Pets 2: Pani's Story (3 page)

Damn.

One long minute ticked into two, and then three. And still nothing happened. Eventually, the need to see where that huge, giant of a man had got to won out, and Judy ever so cautiously tipped herself sideways until she could peek through the drapes.

He was sitting in the chair she had tried to hide under, glancing back and forth between her and the open book in his lap. He paused when he saw her looking back at him, then shaking his head at himself, flipped to the very back of the book and began skimming the index.

With his attention diverted, Judy abandoned the curtain and dashed for the corner farthest from him. She had a good view of the rest of the room from here. She could see down the hallway, a dark dead end with lots of closed doors. There was another door that appeared to lead outside. That was well within a quick sprinting’s distance. So were at least two other windows, both closed, but maybe...just maybe...if she was fast and really, really lucky...

The giant lowered his head, flipping through pages, and Judy took the chance. She ran for the door, grabbing the handle in both fists and yanking furiously to wrench it open.

Also locked. Damn!

She snapped around, flattening herself against the door, but other than to look at her again, the giant hadn’t moved. After a blink or two, he dropped his eyes back to his book and, with a heavy frown, consulted the page again.

Judy dashed for the closest window, but that too was locked and the latch high above her reach, even on tip toes. She jumped for it. On her second attempt, her fingertips just barely grazed the cool handle of the latch, moving it ever so slightly. On her third, however, the giant grabbed her arm. For someone so huge, he moved with surprising speed and quietness.

“Let go!” Judy screamed, grabbing his arm with her free hand as he half-lifted and half-11

dragged her away from the window. She hadn’t thought it possible, but from this close he looked even bigger than before. Big enough to wrench her arm clean out of her socket if he wanted to.

She struggled to break his grip, but prying out of his fingers was like trying to bend steel girders. Still, she kicked and jerked like a wild woman, lashing out with both bare feet, rasping scream after hysterical scream until he wrapped her in his arms, pinning her arms and legs together when he dropped abruptly to sit on the floor.

“Get off me! Get off!” Thrashing and bucking, she squeezed her hands up high enough to seize one of his and sank her teeth into the base of his thumb. She bit as hard as she could, grinding her jaw until her mouth filled with blood. He could have ripped her arm off then. Or thrown her. Or thumped her on the head. Or at the very least yelled. But he never made a sound.

He really was made of stone!

Whimpering with the futility of it, Judy threw herself into the fight to escape instead.

Eventually, all of her fiercest struggles were reduced to mere pants, grunts and wiggles, and it wasn’t long after that before she didn’t have the strength to do even that much. His grip remained strong long after she wore herself out, and all she could do was pant for air in the tight confines of the giant’s seemingly gentle embrace.

He shifted his hold then, transferring her into the grip of one muscular arm so that he could pet her with his free hand. He stroked her hair, her face—she made a feeble attempt to bite him again, but missed—and in her ear, he began to whisper, soft and low, guttural words that held no meaning, although one she quickly discerned from the rest, he repeated it so often.

“Pani...Pani...”

His caresses moved down her body, stroking her shoulders, her arms, her breasts. Judy turned her face away, but she could not move enough to escape his hand. Not when it dipped down, tracing invisible circles around the dip of her navel, and not when it delved down further still, exploring with frank curiosity between her legs.

Her strength rallied and she tried to snap her thighs together. Unfortunately, what she succeeded in doing was trapping his wrist between her legs.

“Pani,” he murmured, but shifted his touch away from that unwanted intimacy, stroking the insides of her thighs before following the curves of her legs all the way down to her feet.

She stiffened, growling through tightly gritted teeth, “Get your hands off me!” But his hand continued playing with her feet, massaging and fondling her toes. She was ticklish, and it took all her concentration just to sit there, eyes staring straight ahead, mouth firmly set in as stern a frown as she could muster while every third pass of his hand brushed a spot that made her whole body spasm in an effort to choke back helpless giggles.

Eventually, his hand crawled back up her leg and then stopped moving entirely. He patted the side of her thigh and stood up. If she was hoping for a chance to break free and run again, it never came. He lifted her with him, shifting her in his grip until she lay like a toddler against his chest, her legs swept off to one side, underneath one of his arms while his hand cupped her bottom. His other rubbed her back, inadvertently keeping her pressed to his broad, hard chest while her chin balanced on his shoulder. She tried to wedge her arms between them, but at the 12

first hint of movement from her, his arms tightened snake-like around her and he stopped walking.

He pulled back his head to look at her, warning all over his tone as he growled that strange word at her yet again. “Pani...”

She let her arms go limp again, and only then did he continued walking, carrying her down the hall and up a set of stairs to the next floor, down that hall as well, until he reached what for all intents and purposes looked just like a nursery. Everything here was oversized as well, from the large, high-barred crib braced against one wall, to the mobile of oddly shaped toys that dangled over it, to the diapers and changing table, complete with powders and lotions and wipes.

There was a chest of toys, brightly-colored shapes and blocks and mock animals, some of which looked very strange indeed. In fact, the only thing this nursery seemed to lack was, Judy realized, a baby. It was a mystery quickly solved when the giant placed her quite neatly into the crib.

Judy sat where he put her, staring up at him in shock while he, hands resting lightly on the bars, a look of immense satisfaction on his face, stared boldly right back. “You have got to be kidding me!”

Kidding seemed to be the last thing on his mind when he turned to get a diaper from the changing table.

“Like hell, buster!” Judy shot to her feet, grabbing the bars at the top of the crib and swinging her legs up and over it. She was about to drop to the ground when he caught her, wrapping his arm tight around her waist. He lifted her against his hip, shaking his head as he chided her—there was that Pani again—‘Bad baby’ all over his face and heavy in his tone.

Her eyes narrowed when he shook his finger at her, but she wasn’t stupid enough to bite.

Instead, when he dropped her back onto the soft mattress, she knelt there, glaring and batting at his hand when he reached down to pat her on the head. ‘Papa’ was obviously very forgiving of his bad ‘baby’.

She scowled, her eyes shifting to the diaper when he opened the flaps and shook it out. It looked like a giant pink Pampers, except that instead of a plastic exterior, it was made of something shimmering and silk-like.

Her eyes shifted back to his, her scowl intensifying as she vowed, “You’ll never get it on me.”

She was wrong, however. He did manage it, but oh, did she make him work for the honor.

She bucked and kicked and screamed, flopping and squirming like a banked trout to get onto her stomach or her side whenever he managed to pin her onto her back. Yes, he won the argument and yes, she ended up wearing that cussed diaper, but not before she’d left them both panting and leaning on opposite ends of the crib.

He hadn’t hurt her, she noted, despite the difficulties she’d put him through. But as she glared at him through narrowed eyes, something glittering in the dark depths of his suggested she probably wasn’t going to get away with all this fussing for much longer.

The giant reached down to collect two toys from the brightly colored chest and dropped them into the crib next to her. At this point, he probably needed a nap every bit as much as he seemed to think she did. She felt an obscure tickle of pride at that.

13

When he turned to go, she picked up one of the toys—a clear plastic maze the size of her head, transparent all the way through, with a number of silver beads rattling around inside. The beads clinked and plunked into multiple dead-ends as she turned the maze over in her hand, then she glared sideways at him as he crossed the nursery’s threshold, reaching backwards for the door.

“Yeah, right.” Drawing back her arm, she flung the maze after him, but hit the door instead and bounced back into the room, rolling across the floor before it disappeared beneath her crib.

The giant paused long enough to frown at her, again that ‘bad baby’ glint of warning darkening his eyes a few seconds before he resolutely shut the door.

His footsteps retreated down the hall back the way they had come.

“I’ll show you ‘bad baby’,” Judy muttered, standing up in the crib and swinging her leg up and over the rail. Jumping lightly down, she ripped the diaper off and left it on the floor.

Running around naked was infinitely preferable to wearing that thing.

Tip-toeing to the door, she tried to open it, but there was a funny cover over the knob that no matter how she squeezed or pushed, refused to grip and turn the handle. He’d child-proofed the door, and she could not get it open.

After several stubborn attempts, Judy gave up trying and turned the focus of her attention to the nursery’s only window instead. This was a smaller version of those downstairs. It was also higher up on the wall, just inches from touching the ceiling and well beyond her reach. Judy moved the hamper out of the way before slowly and quietly pushing the crib across the floor.

Climbing back up into the crib was only slightly more difficult than escaping it had been, although Judy froze often, every unfamiliar sound in the house causing her to cast nervous glances back at the door. Though she half-expected the giant to return at any given second, the door remained shut and eventually Judy climbed all the way up to balance a little unsteadily on the rails. That gave her the extra height she needed to reach the window, her head and shoulders only just higher than the bottom of the sill.

Fortunately, the latch turned easily when she grabbed it, and when she pushed the bottom of the window pane outwards, the hinges squeaked but moved. Planting her hands on the smooth window sill, it took Judy four tries before she could jump high enough and pull hard enough to heave herself up over the ledge. However, when she caught her first glimpse straight down the side of the building, it was almost enough to send her sliding back into the crib, defeated.

“Oh no,” she groaned. What was that, a twenty...thirty foot drop to the lawn below? There was a tree. She tore her eyes up from the distant grass to gauge how far she’d have to lean out to grab a branch thick enough to support her weight. There was one, but she’d have to let go of the nice, stable windowsill and lean well out there.

A sound of pots and pans rattling gently together from the kitchen down below realigned her priorities. Where she was going to go, she didn’t know, but anyplace had to be better than this.

Kneeling on the sill, the metal of the window frame biting into her legs just below her knees, she cautiously reached for the nearest branch. She only just managed to snag it, but there was no way it would ever hold her weight. But if she could reach just a few inches further out, there was another one…a thicker one that might work.

“Go back!”

14

Judy started so badly she almost fell. Her hands dashed out to grab the windowsill before her eyes even had the chance to locate the owner of that faint cry. Lowering her head, she tried to see through the thickness of the tree’s heavy leaf-coverage, until she located—across the street and beyond the white trellis-like fence that encircled another well-manicured lawn—a pair of waving arms.

“Oh thank God!” Judy exclaimed. Those arms belonged to a human—an old man, his hair as white as snow, his back hunched with age, his collar-length beard braided and decorated with a ribbon the same shade of green as the house robe that wrapped him nearly head to foot.

He waved his arms once more, and when he saw her watching, then cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled again, “Go back inside!”

Another human! She wasn’t alone. What’s more, she now had a place to go, even if it was only just across the street. Judy looked both up and down the tree, stopping when she spotted a fat branch that was without a doubt strong enough to support her. It ran almost parallel to the house, a good eight feet out. She’d have to jump for it.

“Don’t! Don’t do it!” The old man waved his arms again, as if he could push her back through the window from clear across the street. But when Judy shifted to get her feet under her, he snapped around and fled back into his own house.

Using the window for leverage, Judy took one good bolstering breath and then jumped, hurling herself towards that branch with arms outstretched. She accidentally let go of it almost as soon as she’d caught it, falling straight down almost three feet before quickly latching onto a slightly narrower branch that she could get her hands around and grip. She tried to pull herself up. It wasn’t as easy as the movies could make one believe, and she barely did more than get her elbows bent before her strength abruptly abandoned her, leaving her to dangle a good twenty feet above the hard ground, with a smattering of thick branches strategically located to break as many bones as possible as she crashed her way down.

She tried to pull herself up again, but this time couldn’t even get her elbows bent. Her hands began to slip on the bark.

“Hold on! Hold on!” This time a woman’s shrill cry.

Judy twisted far enough to see the elderly man had returned to the yard, this time with a little old woman in tow. And he had brought help. There was another impossibly tall giant, with dark hair and eyes and a jutting, primitive-seeming brow, jogging across the street towards her.