Anya strode through the twilit alleys of the city, wearing an expression that showed teeth. It was nothing like a smile. It was a warning.

She was not having a good day.

She blinked, opened another set of eyes, looking down on the street from above. A rat. Blink again, and she was a crow digging through the trash in the wastebin behind a restaurant. She lifted its head and saw herself, a pale woman with dark clothes and amber eyes and scars.

So many scars.

She returned to herself and kept walking, her bare feet landing on the pavement with a soft clicking sound. Her fingertips clicked together, rhythmic like the skittering of insectile legs across the ground.

She had a following. A swarm spread out behind her, like the train of a wedding dress. Fur and feather and chitin, it all followed in her wake, chittering and barking and snarling. She could feel each tiny mind, distinct, like a cloud of sparks at the forge inside her thoughts.

They burned with the anger she felt, reflected and amplified across the hundreds of minds that she had woven into her web. It was growing harder to control, but she kept it contained. Her motions were smooth, crisp, controlled. Her face was a snarl, sharp and smooth. Her teeth had grown into fangs, and she didn’t try to hold that back.

Minutes rolled by as she walked, until eventually she reached her destination. A mansion, a huge building that loomed over the neighborhood from atop a hill. A fence of wrought iron eight feet tall surrounded it with spikes and razor wire on the top of it. There was one gate. She walked straight for it.

She reached the gate, looked at it. Felt her muscles shift and change below the skin in an instant, twisting and flowing into another shape. She leapt, pushing off the ground with the proportionate strength of a flea. She soared over the fence with ease, landed on the other side in a crouch. Her fingers brushed against the paved driveway, and then she stood. She felt the animals and insects following her, squeezing between the bars of the fence. The snarling, chittering noise got louder. A thousand voices, one anger.

Her anger.

She walked up the driveway, and saw the people standing, moving closer, weapons coming up. Guns, batons, knives.

She ignored them completely.

She walked up to the door of the manor, and knocked, rapping on it hard enough to leave marks in the wood. The sound was the clack of chitin on wood, rather than skin and bone.

There was the sound of movement behind the door. Hushed voices. Someone being volunteered to answer, most likely. She waited, patient, still as a statue.

Finally, some twenty seconds later, the door cracked open, the chain keeping it from opening too widely. A scared woman’s face peered out.

“Your boss took someone from me. I want her back,” Anya said. Her voice was calm, precise, cold. “This is above your pay grade. Step aside.”

The woman swallowed hard, took a step back. There was a shout from within. She she was shaking. She took another step back.

There was a shot from within, and the door-woman collapsed in a heap.

The anger inside Anya flared to life, and she kicked the door. The chain snapped, the door coming off its hinges and flying into the room before slamming down. Anya stepped in over it, her features melting and blurring. The pale woman was gone. Her head was that of a wolf, oversized and terrible. Her arms ended in feline paws, with long, sharp claws extended. Feet were digitigrade.

She looked a chimeric monster, inhuman, snarling. She looked like what she was.

Inside, one man had a gun out, aimed at her. She closed on him, blurring with the speed of her motion. One paw reached out and slapped the pistol out of his hand.

She snarled into his face from inches away, and he flinched. She lashed out with her claw, tearing into his abdomen, spilling organs out onto the floor. She stood up, and turned to the others in the entryway. They were covered in her swarm, insects crawling on them, rats and pigeons and dogs and cats and spiders. None of them drew a weapon as she let her face return to that of the woman.

“Where is she?” she asked, her voice a snarl, barely intelligible.

One of the men lifted a shaking hand to point upwards. Anya nodded sharply and kept moving.

The attack came suddenly, without warning. The third man in the room jumped on her from behind, a knife lashing at her back. It glanced off her hard, chitinous skin. She turned and looked at him, found the wiring of his body, seized it and twisted. He screamed, falling to the ground, his flesh flowing like half-melted wax. A wolf stood on shaking feet and she seized its mind, forced it into the swarm. Just another mind in the hive.

It would drive a lesser mind mad, she thought, to have such a chaotic susurrus of mental voices echoing within it. Maybe it had driven her mad. She wasn’t sure she would be able to tell.

None of the others attacked her.

She walked inside, saw someone standing in her way. He raised a gun. She fell on him, one arm turning into a long scythe-blade of bone and slashing. He fell, his throat a wet red ruin. She kept walking, leaving bloody footprints behind her.

She barely even noticed.

She found the stairs, went up them. Two people poked their heads around the corner of the landing. One took one look at the blood-drenched monster and her swarm, and decided better of it. The other drew a knife. Anya took hold of her body, twisting it into a new shape - a fish. She left it flopping, gasping for water on dry land.

Anya tried to be a kind person. Sometimes someone made the mistake of thinking that made her weak. Sometimes these people required an object lesson.

Up to the third floor, and turn. She sniffed the air, smelled blood and sweat and fear. Followed the scent, with her swarm behind her. Her fingers flexed with too many joints.

Turn, turn, and the door was in front of her. She knew at once that it was the right door. It had a heavy chain holding it shut, and two guards standing outside with heavy shotguns.

“Stand aside,” Anya said, her voice low and raspy.

“Fuck off.”

“Last chance,” Anya said. Halfway through saying it her face transformed, growing huge insectile mandibles that mangled the second word so it was hardly intelligible.

The two guards raised their guns and fired.

One of the blasts went wide as she slipped to the side. The other hit her on the shoulder, several pellets piercing her chitinous skin. She leapt forward, her swarm following her. Insects and rats swarmed over the first guard, tearing and biting and stinging. He screamed. It wasn’t pretty or clean or quick.

Anya stepped over the falling body to the other guard, who was adjusting his aim. He hadn’t been ready for her speed. They never were. She reached out and tore the gun from his hands, threw it aside, stepped in closer. Her mandibles snapped onto his throat, serrated edges ripping at flesh. She tasted blood, kept going, biting and ripping. He fell.

The demigoddess turned to the chain, examined it. She could hear footsteps coming up the stairs, sent the swarm to delay them. Seized the chain and pulled. Muscles strained, grew, strained, and finally a link in the chain snapped. She pulled it away, and kicked the door.

It slammed open and she saw Karen lying on a bed. She was tied down, and the rope had abraded away the skin. That was the first thing Anya saw. Then she noticed the blood. The burns. The missing fingers, the eyes that had been burned out.

The fury in her burned to new heights, but the first priority had to be saving Karen. Punishing her captor could come later.

She turned her gaze on her lover, felt the warmth and power in her surge up in time with her emotions. The severed fingers grew back, covered in fur. Eyes were next, growing in with multifaceted insectile eyes.

“Anya?” Karen said, twisting her head to look at her lover. Her goddess.

“It’s me,” Anya confirmed. She stepped in, bony claws tearing at the ropes, slicing through them. Karen sat up, wincing. Anya ran her hands over the abrasions, let her healing warmth flow into the damaged skin. It flowed in and mended under her touch, the new skin more like chitin. Like Anya’s own skin.

Karen touched it, and looked at Anya, and there was awe and thanks and adoration writ large across her features.

“We need to go,” Anya said. She looked around, didn’t see a window, helped Karen to stand. “The swarm won’t keep them for long. Can you walk or do I need to carry you?”

“I can walk,” Karen said firmly.

“Good. This way.” Anya hurried out, saw two gunmen rounding the corner. They had numerous tiny wounds from the swarm, but they were moving. She seized one, twisted him into a hound, and set him on his former partner, biting and clawing. They went down in a heap. She led Karen down the hall to the window at the end.

A quick kick shattered it. She picked Karen up with ease and jumped out, wings spreading from her shoulders as her legs twisted again. She backwinged to slow the fall and landed hard, going to a crouch. She took off running, keeping her pace to something that Karen’s mostly-human body could keep up with.

They reached the fence and Anya drew to a stop, considering. She hadn’t planned how to get Karen over it.

She turned to her lover and said, “I can get you over, but it’ll involve turning you into something that can fly.”

“Do it,” Karen said simply.

So Anya did. A quick twist of power and her lover’s form was replaced with a vividly-colored hummingbird. Anya leapt it the same way she had on the way in while Karen flitted over it. Anya took off down the street at what would be a dead sprint for a human, but was a fairly easy pace for her and for the hummingbird body.

They kept going, ignoring the shouts and calls to stop, leaping over streets and dodging through traffic, until they reached Anya’s territory. There they could finally slow down. The people they passed nodded respectfully to Anya as she passed, murmured honored greetings. She was a god to these people, and they acted it, and she loved it.

They reached her home, walked in the front door. People came to greet them, took Anya’s coat, wiped the blood off her. She thanked them and went upstairs, the hummingbird-Karen flitting along beside her.

Once they reached the top floor, Anya’s suite, she flopped down on the chair. A quick gesture and Karen was back in a mostly human body, flesh flowing until she looked like anyone else - to a cursory glance. Anyone who looked closely, of course, would see the fur and chitin and the insect’s eyes.

“Thank you,” Karen said. Anya got the feeling that she would be crying if her new eyes were capable of it. “I knew you’d come for me.”

“You’re mine,” Anya said gently. “I take care of what’s mine.”

“I know,” Karen said. She smiled, showed the teeth that Anya had given her another time - long and sharp, like a cat’s. “Can I...show you how much I appreciate it before you go?”

Anya smiled. “I think I’m feeling something a little more...exotic tonight,” she said. “If you’d like?”

“Anything,” Karen said, and Anya knew she meant it, and that turned her on more than any touch ever could.

Anya found the blueprint for her worshiper’s body, and made an adjustment. Something stood before her that looked like a bizarre fusion of human and mantis - black chitin and insectile eyes, a mantis’s claws, human torso with four breasts rather than two, multi-jointed legs. Even her face was that of a mantis, a chitinous triangle with large mandibles. Anya stepped forward in the body of an anthropomorphic wolf with chitinous skin and insectile mandibles, and took her in a warm embrace.

Mantis claws hooked over Anya’s shoulder, pulled her closer. She licked Karen’s face with a long, flexible tongue, and Karen made an odd sound that Anya parsed after a moment into a giggle processed through the mandibles. She tasted odd, and the chitin had a slick texture that Anya loved.

They tumbled onto the king-size bed together, a tangle of limbs, fur gliding against chitin. Anya explored the body she had made for Karen, licking and scraping her claws against the chitin and generally indulging her senses with her lover. Her fingers teased the girl’s breasts, her nipples. Karen gasped.

Anya shifted her own body again, twisting its sex. She loomed over Karen, looked down on the submissive mantis-girl, and smiled. “I’m going to take you,” she whispered, “and you’re going to love it.”

Karen made an eeping sound, and put up her claws as though to resist. Anya seized one in each hand and pulled them apart, easily overwhelming the resistance with her greater strength. She rubbed up against Karen, feeling her new cock get hard. It wasn’t her first time experimenting with male genitals - after all, what was the point of being a shapeshifter if one didn’t explore the possibilities it offered? She normally preferred her natural sex, but the violence had left her in a mood that suited this better.

She kept going, rubbing and nuzzling and licking, until she was good and ready, and Karen was mewling in helpless need. Then she lined herself up, still holding Karen’s claws down, and eased forward into her. She was sopping wet from the extended foreplay and Anya slipped in easily.

Most of the time, she took it slow and gentle with her follower. Not tonight. She slid in, pulled halfway out, and then slammed home hard enough to knock Karen’s breath out of her. Her thick canine cock spread Karen open, and then she pulled out and thrust again, hard and fast.

She set a furious pace, panting hungrily, overwhelming the mantis-girl with the speed and force of her motions. Karen was gasping and moaning, writhing under her. “Be my god,” she said softly, between thrusts.

“Always, my love,” Anya said, and slammed in just a little harder. “You worship me with your body.”

Karen came a few thrusts later, the overwhelming sensation overcoming her. Her body strained up into Anya, squeezing around her convulsively. She was gasping for air, calling her goddess’s name. Anya kept going, thrusting rapidly, until she approached her own climax, her knot swelling inside her lover.

She let out a long howl, thrusting in one more time and letting the knot lock them together. She kept moving, small rocking motions that rubbed her around inside of Karen, until she came, spraying hot cum into the mantis-girl’s body. She stayed like that, body arched, eyes half-closed in ecstasy, for several seconds, before slumping down.

Karen drifted from smiling ecstasy into sleep a few minutes later, Anya’s name still on her lips. Anya stayed there, locked together by her knot, and thought bloody thoughts about what she would do to the one who dared to take her away.

There was a war coming. She intended to win it.