Chapter 13

She’s a Fixer Upper

Dana stood beneath the ancient telescope, squinting up at a series of gears. It was like staring into the fathomless depths of the ocean, each spindle holding a gear vanishing up into the darkness of the mechanism that positioned the telescope. If she hadn’t spent the last few months rebuilding the system from scratch with her own tweaks, she would have no idea what she was looking at.

“Well?” she asked, then looked at the goblin standing next to her.

“Hmm.” Tink wore a pair of magical goggles that enabled her to see how things worked and what was wrong with them. The magical lenses clicked back and forth over the primary apertures as she scrutinized the array. “Tink see. Gear right, debris wrong.”

Tink handed Dana a screwdriver and then pointed. Dana got on her ladder and climbed to the top, then looked down at Tink.

“Dead girl go higher,” Tink informed her. “Two feet from outside, lost screw.”

“You heard the girl.” Dana tapped her foot on the ladder, and Ticktock extended itself, raising her up so that she could stick her arm in the gears. She clutched the screwdriver in her hand and looked at Tink again.

“Left. More left. Stop.” The lenses were clicking like a tiny typewriter now. “Use screwdriver, gear sixty-two.”

Dana looked into the mess of gears and pulled a flashlight from her belt. Shining it upward, she picked out the correct gear based on her photographic memory of the schematic and saw that the head of her screwdriver was inches away from a dull, black object jammed into the teeth between sixty-two and its neighbor.

“Good job,” she told Tink, then pressed the head of the screwdriver into the gap. Grease coated her arm as she wiggled back and forth, trying to dislodge the foreign object. It looked very similar to one of the black screws they had used to replace the inner panels of the observatory. Replacing the panels had been a weird experience, because she had been forced to go outside to properly install them. The telescope was mounted to a metal dome on top of a mountain which overlooked a barren wasteland with no water or vegetation. The view made no sense, because the observatory itself was built atop a Victorian era home on the east coast of the United States. Somehow, the windows of the observatory led to an alien landscape devoid of life, but only from the inside. They didn’t even exist on the true exterior of the Radley house.

Ever since the first time Dana had seen this room, the foreign stars in an unfamiliar sky had called to her in a way that she couldn’t explain. Fixing the telescope had become an odd compulsion, one that she had only experienced once before when she had encountered an old clock that turned out to be the mimic beneath her feet.

The ladder extended a bit more in an attempt to give Dana more leeway inside of the mechanism.

“Thanks, Tick Tock.” She patted the top of the ladder appreciatively, wondering if the mimic even enjoyed physical affection. It wasn’t something she had ever thought to ask, and the mimic had never gone through the trouble to tell her to stop.

She pulled a hammer from her belt and was able to line it up with the screwdriver. Giving it a good whack, the bolt flew out, allowing the mechanism to move freely.

With a loud grinding noise, the gears rotated as the body of the telescope dipped. The safety pin they had put in place failed, shearing from the weight of the scope. Dana grunted as her arm was sucked into the gears and pulled off of her body.

“Shit!” She threw the hammer down at the floor and waited a moment for the mechanism to settle. Once it was stationary, she reached into the machine with her remaining arm and found her lost limb. The edges had been mangled, which meant she was going to need help reattaching it.

“Nasty,” Tink muttered, sticking out her tongue. “Tink glad, still have both arms.”

Dana threw her arm at the goblin, who let out a squawk before catching it. She waited for Tick Tock to lower her to the ground, then stepped off and held out her hand.

“Looks like we’re done building for the day.” She turned her attention to the failed locking mechanism. “I thought you said this would hold?”

“Should have worked.” Tink handed over Dana’s arm, then frowned at the dented body of the telescope. Dana was glad they hadn’t installed any lenses yet, as they would have shattered. When Tink picked up the broken pin, she growled and held it up. “Wrong fucking pin.”

“What do you mean, wrong pin?” Dana knelt down to take a look and then groaned. It was one of the thinner pins from a different part of the mechanism.

“Need thicker pin, why dead girl put wrong pin in?” Tink knocked on Dana’s forehead.

“Because ... I was distracted.” She didn’t bother going into details, and the goblin didn’t ask.

“Next time, right fucking pin.” Tink flicked the pin at Dana, and it bounced off her forehead to clatter on the floor. “Tink check gears tonight, but busy tomorrow.”

“Nah, don’t even bother.” Dana looked at her drawing of the mechanism on the table. She had been working on this project for months, but was rapidly losing motivation for it. After so many thousands of dollars and multiple setbacks, there were better things she could be doing.

Once she figured out what those things were, she would go do them.

Tink helped Dana clean up the work space, then used her goggles to identify where all the blood had gone. It took them another hour of scrubbing zombie blood away before the observatory was declared free of potential zombie virus.

Picking up her arm, Dana walked out the door and paused in the hallway. A small group of foot-tall rats stared at her from the opposite wall, their spears held suddenly ready as they attempted to look like they were still officially on guard.

“No surprises today,” she informed them as Tink squeezed past her.

The goblin disappeared down the hall, muttering a list to herself of things she was going to work on. The goblin, foul tempered as she seemed, was one of the kindest souls Dana had ever met. Sure, she swore, spit a lot, and threw the odd tantrum, but was a phenomenal partner when it came to building things. They never argued, and the small talk was almost always at a minimum. What would be an uncomfortable silence for others was peace for Dana.

Talking had become hard for her. Six months ago, almost nothing phased her, but ever since the fight with the Jersey Devil had turned her into a feral creature who killed and ate the living, her emotions had been out of whack. The death of a friend had been the final trigger, and even a casual statement had the potential to catapult her back in time. Ever since she had died, her memory had become perfect, and nothing poured salt into a wound like having to relive her most traumatic experiences.

Down the hall were stairs that she took to the main floor of the house. In the living room, Mike sat on the sofa next to the coffee table, a giant egg strapped into a baby carrier on his chest. A checkers board had been set up on the table, but half the pieces were gone and had been replaced with random objects from around the house. The spooky doll named Jenny sitting across from him gave one of the pieces a kick, sending it across the room.

“It’s not my fault that you forgot the salt shaker was one of my pieces.” Mike rubbed the top of the egg, then captured two of Jenny’s checkers. “Maybe if you’d stop losing pieces, we wouldn’t have to replace them with—oh, hey, Dana. Trouble with the telescope?”

She held up her arm, which she had taped shut to keep it from leaking zombie blood everywhere.

“Do you want to make the joke about being disarmed now or later?” she asked.

He waved her off. “Too easy. You heading to Zel’s to get it fixed?”

“Yeah.” She watched as he stood, cradling the egg with one hand. If he were to lower the egg and wear a shirt over it, she would swear that he was pregnant. In fact, at the rate he was meeting and fucking new monsters, it wouldn’t surprise her if he ended up that way.

Even though her sense of humor was dramatically dulled due to her undead condition, the thought of a pregnant Mike begging someone to rub his feet put a smile on her face.

“Here.” He gave her a small box, which she tucked under her arm. “These are some things they wanted me to order for the centaurs. Tell her hi for me.”

“Yeah, sure thing.” She watched as he sat down across from Jenny, who had hidden three of his pieces while he wasn’t looking. The ghost was the very definition of a troubled spirit, but she had been single-handedly responsible for saving the world from the apocalypse a few months ago. Mike examined the board and pulled a chess piece, a keyring, and an army man out of his pocket to replace the pieces that Jenny had stolen.

Damn, Dana thought. Her life was weird.

Walking out the back door of the house, she saw Naia the nymph and Amymone the dryad sitting on the edge of Naia’s fountain. The dryad was letting Naia rub her shoulders while reading House of Leaves. Around the edges of the fountain, small animals were busy eating some of the fruit that had fallen out of Amymone’s tree. The dryad had found a way to produce multiple fruit in what should have been an oak tree—but that was magic for you.

“Hey.” Naia greeted Dana warmly, her eyes sliding down to Dana’s burden. “Uh-oh.”

Amymone looked up from her book, her eyes stopping on Dana’s severed arm.

“Well now,” she began. “That’s a bit disarm—”

Naia clapped a hand over the dryad’s mouth.

“We all knew that was coming,” she said with a soft smile. The dryad loved puns even more than Mike did.

Dana managed a weak grin, then crossed the yard and entered a small building that looked like it belonged on a golf course. On the far wall was a portal that took her across space and deposited her into a yurt. A pair of centaur guards nodded at her when she emerged, their eyes moving to the bloody stump.

“House is fine,” she told them. “Just had an accident at work.”

The guards relaxed, grateful to know that the house wasn’t under siege. The centaurs lived a separate life from the home, but any assault on the house was officially seen as an attack on them, and they would rush to defend it at the cost of their lives if they needed to. They were still bitter about the house being stolen by an angel back in March, but the house had come back stronger than ever as a result.

“Where’s the boss at?” Dana asked.

One of the guards pointed in the direction of Zel’s yurt at the center of the village.

“Thanks.”

The village was bustling with life, the centaurs greeting her warmly. Her drone project had helped them to establish agriculture in the area, and she was a frequent presence. Quetzalli, her pseudo-girlfriend, often accompanied her on such trips. As a dragon-god bound into the form of a curvaceous woman, she was revered by the centaurs. The relationship definitely escalated Dana’s social capital.

It felt good to be accepted. She doubted they would be as kind if they all knew how much they smelled like steak and hamburgers to her. All living flesh had a smell that typically left Dana’s mouth watering, the more intelligent the creature, the better. On at least two separate occasions, she had almost asked Zel if she could eat a member of the tribe who had recently died.

Earlier in the year, during that fracas with the Jersey Devil, she had fought with a forgotten tribe of beings from North America known as the Nirumbi. Driven to a level of desperation she hadn’t yet experienced, she had feasted on them during the fight, an event which had given her quite the taste for living flesh. It was hard to put it out of her mind some days, and was likely the reason she was so emotionally unbalanced. The hunger was always there, hovering in the back of her mind.

It also didn’t help that eating the Nirumbi had imparted her with greater strength. She was always stronger after feeding, but actually eating living tissue had made some of that strength permanent.

She nodded at the guards outside of Zel’s yurt, then walked through the flaps. Zel, the chief of the centaurs, was studying a bubbling flask in the center of her alchemy table. A mixture of old world lore and modern equipment, it looked like a fantasy version of a scene from Breaking Bad.

Zel looked over her shoulder to see who had come in. “Oh, Dana, it’s you. Perfect timing, could you give me a hand?”

Dana walked up behind the centaur and tossed her arm onto a clear space where Zel could see it. The centaur snorted in mirth, turning just enough to roll her eyes at Dana.

“In a perfect world, we’d both think that was hilarious,” Dana informed her.

“Here.” Zel used a pair of tongs to grab the flask and started swirling the mixture inside. “Keep it moving or the liquid will set.”

“Aye aye, captain.” Dana set Mike’s box down and took the tongs. She repeated the motion exactly the way Zel had taught her so many months ago. There was a benefit to having flawless muscle memory.

Zel double-checked some of her notes and then held Dana’s hand still while she added a powder to the flask. The bubbles turned to foam, and the mixture turned blue.

“Excellent.” Zel took the flask back and put her thumb over the top and gave it a good shake.

“So what are you working on today? Bomb? Fairy repellant?” The faeries had a bad habit of messing with the centaurs, though nothing serious.

“Neither of those things.” Zel took her thumb off the top and put the flask to her lips, slamming the contents of the flask in moments.

“You’re not planning to transform into a human again or something, are you?”

Zel pulled the empty flask from her lips and let out a belch. “Nope. The foal is giving me heartburn and the shits like nobody’s business.” She moaned and rubbed her belly.

“You’re pregnant back here, though.” Dana rubbed Zel’s flank.

“It’s caused by where the human stuff meets the horse stuff. Common issue, but...” Her face scrunched up and she let out another belch. “Wow, that feels better.”

“You make pregnancy sound awesome,” Dana deadpanned, then picked up her severed arm. “Anyway, I was hoping you could reattach this.”

“Yeah, no problem.” Zel moved away from her alchemy table and opened a nearby drawer. Inside was a small kit with needles and special sutures for Dana. “Let’s go outside, the light is better.”

“Sure. Oh, and this is for you.” She tapped the box. “From Mike.”

“Those must be my vitamins. Hold on a second.” She cracked the box open and examined the contents. “Struggling to get enough iron in my diet.”

“Sure.” Dana had no idea what being pregnant required. Even when she was alive, children hadn’t been on the radar. Alex had mentioned adoption a couple of times, but they had both been young and assumed they still had years to figure that stuff out.

Zel popped the cap off a bottle and pulled out a vitamin, which she then popped in her mouth. A waterskin hung on a hook nearby, and she lifted it up long enough to take a swig.

“Okay, let’s get you put back together again.” Zel held up the suture kit and headed for the exit. Dana followed her through the flaps and they moved around to the back of the structure to a work bench with a stool for Dana to sit on.

Zel unrolled a nearby blanket and spread it across the surface. Dana sat on the stool and laid her stump on the blanket.

From a pouch on Zel’s waist, a pair of white latex gloves came out. Zel didn’t bother scrubbing in before starting, as she was the only one who needed to worry about an infection. Dana held still as the centaur lined up the bones first.

“Crushed?” she asked.

“Yep,” Dana sighed. “Trying to get that telescope working, got caught in the gears.”

“Hmm.” Zel pulled the suture kit out and set it to the side. “It’ll take me a few minutes to get these fragments lined up. Looks like a fairly clean break, all things considered.”

In fact, it likely hadn’t been a clean break. Dana’s undead body had the ability to regenerate itself as long as all the pieces were there. The bones would have shifted and popped back into place using the magic stored in her body, but it would come at a cost.

Zel ordered a centaur to prep a small fire, then had them bring some pliers that she had forgotten from her bench. She used the pliers and some tweezers from the kit to push the bones back in place. The regeneration was so aggressive that the fragments would sometimes make a clicking sound as they healed on contact.

Zel hummed to herself as she put Humpty Dana back together again, then pulled out the suture kit to start on the soft tissue. Since the muscles and veins had been severed, it was important to at least push them back together so they could rejoin her body.

“Ah, shit.” Zel held up the sutures. “We’re running really low on spider silk. I’m going to need you to get some more from Eulalie.”

They stood at the base of the mountain, all eyes on a dark crevice that Bigfoot and Abella had just unearthed. Eulalie stood frozen, contemplating that yawning portal with her hands pressed together over a pair of dog tags in her hand.

“I don’t know if I can,” she whispered, knowing that the corpse of her sister was in there.

Mike stood off to the side, his hands wrapped around a large egg and one arm in a sling. His face had gone pale, his eyes already red from the tears.

“We have all the time in the world,” he told her. “And there is no right or wrong. If you want to see her, you can. If not, that’s okay, too. This moment is about you and nobody else.”

Strangely, Lily was standing back and away from everybody. She had barely said a word all morning, her expression hidden behind a pair of giant sunglasses.

“I just ... I want to remember her as she was, and...” Eulalie shook her head, her dark locks spiraling around her shoulders as she bolted into the forest. A cold breeze blew across the opening of the cave, causing it to cry out as if in mourning.

“Dana?” A concerned hand squeezed her shoulder. “Hey, you okay?”

“Still dead, thanks for asking. Mind wandered is all.” Dana looked down at her arm to see that Zel had reattached her biceps. The muscle was thickening where it had been severed, going through months of recovery in moments.

“What were you thinking about?” She offered Dana a dry rag.

“What’s this for?”

“You’re crying.” Zel was familiar with Dana’s intense flashbacks.

“So I am.” Dana wiped her face, surprised that she hadn’t noticed the moisture. Zombie tears came out at room temperature, which was part of the problem.

“You didn’t answer my other question,” Zel said as she adjusted Dana’s arm to start working on her triceps.

“You’re right, I didn’t.” Dana had a strong suspicion that even speaking about Velvet’s death would send her down the rabbit hole of grief once more. Eulalie’s name had been the trigger, there was no doubt in her mind.

Zel changed the subject, asking Dana about a new mapping project the centaurs had planned. Earlier in the year, it had appeared that the Mandragora plant had returned to the area, but Zel couldn’t be sure if it was the original plant or an offspring. After some reports from other centaurs, the plant had vanished. Zel thought it may have just moved to a better spot, but she wasn’t about to go looking herself, as the Mandragora had a very interesting defense mechanism.

It took almost two hours for Zel to complete the task. Throughout the process, anything she used was either sterilized in the fire or simply burned. Even the blanket was tossed into the flames; the last thing anyone wanted was a breakout of zombie centaurs.

“Hmm.” Dana flexed her arm to make sure that everything worked. She could feel the pit of hunger in her belly expand as her magic was used to heal the damaged tissue. “Looks like I’m all fixed.”

“Not all wounds are external.” Zel tapped Dana on the forehead. “You may be dead, but you still have feelings. Have you talked with Mike about it?”

“A bit.” He had been hit hard by Velvet’s death, and she hadn’t wanted to bother him. Several months had passed, and she was still having the odd outburst. “Ratu thinks the part of my brain that regulates emotion may have been partially resurrected. So when it catches up to me, I get it all at once.”

Similar things had happened to Dana before, but it was always after feeding off of Mike’s magic. His semen was essentially a calorie bomb of magic capable of replenishing her lost reserves as well as preventing her from taking a bite out of anyone who moved.

Zel stuck the tweezers in the box and held it up. “No more injuries until you refill this. I have maybe enough for a severed toe, or perhaps a pinky.”

Dana took the box. She had nothing else going on, so figured now was as good a time as any. “Thanks, Zel.”

“Anytime.” Zel pulled off the gloves and tossed them in the flames. The air filled with the scent of carcinogenic smoke, which managed to overpower the smell of Zel’s hamburger hide.

Damn, Dana was hungry. Smacking her lips, she left the centaur behind and returned to her home through the portal. With so much regeneration to fix her arm, she was overdue for a snack, which meant raiding the fridge for a shot of Mike’s semen.

She had long ago come to terms with the idea that her survival relied on eating Mike’s sexual fluids. It was hardly the weirdest part of her day anymore, and she had even hooked up with him a couple of times. When she had been alive, it had only been women who sexually excited her. Now? Dead girls didn’t lust after anyone, at least not until they sucked down enough magic spooge to tickle their hypothalamus back to life. It acted like a magical aphrodisiac, and had led her to fuck anyone (or anything) on hand until her lust was satiated.

There really wasn’t a word for that on the sexuality spectrum.

Without knowing where Quetzalli was, Dana had nobody on hand to fuck afterward. She could call Lily, but the succubus was likely on another crusade hunting and eating the souls of bad people. Last month, a famous celebrity had OD’d on the set of a movie. According to Lily, his soul was currently being used as a cum dumpster inside her belly by his fellow inmates.

Fucking Mike was an option, but the couple of times she had, it had turned her into an emotional mess afterward. Every emotion she should have felt in her undead state would catch up to her all at once. These events had all been before Velvet’s death and the incident with her feeding frenzy. Considering her current emotional issues, she didn’t think such a pairing was a good idea and would likely end with her in hysterics.

Before she knew it, she was standing in front of an open freezer, staring at a tray of shot glasses full of frozen semen with popsicle sticks stuck in them. She didn’t even remember walking there. The carefully measured portions had been created to satisfy her hunger without causing her lust to become out of control. The frustrating void in her belly demanded that she eat something soon, before she took a bite out of someone.

“Fucking hell,” she muttered, pulling out the tray. She moved to set it on the nearby counter and caught a deep whiff of cinnamon with a hint of sulfur.

“You rang?” The silky voice was followed by the chitinous caress of a scorpion’s tail, which draped over Dana’s shoulder and traced a pattern along her neck.

“Actually, your timing is pretty good.” Dana put the spunk tray down and turned to face the succubus. Lily was in a crop top and jean shorts, her legs clad in thigh high leather boots. Her eyes flicked down to the sperm tray, then back to Dana.

“Take it your horny girlfriend isn’t around?” Lily’s tail was now teasing the collar of Dana’s shirt.

“Sure never get tired of that joke.” Though Quetzalli was in human form, she had a single horn in the middle of her head through which she could channel lightning. “And she’s not my girlfriend, we’ve been over this.”

“Oh, but maybe I’m the jealous type.” Lily’s eyes flashed as she put her hands on Dana’s waist, her outfit melting away to reveal perky breasts with strawberry nipples that stood at attention like little soldiers.

“I think you’re just hungry for attention.” Dana reached for a sperm pop, but Lily was faster. The succubus snatched one out of the tray and held it to her lips, her pink tongue snaking out for a taste.

“It has its own unique taste, doesn’t it?” Lily licked her lips, then rubbed the sperm pop across her chest. Her body was warm enough to melt the pops, leaving behind a glittering trail of magical semen that shimmered in the light. “Want a taste?”

Ordinarily, Dana would have rolled her eyes at Lily’s antics. The succubus was constantly baiting her and today would be no different. However, her stomach felt like it was being sucked into a black hole, so she leaned forward and licked the magical cum off of Lily’s tits.

“Mmm, that’s a good girl.” Lily stroked Dana’s hair, then playfully pulled on her ponytail. “You’re just not you when you’re hungry.”

“Jesus, you’re just being obnoxious.”

“Hey now, we don’t discuss sky daddy or his martyr baby, you know the rules.” Lily stuck the sperm pop in her mouth and pulled the stick free, revealing that she had swallowed it whole.

“Hey!” Dana backed away from the succubus. “What the hell?”

“Now you’re talking my language.” Lily cupped her breasts and gave them a squeeze. A tiny bead of milky fluid formed around her nipples, then dripped onto the floor. “It’s just that I thought of a fun delivery method for you, if you’re interested.”

Dana’s tongue tingled from the little bit she had already consumed. That aching void in her stomach demanded more, and the small amount she had eaten had been enough to ignite her sex drive. Repressed desires bubbled through her, moments of previous attraction and intimacy baring themselves for proper inspection.

Quetzalli pressed against the wall of her bedroom, her hands on her ass as Dana ate her out from behind. The dragon cried out in sweet agony as sparks of electricity traveled along the wall to the metal pole that had been grounded to prevent her from shorting out the house again.

“More, please, I want to feel more!” the dragon demanded.

Snapping back to the present, Dana had pressed her face into Lily’s chest, greedily sucking at one of her boobs. The amount Dana swallowed was copious, which made her suspect that most of it wasn’t even the magical semen Lily had consumed. With each spray of the warm fluid into her throat, she could feel the cells in her body come alive once again.

She stuck a hand down the front of Lily’s pants, her fingers seeking the thick folds hidden within. Lily spread her legs, the fabric of her shorts loosening so that Dana could find the treasure inside. The succubus had thick, puffy labia today that gripped and sucked on Dana’s digit like a second mouth.

Lily’s tail had coiled around Dana’s leg, the tip of it vibrating through the fabric against Dana’s clit. Her hips spasmed at the sudden stimulation, but the tail was wrapped tight enough that contact was maintained.

“That’s my good girl, drink up.” Lily squeezed the bottom of her breast, filling Dana’s mouth with the life restoring fluid.

Hungry for more, Dana got too excited and bit down, drawing blood and causing Lily to flinch.

“Ouch, looks like we’ve got a biter.” Lily pulled Dana in close and stroked her hair. “But really, maybe don’t do that. Biting can be sexy, but it’s a habit you can’t afford.”

Dana broke suction just enough to speak around Lily’s boob. “Thorry.” Lily was one of the only people in the house she could bite without fear of infection. Nobody was absolutely certain if her condition was contagious, and she hadn’t had the heart or opportunity to test it out and discover the truth.

“As long as you apologize.” Lily continued to feed Dana in the kitchen, neither of them worried about someone walking in. With all the sex that occurred around the home, it was considered standard practice to just back out of whatever room it happened in. In fact, Dana caught a whiff of Yuki’s scent. The kitsune had acquired a smell like smoked bratwurst, which made Dana’s mouth water. Everyone smelled like the food she had enjoyed when she had been alive, a fact that made not eating them just a little bit harder.

Dana continued feeding, sparks of pleasure running through her pelvis and up her spine as Lily’s tail vibrated against her. She fought to undo her pants, hoping to feel that thick tail between her legs. Once they were loosened, the head of Lily’s tail shifted, transforming to look very much like a rabbit vibrator. A pair of chitinous barbs pressed against her exposed clit, but they were somehow soft to the touch. The head of Lily’s tail entered Dana, causing her to gasp so hard that she spit milk out of her mouth.

“Aw, it looks like you...” Lily cocked her head, leaving the statement dangling. “Yeah, you’re not into the mommy kink that much, never mind.”

To be truthful, none of it was Dana’s thing, but consuming Mike’s sperm did this to her every time. She craved any sort of sexual attention, anything that would grant her that sweet relief. Maybe it was just an endorphin deficiency, or maybe it was something more complicated, but all she could think about was how that hot, thick tail cock was expanding inside her. It was pressing into her hard enough that all she had to do was bend her legs to feel her entire weight centered on that point.