Made to Love

by DL Kopp

  “Who’s telling you what to do?” My phone rang, and I sighed, pulling it out of my pocket. “Hello?” I asked, wandering away from Rich so I could hear better.

  “Calliope, it’s Mom. How are you?”

  “Fine,” I said cautiously.

  “Do you think you’ll be all right alone for another night?”

  Another night? A whole extra day to work on the Byron problem? I tried not to sound too excited. “Yeah, Mom,” I replied, “I think I can manage that okay. How’s that thing going?”

  “Not as well as we had hoped,” she said. “Hopefully it shouldn’t take much longer to hash out all these details. We’ll try to be back tomorrow afternoon. I’m so sorry we can’t be there for you right now.”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  “Love you, Calliope.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Love you too, Mom.”

  She hung up, and I turned back to Rich, but he was gone.

  You have to know the truth about yourself sometime! What in the world could he have meant? There was nothing secret about me. I was just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill seventeen year old with a monster in her basement and a siren boyfriend. No big.

  As if summoned by my thoughts, Octavius pulled up on his jet-black Kawasaki. He jumped the curb and stopped at my side, placing a foot on the ground for stability.

  “You want to ditch last class and go home?” he asked.

  “Do I ever,” I sighed, pulling on my helmet and hopping on the bike behind him, wrapping my arms around his waist.

  Jana and Rita stood in the entrance of the high school, gaping at me as I gave them a wave. Jana was fuming. I wondered if she had the hots for my boyfriend. I couldn’t blame her; he was really sexy. But he was mine.

  “Hold tight,” Octavius said, and we rode off again.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I was getting to be a pro at this motorcycle thing. It didn't even make me dizzy anymore.

  We pulled up to my house within a few minutes – everything in town was no more than ten minutes from the high school – and parked. I was about to further defy my parents, and the thought gave me the warm fuzzies. So did the thought of getting away from Rich.

  Why did everything have to get more complicated?

  Byron was still charging on his table when we went in. He opened his eyes and looked at me.

  “I didn't think you were going to be back for a while,” he said “I was worried.”

  Octavius moved to scowl in a corner, and I stepped forward to Byron. “Worried about what? You knew I'd come back.”

  “We don't have much time to work today. And...”

  “It's okay, my parents won't be back until tomorrow,” I said.

  Byron smiled. He looked so gentle. I pushed back a lock of hair from his face and heard Octavius growl in the corner. My eyes rolled before I could stop them. Boys.

  “I wasn't just worried about that,” Byron said, his face growing serious. “I heard noises outside all day.”

  “Outside? Like in the rest of the house? You know the maid comes in, don't you?” I knew she'd been there. Things had been straightened and cleaned, almost as if by magic. Having hired help was great some days.

  Byron shook his head. “Outside. I heard rattling.”

  I turned a worried face to Octavius. “You don't think there's more giant octopuses out there, do you?”

  “Octopi,” Octavius corrected. “And no, I don't. Were there voices, or anything?”

  Byron considered the question, then shook his head. “It was just a lot of commotion, like something was trying to get in.”

  Octavius shrugged. “It sounds like an animal to me. I wouldn't worry about it.”

  “He's been down here a while,” I said, wringing my hands. “He probably knows what sounds are weird and what sounds aren't weird.”

  Something flickered on Octavius's face. He said, “You know, you're probably right. We should go look around, make sure there's nothing here.”

  “Why don't you go?” I asked, patting Byron's head. “We have work to do. I'd feel a lot safer knowing that you were looking into it.”

  Octavius looked like I'd just killed his favorite puppy. “I don't know your place well.”

  “You know it about as well as I do,” I said. “You've been here nearly every day I have.”

  I found his stricken expressions very endearing. It was good that it was so easy to torture him; I liked seeing him like this.

  “It's not like you're going to help, anyway,” Byron said. It sounded as if he was trying to be nice, but I knew Octavius wouldn't take it that way.

  He didn't.

  “I've already beaten one guy today,” he snarled. “I'd be glad to make it two.”

  “What?” Byron said. His eyebrows disappeared into his hairline. “When did this happen?”

  Great. Just what I needed. I decided it was time to diffuse the situation as best I could, so I went up to Octavius and laid my lips on his cheek. That one action seemed to mollify him slightly.

  “Do whatever,” I said. “But we do need to get to work, okay?”

  “Fine,” Octavius said after a moment. “What are you going to do?”

  I put a hand to my chin. “Probably assemble the motor. It's the easiest part; it shouldn't take more than a couple hours to do.”

  “You promise that you won't do more right now?”

  I knew what he was alluding to. I nodded. “Scout's honor.”

  Octavius moved toward the door. “I guess I'll make a couple of circuits of the place. But I'll be back shortly.”

  “Scream if you hear anything,” Byron said. He snickered.

  A dark cloud seemed to move over Octavius's sunshiny face, but he slipped out the door anyway.

  I poked Byron. “Be nice. He's trying.”

  “He's not the one for you,” he said. “He can't love you like I can.”

  I rolled my eyes for what felt like the millionth time that day, but I felt my insides go mushy regardless. “Let's talk about this later, okay? We have work to do.”

  Byron nodded and unplugged from his charger. He sat up and looked around the lab. “There's some scraps back here that should work.”

  We set to the task with a purpose. It wasn't difficult, but it was involving; we had to do a lot of fitting, welding, and testing. I was so invested in the building that I almost didn't notice Octavius's return.

  Almost. His gaze burned through me like a forest fire did a forest. It made it a little hard to concentrate, but then, so did the occasional brushes of skin and meaningful looks between me and Byron.

  It was enough to make a girl crazy.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “Calliope. You should see this.”

  I looked up from my work to see a very dusty Octavius standing near the stairs down to the lab. He was holding a shovel. “Where did you get that?” I asked.

  “Come here.”

  I glanced at Byron, but he was deeply focused on the work I had given him, leaning in to peer at the motor through a standing magnifying glass. It turned out he had very nimble hands – although not quite as nimble as mine – and he was good at working with the tiny pieces.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told him, and he nodded without looking up.

  I followed Byron up the stairs. “You should brace yourself,” he said. “You may be… unpleasantly surprised by what I’m about to show you.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He led me out to the back yard and through the orchard to the back fields, where I never bothered to explore. It was just a whole lot of pasture, and not too interesting. Under other circumstances, wherein Octavius was not nearly so grim and withdrawn, it might have been nice to get to walk across the grass hand-in-hand with the man I loved.

  But his seriousness was catching, and by the time we hit the small cluster of trees at the apex of a small hill, I was feeling just as grim.

  “Look,” Octavius said, sweeping a hand in front of him.

/>   There was a small cemetery on my parents’ property that I had never known about. It looked like a family plot—all the head stones shared the same last name. Marjorie Feehan. Tom Feehan. There were about two dozen head stones in all, mostly belonging to men. The little cemetery was fenced in, with a small sign that had grown unreadable with the rigors of time and the weather.

  And half of the graves were dug up, caved in, or empty.

  “What’s this?” I asked, frowning.

  “You wondered where they got the organic parts for Byron,” Octavius said. “Here’s your answer.”

  My stomach churned. “He’s made of dead bodies?”

  “Looks like.”

  I opened the gate, and it creaked softly. I went into the cemetery, peering into the closest open grave.

  There was nothing. Not even a coffin.

  “How can you be sure?” I asked. “Maybe they were just moved to a different cemetery…”

  Octavius dropped the shovel and went to the other side of the graveyard. “Look here.”

  I stood at his side and looked into the grave he indicated. There was a body in there. A fresh body.

  It was missing its legs from the thighs down. Byron had just recently gotten new knees and calves.

  I covered my mouth, feeling the bile rise in my throat. “What…?” The grave marker said that it was John Feehan, and that he had died in the eighteen fifties. “How is that possible?”

  “There are two options I can think of. Either someone has been moving fresh bodies into this graveyard from somewhere else, or they were doing experiments back then and preserving their dead for just this use.” Octavius cast a glance at me. “You still like him?”

  I thought of our brief kiss, and it actually didn’t bother me that much. Whatever Byron was made of, he was young—like, a few weeks young. Octavius was old. Probably a few hundred years or something. It wasn’t much weirder to kiss a corpse.

  “He didn’t choose to be made like this,” I said. “That was his Father.”

  “It’s evil business to disturb graves,” Octavius said. “Should we really free Byron? What if he’s dangerous?”

  “He would never purposely hurt me,” I said firmly.

  “Purposely,” Octavius scoffed.

  I wandered to another grave, looking in. I recognized the name on the tombstone. I had seen it on one of the schematics. “I think this is where they were going to get his eye from.”

  “We can’t interfere with this kind of thing,” he said, recoiling.

  I jumped into the grave, thumbing back the corpse’s eyelid. Sure enough, the eyes were intact.

  “Help me get this out,” I said.

  “What are you doing?” Octavius asked. He looked like he was going to be sick.

  I straightened, reaching a hand up to him. “Don’t you love me?”

  His face softened. “Yes.”

  “Don’t you want me to be happy?”

  “Of course I do, Calliope.”

  “I want to finish working on Byron. That would make me happy.”

  Octavius shuddered, but jumped into the grave. “Okay,” he said, “but let’s do this as fast as possible before I pass out.”

  I had inherited a love of getting down and dirty from my dad and performed numerous dissections with his help, including experimenting on cadavers, so it didn’t bother me to work with the body myself.

  We decided the entire body was too much to drag into the house, and a cursory check of the other organs – including the below-the-belt parts Byron needed – showed the rest of the body wasn’t in nearly as good condition. Only the eye would work.

  So I detached the head from the rest of the body while Octavius threw up in the bushes, and Byron greeted me with a smile when I dropped the head onto the table in the lab. Its jaw dropped open, gaping at the lab blindly.

  Byron touched the head, and when he saw the intact eye, he grew excited. “You found it!”

  I grinned. “Ready for surgery?”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I'd prepped as if I were performing an operation on a living person: scrubbing my arms and hands in a huge basin in the back of the lab. I didn't think it was all necessary, considering I was working on dead tissue, but I had no idea if the manner in which Byron was animated made him susceptible to infection. And I wasn't particularly keen on finding out, one way or the other.

  Octavius scrubbed up as well.

  “I could use your help,” I told him, “but if you're not willing, I need you out of the room.”

  Octavius grunted. “I'm willing. But don't you think your dad will notice if you give Byron a new eye?”

  “And he wouldn't notice the motor?” I smacked his arm. “You worry too much.”

  “You don't worry enough,” he said, but there was a ghost of a smile on his lips.

  So that's how we ended up with clamps holding Byron's eye open, Octavius holding a light over Byron's face, and me wielding a needle and thread.

  Life sure was weird.

  It went quickly, and with very little in the way of fluids getting in the way; Octavius was pretty good about noticing and suctioning. Within a couple of hours, Byron was looking around the lab with his new eye. I grinned at Octavius.

  “There's very little honor in grave desecration,” Octavius said, but he looked slightly pleased nonetheless.

  I snuggled up to him. “And there's honor in seducing a woman with your siren powers?”

  He looked surprised. “Of course.”

  Byron came up to us. It was a measure of how happy he was that he could see that he didn't even notice how Octavius and I were touching. “Peripheral vision!” he crowed. “And three-dimensions! I never knew how beautiful it could be!”

  “I'm glad it's working out,” I said. “If only my parents were gone for a couple more days, we could finish this up quick.”

  “There's still some...logistical problems,” Octavius pointed out quickly. “It's likely you wouldn't be able to finish even if you had more time.”

  “Logistical problems?”

  The pleasant expression faded from Octavius's face, and he appeared fierce. “You cannot start his engine, Calliope.”

  “Oh, that.” I smirked. “If you're so opposed to the idea, why don't you do it?”

  “Do...it?”

  Byron frowned. “I don't understand.”

  “Does it have to be a woman who fuels?” I asked. “Or just a warm body? What kind of energy does it need?”

  “Oh,” Byron said. “It would have to be a woman, of course. It needs to be a natural act to fuel an unnatural form.”

  “There's nothing natural about corpse f--”

  “Back off,” I told Octavius firmly, sitting in a chair. “There's no need for that.”

  Byron frowned at me. “You need fuel. I've been selfish.”

  I waved a hand. “I just need to eat and sleep. Not a big deal. I'll order a veggie pizza or something.”

  “Pizza?”

  I frowned. “You've never had pizza? You're missing out.”

  Octavius kissed my cheek. “I'll get your pizza. Go take a shower.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “See you in a bit?”

  He nodded, then took my face in his hands and laid his mouth upon mine. My body sang a descant, but I wanted more. I ran my hands over his chest, but he pulled them off.

  “Not here,” he whispered, looking toward Byron. “It'd be cruel.”

  He was right. I have to say, I was pleased he was taking Byron's feelings into consideration, even if it was probably because we couldn't sate our frustrations.

  I pulled away, and he streaked out the door.

  Cool hands wrapped around my stomach. I jumped, then looked up to see Byron overhead. “What are you doing?”

  “If he gets to touch you, I should as well,” he said mildly. “I need to understand your dimensions.”

  It was the most romantic thing I'd heard in my life. I turned around and pulled his head down to mine; I
had to. He kissed back with a spirit that surprised me, and I pressed against him without fear.

  He broke the kiss. “I feel like I was made to love you,” he said.

  It was funny; I felt similarly. But I couldn't tell him, not with Octavius running to do my bidding. So I did the next best thing and showed him.

  We were kissing vigorously on his table when Octavius walked in with the pizza.

  Oops.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Octavius stared between the Byron and I, his eyes flicking back and forth. Slowly, so slowly, a cloud of fury darkened his face. Lightning flashed deep in his dark eyes.

  “What… is… this?” he hissed. The shadow of his wings rose behind him, arching above his head, shiny and dark and somehow sharper than they had looked before. “I leave the room for pizza, and you… you…”

  “Octavius,” I said, wiggling out from underneath Byron. “I can explain.”

  “Explain what? That you want to make love to a corpse?”

  He flung the pizza box against the wall and it went everywhere with a delicious meaty scent.

  “No!”

  Byron looked hurt. “Really?”

  “Yes. I mean, no, but—ugh.” I rounded on Octavius, but he was already moving.

  He tackled Byron, hauling back to punch him in the face with all his strength. “How dare you take advantage of her!” he yelled as he struck him again and again. “Knowing who—what—she is!”

  “What?” I asked, and then I shook myself, knowing I wouldn’t get answers until they stopped fighting. I grabbed Octavius’s shoulders and yanked him off of Byron. He glared at me, chest rising and falling with hard breath. “What do you mean what I am? That’s the second time I’ve heard something like that today, and it’s starting to really make me angry.”

  “You.” Octavius shoved a finger in my face. “You have no right to ask questions when you were just trying to cheat on me. How dare you? As if it’s not bad enough that he’s assembled out of dead bodies.”

  “I wasn’t trying to cheat on you,” I said, hanging onto his arm as tears pricked my eyes. “I don’t know what came over me. I’m just so—so confused, and so lost. My life in the last two weeks has become so weird. I don’t like it!”