That happiness—or at least his lust—continued to increase even when she finished her little tongue trick. She licked him once for good measure from root to rim, slid her palms up the muscles of his belly, then pushed the ring of her lips down his throbbing length. Having reached her limit, she sucked wetly, tightly up again.
After all her teasing, the feeling was incredible. Tears of pleasure squeezed from his eyes, while at the same time the oddest pressure knotted in his back, as if he were lying on a muscle wrong. He couldn’t worry about it. Khira was pushing down on his shaft again. Her subsequent upward pull had his body tingling from head to toe.
When her fingernails scratched lightly through his chest hair, he felt as if his body had turned into one big cock.
“One more,” he tried to say through his strangled throat.
Khira was already there. The next downstroke tensed him like a bowstring, and the sucking, tonguing upstroke shot him into ecstasy so abruptly that an actual twang of release jolted through his groin. Her head came down again, warmth wrapping warmth as his climax squeezed from him in a series of deep contractions. Dimly, he felt her kiss his penis as she slipped away. Though sorry it was over, he’d never been so satisfied in his life.
When his brain recovered its powers of higher observation, he realized the odd pressure on his back was gone. Indeed, he felt pleasantly floaty all over.
“What the—?” Khira exclaimed.
Her hands were gripping his hips from an angle he didn’t understand. Too replete to puzzle out why her hold seemed wrong, he opened his eyes lazily.
He was suspended in the air above her head. He blinked, dumb-founded. Was this some new Yamish technology? He craned his neck to see Khira and tilted, still floating, to the vertical. Khira’s hands were now planted indignantly on her waist. She was naked, which was rather nice.
“You’re not supposed to be able to do that!” she snapped.
Harry couldn’t help but grin at her. As he did, something rustled behind him, something big. He looked around to see what it was and gasped. A huge pair of wings was unfolding behind him: brown, feathered wings whose tops nearly brushed the warm ice ceiling.
“Ack!” he said, thinking some monstrous Yamish bird had been set on him. He began to twist, trying to get away, but only plummeted to the floor.
“Ow!” he said as his knees cracked the smooth surface.
Khira was at his side in an instant. The wings had followed him down. He swatted them in a panic, his arms weirdly heavy, as if he’d been drugged again. Khira grabbed his hands.
“Stop it,” she said. “They’re yours. You grew them. You can’t beat them off.”
“Oh, God.” He didn’t want to believe her, but she was stroking the wing on his right. He could feel her fingers moving gently down each feather.
“See,” she soothed, moving behind him to pet the wings as a pair. “You’re all right.”
The caress felt perversely nice, but his fear was stronger. “What did you do to me?”
“Well, I didn’t hurt you. I just…altered you a bit.”
“A bit!” His response was a half-choked burst of outrage.
Khira’s voice turned prim. “I didn’t think you’d be able to fly. Your wings were supposed to be just for show. Birds have hollow bones. Your body should be too heavy to lift off. Then again, people say the same of honeybees.”
“Oh, then everything’s all right!”
She was still fondling his feathers, too distracted to pay his sarcasm any mind. Of course, he was feeling distracted, too. Those wings must have had a lot of sensually connected nerves. Absolutely against his will, he made a cooing noise, his back relaxing utterly beneath her touch. Despite its recent pleasuring, his cock began to lift.
“Khira,” he growled a second before his body lifted off as well, not unlike a hot air balloon.
Startled, he flapped his new wings and nearly went careening face-first into the wall. He caught himself on his hands and tried a gentler motion. This time, he wafted perfectly over Khira’s head. He laughed, forgetting his rather insane troubles in the unexpected delight of flying. The laugh sent him bobbing up another foot, with barely an effort from his wings.
“Oh, no,” Khira said and covered her mouth.
“Don’t say ‘oh, no,’” he scolded teasingly from the ceiling. “What you did may be unforgivable, but it’s fun.”
“But, clearly, you’re flying because you’re happy! The shift in your emotions must have changed your vibration, and faster vibrations mean lighter molecules—like steam rising.” She paced back and forth beneath him, muttering about unpredictable correlated traits and shouldn’t have turned that damn modulator up so high. “They’ll all want to fly!” she cried up at him.
Her deduction may have been right, because her distress sobered him enough to touch down.
“Who’ll want to fly?” he asked from the floor.
“The daimyo. The bored royals the science minister thought would be a market for my procedure. If they buy wings, they’ll want to use them, and they’ll only be able to if they throw off every discipline our kind holds dear. Harry, this is a disaster!”
She clutched his arms. His wings seemed only partly under his control, so he wasn’t positive how he did it, but his pinions curled around her in a sort of hug. “I admit, this isn’t a change I would have invited into my life, but—”
“They’ll want to fly,” she insisted, cutting him off. “They’ll want to laugh and be emotional like humans. The fabric of high society will fall apart. The emperor will never, ever lend his blessing to that. He’ll do anything to destroy the evidence of what I’ve done.”
Her face was white with horror, her lips tinged blue. Harry dropped his wings, brushing the hollow of her cheek with his thumb instead. Khira shook his comfort off. “We have to get you out of here.”
“What?”
“Now. Before the guards find out what happened.”
Harry pressed a fist to his chest, unaccountably disappointed that he wouldn’t have the year with her she’d said she required. He tried to make sense of the feeling as he watched her bustle naked about the chamber, stuffing bricks of who-knew-what into a small silk bag.
“These are medical rations,” she explained, though he hadn’t asked. “Very high protein. You’ll need extra energy for flying.”
“Flying?” She expected him to fly out of here?
She threw him a pair of trousers, which Harry automatically pulled on. “You’ll have to manage without a shirt. We don’t have time to rig anything to fit around your wings.”
“Khira, we’re in the middle of the ocean.”
“There’s an island ten miles east of here, and the mainland isn’t more than twenty beyond that. Once you reach it, if you just keep flying south, you’ll hit human lands.”
“This is crazy. I can’t fly home. Even if I could, what would people think when they saw this?”
He spread both arms and wings, but Khira’s jaw clenched stubbornly. “Maybe one of your human doctors can remove them. Anyway, I thought you wanted to be free. Surely you don’t intend to throw your chance away.”
Dressed herself now, she grabbed his hand and pulled him to the door. Rather than push the button that slid it open, she peered at a lighted glass square on the adjacent wall, on which walked tiny, moving pictures of the lab’s workers. Harry’s mind was too numb to register this new wonder.
“The corridor is clear,” she said. “We can slip into the service tunnels at the end.”
They ran pell-mell down the empty corridor. Harry was surprised he could keep up with Khira, given the Yama’s supposed thirty-miles-per-hour racing speed. He ducked into the small hatched tunnel no more than two paces after her. Like everything else, the tunnel had been carved out of the glacier’s ice, its walls glowing softly blue. A single low metal rail ran along the center of its floor, possibly a guide for carts.
Khira was already hunched inside. She reached past him to close
the hatch, the brush of her arm illogically welcome. “I don’t think these tunnels have sensors. We can crawl from here to the landing pad where they leave supplies.”
None of this meant much to Harry, but he crawled after her, learning quickly to tuck his wings close so his feathers wouldn’t bump the walls. He felt surprisingly good, considering what he’d been through—anxious and confused, maybe, but not tired. His thoughts were just coherent enough to hope Khira wasn’t going to get into trouble for helping him escape.
You’re getting out of here, he reminded himself. He hadn’t asked Khira to abduct him. The beautiful mad demon scientist could look out for herself.
“No one will hear your name from me,” he promised, worried all the same. “My government won’t be bringing actions against yours.”
Khira blinked at him over her shoulder. “That would be kind of you,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “But let me see you off safely first.”
Five more minutes of crawling brought them to a second hatch. Khira pressed her ear to it, apparently heard nothing to alarm her, and pulled the lever to open it. Fresh, cold air burst inward, whipping Khira’s hair and leaving Harry glad for the coverage of his wings. He might be a freak of nature, but at least he wouldn’t freeze to death.
Khira climbed out onto a different, smaller landing pad from the one where they’d arrived. A large flying car, this one shaped like a hornet, sat unattended on the flattened ice.
“Quick,” she whispered, waving him after her.
They used the cover of assorted other mysterious equipment to scurry around a corner to a narrow ledge. When he saw the view, Harry clutched a jut of ice to save him from dizziness. He’d forgotten how high up they were.
“You can take off from here,” Khira said. Seemingly unaffected by vertigo or cold, she handed him the bag of medical rations and pointed to a black, snow-covered mountain rising from the ocean opposite their perch. “There’s the island. Once you land there, your human eyes should be able to see the mainland.”
Harry tied the little sack of food around his wrist. More than anything, he wanted to kiss the careful blankness from her face. He knew he ought to be ecstatic about leaving, but he couldn’t help thinking his and Khira’s paths weren’t supposed to part this way. He realized he’d never felt so connected to another person, nor could the rare pleasure they had shared explain it all.
In one heartbreaking flash, he saw the truth of her: that she was bright and lonely and gave too much to her work. That she wanted to be kind, but was afraid to most of the time. That she was proud, but not too proud to bend when her conscience demanded it.
These things were true of him as well. Different though they were, she matched him.
“I can’t do this,” he said hoarsely.
She laid her palm on his chest, a flush of color creeping up her forearm from his energy. “You have to. Things won’t go well for you if you stay. Now be happy. Fly and be free again.”
He gazed into her shining eyes and watched her bite her trembling lower lip. A moment earlier, he’d thought her face was blank, but from the look of her now, she hung a breath away from tears.
Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who sensed how well they’d fit.
“Khira,” he said, soft with wonder, but she shook her head and made a shooing motion with her hands.
“Be happy,” she reminded him.
Harry couldn’t say he was happy, but some emotion rose in him, so fine and strong it lifted him off his feet. The regret that blazed in her silver eyes filled every empty spot he’d ever had with warmth.
“Go,” she said, shooing him again.
He went reluctantly, lifting his strange new wings and trying not to dwell on how sad he was to be leaving her. Driving his wings strongly downward, he shot forward, his heart too full to have room for fear.
She wants this for me, he told himself. I should go.
He’d flown twenty yards from the ledge when shouts from behind him had him spinning round. As he struggled not to roll arse over teakettle, a bolt of what looked like liquid lightning streaked by his head, missing it by inches. Khira’s guards had found them out. The twins were kneeling near the escape hatch with long, fat guns braced on their shoulders, presumably guns that shot lightning bolts. Harry dodged another volley with a maneuver so unthinking it had to be the work of the instincts that came with his wings. He looked at Khira, still unseen on the ledge. She waved frantically, urging him onward while he had the chance. One of the guards spotted her movement.
Harry didn’t have to be told this was bad. He was already speeding toward her when she screamed. A chunk of ice had just exploded in her face. The second guard had stopped shooting at Harry to target her.
“Arms up!” Harry shouted as he swooped down.
He caught her to him without touching down, only scraping one wing at the last moment. Luckily, the injury wasn’t to his flight feathers. He turned with Khira pressed to his chest and pounded the air with his wings. Khira’s hair wrapped him like a cloak as they soared away.
“Harry,” she gasped, clutching his torso with all her limbs.
Harry couldn’t answer, even to soothe her. He was breathing too hard from their conjoined weight.
“Go left!” she cried a second before another bolt blazed to their right. This caught a feather close enough to singe. “Oh, please, you have to go faster. Those plasma rifles are deadly!”
Harry tried to go faster, but he was feeling heavier himself. He had to think of something less grim than dying, or they’d both end up plummeting.
“Tell me…you love me,” he panted, not caring how pathetic he sounded. “And if you don’t, for God’s sake lie.”
“I do,” she said, almost without a pause. “I didn’t realize it, but I think I must!”
The dismay in her voice convinced him; amused him, too. As if by magic, strength surged through him, not just in his wings but every part of him. The feel of the air scudding beneath him was suddenly absolutely right—as if he’d been meant to fly all his life. When another flash from the electric weapon jagged a foot away, he almost laughed.
“Hang on,” he said, driving them determinedly forward again. “I think this calls for evasive maneuvers.”
Though Khira shrieked when he began to take them, a moment later she kissed his chest. “I love you,” she repeated. “Please don’t make me lose last night’s dinner before we’re safe.”
“I love you, too,” he said, and stole one sweet moment to kiss her hair.
Khira and Harry had one advantage. Their head start enabled them to find a concealed cave to hide in on the next island—before the lab could scramble a search squadron. They sat there now, side by side and backs to the wall. Harry had wrapped one wing around her, which had to the most peculiar comfort Khira had ever been snuggled in.
It was also an arousing comfort. Her body buzzed from having clung to him while they flew, and their continuing closeness didn’t help. If Harry hadn’t been so justifiably preoccupied with matters of survival, and likely in need of conserving his strength, she suspected she would have spent every minute before nightfall having sex with him. They planned to continue their journey then, because Harry had discovered that, in addition to possessing owl’s wings, he could also see in the dark. Yamish pilots were equipped for night vision, too, but at least Khira and Harry would be more difficult to spot.
With the arctic wind blasting around them while Harry flew, any heat signature they generated should be obscured.
“We can’t go south,” he said, swiping crumbs from his meal bar onto the floor. “Every aircar we saw was searching in that direction. They must assume I’m trying to get home.”
“They must assume I know better than to stop you. Any Yama we asked for help would surely turn us in.”
“Any Yama?” Harry asked, obviously doubting this. “Don’t you have family?”
“Yes,” Khira admitted—rather grumpily.
Harry peered at her unch
aracteristic frown.
“Oh, all right,” she surrendered. “We’ll go to my parents.”
“If you’re afraid they won’t help us…”
“They’ll help us,” she predicted darkly. “Believe me, they’ll be delighted to.”
Harry wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep going. Holding Khira was wonderful, but he’d been flying for hours, and his muscles burned. The stars no longer enthralled him, the magic of flight was old, and Khira’s meal bars tasted like pasteboard. If it hadn’t been essential that they get as close to safety as they could before dawn, Harry would have begged a halt. Instead, he tried to suck more air into his aching lungs.
Happy thoughts, he urged himself, but the best he could do was imagine how long he was going to sleep with Khira in his arms when this was over.
“You’re tired,” she murmured, one hand stroking sympathetically along his side. He was grateful that she was strong. At least he didn’t have worry about her losing her grip on him.
“I’m fine,” he said against her temple. “Though maybe if you stopped squirming, I wouldn’t have to fight to keep my balance.”
The heat of her blush was palpable against his chest.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, writhing even as she apologized. “I’ll do my best.”
It took Harry a second to realize what was wrong. “Oh, Lord,” he said, his own heat beginning to rise despite his fatigue. “You want to make love.”
“I don’t! I mean, I do. I’ve been holding you all this time, and your etheric force keeps seeping into me no matter how tired you are, but I know you need your strength for flying.”
“Are you wet?” Harry’s voice dropped an octave to ask this.
“What good would it do for me to answer that?”
Rather than argue, he slid his hand around her bottom to touch the seam of her trousers. They were drenched, her cream kept warm by its proximity to her body. She moaned when he brushed her mons with his fingertips. He could feel the swollen bump of her pleasure bud as her nipples pebbled against his chest. Suddenly, his wings didn’t feel so tired. Knowing how much she wanted him, and had been wanting him all this time, was giving him a second wind.
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