Calypso Slaves - Love Me Always

"Um, do you think animals might've done this?" Cassie asked.

"Face wounds happened after he was already dead, animals aren't usually like that," Lily said, "if they wanted to eat his face there would've been bite marks, not claw marks."

"Well, there are drowning ghosts, but none of them are this, uh...enthusiastic," Cassie said. "I don't have the encyclopedia for demons, but it's gotta be one of them."

"So the pull is definitely taking me toward our target?" Lily asked.

"Yeah," Cassie said.

The smart thing to do here would be to use Cassie as bait. Lily knew the monster lived in water. She knew it killed at least one guy by drowning, and he probably didn't appreciate that and tried to fight back, and yet he still had the muscle strength and attached limbs necessary to flip his shit while drowning. Which means the monster drowned him before ripping off or eating anything. So Cassie would have to be alone with the monster for two to three minutes, thrashing manically, before she actually died. And for those two minutes, the monster would basically be target practice. It was a solid plan. It was efficient. It put the most capable person, Lily, in a safe position from which to adapt on the fly if there was an unexpected complication. After all, if she died, the monster would not have much trouble tracking and killing a courtier, one month of slavery notwithstanding. Cassie as bait was the plan her Hashashin mentor would've approved of.

But seriously, fuck that guy. Lily didn't want to put Cassie in danger. She didn't want to turn around to Cassie while she was still freaking out about the body and say 'Hey, I need you to wade out in the water and try to look like you're easily drowned, have very appetizing legs, and I dunno, a really annoying face, so that the monster that made this macabre art piece I've been poking at will make a beeline for you.' Lily already wished she could've been with Cassie while she was looking the thing up instead of scanning the water for an attacker. Especially since nothing ever came.

"Cassie, stay near me," Lily said. Just a few minutes ago she seemed very confident, but given how quickly that crumbled Lily suspected that she either had no idea what she was up against or if it was just a show Cassie had been putting on for Lily's benefit in the first place. Lily needed to stop trying to be fifteen again but get it right this time and start being an assassin, because that is what Cassie needed right now. Someone who hunted and killed things like it was routine because it was routine because it was Lily's actual job. Someone to show Cassie that the corpse wasn't anything to be worried about.

"Stay near me, and if anything attacks, just run and let me handle it," Lily said.

"You said you weren't any good in a straight fight," Cassie said.

"I'm a lot better than you. At least I know how to kill things generally. And if I don't make it, someone has to report to Enlil," Lily said. Cassie didn't answer. Lily could tell she was looking for a reason to say no, and while Lily didn't really give a shit about Enlil, she knew which buttons to push to keep Cassie safe. "Cassie, we're slaves, remember? We need to focus on getting the job done. Which means if something bad happens, someone needs to get out of this place and tell Enlil what happened and someone else needs to keep the demon tied up long enough to give the first someone a headstart. We both know which someone is which. Promise me you'll run if we get attacked."

"I...I promise," Cassie said finally.

Lily turned around, took a deep breath, and headed deeper into the swamp, following the pull on her body. She could feel it getting stronger. This was going to be over soon.

Lily scanned the water ahead while wading into it. It clung to her, weighing her clothes down, chilling her skin, sending shivers up her spine. She bumped aside bits of flotsam. Those ripples would probably have sent a signal. It was hard to tell exactly how far her target was from the ritual tugging at her flesh, but if it lived in water, it could probably feel movement in water from a pretty good distance, and Lily knew without knowing how that the monster couldn't be more than a few hundred yards away.

She climbed out of the water and into a tree, holding a hand out for Cassie. "Wait here. If you have to run, stick to trees and land if you can," Lily said. And then she returned down below, finding rocks and roots and solid clumps of mud to alight upon as she jumped from one to the next, trying to find the sturdiest possible. She also needed to worry about sight, staying behind stumps and boulders and amongst reeds as much as she could without causing too many ripples, trying to keep the trunk of a tree between her and the water as she climbed it.

It took a while, but the monster arrived. A woman with pale skin tinged just the slightest bit blue, long hair covering her face and otherwise unclothed as she emerged from the water, rivulets running down her body. She deserved better than this place, was Lily's first thought. Better than to be in muddy water and tangled roots. Her next thought was a swimming pool, a real big one like the plutocrats have, but that would be halfway to a cage. Really, it should be the other way around, a vast, pristine labyrinth of underwater passages and rooms with a few acres of floor somewhere for the land people to live.

Lily should come out of hiding and introduce herself, she thought. Lily could help the water lady, like she helped Cassie. She could introduce Cassie to the water lady, too. Lily moved halfway out from behind the tree she was hiding behind, but instincts drilled into her a thousand times over stopped her. At first it was the most reflexive fear: She wasn't supposed to show herself outside a safe house. But wasn't this place safe? Having asked the question, Lily immediately knew the answer: No. And, in fact, fuck no, because why the Hell was it that her first thought on seeing this creature that she was here specifically to kill was to walk up and say hi? Oh, God, it was like the Hashashin except it had a shortcut, it didn't need to spend years fucking with her perception, it had some magic bullshit and did it automatically.

Lily crawled a little farther up her tree, it had no branches but its bark was plenty grippy, until she was high up enough to jump across the water and onto another tree, this one bent over as it grew to form a balance beam that was slanted, but not at such a steep angle she couldn't walk across it. The monster had stopped, standing half in the water near the shore, waiting. Probably for someone to give in. Lily looked towards Cassie's tree, and she seemed transfixed by the creature, staring at it, but wasn't moving. Lily looked back towards the creature and got lost a little herself, before pulling her eyes away.

Lily leapt off the trunk and flicked out her hidden blade, but the creature turned towards her at the last second and sidestepped. Lily swiped with the blade but met nothing but air, and then slammed into the water. Before she could get her balance and on her feet, the creature's hands were on her head, forcing her under. She struggled beneath its grip, trying to get free, but it was unyielding. Not as strong as Tanirt, maybe, but it didn't have to be nearly that strong to keep Lily under.

Lily struggled under the grip uselessly for several seconds, squinting against the sting of filthy water and looking for some other way out. Finally she stopped fighting against the grip and instead dove down underneath it, swimming between the siren's legs and coming up behind it. Lily gasped for air and backed away while drawing her pistol and firing a few shots half-blind at the creature. A bullet caught its arm and it turned back towards Lily with a screech of pain and rage, and for a brief moment Lily caught a look at its face through its silken hair. It had black, bulbous eyes and a lipless mouth lined with razor sharp teeth.

It dove back into the water and Lily could barely keep track of it, it was so fast, and the direction Lily was moving in was only taking her into deeper water. She dove out of the way as the creature sped towards her, then wade-staggered toward shallower water without bothering to recover her balance until she was no more than knee-deep. The creature behind her banked hard and drew itself out of the water, wading after Lily, but now Lily was back on her feet and on land and she bolted towards a tree, pocketing her pistol to grip the trunk and climb up until she reached a branch to balance on.

The creature swam back to deeper water, banked back around to come swimming toward Lily in the tree, then rocketed out of the water from the depths and flew through the air at her. Lily dropped underneath the branch. It sailed past, landing on the ground thirty feet from the tree and sliding across it while Lily swung back up onto the branch and tried to line up a shot.

Water stung at Lily's eyes as the creature ran toward the tree. It stumbled and slipped on the mossy ground, unused to fighting on land, but that only made its movements harder to predict, and Lily's shots constantly went wide, slamming into the ground around the creature and ripping through the moss, digging deep into the mud beneath. Lily ran her magazine dry as the creature drew near. The creature grabbed her by the leg and yanked her down from the tree. Lily got to her feet and the creature wrapped an arm around her head and began dragging her back towards the water.

As the creature pulled Lily towards the water, she fumbled with a spare magazine in her pocket, her legs struggling to find purchase on the mossy ground, a trail of mud left behind as her feet ripped up the thin layer of moss coating it. Lily slammed a magazine halfway into the pistol and it jammed, she tried to push it in and she could feel the water up to her ankles. She ripped the magazine out and it slipped from her grasp into the water below, which had risen to her knees. A single gunshot rang through the air, Lily didn't know where from and didn't have time to care. The monster shrieked again, its grip loosened by the wound. Lily wriggled out, falling into the water, but the creature was too busy howling in pain to take advantage and she shot up onto her feet again, the water thigh-deep.

The creature stalked towards Lily again, and she backed away. Head to land? She looked towards the tree, but the creature didn't seem much less adept on land than in the shallow water. As Lily put distance between herself and the creature, more gunshots rang out, this time in a panicked volley that went on until the magazine went dry. The siren staggered to a halt under the barrage of gunfire and then slipped beneath the waves. Lily flicked out her hidden blade, took a deep breath, and dove under to deliver a killstrike to its jugular, and then another to the back of its skull, just to be sure.

Cassie was still standing at the base of the tree where Lily had left her, pointing her emptied gun at the water where the siren had fallen, her grip on the weapon knuckle-white. "You didn't run," Lily said.

"I won't leave you, Lily," Cassie said.

"Well, I think it's dead. The ritual is weaker and tugging all over the place," Lily said. Cassie put her weapon in her waistband and took a deep breath. "You shouldn't have stayed," Lily said.

"I won't leave you," Cassie said again.

"Cassie, please, stop it. You can't fix me," Lily said. "I'm never gonna trust you, really. I'm always, always going to be wondering if today is the day it turns out you were just using me all along. Or the day you give up on me."

"It doesn't matter," Cassie said, "whether or not you trust me, I'm not using you and I won't give up on you." Lily opened her mouth to tell Cassie that it wasn't fair to her to make that promise, but Cassie didn't even let her get started. "You don't get to pick your family, Lily," she said, unbuttoning her jeans, "now shut up, take your clothes off, and pay your dues to big sister."

Lily's gaze dropped. A tiny part of her wanted to argue, but she knew she wouldn't. Cassie could tell her to jump off a bridge in that tone and she'd do it. "Yes, ma'am," Lily replied, pulling her clothes off and folding them up inside her waterproofed backpack, before kneeling down in front of Cassie. Cassie was sitting on one of the moss-covered boulders that dotted the swamp, her jeans pulled down just far enough to expose her slit.

Lily licked up Cassie's cunt and then kissed her clit before pressing her mouth against the lips of Cassie's sex, her tongue exploring inside the tight, pink hole. Cassie moaned with pleasure, gripping Lily's hair as she licked deeper inside. Cassie's legs wrapped around Lily's chest, pressing her tits against the cold moss of the boulder, Cassie's legs warming her body while she licked.

Cassie's moans grew louder and she began to buck as Lily licked deeper and deeper inside of her. Lily's own breath grew heavy. Finally, Cassie's body tensed and she began to cum. Lily greedily licked up the fluid. There was no worry about leaving a mess behind here, there were no guards or cameras, but Lily wanted to lick it up anyway. She licked Cassie's skin clean, and then sat back, ass resting on ankles while she knelt. Cassie got up from the boulder and pulled her pants back over her cunt.

"Are you actually older than me?" Lily asked.

"Prob'ly not," Cassie said, "I'm barely even old enough to be tried as an adult." That would make Lily's 'big sister' a solid year or two younger than her. "I still get to be in charge," Cassie said, "get dressed."

"Yes, ma'am," Lily said, even if it was just sympathetic orgasmic bliss talking. Pulling her shirt over her head, she asked "Do you know exactly what that thing was?"

"Yeah," Cassie said, "it was a fucking fairy."

"When am I allowed to get dressed?" Lily asked, sitting on the carpet of the hotel room, her back resting against the foot of the bed. Cassie had told her to strip as soon as they got inside, nearly an hour ago.

"When I tell you to," Cassie said with a smirk, flicking idly through the archive on the television, sitting atop the bed.

"You said that like four times," Lily said.

"And for some reason you keep asking," Cassie said.

"At least pick something to watch already," Lily said.

"We're only here for one night, I don't want to waste it," Cassie said. "What kinda stuff do you like?"

"I dunno. Something funny. Oh, have you seen Samsara Bluffs?" Lily asked.

"No, what is it?" Cassie asked.

"It's, like, the Hindu gods live in an apartment building together, except they're not gods. So, like, Vishnu is the landlord, Shiva works in retail and that's why he wants to destroy the world, Kali has some kind of mafia job or something, it's not really clear. Stuff like that. It's funny. Can we watch it?" Lily asked.

"Sure," Cassie said, flipping the remote sideways to use the keyboard and look it up.

"So can I come up and watch it with you?" Lily asked.

"What are you?" Cassie asked.

"I'm your slut," Lily said. It gave her a tingle the first time, but now she was kind of disappointed. She wanted to cuddle with Cassie, dammit.

"And where do sluts belong?" Cassie asked.

"On the floor," Lily said.

"Good girl," Cassie said, "I'll tell you when I want you to come up here so I can touch you."

"You're a slave too, you know," Lily pouted, crossing her arms.

"I'm not your slave," Cassie said.

"Come on, please?" Lily asked, pushing herself up just far enough that her puppy dog eyes peeked over the edge of the bed.

Cassie sighed, and then patted the bed next to her. "Come on up here," she said.

Lily grinned and climbed up onto the bed, crawling over to sit next to Cassie. As soon as she started to settle in, though, Cassie pulled Lily across her knees.

"Hey," Lily said, stretching the word out, and then yelped as Cassie spanked her. She wriggled and struggled a bit as Cassie's palm continued to smack into her vulnerable ass, leaving light pink marks behind on her naked skin. Cassie's grip on Lily's shoulders was too firm for her to get far, though. Lily yelped and moaned from the spanking, but she knew it was mostly theater. This hardly hurt at all compared to Calypso.

After a few moments, Cassie finally let up. "No more whining," she said.

"Yes, ma'am. I'm sorry, ma'am," Lily said, still lying across Cassie's knees.

"Good girl," Cassie said, and leaned forward to kiss the back of her head. She left Lily there while she reached for the hotel menu from the end table next to the bed, and then grabbed Lily by the arm to gently guide her off the bed. "Go downstairs and order the large burger meal from the restaurant. We can split it and have something to eat while we watch that Samsara show." Cassie grabbed the TradeCoin bills she'd left on the end table and handed them to Lily.

The hotel offered room service, but Lily was pretty sure Cassie knew that. "Can...can I get dressed first?" Lily asked.

"Do you need to be spanked again?" Cassie replied.

"No, ma'am," Lily said, and scurried to the door. She poked her head outside and checked both ways before leaving. The hallway was deserted, but really, even if it wasn't, what was she going to do? She stepped out and started walking down the hall.

How did slaves walk in public? They hadn't taught anything like this on the Calypso, but Lily had seen slaves occasionally in courtier establishments like this one. They were usually lent by the plutocratic patron of the business, sometimes just passing through or owned by a wealthier courtier. They walked with arms folded behind their back, Lily remembered, usually their heads were tilted just a little bit downwards, and they always took short steps, even if they weren't actually wearing shackles.

And they always drew stares from courtiers who only saw a slave once every couple of weeks, maybe even more rarely than that, but Lily would only stick out more if she acted embarrassed and awkward. The hotel was mercifully empty through to the elevator, but the lobby had a handful of people. The clerk manning the desk stared at her, and a teenage girl sitting in one of the chairs was grinning and filming Lily with her phone. Lily forced herself not to look, or turn away, and walked into the restaurant across the lobby.

A family was dining here. A kid of about thirteen was staring, and his father whispered to him to 'stop being rude'. Lily couldn't bring her eyes up to meet those of the cashier. "Th-the large burger meal, please," she said, sliding the bills across the counter. She fixed her gaze firmly on the floor while waiting for the meal to come, and avoided eye contact with everyone on the way back.

When Lily returned to the room, she said"Here's your dinner, ma'am," offering it to Cassie.

"Good girl," Cassie said with a smile, taking the bag and setting it down across from her, then patted the bed next to her and said "come on, come sit."

Lily smiled and crawled onto the bed next to Cassie, cuddling up with her to watch the show.