I

Blood soaks into her Army regulation boots, darkening the desert tan to a muddy, brick, clay color. Each step toward the Colonel’s office causes the blood to suck at her feet, and she tries not to care about the footprints she’s leaving behind.

She stalks down the hall, feeling her soaked uniform peel off and stick to her with each step. Normally, she wouldn’t be self-conscious of being covered in blood—she’d revel in it—but she can hear the whispers beating at her ears.

“Freak.”

“She’s a glorified monster.”

Sauda turns to look at the tall blond human, who shrinks away from her gaze. The man beside the woman undresses her with his eyes and she sneers and looks away. Apparently, the woman is more disgusted by her than the man who enjoys a woman covered in another human’s blood. Not that Sauda could judge. Sometimes even she found it sexy, in the right situation.

She rounds the corner to the Colonel’s door to find it wide open with the sound of masculine laughter falling out. It instantly stops as soon as she walks in.

“Jesus Johnson!” The Colonel jumps up, finger-pointing, and face puffing up. “You couldn’t have cleaned up before you came in here? Look at the carpet!”

She doesn’t.

The Colonel, graying with age, still looks sharp in his ACU’s. Tall and well built without being too bulky and not an ounce of fat on him. But like all long term G-men, his gray eyes were dark and dead. The complete opposite of how they looked right out of basic.

She took a second to canvas the room, spotting all exits and windows.

Four other men stand in the office, facing her, mouths gaping. They smell human and all look like the same man in different colors. The Army had a way of doing that: taking men from different walks of life and then shaping them into the same mold.

Out of the four of them, one stands in front, the Alpha. His brown hair looks almost black except where the sun hits it through the Colonel’s window. His skin is tan. He can’t be plain lily white, she’d bet on it. His hooded black eyes look her over.

“You sent word that you wanted to see me right away,” She tells him, giving him all the attitude she could muster while exhausted, “last time I ignored an order we had... issues.”

“Last time you took two weeks to report!” The Colonel says, his face getting red. “No one wanted you and your little death squad. You don’t respect authority! I may have got this project as a punishment, but by God, I will teach you to heel!”

Sauda can see the Colonel’s face swelling with each word, and she tries not to smile. She couldn’t help how amused she got at the poor man’s agitation. Getting a rise out of him was like a sport.

“Teach me to heel? Like a bitch?”

“That’s it!” The Colonel slams his fist on the desk.

“Sir,” the Alpha soldier says. The Colonel looks at him. “May I?”

The Colonel's chest heaves up and down, close to hyperventilating. Sauda smiles, imagining his face getting so red that steam comes out of his ears like a teakettle.

“Major Maddox.” He introduces himself, stretching his hand out to her.

She raises her hands to show the drying crimson. “Blood,” she says, “Captain Johnson.”

His eyes widen as he sees the caking blood, and he pulls back two steps.

“I assigned your team to the Major. These men will join the unit,” the Colonel says.

Sauda looks away from the Major to the Colonel. His face is pale, but the smug look on his face makes her pause. His smile reaches up to his dead eyes. She looks back at Maddox, studying him. He smells human. But there were a lot of things that bumped in the night that could pass as mundane.

“What are you?”

“White,” he says, not wasting a second.

She can tell he’s used to that question in that meaning. Ignorant people loved to ask that of anyone they thought was of mixed heritage or too “beautiful to be black”. Her complexion was too brown and dark to be mistaken for anything but gorgeous black. Still, people told her, “You have to be mixed with something. You are just too beautiful.” Sometimes she’d ignore them. Sometimes she’d curse them out. Sometimes they go missing.

“Right. But what can you do?” Sauda crosses her arms.

He looks at her and tilts his head like a puppy. “Are you asking for my performance record? My score at the range? I am an excellent shot and in perfect health. They wouldn’t have assigned this team to me if I wasn’t. I won’t slow you down and neither will my men.”

He tenses, eyes getting smaller. Sauda knows angry when she sees it, even if people try to hide. But his anger looked like the slow-burn type. She was tired and the last thing she wanted was a fight.

“Look,” Sauda says ready to walk out, “I’m sure you’re a good soldier—superb—the best at what you do, however, I need to see how you and your men fit into my team. Your ability is personal, I get it Major, but we don’t have the time to get super comfy first. I need you to trust me and trust me fast. It’s our lives on the line every time we’re boots on the ground.”

Maddox still stands there, eyebrows nearly touching as they scrunch together and his head tilts again. She looks at the other men and their faces match his.

“Let me help you there,” The Colonel says, a smile plastered wide on his face, “Major Maddox has no abilities. He’s not a freak.”

And there it is. That smile stuck on his face because he finally gets his turn to get under Sauda’s skin.

Did the good ol’ southern, old school, Colonel have an issue with her being black?

Yes.

A woman?

Yes.

Did he hate her for being other, a little more than human, a “freak”? Even more than anything else. But Sauda can’t do anything to change that. It wasn’t her fault that a Demon bred with her mother.

“This has got to be a joke,” Maddox says, looking between the Captain and the Colonel. “Abilities? I thought someone was just fucking with me when I read that file. My father said...” He looks Sauda up and down and she can smell the fear, then the disgusting stench of his repulsion.

Few knew about her team of assembled “X-Men”, but the few who were lucky enough to have the clearance, either looked scared or disgusted, like he did.

“So you’re a—”

“Demon.” The Colonel says. That word slides down his tongue with loathing.

“Half Demon,” Sauda clarifies, “Which works for the missions they assign my team.” She looks at the Colonel now glaring at her. “What I don’t understand is why this man is on my team when he has no abilities,” and then to the Major, “You must have gotten in a lot of trouble to report to a lower rank.”

“Report to you?”

The Colonel’s loud barking laugh fills the room. He takes a breath, bends backward, and roars. Everyone else stands uncomfortably looking at him.

“Sauda fucking Johnson,” The Colonel says, finally standing straight up and wiping tears from his eyes. “I didn’t assign Major Maddox to your team. I assigned you and your team to him. Meaning you,” he points dead at her chest, “report to him.”

He tries to point to Maddox, but he doubles over again, silent laughter shaking his entire body.

She can’t help it. The anger burns through her self-control, loosening the bars on her demon’s cage. The muscles in her back strain before picking up the weight as wings try to rip out of her. Her body swells in the back of her uniform and she takes two steps backwards to the door.

“God damn it,” she whispers as she quickly weighs the pros and cons of leaving before being dismissed. The pain takes over her mind.

Assassin chic is what she usually wore on missions; all black, tons of weapons, and in her case, tops with wing slits in the back. But then there were missions like her last one, where Uncle Sam wanted his enemies to know exactly how deadly he was. So she wore her ACU’s and left few survivors.

Her bloody ACU’s didn’t have any slits, and her wings were about to tear through them.

Sauda rips the zipper apart and the uniform cover hits the floor. She grits her teeth as the pain springs out of her back and her legs take on the weight of extra appendages. Skin and blood pour behind her, joining the blood already covering her. The wings shredded the back of her underage shirt, but the blood held the front to her body.

“Holy shit! What are you?!”

There’s a slam against the wall and the pictures fall down. Sauda looks over to see one of the other men in the room, shaking against the wall. She forgot the other three soldiers were even in the room.

She looks to the Major and he stands, mouth wide, and eyes roaming all over her obsidian wings.

The Colonel took away her leadership position and made her into a freak show as intended. She let him affect her, and it pisses her off. “I think you got the wrong men for the job, they can’t even stand the sight of demon wings.” She walks out the door and as soon as she’s out of their sight, she rushes to the elevator.

She walks across the hall, her wings a familiar weight on her, ignoring the gawkers and their gasp. The same woman from earlier holds up a cross and Sauda suppresses the urge to hiss at her.

She reaches the elevator and presses the button as she senses the Major coming up behind her.

“Briefing, tomorrow, oh-six-hundred... Captain,” Maddox says.

The elevator opens and Sauda shifts in, careful of her wings. She turns and Maddox draws closer to her as she leans forward to press the lobby button. Their faces a breath apart.

“You’ll find that I am not an easy man to intimidate,”

She stands, opening her wings up to fill up space in the elevator, and he takes two steps back. The elevator doors close and she smiles, “We’ll see about that.”

When he’s out of sight and she’s looking at her own reflection, she folds her wings back through the torn tendons and muscles, and she’s proud that she doesn’t sob as they do. She pulls out her phone and sends a text to numbers she never saves but remembers by heart. To people who needed to know what was going on.