Calliope's Wings

by Guin Archer

  I laughed, gently batting her mouthplates away from me.

  “Does this mean I get to be an honorary auntie? Like, human-version, of course. Ooh, a baby!” I bounced on my feet much like the far younger Gaddi did when she was excited. My hands even clapped. Big Mama hissed with humor. “How big will the baby be? I’ve seen some of the other young, of course, but no newborns.”

  Several Mahzri heads shook at me while they chittered and warbled over my head.

  Maybe I wasn’t going to be like an auntie. More, I’d likely be an equal-partnership baby with the offspring growing in her womb. Goodness knew they all treated me like I was a precious wittle bitty baby. Their continued ‘isn’t she just adorable’ chatter over me told that story well enough.

  Since I was being ignored anyway, I padded around to Sekhmet’s stomach to get a better look. I leaned over her bulk and skimmed my hands against her warm hide, feeling the baby Mahzri kick back at me. Without that, though, I never would’ve been able to tell she was pregnant. Her trim waist wasn’t unduly swollen and she didn’t carry herself any different than any of the other Mahzri we rode with.

  My lips pursed and turned down into a frown as I considered something.

  “Should I even ride you, Big Mama? It can’t be good for your baaaaby! What are you doing?!”

  My vocal musings turned to screeching as one of my girl’s males hoisted me up only to slap my ass right onto Sekhmet’s back. Even without traditional eyes, I knew a glare when I saw one. He was leveling a heavy one on me, his clawed hands keeping me pinned in place.

  Message received. Io rides on Sekhmet, pregnant or not.

  The male patted my head in a very ‘good girl’ gesture and I blinked irritatedly up at him. Then, something tickled my memory as I saw the numerous cracks in his mouthplates. This was Roprah, Kor’s faithful Mahzri. Probably also the father – maybe – of the bouncing bundle of joy in Sekhmet’s belly. Provided her canoodling with her other males didn’t make her heavy with offspring.

  “So, you’re the daddy, huh?” I smacked aside his claw in my hair to stroke him sweetly across his damaged plates. He chittered happily at my touch. He fingered some of his lethal claws against the new, drooping chains connecting my bakal and wrists. The serah seemed to giggle in their inanimate way at the play.

  “Look, I’ve never been around Mahzri before this, so you’re going to have to help me out here.” I switched my words to the Tongue, hoping maybe that’d get through to them. They were all so smart and I knew they understood the words of their riders. “How much longer until Sekhmet has her offspring?”

  The male’s head shook from side to side, either not knowing how he could answer me or not wanting to tell me, and turned his mouthplates to accept a kiss of tendrils from Big Mama. The two nuzzled each other before bringing their combined display of affection onto me. The other males joined in, all but flattening me to my girl’s haunches so they could shower me in kisses. I’m not ashamed to say that I tittered like a schoolgirl.

  The shit tickled.

  When I was done laughing, Roprah was drawing me back to my feet and nudging me into Sekhmet’s arms. I went to her, hugging tightly and pressing a kiss to her chest. Her tendrils flittered through my hair and the belled chains decorating it before she, too, pushed me away. Her claw scoop-spanked my ass, making me shield it petulantly.

  “None of that!” I waggled a finger at her only to have her head tilt at me innocently.

  Bitch. She knew exactly what she was doing.

  “Fine. If you don’t want me around, I’ll go back to the party. I’m sure they’re all good and drunk by now.” I grimaced at the mental image that brought to my mind. A drunk Horde. Dear God. It was worse than when the fratboys showed up to Jimmy’s for drinks. Property damage out the wahzoo and innumerable booboos ranging from bruises to broken bones.

  Then again, the revelers seemed more game for procreation than destruction.

  Whoopie. …Not!

  Sauntering back through the relatively quiet stretch of pillau displaced from the yawning grounds where everyone was celebrating the comet’s passing, I hugged myself and swayed to the beat of the music. My steps tripped into a familiar rhythm I’d practiced time and again for one of the many fruitless pageants Ma dragged me into.

  Then, realizing that the song echoing around me wasn’t just a figment of my imagination or shadowing a beat that was minutely like one I heard back on Earth, and actually was a very popular song, I bolted. The legs of my romper were long and, now that I was putting on speed, cumbersome. I stumbled twice before breaking through to the sands and the Lubrei. Single touches of my hands to backs, arms, or sides had everyone quickly shifting to make room for me.

  Near the table where I’d only nibbled at bites of my dinner, Uptip was poised before a group of males wielding instruments. She was dancing erotically and singing a song in butchered English. She was wearing scantly anything, her breasts bound by insubstantial gauze and a too-long skirt shot through with silver and blue threads that was equally transparent.

  The two colors made me see red.

  Those were my colors.

  Aerosmith’s ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ was crooned from her mouth, a butchered monstrosity of what it should have been. Most of her speech was garbled English, a sure sign she didn’t know the words or what they meant. The only redemption she had was the fact that, while it was slower, the musicians were playing a fair rendition.

  Feeling spiteful, a little bit jealous, and a large dose of anger at her for taking something that belonged to me and my world, I pulled my mother out of me.

  Ma didn’t try to make me into her little princess simply because I was her only daughter. We were a mid-western family and pageants ran in our blood. Harmony Warren had been a model, an actress, and Miss Minnesota in her heyday. She had the voice of an angel and, while I wasn’t the diva she was, I could hold my own on stage even when I wasn’t behind my guitar.

  Before the Rahvashti could botch up the third stanza, I made my voice dominate hers.

  All eyes turned to me at once while I continued to sing, weaving myself not nearly as sensuously as Uptip did towards where she stood, and locked eyes on hers. She tried to out-pitch me, but I knew the song. I was more than comfortable with it. She was simply hijacking and ruining a classic.

  Whirling around, the tail of my braid clipped her. I heard the serah make an abortive chime from the hit, but it made me thrilled beyond measure to hear her hiss of displeasure for the insult. Not just the strike, but giving her my back like she didn’t matter. Like she was no threat.

  Yeah, no. I knew she was a threat. I just wanted to slap her in the only way I could at the moment.

  Even as I continued to sing for the roaring Udon, my men included in those numbers, I contemplated what it meant that Uptip had heard this song. Eighty years, my ass. This masterpiece came out in the late nineties. That meant there was someone on Intau, from Earth, only a couple decades ago. That meant either Uptip had met the other human or knew who did.

  If Ruune didn’t know, if the rest of the Udon didn’t know, and I knew Mari’et didn’t know, that led me to thinking that Uptip knew personally. A niggling, squirming bite of unease welled in the pit of my stomach.

  What would Uptip do to maintain her position as queen bee? Innintani meant someone higher than her in the echelon. Even from the short time I’d known her and that damnable brother of hers, I felt she could do some very bad, very evil things.

  Spinning back around, I pinned her with my gaze. She was fighting to maintain neutrality.

  I made my eyes tell her what my voice couldn’t. That I was watching her.

  When the song came to a close, I was struggling for air and my mons felt decidedly hot. My breaths were coming in unsteady pants, but I could scent the ooroo in the air. It was thick. Heavy. Two bodies rushed me from behind, one fisting the chains draped from my arms and neck, the other digging a big hand into my braid to tug my head back. My breaths wer
e noisy as I stared up at Miri and Titi, their light shining off each other.

  Then Kor’s face was over mine, his silvered eyes with the speck pupils of white blown out. He looked feral. I could hear his growl and Ruune’s grating purr. Ruune was the one lightly pulling at my chains while Kor had my hair. His free hand he used to knuckle up my bakal-encased neck and then caress my cheek.

  “Opari,” he rumbled.

  Moments later, I was lifted into Kor’s arms. His ooroo was intense. It made my body shudder and tremble helplessly. My mouth opened like a cat’s did in new territory, ferreting out what I sought. I breathed him in like he was the air I needed to survive, my nose pressing into his hot skin. My determination not to have sex with him or Ruune died a brutal death under the boot of my inner slut. The hussy never so much as perked an ear to anyone since coming to Intau, minus the first time Kor fucked me, and my psychological upheaval and revulsion of the last five years should’ve made me shy away from sex like the plague.

  My body and the chemicals inside of it told a different story.

  Fuckity fuck fuck.

  Common sense tried to use a battering ram against the figurative doors my primitive, sex-driven self was barricading from intrusion. It came with ever-haunting memories of exactly how I’d been tortured. Those memories were voices and images that sunk through like the bullet did to my brain that first death.

  “Lie still, nuije.” The growl of the male who raped me the first time thundered in my ears. I could feel his hand clamped strangling-tight around my throat. I hadn’t understood him that night, but years in this world and time had taught me his tongue enough to remember. “Take my cock like the vessel you are.”

  “Fuck,” another voice sneered, the stench of ale thick against his body and mine. I couldn’t breathe as he shuttled his cock down my throat. I heard my jaw crack hollowly. Felt the instant pain and gorge rising in my throat. A fist clobbered the side of my skull. “Suck it, nuije. I knew I paid for a young one, but the other biis’a would be better than this.”

  I screamed long and loud as my braid was snatched back into a fist. Another memory.

  “Did I say you could run, biis’a?” A booted foot trounced on my right leg, shattering bone. My screaming choked off even as my face was smashed into the stone floor of the manor I was a slave in. I was out of it when rough hands lifted my hips, ripped away my rough skirts, and a fat cock ripped through my asshole. My Master’s youngest brother laughed when my piss hit the floor. “No better than a beast, yes? So you will be mounted like the lorun you are.”

  Repeatedly, I was attacked by nightmares of my past lives. I don’t know when I was laid down onto my pallet, both males notably absent from the sheets, though not from my sides, and I don’t know when I started screaming. I only knew I had been, my voice hoarse when I choked the next sob down. I went so far as to chew on my own fist to keep my sounds in, not wanting anyone to hear my weakness. Worse, have Big Mama come charging in.

  Too late.

  The Mahzri were trumpeting and I heard their feet pounding the ground. Moments later, the great Xxyx bowed under the entryway flaps to gather herself to me. The bedding came up without an ounce of resistance. I felt us move and then her bulk folding over to shield me. We were on the pallet together, though she more or less kept me firmly planted against her front.

  Blinking through the blur of my tears, I saw her snapping her mouthplates at Kor and Ruune, keeping them away. Both males had stricken expressions on their faces, their skin-tones ashen. Their hands were hovered open and outward. Something about their kneeling forms screamed subjugation and helplessness, much like I felt in all my lives thus far.

  As shitty as I felt, I didn’t like seeing them like they were.

  “I-I-I-…” My voice was a stuttering croak that wasn’t getting better. Sekhmet crooned to me, her chin rubbing my skullcap tenderly. Her claws raked over me in both comfort and exploration for wounds. She wouldn’t find any. None physically, anyway, other than the same network of scars that showcased my sordid tale to the world.

  All my hurts were internal now. Emotional and irreparable. I could hide them, but they weren’t going to go away.

  “I apologize,” I finally grated out. My hand found my neck and rubbed, as though I could touch the ache away. “I was…overcome. It was not you.”

  “Uum Innintani,” Kor’s own voice was more than a little shaken. He’d only ever sounded so distraught once before; when I told him about my sluiced tongue. Slavery he knew. Rape he knew. He must have at least suspected that that wasn’t the end to it. That I’d been silent because voicing my truths brought them back to life.

  “Yakpa, uum kisa-uu. I have allowed You to keep Your past for long enough.” A note of steel returned to his voice in his next command. “Yakpa. Speak to me.”

  “Lo!” I latched onto Sekhmet desperately. Softer. “Lo. Lo lo lo.”

  “Calliope,” Ruune whispered, his tone choked. Big Mama lashed her tail at him threateningly when he made to stretch and touch me. He flinched, but didn’t retreat. He was braver than me.

  ‘No’ became my mantra. My sobs returned.

  The dam was opened.

  Sekhmet wasn’t tolerant of the men anymore. She hissed and then bugled loudly. Dizzy from my hiccuping sobs, I knew she stood up and began moving. The bonewood of my pillau cracked near the entrance and the front flap tore. She didn’t so much as twitch from whatever destruction she reaped. More bodies piled in around us, all big and warbling in distress.

  “I-I-I’m o-oh-oh-okay,” my sniffled return wasn’t all that convincing to the Mahzri.

  I wasn’t surprised when she hunkered us down back where she’d been with the males not too long ago. In truth, we couldn’t have been more than a half an hour away from when I left the festivities the first time. Such a short time between utter happiness for finding out about Big Mama’s pregnancy and overwhelming pain as I got lost in my memories.

  I felt like a fucking ass for acting like that. When did I become such a baby?

  Gross as it was, I rubbed my dripping nose into my girl’s chest, taking comfort from her rocking me sweet-as-can-be. She didn’t twitch at my sullying of her.

  Instead, I was gently laid down into my omma. The creak of the woven fronds was a comfort as much as the gentle sway of its rounded base once I was in it. I pressed the blankets and sheets to my lips and put all my paltry strength into getting my shit together.

  Mahzri loomed over the omma, their clawed hands pushing and pulling the basket’s rim with deliberate slowness. Sekhmet was one of them to reach down in to pet and stroke me tenderly. The feeling of being a baby, this time swaddled up in a bassinet, came back. I couldn’t hate it, though. Not in the least. Right now I needed their clear show of affection for me.

  I felt like shit for a few reasons. One of the biggest being that I’d been such a cocktease for Kor and Ruune. I’d been rubbing myself against them like a bitch in heat and then, what? I have a meltdown like a total loser. Then again, I knew logically that the psychological damage I suffered was likely to last a lifetime. Anything could trigger it.

  My helpless lust, I knew, did it this time. Feeling my body respond against my conscious will. Thinking about how messed up I should be and how wrong it was to want any sort of intimacy…it did me in.

  My eyes were beginning to burn from crying so hard.

  Unable to face anyone, even the Mahzri who adored me, I clenched my eyes tightly shut and curled up under my blankets like a shlub. I pulled them tight enough that all my extra bells were silenced and I couldn’t be distracted by them. My snuffling was interrupted only by the gentle stroke of clawed hands to my back and sides, their quiet chitter, and a background of worried Lubrei, their voices pitched into the quietest of whispers.

  Maybe it was because I was so suddenly fatigued. Maybe it was the stress and lingering trauma reemerging. Or maybe, just maybe, there was such a thing as life after death and my own guardian angel was looking out for me; saw I w
as in need.

  He came to me in a memory like all the awful ones that plagued me for years and came calling the night of the Sisters’ reunion, but where I replayed the moment of us long ago, I felt his soul embrace mine.

  God Bless you, Mac.

  “Evenin’, Sweetcheeks. Gimme some sugar.”

  I smelled him coming even before his warm arms embraced me from behind. I leaned into the cozy confines his body provided for me and turned and arched my head so he could take his prize from my willing lips.

  My man was a hero to many, but he was my other half. My heart and soul. He owned every inch of my physical and metaphysical being.

  He had strong shoulders and an ass as tight as a drum. I wanted to pinch them now, but my hands were coated in cinnamon and butter for the apple pie I was making us. Not that he’d mind. He never cared if I got his scrubs dirty.

  I supped at his lips like he wanted, like we both wanted, and felt his hands join mine in the bowl to toss the apple slices. His calluses rubbed the softer skin at the backs of my hands tenderly, touches that weren’t accidental at all. His touch on me anywhere was never an accident.

  “Missed you,” I murmured once he let me free from his drugging kisses enough to be heard. His next peck found my cheek instead, much more chaste than his welcome home ones.

  “I missed you, too, Io.” His elbows pinched in to my sides to hug me awkwardly as we worked on our non-kinky, completely above board dessert.

  The adult dessert would come once we laid down in bed or got frisky on the couch. Maybe even after the pie was in the oven. Whenever the mood struck us, really. Whipped cream preferably included.

  Twenty-five and twenty-eight years old…we were a horny couple in the prime of our lives. No shame in that.