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Mira By Strega

"Una bolla stracciatella, per favora."

"Si," said the gelato vendor, and scooped the chocolate-drizzled ice cream onto a cone. "For la bella signora, no charge," he said with a smile as she reached into her belt pouch for a thousand lira coin.

His English was better than her Italian and he was handsome, if you liked humans. And Mira did. She was an inch shy of his six foot height, resembling an enormous upright pine marten, her fur russet with lighter highlights. Her teeth and claws were sharp but her smile was bright and her long prehensile tail flicked to show her approval of the generous vendor. He'd seen her half a dozen times at the Monday (or rather Lunedi) street market in Maniago and smiled as he correctly read her gesture.

"Look mama, an alien," said a nearby child in rapid-fire Italian, but most people here hardly noticed her any more. Mira very much liked the little street markets that sprang up one day a week in most Italian towns and went to several a week to buy local food for the embassy. Maniago's was not the closest to the spaceport but she liked the little town square and made a habit of coming to its weekly market.

"Grazie, signore," she said to the vendor.

"Arturo," he said. "If I may." He reached out to touch her furry tailtip, which had appeared over her shoulder like an inquisitive serpent. It slid forward to allow the touch. "Soft," he said as he stroked it. "I did not think mrish tails were so long and," he glanced down at her legs. Mrish could stand and walk on their hind feet but were naturally quadrupedal. She was clearly a biped.

"There are different sorts of mrish," she purred. "Long ago my ancestors changed themselves to work better in space. Long tail," hers curled around and touched his ear, "Can reach out for tools or to grab a tail hold." She took a lick of the gelato. "Molto bene."

She purred as he looked her over, not accustomed to tail-flicks another mrish would instantly recognize as flirtatious. He wasn't sure he she was actually interested. She was. Like most mrish, or rather ulfermrish ("mrish-of-Ulfe", her subspecies) Mira was...broadminded about potential lovers.

But a familiar and unwelcome scent reached her nostrils just then and her eyes narrowed. Arturo instinctively drew back when he saw her ears flatten against the side of her head and as the groping hand reached up under her dress she was already moving. Her tail twitched to the side, bumping into the interloper's leg to locate her target and her sandaled four-toed footpaw stamped unerringly on his foot.

"Ow!" A short man in ragged, out of date BDUs cursed and jerked back. His fingers had barely touched her sex and some would have said it was an overreaction when her foot cocked up in front of her, lacquered black claws three inches long sliding out of their sheaths.

Only the presence of the crowd and possible injury to bystanders kept her lashing out instantly but still she snarled and readied herself to strike. "You again!" Mira's chops wrinkled back to expose her fangs.

"Signora, no," Arturo said, and leaned forward over the counter to grab her shoulder. Under her fur Mira was solid wiry muscle and she was easily stronger than he was but it made her hesitate long enough for the ragged man to disappear into the crowd. Nearly shoppers drew back as the previously friendly ulfermrish let out a snarl.

"Signora, please," Arturo said. "Be calm. I will buy you an espresso."

After a moment she relaxed, her hackles going back down. "Scuza," she said to the crowd, and nodded after the man while making a "groping" gesture. There was much discussion in Italian but thankfully no one seemed to have been filming her with a phone when it all happened. About the only real damage was to the gelato she'd dropped.

A few minutes later they were at a sidewalk table and except for the attention her long tail and alien nature always drew the locals once again ignored her. "Ciocolatto caldo, non tropo densa per favore," she said to the cafe waiter.

She did not miss that even after his brief exertion Arturo was red-faced with effort. He was young, strong looking, but there was something wrong there. She did not pry. "He is...an unwanted suitor," she purred, tilting her head toward the little ice cream cart now being operated by someone who looked enough like Arturo to be his brother. From his scent he probably was. "It is not that I hate to be touched. I like it very much. But I do not like that one, and have told him so, yet he finds me and," her fangs showed again for a moment. "There are protocols. Niceties. He does not obey them and had you not stopped me I would have hurt him."

Maybe killed him, she didn't say. Mrish were stronger than a human pound for pound and her enhanced metabolism increased her strength still further. Her small breasts and slightly broad hips made her gender obvious but she could easily take Arturo in her hands and do presses with him. She could have gutted the groper with one kick.

"Tell the carabinieri," Arturo said, leaned forward so he could talk without being overheard.

Mira sighed, blew on her hot chocolate and took a sip. "I did. Not everyone likes having aliens around and the local police chief is one such. I refuse to hide at the embassy to avoid this...person but he keeps getting the drop on me because I'm concentrating on shopping. I love these little markets!"

His smile was infectious. "It is good to travel. Not to have just one big place to buy things, as I hear it is in America."

She nodded, taking the hint. "Yes, he's an American I think. When the air base was turned into a spaceport some of the old American military became staff, some went home and a few...well, he's one of the few. I don't know how he stays out of jail, I have never heard one good thing said about him."

She took a last sip of chocolate and set the cup down. "I should go. It was nice to meet you, Arturo."

"La bella signora," he said with a theatrical little bow. She was certain that had she not reacted so badly to the dirty man's touch he would have kissed her hand.

Her aircar arrived and she returned the bow with a little flick of her tail. "Mira," she said as she climbed in.

"You seem stressed," the ambassador mumbled later that evening. Mumbling is about the only way to communicate when a woman is sitting in your mouth, one thigh on either side of your lower jaw as your tongue caresses what lies between them.

"Yeeees," Mira purred, half an answer and half a response to the ambassador's skillful tongue. A moment later she gripped the fur of the ambassador's cheeks and shuddered, her long tail slapping the side of the mwee's neck. A long low growl rose out of her as she shivered, then relaxed.

After a pause to see if Mira pushed herself any deeper into the waiting maw, a tacit indication she wouldn't object to being made a meal, Denivive lowered her muzzle and let Mira slide out of her mouth and onto the same huge hassock the beartaur femme occupied.

"Thank you, Denivive." The beartaur was of typical size and build, somewhere between one and two thousand pounds and easily capable of eating Mira whole. She wouldn't, though, not unless Mira wanted it. She might tease and she might pretend to force her friend, but here, too there were protocols. Only strangers were truly unwilling prey. With friends you waited for a signal that they wanted it.

Denivive's dark-red fur was soft and plush as Mira stretched out along her side. The beartaur had flat teeth and toenails instead of her own claws and fangs but was just as naturally carnivorous. The two women had worked together for four years now and in private, when the ambassador's duties did not restrict her to rules and regulations and politics, they were closest friends and lovers.

"It's not as though he is a threat," Mira purred, but there was a hint of a growl to it. "Even if he attacked and killed me I would just be remade here. Yet I almost kicked him to death. I am tired of looking over my shoulder."

The ambassador ducked her great shaggy head. "Italia is still moving uncertainly into the new world union and adjustments are being made. I do not think they would banish him just on our request. I can talk to the Commonwealth ambassador, they have much more pull than I do."

Mira sighed, snuggling up against a warm beartaur flank. "I don't know. I almost feel sorry for him sometimes. He's not a well man."

But she hadn't felt sorry for him when her claws came out, and a few days later, making her way from the Pordenone market to the aircar, she was just as unforgiving. It was a beautiful Saturday (Sabato) and her mood was bright. Just a few molecules of that scent reaching her sensitive nose changed that, though. As if on a whim she turned on one digitigrade foot and took a short cut through an alley.

She pretended not to see the figure in the shadows, but her furry ears tracked his exact location. And not with just his dirty groping fingers, either. This time he had a knife. Just a little kitchen knife, but sharp. He stepped out as she went past and as though by mere reflex, not at all as though she'd planned it from the moment she smelled him, her right leg lashed out in a powerful side kick.

There were no bystanders to worry about this time and the kick drove into his ribs, picking him up and throwing him against the centuries-old brickwork of the alley wall. Stunned, he looked up at a blur of brown fur. Mira leapt into the air, spinning in place to build up momentum, and the spiral of tail wrapping around her as she turned made it almost impossible to see where her attack was aimed.

He slipped on a bottle. It saved his life. With her weight and momentum behind it the kick came whipping out of the blur, barely grazing his shoulder before caving in the side of a trash can. Her claws were sheathed but it was still a killing blow, had it landed.

He could have run but he'd never been alone with her before and he might never get another chance. He snatched up the knife from where he'd dropped it but before he could swing something like a steel cable wrapped around his chest. Mira twisted the knife out of his hand as her long, powerful tail wrapped him like a python constricting a rat. It was much, much stronger than it looked and he gasped for breath as the claws on her hands unsheathed too. They were only a third the length of her big foot claws but all he could do was wriggle ineffectually in the grip of her tail as she drew her hand back to strike.

"Mira."

It was a voice in her head, but she froze as her comm implant spoke. "Yes, ambassador." By training and practice she subvocalized it, relying on the bone-conduction pickup and computer filtering to make her mumble intelligible at the far end.

As she stood frozen, not striking but not letting the man go either, she felt a tingle as the hair on her tail stood up. Somewhere nearby were several active-camouflaged drones and they set up a holographic wall at the entry to the alley. It was just a shimmer from this side but she guessed anyone passing by would see only trash cans and detritus, not her and her stalker.

"Mira," the voice in her head said, "I have checked. He had no friends, no family, many enemies. No one will miss him and I won't have him harassing you. There are no cameras in that alley and few even in the town. No one saw him go into the alley, no one needs to see him come out."

"Are you saying..." Mira looked down at he man wrapped in her tail, his face red with rage. A string of promises as to what he'd do when he was loose spilled out of his mouth. None of them were nice.

In three minutes your car will be there to pick you up," the ambassador's voice said in her ear. "It has room for two."

Mira had been ready to kill the man, but that was an act of anger. What she did now was something she had always done just for fun. The curses died in the man's throat as she leaned down, smiling, until they were nose to nose.

"No one will see you go into me," she purred. "No one will see you come out." His eyes went wide as she yawned, jaws popping as they creaked impossibly wide. Her fangs scraped past his chin and forehead as she pushed her muzzle forward, and the lush brown-gold fur of her neck bulged as his head and neck slid easily down her throat.

An adult mwee is ten times as massive as the average human. Even without body mods one is capable of swallowing a man whole, and without a single visit to the medical bay a female mwee can shove a man entirely into her sex. More unusual play like cock vore took body mods but even with mods, only extremely rarely did a mwee do anything as difficult as she did now: swallow a person almost as large as herself whole.

Mira's lower jaw popped loose from its moorings and stretched away from her skull on elastic tendons. Her collarbones floated over the great hard lump of skull as she swallowed his face and stretched even further from her backbone when she ratcheted her maw wider to take in his shoulders. Wrapped in throatflesh that gripped and pulsed as she swallowed him down, the man tried to struggle, tried to squirm away from her and save himself. He failed. Her strong tail squeezed him into submission, twitching downward only to make room for her advancing jaws. In less than a minute she was on hands and knees, her jaws gaped around his waist and her tail now wound around his legs like the furry serpent it resembled.

Her fingerclaws retracted back into their sheaths as she gripped his rump, forcing it into her jaws, and she sat up on her knees, thrusting her open maw at the sky. For a moment his clothing caught on her fangs. She preferred to swallow her meals naked but she couldn't leave any evidence behind this time. Something tore in the seat of his ragged BDUs and suddenly there was just a set of legs kicking from her jaws. Her tail released her prey now that it was too late for him to save himself and her trim midsection bulged and twitched as a great gulp and gravity sent the man sliding down her throat.

He did not taste good. His filthy clothing covered equally filthy skin and normally he would be her last choice for a meal. She wasn't doing this for fun this time, though. She tossed her muzzle upward, pointing her gullet at the sky, and the squirming man slipped into her jaws to the knees. There was no need to dawdle, no urge to toy with her meal this time. Three minutes was about the minimum time it took her to eat a man in any case. Her tail curled around to brace against the pavement in front of her, helping her keep her balance, and her hands sank into her belly fur as she gripped the squirming bulge of nearly swallowed man and pulled it downward.

She heard the hum of the approaching aircar as his boots slid into her jaws. This part of him didn't taste any better than the rest she squinted at the taste of dirt and other foulness. There was no help for it, though, and her muzzle at last began to close as her tongue helped push them after the rest. There was a creak and pop as her jaws resumed their usual shape and then a series of gulps sent the shape of the boots moving through the stretched fur of her neck. Finally that, too, resumed its usual shape and Mira slowly rose to her feet, hands and tail restraining the violent struggle beneath her belly fur. Someone very much did not want to be in there but there he was, clothes, boots, bad attitude and all.

The pressure of her grip forced out what air had gone down trapped in the folds of his clothing and a long belch bubbled up out of her. For a moment she considered swallowing some to replace it. She had eaten prey who wanted a slow, torturous death, to succumb to heat and stomach acids rather than lack of air. That was not her habit. She could simply will herself to die and did so when her predator didn't have a painless digestive process. Tastes varied, though, and she'd obliged a meal or two who wanted to last twenty minutes instead of one.

But she had not done this to torture the man. It was not in her nature to be cruel and she squeezed her belly again, burping up what little air remained. Her burp did not taste any better than her meal but the struggle in her gut quickly transitioned to a weak shiver that told him he had succumbed. He would not get back out of her stomach the way he got in.

Just then the little aircar appeared from the alley entrance. It was smaller than an adult Mwee and could hold two human-sized embassy staff plus some shopping. The roof and door opened to allow her in and every bit of passenger space was needed to accommodate one long-tailed embassy staffer and the great bulge of her still-twitching gut. It was not Mira's habit to walk around when gorged but she managed to squeeze herself in and the car drove out of the alley and rose into the air. Normally it would drive to the edge of town first but tinted windows or not it was best not to chance someone seeing the great swell of her gut.

Just as the roof closed one of the hologram-generating drones zipped in the window carrying the man's knife, which she'd lost track of as she ate him. There was nothing at all to show he'd ever been in the alley, now. All the evidence was in her stomach or on the cargo shelf behind her.

Mira only wore human-style clothing to humor local custom (and "decency" regulations, though her fur covered her sex up pretty well) and she had never considered that she might eat someone while so dressed. The drum-tight fabric of the yellow dress stretched over her belly parted with a sound like a gunshot and for the first time since unhinging her jaws she smiled.

"That cost money," she giggled, and sat back as comfortably as she could as the first gurgles of digestion began to consume her bulky meal.

The trip back to the embassy only took a few minutes and as always she spent the time watching ships come and go from the spaceport. The Aviano and Venezia spaceports were continental trade hubs, not big Earth-to-orbit ports, and this was perhaps not the best place in Europe or on Earth for the principal mwee embassy. The current ambassador very much liked Italian food, though, and Italians, which of course were often the same thing to a mwee.

The mwee security guard raised an eyebrow as she wobbled in from the car bay, but didn't say anything. She paused to toss the knife into the recycler and his eyebrow rose higher, but other than a gesture to silently ask if she needed assistance (she didn't) he kept his opinions to himself. With a sigh she slid the grocery bags into the stasis locker. She'd sort the food later.

This was the one time she wished for a four-legged gait like the mainline mrish species. Four legs are better for supporting a huge belly than two. She had to flick her tail back and forth to balance herself as she trundled into her room. With a groan of relief she crawled into her bed, which had only one drawer below the padded sleeping nook instead of the usual two or three expressly to make it easier to climb in when she was gorged. She was asleep almost before she got her tail wrapped around herself.

As she slept her belly gurgled and churned, beginning the long task of dismantling the stalker. Mrish and their offshoots, despite long since modifying themselves to an omnivorous diet, are natural carnivores and her digestive system had no trouble getting a good start on the flesh and soft tissues. The "vorarephile package" she received as an upgrade since working for the mwee had not neglected harder to digest bits. There are biological ways around the issue but making a stomach that can work with thirty different acids and enzymes is tricky. A simpler method was a smart digestive system that used molecule-level bots to help. As a result her stalker's bones, hair, boots, clothing, even the keys and coins and assorted metallic bits in his pockets and clothing too began to break down, albeit more slowly.

Some of it became useful minerals and the rest would leave her body as all used food does. By no stretch of the imagination did she need over a hundred thousand calories from this one meal so while some of it would be converted to fat the process was necessarily wasteful and inefficient. The vast majority of the stalker would serve no useful purpose to her body other than as exercise for her digestive tract.

Sometime later her door chimed. Mira blinked awake, noting the time on the floating display. She'd slept for a little less than three hours. "Come in," she purred, shifting the now noticeably softer bulge in her middle and sitting up in the sleeping niche. She trusted that whoever came in would not be shocked at the sight. She was right. It was Denivive.

"Ambassador," she said formally, not sure how this was going to go. She'd never killed someone this way before. Oh, she'd eaten dozens of people, but always here at the embassy. She didn't have reformation scanners built into her body and eating someone outside this building sent them on a one time tour of her digestive tract. Every other person she'd eaten had been reformed. Not this one.

Denivive was a beartaur like all mwee, dark red with a lighter belly and feral near-bear below, bearlike humanoid above. Like all mweefemmes she could fit a whole human - or Mira, say, which had happened - into the great tunnel of her sex but unlike most mweefemmes her predatory habits were more pedestrian. She would play with her friends down below but when she ate people it was always with her mouth. She padded up and sat back on her haunches in front of the bed.

"All you all right, Mira?" One huge hand reached out to gently feel the sloshing bulge in the ulfermrish's middle. It would take days to digest and pass a meal as large as her friend's but a start had been made.

"I'm okay," Mira purred, and she too felt the bulge. "He isn't. I was ready to kill him but it just seems wrong to do it like this. Of course I enjoyed it, eating people is fun, but I feel..."

"Guilty?" Mira nodded. The ambassador looked up and spoke. "House."

"Yes, ambassador," said the ceiling. 'House' was the standard term for the AI that monitors a building, whether it be a warehouse or embassy or home. 'Ship' was used, obviously, for ships.

"House, how many people has Mira eaten at this embassy?"

"Fifty-three," said the AI.

"How many were reformed?"

"All of them, ambassador," the AI said with no indication of impatience, though everyone present already knew the answers to these questions.

"How many were unwilling prey?"

"Nineteen."

"Of the people who retained the memories of it, did any suffer permanent psychological effects?"

"Kailis, the hestan lieutenant, while in her stomach asked for and received a memory block so that he would remember that something interesting happened here. While in Mira's company he would remember more. He has subsequently returned and asked Mira to swallow him on two further occasions, being allowed to remember more each time."

Mira licked her chops, remembering the handsome cat-man. He was a good lover and had made her several very good meals.

"He ultimately signed on with Captain Khlen of the Opportunity," continued the AI, "Where he is lover, prey and occasionally predator for various crew members. The Opportunity is due in port here in two months, at which point I expect he will return and once more add to Mira's waistline."

Denivive shrugged. "No harm done then. Mira, during the many small wars and even when the Commonwealth fought the Enemy the mwee were neutral. We traded with both sides and were allowed our neutrality because we don't fight. It is not the mwee way to kill unless it is necessary."

She reached out once more to press a padded palm against Mira's belly, which gurgled as the partially digested man shifted inside the ulfermrish. "But we do kill when we must. We are just tidy about it. This man will not be missed, and if you hadn't eaten him I would have. There is no evidence and no body even if the local authorities cared to look for them, and they won't."

The ambassador stood once more. "Mira, if you don't want to be full of him I can help. Otherwise, well begun is half done, as that human movie says."

She was offering to digest Mira's meal for her, which of course meant digesting Mira too. "No thank you, ambassador." The ulfermrish squeezed her belly so it sloshed. "I appreciate that you usually do me that favor, but this one deserves my personal attention."

Denivive smiled and turned for the door. "Enjoy, dear."

Mira's guts gurgled as the ambassador departed. It had only been a few hours since she ate but expanding a stomach to occupy the whole body cavity didn't leave much room for intestines. The result was the frequent need of a bathroom when digesting such large prey and her body was sending signals that soon she'd be going to the bathroom. It would be best for all concerned if she was actually in a bathroom when this happened.

The one in her room was a dual-function one, built both for squatting (which came naturally to mrish, even ulfermrish) and possessing a fold-down seat to accommodate her occasional human guest. Unsteady as she was with her belly this big she flipped it down, raised her tail and sat. That was all the permission her body needed and with a considerable sense of relief she rid herself of the first of what would be twenty-plus bowel movements of used-to-be stalker. As her lower intestine shrank back to its usual diameter a long brown column of used food disappeared neatly down the frictionless funnel of the recycling system. That was it until the next time some portion of him needed to leave. Which, given how much of him there was to digest, would not be that long.

It wasn't the first person she'd shat out but all the others had been reformed long before she was done digesting them. Mira used a wipe to make sure no residue of her bowel movement clung to the fur around her anus, then sent the wipe after it down the drain.

"I should feel guilty about you, maybe," she said as she returned to bed. "But if anyone deserves to be shit and stay shit, it's you."

*****

"Big spaghetti with hen clams," she said to the waiter. She was at a riverside cafe in Verona, and the dish came recommended by friends even if she didn't trust her Italian to order it.

"Si, signora," the waiter said, and took Arturo's order as well. Mira had picked him up as the Monday street market closed in Maniago. He hadn't taken much convincing and had happily climbed into the car next to the long-tailed ulfermrish.

"Have you seen him," he said, and glanced around to see if the stalker somehow lurked in the bushes nearby. "I missed seeing you last Monday. I hope concern about him did not keep you away."

"I was busy last Monday and couldn't come to the market," she said truthfully. In fact she'd still been busy digesting the stalker. Going to market with a big bulge in her middle was a bad idea, even with a holographic disguise to cover it. She hadn't ventured from the embassy until all that was left of him was fat and a hundred-plus pounds of base material being sorted by the embassy's recycler. "But I haven't seen him since that market visit where I met you." This, too, was entirely truthful. She was not in the habit of watching what came out of her asshole as it disappeared down the drain.

"Well, we can hope the threat has passed," Arturo said, and Mira smothered a snicker. She'd been resisting the urge to make that joke for a week now and here it just came innocently out of the Italian's mouth.

"One hopes," she said with an amused tail-flick. She thought for a moment.

"Five thousand years ago," she purred, and waggled her hand, "Give or take a century, the calendars don't all agree, we were about where you are now. Maybe a generation ahead of where your race was when the Commonwealth scout ship got here ten years ago. Five subspecies of mrish on a crowded planet. There was conflict over resources, inter-subspecies bigotry, religion, war." She flicked her tail. "Two billion of us died in an afternoon. The whole sharpfang subspecies, they lived on a chain of big islands, almost all of them died from nuclear strikes and tsunami from bombs detonating underwater. Only a few thousand survived out of six hundred million."

She took a sip of her hot chocolate. "It was agreed that this could not happen again. There had to be another way to work out differences besides war. We chose sex."

He blinked. "Sex."

"Yes, sex," she purred. "We decided we'd rather be in bed with our neighbors than fight them. Sex became competition. 'Fighting forms' were developed. Marriages, relationships became, by your standards, very complicated. Multiple lovers, spouses, life-mates, almost universal...bisexuality isn't really enough. Omisexuality?"

"Luckily we hadn't done enough damage to our planet to kill us all and we turned our efforts to expanding into space. We sent out slowships, frozen crew, to colonize other systems. When we met aliens, we were so accustomed to having lovers rather than enemies that our first thought wasn't 'Can we conquer you' but instead 'Is it possible to have sex with you'."

"When the Commonwealth scout ship found us we had a dozen systems colonized. My subspecies," she flicked her tail, "Happened because we knew the system we were going to had bad planets but a huge, rich asteroid field. My ancestors got their long tails because we were altered to work in low-gravity environments. By the time we had artificial gravity and faster than light drive there were ten mrish subspecies, because we weren't the only ones modified for different conditions. The mainline mrish are the most common, you say they look like big carnivorous squirrels, but there are other mrish. There's a type that doesn't even have fur, but instead scales. There's an aquatic type, one that can glide on flaps of fur...you get the idea."

"We'll still fight, of course," she purred. "We fought alongside a thousand other races when the Enemy appeared and attacked the Commonwealth. But given a choice, we'd rather fuck. So we're broad minded about who we consider handsome, who we'd take as lovers."

"Analysis complete," House said in her ear. She had stalled long enough. She knew what to look for but even she had trouble spotting the active-camouflaged, fly-sized drones flitting around Arturo.

"You were right," House said. "Congenital heart defect. Very bad. Too much exertion could kill him at any time. Mean time to death if he doesn't overexert himself, five years. I am not certain human doctors could successfully treat him."

Mira hid her emotions as she looked at Arturo. He could hardly be into his twenties. She could live for centuries if she chose. The Commonwealth and the Mwee had cracked health problems like this but her friend might not live to see that level of medical care become commonly available on Earth.

"It is against embassy guidelines to offer medical assistance to citizens with no connection to the mwee," House went on in her ear. There was a pause. "But the problem could be easily rectified if, for some reason, he needed a new body...."

Mira smiled, and her tail moved beneath the tablecloth. Arturo jumped. What she had just done was a little more than simple flirting. He remained uncomfortably rigid in his seat as her tail-tip rubbed him where no one could see, and it wasn't just his spine that was stiff.

"When we are done eating," she purred, "Why don't I give you a tour of the embassy. Maybe you'll learn something about my species. Maybe I'll learn something about yours. And I could use help working off this weight I've picked up eating good Italian food." American food, she thought but did not say.

Arturo smiled, and she took pity on him and stopped the tailjob. Mustn't get him too excited. His heart might give out.

That wouldn't be a problem soon. Tomorrow he'd wake to find her gone, be flown home after learning she'd been called away on embassy business. He'd take fond memories, because she could smell and see his interest. He'd happily help her burn off some of the fat from her last big meal.

By then he'd be helping her put it right back on, because for him to need a new body something unfortunate would have to happen to the old one. That was all right. He'd never know anything had changed, just that his condition had miraculously improved. His heart defect would be digested along with the rest of his old body.

"I would be happy to, la bella signora," he said with a bright smile as their food arrived. Mira ate lightly. She had to save room for the main course, after all.