by Guin Archer
Oh God. Oh God!
“Mayday! Mayday!”
The wind licked brutally across my cheeks as I performed an impromptu, and likely painful, swan dive through the open air. My wings flapped and beat awkwardly around me as I tried to regain some semblance of grace, but it was a losing battle.
I grunted, then Vorch grunted, and we both grunted together as I crashed into his chest, knocking him – and thereby us – clear off Hathor’s back. Vorch took the brunt of our landing, the ends of his horns sinking into the cracked earth from the hit. His arms locked around me under the base of my wings, his claws almost breaking through the skin of my trou-covered ass. He growled quite peevishly over my head.
“Biis’a,” he snarled darkly before spanking one ass cheek with great force. I yelped from the hit and slapped his hard pectorals in retaliation. When I looked down at him, his red eyes were glinting in upset. My wings were draped out to either side of us, limp and wispy, and I felt how sore my traps were. I had a moment of clarity to realize exactly why everyone had a habit of putting walls of pillow around me when I slept. It was to keep my wings supported.
“Do not ‘biis’a’ me, you brute! How else am I to learn to fly? You would not allow me on the ship.”
“The winds would have thrown You to the sea,” he grunted in a barbaric fashion. He slapped my ass again. “I am trying to protect You, Calliope, but You are making it difficult!”
“Let me go. Now.” Embarrassingly, I wasn’t able to push off of him with the grip he had against my lower back. Instead, I ended up doing some pathetic-ass pushups over his torso, grunting like a pig with all the effort I put into getting free. Old though he may have been, the bastard was far from feeble.
“No more flying. I mean it, Biis’a. If it requires me wrapping myself around You for the remainder of the sol, I will do it.”
“You cannot tell me what to do!”
Jesus, Io…can you sound any more like a brat?
“I can.” In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, the male had us back on our feet. Or, rather, he was on his feet and I was awkwardly wrapped around his front. I didn’t drop my legs to hang uselessly because, let’s face it, my dead weight wasn’t anything to him. Besides, it wasn’t uncomfortable having my arms around his thick neck with my thighs clipping his hips. He was as hard as stone, but he was warm and felt familiar to me.
Plus, he smelled nice.
Point to the sexy-scented orc.
Hathor snorted at us in a disgruntled way that told me she was sick of our shit. Barely five days in our company and she was already tired of our antics. I couldn’t blame her.
Vorch tossed me up onto the matriarch’s bare back seconds before climbing up behind me. He cinched me into his front and between his legs with both of mine draped over one of his thighs. My wings made it all but impossible to rest with my back to his front. So, that being said, I curled one around behind his back and the other draped over my left shoulder like a long, psychedelic shawl made of mist which blanketed everything except my neck and head. The thing was warm.
“What did You see?”
My shoulders slumped and I sighed dejectedly.
“More burned villages. More death.” I clawed into my thigh angrily. “How could he do this? I know he is upset, but to destroy everything?”
“He is heart-sick without You, Calliope. I cannot blame him this.” The male’s tight lips found my scalp and kissed it. “I would tear this world apart for You. I have nearly done so each time You have passed back to the One for Your change.”
“I can blame him.” I lifted my hands to scrub them roughly across my face. I could feel the air temperature dip outside of my wing-made cocoon and knew my dour mood was affecting the weather again. I marshaled myself and made my temperament switch back from the negative downturn that could, in all likelihood, bring storms down on our heads. “It disturbs me that he would do this. There must have been innocents in those villages. And, even if they were all guilty, mass-killing is not the answer.”
“It is the way of the Udon, my sweet, to take where it will. Your heart is very tender, perhaps too much so for us all, but it is that which will heal Your Tohtahk. You will make the Udon better than it ever has been.”
“I do not have a tender heart.” I was too much of a jaded bitch for that nonsense. But, really, who wouldn’t be affected by so much senseless death?
“You do.”
“You annoy me greatly. You know this?”
“I do.” He nodded once before tilting his head off to the side and smirking at me. “I think You will enjoy putting me in my place and I will like irritating You to see that beautiful fire in Your pure eyes shine. You are radiant when You are angry, my sweet.”
“I should smack you.”
“Perhaps, but You will not. Again, You have a tender heart.”
Kinda hated the guy for being so smugly right.
“You returned from the direction of Mel’lau. Did You see it?” He nuzzled me again. “We should be close enough now for it to have been within sight from the height You flew.”
He squeezed me to his front and grumbled. “Do not stray so far from me again.”
“I think I saw it.” I pointed unhelpfully in the direction Hathor and the male Mahzri accompanying us were outright running in. Truly, the pace the creatures set was mind boggling. They didn’t stop, not once, in the past days. They just kept up a staggering, breakneck pace that would’ve killed any and every other living creature on Earth days ago.
“It was dark on that horizon, but I could see sollight glinting off glass or polished stone. It looked very large.”
Vorch nodded his head. “It is. Mel’lau, being the Innintani’s sacred city, is the largest of Luintak. Your Xerbai will have sheltered there in Your palace with Your kut while the Tohtahk rages. This is where we go first.”
“How do you know that they were not…that they were not sent to death with me?” I swallowed thickly at the mere thought of that happening to any of them. Not my Ruune or Mari’et or my devout girls. “I know that happens in this world.”
“Those that are Yours belong to Mel’lau and in Your palace when Your physical body is no more. They will serve at Your alter until their final breaths leave them and then return to Your side in Skyvryn for the rest of eternity. This was made so by an Innintani long before any of our ages. She, too, had a tender heart. She would allow no unnatural death to befall Her ‘precious’ ones.” He stroked the side of my hip comfortingly. “You do not want to hear it, but Your power and name protects them as it would no others. Were You not who You are, they would have been set upon Your pyre.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
Heathens.
“I still do not see how any of you could know you were either Drake or Xerbai or Muir. I understand…me,” insert awkward self-body-tap here, “but all of you are simply Tauren to me. You look and feel the same.”
As if reprimanding me, his pelvis thumped up against my hip and his previously buried kii poked me. I grit my teeth against scolding him for it.
“You wound me, sweet Io. You do not feel this between us?”
Okay, I was gonna smack him. Fucking old-ass pervert!
I reeled my hand back to strike his cheek – and it wouldn’t’ve even been a very hard hit because of the angle of how I was seated across him – but he caught my wrist preemptively. He raised my hand up to his face so he could lick and nuzzle my palm with a growling purr like a contented cat. Behavior like that buckled my ire more efficiently than a kick to the kneecaps.
“We are marked as shimi with blotches over our backs. The birthmark fades quickly as we mature so that we can hide amongst our kind until our Innintani come to claim us, as possessing one of an Innintani’s Visivi before Her coming is a way to garner Her favor, through them, when She is arrived. Any one of the three could easily be abused and used against Her.”
These people were going to give me a migraine. I tripped back inwardly to thinking that not even Net
flix would pick up a script that sounded half as absurd as my life was turning out to be.
“Uptip’s brago,” I began only to have the male I was sitting on snarl violently. His claws pinched my skin hard.
“Do not bring that bishtak up in my presence. I will flay him alive, cut his abdomen open and allow the birds to feast on his entrails as he is pulled by his ankles behind a Mahzri.”
Ooookay…homeboy was righteously pissed.
“He attempted to claim what is mine.” He hugged me tighter to himself. “You are mine and I am Yours. That los’kah is no more Muir than his tersti is Rahvashti. They are imposters and traitors against the One.”
“Do you know if they were the ones who killed me this last time?” I pressed two fingers to the hard node of skin smack in the center of my throat. The scar from the arrow was there just above the thin line of where I’d been beheaded.
“I am aware of nothing beyond You, my sweet,” he began softly, his red gaze tortured as he watched me fondle my most recent mortal wound. “But I am certain they had a hand in it, yes. The Ohmber would not have dared poaching on the Udon without push from ones with inside knowledge of the Udonak.”
Bloodthirstiness curdled in me and I had the urge to wrap my newly clawed hands around Uptip’s throat to strangle her. I didn’t have proof yet, but I felt the same way as Vorch.
The siblings weren’t innocent in my most recent death.
“Hmmm,” Vorch hummed faintly before jerking his chin up and out. “I begin to see it now. Mel’lau is ahead.”
I turned my own head and squinted. The sun was setting and it was making it hard to see in the distance, but just like in the air, I could see the twinkle of the far-away city. The Mahzri had to have seen it, too, because their speed seemed to all but double.
A second set of eyelids – creepy as fuck when I realized I had them – shuttered vertically over my eyes so the wind and debris being kicked up didn’t blind me. They only filmed my vision by a small margin and I was grateful for their protection even if it was the alienest shit my body underwent.
Wings? …Bring ‘em on.
Tusks? …Sure! Why not?
Second set of eyelids? …say what?!
“Eat,” the male barked at me before thrusting a stick of jerky into my wilted hands. I started chewing into it on autopilot. “This is bound to be a long lune. You must eat while You still are able before the Lubrei descend upon us.”
Gee…he sure knew how to nerve a girl up.
We were about as far from being ‘under the radar’ as anyone could get.
I was stood behind Vorch on Hathor’s flank, bracing myself with his swooping horns that still flecked off dust and sand from our crash earlier. I kept my wings halfway open because they were more than a little heavy when I just let them drape. It was hard to believe that things made of glittery, prismatic smoke could have any weight to them. Or maybe it was just my imagination?
Either way, the Lubrei of Mel’lau were quick to genuflect as the Xxyx’s Xxyx carted us through the streets towards the palace Vorch said was in the depths of the city.
I could feel the tension in the Muir’s body through my legs and front and could read it in the sickly darkness that tinged his aura. He was still self conscious about his horns and skin-tone. Probably, too, his sordid history with the Udon. How many were still remaining who knew about him specifically? Would it even matter if they did since he was mine now?
We were going to find out, I was sure.
The impact of Hathor’s feet on the cobbled street through my new ones via her back was…strange. When I was walking normally, I felt bouncy. Like, just maybe I didn’t need a springboard to get onto Big Mama’s back anymore. I could always use my wings, too, once I learned how to do more than weave and wobble like a drunken goose – Uncle Waldo and his basted-in-a-white-wine-sauce came to mind.
Flying was tricky business.
The city around us was teeming with life and vitality despite the later hour and I admired the cleanliness and architecture of it. The stone walls of the domiciles were polished like marble or quartz and there were glass-filled windows at every corner. Caden fronds and foliage native to Luintak was showcased everywhere. Mel’lau was ancient by comparison to the cities I knew on Earth, yeah, but it was by no means in shambles.
The palace of the Innintani – the damn thing didn’t even have a name – stood tall and imposing the closer we got to it at Hathor’s daunting pace. She’d barely slowed down once we broke through the opened gates of the sprawling city. We were moving almost as rapidly through the alternately wide and then narrow streets as we had been in the desert.
Fast, fast, fast.
I felt my neck crick as we got close enough to see the sheer magnitude of the palace. Black and silver, marbled stone. Windows as black as the abyss-like structure and impossible to see through to the inside. Stairs leading up to an imposing entryway consisting of at least ten, twenty-foot tall doors of obsidian. Shocks of red glass peppered the marble-cobbled streets beneath. There were spires and columns and towers. The place was a fucking fortress unto itself.
I could easily imagine the damned thing being haunted by any number of ghosts and spooks.
Hathor was running up the several-dozen steps when I spotted him.
With a sobbing cry that caught me completely off guard, I vaulted off the Mahzri female’s back and beat my wings as hard as I could. Between one blink and the next, I was wrapped around Ruune’s body and tackling us both to the stone platform outside one set of the palace’s doors.
Ruune openly sniffled into the hair at the top of my head and squeezed me in a backbreaking cuddle that I didn’t hate in the least. I rubbed myself all over him and tried to squeeze myself into the familiar warmth of his body. My lips slapped kisses all across his bare, unbound chest and neck. My man crooned long and low to me, the sound nearly a keening cry.
“Uum Io. Uum Innintani. Uum Taytani. Uumat.”
“My man,” I cried back just as loudly.
God! I missed him so fucking much and I just didn’t comprehend how much until he was back in my arms. My sweet, sweet, beautiful man. Worse, I knew I had the ‘better’ part of the deal. While I was dead, I was unaware. I only knew the week or so of being back into a physical body. For him and everyone else, it’d been months.
“Uum Taytani, Your wings! They are opari.” Ruune’s voice was mumbled into my hair and I was surprised he could even see the things over his nuzzling. Then again, they were fluttering around us and raining something like powdery glitter everywhere. I could feel the backs of his hands as much as I could his palms as the wispy trails of them coasted against his skin.
So nice.
“My sweet, You should rise now. We have an audience that I wish we did not.” Vorch wasn’t touching me, but he was very close. His tone was also harsh.
Looking over my shoulder and dipping a wing low to see him better, I could see the tense way he held himself and the pinched expression he wore. His crimson eyes were moving restlessly over the crowd Ruune and I had drawn in our reunion. They were, as a whole, clustered at the base of the towering steps and landing, but there wasn’t a doubt that they were avidly watching the spectacle.
Ruune took me by surprise by growling up past me to Vorch, his arms squeezing me ever tighter. At this rate I was going to have busted ribs.
“Be nice,” I snapped at my Xerbai, pinching one of his pierced nipples in punishment until he hissed and backed down from his feral display of tusks and teeth.
For his part, Vorch calmly ignored Ruune and held his hand out in offering to me. I took it, but I also curled a forearm behind my man’s neck to drag him up with me. The end result had his face momentarily pressed into my crotch. I could feel the heat of his breath even through the leather.
Not here, Io. Not here and now.
“Calliope?” Mari’et’s shaky voice brought my eye to where she stood amongst my other ladies, her body encased beautifully in a half-gauzy ensemble
of blush and burgundy. She was wearing a headpiece that I knew signified her acknowledged status as a healer of high stature.
“Rocho, my friend.” I stopped to pull Ruune up and out of my hooha – wherein he seemed to have gotten lost and-or consumed – and offered her a smile. “It is good to see you again. All of you.”
“Inside,” Vorch barked, all but pushing me to the opened doorway. He wasn’t nearly as happy as I was. “Now, Biis’a!”
Gasps of horror and disbelief abounded. Ruune sneered up at Vorch. Uh-oh.
“You do not speak to Her in such a way, bishtak.”
I did something then that I never thought I would. I cracked the flat of my palm across Ruune’s face, hurting myself but shocking him into placidity instantly. His shoulders stooped while he all but shrunk before my eyes.
“You do not speak to anyone like that so unjustly, Ruune. You do not know him.” To take the sting out of my reprimand, I closed both my hands around his cheeks and pulled his forehead down to kiss his heavy brow. I made his gaze meet mine before I continued. “Beyond, he is my Muir just as you are my Xerbai. You will see much of him. I will not have animosity between you.”
“But he is…”
“Inside!”
Vorch was done waiting on us. He halfway shoved Ruune out of his way, picked me up, and marched us into the palace. Ruune followed on his heels while Mari’et and the other females waited until we were several feet ahead to follow. Hathor and her troop of merry-Mahzri followed last.
The doors were slammed shut behind us and bolted securely.
Here we go.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I skirted my claws against the bells of my bakal, thrilled to have them returned to me. Their delicate, cheerful tinkle was literal music to my ears.
Never thought I’d miss the shits as much as I did.
At present, I was seated on something very much like the throne I’d been perched on in Granzee. My wings were opened behind me and halfway folded back in around the arms so their ends tickled my booted ankles. Also like in the other city, both Hathor and Big Mama – now even bigger with her swollen belly – were bracketing me in and watching over the strained squabbling of two of my Visivi and my guard. Vorch, for his part, mostly just released angry little snarls and growls while Ruune muttered profanities. The guard, who’d remained in Mel’lau with the Pasha and Gishtak while the Zikta followed my wayward Drake, were arguing over what to do next.