Yes, there was nothing like ten solid minutes of nothing happening to convince oneself that the potion one had taken might as well have been interesting colored water for all of the pregnancies it would actually terminate.

“And that’s it,” Roger said finally. “Remember, don’t take anything else and try to stay away from any buffs or debuffs for the next two weeks. There wouldn’t be any interactions with most of them, but we don’t want any nasty surprises.”

“Okay,” I said.

The whole thing had taken maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes, including the wait before I’d seen Roger. I figured the others had probably headed for lunch already, but they wouldn’t be anywhere near finished, and I still had to eat… okay, technically I didn’t have to eat. But I still enjoyed and was in the habit of eating, and was expected to by my owner, so I went straight to the dining hall.

After I got inside, I decided to check in at the table where the others were before getting my food. My jitters from earlier weren’t ready to leave just yet, so they were finding new things to pester me about, like what would happen if everybody else finished eating just as I was sitting down and so they had to sit there awkwardly while I ate or else they’d all just get up and go, leaving me sitting there alone…

Nothing, I told them. Nothing is what would happen. Certainly nothing worth dwelling on or complaining about.

The jitters were unimpressed with my reasoning, but I held firm.

Ian was there, as I’d expected, along with Amaranth and Steff and Two. Amaranth looked up as I approached, but her smile froze on her face and her perpetually sun-kissed skin paled just a little.

“What’s… what’s wrong?” I asked as the once-downcast jitters rejoiced.

“Do you feel okay, baby?” she asked me.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. I now wondered if I was showing unexpected side-effects from the potion. Maybe a ten minute waiting period hadn’t been quite enough. Maybe the anti-fertility potion had never been tested on those with infernal or extraplanar blood. “Why? Do I look… is something…”

“There’s something… off… about you,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”

“You look okay to me,” Ian said. “Did you go to the healing center?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“Why were you in the healing center?” Amaranth asked. “Mackenzie, baby, is something wrong?”

“No, really,” I said, trying to put as much assurance into my voice as I could. Whatever had Amaranth spooked, the news that I’d gone for healing certainly wasn’t helping put her mind at ease. “During the night of the fish-beast, Ian and I had sex without a ring… so they gave me a potion to cure disease and another one to inhibit fertility, you know, just so I don’t end up pregnant… well, it’ll wear off in two weeks… could you be seeing that somehow?” I asked Amaranth.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I guess that does explain it.”

“You don’t think there’s something else, do you?” I asked. “Because I also took a cure disease potion right before it, so… I should be pretty healthy. But I don’t want to take any chances.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re fine,” Amaranth said. “I’ve never seen anything like it… it just looks funny, is all. I suppose I’ll get used to it.”

“What exactly are you seeing?” I asked. I didn’t want her to be worried, but I also wanted to be sure there wasn’t anything for her to be worried about.

“Well, ‘seeing’ isn’t really the best word… okay, maybe it is the best word but it’s a case where the best word isn’t actually very good,” she said. “I guess I could just say ‘sensing’, since I am processing the information coming to me through a sense, but that always makes me picture something like Dee getting all psionic, where this is more like a physical sense, like sight or smell, but…”

“What are you sensing?” I asked.

“Just… well, it would be like seeing a shadow,” she said. “A dark spot. Or a blank one. Like something that should be there is being blocked out, or erased. Like I said, I’ve never experienced something like it before, but I suppose it is how I would ‘sense’ things if your natural fertility was being suppressed.”

“Wouldn’t someone who happens to be infertile hit you the same way?” Steff asked.

“No,” Amaranth said. “I mean, I can tell when people are more or less fertile in the course of things, but this stands out… it’s like the difference between knowing all your life that people have different faces, and then seeing someone wearing a mask for the first time. It was a little startling.”

“Well, I’m going to go get a tray,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I headed for the desserts first. I felt like I deserved a bit of a treat for what I’d done… well, it was more like I felt like I should feel that way, that Amaranth or others might think I deserved something. I didn’t feel like I wasn’t entitled to something, and I supposed that was a start.

What I really would have liked was something with a good deal of meat to it, but lunch time was the worst meal for that. Breakfast always had some combination of bacon, sausage, or ham available by itself.

Dinner sometimes had a meaty entree, mixed in with the rice and noodle dishes that had shreds of chicken or tuna or beef hidden like tiny prizes among the larger bits of starch that weren’t so much seasoned as stained interesting shades of brown and yellow.

For noontime meat entrees, we were pretty much stuck with the alleged chicken-and-rice dishes, and occasionally things like cold cut sandwiches. Most students seemed to just fill up a plate at the salad bar or grab some of the snackier items.

But as I passed the salad bar on the way to the cake and stuff, I noticed something: there were great big strips of chopped up ham and pieces of grilled chicken sitting on it. So I ended up with two pieces of strawberry cake and something that stretched the definition of “salad” to the breaking point and beyond for lunch, but even if I couldn’t convince myself that I deserved anything special, I also couldn’t convince myself that I didn’t want a pyramid of chicken and ham stacked over a thin layer of lettuce.

I expected a bit of reproach for my meal choice from Amaranth, but she just raised an eyebrow at it. When Two didn’t have anything to say about my use of the salad bar, I figured that I was in the clear… but then, her ice cream sundae had more little candies on it than was probably strictly regulation, so maybe she just didn’t feel like casting stones.

“There’s an interesting question that just popped into my head,” Amaranth said. “If you did get pregnant by a human father, would you need to eat human sustenance while you were carrying the child?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My understanding is that human appetite plus demon appetite divided by two equals a slightly moderated demon appetite, because demonic hunger is stronger or bigger or more dominant than human… at least, that’s how I made sense of it when my grandmother explained it, to the extent that she explained. I suppose at some point it’s got to average out to the point that a human with infernal blood would have to eat human food. I just don’t know what that point is… and I’m not too interested in finding out.”

“Well, you never know how you’ll feel in the future,” Amaranth said. “You might change your mind. And after all, if you were to find out that three-quarters human or non-demon would be enough to allow a more conventional diet, wouldn’t that do away with one of your main objections to being pregnant?”

“Psst… I think Amy wants you to have her babies,” Steff said.

“Well, obviously not,” Amaranth said, rolling her eyes, “I just want Mack to be aware of what her options really are.”

“I’ve had enough of options for now, I think,” I said. “I don’t want to think about choices, or possibilities, or potential. I just want to coast for a while.”

“Then I’ve got good news for you,” Steff said. “It’s all downhill from here!”

Amaranth wasn’t the only one who noticed something different about me… when I headed back to the dorm after lunch, I saw Celia in the stairwell and she flicked out her tongue and told me that I “tasted funny”.

This wasn’t the first time she’d said something like that to me, so rather than assuming she was talking about my potion use I just said, “I thought you’d be used to my scent by now.”

“Different than what passes for normal, for you,” she said. “Like when you’re having a weird mammal thing, only… different.”

“Oh, well, I’m sort of on something at the moment,” I said. “For health reasons,” I added, since Celia was the biggest user of recreational alchemy in the dorm.

“No shit?” she said, her big, lidless eyes brightening. “You got anything you want to trade?”

“No, it was just a single dose thing,” I said. “And I wouldn’t want to trade… this is a legitimate health need.”

“Hey, I’ve got not needs, too,” Celia said. “Emotional needs, spiritual needs… there’s more to health than blood and guts.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not judging… I’m just saying I’m not holding or carrying or whatever you’d call it, and I’m not looking for anything,” I said.

“Alright. Cool,” Celia said. “Baby steps. Got to learn to slither before you learn to walk, I get that. Oh, Feejee asked me if I’d seen you.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Why don’t you ask her yourself? I don’t even know why she asked me in the first place,” Celia said. “She’s a lot ‘closer’ to you than I am. If I had eyebrows I’d be raising them when I said ‘closer’.”

“Was she in your room?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Celia said. “Where do you think I just came from?”

“Okay… thanks,” I said.

“Don’t overwhelm me with gratitude or anything,” Celia said, and she went on her way.

Feejee and Celia’s room was at the near end of the hall, the closest one to the bathroom not counting Kiersta’s. I’d have to walk right past it to get to my own room. I decided that was okay, though… if Feejee were looking for me, it would be better for her to find me in the hallway of our shared dorm than out and about somewhere. There were bound to be at least a few other people on the floor, and I had my own room to retreat to.

It wasn’t like she could corner me, I realized… if I had to, I could always break down the nearest door and jump through a window. I didn’t tend to think of things like that because I’d been brought up to think of using my strength like that as something like a horrible sin. My brain really didn’t even pick it out as an option in most cases.

But I wasn’t too worried. It wasn’t like I didn’t believe Feejee was capable of harming me, but she was also at the same time determined to be friendly, and she also held to her own people’s values when it came to things like hunting on the land. That was more than could be said for Iona. I also knew that I could cow Feejee with a show of my own predatory mojo, if I could muster it.

The man in my dreams had called mermaids “sea devils”… that raised some interesting questions. Was that just an old name for them in their monstrous forms, or was there something more significant to the name? In another one of my dreams, he’d suggested that the current state of the demon race was as a result of meddling by Khersis… if demons had once been another race of human predators inhabiting the natural world, might they not have been similar to land-dwelling mermaids?

Of course, demons couldn’t shift their shapes… at least, no more than humans or most other races could. An immortal life span and a hefty power reserve meant that a given demon was likely to be better at altering its shape than a given human.

All of this was an interesting mental digression, but if I was going to go upstairs and face Feejee I would need to do that. Well… I wasn’t so much specifically planning on facing her as I was planning on walking past her room and letting her say whatever she wanted to say to me outside in the hallway. I wasn’t going to go out of my way to confront her and I wasn’t going to go off alone with her.

I figured there was no point in trying to be all stealthy, both because I wasn’t exactly known for my ability to move with elf-like grace and silence and because Feejee would latch onto my smell as I went past her door, but even though it was slightly ajar there was no sound or movement from within it. It was only when I was almost to my own door that I heard hers opening and, stupidly, I stopped and turned to see her headed for the stairs. She must have glimpsed me out of the corner of her eye, because she spun around. Her face was not quite unreadable.

There was a trace of genuine happiness around her eyes, and a touch of worry, but on the whole she looked a bit like she was under the effect of a numbing spell that was just starting to wear off.

“Oh… hey,” she said, heading towards me. She blinked a couple of times as she got closer. “Are you wearing perfume?”

“No,” I said. “Do you smell something?”

She came right up to me and leaned forward, sniffing all around me.

“No,” she said. “I just… I didn’t recognize your scent. It’s usually pretty distinct.”

“Well, I didn’t do anything different, in the olfactory arena,” I said, which was technically true.

It was pretty obvious what the cause of the change that was tripping her and Celia up, but if it made it harder for her to recognize my scent then I wasn’t about to volunteer any information about the source or its duration.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said.

“Yeah, Celia told me,” I said.

“I was wondering if you’ve seen Iona.”

Well, that was a question and a half.

“Not today,” I said. “Why?”

“I haven’t seen her for a while,” Feejee said. “She went out for a walk the other night, and didn’t come back.”

“What night was that?”

“Wednesday,” Feejee said.

That was the night of the fish-beast… the same night that Iona had cornered me in the bathroom in Smith Hall, after history. I hadn’t exactly gone looking for her, but I hadn’t seen Iona since then, either.

“Iona’s pretty good at taking care of herself, I’m sure,” I said. I didn’t really want to wish her well, but it didn’t exactly seem politic to say as much.

I was trying hard to keep my voice steady while not actually saying any of the things that were running through my head. Had someone already made an official unofficial move on her? Had she encountered something nastier than herself out there in the dark? Had the fish-beast done something?

“Still, I worry about her,” Feejee said. “She goes wandering around the campus at night. It’s not safe.”

“For anybody,” I said. That was a lot more pointed than I’d meant to get, so I decided it was time to end the conversation. “Feejee, I’m sorry you can’t find Iona, but I really haven’t seen her, and I’m not about to go looking for her.”

“Okay,” she said. “Sorry. It’s just… we kind of had plans for this weekend. Involving you. You know?”

Yeah, I did know.

How much safer the world would be for humanity if all of their predators were as guileless as Feejee? Though I couldn’t help but think that would make the world that much more dangerous for everyone else… and now I was sounding like my father. The man in my dreams.

“Well, if I do see her, I’ll try to send her your way,” I said.

“Okay, thanks,” Feejee said. She sniffed the air again, made a little frown, and then turned to leave.

It seemed like I wasn’t going to be able to avoid being stuck with decisions, as I now had a new one to make: get the hell out of campus for the weekend, or spend it surrounded by my friends… including Dee and Pala, preferably.

Soon: Well, that would be telling.

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It seemed like much of Harlowe shared our plans. On our way down the boys’ side we passed a few guys who were carrying garment bags and things that were obviously costume props. One of the other canids whose name I didn’t know had evidently decided to highlight his appearance by dressing up like a stereotypical werewolf. In the girls’ stairwell, we passed Trina… dressed like a faerie princess, complete with wings and sparkles in the air all around her… and a girl I’d never seen before, who seemed to have painted her entire body with gold and green paint. There was only the faintest outline of pasties over where her nipples would be. You could only just barely make them out if you looked really closely. I wasn’t sure what she was going for with the costume, exactly, except for “sexy mostly naked girl covered in body paint”.

I had to admit, it worked.

“Oh my kosh, Gladys, did you see her checking you out?” Trina said once they were a flight down. So that was Gladys. I wondered what her racial background was… she’d looked human enough, except for maybe being bald. Though it was possible that might have been a skull cap… I hadn’t been paying that much attention.

“Man, did you see her eyes?” Ian asked.

“Um, what about them?” I asked. I hadn’t really noticed anything out of the ordinary about them.

“They weren’t there,” he said. “She had like an illusion effect or something… it was like you could see straight through to the wall behind her, like she had a chameleon spell just in that spot. Or those spots.”

“That’s weird… why would she do that?” I asked.

“Maybe because she couldn’t paint them?” Amaranth suggested. “I mean, maybe she wanted her costume to feel complete?”

“I don’t know why she wouldn’t just use glamour for the whole thing,” I said. “That paint had to be a hassle for whoever helped her put it on…”

“I don’t know about that,” Ian said.

“…and it’s probably going to make a mess everywhere she goes,” I said.

“Maybe she’s glamour-resistant?” Amaranth suggested.

“I don’t think anyone’s specifically resistant to glamours,” I said. “Except in the ‘able to see through them’ or ‘dispel them through contact’ senses. It’s nothing more than an alteration of appearance. I suppose if somebody were resistant to alterations, or to magic in general, that might make it harder to apply a glamour, but anyone or anything that has an appearance is equally susceptible to having that appearance manipulated.”

“Well, then it’s probably a tactile thing,” Amaranth said. “She was feeling very sexy, and very confident in her sexiness. I’d imagine that if she were just wearing a skimpy bikini and had her skin glammed, she might feel more exposed compared to the feeling of the paint against her skin. It could be her way of being both daring and coy, by covering herself and revealing herself.”

“It’s kind of a weird costume, though,” I said. “I mean, she’s not really going as anything, as far as I can tell. She’s just going as herself covered in paint.”

“I think it’s a bold choice, and I hope I have a chance to tell her so at the dance,” Amaranth said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “That’s Trina’s friend she’s reflecting to every minute of every day with the latest up-to-date reports on every tiny little thing anyone does.”

“Yes, well, we can hardly judge her for that,” Amaranth said. “I mean, you’ve never heard her side of those conversations… maybe she just tolerates Trina’s gossipy ways because she wants to be a friend to her?”

“Okay, I don’t exactly have a lot to go on here, but from my one almost-run-in with her, I’m pretty sure it’s a mutual relationship,” I said.

“Well, I’m withholding judgment,” Amaranth said.

“That’s a shocker,” Ian said.

“Oh, hush,” Amaranth said.

There was a strong breeze and a high-pitched buzz when Amaranth opened the door at the top of the stairwell.

“Whoa,” she said, laughing and rocking back a little. She stuck her head into the hall, then laughed and stepped through. Ian and I followed.

The hallway was pretty busy. Mariel the sylph was zipping around like a hummingbird on haste. She stopped in front of us… well, hovered might have been a better word since she didn’t actually stop moving. An incomprehensible torrent fell out of her mouth in Amaranth’s direction, though her eyes kept darting over towards me. From the look she was giving me, I thought she was complaining, but Amaranth just said, “Yes, please, if you aren’t too busy.”

Mariel’s four delicate arms moved like a tornado, and a wash of rich woody color spread over Amaranth’s skin while her hair darkened and turned green.

“Thank you!” Amaranth said. She dropped a few coins, but Mariel had already zipped off… though she zipped back and caught them before they hit the floor.

Leda was out and about, dressed as a prima ballerina. She was talking in low tones with a tall, athletic human girl who looked a little familiar. She didn’t seem to be in costume, though from the way she kept staring at her hands like she was on something, I almost wondered if it wasn’t Celia in a really elaborate illusion. Celia would have been probably the second last person to dress up like a human, but she might have done it for irony purposes.

“Yo!” Celia called from by her room, dispelling that theory. “Can I get a little help?”

Mariel flitted over and buzzed angrily at her.

“Hey, slow it down,” Celia said. “I don’t speak bumblebee.”

“…have time to slow down I have people waiting on other floors and I thought you said you didn’t need my help and anyway I know you don’t have money to pay and I’m not doing this for my health and…”

“Please help her out,” Feejee said from within the room. “I’ll pay for her.”

Mariel sighed, then went to work on Celia. Her pink skin tinted itself orange and slightly metallic. The texture changed, looking leathery and scaly.

“Can you do wings and a tail?” Celia asked. Mariel exploded into another hypervelocity outburst, and then flitted away towards the other end of the hall.

“That would take an illusion,” I said.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Celia said. “That’s why I told her I didn’t want her weaksauce glamour in the first place. Oh, well… I guess I can use this as a base and whip up the full effect at key moments.”

“Hello, Mack!” Feejee said, sauntering into view of the doorway.

She was wearing a chef’s hat, a long white apron with a barbecue fork, a basting squirty thing, a brush, and a squeeze bottle of some kind in the pockets. That was all she was wearing. She’d gone the opposite route of Celia, melting her scales into mammalian-looking flesh.

“Wow,” Ian said.

“Oh, do you like it?” Feejee asked, leaning against the doorframe and striking a pose. “I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows lately. Something about the look just appealed to me.”

“Well, I think you look just great, Feejee,” Amaranth said.

“What do you think, Mack?” Feejee asked.
“I… uh… I have to get my own costume on,” I said.

“I look forward to seeing it,” Feejee said, and she turned and headed back into her room.

“I don’t know who she thinks she’s fooling,” Celia said. “That girl is so queer for you.”

“Seems that way,” Ian said.

“Yeah, um, let’s get changed,” I said, and I started heading down the hall… though I stopped outside my room when I saw Honey’s outfit.

She had let Mariel tinge her skin a mottled goblin green. Her curly hair was pulled up into three short spikey pigtails. Her dress was kind of an approximation of something that Oru might have worn, though the top came up much higher and the skirt went down much lower than was the goblin style. She was wearing Oru’s lock necklace around her neck.

“Um… have you seen Shiel?” I asked her. What I really meant was, had Shiel seen her.

“Oh, Shiel can go soak her fat head,” Honey said. “We’re just having good clean fun. It’s Hazel who should be ashamed of herself. Her costume doesn’t hide anything. You can see the shape of her legs, all the way up.”

“Go soak your own head!” Hazel yelled from down the hall… from the door to my room, in fact. Her hair had been glammed blonde, and she had vaguely runic-looking letters stenciled on her forehead that said “TFH”. “There is nothing wrong with my costume.”

As far as I could see, she was right. Far from being more revealing than Honey’s, hers actually covered more than her cousins. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a fuzzy sweater. They maybe clung to her small form a bit more snugly than her everyday clothes, but that was the look she was evidently going for… everything Two wore was pretty perfectly fitted to her.

It was a little shocking to see Two’s friend in anything other than an earthy shapeless house dress. I’d seen Hazel in the showers before, so I knew that she’d been hiding a mature woman’s body under those dresses, but this was a whole new context to process it in.

“Hazel, you forgot the band,” Two called.

“I didn’t forget it, love, I just had to straighten my cousin out a little,” Hazel said.

“If you think I’m going to let you walk out of the hall dressed like that…” Honey said, her bare feet slapping the tile of the hallway as she stomped her way past us towards her cousin.

“Let? I don’t at all hate to tell you this, Miss Honey Callaway, but you are not my mother,” Hazel said.

“No, but it’s her I’m thinking of,” Honey said. “What do you think she would say, if she knew her only daughter was strutting about in trousers, like the commonest trash that ever floated down the river?”

I braced myself for an explosion, but Hazel just drew herself up to her full height… she seemed to be an inch or two taller than Honey, though I’d never noticed before… and said, “I don’t know, Honey. Maybe she’d say, ‘That’s my daughter’.”

“I can’t believe that even at her…”

“At her what?” Hazel said.

“Most rebellious,” Honey said. “I can’t believe that even at her most rebellious, she would have countenanced her daughter gallivanting around in trousers, with her feet shoved into shoes.”

“They’re sandals,” Hazel said, and I realized that was the source of Hazel’s elevation… I hadn’t registered the unusualness of a shireling with footwear because the clunky wedges she was wearing went with the rest of her outfit. “And they’re just part of the costume. Golems don’t go around bare. They’ve got regular feet of clay.”

“They’re shoes, Hazel, whatever you want to call them,” Honey said. “May Owain the Merciful have mercy on your soul, because Owain the Just probably won’t.”

“I don’t see what’s…” I started to say, but Amaranth reached out and shushed me with her finger.

“Come on, baby, don’t put yourself in the middle of this,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, I have to side with her,” Ian said quietly, drawing me towards my door. “This is cultural and it’s family… you really don’t want to get involved.”

We ducked into the bedroom while Honey and Hazel continued to quarrel loudly in the middle of the hall.

“Hi, Mack,” Two said. She was wearing a human-sized copy of one of Hazel’s dresses. Her runes had been masked over, and her hair was curled and chestnut color. “Hi, Amaranth. Hi, Ian.”

“Hi, Two,” I said, along with the others. “Wow, you guys really went all out.”

“Yes,” Two said. She scowled. “My clothing is not indecent. It’s just regular clothing. And it’s pretty.”

“Oh, honey, Honey’s just from a different culture,” Amaranth said. “She has different values.”

“Well, her values are wrong,” Two said. “There is nothing wrong with girls wearing trousers and there is nothing wrong with the shape of my legs, so there is nothing wrong with letting people see them.”

“She’s not talking about you, sweetie, she’s talking about her cousin,” Amaranth said.

“She’s talking about the way I dress,” Two said. “She just won’t say it to me because she knows it’s none of her business.”

“Well… it isn’t,” Amaranth said. “So don’t worry about it. It’s her culture and her values, not yours, and so whatever she thinks, it doesn’t really hurt you, does it?”

“No,” Two said. “She’s still wrong, though.”

“Well, let her be wrong,” Amaranth said.

“Okay,” Two said.

“Are you done getting ready?” I asked. “Because Ian needs to get changed.”

“Yes, I’m done,” Two said. “I think you are the last one on the floor to get ready.”

“Well, we’ll take care of that if you’ll just excuse us for a few minutes,” I said.

“Okay,” Two said. “I have to go to the bathroom, anyway.”

“Thanks, Two,” Ian said.

“You’re welcome,” she said, and she left the three of us alone.

“Man, if I could attract girls the way you seem to…” Ian said, leaving the sentence hanging unfinished in the air.

“What?” I said.

“I’d attract a lot of girls?” he said, pulling off his jeans.

“It’s not all great,” I said. “Believe me, some attention is not worth the trouble it causes.”

“You’re talking to the human guy who’s dating a half-demon,” Ian said. “When you’re sexually involved with someone who might occasionally look at you like you’re a tasty snack cake, then you can talk about trouble.”

I would have liked to change the subject, but what could I say to that? Some dramatic irony we’ve been having lately, huh? So instead I just let it hang awkwardly, while I kicked off my shoes and pulled off my shirt. We got changed in silence, Amaranth helping me get the bikini top on.

“I am going to freeze to death,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror. It was amazing how my boobs seemed to have stayed just as tiny as ever while my tummy was starting to hang out and my ass had blown up like a pair of balloons. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You can put an insulation spell on the cape,” Amaranth said, holding it up. “The fur… even if it’s fake… will be good for that, right? And of course, you can wear your coat on the way there… I’ll take it when we get inside.”

“Looking good,” Ian said. He took a step back behind me. “You know, I’m not even sure you need the cape.”

“Oh, I am wearing the cape,” I said, grabbing it from Amaranth. “I can feel myself hanging out in back.”

“While I agree she looks better without it, Sooni might feel put out if she doesn’t wear the cape after she took the time to fix it up,” Amaranth said. “The poor girl tries so hard to be a good friend, and I think she actually came pretty close here. It would send the wrong message to reject that.”

“Thank you,” I said, though I suddenly felt a lot less sure about the cape. I’d forgotten Sooni’s part in it.

“You’re welcome, baby.”

I finished decking myself out with the accessories. The boots, which were fuzzy inside, were a big surprise… not only did they fit my feet snugly, but they were pretty damn toasty inside.

“Oh, wow,” I said. “I am so keeping these boots.”

“Feel free,” Ian said. “I rescued them from the garbage… I mean, I saved them from going into the garbage. I didn’t rescue them from out of the garbage.”

“I think I’d probably wear them anyway, as long as I’d already put them on before you told me that,” I said. “I think they’ll even kind of go with my coat, as long as the color change is permanent.”

“With that coat, I don’t think it would matter if they were hot pink,” Ian said.

“Can I put making fun of my coat on the black list?” I asked Amaranth.

“The important thing is that you like it,” Amaranth said.

“I think the important thing is that it keeps me warm,” I said. “That’s what a coat does. That’s what it’s for.”

“Who’s dressing up as a golem, again?” Ian asked.

“I’m just saying form’s not as important as function. If it keeps me toasty on a cold night, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world by default.”

“The most beautiful thing?” Amaranth repeated, arching an eyebrow at me.

“Uh… well…” I said, starting to shrink down inside myself. I recovered, though, and slipped an arm around her. “That criteria isn’t just for coats.”

Discuss this story.

Feejee had abandoned all caution and her own personal morals. Sara looked like she was trying to literally tear her sister and her apart. Trina was giving a blow-by-blow of the fight, as if us poor two-eyed folks couldn’t see, and she kept punctuating it with remarks about what freaks the Leightons were and how everybody should stare at them.

Me? I was a messy mass of conflicting desires… I wanted to climb back in the tub with Feejee. I wanted to jump on the Leightons and tear them apart. I wanted to eat and be eaten, I wanted to cower and I wanted to roar, I wanted to obey and obliterate, consume and consummate, hide in the basement and set the world on fire.

“Everybody… get… out!” I yelled, trying to put some kind of authority into my voice. It came out kind of fierce, gravelly and growly… kind of poorly modulated, but that didn’t make it sound any less scary in my head.

The crowd by the door scooted back a tiny bit, if only reflexively. Trina stood her ground, less concerned by the second with what was happening than she was with pushing the “freak” label onto anybody but her

“Look at them, they’ve got four eyes on one body!” Trina said. “And Twyla has horns!” she added, even though I didn’t think Twyla was even there. “What is she, part minotaur? Everybody in this dorm is a freak except me!”

The twins ignored her, me, and everything else except for each other. They sounded like they were speaking in tongues, some weird kind of sing-song baby talk that reminded me vaguely of Yokano… though that may have just been because I couldn’t understand either of them. I gave them a shove… I didn’t really care if they tore themselves apart, but the spectacle would keep everybody else hanging around.

“Everybody get out!” I yelled again. Yeah, okay, it hadn’t worked so great the first time, but my brain was still dripping with misty molasses. I felt very detached from everything that was going on even as I considered the situation urgent. “Something in the bath is making people crazy!”

I was being vague on purpose… I had just enough presence of mind to know that suggesting it was my peppermint bubble bath that was doing it would be a bad idea… that would sound even weirder and the confusion it was likely to engender would just make people stand around asking clarifying questions when they needed to be getting back.

Also, there was already enough likelihood I’d be handed the blame for this without me putting the idea in Trina’s head that it was my fault… assuming she even noticed over the sound of her own ranting, which wasn’t even restricted to people from our floor anymore.

“Michelle wet the bed all the way until seventh grade!” Trina gleefully yelled. “Becky Davis picks her nose and leaves it under her desk! Becky Jones started the fire in the girls’ room to get the smokers in trouble! Estelle wears pads because she thinks tampons are sinful! Myra’s grandfather was a half-dwarf!”

I supposed she must have been talking about girls she went to high school with or something… it was too much to hope that getting all this off her chest would be healthy for her. Feejee had jumped from the tub and was running from the room, shoving her way through the door while shouting that she wasn’t gay, she just wanted to eat me. Luckily for her, it didn’t seem like anybody heard or paid attention.

Behind the first ranks, Two was getting ever more shrill in her objections, and Sooni was joining, her voice even shriller. The whole noisy spectacle was happening right outside Kiersta’s door, but I didn’t entertain any hope that she’d come riding to the rescue… if she did intervene, it would probably be just to blame me. Chances were she’d get one whiff of the peppermint and either barricade herself in her room or take up Trina’s slack in shouting about what freaks everybody in Harlowe was.

I saw Rocky pushing forward past Trina… I could guess what she had in mind, if the fumes were reaching her… and probably even if they hadn’t. Bad shit was going down and I was there. Clearly it had to be my fault.

I couldn’t move, paralyzed with conflicting desires… I wanted the beat-down she surely longed to give me, I deserved it, every inch of it, and certainly she had every right to give it to me… but I also remembered the crunch of stone skin and brittle bone in my mouth, the candy-sweet taste of her virgin flesh and blood.

It’s the morning bathroom rush. Nobody’s fully awake. Nobody’s armed. I could kill them all.

But I didn’t want to… no, I did want to, but I also wanted not to.

Feejee hadn’t been the least bit conflicted. Trina and the twins didn’t seem to be, either. Was I the only one whose innermost thoughts and desires were so completely twisted around?

“Oh my kosh, look at her… does anybody really believe the stoneskin story?” Trina said. “Her mother probably fucked an earth elemental!”

Rocky wheeled around as Sooni of all people shrieked “Don’t talk about her mother!” and Two started saying something about her friend Dee, who had just that moment joined the throng and added her voice to their objections.

“Everybody get out!” I yelled again. Third time was the charm, right? Just in case my voice hadn’t gained magical hypnotic properties in the last thirty seconds, I decided to try another tack: asking effective people for help. “Dee, Two… get everybody away from the door!”

I couldn’t say if that would have worked on its own, because the unmistakable sound of vomiting from the back of the crowd grabbed everybody’s attention. I fought the urge to vomit myself… even though I couldn’t see it, it was enough to send my stomach into a twisting fit.

“Please, everyone, let us stand back and give her some room,” Dee said, politely but firmly, and the crowd began to withdraw.

Getting people to stand back from a dangerous spectacle was no easy task, but getting them to clear away from throw up was a little easier. It’s possible she applied something more than regular persuasion, too… she moved forward through the flow of people and seemed to calm Sara and Tara with a touch, then drew them by the hand out of the bathroom. Once they were clear, she closed the door and locked it.

“What exactly is going on?”

“Don’t breath too deeply!” I said. “I think it’s something alchemical, in the bath water.”

“Perhaps we should let it out,” Dee said.

“Yeah, good idea,” I said. I held my breath, but before I could stick my head behind the curtain I heard the water start to gurgle and realized that Dee had taken care of it herself. I knew from experience that the water didn’t drain super fast… I’d enjoyed the sensation of it slowly drawing away, emptying the tub bit by bit instead of getting out and leaving me to linger in the warmth it left behind. Actually, that didn’t sound like a bad idea… most of my bath had already been ruined. Why not enjoy the rest of it?

“Mackenzie,” Dee said sharply as I started to pull the curtain back.

“Oh, right,” I said. letting it fall back in place. I could feel swirling eddies of steam tickle my face.

Are you an enchanter or aren’t you? I thought again. I’d turned the shower curtain into a barrier to keep steam in before… I threw the strongest formulation of my insulation spell I could muster onto the bath’s curtain. I could feel it taking hold, but it was hard to say how well it worked for its intended purpose since there was already so much of the stuff hanging around in the aisle.

Well, enchantment wasn’t my only lab… I’d only just started on directed evocation, but air out of air seemed like a no-brainer. I took a few steps towards the door and called forth air, pushing it back towards the showers. It would have been better to direct it towards a window, but there weren’t any in the bathroom. I supposed we’d have to open up the windows in the stairwell and prop open the door to help it dissipate fully, but getting the main cloud dispersed seemed like a good start.

“That was a good beginning, but perhaps we should leave the bathroom before we succumb to lingering influences,” Dee said, staring holes through my bare breasts.

Was she looking at my piercings? Impossible as it seemed, I was actually getting used to having pieces of metal rammed through my sensitive bits, but maybe in her culture that would be shocking or outrageous.

“Yeah,” I said. I blushed and grabbed for my bathrobe and my other stuff, slipping on the wet floor as my fingers wrapped around the squeeze bottle of peppermint bubble bath. My hand closed spasmodically and the top of it exploded, sending a gout of pinkish-white goo up right in front of my face and all over my hand.

The sharp mint smell seemed to ram itself up my nostrils like a pair of skewers, right into my brain. The world vanished in an icy white hot haze.

“Give me that,” Dee said, grabbing my robe.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said as she roughly wiped my hand clean then threw the robe aside. She grabbed my other hand and pulled me from the bathroom. The hall was still full of people, though they were mostly hanging out in clusters in front of open doors.

“Stay still,” Dee whispered in my ear, even as I looked around and thought yummy.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I couldn’t even make out specific people… it was just food and not food. Was that how Feejee and Iona saw the world? Feejee… I should try to find her while she was still in the mood.

“Nobody has told you to move,” Dee said icily, and I froze. “The bathroom is out of service until further notice,” she announced, and I heard a click behind us. “There has been an alchemical accident. I advise everyone not to linger too long by the stairs.”

There was a chorus of protests and questions, but Dee ignored all of them. She dragged me towards her room. The door opened in front of her and she shoved me inside, with more force than was in her arms.

“Down on the floor, beast,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, but something inside me said why? Why was I letting myself be cowed by this slip of an inexperienced priestess? I was a demon… I was tooth and fire, I was power and pain, hunger and hatred… I was made of malice and magic and she… she was not.

“Close your eyes and sit on your hands,” she said. “Remain perfectly still.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said and obeyed.

I heard soft scratching sounds, and then Dee said, “It is done. You may open your eyes.”

When I saw that she had inscribed an octagon around me, I felt a surge of hatred and anger rising up within me, but I stayed still. She hadn’t told me I could get off my hands.

“That was not the only variety of bath product you use, was it?” she asked me.

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“I am going to have Kiersta notify the university that our bathroom is contaminated, and then I am going to enter your room and inspect the rest of your hygiene products,” Dee said. “Remain here. Do not struggle against the bonds.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and then I was alone.

The fog was starting to lift from my head, but I still felt most comfortable remaining in that framework. I was naked and trapped in a protective circle. My hand still smelled like that peppermint stuff and the longer I sat there in the circle, the more aware I was of that and how good it smelled… I wanted to shove it in my face and drink it down.

Dee told me to sit on my hands.

After a few minutes, I heard a voice outside the door… Two. I felt the same mix of emotions and urges as I had in the bathroom.

“Dee, my friend Hazel needs…”

“I’m fine!” Hazel protested. “I keep telling you, I’m fine!”

“You can help her clean up in the kitchen,” Dee said. “Our bathroom is off limits.”

“But that isn’t fair. Also, I have to pee… and I have to get ready for class,” Two said. “But I really have to pee.”

“It isn’t safe… please, Two, use the fourth floor.”

“Okay.”

Then the door opened, and Dee entered. She looked down at me cautiously, then stepped around the warding circle, inspecting each line. Finally, she spoke.

“If there was any doubt that you received a genuine visitation last night from an infernal presence, it is now effectively erased,” Dee said. “It was not just a mental sending, either… a demon has been in your room.”

“In my room?” I repeated, the impact of the idea shocking me out of my sub space. While I was sleeping… with Amaranth right there on top of me… “Are you sure?”

“The traces had been deliberately obscured, but once I looked for them, they were unmistakable,” Dee said. “Particularly around your dresser. I am sorry to say that every bottle I checked seems to have been contaminated with the same potion. I attempted a brief purifying ritual on one, but it reduced the contents to slightly discolored water. Slightly discolored holy water, at that. Amaranth is disposing of it, along with the rest.”

“She’s disposing of all my bubble bath?”

“And your shampoo and body spray,” Dee said. “It was all contaminated.”

“Do you know how much I spent on that stuff?” I asked.

“It had already been rendered unusable, Mackenzie,” Dee said. “It is not any more wasted for having been safely removed. I can only surmise that your visitor sought to unleash what he saw as your ‘true self’… fortunately, your true self is rather more deeply conflicted than he imagined. In the absence of overwhelming hunger, your demonic side can be overwhelmed by your other desires.”

I couldn’t help but notice that as she said this, her eyes were again fixated on my breasts.

“I apologize,” she said, noticing that I’d noticed. “In the absence of sophisticated alchemical knowledge, my method of investigation was rather direct… I inhaled quite a bit of the altered scents from your bath products.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“My interest in your body is not personal, I assure you,” she said. “While my mental training allows me to minimize the influence of the alchemical fumes, my natural interest in the female body is considerable and the elven sexual drive is… considerable.”

“You don’t have to explain to me,” I said. I’d been known to have similar reactions to other women, in my unguarded moments.

“Your breasts might be impressive to one of the stunted women of the surface elves, but they are rather underdeveloped by my tastes,” she said.

“Seriously, it’s okay,” I said.

“You would really not be my first choice for a partner, even if I were to consider taking a non-elven lover,” Dee said. “I can assure you of that.”

“That’s… nice,” I said.

“In fact, I would sooner dip a holy chalice in a toilet than defile the altar of my body through sexual contact with you,” she said. Her face darkened. “It is within the realm of possibility that my mental training is not as effective as I had thought,” she said, backing towards the door.

“Dee… wait,” I said. “The circle?”

“I’ll return to release you when my own head is clear,” she said. “That should be a fairly accurate indication of when it’s safe to do so.”

“I have class this morning!” I said. “Ten fifteen.”

“I will be back before then.”

Discuss this story.

Unless he planned on handing out some more free hundreds before the end of the semester, I couldn’t really afford to skip any more Fridays. So, I decided to steal a bit of relaxation and get in the bathtub before the rest of the dorm woke up.

Feejee was snoozing in her usual tub when I got in there. She had the curtain drawn for once, but her flipper… or fluke, I guess she called it… was kind of poking out. I didn’t want to wake her up, but it wasn’t like the tub came with a volume control… though I could see how that would be useful. Not only would it help you not disturb your neighbors if you were the sort of person who took baths at odd hours, but it could be useful if you wanted to listen to music while the tub was filling, or whatever.

That seemed like the kind of feature that a really high-end tub might have. There hadn’t been anything like that in the Empress Suite, but I could see a custom bath with its own music box also having a silence spell on the faucet, or even something that transformed the sound of it.

Of course, the simple stone tubs in the dorm bathroom wouldn’t have anything like that… but was I an enchanter, or wasn’t I?

I wasn’t, in point of fact… but I had spent like a month and a half learning how to alter the intensity of a property. I could probably make a loud thing louder. It seemed to me like I should have been able to make a loud thing less loud… or at least make a very slightly quiet thing more quiet.

Of course, there was a problem… the water pouring out of the faucet wasn’t a single discrete thing, it was a bunch of amorphous stuff that would crash against the bottom and fall apart as soon as I grabbed hold of it. Even still water was hard to enchant. What I really needed was an actual silencing spell to throw around it. I could have maybe made the walls in the alcove less echoey, and the curtain more muffling, but they were very echoey and it wasn’t much of a muffler. Trying to turn the bathtub into a zone of silence for the duration of the tub filling wouldn’t have made for a very relaxing start to my bath.

But it was interesting to think about it, about what I could do with my limited knowledge and how far I had to go. That was what applied enchanting was about: finding uses for this stuff. In the bad old days, you’d throw a silence spell on a pair of boots or a cloak or something so you could sneak around and kill people or things without getting noticed. Now it could be used for privacy, for greater comfort in travel, or to avoid awkward and disturbing conversations with ravenous floormates.

I giggled a little at that last thought… I tried not to, and only succeeded in sublimating it into a loud and kind of painful snort that resounded way too loudly all around me. I froze. Feejee muttered a “huh, what?” kind of sound and shifted around a bit in the water.

I considered very quietly picking up my things and going back out the way I came, but only for a moment. I’d come there to take a bath. Why did it have to be a whole big operation? Well, partly because of Feejee, but I was letting that happen. I could have just come in all matter-of-fact, turned on the water, and climbed in. If I wasn’t letting Kiersta’s lame attempt at being an authority figure keep me from enjoying a morning soak, why was I letting a little thing like… okay, it wasn’t a little thing. It was a serious problem that needed dealing with.

But it had nothing to do with me taking a bath or not.

I turned on the water, slipped out of my robe, climbed in, and closed the curtain. A liberal application of bath products and a few minutes later, I was in steamy peppermint heaven. Dee’s deep-breath-through-the-nose thing was so much easier to practice when the air tasted like soothing candy.

Why couldn’t I smell like this all the time?

Not rotten eggs, not Feejee’s favorite treat with a possible side of supernatural addiction, but just… a pleasant peppermint haze. It would be nice to smell like that… like anything other than what I was, anything other than a demon or a human or a mixture of the two.

I must have drifted off, because I didn’t hear Feejee getting out, or the curtain sliding open, but I opened my eyes after a particularly deep and soothing breath, and there she was, looking down at me.

With the whole “don’t eat me” thing, I’d kind of lost sight of how beautiful she was. Feejee’s skin… when she wore it as skin and not scales… was incredibly clear and smooth, but it was a color you didn’t find in most races: like a deep tan, but tinged slightly green. Not what people call “olive skin” on humans: just deep tan, mixed with a bit of green. She was very solidly built, broad across the hips and shoulders.

For all that they were equally unsupported, her breasts hung more freely than Amaranth’s did.. and while I liked Amaranth’s, there was something very free about Feejee’s. She was wild and untamed. Amaranth was cultivated.

I realized that my hand was between my legs, and I didn’t care. Neither, apparently, did she.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said, my finger rubbing all around the area around my… well, the general clitoral area.

“You smell like candy canes,” she said, breathing in.

“Yeah,” I said. My finger flicked back and forth.

“I like candy canes,” she said. “In fact, I love candy canes.”

That was a little surprising to me… I wouldn’t have guessed she would have known what they were, much less that she had a taste for them.

“Me, too,” I said. Had I had a candy cane that I could remember? Not that I could think of. I didn’t fucking care. Feejee loved candy canes. I had enough scent clinging to me that could have been one. I loved them, too.

“I like to lick them,” she said, flicking her green tongue out around her lips. “Until their stripes come off in my mouth. I like to suck on them, until they’re worn down to little nubs. That’s what I like to do, when I can… but I’m usually not that patient.”

“Me, neither,” I said.

“I’m going to eat you now,” she said, and she started to climb into the tub with me.

“Okay,” I said, only hoping that she wouldn’t finish before I did. I could feel it building up inside me, getting closer and closer… I had this idea that all I needed for a truly epic climax was Feejee’s teeth sinking into me.

“Mack?” she said.

“Okay,” I repeated. I closed my eyes and drank in more of that scent. Closer… closer. “Eat me.”

“Mack?” she said louder. She bent down and started shaking me, and that was all it took… I was off. I was bursting off like bubbles rising to the top of a cauldron.

“I said you could eat me!” I shouted through the waves of pleasure. “Go ahead!”

The world seemed to flip around, the water of the tub sloshing up past me to envelop her. My leg was tangled up in the curtain somehow. Feejee had resumed her fishy lower form for some reason.

“Mack!” Feejee said again, her voice suddenly seeming much closer to me even though she’d been right in front of me all the time. “Mack, I’m glad you’re coming around but… time and place?”

“What?” I asked, kicking free of the curtain.

Her tail melted into a pair of scaled legs and she sat up, scooting out from under me.

“We can’t do this here and now,” she said. “Among other things, Iona would never forgive me… and we’d never get away with it.”

“Hey, you started it!” I said, trying to get to my feet. What had I been thinking? “And I am not coming around, Feejee. Not to that… not for real.”

“Then why’d you climb into my tub telling me to eat you?” she asked.

“You climbed into my tub,” I said.

“What?”

That was when I realized where I was.

“Oh,” I said. “Um… I guess maybe I was sleepwalking?”

“What?”

“I think I was asleep,” I said. “I was dreaming.”

“People walk in their sleep?”

“Not usually,” I sad.

“But you do?” she asked.

“Not usually.”

“Then why do you think you were doing it now?” she asked.

“Because I was dreaming that you and I were having a conversation about candy canes and then I woke up over here,” I said. No sense going over the details.

“Uh huh,” she said. I could tell she wasn’t buying it. “And that stuff you sprayed was part of the dream?”

“Stuff?”

“From your…”

I was probably already blushing, but the realization that I’d probably gushed all over her stomach really turned up the steam.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s kind of interesting. I always wondered if being lesbian meant you were part guy. I guess now I have proof that I’m not one.”

“What? Feejee, that’s just… you know… an orgasm,” I said. “Every woman does that. It’s normal.”

Not that I had a lot of basis of comparison there, but Amaranth hadn’t said that anything was wrong the many times I’d came in her presence, and neither had Steff or Ian.

“I don’t,” she said.

“Yeah, well… maybe yours isn’t completely functional,” I said. “Like a decoy. Actual mammalian vaginas do that. It’s normal.”

“If mine’s not doing anything it’s supposed to, Rick’s been a pretty big gentleman about it,” Feejee said.

“Well, maybe he doesn’t have a lot of experience,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess you would know better than most,” she said. She stretched her legs back out, slipping one of them across to trip me up so I landed with my butt on her ankles. “This is kind of nice, you know. Sharing water.”

She gave me the hungry look that let me know exactly what she meant.

“You’re not worried that someone will come in and realize we’re in here together?”

“I don’t really care about that now,” she said. She tilted back a bit and lifted up her legs so I started to slide towards her. Her legs seemed to be surprisingly strong, but then, she did swim with them. “I just want to keep you close to me.”

“You don’t care if someone thinks you’re a lesbian?”

“If someone comes in, you can be very quiet, can’t you?” she asked. Darkness started to swirl out of the centers of her eyes, turning them into black pits. “Very still?”

Push back, I thought… and then I wondered if I really wanted to listen to the advice of a demon. If not listening will get me killed…

But I didn’t want to push back, not too much. I wanted to be close to Feejee. The scent of peppermint still hung over me like a shroud, still filled my nostrils. I felt my hand moving.

“No gay stuff,” Feejee whispered. “We don’t need that. I know what you want, Mack. I know what I want.”

“Feejee, whatever I said… I was dreaming,” I said. “Raving.”

“Shh, shh,” she said, her eyes boring into me. “Food doesn’t talk… and anyway, maybe you were just saying what you really felt.”

She pulled me in against her chest, turning me around to face away from her. Breaking contact with her eyes didn’t seem to lift the heady fog that filled my brain. But even through that haze, I realized there wasn’t anything she could do to me… she didn’t have a magic blade with her, and her teeth couldn’t pierce my skin.

I felt her teeth closing in on the skin of my neck, as if to confirm that. She bit hard and she pulled hard to the side like she would rip and tear, but of course all that did was spike the pain in a wonderful way. She let go of that mouthful and began to nibble up and down my shoulder.

This wasn’t so bad. The scent of peppermint and the teeth of a mermaid, her breasts pushing against my back… it wasn’t bad at all.

“We’ll just enjoy a little nibble,” she whispered in my ear. “And then I’ll take you back to my room. I caught you in water. That’s close enough, I think. It’s close enough. I mean, you’re only halfway human, so even if it only halfway counts… you know?”

Something was badly wrong… beyond the fact that I was getting snuggly with a mermaid who wanted to devour me, beyond the fact that a mermaid wanted to devour me. Even though Feejee’s self-control wasn’t much better than mine, she should have at least reacted to the possibility of being caught in another supposed lesbian tryst. She’d always been as scrupulous about the restriction to feeding in water as Dee and Amaranth had been about their own religious beliefs.

“Celia,” I said. Feejee didn’t have a private room. No matter how muddled she had me, she couldn’t risk doing me in the bathroom, but she couldn’t take me back to her room. “What about Celia?”

“Probably didn’t sleep in our room,” she said.

“Iona!” It was a weak objection, but it could stall.

“I saw you first,” she said. She turned me around again. Her mouth split open wide, her teeth gone long and pointed. “But Mack, I keep telling you food doesn’t talk… I think it’s time for us to go before you get more ideas.”

Her head whipped to the side, and then I heard voices outside the door: Trina and one of the Leightons. The door swung open. We both froze, I felt as guilty as Feejee looked, for some reason.

“Oh, kheez, what the hell happened in here?” Trina said. “There’s more water on the floor than in the tub.”

“What happened, Feej… wet the bed?” one of the Leightons said, and the other laughed.

I tried to make myself very small… as Feejee had said, very quiet and very still. Why was I hiding with the ravenous, me-eating monster to escape from mere bullies? It was a good question. I could have screamed murder as soon as they interrupted Feejee’s hold over me… or could I?

Maybe the fact that I still felt paralyzed with fear proved that I couldn’t… but it wasn’t fear of Feejee, it was fear of them, of their scorn. I knew that Feejee longed to literally eat me alive, but in that moment I was almost convinced that what Leightons and Trina would do would amount to the same thing.

“It was probably the other one,” one of the Leightons said. “Look at all these fruity bubbles… by the Dark Herald, if I didn’t know she was a dyke I’d think she was a faggot.”

Fortunately, the sound of my gasp was covered by the sound of her sister’s and Trina’s.

“You can’t say that!” her twin said.

“What? Yes, I can.”

“Are you crazy? We’re attached. You can’t say that kind of shit, Tara, not when you’re stuck to me,” the one who by the process of elimination had to be Sara said. “You can’t!”

“Oh my khosh, I have to tell everyone, right now,” Trina said, and she did just that, her flip-flops making splat noises on the wet floor as she ran for the door yelling, “Everybody was up! You won’t believe what Tara said!”

The vague silhouette that was the Leightons began moving in the strangest way as they both stopped talking and instead starting making other sounds. It took me a moment to figure out that they were fighting. Trina, still in the doorway, reported this new development: “Everybody get up right now, the twins are killing each other.”

Thinking there wasn’t going to be a better time, I stood up and slipped out of the tub… “slipped” in the sense of “my foot failed to find purchase and I ended up landing smack on my ass with my legs going in directions no gods of good had intended for them to go in”, not in the sense of “with commendable stealth and grace”.

Oh, well. I had a feeling I was going to be in trouble no matter what happened, but it would be far, far better to not be in the bathtub when people responded to Trina’s summons, as they would… it was the time of day when people would be heading there anyway.

The Leightons were really going at it. Tara seemed to be trying to choke her sister with her one hand when she could get a grip on her neck, and was otherwise grabbing and pulling on her. Sara was just straight out beating on her. Neither of them was doing anything to defend herself from the other. They’d been wearing nothing but a towel when they came in, and now they were wearing nothing.

It was… well, they had kind of an athletic build that didn’t do a lot for me. Tara had gouged out some scratches on her sister’s arm and shoulder, and Sara had bloodied her nose in return. The tangy sweet coppery scent mingled with the smell of the peppermint, so strong in the aisle between the tubs.

Feejee climbed out of the tub. She put her hand on my shoulder and I felt torn: eat or be eaten. They both seemed like valid choices in that moment.

More people were crowding around the door, though there was a bit of a logjam with Trina of the creepy eye and the plump ass standing in the way. I could see the people milling around behind her, though.

There was Rocky, who’d tasted so good.

Sooni… why couldn’t she have been as mature on the inside as she looked on the outside? My insides ached for her, but she was every bit the baby she pretended Kai was… otherwise I’d fuck her brains out. It would be worth the trip to Yokan just to smack some sense into the idiot mother who’d spoiled her.

Who was I kidding? If I wasn’t Amaranth’s, I’d trade places with Kai in a heartbeat. I’d be a better match, anyway. Sooni could throw shoes at me all day long and not even dent me.

Oru was peeking around Trina’s legs. She creeped me out. Goblinoids creeped me out. That was all there was to it.

There were more, but they were at the front. Behind them all was Two… I couldn’t see her, but I could smell her through the peppermint haze and I could hear her complaining about people blocking the door when she needed to take a shower. The sound of her voice… I wanted to deck her. That wasn’t all, though. I wanted her to spank me, I wanted to eat her, I wanted to hold her forever, I wanted to kill everybody who’d ever hurt her, I wanted to build her a box and hide her away from the world, I wanted to climb inside her dreams with Dee and watch her fly.

What the hell is happening to me? I thought, and then I watched the Leighton’s foot smash down on a pile of bubbles I must have tracked across on my way to Feejee. Peppermint, I thought. Peppermint haze.

Discuss this story

Seven days… I wondered if they were going to be tender and raw that whole time. It hardly seemed worth it. I didn’t know how people with multiple piercings could stand doing it more than once

I skipped my robe, since I didn’t want it to get soaked, and simply hurried down to the bathroom in my wet underwear with my towel and robe in my hands. Feejee was dozing in her accustomed tub when I got into the bathroom. I did my best to be quiet and not wake her, but of course the water doesn’t come with a volume control.

“Hey, Mack,” she said sleepily as I was stripping off my slinging my wet stuff up over the curtain rod from inside the tub.

“Hey,” I said. “Have a good afternoon?”

“Say what?”

I opened the curtain.

“I said, did you have a good afternoon?”

“Oh!” she said, in a heart-melting, face-scrunching tone of voice that sounded like it was saying, “You brought me puppies! My favorite!”, “Did you do all that for me?”

“What, the piercings?” I asked. “No, they’re for Amaranth.”

“No, I mean… you shaved all your hair off down there,” she said. “I had been thinking how much better it might be… when I saw, I thought maybe you were thinking…”

“That’s for Amaranth, too,” I said.

“I thought she was an herbivore,” Feejee said.

“It’s not for… it’s a sexual thing, okay?” I said.

“Oh,” Feejee said. “I thought that hair down there was. That’s why I assumed you getting rid of it meant you… well, never mind. I guess why you originally did it doesn’t matter. I appreciate it all the same.”

“Well, don’t,” I said. I remembered what Amaranth had said. “Oh, Amaranth wants to talk to you about… all that.”

“She does? Great,” Feejee said. “She seems really understanding. I’m sure we’ll be able to explain our position to her in a way that makes sense.”

“Yeah, um… I don’t think it’s going to go like that,” I said. “I think she’s looking for some kind of middle ground, though I can’t imagine what that would be.”

“Maybe if we just took half… ooh, wait. Are we sure she’s an herbivore?”

The door opened and Trina breezed past, talking into a very familiar-looking sleek black octagonal mirror case. I was so shocked by the sight that I didn’t close the curtain.

“Oh, my fucking Lord Khersis, Gladys, she’s showing off her new elven wax and tit piercings, and Feejee’s slobbering all over her,” Trina said, heading back towards the showers. “She used to be cool before she turned gay. It’s tragic.”

“Tell Amaranth we should talk soon,” Feejee said. “The sooner we get this done, the fewer people are going to think I’m gay for you.”

“Hey!” I yelled at Trina, stepping out of the tub. Feejee’s skewed priorities and her kneejerk not-gayness could wait. “Where’d you get that mirror?”

“Why?” Trina asked. “Do you want to break this one, too? My mom rushed it out to me so she could keep in touch with me, if it’s any of your business… which it’s not.”

“Oh,” I said. I supposed it might have simply been the same model from the same house, especially if Trina’s mom had ordered one locally for speedier delivery. As far as I knew mine was safely in my coat pocket, or on my dresser, or wherever I’d left it. “Sorry.”

“Can you believe this, Gladys?” Trina said into her mirror, turning back towards the showers. “The little freak is sorry my mom sent me a mirror, after she broke my last one.”

“That’s not… at least I don’t have a fat ass!” I yelled.

Trina froze with her hand on the shower curtain.

“I’m going to have to get back to you,” she said. She closed the compact and put it down on the bench, then turned around to face me. It was my turn to freeze. Her one bigger eye seemed to be bulging out of its socket as she stalked across the bathroom towards me. When she was eye to eye plus one with me, she let a snort of hot air out of her flared nostrils. “What did you say to me, you disgusting little feeb?”

“I… sorry,” I said.

“What are you doing, looking at my ass anyway?” Trina asked. “My ass is not here for you.”

“I’m sorry,” I sputtered. Amaranth was going to kill me. That would be her performance on Saturday. Killing me. “It was… it was rude and inappropriate and…”

“The only thing that’s stopping me from grabbing you by the hair and smashing your face into the first open toilet is I’d have to touch your hair, and there’s not enough soap in the world for that,” Trina said. “So instead I’m just going to tell you that everybody in the gladiator program knows your supposed ‘boyfriend’ is fucking that psycho barbarian coach.”

“Fuck you!”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’d rather do that than fuck him, which is probably why he ended up with her,” Trina said. “Khersis knows she’s grody and scary enough as it is. Kills one student at the start of all her classes, just so the rest know she’s serious, you know.”

“If you wanted to convince me that Ian’s cheating, you should have shut your mouth after that,” I said. “Each thing that falls out of it is more ridiculous than the last thing that… fell out of it.”

“Oh, wow, witty comeback,” Trina said. “Were you there for the first day of her class? I don’t think so. Otherwise you would know that she cut some elven kid in half with his own axe for smarting off at her… the long way… and it wasn’t that big an axe!”

“She gets away with a lot of shit but she wouldn’t get away with murder,” I said. “Much less in every single one of her class.”

“Yeah, well, I heard that there’s a clause buried in the middle of the liability waivers that says that melee coaches can’t be held responsible for anything on the first day of class,” Trina said. “They call it the First Day Clause. It was put there because students would show up and start shit and get injured on purpose so they could sue, then dropped the class.”

“You heard? Trina, you had to have signed one of those things,” I said. “You have to know what’s in it and what’s not.”

“Who can tell, for sure?” Trina asked. “The way they’re written they could be anything. It’s all lawyers.”

“What does that even mean, ‘it’s all lawyers’? It’s a simple, straightforward… for fuck’s sake, it’s not even that long,” I said.

“Well, I’ve heard this from more than one person, so you’re calling all of them liars, and since you’re the demon I don’t thin you’re qualified to do that,” Trina said. “And whether or not she did kill one particular student, she’s definitely fucking your ‘boyfriend’.”

“Trina… that’s ridiculous,” I said. “And I want you to know the only reason I’m not kicking your ass is that I couldn’t do it without hurting you.”

“Oh,” Trina said. “Oh. You’re worried about hurting me.”

“Yeah, Trina, I am,” I said.

“You let a nymph beat you up,” she said.

“That’s… that’s not a very good characterization of what I do,” I said. “But the key word is ‘let’.”

“You’ve been in a fight like every day since you’ve been here and you’ve lost every one of them,” Trina said. “Mariel had you on the floor crying for mercy in like three seconds.”

“Fucking hell, Trina… do you believe every rumor you make up?” I asked.

“I don’t have to make shit up,” she said. “I just keep my eyes open and my ears to the ground. This is stuff everybody knows… like how the golem fought you off the first time you tried to rape it.”

I couldn’t answer that. It was taking every ounce of self control not to punch through her face. I remembered how badly I’d freaked her out when she’d caught sight of my flaming eyes when I was hungry. I pushed the anger I was feeling into a tight little ball and I lit up.

And Trina just stood there. She smiled smugly, reached into the pocket of her robe, whipped out a seasoning shaker, and threw a bunch of garlic salt in my face.

“Fuck!” I yelled. Eyes of fire may be cool looking, but they don’t do much to protect you from having particulate matter shoved into them.

“I toldyou I keep my ear to the ground,” Trina said, continuing to throw the seasoned salt at me, though luckily not in my face. “I know your secret weakness is garlic.”

“Fuck!” I yelled again. “Trina, it’s not a weakness… you threw salt in my fucking eyes.”

“Whatever, it’s totally your weakness,” she said, and she turned and walked back to the showers. “There’s plenty more where that came from, and I’ve always got it with me.”

“No, you idiot, my weaknesses are holy power and magic,” I said, my eyes squeezed shut. “That just fucking stings.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Trina yelled back. “Why would you tell me that if it were true?”

“You know, if you can get some garlic-infused olive oil, it might be even stronger,” Feejee called to Trina.

“Don’t freaking encourage her,” I said, trying to rub the stuff out of my eyes.

“Well, I don’t want her thinking I’m gay,” Feejee said. “And quit doing that, you need to flush them out. Turn off the water.”

The tub, which I’d forgotten about, was almost full now. Opening my eyes a sliver for a split second at a time, I found the knobs and shut it off as Feejee shifted her tail into legs and climbed out of hers. She grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the showers.

“I’m okay, Feejee, really,” I said.

“Quit touching your eyes, you’re only going to make it worse,” she said. “You need to stand under cold water and…”

“Fuck, no!” I said, pulling away.

“Lukewarm water, then,” she said.

“What’s wrong with hot?”

“I’m just saying what they taught me in my intro to alchemy lab,” Feejee said.

I heard Trina say, “Oh, I am fucking out of here,” as Feejee pulled me into the showers. A shower turned off, then another one turned on. Feejee put her hands on me and pushed me into an icy cold stream. Fuck.

“It’s about half hot, half cold,” she said, clearly lying or deluded. “Compromise. Tilt your face up like this,” she said, moving my head, “and open your eye.”

I forced my eye open, but the sight and sensation of water thudding into it as well as the sting forced it closed.

“Keep it open,” Feejee said. “Mother Ocean, you smell so damned good. Keep your eye open.”

It was weird and it was hard, but the water on my eye actually did seem to help, and then I did the other one for a bit.

“I’m just gonna…” Feejee murmured, and she stood behind me, her cool breasts pushing against my skin. I could feel her breathing in near my neck and the side of my face. The way she was standing, it was impossible to miss how similar her build was to Amaranth. Feejee was a little wider at the shounders and while she looked just as soft and feminine, her flesh was tauter and firmer all over, to say nothing of colder.

She was Amaranth without the softness and warmth, and full of sharp pointy danger instead of love.

But for all that she was chickenshit about being seen as gay, she’d reacted to seeing me in pain by administering the proper treatment. It seemed as hard for me to wrap my mind around her ability to see me as both a friend and a meal as it was for her to see the conflict there.

Her mouth closed around the side of my neck, her teeth flat and human. She murmured, the sound transmitting as a hum into my flesh. I moaned. She opened her mouth and withdrew a tiny bit.

“You know how I said… I didn’t want… that it was weird…?”

“Uh huh,” I murmured. My eyes still felt scratchy even with all the salt flushed out of them. I could taste garlic in my mouth, smell it in my nose.

I was unbelievably horny, considering I’d just been assaulted with spices. My butt tingled in memory of where Amaranth had spanked me.

“I think… I’m gonna…” she said, and then she bit down hard, with her still-untransformed teeth. I let out a yelp and that was all it took.

She stayed mostly human, except for her eyes and her teeth, and her teeth went everywhere. She licked my face, especially around my eyes, and everywhere else that the garlic salt had stuck, though it had long since dissolved and washed away.

As far as vivid illustrations of the difference between being invulnerable to harm and being invulnerable to pain went, having salt thrown in your eyes was a pretty good one… but it couldn’t hold a candle to having a predator tugging on a piece of metal jammed through a sensitive part of your anatomy.

The spell kept the piercings from coming undone and my own nature kept me from coming undone… it was a “something had to give” situation, and there was nothing to give but my ability to process pain.

I was coming hard before she even got below my legs, and when she did…

Fuck.

Or maybe eat.

Feejee looked even more self-conscious than she had after last time when she’d finally had enough. I was on my back in the middle of the showers, and she was getting to her feet.

“So,” she said. “That should get the garlic stuff out of your eyes.”

“Yeah,” I said, weakly. “Thanks.”

“I’m going back to my tub,” Feejee said. “Um…”

“I’m just going to go to bed,” I said.

“Celia hasn’t been back to the room the past two nights,” she said. “If you wanted…”

“No!” I said. “Thank you.”

“Oh, I’m not going to… I wouldn’t… not before I talk to Amaranth,” Feejee said. “I just thought…”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Thanks but no thanks. I have a lot of stuff to do tomorrow.”

“Well, okay,” she said.

I headed back towards the door, grabbed my robe and threw it on, scooped up my towel and my underwear and bolted out into the hall… where I almost collided with Kiersta, who was standing there cross-armed in flannel pajamas and bunny slippers, the perpetual dark circles around her eyes making her look like a belligerent panda.

Behind her was Trina with her shower kit, the Leightons with toothbrushes, and Oru with… something that might have been a hairbrush and might have been a bed of nails for a particularly disciplined hamster.

“Who else is in there?” Kiersta asked me.

“Uh…”

“Get them,” she said.

I stepped back and opened the door a crack. “Feejee, uh, Kiersta wants to talk to us.”

“Can’t she come in here? I just…”

“Get out here now,” Kiersta said.

There was a splash as Feejee hurried to obey, joining us a few seconds later.

“Was it just the two of you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, ducking my head.

“Mack was trying to eat me!” Feejee blurted.

Kiersta gave her a look.

“The showers are not for sex,” she said.

“We weren’t!” Feejee said. “Oh, Kiersta, I swear I didn’t…”

“Neither are the bathtubs or the stalls or the lounge or anywhere else that’s not your own room, and if you’re that noisy, you can take a place in town,” Kiersta said.

“Kiersta, I swear…”

“Don’t swear,” Kiersta said. “Just don’t fuck in the showers. Everybody else has to use them. From now on, when you’re in the bathroom she isn’t. When she’s in the bathroom, you aren’t.”

“She sleeps in the bathroom!” I said.

“Not any more,” Kiersta said.

“What?” Feejee asked. “That’s not fair. I can’t sleep in a bed.”

“Get used to it,” Kiersta said. “It’s not fair to everyone else that you’re in there all the time, especially when… yeah.”

“I’m not fucking gay!” Feejee yelled. “I have a boyfriend. I like boys. I don’t like girls. I’m not gay.”

“Pipe down and go to bed,” Kiersta said. She turned to me. “Close your robe and go to bed. Everybody else, do what you need to do, the bathroom’s clear now. Unless there’s anything in there I should know about?”

“No,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “You two are going to be cleaning in there for a week.”

“But you said we can’t be in there at the same time,” I said.

“Alternate days,” she said.

“But that’s an odd number of days,” I said.

“Then you can do it for one week and she can do it for the next,” she said.

“I don’t even think you can do this!” I said.

“Yeah, I don’t think I can, either,” Kiersta said. “You want to come with me and help me look up what I’m really supposed to do when I catch you having sex in the public spaces?” I said nothing. “No? Then you can clean the bathroom for a week. I’ll tell housekeeping not to bother. Come see me tomorrow when you’re ready to do it and I’ll unlock the supply closet for you. No getting your golem to help.”

“Stop calling her my golem,” I said. “She has a name.”

“If you can call it that,” Kiersta said. “Look, I’m sick of dealing with everybody’s shit. People treat you badly, human oppression, I get all that… that’s no excuse for you people to act like animals all the damn time. It’s hard enough being a resident advisor in this dorm.”

“Yeah, poor you,” I said as she turned and opened the door to her room. Looking past her, I could see empty liquor bottles on the windowsill and dresser. “Oh, that’s nice. Room full of booze.”

“Hey, I have a racial exemption,” she said.

“Yeah, what?”

“Only fucking human in this madhouse,” she said.

“Hey!” Tara and Sara both said, having stuck around to watch while everybody else went about their business.

“You heard me,” Kiesta said, and she slammed her door.

The twins looked at each other, then looked at me and smiled evilly before heading for the bathroom. I turned to Feejee, the only person left out in the hall.

“I’m going to talk to Amaranth tomorrow,” she said. Her skin was tinged a more visible and less healthy green than normal. “Maybe once you’re… they won’t think I’m…”

She turned and headed into her own room without another word, leaving me alone.

“Oh, fuck!” one of the Leightons yelled from inside the bathroom. “Watch where the fuck you’re… oh my Khersis, all over the seat!”

It was going to be a long week.

Discuss this story.

“I’ll just watch you eat,” she said. “Are you sure you’ve got enough?”

“Uh… for now, yeah,” I said, half-hoping that one of the staff would decide she was loitering.

“You’re so scrawny,” she said. “You’ll be a lot better if you fill out some more.”

“Feejee, seriously, you’ve…”

“Dinner’s the only meal that’s any good here,” she said, ignoring me. “They almost always have some pork or chicken, and sometimes they even put out fish. They never have any fish for breakfast for some reason, and hardly ever for lunch. Not that the stuff they call fish here is all that great. Old and covered in crusty stuff.”

“Breading?” I asked, hoping that’s what she meant. I thought fish was kind of gross to begin with, but the idea of it being “old and crusty” was about enough to turn my stomach.

“Yeah, whatever it’s called,” she said. “It isn’t much like the bread I’ve seen, though… and then you get it open and it’s been cooked so much it’s all tough instead of flaky… well, it’s the best under the circumstances, I guess.”

“There have to be places that sell seafood in town,” I said.

“Is it going to be any better? We’re a long ways from the sea.”

“Expensive restaurants can probably get it fresher than the school,” I said. “And they’re sure to cook it better. I’m not big on fish, but I think the breading’s kind of a hallmark of the cheap stuff.”

“I wonder… I wonder if they’d give me a whole one, bones and all,” she said, looking up at me all scared and tentative, like she thought for sure I was going to tell her that no, they wouldn’t.

It might have been cute, if she hadn’t already seen what her kind of money could buy from a person like Mercy. It was amazing and a little scary that she could know she could buy a human life if the mood struck her but worried about procuring fish. It was that disconnect again, or still… there was no sense there that the one was many magnitudes greater and more terrible than the other. It was simply two kinds of food, two commodities.

Well, if it was fish she was hungry for… might as well encourage it.

“Feejee, I don’t think you understand what all that gold you wear means up here,” I said. “Whatever you want, even if they don’t have it in Enwich, somebody will order it for you because they get to charge you money for it. Fresh fish, or even live, not frozen… whatever kind you want. If you get a place off campus like you were talking about, you could even get an aquarium put in.”

“A what?”

“A tank full of water that fish swim in,” I said. “Like for pets.”

“People… pet… fish?”

“They keep fish as pets,” I said. “Noun, not verb.”

“Oh,” she said. She scowled. “Language again.”

“You don’t have any pets in the ocean?” I asked.

“Not if I’m understanding the meaning,” she said. “We have… relationships… with some sorts of creatures. Helpful, friendly ones. But that was mostly with other intelligent races, like dolphins and cuttlefish.”

“Cuttlefish are an intelligent race now?”

“Always have been,” she said.

I figured she meant they were really, really smart for animals, but I didn’t press the point. If humans had been the only race created on land, they might have been lonely enough to make too much of the thinking abilities of apes and elephants and other clever beasts.

Of course, I didn’t even really know what a cuttlefish was. I heard the word and I pictured a fish, maybe one of the ones with some kind of blade-like arrangement on its nose or back… I didn’t know what “cuttle” would mean, except that it sounded like it had something to do with cutting.

So, maybe I was being a little too presumptuous in dismissing the possibility that there was an intelligent fish. It was just that on land, all the intelligent races were organized physically along more or less the same plan… some of them might have had a few more limbs or a few fewer, but the shape that humans called “humanoid” was pretty close to universal.

But then, Feejee’s other face was a lot fishier than the one she showed to the world. In their most natural state, her legs were joined together into a tail. Who knew how far the full transformation might go? There might be nothing about her natural form that resembled the races of the surface beyond the features that were also common to animals.

“Um, Mack?” Feejee said. “Hello?”

“Huh, what?” I said, looking up.

“I was talking there,” she said, irritated. “You know, I’m interested in your body, too, but I don’t let that get in the way of knowing you as a person.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking, and my gaze… drifts.”

“It’s okay,” she said. She hefted her breasts and jiggled them. “I don’t mind you staring… everybody does. Io calls them our ‘beer lures’. It’s just when you’re not paying attention, that bothers me. Sara and Tara are kind of prickly, but they do listen when I’m talking, sort of.”

“What kind of things do you talk about with them?” I asked. The more topics I had, the more comfortable conversation was likely to be. Maybe it was crazy or stupid to hang around with Feejee with everything I knew, but I couldn’t help feeling like I was a better influence on her than Iona.

That had to say volumes about Iona.

“Well, I guess it was more them talking and me listening, but I was learning,” she said. “They listened to my questions, anyway… which was good, since when I came here I didn’t know anything.”

“Why did you come here?” I asked. “I mean, there are schools on the coasts. Big ones.”

“I wanted to go someplace new,” she said. “Do you know how hard it is to even picture the concept of land when you’ve never seen it before? ‘Like the bottom, if it was at the surface’. That’s how my dad put it to me. I could never make any sense of it. Even when he took me to my first island. When I saw the shallow water, with all of its reefs and stuff, I thought so that’s what he was talking about… the bottom, at the surface. But then he took me up to the surface and I saw it… I couldn’t make sense of it. What I was seeing didn’t add up for me. Do you understand?”

“Not really,” I said. I’d never seen the ocean but I knew what water was. I’d seen rivers and lakes and ponds and pools.

“When he told me that the ‘land’ the boats came from was like the islands but it kept going, I pictured lots and lots of islands,” she said. “And even after I’d learned how to walk on them, I’d catch myself picturing humans swimming around in sand and rocks. I knew it was wrong, but that was the only way I could think of it.” She laughed at herself a little. “I’ve finally broken that habit, I think… it’s been really educational coming here, even outside of the classes. When I picked Magisterius University, I knew it was ‘inland’… and I’d learned that it was more like one unimaginably huge island than a bunch of them going on forever… but I still had no idea what that really meant, how far it really was from the ocean.”

“How’d you end up going to college in the first place?”

“Well… our tribe’s never had a lot of contact with humans… apart from, you know. We’re deep dwellers. But we’d been improving relations with the folk who live in the shallows and among the islands, and some of them had regular trade with the surface. I spent a couple of warm cycles staying with one of them, and learned a little bit about surface cultures from a girl who’d taken some semesters in the Mother Isles.” She shrugged. “It sounded interesting.”

“But you ended up here?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Feejee said. “I’d seen islands. I wanted to see something bigger.”

“Did you have any kind of schooling before you came here?”

“There isn’t a lot to learn in the ocean,” she said. “We have what I guess is called an oral tradition, though we didn’t actually call it anything. Just stories about the way things are. Not history you like have.. Iona had to tell me about years and seasons a bunch of times before I got it.” She laughed. “She hates the cold. I told her she should keep your coat, if… well. You know.”

Yeah, I did. She leaned forward when she said it, smiling and whispering all conspiratorially. A secret between friends, isn’t this fun?

“They sell coats just like this at the Walled Market,” I said. “And you’d have a hard time convincing anyone you didn’t have anything to do with me disappearing if she walked around wearing my coat.”

“Oh, right,” Feejee said. “I’m so glad you’re here to think about that kind of thing. I’ve never had to worry about anything like that before… it was always just ‘chow down’!”

“I’m actually not trying to help,” I said. “I’m trying to show you how completely unfeasible it is, so you’ll realize it’s in your interest not to… since the legality and morality and my thoughts on the matter don’t seem to bother you.”

“I wouldn’t do it immorally,” she said. “And the legality’s why I’d have to be careful, if I did. Would it bother you less if it was just me?”

“What?”

“I kind of get the feeling you maybe don’t like Iona that much,” she said. “I’d hate to be a bitch to her, but you’re my friend. Would you like it better if it was just me?”

“Feejee… can you please think about what you’re asking me?” I asked. “Just for one second stop and think about that?”

She stared at me, not comprehending, her big green eyes blinking.

“I think about it all the time,” she said.

“From my point of view,” I said.

“Well… if I were prey,” she said quietly, “and I happened to be friends with a predator… I mean, think how much easier your life would be if your human friends were a little more willing to go along with your nature? Wouldn’t you enjoy helping me like that?”

“I wouldn’t want them to ‘help’ me like that,” I said. “And I don’t feel like prey.”

“Part of you isn’t,” she said. “And that’s got to be weird, and maybe that’s why you’re conflicted about the whole thing…”

“I’m not conflicted,” I said. “I don’t want this… and there’s no need to go looking for a reason. It’s simple survival instinct.”

“I’d expect that from a fish,” she said. “But you’re a thinking being. Is it really too much to expect you to be reasonable?”

“Apparently,” I said. “But Feejee, you have to realize that it’s not going to happen. You’re never going to make it work out. I have too many friends, you’re too inexperienced… you’re a fish out of water here, literally. You’d forget something, you’d slip up, or you’d say something to somebody… and that’s ignoring Amaranth.”

“You don’t think maybe she’d be okay with it?” Feejee asked. “She seems kind of easygoing to me.”

“She wouldn’t be okay with that,” I said.

“She’s the one who told me about… T.M.’s.”

“That was a special circumstance,” I said. “She was only doing that so I wouldn’t end up on the menu.”

“Oh,” Feejee said, disappointed. “So she probably wouldn’t turn around and…’

“Yeah,” I said. “And you couldn’t get rid of her. She’s immortal, as long as her field’s intact.”

“And her field is…?”

“Very, very far away,” I said. “Remember how big and vast this land is?”

“Right,” Feejee said. Her face lit up. “Oh… but…”

“But?”

“You keep telling me my money can do all this stuff,” she said. “Could it get me to her field? Or could I pay somebody else to go do something to it?”

Me and my big mouth.

“But then you’ve got a whole bunch of other crimes,” I said. “And how do you hide them?”

“Tell me,” Feejee said.

“I’m not offering to help!” I said, way louder than I’d meant to… almost yelling.

“Oh, you don’t have to yell,” Feejee said, hurt, and in spite of everything my cheeks turned red. Okay, I hadn’t just almost yelled, and Feejee was technically a friend… there was no way I could not tell Amaranth about this.

I realized then that I’d never sat down and told her exactly how sharply focused the mermaids’ predatory impulses had become. She knew they had a taste for me, she knew about how we’d played at it, but had I ever thought to mention that they’d started scheming about whether and how they could do the real thing? Amaranth was my only real trump card over them, but that wouldn’t be worth anything if she didn’t actually know.

“Thinking again?” Feejee said sardonically. I looked up to see an expression on her face that suggested she suspected I wasn’t really thinking at all… or maybe she was just pissed that I’d yelled at her and then spaced out again.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to yell. I’m sorry. But, Feejee… this is like the island/land thing. There’s something big and huge that you’re just not grasping, and maybe you can’t grasp it, but if you want to survive among humans you’re going to have to at least fake it.”

“Okay,” she said doubtfully.

“You can’t do what you’re thinking about, with me or anybody,” I said. “It’s just not going to work. I’m not even going to try to convince you it’s wrong, but you have to trust me when I say as your friend that you can’t do it.”

“Amaranth said it was legal when we…”

“That was legal,” I said. “Also wrong, but… look. What a couple of obscenely rich and bored and evil humans and elves do is one thing, but you’ve seen how people react to demons. Do you want that for you and your people?”

“No, but…”

“Feejee, it’s safest if you just pretend that places like Mercy’s don’t exist, and that all the people walking around… including me… are the same as you, not prey, not food,” I said, dropping my voice for the last bit, as it was more explicit. The lunchroom was pretty empty, and nobody was sitting very near us, but there was no sense blowing the secret while telling her how to best protect it.

“I think there’s got to be some kind of middle ground,” Feejee said. “Whatever happened to compromise?”

“Humans don’t compromise on some things,” I said. “Man-eating monsters is a big one.”

“That hardly seems fair.”

“Welcome to my world,” I said.

Discuss this story.

It was one of my favorite classes, but being in an auditorium-style room, it had the most absolutely uncomfortable seats I had ever encountered.

On the other hand, I had a good handle on everything we’d gone over and most of the grade consisted of Friday quizzes, so it wasn’t like I couldn’t skip out and go soak my lower regions in the bathtub or something.

But then, it felt like I’d missed a lot of classes and I was the one who kept stressing the importance of having some school in my school life.

I kept going over the pros and cons in my head the whole time I trudged towards the class, long after it had become a foregone conclusion that I was in fact going. One little class… one little lecture, and then I’d be off until my logic class and I could spend hours in the bathtub or face down in my bed or whatever worked out.

Anyway, Amaranth was right… walking did help a bit, at least compared to sitting down or standing up straight. The worst of the pain distracted me from the rest of it.

The good news was that even as slow as I was moving, I still got to my thaumatology classroom plenty early… the benefit of starting my schedule later in the day than any of my friends. I waited until the previous class had emptied out and then I slunk into my seat, thankful that I didn’t have to scoot past anybody. Not that anyone would have necessarily been able to tell why I was walking funny, but I was still smarting so badly that part of my brain couldn’t accept that it wouldn’t be as obvious to everybody else what was going on as it was to me.

I folded my ridiculously large coat up into a sort of cushion and smooshed it down on the hard plastic chair that had been contoured to perfectly fit a race that didn’t exist, then gingerly sat down on it to wait for class to begin.

Professor Goldman came in sniffling and sneezing, and when he first tried to address the class, he broke down coughing for half a minute.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on with campus health, but with how long it takes to get a simple potion now, I just haven’t had the time… one sec,” he said, and then started hacking into his handkerchief again.

My face burned bright and I tried to slouch down. What a day to decide to sit on a furry booster seat… not that he had any idea I had anything to do with the added bureaucratic delays… not that this made a difference to my brain or my cheeks.

“Anyway,” Goldman said, “I’ve been compiling grades and I have to say that some of you could be doing better. No one’s failing, people, but I’d like to see some more effort. I know you all think that this is just a fluff class that gets you three more credit hours without requiring a lot of papers and research and, you know, work… but it’s so much more than that. It’s also an easy ‘A’. Don’t you realize that courses like this exist to balance out the lousy grades you get in the harder classes that you actually need?”

He paused, cleared his throat, took a drink of water, and then went on.

“But all hope is not lost, for I come bearing optional credit,” he said. “Yes, it’s optional, which means if you decide that you don’t want free points added onto your grade, it’s your decision. The subject of the extra credit assignment is going to be wishes. Yes, yes, I know we haven’t covered wishes in this class,” he said in response to the classroom-murmurs, but there was as much excitement as anything else. “But wishes are fun and exciting to think about, and wish theory encapsulates so much of thaumatological study. Besides, my goal is to get you to think outside the box.” He paused for another coughing fit. “Or inside the box. Or around the box. Or on it. I’m an educator. I can’t afford to be too choosy when I set my goals.

“This assignment will be in two parts. The first part is easy: make a wish. Write it down. Use as many or as few words as is necessary to convey whatever the heck it is you wish for. That’s just the raw materials for the second part of the assignment, where I’ll be taking all the participants’ wish papers and handing them out to another participating student to play cosmic adjudicator with. That’s right. You’ll play the role of a personified wishmaster, and your goal will be to take your classmate’s wish and turn it on its head. Subvert it. Pervert it. While acting in strict accordance with the letter of the wish as written, find a way to give them something completely unforeseen and/or unwanted. This is the part of the assignment you’ll be credited for… not for designing the perfect foolproof wish, because of course that’s not possible… but for demonstrating the awareness that no wish is foolproof.

“If you wish to participate, write your wish out for Friday. I’ll mix them up and pass them back on Monday, and you’ll have until next Friday to answer them.”

While he started the lecture proper, I started turning the assignment over in my head. It was an interesting idea. I probably didn’t need extra credit for this class, but he had a point about balancing about other grades. If I could ace thaumatology completely, that might cushion the blow if Professor Hart gave me a lower grade in history.

Of course, that wasn’t even getting into what Callahan would assign… I just had a hard time thinking of her as a teacher, though, which made it harder to factor in the idea of a grade. To be honest, it seemed ridiculous to think that a score on how well I could beat people up with an imaginary stick would be averaged together with my academic achievements.

That reminded me… I was supposed to get a staff or something to spar with. I’d have to try to remember that.

In real life, I knew exactly what I would use a wish for, if one ever fell into my possession. Cautionary tales aside, wishing somebody back from the dead was not the most pitfall-fraught thing you could do.

You just had to word it correctly: you couldn’t just wish somebody “back” or “here”, because that didn’t specify that they were alive, and you couldn’t just wish somebody to be alive, because that didn’t dictate where they would be, and most peoples’ final resting places weren’t anywhere that was conducive to continued life.

Other than that… the universe would react badly to people who tried to get too complicated or reach too far, but resurrection was possible through other means, all of which were more common than being handed a blank check by cosmic forces. Goldman was right in saying that there was no such thing as a perfectly worded wish, but wishing for something that could be reliably attained through other means was generally counted as safe.

I couldn’t use that for the assignment, though. It was too personal, and somebody else in the class would have to turn around and twist it. That would hurt too much for me if my blind partner happened to be a cruel asshole, and would possibly hurt too much for them if they weren’t. I’d leave my mother out of it.

What, then? Wishing to not be a half-demon would be handing fate (or its stand-in in the class) too big a hammer to hit me with. Wishing to be human… that was tempting, but it would feel like I was betraying everybody else in Harlowe. I could wish to be sustained by human food instead of blood, but that was exactly the sort of thing that would earn a serious smiting if pulled in real life. It went against the nature of what I was. It would be like wishing for dry water… not for water to dry up, but for water itself to be dry.

The student writing up the response wouldn’t necessarily realize that, but I knew it, and it stopped me from considering it to be a viable wish.

Also, I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to put anything in mine that would single myself out as the half-demon. We weren’t grading each other or anything, but I didn’t want to cause another scene if my paper ended up on the desk of somebody who refused to have anything to do with me.

Anyway, the point of the assignment wasn’t actually “what would you do if you had a wish?” As Goldman had explained it, the first part of the exercise seemed like it was supposed to be something fun and frivolous. With that in mind, I decided I would wish for a working motorcycle… or rather, a motorcycle replica enchanted to work as though it were real. I knew that the wish would go horribly wrong on paper, but there was no sense wishing for something impossible right off the bat. I didn’t want to make it too easy on anybody.

I spent the rest of the class daydreaming about racing over the school grounds on a motorcycle. In my head, I’d given Amaranth a lift to her stupid Mechan group, and when she ran off after the argument caused by the jealousy the Mechans had for my cycle, I went roaring across the hills to save her from the pack of ghouls with style and panache.

Really, there weren’t any situations that couldn’t be improved by a judicious application of hot, noisy science.

Dee being harassed by campus guards? Not on my watch… I didn’t have anything to go after the part where I came flying out of nowhere and skidded to a stop between her and them, so I went over it a few more times to get the pose just right.

Poor Sooni spent all her pocket money and doesn’t have coach fare?

Don’t worry, foxy lady…

Okay. Hot, noisy science didn’t mean I had to pull out cheeseball lines like that.

But it was kind of a compelling visual.

“Excuse me,” someone said. I turned and looked up at a chestnut-haired girl with a kind of round face.

“Huh?”

“Get out of the way!” she said, and I realized that class was over and people were filing out.

Oops.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. Standing up reacquainted me with the forgotten soreness, and I winced as I gathered up my coat and my bag and then hurried away from the scowling girl, catching my foot on three separate bolted chair legs in my haste to make way.

Back at Harlowe, I promised Two that I would take the time to eat a meal later in the afternoon, grabbed my bath stuff, and headed for the bathroom. By that point the major pain in my netherest of regions was nothing but a dull memory of an ache and my ass was more tingly than anything else, but it had been thoughts of a warm soak that had kept me moving earlier that morning and to deny it to myself now would make it seem like I’d been lying to myself.

Besides, there was no sign of Feejee. That was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

I drew the curtain and realized that there was a hook on the wall inside it where I could put my robe. With my bottle of bubble bath up on the ledge, there was nothing outside the curtain that could identify me to anyone sharp enough to recognize it and I doubted that even Trina or the Leightons would be nosy enough to stick their heads in to see who it was.

It wasn’t quite perfect privacy… I heard the door opening and closing and toilets flushing and sinks running multiple times while the tub filled… but nobody disturbed me as I floated in a peppermint fog, and that was a tiny piece of heaven.

By the time the tub was filled, it seemed like most people had gone on to their next class or gone to lunch because the bathroom remained deserted beyond me. Then the door opened, and I heard the sound of large bare feet slapping on the tile.

I heard the other tub’s curtain rings rattling just as Feejee said, “Hi, Mack!”

“Hey,” I replied.

“Can barely smell you over all that mint,” she said as she started running her water. “Do you really need to use so much?”

“I like it,” I said and made a mental note to use more next time.

“It’s kind of overpowering,” she said. “Do they make bubbles that smell like honey?”

“Probably,” I said. “They seem to have every other kind. Thinking of getting some?”

“Oh, I meant for you.”

Of course she did.

“Iona’s trying to talk me into renting a house together next year,” Feejee said.

“Yeah?” I said. Housing situation. Plans for next year. That was a better topic.

“Yeah. She’s been looking into it and she says I should have the money for it,” Feejee said. “Who knows if that’s right or not? I can’t make any sense of that kind of thing.”

“Maybe you should get like an accountant or someone to manage your finances,” I said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Do people ever have water in their houses? Like, a pond or a pool or something?”

“Um… some people have pools,” I said, tensing up beneath my protective cloud of bubbles. I felt like we were inching back to Feejee’s favorite topic. “That’s more expensive, though to be honest, if a house like that is on the rental market, you could probably afford it.”

“I’m just so sick of sleeping in these tiny tubs,” she said. “I barely fit in them unless I’m in legs, and you try sleeping… well, I guess you’re used to it. It’s weird, for me, though… having two bottom halves flopping around independent of each other. I’ll start drifting off and then one of my legs will brush the other and I’m awake again.”

“You could probably get a place with a big whirlpool tub or a sunken bath,” I said. “That would give you more room to stretch out without stretching your budget too much, and would be easier to find than an indoor pool.”

“How big are those?”

“I think they come in different sizes. There are hot tubs that are big enough for a bunch of people to sit in,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Because to be honest, it’s not just the sleeping… I’m also thinking about how much more private it would be.”

Of course.

“But we don’t have to talk about that,” she said. “I know we have… differences… there.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But you’d be welcome!” she added quickly. “I mean, if you wanted to… I know that you like… or that you need, anyway…”

“What, you’ve given up on getting me?” I asked, not sure I believed it.

“Until we figure out what to do with Amaranth,” Feejee said. “If she were cool with it, you know, it wouldn’t be a problem, but it seems like she might have some issues… you know more about nymphs than I do. Do you have any ideas there?”

“Do I have any ideas about taking out my immortal girlfriend so she couldn’t turn you in if you killed me?”

“Yeah,” Feejee said. I could picture her nodding enthusiastically “Uh huh. Do you?”

“If I come up with anything, you’ll be the first person I tell,” I said. It was almost an eyeroll moment. Almost. It was definitely very surreal.

“Awesome,” she said. “I’m glad you’re being more reasonable about this.”

“Feejee… you know you’re going to screw more people than yourself if you do something stupid and get caught, right?” I said. “Like, every other merperson walking around on dry land or living in sight of shore?”

“Yeah, I tell Io that all the time,” Feejee said. “But she says that’s why you’re perfect. If we get caught… demon. Other than Amaranth, who would care?”

“I have other friends,” I said.

“They don’t know, though… do they?”

“They could,” I said.

“Oh,” Feejee said, very serious.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know we have ‘differences’, as you put it, about this kind of thing, but you’ve got to understand I’m going to do what I have to, to stay alive.”

“Well, then,” Feejee said. “You’ve got to understand that if we thought you were going to tell more people, we’d take our chances and make up a story to tell Amaranth or just play dumb about where you’ve gone.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And I’m pretty sure if I put my eyes on you and pinned you down and asked you, I’d be able to smell if you were lying, because you’re not very good at that,” Feejee said, very casually. It was a chilling reminder that however oblivious to some things Feejee might seem, that was due to cultural differences. She wasn’t stupid. She was smart enough to be accepted to an imperial university, from a culture that probably didn’t have schools in any sense but the collective noun.

“So, anyway,” she said. “Renting. That’s more like paying board in the dorms than buying, isn’t it?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. My legs were shaking. The bathwater felt tepid, all of a sudden.

“I guess I could try it for the summer to see how I like it,” she said. “Though I’d miss the chance to go home and, you know, everything that goes with that.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“How about you?”

“What?”

“What are your plans for the summer?”

“Very ill-defined,” I said. “But I’m probably going to get a job and stick around. I don’t really have anywhere else to go.”

“Oh,” Feejee said. “Is everybody doing that? Or are most people going home?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it’s the usual thing to go back home for the summer, but I think a lot of the people here in Harlowe would have a long trip if they did that every year. I know Dee isn’t going home until she’s got her degree.”

“You know, she has so little scent that I didn’t know she was her the first time I saw her without her cloak,” Feejee said.

“She had her hood down at the floor meeting where we all introduced ourselves,” I said.

“Yeah, I didn’t pay a lot of attention then,” Feejee said. “It was mostly the humans and the semihumans that caught my attention… that’s kind of how I ended up hanging out with that bunch in the first place.”

I snorted, in spite of myself. Feejee had only ended up in the Leightons’ clique because they smelled the most like lunch? It was horrible to think about, but also funny.

“And they kept inviting me to do stuff, of course,” Feejee said. “That party was nice, by the way. What else have you guys got planned?”

“Um… nothing I can think of,” I said. “We’re all going to the Veil Ball, I think, though I’ve got no idea where I’m going to come up with a costume… um, it’s a costume party, obviously. That’s a party where people wear costumes. Do I have to explain what a costume is?”

“No, Rick told me about it. He talked about me dressing up as a sexy healer, for some reason,” she said. “I don’t see what’s sexy about healers, but whatever. I don’t even know if we’re still going to it together. He’s so weird about stuff, and Io doesn’t like him, so I’ve had to split my time. We’re doing a whole ‘date night’ thing tonight. When you go to the movies, does everybody have their own TV, or how does it work?”

“No, there’s a big stage at the front of the room and the illusions play out on it,” I said.

“Oh,” Feejee said. “That sounds kind of… wouldn’t individual TVs make more sense?”

“Why would they?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been to the movies,” she said. “It just seems like only the people in front would be able to see.”

“It’s a big stage, and I think the floor’s usually sloped,” I said. “I haven’t been to the movies since I was like seven or eight, so…”

“You should come with us!”

“Feejee, it’s a date,” I said. “That’s not how they work.”

“You don’t go on dates with more than one person?”

“I might,” I said. “But only because I’m dating more than one person. You and I aren’t dating.”

“We could.”

“What happened to ‘I don’t want people to think I’m gay’?” I asked.

“I don’t!” she said. “But… I thought that meant sex!”

“Dating means sex,” I said. “Usually. Sometimes. It’s assumed to, I guess. Straight women don’t date each other.”

“Oh. What would you call it when two women go out?”

“Going out,” I said. “Only… not ‘going out’. Hanging out,” I said quickly. “It’s hanging out.”

“Even if you go somewhere and do stuff?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But when Rick and I just stay in the dorms, that’s hanging out, too.”

“Yep,” I agreed.

There was silence while she processed all this.

“Your language kind of sucks, you know that?”

“Tell me about it,” I said, and I sat up to let the water out. I was getting a headache, and I figured it was time to end the conversation before I managed to confuse Feejee even further. “I’ll talk to you later,” I said. “I’ve got to go find something to eat.”

“Oh, that sounds like a good idea,” she said. “Mind if I tag along?”

It didn’t look like they’d showered, as they were both in their pajamas… Hazel’s an all-concealing forest green robe and Two’s a nothing-concealing sky blue gauze. Hazel looked like hell warmed over, then frozen and reheated the next day. Two had her most alarmed look on… the one she only wore when she was bursting to do something she was sure needed to be done but had been told not to.

“Hi, Mack. Hi, Amaranth,” Two said.

“Hi, Two,” we both said.

Amaranth frowned sympathetically down at Hazel.

“Oh, Hazel, are you alright?” she asked.

“She’s been throwing up more. I think she needs to go to the healing center,” Two said. “But she won’t.”

“Two, your friend Hazel is an adult,” Amaranth said. “She’s older than any of us, and she can make up her own mind about when she’s ready to deal with something.”

“I usually start when there’s something to deal with,” Hazel said stiffly. “But thanks so much for your concern.”

“You’re welcome,” Amaranth said. “I’m always available if you ever have anything you want to talk about.”

We headed into the bathroom. Feejee was asleep in one of the bathtubs. Trina was in one of the stalls… it sometimes seemed like she lived in there… prattling away to her unseen friend. Her jeans weren’t even down.

“…golem’s birthday or something,” she was saying. “Big drunken party. That sneaky little shit with the curly hair’s totallyhungover. Honey, I think.”

“Ignore her,” Amaranth mouthed to me.

“Probably up all night eating each other out,” Trina continued. “They use the golem as a sex doll, you know. Should probably be illegal.”

I turned and reached out for the stall door. Amaranth gave me a hard bare-handed swat on the ass, and I yelped. Trina did, too, louder. There was a loud crash as her hand mirror hit the floor.

“Careful where you step, baby,” Amaranth said loudly. “The tile’s a little wet.”

There was stunned silence from Trina’s stall as her hand came down and picked up the remains of the mirror, then she got to her feet and threw open the door. She was red in the face as she started shrieking, and the only part of what she said were the first three words, “What the fuck…?”

“Oh, what’s that? We were just going to the showers,” Amaranth said.

Trina waved the broken mirror in Amaranth’s face.

“What are you going to do about this?” she demanded.

“Kosh, Trina, I’m sorry, but you probably want to have a professional look at that,” she said. “And you should probably be more careful about where you try to use it. It’s all sharp corners and hard surfaces in here.”

So saying, she gave me a firm shove on my tender backside in the direction of the showers, leaving a stunned Trina… in shock, if not outright mourning, over the loss of her favorite appendage… to stand there, probably glaring after us with all three of her eyes.

“Can you keep it down?” Feejee called. “Some people are trying to sleep in.”

Trina exhaled through her nose and then turned and stomped, rubber flip-flops making slapping noises on the tiles as she headed to the door.

“Hand me your paddle, baby, so it’s not just lying around out here” Amaranth said, and I did. She tucked it out of sight before stepping into the shower.

“You know, by the end of the day the story of how I broke her mirror is going to be all over school,” I said.

“You can’t stop Trina from spreading gossip,” Amaranth said. “And if it bothers you that she’s got new fodder, maybe you should remember that it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t decided to try.”

“So, it is my fault, in other words,” I said.

“It’s not your fault,” Amaranth said. “She got startled and dropped the mirror. That’s her own accident… but the opportunity for it came about as an unforeseeable consequence of your action, which happened to be a bad idea anyway for other reasons.”

“But it was unforeseeable,” I said. “It’s completely random. It’s not like I can’t do everything right and still had somebody break something as an unforeseeable outcome and blame it on me.”

“Baby, if the universe handed out neat little judgments for everything we did, you wouldn’t need me or anybody else to tell you these things,” Amaranth said. “Not every little thing in life has a built-in moral. This is just one thing that does happen to have one… kind of.”

“The moral could be for you not to spank me when I’m about to put another hole in Trina’s head,” I said.

Amaranth reached over and turned the hot water off just as I working the shampoo into my hair.

“Oh, fucking fuck!” I yelled, jumping back out of the spray.

“I told you I’m going to be giving you more immediate correction,” she said. “Now finish washing up, with the cold water. We’ll just pray… uh, hope, I mean… that the germs don’t get you.”

“That’s not fair!” I said.

“Isn’t it?” Amaranth said. “Even ignoring the fact that violence is never right, and ignoring the fact that you of all people can’t be heard threatening violence against humanbloods, you just complained about Trina spreading rumors about you before you turned around and gave her something even more damning.”

“It’s not like she could hear it,” I muttered.

“As far as she knew, we couldn’t hear her when she decided to talk about Two,” Amaranth said. “And of course, we shouldn’t ignore the first two things. You had every reason to be smarter than that, baby.”

“I just hate people like Trina so much,” I said.

“Yes, well… I can’t do anything about that,” Amaranth said, frowning and biting her lip. “But it would be irresponsible of me as your owner to let you get in the habit of making casual threats of violence against anybody, much less a… a… person who’s really good at spreading news around.”

“It wasn’t a real threat,” I said. “It’s just… hyperbole.”

“More like hyper-bully,” Amaranth said. “I know you’re a big ol’ pussycat, baby, but to everybody else, you’re the monster under the bed. Whether you want it to or not, all of your strength and all of your heritage are standing behind you when you interact with a human. I know you don’t like to dwell on these things, but you have to be aware of them, because everybody else will be.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just… she makes me so angry.”

“There are better ways to express anger than that,” Amaranth said.

“Like?”

“Um… I’ll have to think about that,” she said.

The air in the shower was almost as cold as the water that continued to pour from my showerhead was. I edged around the stream so I could stand between it and Amaranth’s shower, from which clouds of steam were billowing.

“You go back to your own shower,” Amaranth said. “And finish washing up. You don’t have to stand underneath it. You can just stand next to it and use the water. The faster you finish, the sooner you can get dried off and dressed.”

It was a miserable experience. As great a pleasure as a long, hot shower was, a cold, drawn-out one was hell. I didn’t draw it out on purpose, but Amaranth wasn’t about to let me skimp on cleaning anything.

“Have you given any thought to your Veil costume, baby?” she asked, as I scrubbed my shivering skin.

“How about an icicle?” I said.

“You brought it on yourself, baby,” Amaranth said. “It isn’t as though I like watching anybody else really suffer, especially you. But think about it… what would you have done, if I hadn’t stopped you from confronting Trina? Attacked her?”

“No!” I said.

“Threatened her?”

“No,” I said.

“Had a reasoned discussion with a willing listener?”

“Um…”

“Probably not, right?” she said.

“No… probably not,” I admitted.

“Right now she’s mad at herself and she’s displacing that onto you,” Amaranth said. “So you’ve got the moral high ground at least, and there’s a chance she’ll be too embarrassed by what really happened to make too much of a big deal out of it. But if you’d broken down the door and started yelling at her, you would have given up that high ground and more, and for what?”

“Am I not supposed to protect my friends?” I asked.

“How would that have protected her?” Amaranth asked. “Bursting in on Trina wouldn’t have improved Two’s reputation, or her situation.”

I sighed.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. Really. I wasn’t thinking.”

“I know,” Amaranth said quietly. “This is so that next time, you will.”

“Can I please turn the hot water back on?” I asked. “I don’t know how I’m going to rinse my hair out…”

“You can use handfuls of water or you can stick your head under a bit at a time,” Amaranth said. “Or you can suck it up and get underneath it. Mundane cold isn’t going to kill you, baby… I looked it up.”

“You were planning this?” I asked.

“No, I was worried about winter,” she said. “But when I saw you standing there shivering in the bedroom, I thought that cold might be one teacher you wouldn’t be able to ignore.”

“I listen to my teachers,” I said.

“Oh? What about Coach Callahan?”

“She’s a coach, not a teacher,” I muttered, but she didn’t hear. Probably a good thing. There was no way I was sticking my head under the faucet, so I cupped my hand and caught freezing handfuls to try to get the suds out.

The curtain rustled as Two came in. One good thing about freezing my ass off to begin with was that the draft which blew in wasn’t noticeably colder.

“Hi, Mack. Hi, Amaranth,” she said.

“Hi, Two.”

“She’s showering wrong,” Two said to Amaranth.

“She’s being punished,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, okay,” Two said. “That’s good.”

“Good?” I repeated, spluttering a little.

“Yes,” Two said. “You aren’t a very good toy.”

“Two, honey, expressing negative opinions about other people’s relationships is rude,” Amaranth said.

“Okay,” Two said.

“So, did you guys have fun last night?” Amaranth asked her.

“I have been told to tell you that I did not give my friend Hazel a foot rub,” Two said. “I really think she should go to the healing center. She threw up a lot.”

“Two, what’s wrong with her can’t… well, it isn’t even wrong,” Amaranth said. “She should be talking to healers before too long, though, because it could get difficult for her.”

“Amaranth, I’m not getting the shampoo out,” I said. “I’m just dumping cold water on my head for no reason.”

“No, you’re dumping cold water on your head because you were bad,” she said. “But you may turn on the water now to finish washing your hair and do a quick rinse on your skin.”

The quick rinse turned into another full scrub under the steaming hot water, as Amaranth was unable to repress her fear that I would be eaten by invisible science bugs if I didn’t kill them all with hot water. I didn’t care what her reason was. The hot streams pounding against my skin were heaven after the bone-chilling cold I’d endured.

After I turned off the water, Amaranth reached over and squeezed my hand.

“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” I said. “I’m sorry. I should have thought before… it’s just that Trina was pissing me off so badly.”

“Me, too, but we can’t do anything about what she does, baby,” Amaranth said.

“She shouldn’t be able to say shit like that,” I said.

“That’s true, too,” Amaranth said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that we can’t do anything.”

“But…”

She reached out and shushed me.

“Don’t dwell on this,” she said. “You’ll only work yourself up again, for no reason.”

I didn’t think Trina’s antics constituted “no reason”, but I didn’t argue.

My much-abused ass had gone completely numb by the time Amaranth relented, and the hot water had been soothing even as it had reawakened my sense of feeling. I was still smarting when we got back to the room… especially after squeezing my seemingly ever-expanding butt into the tight-ass jeans Amaranth picked out for me… but it was approaching tolerability.

When we left to go to breakfast, Two stopped in the hallway and stared indecisively at Hazel’s door.

“Two… I know you mean well, honey, but Hazel’s the sort of person who’s got to make up her own mind about what she does,” Amaranth said.

“I know,” Two said. “But she should go to the healers.”

“Hazel’s old enough to do what she shouldn’t,” Amaranth said.

Off to our side, Dee’s door opened.

“Good morning,” she said, bowing. “I hate to intrude on a prior conversation, but I would add that Miss Hazel can generally be counted upon to act with more maturity than many students. If she is acting under some amout of shock at the moment, I feel we can trust her to do what is necessary when it becomes necessary.”

“Thank you, Dee,” Amaranth said. “That’s exactly what I think.”

“And I think when somebody throws up that many times they should go to the healer,” Two said.

“Well… you’re entitled to think that,” Amaranth said. “But Hazel’s entitled to do what she wants.”

“But…” Two said, and I watched her working the concepts around. Then something clicked into place. “I can’t make Hazel go to the healer, but I don’t have to stop thinking that she should?”

“Yes, honey, that’s right,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, okay,” Two said, and she relaxed. She still knew she was right, and that there was nothing she could do about it… and rather than the weight of that twin knowledge overwhelming her completely, they canceled each other out, leaving her at peace.

It was a neat trick. I’d have to learn how to do it sometime.

“You know what?” Feejee said when we gave her the dish from Hazel. She held it back out to me. “You should take this.”

“Are you sure?” I asked to be polite. I could always have more candy and cake, but I felt like I’d eaten more than my share throughout the party. “It didn’t seem like you had a lot at the party, and then you had to leave.”

“Yeah, it’s not really my kind of food,” she said. “You should eat more, anyway. Get some meat on those bones.”

“Uh, right,” I said, my mouth going from watering to dry.

“We’ve really got to get going,” Amaranth said, tugging me down the hall.

Not that I gave her much resistance. “Alone time with nymph” vs. “ogled by hungry mermaids” was not a hard decision to make.

Dee opened her door as we approached it.

“I apologize for delaying you,” Dee said. “But how is Steff?”

“Better,” Amaranth said. “Tired. I think she’ll be okay. She’s with Viktor… he won’t let anything happen to her.”

“That is good,” Dee said. “I hope you will convey my apologies to Two and her friend Hazel for my abrupt departure. I felt that by staying any longer I risked making an inappropriate scene.”

“Oh, um… I’m sure it’s fine,” Amaranth said. She pulled out the container for Dee. “And anyway, we were going to stop by to give you this… Hazel packed up some leftovers for you.”

“She did? I would not have had her go out of her way like that, when I chose to leave,” Dee said.

“Oh, she did one for everybody,” I said. “She told us before that it’s traditional to give gifts to the guests, where she’s from.”

“Ah,” Dee said, accepting the dish. “Well, I suppose that is different. You are certain Steff’s condition is stable?”

“Stable and improving, from what I could tell,” Amaranth said.

“I will trust your judgment as a natural healer,” Dee said. She gave Amaranth a deep bow. “Good night. Good night, Mackenzie.”

“Wow, I wouldn’t have expected her to be so worried over Steff,” I said after she’d closed the door.

“I think Steff touches something in her,” Amaranth said. “There’s very little attraction, which is a shame, but Dee responds to her in other ways.” She grabbed my hand and tugged me towards my door. “But, come on… I want to get going before it gets any later. We put Two’s stuff in Hazel’s room earlier, so we won’t have to worry about being interrupted.”

I got the door unlocked and open and Amaranth all but shoved me through. She tried to get my coat off me at the same time I did and just ended up slowing me down… after that, she just started grabbing my clothes and pulling them. At first I thought she’d ripped my shirt off, literally tearing it, but then I realized it was just gone and she was on to my jeans, and then my bra.

“Oh my goddess, little missy, you have no idea how bad I want you right now,” she said, reaching for my panties with both hands. Her aggressiveness was both startling and thrilling. “Sleeping beside you is nice, but it’s like… like being a kid in the world’s biggest toy store and not being allowed to play with anything.” She giggled and seized my waistband, content to slide them slowly down the long way instead of yanking them out of this plane of existence. “But then, you are my toy.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. The heat that spread out over my face and down my body felt less like embarrassment and more like excitement than usual.

Her toy. Her toy. Her toy. There was no part of that thought that didn’t turn me on. I was hers. I was a toy.

“I want to do something different with you tonight,” she said when she’d got my underwear to the floor. “Would you like that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“We’re going to do a little bit of roleplaying to spice things up,” she said. She stepped back and stood with her hands on her hips, posing sexily. “I am wearing a long, loose cardigan, open over a teeny little camisole and a strapless bra,” she said, moving her hands up and down her naked sides. “And a skirt with stockings and garters and a pair of pumps. I want you to undress me.”

“Ma’am?” I said, confused.

“I said, I want you to undress me,” she said. “Slowly. Sexily.”

When I didn’t move, she said, “Come here,” and I did. She took my hands and put them on the sides of her stomach. “Here’s the edges of the cardigan,” she said. “Now take it off me.”

Feeling stupid and about as unsexy as it was possible to feel, I tried to mime like I was taking a jacket off of Amaranth.

“Oh, baby… how do you like it?” Amaranth moaned.

“What?”

“The sweater,” she said. “Tell me about it.”

“Um… it’s soft,” I said.

“And fluffy?”

“Very fluffy,” I said.

“Now just throw it anywhere,” she said. She lifted her hands. “And the cami next.”

Even though I didn’t do anything but run my hands from her waist up to her shoulders and the over her head, Amaranth shivered and wriggled like I was discovering whole kingdoms of new erogenous zones. She had me take off her “bra” and “skirt”, too. It wasn’t until she “stepped out of her shoes” and we got to the stockings that I really started to feel it. But then, it was an incredibly sexy thing to start at her thigh and go all the down towards her feet without the pretense of clothing. Adding that scenario didn’t take much away from it.

Actually, when I pictured her in silk stockings and actually imagined I was peeling them off of her, it added something. Too late to help anything, I wondered if the rest of it would have felt less silly if I’d put myself into the scene a little more.

When I finished the second leg, down on my knees with her foot in my hand, she looked down at me and giggled.

“And now, I’m completely naked,” she said. “You don’t know how dirty I felt going around all day without any panties. You did a good job undressing me, though. I think you deserve a little reward. Would you like that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

She reached out, leaning on one leg since I was still holding her foot, snagged my desk chair and sat down on it.

“You seem to like my feet,” she said. “Would you like to kiss it?”

I blushed. Amaranth could see a person’s desires as easily as she could read the expression on a face. I didn’t go around looking at people’s feet or anything, but I’d sometimes had odd daydreams about being trampled or being forced to kiss certain people’s feet. They had definitely at least verged on being sexual.

“I asked you a question, baby,” Amaranth said in her warning tone.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Go ahead,” she said. I started to lean in. “Just one kiss,” she said. “The top, above the toes. Only lips.”

Commanding restraint seemed out of place from Amaranth, but I obeyed, just a quick brush of the lips. Done that way, it wasn’t much different than kissing the back of a hand. There was little feeling of humiliation, apart from some incidental feelings of ridiculousness, and it hardly seemed intimate.

“That wasn’t what you wanted… was it, baby?” Amaranth asked.

“No, ma’am,” I admitted.

“What do you want to do, then?” she asked.

There was the hot rush to my cheeks. I squeezed my eyes shut and murmured, “Lick.”

“What’s that?” she asked. “You shouldn’t mumble when I ask you a question.”

“I want to lick,” I said. “Your feet. Your toes. All over.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Well… it doesn’t matter what you want, does it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You’re my toy and I am your owner,” she said.

“Yes!”

“But… as it happens… I want you to do that,” she said. “I want you to taste my foot. Lick it. Lick every inch of it, starting from the heel.”

Kneeling before her, looking up the length of her leg with her foot in my hand, I didn’t need to be told twice. She tipped her foot up so the sole was towards me and I scooted back a bit, then lowered my face and raised her foot closer to it. Out of love and gratitude, I kissed her foot several more times before I began licking.

“Slower,” she said. “I want to feel your tongue moving over my skin.”

Obediently, I traced a long line, feeling as well as tasting my way over the contours of her foot.

Disgusting. Filthy. The litany in my head was quieter than it once would have been, but it was still there.

Damn straight, I told it.

The reality was that the bottom of Amaranth’s foot felt and tasted no different than the skin on her neck, or anywhere else on her body. It didn’t matter if she was fresh from the shower or if she’d just walked barefoot across a barnyard, her feet were cleaner than anything on my body ever would be. But the idea of lowering myself, physically and metaphorically…

Hot. Hot enough to ignore reality and wallow a bit in the fantasy that I was cleaning her feet with my mouth.

“Do it again,” she said, when I’d reached the end of her last toe. “I want to make sure you didn’t miss anything.”

I did, and she began to moan. I glanced up and saw her hand between her legs.

“Tell me how I taste,” she said.

“Wonderful,” I said, and it was true.

After seeing her reaction to Iona’s predatory state, I had a tiny suspicion we might have been enjoying this scenario from two very different angles, but I didn’t care. I was right where I wanted to be, beneath my owner. Filth under her feet.

She’d called it a treat for me, but the fact that she enjoyed this so much, whatever the reason, just fueled my enthusiasm.

“Now the other one,” she said breathlessly, and I repeated the process, tonguestroke by loving tonguestroke.

“Now my toes,” she said when I’d done both soles twice. “Suck on them. Gobble them all up.”

I felt a momentary twinge of uncertainty at the thought of having her flesh in my mouth, with that kind of phrase given for context. But there wasn’t any real danger of me losing control. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t angry. I was calm and I was happy, and I wasn’t in control to begin with. I was in my safe place, on the floor in front of my owner.

Amaranth shrieked and squealed with glee when I sucked her big toe. She wasn’t giving me any directions any more, so I tried to respond based on how she responded to me, and it quickly became apparent that what really drove her wild was me going wild. I abandoned the slow, methodical technique I’d used in worshipping the bottom of her feet and jumped from toe to toe, sucking and even nibbling with lip-covered teeth at random. She writhed so much she started pumping her legs, kicking me in the face with both feet at one point, and that was better.

I felt like I could have spent the whole night down in front of her, lavishing attention on just her feet… but there was so much more of her, and even as I could say I was perfectly content the excitement I gained from it was building up other desires.

Eventually Amaranth’s own excitement built up to the point where it wasn’t really possible for me to keep hold of her feet, much less safely keep my mouth on them. She jumped off the chair and tackled me. We rolled around on the rug a bit until she was on top of me, and I savored the feeling of her sun-warm body blanketing me. I was beneath her again, in a different and equally delicious way. She wasn’t in a mood to savor for long, though. With deft insistence, she started rearranging our bodies into the position we’d tried once and been interrupted: legs entwined, bodies joined at the most intimate point.

As before, I felt the shudder of self-revulsion at the thought that she was sullying herself by touching me there… polluting her pure and perfect, divinely ordered self with my infernally tainted, inherently filthy womanhood… but after the long session at her feet, that feeling just added to the foreplay.

“I’m going to fuck you so hard,” Amaranth said, and it was the first time I’d heard her use the word “fuck” where it retained its usual visceral, deep down dirty connotations. This wasn’t casual. This wasn’t matter-of-fact. This was personal, the way a grudge match was, and when Amaranth started driving herself against me, it was intense in a way I would never have thought to associate with loving lesbian sex.

“Brutal” might have been the word, if there had been any violence.

She came almost at once but she kept grinding against me. I felt my own orgasm building and building until I was dizzy with the need for release, until the room around me was nothing but shapes and colors, until I could feel nothing but a hundred thousand pins and needles… but the release never came.

“Are… you… close?” Amaranth said between gasps.

I couldn’t answer that. I mean, I physically couldn’t… the air wasn’t staying in my lungs long enough to even have a look around… but I didn’t know. I felt close. I felt more than close. I felt like I was past it. And yet I wasn’t there.

Amaranth moved her hand between us. I only barely registered this, much less what she was doing… but it was like she’d flicked the trigger on a crossbow and I was off like a bolt. We rode each other until I finished screaming and then we lay there. I couldn’t see her without moving my head, but I could feel her smooth legs against mine. Both of us wet with the other’s fluids. It was hard to imagine a more intimate exchange.

“I love you so much, Mack!” she gasped out.

“I love you, too!”

Two wakes up in the glass case, which means that she hadn’t woken up at all.

The case, like everything else in the full but tidy basement workshop, bears a label. Its label says “Golem Case”. The block letters were applied to the glass almost directly across from her eyes, and so she can see the backs of them without moving or looking around and so she knows without moving or looking around that she was in the proper place, that she was in her place and so she knows that much at least is right in the world.

This means she’s dreaming.

She hears the bolts on the door at the top of the stairs sliding open, one after another. She tenses up. She hears the door open and she sucks in her lips a bit.

This time I won’t do it, she thinks as she hears feet tread on the stairs. I won’t say it. I don’t have to. I don’t have to say anything I don’t want to ^{I WANT TO DO WHAT I’M TOLD} but I’m a free being ^{but if I were a free being I wouldn’t be back here} but if I’m back here and not a free being then Miss Ruth never told me to say it and so I don’t have to.

Then she hears the bolts on the door at the bottom of the stairs and that door opens, and the man steps inside.

“Good morning!” Two says, and he freezes. The perfect dream of her perfect life begins to crack and fray around the edges. She doesn’t know what he says in response to this. She doesn’t know what happens next.

She had never said “good morning!” to the man.

Sometimes when this happens she wakes up and she cries because she ruined the dream and she can’t get it back. Other times she keeps dreaming. The workshop falls to pieces and is blown away, leaving her on a vast, flat, featureless plain (labeled “A Vast Flat Featureless Plain”) in an infinitely expanding empty space (labeled “An Infinitely Expanding Empty Space”), alone except for some sort of ridiculous owl turtle thing sitting on a post, both labeled appropriately.

The ridiculous owl turtle thing has occupied the vast featureless plain ever since the day that Two, wanting something to replace the workshop dream that had been her refuge until Miss Ruth’s increasingly specific admonitions to be more personable had finally destroyed it, had asked her friend Hazel what sort of things people dreamed about. Her friend Hazel had told her that a lot of her dreams had impossible things that were not quite one thing and not quite another. The next time Two had fallen asleep, after she wrecked the workshop dream, there it was: not quite an owl and not a quite a turtle.

It perched upright on the top of the post on bird-like talons, but it had a reptilian underbelly and a turtle shell. The things that stuck out of the holes at its shoulders might have been flippers and might have been wings. Its head was turtlish, but with owl-like tufts over big yellow eyes and a beak that almost might have belonged to a snapping turtle as much as a bird.

“Oh,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “Back again?”

“Yes,” Two says sullenly. “I am back again.”

“Did you try what I said?”

“No,” Two says. “I did not.”

“Well, there’s no use glaring at me like that if you aren’t going to take my advice.”

“Your advice isn’t any good,” Two says. “I cannot make something up about my own… my maker. Making things up about people is called lying and gossip, and it’s wrong.”

“It’s only gossip if you tell other people and it’s only lying if you act like it’s true,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing said.

“I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think I know those things,” Two says. “So I don’t know how you could possibly know them.”

“I am a ridiculous owl turtle thing,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing responds, “and I am clearly impossible.”

“I am going to ignore you,” Two says. She looks around the vast, flat, featureless plain. “I think I am going to sweep.”

“Going to sweep? But you’re alweady sweeping,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “This is all a dweam.”

“That isn’t very funny,” Two says.

“It’s your nascent sense of humor, honey. I just work here.”

“I need a broom,” Two says, looking around the infinitely expanding space, but of course, there is no such thing as a broom there.

“And who told you to sweep?”

Two freezes, looking guilty. Her face in the dream takes on the spasmodic tic that it does when she’s stuck in a chain of thoughts. In her bed, under the blankets, her whole body kicks and twitches.

“I… I… I… this is my space and I am supposed to keep my space clean and tidy,” she says with a measure of triumph as she works the justification out.

“Looks pretty neat and tidy to me,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“Miss Ruth says that practice makes perfect.”

“I don’t think she was talking about sweeping perfectly clean surfaces.”

“She did not specify,” Two says. She says again, “I need a broom.”

“Have you tried the other side of my post?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “It seems to me that you can see everything there is here from where you’re standing, except for the other side of my post. So if you can’t see a broom, that’s the only place it could be.”

“Oh, okay,” Two says, and she walks around the ridiculous owl turtle thing. There is no broom leaning up against the post. “No,” she says. “There is no broom here.”

“Well, of course,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. It’s facing her again. “That’s this side of the post. You want the other side.”

“But I went to the other side,” Two protests.

“I beg to differ,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “You did not go to the other side. You came to this side. The other side is always the one at which you are not.”

“That poor chicken must be very tired, then,” Two says. “And dizzy.”

“Now who isn’t very funny?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing asks as Two reached around to the other side of the post and feels her hand closing around a wooden handle. She pulls out the improbably-placed broom. It’s labeled “Improbably-Placed Broom”.

“You,” Two says, and she begins to sweep the perfectly flat, perfectly clean surface of the vast, flat, featureless plain. “You aren’t funny. Still. Now be quiet. I have sweeping to do.”

“How will you know when you’re done?”

“When I’ve swept the whole place.”

“But it’s endless.”

“Yes,” Two says, and she smiles.

“You aren’t very good at dreaming, you know,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“I don’t care,” Two said as she starts to sweep.

“Your name isn’t even Two,” it says. “You just made that up.”

“I think I hate you, ridiculous owl turtle thing,” Two says.

“You aren’t supposed to hate anybody.”

“You aren’t anybody,” Two says. “So that’s okay.”

Steff doesn’t have the self-awareness to know that she’s dreaming, but when she wakes up it will seem like it should have been obvious to her… so obvious that in the moment she awakens, she’ll manage to convince herself that she knew it was a dream and was just going with it.

There is no room in the fortress at Kilrest as big and expansive as the throne room in her dreams. While the ogres tower over her, they don’t build their structures any bigger than they need to. They lack the architectural cunning to build a great big hall with a high vaulted ceiling like the one Steff always imagined before she saw the real place, the one she still pictures more than half the time when she imagines her life after graduation.

Steff sits on her throne in the hall, and it is her throne. Viktor doesn’t factor into this dream. She has dreams about Viktor and she has dreams about Kilrest, but ever since they went there she hasn’t had any dreams about Viktor and Kilrest. Her sleeping mind cannot make them fit together. Her brooding lover does not fit with her idealized fantasy life of wicked decadence.

The hall is full of her subjects… ogres and reanimated skeletons and zombies… and her victims, which this time around consist entirely of people she went to school with. The ones who attacked her, the ones who teased her, the ones who snubbed her, the ones who happened to be present for the worst years of Steff Johnson’s life are being torn apart, being impaled on spits, being tortured to death in a dozen ways, but none of them are dying because Steff’s dark magic is too awesome to allow them that escape.

They’re starting to twist off Cindy Mears’s head now. What had Cindy done? Steff couldn’t remember anything in particular. But she was hot and effortlessly popular and Steff had popped so many boners over her while trying to figure out if she was a gay boy or a straight girl or what and that hadn’t made things easier for her.

Not that Cindy had been alone on that score. An adolescent male body is on a hair trigger to begin with. Adding in fifty percent elven blood… for a while it had seemed like everything turned Steff on, and this at a point in her life when she regularly found herself thinking of violent and/or morbid things…

It really was no wonder that certain associations had stuck in her head, though Steff has never had the self-awareness necessary to think about how she might have come to associate violence and death with sex. Even asking the question could seem to imply that there was something wrong with doing so, and Steff had spent too many years and too many tears convincing herself that she was fine to do that.

Life in her dream of Kilrest was so good. She didn’t feel like rocking the boat with a lot of moody self-examination.

“Why, yes, I do see your point,” Mother Khaele tells Amaranth in an utterly realistic and wholly plausible scenario in which the nymph has just pointed out the fundamental flaw in existing cosmological models which results in the perceived division between the so-called higher and lower races, the people and the animals. “You’ve worked it out quite nicely. In fact, I have to admit that I left that mistake there on purpose to see which of my children would be the first one to spot it, so that I would know who would be worthy of sharing my…”

At this point, Mack’s leg twitches in her sleep and she kicks Amaranth in the ankle, jarring her awake. She blinks her myopic eyes several times in the perfect darkness of the blanket tent before she realizes where she is and that her Mother’s praise had simply been a dream. She sighs, and tries to go back to sleep.

Moeli’s working the desk when She comes in, cool as ever. She doesn’t look at anyone when she comes into the room. She keeps her head down, thinking her important thoughts, but She‘s not afraid to say anything to anybody. Really.

She‘ll just blurt out things that would make a bugbear blush without even thinking about it. Just like that.

Eventually She sidles up to the counter, the way She does, like whatever She has got to do isn’t even that important.

“Hey,” She says, with that quiet, husky voice that drives him wild. “I, uh, found your notebook.”

“Oh?” Moeli asks. His hearts skip a couple of beats as She puts it down in front of him. He’d wanted to show his notebook to her, but he’d always chickened out. It was a million to one chance that She would be into something so weird.

“I hope you don’t mind I looked through it… well, I had to figure out whose it was. I thought the drawings of motorcycles were kind of cool. Did you do them?”

“Yeah,” Moeli said. “I did.”

“I like motorcycles,” She says. “I think they’re awesome.”

“I do, too,” Moeli says.

“In fact,” She says, leaning in close. “I’ve got one outside. A real one.”

“No shit?” Moeli says.

“Yeah,” She says. “Half-demons have motorcycles. But I can’t seem to figure out how to make it go. You seem like you know a lot about them, though. Do you think maybe we could try to take a ride… together?”

“Well, I’m kind of working now,” Moeli says. “And I can’t just walk away. Also, you said you weren’t into me.”

“I’m a bitch and I was lying to you for no reason,” She says. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Of course,” he says. “You know what? My shift’s over.”

Two has been sweeping for what seems like hours, and the ridiculous owl turtle thing is a distant memory behind her, as she’s sweeping in the way she’s been taught: one straight line until she comes to the wall or carpet, and then move over.

She doesn’t expect to find a wall or carpet any time soon. She doesn’t expect to find anything, as there has never been anything in the vast, flat, featureless plain except the post with the ridiculous owl turtle thing on it. But there had also never been a broom behind the post (that she knew of, anyway), and unfortunately for her, Two understands that one runs across unexpected things in dreams.

However, there are an infinite number of things she does not expect to run across, so it won’t necessarily have to be a wall or carpet or something else that would force her to turn around and start heading back towards the ridiculous owl turtle thing.

In fact, the first unexpected thing she runs across is her teddy bear, Hand Wash. In her dream, he’s as tall as she is, though he still just sits there with his firmly stuffed legs jutting out in front of him to support him and his upper body leaning slightly forward to keep him balanced on those legs.

“Hello, Two,” he says.

“Hello, Hand Wash,” she says. “I can’t stop to talk. I’m busy sweeping and I have to keep going until I’m done.”

“Sweeping? I thought you were dreaming.”

“I can do both,” Two says.

“I can’t do anything,” Hand Wash says.

“I know,” she says.

“I’m a teddy bear,” he adds.

“Yes.”

“I’m not even supposed to be talking,” he says. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “I forgive you.”

And onward she sweeps.

Ariadne knows the dream before it starts, because it’s the same one she’s been having for weeks now. That thing is in her class. It wears a mousey, unassuming little face, but the elven professor knows the fire and death and hate that lie behind that mask. She can’t say anything about it, though. She can’t do anything.

Nobody else sees. Nobody else knows.

Every time she turns her back, even if it’s only for a second, another of her students is gone. The thing is clearly responsible. Why can’t anybody else see this?

And now there’s more of it. More of them. It’s brought in its friends.

How much longer can this go on?

How long before the school’s overrun?

Something must be done.

Something must be done.

Amaranth, having just found out that she had aced all of her classes (as expected!), was getting ready to go home for winter break, but she was planning on taking the fast route home and traveling there in style. Steff had helped get her “dressed”, so to speak… arranging her on the platter with roasted potatoes and other vegetables, brushing her body down with garlic oil, and even stuffing an apple in her mouth for aesthetic purposes. Steff had wanted to use garlic butter, but Amaranth had felt that using an animal product would be more likely to bring Mother Khaele’s disapproval.

Now Steff is wheeling the trolley with the covered platter on it to the elegant dining room where her Mack waits along with Viktor and their new best friends, Iona and Feejee. This was such a brilliant idea, she thinks to herself, enjoying the smell of the garlic and the pepper and the fire roasted onions, and when she surprises all of her sisters by arriving home early and explains how she got there, they’ll all be so excited to try this… the ultimate carnal experience, the ultimate sharing of self… and the new phenomenon of responsible, consensual cannibalism utilizing renewable resources will put places like Tender Mercy’s out of business, she just knows it.

Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it, too?

And then the trolley stops and she knows that the moment of revelation is upon her and Mack is going to be so surprised and everybody’s going to think she looks sexy and delicious and she’s going to taste so good…

…and then Mack rolls over in her sleep, pulling on the blankets and Amaranth isn’t on the platter at all.

“Oh, phooey,” she says, and then she tries to go back to sleep.

Some dreams are simpler than others.

In Trina’s dream, everybody had four eyes, except for her, and this made them all freaks. Sara Leighton dreams that the teleport accident which in reality had joined her with her sister had actually sent her twin to another plane of existence. Tara’s version has it so that it merged them fully and they’d become one person. On occasion, they’ve each dreamed it the other way and broke out in a cold sweat in their sleep.

Feejee dreams of blood in the water.

Iona dreams of blood.

Kai, who often thinks of nothing but murder all day, dreams a surprisingly peaceful dream about her grandfather’s calligraphy pens. Suzi dreams of invisible cheeseburgers. Maliko dreams about her Sooni.

Scylla dreams that she’d made it to the damned rabbit before the snake-eyed bitch did. The snake-eyed bitch dreams of cutting off her pink skin and finding scales underneath. Gladys dreams of being up on stage, hundreds—no thousands—of people’s eyes upon her. Cetea dreams that she can use a damned mirror without it breaking.

Honey dreams absolutely nothing, as six crushed flower petals in a tall glass of vodka have rendered her oblivious even to oblivion.

“Hey, hey Two!”

“What is it, ridiculous owl turtle thing?” Two asks as the clearly impossible thing flaps its flipper wings in ungainly flight alongside her, oblivious to her attempts to sweep away from it.

“How come you never dream about your friends?” it asks her.

“I do,” she says. “Sometimes. But not when I dream about the workshop, because they weren’t in the workshop.”

“You never dream about them here, either.”

“They were never here,” Two says. “And anyway this is still the workshop dream. It’s just broken, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“You could stop saying good morning,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“No,” Two says, shaking her head. “I tried that.”

“You could stop freaking the hell out when it happens,” it says. “That’s what breaks the dream, you know.”

“I don’t care,” Two says. “I have a different dream now. I’m sweeping.”

“But have you considered the ramifications of that?”

“No,” she says.

“Do you think there really was a broom on the other side of my post?”

“Yes,” she says.

“It was there because you dreamed it up,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “You could dream up anything you wanted.”

“I don’t care,” Two says. “I’m sweeping.”

Dee is a child in the marketplace. One of her hands is being held by Dehsah, and the other by her mother.

No, that’s wrong. My mother never took me to the marketplace.

Dee is a child in the marketplace. Her mother, pretty Dehsah…

No.

Dee is in the marketplace, with her lover, Dehsah.

Dehsah hasn’t been out of the house since we became lovers.

Dee passes a fitful night, her subconscious unable to provide any dreams of succor which her conscious mind does not reject out of hand.

Amaranth looks beautiful in her wedding dress, and so does Mack. They are having an outdoor ceremony, of course, and even a hilltop shrine was out of the question under the circumstances, so they’re holding it in a beautiful elven forest bower. Everybody from Paradise Valley is there, and so are all the students she’d worked with during her years of study (in which she’d attained multiple degrees and many honors), and nymphs and satyrs and fauns of all stripes.

Mack had agreed to have a Mechan officiate, to get around her little disability, but when they get to the end of the aisle Amaranth sees that it’s not the scientist there at all, but Mother Khaele herself. Amaranth looks in alarm at Mack, but Mack is standing unharmed in the presence of the divine.

“Rest easy, my daughter,” Mother Khaele says. “For your love has redeemed this demon-tainted soul completely, and now I will happily join the two of you as one, after which you will be taken to your honeymoon in a carriage pulled by specially trained horses, who will join you for…”

“Sooni!” Mack blurts out, and Amaranth looks at her in confusion as the wedding dissolves and she finds herself in bed once more, where Mack blurts out Sooni’s name a few more times.

“Suzune-Darling, there is something you must know,” her mother tells Sooni, who sits anxiously by her feet, hanging on every word. Her mother is so wise and so beautiful, just like herself. “We have kept this from you for years, for your own protection, but now you must be told.”

“What, Mother?” Sooni asks. “What is it?”

“I only hope you can forgive my dishonesty towards you,” her mother says.

“I’m sure if you were not truthful towards me, it was for a very good reason,” Sooni says, bowing her head.

“You are such a good daughter, Suzune-Darling,” her mother says. She gets to her feet. “Perhaps it would be easier to show you than tell you.”

She turns around in a circle, and when she does her features have changed. It’s the same kind, wise eyes that are looking down at Sooni, but they’re yellow instead of black. The same calm smile, but with a shorter snout.

Her mother is a nekoyokai.

“Mother… you’re…?”

“Yes,” her mother says, nodding. “And not just that, but I am Queen of the Nekos. Which means that you, my humble daughter Suzune-Darling, you are the Neko Princess. You look like you do because you are half kitsu, but now that you know the truth you will be able to change between the two at will. You must keep your identity as Neko Princess secret, though, or else you will be in terrible danger.”

“That’s why Father always became angry when I acted like a neko!” Sooni exclaims.

“Yes. He was simply worried about you,” her mother says. “And you must know that Kai…”

“Kai is my true sister!” Sooni says. “I’ve known it all along!”

“Yes! Your heart knows the truth, Suzune-Darling, my Neko Princess!”

A door slams downstairs, pulling Sooni away from her mother. She sits upright in bed, shaking her head in confusion. What had she just been dreaming? It had been about her mother, she’s sure about that… but the details are all slipping away. Her mother and nekos.

Oh, well. It couldn’t have been a True Dream if I can’t remember it.

She reaches down and gets her mother’s shoes, the shoes she wears everywhere, even inside the house, off the floor and holds them to her chest as she lays back down, hoping her mother comes back to her soon. She had left a map of the Imperium with Prax circled on it at the family shrine, along with a brochure for the campus with her room number on it, but she wasn’t sure if her mother could come this far, or that she’d have the time.

She had a lot of work to do, her mother did. She was a very important person.

“My friend Hazel used to keep a dream diary,” Two says.

“Oh, so you’re talking to me now?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“I’m talking,” Two says. “I don’t think it matters if I’m talking to you or not, since you are not real. Her mother made her keep a dream diary from when she was eleven until she turned twenty-two. She made my friend Hazel write her dreams down every morning, and then she read it. She wanted to make sure that my friend Hazel didn’t get the curse.”

“No, she wanted to find out if your friend Hazel already had it,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing replies. “That’s a different thing. And it isn’t a curse.”

“I know,” Two says. “I told my friend Hazel that, and she said ‘Well, it isn’t a blessing.’ And then she told me not to talk about it.”

“But you are.”

“I’m dreaming,” Two says. “I’m not really talking.”

“So why can’t you stop yourself from saying ‘good morning’ to the man?”

It’s the war again.

The bridge.

Theona’s down by the bridge, trying to finish her spell of unmaking before the orcs overwhelm her. Jill can see that she’s just going to make it… get the spell off, that is. She doesn’t have time to finish it and escape.

The rest of Hydra Company… all four of the other survivors… have their hands full. Nora’s gone dead to the world again, seemingly conscious of nothing but the bow in her hands. Ironically she’s doing the most to help Theona, sending arrow after arrow at the thundering horde as it bears down on her.

She makes every shot she takes, and every shot is a fatal one, but she might as well be standing on a beach trying to shoot down the waves as they head towards the shore.

Mur-Si is… who the fuck knew where Mur-Si was? The most Jill could see was where she had just been, as ogres collapse with the legs cut out from under them and orcs die in fountains of spurting blood. Jill had been told… some hundred years before… that she had been bred to be the greatest warrior the world had ever seen… but the bastard elven hybrid is a strong argument that the Founders had wasted their efforts.

Jill and Fayborn are fighting back to back, Fay’s gleaming sword and Jill’s giant axe cleaving a circle around them. Jill keeps getting glimpses of the kid in the wizard robes down by the bridge, kneeling helpless and alone as she focuses on her spell.

“What’s the plan for extraction?” Jill asks.

“Soon as we see the bridge go down, we bug out,” Fay says. “Simple enough for you, Flattop?”

“What about The?”

“She bugs out, too.”

“She’s never going to make it back up to us,” Jill says.

“She might,” Fay says. “Didn’t think we’d make it this far at all.”

“We’ve got to get down to her,” Jill says.

“Can’t,” Fay says. “If she fails, we’ve got to be ready to try Plan B.”

“She’s our wizard,” Jill says. “What are we supposed to do to the bridge without her, have Mur-Si stab it to death?”

“Need to know basis.”

“You sent her down there to die,” Jill says.

“We were all sent here to die,” Fay says. “Some of us are better at it than others.”

Jill headbutts the orc in front of her and then charges through the gap left as it goes down, trampling goblins, shouldering past orcs, and dodging around ogres. Fay yells out behind her, something about sticking together, but let the bitch yell. She stands a better chance on her own than the neophyte mage who had, completely unwittingly, become the linchpin of the entire mission.

And as she thunders down the side of the ravine towards the bridge, Jill remembers that this has all already happened and that it’s just a dream, and she realizes she’s not going to make it in time.

The bridge starts to crumble and Theona stands and turns to run up towards her. The bridge is collapsing as a pair of ogres catch hold of her.

They don’t even have weapons out. Why would they? She doesn’t. If she’d been fighting them, they might have been forced to kill her, but instead they’ve got her in their hands…

“Opening the first charity brothel together was the best idea ever, Amaranth,” Mack says.

“Oh, it just seemed like the natural thing to do, after you and Two overcame your inhibitions and embraced the nymphly codes as a way of life,” Amaranth replies. “But this is just the start. Once we start teaching our classes, we’ll get more women of all races to subscribe to my new revolutionary philosophy and soon the entire world will be at peace because everybody will be too busy loving one another to hate anybody. Of course, some credit belongs to Mother Khaele.”

“No, she told me it’s all because of you,” Mack says. “And that you shouldn’t need to feel humble about it, but that’s just like you to think of her.”

“But, Mack, you couldn’t have spoken to… oh, poop. This is a dream again, isn’t it?” Amaranth says as she wakes up.

“Huh? What?” Mack murmurs sleepily beside her in the darkness.

“Nothing, baby,” Amaranth mutters, frowning. “Nothing.”

Leda is dancing across the smooth, glassy surface of the lake. It’s winter, her favorite time, but though a dusting of snow coats trees and the ground on the shore around the lake, the water remains unfrozen. Even in human form, though, it bears her weight. She leaps and she glides about in the moonlight, and then she heads for the thicket of reeds in the center of the lake, where on this side there is a small island, barely more than a bump of rock jutting up above the surface of the water.

That small island of reeds is the gateway to the other side, where her mother’s castle and where her true kingdom is. On both sides, the kingdom of Mariinsky Lake is not more than the lake itself, but on the Other Side, that lake is much bigger.

Even though she loves the castle and she loves the true lake far more than she loves the dreary, cramped one she’d just been dancing upon, she feels cold dread seeping down her spine as she passes through the reeds and finds herself on the large island with her home in front of her. It’s daylight on this side, but the sun doesn’t seem to warm her up much.

She knows what’s coming next.

Leda is a true princess: grace defined, possessing endless reserves of natural charm and refinement. But somehow—witches, probably—she screwed up and got herself exiled for four years to a moonforsaken frontier outpost in an empire of human barbarians. It was unthinkable, it was impossible… but it had happened, and it was going to happen again.

What would it be this time? Would she upset a tureen of soup? Lean against a priceless tapestry? Would she tread on an ambassador snail’s tail? Accidentally insult a visiting frog prince?

Knowing that her doom was coming but not knowing what shape it would take was terrible torture, but no matter how much she fights against it, her body still insists on passing over the drawbridge, under the portcullis, and through the gatehouse. She exchanges polite pleasantry with the guards in their bright red uniforms.

Her mother and her stepfather are waiting for her in the throne room, and in between her and them is a gauntlet of respected courtiers, servants bustling around with important loads, and guests of high social rank. But no matter what Leda did, no matter how careful she was, something would go wrong because when she reached the throne room, her stepfather would smile that sneering smile at her and say those nine most hated words:

“Your mother and I have been discussing your education.”

And so the dream went.

“Do you want to know what I think?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing asks.

“No,” Two says. “I really think I do not.”

“I think you say ‘good morning’ because you want to.”

“I want to do what I’m told,” Two says.

“Among other things,” it says. “But I think you want him to acknowledge you.”

“No,” Two says, shaking her head. “You are mistaken.”

“I think you know you couldn’t go back to being a piece of lab equipment now that you’ve been a person, and you want to know if he could relate to you as a person.”

“No,” Two repeats decisively.

“I think part of you would like to have a conversation with him.”

“You are mistaken.”

“I think you want to know what he thinks about you… if he thinks about you. Does he miss you like you miss him? Would he take you back as you are now? Would he hire you as a free person? Would he like you?”

“No!” Two yells. She turns and clobbers him with the broom. “I hate you, some sort of ridiculous owl turtle thing!” she yells as she hits him again and again. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

“Amaranth, you’re so smart!” the professor proclaims. “In all my years of teaching, I’ve never met a student who understood the material so quickly and so completely. That a nymph should be the one to…”

Under the covers, Mack begins to masturbate furiously. Amaranth, awoken once again, sighs, reaches over, and guides her lover’s hand to a slightly better spot. Mack moans in her sleep.

“At least somebody’s having pleasant dreams tonight,” Amaranth says.