Part I here

Garrick and Stacy stood facing one another by her bed. The old rancher was not tall, but he was near head shoulders taller than the diminutive writer and she had to lift her chin to eyeball him.

“I am not a kid, I am not one of your minions and I am certainly not…” Stacy didn’t finish on the W word, adding instead, “…what you think I am.”

Garrick’s nostrils flared and the old drew up on generations of frontier spirit and bestial nobility. For a moment he felt the wolf stir within but then he remembered another defiant brat from years before and he touched base with his humanity.  “Young lady I have had just about enough of your arrogant denials. You came looking for answers, even if you didn’t know it. It is hardly me and mine’s fault if you don’t like what you found,” he said.

“Fuck you,” Stacy snarled.

Garrick winced. “I have also had enough of your cursing. In my day men scarcely spoke that way to one another, let alone a woman. Let alone a spoiled arrogant young city girl like you speaking to me like that. We took you in, we protected you…” He steered his words like a plough in a gale lest he lose his temper.

“Double fuck you,” Stacy spat in her suddenly broad New Yorker accent; two inelegant fingers on each hand directed at the ceiling.

Garrick took a deep breath and looked at the floor for some inspiration. Then levelling his gaze he gave her a look that could curdle cream. “You ungrateful brat, I ought to take you out the barn and leather your bare bottom with my belt where everyone can watch. Then I ought to take two or three switches to what will by then be the sorest bare bottom in Montana. If’en you have any backside left after that I ought to turn you over to Augusta for latrine chores for a month with instructions to paddle your hind end if you so much as looked at anyone decent,” his words were calm and given in casual warning.

Stacy was about to go for another FU with a flourish, but she literally swallowed it. She remembered Marsha. Instead she gasped, “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh I think you know I would,” Garrick snorted derisively. As he spoke he unhooked the buttons on his right sleeve and began rolling up the arm of his shirt. “But I think I’ll take another tack first.”

Stacy remembered her encounter with Augusta and took half a step backwards. “Wait a minute, if you think you are going to…” she blustered.

Garrick picked her up like a doll and dropped to sitting on the bed. Stacy flipped over his lap easily, her small pert bottom lost in the ill-fitting jeans Augusta had picked out for her.

“Mr Stone, what the f…” she yelped.

The old man did not stand on ceremony, but hooked two fingers in the loose band of her pants and tugged them down with regard to zipper or button. The girl wore no panties, hers having been reduced to rags by her earlier transformation. She was now helplessly exposed across his knee, her bare bottom a city-white tight split sphere, prominently pert atop her slender legs.

Garrick was unmoved by the now half-naked brat, he had a duty to do.

“What the hell are you doing?” Stacy gasped and futilely kicked her legs.

Garrick showed her with a sudden and sharp smack to her bare bottom that made her gasp. For a second she had no breath to speak and then he spanked her again. Her bottom was seized by an all over tang that sang on her flesh as she tried to process it. It was a double assault; shame-red at one end and burning hell-hot at the other.

“You bastard,” she managed and squirmed like a kitten in a sack.

“No more foul language,” Garrick barked, each word complimented by a spank on her bottom.

Bug-eyed and boiling, she spat a stream of garbled insults the gods alone could have understood.

Garrick didn’t listen or care. He spanked her bare bottom at a pace until it sang with sting and burned berry red. Then he spanked her some more.

Stacy wailed something that could have been another ‘bastard’ but her mouth was wet with spittle and tears and snot had already leaked from her face.

“This is a spanking you will never forget,” Garrick sighed, “And think yourself lucky I don’t take it out side so all the people you nearly got killed can have a good laugh. You are certainly not worth taking to the woodshed right now. That is the privilege of half-grown-up teenagers. You are just another silly brat of a kid getting a sound spanking.”

“I didn’t…” Stacy sobbed her denials.

Garrick paused and leaned down low so he could speak into her ear. “Who called Coleridge in the first place? Who broke out of the perimeter during the attack? Who had to get herself rescued under fire? You even put our friend in harm’s way didn’t you?” He spoke calmly but with vehemence.

Stacy lie panting over his lap and felt suddenly sick. It was true. “Please,” she whimpered, “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” he said gently, “Now take your spanking.”

The rest of the spanking was as long and hard as everything that preceded it. Only this time Stacy bawled like a sorry teen, even apologising in occasional babbling under the bottom burning assault.

Finally Garrick set her on her feet where she hopped before him grabbing her bottom and bawling like a child.

“Now listen,” he said.

Stacy stood panting and clawing at her behind, snot and tears marring her face. She had never been so sorry about anything in her whole life. Even the spanking hadn’t stung that out of her. She suddenly wished it had.

“Tell me,” Garrick continued, “What are you?”

A doe just before the kill looked less confused and vulnerable. Stacy shook her head.

“When you 18 and first moved to New York,” he said quietly, “Did you ever wake up naked and alone in that basement you mentioned?”

Stacy remembered that first time she had woken up on the cold dark floor. Not just that first time. She had pushed it from her mind. Once a month she would party hard and finish the evening in the basement. It had been just a thing… she felt a surge of panic. Then there were the blackouts… booze, just the booze…

“Yes,” she groaned in answer to Garrick’s question.

“What are you?” Garrick whispered urgently.

Stacy gaped at him. Her eyes and mouth formed three perfect circles and she felt that she was drowning. “I didn’t kill him. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me,” she wailed and suddenly she was lunging at Garrick and pounding his chest. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not…” she cried now collapsed in his arms and sobbing.

“It is okay, it is okay,” he soothed as she rocked slowly in his arms.

To be continued…