Darlings of New Midnight by Andrea Speed

Author:Andrea Speed [Speed, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay romance
ISBN: 978-1-64405-818-3
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2019-12-19T06:00:00+00:00

4—Five Feet And A Hammer

LYN WONDERED how old she was.

She knew most people assumed, when they knew she was a harpy, that she was being coy about her age, like supposedly all women were. But the real reason was far more embarrassing—she had forgotten.

Apparently a brain could only retain so many bits of information before losing some others. Maybe The Simpsons was right, and learning something new inevitably pushed out another thing, because that had been Lyn’s experience.

It wasn’t a total blank. Every now and then, a fragment surfaced, but nothing that helped give her any context. She was alive in the nineteen hundreds, clearly. Harpies could live to a thousand, because, as Logan had once described her, they were tanks. Hard to hurt, harder to kill, with a natural immunity to most human diseases. Because, despite their ability to look like any human woman, they were not human. They weren’t birds either, despite their natural winged state.

It was hard to say what they were. Her mother honestly believed that whole thing about them being blessed—or cursed, depending on the interpretation—by the gods to wreak vengeance for all wronged women, but Lyn always had a hard time believing in gods. Never mind that she was a gender-based shape-shifter living in an isolated part of the Italian Alps with other gender-based shape-shifters. Gods still seemed like a tough thing to swallow.

Her mother was named Lucia—she knew that—and she had very vague memories that the springs and summers in the mountains were beautiful and the winters were fucking brutal. But much of her childhood was gone. It was a blur of training and an occasionally weird solstice festival, which she quickly learned was not a thing in the wider world.

She also wasn’t sure why the harpies were hiding their true nature, although years in the human world had taught her the why of that, in that women were generally ignored and hardly considered human. After all, males seemed to be determining what history was, making a harpy a term for a shrill woman, not a fierce warrior for justice; mythical instead of real; birds with tits instead of the shape-shifters they were. Human male history was decidedly wrong and pretty much went out of its way to exclude women, as if they were props and not people. Lyn could still remember wondering how humanity continued, since men were so disdainful of women as a group. Why would any woman agree to breed with them? That was before she learned that human women couldn’t control their pregnancies like harpies. They only became pregnant when they wanted to. Human women got the shit end of the deal all the way around. Also, harpy procreation was purely parthenogenesis, which meant they were all basically genetic clones of the original harpy, but because they could change appearance at will, no one looked the same, so you really couldn’t tell. Human reproduction was just fucking bizarre.

But her age. She couldn’t remember her exact birthday because the harpies had a different calendar than much of the western world, and the months didn’t exactly match.

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