Incubus Pupa Ch. 12

Rising, I turned to my mate and smiled.

"You know, it just occurred to me that I've never shown you my wings."

"W-wings?" she stammered.

"Yeah," I confirmed, pulling off my t-shirt, "wings."

With a thought, I manifested them, throwing them open to her shocked look. The flickering light of the fire reflected off their iridescent highlights.

Christine drew back, looking positively terrified. Fuck! Catholic upbringing... Probably should have prepped her better for that. Standing in the firelight, I probably looked positively demonic. I retracted them but didn't send them away.

Kneeling next to her chair, I reached for her, but she pulled away, looking at my hand with horror. I felt awful.

"Christine, it's me. It's your Adam, Baby. Look into my eyes."

She did, hesitating another long moment. When she saw the care and kindness in my gaze, some of her tension receded.

Reaching for her hand, I clasped her small fingers with mine. "Feel my hands. It's just me."

Finally, recognition dawned on her features once more. "Adam... I'm...sorry. That was a bit of a shock."

"No, that's my bad. I should have prepared you better for that. But here, take a look." I bent over and placed her hand on the rounded leading edge of my wing, watching her caress my feathers. "Just me, see?"

"They're so soft!" She said in wonder. "And beautiful!"

I closed my eyes, enjoying her delicate hands on the alien appendage. It was a very unfamiliar sensation: the feeling of her stroking a part of me that hadn't existed until two minutes prior. Sort of like having my back massaged, but my wings were more sensitive, so that didn't quite capture it.

"They're not exactly easy to show off...with how big they are, I kind of stick out like a sore thumb, and not in a good way."

"Can you fly with these?"

"That's what I aim to find out. Wanna help me?" I stood up and offered her a hand. I expected the cold to be getting to me without my shirt, but somehow, I felt a lot warmer with my wings out. Weird.

"Sure..." she said tentatively, "but I'm not sure what I can do."

"Come on, you can be an extra set of eyes. You know pretty much everything I do about flying, frankly," I waved her on.

I'd given only a modicum of thought to how this might work. Truthfully, I had no idea if these things were just for show, some kind of organ that helped me focus or store Vitae (I suspected this was the case based on some innate knowledge of the Fae), or if they allowed me to fly. I was no aerospace engineer, but I knew that most popular television and films portrayed mythical animals and humans that flew with entirely ludicrous proportions. Real birds flew only because they were extremely lightweight, and even they needed very large wings relative to their body size. Would these carry my weight at all? I verbalized my uncertainty to Christine.

"You'll never know until you try, right? Maybe just flap away and see what happens?"

"I like it," I grinned, "let's go."

Grabbing her hand, I walked beyond the fenced-in portion of the yard to an area that largely free of trees or other obstructions. It was a few hundred feet from the house, and about the same distance to the tree line near the edge of the property. There wasn't much light this far from the house, but the moon provided enough illumination at least to see each other and the terrain. Looking around, I thankfully found that we were almost surrounded by trees, off in the distance, and the sprawling house blocked the view from the road. That should provide me at least some protection from someone who might have witnessed what I was about to attempt.

"Okay...here goes." I opened my wings fully to Christine's now excited smile, walking away from her a reasonable distance to avoid a collision.

I started slow, using the muscles in my back that I'd found could provide the flapping action to familiarize myself with the motion. Summoning as much strength as I could muster, I raised them as high as they would go and gave a mighty flap.

A powerful gust of air carried me all of about four feet into the air, at which point I dropped unceremoniously onto the dewy grass.

"Okay, that was embarrassing," I muttered.

"Don't beat yourself up, Love, I'm sure that's more difficult than it looks." Christine consoled.

I brushed myself off, gathering my dignity once more to repeat the process. This time I added leg power to the equation, figuring my incubus strength would assist. Crouching, I did my best high jump while pumping my wings. On reaching the seven or eight-foot apex, I flapped furiously to try to maintain my meager altitude. Frustratingly, each pump of my wings added little height, and worse, my upstrokes pulled me downward. At least this time I didn't dump myself on my ass when I came back to earth.

I growled.

"Well, it's an improvement, right?" she offered cheerfully. She's such a sweetheart. "You know, I noticed something odd when you were flapping up there that last time."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, it almost looked like your wings were pulling you backward as well as upward."

"Hmm, that is interesting. I probably should have noticed that, but I can't see the ground all that well in the dark. There's not much of a reference."

"Just a second. Let me check something."

I folded my wings and walked over to her while she pulled out her smartphone. Heh, she was looking up the mechanics of bird flight. Actually, that wasn't a bad idea... I pulled out my phone and searched.

"Hmm, this is interesting," Christine murmured, "it seems as though birds don't pump their wings to fly up, they do it to fly forward. Err, at least some of it. It seems there are two components to the stroke."

"Yeah..." I continued, finding my own results, "looks like it's the forward motion that gives them the lift to stay in the air." Then I noticed something else about the photos of the birds in flight. "But the orientation is wrong."

She nodded, picking up my train of thought, "Exactly. If you were flying like a bird, you'd be lying down, based on the way your wings look to be attached to your body. But then...how could you take off in a horizontal position?" she pondered.

"Good question. I mean, I could try running bent at the waist. That should at least put me in the right orientation for takeoff."

She shrugged. "Give it a try."

I grinned, really enjoying the challenge with her. Christine's pragmatic attitude and sensible approach to problem-solving was already winning me over. "You're amazing, you know that? We're a pretty good team." I exclaimed, grinning like a giddy fool.

I thought I caught her blush, but that couldn't be right. It was too dark. Wait...no. I hadn't seen it, I felt it. Almost like it was a second skin. Amazing...but I'd have time to appreciate that later. Right now, we were going to crack this nut if it killed us.

Facing away from her, I bent over and started running, wings extended. Holy shit was this awkward. Ever run while you're bent over? I can tell you, it ain't natural, and you feel like a fucking idiot when you're doing it.

Regardless of how comical I might have appeared to onlookers; my efforts did improve the results. Leaping into what was essentially a long jump, I projected myself to a lower height, but I was able to maintain it slightly better due to my forward momentum. I kept flapping with everything I had, using the powerful muscles in my back to pump my huge wings. Then I stopped, extending my wings and just trying to feel the flow of air over them. Gliding. Their sensitive structure gave me a remarkable amount of information about the direction and flow of the wind. I was too busy processing the sensations to realize that I had flown a good way, only returning to reality when I saw the ground quickly approaching.

Tumbling into the moist turf once more, I collected myself.

Christine jogged over. "Adam, that was phenomenal! You must have flown sixty feet."

Looking back to where I'd 'taken off' -- as disingenuous as it felt to think of it that way -- I felt pitiful and frustrated, but at the same time oddly gratified at her words. Like Clark Griswold proudly ruminating on jumping the family truckster fifty yards.

"One thing," she offered, "you looked like you were flapping your wings in the same direction as when you jumped vertically before. Sorta straight down like," she flapped her arms to pantomime, "only since you were flying forward, they looked like they were moving mostly back. Is there a way you can kinda... Here, open them up."

I did so, extending them to either side of me. It was odd. Amid my frustration, I felt a sense of excitement worming in. This was exciting, but the feeling had insinuated itself so suddenly, and in a moment when I was focused on my failure, so I wondered if the emotion was mine, or Christine's. Whatever... I let it wash over me, becoming immersed in the moment.

She walked her fingers over the length of my wing, giving me a heated look as she stroked my feathers. When she reached the tip, she gathered the section on the end with the larger feathers with two hands and folded the end segment of my wing for me. I was getting aroused at her gentle touch, and I was pretty sure some of it was bleeding over onto her, but I wanted to make this happen.

"Like this," she moved the folded tip of the wing downward, toward the ground, "this is how you're doing it. But I think you need to do it like this." This time, she pulled it toward the front of my chest, horizontally with the ground. "Tell you what, let's try something. Lie down on the ground."

I complied, noticing once more that the cold of the damp grass didn't register. It did make my jeans a little wet though.

"Okay," I said, ready to take instruction.

"Extend your wings again." I did, laying them flat to my sides. "Good. That's good." She walked to my face, kneeling to watch me closely. "Now, try to flap them."

Using the motion I'd become accustomed to, I flexed my muscles to pump my wings. The wings pulled downward somewhat into the ground, but mostly they folded back toward my feet.

"You see what I'm talking about now?" she asked.

"Yeah, I think I do. I'm not using them correctly." I realized what I was doing was flexing my lats. The large muscles in the back that lets you do pullups and rowing motions. They're immensely strong -- the strongest muscles in the back, in fact, but they were pulling my wings in the wrong direction.

Christine knelt patiently with me, watching me flex each muscle in my back and shoulders I could single out. "There! I think you've got it!" she cried out. "Try that one again."

This time I used some combination of my traps and deltoids, or maybe even an unfamiliar muscle in my back that was specifically for using my wings, and it seemed to work. They flapped mostly up and down, relative to the ground. I practiced for a few more minutes, trying to simulate the compound waving action that I'd seen in some slow-motion bird flight videos.

"What do you think? Ready to try again?" she asked, ever patient with me. I clamored to my feet and gave her a peck on the cheek, earning me a bright smile in return.

"Alright, here goes nothing," I said, giving a determined huff.

After several more attempts at running starts, I had worked my flight range record up to maybe double that of the first time, but frustration crept in again. Each time my wings were carrying me further, but none of my initial jumps launched me high enough to get the blasted things fully clear of the ground -- they kept brushing it on each downstroke, so I couldn't get full extension. But how could I get higher with the launch?

Christine echoed my thoughts, apparently following my line of reasoning very closely, "Maybe if we had a trampoline or something?"

"I thought about that, but I'm not sure that'll give me the forward movement I need."

If only I had more power for the jump... As an incubus, I was stronger than a human, but nothing like a comic book hero. Wait a minute though...most of my powers involved controlling the mind, but didn't the mind control bodily functions? If I could mess with my lover's brains to induce orgasm and arousal response, it stood to reason I might be able to increase metabolic function and muscular response.

This one had me a little worried though. What if I screwed something up? Would I end up crippling myself? Fuck it, I was determined to try.

I realized that Christine was still standing there waiting without complaint. Her confidence in me bled through our link, inspiring me. Smiling at her, I said, "I've got another idea. Gimme one sec."

Yet again I tinkered with a life pattern, this time my own. I found the centers of the brain that controlled the functions I was looking to manipulate, tweaking them. Suddenly I felt very warm, and my skin felt flushed. My cock firmed up a bit from the increased blood flow, making a ridge in my jeans that snaked down my thigh. It was dark, so Christine must not have noticed.

"Alright, stand back," I warned, getting down into a runner's starting position.

I launched into a sprint, pumping my quad and calf muscles while I swung my arms with every ounce of power I could muster. It wasn't perfect -- each contraction was so intense it felt like a painful muscle cramp -- but I was flying over the lawn. I barely had time to think about how fast I was running before I was cresting the small hill I intended to use to take off. I leaped, pumping my wings with everything I had.

Holy shit! I shot off like a firework, launching myself at least two or three stories into the air. Remembering to keep my torso prone, I kept flexing the muscles Christine and I had discovered would allow me to fly.

It was working! Each powerful stroke took me higher and faster until the sound of the air rushing by became overwhelming. I held my wings in a glide, trying to bank into a turn and finding it surprisingly easy. It felt like riding a bike -- I just leaned over and my wings took me in the right direction.

Realizing I had closed on the line of towering trees at the edge of the property, I gave several more powerful sweeps to clear the treetops. I knew from the size of the trees I was well over eighty or ninety feet up at this point, and looked back, seeing the tiny form of Christine looking up at me off in the distance.

Hot damn, I did it! I actually did it! I was fucking flying! This was amazing.

I turned back toward the house, making small movements to dive, climb, and bank. Over the next several minutes, I grew ever bolder with my aerial maneuvering, eventually summoning the courage to execute a barrel roll. A giddy feeling bubbled up in my gut and burst from me in a peal of gleeful laughter. It was like riding the best rollercoaster of my life.

Pride and a sense of triumph from Christine overwhelmed and augmented my own sense of accomplishment, making me feel like I could achieve anything. It was a hell of a rush.

Several minutes later I zeroed in on Christine, spotting her by the light of the moon. My experimentation in the air had taught me the rudiments of how to slow myself, and I pulled back on my wings, making a kind of sail to tilt my body downward and touch down. When I landed, I was going slightly faster than even my augmented running speed, so after several skidding attempts to slow down, I lost my balance and tumbled ass over teakettle onto the grass.

"Was that fun?" she asked in a patronizing fashion. Her amusement was clear through our bond, making me grin like an idiot.

"Uh-huh! You ready to go up with me next time?"

That earned me a 'c'mon, really?' look. "And how is that gonna work? What am I gonna do, sit on your back? I'd be in the way of your wings!"

"No, silly, like this!" I picked her up into a bridal carry, receiving a shriek of surprise. "See?" I flapped my wings several times, showing her that she wasn't in the way of their range of motion. "No problem. Well, maybe not tonight. I want to practice more first... But soon," I put her down, pointing a finger at her in promise. "I want you to experience this with me!"

My earlier flight had shown me the relative ease with which I could fly once I built some speed, and I was sure that I could handle the extra weight. Just in case, I figured I'd practice with a large bag of sand or something that would represent her weight before taking her up. That was for another time, however.

"I'm sorry," I said, "mind if I go for a short flight? I'm too excited, and I just want to try one more thing."

Christine gave me a small smile to humor my enthusiasm, but I knew she must have felt my eagerness sharply when we were this close. "You go on and play, sweetheart," she said in a mocking parental tone, "but be home by 8, or you're grounded."

We both chuckled. "Yes, mom..." I intoned. Shaking off the act, I went on, "actually, why don't you go get dressed and get in the tub. The controls for temperature and stuff are on that panel in the kitchen that I used earlier if you want to get it warmed up. There's also one outside next to the tub. Set it however you want.

"You relax, and I'll be back before you know it. Okay?"

Smiling, she nodded. "Okay, Baby, I'll see you soon," rising on tip-toes, she pressed her lips to mine tenderly, "and be careful, please? I don't know what I'd do if something happened to you."

To be continued...