by Amanda Milo
“We do. They do slammin’ work,” I agree.
“That’s because they’re my crew,” Bash erupts. Not loudly, but with a lot of growly Rakhii feeling.
“Ah.” I slide my hand up his back, patting him on his shoulder right next to his puffed-out dorsal spines. “You don’t want to share.”
“She isn’t proposing sharing,” Bash smokes. As in, he says the words with little clouds of irritated smoke-filled exhales.
Gracie shrugs at me. “It took us how long to build the sets? We’d pretty much need a full-time crew if we want to try doing this every few weeks with different stories.”
“Ohhhh, that’s like full-time! I would love to be able to do this full-time,” I moan—and under my still-patting hand, I feel Bash’s back tense.
Gracie’s eyes dart from my hand on Bash, to me. She grins.
“I mean it,” I say to her, to Bash, to everyone. “This is what I love to do. This… this was wonderful. It was like having my old job back, but better—because I have people here that I love more.” I start rubbing Bash’s back, bumping his deflating spines. “I would absolutely love it if I could do this full time in this place. Next, I want to put on Annie!” I make surreptitious pointing motions to my alien. “I think somebody will want to adopt Miss Hannigan for his spirit animal. ‘Do I hear... HAPPINESS in here?’” I quote, wearing a very Bash-like worktime sneer. “We’ll have him singing a nicely threatening ‘Little Humans,’ in no time.” I hum, “‘Lucky me, lucky me, look at what I’m dealing with: liiiitttle HUMANS,’” and gesture to Gracie for her opinion. “Is this or is this not Bash’s song?”
“Oh, I think it’s perfect.” Gracie’s smile is victorious but she drops her arms and folds her hands in front of herself almost demurely. “But if we intend to do this, if this is what would make you happy, Isla, then it seems that we need to start the hiring process for a good crew. A trustworthy crew. I mean, you know I have nothing against Rakhii—but you know how they are,” she says with a lot of significance in her tone. “This brand new bunch of guys will have to be vetted to ensure they won’t see all the beautiful humans running the show and start thinking that they could simply take one or two or all of them for their own—”
“You’ll have the same men,” Bash decrees. “The ones I’ve trained to fear me who you’ve taken from my quarry will be the ones you keep.”
I glance over at him. “You don’t have to give up your guys. Ignore what Gracie’s deviously insinuating there. We can hire our own aliens to do this. We can train them ourselves.”
Bash glares at Gracie—not like he’s angry at her, but just because his eyes are set all fierce and minatory at the idea of exposing women (me) to fresh, yet-unterrified Rakhii who really do have a tendency to see a woman, bond to her, and sort of take off with her.
Bash turns his minatory look on me, only making it soften a little. “If you trained raw men, they would grow madly infatuated with you.”
“You are so good for the ego,” I tell him.
“Whereas my men all know who you belong to,” he declares. “They would never dare risk my wrath.”
Gracie pretends to be absorbed in looking at her fingernails. “So… we get to keep all the guys we’ve already taught how to build sets?”
Bash sends her a skin-peeling glower that thankfully seems to bounce right off of her wide, wide grin. “Keep your cowed males. I’ll break in a new set for my quarry.”
“Awesome! Then my work here is done,” Gracie calls, giving a little bow. But she can’t quite straighten once she’s bent over, and I’m both surprised and glad when Bash moves for her as fast as I do to help.
But neither of us are as quick at reacting as Dohrein. He’s right behind her, taking her elbow and her shoulder.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Gracie tells him and us. “But we’d better get me to a bathroom. I’ve got to check myself.”
“Are you well?” Bash asks, his forehead scales wrinkled up enough to show he really is concerned.
“I either peed myself or my water broke,” Gracie answers on a sigh. “And I’ve been ready for this kid to come for two weeks, so it’d be grand if it wasn’t incontinence.”
“Wow. Pregnancy sounds…” I start.
“Oh, it’s a blast,” Gracie agrees. “Just wait til you’re carrying the spawn of your husband. Yours will have horns.”
“Awww,” I coo, just imagining it.
“Not for days after the young emerge,” Bash corrects. “Hornbuds don’t erupt inside a mother’s womb,” he chides Gracie, like otherwise I’d have been worried.
“Our babies are going to be so cute!” I exclaim.
Bash’s tail slithers tightly around my waist. “They’ll be magnificent. They’ll be half you.”
“Oh boy, he’s about to get lucky with a line like that.” Gracie gives me a smile of thanks. “Which is good. You make sure he’s happy, we got what we came for, this was a good night,” she concludes, waving at Bash and me before Dohrein closes his arms around her and flies her down.
“We’ll need to check on her to see if she really is in labor,” I tell Bash.
“Later,” he promises. “Where in this rigging can we mate without having to worry that we’ll fall?”
EPILOGUE
ISLA
Bash has gotten a little nicer with the other humans. A lot nicer actually, but I’d never point this out to his face. He still likes to growl and look impatient, but everybody can feel the difference. He’s more tolerant. He still says terrible things about humans just so we all think he can’t stand us, but inside he’s 110% pro-human race. Or at least a high 90%. (It depends on the day.) He’s also genuinely more relaxed. Yes, he’s still dead serious about deadlines and getting work done, but he’s not going to kill anybody for taking an unscheduled pee break.
(It helps that he’s got very few humans who work in the quarry anymore. Apparently the native aliens to this planet whom he hired after we left can hold their bladders for ‘a respectable length of a shift.’)
Bash’s family has become my family. His brothers welcomed me with playful, open arms, and remind me so much of my brother that sometimes I cry happy tears when I’m around them. This upsets Bash, and at first, it upset my brothers-in-law—seeing a woman cry is not something Rakhii males handle very well—but they get it now. They were touched that I love them all like family.
Bash’s mom and dad have become my mom and dad. It’s different, having Bash’s mom—she’s not like my mom, who I could discuss anything with. Bash’s mom has different biology than mine and I can’t spill sex details about her son, so there are some boundaries and differences, but we still talk tons and hers is the most comforting maternal relationship I’ve enjoyed since my birth mom died.
Bash and I still split our time between the house in the village and the cave behind the waterfall. That’ll probably change when the baby comes. Baby-growing hasn’t actually been achieved yet, but we’re really enjoying trying. And when we do have a bun in the oven, well? Bash hasn’t voiced his dread out loud but I think he’s silently bracing himself for me to ask if we can live full-time in the village.
I figure we’ll let it all sort itself out. Maybe I’ll want the privacy so that I don’t have to struggle into a breastfeeding bra on days when I just want to bum it at home. But maybe Bash will decide he appreciates built-in babysitters if we’re close enough to friends that we can step out our front door and practically hand our tot off.
(Yeah, maybe not. Rakhii seem to be a little crazy-protective over their children and not one of them has passed off nannying duties, or so I’ve heard. I wonder if hobs might. Rakhii? No.)
Today I get up early because I intend to send Bash off with a very friendly goodbye before he heads for the quarry and I make my way to the Playhouse.
That’s right. We have a whole Playhouse to entertain in. I build new sets every few weeks, and aliens from all over the planet watch our shows.
I’m planning on givin
g my male a kiss he’ll think about while we’re apart. All day. For hours and hours. I time it so that I catch him well before the T-minus fifteen minutes he’s scheduled to walk out the door for work, and I’m grinning as I wrap my arm around his waist and prepare to take his wrist and give him a proper love bite. I’ll send him off with a smile. After all, last night’s mark is sure to be fading, I think with a smirk.
Instead, Bash’s tail wraps around my butt, boosts me high enough he slings his hand under my rear—and then we’re heading away from the living room area and moving for the kitchen counter. “This skirt,” he grumbles.
I clutch his neck. “I wore it just for you. Do you like it?”
“It’s driving me mad,” he admits and plunks my ass on the counter. My essentially bare ass—I’m not in chastity so far. It’s just me in a cute skirt… no panties.
I’d sort of been banking on something like this happening.
His fingers take hold of my skirt on either side—
And I squeak. “Wait! Wait! Don’t rip it!” Gracie will kill me. This is her design, a piece she made for herself but can’t wear yet because she said her butt is too big. This skirt is her weight-loss goal, and if we ruin it, she’ll stab out my heart with a seam ripper.
Bash carefully shoves it up my thighs. “I wasn’t going to damage it. I only thought to enjoy a quick breakfast.”
“Oh yeah?” I gasp, falling back and bumping the coffee grinder further back on the counter as his clawed fingers wrap around my thighs, sliding to the spot behind my knees, lifting my legs to his shoulders before he hauls my ass in the air. “That’s g-good! I’ve heard it’s a very important meal of the day.”
“I’ve heard the same,” he breathes into my pussy, before his tongue gives me a swipe. Then he purrs between my legs.
“Am I wearing the belt later?” I ask with a blissfully breathy sigh. “Pretty sure it’ll show in this skirt.”
His eyes heat, but he shakes his horns. “I plan to visit you for lunch breaking. I don’t want the belt to hinder my access.”
My whole body heats at his words. I hold my hand out to him, fingers splayed.
He locks his fingers with mine, brings my hand down beside my thigh, and sinks his mouth against my pussy. There’s a delightfully eerie glow cast from his eyes that lights up my mons and thighs and belly, making me look ringed in magic.
Bash is certainly making me feel magic.
He licks me until I scream, then he unknits our fingers to pin my stomach down for round two.
But back on the subject of my belt: chastity has become a game. That Bash is opting to have me walk around beltless more and more is a sign of how secure he finally feels. His trust is a beautiful thing.
I’m sure we’re not done with the belt for forever though. We’re sure to drag it out from time to time, but lately, Bash hasn’t needed it. That said, I figure when our kids are twenty or thirty we might let it slip that they were conceived after I was violently torn out of a chastity belt. Because your conception happening while your mom was getting shredded out of said belt by your horny dad is the kind of mental bomb you should share when it’s time to round out your children’s therapy sessions. I mean, you don’t want them paying the therapist for the average crap to wade through. You want to make those sessions interesting. Now the doctors won’t be bored and our kids will at least know their parents are madly in love.
We're going to have so much fun scarring our offspring.
Besides his growing trust, Bash has been motivated to ease off the belt play because they were getting expensive to repair, or in some cases, replace.
Just thinking about it makes me gasp and clutch his quills and snicker. Bash and I enjoyed a good long stretch of roleplaying where my king was away—and my naughty royal Rakhii guard wrenched my belt apart to have his way with me.
Then came the day Cyden informed us he was getting sick of making belts. Since he’s also charging a mint to repair or replace them, it’s not like he wasn’t well compensated for his talents. But apparently the man has other plans for his life than mending our sex toys.
Liiiike… plans for finding his own female. He approached Dohrein with his savings (care of us, really), whose dam supplied the considerable funds once to make a trip to Earth, wherein a shipful of hobs plus some Rakhii picked up human mates.
Cyden wants a mate.
Dohrein agreed to approach his dam for a second trip with one condition—Cyden has to take Jonohkada and find the hob a wife.
Gracie is worried, Jonoh doesn’t feel very hopeful that he’ll have success (he was on the original mission-trip to Earth and found no woman who wanted him for a mate), but Dohrein is already relaxing.
I told Gracie, “See? If you’d been in a chastity belt, your bat-husband might not have felt so wildly territorial.”
“Yeah, well,” she’d said with a strained sigh, “I was kind of pregnant, so that’s not an option I’d have wanted to explore.” She nuzzled with her baby girl then, reassuring herself. Nisha is her baby’s name. Just like her father, she was born with leathery-skinned wings, glacier-blue eyes, little claws on each finger—and she’s the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen.
“Jonoh will be fine on his own,” I’d assured her. “And he won’t be alone alone. Sounds like there’s a bunch of guys who are hoping to bring back mates.”
“Yeah,” Gracie had agreed, but she still looked like a mother swan who watched one of her cygnets get jerked underwater by an alligator snapping turtle.
“He’ll be fine,” I’d said confidently. “He’ll find some nice girl that you’ll terrify so much she’ll privately consider you the mother-in-law from hell.”
Gracie took a moment to consider this before rocking her adorable newborn and nodding. “I like this scenario.”
EPILOGUE II
BASH
(Crying Counter: I WILL BREAK YOUR HAND IF YOU TOUCH IT)
You—yes. *Sigh.* You, human. You.
There are three rules: The first is you’d better enter my domain ready to work.
It’s very simple. So are you, I realize, but I expect you to do your best. The second rule is don’t touch the Snivel Counter.
The third is don’t speak. I don’t want to hear your voice grating in my ears.
I am the Quarry Master. And I am mated to a human. What can I say? Rakhii are particularly susceptible to your strange human charms—even me.
But then, it isn’t as if all of you are irredeemable soulless alien succubi. Some of your kind prefer to remain with a single partner. Some of your kind are loyal. And one of your kind can love even a beast like me.
You are lucky that my mate is a human like you. She has softened my dislike of your species to the point that I might not snap your neck and burn the evidence of your body’s demise.
You are also lucky that thanks to my mate, we have a pup. A healthy, beautiful, half-Isla pup. And raising whelps teaches you patience. I’m far more charitable with your people because of my learned restraint, which feels as if it's being forged in fire some daycycles.
But back to our offspring. All of my mate’s forced socializing must be melting my brain cells, because I want to share with you a glimpse of this event in our lives. Let me tell you how the birth of a half-Isla brought many surprises. Good ones, actually. Which, in my experience, are the very rarest type of surprises.
I have more claws on one hand than the number of times I’ve known my dam to travel far from my parents’ den. Female Rakhii are bold in all things—save for one’s tolerance for travel. It’s rare for one of our females to thirst for any adventure beyond her cave door. There’s so much to do right where she’s standing, my dam has always said.
I’ve secretly maintained that she doesn’t appreciate the way complete control of her domain is revoked once she ventures beyond the thick stone walls of her kitchen, and she becomes a ruler no more.
(To think that everyone wonders where I get my thirst for having absolute authority from.
)
But when it was revealed that Isla was carrying our first litter, and as the whelping day approached, my dam was prepared to leave her sanctuary and make the brave trek to be at Isla’s and my side when it came time for Isla to whelp.
Rather than have her dam-in-law—her fearless, spice-tongued dam-in-law—grow uncomfortable moving through unfamiliar environments though, Isla decided to whelp in my family’s own den.
It was an event of almost unprecedented proportions.
Hobs who had assisted in human birthings joined us, as well as Angie, a human who has experience acting as a midwife to her kind. Angie’s mate, Arokh, accompanied her of course. And between them and my dam and myself, the homecave I grew up in was full to bursting. My littermates abandoned the abode and I think my sire would have too if he weren’t so invested in meeting the outcome.
Isla birthed a boy. We have a son.
When Isla struggled through that final push, it was the most relief I’ve ever felt in my life.
I felt everything at once: awe that we’d created a new life, wonder that I already loved it, gnawing anxiety at the hours of agony Isla had endured to bring our babe forth, and unparalleled joy that she succeeded and safely.
And perhaps the greatest shock of all came to me: I was grateful to be surrounded by family and friends. I had thought I would have preferred the privacy of our cave for Isla to quietly birth at home, but this… to share such an experience with loved ones, to see the females midwifing with their gentle understanding and tireless encouragement, to lend their assurance and strength to my mate as she labored, and for my dam to be present to usher in the next generation, amethyst tears shining in her eyes as she beheld her newly birthed, beloved grandpup—it was something I wouldn’t have traded for the world.
My dam soothed Isla, telling her to rest, bustling around to make her comfortable and generally glowing with pride that her adopted daughter had fought such a formidable battle and come out victorious.
But if we hadn’t had my dam here, if she hadn’t mopped the sweat from Isla’s agonized brow and been here for every minute of the horrible labor, I expect her response would have been far different. She’d have held her newly birthed grandpup in her arms, her face radiant as she beheld his tiny form, and then my dam would have looked to the pair of us, pinned us with an adversarial stare, and asked, “When will I get the rest of them?” As if we’d made some agreement and hadn’t yet delivered the set.