by Amanda Milo
“Human females can be much like Gryfala,” Dohrein muses. “When they spy a hob that interests them, they can become very brazen in pursuit…”
The woman that halted Wirav is brazen all right. She reaches out to grab his wrist.
Instead of shaking her off and giving her a good rib-kick, he stops and smiles at her. “Can I help you?”
I’m making my way back to them, pushing through the clog of women converging on him “Move, move, go, be gone—clear off, you cows!”
Just ahead of me I hear, “Can you sign me?”
Wirav sounds perplexed. “Sign… what?”
“I don’t have anything to write on so you’ll have to sign me.”
Oh no. I jump on the woman in front of me and for the half of a second before she collapses like she wasn’t expecting to be my ride, I see Wirav grin down at Miss Sign Me, and she swoons, and then the crowd swells forward like a wave rolling towards a hot sunny beach.
Just as I’m landing hard on top of this flattened, piss-poor excuse for a mount, ignoring her screams and curses—Dohrein’s hands fit under my arms and he’s hauling me up, and up, and up. My arse drops onto his neck, my legs on either side of his shoulders. I can feel the curved sides of his wing talons under me.
Now here’s the way to ride! From here, I can see everything...
“Oh shite!” I shout.
Kio’s little group is in trouble.
A woman grabs at Kio, which jostles the kid on his shoulder, and the kid startles awake with a piercing sound of fright.
There’s this thing with animals: when one perceived as weak screams, it can trigger the beginning of an attack.
The horde of women swarm us. I want nothing more than to get down and kick some arse—but I’m no match for this frenzy and I know it. I HATE it, but I know it.
Dohrein’s doing his best to keep us from getting trampled, but we’re trapped in a dangerous eddy of bodies. He’s trying to stay with our cluster, but he’s fighting a losing battle. It’s almost systematic, how they’re separating us—even though this is chaos, they’re effectively cutting us off from each other and taking each one of us down. It’s chilling, like watching footage of orcas hunting a pod of long-beaked dolphins.
Kio’s little family is terrified, and the kids are screaming, and I’ve never seen him angry—not ever!—but he’s furious now as he shoves women away—
His cloak gets ripped off.
Once wing powder hits human skin, we’ve reached the level of trouble we were really, really hoping to avoid. If they don’t get off, we’re going to have a bunch of angry women, and then we’re going to have a bunch of women falling mysteriously ill. I’m told it’s debilitatingly painful—and grows progressively worse. To save these idiot women from extreme pain—and if humans are like Gryfala, then death—the hobs are going to have to take one for the team.
Formerly exhilarated women turn into aggressive, grabbing, pulling maniacs—now with the specific goal of getting into the hobs’ pants.
Eww. Thankfully, full out sex doesn’t have to be the answer. “Only your fingers!” I shout—and to think: I’d given them all the stinkeye back on the ship when they were studiously filing down their claws like Dohrein does, because it was obvious they were hoping to get lucky.
My mouth fills with a profoundly bitter flavor knowing this isn’t at all the way they so desperately hoped things would go down.
“Ack!” I nearly topple off Dohrein. If we weren’t holding hands and his fingers weren’t laced with mine, I’d have been dropped for sure, because some cuntcow just tried to rip at his cloak.
On account of it recently being talon-vented, it doesn’t stand up to the abuse.
Dohrein hisses at her and I clutch at him, trying not to squeeze the breath out of his neck with my legs when his body tilts and he jerks to the other side to correct our balance. “Release me!” he warns them.
Because now we’ve got two.
Of course these slags don’t listen: they’re in the grip of some serious herd behavior and they’re charged up and ready to maul a man. As much as I want Dohrein to put me down so he can fend them off properly, the whole reason he hauled me up was so I don’t get crushed under this stampede. I swing my head, and what I see reminds me of riot footage the news replays of fans crowding the field after a football match. Here, women are screaming in frenzied excitement, men are shouting from the outskirts, kids are crying, cars are honking—this is insanity.
Over all this chaos, I shouldn’t be able to hear his wings opening—but it’s as if the sound of Dohrein getting molested is nearly all I can focus on.
Hob wings unfolding are usually pretty quiet. They’re very flexible, with the elasticity of spandex, and it’s spandex I think of when Dohrein tries repeatedly to snap his wings flat to his back—like the sound you hear when you tug on your waistband and it slings back into place.
With dread, I also think of the fact that if you grab a hob’s wing just right, it sort of auto-unfolds.
Snap, snap, hiss—smack! The girls manage to yank one wing just right—make that very, very wrong—extending it wide open.
“Release me now,” Dohrein snarls, adding twin streams of steaming spit this time. Venom. He just spit venom at women. You know shite’s real when hobs take action that could hurt a female. Granted, he aims at a spot nowhere near them and unerringly, he lands it down at the pavement just off the curb, but still. Dohrein’s not playing. He’s pissed.
But it’s too late. The giddy laughs and exalting sighs prove they did indeed touch his wings—the sexy-side. My side.
“You empty-headed twats!” I screech, and almost topple us when I lean down to cuff one that ventures close enough for me to reach.
Dohrein grunts and rights us, opening his wings full now, using their strength to sweep out and force all the women behind him to move back.
The ones in front of us aren’t so easily deterred. Now they’re as good as chemically-induced randy, and we have a serious problem.
But dammit—it’s their own doing. I put our clasped hands on top of Dohrein’s head so he can tune into my voice over the din as I inform him, “I don't care how painfully they die—you don’t touch them!”
Dohrein glares down at the women. “No argument from me. We’re well agreed.”
“I’ll take care of them.” A very, very stunned-looking Xarshish stumbles to us and… takes care of the women almost one by one. They’re all basically mobbing him, and he’s almost as naked as they are by the time he’s done. Very unfortunately, orgies aren’t nearly as sexy as you’d think.
“Ugh,” I grimace. “This isn’t like watching porn at all. This is no fun.”
I look over to the only other female I care about at the moment—the one at Kio’s huddle—and the mum is horrified, trying to shield her children from seeing this.
“This is just wrong!” I shout in outrage.
Quite impressively, a T-Rex bellow follows my exclamation.
It booms out over the crowd.
During the pin-drop silence that follows immediately after, I lower my hands from my ears, and relax my legs so Dohrein’s ears won’t be muffled either. “Thank Creator!” I shout—but I’m the only human that knows this arrival is worth cheering over: the sound was terrifying.
The crowd screams and scrambles in every direction.
Tepkik the Rakhii looks ten times as menacing when he’s pissed—bless his hearts—and he wades in snarling, flashing tailblades, sending all the humans into such a panic that the women barely get their clothes on right before they’re running.
I cup my hands over my mouth so the sound of my voice carries, and I hope he can hear me; I don’t really know him well. If he’s a gladiator, he might not have much for hearing left. “Thanks for the save! I’d ask where the hell you’ve been, but I don’t want to know.”
He’s got an opened bag of cat food fisted in one of his hands. I’m so happy to see him that I’m not even going to ask.
> My resolve lasts for all of two seconds. “Why do you have kitty kibble?”
He looks down at the bag, then at me. “It tastes good.”
I huff a laugh, and I feel my heart lighten. I’m getting a mental picture of the cartoon cheetah brand of cheese puffs—is this the Rakhii version? I snicker, relief trickling through me, cutting past the anxiety of the last few minutes. “Right. Okay, then. Carry on.”
A thought occurs to me. “Um, actually hold up. You didn’t eat… anything furry, right? You didn’t eat the thing that the bag of food belonged to?”
Tepkik gives me a look of exasperation. “I would never eat her pet.”
My eyes bug, I can feel it. “There’s a ‘her?’ ‘Her’ who—?’”
We’re interrupted by the raised voice of Kio’s woman. Understandably, she’s freaked the fuck out.
Kio looks so… dammit, I feel sorry for the lot of them. Very lightly, I press my heels into Dohrein’s chest like I’m giving him spurs. “Take us there, please, my trusty, tall, winged steed. Wow, I just realized you’re my pegasus.”
Dohrein huffs in amusement, and probably mostly because he was headed there anyway, he does.
“Oi, Kio’s mum!” I call out.
Kio makes a face. “Uggh...”
I carry on over him. “Don’t… don’t go. I know this wasn’t good, but this is definitely not the norm. Most days are way, way more boring than this, and if you like boring, then don’t give up on Kio over this.”
Kio gives me the most harried grin I’ve ever seen before he says to her, “To clarify: I’m not boring. Our homeworld is pleasantly sedate though, most of the time. It’s been more chaotic ever since Gracie arrived.”
I flip him off, but some time ago the hobs decided to consider my go-to gesture a crude form of affection, so Kio beams at me a little brighter like I just gave him a hug.
I shake my head at him. To Dohrein I comment, “He doesn’t even have the decency to be insulted. What a twit.”
Not that he could have seen my hand signal—Dohrein still pats my leg. “Right.”
Although Mum doesn’t look happy, she doesn’t immediately hightail it.
I’m not going to make her leave Earth if she’s changed her mind; she’s got to make the choice. But for Kio’s sake… I hope she and the kids can get past this.
I release one of Dohrein’s hands and sift my fingers into his hair, scritching slightly at his scalp, feeling us sway before he locks his knees. He arches his neck into my ministrations just as I’m declaring, “All right, my trusty steed. Let’s go.”
Does he drag me off his shoulders in reaction to my impertinence? No, he flicks my foot and ambles us to the head of the line.
The tops of his closed wings press against my back, warm and solid, and with Tepkik bringing up the rear of our procession, we book it to the ship.
I bust out Dohrein’s waterless cleaning solution and some rags and start to scrub off our shell-shocked group of hobs. There’s a lot of sparkle dust, lipstick, and… ick, I know where their hands have been. I send everyone to dunk their digits in the germ-scalding solution that Lem—one of Brax’s crew—offers by way of the Comm system. He has Tac’Mot—another one of Brax’s crew—hop it out to us because Lem’s a germaphobe to the nth degree and there’s no way wants to get near this nastiness. He even tells us to keep the bottle.
I don’t blame him. I’d dip these guys in a vat of this stuff if I could. Unfortunately, I know there’s no way that even Lem has access to that kind of germ-killing quantity.
Between scrubbing hobs like a litter of puppies that escaped and rolled in mud puddles, my gaze ventures to the alien who brought out the cleansing solution.
Without Tara here, Tac’Mot’s not the loved-up emerald green color I’ve mostly seen him as. He’s dulled down and barely making eye contact.
This alien is so shy, but I have so many questions. I’m not the only one—Dohrein looks like he wants to throw the world’s biggest butterfly net over him and get a closer inspection.
Considering the people Dohrein hails from, he might be thinking of that very thing. I mouth ‘No.’
Rein’s brow flattens, which makes me grin.
To Tac’Mot, I say, “Thanks bunches. When Tara gets back, let’s have lunch.”
Tac’Mot lifts one long foot, then the other like he’s unsure, or uncomfortable, but I’m distracted when I see Xarshish scrubbing at four red lines on his arm. “Did a girl scratch you?! Ugh! Lem’s got an extra strength something that should keep it from getting infected, he said Tara bathes with it—”
“No thank you,” he begins politely. “I will proudly wear the marks of—”
“Of some pikey muppet?” I shoo him towards the ship. “You don’t know who she was or what she’s carrying, geez! No, we’re cleaning it—I’m female, I say so, you do what I say, etcetera, etcetera, got it?”
He nods and dutifully heads off to do just that.
“Good lad!” I call after him. Then I round on Dohrein. “I’m hungry.”
He leans forward a fraction. “Waffles?” he asks hopefully.
I got him majorly jonesing for waffles. I got all of them going on the sound of this wonder-food because I’m effing awesome.
But instead of us working on the waffle problem, I get waylaid by the sight of a huge alien I’ve been trying not to worry over. “Hey! Here’s another one of our missing Rakhii.”
He’s like a giant tomcat; he saunters up to the ship, unashamed of being out and causing trouble all over the neighborhood.
I blink when I see what he’s got in his hand.
It’s a little girl’s hand.
He’s holding a preschooler’s tiny hand, and there’s a boy trailing right beside them.
“Rein? Do you see our massive beast pet-alien with two kids in tow?”
Dryly, Dohrein replies, “If I turn away very quickly, perhaps I can tell myself that no, I didn’t.”
I storm over to the Rakhii. In my most controlled, level voice, I say the most reasonable thing. “You can’t take kids.”
One giant gnarly horn goes up, the other one sweeping down when he cocks his head. Also stating a reasonable thing, he points his great big scale-covered hand at Kio’s group. “They have taken children.”
Privately, I’m relieved to see Kio’s group is still a group.
When I glance back at the horned alien, he’s looking more confused than a chameleon in a bag of skittles.
It’s obvious he sees absolutely nothing wrong with finding two kids and taking them home with him, like someone would pick up two pitiful puppies out of a Free bin. I rub the back of my neck. “Take a gander at the woman with them. You see her, you know, mothering them? Those kids are with their mum. It’s a different thing entirely! You have to take yours back.”
Of course... this does beg the question of how he came into possession of these kids. But I don’t get time to ponder it. His spines start to shiver. Not like he’s afraid. I know this sound—I hang out with former gladiators. This here is the shite’s-about-to-go-down sound.
His ears slowly fold to his neck. His glacier-blue eyes meet mine, his stare unwavering. “No.”
“‘No?’” I’m reminded of earlier when I told Dohrein that Rakhii remind me of Japanese fighting dogs. Akitas, they’re called.
This guy is a sterling example: he’s born and bred to fight, he’s covered in muscles, he’s self-willed, and the only rules he wants to follow are the rules he creates. Rakhii aren’t supposed to be comfortable saying no to human women—but I’m here to tell you I’ve met as many ungovernable Rakhii as I have kowtowing-Rakhii.
Actually… I’ve never met a kowtowing Rakhii. I don’t think they’re made that way. What did Dohrein call them? Headstrong?
Total Akitas. And this one just earned himself a nickname.
The tiny hand clasped in his big one tugs downwards, and he carefully extends his fingers, claws angled back so he doesn’t scratch or slice the little person hang
ing onto him.
When I look at said little person, I find her watching me—fearfully. She’s looking at ME like I’m the friggin’ scary one!
I shake my head to clear it: Can’t steal kids! I snap my fingers under Akita’s nose—the vicinity, at any rate. It falls what feels like fifty centimeters from the mark, because as I said—I’m fucking short. “Listen up. This may come as a shock, but you can’t just TAKE people.”
He reminds me of Zadeon, my friend Callie’s seriously dangerous mate, in that he’s not afraid to speak against a woman’s opinion, but unlike Zadeon, this one is backing down and even averts his eyes—but he does it by turning his whole head, horns slicing the air, and his tail snaps back and forth. If there was anyone behind him, they’d be in halves by now and speared.
I shift my focus to the two captives who don’t even know that they’re captives. And make no mistake—now that they’re here, we can’t just immediately dump them off and expect them not to tell people about the big man in the monster suit who tried to get them to go home with him.
Fuuuck, what a mess. “Huh, hi kids. This was cool, right?”
The little girl smiles at me shyly, but the boy’s eyes look older than all of us here combined. He looks resigned, and stoic, like he’s expecting life to kick him down—and it’s doing weird shite in my chest. I’m getting a real bad feeling.
I’ve never been the voice of reason. I’ve never been much for following rules. But I feel the strangest sense of responsibility over these well-meaning, crazy aliens, and I don’t want to see them hurt. Why Akita feels compelled to take them isn’t going to matter to the general populace: abducting children is a great way to turn this mission into a King Kong-esque nightmare.
I rub at the back of my neck again and let out a long breath. Thing is, I know Rakhii. They seem to have this must-rescue-the-day switch they don’t even try to turn it off. Odds are, Akita had a good reason for hauling off with two lone children.
I address the boy. “Are things bad at home?”
His jaw juts out, before he moves his stare past me. When his eyes start to glisten, I mutter, “Shite, shite, shite!”
The girl’s eyes go wide, and she covers her mouth with a gasp.