by Rob Bliss
“Genetic flaws,” Venus spoke in the darkness. “Not from the family, of course, but from your barren, imperfect mistress. Her tadpoles will be at the bottom of the family barrel, naturally. Once grown to maturity, they’ll possibly be used as slaves, or breeding cows—depending on the quality of milk they can provide. If they’re no good for anything, though, they’ll make adequate food. Of course, I wouldn’t eat anything that came out of that cunt’s cunt. But some family members have less discriminating tastes.”
I watched the television and saw Elizabeth give birth again and again, the same procedure repeated, the infants resembling each other in their strange genetic attributes. I felt sick. And sad for what Elizabeth was going through. I prayed that she didn’t think I had betrayed her again.
I counted seven babies, but Venus said that Elizabeth had begun giving birth before I had awoken. The average gestation period for a family birth was only a few hours. By the time she was done, umbilical ropes and blue masses of afterbirth were stacked in a pyramid wedged into a corner of the room. Liquids seeped out of the stack and pooled on the floor, running beneath the chair. Elizabeth fell unconscious, exhausted, and the nurses hooked up an IV to her arm, shot something from a syringe into her vein. Then turned out the light.
Venus said that there was a total of seventeen infants born from Elizabeth’s drained body. She would sleep, painlessly and without nightmares, for hours. I wasn’t to worry—mother and babies were doing fine.
The television clicked off.
The overhead white light swung back to shine on my face. Venus held up a hand mirror for me to see myself. My hair had been shaved off completely. The strange letters and symbols I had seen on the tattooist, on Venus, on the jackets and vests, were now in ink across my head above the line of my eyebrows. Only two letters were left as outlines, still needing to be filled in.
“We’ve made our mark on you now,” Venus said. “Wherever you go, family members will see that you’re one of us. Not to worry, the marks are made with special ink which disappears in a matter of minutes. Normal people—that scum—won’t be able to see them. But family members will. And you’ll be able to see the tattoos of other family members. The ink gives you special sight. It’s how we all confirm each other as family members. Do you like it?”
I squinted against the light and the pain that seared my skull. “What does it say?”
“Many things. You’ll learn in time. It marks you as a member of the Royal Order of Ursa. It also mentions that you are one of my husbands. A great privilege. You’ll go far with that mark. You’ll thank me one day.” She took away the mirror, smiled down into my stinging eyes. “I may play with my husbands, but I don’t get rid of them too easily. And they don’t get rid of me either. Ever.”
“What about Gord?”
“He was never officially my husband. I can change my mind up to the last minute. A bride’s privilege. Though I’ll be inside his soul for life. No separation, no divorce—I will always own him. Whether I want to play with him or not…well, my moods come and go.”
That was putting it mildly.
Leaning in, she kissed my lips. When she slipped her tongue into mine, I bit it. She chirped and giggled, not in pain, but happy. She opened her mouth with her tongue pinned by my teeth, then used her teeth to bite my lips. I felt pain. Yelled and released her tongue. She sucked the blood off it, licked a red stain around her lips. Then held my mouth squeezed and licked the blood off my lips.
She wore her white bear fur once again, taken from Elizabeth, returning full power and protection to herself.
“Still feisty,” she cooed. “You’re learning how to make me horny. But, alas, I can’t fuck you just yet. I must first put someone between us. Not to worry, you know the routine. You saw it once before. But like I said, you owe me. Your mistress has provided her share. For now. She’ll have to be gang-raped once she wakes up, of course. Would hate for her to sleep through the fun. Seventeen doesn’t even come close to what you and her owe me.” She leaned in and smoothed a finger over my head tattoo, looked lustfully into my eyes. “Ever taken it up the ass?”
She stood away and the chair tilted back, facing me at the ceiling, my legs thrown up by projecting extensions in the chair, straps spinning themselves around my shins, wedging my legs wide apart, raising them like an astronaut sitting in a space capsule. My ass cheeks spread.
Venus vanished into the shadows for a moment. I tried to gaze around the room, but the white light in my eyes prevented me from seeing how large or small it was. I could only see stone and wood and feel the cold. Felt like I was in a castle dungeon. The tattooist sat at an old-fashioned student’s desk with arms as broad as canoe paddles. A collection of bottles and vials and various tools were arranged on a small rolling stainless steel tray, like the kind surgeons used, and between his feet sat an antique black leather doctor’s bag. He picked through vials on the tray, reading labels, then stuck them back down into the doctor’s bag. I had a feeling that the bottles weren’t all filled with tattoo ink.
Venus reappeared in the light, Gord’s arm in hers, leading him to the side of the chair where I could see him. He looked even worse than before—his burned, melted skin clearly defined in the harsh light. The gash across his forehead had been cauterized and washed of blood. One eye was still a blood-caked wound, rags of the vest and jacket sealed to his skin by fire, but the exposed parts of his chest were burned and bubbled. He wore fur pants again, his blackened legs covered, and the shoes were still melted up his shins, almost to his knees.
His remaining eye stared blankly with hollow dejection, as though he had been through a thousand wars—looking at me and through me at the same time. Was he even the same person I had once known, grown up with?
Venus kissed his cheek, but he didn’t seem to notice. Only kept staring down at me, but I couldn’t read his vacant gaze. Did he want to kill me? Did he still hate me for being chosen as Venus’ husband? For wounding him with blade and fire?
She caressed a hand down his chest and cooed into his melted ear, “Baby, mama wants you to do a big family favor for her, okay? If you do it, I’ll love you forever.”
He swallowed and turned his eye to her, asked in a monotone, “Will you make me your husband?”
She pouted. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I can’t do that. Only one husband at a time, those are the rules,” she lied. “A queen can only have one king at her side. Multiple husbands would lessen the stature and position of the king’s throne.”
“What about many kings and many queens?” Gord asked in a voice cracked by fire and smoke.
She chuckled. “Well now that would degrade the positions of both king and queen, wouldn’t it, silly?”
“How about no kings or queens?” he asked, his face concrete, eyes sunken into pits of shadow.
This question made me think that there was still some fight left in him. It gave me hope that he could still return from whatever madness he was locked inside of.
Venus was mildly insulted. She deflected the question and pulled Gord to stand between my legs. “Let’s not talk about such silliness—we have a job to do.” She pulled open the flap of his pants and withdrew his flaccid, blackened penis. He stood like a robot, staring down at me, as Venus caressed him. With little girl eyes, she asked, “Don’t I turn you on anymore, baby? Come on, get nice and hard for mama. You got your sister pregnant—now you just gotta put some babies in your best friend too. I’ll help, of course. In our family, both women and men can get pregnant.”
Gord and I glanced down to see Venus’ tail rising between her legs, the cobra twitching and ready. She put his hand on the tail for him to stroke as she stroked him. But he wasn’t coming to life, dead from the waist down if not also from the neck down.
Venus looked up to flip her chin at the tattooist. He scanned his tray, then fiddled through his doctor’s bag, lifting out vials to read their labels, until he settled on one labelled with only the letter V. Viagra? I wondered. Or was it bl
ood from Venus herself? The tattooist dug around and pulled out a long steel syringe, poked it into the vial, filled it. He patted one arm of his schoolhouse desk for Venus to walk Gord over to him.
She angled the chair arm between Gord’s legs, pushed on his shoulders to make him squat low. Stretching out his penis, she held it pinned to the scratched and stained wood of the chair arm, whispered into his ear. “This’ll just pinch a little. Stinger here is a skilled technician. Tattooist, doctor, dentist—a jack of all needles. Not to worry, his hands are relatively steady.”
I watched the needle push into a bulging black vein. Gord didn’t flinch. Stinger lived up to his name.
All of the liquid was out of the syringe and into Gord’s bloodstream. The steel was pulled from the flesh and the tattooist absorbed a spot of blood with a cotton ball, told Gord to keep the cotton pressed on the injection site.
Gord held his cock in a fist, staring at nothing until the sagging meat between his legs began to grow. I watched his face and more life came into it. But not necessarily in a good way. The melted muscles of his face twitched and his one eye blinked compulsively. Letting go of his penis, he flexed his hands into fists, rubbed his fingers together, cracked his neck and back and every bone in his warped body. He couldn’t stand still.
As he paced a horseshoe path around my chair, Venus tried to corral him back between my upraised legs.
“Baby, you gotta fuck…come here, put it right in here, mama’ll help you, okay?”
He glanced at her, at me, wouldn’t stop pacing. Reached up and smacked the television, making it wobble, then clenched his hands together as though he was cold.
I chanced asking a question as Venus tried to hold Gord still. “What’d you shoot into his dick, bitch?”
“Just a little something to help him rape you. Now shut the fuck up and lie back—bitch!”
Frustrated, she tried to hold Gord’s hands still, but he kept pacing away from her. He didn’t seem to know what to do with a hard dick. Strolled around my chair and his penis swung like a bat—at least twelve inches, though I was sure he was never that size before (he would’ve bragged for sure when we were teens)—knocking it against my legs and the chair, against the wall when he wandered into a corner. Maybe looking for an escape as the erection serum raced through his body, maybe further dementing his already demented mind.
Venus tried a new tactic. Her tail had lost its vigor while she was trying to reign in Gord, the piece of flesh dangling from the base of her tailbone, along the crack of her ass and down to the backs of her knees. It flicked and swung, occasionally curling up on itself, like a cow’s tail batting away flies. I wonder to what extent she controlled it, or did it somewhat move by automatic reflex? And did only the females of the family have such an appendage?
She made the thing rise between her legs where she stroked it, curving up and out from her navel. Trying to get Gord’s attention with it, inciting him to lust. He would pass by her, glance down at it, touch it lightly, pet it, then keep pacing. He disappeared in and out of shadows, his steps clopping on the stone floor. I could take a guess at how big the room was from listening to him.
Stinger held a hand to his mouth, trying to stifle a laugh.
Venus erupted at him. “How much did you fucking give him? He’s a goddamn basketcase!”
“Sorry, Mistress,” he said after clearing his throat, but the smile still formed on his mouth and his split tongue jutted through his lips.
“Well, do you have anything to fucking bring him down? Keep his cock up but bring his useless mind back down to Earth! Just enough for the braindead fuck to obey me!”
Stinger turned to inspect the vials he had, then lifted small metal trays inside the depths of the bag, searching. He pulled out everything, it seemed—a dentist’s drill and tools, more vials of chemicals and jars of tattoo ink, replacement needles, scalpels, forceps, surgical needles and hooks, retractors, drills, bone chisels, a speculum, a rubber ball gag. I wondered how many people had been strapped to the chair before me, and had they been cured or killed under Stinger’s care?
I glanced at the vials he was sorting through, saw a small black bottle with the letters “L.O.V.E.” painted on it in red. A homemade elixir? Maybe it was all homemade. The “V” may not have been for Viagra or Venus. But Stinger didn’t inject a needle into the bottle of “L.O.V.E.”; he placed it delicately down into its own side pocket, kept searching for something else.
I glanced away to see that Gord was finally standing still. Just beside my right leg. Venus watched his face, stepped slowly to him, the tail prodding out ahead of her. Trying to assess what was going through Gord’s fucked-up mind.
No longer with penis in hand, he instead held a hand mirror. In awe and horror, he gazed at his burned face and missing eye, probably for the first time since being injured. His facial muscles still twitched, but that must have only increased the shock of seeing his reflection. Glancing down at his penis, his eye turned to glass, but no tear fell.
Venus approached from over his shoulder. “You’re beautiful, baby. You don’t have to worry about a thing. The family has lots of experimental medicine and doctors all over the world—California, Switzerland, Brazil, China. They’re all miracle workers, I swear. They’ll take good care of you. We have castles in Europe you can live in, islands in the Pacific and Caribbean—anywhere you want to go, we’ll set you up for life. But, baby, right now I need you to fuck.”
Gord snapped out his arm and the mirror shattered against the wall. His head and body were a mass of twisted scarlet; only his single eye and his teeth beamed phosphorus white.
“Fuck your fucking, bitch! I’m not going to fuck ever again—and neither are you!”
He pulled a piece of metal from the back waistband of his fur pants. I recognized it as the blade of the golden knife that Venus had snapped from its hilt and thrown into a corner of her bedroom just before I burned it to cinders. There was still hope. Still a part of the real Gord deep inside his outer traumatized self. He had secreted a weapon, kept his mind blank so that Venus couldn’t read his thoughts, kept the blade to use at the appropriate time.
Gord was a fucking genius! I laughed out loud, which distracted my bride, drew her glare to me.
Gord grabbed the tail where it curled up between Venus’ vaginal slit, flexed his melted wax biceps, and wrenched the blade under the flailing muscle. It spat blood, red and black, across his hands and the fur of his pants. The tail roiled in his hand like a headless snake and threw blood across his face as he held it up to Venus’ horrified eyes. Crimson spat from her twitching tail stump, spattered the walls and chair, ran down the inside of her legs to pool on the stone and wood.
She screamed—not from pain, but from rage.
Gord took a bite of the tail’s tip and smiled bloody teeth at Venus before he began to chew.
Then she began to change.
Her body stiffened as muscles beneath her skin bulged and molded her shape out of its feminine form. Bladders beneath the skin pushed her forehead high and swelled her cheekbones—the bridge of her nose extended, and her mouth gaped and split to expose two long rows of teeth jutting from black gums like a yellowed mountain range. Her arms and legs extended so that she had to duck her head to keep it from scraping the ceiling. Hands and feet elongated and grew six-inch claws. The white fur cloak became her hide, expanding to cover her entirely, sealing to her face.
She roared her bear howl through the mid-sized room, like the crashing waves of a storm-battered ocean.
Gord rushed to Stinger, plunging the golden blade into his neck, toppling the tattooist surgeon off his chair, butchering his face as he lay on the ground. The rolling tray, bottles and vials, steel implements splashed and clattered across the stone floor. Gord’s hand flashed upward, a tongue split into a Y writhing in his hand, a living thing, quickly dying, before he threw it into shadows. Then kept hacking at the corpse of the tattooist on the floor.
I kicked and pulled hard again
st my restraints, the bear Venus between my legs, her maw gaping and roaring a breeze of putrid breath against my face.
“Jesus, Gordy—get me out of this thing!” I yelled.
My eyes were locked on my bride, so I didn’t see at first as Gord rose off the floor with the doctor’s bag in one hand and a filled syringe in the other. The bag dropped to the floor as he hunched over, looking for a way to attack the bear.
Venus roared into my face. I wondered if she would kill me—her husband. As her bear self, did she still know me? Her paws didn’t swat at me, only gouged claws across the stone floor.
From the corner of my eye I saw Gord circle around her and leap onto her back. He drove the syringe hard into her hide. Hopefully it went in, able to pierce the thick bear flesh. And hopefully he was able to depress the plunger before she spun and batted him away. He flew into shadow and sounded like he had hit a wall.
The bear—my bride—roared until my eardrums felt about to burst. Her paws slapped at her shoulders and ribs, trying to find the syringe. Sticks of metal littered the floor, but I couldn’t see the steel syringe. I held my breath and felt my heart pound as I watched Venus’ movements slow down. She swayed drunkenly as her massive arms swung at walls. But she wasn’t going down. Instead, her sway was broken by twitches and convulsions. Her paws shot out, seemingly beyond her control, to smash against walls, to crack wall timbers in two, to swat the television and its ledge off the wall, to buckle the door outward and let in light.
Then a deep lull paused her body, head rolling, tongue lolling out of her mouth, snot drooling from her black nostrils. I could only wonder what Gord had shot her up with. He came out of the shadows. In his hand was the bloody golden blade, crimson splashed up his arm. He kept his eye on the bear as he slipped to my side, tucking the blade under the restraint pinning one of my wrists to the chair. The steel sawed through the binding, but both of us were more intent on keeping our attention on the bride.
Gord was still a little dazed from whatever poison or panacea had been injected into his penis. I took the blade out of his hand and told him, “You watch her, keep out of her way—get another syringe if you can and shoot her up again! Drug the bitch until she’s dead!”