by Guin Archer
I knew what we were going to do, but I knew none of them were going to like it. Mostly because it was more of a ‘me’ thing than a ‘we’ thing.
Mari hurried up the steps of my slight dais – a veritable alter for my living, breathing self – to offer me the glass goblet of Sky-nectar I’d asked for. She hovered nearby, her jaw tense as she watched the males bandying back and forth.
“You are well.” It was more of a statement from me than a question. My healer friend was dressed finely, looked markedly well fed, and there wasn’t as much of a shadow lingering over her or clouding her aura any longer.
“I am.” Her answering smile was tremulous. She reached a hand out to me and I touched our fingertips together. Power zinged from me to her and I watched her aura sparkle. She stumbled back a step, breaking our connection and my transference of power. I hadn’t intended to do it, but her energies fed greedily off mine automatically.
Other than the pop of heat that lasted only a fraction of a second in my fingers, I couldn’t feel the loss of the power I gave to her. It was a lot, too. Far more than I’d have been able to comfortably shift before my last death and change.
“Forgive me,” I bobbed my head once in apology. I could see how her hands vibrated at her sides and felt as well as saw the renewed glow of her aura. I’d need to watch myself so I didn’t accidentally hurt her or anyone else.
“No need, uum Taytani. No need.” Her grin was cracking her face in two. She gestured to me, wings and all. “I am merely happy to see You returned and in good health.”
“Aichi. Good health.” I sighed deeply when Vorch narrowed his crimson eyes at me, clearly reading me better than anyone else in the room. He should. He’d been privy to my entire existence on Intau in a way no one else was. He was beyond intimately familiar with me and my manner. He could probably read me better than I could myself sometimes.
“You are not going alone, uum Innintani,” the Captain snapped at me, his jaw set tight.
His command shut everyone up as though the jumble of growling sounds had been turned into a whip against unprotected flesh.
Whoops.
“You do not order me, Vorch.” My index claw tapped the goblet I set to the arm of my throne. “You serve. You obey.”
“Yuum’a uumat.” You are mine.
I couldn’t suppress my sideways smirk. The guy was a stubborn, persistent fucker. I’d give him that much. It helped, too, that he was handsome in his orc-ish way. I’d grown fond of heavy, hairless brows, tusks, and overly muscular physiques. Human men were now classified as ‘pretty’ in my mind while Tauren males were ‘handsome’. I figured I had to be a pretty deranged puppy to find them attractive in their own way where I’d once seen them as nothing but monsters.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Or is it risen? Cuz, really, I’m a freakin’ angel now. Who’s gonna argue my place in this world? Who’s gonna naysay me? I’m damn near a goddess in the flesh.
Oookay, I snorted inwardly at that last bit. I’d stick with angel. A corrupt, spiteful, half-orc angel. Thinking of myself as a goddess was going too damn far even in the privacy of my own mind.
“You will not meet that foolish los’kah on Your own. You will wait for the Horn to summon him to You. Safe here in Mel’lau.”
“I will not.”
I stood, leaving my goblet behind. Giddiness swamped me when I noted not for the first time that I wasn’t diminutive anymore. I was still shorter than everyone in the room, yes, but I didn’t have to crane my neck all the way back to meet the eyes of my fellow females. I actually reached Mari’s shoulder when I walked up beside and then beyond her.
My boots thumped loudly on the stone floor.
I hadn’t seen much of the palace, but the place was as gargantuan as I thought it’d be from the outside looking in. Cathedral-height ceilings. Masterfully done architecture. Sculptures, carvings, and paintings everywhere. I couldn’t keep count of all the rooms we passed as I was ushered quickly into a suite of rooms which were my bedchambers to have a quick bath and my bakal reattached. I turned down one of my familiar, see-through dresses to return to my sun-warmed trou and blouse. That in and of itself probably clued Vorch in to my plans.
I padded between my men, both the one I’d culminated our bond with with sex and the one who’d been psychically connected to me since my first death, and touched my hands to their chests. Both of them were stiff as statues and wore identical expressions of ire.
I didn’t look at them. Instead, I gazed up into the faces of my guard. Gaddi’s Dorai, Daal, was amongst them. I wanted to ask where my friend was, but I knew she would be safe if the male that was her mate was still standing before me. He wouldn’t, just like most Dorai couldn’t, have continued living without his Pasha.
“You will obey,” I told them firmly before outlining my plan.
Yeah, no one liked it.
Tough noogies.
“Biis’a,” Vorch roared as half a dozen Zikta attempted to drag his ass off the highest spire of the palace. He wasn’t being moved. Ruune, too, was being held back, his keepers two less than Vorch’s as he was just slightly easier to handle with his more slender stature.
“I explained this to you both,” I groused even as my heart warmed at their overwhelming worry for me took them over. Their auras were awash with the same fear I could see in their eyes, but there wasn’t anything I could do to make them feel any better. Not now.
“Return to my side. Now!”
“Your sweetness will get you nowhere.” My saccharine jeering was met by deaf ears. I sighed bitterly. Tan tightened the strap of my double-bladed spear’s harness further, ensuring the thing wouldn’t go flying off my back. Hopefully it wouldn’t impale me, either, if this sink-or-swim moment turned into a same-sad-ending rendition of the Titanic. I could barely get a full lungful of breath in from the constriction of the harness around my torso.
“Find Uptip. Bring the nuiji here and hold her until I return. Do not kill her brago if he fights. They have much to answer for.” I adjusted the silver and white-leather gauntlets over my wrists, securing them so the belled bangles had nowhere to move. The other chains were secured with silver-studded lashes so they wouldn’t be caught by anything once I was earthbound. More specifically, no one could grab them and yank me around by them if they tried.
“Calliope!”
“I will return.” This was a heartfelt promise I had every intention of keeping.
“Do not do this,” Ruune begged through gnashing teeth. Veins popped in his arms and across his neck as he strained against his detainers. “Lo’to. Wait for the Horn to summon the Tohtahk. He will come.”
“I cannot take the chance that he will not. Not while there is blood being spilled across the Southlands.” I hummed and leaned my head over the railing. The wind beat my face and I felt a swirl of vertigo at looking all that way down. I was nuttier than a fruitcake for doing what I was about to. “He is out of control. He needs me.”
He also needed a swift, hard kick in the ass, but I didn’t need to say that out loud.
Tan’s face was pinched with disapproval as she was handed a crossbody type of satchel that sluiced between my wings when she hooked it to me while the pouch hung a little over my right hip and thigh. It was secured by a strap around my thigh so it wouldn’t shift and flop. The satchel was small, so I didn’t have very many supplies stored in it. Just some jerky, dried fruits and nuts, and a single water-skin.
I needed to make this a speedy rescue.
Lifting my wings up higher, I felt the comfortable weight of them. I felt their heat around me and knew they were glittering and glowing brightly in the now mostly clear, sunny-sky day.
Funny, but I’d have thought I’d be scared shitless about my upcoming flight – attention all passengers…flight 20-20 from Mel’lau to Who-Da-Fuk-Knows is now boarding – but I wasn’t. Well, okay, yeah, I was a little nervous, but I wasn’t having a full blown panic attack.
After
all, what was the point of having wings if you weren’t supposed to use them?!
Neither Ruune nor Vorch seemed to agree with my way of thinking because, after hugging my friends briefly and accepting a chirping nuzzle from both Sekhmet and Hathor, they lost their minds even more as I climbed up over the spire’s decorative wall to perch on the ledge. Everything spun a little dizzily as I looked way down, but a few blinks of my eyelids cleared that right up.
“Uum Taytani!”
“Calliope!”
“I will return soon, uum los’kah. Protect each other for me.” I waved a jaunty little finger wave at them before biting the bullet and jumping.
Bad idea, you dumb bitch.
So, apparently, just like in Earth cities, winds tended towards buffering against buildings. As in, that shit was knocking me around like a ragdoll. I eeped and yelped and choked with the best of them as I tried to straighten my wings out. Even as the winds shot by my ears and made me feel like I was stuck in a vortex, I could hear female screams and male roars.
No one has faith in me.
Course, as the ground got ever-closer, I was beginning to lose faith in myself. I chose the spire because, well, wouldn’t it have been easier to already be up so high than pump endlessly at my wings to get up there? Turns out, no, it wasn’t easier.
I should’ve opened my wings as soon as I jumped. Shoulda been the wussy parajumper that opened his chute immediately. Premature extension would’ve served me well.
My teeth clacked from the force of the wind beating my face and I made my body go flat. No more diving. Arrowing straight for the ground was compounding my issue, I was sure.
If I was going to hit earth, I was gonna flop it and be an Io-pancake – extra splatter – all over the marbled street. With any luck, no one would be able to differentiate between my blood and the red glass amidst the stone.
Luckily, my new position helped my wings to catch the air they needed and I made a pathetic little grunting sound closer to a cough when my body lurched backwards as though the hand of God had fisted my back. I guessed I probably looked like an uncoordinated pidgeon as I got my shit together and flapped upwards again.
Fortune smiled on me because, by the time I reached level with my entourage on the spire again, I had everything completely under control. They’d never know how close I came to dying from a bellyflop.
That’d go down as my most embarrassing death to-date. Not my worst, but certainly not my best.
For a one, they all looked like I’d just scared ten years off their lives. If I aged anymore, they could join the club. A decade for them, a century for me. My heart was barely coming back under control.
“I’ll be back,” I reiterated in English, sounding nowhere near as awesome as everyone’s favorite Terminator, before turning – roll wing, pivot torso, downward thrust – and flying off.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I could teleport!
I was several hours flight – and dayum, could I fly fast! – out of Mel’lau when I learned of this nifty little trick. Pure accident, of course, since I was trying to perform aerial stunts here and there. I’d shrug it off later as making sure I was familiar enough with my new body that I wouldn’t end up hurting myself later, but we all knew what I was really doing.
I was being a goober.
Either way, it was during one of these stunts that I discovered my Beam Me Up ability.
I had rolled my wings closed around me and dove, probably looking something like a psychedelic bomb, over a large body of water. My plan had been to open my wings up just before crash-point and shoot back up like a rocket. The water was my failsafe in case it didn’t work. Which, with my shit luck, it wouldn’t.
Only, it didn’t happen at all like I thought it would in my head.
Instead, I felt way-hot heat scorching my skin from my wings and had to close my eyes against the brightness of them. I thought, without really intending to think about it, about the last time I’d felt so hot. The time in the Northlands where I’d been burned at the stake and had the flames licking at my skin, the unholy brightness of the fires forever scarred in my mind.
Then, the heat was gone, I was blasted with cold air, and when I opened both my eyes and wings…I was flying over the courtyard where my murder had taken place.
The villagers screamed when they saw me. Like, Godzilla is on a rampage scream. I was pretty sure a couple orc-people even shit themselves.
So…fucking…cool.
If only I could breathe fire…
Once I saw the archers come out along the wall of the nearby keep, I decided it was time to get the heck out of dodge. One arrow through the neck, one that choked me in memory, was enough. I didn’t need to be punched full of them like a pincushion. I’d be flying Swiss cheese.
Dah dah dah dahhh! Cheese away!
Doing a half-helix, half-barrel roll, I made like a tree and leafed.
Get it?
This time, instead of diving, I just wrapped my wings back around me, felt the heat, and thought of the little sea village I’d called home for only a few weeks before the raiders came. The purple sand beaches and blue palm trees. I could’ve happily lived there for the rest of my twisted life on Intau.
The taste of salt air in my mouth and the much nicer, warm brush of ocean-tempered air against my body prompted me into opening myself back up.
The village was no more than weather-battered wood and toppled chimneys now, but the landscape looked virtually untouched. It was deliciously warm without being too hot. Beautiful in a way Luintak’s deserts could never be. Even knowing Frankenstein’s Kraken was out there somewhere with all its evil spawn couldn’t lessen its appeal.
I needed to bring my men here. Maybe we could have a wittle, itsy-bitsy kinda honeymoon of the kinky, orc-people variety? …If I could just drag my Tohtahk off his road of revenge and carnage long enough to do it!
Puffing out a disgruntled breath, I wondered if, just maybe, I could get myself to Kor’s side quicker if I thought about him. I didn’t know exactly where he was and was only flying in the direction the last runner came from. Of course, the male and his Zikta left a trail miles and miles long worth of destruction and chaos. It was his version of breadcrumbs. And those breadcrumbs made it pretty damned clear which direction he was moving.
Well, I thought blithely to myself, only one way to find out.
So, wrapping myself up again, I Scotty’d.
Only, my thoughts drifted again. They drifted somewhere sad and far, far away from my current problems. They shifted to the family I left behind on Earth. They moved to the life I lost and the friends I’d never see again. There were places and things I’d seen that, despite all the wrongs I suffered, were worth sharing. Like my ruined village by the sea.
Rachel would’ve loved it.
Something wasn’t right when I came out of my self-made cocoon. I knew that immediately.
The feeling was amplified when a bullet plowed through my left thigh like I’d turned to hot butter. I screeched an unholy cry and plummeted right onto the tarp of a trampoline, then bounced right back up and off to the rose bushes inconveniently close to said trampoline.
Ow.
“Get out of there, Zulu! I’m about to pump you full of buckshot.”
“Who the fuck you callin’ Zulu, you little prick?!” I groaned and struggled to crawl out of the ornamental bush from hell. This exact flower was why I’d never gotten into gardening. The shit always had it out for me. A thorn scratched close to my eye and I’d had it.
With an almighty roar – also see banshee shriek – I flared my wings out hard. They annihilated the pseudo-innocent bush in a blaze of technicolor glory. Petals and leaves turned to ash while the branches flopped lifelessly to the dewy ground of a cool morning. And me, the badass that I was, pinwheeled my arms to stay aloft on my bum leg.
The shit that shot me needed his skull cracked.
“Holy fucking shit! Grams’s gonna be pissed. I just shot a fuckin’ an
gel.”
“Easy with the fucks, you little shit. It’s uncultured.”
Pot, meet kettle. I rolled my eyes at myself.
My hand warmed and I placed it to my thigh and blood-soaked trou. It was to my extreme delight that I realized my defunct healing ability had migrated to something more substantial. I could heal myself now. Which was pretty wicked considering how often I found myself on the shit end of the stick.
Peering up through my lashes at the young man that’d practiced his aim on me, I noted a vaguely familiar nose and jade green eyes. There was only one woman I knew who had eyes like that…
“Do you know Rachel Smythe?”
“Oh shit. Oh shit.” Like a dunce, the kid dropped his gun and ran for the house not too far away. He tripped over a lawn chair set up by an ash-filled fire pit, but had enough grace to catch himself. His stumble was snigger-worthy, though, and I found myself doing just that as he started hollering.
“Yo! Grams! Grams!”
You pain in the ass. You were absolutely no help.
I watched his slender, too young for me ass running for the laden porch. I’d wager a guess that he was all of seventeen years old. Maybe eighteen. He was a youngin’ for sure. It was good to know, too, that I wasn’t so much of a slut that I’d lust after a kid. I was beginning to wonder about myself after falling for Tauren males, too.
Padding out from my own ash pit, I shook my wings out before tucking them in. Skimming my fingers through the insubstantial smoke, I hummed to feel the tingle of whatever otherworldly power they held. I wondered what else I was capable of.
I felt shaky, though, kinda like my insides were being pulled in two directions. The biggest part of me was wrenching back to where I suspected my new world to be. To where my men were. My head was cleaving with an instant migraine as I fought against whatever forces were urging me to come back.