“I’m guarding you. That’s my punishment.”
She snorted and pulled the sheets up around her neck. “Doesn’t seem like much of a punishment.”
“Trust me. It’s plenty punishment.”
Katie guffawed.
“I’m going to tell Dominax you’re awake. He needs to talk to you.”
He got up with a swoop of wing, dropping a few small feathers as he left the room. She didn’t want to talk to Dominax, but she knew she wasn’t going to get a choice in the matter. The king had her back in his custody, and her free will had evaporated in the process.
It did not take long for Dominax to return, along with the doctor who had sedated her. She did not want to see either of them.
“We’ve been able to understand what is happening to you,” Dominax told her.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“You are going to be undergoing some physical changes,” Dominax said in the same tone the lady who had taught sex-ed at her school years ago had done.
“I’m not pregnant,” She denied out of reflex.
“No. You’re not.”
Her first reaction was a hollowing in her stomach, followed by confusion. “Wait. What?”
She’d been secretly certain that she was pregnant. Hearing Dominax tell her that she wasn’t didn’t really compute right away.
“The doctor has confirmed that you are not yet pregnant.”
“Then what the fuck are you talking about?” She looked from Dominax, to Darma, and to the doctor. None of them had expressions on their faces which told her anything at all. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Have you noticed any pain or discomfort in your shoulders?” The doctor asked the question.
“Uhm. No. I mean, not any more than everywhere else in my body. More my ass really.”
“If you’d like to sit up, I’ll show you something in this mirror,” the doctor said, producing the aforementioned instrument.
“What is happening?”
The sheets left her back bare, and when the doctor put the mirror behind her, and then Dominax held another one in front of her, she saw her back.
“Okay, what the fuck!”
Her shoulders were… bulgy and lumpy. Not hugely, but definitely noticeably.
“What is going on back there?”
“Would you like to break the news, sire?” The doctor’s voice came from behind her head.
“Yeah, would you like to break the news, sire!?” Her tone was much less respectful than the doctor’s and far more irritated.
“You’re growing wings. That is what the doctor believes. The growths on your back are the beginnings of wing buds. We see these quite often in the teenage juveniles of our species.”
“Wait. The teenagers? So babies can't fly?”
“No. The wings aren’t developed to a flying state until around thirteen years of age or so. Evolution did not favor flying babies in a lava world.”
“No. I imagine it wouldn’t.”
She was in shock. That’s why she was having an inane conversation about flying babies. Being told that she was growing wings, and then seeing the beginnings of that process taking place beneath her skin was, well, the more she thought about it, terrifying.
“How is this possible? I’m a human.”
“It means that your genes code for wings, but that in your natural environment those genes are not expressed. When the environment changes, different genes are activated. Humans apparently have vestigial wing DNA. This is quite a breakthrough.”
“So I am going to be able to fly?”
“Maybe. It depends how large they grow and whether you develop the necessary musculature to support wing function. Because your species is not usually winged, what grows might be more vestigial than functional.”
“But there’s a chance.”
“Yes. There’s a chance.”
“Wow,” she breathed. “Awesome.”
The king did not share her opinion. The last thing Dominax needed was a pet who could fly. There was nothing in the literature or human history about having wings, at least, nothing that didn’t have serious questions around it as to its veracity.
However, it did not take a great deal of research to realize that Katie was going to be a pain in the ass as a flying pet.
“Is there something you can do to stop the progress of the growth? It can’t possibly be good for a human to grow wings.”
“I don’t believe intervention would be wise, my king,” the doctor said. “If her body is producing wings, I think we have to accept it as the proper course of nature. The practice of wing docking has long been considered cruel.”
The doctor was not saying anything Dominax did not already know. But that did not mean he wanted to hear it. Once she had wings, she would be even harder to control — and what would she truly be? A human was a pet. A human with wings was practically a Homelander. She would be practically indistinguishable if they were feathered.
Keeping her as a pet would be considered, well, unorthodox in that case. The Homelanders were not in the habit of questioning their king, but the last thing Dominax wanted to do was encourage his citizens to start keeping one another. That never ended well.