The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

The Greenfield Family.

While the graduating seniors are having their private celebration that we saw in the last chapters, we check in now on what the rest of the family are doing in the meanwhile, with regard to Lily's unexpected homecoming. Was it a good idea for Lily to come back and try to face Rick now? Can she manage to get through even a single dinner with him, let alone the whole summer?

And if she can't, what other option is there? Is there somewhere else she can go while she sorts through her feelings? Can Marcus, Raven and Mina help her to get there?

And how exactly are they going to go about that?

https://storiesonline.net/n/52852/the-gr...-family/37

Headless Over Heels.

Four beads filled. Four at a sacrifice of two, a seraph cult cleansed or crippled. This was a good day. This was a triumph. She felt full of broken glass.

Seth and Tiago crept from the forest behind her, talking in low voices as they loaded the case onto Draco’s sturdy back. Tiago chuckled at something Seth said and it was like a starting gun, it flicked Anna’s reins instinctually, and Demetrius was off at a canter.

“We’re not loaded yet,” Tiago protested.

“It’s okay,” Seth said. “See you at the carriage, Anna.”

Fuck you, she wanted to say. Don’t act like you understand me. But what didn’t he understand? What couldn’t he see? Why was he being so fucking reasonable? So she said nothing, just waved distractedly. And it was all she could do, as the trees thinned and the road reasserted itself, not to break into a gallop and flee them. Tiago’s face caught halfway in time, infant son warrior, and Seth, Seth, his seeking eyes beneath shadowed lids in that thin, angular face.

He saw her looking over her shoulder at him as they parted and grinned through his blood-flecked lips. She wanted to wring his scrawny neck. She wanted to feel his Adam’s apple under her thumb.

Here was the carriage. Ofelia got to her feet on its roof, waving at the incoming riders. “All’s well?”

“Fine.” Anna clambered off her horse. “I need—I—wait.”

Ofelia’s concern was another burrowing gnat on her psyche. “Okay.”

Anna yanked the carriage door open. She huffed as she sought Annalise’s head like she’d sprinted all the way back, on the edge of hyperventilation, and when she found her skullcase she practically tore its latched lid off. She didn’t even bother to remove her head; she made the change and let the melting skull topple from her shoulders.

Then she was Annalise, and she laid a snarled curse on Anna’s empty, pixie-cut head, because it only got worse.

Stay Perfectly Still

She let out a half-sob of breath, affixed her new head, and with this more-familiar mouth she bit her knuckle, hard enough almost to draw blood. She probed for that firm impossibility she’d felt, that annoyance at him, the flaws she’d seen. He was skinny, he was short, he had that resting frowning face, he had that nasal voice he did when he was telling a joke or talking back, his hands were bony and fleet and smelled like lavender, and oh this was not working.

She wanted him, she wanted him, she wanted him. She wanted him so bleeding badly it was hurting her, a heavy pressure pushing out from behind her ribs. He was funny and sharp and cute and when he thought she wasn’t looking he stared at her ass like it was the most beautiful ass he’d ever seen, like it was the legion of saints returned, and whenever he made her smile, he got this expression like he’d summited a mountain. He was everything she’d wanted for a fucking decade, a lance through her loneliness, her first chance at feeling human again, at feeling sexy, and she wanted him worse than she’d wanted anything, and he wanted her, and that made a hot air balloon of her heart, tugging her into the sky no matter how she ground her heels into the dirt. Her thighs squeezed together in a vain effort to smother the throbbing ache in her belly. She felt like a stupid teenager.

Voices outside. Greetings and jangling horse tack. Tiago and Seth were back. She balled her fists into her hair. Get up. Fix yourself and stand. Why couldn’t she be Lisa all the time, and tear this last barrier down, and have him? Why couldn’t she be Anna all the time, and see this desire for the disaster it was, and spurn him? Why was she stuck in purgatory?

If he’s so wonderful, you don’t deserve him. Orwinese Dray. Walking corpse.

She raised her face and looked at her hands. Her gnarled, scarred-over, pale-as-death hands. Finally she felt the fire flickering lower. This would do nicely. If she couldn’t tear him down, she could tear herself instead. With perverse enrapturement she hammered the nail further home:

He looks at you like you’re a hero—you’re not a hero, and when that finally gets through to him, it’ll be back to seeing you as the monster you are. Unless you get him killed first. Like how you got Nik killed. Like how you kill dozens and dozens of people, everywhere you go. Like that horrid helplessness you felt watching that sorcerer preparing to toast your son. Like how you couldn’t protect your children from Kevan, you couldn’t keep them from going unlit, and it’s only a matter of time before you lose them both to this murderous life. Remember the last time you felt this? Remember when you let your idiot dreams of a handsome prince steer you? Remember what happened?

You’re a horrible mother, and you were a horrible wife, and you would be a horrible lover. You’re old and scarred and used-up, and the morning after you sleep with him is the morning the timer starts to him realizing how terribly you’ve ruined him. You dragged him closer and closer with your idiotic flirtation. And it’s too late now. If you go forward, you’ll doom him forever, and if you go back, he’ll hate you forever. So stay still—stay perfectly still—and hold these precious days with Seth il Gutierre as long as you can before all of it slips away.

Now she felt marvelously, indulgently horrible about herself, and the burning need had receded, just in time to pop back out of the carriage and face the world—and the thief who’d gravitated into its center—with a smile.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...ctly-still

Princess of the Void.

They knew it would happen eventually. Here and there was a hardcase refusing to speak to their beautiful captors, or holding onto their convictions. But there’s only so long you can spend ignoring that the aliens who have abducted them are pint-sized, thick-thighed technicolor supermodels. It’s been the subject of whispered conversation: have you thought about it? Would you get with one? Who’s gonna be the first?

So it’s no surprise when, nine days into Dylan’s stay on the Imperial research station, someone bangs an alien. And it’s no surprise that it’s Santi from Miami, who’s a self-described picaflor, meaning man-whore, amigo, he proudly told Dylan.

The surprise is this: when Dylan steps into his silk slip-ons and eases open his cabin door to the soft artificial dawn that shines through the guest wing, the alien leaving Santi’s cabin, with a satisfied sway in her hips and a gloating grin on her face, is six-foot-three and has a big fat shark tail.

I call her Sharkira...

“We’ve been dumbasses,” Santi says over breakfast, as the English speakers gather at a long table seemingly carved from a single sturdy piece of crimson-stained wood. “It’s Eqtorans, bro. You gotta fuck an Eqtoran.”

“You are being so loud right now,” Dylan says. “Look at the translator, dude.”

The cylindrical translator panel in the center of the room, which is tuned to pick up anyone who raises their voice loud enough to address the room, has gotta fuck displayed on it in English, Spanish, Mandarin, Taiikari, and Eqtoran, from the force of Santiago’s loud insistence. The Spanish table nudge each other and point laughingly at it. “Cuéntanos más, zalamero,” a woman calls. Tell us more, smooth-talker, the panel displays.

“Cállate la boca, Ines.” Santiago cheerfully flips her off. He’s a bit of a gadfly when it comes to who he sits with at breakfast, but he’s been hanging with the anglophones lately after some kind of vicious sports-related argument with a glowering guy from Madrid. “When I tell you she fucked me into the ground. I mean, like, there’s a Santi-shaped fucking dent in my bed like I’m fuckin’ Wile E. Coyote. She—oh, shit.”

A shadow falls across the table. An Eqtoran woman, her amber eyes crinkled with amusement. “Santi.”

Santi puts on an innocent face. “Si, mami?”

She points to the translator panel. “Ga da fuck?” She sounds out the syllables and shakes her head. “Nuaqm nereq, sakqene.”

Jason drops to a confederate whisper. “Is that her?”

“Yeah, amigo. No need to whisper. She don’t speak English.”

Dylan only got a glance this morning. Now that he’s getting a better look at her, he kinda gets it. Compared to the Taiikari, she is manifestly inhuman. But it’s impossible not to notice how shapely she is. Even if the shape involves a snout and a dorsal fin. She points at a spot on the bench. “Sit?”

Everyone nods.

Dylan feels the bench shift as the broad, muscular shark woman lowers herself onto it. She wraps an enormous arm around Santi and lifts him onto her lap.

“So this is Viaq,” Santi says. “But I call her Sharkira cause the hips don’t lie.”

Viaq points at herself. “Sharkira,” she repeats. She pats Santi’s head. “Santiago abqa Sakqene, niqmva rmvik kqen.”

“Say it like Santi, baby.”

“Santi,” she echoes, lisping the S in a passable impression of his Latin Lover affect. He laughs and kisses her bicep.

“Yeah, man,” he says, as Viaq reaches past him to tuck a piece of toast into her mouth. “Forget the Taiikari. The Santi needs a woman with some downward force, know what I mean? Some fuckin’ meat on her. Viaq’s got that omega-3.”

Stephanie, a zaftig bank teller from Manitoba, chuckles. “You’re such a weirdo, Santiago.”

Santi crosses his arms and cozies into the lap of his piscine paramour. “I’m ahead of my time.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/120617...8-sharkira