The Outcasts

by Alexa Black

  “Go ahead,” Sue breathed. “Bite. You’ve done it before, and I liked it.”

  Kara drew away. “I want to. But for this ritual, I need you pristine.”

  Sue turned to look at her. She wasn’t sure she’d wanted to see what Kara held in her hands. But something compelled her to turn and look, all the same.

  The whip Kara held had thin strands of what looked like leather. Sue had never been whipped before, but she guessed that it would sting, and her muscles tensed in expectation.

  It also wasn’t on fire. But Sue could see small streaks of light curl over it. She looked over at Kara. Was Kara humming? Sue thought of the magic the musicians made through their song. Or was there some kind of energy moving over the tails of the whip?

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t as intense as what she’d seen. Much less than what she’d dreamed.

  I’m with Kara. Kara will take care of me.

  Sue turned back toward the wall again. She heard the whip move behind her and felt a small breeze of air as Kara practiced a few swings.

  It fell lightly against her shoulders, barely a blow. Probably Kara testing her aim. Or being kind. Still, it did sting. And after the fire of the blow, an electric crackle, like lightning crawling over the places it had been.

  That wasn’t a blow. Not really. But—

  I can do this. I can endure this.

  Sue closed her eyes and let her images come. Let herself imagine it. Red liquid on asphalt and closed eyes and brown skin. Buttons pinned to a jacket, flashing political slogans, over and over, heedless of what had happened to their owner.

  She heard the whirl of Kara’s whip through the air.

  Then it crashed against her skin.

  It stung, a bright fierce pain that sped through all her nerves, shocking every part of her awake. Sue opened her mouth and gulped in air.

  She also opened her eyes. The image shattered, ripped away from her by the fierce sting.

  But that was nowhere near as hard as an Outcast warrior could hit, and Sue knew it. I’m with Kara, and Kara will protect me.

  Kara swung the whip with a slow and steady rhythm. It burned, scorching lines of fire into her skin. And the electric crackle that came with it made sure that the burn lingered.

  And yet the rhythm came with its own strange reassurance. In another moment, it will burn me.

  Sue focused on her images. The boy. The dream. Kara’s face, transformed and transfigured into something forbidding and alien and angry.

  Each one, the blows tore through, the tails of the whip rending and tearing at the image and drawing her back.

  Here.

  Into the temple, with its red walls.

  Into her burning skin.

  She swayed with the rhythm of the whip, expecting the blows, twisting into them. Opening her mouth and shrieking, half because it did hurt and half to give vent to the sounds she’d never let herself make then.

  It burned. But it meant she was alive.

  And it meant she was with Kara, and Kara was with her.

  The sensation built within her skin, a fire like the living fire in Kara. It tore through the numbness, ripped Sue from the dreams that froze her, and brought her home to herself at last. She tilted her hips and heard herself moan.

  Kara swung the whip across Sue’s buttocks. It tore lines of flame over them, just like Kara’s claws might, and Sue screamed out a welcome. All around her, the shadows of her past crouched, waiting to take her over. With every blow, they receded, the shocks of sensation awakening her nerves and driving them all away.

  The whip crashed over her again and again. Sue lost count of how many times. She moved to Kara’s rhythm again, tilting her hips, presenting each buttock to the whip and its electric aftermath.

  At long last, Kara lowered her arm.

  Sue’s hair—the hair Kara had cut—clung to her forehead, plastered there by sweat. Her throat ached from screaming and moaning, and some of the moisture on her face was probably not sweat but tears.

  Kara stepped over to her, reached out to touch her buttocks, her back. It reawakened a fresh sting, but Sue didn’t mind that at all. Yes. Touch me. Be with me.

  Here.

  What Sue said when she found the strength to speak again was more vulgar than that, but no less heartfelt.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “You want me to do what?” Kara asked, the echoing voice rich with mischief.

  “You heard me.” Sue smiled. “Fuck me.”

  Kara chuckled and ran her hands over Sue’s welts, sending new sparks of sensation through her tender skin.

  Sue laughed right back at her. “You’re a demon, according to us humans. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard those words before.”

  “Very well then. I won’t.”

  Kara slapped at Sue’s thighs. It might have startled her before, but under the bright burn of the flogging, it just felt like a firm touch, with all of Kara’s warrior strength behind it. Sue spread her legs wider.

  Kara didn’t hesitate. She sank two fingers into Sue with a confident thrust.

  Sue moaned and arched back against Kara, savoring the feeling of being filled. Kara’s whip had seared her, pushed her, ripped away her illusions. This, at the end of it, was just sex: rough and welcome.

  “Harder,” Sue begged. Kara growled and obliged, driving deep. The friction and rhythm flooded Sue with sensation. The bright burn of the welts on her back and buttocks only fed its tide. The bright burn of being alive, asked for and embraced.

  Sue threw back her head. Kara was heat and light under stone skin. Sue was only human, but every part of her blazed now, overflowing with life and light. Kara slipped another finger in and Sue hissed and shivered as it stretched her open wider.

  Sue moved back on Kara’s fingers, heedless of anything but her own hunger. Yes. This. More.

  With a slow, deliberate motion, Kara pulled her fingers almost out of Sue, leaving only her fingertips inside. Sue whimpered at the loss. Then Kara slammed her fingers in again.

  Sue froze, her body locking hard around Kara’s fingers. She cried out again as the spasm overtook her, a wordless affirmation.

  * * *

  “Are your visions gone?”

  Sue blinked, her sex twitching with aftershocks. She opened her eyes to see Kara’s face inches from her own, her lips curled in a smile.

  Sue shook her head to clear it. “I…I don’t know. I won’t know for sure until I sleep and don’t dream about him.” She gave a wry laugh. “For several nights in a row, probably.”

  She winced at that. But Kara only nodded. “The memories never leave us. Not for good.”

  Yeah. You said that before. The difficult ones are the ones that don’t leave us. And you were right. “But they’re not in my head right now, and that’s a start.”

  All you’ve left room for in my head right now is you.

  Thanks.

  Kara slipped the restraints off Sue’s wrists, one after the other. She massaged the places where the cuffs had been. That made Sue wince a little, sensation and discomfort returning all at once. But all things considered, she’d rather have Kara touching her than not.

  Her arms free now, she wrapped them around Kara’s back, seeking out the scarred places and pressing her fingertips to them.

  “Sue,” Kara growled. “This isn’t about me. This is about you.”

  Sue clutched Kara tighter. “No. This isn’t just about me. This is about us. You made it about us when you came after me.” She moved her hands over the scars.

  Kara made another rumbling little sound, but to Sue’s immense satisfaction this one sounded a little bit more like a purr.

  “I thought it was about me,” Sue went on, sliding her hands down Kara’s back. “I wanted it to be about me and nothing else. Then you came after me.”

  Kara snorted. “That is true.”

  Sue grinned. “So you see? This one’s on you. You’re just going to have to live with that.”

  Kara chuckled
. “Very well.” She wrapped her arms around Sue and Sue sank into them. “But you don’t know how tired you are. You snuck out in the middle of the night—you couldn’t have slept—and found your way to the hangar. Then you convinced Dehek, of all Outcasts, to fly you to the surface.”

  “Yeah.” Sue let Kara hold her up. It felt good to sink into her arms like this, her skin still stinging from the beating, her cunt still pulsing with the last of her aftershocks.

  Kara lifted Sue effortlessly and cradled her in her arms. Sue snickered. Is that because you want to hold me, or is that because you’re not sure where to put me down? But that, too, felt good, the welts on her back pressed against Kara’s stony skin and the warmth of the cracks in it. She wriggled to show Kara she liked it.

  Kara grinned. “And that isn’t all of it,” she said, as if Sue hadn’t interrupted. “Then you crawled halfway here in a sandstorm. Something even the dead don’t like to endure. And offered yourself to the ritual of absolution afterward.”

  “And to your hands.”

  “Yes. And to my hands. But my point is, Sue Jones, you must be exhausted.”

  Sue let her eyes close. “Yes. I am. I could fall asleep right here in your arms.”

  “Without visions of the boy?” Sue couldn’t see Kara smiling, but she could hear it in her tone.

  “Without visions of the boy,” Sue agreed. “But are you really saying that you want me to fall asleep right here in the middle of your, uh, temple?”

  “Let me take you back to our craft first.”

  Our craft. Not “my craft.” Ours.

  “I’d like that,” Sue said.

  Kara carried her to the door. “You won’t like the storm outside. Though it seems to have died down a little. You really must have wanted to punish yourself before. I’m surprised you got as far as you did.”

  Sue winced, bracing herself for the sands. “No, I won’t like the storm outside.” She opened her eyes, made sure to look up into Kara’s face. “But I’ll like you taking me there. You have to glide to get to the ship.”

  Kara’s eyes widened. “I—”

  “You can’t fly any more, no. But you can glide and you can hover. Storm or no storm, sand or no sand, I want to be in your arms when you do, Kara of the Outcasts.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  As soon as they got back to Kara’s apartment, Kara laid her down.

  Sue could tell Kara was tired. Gliding wasn’t flying, and sandstorms weren’t friendly to beings whose skin was filled with cracks. Kara’s wing shadows hovered behind her, their shifting sluggish.

  But she’d perked up as soon as Sue lay down.

  The protector thing again, probably. Sue closed her eyes, remembering Kara holding her tightly, the winds carrying them, the growl in Kara’s throat as she battled the weather.

  Kara wouldn’t let Sue lie on her back. She walked over to the cooling cupboard and drew out a small bottle of ointment. She spread the ointment on her fingers and then pressed it to Sue’s welts.

  Sue hissed as it made contact. Her welts were fresh and still stung. But the ointment was cool and the burn in her flesh quieted. It didn’t hurt, not really, not unless Kara was touching the welts. Sue found she welcomed that, a reminder of what had passed between them.

  Kara seemed to like touching them, too. She ran her fingers over Sue’s back and buttocks even after she’d dabbed the ointment on them, sometimes careful to avoid the welts, sometimes touching them.

  “It is a ritual,” she said, “and I performed it for your sake. But I like seeing my marks on you, my little human.”

  Sue leaned her head on her elbows and turned to look at Kara. “Little human. I’m not so sure I like that.”

  Kara paused. “You are not like us. You’re—”

  “Just a mortal. I know.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “Yeah, you did. I remember what you showed me when you sang.” Sue closed her eyes and pictured it: the dark-skinned woman, her glowing skin, her wings, so bright a white Sue hadn’t quite been able to make them out. The inner fire in her eyes and mouth, the hints of what became her horns once she fell.

  Kara’s hands on Sue’s back stilled. “When I sang?” She hung her head, the great horns pointing down. “That was me before the war. Before I lost my wings.”

  “I know.”

  “I haven’t been that for a long time.”

  Sue looked directly at Kara. “That’s exactly what I meant. Neither one of us is perfect, Kara. Me or you.”

  Kara sighed and looked down at herself. She moved one of her hands from Kara’s back and traced the contours of one of the cracks in her skin. “That is so.”

  “That’s why I left.”

  “Which you should never have done,” Kara whispered. She squirted more of the gel onto her fingertips and ran them over Sue’s welts again. The gel’s chill soothed the welts’ sting. “There is no point to feeling shame over that.”

  Sue let herself savor the feeling of the gel on her welts. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “No, there isn’t. But I ran off for a reason. From this, from my dreams.”

  “From me.”

  “No. From what I’d learned. From you telling me that this really was hell, that the people on the surface are human.” Sue shivered, remembering.

  Kara said nothing. She ran her hands over Sue’s back again. Sue sighed into it, trying to let herself relax. Trying to remember the pleasure she’d just felt under Kara’s hands. Trying to forget the serious conversation and just let go.

  “That the Enemy ordered us to torture humans.” Kara looked down, her expression unreadable.

  “Yeah. And that you did it willingly.”

  “Even though you wanted to see it.” Kara snarled, showing her fangs. “Even though you asked me to bring you down to the surface and show you.”

  Sue closed her eyes. “I thought I needed to know.” She reached up to grab Kara’s hand. She laced her small, brown fingers, with Kara’s clawed and gray ones.

  “I should never have agreed to bring you to the surface,” Kara said. But she tightened her grip on Sue’s hand, clutching hard.

  “I had to see it eventually,” Sue said. “But you were right. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready and I ran.”

  “And now?”

  Sue gestured around the room. “Look around you. Look at this stuff, this place. These Rings.”

  Kara did look around but said nothing.

  “You Outcasts built a whole world for yourselves,” Sue went on. “You were supposed to live on the surface, to work and toil and suffer like your human victims. Am I right?”

  “You are.”

  “And instead, you Outcasts—you glorious, rebellious bastards, fighting even after you lost—decided fuck it, hell no, we’re not living in a wasteland. We’re building ships and cities and living like we want to, banishment or no banishment.” She looked up at Kara. “What about that one? Am I right about that too?”

  Kara turned back to look at her and smiled.

  Sue didn’t say anything. She just waited.

  “But what does this have to do with our duties in the temples?”

  “You’re rebels. You live the way you want. You always have and always will. Enemy or no Enemy, scars or no scars.”

  Kara’s cracks flashed with light. “Yes.”

  “Then if you give the ritual of absolution to the dead humans, if you torture the damned, you do it because you chose to.”

  Kara shook her head and snarled. “I already told you I didn’t want to do it. That I’d given it up. That if it had been any other human down there, any soul but yours, I would never have gone down to the surface again.”

  “Then you don’t like this ritual?”

  Kara looked down at her. “I liked it with you.” She unwound her hand from Sue’s and traced one of the welts on Sue’s back with the tip of a claw. Sue froze, not wanting a stray movement to cut her.

  “I liked it too. But that’s bec
ause you were helping me. The others—”

  “They are damned. Beyond redemption.”

  “So they just”—Sue shuddered in spite of herself, and Kara pulled her hand away—“deserve it, over and over? I didn’t.”

  “They think they do.” Kara growled. “They are damned, as you say. Or so the Enemy tells them, and so they believe.” She shook her head. “I want no part of it any longer.”

  Sue lifted herself up on her hands. “Not even with me?”

  Kara’s frown became a smile, fanged and bright. “You’re different. You wanted redemption.”

  “Redemption. Isn’t that the Enemy’s business? Savior and redeemer,” Sue recited, a faraway title from a story she suddenly wished she’d paid more attention to.

  “We are rebels, Sue Jones. We live as we want to, like you said.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means if my rituals can offer you redemption I will give it to you. I like what you are, Sue Jones.”

  Sue grinned.

  “That is why I call you my human.”

  “It was the ‘little’ part I objected to. Not so much the ‘my.’”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Kara’s eyes widened. “You want to be mine?”

  “You were right from the beginning. I already am yours.” She shimmied under Kara’s hands again. Kara purred.

  But this wasn’t just about fun. “Doesn’t really matter if I wanted to be or not,” Sue finished.

  Kara pulled away. “Sue.”

  “I’m human and you’re not. To the other Outcasts who don’t know me, that makes me your pet. Just like you said.” But don’t you run from me, Ms. Warrior. “Don’t worry. I’m not angry. As long as I’m here, it is what it is.”

  “As long as you’re here.”

  “Yep. Which is probably going to be a hell of a long time.”

  “Is that so?” Kara narrowed her eyes. “The others told me you went to the hangar looking for your own ship, not for mine.”

  Sue sucked in a breath. What could she say to that? “I did. At first.”