Not My Fantasy

by Sam Hall

  “Fuck this shit!” Flea said, then turned and punched the wall. The plaster gave in a nice shower of dust, leaving a gaping hole. “We should have gone when I said. . . .”

  “You’re right, is that what you want to hear? It was clear when he had me pinned down on the bed, trying to force his cock into me and it’s clear now. I should have listened to you; we should have done a lot of things. I should have known she was going; you should have kept fucking her all night, so she couldn’t leave. Hindsight’s not going to help any of us right now. We have to deal with what we’ve got.”

  “Someone needs a vet in here?” We all turned to see a brown-furred canid with a bag slung across his body in the doorway. His nostrils flared and he looked down into the bath. “This doesn’t look good. The prince’s bully boys went overboard again?”

  Vickers, it turned out, actually knew his stuff. He approved of our soaking idea, adding some herbs he said would help reduce the bruising as we slowly, painstakingly removed Gabe’s clothes. Blood began to leak into the bathwater as we went. “Don’t worry about that,” the vet said as we worked, “Bleeding is good, it’s when the infection starts you know you have a problem.”

  He shook his head once we had most of the clothes off, standing back to take in the sum of his injuries. “Bloody waste that is,” he said, “this one’s strong, well-made. Good for breeding stock if he couldn’t have been brought into line.” He glanced up at us and then said, “Sorry, keep forgetting you are the sentient ones. We have so many pinkies here that ain’t. It looks like he’s been given the hiding of his life. Let’s empty the bath and start again, try and wash him clean. Avoid any scabs if you can, they dislodge easily in water.” It took quite some time, but finally, after filling and refilling that bath, the water finally stayed clear. “Better put him in his bed,” Vickers said, “keep him dry and warm. I’ve got some medication to give to him and we’ll need to straighten his fingers. Not sure if they’re broken or dislocated, but letting ‘em stay the way they are won’t help.” The guys got him upright and dried him off carefully, his body limp in their arms. I wrapped him up tight in the blankets on the bed but had to look away when the doctor set his fingers. I looked back when a rusty moan came from Gabe’s lips, but while his eyes fluttered, he didn’t regain consciousness. Probably a better thing at the moment. “I’ll give him this with a drench, he can’t swallow nuthin’ right now,” the vet said. “Got some stuff that’ll help with the healing and the pain. Can’t tell for sure, but don’t think there’s anything else broken. You can ask for me if he wakes up and complains of something else.”

  I sank down beside the bed, fighting the urge to run my hands through the ragged scruff on his chin. Just watching the small hairs there shift as he breathed in and out was strangely soothing, for a moment at least. Now, all we could do was watch him sleep, the guilt shouldered itself into the forefront of my mind. His body was a kaleidoscopic mass of bruises, from darkest black to scarlet, yellow, green and blue. Every part of him, down to his feet showed evidence of the canids’ violence. When I looked up finally, Flea was there, meeting my eyes with an equally flat gaze. “We’ve got to find a way to kill these fuckers, every last one of those soldiers.”

  “Now you’re starting to talk my language,” he replied.

  We talked in circles for a while, the moon streaming in through the window, but didn’t get very far. We had no weapons; we were outnumbered and Tess’s isolation from us made her vulnerable. On top of that, the only thing stopping the rest of us ending up just like Gabe, or being served for dinner was the deal I’d struck with the prince.

  “We have no way out of here,” Natty said. “I understand, really, but what are we going to do?”

  “Only asset we’ve got is knowledge,” Flea said. I frowned at this, confused. “The library upstairs has all the knowledge in the world, in all of the worlds. Got to be something there we MacGyver our way out with. I’m heading up, going to try my luck, you guys get some sleep.”

  I just nodded, crawling onto the bed, trying to curl my body around Gabe’s without actually touching him and hurting him. In the cold, hard light of the moon, I had all the time in the world to ponder my folly. I had been upset that Tess had gone through the door, seeing all sorts of possible danger in my head and had blundered on after her. The guys with their bikes, their guns and their competence had lulled me into a false sense of security. A bag full of guns wasn’t going to do much against an entire pre-industrial autocracy. I might have studied the Industrial and French Revolutions, but that didn’t give me a whole lot of skills to survive in it.

  I looked at Gabe in the moonlight, feeling my breath catch in my chest as I tried to study the impact my decisions had, had on him. I brought him here; I got him hurt. He could have a bleed on the brain or a concussion and there’d be nothing I could do about it except for a little trepanning. I had made a devil’s bargain, keeping the prince from my door with promises of help to woo my sister, while trying to get her to get a fucking clue and get out of here. And how would we get out of here? I looked up when the door to our room opened, stiffening until I saw it was Flea, toting a pile of books. He met the question in my eyes with a flat gaze, then croaked out, “I think I’ve got a plan.”

  34

  I may have made a devil’s bargain, but now I’m in hell, I thought as the carriage rocked to-and-fro. Mellors, the furry little cunt, had turned up at my door at some stupid hour and delivered his instructions, I was to be ready for an outing in fifteen minutes. I met his flat yellow gaze, his weird animal eyes staring right back and then simply nodded. I went like a robot to the bathroom, stripped off and stood on the silvery dirt trail that was all that was left in the bath of Gabe’s soaking. I washed myself in brisk and economical motions, barely drying when I stepped out before pulling on some clothes. I didn’t look at what; I think they were clean, but what if they weren’t? I was a coach, not a prospective mate; I was merely attending to help and hinder as much as I could.

  “I have a dress . . .,” Mellors said, looking me up and down.

  “Fuck the dress. I’m ready, let’s go.”

  Mellors’ eyes had narrowed for a moment, but even he seemed to realise that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with me today and led me down to the main foyer where my sister and the prince stood, elegantly dressed. “Good morning, you look. . . .” the prince said, taking in my, what was now apparently, dirty jeans and creased top.

  “Clean. I washed and everything,” I said, my voice the sound of broken bottles against gravel.

  “I was going to say serviceable, nevertheless, I believe we have quite the outing planned.”

  “Oh?” Tess asked, “What are we doing?”

  “An aerowhale ride,” the prince says with a smile, holding out his arm to Tess. “Our aeronaut will take us up into the sky, giving you an unparalleled look at our humble estate and the land around it. The view is quite spectacular, I’m told.”

  They twittered some nonsense as they walked out of the building into the courtyard; me trailing behind, my eyes boring into the gilt brocade of the prince’s frock coat. I told him historical was more romantic than business chic, so he’d no doubt kept hundreds of the servant women up last night, mocking up this Louis XIV shit right here, in time to please my sister. “You’d best remember our bargain,” Mellors growled as he kept pace with me. “I can have you installed in His Highness’ bedchamber before you can–”

  “Shut up, you dumb fuck,” I said flatly. “If all of you are stupid enough to piss away your opportunity to get free of this place for a little non-consensual fun, then I can see why the government cursed your liege the way they did. It’s so simple what he has to do, people fall in love all over the world, billions of them at a time, and your lord can’t even do what a two-bit player in a seedy club back home can do. You brutalised Gabe,” I said, my voice beginning to break, but I fought to keep it steady. “You didn’t send a message; you severed all good will. Of course, I’ll follow t
he letter of our agreement, but no more; and no rape, real or implied, is going to change that. You took away my motivation, Mellors. Keeping my friends safe is all important to me, I’d do almost anything to make that happen, but when you hurt them?” I stared into his eyes, not wavering for a second, “If there’s any way I can take you down, painfully preferably, I fucking will.”

  “Come along, you stragglers!” the prince ordered, turning around to look us over with a frown. I snapped my attention away from Mellors and strode on up to the awaiting carriage.

  I had no idea what an aerowhale was, but we heard it before we saw it. “What’s that sound?” Tess asked, trying to peer past the sumptuous curtains His Highness pulled when we got inside. I thought it counterproductive, but the prince insisted it would help preserve the surprise. The prince’s smile broadened and if you didn’t know him, you’d think that gleam in his eye was something other than maniacal zeal. Tess frowned as an eerie, hollow, almost wailing sound periodically filled the air. Her eyes began to dart and even met mine. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.

  “Haven’t the faintest,” I said.

  “Ladies, do not be concerned,” he said, and pulled the right side curtains up, using the golden pull, “for here we are.”

  Well, he had ticked the epic grandeur box alright. An aerowhale looked nothing like a blue whale, it was some kind of weird combination of a sunfish and a basking shark, but instead of swimming the ocean, it hovered in the air. It had a similar mouth to the shark, open and toothless, great ribs apparent when you looked into its massive mouth. Which was, apparently, where the sound was coming from. The carriage pulled up to a stop and we saw numerous wolf people scurrying around, securing the massive beast to the ground, struggling to hold on as it shifted and bucked. It was hard to tell if the beast was trying to fight free or if it was being pushed and pulled by the wind. In a lot of ways, it was like a huge windsock. Which had a basket tacked on to its underside that we were going to ride in, just like a living, breathing balloon. “I’m never going to see home again,” I whispered to myself. My paranoid fantasies had come up way short when it came to this foray through the portal.

  “Come, come,” the prince said, striding over to the . . . airfield? “Mellors, give the ladies their goggles.”

  “Of course, Your Highness. You’ll forgive the fit, my ladies, we have had few humans go up with the aerowhale, so these have had to be crudely converted.” Tess barely noticed the leather and glass contraption being passed to her, only glancing down when they were pressed to her palms and then staring back at the immense beast. I sighed, looking through the thick glass for a moment and then back. The prince had taken my advice too well; she didn’t seem to see the big hooks embedded in the animal’s side, the faint stream of blood that began to leak from one site, then two as the wolf attendants wrenched on the cables to settle the beast. She didn’t seem to smell the subtle stench of decay that came from some of the red and inflamed hook sites. I don’t want to do this, I thought. Going up into the air with two raving psychopaths to watch one of them take advantage of my sister’s lifelong desire to experience something from a fantasy novel. My eyes flicked around, looking for some kind of plausible excuse.

  “Your Highness, by your leave, might I stay behind?” I asked. “I’ve no head for heights.”

  “You went parachuting with your class when you finished your degree,” Tess scoffed. I looked at her, willing her to read between the lines for a minute, but she turned to the prince with a smile. “You have safety precautions, surely?”

  “Of course, milady. Each of us will wear our own parachute and Mellors will show you how to use them, if the need occurs, though perhaps this is not needed for our more experienced party members,” the prince said, fixing me with a steely eye.

  “There you go, Lady McKinnon, safe as houses. So, where will we go?”

  “This way, Lady McKinnon,” Mellors said. “What the hell are you doing?” he hissed at me as we walked over to the airfield shed to retrieve the parachutes.

  “Giving him alone time with Tess, you moron! This is perfect, just the kind of thing to get her going, but she’s not going to want to kiss His Highness with us looking on!”

  “She won’t?”

  “No, things might be a bit bloody different here, but back home, romance is a private thing. I could have been at home, trying to repair the damage your fucking goons wreaked and Tess and the prince would be getting to first base in the skies! No wonder you’ve never been successful before.”

  “I hadn’t realised. I thought you were trying to derail this–”

  “I know what you were thinking,” I said and snatched up a parachute from the pile on the ground then jammed the goggles down on my face. “Just because I want to watch you die slowly and then piss in your decaying eye sockets doesn’t mean my advice isn’t sound.”

  “I’ll make His Highness aware of this.”

  I clambered into what felt like a huge rickety basket, now close enough to the aerowhale to touch. Its mournful cries that rang through the countryside seemed to devolve into shrieks as I did so. I fought back a tear, unable to wipe my blurry eyes behind the bleary goggles. Each movement I made yanked on the hooks embedded in the whale’s skin. I went to say something as Tess, the prince and Mellors joined me; Mellors and one of the staff going around and giving each hook a jerk to make sure the basket was secure. I barely suppressed the wince at each pull. Mellors dodged a splatter of blood with a curse, picking up a stick stored in the basket and prepared to jab it into the guts of the beast. I caught his eye and shook my head slowly, looking over to Tess, who stood rapt at the basket edge, her eyes sparkling. I saw the man’s muzzle pull back from his gums in a silent snarl, but he schooled his face to politeness when Tess turned to ask him a million questions.

  “Your advice seems to have done just the trick,” the prince said, coming to stand beside me. “You needn’t truss yourself up with that parachute. My men are experts in this field. We’ve never had an accident yet.”

  “No slight on your men, but I’m bloody terrified of heights,” I said. “It took a handful of Valium and a very sexy instructor to get me out of the plane last time. The only way I can do this is to be prepared for anything.”

  He sniffed at this, as if my hunched form somehow compromised his grand plans for the day, “Your advice was well-founded, your sister seems quite enraptured.”

  “Wait until you fire this baby up. If I were you, I’d be close by to help her find her feet. We’re both pretty klutzy and likely to stumble when the wind shifts. Hopefully, she’ll stumble right into your arms.”

  “Ah yes, as when Brock stops Sage from falling on her face during her presentation in Moonlight on Sable. That seemed to lead almost directly to a consummation of their relationship,” the prince said. I blinked at him, my rude stare thankfully, masked by the owlish goggles. There were three hundred pages of ‘will she, won’t she, will she, what is he?’ in that book. Between Brock saving Sage from embarrassing the shit out of herself in front of the really important neuroscience conference she was a keynote speaker at, finding out he was a werewolf, being attacked by an NSA-style organisation and her discovering the psychic link between the two of them that allowed the two to escape the kind of medical testing neither would survive alone. Direct consummation? I didn’t see it.

  “Yeah, of course, though a word to the wise, you may need to put in a bit more legwork with Tess. This is a great start, don’t ruin it by rushing in too early. Be attentive, indicate you’re interested, flirt, but be mysterious.”

  “Why would I bother with that? It sounds downright tedious. Surely, the splendid view will be enough.”

  I let out a long sigh. “I’m not sure how things work here, but at home, the mating dance, y’know, like animals do? We do that, too. People get to know each other slowly, they get a sense of the other person, start to work out if they are someone to get invested in. Men that come on too strong can be off-putting for
women.”

  “Hmm, this is that ’hard to get’ concept you were blathering on about beforehand. It makes sense, I admit. Seen plenty of my friends make fools of themselves chasing after a bit of fluff that won’t give him the time of day. I don’t mind saying, this is the part of your plan I find the most onerous.”

  “Well, hang in there, Your Highness and think of your freedom. Getting furry again, being able to howl at the moon, your dick doing that weird knotting thing . . .”

  The prince’s eyes whipped around to meet mine. Fuck, Ash, you moron, don’t mention his dick if you don’t want to go anywhere near his dick. “Quite, well, your counsel has proven useful so far, so I will continue to heed it.” Thankfully, all I got was a sharp nod and him returning to Tess’s side.

  I tried to watch my sister’s face fill with joy with some kind of pleasure, as the aeronauts scurried above us and commenced lift-off. I was more concerned with the buffeting winds and how unsteadily we seemed to be gaining height. Her eyes went wide and glistened as we slowly rose up into the air, her hands clutching at the edge of the basket, soon to be wrapped around the prince’s proffered paws. She’s having a once in a lifetime experience, I thought, every book, convention, and film was leading to this.

  “Oh, my God,” she gasped as we started to get to a decent height, “Look at the view! And those huge ruins! Who made them?” Here’s his in, I thought, both fearful and pleased when he responded.

  “They are some of the remains from the Brigintinian Empire. You see them all over the country, what is left of a race of giant p–” he caught himself and went on, “hoo-mans that came before us. Apparently, they rose up and conquered our lands, were supreme rulers and then inexplicably, they were gone, their broken architecture all that remained.”