(Quick note-- There's no sex in this story. Later on there will be, but this first chapter is about setting up the plot. Patience will be rewarded, however.)
Mandorus flapped furry, leathern wings, fighting for lift over the darkened suburban neighborhood, cutting horizontally across the blocks of houses. She snuck a glance behind her, but saw no pursuing lights; it was early morning, and the only lights breaking the sterile darkness were streetlamps. She closed her eyes and glided for a moment, pricking her ears up and doing her best to hear over the rapid thumping of her tiny heart. She heard nothing but late summer crickets and the rush of the wind.
She sighed a tiny bat sigh, opened her eyes, and banked sharply to the right to avoid a looming elm, flapping hard and managing to gain enough elevation to pass about a foot above the next roof. Her adrenaline from fleeing the Guard was waning, taking her comfort in bat form with it. At least hitting the next tree won't technically be collapsing from exhaustion, she thought.
When she passed over the next roof she saw an opening, and decided to take it. Literally. The light across the street was shining from the second story of an aging brick building, easily the shabbiest house on the street, also the only one with an open window. Thanking gods, she swept gracefully through and into the small bedroom (which she just had time to take in was what the room was) but at far too fast a speed; she backpedaled hard, still smacking into the rapidly approaching wall and peeling off like a batcake.
She didn't remember striking the wall, but she did remember falling like sinking. Everything was dark before she hit the ground.
* * *
Contrary to what a lifetime of consuming cinema would teach you, unless you're suffering from a major, traumatic, coma inducing brain injury, a concussive knockout usually won't last more than a couple of minutes. Mandorus woke up in about thirty seconds, shocked conscious by a loud shout.
The shouter was a young man named Jack Katz. He'd been reading in bed when Mandorus, batform, had flown through his window and into his bedroom wall, hard. He sighed, conquering his initial surprise quickly and accepting the mundane horror of the situation; that, killed by the suicide strike to the wall or not, he'd soon have to handle and dispose of a dead bat. He took his time marking his place in his book.
Stepping out of bed, Jack was knocked short by what he saw; lying on the ground where there should have been a bat was a pale young woman, nude, facing away from him. Dark chestnut tresses fell across her shoulders and down her back. Even though she was turned away from him the spray of her hair and the swell of hips brought out an animalistic rise in him, and he was instantly hard.
Jack had just watched a bat take a kamikaze dive through his window, and upon investigating the crash he'd found a beautiful, naked young woman. Despite his arousal (more likely intensified because of it), he was fairly bewildered. To no one in particular, he yelled, "What the fuck!"
* * *
Mandorus jerked awake at the shout and spread her arms, ready to catch herself-- as she noticed that she was already lying on her side, facing a wall. Her ribs twinged, but as she swept her hands over her front to check herself, nothing shifted wrong or was overly sore. That quick check done, she noticed a warmth spreading over her backside, especially on her ass, where she tingled as if she'd just had a nice spanking. The thought made her wriggle, suddenly very lucid and very horny. Lustful gazes on her bare skin always did this to her, and she hadn't even seen the guys face yet.
She turned over slowly, enjoying the heat of his gaze ass it passed from her ass and back to her hips, then her breasts and the cleft between her legs, a small dark thicket of infinite interest. When she turned her head, Mandorus knew she had him.
"Please, help me," she said, eyes as wide and imploring as a hungry lamb. "I need you to close the window and turn out your light."
She gave the directive in a slower, measured voice, but by no means sterile or robotic, and the hint of helpless need never left. Before Jack had thought about it, he'd switched off the lamp and moved to the window, where he closed it quickly (for some reason taking care not to bang the sill too loudly).
The moonlight that shone through the window seemed somehow intensified. Jack found it bringing things into focus, like the neatly ordered neighborhood outside, tall boxy hedges and tall green recycling bins repeating off in a fractal infinity along the blacktop branch of the road, all cast in gleaming silver by the moon. His consciousness swung back into the room, taking in the window frame and how alluringly cryptic the whorls and lines were, painted over white in a pretense of hiding the wood's true pattern but only blanketing and softening it. Turned away from the alarming, intrusive, beautiful woman, he frowned, wondering at the quickness with which he'd jumped to her bidding.
Jack had felt a little like this once before, when he'd taken acid with his cousin Jedd. They'd laid in Jedd's wall-hung and carpet strewn apartment, talking, thinking deep thoughts, and intermittently just sitting back and watching the walls wriggle. This was something like that, but that experience had been largely pleasant after the initial wave of weirdness had been conquered. This was overpowering, and made it feel like his thoughts were fleeting and disjointed, even as they were clarified.
He turned back to the woman, and instantly understood why he had acted so quickly when she had spoken; beneath her elfin beauty, and that deep look of longing that she wore like a mask (he saw that now) was a disquieting note of very real fear. And now he did want to help her, despite whatever weird trick she had just pulled on him. Because that was just the kind of guy he was.
