CONTENT/TRIGGER WARNING: This story contains material of a sexual and/or mature nature that some people may find distasteful, upsetting, or offensive and which may not be suitable for younger readers. If you feel you are such a person, please move on to the next story. The Chamber Magazine wants all its readers to have an enjoyable experience.

Wooden spikes embellished with runes, markings of her ancient clan, protruded through her fluorescent purple nipples. Her white breasts turned pastel blue as they sank and rose with the pulse of their dance. His back clung to the drab cotton sheet weeks past due for a wash. He looked up to see pale eyes turn cinnamon-spiced brown; even the whites of her eyes changed, and a rancid, lime-colored milk drudged out from the corners, but she continued to throb and ride. His hands gripped her sides with determination.

Her teeth, once white, transitioned, and now a piss-colored smile glistened over the boy as she sang to him in words black and slimy like the tongue dangling from her mouth, and his manhood replied with reinforcement. She grabbed his neck, and he returned the grip by clinching her warm sides, just above the hips. As he grasped her tighter, the flesh grew cool, and his nails plunged into it. Her smile turned to a grimace, and he braced.

The cold encased her entrails, and her insides near froze the boy’s penis as he ejaculated. Her sides stung where he tore into her. Millions had looked upon her icy transmogrification, but in thousands of years, this young man was the first to hold tighter. She held his seed inside her. Her sides struggled to heal, and now she sat on his bed in full form—white hair, blue skin, black tongue, yellow teeth, bulging blue breasts with dark-green nipples, pointed ears, and a face decorated with scars obtained during the escape attempts of former lovers. The boy smiled. He moved to grab her left breast before she turned away, sliding backwards on the bed.

“What are you?” she asked.

“Patrick,” the boy replied, smiling.

“How old are you?”

“Six and ten years.”

_A sweet young fool_, she thought. Confused, she stood up to leave.

“Don’t go! Please, I want to be with you! Again and again!”

“I have work to complete,” she said.

“It’s the middle of the night,”

“The witching hour is the only hour my work is done.”

“Come back, please. Tomorrow come back.”

She leapt from the boy’s window. Until her vault, the boy hadn’t noticed her frail, tattered wings. _An angel_, he thought. “My angel!” he screamed to the black, starless sky.

She skirted along the wind and removed a grey ceramic vial from her satchel. She ejected the boy’s semen into the cylindrical vessel, sealed the container, and tucked it away. At the end of the evening’s work, she returned home with several vials. She opened her bag to submit the tubes of man seed to the clerk at the collection and distribution desk of the dispensary. Her work contributes to her specie’s old tradition of cross-breeding with humans, a practice upheld to accomplish a strategic goal unknown to her. She assumed power to be the primary motivator, as it had been in most affairs of the royal, both man and beast. She held the warm, stone-colored tube and recalled his distant yell—_my angel_! Her sides pulsated where he had squeezed her; a series of tingles scattered inside her stomach, a feeling foreign to her. She kept the sample, refusing to submit it to the endless menagerie of human sperm.

#

The next night, she was scheduled to fly the east corridor in a forty-square-mile block. She diverted, and in twenty minutes, she reached the boy’s unhatched window. He woke to see the pale-skinned, fire-haired woman he had lain with the night before, but in her unnatural form—the appearance of a woman, with white teeth and no blue skin.

“I prefer your other form,” the boy said.

She looked down at her pink-white feet like polished silver. The feet turned gnarled and grey blue, with protruding bones and spiked toes capped with brown nails. When she looked through her brown, leaky eyes, she noticed the boy’s smile and the protrusion of his penis through the single unkempt sheet. She walked to him, and this time she lay under him. Again he penetrated her stomach with the tight grip of his supple hands, the hands of a young man, new to the touch of another. She absorbed his seed.

“I must fly; I am far behind,” she said.

“What do you mean? Just stay, please. Don’t abandon me again.”

“I have to work.”

“What is your work? Who are you?” he asked.

“Please forget me, my sweet boy.”

She flew back to the east corridor to relinquish lost time, but she arrived at the dispensary short on vials and had to fly twice as fast and collect twice as much the next evening. Three days passed before she returned to her boy lover. She returned to see the boy awake under the covers, a candle in hand, writing in frantic, harsh motions, perhaps doodling. She fluttered away. He jumped from the covers in a decisive and violent thrust of the legs, ignoring the fate of the flame in his hand. He ran to the window.

“Come in!”

She turned back and entered the boy’s room. The boy’s skin smelled of peppers and earth, his eyes red and lined with purple and black flesh. She flew in with some hesitation. The walls were littered with paintings on parchment and tapestry, blue women with black tongues and dainty wings.

“You create these figures. Why?” she asked.

“Oh, I am so glad. Oh, my. I love you! I do. I love you; tell me your name. What is your name, my angel? What is it?”

She knew from his blood-wrenched eyes that what had been fear and hate in the millions of other men was a dangerous passion and ravenous lust in him. The boy admired her, but his mind had turned wild all the same. _I thought you different, my lovely boy, and you are, but my sting penetrates your mind nevertheless; the rot grows in you_. She went to bed with the boy. She desired the burn in her sides left by the cut of his sharp nails and the twinge in her belly when she parted from him.

#

A fortnight passed before she returned to the boy. His head was bare, only white skin, skin far more pale than his soiled face. An array of multi-colored bruises covered his flesh, black and blue, purple and black, yellow and green.

“Oh, my angel, my angel, my wonderful angel. I need not your name. My angel. That is your name. My fair and true angel, that’s what you are. Please come in, my angel.”

He had painted the room with black ink and blue paint and the juice of berries; the rock walls were drenched in silhouettes of her kind, Patrick’s angels. Utensils and crusted fruit and berry skins scattered the floor. _All for his walls and not his belly, I’m sure_. The boy appeared famished, and his flesh transmitted the scent of vinegar and soft cheese. She assumed he was days without sleep, and she knew he was several days without bathing.

“Who cares for you, boy?” she asked.

“Why, my angel, do you call me ‘boy’? How many years are you? Eight and ten at the most, yes? My angel, come to me, please.”

“I am as old as many generations, my sweet boy; who cares for you?” she asked.

“I do, my angel, only me. I am all I need, and you of course. Myself and my angel, all I need. Please come to bed, my angel.”

The thought of how he had once looked at her with desire as her flesh fell off in his hands made her stomach tingle. The damage dealt to her tender sides by the boy’s ragged nails had given her a long internal burn. What she felt now, standing in front of this bald, tainted boy, was another new feeling, one unlike the feeling conjured by the boy’s touch. This new feeling happened internally like the tingle, but it was a violent eruption. _I am a daughter of Lamia_, she wanted to tell him; _I came about in the Bronze Age. You are the first to smile, the first to pierce my fragile guts_. Her face wore the scars of past lovers, countless men, but her sides wore only the fresh scars of this boy, her sweet boy. The pain of his grip lingered still, moons after their last affair. Her mind rattled with words she could not speak.

“I said forget me, boy!” she proclaimed in a growl, in a language meant for beasts. The boy could not interpret her language, but he understood her meaning all the same.

“My angel, please, you are my love! You are my angel!”

“Boy, you will be no more; you must forget me!” she said in his tongue.

“I would die before—”

She squealed and hissed. Jars shattered, stone walls shivered and cracked. The boy dropped to his knees in tears. She scooped him up and flew through the window snapping the hinges, his gaunt arms tangled with her own as her wings worked to support the extra weight. Her black tongue slipped into his mouth, feeling every corner.

On a grass hill, he dug into her sides, and she whispered to him, “My boy, you are my sweet boy.”

He replied, “You are my angel.”

#

Her kind and their ancient curse had scoured many minds, but never before had she watched as her toxins sank deeper into one’s viscera, fostering steady deterioration of the mind and body. Her sweet boy had held tighter, he gave her an admired pain, and now she gave him what none before received, her attention. Many moons came and went as she watched him from afar; the boy tore his bed to pieces, making a blue-painted altar to his angel. He wrote in scribbles, attempts at writing the old tongue she spoke to him, a language long dead and impossible to scribe. She watched as he cut toes from his molding feet. She watched the toes decay in an assortment of jars. The toes turned blue like the color of her breasts, and he cherished his toes in the same manner, caressing them in his palms, until they turned black, and he tossed them from his window. She watched, hovering in the sky, when the boy tossed himself from the window, shattering his neck on the mildew-covered ground below.

Four vials of her sweet boy’s semen remained in her satchel pocket. She took them to an old friend, Zarik, a leader in the distribution department of the dispensary. She promised Zarik any favor if she helped her find the most impeccable suitor for her precious seed. She accompanied Zarik and a breeder on the journey north, where a young woman lay in a decayed farmhouse. Her golden hair swam around her full body, a body prepared for a child. Four chances for the seed to take.

She held no expertise in human reproduction; collection was her work. The firm-bodied breeder flew into the farm girl’s window on his sturdy wings, her sweet boy’s semen injected into his loins, and bedded the fertile girl. Now she watched from afar, hoping the seed took and hoping the seed was true. She longed for a boy to be born of this woman, a boy to look upon her icy skin and tattered face with delight and pierce her delicate sides. This hope summoned the welcome intestinal tingle and the persisting heat of her mangled flesh.

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Caleb works as an analyst in Washington, D.C. His passions apart from reading and writing fiction include film, basketball, bourbon, and traveling with his wife Melody. 

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