the problem, but Max had little doubt that he’d tamed the abducted bartender to the point she would absolutely be willing to do anything at all he asked of her. It really was amazing what a woman would agree to when she was certain she was moments away from death. He had needed to get creative with this one, since he had none of his tools with him and such short notice. A bit more violent than normal, more brutal than he preferred, and far less refined, but at least he was only training her for a woman - she didn’t need to learn to enthusiastically squeeze a dick, or fuck back against him. In the end, just being broken enough to be obedient to whatever Astrid asked was all he really needed from the former bartender.

Max let himself sag down into a recliner in the borrowed room in Astrid’s basement apartment and drank as he recalled the events of his evening. After he had stunned the pretty redhead he had cuffed her, gagged her, and stuffed her in his car. He had been worried that he was going to need to find an abandoned lot or a motel where some strangeness would be overlooked, but thankfully Astrid offered him a room. No one asked any odd questions as they brought the blanket-wrapped woman inside…as far as he could tell he hadn’t seen a single other person, which was lucky. As a small blessing, it didn’t seem like the svartalf - god, thinking about that was not getting any less strange - didn’t consider it part of the test for him to find a safe place in a strange city to work or to dodge people knocking on his motel doors asking for an explanation on the muffled screaming. A large tip to the front desk clerk could only have gone so far.

After arriving he hadn’t delayed… the clock was ticking. Being experienced with his craft, he knew fairly well how far he could safely take her body and still keep her intact enough to heal eventually, and he took full advantage of everything he knew to chart the quickest possible way of bringing her there. To start, after he had taken stock of what he had available and what was in the room, Max had begun by taking the bedsheets right off the bed and used them to fashion a long makeshift rope. Then as she started to wake up he had tied one end of it around her neck and looped the other through the handy mounting bar on the ceiling… He didn’t question why Astrid had had such a thing, but it made his job easier. The bartender was still a little dazed, only slowly coming too, so he’d slapped her face a few times to get her to wake up, hitting her until her eyes focused on him. Margret looked absolutely terrified when she woke up and saw him smiling, but he had given her only a moment or two to appreciate that sight before he had tugged on the bed sheet to lift and start choking her, silencing the scream she had been preparing. “I really don’t want to kill you,” he told her as her legs scrambled on the bed, the bound girl trying to find a way to get some support under her and take her weight off her neck. “So before you run out of air, I’ll make the rules simple for you. Good girls get to breathe. Bad girls leave in multiple trash bags.”

He secured the other end of the sheet rope by tying it to the foot of the bed, a massive wooden four-posted thing that was probably the only item in the room heavy enough to support her. He gave her just barely enough room to let her feet touch the mattress… enough that she wouldn’t choke to death. It was still going to make her work tirelessly to keep her feet underneath her. The shortness of breath that came with meant that speaking and screaming were going to stay beyond her… breathing remaining the girl’s first and only concern.

Once she was secured enough Max ripped her shirt open, watching her breasts spill forth from her top… he could have stripped her more easily while she was unconscious, but the psychological effect of taking it off her now was all the better. She swayed as his right hand smacked one of those breasts hard, watching it bounce all around as his handprint slowly grew red on her pale skin.

Margret had been a beautiful woman in the flower of her life... A prize to be sure. She was shapely and lovely with a winning smile, and in the bar she had an easy, musical laugh. Her breasts gave him plenty to play with: bright pink areola and nipples contrasted with her pale and freckled skin. She would have made some man - or woman, he supposed - a lovely wife someday. Unfortunately for her, that future had ended the moment Astrid had named her. Instead, once he was done with her Margret would make a perfect willing servant for an ancient, immortal creature she almost certainly didn’t have the first inkling even existed yet, just like he hadn’t a few hours ago.

His fingers grabbed onto her nipples, giving them a tight twist. She let out a tiny, breathless cry that couldn’t properly be called a scream but was probably all she could manage of one on so little air. The cold, the fear, and his brief touches all conspired to begin making them grow hard, but he suspected it had nothing to do with desire… while it was too soon to be sure, he didn’t see any signs that she was a masochist, and he doubted she liked being treated so roughly. That didn’t matter anymore. Instead, he drew his hands down her body, put them down on her hips, and moved toward the tight jeans that she wore… He had been eager to see what she had on underneath. Challenge or not, time limit or not, she was a beautiful woman - every woman he had ever taken was lovely in their own different, unique ways, and he was excited to see what this one offered him. The button holding her jeans shut ripped off in the struggle and then Max was tugging her jeans down her long, luscious legs. Her panties got pulled down with the jeans, revealing her to his eyes, and Max had to smile. She had a smooth labia, freshly shaved… her legs were as well, he noted. Perhaps she was meeting up for a date that night. Maybe he’d ask later.

It didn’t really matter. She wouldn’t be making it.

The woman tried to resist his molestation. Her legs kicked at him and attempted to shove him away, but hanging from her neck her attempts were pathetically ineffective. Still, the attempt was important to him because it was valuable - It gave him an excuse to punish her. Time was short, and he needed to teach her as quickly as possible that she had no autonomy anymore, no freedom… that the lack of suffering was the best she could hope for, and whether or not she got it was entirely up to him. Max made a tsking sound as he shook his head, and then his hand merely had to grab onto the blanket rope and tug on it. The gurgled gasps for air that came from inside her neck were more than enough to demonstrate his point in the first second, but he held it for thirty, meeting her eyes before he even started speaking. “Listen here, bitch. I’m not here to play games with you. I’m here to teach you how to survive. There are two paths before you. By the time the sun comes up, you’ll either be a good little whore eager to please me, or you’ll be in a shallow grave where no one will ever find you.” He continued holding the sheet. “Understand me?”

She nodded frantically. Young, scared, and eager to please… for the moment. She didn’t mean it yet, of course. Maybe she actually thought she did, but Max knew better… she was merely desperate enough to breathe to agree to anything for the second. She would still fight, still try to escape pretty much every chance she got. That was fine. He would have plenty of time to reinforce that agreement. By the time he was finished, she would mean it. “Good,” he said. Only then did he release his grip on the rope, letting her toes touch the mattress again.

As she stood there, gasping, Max stepped in front of her and let his pants drop to the floor… allowing his rigid member to be visible to the woman. He watched as she slowly focused on what was going on again, her breath catching up. He saw the exact moment she realized what he was showing her, when she understood what was coming… the moment her eyes widened and filled with primal terror. She didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting away from him, but she did try to resist again regardless. It made Max smile despite himself… Her lack of resistance had only lasted a few seconds. Even if it would benefit him if this one was spiritless, he was still far happier that she was a worthy challenge. Even if he needed to be crude in his methods, at least she was worthy of his time. It was just a shame what he would need to do to her.

It was time to reinforce the lesson.

The slave trainer simply balled his hand up into a fist and drove it hard into her stomach as she hung, punching hard enough to drive what little breath she had recovered right back out of her. Margret coughed several times as her body went rigid for a moment and then completely limp, and she would have bent at the waist were it not for the fact that she needed to keep her toes on the mattress to keep from choking to death.

“Going to fight me all night or accept your fate as a fuck doll?” Max asked, looking directly into her eyes. He had to make her see that he had all the power here… that he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt or kill her, so he hid any happiness, pleasure, or regret from his face as he stared into the woman’s gaze. It was important, in training a slave, that she believed the absolute worst about him and how little her life was worth.

Thankfully, from the terror in her eyes, it seemed to Max that she was starting to get the idea. The slave trainer grabbed onto her waist to lift her legs up, taking her weight off of them, but it was little relief to the girl… a moment later, she felt his dick rubbing against her exposed cunt. She barely had time to process that and jerk her legs - which really just wrapped them pleasantly around his hips - before he had thrust his cock upwards into her snug pussy.

Her hole resisted, but not enough… he had gravity on his side, and she couldn’t clench her legs to try to push him away or out like this. He let her inexorably sink onto him, his thick rod penetrating her and driving into her deeply… and as he let her sag down, the sheet-rope tightened around her neck again. He let her jerk like that for several seconds, staring into the panic in her eyes, before he slammed his hips forward and up. That slackened the noose for just an instant and her desperate heaving attempts at breath let her gasp in before gravity had its say and pulled her back down again, impaling him further inside her resisting body. She stared at him in mute desperation, begging for mercy. Instead, he smiled at her and thrust again.

His cock sawed back and forth into her mound, taking pleasure while letting her rest on the precipice of death… but as good as he felt, his focus was entirely on her, judging what was happening to her, changing his pace to keep her on the verge on blacking out without letting her ever escape into that darkness and peace. Half senseless, balanced between life and oblivion - the pain and the stimulation were doing interesting things to his plaything’s mind: Max felt as her pussy started growing wetter, letting him fuck her easier and more pleasantly as her body grew confused as to what was pleasure and what was pain. Her mind mixed and mingled the emotions and feelings of being choked and beaten and raped with the intense heat building between her legs, her body’s self-defense mingling with her mind’s growing madness.

Max didn’t have time for games… but he still had to do this right. He might be on a time table and he needed to have this piece of meat eating out Astrid by morning, but that meant he couldn’t make her catatonic or non-responsive either. Fear and pain would be the key elements to break her will that quickly, but shame would be an especially potent accompaniment. He couldn’t afford for her to balk when she got her orders in the morning, so Max did what would help the most - he fucked the hanging bartender closer and closer to a shuddering orgasm on his cock. “Aww, would the pretty little whore like to cum?” he said with a smile, staring into her eyes as they fought not to roll back into her head. “If you had to pick, would you like to breathe… or to cum, bitch? Would you like a little death to go with your big one?” The wench that hung from the blanket rope gurgled as she tried to nod her head to him, probably not even sure what she was agreeing to, but that was fine with him… she would remember later.

The sensation of her orgasm building while she was oxygen-deprived was a thrill for Max. Her pussy was tightening even more around his cock and squeezing down on it… and he liked it. His hands gripped onto her hips and he thrust up into her soaking wet quim repeatedly, fucking her hard with his dick. The cock throbbed inside of her pussy, ready to spill out his pleasure… but he wouldn’t do that, not before he brought her to the brink and then over it. He wanted her to cum before him. Make her know she wanted this more than he did.

Max knew how to make her do it, too. His hand moved up to grip onto the rope blanket, giving it a slight tug. At the same time, his other hand moved between her legs and found her clitoris. His fingers rolled her swollen, moist nub around, stimulating it to bring her even close to the edge. Max laughed as he jerked his hips up, pressing his large member against her cervix deep inside her, making the strangled redhead squirm… that had hurt, but in her current, lightheaded state the gap between pain and pleasure was awfully small and easy to confuse. The tighter grip of the blanket rope around her throat had her gurgling and gasping for air. Max knew how far he could push it before she would either pass out or die from strangulation, and he pushed as hard as he dared… His cock pressed into her deeper, thrusting even harder, emerging almost all the way from her clenching hole on each stroke before he slid it all the way back into the back of the pussy. She was writhing in confused pleasure now, so close to the precipice of her orgasm that just the right twitch would bring her off like a bomb, so Max kept up with his assault… building her up even further, making sure that when he let her get off it would be explosive. He lifted her hips around his cock, pounding his shaft into her pussy. At the same time, the lifts weren’t giving her any real amount of air anymore… with his other hand maintaining tension, he only allowed air to flow into her lungs when he consciously allowed it.

Max kept on fucking her with long, deep strokes that would draw out her pleasure, whether she wanted it or not. Margret was right there and Max knew she was about to go off at any second… so as she squirmed and gave silent moans, he drove his fist into her stomach. She squeezed on him, her body rebelling against the painful treatment as she was brutalized by the sensations of pain and pleasure simultaneously. It took the edge off… but it wasn’t enough to stop him from building her right back up to the edge of orgasm again. He punched her again. The time after that, he slapped her across the face three times until she was far enough from the edge. Then, another punch. She seemed half insane already after just one long fuck… the abducted waitress was squirming on him, and her mouth worked like she was chewing on the air, opening and closing in rapid succession. The constant choking was also having a self-reinforcing effect on her too… Every time she was choked, it made her pussy tighter and all of the sensations far stronger.

Her mind might have been enough to hold out against only pleasure or only pain, but the two assaulting her senses at the same time were enough to break her will. Only temporarily, he knew… within a few minutes, she’d be back to herself, but for just this moment she was clay in his hands to shape however he wished… and that was when he let her finally cum. She screamed silently, breathlessly, as he finally pushed her over the edge, making her body tremble and shake and clench as her legs squeezed his hips and ass. She wasn’t even trying to push her upwards anymore - the only coordinated part of the senseless thrashing was just an attempt to hold onto him in general.

It was too much for Max to hold out against even if he wanted to, and he let her orgasm drag him into his. He released his first load of the night into her… pumping his cum into the trembling, hanging girl as she jerked back and forth like a woman possessed, letting her squeezing body milk him deep inside of her cunt until she had wrung every last drop of semen out of him. It felt amazing, and it was just as tiring… he felt like he was pumping energy to keep living into her with each spurt of semen, and by the time he was finished with his orgasm and she was done with hers he was breathing hard. Max was done for the moment, he definitely wasn’t ready to fuck her again… but that didn’t mean he was done with her. After all, if he dropped her at the moment there was no way she would be strong enough to stand. Instead, as one hand held her on him, the other played idly with her tits - squeezing them, pinching them, twisting them until he judged there was enough awareness back in those eyes for her to manage something as simple as standing up straight again and keeping herself from strangling. Only then did he give her sweat-streaked face a short caress, put both hands on her ass, and lifted her off of him to set her at that same near-choking precipice on the bed she had been at before they had started.

She was utterly exhausted already he noticed… as tired as he was, she was far more so, already having to shift her weight from foot to foot within seconds of him letting her down. That worked for him as he stepped back, letting her struggle with it for a moment while he searched the drawers of the room for usable tools. He didn’t have access to any of his toys or tools, so he needed to make do with what he had… whatever junk Astrid kept around. When at last he had found enough to make a plan he returned to in front of the sweating, agonized serving girl who was looking at him with wild, almost feral eyes, wide as a full moon in their sockets. “Do you know,” he asked softly, a casual smile on his face, “what makes you any different from a blow-up doll?”

Two of his fingers traced the way over her trembling thighs, and he could tell she longed to start kicking again… but she couldn’t get enough balance on a single foot to manage it. Even if she could do it there wouldn’t be any strength behind it. “You might think it’s your mind. Your personality, your intelligence. Your life experience and desires. The idea that you are a person and not an object.” Max shook his head. “And you’d be wrong. None of those things matter… they never did. If they were important, your life as you knew it wouldn’t have ended in a few seconds because someone in your bar thought you looked fun to play with.” He stepped away to the table where he had placed what he found in the drawers: a small sewing kit, and a book of matches. He pulled out one of the needles, lit a match, and began to run the needle through the flame while her eyes tried to follow him.

“In a few hours, I’ll have disabused you of that idea,” Max told her without looking. “You won’t believe it anymore. Instead, you will begin to cling to the idea that it's your skills that make you better. The way you can learn to ride me, or suck on my cock, or squirm for me in a way no lifeless sex toy could is what differentiates you from a fifty-dollar fuckable balloon.” He looked up at her and walked over with the needle. “And once you manage to convince yourself of that… you’ll be wrong about that, too.” The hot needle rested against one of her nipples. She flinched away… even without stabbing it into her it was burning hot already, and singed her instantly. Max chased her with it, tiny burns following her as he went. “Those don’t matter either. Sure, you’ll do them to earn scraps of mercy, but in the end, all that makes you is a slightly better blow-up doll. Something a little bit more fun to masturbate with, not something different.”

Then Max drove the needle through her nipple in one sharp push.

Not even her breathlessness could stop the scream, although it did mute it significantly. Her whole body went ramrod stiff for a moment, and then every muscle unclenched at once, everything she was shaking like a leaf about to be blown from a tree in a storm. She pissed herself too, though Max had been expecting that and had already stepped to the side, leaving it there so that he could push her face into it later… after she’d earned the right not to be strangling every moment. Margret started crying fresh tears as he looked at the trembling girl, the needle glinting inside her nipple as her tits shook with her sobbing, and Max went back to the table to grab and start heating another needle.

“By morning, you’ll understand the truth,” he told her as the flame licked over the metal, her teary eyes frantically following the flame and filling with panic. “What makes you different is that a blow-up doll is only useful when you’re fucking it. When my dick isn’t hard, the doll doesn’t offer much to help with that problem. You, on the other hand, do.” He approached her again, and she - pointlessly - flinched, choking herself as she tried to get as far away from him as she could. It barely got her another two inches of room. “Now… how many needles do you think it’s going to take before you make me hard again?”

The answer, as it turned out, was five. After she finished thrashing with the fifth, Max noticed that her squirming, screaming, spasming reaction had made his cock rock hard, so he stepped right back between her legs and fucked her again. He left the needles in while he did that too, and Max made a point of playing with her newly skewered tits while he choke-fucked her to another orgasm for both of them… her first, of course. Then, after he had filled her again, he had started putting needles into her other breast until she had given him a third erection. Then he had started fucking her again.

Hours passed like that. After the first few times he came the gaps between him fucking her grew longer and longer, until he was torturing her for an extended period of time instead. Her breasts were especially sensitive so he had largely focused on them… cigarette burns, needle piercings, and bruises covered basically all of them at this point. Occasionally he mixed it up, fucking her face or cunt with a dildo he had found in the room - likely one that already tasted like her future mistress, he thought - or working to shove his fist into her. Eventually, he caught her mouthing a word over and over again… please, she was saying. Please please please.

That was when he knew that he had won. She was begging for him to fuck her. Begging for him to get hard again so she could be that obedient little masturbation aid instead of a pain toy, for at least a few minutes. It didn’t mean he was finished just yet… but it was all downhill from here. Once she stopped thinking of herself as a person with hopes and dreams and started realizing that her goals and aspirations should be measured in “Can I make the pain stop for a few minutes,” she was well on her way down the road to being properly trained.

By the time a few more hours had passed after that Margret was almost completely covered in bruises, scrapes, burns, piercings, and various other injuries. She’d suffered her way through at least a dozen orgasms by the time he couldn’t get her to stand for the noose anymore… her legs had all the firmness of jello by now, and no matter how he positioned her or how long he waited they couldn’t support her weight any longer. Finally, hours and hours after she’d started being choked, Max showed her the slightest bit of mercy by lowering her back down to the bed to let her get some rest. He kept her tied up by her hands and wrists so she couldn’t escape but he probably didn’t need to… the moment he put her down she didn’t so much as twitch as he lowered himself onto her and pushed his cock into her warm, slack mouth. “You’re going to do everything I tell you now, right?” he asked her, holding her head. The nod of her head was weak but he felt it on his cock. “No matter what? Because right now I’m thinking I need a piss, and your throat looks awfully convenient to me.” She had made a whimpering noise that his cock had almost fully blocked… but her tongue started automatically lapping at his length. Max smiled. “That’s a good girl.”

That had been two hours ago.

He had spent the time since then reinforcing the lessons he’d sunk into her… more pain, more fucking, and more edging her. No more orgasms for the slut anymore, either… now that her mind was beginning to associate pleasure with the treatment he wanted her constantly on edge and confused, not getting what she wanted. It would be Astrid’s decision if the pretty redhead ever came again now… but he wanted her turned on and frustrated while she was in pain. The end result was a slut on the bed that was almost as exhausted as Max himself… but she would do.

Now, this wasn’t exactly what Astrid might have meant. She wasn’t broken yet, not really. Margret was exhausted, weak, malleable, and obedient at the moment with her will to resist completely shattered, but that wouldn’t last. Given some time to recover, she would bounce back… It wasn’t possible to do otherwise, not in only one night. It would take repeated reinforcement of these lessons to make it stick forever, but that wasn’t the challenge the way he saw it. What mattered was that she would obey his commands today… and she would. And so, thirty minutes later when Max walked down the stairs it was with a naked girl crawling on the end of a bedsheet leash behind him, and he was all too ready to present Astrid with her own personal cunt licker ready to get to work.

Astrid sat on the couch in her living room, watching him with intrigued eyes… and he noted the svartalf woman was naked and utterly shameless about it. She must have dropped whatever… magic… maintained her disguise because he wasn’t wearing the glasses now but still saw her how she really was… a slightly too thin, slightly too stretched-looking woman with coal-black skin and golden eyes. Margret saw her too and whimpered, but to her credit - and his, he supposed - she only hesitated a single crawling step before she turned her gaze back down and continued after him. “Well, it seems like you had an entertaining evening,” Astraid said, one thin eyebrow raised. “I’m guessing your cock is rather sore by now.”

“I’ll survive,” Max said with a small smile, and he passed the end of the leash over to the svartalf wearing her new wig of golden hair. It shone bright as it cascaded down her bitch black skin in a bright contrast.

“I hope it was a productive evening as well,” Astrid said as she stroked one hand over the woman’s cheek, looking down into her frightened eyes. “Oh, you precious thing… too dumb to realize she was parading herself around on display, completely unaware how fragile the shield of societal rules that protected her truly was until it was too late.” She spread her legs, revealing what Max couldn’t help but notice looked like a very pretty nexus between her legs, and pulled the leash forward. Max had been very clear to the captured server what was expected of her, and, thankfully, Margret didn’t embarrass him by needing to be told what to do, and didn’t require any further persuading… She immediately crawled between Astrid’s legs and no matter how tired and sore her lips and tongue were by now, they immediately went to work.

The pretty pink thing contrasted brilliantly with black skin as it glided between the lips of Astrid’s pussy. The svartalf leaned back on the couch, settling further into the cushions, and sighed in pleasure. “Ah! Intriguing… not especially talented I suppose but I can’t blame you for that… she certainl— ah! Certainly has the enthusiasm…” She placed her hand on top of Margret’s head, shuddering slightly as she hedonistically rolled her back in praise of the tongue work the former server was administering to her. Then she looked up, meeting Max's gaze. “You ah— Well, I’d say that you have lived up to your end of our deal, Max.”

Max smiled confidently as she slipped down onto the other couch. “Told you I would. She’s not my best work… can’t do much more than this in a night, but at least she’s obedient.”

The svartalf moaned with pleasure as her hand guided the bound redhead closer to her. “You mean this isn’t how you sell them?”

He scoffed. “Hardly. I spend weeks making sure they’ve internalized their place and found purpose in it… I work to transform service into their mission for life. By the time I’m done, I want them unable to envision what they would do with themselves if they ever got free.”

Her dark fingers looked like soot as they snaked through Margret’s crimson hair, tangling through it all the way to the base. “What’s the difference?”

“They’re not even close to the same!” Max protested. “Margret here is terrified of resisting, and eager to stay on our good side, but if you opened a door and turned your back on her, she’d run. If you continue to keep her hopeless and broken down, she’ll eventually give up completely and become listless, or suicidal, and require more effort than she’s worth. She’s also not trained in how to properly service, nor in rules for submission, or…”

Astrid laughed. “Oh Max… I promise you, you’re overthinking this completely,” she said, smiling. “You act like people haven’t been enslaving people for longer than humans have been setting fires. Taking a woman from her home, or her battlefield, and making her do what you want because you’re stronger than her is practically a law of the universe. All of what you just said… your methods, your control, the way you tame these poor stupid pets… none of that matters. There is only one distinction. Whether or not they obey.” She smiled at him, her eyes glittering. “And for that, the process is simple. The longer it takes them to give you what you want…” One of her fingers had traced down the woman’s side, and Margret abruptly squealed as Astrid grabbed onto her nipple and twisted viciously. Even from here, Max could hear the desperate slurping sounds as the redhead redoubled her pace. “…the more they suffer until they decide to obey.”

Max snorted. “If that were all there was to it, you wouldn’t have had me do it.”

“I confess I was curious,” Astrid admitted. “And I’m impatient. I like things to happen when I give the order the first time… tormenting a lovely little painslut is so much more fun when you already have her tongue on your clit.”

The slaver leaned back, warring with exhaustion. As attractive as the sight was, his cock barely did more than twitch, too exhausted to move. “If you want to see the difference, what I can do,” he chuckled, “you’ll have to give me more than one night. We’ll see what you think after I’ve gotten one of Mr Root’s targets.”

The svartalf moaned out a rich purring sound. “Very well, human… You will get your chains, and your guidance. I am still confident you are going to get yourself killed, but it will be interesting at least to watch you try.”

“I’ve never failed in a hunt yet,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m confident I’ll make this one work too. Get me my chains and I will do the rest. When I succeed, you will get the rest of your coin.”

The svartalf purred in pleasure, tightening her grip on Margret’s red hair. “Fiiiiiiiiiine,” she said. “When I’m done. You can wait a bit longer.”

Max leaned back contentedly and yawned. “Take your time and enjoy. I… I’m going to get some sleep.” He wasn’t overly worried about going to sleep around the unfamiliar Svartalf. Mr Root, whoever he was, had assured him that her word was good, but he trusted that less than he did his instincts for people. Astrid’s apparent unwillingness to just take the coins from him was only a part of the reason he found himself trusting Astrid. The woman was… interested… in what was going on. She was quickly becoming invested in this. She wanted to see how it ended. For better or worse, he had a partner until this was done.

Margret squealed softly as Astrid tugged on her hair, and Max tilted his head back and closed his eyes to the sound of her tongue lapping away. He was asleep within moments.

· · ─────── ·☽◯☾· ─────── · ·

The ringing of a hammer echoed in Astrid’s basement as she drove it down on the small anvil time and time again, making Max’s ears hurt. The svartalf worked topless, sweat dripping down her skin and over her tight muscles until she shone like an oil spill on water. He wouldn’t have thought working in a forge, even a small one like she had built for herself down here, without protective equipment would be wise, but sparks flew with each impact of the hammer and spraying across her naked skin and breasts, and Astrid never seemed even to notice. Perhaps that should be unsurprising, since she was also holding the red-hot metal in her bare hands without gloves as well. Evidently, for a svartalf, it would take significantly more heat than a bit of molten iron to bother her. She worked tirelessly, too… Max wasn’t sure how long she had been down here because he wasn’t sure how long he’d slept, but she had been banging away for at least an hour without showing any signs of slowing after he’d come down… the woman seemed indefatigable, at least by something so evidently within her wheelhouse as smithing.

She tossed the chains into the forge, her gaze flitting over to Max. “I warned you this would take some time,” she said, wiping some of the sweat out of her eyes. “Muspelheim iron fights for every single warp and bend. You should get comfortable.”

Max was moving to sit down by the table where the discarded mold lay, still smoldering with the leftover heat from when she had doubtless poured molten iron into it to take on the basic shape when he caught sight of Margret. The red-haired bartender hung by her wrists from the ceiling in the corner, unconscious… and if anything, she looked more worn down and exhausted than she had this morning. Max noted that already she wore rings through her nipples and clit of woven silver, impossibly fine and glittering. “You know you can damage her wrists, leaving her like that,” Max said as he walked over to her, lowering her from the hook she had been hung from. With the ease of casual practice, he began binding her hand behind her back on the floor.

“And if she needed working hands to lick my snatch, then that would concern me,” Astrid laughed, watching as the metal grew hotter and hotter as he worked a billow pump. “Why do you care? The way I see it, anything I let her keep intact she should take as a personal favor.”

Max shrugged. It was true that he’d already turned the girl over to her new mistress, and it really wasn’t his concern how she treated her new pet, but… it was like a work of art. If he had painted someone a picture, he would have to accept that they wouldn’t appreciate it the way he did, or take care of it, or display it right. That didn’t mean, however, that he was obligated to ignore it if he found his painting tossed on the floor and in danger of being stepped on. It was only within his nature to pick it up and clean it off. “Whatever works for you,” he said as Astrid reached back into the impossibly hot forge, grabbed onto the white-hot iron with a casualness that made Max wince, and tossed it back down on the anvil once again.

“Soft,” Astrid scoffed before turning her attention back to the forging. “That is going to get you killed, human. Anyway, if I can get back to work? These chains might not be difficult to make but they are time-consuming,” she said in between hammer blows.

Max settled back to watch, climbing onto the couch now that Margret was bound more safely. “Hardly seems a task worthy of your skill, then?” he questioned.

The svartalf barked out a laugh. “Mortal, when I say they are simple I meant for me. Nothing is simple when it needs to hold godspawn, and the greatest human smith would be confounded by it. It doesn’t make this a challenge for me.” she said. “Besides, these are just the filler work. Important, but hardly the focus point. The collar is the part that is actually tricky… that will require some enchantment to do what it’s required to.” She gestured over at the bench to her right and Max could see the collar sitting there, already formed. One of the crimson-filled ampules was open beside it, and a bit of the red liquid had been used to draw symbols on the metal. “They have to be put on in layers,” she said as she worked. “Then more metal forged on top to seal each layer in. Always stronger, always more secure, until it's unbreakable by anyone short of Surtr himself.”

“What is in the vials?” Max asked.

“Do I bother you with dumb questions while you’re working, mortal?” Astrid grunted. Then she sighed. “Blood, of course. And no, I don’t know whose exactly, though I suspect it’s one of two people. Probably Verdandi.”

Max wasn’t sure who that was, but he moved on. “How long will making this take, then?” he asked. “A week? A month?”

Her head snapped up to him as she glared at him, seeming to wonder if she was being insulted for a moment. Then she laughed riotously, almost doubling over. “Sindri, my mentor, took a month to forge Mjolnir,” she said, holding her stomach. “And you think… you think a little collar… for a svartalf…” She laughed until it clearly hurt, shaking her head in disbelief. She picked up a cigarette, lit it, and sucked in a deep breath. “It’s been centuries since I made wonders, mortal… not millennia. I am not that out of practice. This one will be finished by tomorrow.” She resumed hammering, still chuckling to herself. “A month. A month… I forged Gleipnir in a week.”

“The way I remember that story, the chain that bound the Fenris wolf was made by Idi and Egil,” Max said, leaning back. “Is one of those your true name?”

Astrid growled. “Ivaldi was a master smith. He could have forged a way to bind the sun and the moon to the sky. The only thing his sons ever forged was credit they didn’t deserve.” The svartalf looked up at him briefly. “So you do know some stories, at least.”

Max didn’t mention that he had been reading the entire Wikipedia on Norse mythology since he woke up… that probably wouldn’t get him much credit from the creature working before him… instead, he just nodded sagely. “A little bit.”

“Not much, but it is good you are not completely ignorant,” the smith said as she got back to work.

“And speaking of that,” Max cut in, seizing the opportunity as he stayed as far away as he could from the heat of the nearly molten metal, “Why don’t you tell me more about these women that I will be hunting down? Start with the closest one… Give me everything you have on her. Is she far?”

A hearty laugh emitted from Astrid as she worked. “Her? Oh, no, not far. Not far at all. That one will be easy enough to find… Selkolla, last I heard, lives right here in Iceland. Do you know anything about her?”

“Only what Google could tell me about her,” Max said idly. “Stories about a supernatural being from Icelandic Folklore. A couple stopped to fuck on the way to a baptism and left their child on a rock while they indulged. It died before they finished, and that sin summoned the monster to ravish their town, or something like that.”

Astrid looked up, her face twisted oddly. “G… google?” she asked. “What is that?”

This time, it was Max’s turn to roll his eyes. “You want to say I know nothing, but you’re living in the human world and you don’t know what Google is? Have you heard of computers, at least?”

Astrid turned away and kept hammering… and it was hard to tell on her pitch-black complexion but Max thought she might have… blushed. “You humans are exhausting,” she growled as she worked. “Changing everything too quickly. Who could possibly keep up?”

“Make you a deal. After I come back with Selkolla I’ll explain search engines to you,” Max chuckled.

She snorted. “You barter with empty coin, human. I suspect she will empty you like a wineskin.” She sighed. “Anyway, what you found isn’t exactly wrong. At least some version of that did happen and your monks recorded it, naming her a demon. She’s nothing of the sort, though.” She drove the hammer down especially viciously as she continued. “She’s not a demon. She’s a monster. One of the children of Angrboda.” Astrid paused for a moment, and Max could have sworn she shuddered. “Selkolla is a creature of sin and death… and she will forever inflict both of those back on every creature she meets. Like many of the Mother of Monster’s children she’s a weapon without a sheath, abandoned after her purpose was finished and left where others can be cut on her edge. Going back 800 years, you could probably put a quarter of Iceland’s unexplained deaths at her feet. Your priests, like the one in the story about the baptism, called her a succubus, but it is more likely she’s actually the source of the myths your people have of vampires… a bloodsoaked killer with a penchant for biting apart the throats out of her prey and drinking their life away.” Astrid shook her head. “Really, all that makes her sound more grand than she is, like she still has some kind of mission or quest. It’s simpler than that… she’s really just a murderer, albeit one far beyond your abilities.”

He shrugged. “I’ll manage.” The history lesson was nice, but Max really needed to know more than that. “It shouldn’t be a problem for me, but how do I find her? Iceland might be a small nation, but it's still an awfully large place to find a single person.” He looked at the forge as Astrid, using a second set of molds, poured more metal around the chains she had been hammering into shape, watching as it slowly hardened as it cooled the slightest bit. He didn’t pretend to understand the mechanics of what it took to forge these powerful collars and chains that he needed… He only needed them to work.

“Relax, mortal child,” Astrid said. “You won’t have any trouble with that. It will be easy to find her… Just start going around town to every bar and ask for her. She’ll find you. Of course, then she’ll probably kill you in short order, but at least I’ll get my gold.” The chains and collar were being dunked into some kind of foul-smelling oil to cool and temper them now. Astrid brought them out of the liquid, watching the smoke rise off of the collar and chains. The metal glistened with its silvery sheen and looked crisp and new. Astrid took pride in her craftsmanship, double-checking the collar and chain for any imperfections she would need to correct. “One chain down. Seven to go.”

“Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.” Max tried to reassure her… as if she needed reassurance. Like she said, she would be taken care of either way. Max eyed the chains that would be the tool he would need to take down this killer, this… succubus. No one was untouchable. He could reach anyone with the right tools and equipment, and Astrid had crafted the perfect tools for him.

Astrid grinned as she watched Max admiring her work. “Chains of Iron, torn from the mountains of Muspelheim… the ore reinforced with the fossilized remains of million generations of Fire Giants. These might be the strongest I’ve ever crafted… once the collar is completed, not even she will be able to escape them. Not that it's likely to matter to you. A mortal man is nothing to her.” Astrid departed from the forge, carrying the chain over to drop it on his table. “She’s a god-slayer, mortal. Selkolla is the name you humans gave her. Angrboda birthed her with a very different one.”

Max hefted the chain, noting just how heavy it was… far heavier than he would have expected. “Oh? What name was that?”

“Mistletoe,” Astrid said, the flames of the forge reflected in her dark eyes before she turned back towards it, intending to get back to work. “She called her daughter Mistletoe.”

· · ─────── ·☽◯☾· ─────── · ·

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