The magic worked its way up. This torso was narrower than before, the ribs tapering down to the waist where his scales started, the heart not so much to the left anymore as the right. Shoulders and arms, intact, as was his neck, but his jaw, gaping wide with his shrieking and nonsensical pleading, cracked away from the skull, like an invisible hand had reached into his mouth and jerked it down beyond normal limitations. His tongue divided, left and right side writhing as if they couldn’t coexist inside of their shared space without quarrel.
Luke drooled and whimpered, bloody tendrils coursing over his cheeks, neck, and chest. His jaw reattached, but further back, toward his neck, granting him a severe overbite. It allowed for his human canines to tear from their sockets so new fangs—curved ones, delicate ones that would administer poison in times of duress—could erupt from his tender, bleeding gums.
“That’s it, darling, that’s it. Come to me,” Lamia crooned, stroking one of her claws down his cheek. Luke’s eyes rolled into his head as the cartilage of his nose cracked and, much like his cocks, receded into his greater self, his nostrils wide, flat vents against his tan skin. His brow hair fell out, followed by his head hair and any other body hair, leaving him smooth all over save for the bumpy texture of his virgin scales. Another crack, and the front of his skull sloped backward, like someone had brought a shovel down on his head, the bones near his now-bald temples disintegrating so he became less rounded on top and more flat and sleek. His brain, once a three-pound mass of human hopes and dreams and cruelties, became three pounds of base, snake instinct.
That was where the madness crept in. Luke the person was all but dead, in the presence of primal urges that could not and would not be denied.
Hunting and fucking, respectively.
Luke, or whatever was left of him, collapsed into the queen’s blankets with a sound that was more hiss than scream. The glowing from inside of his body subsided. He was, for all intents and purposes, see-through from the hips down, no color to his scales, though the varying textures and layers made it hard to discern the details.
Like the textured glass on one of those sliding shower doors. You can see the person showering inside, but not get a clear picture.
Fuck, I need a shower. I smell like piss.
And I really wish I had a smoke.
Tanis pushed herself up from her seat on the floor and beat the dust from the ass of her jeans, her back screeching in protest. If she was lucky, it was just scrapes and abrasions that’d go away overnight. If she was unlucky, she had actual cuts that’d need attending and they’d ache for a few days.
“Am I done?”
It was directed at Lamia, but Luke was the one to respond. Sensing something present in the chamber, something beyond what, perhaps, his addled snake brain already accepted as his mate, Luke groaned and growled, flopping around on the mattresses before he rolled onto the hard stone floor. Lamia allowed it, watching curiously. He lifted his head to regard Tanis across the room, his tongue dangling from his mouth. He hadn’t quite figured out the flicking in-and-out trick to tracking, where he ought to bring the tongue back into his mouth to better gather the smells to his new and improved scent glands, and so he let it loll.
Then he crawled, heaving himself along with the power of his arms.
His body wasn’t ready for upright movement, his lower half too new and too fresh to support him, nor was his skin ready for the rock he raked against. It shredded at him, prying fragile scales away from more-fragile flesh, but he didn’t care. He was too intent on Tanis, his eyes big and bulging, a gurgled half-scream of rage bursting from his throat. He was a mindless thing to his needs, which, in this case, was hunger. She’d become food, the abuse he inflicted upon his fresh-born body secondary to his desire for feeding. Tanis knew, if she didn’t serve an immediate purpose to the queen, Lamia would have let him have her, but before he got too far, the queen looped him up into her coils and hauled him back toward the beds.
“Don’t harm yourself, love. My love. My sweet thing.”
Luke whipped his head around, at first eyeing the much-larger female lamia with hostility that she’d interrupted the least effectual hunt ever, but then she lifted her tail tip to him and ran it over his face. Pheromones, her sexual invitation presented so close to his nose, so immediately, he wouldn’t be able to ignore it. Her stench pervaded the Den, yes, but Luke was still addled and adjusting to his monstrousness. So forcibly presented, however, he couldn’t ignore it no matter how much his belly pleaded for sustenance.
He bumped his head against one of Lamia’s milk-swollen, white udders. She pressed his face in close, rubbing her tail against his tail. Insistence. Distraction. Luke’s own tail rose, weak still, but not so weak he couldn’t wrap himself around her, writhing against her and growling. His face nuzzled at her, tongue careening over the soiled valleys between the queen snake’s rolls of fat. He didn’t mind the dirt or the grime; he was there for a singular purpose.
Tanis spied an angry, pink-red presence sliding out of his cloaca.
When there was dick involved, and it wasn’t hers, she was out.
Lamia didn’t comment on Tanis’s escape, instead presenting herself for the mating. Luke would inseminate her once with one cock before going at her with the second. Each crotch rocket had its own seed basket, his testicles ‘dividing’ to provide sperm to the separate peni. Tanis didn’t work the same way—she had a two-for one special when she came—but she and Naree had figured out how to keep it clean.
Cleanish. Unless they didn’t want it clean.
Naree.
The idea of a soft, loving woman who didn’t smell like Lamia’s death-and-fuck prison, who would, at no time ever in her life, be able to unhinge her jaw to swallow Luke Des Moines whole, was nice. Tanis two-timed it from the Den, nearly running her way down the tunnel of the queen’s chamber, past Kallie, past her snakier-looking sisters in their hovels, and toward the ladder that’d release her on the Den. Ten minutes. That’s how long it would take to get back to the Caddy at a good sprint. That’s how long it’d take to get that much-needed smoke.
That’s how long it’d take her to get on the road so she could see the one thing in the world she actually loved.
Anywhere but here. ANYWHERE but here.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DRIVES BACK to Percy’s Pass were always thinkfests. Maybe Luke’s frailty in the face of her demigod mother afflicted her with existential crisis by proxy. Maybe it was the easy thrum of the Caddy’s engine lulling her. Whatever the case, Tanis couldn’t escape the tangle of her thoughts. The radio would have been a nice distraction, but station roulette had proved time and time again the only music she’d get in that part of the swamp was the praise-Jesus gospel hour, a few local nutjobs reporting on their UFO sightings, or old time country music. Tanis couldn’t abide the first two, but she was fine with the last. George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty. All had a place in her heart, but unfortunately, the reception wasn’t good, and white noise ruining “He Stopped Loving Her Today” couldn’t be abided.
She took a deep breath. Fresh, above-ground air. Water from the Glades. Pavement, which did have a smell no matter what humans thought; green growth. The ghost of her last cigarette.
So much better than home.
Were the sewers home? Not really. Not anymore, nor had they been since she was seventeen. Too-human lamias were kicked out of the Den as soon as they were deemed ‘old enough’ which was an arbitrary, sliding scale based on how quickly the daughters physically matured. In Tanis’s case, seventeen. Barbara, the denmother, had given her two hundred dollars and a backpack full of clothes before showing her out on a Tuesday morning.
“I’m sorry,” was all she said. She didn’t want to see Tanis go—she didn’t want to see any of her “babies” go, as she called them—but it was the law of the land. Lamia wouldn’t be surrounded by the pink skins anymore than she had to be. Humanoids like Barbara, covered in green scales, with a sloping head and a thin s
liver of pupil? Fine. But Tanis, Bernie—Hell, even Fi who had scales on her arms and legs but not on her face—were sent away.
It should have been a freedom; the Den was a hostile, sad place where the bipeds made do with too little food and fewer supplies. But it wasn’t, not really. Even if the girls forged better lives elsewhere, they were expected to keep close to the Den wherever they landed. The lamia, not Lamia herself but the people that were lamia, would perish without their cooperation.
Tanis wasn’t sure then, or now, that was such a bad thing.
Barbara had prepared Tanis as best she could for their world, instructing her on how money, clothing, language, sex, and everything else worked, but it never felt sufficient, not when Tanis was in the tunnels, and certainly not when she was out in the human towns. “You’ll be fine. You’re just like any other snake having to adapt to a new habitat after a den’s destruction,” Barbara had insisted. Except that wasn’t really Tanis’s circumstance. A den’s destruction was predator-born. Tanis’s abolishment was because she wasn’t what her mother wanted her to be. She’d been rejected by the one person everyone should be able to count on for affection and acceptance.
It hadn’t been fair, and it didn’t get fair until Tanis walked into Percy’s Pass and was taken in by other, ostracized lamia, the denmother a big-hearted, butchy woman with dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes named Gaia. She was the ringleader of the lesser, the broken, the unimportant; although, Tanis quickly realized under Gaia’s tutelage, they were the building blocks of their small society. The Den couldn’t operate without them. The humanoid lamias were accepted among the humans, and the lamia could reap the humans for all they needed to survive. Lamia made excellent thieves. Fast, quick, strong—they could get in and get out of tight spaces without detection, stealing what they needed to get by. They made great laborers, too, excelling at factory work that required precision and speed. They took jobs in lumberyards and junkyards because they could haul extra weight. They were great in warehouses and often opted for overnight shifts in security or stocking shelves in stores because they liked night hours. The fewer people to see them and maybe catch a glimpse of scales or a forked tongue or whatever other gifts their snake blood bestowed upon them? The better.
And the lack of a social security number wasn’t as big of a problem as most would think. Local businesses didn’t mind under-the-table. Less overhead for them, lower pay for the lamia. Gaia hooked Tanis up with a job and a half-dozen more like it after that.
When Tanis was taken in, Percy’s Pass had about twenty lamia residents. They’d holed up on the outside of town, their three two-bedroom apartments housing six or seven daughters each. To Tanis, it was heaven; she no longer had to sleep beside a dumpster outside of a McDonald’s, there was no mean mother lamia around to make her feel like a mistake of nature, plus she’d gotten her own futon mattress, pillow, and soft blanket. Instead of six people huddled inside of her tent in the tunnels, there was only her and two sisters—Alexandra and Adonia—sharing a room. They even had a few luxuries. Her apartment had an old television with a VCR and a mountain of VHS tapes. The apartment next door had a stereo system with tall speakers, and the apartment beside that had what Tanis came to enjoy the most: a computer with stolen wireless internet.
Teenager Tanis found games. The computer was a commodity for all of them, but many of the lamia preferred not to use it, distrustful of technologies they’d never had in the tunnels. Tanis had no such qualms and soon she was addicted to the make-believe worlds beyond her door, so much so that her first major purchase when she’d started working at a local pizza place was a secondhand laptop. The pawn shop had it for a hundred dollars. Tanis saved up for three weeks and, a month later, played World of Warcraft for the first time.
Which is where she met Naree.
They were friends for years, killing internet dragons and talking until the late night hours about... well, Naree. About Yale. About her Korean heritage and her parents’ expectations. About her atheism and her religious family’s disapproval. About computers, her closeted queerness, and what it was like in the cold northeast where the snow stacked to your navel in January. It took Tanis a while to open up, but eventually the small details emerged. That she lived in Florida. That she was tall and athletic and female. Naree asked her if she had a boyfriend and Tanis had to consider, for the first time, whether she liked boys or girls, or if she found humans palatable at all. It’s not that she’d never been sexual, it was just that her desires were always chemical based, reacting to the musk of the fertile True Daughters or the queen herself. Some of the humanoid daughters took lovers among their own sisters, but Tanis had always suffered it alone. It was nothing a quick tug and a dirty cloth couldn’t fix.
Enjoying a human because of aesthetic, because of wanting, didn’t occur to her until Naree asked, and after weeks of surveying the humans coming into the pizza shop, Tanis came to a definitive conclusion. Yes, she appreciated them, and in appreciating them, she preferred females, and on the fat side. They looked bouncy.
Bouncy did things to her.
So Tanis admitted it to Naree, and eventually, after another year or so, Naree informed Tanis that they were effectively dating on the internet, which Tanis didn’t know was a thing, but she didn’t exactly fight it either. She was fond of the girl on the other side of the line who’d convinced Tanis to Skype her every night. They developed a routine; play games for hours and then, at eleven, Tanis would step over or around her sleeping sisters to go into the bathroom and hunker down in the tub. Naree would call and inevitably comment on the ugly pink-beige tile behind Tanis’s head. She was round and fresh-faced with glossy black hair and dark brown eyes and everything Tanis admired about the girls who visited the pizza shop.
Only, in this case, she was professing to be Tanis’s own. It pleased Tanis in ways she didn’t entirely understand.
Through it all, Tanis kept the snake out of their relationship. How did one confess they were a demigod’s daughter with magical snake powers without looking like a nutter? She would have been fine to keep it quiet forever, but then spring break of Naree’s junior year happened. Naree informed Tanis, three years into their relationship, right after Tanis had gotten a new job as a garbagewoman and made enough money to get her own apartment around the corner from her sisters, that she’d bought a ticket to Florida and was coming to visit. Tanis panicked, giving her a thousand reasons why she shouldn’t come. Naree demanded to know what the problem was and Tanis confessed the first of her secrets through gritted teeth.
“I have cocks.”
“Oh,” Naree had said, looking thoughtful on the computer screen. “So you’re trans? That’s fine, you know. I don’t care.”
“No, not trans. I... it’s not one cock. It’s two.”
That had gotten more of a thinky-faced reaction from Naree on the computer screen. She looked surprised, then in awe, and then she had Questions, but she didn’t ask any of them, instead shrugging and insisting she still wanted to come down. “Whatever. I love you. I want to see you.”
Tanis’s last, futile effort at rebuffing her from an in-person meeting was, “I’m not saying this to be melodramatic, but I’m not like other people you know. I can do things they can’t. Things you wouldn’t believe.”
“Let me decide what I can and cannot believe,” was Naree’s curt reply. Every attempt thereafter to convince her that meeting was a bad idea got argued or outright ignored. She was coming, and Tanis could or could not pick her up at the airport, but abandoning her there meant they were done.
Three weeks later, Tanis drove her new-to-her Caddy to the airport, her hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly she left a dent at the ‘two’ position. The cat would be out of the bag in short order, and Tanis braced to lose the only person with whom she’d ever really connected. Naree kissing her on the mouth, wrapping her arms around her middle in greeting outside of baggage claim only made the fear worsen. Tanis liked how Naree looked, how she felt aga
inst her, and—more than anything else—how she smelled. Sweet, a little sweaty from her time on the plane, a mix of human female, vanilla shampoo, and peanut butter airline snacks.
Naree held her hand as they went to the car. She talked incessantly when they got to the apartment. After take-out Chinese dinner and a scary movie that wasn’t all that scary, she climbed in Tanis’s lap and kissed her breathless, all the while grinding down at Tanis’s straining crotch.
“It’s cool, you know,” Naree insisted, her hand sliding down Tanis’s shoulder to cup a barely-there tit. Tanis had loved it, had settled into the touch with a pebbling nipple, but then she remembered the thing she hadn’t admitted aloud yet and she gently pulled Naree away.
“I have to show you what I meant about being different,” Tanis insisted. “Before we go any further.” Naree’d agreed, albeit reluctantly because she was flushed and smelled eager for sex, and Tanis, not knowing how else to explain herself, took Naree outside, behind the apartment. She found an old hubcap next to the dumpster and showed it to her. “Solid,” she said. “Solid metal.” Naree examined it, holding it herself.
Tanis took it from her hands and bent it in half.
She did it to three other pieces of random metal around the grounds, all far too strong to be manipulated by a regular human. Naree checked each one, incredulous, trying to bend the metal back into place with her own smaller hands, with their charmingly plump fingers and too many silver rings, and failing.
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