Alone with Ian and me in our suite, Amaranth frowned and chewed her lip when I told her in detail about the dream and the conversation that had followed it.

“I guess it was kind of… drastic,” I said when I finished. The word seemed a little inadequate, but it really only seemed that way when I tried to explain it to someone else. Inside my head I understood what I’d done and why.

“Well, yes, it might have been better to wait and think about your options before going straight to something so… irrevocable,” she said. “I’m not saying you did the wrong thing, baby. Just that you could have waited to be sure it was the right one.”

“When I picked up my mirror, I didn’t think I’d actually be putting anything into motion,” I said. “I just felt like I needed to do something, even something small and symbolic like finding out how to get a hold of Kent, while I was still feeling all… well… while I was still capable of doing something. I think if I had gone back to sleep and waited until later I probably would have found it easiest to do nothing and just wait for my appointment with Teddi.”

“Would that have been so terrible, though?” Amaranth asked. “I mean, not only might she be able to give you other options for keeping your father out, but she could have been a sounding board for the whole Law plan.”

“Maybe… but, Amaranth, I feel like I did the right thing,” I said. “I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I don’t know if it’s the best thing. But I’ve had a great day and I feel good about what I did.”

“Then I’m glad you did it,” she said. She sat down on the bed and patted her lap. “Come here, baby, and I’ll get you ready for bed.”

That apparently entailed a torturous make-out and teasing session that heavily involved my nipple piercings and a lot of light, ticklish touches from the ends of her nails around the inside of my thighs.

Amaranth knew better than anyone how easy it was to set me off. I almost came three times while Ian watched. She knew exactly where the edge of that particular cliff was located, and she knew how to push me right up to the very brink of it before yanking me back from it. She got me panting and left me there… and I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard myself pant before. I hoped it sounded better farther away from my skull.

At the very least the sound couldn’t have been too distracting because Ian finished once just from watching… well, I think his hand helped, but under the circumstances I think that was the least that could have been expected. He was nearly hard again by the time Amaranth released me to take care of his needs, which I did without complaint.

One thing that had to be said about the whole denial thing: his sex life was definitely improving by any measurement.

Mine was… harder to say. The climax had always been more of about release and relief for me than simple pleasure. It was frustrating to have Amaranth work me up and then kiss me on the cheek and turn and walk away… but somehow that frustration made it all the more fulfilling for me to put my needs aside and get down on my knees in front of Ian.

It felt more like service, like a real gift I was giving him.

It was hard to explain, which made it all the more awkward when I found myself trying to do so to Nicki in class the next day. We’d sort of drifted in the topic of my sex life, ironically because I’d been asking her about what she would look for in a girlfriend. She didn’t really know what she liked, sexually, so she turned things around back to me.

“So, wait… Ian can just decide that you don’t get to get off for a few days?” she said.

“If that’s what he wants,” I said. I manged to say it without blushing, though I did incline my head. It felt more like a token of submission than embarrassment, though it was at least a bit of both. “It’s not a regular thing with us. I mean, it hasn’t been. We kind of just started it… I think we’re both getting to a place where we’re confident enough to try that kind of thing. Who knows where it’ll go?”

“Do you actually enjoy that?”

“I’m… learning to appreciate it,” I said, after some consideration. I didn’t want to sound like it was bad, but I felt like I’d only just barely brushed the surface of the good.

“More so than you would an actual orgasm or three?”

“No,” I said. “They’re… different styles of good. Good in different ways. It’s not something that could replace actually, you know, having sex all the way. Like I said, we’re just trying it, but now that you’ve got me talking about it my feeling is that in the long run it’ll kind of be like… like not having the same thing to eat every night. you know?”

“So you are into it?” she said.

I laughed a kind of sputtery laugh, that kind of came out my nose when I tried not to be too loud during class. Nicki seemed to provoke this reaction from me… in this case I wasn’t laughing at anything she’d said and I certainly wasn’t laughing at her. It was more that the question was unexpected. Normally the unexpected would make me freeze up for a moment.

With Nicki… I really couldn’t say what the difference was, but it was there.

“Well, I’m not out of it, I guess?” I said. “I mean, I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m reluctant or I’m just putting up with it for his sake… I’m not sure how I’d feel about it all the time or long-term, but it’s… a new experience. I’ve never had a chance to get used to having sex every day for a long period of time in the first place. In some ways, I’m getting more attention than usual. It’s not something I would have picked for myself… but it’s not something I’d turn down.”

“But you… you told him to do this, right?”

“No,” I said. “It was all his idea.”

“I thought that the whole sub thing was supposed to be voluntary?”

“It is,” I said. “I’m his sub, voluntarily.”

“So, would you normally tell him what you want and then have him make you do it?” she said. “I mean, that’s the impression I’ve had… the sub has the power.”

“Um… I think maybe some people do it like that that,” I said. “Maybe. I don’t really know. And, if I’m completely honest, there are some elements of me wanting someone else to take charge for the stuff that I want but I’m self-conscious about doing for myself… but really and truly, one of the things that I want is for someone to take charge. Period, and for real.”

“Oh,” she said. “Um… oh.”

“I have a feeling like I’m disappointing you,” I said.

“Oh, it’s not that,” she said. “I mean, not you, personally. I just had an idea about how the whole d-and-s thing worked that I guess was wrong… I’m not sure it’s something I can support.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you don’t have any control. It just seems really… unequal. One-sided.”

“The basic idea you were describing sounds one-sided, too,” I said. “I mean, you thought someone was calling all the shots for the other person. That’s still true.”

“Yeah, but it seems less squicky to think that the person who’s tied up or being whipped or whatever is the one in charge. You know?”

“I could see that,” I said. “But… if I wanted to be in charge, I wouldn’t want to be tied up. So to speak.”

“So… do you think you could ever be dominant?”

“N-no,” I said, with only a small sputter. “When I’m at my most confident… well, confident and self-aware… is when I’m most submissive. The times when I’m confident and really assertive, I have a small tendency to sort of be a bit of a clueless bitch. I don’t think there’s a lot of talent there waiting to be harnessed.”

“I can’t picture you being a… you know, bitch,” Nicki said, and it was adorable how much her voice dropped in volume when she said the word. “But then, I have a hard time seeing you as submissive. I guess that’s part of why it made more sense to me that you would be the one calling the shots?”

“You know, I’m really happy to be a passenger,” I said. “I’ve never really had a lot of feeling of control in my life, but I’ve also not had a lot of security. This gives me a feeling of both things at once.”

“I just don’t think I could do it,” Nicki said, shaking her head. “I mean, I’ve had dirty-tingly thoughts about women in leather with thigh high boots and whips, but it’s mostly thoughts about having sex with them while they’re slightly bossy, and maybe calling me, you know… names.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “I’m fond of… names, myself.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“A little bit,” I said. “But if you knew how rarely I’m the most experienced person in these conversations you wouldn’t blame me.”

“I’m not in-experienced,” Nicki said. “I just have had… different experiences. Then you have.”

“Well, most people have,” I said. I noticed that Professor Stone was kind of looking our way, so I added, “Let’s finish this conversation at dinner?”

“Okay,” she said. She was blushing. “I’m not like… I mean, I know you said I was welcome, but sometimes I like to eat lunch at different times, and…”

“Hey, you don’t need a reason to join us or not,” I said. “Real friendship isn’t an obligation… that’s something I learned from Puddy.”

“That doesn’t seem like something… oh,” she said.

After having spent a whole hour in Coach Callahan’s class the day before mostly trying the same couple of things and having my classmates catch on, I decided to spend the Thursday evening session working on feinting and faking people out so I could get around their defenses instead of powering through them all the time.

I figured that was the sort of thing the coach wanted to see from me… ways of handling situations where my usual tactics wouldn’t work or where my strength wouldn’t be such an overwhelming advantage. My strength and the speed it gave me still provided me with some benefits, because I could whip my staff around and reverse direction really fast. I wasn’t really great at it to begin with, but I picked things up as I went and I didn’t have to even be haflway good for another day.

As a half-immortal half-demon, I didn’t sweat much, but I still felt a little unnecessarily grubby after the unusual workout. I didn’t really have time to head back to the tower and take a shower, especially when I might need to eat in hurry to make my appointment with Teddi afterwards. There were shower facilities somewhere in the athletic center, but it would be a dry day on the plane of water before I ever set foot in them. I decided to just head back and change into a nicer, cleaner top.

I had a fitted T that had been a gift from Two. It was black, but it had a little bit more of a v-shaped neckline and some… reflecty-rectangle… things… making a kind of checkmark pattern around it. I didn’t wear it very often because I had a feeling I’d break the whatevers off of it if I wasn’t careful, and I was never careful… but I figured I could be careful enough for one evening.

As I carefully didn’t hurry to meet the others for dinner, I wondered if Nicki would say anything about the change. I really didn’t want to give her the wrong impression, that I was the kind of person who’d change clothes just for dinner.

It turned out that I’d had no need to worry, though, because she didn’t show up. Two noticed and appreciated it, though.

“I like that shirt,” she said. “It looks pretty nice on you.”

“You gave me this shirt,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Amaranth helped me pick out. She said it was more to your taste than my first choice. Otherwise it would have been nicer. You and your friend Nicki and I should go shopping sometime. She could help me convince you to wear more colors that are… colors..”

“My wardrobe is the most diverse it’s ever been, thank you very much,” I said.

“Yeah, ever since you bought that third pair of jeans things have really taken off,” Ian said.

“I have m… I do have more than three pairs of jeans,” I said. “I just… when I find a pair that I like, I get more of them. It’s more about comfort than appearance.”

“We could put sequins or rhinestones on the duplicates to make them more distinct,” Two said.

“I have only two questions,” Steff said. “Where would these sequins go and what would they spell?”

“On her pants,” Two said. “I have not thought about words. They could say… Mack’s Jeans?”

“There will be no writing things on my pants!” I said.

Ian gave Amaranth a meaningful look, and she smiled.

“I think we have some say in the disposition of your pants, baby,” Amaranth said.

“You didn’t say if you wanted to go shopping,” Two said.

I thought about it. It was in Two’s nature to keep herself busy, she had a wider circle of friends than I did, and since I wasn’t dating her and hadn’t needed her help with mental invasions we really hadn’t seen a lot of each other so far during the school year. And I had a feeling Nicki would be flattered to be asked along for her fashion expertise.

“Okay,” I said. “Well, we’ll have to ask Nicki, obviously… and I’m going to be kind of occupied this weekend.”

“With me,” Steff said. “And I think this sounds awesome. I can take you out for a little walk… I still remember our first time hitting the town.”

“Then it’s a date,” Two said. “But not a date-date, except between Steff and Mack, and maybe Mack and her friend Nicki, and maybe Mack and her friend Nicki and Steff.” She paused and her face scrunched up as she worked her way through the various permutations. “It is perhaps substantially but not entirely a date-date, pending the acceptance of Mack’s friend Nicki.”

“Two, you’re one of a kind,” Hazel said.

“That’s our pseudowench,” Steff added.

“Set an alarm for your first class,” Ian suggested after I helped him relieve a sort of debilitating cramp that’s apparently caused by watching your naked girlfriend talk tough to government agents. “Your first class isn’t until like ten, right? You can get way more sleep that way. I’ll tell everyone at breakfast why you aren’t there.”

“Okay, but… everyone?” I said. “I mean, tell Amaranth…”

“Well, Dee might already know,” Ian said.

I waited a few seconds to see if she’d respond from the other room, but she didn’t.

“I think she’s become pretty reflexive about throwing up a wall of silence when you stay over,” I said. “Anyway, if it’s just people from the suite and Steff, yes, tell, but otherwise, just say I didn’t sleep well.”

“Okay, but I can’t always tell when Two’s friend is there.”

“I guess Hazel’s cool,” I said. “But seriously, don’t talk about this stuff in front of Nicki.”

“Not that I think it’s a good idea to spread this around, but you want to start by keeping secrets from her?”

“I don’t want to scare her off,” I said.

Ian headed back to his own room so he wouldn’t wake me up when he got up, and I settled back down for a few more hours of sleep, mercifully dreamless and mercifully alone.

I didn’t like to skip breakfast because it would be an easy habit for me to acquire. Not having my usual plates of sweet and savory goodness at the start of the day wouldn’t leave my stomach grumbling for the rest of the morning or my body crashing later in the day. Breakfast was a treat for my senses and a chance to socialize rather than a physical need. The intermingling of my immortal and mortal heritages meant that I didn’t actually need to eat or perform any of the other functions associated with eating.

But getting up for breakfast gave me one more chance to see my friends during days in which we’d all be off doing our own things. It gave me a chance to start waking up a little bit earlier than I needed to, so I could be sharper and more alert during my morning class. I didn’t have much advantage over the fully mortal in that department. Some diabolists have stated that demons could go longer without sleep than humans could with fewer adverse effects, but that aside the basic need was the same: about eight hours about once a day.

With the sunlight that managed to sneak in around the edge of the curtains and the sounds of life echoing all around the hallway, I didn’t manage to sleep all the way until my alarm. But with the suite all to myself and nowhere else to be, I was able to enjoy a long, hot soak in the tub… my first of the school year.

I’d had a complicated relationship with the shared bathroom in Harlowe Hall. I’d loved hot baths and showers, but the longer my first year went on, the more the bathroom had felt like hostile territory. It wasn’t just that I’d actually been physically attacked in them. Being in them meant I was sharing space with people who hated me, who felt threatened by me and were a threat to me because of that.

That had been a big part of the appeal of a private bathroom for me. But once everyone else got moved in, I’d started deferring to the others’ needs. The fact that Two and Dee both might need to use the bathroom had kept me from staking a claim to it for an hour or more at a time.

I realized as I sat enveloped in hot water and suds and steam that this had been a mistake. It would be a total dick more to take up the bathroom in the morning, but I had spaced out my classes to make sure I had time to myself during the day. A daily soak was probably not in the cards, but I figured I should be able to manage it once or twice a week and be better for it.

A bubble bath wouldn’t make up for lost sleep, but it was definitely a better start to the day than stumbling out of bed, pulling on some clothes, and staggering off in the direction of my local hazards lecture. I’d left the door from the bathroom to our half of the suite open so I’d hear the alarm in my mirror going off which meant I could forget about the passage of time and just relax, something that I badly needed when I reviewed what had happened in the night… when I thought about what I’d done, what I’d said.

By the light of day… or the light of a windowless bathroom, anyway… my actions did not seem half as clever as they had at the time. Standing up to my father had felt good, but it might have been better to not let him know I was going to be working against him.

I felt that it couldn’t have been helped, though. If I hadn’t acted so defiant in my dream, I couldn’t have acted that way awake. There was no way for me to put on a meek front and just pretend to capitulate to him, because it wouldn’t have been a front. Basically I was a recovering capituholic. I had no resistance to the path of least resistance.

Anyway, it was done and there was no way to undo it. If I got back to Kent and told him I’d changed my mind, I had no doubt that I would have to pay dearly for him to consider recalling the arrow I’d loosed. Rather than worrying about where exactly it would land when it came back down, I decided to focus on the present and my immediate future.

Ian wanted to assert more dominance… the thought of that left me tingly in interesting places. Submission might have been a close cousin to capitulation, but it was far more useful and it left me feeling full of direction and purpose rather than adrift and at the mercy of the winds and tides.

What would it mean in practical terms? Right now the answer seemed to be sex more often but with fewer orgasms. Then I thought back to how he’d phrased his suggestion about sleeping in… forcefully and matter-of-factly. It had also been reasonable, though, and definitely the right move.

I could definitely like this.

As long as I was comfortable and alone, I decided to work on my breathing, too. It helped that the air inside the shower curtain was warm and smelled like cinnamon and vanilla. I closed my eyes, slowly pushed a breath out, and then even more slowly drew one back in.

Submission.

I’d always had an easy enough time throwing myself into my schoolwork when it was subjects I cared about and classes I wanted to be in. Other times it was a struggle… a struggle that could be managed, but one that was easier to manage when the rest of my life wasn’t giving me anything else to fight against. That didn’t seem like it would be the case for the next while.

Was it possible that I was overlooking an easier way?

My day would start nicely enough, but the rest of it was made up of classes I didn’t particularly care for, that I had as a result of obligations that were forced on me. Okay, I’d agreed to take this second class with Coach Callahan in order to save my grade point average during my first semester, but the chain of events that had led me there had started with the requirement to take a weapon proficiency class.

But neither her class nor Professor Swain’s was really all bad, and even if they had been completely pointless and terrible, I still had to get through them and I had to do so with a decent grade.

I breathed in and out and thought about how it felt to to be under the palm of Amaranth’s hand, to be under Ian’s control. I thought about how good it felt to be following a process, to be given clear instructions… to have clear lines of authority.

Professor Swain was my teacher. She didn’t want to cross over to the main campus to teach a delving class three times a week any more than I wanted to be taking one, but she did it all the same… she did it, and that meant she was my teacher. She probably didn’t get a lot of respect as a gnome among humans, but she was a professor and she deserved it.

Callahan… as much as she clearly relished what she was doing, something in her seemed to chafe at it, too. Possibly it was the effort it took her not to kill any of her students. Whatever it was… well, she seemed at least mildly squicked out when I acted submissively in response to her, but she’d never complained about the results.

I worked the way that I worked.

By the time the alarm ended my bath, I’d managed to work myself into a state of utter calm and confidence that I didn’t break my concentration or start blushing when Acantha stopped and stared at me as I came into her classroom… later than I normally would have arrived, but still a couple of minutes before class began.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Not a thing that I can discern,” she said. “Did you sleep well last night?”

“Actually, no,” I said.

“Whatever you took for it agrees with you.”

“That would be a bath,” I said, and she laughed.

Somehow she seemed a lot more relaxed than normal, too. That probably had more to do with the fact that some of the more unruly voices were gone from the room and in their absence the rest of the class seemed slightly more willing to treat her more like a knowledgeable professional than a substitute teacher in elementary school.

Twice during class Acantha said something to me about my attentiveness to the safe handling procedures. Attentiveness was not something a teacher had ever specifically recognized me for. It felt good… not just like a compliment, but like praise. I beamed more than I blushed.

I thought it was a good sign, too. She’d given me a perfect score and extra credit on my first assignment for exceeding the bounds of it, but she’d also told me she wanted to see my ability to work within confines… or as she’d put it, to show her I could be prudent.

I was hoping to see Nicki at lunch, but she wasn’t there and Ian told me she hadn’t joined them for breakfast, either. Maybe she wasn’t an early riser, but I had a feeling she’d need a dose of reassurance the next time I saw her. Hazel and her suitemates were with us, and so I didn’t want to get into the whole subject of who knew what about my nocturnal dealings at the table. Amaranth told me that Ian had said I had something to tell her about, and she suggested we wait until the evening when we could do it behind closed doors.

That afternoon I wasn’t moaning in my head about having to go to Local Hazards… I wasn’t even telling myself that Eloise’s geomancy would make it worthwhile, though I was still looking forward to that. I’d say I didn’t have any feeling about the class itself one way or the other, except I did… I felt ready for it. Not happy and not grumbly, just ready. It was coming up and I was prepared for it.

“Hey there!” Eloise said when I walked in. “Looks like someone got up on the right side of the bed this morning.”

“Yeah, and it felt so good I did it again a few hours later,” I said.

“Well, you look like a thousand gold,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you walk in with your head like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Up,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Nothing wrong with keeping one’s eyes to the ground,” Professor Swain said. “You can miss a lot of things if you aren’t watching where you put your feet. Of course, you miss a lot covering your feet up, too.”

“I like to go barefoot,” Eloise said. “But human culture frowns on it.”

“Shoes are a conspiracy to sell more carpets,” the professor said. “You’d get years’ more use out of your carpets if you didn’t wear shoes.”

“You won’t hear me arguing with that. I don’t wear shoes inside my own home,” Eloise said. “But the university actually requires them.”

“Mark my words, someone is getting a kickback there.”

By the time it was nearly the end of the day, I was starting to feel a little self-conscious for the first time since I’d woke up… but mostly I was aware of all the things that were missing. I was used to having a certain amount of background anxiety, a nagging doubt that I didn’t belong in whatever place I was or that whatever I was doing, I was doing wrong. A full calendar year at college had diminished my fears and made them recede from the front of my brain, but they’d always been there.

For the first time they’d left me completely alone for the day. As soon as I realized that, I kind of felt like I was due to get completely knocked on my ass by life… but then, I’d already faced my father and a government agent who would probably have no qualms about killing me in my sleep if he had orders to or if he thought it would further his cause. I’d already had my wake-up call, and I’d dealt with it, gone back to sleep, and got on with my life.

Coach Callahan reminded me near the start of her class that she wanted to see me taking more chances… pretty much the opposite of what Acantha wanted from me.

“The point of class is risk mitigation,” she said. “You take the opening that’s in front of you, you end the fight without messing around. But I know you have enough brains in that skull to not lose sight of that for part of a week. What I don’t want is for you to get too comfortable while you’re using your demon strength to blow past defenses. So today, tomorrow… you find other ways to take your classmates out, and you figure out how to do it as fast and hard as the obvious way. Clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said… which got me a raised eyebrow, but Coach Callahan was the queen of doing what needed to be done, and I needed to be in that head space to make doing what she told me to second nature.

I could think on my feet. I could solve problems. But when someone was coming at me with an axe or sword and the problem involved hurting them before they hurt me, I needed to be completely in the submission zone.

By telling me she wouldn’t be counting how well I did for the next two days as long as I pulled out something by Friday, she’d given me the freedom to experiment. I started by trying for less direct victories… making opponents come to me and knocking their legs out from under them and then finishing them while they were down. That was something that would have been completely against my nature if I’d been doing it for myself.

As it was, they went red before the second blow about half of the time that it worked… but I made myself follow through anyway, because stopping to see if the extra blow was needed was not what Coach Callahan wanted to see. It was not the point of the class. If they were red, my phantasmal weapon would pass through them like the phantasm it actually was. No hurt, no foul.

That’s not to say that it worked every time. I hit the floor sometimes, and some of my classmates were agile enough to avoid a low blow without losing momentum. I received my first jump-kick that day. Even though it was real and not phantasmal, I couldn’t complain because it didn’t harm me any more than an illusion would have and I think the girl who did it was probably reacting in the moment. It took me by surprise, though, and gave her enough time to finish me off.

By the half hour mark, my record for the day was four and three and my opponents were less willing to come at me. Since I wasn’t being graded, I tried throwing my staff at one of them. It spun into his sword with enough force to knock it out of his hands and send it flying, but I didn’t have a follow-up and he had my staff. He didn’t have enough strength or skill with it to score a quick victory with it, and so I was able to wrench it back from him after taking a blow to the head and one to my arm.

The arm injury kept me from doing a one-hit kill. I wasn’t coordinated enough to swing the staff in my off-hand very effectively.

I won that fight, anyway… eventually. I might have had a harder time letting go of my feelings about conflict and violence and just getting down to what needed to be done if I hadn’t been deep in my submissive state, but by the time I finished I was way out of it. Battering a guy into submission required me to let go of my own… my altered mental state was able to carry me right up to the door and even knock on it, but it couldn’t carry me through it.

Being purposefully submissive instead of just bending with the most aggressive source of pressure could make my life easier and better, but it seemed submissiveness was not going to be the answer to everything.

Even without any cliched catapulting into an upright position, it would have been hard to jerk myself awake without disturbing Ian given how close we slept.

“…who was it this time?” he said groggily.

“Him,” I said.

I slipped my legs out from under his and got a little shakily to my feet. The cold was bracing, or that’s what I told myself. I was moving with a purpose, if not a lot of balance. I’d told the man that I would make an alliance with anyone to keep him out, and apparently it was true.

The next time I saw the owl-turtle thing I would talk to it… not necessarily about any forays into hostile territory, as I thought that was likely to go nowhere, and it had probably been responsible for my restless nights. But if it could interfere with his visits into my head and help me shield things from his knowledge… well, that would be a start.

I wasn’t going to wait for it to pop up again, though, especially since that would require me to be asleep, and then it would be beyond my control whether it showed up, or if he did. If I could make a problem for the man in the physical world, it might just put enough of a stick in his spokesto keep him out of my head for a while.

“Who are you reflecting at this hour?” Ian asked, realizing that I was going for my mirror on top of the dresser.

Or I had been.

The transition from my dream… where I’d been fully awake… to the waking world… where I’d been asleep… had left me with a serious case of jelly-legs.

“You remember last year after Leda’s murder when I gave myself up to those guys from Law?” I asked, stretching out an arm to steady myself against the wall.

“No, actually that totally slipped my mind,” Ian said. “That was you?”

“Smart ass. The guy who delivered me to Embries. His name was Kent… Art,” I said. “Short for Arthur, I think. He has some stuff on my father I think might be useful.”

“Do you have his contact info?” Ian asked.

“No, but I know that as of last year he was a Law agent,” I said. “And he worked in the central provinces regional office, or however they’re organized. I think that would be enough to find him.”

“You’re not going to reach him in the middle of the… well, I guess it’s technically morning,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But I want to see if I can at least find him in a directory or something… he could have been reassigned, or had his name and face changed, or who knows what. If I can’t find him, I guess I’ll start looking for a Plan B.”

“Why isn’t he Plan B?”

“Because that would leave me without a Plan A.”

My legs woke up enough for me to totter forward, grab my mirror, and then seat myself on the floor with a modicum of something that could almost be called grace. That last part had been more a matter of necessity than part of any plan, but once I was down I decided it was as good a place as any. I forced my breathing to slow again, remembering Dee’s meditation lessons.

The Department of Law could not by any stretch of imagination count as the good guys. They were the greater good guys. They were the order guys. In theory they existed to uphold the tenets of law and order, but in their view the preservation of the Imperial Republic itself was the best bet for preserving law and order, and they themselves were absolutely essential to its protection. Hence, they were somewhat ambivalent on the subject of actually following laws themselves.

But it was liked I’d said in my dream: I’d make an alliance with just about anyone.

And in this case, Arthur Kent would just be the messenger.

“Um… do you maybe want to put on a shirt or something first?” Ian asked.

“I’m not going to be talking to him,” I said. “Anyway, even the thought of dealing with these guys again would be enough to make my knees go weak, if I wasn’t already. I’d rather be as relaxed as I can be.”

I opened my mirror and focused on it. According to the timepiece display it was just a little past five, but I willed myself past that and to the ethernet. Modern communication devices didn’t require a lot of divination talent to operate, or else most people wouldn’t be able to use them. My unusually centered state of mind heightened my connection to it.

“Law offices,” I said aloud to help focus, and though I half expected to get offices where law was practiced, my focus was apparently sufficient to convey the concept of Law rather than the law. “Prax and Blackwater area. Agent Kent, Arthur.”

Mist filled the tiny mirror. I stared at it for half a second before I realized that it wasn’t conjuring up a list of results but connecting the reflection. Half a second later I was looking at the man himself, somewhat battered and weary looking.

“Yes?” he said.

“Agent Kent? It’s Mackenzie Blaise.”

“I know,” he said.

“Sorry… I wasn’t actually counting on getting you,” I said.

“I’ve had a funnel-glyph out in the ether for you for a while,” he said. “I happened to be at my desk when it went off, or you’d be talking to my echo-trap now.”

“It’s like five in the morning,” I said.

“I know, and if we make this fast enough I can still get home in time to get a full hour of sleep before I have to get up again,” he said. “Are you aware that you’re naked?”

“I borrowed my girlfriend’s shirt,” I said.

It was a little late to duck and cover, but I tilted the mirror up more towards my face. Since I couldn’t see my own reflection there was no way of knowing how much difference this made, but I focused on my breathing and ignored my nudity.

“You’re witty for five in the morning,” he said. “I don’t do witty before six.”

“Won’t you be asleep then?”

“That’s the best time to deal with witty teenagers,” he said.

“Fine. Do you know if my grandmother was aware of my father’s involvement in my birth?”

I was pretty sure the man hadn’t meant to feed me on purpose, but it would be good to confirm that it was true.

“Well, she grew up on a farm and she had children herself, so however old-fashioned she may seem I think she’s probably familiar with the part a man plays in…”

“I mean him, specifically,” I said. “Does she know who my father is?”

“I really couldn’t say,” he said. “And yes, I mean I don’t know. Judging by what I know of her, my best guess is that she doesn’t. If she knew at the time, she probably would have intervened. Do you have any happy childhood memories of her?”

“I guess,” I said. “Holidays and stuff.”

“Then I think it’s safe for you to assume she didn’t know back then,” he said. “My best guess based on what I know about her… and I want to emphasize that this is not based on any direct, first-hand knowledge of her… is that if she found out about it later she would have done something with that information, or tried to do so in a way that we would have noticed.”

It sounded like he was going on the same kind of reasoning I’d used. I’d hoped for something more concrete.

“Mackenzie? I do have something I need to finish here.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you’d know something more than that.”

“I do have a file on your grandmother that I read last year, but it was out of date and incomplete,” he said. “It was a pre-recruitment evaluation that my office inherited.”

“It was never updated?”

“We never recruited her.”

“She was an imperial agent,” I said.

“She was a paladin in the service of the empire,” he said. “There’s a bit of a difference there. The White Dragons are an imperial order, and they coordinate their international missions with Law, but they’re not actually under our aegis. Separation of powers, and all that.”

“Like that actually means anything to you guys.”

“No matter how many spheres our interests might touch on, we actually do have certain prescribed limits to our power,” he said. “To say nothing of practical limits. Even if I somehow had a file on every single person in the world, I couldn’t have every one of them in arm’s reach at all times. If you looked me up to just ask me what your grandmother knows… that’s not the reason I had you flagged.”

“That was actually just the preamble,” I said. “What I really want from you won’t make much difference if she already knows and isn’t doing anything. I want you to send your file… the one on him… to her, and identify him as my father.”

“Is that all? You could tell her that he’s your father.”

He could be right… I probably could give her enough information to at least lead her to the right demon. But with no name and so little to distinguish him, it was far from a sure thing… and the lack of an easy identification meant it would be impossible for me to just drop her a postcard. It would have to be a lengthy conversation, at the very least.

And even if she would do it herself for her own reasons, I couldn’t believe my grandmother wouldn’t make me pay for it. She would not pass up the chance to bring me back under her control.

In fact, if she saw an opportunity to do that, she might consider it a higher priority than killing a demon or avenging her daughter’s death. She’d spent almost a decade trying to keep me safe and safely in check.

“This can’t come from me,” I said.

“I like the sound of that,” he said. “But what explanation am I supposed to give her for dropping this information into her lap out of the blue?”

“What sort of explanations do you usually give?” I asked.

“She’ll be looking for a motive.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got an obvious one,” I said. “A demon’s been operating in your beat. He evades your usual methods. She’ll probably figure that you want to get rid of him. And as far as I know, that’s true.”

“A successful demon removed from the plane is a win for everybody,” he said. “But the kind of brawl that it’s likely to take to dislodge him, especially when it’s a fight between a paladin of Brimstone Blaise’s caliber and when she has nothing to lose and he has everything to lose? I know people your age throw around the words ‘epic level’ a lot, but that phrase exists for a reason and an epic level battle is not the kind of thing we want to see. Not in the middle of inhabited provinces. It’s not orderly. It’s not good.”

“But would it come to that?” I said. “He doesn’t fight his battles head-on. You said he likes to keep his head down. If he knows she’s hunting him, he might even go to ground completely… and that will probably take him away from settled areas, if he’s in one now.”

“So this isn’t about killing him?” he said. He sounded disappointed. “I was halfway interested when I thought you were trying to use me to put a hit out on your own father using your own grandmother.”

“Well, it will at least give him something to think about,” I said. “If it does nothing but keep the two of them busy for a while, I’ll call it a double win.”

“And what will you call it if she dies?”

“Her choice,” I said. “I don’t think anybody made her be a paladin.”

“I take it back,” he said. “I’m more than halfway interested. You are one cold daughter of a bastard. But what do I get for doing this?”

“Well, since it’ll cost you nothing I think a fair trade would be… nothing.”

“It’ll cost me time.”

“Minutes.”

“Minutes are how I measure my sleep, kid,” he said. “Which means you already owe me just for listening.”

“You led me into a dragon’s den,” I said.

“And you came out the other side unharmed.”

“I came out the front door, actually.”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

“Yeah, well, that’s where we’re having a bit of a disconnect, because I was speaking literally,” I said. “It wasn’t a tunnel I passed through or a rite of passage, it was the actual lair of an actual dragon and what happened there was the single worst, most harrowing experience of my life.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I can’t,” I said. “And I wouldn’t talk about it with you. Look… you had a flag out because you were hoping to hear from me. You probably didn’t expect me to turn up out of the blue looking for a job.”

“No, I thought you’d turn up wanting something from me,” he said. “Which gives me the opportunity to ask what you’ll do for me. You see how this works?”

“What I’m asking is not that big a favor,” I said. “It lines up with your interests and it probably won’t require anything you couldn’t do on your lunch break.”

“You’re assuming my lunch break isn’t booked solid as it is,” he said. “And no, you’re not asking for anything big from my point of view. But you said this can’t come from you, and I can’t imagine any situation where you’d be calling on me if you could see another way of accomplishing the same goal some other way. You need me to do this, and that makes it a big favor.”

“Fine,” I said. “You do this and we’re even.”

“That doesn’t get me anything.”

“Yes it does,” I said. “It gets you even. You want me to owe you a favor, right?”

“And you’re saying I won’t.”

“You’ll be one step closer,” I said. “Look, you could watch me secretly and swoop in and save my life the next time I’m in real trouble and I still wouldn’t feel like I owe you a damned thing. You’d just be making up for what you did before. And that should be what it takes to make up for that… something seriously life-or-death. And now that I’ve said that out loud I could never trust any situation where that happened.”

“Believe it or not, you aren’t important enough for me to engineer a rescue for,” he said. “You are one of several potentially interesting candidates I have an eye on.”

“You put a trace on me,” I said.

“That only took a minute,” he said.

“Whatever lengths you would or wouldn’t go through to get me to forgive you is beside the point,” I said. “The point is that you can either do this one relatively simple thing and the next time I need a favor from you I’ll agree that it is a favor, or else it doesn’t matter what you do, I’ll never want to deal with you.”

“How do I know there’s going to be a next time?” he asked. “You could just shake me off and never give me a second thought.”

“That’s my plan,” I said. “But you already know how good my plans are, because I told you last time I wouldn’t be contacting you.”

“Hold on,” he said, and before I could respond the mirror went back to swirling mist. I barely had time to be irritated before he came back. “Okay, I’ll do it. But I want you to know, I’m doing this more because I’m amused by your attempts to negotiate than because you’re any good at it.”

“Whatever you have to tell yourself to get the file in the mail,” I said.

“If you want to have a look at it yourself, I’d be happy to arrange a meeting.”

“Maybe next time,” I said. I flipped the mirror shut. It was beyond brusque, but he was the one counting his minutes.

I stretched out my legs before trying to get up. I looked over at the bed, where Ian was sitting up watching me at rapt attention.

“What?” I asked.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “But I’m trying to figure out if something else could have crawled into your head while you were sleeping and grabbed the reins.”

I laughed, not so much because it was funny but because all the tension I’d been holding onto for the past several minutes just sort of broke at once and left me first laughing and then shaking. I felt like I used to feel every time I’d had half as much attention focused on me… that is, like I was going to throw up.

“It’s me,” I said. “I promise.”

“I know,” Ian said. “I watched you almost bash your head into the corner of the dresser. No entity could be as graceless in that body as you are without a lot of practice.”

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Out-and-out humiliation could get me hot and bothered given the right context, but it would also leave me just as bothered as I was hot. But what we did was not humiliating. Giving in to Ian, giving myself over to him, being put to his use like that… it was more a form of sublimation, no pun intended, and it left me feeling both very relaxed and very strong in myself. Amaranth’s gentle, loving, but firm spanking had had a similar effect, or else I probably would have been too frazzled about the casual nudity to pull it off.

We didn’t go to bed any time soon after I finished Ian off, but instead just went back to our homework. Only now I was sitting cross-legged on the floor near him, and he still had his dick out until the next time he needed to get up… but only in an incidental sort of way.

The whole thing left him with a kind of unassuming cockiness, pun somewhat intended, that just made me want to be used even more by him.

I’d spent enough time sitting on the floor at the feet of either Amaranth or Ian to be comfortable doing it, though doing homework was a new experience. I thought I would probably need to get some kind of writing surface if I were to do it more often. The interesting thing was that even without a desk to write on, the clarity and calm it left me with made a huge difference in my ability to write out a spell formula flawlessly.

If Ian really did want to assert more dominance in our relationship, I could definitely see the upsides from where I was sitting. It was something to talk about in the morning, I decided, once I’d re-emerged from my submersion. I didn’t feel like talking much at all as it was, and there didn’t seem to be any need to.

My dream that night began with me naked and on the floor, though sitting rather than kneeling or crawling. It had the horrible hyper-real clarity that told me it wasn’t just a dream.

The contours of the room had shifted a bit. In the waking world, the only way to fit a queen-sized bed into the undersized dorm room was to have it with one end stuck in the nook where the original bunk beds had been. In the dream, the whole room was bigger and the bed had its head towards the outer wall and its foot towards the door.

The man was sitting on the foot of the bed, his hat in his hand. I didn’t know how much control he had over the initial setting of the dream, but he certainly would have had a hard time figuring out a better way to make me feel looked down upon. The altered dimensions of the room even made me feel smaller, like I was a child instead of being a mostly-adult college student in what was technically her own room.

“So that’s how you spend your time,” he said, shaking his head .”On your knees, slobbering all over a piece of human meat… it’s like watching a vampire kiss a boo-boo to make it all better. Disturbing”

“Well, I’m sorry for having sex in a way that makes it creepy for you to spy on it,” I said.

I used the shot of indignation that went through me as I said it to asset myself a bit, and I found myself sitting on the desk chair. I’d go to the floor for any of my lovers because I chose to be beneath them, but I wouldn’t lower myself for him.

I kept myself naked, though. I was naked, in real life, and since I was alone in bed with my boyfriend I didn’t see a problem with that. If he was going to sit there in judgment of the way I lived my life, pretending I was living it a different way wasn’t exactly a strong opening move.

“Listen, child, your mind’s not a television box and it’s not a book,” he said. “I can’t change the channel and I can’t flip around in it. You got something fresh and firm in your head…excuse my choice of words… when you fall asleep, it’s going to be right there when I show up.”

Buoyed by the sense of clarity that still lingered from my earlier submission, I took the time to dissect what he was saying before responding. He was acting like he’d had the misfortune of stumbling into his knowledge of my bedroom hijinks… but even if that were true, he’d had no business in the place where he was stumbling.

“Think of it as a trap for the unwary burglar, then,” I said. “I’m sure you’d rather I’d been biting and tearing… but I’m just not made that way, and even if I was, he wouldn’t be very filling any more.”

“Hey, just because I’d like to see more respect for yourself doesn’t mean I’d want you to do anything that makes it more dangerous for you to live in this world,” he said. “You are far too precious to me. That’s one reason I took your pitchfork away until you’re a bit… wiser. It was apt to get you into far too much trouble.”

The mention of my pitchfork stirred something in me that almost distracted me from the ongoing judgment, but I decided to address that and ignore the dangled bait.

“I’m learning how to respect the person I am,” I said. “I have to know myself in order to respect myself, and I’m not going to accept the judgment of someone who doesn’t know the first thing about me when it comes to what is and isn’t respectful… and anyway, you could have told me what the pitchfork could do to me and how to handle it safely!”

Okay, so ignoring the dangling bait hadn’t completely worked out. But I hadn’t let his judgment pass unchallenged, and I’d kept mostly calm.

“Still could,” he said. “Will, one day… when I can trust that you’ll listen to me and won’t just go doing the opposite of what I say out of sheer damned spite. The point isn’t that you should be out there killing humans or that you shouldn’t be enjoying yourself, it’s about how you do it.”

I didn’t want his approval, but I didn’t deserve his disapproval.

More than that, he didn’t deserve to approve or disapprove of me.

“Yeah?” I said. “If you think you could do a better job, I’ll dream a dick and you can show me.”

“So that’s how you talk to your daddy?”

“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never met him,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think he even exists. I also don’t think you really give half a disapproving cluck who I have sex with, or how I do it… it’s just a convenient lever, a way of making me feel inferior.”

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” he said.

“Right, which is why you need to go to that kind of effort to convince me to,” I said.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “We’re getting off to a bad start… again… but I’m not here to push my own agenda. I wouldn’t be bothering you at all, to tell you the truth, but there’s something going on you need to know about. Something new.”

“What?”

“Well, I don’t want to alarm you any, but you should know you’ve got something creeping around your backstair,” he said.

I bit back my first response and forced myself to breathe, in the process realizing that I hadn’t been. At all. One of the lesser pitfalls of a dream. Elves… full elves… could stop their breath in real life, though they lost some of what made them like mortals in the process.

What did I lose when I didn’t have a breath? Any sense of tempo, or temper, probably. Though I still felt more in control than usual, I’d been getting angrier and angrier.

Focus, I thought, and it sounded in my head like Dee’s voice during our meditation sessions. Breathe.

I made myself breathe and thought before I answered. The way he said it, it sounded like he didn’t know that I knew about the owl-turtle thing… that seemed impossible, but the owl-turtle thing itself was an anomaly to begin with, and Dee had said that it was able to hide its nature and true presence from even skilled telepaths. Whatever path he’d taken to my sleeping mind, I didn’t think the man measured up to the standards of Dee’s people in that department.

If he didn’t know, I decided, I wasn’t going to tell him.

“What, child?” he said. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing… just another retort wasted on you,” I said, realizing that leaving it at “nothing” was telling him that it was something I didn’t want him to know. “But it seemed too obvious, and honestly, you’re not worth the effort.”

“I’m serious, though, and no, I’m not talking about me,” he said. “There has been something lurking around the edge of your mind the past couple of nights. Listen, I know you don’t think much of me but I’ve always been up front with you about my presence. I’ve got no reason to come by except to see you, so you’ll always know when I’m around.”

“As far as safe but meaningless claims go, ‘I’m never around when you can’t see me’ rates pretty high,” I said. “How exactly is it that you came to know what’s going on in my mind, if you weren’t around?”

“A father knows,” he said.

“So how did you?”

“Thought you weren’t wasting time with obvious retorts,” he said.

“It’s a work in progress,” I said. “If you haven’t been spying, how do you know what has or hasn’t been in my head?”

“When I go in and out, I leave protections over my path. Alarms, you might say,” he said. “It’s you I’m thinking of… I wouldn’t be so irresponsible as to leave a way into your mind that any Tom, Dybbuk, and Harry could crawl in through, you know. I hope you can at least appreciate that.”

“Thank you for taking the time to put a string with some tin cans on it across the hole you leave in my head,” I said.

“Yeah, well, something tripped over that ‘string’, only it was heading in the wrong direction… it wasn’t on the outside heading in, but the inside going out.”

“Oh,” I said. So, it seemed that the owl-turtle thing had at least made an initial foray in the direction of the man’s mind without my permission. It seemed obvious that the sense of lurking presence I’d felt the past couple of nights was either a result of it trying to skirt around the edges of my consciousness, or a side-effect of it trying to get past the man’s defenses. So it seemed that either it had decided there was something there worth pursuing with or without my cooperation, or it was trying to test the feasibility of its ideas in the hopes of better persuading me to go along with them.

The man’s eyes narrowed, just a bit. I realized my noncommittal response had rattled him somewhat. That was surprising, but it was nice to see.

I kept breathing. Slow, steady.

“What?” he asked. “What do you know?”

“Nothing,” I said, this time counting on the fact that it was the world’s most transparent denial. It was more or less the truth, but if I said it loud enough he’d never believe it. “I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you noticed.”

“What were you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing!” I said, even more forcefully. “I mean, you’d know if I did, right? You’re the expert here. I’m just sort of… feeling my way around.”

I didn’t have to force the smile that came onto my face as I said the last part. Feeling my way around. If he thought I was stumbling around in the direction of his headspace, that would probably reinforce it.

“Don’t play around,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant not to play around with him in the here and now, or not to play around at poking back at his mind, or if he was just covering all the bases in general. “Seriously, girl, you do not want to mess with me.”

“You’re right about that,” I said. I got up and stretched. Now that he was getting uncomfortable, I was feeling far less so. “I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

“You’re not fooling anyone,” he said. “I know there’s something else that’s been bird-dogging me. Not you. More than you.”

The phrase “bird-dogging” made me smile because of its accidental almost-appropriateness. I didn’t hide my amusement from him… I’d let him wonder what was so funny.

“I thought I made it clear that who I let into my room and what I do with them is my business,” I said. I wished it were true, but I could say it with enough conviction anyway because given the choice I would take the owl-turtle thing in over him.

I had the increasingly surreal sense that to an outside observer… someone who had no clue what was going on in my head… I’d look a lot more clever than I actually was, like a character in a TV show or comic book who always keeps her cool and always has a plan.

I didn’t have a plan, exactly. I was just liked seeing him rattled.

Is this how he feels? I wonder. Not knowing half of what he wants me to think he knows, not telling me half of what he does know. I didn’t necessarily agree that turnabout was fair play, but playing fair had to be done on both sides.

“You’re messing with things you don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m messing with things you don’t understand… and that worries you,” I said. I added the last bit when I realized how I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I I had almost sounded. With the addition, it almost sounded insightful.

“I’m worried for you,” he said. “Can’t you understand that?”

“Yeah, well… if I didn’t have anyone climbing into my head in the first place, I wouldn’t have to turn to anyone else to help keep them out,” I said. “So if you don’t want me making any alliances with forces that are beyond your reckoning, stop giving me a reason to.”

I felt every inch the brat that Amaranth had said I wasn’t, and that thought gave me a weird thrill of impish glee. Asserting myself like this was doing nothing to knock me out of my comfortable headspace.

I still felt submissive, that just made it all the more significant that I wasn’t submitting to him.

“Girl, you have no idea what kind of forces I can reckon with after a thousand years of crawling about the skin of this world,” he said. I could see fire behind his eyes… I could practically see it burning beneath his skin. For the first time, the thin veneer was fading away.

“No, but I know at least one thing you can’t reckon with,” I teased.

“You’ve got too much of your mama in you,” he said.

“Nine years’ worth of her… not nearly enough,” I said. That was probably his fault, but I sat on the blast of anger that thought provoked. “Can I blame you for that? I think I will.”

The offhand way I said it to him was apparently the conversational equivalent of a head blow in Callahan’s class. He leaped to his feet like he’d just sat on something with teeth, a sneer on his face.

“Yeah, don’t you be so proud,” he said. “You know where you get that from, don’t you? You Blaise women are so prideful, so stubborn when you get pressed to the point. Your granny would light the whole world on fire if she thought that wickedness could be burned out of it.”

“I bet she’d do just about anything to stop you,” I said.

“Of course she would, even on principle alone,” he said. “Wouldn’t even have to be personal. That’s what I’m saying. No sense of proportion at all, just like your mother. Just like you.”

“Like you’ve never given her a reason to make it personal.”

“Not so far as she knows.”

“You mean she doesn’t know who you are?” I asked.

“As much as anyone does, I suspect she does,” he said. “We’ve had our go-rounds, but I think I learned more from them than she did. Mostly I learned she’s not worth trying to tackle directly.”

“No, not when you could take advantage of her daughter and rub her face in it,” I said.

“Oh, like I’d be so indiscreet,” he said. He sounded offended… not wounded in the way he did when he was pretending to flinch at my disdain, but actually insulted. “Being with your mother was a great big risk, and I’ll admit to some private pleasure, but what happened between your us wasn’t about petty revenge. I wouldn’t risk what we accomplished together just for the sake of spite… though the same can’t be said for your mama.”

I wanted to tell him to shut up… but more than that, I wanted him to keep talking. I’d never made him mad like this before, and his chrome-plated tongue seemed a lot looser when he got wound up.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Do you want to know the real reason why she’s gone?”

“If you’re going to say it’s because of me, you can save your breath,” I said. “I know it wasn’t my fault.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “And if you’re going to guess it’s because of me… well, that’s what she’d say, too, if she could tell you. But the truth is, I didn’t lay a finger on her. She did it all herself, and she did it out of spite… to spite me. She was so dead-set on shutting me out, she was willing to take herself out of the picture to make it happen.”

“Even if that is true, I don’t think you’re proving what you think you’re proving.”

“She left you alone, Mackenzie,” he said. “She left you alone with that woman. Think on that a spell, why don’t you. However much I irk you for whatever reason, try to imagine having a daughter you love, and taking your dislike of me out on her the way she took it out on you. Could you do it?”

“No,” I admitted. “I really don’t think I could.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said.

“That’s why I don’t think she did,” I said.

“I’m telling you, I didn’t kill her,” he said.

“I can believe that much,” I said. “I’m not saying I do. But if I go with the idea that you’re slanting things rather than lying outright, then maybe she did give her life to spite your plans… and I’d have to be pretty stupid to not think your plans don’t revolve around me.”

“Then you’re as arrogant as your grandma.”

“Fine,” I said. “They revolve around you using me. From this point on I’m working on the assumption that she gave her life to put me outside your grasp, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to honor that.”

“Girl, you’re making a mistake you don’t want to make,” he said. “You’re doing the exact same thing she did.”

“And wouldn’t she be proud to know it?” I said. I walked over to the door and opened it. “I think you know what this is and how to use it. I’m going to give you exactly one chance to walk out of here under your own power, and then I’m going to wake up. I’d rather not do that because I have class tomorrow, but missing a little sleep is the least of what I’m prepared to do to keep you out.”

“Girl, every time I see you, you say you’re going to…”

“Goodnight,” I said, and I pried my eyes open.

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“Are you staying in tonight?” I asked her as we rode the lift to our floor.

“No, baby,” she said. “I have to circulate… I was thinking about going to one of the male dorms, since I’ve been taking on a lot of women lately. But there’s something I want to give you first.”

“What’s that?”

“A surprise,” she said. “Though nothing too out of the ordinary. I’m glad you got Nicki to come to dinner. I think we’ll probably be seeing more of her, now that she and Hazel are talking. It gives her a reason to hang out here… another reason, I mean. Not that you aren’t reason enough, but you know some people will always need an excuse.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

The bell chimed, the doors slid open, and she led me by the hand to our room, where she sat down on the bed.

“Pants,” she said, and I got my pants off as far my shoes before I realized the problem and started to kick my shoes off. “Oh, for my mother’s sake, baby, you’re going to mess up the carpeting. Bend over and take them off properly.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I stooped down to undo my shoes.

“Actually… turn around first, and I said bend, not squat… keep your knees straight. Undo both of them, then take one off and then the other, then step out of your jeans. Stay bent.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, my cheeks flushing as I complied. The actions in question were harder to perform than they’d been for her to describe, especially when I was so focused on keeping my knees locked and so mindful of the way my cotton-clad rear was sticking out in the air.

Gilcrease Tower had better environmentals than Harlowe Hall, and even this early in the year the rooms were pleasantly cool… or cool in a way that was pleasant for people who didn’t have ties to the elemental plane of fire. It wasn’t a horrible ordeal for me, but rather bracing… it kept me fully aware of every inch of exposed skin.

I left my socks on because Amaranth hadn’t said anything about them, and I stayed where I was, bent at the waist and facing away from her.

“We’re going to have to do something about your socks,” she said. “The rest of your wardrobe has been slightly more refined, but most of your socks are so… functional. I know you’re inclined to think that anyone who pays too much attention to clothes is shallow, but you can acknowledge that things have a surface even when you’re looking beneath that surface. You know, I think Nicki could be a good influence on you. She’s fashion-conscious, but not… well… fashion-beholden.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. More so than just obeying her directions, holding such an uncomfortable position was sharpening my submission.

I heard the bed shift as Amaranth got up off of it, though her bare feet made no noticeable sound on the plush carpet. I thought I could feel her standing behind me. Her warmth was not so great that I should have been able to feel heat radiating off her body across the open space, but I was a trained elementalist with an affinity for fire, and so when I opened my senses up a bit I could in fact follow her as she moved back and forth a couple of times, admiring for whatever reason the shape of my ass.

“You’ve always seen spankings as a punishment,” she said. “Which is inconvenient, since they’re also one of your favorite things in the world… they have been from the beginning. You had your first conscious orgasms from spanking, after all. If you were at all naughty by inclination, you would have evolved into a perfect brat by now, but no amount of physical pleasure is worth the shame of being bad for you. That’s why I’m going to try my best to teach you to enjoy it as a reward.”

She carefully pulled my panties in back just enough for the top half of my ass to be hanging out of them, and then she stroked the back of her hand across the now-exposed skin.

“I know you like just about any kind of attention down in this neighborhood,” she said. “So we’re going to start with that. Just some good, affectionate, loving attention.”

She hooked a finger under my waistband and then started to pull me back towards the bed.

“Straighten up, missy!” she said with a giggle, and I did. “Backwards, march!”

She led me back towards the bed and then pulled me onto it, arranging us in the middle of the bed. She closed the curtains around it, leaving us not exactly swathed in darkness but at least enclosed. It made a difference in both the air temperature and my less material comfort levels. Small spaces were comforting. A small space with my loving owner holding me tightly against her body was even more so.

“Okay, you’re going to lay yourself out… face down, head towards the foot of the bed,” she said, and she helped me position myself the way that she wanted, then she laid her own body down on top of mine. I was only mostly naked from the waist down, so while I could feel her chest against my shoulders the primary point of contact between us was the exposed curve of my butt.

She slid her way down my body, hugging me from behind. Her hands caught on my panties and she pulled them the rest of the way off. Then, kneeling between my legs, she began to massage my backside, firmly kneading it with a hand on each cheek.

“I want you to understand this and everything that follows as a reward,” she said. “You did so good today, baby… Ian was impressed with how confident you were. He likes it when you’re confident, you know. It makes your submission to him more meaningful.”

“I didn’t feel particularly confident,” I said. “I wasn’t really nervous, because I wasn’t the newbie at the table, but I didn’t feel especially confident.”

“You’re not new to any of us, but you weren’t worried about impressing Nicki… and you barely made faces when they were talking about their game,” Amaranth said.

“I was trying not to make faces at all.”

“Someone who didn’t know you as well as I do probably wouldn’t have picked up on it,” she said. “I was watching for a reaction, in case you needed a reminder to behave… but you didn’t. Now, you mustn’t count on getting rewarded just for common civility, but this is for the whole package, you might say.”

She slowed the rubbing, and then stopped it. The bed shifted as she bent down and deposited a pair of gentle kisses, one on the outside dimple of each side of my rear. She straightened again, and then there was a pause and I held my breath, guessing the general shape of what was coming.

I was not disappointed.

Amaranth was a relatively large girl, not overly muscular in a bulging way but with the muscle of an athlete or a farmhand underneath her soft curves. She could put a lot of force behind the swing of her hand, and she did. She followed that first hard smack against my bare and unprotected ass with a gentler slap using just the tips of her fingers, then she bent to kiss me and did the whole thing over again.

Masochist or not, pain hurts. I don’t want to give the impression that the repeated impact of her hand against my backside was anything but painful. But it was a pain I could relish, and what sprang up in its wake was undeniably pleasurable. The massage had felt nice, but the spanking felt good… so very, very good.

The tears that welled up in my eyes weren’t purely from the pain, though. Amaranth was right. This was too close to a punishment for me. I thought it probably always would be, regardless of her expert ministrations. The tender kisses did something to quiet the voice inside my head that wanted to tell me that I was bad and I deserved it… as did Amaranth’s voice urgently cooing that I was good and I deserved it.

Amaranth knew how to work me to build up to a climax without anything more than repeated strokes across my backside… okay, with the occasional shot going meaningfully astray… but she wasn’t doing any of that tonight.

“I don’t really have a dramatic stopping point in mind tonight,” she said. “So I’m just going to wind things down. Ian talked to me while you were talking to Steff. He’s been taking charge more when the two of you are together, hasn’t he, baby?”

“Yes… ma’am,” I said, as she gave me a still firm but somewhat gentler stroke.

“Like I said, he liked seeing you a little more poised than usual,” she said. “It makes him want to take a, uh, firmer grip on you. Specifically, he asked me not to get you off for the next few nights. I told him it wouldn’t be a problem, because I probably would be spending my nights out anyway, but once I started thinking about it more, I thought it would be more fun to work you up a bit every day… I mean, there’s not giving someone an orgasm, and then there’s withholding an orgasm. I pass by lots of people every day without getting them off… at least not directly and right at the moment… but you’re special, baby, so I should be doing something special for you. To you.”

She giggled.

“It’s going to be a challenge, given how tightly your bow is strung,” she said. “But I look forward to meeting it. I can’t tell you exactly what Ian has in mind, baby, but I’d get ready for some intense frustration.”

She couldn’t tell me, but I thought she probably knew, or had a good idea… when it came to sex, a nymph was the next best thing to a mind reader. It was possible that Ian’s desires didn’t correlate perfectly to his plans, but they would be in the same neighborhood.

Amaranth bent over and planted delicate little kisses all over my bruised-feeling backside. There wouldn’t be a mark on it, because my invulnerable flesh would not do more than momentarily dimple a bit after a non-magical, non-sanctified impact, but invulnerability to harm was not the same thing as invulnerability to hurt. I felt everything the same as anyone else would.

I figured we were probably done, but after helping me upright and giving me a long, lingering kiss on the lips, Amaranth started to take the rest of my clothes off me.

“You don’t have any reason to go out tonight, do you?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Then tonight is a naked night. I don’t know when Ian’s planning on coming over, but I want you to be naked when he does. If someone knocks on the door, you can put on a robe. Same thing if Two needs to talk to you. Don’t cover up for Dee, though, since your nudity doesn’t mean anything to her.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I blushed at the thought of going about my business buck naked, while people came and went through the hall just outside my door all evening long.

The thing about dorm life was that sounds in the hall carried everywhere. I could hear doors opening and closing all the time. People hanging out and talking anywhere in the vicinity of my door sounded like people hanging out and talking right in front of it. I’d learned to block out such things as the ordinary sounds of dorm life, but the thought of sitting naked and exposed… not just incidentally or momentarily naked in the course of changing or getting dressed or doing anything that made nudity appropriate, but just… being naked…

“There,” Amaranth said, smiling radiantly at my growing embarrassment. “Now you’ll be ready for Ian. Don’t hide in bed, either… still do whatever homework or other things you were going to do. Just… like that. Now give me one more kiss goodbye, and wish me luck.”

“Good luck, ma’am,” I said.

“Goodnight, baby,” she said.

I stayed in bed until I heard the door close and lock, and then it was only the force of orders that got me out of it. I did my best to forget that I was naked, but the cool air made that impossible. My piercings in particular made me acutely aware of my nipples… sometimes the fact that I’d literally risked my ass along with the rest of me to get enchanted ones but hadn’t thought to have some kind of temperature-moderating spell layered onto them struck me. I did have homework to do, though, so I focused on that.

I wasn’t expecting Ian to come over until near bedtime, but I’d barely started revising spells for my grimoire for Acantha’s class when I heard a knock on the door. Any question that it wasn’t Ian was all but dispelled by the way it happened: one slightly quiet and uncertain knock followed almost immediately by a firmer one.

Ian had his own insecurities. One of the reasons we worked well together was that we had complementary ways of dealing with them.

I went up to answer the door and immediately realized there was no space for me to stand behind it while pulling it open. So instead I unlocked it and then stood on the other side, saying, “It’s open.”

It was only a second later that I realized I hadn’t checked the peephole, and my confidence in my ability to recognize Ian by his knock plummeted into the pit of my stomach. I felt the splash when it hit bottom.

Luckily I had been right, though.

“Hey, what’s… oh,” he said, when he saw me. He closed the door and held up his backpack. “I, uh, actually wanted to bring my homework over, if it’s not going to distract you… but maybe you have other things on your mind?”

“I was actually doing my own homework,” I said. “But… Amaranth…”

“Loaned you her favorite outfit?” he said. He kissed my forehead. “I approve. So… if I sit here and do homework and talk to you, you’ll just… you’ll stay…”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the idea.”

“Okay,” he said. He put his book bag down on the little two-seater couch that Amaranth had replaced one of our desks with. “Is this… something you’re going to be doing often?”

“If you want me to,” I said. “Amaranth said it’s a ‘naked night’, so I don’t think it’s going to turn into a new rule or anything.”

“I do really like the thought of you meeting me at the door naked all the time, but it’s kind of… a dorm’s not a great set-up for something like that,” he said. “You know?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I had to admire Amaranth’s ability to set it up so he’d get what he’d want without having to orchestrate it for himself. She did sometimes misjudge the gap between sexual desire and reality, but she was generally pretty good at it.

I realized that Ian was focusing his attention rather intently on the book he’d pulled out of his bag.

“You… you know you’re allowed to look at me, right?” I said. “I mean, this is basically… I’m basically here for your benefit.”

It turned me beet red to say that, which is another way of saying that it really turned me on.

“I know,” he said. “But… I really do have homework to do, so I think I’m just going to enjoy the fact that you are naked and almost shivering for my benefit for a while. I mean, that’s the fantasy, really. Availability. Willingness. Convenience. At the end of the night we could still end up in bed even if you were fully dressed right now and I was sitting in my own room. This is just like foreplay. Anyway, it’s good to practice a little self-control.”

“Okay,” I said. And for a while, we sat in relative silence, him scratching words out in pen in a notebook and me writing lightly in pencil the lines of symbolic runes I would trace over in ink. A grimoire was meant to be permanent, but because it was permanent, it also needed to be perfect.

“So, what do you think about Nicki?” Ian asked after a while, which surprised me… it seemed like something I should be asking him.

“I like her,” I said. “She’s fun.”

“I mean… never mind.”

“No, what?”

“I mean, do you like her?” Ian asked.

“I don’t… not… like her,” I said. “I mean, she’s… cute.” I blushed. “I’m really not used to talking about girls… or guys.”

“Well, you spent most of your life not really seeing yourself as a sexual person,” he said. “You know you are now. I don’t think that means you have to start checking people out and talking about them, but I just thought… you know… if you wanted to but maybe didn’t have anyone you knew you could talk like that with… in theory, being able to talk about girls is supposed to be one of the perks of having a bisexual girlfriend, so I just wanted you to know I’m cool with that.”

“Honestly, I’m not looking to date anyone else, and I’m not interested in casual sex,” I said. “I mean, with people I’m not dating. I don’t think sex between us should always be formal.”

“Good thing we’ve apparently relaxed the dress code, then,” Ian said.

“What do you think about her?”

Ian stuck his pen in the spiral of the notebook and set it down on the arm of the loveseat.

“Well… I’m honestly not surprised that Steff wants to nail her,” he said. “And when I started that sentence I was going to say because her ass is her best feature, but now that I’ve said it I’m trying to think of someone or something I would be surprised about Steff wanting to nail, and I’m not really coming up with anything. A bucket of cole slaw, maybe?”

“I meant as a person,” I said.

“Well, she seems a little desperate,” Ian said. “For approval, I mean… and not in a way that makes her annoying. She’s not like clamoring to be the center of attention all the time. She’s almost wary of it, in case she screws up.”

“That seems pretty perceptive,” I said.

“Yeah, well… it’s not like she’s a simulacrum of you, but you’ve got elements of that,” Ian said.

“We’re definitely not simulacra,” I said. “She’s more sociable, even if she feels like she’s faking it. And I think Steff’s way off base in thinking she’s, um, hot for me.”

“Do you?”

“You think Steff’s right?”

“I think Steff’s wrong in thinking it’s going to happen,” Ian said. “But I’d say from the way she looks at you that you’re her type. But I think she’s more actually interested in making friends.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She seemed pretty interested in getting a girlfriend. I mean, she asked me how to meet girls. I’d think if she was interested in me, she’d cut out the middle… lesbian.”

“A lot of people who aren’t nymphs can look at someone and say, ‘Yeah, I’d fuck that’,” Ian said. “Or some more tacitly respectful version of that. And maybe if the opportunity came up they would, but ‘the opportunity’ doesn’t just mean you’re both in the same place and willing to have sex, because there’s so much baggage and expectations and stuff that goes along with sex… and honestly, not all of the baggage is bad.”

“So your non-professional opinion is that Nicki wants to have sex with me, but wouldn’t,” I said. “Because what she really wants is a girlfriend.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Ian said. “I mean, it’s not like she’s burning a hole in your clothes with her eyes, or groping at you all the time.”

This made me think about my deal with Steff, and I started to blush.

“From the looks of things, you wouldn’t exactly mind that?” Ian guessed.

“I’m actually thinking of something else,” I said. “Anyway, I think she’d be too shy to do that.”

“But dancing with you would have been the perfect cover,” Ian said. “I think the bottom line is that when she looks at you she doesn’t see someone she could have a relationship with.”

“Yeah, my life is pretty complicated already.”

“Well, that’s why you wouldn’t have a relationship with her,” Ian said. “From her point of view, I think it’s more a matter of reach and grasp.”

“You think… you think I’m out of her league?”

“Well, if you weren’t naked and mine I’d probably feel the need to lie and say totally,” Ian said. He shrugged. “I like you, but I have to defer to Amaranth’s Principle here. You have nifty shapes, but a random person could easily find one or the other of you hotter than the other because that’s how it works. The thing is, she thinks you’re out of her league, and that’s what matters.”

“I… you may be right,” I said, when I thought about the fact that she’d needed to work up courage to talk to me. “So, what do I do with this information?”

“You’re not looking for another girlfriend, right?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t really need to do anything,” Ian said.

“But… if she thinks I’m so much better than her, she could probably stand to have a higher opinion of herself.”

“She’s got some confidence issues, yeah,” Ian said. “But I don’t think it’s a matter of a precise amount of self-esteem. It could go up and down without affecting how she sees you in relation to her, or she could decide you and her are more on the same level without it affecting her opinion of herself.”

“Did you turn into a subtle artist when I wasn’t looking?”

“No,” he said. “I’m speaking from a long experience of thinking girls are out of my league,” he said. “Since you’re hanging out together, there’s about a fifty-fifty chance she’ll get over it eventually, but by that time you’ll be firmly cemented as good friends… though if she’s anything like me, she might still jerk off over you every once in a while.”

“I don’t think that all of your experiences apply,” I said, blushing again at the thought.

“Well, maybe in translation,” Ian said. He’d been looking at me throughout our conversation, and the effects were starting to show in his lap. “Though, um, on the subject of jerking off: if you’re at a good breaking point…”

“You want to do that again?” I asked, remembering how he’d made me watch while he pleasured himself, in lieu of allowing me to. It had been a surprisingly maddening punishment, and I’d loved it.

“No, actually, I want to come in your mouth tonight,” he said. “But somehow, it’s hotter when I think of it as jerking off with your head.”

“Do I… do I get anything in return?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said with a smirk that just about skewered me on the spot. “If you do it three nights in a row… I’ll fuck you. But if you get off before then, with me or without me, we start over… and you pay a forfeit to be named later.”

So that was what he had in mind. I counted nights in my head. That would just work out with my arrangement with Steff if he gave me my reward on the third night.. Assuming I could withstand whatever Amaranth wanted to do, the other chance I had of failing was if my dreams took a sexual turn, and that did not seem to be in the cards.

“Steff has me, from Friday night,” I told him.

“Do you want to tell me I can’t get it up twice in one night?” he said, still smirking.

“No,” I said. “And I have to go the next two days without an orgasm?”

“You have a problem with that?”

I had to think about it, but I didn’t have to think long. The prospect of placing myself more fully into Ian’s hands… and Amaranth’s… for a few days was more appealing than straightforward sex.

“No,” I said.

I laid my grimoire aside, Ian stood up long enough get his pants down, and I became a masturbatory aid.

All in all, there were far worse ways to pass the time.

For an hour, I kept my head down, I stepped up when it was my turn, and I swung my illusionary staff through the heads and knees and arms of my classmates. I ignored the brief spatter of gore that disappeared as soon as the red box enchantment registered that I had taken the fight out of my opponent and vice-versa.

I was also thinking less about what I was doing. I wasn’t going full-on automaton, but I was thinking about situations rather than people. He’s got a longer reach. She’s faster. He’s guarding his legs. Once I started seeing each fight as a problem to be solved, the solution to each seemed more obvious and less distasteful. The previous day, I’d won more fights than I’d lost. On this day, I only lost one.

I wasn’t crazy about the thought of becoming so inured against violence, even mock violence… but being unaffected by it was better than reveling it, I supposed. The great fear I’d had about learning how to fight was that my barely restrained demonic side would take the opportunity to assert itself.

So far there didn’t seem to be much danger of that happening. Ignoring my feeding cycle was dangerous. Exposing myself to violent situations just reminded me how much I disliked violence. Even putting myself in a situation where I had to fight five days a week just strengthened my resolve to get through it.

“You’ve been showing some focus these past couple of days, Frybaby,” the coach said to me at the end of class A. “Maybe you aren’t bringing everything you’ve got, but you aren’t dropping what you brought. If you keep building on this you’ll be in decent shape, but if you try to just coast along like this you’ll be lucky to end up with a low B?”

“I did better today than I did yesterday,” I said.

“Yeah, but I’m talking about your trajectory,” she said. “What you’re doing’s only going to carry you so far. You won’t be better Friday than you are now, the way you’re going.”

“I only lost one fight,” I said. “Do I need to be perfect?”

“I don’t grade on win/loss ratio,” she said. “You’re getting better, but don’t get comfortable. Listen, you can go nuts the next two days… I won’t be watching for how many hits you take or counting how many times you go down, I’m going to be watching to see if you’re trying new things. Then on Friday, if you’re doing better than you are now, I’ll tell you how you can get some of the extra credit you need.”

“I thought the point was to take our opponents out the quickest and easiest way,” I said.

“Quickest and most effective way,” she said. “That’s not always the easiest, and it’s not always the most obvious. Easy and obvious has its advantages when it works, but it doesn’t always… and then you get the little corner cases where the most obvious thing is going to blow up in your face.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Ask anyone who fought the hundred and fifty pound girl who rammed a staff through their head today,” she said.

“I do not weigh a hundred and fifty pounds,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said. “The point is that you’re a great learning tool for everyone else because of your strength, but this just makes it easier for you to get complacent and also harder for you to impress me, which is what you need to do. Lucky for you I’m not going to let you fall into a rut. Next week I’ll have something to shake things up for you. This week you’re going to have to do some shaking of your own if you want to keep on course. You got it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I winced as I said it and I knew she saw me do it.

I couldn’t help it, though. “Ma’am” was Amaranth. I couldn’t say it without connotations of submissiveness and even sexuality creeping in. But putting myself into Coach Callahan’s hands and ignoring my ingrained instincts sort of shifted me into that headspace… and anyway, a one-word answer felt surly, and for me to call her “Coach” seemed phony.

My worries about bringing Nicki up to speed about my life’s strange goings-on proved to be a little premature. There was nothing new to say on the ridiculous owl-turtle thing front, so no reason to bring it up immediately.

She had changed for dinner, her hair and clothes both. She’d put on a pair of dark hip-hugger jeans with a wide belt studded with metal squares, and a black midriff-baring fitted tee with a spiraling starburst of sequins rotating around on the front of it.

Her hair was now a kind of pinkish-purple color in a messy style that looked something between a pixie and a pageboy cut, though one of its major features was that it was pretty much immobile. I wondered if her tendency to lock her hair in place reflected some limitation in her abilities, or if she was going for it on purpose.

It seemed safer not to ask, though. If it was on purpose I might be implying that it looks like an accident, and if it was accidental I might be rubbing it in.

“I like your top,” Two said.

“Thanks,” Nicki said. “If I say the word ‘rose’ it… oh, there it goes.”

The spinning sequins formed a flower, held the pattern briefly, and then separated and went back to their usual dance.

“It knows other words, but I don’t remember what they are,” she said.

“What is the purpose of this enchantment?” Dee asked.

“I don’t know, entertainment?” Nicki said. “It looks cool, I guess.”

“I grant that entertainment is a legitimate need of the mind, but I would imagine there is a limit to how much meaningful distraction there is to be in a set of silver dots forming an image.”

“It’s kind of hypnotic,” Amaranth said.

“I can see two sides of it,” Hazel said. “On the one hand, I have to agree with Dee about there not being much point to it beyond the shiny. On the other hand… shiny. And it is kind of compelling.”

“I just thought it was neat,” Nicki said.

“I think it’s neat, too,” Amaranth said.

“I like it,” I said. “You didn’t change just for dinner, did you?”

She ducked her head and blushed. I started to wonder if her interest in me was about more than making new friends and maybe meeting girls… or rather, if she’d already met a new girl. Then I ducked my head and blushed.

“…I decided to change my hair after class, and then it didn’t really go with what I was wearing anymore,” she said.

“I would never have been able to tell,” I said.

“It’s true,” Two said, nodding solemnly.

“Thanks, Two,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“We can’t all be fashion-conscious,” Amaranth said. “But Nicki clearly uses her clothing to express herself, and she likes to look her best… so dressing up a little when class is over and she wants to hang out with her friends is not so much making an extraordinary effort as it is making a gesture.”

“In my experience, the main reason for changing your pants is to get into another pair of them,” Steff said.

I felt really bad for Nicki. Amaranth was trying to be nice, but even she’d managed to talk about her in the third person like she wasn’t there. I tried to think of something to say to her instead of about her, but the most obvious things that popped into my head were compliments on her appearance… which she might have liked in general, but at the moment it seemed like a good way to prolong her torture.

“Nicki plays stone soldiers,” I said to Hazel, immediately before I realized that this was also talking about her in the third person. Though I was trying to start a conversation that woudl involve her.

“Oh?” Hazel said. “You should come up to Gilcrease sometime, we’ve a nice set-up… a whole room just for gaming. It’s a bit cozy with too many tall folks, but big enough to accommodate players if not a lot of spectators.”

“Really? I’ve been hearing rumors about a room somewhere that they took the furniture out of and turned into a battlefield,” Nicki said. “But I figured they were just… well… rumors.”

“No, it’s true enough,” Hazel said. “It’s my room, to be perfectly technical, but I share a suite with my friend Shiel and her friend, er, Mouse, and there’s room enough for the three of us in one half of it. It gets a little awkward when my man comes around, but we’re working things out.”

“Is ‘Mouse’ a… um…”

“She’s not an actual mouse,” Hazel said. “And that’s just her nickname. It’s the translation of her name, Nae. She’s a kobold, like Shiel… who is incidentally also a kobold, if that wasn’t clear. She’s tiny, and quiet. Very serious. Big fan of standing in the corner.”

“I like Mouse,” Two said.

“You would,” Hazel said. “Two gets on well with her. The pair of them can just sit there quietly forever and never say a word.”

“It’s true,” Two said.

“I find Mouse’s company restful and her demeanor agreeable,” Dee said. “I was surprised to learn she is not a divinity major, as she has a very spiritual bearing.”

“That’s submission,” Amaranth said.

“You mean she’s religious about it?” Ian asked.

“No, Dee had it right,” Amaranth said. “She’s spiritual about it. Full submission can be a sublime, almost ecstatic state… my Mack has brushed up against that level only a few times, but I think Mouse has been living there.”

“Is Shiel her dom?” Nicki asked.

“No, I think they just met a bit ago,” Amaranth said. “Mouse’s primary relationship is temporarily on hold for her education.”

“Oh, so I guess it’s a long-distance thing for now.”

“You might say that,” Amaranth said. She focused on her salad. She respected people’s privacy, but wasn’t terribly comfortable lying.

We both knew that Nae’s girlfriend was Caron, a human-raised dwarf who lived no further away than the town of Enwich. I wasn’t a fan of Caron, due to the small matter of her trying to trick me into a lifetime of servitude at the hands of a deranged slaver. I had a slightly higher opinion of her “Little Mouse”, whose disapproval had somewhat blunted Caron’s determination to snare me, and whose existence had ended Caron’s hold over me when Amaranth deduced her identity.

Dwarves and kobolds weren’t exactly like oil and water when it came to mixing. They were more like oil and fire. Elves and dwarves were the more stereotypical rivals, but they didn’t tend to live literally on top of each other and they didn’t compete for the same resources or business. The two races of miners and smiths had been going at it hammer and tongs for long that they were probably responsible for the phrase.

“I guess there probably aren’t any kobold whatsits around here,” Nicki said. “No mountains.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think Shiel’s from one of the eastern ranges. I’m not sure where Mouse is from.”

The conversation from that point on was pretty easy, though a little bit heavy on tiny imaginary warfare for my tastes. I tried my best to hide my lack of interest in stone soldiers, since Nicki still seemed to be taking the things I said to heart. Maybe it was arrogant of me to think that she’d changed her hair just because I’d said something about it, but… I really thought that probably was true. I knew she’d kept it orange because I’d mentioned it in class, and then she went and changed it after I asked her why she hadn’t.

There were probably only so many times I could tell her that she didn’t need to impress me or to just be herself before she’d start feeling bad about wanting to impress me. I wasn’t going to start censoring everything that popped into my head, but it wouldn’t kill me to avoid casually disparaging the things that she liked. Even Steff was being fairly restrained, after all. If all my friends were making the effort to be nice to my new friend, it didn’t seem like it was asking too much for me to do the same.

After dinner, I got Steff alone to ask her about fixing her picture. I didn’t have to do more than pull it out before she started snickering.

“So… you noticed?” she said.

“Nicki did,” I said.

She laughed.

“It figures… I could hide a fortune in platinum five inches from a decent pair of tits and you’d never find it,” she said. “Apparently doesn’t even matter if they’re yours… how do you ever make it past a mirror?”

“I don’t spend a lot of time looking in mirrors,” I said. “Steff, come on… will you change it up a little?”

“You said you were satisfied with it as-is,” she said. “You said I’d fulfilled my end of the bargain.

“Okay,” I said. “What do you want for it, Steff?”

She sighed and took the paper from me.

“Nothing more than you’re already giving me that would be worth it to you for a few quick edits,” she said. “Did your teacher give you an extension?”

“It’s been pushed back until Thursday,” I said.

“I just have two favors I’d like to ask in exchange,” she said.

“What?”

“Viktor’s starting to get all… intense,” she said. “I’m going to need to sleep over for a few nights, maybe.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And when I say ‘sleep over’, it kind of goes without saying that my penis is going to be inside you at some point. Or several points.”

“It kind of just went with saying,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it goes both ways,” Steff said. “And the other thing: when Nicki makes her move, find out if she’s down for threesomes.”

“If that happens, I’ll ask,” I said.

“And put in a good word for me,” she said. “Or a sort of ambiugously evil but still vaguely good natured one.”

“She made it sound like you weren’t too interested in her,” I said.

“I’m not,” she said. “She doesn’t really do anything for me… but you and her together, that’s more interesting.”

“Okay,” I said. “And just so we’re clear, what I want from you is to make the mermaid look less like me… and not like anyone else in particular. Just a generic female figure.”

“I’ll have it back to you tomorrow.”

“Cool, thanks,” I said. “Um… can I just ask…”

“Why I did it?” she said. Her eyes kind of flicked down, and a touch of color crept into her pale cheeks. “I could say something about liking to see you squirm, and that would be true, but… I was a little annoyed, and that was just me being… well… a little bratty.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wouldn’t have asked you if I didn’t think your skills were up to the task, but I guess this time I pushed you out of your comfort zone.”

“I don’t know, maybe it’s good for me, too,” Steff said. “Hey, if you get a good grade on it, let me know.”

“I will,” I said.

“Come here,” she said, and pulled me into a kiss. Her hands were on my ass for a moment, before she realized we were still semi-public, and then she pulled away.

“Um… I’m pretty sure Ian’s sleeping with me tonight,” I said.

“It’s cool,” she said. “I’m thinking more of the weekend, anyway… Viktor’s started grumbling about how classes get in the way of his ‘real work’, so I think he’s going to be want to be alone and I’m going to want some company.”

“Company you can have,” I said. “Depending on how things are going in my life, I may or may not wake up in the middle of the night screaming…”

“Oh, I can help with that,” Steff said.

“How?” I asked. “And please don’t say something about making sure I don’t wake up.”

“I was going to say I can help keep you awake..

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And screaming, of course.”

“Of course.”

Sunday night, we had a comfortably crowded bed. Ian had needed a couple nights of me to himself to feel completely at home in the room, and now that he was over that I hoped to spend a lot of nights beneath him and Amaranth. I knew she wouldn’t spend every night with us, but Ian didn’t exactly have a better deal waiting for him back in his own room.

Even if he wanted more space to himself, he wasn’t exactly going to find it in the standard bunk compared to his side of the queen-sized four poster bed Amaranth had smuggled in for us, at least in Amaranth’s absence. We were narrow people.

Technically, the room belonged to Amaranth and me, but I had a hard time seeing that way. In some ways, it felt like Amaranth’s room. She’d gone through the trouble and expense of decorating it as an actual bedroom, after all. In other ways, it felt like ours… all of ours. The fact that Ian wasn’t technically part of our suite was only because the university didn’t allow that kind of mixing across gender lines. We’d picked Gilcrease Tower specifically for its co-ed floors, so Ian would be close enough that he could live with us for all practical purposes.

My dreams Sunday night were pretty indistinct, which was a good indication that they were just dreams. All the same, I thought I felt something poking around just outside the edge of my awareness. Though since they weren’t particularly lucid dreams, I couldn’t say if I really felt that or if I dreamed that I did… or if, upon waking, I imagined that I had and then remembered it that way.

Ordinary dreams were such tenuous, malleable things. That was part of what made it so easy for an invading mind to seize control of them, especially since the invader’s mind was almost always more awake by definition… but this also made them susceptible to more mundane powers of suggestion. It would be so easy to fool myself if I got all wrapped up in the possibility of what could be happening.

I had techniques for evicting a presence from my head, though they were only as good as my willingness to use them and in the heat of the moment… more particularly, in the dream-heat of the dream-moment… it seemed like I was too easily distracted to be trusted as the only line of defense. What I needed was some kind of alarm, something that would let me know for certain if my mind was touched while I slept.

Possibly something that could wake me up at the first sign of trouble… as long as I could remove it easily if I started to get sleep-deprived… but even just something that let me know for certain when I woke up normally would help.

Otherwise it seemed like I might go crazy wondering if the things I thought I felt were real, and I would never know if I was doing it to myself or if I was being dancing-lighted by either or both of my nocturnal visitors.

There was one person who I thought could possibly help me there, and I was due to be checking in with her anyway… we’d kept things loose after my last scheduled appointment of the spring semester, with the idea of re-establishing a schedule after things settled down again in the fall. I couldn’t say for sure that things were necessarily “settled”, but the lull between when the semester began and when it started to pick up speed seemed like as good a time as any.

I waited quietly in between Amaranth and Ian until they woke up.

“You sleep okay, baby?” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, mostly,” I said.

“No surprise visitors?”

“I thought the potions took care of that,” Ian murmured, obviously less sleepy than he sounded. Amaranth gave him a something between a light shove and a very slow slap on the shoulder.

“Not that I can tell,” I said. “But I’m not sure.”

Amaranth frowned.

“That could be a problem,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m working on a solution.”

“Oh?”

I stopped, because I heard Dee inside the bathroom… or rather, because I heard the water running and nothing else. Like a lot of the students who’d come out of Harlowe Hall, Dee and I shared a mental healer. Theodora Lundegard had gained a reputation for the hard-to-handle cases, which included the difficult ones, the unusual ones, and the hard-to-care-about ones.

“Yeah,” I said. “Excuse me for a second.”

I knocked on the door.

“I apologize, but this chamber is in use but shall be vacated shortly,” Dee said from within.

“I don’t need the bathroom,” I said. “I just wanted to ask you if Teddi knows about the, uh, owl-turtle.”

There was a pause, and then the door opened and Dee came through. She was wearing a floor length dark blue night gown… though I noticed the hem only touched the floor when it was across the threshold from the bathroom to our carpeted one. Telekinesis had its little advantages.

Ian pulled the blankets up over himself. I realized that I was also naked, but it was a little late for modesty. Dee and I had both seen each other naked before, and she didn’t equate it with intimacy.

That didn’t stop me from blushing a bit, but making a big deal out of would have made the whole thing more embarrassing.

“Yes,” she said. “I am uncertain if she believes in its existence as an entity, though she assures me that she believes that I believe in it. It is a peculiarly unreassuring assurance.”

“Well, I might be giving her independent testimony,” I said. “I want to talk to her about ways to be sure if it… or anyone else… is coming and going.”

“It was definitely present in my dreams last night,” she said. “Though perhaps it would be a mistake to assume it can only exist in one place at a time. It has told me in the past that it believes it could replicate itself across multiple minds but chooses not to do so, for fear of losing its ‘specialness’ and creating rivals for itself… but perhaps some intermediate step exists before the full-fledged duplication.”

“No pun intended,” Ian said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Fledged,” Ian said. “It’s a bird. Ish. Thing.”

“Ah,” Dee said. “I must confess, I do not know what that word means outside of the idiom.”

“…something to do with feathers,” Ian mumbled.

“Fledgling is what a bird is after it’s a hatchling,” I said.

“It’s when a bird is developed enough to fly but still learning,” Amaranth said. “Though I guess full-fledged would be when it gets past that?”

“As… illuminating… as this digression may be,” Dee said, “I believe it is a distraction from the issue at hand. The owl-turtle thing has not been forthcoming on the subject of its interest in you, beyond admitting that it did cross into your mind.”

“What did it say when you asked?” Amaranth asked.

“Its exact words were that it was a private matter and I should direct my inquiries to Mackenzie if I wished to know further,” Dee said. She turned to me. “I believe it was fully aware that we had already discussed the matter and that I was looking for information that you do not possess, though I have enough experience with its games to know that if pressed on that point, it would claim that you and I collectively know all that we need to between us if only we would realize it. It is a most frustrating entity.”

“Have you ever considered giving the damn thing back to Two?” Ian asked. “I mean, if it uses your telepathy to get around, it would basically be stuck there, right?”

“That wouldn’t be fair to Two,” I said.

“Well, it’s not fair to whoever it lands on,” Ian said. “But Two made the thing. If it belongs anywhere, I think it would be her brain. Or mind. Or dreams, or whatever.”

“I weighed that as an option,” Dee said. “But I am uncertain that I could effect a safe and effective transfer on purpose… and I did take the owl-turtle thing into myself when I unwisely attempted to aid her with her dream problems. That I succeeded in that goal in any fashion is an accomplishment I would not undo.”

“Well, as martyr complexes go, that one seems pretty benign, at least,” Amaranth said.

“I also think of the future,” Dee said. “If the owl-turtle thing were returned to Two, it would simply exist in her mind indefinitely. She would be bound to it for the rest of her dreaming existence. Within my mind, there is the chance for progress… be it an evolution into something useful, or a lessening or removal of the burden. And I must confess that the longer I reflect upon it, the less certain I am that removing it would be wholly beneficial.”

“You can’t actually like it,” I said.

“Baby, no one’s completely unlikable,” Amaranth said.

“To the contrary, I believe that may be one of its inherent traits,” Dee said. “If only because its creator felt no fondness for it and her mind shaped it. But as little as I care for it, I believe it can be useful… and it is a new thing.”

“So?” Ian said. “Aren’t there new things all the time?”

“Forgive my imprecise command of an imprecise language,” Dee said. “But, no. It is not a new thing in the sense that a new pair of socks is new, or even in the way that a new type of socks would be. It is a new thing in the way that the first pair of socks ever was.”

“Interesting analogy,” Ian said.

“It is early and I have been engaged in laundry,” Dee said. “My point is that I am coming to the conclusion that to rid the world of the owl-turtle thing would be a… well, it would fall somewhere between a sin and a missed opportunity.”

“Um… have your conversations with it helped you reach this conclusion?” I asked.

“It is a staunch advocate for its own continued existence, but it has never raised this point in its own defense,” Dee said. “The idea originated within my own mind.”

“Um… point of order,” Ian said. “Wouldn’t any idea it had also originate within your mind?”

“Yes, but this one came from me.”

“How can you know for sure?” Ian asked.

“I have been trained from an early age to recognize external insinuations,” Dee said.

“Except this wouldn’t be external,” Ian said.

“When we were dealing with my pitchfork, you told me that when an idea is planted inside someone’s mind, their mind will figure out how to slot it in naturally and then just sort of roll with it,” I said.

“I did say something of that nature,” Dee said, shifting a little uncomfortably… which meant she was really uncomfortable, or else it would have been completely unnoticeable. “But… I do not believe that is the case here.”

“You don’t know, though,” Ian said.

“I believe it to be true, but I will by no means discount the possibility that I could be wrong.”

“Anyway,” I said, “I’m going to talk to Teddi about any kind of external countermeasures I can use.”

“Don’t you think she would have mentioned them when you were dealing with your father?” Amaranth asked.

“Maybe, but I didn’t ask,” I said. “And I was looking for things I could learn because I didn’t have any money to spare. But if my head’s going to be turned into a carriage hub, I think it’d be worth it… actually, I think even just keeping the man out would be worth a few coins. I just didn’t think of stepping things up any until something else changed.” I shrugged. “It’s an idea, anyway.”

“It’s more than that,” Ian said.

“Oh?” I said.

“It’s a plan.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” I said.

“I’m not saying it rises to the level of an intricate multi-layered scheme,” Ian said. “But that’s probably one of its better features, honestly. Less that can go wrong. I mean, Teddi will either be able to help you or she won’t. There isn’t much room for hijinks there.”

“I have to say I can see no fault in your intended course of action,” Dee said.

“Do you have to say it, or must you confess it?” Ian asked. Dee glared at him. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m naked under here, and insecurity makes me feel testy.”

“No pun intended, I am certain,” Dee said. She bowed to him, and withdrew from the room.

“That was rude,” Amaranth said to Ian.

“It’s banter,” Ian said. “I don’t mean anything by it.”

“It’s like what he does with Steff,” I said.

“Right,” Ian said. “Except I don’t mean anything by it.”

It was more surprise than objection. I felt as wide awake as Ian did… and while my experiences so far that night hadn’t done anything to put me in the mood, they hadn’t done anything to kill the idea of sex for me in general.

“I told you I’ve missed you,” Ian said, his hand going to my thigh. “Anyway, what else am I supposed to do with you?” A small flush of anticipatory heat dribbled down my spine. His voice dropped into a low, husky growl. “Last time I checked, cunts were for fucking.”

There it was.

That was… well, it wasn’t exactly that I needed to hear it, and in general I wouldn’t even say that I liked hearing it. The word itself bothered me in conversation. It offended the sensibilities of both the person my mother had raised me to be and the one my grandmother had brought up.

But alone and from Ian? It somehow shot right through to some secret core of me and triggered a rune that said “Yes, YES, YES“.

I couldn’t tell you why it worked the way it did, though sometimes I suspected it had something to do with my grandmother’s upbringing. She had tried to instill in me her own views on women and sexuality and women’s sexuality, and in some regards she’d succeeded… but nothing could change the fact that I was a sexual being. She’d only altered the way that was expressed.

Maybe.

Or maybe I would have always found a guy who’s a little rough to be a little hot… and a guy who’s really rough to be really hot. Maybe I would always have liked my slap and tickle to be a little light on the tickle.

I didn’t know if Ian still grappled with the rightness and wrongness of his own predilections. If he did, he’d reached a point where he didn’t need to hash things out with me nearly as often. I didn’t mind that one bit. It was one thing to believe in clear, unambiguous assent but the goal there was to create a space where it was safe to be spontaneous, not to stifle it.

I hadn’t said anything, but I didn’t have to… Ian could see my response written across my face as if it were written there in glowing red letters. He flipped the blanket off of us. Underneath it, his body was lean, lightly muscled, and sweaty… it wasn’t strictly cold enough to require a blanket this early in the fall, but I liked to have one anyway.

The sweat made his smell stronger. I don’t mean the smell of the sweat, I mean the scents that it carried: sex, man, and… because he was human and I had demon blood… meat.

I wasn’t turned on by the sweat, exactly. I wasn’t turned off by it, either. A dry, clean body might be naked or merely nude, sexual or simply aesthetically pleasing. Art doesn’t sweat, so a sweaty body almost had to be naked by definition.

“You know what to do,” he said, putting a hand on top of my head and giving a gentle push.

I nodded and slipped downward, sliding my naked body over one of Ian’s legs as I took a position between them. Amaranth’s trick of smuggling a full-sized bed into the dorm room was going to pay off on a regular basis, it seemed.

Ian was getting harder, though he hadn’t touched himself. I knew why, of course. That was my job. My purpose. It was my function to fulfill his needs, to surrender myself to his pleasure. He gave me no more encouragement than a smirk. I started to reach out…

“No hands,” he said. “Get down and do it like the dog you are.”

He didn’t have to give me any more directions than that. I knew his body and I knew what he wanted from me.

I lowered myself even farther and crawled in close, extending my tongue. I didn’t go for his dick yet, because I hadn’t been given permission to. I couldn’t really help brushing against it as I touched the tip of my tongue to his the bottom of his ball sack. It nuzzled against the top of my head in a way that felt… well, as if he’d reach down and patted my head with his hand.

My physical relationship with Ian had started with a blowjob. Our initial toe-dipping excursion into the world of dominance and submission had been the idea that he could have one any time that he wanted. Not much had actually come of that. As a young man of limited sexual experience, he’d been enthralled with the idea of blowjobs… and he’d enjoyed the reality, but not so much that a head-giving automaton would make the best Khersentide present ever or anything.

What he really liked more than the raw physical act was the dynamics that were possible around it. He liked to be active, to fuck my mouth and throat rather than simply being sucked off. He liked me to get down in front of him, to lower myself physically and metaphorically, to give myself over to the worship of him.

I bathed his balls with my tongue, lavishing affection on them in the basest way I could, savoring the sweaty, meaty tang of his skin. This he liked. Once upon a time this would have seemed strange to me, but now it just felt right. It wasn’t mere familiarity that had wrought this transformation… rather, it was I that had shifted into a state where the only thing more right than what Ian wanted was that I did it.

And I liked it, too. I loved the taste of him, the feel of his skin under my tongue. I would have licked his body all over if he’d wanted, put my mouth on every part of him… but I especially loved to do it to the lowest and dirtiest parts of him.

Once I had done it because I thought it debased me.

Now I did it to exalt him.

And that’s what I did, licking and kissing and gently sucking until he judged that I’d adequately demonstrated my love and submission. I didn’t know how he would let me know. It might be a word, or an action. I trusted that he would make it clear, though, because he always had.

His big, thick dick had long since moved on to full-on stiffness, and every once in a while I chanced to flick my tongue at the base of the shaft or nuzzle it with my nose.

Like a dog. Just like he’d said.

“That’s a good bitch,” he said. He put his hand on the side of my head, took hold of my hair and wrapped his fingers around it. He tugged upward, and I lifted my face towards his. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that I like your hair like this. You should think about growing it out more.”

If it had been Amaranth, I would have answered with a “Yes, ma’am,” but it was Ian and he hadn’t told me to say anything, so I just nodded slightly.

He yanked my hair sharply to the side. I let out what I hoped was a sexy and feminine grunt. There were definitely downsides to dorm life… without a wall of silence on all sides, screaming out loud at an odd hour of the morning didn’t seem like a good idea.

He put his other hand on the other side of my head and grabbed me by the hair there. I expected him to pull my head down onto his shaft, but instead he just pulled my hair in both directions and then let go.

“Kiss it,” he said. “Show me how much you love my dick and maybe I’ll put it inside you.”

So I did. I pursed my lips together and tenderly kissed the head of his dick. You know what? I did love it. So hot, so thick, so solid… when it got hard, Ian’s dick was like everything I loved about him physically in concentrated form.

Still not using my hands, I kissed the top of his head, and then all around the sides of it. I worked my way around the ridge, then down the top of the shaft and back up. I went all over the thing, using my tongue a little but mostly my lips… he’d specifically told me to kiss, after all.

It was both frustrating and fulfilling. I wanted to taste his cock, I wanted to feel it in my mouth and know he was feeling my mouth around it… but I didn’t have permission. The thrill of knowing that I was doing what he wanted wasn’t enough, especially because I knew he wanted more, too. He was putting me through this as an exercise in self-control, his and mine both. He was denying himself further pleasure because he was could, and forcing me to restrain myself for the same reason.

Here was the unspoken secret of our relationship: I sucked Ian’s dick whenever he wanted me to, because if I did it whenever I wanted to, I would be doing it all the time. That was how much I loved it, after a year of dating. It didn’t consume my waking thoughts or anything, but once I got my mouth near it… well, maybe this was a side-effect or sublimation of my demon hunger mixed with a general growing fondness for penis. Who knows?

It wasn’t just dick I liked. Steff had a dick, and more experience wielding it than Ian had. As much as I liked girls, as much as I seemed to be more attracted to women in general… there was just something about a man that I could give myself to. I belonged to Amaranth, but I gave myself to Ian. The difference was hard to explain, but not exactly subtle to experience.

He cuffed me hard on the side of the head… without thinking about it, I’d taken the head of his dick between my lips and started sucking. I stopped and withdrew.

Self-control had never been my strong point. With Ian, it was almost a kink. For me, it was more of an aspiration.

“Bad slut,” he said. “You know better. Off the bed.”

I complied, thinking he was going to punish me in some fashion for overstepping. He stayed where he was, though, and just reached down and took matters into his own hands, so to speak.

“I’d say this hurts me more than it hurts you, but honestly it’s not that bad,” he said, running his eyes over my naked body. “And I know you’d rather be taking care of me yourself. Think about that… think about this the next time I let you put your mouth on me.”

As punishments went… okay, if anybody had asked me to devise one, I wouldn’t have thought of it, and if anybody had described it to me I might have laughed at the idea that a guy jacking himself off instead of having sex with his girlfriend would teach her a lesson.

But it was effective all the same. Ian was right, I really did want to be the one to please him, with my hand or my mouth or by offering my body for him to take.

I stood there unmoving while he looked at me like I was an image in a crystal ball for him to get off on, and that was hot… unspeakably hot. I liked being used as an object, and now I was being objectified both literally and metaphorically. It was like being transformed into porn. But however hot it was, I wasn’t going to get off on it, and… more important to my actual personal needs of the moment… I wasn’t even going to get him off.

He was working his fingers up and down his shaft at an easy pace, still practicing his self-control. He occasionally flicked a finger across the ridge or gave a small tug or twist, but mostly it was a simple sliding motion with a light grip. He knew what he was doing, and he wasn’t getting carried away with it.

The weird thing about a dick… well, among the weird things about dicks… is the fact that you could never say they’re fully hard. One can seem like it’s fully deployed and then it flexes and it’s just bit harder, a bit bigger. Sometimes it could look painful, how swollen they could get. Ian’s dick was like that, and maybe it was my imagination but it seemed like it was still growing.

The sight of it provoked a reaction deep inside me, which, not coincidentally, was right where I wanted him to be. I wanted to be serving him, but I also wanted him to be fucking me. I wanted it in a way that had nothing to do with him in particular being my boyfriend or me being his girlfriend, nothing to do with dominance or submission.

It was primal, it was alchemical.

I was horny, and I wanted sex… just flat-out and simple sex. This was actually kind of new territory for me and I didn’t really know what to do with it. It actually scared me a little how much I wanted it.

“I’m thinking about finishing on your face,” he said. It’s hard to describe the brief flicker of hope that this instilled in me. It wasn’t like I had a deep-seated yearning for semen to spurt onto my face… except for right then, when the prospect was raised in the heat of the moment. Then he smirked, and I knew he was playing with me. That brought its own kind of enjoyment, even if it wasn’t as fulfilling. “But I think I’ll just keep thinking about that.”

Once he decided to finish, that was really just about it. He took a tissue off the nightstand and brought things to an impressively quiet close as simply and efficiently as if he were blowing his nose. Not that I’d ever thought of blowing one’s nose as a particularly efficient act, but compared to a mind-blowing extended orgasm, I supposed that it was.

From the way that Ian was grinning, I knew that he was more pleased with himself than he was pleasured, and that I supposed was part of the point of the exercise. An orgasm was an orgasm, and that wasn’t a bad thing, but the boost Ian got from control… self and otherwise… lasted far longer.

He disposed of the tissue and then patted the bed beside him. I joined him.

“I love you,” he said, kissing me gently on the lips.

“I love you, too,” I said. “That was… a little different.”

“Different good or different bad?”

“Different-different,” I said. “I mean, it’s not something I would want to happen every time, but…”

I tried to figure out how to tell him what I felt like, which was basically that I hadn’t exactly liked it, but not in a way that I would like him not to do it.

“You didn’t enjoy it, but you it’s the sort of thing you enjoy not enjoying?” Ian said.

“Sort of,” I said. “Not really, but that’s a good enough working explanation. I don’t want it off the table. I mean, I don’t want you to do this to me because you think I’m going to enjoy it, but…” I blushed. “I’ll enjoy it being a part of your, uh, masterly repertoire.”

“You mean you’ll get enough enjoyment from having it hanging over your head to make it worthwhile when and if it actually happens again,” Ian said.

“Yes!” I said, maybe a bit too enthusiastically, but he’d said it perfectly. “You’re exactly right.”

“Of course I am,” he said.

“Okay, Amaranth,” I said putting an arm over him and pressing up against his side.

“Do you want to sleep on the floor?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, grinning wickedly, and he hit me with a pillow.

The pitchfork. I had won it in the school’s labyrinth, where it had been locked away along with a cursed and blighted cornfield in some earlier age. It contained… or maybe had contained… a fragment of the mind of an ancient demon. The fragment wasn’t a fully-formed being in its own right, but it had the power to influence people who held the pitchfork, and even possess them. Dee had described it as overlaying the host’s personality with a template. Basically, the possessed person had their own memories and personality traits but with an infernal gloss. This had made for some serous “oh, shit” moments, not the least of which had been when a remnant of it got a hold of Dee.

Dee was a powerful subtle artist, telekinetic as well as telepathic. She was a highly trained fighter, as the dark-skinned elves of the underworld had something like universal conscription. Fortunately, she was also a cleric… and while the remnant of the entity was able to use her physical and psychic gifts, that piece had been destroyed when it tried to invoke her divine gifts.

The real pitchfork was still out there somewhere. It had been taken off campus through the machinations of someone… according to Dee, not the pitchfork itself… and vanished. I had to admit that I missed it. The labyrinth was used to train advanced delving students, and I’d been dumped into it naked and totally unprepared. The pitchfork was the only thing I’d had to show for it, and according to the rules and customs of delving it had been mine. More to the point, it had felt like it was mine.

My father had hinted that he was keeping it for me before, as a way to try to keep my interest. There was no way of knowing if he actually had it or not, or if he would ever return it to me or keep it for himself… but I believed he would have held it out as a carrot regardless of what the truth was.

But if the owl-turtle thing really could infiltrate his mind the way it had moved into Dee’s and visited mine, there was a chance I could learn the truth.

It was the worst kind of temptation: the kind where you really, really want to do something that you know you’re not going to do. I didn’t want to give the owl-turtle thing any further license to poke around in my head, I didn’t want to get any more deeply involved with my father, I didn’t want to have any reason to not eject him immediately the next time he came around… if that meant the pitchfork was out of reach, it meant it was out of reach. Knowing for sure that he had it would only put me that much more in his power.

Ian’s body was a warm and solid mass beside me. He stirred slightly as I struggled awake, his semi-hard cock brushing against my bare thigh. I hadn’t necessarily been trying to wake him up along with me but we were pretty well-entwined and the more I wriggled, the more his body responded. Pajamas had been a requirement when I’d shared a room with Two, whose sense of social appropriateness was not overly encumbered by flexibility… but now that she slept in another room neither of us had the habit of sleeping in clothes when we slept together.

Still mostly asleep, he cupped my breast, his fingers idly playing with the lock-shaped piercing over my heart.

“…morning?” he murmured.

“No,” I said. “Well, maybe technically. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Is everything okay?” he said, slightly more awake.

“I’m not sure.”

“Mackenzie?” he said. He shifted off of me and sat up. “Don’t tell me it happened again…”

“No,” I said, once I took a moment to figure out what he meant. “Not exactly… it wasn’t him this time.”

“Someone new is invading your dreams?”

“Something old,” I said. I raised my voice very slightly. “Dee, are you awake and listening?”

“I am now,” she said. “Saying my name in an inquisitive inflection cancels my silence wards. Is something amiss?”

Her voice came quite clearly from a space in the air just ahead of us. This might have been slightly disconcerting, except for the fact that this meant it came from the middle of the bed… so it was extremely disconcerting.

I knew she wasn’t actually there, or even in the room with me. Elven voice magic was the flipside of their incredible hearing. An elf could whisper into an ear a hundred feet away, or shout something to a single person, or speak in a conversational tone that would be heard the exact same way by everyone in a crowded room. As a telepath, Dee didn’t use her voice magic often, but the infernal half of my mind meant it would not have been safe for her to respond to me mentally.

“Is it possible for your owl-turtle thing to have been in my dreams?”

There was a pause, during which I wondered if she was coming over to continue the conversation face-to-face. But then her voice sounded again from the empty air.

“It seems that it is so. And for that I apologize… though I would appreciate it if you would refrain from labeling it as mine.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“You had the owl-turtle thing in your dream the night after the other guy visits?” Ian said. “That seems a little… iffy… to me, timing-wise.”

“Yeah, I think so, too,” I said. “Though according to it, the timing isn’t a coincidence… it came because of him. It was offering to spy for me.”

“How?” Ian asked.

“The mechanics of the owl-turtle entity are not fully known to me,” Dee said. “Nor, so far as I can ascertain, to anyone else. It has impressed upon me the desire to know more about its own capabilities, in the past… this is the one matter upon which the two of us stand united.”

I nodded, then realized Dee couldn’t see what I was doing.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what it was talking about to me.”

“Let’s not be too quick to take this thing at face value,” Ian said.

“Thus far, the entity has been remarkably straightforward in its dealings,” Dee said. “Even when I would wish for it to be otherwise.”

“I’m just saying… are we sure that this is the real deal we’re dealing with?” Ian asked. “Mackenzie’s father shows up, and critically fumbles… then the next day here’s someone or something or whatever you want to call it trying to earn her trust specifically by offering to see what he’s really up to. If the man can infiltrate your dreams and alter the environment, is there any reason to think he couldn’t change his appearance?”

“While I am not certain that the word ‘real’ fully applies to it, I can assure you that the ridiculous owl-turtle thing is in fact a construct with independent existence,” Dee said.

“Right,” Ian said. “But just because there is a ‘real’ owl-turtle thing doesn’t mean that any given owl-turtle thing is the real one. Right?”

“I cannot vouch for its whereabouts during the night, but I can attest that it was not with me,” Dee said. “This is not proof that it visited you, but it is at least suggestive of that. If this is not in fact the case, I will most likely know by later this morning.”

“Is there any reason to think that a man who can manipulate dreams couldn’t have somehow corrupted an entity made out of dreams?” Ian said.

“With the owl-turtle thing, there is no reason to think anything, one way or the other,” Dee said. “But… my instinct is that it would take an exceptionally clever mind to have learned about it and learned enough about it to make such an alteration, all without detection.”

“Ian might be onto something, though,” I said. “It knows about the pitchfork.”

“Not to undermine the whole being onto something thing, but you know about the pitchfork,” Ian said. “Maybe it just knows what you know?”

“That would be consistent with my experiences,” Dee said.

“Which isn’t much,” I said.

“We have never been able to ascertain the fate of it,” Dee said. “Amaranth unwittingly bore it outside the boundaries of the campus, and there it vanished in a manner that prevented me from tracing it further. The presence of a full demon exercising powerful magic would explain the burst of infernal power that I detected, and if that demon has spent years concealing itself in forests it would explain why my attempts to trace it via spider-speak never mushroomed.”

“I think hiding himself from prying eyes is one of his specialties,” I said.

“Okay,” Ian said. “So, going on the theory that the owl-turtle thing is real and not acting under any outside influence… what’s its angle?”

“It made it sound like it’d be doing it just to see if it can,” I said. “Except it won’t do it if I don’t want to hear about the results.”

“The owl-turtle thing considers itself something of an avatar of self-awakening,” Dee said. “It believes its presence to be beneficial, and its ultimate goal is to help its host. Although I am not certain as to the efficacy of its methods, I do believe it would not mean you harm. However, it does have its own agenda, of sorts: continued existence. During our… my… time in Ceilos over the summer break, it took pains to conceal the extent of its existence from the more powerful priestesses and telepaths.”

“The extent of its existence?” Ian repeated. “What do you mean?”

“It could hide its presence from telepaths but was not able to do anything regarding my memories of it, so it pretended to be nothing more than an odd recurring dream of mine,” Dee said. “Which I suppose might be a somewhat apt description, though it only tells half of the tale. I was already regarded as being a bit …silly… and that aided its deception, as well as making me unwilling to pursue the matter further. But in light of its fear of detection, I find it very odd that it would volunteer to spy on a demon of sufficient power and subtlety to have remained active on this plane for as long as your father has.”

“Unless it thinks a demon is really in need of some enlightenment?” Ian suggested.

“That doesn’t explain why it would insist on asking for my cooperation,” I said. “Maybe it wants to learn from him, though. The way the man talks about getting inside my head, it sounds like he knows some special back way in… maybe the owl-turtle thing wants some help getting around.”

“This is a possibility,” Dee said. “I believe it is already learning from the man’s example. In the time it has occupied my dreams, it has never… to my knowledge… spontaneously visited the mind of another without drawing on my telepathy in a rather obvious way, barring the night when the walls of reality were weakened. I know there was no connection between our minds last night, so I must surmise it somehow ‘watched’ your father’s coming and imitated him. It could be that it desires a closer look.”

“It could be,” I said.

“Or perhaps its interest is in the pitchfork,” Dee said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It is all supposition,” Dee said. “But as Ian said, the dream entity knows what the dreamer knows… I have held a fragment of the pitchfork entity in my mind before. It is possible that this is what has attracted the owl-turtle thing’s interest to your father.”

“What would it want with the pitchfork, though?”

“I do not know,” Dee said. “Again, I believe its intentions are benign… but so were mine when I took on the pitchfork entity. I believe the best thing to do would be for me to confront it directly and ask it about its motives and what interest, if any, it has in the pitchfork. I do not believe it is capable of lying.”

“That would be a really convenient thing for it to let you think,” Ian said.

“I am aware of the possibility,” Dee said. “If it tells me nothing I will not conclude that there is nothing to tell, but if it has anything interesting to say on the subject of the pitchfork and its aims I see no reason not to believe it.”

“Doesn’t the fact that we’re talking about it mean it’ll know what you’re up to?” Ian asked.

“The rate at which new information I take in filters through to it seems to vary somewhat, but there is a good chance it will be aware of my intentions,” Dee said. “This is why the straightforward approach is the best. If you will excuse me, I will restore my privacy spell and return to sleep… the connection between the actual passage of time and the apparent duration of a dream is always somewhat chancy, and I would like to have sufficient time for a long conversation, if necessary.”

“Okay,” I said. “Goodnight, Dee. Thanks for the help.”

“You’re welcome. Goodnight.”

No one said anything for a few seconds. There was no sense of a withdrawal, because of course Dee had never had a real presence in the room… but we’d been sitting up talking to her for so long that it felt like she had been there.

“Do you think she’s gone?” Ian asked after a while.

“I’m pretty sure she is,” I said. “I mean, she’d be correcting us if she could hear us assuming that she couldn’t.”

“So what now?”

“I guess we wait to find out what she learns,” I said. “If the owl-turtle thing is after the pitchfork… or even inordinately curious about it… I’m going to be even more inclined to say no.”

“I guess you’re getting over your attachment to the damned thing, then,” Ian said.

“It’s not that,” I said. “I just… well, imagine if it uses the owl-turtle thing as a conduit to Dee’s mind. And that’s not even getting into the possibilities just with it merging with the owl-turtle thing.”

“What possibilities are those?”

“To quote the song of the day: I don’t know,” I said. “No one knows. But how badly do you want to find out?”

“I get your point,” Ian said. “Anyway, what I really meant was what do you want to do now… try to get back to sleep, or something else?”

“I’m actually feeling pretty wide awake now,” I said. “But I can’t really think of anything constructive we could be doing.”

“I’m pretty much awake, too,” Ian said. “But there’s a thing about waking up next to my naked girlfriend… it gives me all kinds of ideas, and not all of them are necessarily constructive.”

---

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Ian was kind of quiet and stood back a bit through a lot of the night. I worried that he felt left out by the amount of time I spent talking to Nicki, but every time I looked at him he looked like he was enjoying himself, and he seemed perfectly fine when he was talking to me, especially when we were out under the lights together.

Still, I worried about it enough to ask him if he had a problem with her when I was sure we were well away from Nicki.

“I like her okay, so far,” he said. “And it’s good to see you making friends you can talk to like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like you talk to her,” he said.

“So why don’t you talk to her?” I said.

“If you want me to make forced and awkward conversation with her because it’ll make you feel better, I will,” he said. “But if you want me to do it because you think it’ll be fun for me or her, you’re probably wrong.”

“Why would it be forced and awkward?”

“Because I’ve never been great at talking to girls,” he said.

“That’s stupid,” I said. “All the people you hang out with are girls.”

“First, not all the people,” he said. “Most of my friends are guys. Close friends? I don’t know. But I don’t wink out of existence when I’m not with you. And I don’t spend that much time talking to a lot of the group. And the reason I can talk to you…”

“Don’t say I don’t count as a girl,” I said.

“You don’t count as ‘girls’,” he said. “You’re a specific girl. I’ve spent time getting to know you and figuring out how to talk to you. Mostly by trial and error.”

“So get to know Nicki,” I said.

“I will,” he said. “But even if I don’t end up best friends forever with her, that doesn’t mean you can’t hang out with her.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t mean to pressure you.”

“You were just looking out for me,” he said. “I’m a quiet guy sometimes. It doesn’t mean I’m not a good time. You of all people should know that.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Say that a few more times and I’ll be having a great time.”

Steff did show up, as I’d been pretty sure that she would… her transparent attempts at being coy and blase about it had been, of course, transparent. She’d taken the time to get dressed up-ish, wearing a lacy spider web-patterned shawl over a loose peasant top and black jeans that hugged the hips she’d sprouted early in the previous year.

She didn’t dislike breasts on others and I think she enjoyed having them, but her internalized elven mores meant that she was often less comfortable with clothes that showed off the bulges on her chest than she was with clothes that made it hard to hide the one between her legs.

Neither touch made her look any less feminine to me… or any less hot, for that matter.

“So this is the new sidekick,” she said, giving Nicki an up and down look.

“This is my friend, Nicki,” I said, correcting rather than arguing with her… just on the off-chance that Nicki actually aspired to sidekickdom and would have found it slightly soul-crushing to hear me blurt out a quick rejection of the idea.

“Hi,” Nicki said. “We’ve actually met, a little.”

“She looks a little sturdier than the last one,” Steff said, “but I still don’t think she’d last three rounds with the Dark Lord.”

“Wait… what Dark Lord?” Nicki asked.

“This is Steff’s sad little attempt at a running joke,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m just kidding,” Steff said. “Like he’d kill someone important to Mack that quickly after what she did to him last year.”

“Seriously, there isn’t a Dark Lord,” I said. “There isn’t even so much as a beige duke. My life is not the simplest place to stand, but it has yet to be complicated by any evil overlords.”

“And isn’t that a mercy?” Steff said.

“Mostly uncomplicated by evil overlords,” I said before she decided to spill any more in front of Nicki. I was sort of equally concerned of her being scared off and of her continuing to get the wrong idea about my life of adventure and excitement… i.e., that it existed. “Though I can’t really say the same thing about overlords-in-training.”

“There are classes for evil overlords?” Nicki asked.

“Not as such, no,” Steff said. “I mean, I thought about minoring in poli arts, but that’s only because it sounded like something else. Um, Mack, I think you might want to rescue your girlfriend from the fight she’s about to start?”

“What?” I said, looking around. Amaranth was a bit more prone to wide open socialization than any of the rest of us, and so I hadn’t thought much of it when she’d split off to go talk to someone else. I could easily see a fight breaking out over her attention, but I didn’t see anyone squaring off over her… instead, I saw her engaged in a conversation with a somewhat bemused Eloise Desjardins while looking increasingly flustered. “I, uh… I should probably go see what that’s about.” I looked at Nicki. “I’ll be back, seriously, don’t…”

“Go!” she said, with an easy laugh.

Amaranth wasn’t quite at the foot-stomping mad stage, but she looked closed… her cheeks were red and her eyes could have been flushed with tears. Her losing her cool was unlikely to lead to violence, but it could easily lead to her saying or doing something she’d regret… and I’d regret if she alienated or pissed off Eloise. Not only was she pretty cool, but her presence was the only part of my local hazards class that I actually liked.

I knew that the two of them’d had at least one debate before, though I hadn’t been present for it… Amaranth generally tried to err on the side of respecting other people’s beliefs, but it’s possible she had a blind spot regarding secularists… especially ones who were specifically not following the ways of her goddess. She might have been the first one to agree that Mother Khaele didn’t particularly want or need worship, per se, but she identified the goddess as her literal mother to the extent that a perceived lack of respect offended her.

Once I got close enough to hear what Eloise was saying, though, it seemed that religious conviction in and of itself wasn’t the source of the dispute.

“No, I’m not saying it’s an absolute certainty that there are no druids anywhere who have ever had sex with a humanoid while ‘shaped, I’m just saying it’s not likely,” Eloise said.

“I don’t know how you can say that, though,” Amaranth said. “I mean, it’s not like you’ve spoken with every druid who exists.”

“It seemed like you were willing to take me as spokeswoman for druidry when you asked me if I agreed with you,” she said. “Anyway, I’m not talking about what other druids think, I’m talking about how we think. You have to understand that even when we keep our minds, we are the shape we wear. Fundamentally. That’s not just a basic tenet of druidry, it’s a big part of how it works. If I’m being a hawk, I’m thinking I’m a hawk or else I’m falling.”

“And?”

“And hawks aren’t interested in people,” she said. “Romantically. Sexually. On any level you can think of.”

“Maybe that’s typical, but is that the same thing as fundamental? I just don’t see the fundamental incompatibility between an animal’s nature and the physical act of love with another being,” Amaranth said. “We may be different orders of creation, but we were created after the same models.”

“I ever meet a hawk that wants to engage in the physical act of love with people and I’ll lead the hunting party myself,” Eloise said. “That would be a serious menace… a seriously fucked-up menace.”

“Look, can you let go of the hawk example? I wasn’t thinking about a hawk specifically,” Amaranth said.

“Okay, you look,” Eloise said. “If you’re not actually trying to talk me into putting the ‘wild’ into ‘wild shape’ with you, then I really don’t care what your beliefs or preferences or predilections are. But… and this is the key part… I really don’t care. That doesn’t just mean I’m not going to say anything about them. It means I don’t need to hear anything about them.”

“Has anybody ever tell you that you have a very closed mind?” Amaranth asked.

“Nothing’s fallen out of it yet.”

“Um… is everything okay?” I said.

“Just a minor disagreement on a philosophical point,” Eloise said. “But you know, since I’m not affiliated with a circle and I’m not religious I really don’t think you should be bringing any more questions like this to me.”

“Alright,” Amaranth said. “I just thought that since you’re not affiliated, you might have a different opinion…”

“And it turns out I do. How about that?” Eloise said.

Amaranth didn’t seem to have an answer for that. She opened her mouth and closed it a couple of times. I felt bad for seeing her so completely frustrated, but… she was very in the wrong here.

“Is that Steff?” she said finally. “I’m going to go say hi to Steff.”

“Sorry about that,” I said to Eloise.

“What for?” she said. “You’re not her keeper… anyway, I wanted to tell you that Swain’s finalizing the schedule for her field excursions. It’s actually supposed to be done already but she’s had to juggle things around a bit to make things work… it seems neither one of us has a lot of luck getting attention and respect from the bureaucracy.”

“I’ll be looking for it… I know you’re leading your own excursions, but are you going to accompany hers?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m definitely going to be on for the overnight trip,” Eloise said. “And the plan is for me to be there on the shorter trips, too… but that’s going to come down to some external factors.”

“Well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” I said. “I’m not exactly comfortable in the woods, so I’m hoping to go out with as big a group as possible…”

“Yeah, it seems like a safe bet that she’ll have the largest group,” Eloise said. “Maybe not as big as you think, though… some people will go for the other accredited guides just because they aren’t teachers, is my guess. And if you’re worried about safety, you stick close to the professor. Don’t let her hear you repeating this, but she had a pretty good run as a wilderness adventurer before she took up teaching. The wee folk respect her, and so does the forest.”

“Somehow I’d take more comfort in your presence than hers,” I said.

“You’d have a hard time keeping up with me when I’m airborne, and when I’m not… well, I’m more about seeing the sights up close and getting my hands dirty,” she said. “I’m not careless, I just weight my priorities a little bit differently. I pick the reasonably safe place that gives me the best view. She picks the safest place she can see okay from.”

“Do you spend a lot of time as a bird?” I asked. I didn’t think druids were very limited when it came to the forms they could assume, but it seemed any time Eloise’s animal time came up she was flying.

“In total? No, but compared to other animals, yes. I’m a city girl originally, but I always wanted to fly,” she said. “It was either that or the air navy… I thought about both, but I decided I’d rather be able to spread my own wings and see the whole world spread out beneath me than be stuck on a boat looking over the railing, when I had time to look at all. That and the philosophy of druidism appealed to me more, though the hierarchical aspects put me off the religion. A hawk doesn’t answer to anyone, or have anyone under them… both are important to me.”

“So I guess you’re not looking to go into teaching full time,” I said.

“I don’t think teacher/student has to be a hierarchical relationship,” she said. “Students have to respect teachers for anything to get done, but it’s just as bad when teachers don’t respect students. I taught myself more than I ever learned from half the teachers I’ve had. I don’t know, you might have had something similar to deal with growing up.”

“I suppose,” I said. “I’ve had pretty good luck in college so far, though the exceptions have been… exceptional. So far even the classes I haven’t been crazy about have had good people leading them.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “Is it that obvious that I really don’t want to be there?”

“There’s a lot of resentment over the new rules,” she said. “I guessed it from what you said about the excursions. I wouldn’t have picked your face out of the crowd as being someone who was ticked off… you look like someone who has a tendency to look more sullen than you actually are, if only because you don’t go around looking people in the eye and smiling at them.”

“It’s been more interesting than I expected, really,” I said. “I don’t think I’d drop it now if I had the choice of opting out of the requirement somehow… though I would skip the excursions if I could.”

“You can,” she said. “You’ll fail, the class of course, but that’s the nice thing about failure: it’s always an option.”

“Well, it’s an option I can’t afford,” I said.

“Oh, you’ll do alright,” she said. “Professor Swain is a pretty soft touch when it comes to grading, as long as you’re legitimately trying. Anyway, they couldn’t make these classes too hard when they’re making the whole university take them, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not really worried about passing the class. I’m just…. not looking forward to the process of getting there.”

“Well, there’s that other option we talked about,” she said. “Relax, though. Maybe it’s been a rough beginning, but we did kind of throw the thing together. Things will smooth out further down the line.”

“Actually, it hasn’t been that bad a beginning,” I said. “I mean, last year I’d already changed one class by this point and I was on the verge of dropping another. All things considered, this year has been going pretty smoothly, classes I’m not crazy about included.”

“Glad to hear it,” she said. “Hey, I’m going to take off. Not that I don’t like fraternizing with undergrad, but this isn’t really my crowd. See you next week.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She walked off, and I headed back to my group, thinking that the year really had been off to a much better start than the one before. Sure, there had been some rough patches. I’d let myself get way too caught up in the whole thing revolving around Twyla… but we’d got that sorted out pretty quickly. I was doing at least okay in my classes so far, and my relationships were going pretty strong… we had our miscommunications and our miscues, but we cleared them up like grown-ups most of the time now.

Nothing was perfect, nothing was terrible, and so the year rolled on.