Homelands Pt 03 Ch 03

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Part Three picks up where Part Two left off. Be advised that if you haven't read Part One and Part Two, the story may be quite difficult to follow.

This is primarily an incest story, but it is also sci-fi/fantasy, and supernatural elements are not incidental to the plot. Additionally, most chapters will feature elements of other categories, particularly group sex and anal.

All characters are over eighteen. All acts are consensual.

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When my father arrived the next day with Josh and Val, as promised, Brianna slipped up alongside me and whispered, rather unnecessarily, "Ixnay on Adam-ay."

As if I was going to bring that up. "Thanks," I whispered.

We all introduced ourselves, then went and sat on the two sofas.

Josh looked more like Todd than he did me. He was a few inches taller than I was, with a lean, athletic frame and a mop of dirty blonde hair. He even had Todd's gray eyes. He looked out of place in his white tank top, though, as he lacked the bulk that tended to set Orwin men apart from Farriers. His ears were a little big, and his skin was a bit paler than women tended to find attractive on a man. By mortal standards, he was well past good-looking. But for our kind, he was about average.

Valerie wore a white T-shirt that was two sizes too small for her, and a pair of tiny white shorts that covered just a little more skin than panties alone would have. She wore just the right amount of makeup and had big gold hoop earrings. Her skin was as white as cream, like all the women of House Orwin. Her hair was dark brown, thick, and long. She had lips as big as Iva's, a cute little nose, beautiful brown eyes, long lashes and lush eyebrows. Thought that last part might only have been true in my mind, given what Brianna had said earlier. All in all, though, she looked a lot like my mother. Only prettier. And, in fairness to my mother, with a less ultra-feminine figure. Val's exaggerated curves put everyone else in the family to shame, but she didn't quite have her grandmother's figure.

I didn't need to look at Brianna to know she was immediately filled with envy. I could feel the insecurity, anger, and jealousy pulsing in her Libido.

I hated knowing that she felt that. If I could have stopped myself from noticing how incredibly sexy my daughter was, I would have.

Perhaps that wasn't even just for Brianna's sake, for that matter.

As immune as I'd thought I'd become to the guilty thoughts normal people experience at the mere thought of incest, thinking about violating my daughter was simultaneously filling me with excitement and revulsion. She was just so young. Pure, and innocent.

And bound to have all kinds of mixed up feelings about me.

Even if I welcomed my daughter into the family tradition personally, I didn't want to let myself develop any deeper feelings for her. It seemed that she and Josh were on their way to building something together, and I didn't want to get in the way of that.

When she pressed up against Josh and wrapped both arms around one of his, I felt a pang of jealousy. Followed quickly by guilt. Then something akin to pride. And it was that last feeling that trumped the others.

"What was it like? When you found out?" I asked Josh. Or both of them, I guess.

Brianna smacked my arm. "What your father means to say is, he's glad to finally meet you, and he's sure you must have a lot of questions for him."

"Yeah, that," I said.

Josh snickered. "That's okay. We can go first." He smiled affably. "So. Where to start." He drew a deep breath. "Well, I liked my foster parents. They were good to me. Even after they started to suspect that I was...different. Mom just about fainted the first time she saw my blue skin. But she didn't treat me like an alien, the way the kids at school did. In fact, I think maybe she thought I was a superhero or something." He laughed at that. "So, yeah, puberty was even less fun than I gather it usually is. But eventually I learned to control things. I'm only blue when I want to be now."

Valerie's blush told me when exactly it was that he wanted to be.

"When the queen came and told me I was from a magical world, and that it was time for me to learn about my heritage and such, well, it was like a dream come true," Josh continued. "What nerd doesn't secretly wish for that?"

He might look more like Todd, but Josh was definitely

my

son.

Both my father and Brianna clearly had the same reaction to that comment. Dad barely hid his snicker. For her part, my cousin gave me a look that was equal parts accusatory and amused. As she did, her Libido swelled.

That was interesting.

Suddenly,

my

Libido was swelling.

"Of course, finding out that the Homelands aren't like porn versions of Oz or Narnia is something I'm still getting used to," Josh continued, seemingly unaware of the reactions he'd inspired by revealing his nerdiness. "The queen seemed so nice. When she told us that we were going to be sent away and never allowed to return to an ancestral home we didn't even know about until recently, all because the grandmother we'd just met belonged to the wrong house, I cried." He looked at his grandfather. "That's right, I

cried

, and I'm not so insecure about my masculinity that I can't admit it."

Val giggled.

I gave him a affirming nod.

My father held up his hands in protest. "Hey, I didn't even say anything." Under his breath, he added, "Sissy." Then he turned to me. "He's definitely your son."

I was glad to see that Josh took that as a compliment.

"That's not a good thing," my father added quickly. With a shake of his head, he said, to no one in particular, "Poor kid."

My daughter gave him more or less the same look I imagined she might have given him if he'd stood up, turned around, pressed Josh's face against his ass, and farted on him.

"Thanks, Dad," I said, dripping sarcasm. Then, to Josh, "Ignore your grandfather."

He nodded the barest nod.

"Yes, by all means, ignore me. Your father always did. And look how he turned out. A widower who's been imprisoned by his hand-picked successor to the throne."

"Enough, Dad," I said. "We get it. You're the manliest man of the clan."

He shrugged. "Long as we're all on the same page."

Brianna ran her fingers through my hair. That slight touch made my skin tingle.

It was more than a little obnoxious of him to point it out, but my father wasn't wrong. Could my life have gone any worse lately? I'd killed my wife. The woman I loved had moved on. The other woman I thought I might be in love with had become a pawn to a grandmother I had never realized had so little regard for me. One of my sons had died before I'd even met him, and died at the hands of his own brother at that. And, to top it all off, I was developing feelings for the cousin I'd once feared and maybe even hated.

Yup. I was quite the role model.

"What about you?" I asked my daughter.

Val's story was broadly similar to her brother's. She'd never fit in. Had hopes that her life was about to improve when she graduated high school and was headed off to college. She was a little less excited about discovering who and what she was than Josh had been, particulary since she'd been a virgin at the time. But she'd warmed up to the idea quickly. Particularly the part about being the daughter of a king, which she figured kinda sorta made her a princess. Then she too was devastated to find out that she was being imprisoned for the crime of being born to the wrong parents. Parents she'd never met.

"I do actually think I made the right choice, letting you grow up there. Sparing you the craziness of this world until you were ready for it," I said. `For what it's worth. And I hope someday you come to agree with me about that. But I also want you to know that I'd meant to be there when you came of age. To be the one who told you who you are. I'm so sorry that I wasn't. I don't know if I can make that up to you, but I mean to try."

"Touching," my father said with a hint of amusement.

Brianna whipped an empty hand back, flicked her wrist, and threw something at him. It burst upon contact with a flash of light.

Dad jumped back violently. "Ow!"

"That was awesome," Josh said. "Can you teach me that?"

"I didn't even know I could do it, until I thought to try," Brianna said, eyes wide. She stared at her hands, as if the secret to how she'd done it might lie there.

"It didn't

really

hurt. Was just surprised, that's all," my father said, in case anyone was listening. Deeply concerned, I can only assume, that someone might dock him precious man-points if we thought it actually

had

hurt him.

"Nice one," I said to Brianna, ignoring my father.

Her smiled broadened.

Could it really be that she'd just wanted to impress me all this time?

It seemed so hard to believe. I'd like to think that was true, but there was just no way it was that simple. Was there?

Of course, even if she was simplifying the past a bit, the way she responded to a simple little compliment from me told me that there had to be at least a little truth to the story she'd been telling me for some weeks now. And that realization set off a chain of complex emotional reactions inside me. Not that I had time to sort through them just then.

"There are a few things we can do that are a little involved," I said. "The kind of thing where you need not just raw power but some actual understanding of what you're doing. Reading Libidos, for example. Some of the more fantastic transformations. But you'll find that an awful lot of what we do isn't very complicated. If you've got the energy to do it, it's mostly just a matter of willing it to happen." I turned to my cousin. "Wouldn't you say?"

"Sounds about right," she said, still smiling, if less unabashedly.

My father was still mumbling to himself. "You'd be surprised too. Can't blame a guy for being a little startled. Who goes around throwing balls of light at people?"

Josh held out his palm and a glowing ball of energy appeared. He bounced it up and down a few times. "So cool," he said, before letting it wink out.

My eyes bulged.

If I'd seen someone do what Brianna had done when I was as new to it all as he still was, would I have been able to mimic it?

As I'd just said, it was mostly just a matter of willing it to happen. But still.

"Whoa," Val said. "Cool!"

"I hope he takes after you in other ways," Brianna whispered in my ear. "Because there's no way he's leaving here without fucking me first. You realize that, right?"

My heart raced. I nodded without looking at her.

"So, anyway, why

weren't

you there for any of that?" Josh asked. "Why wasn't our mother? And why won't anyone tell us what happened to her?" When Val shot him a shocked and disapproving look, he held up his hands defensively and rushed to add, "I'm not judging. I'm sure he had his reasons. I'm just wondering what they are." He turned back to me. "No one tells us anything."

I couldn't blame him. In fact, it almost felt like I was speaking to myself with my son's mouth. I'd have asked the exact same questions in his shoes.

I sighed. "Neither of those stories are pleasant. I could use a drink first. Anyone else?"

"Should you be offering us alcohol? We're minors," Val said. Then she winced, like she wanted to take the words back. "There's, um, not really a drinking age here, is there? Of course not. If incest is cool, can't imagine you're big on the whole legislating morality thing."

"Not really, no," Brie said. "You'll find plenty of other reasons to resent the political system here. But no one's going to tell you what you can put in, or do with, your body."

My father smiled wickedly. "Oh, I'll tell her what to put in-"

Was that the same look Josh had gotten on his face right before he'd killed his brother?

Dad swallowed his words. "So, anyway, the question is, does anyone want a drink?"

Josh, Brianna, and I said yes, but Val politely declined.

"Requests?" my father, the self-appointed bartender, asked.

"I sometimes drink vodka," Josh said. "Or, um, I've heard-"

I laughed. "It's okay. Really."

My father flashed a look of what could only be described as wariness, if not quite fear, at Josh. Perhaps he was thinking about whether to point out that "real men" drank whiskey. If so, he plainly thought the better of it.

"Vodka it is then."

After the four of us did a shot together and Dad placed the bottle and glasses on a wooden coffee table that hadn't existed a moment ago, I settled back in the couch and drew a deep breath. I'd practiced parts of this speech a hundred times in my mind.

Nonetheless, I still felt completely unprepared.

The first of Josh's questions was the easier. "The queen sent me to your mother's world. The Shadowed Glade of the Moon. Which is one of the two oldest courts. Time flows differently there, just as it flows differently here than in the echo of the mortal world."

"Echo?" Josh asked.

"We'll get there," I said. "The point is, when I left, you were still underage. And though I only felt like I was away for a week, which should have meant I'd have been back in plenty time to be there when you came of age, what I thought was a week was more like four months here. And four months in Autumn is more than three years where you were."

"Wait, so how old are you?" Val asked. Then she covered her mouth with a hand. "If you don't mind my asking, I mean."

Brianna laughed. "Aww. Your daughter is

such

a little angel, Frank."

Val smiled meekly, mistaking the insult for a compliment. The poor girl.

Part of me wanted to reproach my cousin. Flick her, or pinch her, or something. But if I did, my daughter would realize the truth. But Brianna would definitely hear about it later.

And to think, I was just marveling at how sweet she could be.

"That's a complicated question," I said to my daughter.

I explained to them why it was, much as Iva had once explained it to me.

"So you didn't discover the Homelands for the first time until just a few years ago yourself?" Josh asked, as if I hadn't already said pretty much exactly that. "And you had just graduated college at the time?"

I nodded.

"So...in a way...my father isn't almost the same age as me," he said.

Brianna giggled. "Such awe you inspire."

That time, I did flick her. She yelped, but it quickly turned into a laugh.

"You could look at it that way," I told Josh.

"Now, your grandfather, on the other hand," Dad cut in, "has actually been around the block a few times. Seen a few things. Learned a few tricks."

I rolled my eyes. He was older than me, yes. Quite a bit. But I was actually pretty sure that, in all the ways that counted, he was less experienced. And he damn sure didn't know more tricks than me. As Aunt Cindy could attest.

"When exactly were you initiated, anyway?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "Before Iva was born, I'll tell you that much. And she was of age before you were born. So I'm old enough to be

your

grandfather, nevermind

his

," he said, jerking a thumb at Josh.

"I see," I said. I hadn't realized he was so much older than Iva.

That seemed significant, somehow. I'd have to file that away for later.

"So, about our mother," Josh prompted.

I nodded. Holding up a finger to signal that he should give me a minute, I poured us all another round of shots. Vodka wasn't my liquor of choice anymore than it was my father's, but it worked well enough for shots. And shooting good whiskey was a crime.

The vodka went down quickly. I waited for the burn to fade before speaking again. "Your mother and I had different views about how you all should be raised." True enough, so far. "I wanted you to have normal, happy lives in suburbia. She wanted you to live with us, to be part of our world from an early age. In every way." The lie came out easier than I would have thought. "I wouldn't have it. We don't have a lot of rules about sex, but requiring that everyone involved be a consenting adult is one of them."

"Good rule," Val said softly, eyes wide in shock at the "revelation" about her mother.

"Yeah," I said. "Kind of a biggie. So we argued, and arguing turned into fighting, and then one night, she tried to kill me. I killed her instead."

They'd need to know about Devouring eventually, but I couldn't bring myself to explain it just then. It was hard enough seeing the look on my daughter's face when I admitted to killing their mother without explaining how I'd done it.

Brianna, who didn't know the truth herself, caressed my shoulder reassuringly.

Back to sweet, then. Couldn't make it easy, could she?

"You have to understand, I did it for you. For your safety. If she'd killed me, as she'd intended, she'd have taken you from your families," I said.

Val pressed herself against Josh's arm. "This is sounding less and less like a fairy tale."

"Could be a reason for that," my father observed.

"Very adroit of you," I said.

"Very SAT of

you

," he replied.

Brianna giggled at that.

I might even have pointed out that before they were whitewashed for modern audiences, fairy tales were actually themselves pretty dark. But now wasn't the time.

"So I guess," Brianna said, with a devilish grin directed at my daughter, "that means you don't want to hear about how, when I was queen, I sent your father away, and he ended up being held captive for nearly three years. Or how I was sent to a dark abyss for a decade by my successor. Or how the current queen killed your uncle."

Val's eyes went wider and wider with each revelation.

"Brie," I said.

And the pendulum swings again.

She smiled innocently at me. "Sorry. Sometimes I just can't help myself."

That was the

exact

grin I remembered from before she was deposed.

I tried to remember what she'd told me about how she refused to apologize for who she was, even if she regretted some of the things she had done. That I shouldn't freak out if every now and then if something she did reminded me of the way she'd used to be. There was, after all, a big difference between delighting in scaring my daughter a little and Devouring her parents or threatening to rape my mother.

But, even so, I liked that grin not at all.

"Cheers," my father said, raising his shot glass to his niece.

Josh glowered at him again. My father's cheeks went red and he knocked the vodka back, breaking eye contact almost the moment it began.

"So, I have a question about those rules you don't have many of," Val said. Her pale cheeks turned blue, and a dark blue at that. "You know, about, uh, about sex."

"We do a lot of that," my father said.

I rolled my eyes at him. "Yes?" I asked Val as I poured a third round.

Staring at her hands, she said, "Well, I guess, basically, what I want to know is...."

Brianna started to say something, but I flicked her thigh and she got the message.

Was she finding it hard to resist being mean to Val because Val was meek and therefore an easy target? Or because she knew that the voluptuous brunette was very much my type?

The idea of Brianna being jealous of other women because I found them attractive was still not an easy one to wrap my head around. Was I really supposed to believe that all that time, she'd been angry at me for not being in love with her instead of my mother?

It just seemed so crazy.

"We all, you know...with each other," Val said. "That's, like, what we do, right?"

"Pretty much," Brianna said.

"We're a family of filthy, horny, degenerates," my father added.

"And we do it with everyone?" Val asked. "No one ever, I don't know, just ...stays loyal to one partner?"

Josh placed a hand over one of hers.

"Generally not, no," I said slowly. "But you don't have to do anything you're not comfortable with. And while none of us are exactly monogamous, most of us do tend to form strong bonds with particular people. Your grandmother and I were like that, for a time. Now I suppose she and her brother are. And though your grandfather and his sister take other lovers at times, they're closer to one another than anyone else." I turned to him. "At least, I assume that's still true?"