Snake Eyes Read online

  They were terribly spoiled, given pretty baubles and luxuries Lamia’s other get would never see. Their two birthing chambers, flanking Lamia’s own, had lush beds with velvet comforters, silk drapes along the walls, and stacks of pillows. They were given makeup and perfume and all manner of glittery things. Hell, they even had televisions hooked up to generators, kept entertained by video games and DVDs that no one else was allowed to go near, for fear of Lamia’s wrath.

  The second type of daughter, and by far the most common, were pure serpents. Ten to fourteen feet long, as thick around as Tanis’s thigh, constrictors, all female—they didn’t do Lamia a whole of a lot of good beyond keeping the cave free of rodents, but Lamia had a soft spot for them all the same. They thrived even before they were released on the Glades, an unnatural predator in a luckless ecosystem. For a while, their population was kept in check by the gators, but then Florida residents began releasing unwanted pet pythons into the swamp. Lamia’s snakes bred with the male pythons, producing an army of mammoth serpents, and now a few types of birds were in danger of extinction and the humans had annual snake hunts to combat the growing threat.

  They weren’t winning. They had no idea how far the snakes’ reach was.

  The last of Lamia’s get was Tanis’s kind: the humanoids. Lamia hated humans and held them responsible for the weakness of her line, so to see her own children look like them didn’t make for a happy queen. These daughters were a wide and varied bunch, some sporting buxom, curvy shapes while others were more athletic and narrow. Some had vaginas but they weren’t capable of carrying children or eggs to term, for the same reason most True Daughters didn’t live: genetic variance between snake and human was too disparate. Others were born with a penis—or, as in Tanis’s case, double penises like snakes had—but while many of them could maintain erections and ejaculate, they too were sterile.

  The humanoids were far less common than the snake spawn, but far more common than the True Daughters; there were three hundred total, and Lamia loathed them all. It didn’t matter that without them, neither Lamia nor her True Daughters would have food, luxuries, or mates. It didn’t matter that the humanoids were the soldiers when the Den was in peril. They were, in Lamia’s words, “two-legged, pig-fleshed wastes.”

  If Tanis could muster anything other than weary resignation regarding her mother, it might have hurt her feelings.

  Tanis ventured down the pipeline, hopping over juvenile snakes. To her left, a half-dozen biped sisters crouched around a large cooking pot on a fire, weenies on sticks poised over the heat. Some waved to her, some didn’t, but she spared them a nod all the same, only knowing some of their names. When an enormous snake rose up from the shallow water to snap at her, rearing toward Luke’s head, he managed a moan and a twitch, one of his mangled legs kicking out and birthing a second whimper.

  The venom’s weakening.

  “Don’t be overeager, buddy. This doesn’t get any easier from here on out.”

  Past an offshoot that led into one of the two True Daughters’ chambers and then to the main birthing chamber. The entrance was twelve feet in diameter, two privacy screens side-by-side demanding a full stop. Kallie, a six-and-a-half-foot-tall humanoid lamia tolerated slightly more than the rest if only because Kallie was better at kissing ass than most, stood guard by the door.

  “Yesss?” she asked, tilting her head Tanis’s way. She had bulging eyes, snake eyes, in her otherwise human face, her irises tiny slivers in shining green orbs. Her head was covered in spiky blond hair. Her ears were pierced from lobe all the way up to the tippy top of her cartilage with glinting steel barbells.

  “Cut the shit, Kallie. You know why I’m here.”

  “Mmm.” Kallie gave Luke a once-over and stepped aside. Tanis pulled Luke from over her shoulder to carry him in front of her body, his head lolling back and making him look like the damsel at the mercy of the horror-movie monster. Tanis was reminded of Dracula with his prey, or maybe that iconic film still of the Creature from the Black Lagoon with the passed-out brunette drizzled across his arms.

  “Do you believe in monsters, Luke?” He didn’t answer, but she hadn’t expected him to—not with a tongue so swollen it made his cheeks bulge. She rolled him forward, angling him so his face pressed into her chest, like an overgrown baby in a freakishly strong mother’s arms. Tanis juggled his weight and walked forward, sucking in a deep, deep breath. “’Cause if you didn’t before, you’re about to.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  TANIS WALKED THE long passage to the main birthing den, as taut as a wire spring. The Den’s mingled stench enfolded her: the urine, the wet, watery, mildewy smell, the rot of death. Previous half-devoured feeds added a sickeningly sweet, meaty stench to the place. Feces, the musk of Lamia’s terrified paramours, eggs that wouldn’t hatch—Lamia was protective of her space and only subjected herself to chamber cleanings twice a month or so. A lot of decay could happen in a few weeks. Tanis had seen the cleaning crew going in before with wheelbarrows, contractor bags, and industrial bleach. Their efforts helped a little, but not a lot.

  It seemed they were overdue for a visit.

  A few steps more. Tanis cringed, stopping just outside of Lamia’s room. The scents pervaded, awful still, but that wasn’t what gave her pause. No, it was the pheromones; oh, the pheromones. Lamia’s den telegraphed her readiness to breed. It was faint on the air outside of her chamber, faint enough Tanis could handle it without consequence, but the closer she got to the actual room, the stronger it grew. Cloyingly sweet, like cotton candy and Sweet’n Low packets and honey all in one. There was no other smell like it. It was chemical sex that prodded Tanis’s reptilian side and coaxed it forth. She didn’t want to react, but she couldn’t help herself, her cocks thickening inside her pants because, biologically, this was a thing that called to her, calling her to a base function she couldn’t actually perform.

  Tanis would have rather sawed off her dicks than to ever consider coupling with the mother who’d kicked her out at seventeen because, “Looking at human meat makes me sick.”

  Fuck’s sake. Get a hold of yourself.

  From the darkness, “I smell you. What have you brought me?”

  Lamia’s voice was dry, like gravel scratching over pavement, or two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. She spoke the old tongue, the home tongue, that Tanis had learned first; she only picked up the English language of the local humans at six or seven, under Barbara, an elder humanoid’s, tutelage.

  “Your offering, Mother,” Tanis replied in kind.

  “Bring it.”

  Tanis gulped air through her mouth, refusing to inhale any more of what, to her human parts, was a rank, disgusting stench, but was to her reptile brain a liquid invitation. It was there, in her head no matter what, but her human blood buffered it enough that breathing through her mouth made it tolerable. She stepped forward. The main chamber was dark near the tunnel entrance, but at the back, forty feet away, two overhead saucer lights were suspended from wires. Centered beneath them were king-size mattresses, four of them, stacked in two layers and covered with rumpled blankets and pillows. Comforters, mostly, to keep the queen warm when it was chilliest, but the cold season was behind them and Lamia would be quite content in the jockstrap humidity of Florida’s Deep South spring.

  The mattresses were empty.

  Tanis walked. Rustling to her left, the sound of hand-sized scales dragging over the floor. The matron’s chamber was a dug-out cave, the floor and walls lined with flat slabs of granite, the crevices between patched with cement. If you got close enough, you could see the handprints of the humanoid daughters who’d labored to build this place for their mother despite her disdain. They’d erected a steel beam ceiling, over which they’d laid more stones, exposed to the sun. Above ground, they looked like boulders poking up from too-tall grass, but they acted as a primitive sort of heating system: when the stone warmed, so did the birthing chamber hidden below.

  Luke whimpered against Tanis�
��s chest. Either the room’s smell or the slithering sounds kicked his terror into high gear, because his bladder let go, piss raining rampant over Tanis’s T-shirt and jeans.

  “God fucking damn it!” she barked, dropping him to the floor. He landed with a thud and a groan. Tanis paid him little mind, tearing off her shirt and using the dry parts to dash at her pants. The backhand shouldn’t have surprised her; Lamia careened at her, closing the gap between them faster than Tanis could blink. Tanis’s feet left the floor with the smack, her back striking the wall ten feet away before she crumpled.

  The queen snake’s strength was unmatched among her daughters. She was nine feet tall and nearly as wide, her upper half a pale, bluish blob of white skin and pulsing veins and rolls upon rolls of grayish fat. She’d been denied sunlight for decades, and her pallor showed it, the skin stretched thin over her breeder-thick corpulence. Her pendulous breasts hung past her waist, where the scales met the human skin, nipples large and brown and pointed at the floor, the ends beaded with a milk no snake child would ever drink, not even the humanoids who could benefit from the nourishment. Her face, once fabled to rival Aphrodite herself, was a pair of yellow eyes and flaring nostrils with a too-wide mouth that reminded Tanis of a guppy. Her hair was a matted tangle of thick, ropey locks that dragged on the floor, each cluster held together by dirt, blood, and other unsanitary bodily fluids.

  The rest of her was snake. All snake. Yards of snake, that could raise her three to four extra feet as needed, the thickest part rivaling a tree trunk or, perhaps, two tree trunks. Her scales were rum-colored with gold stripes at the bottom, so brightly yellow they looked like they’d been dipped in twenty-four karat.

  Catching a breath wasn’t easy. Tanis oomphed and held her guts, wheezing, every hard nub of the rock wall imprinted into her back by the force of the collision. Once, when she’d been a teenager, she’d been thrown off a dirt bike and rolled across the sun-scorched Florida pavement, scouring off the top layer of skin on her biceps and hips. The effect of Lamia’s blow felt like that.

  She’d be bruised in the morning.

  “How dare you? He is my darling, my consort, my prince! Useless swine daughter. I should have devoured you.”

  That Luke Des Moines could be referred to as anything precious after the shit he’d pulled on his wife was reprehensible. That Lamia said it about a human when she had humanish children she abhorred? Vile. But Tanis wasn’t brave enough to say it, instead picking herself up off of the floor, her body a throbbing, stinging mess. Lamia collected the heap of man before her, his body dwarfed by her gripping coils. She flipped him about so he faced her monstrousness, looming over him as she inspected his fine features, a taloned finger with swollen blue joints tracing his patrician nose and pretty mouth.

  “You’ve done well, pig. I’ll give you that.”

  Tanis didn’t reply; a reply invited attention, and attention was not a thing she wanted, not so soon after upsetting her mother. Lamia slithered across the ground, Luke still in her grasp, the man mewling as he was deposited in the queen’s nest of blankets and pillows, all undoubtedly smelling of her mating-time secretions. In a way, Tanis was thankful for her mother’s punishment; it’d quelled the straining ardor inside her boxer briefs.

  “You will stay,” Lamia demanded, looking at Luke but talking to Tanis. Sometimes, Lamia wanted privacy as she ‘romanced’ her consorts, but there’d been enough incidents of the chosen male dying mid-transformation and Lamia needing a posthaste replacement, that sending Tanis away didn’t behoove either of them. If Luke croaked before he could spunk up the snake queen, Tanis would be out hunting again, and as much as she didn’t like the old stranger snatch-and-grab, she wasn’t above saving her own hide and blind-picking a male sacrifice.

  Sorry, Naree. Batman I am not.

  Tanis sank back to the floor to become a thing best forgotten, not wanting to behold her mother doing her most-terrible deed, but really having no choice. Besides, Tanis had seen it all before, too many times to count, and she’d become desensitized. This was her job. She was, for better or worse, Lamia’s personal hunter. Others served the daughters, others were maintenance or sanitation or food scavengers, but Tanis had drawn the short straw. She was responsible for collecting her mother’s playdates.

  E-harmony, Match.com, and OkCupid done up lamia-style, in one fine, muscular body.

  Tanis slapped at her jeans pockets but remembered too late she’d left her cigarettes in the Caddy. There’d be nothing to distract her from the fucked-up foray going on a couple dozen feet away. Lamia stroked her hands over Luke’s body while the man muffle-shrieked, his back bowing as Tanis’s weak toxin lost its thrall. Lamia looped one of those razory claws into his belt. She plucked at it, delicate, like it was a harp string, and the thick leather snapped. The pants were next, Lamia cooing as she delicately serrated them at the seams to expose long, furry man legs. Socks and shoes, thrown aside. His shirt, gone, his gray boxer briefs with the black waistband removed because, Tanis knew, they’d tear.

  That’s what the transformation did. It took two legs and made them one. And then it made no legs at all.

  Luke’s breaths were rapid gasps and his moans became louder. Lamia didn’t care, not as she picked him up and crushed him to her too-warm flesh, his face forced into the side of a basketball-sized breast.

  “Don’t cry. Don’t cry, little thing. I will make you perfect. I’ll immortalize you,” the queen crooned right before dropping her head, her knotted hair plummeting past his shoulder like the vilest of mantles. She whispered to him, something soft, before plunging her fangs into his shoulder, not very far from the still-swollen mark Tanis herself had made. His body jolted in her grasp, lightning striking twice, the queen’s venom surging through his veins. If left unattended, it would kill him, crushing him from the inside as his lungs collapsed, but Lamia had learned a thing or two from her own curse, of how to manipulate the magic that made her existence possible, and with a few uttered words, the venom inside of Luke Des Moines quickened.

  Tanis watched. Waited. It was always the same. Luke’s nude body went from a slab of meat to a slab of glowing meat, the lamia poison inside of him whizzing through every vein and capillary and glowing green with magic. He was illuminated from the inside, his heart visible inside of his chest, behind his ribs, the strong organ pounding faster and faster as he succumbed. His fingers splayed, his toes stretched out from his feet. All of his muscles flexed at once, his head snapping upright from a lolling, useless weight on his neck, too aware, his eyes bulging from the sockets, his mouth agape with silent screams.

  Lamia’s hands fell away from him, letting the human drop back onto her blankets. He thrashed atop them, body convulsing and tangling in the queen’s soiled sheets. Tanis watched Luke’s heart as she knew her mother did, waiting for it to either erupt from the magic building inside of him or to ‘swim’ inside of his ribcage. Snakes had mobile hearts to make way for large, swallowed prey. Luke would be the same when he was through with his transformation.

  If he survived.

  It was looking good, by whatever definition of good was at play. Luke’s heart slowed and changed position, suggesting that his torso had begun to elongate. It was easier to tell when the men were in their clothes still—seams would rip and burst a la Bruce Banner to the Incredible Hulk—but Lamia’d stripped him raw and so it was harder to gauge where they were at. It’d get much more obvious soon, after...

  SNAP. SNAP. SNAP.

  That. His bones were breaking. Luke started screaming, real screams that broke through the poison in his system, as his vertebrae pulled apart, his whole body stretched out taffy-like. His legs popped from their joints at his hips, his pelvis cracking to bits that would dissolve inside of the thick flesh forming to fill the new space. His skin rippled like something was trying to claw its way out, but it was the magic, pushing. Kneading. Forcing his body into acquiescence. The skin on his legs grew translucent, the veins inside rewiring themselves to make
way for what came next.

  The worst part, really, for him.

  It started with his penis. Tanis described it to Naree as a banana peel falling off the fruit once, and that was somewhat right, but it was only the first step. His cock glowed red, like an iron left in a blacksmith’s fire too long, and then the outside sloughed off, but it didn’t exactly fall away. It more coalesced in wait as his midsection, from bellybutton to knees, narrowed. Men usually didn’t have much in the way of hips or asses, but the snake had even less, and the fat stores from his buttocks shifted and spread, wrapping around his legs like a meaty blanket.

  Still Luke screamed, but, Tanis supposed, she would, too, if her legs were fusing. Luke’s bottom half was gone to jelly, his femurs no longer separated as they’d been when he’d walked on two legs, but clumped together and held by burgeoning coils of muscle. The knees did the same, followed by the tibia and fibula. There were more crackling sounds as his foot bones crunched down and tapered, Lamia’s rippling magic pulling his body as long as it would go and then forcing it to grow beyond that.

  Jelly legs became jelly not-legs. They became yards of translucent snake, still glowing thanks to the green veins inside, still pulsing as the muscles finished forming so they could support his human torso. Six feet of human male had become eight feet of man-snake, the shed skin from his penis finally collecting itself together and forming a second penis, right next to the first one, both glowing red, both turgid with magic and resembling mushrooms on long, pink stems. They weren’t inside a cloaca yet, because his body was still forming it, creating a chamber in his new snake tail that would excrete his body’s waste and hold his peni inside until it was time to mate.

  Tanis watched with disinterest as both cocks sunk into his blob of snake flesh like they’d been sucked under by quicksand.

  Luke flopped around on the bed, trying to move, but he was still too fragile, and so the looming queen put her hand on his stomach to hold him while the last effects bore down on him. His lower snake skin cracked, each fissure lit from the inside, before a thousand tiny cuts burst open with sharp, fresh scales, as clear as the rest of his twisting flesh. They’d wear down to smooth curves given time to rub against things, but he’d never get that time. Lamia’d yet to have one of her consorts not go mad with the utter disintegration of his former self, which had to do with the magic and the violence of the snake half’s growth, yes, but there was also the chemical onslaught to consider.