The protections flared up as Kent’s hand approached them, then they shifted and flexed and the door opened without incident. I had a sense of something old and strong stirring behind them. It was almost like watching a living thing rouse from its slumber, fail to see anything worth getting up for, and then rolling over and going back to sleep.

It was only as I stepped through the door ahead of Kent that I thought to consider whether we were creeping past a sleeping guardian, or stepping right into the maw of a beast.

There were no agents inside the foyer or the main hallway. It was so quiet inside, and the lights were so dim… the place felt hollow. Cavernous.

I had to remind myself that hollow didn’t mean the same thing as empty. If Embries wasn’t there, someone else would be.

“It’s right this way,” he said, indicating the broad, portrait-lined main hall that led to the chancellor’s office.

I wasn’t at all surprised… it only made sense that the vice-chancellor’s office would be there, too. I hadn’t specifically noticed it during my previous visit, but then, I hadn’t been looking for it. That, and I’d taken a different route in that time.

I was a little bit surprised when he suddenly stopped me and pointed to the left. There was a little cubby set into the wall that at first I thought was just an odd setback since it didn’t seem to lead anywhere, but then I realized it was the top of a narrow spiral staircase.

The idea of descending underground might have worried me, but I was already in the belly of the beast… going down might be the only way out. I didn’t thnk escape was possible, at that point… not with the crazy wards around the building. It seemed to me like those might even give a goddess pause, at least for a moment. Khaele was thought to be confused by or at least somewhat unfamiliar with arcane applications of magic

Again Kent made sure that I went first down the stairs. It was funny, it seemed to me like I had a lot more reason to distrust him… well, it wasn’t funny. Nothing about the situation was.

Though, unaccountably, I felt like I was one good shove in the wrong direction away from bursting out laughing.

The stairs let out in a short downstairs corridor without any branches. It was vaguely trumpet-shaped, widening as it went. There were a couple of hard wooden benches against the wall just before the end, where there was a pair of double doors of some very solid-looking dark-stained wood. They looked very old, antique as opposed to the drab and outdated paneling on the walls and the threadbare institutional carpet… they would have fit in much better with the upstairs corridor. There was a gold-colored plaque above them.

It occurred to me that Kent had gone from talking about how tight-lipped he was to not saying anything, and he’d been that way since we entered the building. He was practically holding his breath by this point. I thought he was going to usher me towards the doors ahead of himself once again, but he looked conflicted for a second and then went forward and rapped his knuckles rather gingerly.

“Enter,” the smooth voice of Vice-Chancellor Edmund Embries said. He managed to make it sound like a polite invitation rather than a brusque command. Kent pushed one of the doors inwards and then swept his arm forward. I stepped up to just on the threshold.

It wasn’t specifically my father’s warning about being in a room with Embries that made me hesitant… it was just a very menacing situation. It could have been Mariel or Twyla in the office and I still wouldn’t want to step inside before I knew the score.

The inside of the office had a bunch of furnishings that were only modern in the sense that they had been made during an age of automated mass production, though not necessarily this one. They clashed badly with the wood paneling and sconce-style lights on the walls, giving the impression of a place that was completely out of joint with time.

There was another door on the side of the office, opposite the desk. It might have been a closet, but the crystal doorknob suggested otherwise, unless Mr. Embries had expensive taste in closets.

I thought there was no sign of Embries, until my second look around when I realized that he was sitting behind the desk, his fingers steppled in front of him. He hadn’t just appeared, or at least, I didn’t think he had… he was just so still that I’d missed him.

He still hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked. His eyes seemed so vibrant, even across the dimly lit room, but I could look right at them and they didn’t flicker in the slightest.

When his mouth finally opened, I almost jumped and screamed in terror.

I didn’t, though… I just jumped.

“And who is this, please?” he said.

“Mackenzie Blaise,” Kent said. “Sir. As you, uh, requested.”

Embries’s head tilted and turned slightly. He stared at me with his cold electric eyes. They reminded me of Celia’s lidless orbs… there were lids there, but they were so resolutely fixed in place that they might have been painted there.

It wasn’t a relief at all when he closed them a moment later, because I still had the sensation of them boring into me. His nostrils gave the slightest flare. I thought I saw his lips part slightly.

“Are you quite certain?” he asked, eyes still closed.

“Quite. Yes. Sir. We’ve had trackers on her since before you requested her,” Kent said, visibly unnerved. His discomfort was even more obvious considering that he’d just blurted that out in front of me. The information wasn’t exactly a surprise, but the fact that he would confirm it in my presence was. “I can verify her identity again…”

“No,” Embries said, his eyes flying open. All at once he seemed a lot more animated. It was like watching a high-end enaction figure with facial articulation coming to life. “I suppose that will be sufficient. Well, this is a slight disappointment… athough it is probably for the best, considering. Arthur, you are dismissed.”

“Yes, sir,” Kent said, backing out of the door. I heard it swinging shut behind me. It was only then that I realized at some point or another I’d started drifting closer to Embries, and was actually still moving slowly closer.

“Miss Mackenzie, you will please stay and you and I will have a little chat,” Embries said as the door clicked closed.

“Ms. Mackenzie,” I said, and I managed to stop my forward progress about four feet away from the desk. “Sir.”

“Oh? Hmm,” he said. “Well, this might be mildly interesting anyway. My most sincere apologies for the rigmarole. The agents of Law naturally tend to believe that any task in which they engage is of the utmost importance, and I have found it’s best to play up that impression. The more of them we can keep busy running around…”

He made a slow circular gesture with his hand.

“You couldn’t just send me an a-mail?” I asked.

“A-mail?”

“Arcane mail,” I said. “Written communication over etheric media.”

“Oh. Like a telegrim?”

“Sure,” I said. It seemed like a bad joke… yeah, I could believe that Embries was old enough to remember telegrims. He wouldn’t even be the only member of the faculty. Not knowing what a-mail was, though? He worked in an office.

“Dealing with such modern complications are among the reasons I like to keep a secretary through the year, when I can,” he said, as though he could pick my thoughts right off of my face. “You don’t have much respect for me, do you?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to be disrespectful or anything, I just… well, I really don’t understand why I’m here.”

“Don’t apologize, it makes things more interesting,” he said. “Unpredictable, that is. At least insofar as I’m less certain how all of this is going to end for you. The rest I have worked out.”

“Then what’s going to happen?”

“Well, I thought we’d have a little chat, as I said,” he said. “I am not so fond of chatting that I have any great desire to repeat myself, so let’s try to keep things moving forward, shall we?”

“I’ve had a lot of chats lately,” I said.

“And have you learned anything from them?”

I thought it was a rhetorical question, just a jab, but as he sat there looking at me I realized he was actually asking.

“What… like a moral, or something?” I asked.

“I despise morals,” he said. “One does not learn a moral; they must be inflicted. I meant a lesson. Have you learned any lessons?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Then it seems I might owe you a refund, in my professional capacity,” he said. “You can use it to pay back your scholarships, who will surely be next in line for one. I met your grandmother.”

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out. The segue was so… so not even a segue that I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Your maternal grandmother,” he said. “Martha Blaise.”

“Yeah, uh, I know who you meant,” I said.

“Oh? I see… how very slightly drole,” he said. “I’ve met her twice, in point of fact, though I don’t think she remembered me. I must say, it’s a bit of a blow to my ego to have made so little impression on a person. I doubt she could have recognized me, all things considered, but still… a bit of a blow.”

I didn’t say anything to that. What could I have said? Apologizing again would have made me sound like even more of a smartass, and I gathered he didn’t like having his ego bruised.

“It amuses me that they call themselves white dragons,” he said. “Whites really are the lowest of the low… craftless and venal, scarcely more than beasts. They are utterly incapable of long-term planning, basic manners, or decent conversation. But the humans who set such things down equate the very concept of ‘white’ with purity and virtue, and so the most ignoble of dragons is used as a mascot for some of the more noble of humanity. I would almost like to say that it’s fitting, but I’m afraid I feel humanity is slandered by the comparison.”

“So… does this deal or whatever have anything to do with my grandmother?” I asked.

“Hmm. What? Oh, no… according to Mr. McAvoy’s men, she boarded a regional skiff for Blackwater at Earl P. Osborn Memorial Air Harbor at a quarter past five this evening,” he said. “I suggested they keep an eye on her… more busywork, you know, but I do feel better knowing that she’s gone. The proverbial loose catapult cannot begin to wreak as much havoc as a tightly-lashed one pointed in a direction in which one does not wish for missiles to be hurled.”

“So… why are we talking about her?”

“She’s your relation, and a mutual acquaintance,” Embries said. “I don’t do this very often, I confess, but I’ve gathered that this is how it’s done.”

“How what’s done?”

“Small talk,” he said. “A little conversation before dinner. Don’t make me say the thing about repeating myself ag… oh, drat.” He might have said something stronger, but I was only half paying attention. The bit right before that had made my blood run cold. “Well, to forge ahead: my immediate neighbor to the west has some messy habits that occasionally spill over onto my property,” he said. “For the sake of the peace, I ignore it as much as I can, but when I heard she gave him something to think about I had to go and see her for myself… well, I suppose I see where this is beside the point. Perhaps we should just get right down to it. Miss Mackenzie, are you quite prepared?”

I didn’t know what to say to that, in part because I didn’t know what it was I supposed to be prepared for… and in part because deep down inside, in the small, scrabbling little animal place that only existed in the pit of my stomach and the back of my brain… in the place that responded when Iona or Feejee looked at me with their fathomless black eyes… I was afraid that I did know.

“Well, then,” Embries said, rising to his feet so smoothly that he might as well have levitated, “let’s go in.”

I had no sense of wanting to move toward the crystalline doorknob or of being made to do so… I simply did it. It was warm beneath my hand, and it turned easily and silently. There was another room beyond it, a larger office decorated in the same style as the outer one but with elegant furnishings better suited to their surroundings.

Sitting in one of two high-backed chairs in front of a big black mahogany desk was Iona. She twisted around to look at me as I continued forward into the room.

“Finally,” she said.

“Yes,” Mr. Embries said behind me. His voice seemed to be as close in my ear as Steff’s when she whispered. “Indeed.” The door clicked shut with a sound like a portcullis slamming into a stone floor. “Finally.”

Iona let out a big dramatic sigh that suggested she was even less affected by Embries’s aura of whateverness than I was… and I was accumulating some pretty substantial evidence that I wasn’t actually immune.

“You are a very rude young lady,” he said, gliding around me and heading towards the desk. The slightest touch of his hand on my arm in passing had me heading for the other seat, which I folded myself meekly into. “I’m afraid that I don’t know how to relate to your kind… mammals feel an instinctive and primal fear that can shade over to awe. Goblins and other spawn of the crawling chaos tend to experience enmity or revulsion. Reptiles show a sense of profound reverence and respect… but despite a somewhat superficial resemblance to our nearest relatives in the created orders, I find that piscines simply do not ‘get’ dragons.”

I suddenly became aware of the painting on the wall behind him. Iona’s presence had distracted me, and my mind had not registered it properly… the big gleaming whitish shapes spreading out against the sky could have been the sails of the most stereotypical schooner in the most cliched big old important looking painting imaginable.

They weren’t, though.

They were the wings of what was at the very least a greater silver dragon, to judge by its crown of horns.

“What, now?” Iona said.

“Precisely,” Embries said, and he smiled as he had at the press conference. “Now, I was just telling Miss Mackenzie about her grandmother not recognizing me.”

His smile was not a good smile. It was not a kind smile. It was not a reassuring smile. It wasn’t the sort of smile you gave to someone who was likely to survive seeing it. It was the smile of a gourmand addressing a delicacy. I had never been so glad for someone to not be smiling at me in my life.

Iona seemed completely and utterly unconcerned about being on the receiving end of it.

“Are all old people supposed to know each other?” she asked. “I thought that was just a stereotype.”

“The Shifters, on the other hand… they know how to spot when someone’s wearing a skin he wasn’t born in,” Embries continued. “They saw right through me.” He looked at Iona. “They’d see right through you, too. I confess you’ve had me fooled… that’s a general you, as it happens. I had no idea your kind were still extant. I thought you’d departed this world, or were sleeping beneath it.”

Sea devils, the man had said. When I’d asked if he’d meant mermaids, he’d replied, ““If that’s what you call their kind these days.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Iona said.

“Of course you don’t,” he said. “It’s well before your time.”

“My own kind is before my time?” she said.

“Most people’s kinds are,” he said. “Mine? Markedly less so. But as much as it pains me to say it, I didn’t bring either of you here to talk about me.”

“Then you’d better tell me why you did bring me here or let me go,” she said. “I know how human laws work.”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure you’ve seen all about it in the television box,” he said, waving his hand. “Unfortunately for you, I’m afraid we’re quite done with human laws. They have, for the moment, been dispensed with. Or suspended, if you prefer.”

“What?” Iona asked, real concern not so much creeping into her voice as leaping up it to escape as a tiny squeak at the end.

“Oh, my, yes,” Embries said. “You see, it has been decided… with a little counseling from the august personage of myself… that the best way to resolve the matter of the poor dead girl, whatever her name was… is to step outside the laws of the Imperium, which could neither have furnished the bereaved family with an adequate solution nor denied them one without provoking a dangerous domestic situation and/or risking a destructive and expensive war.”

“She was killed by a monster,” Iona said. “I heard it. That’s what the law guys said. She was killed by a monster!”

“Precisely,” Embries said. He had a way of making that one word function as both punctuation and threat. “And so it is in our capacity as monsters that we must deal with it… and deal we shall. As for you…”

His head swiveled abruptly towards me. Up until that point I could almost have believed he’d forgotten I was there, he’d become so focused on Iona… I had almost forgotten that I was there. I’d felt like a detached observer, helplessly watching the horror of Iona’s dawning realization.

“As for you, Miss Mackenzie,” Embries said. “It seems to me that you are not entirely blameless in this. I’m a big believer in letting the punishment fit the crime. Well… no, I’m not actually all that big of a believer in punishment, to be honest. As a general concept, it can go hang itself after denouncing and implicating morals at its trial. But as long as there must be punishments… and they do seem to be rather en vogue right now… why should they not fit their respective crimes? It’s so much neater… so much nicer, in the original sense of that word… when they do. Which, ah, is not to say that the punishments themselves might get a bit… messy.”

His gaze fell back towards Iona then, and I was grateful… so grateful, so pathetically glad to have his eyes off of me when he said it. Let her punishment be messy, I thought… I almost prayed. If I believed there was a god who would hear the prayers of a haf-demon who might be eaten by a dragon then I would have and taken the consequences. Let her punishment be messy, as long as mine isn’t.

“I believe you are both beginning to get the picture where Miss Iona is concerned,” Embries said. “For your part, Miss Mackenzie… well, your crime lies in knowing… knowing and not saying, not doing. What happened was made possible by your inaction. For that? I sentence you to the burden of yet more knowledge.

“You will stay. You will bear witness. You will know what happened here, and you will never… ever… say a word to anybody. If anyone breaches your mind or is privy to your thoughts, they will not be able to see what happens here tonight. You will keep the events so secret that they will be shielded even from someone sharing space in your soul. Do you understand me?

“I’m talking about something quite like a geas… but I am of the wrong persuasion for such bright and brittle faerie magic, and far beyond the cheap imitations your arcanists weave. When I say that these things will happen, Miss Mackenzie, I mean that they will happen, with an emphasis most decidedly on will.”

“I’m getting out of here,” Iona said.

“Oh, no, I’m quite afraid you’re not,” Embries said. He leaned forward over the desk. “And… please, no. Stop trying to shift. You’re much more pleasant this way. All those scales and spiky parts… honestly, it’s like trying to peel an artichoke. Miss Mackenzie, you may stop trying to close your eyes. It won’t do you any good, but it’s irritating to me… if you stop fighting, I’ll allow you to blink normally, and believe me when I say you’ll miss that sorely before too long.”

I hadn’t realized until he said it that I had been trying to squeeze my eyes shut. Despite his invitation, I didn’t stop fighting. The need to move and the inability to do so made the whole thing feel very dream-like. I had a feeling that before it was over, I would welcome that.

“The time has come,” the dragon said. “Miss Iona, you will please lay yourself out on the desk. Miss Mackenzie, be attentive now… we are monstrous folk, and you are about to bear witness to a monstrous thing. I suspect it will probably break you. It might have an altogether more salutatory effect, though, and one way or another, it will certainly change you. It will teach you a lesson, to be sure. There may even be a moral, if only you can find it.”

My eyes seemed fixed to Iona by invisible strings as she got up rather primly and did an obscene, jerky version of a model’s catwalk strut, her scaled legs melting into meaty skin as she did. With a mouth that was locked tightly shut and a face that was horribly placid and calm, she stood at the edge of the desk, turned around to face away from it, and then hopped up backwards. She scooted back as she reclined.

I couldn’t help but notice that Embries’s desk was well long enough to accommodate the entire length of her frame.

“Now if you’re ready, monsters dear,” Embries said, “we can begin to feed.”

Friday: Well… you heard him. What do you think’s going to happen?

It said something about just how powerful an image it was that Iona could walk around completely topless… completely naked, in fact… and I still ended up staring at her mouth.

Where was Pala? I doubted Iona could have dispatched her, but that obviously didn’t mean she couldn’t have got rid of her in some other way. What had we been thinking, trusting such a total airhead to watch my back? Of course, she hadn’t been the one who decided to lock me up in a room and throw a soundproofing spell around it…

“Mackenzie,” Iona said. Her smile widened just a bit, and every part of me that she or Feejee had ever bitten felt a twinge. “I’ve been looking for you… well, that’s not exactly true.”

She shoved me back away from the door, with just a touch of her fingertips in the center of my chest. I didn’t resist it… the part of me that still felt free to resist felt pretty sure that it was better to step backwards than to fall on my ass in the middle of the dirty, damp, toilet-paper-strewn floor.

“I’ve been seeking you,” she continued, closing and locking the door behind her. “You’re never that hard to find, and I figured out your schedule days ago.”

I shook off my surprise… that was mostly what it was… and took stock of the situation. She wasn’t armed, that I could see. This was important. The mermaids could tear an ordinary person apart with ease, but my flesh wouldn’t part for any amount of force or savagery unless there was magic backing up the muscle. If she was unarmed, that meant she’d either just come to talk, or she’d made a big mistake.

I was invulnerable, I was stronger than she was, I could use fire and magic to defend myself. There was no way in which she was a real threat to me.

It was just a matter of convincing even the smallest part of my body of that.

Or better still, a useful part… like my arms, or legs, or even my mouth.

“I’m guessing you saw the press thingy,” Iona said. “Since you were in class during it… I have to tell you, I’ve been slightly worried a couple of times during the past few days. I guess I didn’t really ‘get’ what Leda was, or understand how she was different from everybody else… well, not that different, as it turned out.”

“Iona,” I said. It wasn’t much, but it was all I could force out past lips that barely wanted to move. But saying it was enough to break the dam and let other words spill awkwardly out of my mouth. “I know… I know it seems like you’re getting away with…”

“I am, aren’t I?” she said, and she laughed. “I kind of understand what they mean when they say ‘getting away with murder’, but this is even better. It’s not even murder, it’s just hunting… even the human authorities acknowledge that. You heard what they called it, right? It’s a monster attack, that’s all.”

“You might not feel so relaxed about that idea if you get identified as the monster,” I said. Okay, not the smartest thing I’d ever said… the last thing I wanted was for her to think I’d turned her in… or maybe even worse, that I was going to, and therefore she had something to gain by stopping me.

“You think I haven’t thought of that?” she said. “I really don’t mind. I mean, from their point of view, I suppose it’s true. I am a monster… and if some intrepid monster hunter sees me prowling around in the dark, I’m fair game for them. And so are they, for me. The system works.”

“That’s not a system.”

“Isn’t it?” she said. “I think it’s a rather nice set-up… rather too nice to be completely accidental. Everybody risks their lives going out after dark… them by being prey, us by being threats. No one has to go out at night, so anyone who does, the risk is on their own head. The school denies responsibilities. The authorities barely investigate, and even then only if it’s somebody important.”

“You’re talking like you think it’s set up that way on purpose.”

“Why not? The investigators don’t seem interested in finding out whether or not the monster was a student. They don’t seem interested in finding her. They did the bare minimum and now they’re walking away,” Iona said. “Even that much attention is a huge, uh, fluke. Sorry, I can barely say that with a straight face.”

“How exactly do you figure that?” I asked.

“Because it’s not like I just started hunting on Veil Night, or that I’m the only one who’s done it,” Iona said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Who else is out hunting at night?”

“Well… I don’t know, exactly,” she said, and a look of uncertainty flashed across her face before being quashed by a much more determined look of extreme certainty. “But I know I can’t be the only one. It’s just nature, you know? There are too many hunting folk here, and so much prey…”

“It’s not a good idea to think of humans as prey,” I said. “They didn’t build two of the biggest empires the world has ever seen by rolling over and dying.”

“We don’t hear much about their empires where I come from,” Iona said. “And we live by the shores of some of their islands. It’s just not that big of a deal. I heard in one of my classes that humanity controls a quarter of the dry land… have you ever looked at a globe of the world? That’s like a quarter of the quarter of the world. Less, really… I mean, a globe only shows the surface. Humans only have a sixteenth of the skin of the world and they act like they’re running the whole show.”

“Yeah, but they’ve… we‘ve done things no one else has,” I said. “We’re organized. We’re innovative.”

“You’re food, and you know it,” Iona said. “I don’t mean just you, well… kind of especially you. But everyone else knows it. The whole world is folk and food, people and prey… and deep down inside, everybody knows where they fall. Look, Feejee’s people live out in the middle of the ocean. At the deep crossings. They would never, ever encounter humans or other land-dwellers if nobody ever built a great big boat and sailed out over their hunting grounds. Each tribe gets maybe one or two ships an average year, I think. And that’s obviously a small enough number compared to the number of ships lost to other natural causes that nobody blinks about it.”

I didn’t think she realized how hard it was to determine why a ship went down with no survivors… divination was out of the question, and communication magic was severely hampered in the middle of a vast expanse of moving water. Even necromancy… classical necromancy, that is, communication by summoning spirits of the dead… was not a great option. Souls that died violent and sudden deaths were dangerous to deal with, and it was hard to wrest lives claimed by the sea back up to the surface.

But if ever there was a moment to get hung up on being all pedantic about that sort of thing, this wasn’t it.

“Iona, I think you’re underestimating the difficulty of finding out what happens to a ship lost at sea,” I said. There again I was having the problem of convincing my mouth what my brain knew.

“Well, maybe I am,” she said. “But… I don’t really care. Look, last year, my first time among humans, I was probably a lot like you. I thought that up here, everybody was folk… we’re all just people, you know? I wondered how it would affect me when I got back to the seashore… and then I found out that it didn’t. Even then I still thought… oh, I don’t know, that there was some kind of bright line dividing life here and life in the water. Feejee still thinks that, kind of. The deeper folk are a bit insular, you know, a little backwards. They still put a lot of stock in all the old stories.”

“Iona, why are you here?” I asked.

“Well… I had to talk to someone,” she said. “I can’t talk to Fee, obviously… that would be like talking to one of your Khersian friends about sex outside of marriage, if I understand the drift of things there. She’d never understand it. She’d never forgive me. And she’d make sure my folk find out about it.”

“So Feejee hasn’t been… hunting?”

“Oh, no, of course not,” Iona said. “Well… just you. If you can call that hunting. She’s so darned amiable about it… I don’t know what’s more pathetic, the way she’s trying to be friends with you or the fact that it’s probably going to work.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we are going to eat you, Mack… unless you wise up and start acting like people instead of prey,” Iona said. “I don’t see that happening, really, though I am sort of open to the possibility… I would love to have a hunting partner, Feejee’s sort of out of the question and I can’t really get a read on any of the girls on the skirmish team… but otherwise, well…” She shrugged. “Yeah, I’m going to eat you. What are you going to do?”

“Offhand? Stop you,” I said. “Fight back.”

“Come on, Mack, you’re a pushover,” Iona said. “You’re going to be the most deliciously accommodating meal I’ve ever had, and we both know it.”

“I’m less of a pushover than you think,” I said. “I’ve been practicing a few things.”

“Yeah? Fighting? Throwing magic around?” Iona said. “None of that matters, because what you haven’t practiced is not being a victim. Listen, I’m going to get myself a magic knife, I’m going to slip it right inside your little mammal-dimple here,” she said, poking a finger into my navel through my shirt,” and just… unzip you, all the way up to the bone. The stuff that spills out will be plenty vulnerable, once it’s separated from you. I’ve been reading up on this.”

On eating demonbloods?, I wanted to say, but her touch and her closeness were shutting my ability to speak down again.

“Oh, well, look at you,” she said, looking down at me. The whites of her eyes darkened just a bit. “I should have brought a knife with me. How long do you think it would take me to find someone to lend me something sharp, Mackenzie? Not long, I’d bet.”

“Feejee…” I said. As objections went, it was pretty lame.

“Oh, I could bring her back something, and let her make up her own mind about where I took you,” Iona said. “Really, it would be so much easier than messing around with getting you into the water somehow. I’ve been kind of splitting the difference so far. Leda was in the fountain, I took some guy in the pouring rain… the other one, well, I don’t really have much of an excuse for her.” She laughed. “Oh, but I’m afraid I’m teasing you… and myself, as well. I didn’t come here to eat you. I’m not even that hungry. I was just so relieved, you know? I’ve had some… tense… moments these past few days, Mack… and you, you’re not telling anyone anything, are you?”

I was suddenly glad to be all but paralyzed with fear, because if I’d had any animation or power of speech at the point she said that, I was sure I’d have given something away.

“Oh, well, of course you aren’t,” she said. “You just don’t have it in you… you’ve got all the self-preservation of a sailor climbing into a boat, or a girl swimming alone, on the far side of the rocks from the beach.”

“Iona… I’d be careful, if I were you,” I said.

“Careful?” she asked. She managed to pack an impressive amount of disdain into the word. “Of what?”

“Even if they’ve closed the criminal investigation, that doesn’t mean they’ve given up on catching the monster,” I said. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was hoping for with this… I didn’t exactly want to put Iona’s guard up, but it seemed like a good idea if she could be persuaded to be a bit more cautious until things… well, until whatever was going to happen happened. “There are still imperial investigators on campus.”

“Yeah, wrapping up that conference thing,” she said. “Over at the admin building. Far from here. Nobody’s paying any attention…” She froze, staring at me right as I was wondering if they wouldn’t have Iona and Feejee under surveillance. If so, then they would have heard her saying that she killed Leda… if that was the case, then what were they waiting for? Were they really that devoted to keeping things quiet. “What? What is it?” Iona asked. “Do you know something?”

“I just… they’ve had their eyes on me from the beginning,” I said, surprised at how easily the half-truth came to me under pressure. “I’m kind of the number one suspect when it comes to monsters.”

“You’re a meat pie with legs,” she said. “And without all the annoying flaky stuff, and vegetables.”

“To you, maybe,” I said. “But humans don’t see my human side.”

“Right, that’s why you had the tall gladiator watching your yummy little behind,” Iona said. “Though she was easy enough to get rid of. After you deadened the sound for whatever reasons… well, it was obvious to me that the bathroom wasn’t empty, just silent… but it didn’t take much to convince her you’d left.”

“Well, yeah, that is why I had her with me, actually,” I said. “If people saw me as just another human… or as a ‘meat pie’… I wouldn’t need a bodyguard. Even if the authorities aren’t interested in hunting monsters, there could still be a backlash… I’m not exactly the safest person to be around right now. Um… sorry I didn’t mention it before.”

“Oh, well, you can hardly be blamed for that,” she said. “I kind of took over the conversation… and I can hardly be blamed for that, it’s just the natural order of things.”

“Right,” I said. “But now that you know… well, it’s probably best to keep your distance until things die down. And for you to keep a low profile, I mean, hunting-wise. There might be more eyes and weapons around campus until things get back to normal.”

“I have been keeping my head down,” Iona said. “I figured things would be back to normal, now… but I suppose you’re right. What’s another week or so? Or at least a few days. Well, I suppose I can at least pop outside tonight looking like this and see if anything looks sketchy.”

It looked like my gambit might accomplish something in terms of getting Iona away from me for the immediate future, but it wasn’t going to change her habits beyond that… she had thrown patience and any real sense of caution to the wind. The uproar over Leda had scared her a little, but only just a little.

“Of course,” she added, “if you’re going to be treated like a monster anyway… I mean, if the rest of the prey are going to be looking at you like you’re a predator…”

“You called me a meat pie,” I said.

“Food is as food does,” Iona said. “Folk, too… like I said, I like having someone to talk to. I wouldn’t mind having someone I could share things with, regularly.”

Telling her no seemed like a bad idea. Saying anything that sounded even halfway like I was considering it was probably a bad idea, given the possibility that someone was listening in. Saying nothing seemed like it was handing control back to Iona, putting myself back in the role of food.

“I should probably go find Pala,” I said. “I’m sure she’s still looking for me… she’s bound to double back here before too long.”

There… that was probably the best thing to say.

“I suppose you’re right,” Iona said. “And I’m supposed to be meeting Feejee. Well, I’ll be seeing you in a day or two… think about what I said.”

I nodded. I wouldn’t be considering her offer in the usual sense of the phrase, but I was very sure I’d spend many moments thinking about exactly what she’d said to me.

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“Hold on, you’ve done enough work,” Hazel said, snatching the plate away so fast she almost tipped over the stool she was standing on.

“Oh, come on, Hazel,” Steff said sleepily from the pile of coats, where she’d collapsed about an hour before. “It’s her party and she’ll dry if she wants to.”

“I think you may as well let her help, Haze,” Amaranth said. “She’s sleeping with you tonight, so there’s no point in her going back to Harlowe before you.”

“Sleeping over with me,” Hazel said, handing the plate back to Two.

“Oh, well, yes,” Amaranth said, blushing. “I didn’t mean to imply… I mean, if it happened we’d all be tremendously supportive…”

“Er, are you crossing your fingers for luck?” Hazel asked, looking at Amaranth’s hands.

“Um… no?” Amaranth said, holding up her hands with fingers still intertwined. “I mean, I was,” she said, quickly unfolding them. “Obviously. Duh.” She laughed. “But… for something else, not for the possibility that you and Two hook up.”

“Right,” Hazel said. “Well…”

She didn’t seem to have anything else to say, because she just turned around and went back to washing.

After Dee and Honey had slunk away and Feejee and Iona left, Hazel didn’t let anybody else get out of the party room without a container full of leftovers.

“It’s against my conscience to let somebody out of a party empty-handed,” she said with grim solemnity as she loaded us down. “It’s a matter of principle, it is. Never again!”

After receiving my half-hearted confirmation that I was friends with Feejee, she also gave me the dishes for her and Iona. Since we were also taking Dee’s grainless offering and managing Steff… who was not particularly refreshed after her nap… Amaranth took all the various containers and disappeared them. I was glad she took charge of them, because it lessened the chance that I’d be sent down to Iona’s room to deliver hers.

Of course, that just meant that Amaranth would have to do it. I loved Amaranth and she was certainly worldly in some… well, maybe exactly one… sense of the word, but I didn’t think she was quite canny enough to be dealing with Iona, especially when the mermaid’s predatory blood was raised.

“We can probably just leave Iona’s with Feejee,” I suggested as the three of us headed back to Harlowe. “So we can get to bed sooner.”

“I think it’ll be more personable if we deliver it to her door,” Amaranth said. “After we get Steff home, of course. I’m sure Viktor will want to thank you for showing her so much concern, baby.”

“Yeah, I’m sure he’ll have something to say to me,” I said.

“You had very good reasons for not wanting to touch that dagger,” Amaranth said. “Which meant your choices were either get Steff in trouble by calling in the authorities or trust her to put it back, which she did eventually do.”

“I don’t know why you guys are making such a big deal over it,” Steff said. “Just a knife. Just…”

“Steff, from what Celia says you burned through half your life force playing vampire games with it,” I said.

“What’s she know?” Steff said. “Probably took a bad elixir… or ate some bad squirrel. Something. I’m just… sleepy. I’m fine.”

“Can I get that in writing before we get to Viktor’s?” I asked.

“Oh, hush, baby,” Amaranth said. “It’s going to be fine.”

Steff had been leaning against Amaranth for most of the walk, and by the time we got inside we were both supporting her. She was practically dead… unconscious, I should say… on her feet.

Amaranth paused when we got up to Viktor’s door on the boys’ side of the fourth floor. She raised her knuckles and her face scrunched up like she was trying to remember something, but then the door opened before she could decide how to knock.

Viktor was all business. He was also all naked.

“What has happened to her?” he asked, pulling Steff away from us and leaning her against his body.

“Low energy,” Amaranth said. “She just needs rest… physical rest, but especially rest from magic. A good night’s sleep should put her mostly right, I think… but you sh… I would send her to the healing center if she doesn’t seem any better.”

“Where was she?” Viktor asked, stroking the top of Steff’s head with his entire hand.

“She just came…” Amaranth started to say.

“Mack found me,” Steff said quickly.

“Tell me if this is true,” Viktor said, looking straight down at me.

“Um… no,” I said. “It’s not,” I clarified, in case he thought I was refusing rather than answering in the negative, then added, “I was at the…”

The back of Viktor’s hand slapped across my face, wrenching my head backwards and knocking me off my feet.

“We use a finger to the lips, Viktor,” Amaranth said, with surprising sternness that only sounded ridiculous, considering who she was and whom she was addressing… or more particularly, what she was and what she was addressing.

“I believe that was involved in my solution,” he said.

“You aren’t allowed to hit her,” Amaranth said, tilting her head forward to give him a shot of the over-the-glasses look. It didn’t exactly leave him quaking in his lack of boots… but it didn’t make him throw her across the hall, either.

“I do not allow her to speak to me beyond what she is directed to,” Viktor said.

“That’s fine,” Amaranth said. “A finger to the lips is all it takes. Stand up, baby.”

More or less on instinct, I’d been staying exactly where I’d fallen, doing my best imitation of a rug. Since I didn’t know if the confrontation was over or not, I kind of would have liked to stay where I was, out of the fray, but Amaranth was standing up for me and I wasn’t going to undermine her position as my owner by disobeying her, so I got to my feet, accepting a hand from her to help me up.

“Say goodnight to Steff,” Amaranth said.

“Goodnight,” I said.

“Night,” Steff said.

“Goodnight, both of you,” Amaranth said.

“Goodnight, Amaranth,” Viktor said, and he turned and stepped back inside the room with Steff and closed the door.

“Thanks,” I said to Amaranth. “Thank you.” That sounded inadequate considering the fact that she’d just stared down a half-ogre, so I added, “Ma’am,” and she glowed with pride.

“You’re welcome, baby.”

“I thought you were submissive to him,” I said.

“I have obligations to you that go beyond that,” Amaranth said. “For as long as I’m allowed to keep them, anyway… and I just thought that was excessive.”

“Oh, you think?” I said.

“You weren’t being disrespectful, you were being… expansive,” she said.

“So you don’t have a problem with him backhanding me across a room when I am being disrespectful.”

“Do you have a problem with it?” Amaranth asked, and I realized I didn’t have an immediate answer.

I resented the hell out of the way Viktor treated me. That resentment crawled across my skin in a way only the most powerful and most unpleasant feelings could. But that wasn’t the only thing I’d felt in his room. Was the resentment so bad that I’d forego the peace that came from total objectification, or from the utter seclusion inside his box?

Honestly, I had to think about it… but once I did, the answer was obvious. I hadn’t sought Viktor out. I’d done my best to avoid him. I would have loved the chance to crawl into the box and spend a couple hours by myself working out the rest of my Mecknights story or putting together my thoughts on everything that had been happening to me or just get away from it all, but that chance wasn’t worth putting up with somebody who would sooner wipe his boots on me than look at me.

“Yeah, I kinda do,” I said.

“Baby, you have to remember Viktor comes from a place where he always could lash out at anybody for pretty much any reason,” Amaranth said. “And he doesn’t necessarily like that fact or agree with the system behind it, but it’s how he was raised. It’s a privilege he grew up with, and when he lost self-control and lashed out it was seen as a sign of strength and praised. Now he spends most of the year in a place where doing that could have real consequences, and not just for him.”

“But he can hit me as hard as he wants without breaking me, so I’m the designated whipping girl,” I said. I heaved a disgusted sigh. “Yeah, that’s fair.”

“It’s not,” Amaranth said. “And I’m not saying he sat down and thought about you and decided this… but when he gets angry like that, there’s a lot of frustration and anger that he doesn’t know how else to vent and it’s all coming out through the only channel it can.”

“And I’ve just got to take it,” I said.

“No, you don’t!” Amaranth said with alarming vehemence. She stomped her foot. “Sweet Mother, Mack! Are you even listening? Did you hear me ask you if you had a problem with it? Did you hear me tell him he’s not allowed to do that anymore?”

“I… I… you never cared before,” I said. “If you knew all this…”

“I never saw it before,” she said. “Intellectually, I thought it might be good for him to have an invulnerable receptacle for his anger and I thought you might enjoy it, but then I saw his face when he lashed out… and I saw yours… and… well, you should show Viktor proper respect because it’s respectful to Steff, if for no other reason, but you don’t have to put up with that.”

A feeling of profound gratitude and relief washed over me as I realized that she meant it. She gave me a hug, which I held onto for about a minute, and then we continued on back down the stairs and then over and up.

“So, Dee says you’re going to write to your grandmother?” Amaranth said.

“Uh… we did talk about that,” I said.

“So you’re really going to do it?” she asked. “That’s wonderful, baby.”

“I guess,” I said. “Dee thinks it’s a good idea. I’m not sure about it.”

“Well…” Amaranth said. “Family ties are important, when they can be salvaged… but I don’t think any of us are in a better position to know whether this one can be than you are. Though,” she added, a hopeful note in her voice, “if you have any uncertainty about it I think it’s best to err on the side of forgiveness. After all, where would you be if nobody was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt?”

“If it’s up to me…” I said.

“Of course it’s up to you,” Amaranth said.

“Okay, then I think I’ve given her more than enough benefit through the course of plenty of doubt,” I said. “Dee thinks her expertise would be valuable…”

“Oh, that is a good point!” Amaranth said. “But… still your choice.”

“It’s just, I really don’t know who I could trust to both see my side and not take advantage of me, among exorcists and diabolists and everybody else who might be available… but… I wouldn’t feel any safer with her,” I said, and once the words had left my mouth I felt strangely good about things.

I didn’t feel safe with her. I didn’t trust her. Awful things to think about my own grandmother, but true. Safe had been down in the basement with a sturdy door between us.

“I guess that’s that, then,” Amaranth said, and she sounded disappointed, but it didn’t feel like she was disappointed in me and that was what was important.

“The thing is, I already told Dee that I would,” I said.

“Oh, well, Dee’s not Sooni,” Amaranth said. “I think she’ll take a change of heart a little better than Sooni does.”

“I don’t know about this change of heart,” I said as we went out of the stairwell and into the hallway. “She seemed pretty set on the idea.”

“I’m sure she’s got some good reasoning, but… well, family ties really are a big deal, but Dee’s going to be attaching even more importance to them,” Amaranth said. “Because of her culture, and because she’s dealing with the fact that she was taught to idolize a mother when it doesn’t sound like her mother’s ever been a big part of her life.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“That’s the impression I get,” Amaranth said. “Think about how often she talks about her mother in specific terms.”

“She’s a private person,” I said. “I don’t think I’d be comfortable reading too much into the things she doesn’t mention.”

“But when she has an unguarded moment, she talks about her lovers,” Amaranth said. “When she talks about her childhood, it’s Dehsah she mentions… what are you doing?”

I’d just turned to go into my room, and then I realized I wasn’t looking at my room, but 317… the same room I’d tried to go into on accident before, home of a medusan girl and Trina’s blabby friend Gladys.

“We stopped on the wrong floor,” I said.

“No, we stopped on Iona’s floor,” Amaranth said, holding out a covered rubber container with Iona’s share of the leftover food in it. “You can knock on her door, since you know her better,” she said, giving me a nudge towards it.

Maybe this would have been the time to tell her in no uncertain terms that I wanted as little to do with Iona as I did with my grandmother, but I felt like Amaranth had been so accommodating already that I would have felt guilty digging in my heels now. Compromise. She wasn’t asking me to spend the night with Iona, or even go in her room with her. Just knock on the door and stand next to her while she handed off the dish.

“Go ahead,” Amaranth said. “It’s okay. I think reaching out to Iona and Feejee is going to do more good than anything in the long run.”

I sighed and knocked on the door.

Iona opened it, smiling a dazzlingly inviting smile

“Well, this is a nice surprise,” she said. She stepped back, opening the door wider. “Come on in.”

“Thank you,” Amaranth said, pushing me forward. “We can’t stay long, but we brought you some food since you left the party early.”

“I see that,” Iona said, looking me up and down as we stepped past her into the room. She closed the door. It was probably just reflex that she twisted and locked the knob as she did so, but I gulped as I heard it clicking.

“So, can I just set this on the desk?” Amaranth asked.

“Sure,” Iona said. “Your friend make it back okay?”

“Oh, yes,” Amaranth said. “I think she’s going to be fine with a little rest.”

“She looked good, I thought,” Iona said. “Take off your coat, Mackenzie.”

“I’m fine,” I said, pulling it around me like a magic cloak to shield me from her hungry gaze.

“Really?” Iona said. “You ought to be roasting.”

“You know, we really should be going,” Amaranth said, grabbing my hand and pulling me towards the door.

“Oh, can’t stay?” Iona asked, affecting a pout.

“Sorry, no,” Amaranth said, fumbling at the doorknob.

“How about Mack?”

“I need her,” Amaranth said. She got the door open. “Say goodnight, baby.”

“Uh… goodnight,” I said.

“Goodnight, Iona!” Amaranth said.

“Night,” Iona said, following us out into the hall. She stayed leaning against the doorframe watching us as we headed as quick as we could without being obviously rude for the stairwell.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Amaranth said, once we were through the door and out of sight.

“It’s okay,” I said, thinking she was apologizing for putting me in the room with a hungry, amoral predator who had a taste for me.

“I didn’t mean to pull you out of there like that,” she said. “I was just getting so worked up watching Iona, listening to her talk like that…” She shivered all over. “Let’s get Feejee and Dee their stuff and then get to bed.”

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

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

This means she’s dreaming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you try what I said?”

“No,” Two says. “I did not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That isn’t very funny,” Two says.

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

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

“And who told you to sweep?”

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

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

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

“Miss Ruth says that practice makes perfect.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How will you know when you’re done?”

“When I’ve swept the whole place.”

“But it’s endless.”

“Yes,” Two says, and she smiles.

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

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

“Your name isn’t even Two,” it says. “You just made that up.”

“I think I hate you, ridiculous owl turtle thing,” Two says.

“You aren’t supposed to hate anybody.”

“You aren’t anybody,” Two says. “So that’s okay.”

Steff doesn’t have the self-awareness to know that she’s dreaming, but when she wakes up it will seem like it should have been obvious to her… so obvious that in the moment she awakens, she’ll manage to convince herself that she knew it was a dream and was just going with it.

There is no room in the fortress at Kilrest as big and expansive as the throne room in her dreams. While the ogres tower over her, they don’t build their structures any bigger than they need to. They lack the architectural cunning to build a great big hall with a high vaulted ceiling like the one Steff always imagined before she saw the real place, the one she still pictures more than half the time when she imagines her life after graduation.

Steff sits on her throne in the hall, and it is her throne. Viktor doesn’t factor into this dream. She has dreams about Viktor and she has dreams about Kilrest, but ever since they went there she hasn’t had any dreams about Viktor and Kilrest. Her sleeping mind cannot make them fit together. Her brooding lover does not fit with her idealized fantasy life of wicked decadence.

The hall is full of her subjects… ogres and reanimated skeletons and zombies… and her victims, which this time around consist entirely of people she went to school with. The ones who attacked her, the ones who teased her, the ones who snubbed her, the ones who happened to be present for the worst years of Steff Johnson’s life are being torn apart, being impaled on spits, being tortured to death in a dozen ways, but none of them are dying because Steff’s dark magic is too awesome to allow them that escape.

They’re starting to twist off Cindy Mears’s head now. What had Cindy done? Steff couldn’t remember anything in particular. But she was hot and effortlessly popular and Steff had popped so many boners over her while trying to figure out if she was a gay boy or a straight girl or what and that hadn’t made things easier for her.

Not that Cindy had been alone on that score. An adolescent male body is on a hair trigger to begin with. Adding in fifty percent elven blood… for a while it had seemed like everything turned Steff on, and this at a point in her life when she regularly found herself thinking of violent and/or morbid things…

It really was no wonder that certain associations had stuck in her head, though Steff has never had the self-awareness necessary to think about how she might have come to associate violence and death with sex. Even asking the question could seem to imply that there was something wrong with doing so, and Steff had spent too many years and too many tears convincing herself that she was fine to do that.

Life in her dream of Kilrest was so good. She didn’t feel like rocking the boat with a lot of moody self-examination.

“Why, yes, I do see your point,” Mother Khaele tells Amaranth in an utterly realistic and wholly plausible scenario in which the nymph has just pointed out the fundamental flaw in existing cosmological models which results in the perceived division between the so-called higher and lower races, the people and the animals. “You’ve worked it out quite nicely. In fact, I have to admit that I left that mistake there on purpose to see which of my children would be the first one to spot it, so that I would know who would be worthy of sharing my…”

At this point, Mack’s leg twitches in her sleep and she kicks Amaranth in the ankle, jarring her awake. She blinks her myopic eyes several times in the perfect darkness of the blanket tent before she realizes where she is and that her Mother’s praise had simply been a dream. She sighs, and tries to go back to sleep.

Moeli’s working the desk when She comes in, cool as ever. She doesn’t look at anyone when she comes into the room. She keeps her head down, thinking her important thoughts, but She‘s not afraid to say anything to anybody. Really.

She‘ll just blurt out things that would make a bugbear blush without even thinking about it. Just like that.

Eventually She sidles up to the counter, the way She does, like whatever She has got to do isn’t even that important.

“Hey,” She says, with that quiet, husky voice that drives him wild. “I, uh, found your notebook.”

“Oh?” Moeli asks. His hearts skip a couple of beats as She puts it down in front of him. He’d wanted to show his notebook to her, but he’d always chickened out. It was a million to one chance that She would be into something so weird.

“I hope you don’t mind I looked through it… well, I had to figure out whose it was. I thought the drawings of motorcycles were kind of cool. Did you do them?”

“Yeah,” Moeli said. “I did.”

“I like motorcycles,” She says. “I think they’re awesome.”

“I do, too,” Moeli says.

“In fact,” She says, leaning in close. “I’ve got one outside. A real one.”

“No shit?” Moeli says.

“Yeah,” She says. “Half-demons have motorcycles. But I can’t seem to figure out how to make it go. You seem like you know a lot about them, though. Do you think maybe we could try to take a ride… together?”

“Well, I’m kind of working now,” Moeli says. “And I can’t just walk away. Also, you said you weren’t into me.”

“I’m a bitch and I was lying to you for no reason,” She says. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Of course,” he says. “You know what? My shift’s over.”

Two has been sweeping for what seems like hours, and the ridiculous owl turtle thing is a distant memory behind her, as she’s sweeping in the way she’s been taught: one straight line until she comes to the wall or carpet, and then move over.

She doesn’t expect to find a wall or carpet any time soon. She doesn’t expect to find anything, as there has never been anything in the vast, flat, featureless plain except the post with the ridiculous owl turtle thing on it. But there had also never been a broom behind the post (that she knew of, anyway), and unfortunately for her, Two understands that one runs across unexpected things in dreams.

However, there are an infinite number of things she does not expect to run across, so it won’t necessarily have to be a wall or carpet or something else that would force her to turn around and start heading back towards the ridiculous owl turtle thing.

In fact, the first unexpected thing she runs across is her teddy bear, Hand Wash. In her dream, he’s as tall as she is, though he still just sits there with his firmly stuffed legs jutting out in front of him to support him and his upper body leaning slightly forward to keep him balanced on those legs.

“Hello, Two,” he says.

“Hello, Hand Wash,” she says. “I can’t stop to talk. I’m busy sweeping and I have to keep going until I’m done.”

“Sweeping? I thought you were dreaming.”

“I can do both,” Two says.

“I can’t do anything,” Hand Wash says.

“I know,” she says.

“I’m a teddy bear,” he adds.

“Yes.”

“I’m not even supposed to be talking,” he says. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “I forgive you.”

And onward she sweeps.

Ariadne knows the dream before it starts, because it’s the same one she’s been having for weeks now. That thing is in her class. It wears a mousey, unassuming little face, but the elven professor knows the fire and death and hate that lie behind that mask. She can’t say anything about it, though. She can’t do anything.

Nobody else sees. Nobody else knows.

Every time she turns her back, even if it’s only for a second, another of her students is gone. The thing is clearly responsible. Why can’t anybody else see this?

And now there’s more of it. More of them. It’s brought in its friends.

How much longer can this go on?

How long before the school’s overrun?

Something must be done.

Something must be done.

Amaranth, having just found out that she had aced all of her classes (as expected!), was getting ready to go home for winter break, but she was planning on taking the fast route home and traveling there in style. Steff had helped get her “dressed”, so to speak… arranging her on the platter with roasted potatoes and other vegetables, brushing her body down with garlic oil, and even stuffing an apple in her mouth for aesthetic purposes. Steff had wanted to use garlic butter, but Amaranth had felt that using an animal product would be more likely to bring Mother Khaele’s disapproval.

Now Steff is wheeling the trolley with the covered platter on it to the elegant dining room where her Mack waits along with Viktor and their new best friends, Iona and Feejee. This was such a brilliant idea, she thinks to herself, enjoying the smell of the garlic and the pepper and the fire roasted onions, and when she surprises all of her sisters by arriving home early and explains how she got there, they’ll all be so excited to try this… the ultimate carnal experience, the ultimate sharing of self… and the new phenomenon of responsible, consensual cannibalism utilizing renewable resources will put places like Tender Mercy’s out of business, she just knows it.

Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it, too?

And then the trolley stops and she knows that the moment of revelation is upon her and Mack is going to be so surprised and everybody’s going to think she looks sexy and delicious and she’s going to taste so good…

…and then Mack rolls over in her sleep, pulling on the blankets and Amaranth isn’t on the platter at all.

“Oh, phooey,” she says, and then she tries to go back to sleep.

Some dreams are simpler than others.

In Trina’s dream, everybody had four eyes, except for her, and this made them all freaks. Sara Leighton dreams that the teleport accident which in reality had joined her with her sister had actually sent her twin to another plane of existence. Tara’s version has it so that it merged them fully and they’d become one person. On occasion, they’ve each dreamed it the other way and broke out in a cold sweat in their sleep.

Feejee dreams of blood in the water.

Iona dreams of blood.

Kai, who often thinks of nothing but murder all day, dreams a surprisingly peaceful dream about her grandfather’s calligraphy pens. Suzi dreams of invisible cheeseburgers. Maliko dreams about her Sooni.

Scylla dreams that she’d made it to the damned rabbit before the snake-eyed bitch did. The snake-eyed bitch dreams of cutting off her pink skin and finding scales underneath. Gladys dreams of being up on stage, hundreds—no thousands—of people’s eyes upon her. Cetea dreams that she can use a damned mirror without it breaking.

Honey dreams absolutely nothing, as six crushed flower petals in a tall glass of vodka have rendered her oblivious even to oblivion.

“Hey, hey Two!”

“What is it, ridiculous owl turtle thing?” Two asks as the clearly impossible thing flaps its flipper wings in ungainly flight alongside her, oblivious to her attempts to sweep away from it.

“How come you never dream about your friends?” it asks her.

“I do,” she says. “Sometimes. But not when I dream about the workshop, because they weren’t in the workshop.”

“You never dream about them here, either.”

“They were never here,” Two says. “And anyway this is still the workshop dream. It’s just broken, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“You could stop saying good morning,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“No,” Two says, shaking her head. “I tried that.”

“You could stop freaking the hell out when it happens,” it says. “That’s what breaks the dream, you know.”

“I don’t care,” Two says. “I have a different dream now. I’m sweeping.”

“But have you considered the ramifications of that?”

“No,” she says.

“Do you think there really was a broom on the other side of my post?”

“Yes,” she says.

“It was there because you dreamed it up,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “You could dream up anything you wanted.”

“I don’t care,” Two says. “I’m sweeping.”

Dee is a child in the marketplace. One of her hands is being held by Dehsah, and the other by her mother.

No, that’s wrong. My mother never took me to the marketplace.

Dee is a child in the marketplace. Her mother, pretty Dehsah…

No.

Dee is in the marketplace, with her lover, Dehsah.

Dehsah hasn’t been out of the house since we became lovers.

Dee passes a fitful night, her subconscious unable to provide any dreams of succor which her conscious mind does not reject out of hand.

Amaranth looks beautiful in her wedding dress, and so does Mack. They are having an outdoor ceremony, of course, and even a hilltop shrine was out of the question under the circumstances, so they’re holding it in a beautiful elven forest bower. Everybody from Paradise Valley is there, and so are all the students she’d worked with during her years of study (in which she’d attained multiple degrees and many honors), and nymphs and satyrs and fauns of all stripes.

Mack had agreed to have a Mechan officiate, to get around her little disability, but when they get to the end of the aisle Amaranth sees that it’s not the scientist there at all, but Mother Khaele herself. Amaranth looks in alarm at Mack, but Mack is standing unharmed in the presence of the divine.

“Rest easy, my daughter,” Mother Khaele says. “For your love has redeemed this demon-tainted soul completely, and now I will happily join the two of you as one, after which you will be taken to your honeymoon in a carriage pulled by specially trained horses, who will join you for…”

“Sooni!” Mack blurts out, and Amaranth looks at her in confusion as the wedding dissolves and she finds herself in bed once more, where Mack blurts out Sooni’s name a few more times.

“Suzune-Darling, there is something you must know,” her mother tells Sooni, who sits anxiously by her feet, hanging on every word. Her mother is so wise and so beautiful, just like herself. “We have kept this from you for years, for your own protection, but now you must be told.”

“What, Mother?” Sooni asks. “What is it?”

“I only hope you can forgive my dishonesty towards you,” her mother says.

“I’m sure if you were not truthful towards me, it was for a very good reason,” Sooni says, bowing her head.

“You are such a good daughter, Suzune-Darling,” her mother says. She gets to her feet. “Perhaps it would be easier to show you than tell you.”

She turns around in a circle, and when she does her features have changed. It’s the same kind, wise eyes that are looking down at Sooni, but they’re yellow instead of black. The same calm smile, but with a shorter snout.

Her mother is a nekoyokai.

“Mother… you’re…?”

“Yes,” her mother says, nodding. “And not just that, but I am Queen of the Nekos. Which means that you, my humble daughter Suzune-Darling, you are the Neko Princess. You look like you do because you are half kitsu, but now that you know the truth you will be able to change between the two at will. You must keep your identity as Neko Princess secret, though, or else you will be in terrible danger.”

“That’s why Father always became angry when I acted like a neko!” Sooni exclaims.

“Yes. He was simply worried about you,” her mother says. “And you must know that Kai…”

“Kai is my true sister!” Sooni says. “I’ve known it all along!”

“Yes! Your heart knows the truth, Suzune-Darling, my Neko Princess!”

A door slams downstairs, pulling Sooni away from her mother. She sits upright in bed, shaking her head in confusion. What had she just been dreaming? It had been about her mother, she’s sure about that… but the details are all slipping away. Her mother and nekos.

Oh, well. It couldn’t have been a True Dream if I can’t remember it.

She reaches down and gets her mother’s shoes, the shoes she wears everywhere, even inside the house, off the floor and holds them to her chest as she lays back down, hoping her mother comes back to her soon. She had left a map of the Imperium with Prax circled on it at the family shrine, along with a brochure for the campus with her room number on it, but she wasn’t sure if her mother could come this far, or that she’d have the time.

She had a lot of work to do, her mother did. She was a very important person.

“My friend Hazel used to keep a dream diary,” Two says.

“Oh, so you’re talking to me now?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“I’m talking,” Two says. “I don’t think it matters if I’m talking to you or not, since you are not real. Her mother made her keep a dream diary from when she was eleven until she turned twenty-two. She made my friend Hazel write her dreams down every morning, and then she read it. She wanted to make sure that my friend Hazel didn’t get the curse.”

“No, she wanted to find out if your friend Hazel already had it,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing replies. “That’s a different thing. And it isn’t a curse.”

“I know,” Two says. “I told my friend Hazel that, and she said ‘Well, it isn’t a blessing.’ And then she told me not to talk about it.”

“But you are.”

“I’m dreaming,” Two says. “I’m not really talking.”

“So why can’t you stop yourself from saying ‘good morning’ to the man?”

It’s the war again.

The bridge.

Theona’s down by the bridge, trying to finish her spell of unmaking before the orcs overwhelm her. Jill can see that she’s just going to make it… get the spell off, that is. She doesn’t have time to finish it and escape.

The rest of Hydra Company… all four of the other survivors… have their hands full. Nora’s gone dead to the world again, seemingly conscious of nothing but the bow in her hands. Ironically she’s doing the most to help Theona, sending arrow after arrow at the thundering horde as it bears down on her.

She makes every shot she takes, and every shot is a fatal one, but she might as well be standing on a beach trying to shoot down the waves as they head towards the shore.

Mur-Si is… who the fuck knew where Mur-Si was? The most Jill could see was where she had just been, as ogres collapse with the legs cut out from under them and orcs die in fountains of spurting blood. Jill had been told… some hundred years before… that she had been bred to be the greatest warrior the world had ever seen… but the bastard elven hybrid is a strong argument that the Founders had wasted their efforts.

Jill and Fayborn are fighting back to back, Fay’s gleaming sword and Jill’s giant axe cleaving a circle around them. Jill keeps getting glimpses of the kid in the wizard robes down by the bridge, kneeling helpless and alone as she focuses on her spell.

“What’s the plan for extraction?” Jill asks.

“Soon as we see the bridge go down, we bug out,” Fay says. “Simple enough for you, Flattop?”

“What about The?”

“She bugs out, too.”

“She’s never going to make it back up to us,” Jill says.

“She might,” Fay says. “Didn’t think we’d make it this far at all.”

“We’ve got to get down to her,” Jill says.

“Can’t,” Fay says. “If she fails, we’ve got to be ready to try Plan B.”

“She’s our wizard,” Jill says. “What are we supposed to do to the bridge without her, have Mur-Si stab it to death?”

“Need to know basis.”

“You sent her down there to die,” Jill says.

“We were all sent here to die,” Fay says. “Some of us are better at it than others.”

Jill headbutts the orc in front of her and then charges through the gap left as it goes down, trampling goblins, shouldering past orcs, and dodging around ogres. Fay yells out behind her, something about sticking together, but let the bitch yell. She stands a better chance on her own than the neophyte mage who had, completely unwittingly, become the linchpin of the entire mission.

And as she thunders down the side of the ravine towards the bridge, Jill remembers that this has all already happened and that it’s just a dream, and she realizes she’s not going to make it in time.

The bridge starts to crumble and Theona stands and turns to run up towards her. The bridge is collapsing as a pair of ogres catch hold of her.

They don’t even have weapons out. Why would they? She doesn’t. If she’d been fighting them, they might have been forced to kill her, but instead they’ve got her in their hands…

“Opening the first charity brothel together was the best idea ever, Amaranth,” Mack says.

“Oh, it just seemed like the natural thing to do, after you and Two overcame your inhibitions and embraced the nymphly codes as a way of life,” Amaranth replies. “But this is just the start. Once we start teaching our classes, we’ll get more women of all races to subscribe to my new revolutionary philosophy and soon the entire world will be at peace because everybody will be too busy loving one another to hate anybody. Of course, some credit belongs to Mother Khaele.”

“No, she told me it’s all because of you,” Mack says. “And that you shouldn’t need to feel humble about it, but that’s just like you to think of her.”

“But, Mack, you couldn’t have spoken to… oh, poop. This is a dream again, isn’t it?” Amaranth says as she wakes up.

“Huh? What?” Mack murmurs sleepily beside her in the darkness.

“Nothing, baby,” Amaranth mutters, frowning. “Nothing.”

Leda is dancing across the smooth, glassy surface of the lake. It’s winter, her favorite time, but though a dusting of snow coats trees and the ground on the shore around the lake, the water remains unfrozen. Even in human form, though, it bears her weight. She leaps and she glides about in the moonlight, and then she heads for the thicket of reeds in the center of the lake, where on this side there is a small island, barely more than a bump of rock jutting up above the surface of the water.

That small island of reeds is the gateway to the other side, where her mother’s castle and where her true kingdom is. On both sides, the kingdom of Mariinsky Lake is not more than the lake itself, but on the Other Side, that lake is much bigger.

Even though she loves the castle and she loves the true lake far more than she loves the dreary, cramped one she’d just been dancing upon, she feels cold dread seeping down her spine as she passes through the reeds and finds herself on the large island with her home in front of her. It’s daylight on this side, but the sun doesn’t seem to warm her up much.

She knows what’s coming next.

Leda is a true princess: grace defined, possessing endless reserves of natural charm and refinement. But somehow—witches, probably—she screwed up and got herself exiled for four years to a moonforsaken frontier outpost in an empire of human barbarians. It was unthinkable, it was impossible… but it had happened, and it was going to happen again.

What would it be this time? Would she upset a tureen of soup? Lean against a priceless tapestry? Would she tread on an ambassador snail’s tail? Accidentally insult a visiting frog prince?

Knowing that her doom was coming but not knowing what shape it would take was terrible torture, but no matter how much she fights against it, her body still insists on passing over the drawbridge, under the portcullis, and through the gatehouse. She exchanges polite pleasantry with the guards in their bright red uniforms.

Her mother and her stepfather are waiting for her in the throne room, and in between her and them is a gauntlet of respected courtiers, servants bustling around with important loads, and guests of high social rank. But no matter what Leda did, no matter how careful she was, something would go wrong because when she reached the throne room, her stepfather would smile that sneering smile at her and say those nine most hated words:

“Your mother and I have been discussing your education.”

And so the dream went.

“Do you want to know what I think?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing asks.

“No,” Two says. “I really think I do not.”

“I think you say ‘good morning’ because you want to.”

“I want to do what I’m told,” Two says.

“Among other things,” it says. “But I think you want him to acknowledge you.”

“No,” Two says, shaking her head. “You are mistaken.”

“I think you know you couldn’t go back to being a piece of lab equipment now that you’ve been a person, and you want to know if he could relate to you as a person.”

“No,” Two repeats decisively.

“I think part of you would like to have a conversation with him.”

“You are mistaken.”

“I think you want to know what he thinks about you… if he thinks about you. Does he miss you like you miss him? Would he take you back as you are now? Would he hire you as a free person? Would he like you?”

“No!” Two yells. She turns and clobbers him with the broom. “I hate you, some sort of ridiculous owl turtle thing!” she yells as she hits him again and again. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

“Amaranth, you’re so smart!” the professor proclaims. “In all my years of teaching, I’ve never met a student who understood the material so quickly and so completely. That a nymph should be the one to…”

Under the covers, Mack begins to masturbate furiously. Amaranth, awoken once again, sighs, reaches over, and guides her lover’s hand to a slightly better spot. Mack moans in her sleep.

“At least somebody’s having pleasant dreams tonight,” Amaranth says.

“Steff!” Amaranth said. “Are you okay? What happened to your jacket?”

“What?” Steff said. She lifted her arm listlessly and looked at the shredded sleeve. “Oh… I don’t know?”

I had a pretty good idea. It wasn’t torn, but cut, over and over again in different directions. Which meant probably she hadn’t made it back to the necromancy building before she’d had the urge to do something bigger than scratch her palms with the vampiric knife.

“You did put it back, right?” I asked her.

“Huh? Oh, yeah… of course I did,” Steff said. I honestly couldn’t tell if she was lying or not, because she was saying everything in the same tiny, tired voice. “Definitely.”

“Where have you been?” Amaranth asked. “We’ve all been worried sick over you.”

“Oh, that must be what it was,” Hazel said. “I’m a champion worrier.”

“I’m fine,” Steff said. “I just sort of… lost track of time. I’m not too late to kiss the birthday girl, am I?”

“It isn’t my birthday,” Two said. “I wasn’t born. But you aren’t too late to kiss me. There isn’t a time limit on that.”

Steff stared at her, confused. It seemed like Two had just thrown too much at her for her to handle at one time.

This looked really bad to me. Whatever Steff had done with the knife, it wasn’t in her hands anymore, so it clearly wasn’t a case of simple fascination distracting her. Even taking into account the emotional whirlwind that Steff had been going through, it seemed like there had to be more going on.

It hit me that if the knife was in fact evil and not just sketchy-looking and with a questionable enchantment on it, it would likely extract a cost from the wielder or the victim for the use of its mystical powers.

“Go to her, hon,” Amaranth said, nudging Steff towards an expectant and increasingly alarmed-looking Two who didn’t understand why she was hesitating to give their ritualized greeting.

Finally, Steff went over to her, tripping a bit on the leg of a chair, and with a little prompting from Two, she did the required hug and double-kiss.

“Happy, um, party,” Steff said.

“Happy party to you, too!” Two said.

Amaranth looked at me, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. I just nodded. Steff flaking out a bit wasn’t so weird, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing Steff stumble like that, even a little bit.

“Dude, what the hell has Steff been quaffing?” Celia asked.

“She has… issues,” Amaranth said.

“No kidding.

“But she’s getting help for them,” Amaranth added.

“She should get more.”

“Hey, she didn’t spend a couple days petrified,” I said.

“What I do with my downtime is my business,” Celia said.

“You’re going to pretend that you did that on purpose?” I asked.

“It’s so damn boring here,” she said. “Why not be a rock if nothing else is going on?”

“You could always take part in activities with the rest of us,” Amaranth said. “We do appreciate your company, you know.”

“What? Watch TV? Play dress-up with the ear brigade? Fuck everything that moves? Play with little stone dolls?” Celia said.

“Well, what did you do for fun where you came from?”

“I hiked,” she said. “Explored the canyons. Collected rocks.”

“You could go hiking around here,” Amaranth said. “There are some trails in the forest.”

Celia shuddered visibly.

“What?” I asked.

“There wasn’t that much green stuff around where I come from,” she said. “Anyway, it’s too damn cold to be outside for long now.”

“No kidding,” I said. “I’m not looking forward to the snow. When I applied here, I was thinking since it was kind of in the middle of everything, from north to south, that it wouldn’t be too cold in the winter but it also wouldn’t be too intolerant about stuff… turns out it just means I get both cold and intolerance.”

“Oh, well, I can’t speak about the south and tolerance, but I can tell you the autumn has been much more mild so far than it would have been further north,” Amaranth said. “Actually, I’m surprised at how fast it’s been passing me by… the fall’s always been my ‘busy season’ back home. I mean, the time of year when there’s a lot of extra stuff going on. I do most of my regular work in the spring and the summer, then fall was festival season, and then winter was the closest thing I had to downtime. There was the solstice observance, but other than that… well, cold always bothered the humans a lot more than it did me, and with my field hibernating I always had energy to spare. As much as I love my work, I always looked forward to winter.”

“Not me,” I said. “Only thing I ever liked about winter was Khersentide and, of course, the break from school… and I only had a few Khersens I can really remember before I ended up with my grandmother.” I felt a flush of irritation at the memories that were being stirred. “Anyway, what are we going to do about Steff?”

“Well… I don’t know what we can do, except keep an eye on her and be here for her. She’s already seeing a mental healer, isn’t she?” Amaranth said. “I… um… I don’t think we need to try to do their job for them, you know? I think it’s just possible that we could make things worse. Anyway, don’t you think it’s kind of a good sign? I mean, obviously she must have had a pretty strong impulse for hurting herself, but she didn’t give vent to it until she found something that could do it without lasting harm.”

“Apparent lasting harm,” I said.

“Yeah, uh, I’m not really clear on what you mammals do or don’t have going on in the sensory department, but it seems pretty damn apparent to me,” Celia said. “The elf thing smells about half-dead.”

“Uh, that’s probably because she’s been in the necromancy department,” I said. “Some of the stuff she does is pretty… hands on.”

“Yeah, among other things,” Celia said. “I don’t mean she smells like dead bodies. She’s always got that taste swirling around her. I mean she’s got the scent of somebody who is half-dead on her. Not sick. Not hurt. Death. It’s got a flavor of its own.”

“So, there’s nothing wrong with her but she’s almost dead anyway?” I asked.

“No, there’s something wrong with her and she’s half-dead,” Celia said.

I looked over at Steff, who was very visibly leaning on Two for support as she showed her the deck of cards. A little movement caught the corner of my eye and I saw Iona, drifting over towards them with a casual look on most of her face that did nothing to hide the hungry gleam in her eyes. I seriously doubted it was the buttercream frosting that was drawing her in like that.

Whatever Celia’s tongue could pick up, so could Iona’s nose.

“We should get over there,” I said, hurrying towards the table before Amaranth had started her response.

“Good idea,” she said. “I feel weird, standing here and talking about her.”

“Look at what Steff made for me, Mack,” Two said, holding up one of the cards. “It’s okay to look at them,” she added. “They’re only orders if you’re reading them for one.”

“Nice,” I said, looking at a card that said “draw on the back of your hand”, and had a picture of a slim hand with neat little fingernails and an elaborate pattern of vines and leaves drawn on it. Steff’s elven heritage wasn’t as easy to leave behind as she liked to pretend, it seemed.

“They are just silly little doodles,” Two said. “But I think they are very good silly little doodles.”

“I think you’re right,” Amaranth said.

Iona had sidled up alongside Steff, on the other side from Two. Two turned towards her.

“You look hungry,” she said. “Would you like a piece of cake?”

“I could just kill a piece of cake,” Iona replied, her eyes locked on Steff, who didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, you don’t have to kill it,” Two said, holding out a plate with a piece of cake on it, which Iona ignored. “It was never alive. Only the wheat and the sugar ever were.”

“So, Steff, have you talked to Viktor?” I asked. “He was looking for you, you know.”

“He was?” Steff said. “Oh, shit… I hope he’s not mad.”

“I think he’ll just be glad that you’re okay,” Amaranth said. “We got worried when you didn’t show, that’s all.”

“Sorry,” Steff said. “I just… I got wrapped up in stuff.”

“Have you ever met Steff’s boyfriend, Iona?” I asked. “I mean, you guys are the same year and all.”

“Don’t think so,” Iona said, still looking at Steff. “What’s he like?”

“He’s pretty much the last person on campus you’d want to have pissed at you,” I said.

“That a fact?” Iona said, leaning in towards Steff like she was being pulled.

Apparently, my aim with subtle hints was about as good as my aim with thrown daggers, because Steff burst into tears.

“Shit, Mack, I didn’t mean to get everybody worried,” she said. “I was just… I was having…”

“I didn’t mean you,” I said quickly, but it was too late. Steff turned and collapsed against Two, who hugged her tightly without understanding or reservation, her face as blank and neutral a mask as it ever had been. She tried vainly to put the plate with the cake on it down without releasing Steff from the clench. Amaranth took it and put it on the table.

“Oh, you’re all worked up,” Iona said, putting her hand on Steff’s shoulder and tugging her away. “You know what you need? Fresh air. A little walk around campus.”

“You aren’t supposed to go out after dark without a reason,” Two said.

“Oh, we’ll be fine,” Iona said.

I tried to figure out what to say to get Iona to back off without starting a panic… at this point, I was more concerned with that than with preserving her secret for its own sake. I’d kept my mouth shut about what the mermaids had done in their own lands, but if Iona couldn’t keep her predatory nature in check she wasn’t going to be my top priority.

Feejee intervened before I could, though. She put her hand on Iona’s arm and pulled her away from Steff.

“Come on, Io,” she said. She gave me an apologetic look and a “can you believe this?” eye roll. “Maybe we should take that walk.”

“Wow,” Steff said, sniffling and drying her eyes. “First Feejee and you, then Iona takes after me… I wouldn’t have expected the merms to be so hot to trot.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I think we’re going to have to have a talk about that.” I looked at Two. “Possibly all of us.”

“I’ll be looking forward to that,” Ian said, drifting in a little closer.

The rest of the human guests were kind of watching us with half-concealed interest. I wondered what it looked it like through their eyes. From Hazel’s nausea to the conversation about her possible pregnancy through this, it had to be strange being on the edge of so much drama and not understanding it.

Either that or they were just staring at the weird Harlowe kids and I was badly overestimating how interesting our little lives were.

“Hey, come on, isn’t this a party?” Hazel said again. “The fishfolks may have floated off early, but there’s still plenty of food and I’m waiting for a challenger on the darts.”

With a little more cajoling on her part, things settled down and people started eating and talking and playing again. I hung close to Steff, but she seemed to be doing alright. She wasn’t getting any weaker or more out of it or anything, and half-dead was still half-alive. People probably came back from worse.

It was only as the party wore on that I realized the mermaids weren’t the only ones who’d left. Honey and Dee had both slipped out at some point. I asked Amaranth and Ian if they’d seen either of them leaving, but of course, they hadn’t.

Thinking back, it seemed like I hadn’t seen Dee since Steff stumbled in. The two facts didn’t have to be related, necessarily, but considering Dee’s harsh judgment on Steff’s behavior, it wasn’t impossible to think that the animosity she’d once felt towards Steff might have been rekindled a little.

In any event, the party could hardly be said to have come off without a hitch, but there was cake and there was good food and Two was happy. It hadn’t been an unmitigated disaster. Nobody had ended up in the healing center. Nobody had got arrested. There hadn’t been any screaming arguments. The metaphorical glass could hardly be said to be full, but I wasn’t about to complain.

I supposed that was what I’d have to call a “pretty good night”.

And, as I listened to Hazel explaining about sleepover parties to Two, I realized it had nowhere to go but up.

“Here,” he said. He shrugged. “I’m not sure if this counts as wrapping.”

“Thank you. I’m not sure, either,” Two said. She opened it up and it was a stack of gift certificates… for White House.

“You gave her gift certificates for the place she works at?” I asked. “Don’t you guys get free food anyway?”

“One free meal for every shift,” Two said, nodding.

“She won’t take anything more than she’s entitled to,” Kyle said. “It drives me freaking crazy the way she stares at the ice cream dispenser sometimes.”

“Is that everyone, then?” Hazel asked, looking around the room. Her eyes stopped on Amaranth and me. Amaranth cleared her throat.

“Steff will probably be coming by later,” Amaranth said. She turned to Two. “She had some important things to take care of, but she loves you very much.”

“I know,” Two said.

Dee had slipped around to stand beside me.

“Is Steff’s absence simply a bit of unreliability, or is something amiss?” she asked quietly.

“Um… something might be amiss,” I said. “But hopefully not too badly.”

“Your reassurance would be more effective if it were not for your record of badly underestimating the magnitude of problems in the recent past,” Dee said.

“It‘s really not that bad this time,” I said. “She does have a weapon that‘s probably evil, but we’re pretty sure this one’s not possessed by anything. Or at least, we don‘t have any reason to think it might be.”

“Is there any chance whatsoever that I’m simply failing to understand your strange surface humor?” Dee asked.

“Um, sorry, but no,” I said.

“And what is being done about this?”

“Viktor’s out looking for her,” I said. “Amaranth didn’t want to cancel the party for it.”

“Is that the best response, considering the potential threat to life?” Dee asked.

“I think Steff’s really more of a danger to herself right now than to anybody else,” I said.

“How so?”

“She’s got a life-stealing knife that heals the wielder in equal measure to the wounds it inflicts, and she was using it to cut herself and feel it heal,” I said. “We’re mostly worried about what it might do to her mentally or emotionally.”

“If that is truly the case, then I must agree with Amaranth,” Dee said. “Perhaps I am not as good a friend to Steff as I should be, but I would not subtract this small amount of joy from Two’s life to pull her out of the peril she has placed herself in.”

“That’s a little harsh,” I said.

“Perhaps my keen elven senses have failed me, but it appears to me as though you are here enjoying the party and not out searching for Steff, ” Dee said. “I may have stated it a bit baldly, but I believe Steff herself would not approve of canceling the celebration on her behalf.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I admitted. “Amaranth said she’d hate herself for missing it, but she’d hate it even more if everybody else did.”

“Alright, then,” Hazel said loudly, getting everyone’s attention. “We’ve decided to forego the traditional candles… or the candles that would be traditional for a birthday party, anyway… in order to head off arguments from the guest of honor. So, in lieu of that, Two, love, would you like to cut the cake?”

“Yes, I would,” Two said.

“Wonderful. Now, I spent a lot of time decorating this, so let’s all gather around and have an admiring look at it before we start the slaughter,” Hazel said. “Oh, actually can we get the cake onto the table and then we can spread out the rest of the spread on the counter?”

The cooking students jumped to work, moving the big cake box over to the card table. Hazel pulled out a chair and hopped up on it.

“You want to do the honors, Haze?” a pretty black-haired girl asked, gesturing to the lid.

“Are you kidding me? I barely got it on,” Hazel said. “You do it, and I’ll just give a little flourish or something.”

The girl said, “Okay,” and then went to lift up the lid while Hazel posed like she was presenting a prize..

When the box came open, I could see why she was so proud of the work… and why she’d been so cautious about how it was transported. It was a big sheet cake covered with pale blue frosting, with slightly darker blue roses made from mounds of frosting as a border around the edges. They almost doubled the height of the cake. The runes from Two’s forehead, from which she had approximated her own name, were also rendered in blue icing across the center.

“Oh, Hazel, that looks just lovely,” Amaranth said. “Very pretty… and I’m sure the people who eat it will agree it’s delicious.”

“Are you sure you can’t have a piece?” Hazel asked. “I promise you no animals died for it.”

“No, I’m afraid I really can’t,” Amaranth said. ”Butter, milk, and eggs are all animal products, even if they don’t result in death when they’re harvested.”

“Alright, then,” Hazel said. “I won’t argue with anything that leaves more for me.”

While Two started measuring the sides of the cake with her fingers in the air next to it, Hazel hopped down and went over to the counter, where she scaled a barstool and then pulled herself up to get the rest of the food arranged. She pulled a towel off a multi-tiered silver tray which held a bunch of delicious looking tidbits and unstacked and uncovered a bunch of plates that had sandwich makings on them.

“Nothing on these trays has wheat in it,” Hazel said, pointing to the silver tower, which held things like bits of fudge and cheesecake, and candied fruits and nuts. “And nothing on the bottom one has animal bits.”

“These look interesting,” Dee said, gliding over and looking at the candied fruits on the bottom shelf. She picked up a ring of sugar-glazed pineapple. “Is this a bit of confectionery which has been made to resemble fruit, or fruit which has been made into confectionery?”

“Er, the latter,” Hazel said. “Crystallized pineapple.”

“Crystallized?” Dee repeated.

“Preserved with sugar,” Hazel said. “There’s also orange peel, cherries, and apricots there, and toasted almonds.”

“Interesting,” Dee said. She picked up a cherry. “This appears to preserve the fruit’s shape to a degree, as well.”

“Well, yeah. They shrink a little as they lose their water, but you can still tell what they are.”

“Indeed. I considered and rejected the idea of sending some jars of plum jelly home because I did not believe the end product resembled plums well enough to have the same effect,” she said. “Is there any reason why plums could not be subjected to this process?”

“Er, none at all,” Hazel said. “Some folks enjoy candied plums. Me, I never trusted plums after I learned where prunes come from.”

“I see,” Dee said. She popped the cherry into her mouth, then made a surprised face and hurriedly swallowed it.

“Is something wrong?” Hazel asked.

“It was a somewhat stronger taste than I anticipated,” Dee said. She looked at the ring in her hand. “I do not wish to give offense, but I’m not quite sure I trust this.”

“Oh, I’ll take it if you don’t want it,” Hazel said, taking it from her. “Try the cheesecake squares… they’ve a smoother, richer taste. The fudge might be too rich, if you don‘t fancy strong flavors.”

“Forgive my trepidation, but are you certain this ‘cake’ was made without wheat flour?”

“No flour of any kind,” Hazel said. “It being called a cake is more a matter of function than of form.”

“You should try it, Dee,” Two said from the cake table. “It’s made from milk.”

“Is it, now?” Dee asked, picking up a red-and-white marbled square in a foil cupcake wrapper. “I sometimes think that if the surface has nothing else to teach us, we could learn quite a bit about a varied diet from the cultures here.”

“That one’s raspberry swirl,” Hazel said. “I was feeling experimental and I was cooking in small batches, so I made a bunch of different flavors. The brown ones are chocolate, of course, and the green and brown ones are mint chocolate swirl. The ones with crushed nuts on top are maple nut. The orange are… well, they aren’t purple-flavored. The reddish-pink are strawberry, and the white with specks is vanilla bean. The plainish sort are plain, just in case none of my experiments turned out.”

I’d headed towards the line to get a piece of cake once Two finished cutting it into exact perfect squares, but Hazel’s description of the cheesecake cups pulled me over. It seemed like it was going to take Two a while to get the cake cut to her satisfaction anyway.

“I think I’ll try an orange one,” I said, reaching for one.

“Oi, everybody’s being so dainty,” Hazel said. “Isn’t this a party? Don’t just take one, try a few… I didn’t make them for looking at!”

“Well, okay,” I said, and I took one of each. Hazel’s exhortations got the rest of the guests moving, and soon people were making sandwiches and eating cheesecake and popping fruit and nuts into their mouths. Two, meanwhile, was almost finished cutting. I’d finished my sampling of the cheesecake… the raspberry swirl and vanilla bean were my favorites, the other kinds all tasted like they had too much flavoring overpowering the taste of the cheesecake itself or not enough to stand out above it… so I wandered over to wait behind Kyle and Honey, who had patiently stood there while Two did her work.

“That’s very… exact,” I said to Two, watching her slowly draw the knife through the cake to finish the last line.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m trying to make the pieces fair. Though, they don’t have the same amounts of frosting on them.”

“Well, maybe different people like different amounts,” I said. “If everybody gets their own choice, that’s fair, too.”

“Yes,” Two agreed. She looked at Honey. “Which piece would you like?”

“Oh, I’m not particular,” Honey said. “But I guess, if it makes it easier to get started, that you could give me a corner piece.”

“Okay,” Two said.

Honey was right about the convenience of starting at the corner, but I had little doubt in mind that it was exactly what she wanted. Not only did the corners have frosting down two sides, but they had the thickest concentration of flowers on top. Kyle just asked for the next piece on the side, but when Two got to me I asked for a corner without hesitation. After all, she had just agreed that it was most fair if everybody got what they wanted.

Still, some people deserved special consideration, and while there were plenty of edge and center pieces, there were only two corners left.

“If you’re going to serve everybody else first, maybe you should pick your piece now and put it aside so you get the one you want,” I told Two. “After all, it’s your cake.”

“Oh, okay,” she said, and she took one of the other corners and put it on a plate.

I took my cake and went to stand next to Amaranth, who was talking about the logistics of dairy farming with Dee.

“The main problem, as I see it, would be feeding them,” she was saying. “I don’t know how well cows would take to fungus and mold. There are reindeer, of course, that eat lichen supplemented with small birds and rodents, which sounds a lot closer to the diet of your lizards, but… well, I don’t know if they’d be adaptable to the dark. It might take something like your orchard island before you could get a viable herd of anything going, and then… well, it takes more land to grow crops or grass for cattle than it does to just grow crops.”

“It is a puzzling problem,” Dee said. “But one I would not be in a position to solve in the near future, goddess willing. I will have to give it more thought, and reflect upon it in my meditations.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” Amaranth said. “And even if you can’t get a steady supply of fresh dairy, cheeses keep pretty well, if you want to expand the trade… smoked cheeses, especially, might work well. How‘s the cake, baby?” she asked, noticing I’d joined her.

“It‘s very good,” I said, after taking a big frosting-laden bite. The underlying cake was marbled chocolate and white. “People smoke cheeses?” I asked. I was picturing a bunch of cheddar slices hanging up next to a slab of bacon in a smokehouse. It seemed funny to me.

“Oh, yes, baby,” Amaranth said. “I think it’s done more for the flavor it imparts than anything else, in this day and age, but it’s not that uncommon. You’ve never heard of smoked gouda?”

“Oh, I guess I have,” I said. “I guess I just thought it was a type of… I mean, I never thought about what it meant, you know?”

Amaranth clucked and shook her head.

“People don’t understand where their food comes from,” she said. “You’ve probably never had cheese that didn’t come in slices or melted on top of something.”

“Yeah, but you’ve never even tasted cheese,” I said, a little defensively.

“No, but I’m sure there’s a difference between a big corporate dairy farm that churns out a million identical hunks of cheese and a little craft shop that produces individual wheels of cheese in distinct styles,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, there certainly is,” Hazel said. “We used to have cheese parties back in the shire. Everyone would bring their best for judging. Goat cheese, mostly, of course, but there’re a few folks who can afford to keep cows.”

Ian joined us, with a very plain-looking piece of cake from the center.

“Oh, did we run out of side pieces?” I asked.

“No, I asked for this one,” he said. “I don’t like a lot of frosting.”

“Hey, Hazel… what do you call these?” Celia asked, holding up half a boiled egg.

“Deviled eggs,” Hazel said. “You boil an egg, cut it in half, pull the yolk out, mix it up with other stuff and put it back in.”

“Awesome,” Celia said. “What do you do with the shell?”

“Well, you throw that out.”

“Oh, lame,” Celia said. “Hey, you should break the shell up and put it in the yolk with whatever this green and red shit is.”

“Er, I’ll do that next time, just for you,” Hazel said.

“You should,” Celia said. She popped the deviled egg into her mouth, closed her jaw, and then held it for a few seconds before swallowing. “Oh, fuckin’ A, usually I like my eggs whole because the inside’s nothing special, taste-wise.”

“Well, it’s just a little mustard and celery and seasoning,” Hazel said. “My mum used to make them when we went to visit my cousins downriver, and we’d sit out on the deck and have a little picnic in the sun…”

“Eggs and sun,” Celia said. “You’re talking my language.”

“Hazel, please, you’re making me seasick,” Honey said, and she did look a little green. She took the deviled egg she had been eating and folded it up in a napkin.

“What, just mentioning the boat makes you queasy now?” Hazel said. “Sorry if I’m not properly ashamed of my upbringing, but ’boat’ isn’t a four-letter word, you know.”

“Yes, it is,” Two said.

“It isn’t that,” Honey said. “Maybe something I ate? All of a sudden, I’m just… I don’t feel… I’m not quite…”

“Oh, don’t you dare throw up, Honey Callaway,” Hazel said. “Nobody loses their lunch when I’ve cooked it.”

“Believe me, if it were up to me…” Honey said, before putting a hand to her mouth. Her cheeks puffed out a bit and she ran for the door.

“Oh, fuck, what else did she eat besides the eggs?” Celia asked.

“Bit of everything,” Hazel said. “But it’s not my cooking.”

“Um,” Ian said. “Should somebody…?”

“I will go and see to her,” Dee said. “I believe I stand the greatest chance of finding her and of rendering aid, if it proves to be more serious than a simple stomach upset.”

“Hey, you can use your divine whatsit to make sure it wasn’t my cooking, right?” Hazel asked.

“Well, if you are not confident that such is the case…” Dee said.

“Er, no, I am,” Hazel said. Don’t go out of your way on my account.”

“Thank you. Now, if you will excuse me,” Dee said, giving the room a bow before heading for the door.

“What happened?” Feejee asked, coming up to us.

“Dee’s going to check on Honey,” I said.

“You mean Hazel?”

“No, I’m standing right here,” Hazel said.

“The other gnome,” I said.

“Both gnomes were here?” Feejee asked.

“The gnomes are here?” Iona asked, a piece of ham in her mouth.

There was a tiny noise, and we turned to look at the door and see Honey there, clearing her throat and looking rather sheepish. Dee was right behind her.

“Sorry,” she said. “False alarm, I don’t know what came over me. One moment I was fine and the next, I just… I looked over at Hazel and I started to feel quite nauseated.”

“Oi, first it’s my food and now it’s my face?”

“I’m sorry,” Honey said. “Like I said, I don’t know what came over me.”

“Well, at least now we know… I mean, now we all know… that it wasn’t the food,” Hazel said. “Because the day someone throws up after eating my cooking is the day… is the… is…”

She didn’t get anything else out.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. She didn’t get any more words out. Everything else, everything she’d just eaten… that got out just fine.

“What’d you get?” I asked, looking at the little bag.

“A surprise,” he said. “I figure it fit the theme.”

“If you’re worried it’s not any good, you don’t have to do more than the card,” I said. “I don’t think her cooking classmates are…”

“No, I think it’s good,” Ian said. “It’s just a surprise.”

“Ian, it’s a college bookstore,” I sad. “They sell pens and paper and tourist mugs and lodestones for the fridge with the school crest on it. They don’t sell good presents.”

“Maybe you don’t know how to spot a good present,” he said.

“Hey, I spotted a great present,” I said.

“In a big chain bookstore in town,” he said. “That’s like finding hay in a haystack. I’m just a tiny bit more ambitious than that.”

He wouldn’t say anything more or let me get a peek in his gift bag, which had wads of green and purple tissue paper sticking out of it. We made it back to the room with barely minutes to spare. There were some more people there, but Hazel was chatting with them so I figured they must have been the guests. Kyle from the food court had showed up, too. I gave him the least weak hello I could muster, since he was standing off by himself, a stranger even to the other humans.

I hurriedly signed the card. Lacking any way to attach it to the gift bag, I simply put it inside its envelope and slipped it into the bag.

I was thankful I’d found a card that summed up what I wanted to say so simply and succinctly. A personal message was personal, but I didn’t know what to say to or about Two that could fit inside a card. She was the best of us, and not just because she was the innocent one. She had come so far since her first days at MU, and whatever of that progress could be said to be because of us, it could not be denied that after the first few hurdles, a lot of it had happened without us… and some, perhaps, had even happened in spite of us.

Amaranth arrived just after that. Her face told the story more completely than Steff’s absence did… they hadn’t been able to find her.

“I’m so worried, baby,” she said, without having to explain what she was worried about. “And even if she’s okay, she’s going to hate herself for missing this… I checked some of the places I thought she might have gone, but if she wandered into the trees or something… I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“What did Viktor say?” I asked.

“He was going to get another student who has a pass to the vaults to go and look for her there,” Amaranth said. “But, if she’d actually gone there like she said she was going to, she would’ve been back, right?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “She might have gone there… she might even have intended to put the knife back, at least a little… and then got enraptured by it again once she got there.”

I found myself not believing it as I said it… Steff had already been off in her own special place when she’d left, supposedly to return the knife. If she’d decided to go play with it a little more before returning it, I couldn’t see her going to the place where someone might recognize it and ask her what she was doing with it. No, she’d probably go somewhere that she could be alone with no chance of being interrupted. After all, if someone saw her cutting herself again and again, they’d probably do something to stop her.

Unless they were into it, that was.

“Callahan,” I said.

“What?” Amaranth asked.

“She might have gone to Callahan’s office,” I said. “I mean, if Steff’s in a self-injuring mood and she wanted an audience or a partner… she wanted me to try the knife but I wouldn’t. She might have gone to Callahan next.

“Yeah,” Amaranth said. “Hopefully Callahan would recognize the potential for danger and take it away from her, though.”

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“She is a teacher,” Amaranth said. “Oh, they’re here.”

“What?”

“Dee and Two… Dee says they’re almost here,” she said. Louder, to the room, she said, “Everybody get ready.”

“Should we turn out the lights?” one of the cooking class girls asked.

“Um, I think she can see in the dark,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Let’s do it anyway,” Hazel said. “Sake of form and all that.”

Amaranth started to reach to do that, but at that moment the door opened and Two walked in.

I froze up completely. It was only after the sound of the others yelling “Surprise!” was fading away that I remembered that this was the thing to do. It was too late to yell it myself, so I just kind of moved my mouth like I might have just said something and was only now closing it.

If I had been momentarily at a loss for what to do, I was in the very best of company… Two stood there in the doorway, just in front of Dee, and looked around from her classmates to her friends, blinking and thinking.

“It’s a surprise party, love,” Hazel said gently. “For you.”

“Oh,” Two said, and then she smiled rigidly. “What do I do?”

“You gasp and you shout how surprised you are,” Hazel said. “And then you enjoy the party.”

“Okay,” Two said. She gasped rather theatrically, and then yelled, “Somewhat!”

Now that she knew what was going on and had played her required role, she visibly relaxed quite a bit and headed for the food. It seemed likely that this was her idea of what a party was about. I knew she’d had class parties in her cooking classes that had probably just involved everybody bringing a dish, and she’d held her own little dinner party before. If she’d had any experience with parties in her former life, I had to imagine it would have involved holding a tray full of tiny foods or something.

“Oh, hold on,” Hazel said, and Two stopped. “Don’t you want to open your presents first?”

“Presents?” Two repeated.

“Yeah, some of us got you presents,” Hazel said. “Like it’s your birthday, you know?”

“But I wasn’t born,” Two said.

“Neither was I, but most people were, and they get birthdays” Amaranth explained. “So we wanted a day to celebrate you.”

“Oh,” Two said. “That’s fair.”

“You can open mine first,” Hazel said, holding up a box that was about a foot and a half across, though it didn’t seem to weigh much.

Two accepted it with a thank you and began carefully unwrapping it, first untying the ribbon and slipping it off and then finding the edge of the paper where it had been taped and undoing that. She got the plain white box uncovered and then opened it.

“Oh,” she said. “A stuffed alligator.”

She pulled it out. It was a very big, very squishy-looking alligator, but an alligator nonetheless.

“Like in the song,” Two said, and then she laughed. “Alligators don’t eat raspberries.”

Two’s laughter was like her singing and her crying: honest and uncontrolled. It was a lot more pleasant to hear, though. I wondered for a moment if we’d done her a terrible disservice by telling her it was okay to cry but not giving her a similar order for laughter, but I decided otherwise, for two reasons. One was that it didn’t seem to be necessary. She thought alligators were funny for some reason, and she laughed. Maybe Hazel had seen the need and taken care of it. Maybe she’d worked it out for herself by analogy to crying.

The other reason was that an order to laugh when things were funny would require Two to figure that out, which could be stressful for her and could also lead to awkwardness if she judged incorrectly.

“Why don‘t you set her down here for now, so you can keep your hands free ,” Hazel said, leading her over to the carom table. “You can put your gifts here as you open them, so they’ll be out of the way.”

“Okay,” Two said.

I wanted to press forward with my present, but Honey was sticking to Hazel’s side like she’d been glued there, and she held up her package, which was a long, flat bundle of paper with gold ribbon. Two opened it and found a pair of pens made from brightly colored feathers with designs painted on them.

“I didn’t know what you would like?” Honey said, her nervousness making it into a question. “But I saw these in a stall in the bazaar and I thought they were pretty?”

“Yes, they are,” Two said. “Thank you, Honey.”

“Oh, you’re quite welcome,” Honey said, and she relaxed, too.

Dee got hers in next, since she was standing right next to Two. It was a slim box wrapped in plain black paper.

“Oh, pretty,” Two said when she saw it. She opened it to find a rack of ten little jars of different kinds of jelly. “Thank you, Dee.”

“You’re very welcome,” Dee said. “I discovered the concept of jellied fruit while researching methods of preservation. I had seen grape and strawberry jelly in the cafeteria, of course, but I did not realize its true nature at the time, nor had I realized that the concept could be applied to other fruits.”

As strange as it was to hear somebody talk about jelly like it was some esoteric alchemical preservation, I could kind of understand her fascination. We all saw grape jelly, but did the average person stop and think about how it had come to be? Hell, there had been a steady trade of jars in and out of my grandmother’s pantry in the nine years I’d lived with her and I probably wouldn’t have been able to name ten different kinds of jelly without thinking about it.

“You don’t have fruit preserves back home, Dee?” Amaranth asked. “Considering how valuable fruit must be…”

“Had there been any sources of fruit in the nomadic ages, I’m sure preservation techniques would have been discovered,” Dee said. “But our magical orchards know no barren season, and the demand is such that there is never any surplus to speak of.”

I took advantage of the conversation to step forward with my gift bag, which I handed to Two. She took it, glanced down, and then looked at me in confusion.

“It’s my present,” I said. “For you. Your present from me.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re supposed to wrap it, but that’s okay. I’ll take it this time.”

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. Apparently she didn’t know about gift bags. There’d be time to explain that later.

She set the bag down on the table and pulled the books out one after another, reading over the title of each one. She then pulled out the card, opened it, and read it.

“Oh,” she said, and she looked up at me, smiling. “You’re welcome.”

“You mean ’thank you’,” Amaranth said.

“No, I mean ’you’re welcome’,” Two said. “But thank you, Mack. It’s a very pretty card.”

“What about the books?” I asked. I didn’t want to sound like it was all about me or anything, but the lack of reaction was killing me. I thought she’d at least respond to the gnomish cooking book. “Do you like them?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t read them yet,” she said. “I think it would be rude if I did that at my party.”

“Oh,” I said, chuckling a little. It was a very honest answer. “Okay.”

Contrary to my prediction to Ian, her classmates had brought gifts. They included a little beanbag penguin, a set of stirring spoons coated in different flavors of chocolate, a little self-warming teapot, and a bookmark that could pick up the contents of pages it had been put against. Judging from the picture of crossed utensils at the bottom, it was intended for use in cookbooks.

I hadn’t even noticed that Feejee was missing until she came back into the room with a giggling apology. She had a tiny gift bag with a fringe of tissue paper sticking out of it. The bottom was bulging quite badly. I guessed the contents were made of some particularly weighty substance, like metal.

“Sorry, I didn’t even think about a gift before we came over, so I had to run back and then to the store,” she said.

“Oh, you didn’t have to,” Amaranth said. “We only did because we care for Two so very much.”

“But I wanted to,” Feejee said. “I would like to be better friends with everyone. Here,” she said, holding the badly strained little bag to Two.

“Thank you,” Two said, forgetting to lecture Feejee about wrapping as she pulled out the contents. It was a heavy gold medallion on a gold chain. There were gasps and one “holy shit” from the non-Harlowe crowd. Two had gone rigid and pale, and she thrust both her hands, one with the necklace and one with the bag, out towards Feejee.

“I’m sorry, but I am not able to accept gifts of more than five silver pieces in value,” she recited.

“Oh,” Feejee said, looking a little hurt. “Um… is that a lot? I don‘t know what else… I have some pearls, too?”

“I don’t think that’ll make the difference, Feejee,” Amaranth said.

“I’m sorry, but I am not able to accept gifts of more than five silver pieces in value,” Two repeated, her voice rising a little in pitch and volume.

“But it’s not worth that much to me,” Feejee said. “I mean, I got it for free, so if you want to be technical about it, it’s worthless, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, but I am not able to accept gifts of more than five silver pieces in value. Please consider a donation to Hearts of Clay as an alternative,” Two said, her arms beginning to shake. She looked and sounded desperate with the urge to divest herself of the forbidden gift. “Please take them,” she said.

Amaranth stepped forward and grabbed the necklace, putting it out of sight.

“I’ll just hold onto it as a sort of trust until we can talk to these Hearts of Clay people,” she said. “Two’s a free being. She should be able to decide for herself whether or not to accept a gift.”

“Thank you,” Two said to Amaranth. “And thank you for the thought,” she said to Feejee. “It was very nice.”

“Maybe you could sell one of your pieces of jewelry and keep that money aside to buy more reasonable gifts when you want to give somebody something,” I suggested to Feejee.

“Okay, but it’s not really that big a deal,” she said.

There was a soft knock on the door.

“Is this where the party is?” Iona asked.

“Yeah, come on in,” Amaranth replied.

The door opened and Iona and Celia walked in. Iona held up a wire basket with a plastic pouch full of bath products in it.

“Sorry it’s not wrapped,” she said, smiling a big, dazzlingly tooth-filled smile. “I didn’t have time.”

“That’s okay, I forgive you,” Two said, accepting the gift.

“Where’d you find that?” Amaranth asked.

“Oh, I had it on hand,” Iona said. “I’d meant it for somebody else, but I thought it might suit Two just as well.”

“Coconut lime body spray, body wash, lotion, and bath salts,” Two read.

“I love the taste of coconut,” Iona said. “And lime brings out so much taste in meat.”

Yeah, the mermaids’ privacy be damned… we needed to talk to Two. I trusted her more to keep the secret for Feejee’s sake than I trusted Iona. If Feejee ended up being caught in the same net because Iona wouldn’t reform her habits on land… well, that would suck for her, but if she was the worst-hit victim of the incident, it would be a very lucky thing.

Despite the last minute invite, Celia had not turned up empty handed, either. She had a rolled up piece of leather, which, when unfurled, had a scale-like pattern pressed into it. The hexagonal scales were dyed orange and turquoise, and the individual colored scales made a pattern of swirls and lines.

“Thank you,” Two said.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Celia said. “But, you invited me to your chicken thing and you didn’t invite Puddy, and that was kind of awesome. So… well, that piece is from my back. Two summers ago.”

“Wait, it’s what?” I said.

“It’s the skin off my back,” Celia said.

“That thing is you?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Do you shed?” I asked.

“Not naturally,” she said. “It’s a religious thing.”

“You flay yourself, religiously?”

“Every year on my birthday,” she said proudly. “Most girls only do it the first time, when they turn eleven.”

“That’s, er, a good year,” Hazel muttered.

“Auspicious year,” Honey agreed.

“I’m not so sure about the auspices of a year you start by getting skinned alive,” Hazel said. “Though, surviving it’s a good sign.”

“Well, you don’t just take a knife and start cutting yourself,” Celia said. “What kind of an idiot would do that? There’s a shaman on hand and everything.”

“I think as long as you’re being safe, it isn’t anybody’s business,” Amaranth said. “And I’m sure it’s a very personal gift to give.”

“It’s nothing,” Celia said, and she actually blushed. “It’s junk. I’m not happy with the staining. I’d be embarrassed to give it to anybody back home, who knows what a good skin piece is supposed to look like.”

“And speaking of personal gifts,” Amaranth said, beaming, “I think you should open mine next, Two.”

Under the gold wrapping paper, it was obviously a garment box, and I entertained a brief hope that she’d thought better of her initial plan. But the way the box wobbled in transit between them, it was obvious that one end of it was heavier than the other.

Two undid the paper with the same care as she had shown the other packages, and then lifted off the top.

“Oh, pretty!” she exclaimed, and she lifted out a long, glittery icy blue camisole. It seemed pretty voluminous, which meant that somebody had used an awful lot of material to cover up almost nothing, as it was completely see-through except for a pattern of flowers that would vaguely obscure the chest region. She held it up to her, and it became apparent just how roomy it was. I couldn’t see the shoulder straps working on Two’s narrow frame. “Oh, but I am afraid this is not the right size. This is too big for me. I think it would fit you better.”

“What?” Amaranth said. She’d gone very pale, and she grabbed it out of Two’s hand. “L-let me see that, Twoey, please.”

“Hey, my name isn’t Twoey,” Two protested, but Amaranth wasn’t paying attention. She turned away from everybody for a moment, and then turned back, holding out a clearly smaller version of the same garment.

“No, this is the right size,” Amaranth said holding it out. “Check again, I think you’ll find you were mistaken.”

Two did as she was bade, looking at the tag and then holding it up. She shook her head.

“It is my size, but this is a different one,” Two said. “It’s like you bought two of the same thing, only one of them is in my size and the other of them is in yours.”

“What? No,” Amaranth said. She shook her head emphatically. “No, you silly… just no.”

“Okay, but it looks like…”

“It’s probably best if you just drop it,” I said to Two.

“Okay,” she said. “But I don’t think I’m wrong.”

“Oh, and there’s more in there,” Amaranth said.

“No, there isn’t,” Hazel said. I hadn’t even noticed how close she’d come to the table with the box on it.

“What?” Amaranth said.

“I think there was,” Two said. “It was a heavy box.”

“No, that’s all she got you and that’s fine because it’s a very lovely present,” Hazel said. “So much that I think after the party I’m going to have a conversation with her about where she shops for presents for you.”

“Hazel, you’re being ridiculous,” Amaranth said. “Why is everybody trying to blow this out of proportion? It’s just a little…”

“I know little,” Hazel said. “It’s not a little anything. Two, love, Amaranth got you a nice… undergarment, and that’s all she got you.”

“This is a very confusing present,” Two said, looking sideways at the box, her eyelid twitching as she tried to reconcile what she knew with what she was being told.

“Maybe this will be less confusing,” Ian said, stepping forward with his gift bag.

“I hope so,” Two said. “My head is starting to hurt.” She looked at me. “You should pay attention to how Feejee and Ian did it. They know how to wrap presents in bags.”

“Told you,” Ian said. I stuck out my tongue.

She pulled out the tissue paper and inside it was a desktop model of a candy or gumball dispenser, the kind with a penny bank inside, and a little bag of fruit-shaped candies to fill it.

“The only thing I knew you like is candy,” Ian said. “But I didn’t want to get you just candy, so…”

“Oh, thank you!” she said, and the enthusiasm in her voice burned me like petty, petty fire.

“It’s going to be hard to keep the different flavors sorted out inside the globe,” I said.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I can sort them as they come out. Thank you, Ian. That was a very thoughtful present.”

“Try not to let your jealousy get the better of you,” Ian told me.

“I’m not jealous,” I said. “She just hasn’t read the books yet.”

“Oh, shit,” Feejee said. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit… we’re dead. We are dead. They’re going to kill us. We’re dead.”

“Shut up!” Iona said, her voice gone squeaky. “For fuck’s sake, shut up!”

“Mackenzie?” Ian shouted, sounding more curious than frantic. “Can you open the door?”

“Wait,” Iona said to me. “Wait a second. Nobody fucking do anything.”

“We’re fucked,” Feejee said. “We’re fucked.”

“I’m coming, Ian!” I said.

I got up off the bench and lunged towards the door. The room seemed to lunge in the opposite direction I moved, and I fell over the trough of heat stones and banged the hell out of my shin. The thump and involuntary cry of pain resulted in another round of pounding on the door and a shout of “Open up!”

“I’m fine!” I said. “I’m coming!”

It wasn’t a picnic walking with a barked shin, to say nothing of the still-blistering pain in my crotch, but I waddled and hobbled my way over. My legs were having a hard time understanding where I wanted them to go, which was possibly related to the pain.

My head was a bit cottony and my skin was tingling where the mermaids’ teeth had been. It wasn’t completely unpleasant. I felt warm all over.

I made it over to the door, standing to the side as I opened it so I wouldn’t be in direct sight of the opening. I jumped even further away when I saw the crowd of curious people, human boys and dwarves, gathered in an arc a short distance away.

Ian looked ready to charge in swinging, but he stopped short at the threshold. He was looking at Feejee and Iona, who both looked like they’d been caught with their hands in a cookie jar.

“Oh,” he said. His eyes narrowed a bit. “Right. Of course.”

I realized he must have thought we’d been having sex, or something. Three girls, moaning and screaming, nudity… it wasn’t too big a stretch.

“It’s not what it looks like!” I blurted out, before realizing that what it looked like was probably a lot better than what it was.

“Yeah, it so isn’t,” Feejee said, holding up her hands and shifting her legs back to the sexless, albeit shapely, scaled form. “We weren’t… I mean, we were just… you have to understand, I have a boyfriend. And I’m very happy with him.”

“Oh, come on. It’s exactly what it looks like,” Iona said. “Hope that’s okay?”

“Yeah, no offense, but I’ve heard this song before,” Ian said to Feejee. “And I’m getting pretty sick of it.”

“No, but…” Feejee started to say.

“Come on, Fee,” Iona said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s not make this into a bigger thing than it is. We were just having some harmless fun… experimenting. Right, Mack?”

“I don’t really care,” Ian said. “Okay? I don’t care whether you call yourself a lesbian or what. I’ve beat my head against this wall enough times in the past few weeks. I’m not interested in doing it any more. I just want to talk to my girlfriend… alone.”

“Come on,” Iona said again, pulling Feejee towards the door. She looked at me. “Remember, don’t say anything you might regret.”

Ian stepped aside to let them past. His eyes were on me. His face was blank and unreadable… but his eyes might as well have been letters fifty feet high, and they said, “You and me, we are gonna have this thing out.”

“We’ll talk later,” Feejee said to me as they left.

“What the hell did you mean, running off like that?” Ian asked, after he’d closed the door. “I looked all over for you… I didn’t know where you were or what happened.”

“Well, you kind of left me standing there all by myself,” I said.

“I left you standing where I could see you,” he raged. “I was only going to talk to those guys for like five minutes and then come right back. Five minutes!”

“You were already gone longer than that when I left,” I said. “And you must not have been watching very closely if you didn’t see me heading downstairs.”

“But if you’d stayed where you were, I could have looked over and seen that you were okay,” Ian said. “When I saw you were gone, I went tearing through the side tunnels and the cubbies, looking for you… I didn’t know if you were getting charmed or raped or attacked or what!”

“Well, kee, I’m so freaking sorry I turned out to be okay,” I said. “Next time, I’ll make sure something bad happens, okay? How’s that? Is that better?”"

“I was worried about you, you thoughtless bitch,” Ian yelled.

I sucked in a sharp breath. My hand trailed down my stomach to the painfully tender folds of my pussy. They were extremely sensitive to the touch after the abuse Iona had wrought upon them.

“Oh, that’s right,” Ian said, throwing up his hands. “You’re going to get off… again… on this.”

“I’m not!” I said, jerking my hand away. “I’m just… sore.”

I saw a hint of jealousy in his eyes, but he pushed it away with anger.

“You want to hit me?” I asked, stepping forward and turning my head slightly. “Go ahead… hit me.”

“I want you to take this seriously,” Ian said. “I want you to take me seriously. I told you to wait and you didn’t. You said it was my choice when the chains came off and then you ditched them without a second thought.”

“If you just wanted me to be your little slave girl for the night…”

“I didn’t,” Ian said. “I don’t. But if you didn’t want to wear them, you should have said so… and if you say something is up to me, I expect you to honor it. Khersis, Mack, that should be pretty basic.”

I stared at him, not knowing what to say to that.

“You left me alone!” I finally said.

“For five minutes!” he countered. “While I talked to a bunch of guys you didn’t want anything to do with… and by the way, all the shit you’ve said about beer and drinking looks kind of different now, doesn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “All I had was one beer thing.”

This struck me as being slightly wrong… but I definitely hadn’t had more beers than the one.

“Well, I guess that was enough,” Ian said. “You’re pretty well plastered.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I felt fine. A little bit woozy, a little bit wobbly, maybe, but not plastered.

“Sure you don’t,” Ian said. He shook his head. “The words ‘fucking hypocrite’ come to mind.”

“I’m not allowed to change my mind?” I asked. “Is that it? I can’t decide to have a drink with my friends if I decide to… to… make that decision?”

“You came to the party with me,” Ian said. “So, yeah, I think you’re not allowed to run off with a couple of your girlfriends I don’t even know without telling me where you’re going, lock yourself naked in a room with them, and scream like you’re being murdered while I’m running around frantically trying to find you. It really sounded like you were dying. Were you honestly enjoying yourself?”

“Yeah!” I said, and after a moment I realized it was true. “I really was.”

Okay, I wouldn’t have chosen for Iona to chow down in the precise place she had, but up until that point… it had been incredible. Terrifying, but wonderful.

“And that’s why they were howling like bansidhes and you were squealing like a stuck pig?” Ian asked. “Because you were having such a good time?”

I glared at him. Why was he being such an asshole about this? I had just told him I was having a good time. What was so hard to understand about that?

“Mackenzie, if they were doing something you didn’t like…”

“Oh, whatever,” I said, feeling this was a bad line to let the conversation continue down. “The only reason you’re acting like this,” I continued, feeling a wave of pre-emptive triumph washing over me in advance of my absolutely winning the argument, “is because you’re jealous.”

“Jealous?” Ian echoed.

“Because I get the hot girls and you don’t,” I said. “I have Amaranth and Feejee and Iona and Steff. Who do you have?”

Ian snorted. His hands twitched at his sides, fists opening and closing, and then… he laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“You are. You’re so fucked up right now, Mackenzie,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t even know what you’re saying.”

“Yeah, you tell yourself that,” I said. “Because you know it’s true.”

He put a hand on his head and ran his fingers through his hair. His nostrils were flaring. He looked like he wanted to say something else. Actually, he looked like he wanted to yell something else. He didn’t.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re leaving. I’m taking you back to Harlowe, right now, before you do something really dumb.”

“No,” I said.

“What?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to leave.”

“You didn’t even want to stay long in the first place.”

“Don’t tell me what I want to do!” I said, pulling my arm away. The sudden motion made the world dip a little bit, so I sat down on the floor. “I’m having fun. It’s nice and warm in here.”

“You have to get up early tomorrow,” he said. “Remember?”

“So I’ll sleep here.”

“You’ll sleep in a steam room in the dwarven hall?”

“Yes,” I said. It didn’t sound like a terrible plan, all things considered, and just to prove my point, I laid down on my side and stretched out. The room was nice and warm and if the floor wasn’t actually comfortable, then it was comfortingly stable. “Just turn the dial back up to eleven when you leave.”

“Get up off the floor, Mackenzie,” he said.

“No.”

“Get up.”

“Don’t make me kick your ass,” I said.

He snorted again.

“Don’t you scoff. I’m stronger than you,” I said. “Faster. Tougher.”

“Mackenzie, you don’t have any clue how to fight and you trip over your own feet on a daily basis,” Ian said. “Come on. Quit fucking around and get up.”

“I let you hit me,” I reminded him.

“You do,” he said. “Come on. Get up.”

“I’ll get up,” I said, getting to my feet. Well, to my knees. The feet were a work in progress. I lunged towards him anyway, and ended up on my face.

Ian laughed.

“Don’t you laugh at me,” I said. “I’ll fucking take you apart.” I tried to push myself up to at least halfway upright. It took me a while to figure out that the arm I was trying to use was stuck underneath me. “Help me up.”

He strode around beside me and grabbed my hair. I gasped with pleasure—I think—as he yanked me back up into a sitting position and then breathed hard as he pulled me to my feet.

“You want to fight, bitch?” he asked, his voice gone husky.

“I’ll kick your ass,” I told him again.

He twisted my hair and then shoved me sideways and let go. My face hit the wall. Bright spots filled my vision and the world lurched funnily while I fell backwards onto the floor.

“I can’t fuck around with you, Mackenzie,” he said. “I love you, but I can’t. If you ever take a swing at me, I’ll sign your ass into the wall and then put you down hard, whether I think you’re going to connect or not. I can’t afford to take the chance.”

The words washed over me without touching me. I was listening to his voice, not his meaning. One of my hands was on my breast, squeezing. The other was looking without much success for my pussy, which was throbbing.

“Do you understand me, Mackenzie?” he asked, peering down at me through miles and miles of fog.

“Stomp on my face,” I breathed up at him. “Please.”

“Get up,” Ian said. “Get up,” he growled, when I didn’t move, and the toe of his shoe nudged me hard in the side. I rolled over and got up on my hands and knees.

“Fuck me,” I begged.

“Stand up and walk,” he said.

“But I wanna fuck,” I said, stretching out and giving my ass a wiggle in Ian’s direction. He responded by kicking me again, in a place that was already pretty sore to begin with. I whimpered and squirmed, my eyes watering and rolling back in my head.

“Move,” he said.

I moved. He put his hand on the door handle.

“Do you want me to get your clothes?” he asked, looking down at me. “Or do you even care if you go out there naked?”

“I want to fuck you,” I said, looking up at him. I rubbed my face against his jeans.

The smell of him… separate and distinct from the smell of humanity which hung throughout the area… was intoxicating. I wanted him so badly in that moment. I wanted him to pound into me, never mind the pain. Never mind anything. I wanted to be fucked. I wanted to be taken.

“I’m only going to ask one more time,” he said. “And then I’m dragging you out there. Answer me: do you want me to get your clothes?”

I looked up at him for a long time. He looked down. Him above, me below. It was so perfect. It was so right. I opened my mouth to tell him I loved him.

Mead and bits of chicken and pork spilled out all over his foot.

“That’s… nice,” I said. I felt a lightening of my mood within seconds of it hitting my stomach. My head felt clearer and fuzzier at the same time. “What is it?”

“Mead,” Feejee said. “Dwarven mead.”

“Oh,” I said. I took another sip, a little bit more respectfully. Hazel had made it sound like drinking dwarven mead was physically painful or something, but this was good. Maybe her small size just meant she couldn’t handle it? I had a few more bits of pork, and then took another drink.

“Maybe we should get you your own bottle,” Feejee said, smiling at me from behind her hand.

“Oh, sorry!” I said, handing it back. “It’s good. Sweet.”

“Yeah, apparently, normal fermenting just transmutes sugar to alcohol,” Feejee said. “The dwarves have a technique that doesn’t do that as much, somehow. Have some more pork.”

She inched the plate across the bench towards me, and I scooted closer as well. It was pretty good, and I was starving, or at least, I felt like I was. It was way too early for me to be hungry for real, but the smell of humanity in the air was making my mouth water and my stomach growl.

After getting permission from Feejee to continue sharing her drink and doing a little experimenting, I figured out that a touch of mead in my mouth with the meat gave a slightly closer approximation of the sensation of actual human flesh, at least with regards to the wonderful, intoxicating sweetness of it.

It still wasn’t the real thing, but it was good.

“You know who I would totally eat?” I said, after I’d had a bit more of the bottle. I had been thinking this, not realizing my mouth was currently connected to my brain, but once I’d said it out loud I decided to run with it.

“Who?” Feejee asked.

“Fucking Trina,” I said. “I can’t stand her… two-faced, three-eyed bitch.”

“She’s kind of scrawny, though,” Feejee said.

“Have you seen her ass?” I asked. “I mean, have you got a good look at it?”

“I don’t normally look at other women’s asses, actually.”

“Where you really want to look at is the thighs,” Iona said. “Big, juicy legs with a lot of meat on them, especially near the top… that’s the best part. Though, the organs are good, if you like a richer flavor.”

“Oh, that would probably be to Mack’s taste,” Feejee said. “Blood’s your focus food, right? You can get a lot of blood just eating the vitals.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. I squirmed a little on the bench. It felt like there was a bright light shining down on my face. Oddly, the topic of blood made me more uncomfortable than eating people.

Maybe it was because I’d had it drilled into my head while I’d never even thought of consuming other things until my first inadvertent taste of human flesh, or maybe it was because I knew I could keep talking about eating somebody in the abstract forever but sooner or later I’d need to drink more blood.

“I like a big ol’ thigh because you can sink your teeth into them all the way and then rip off a huge chunk,” Iona said, holding her hands in front of her like she had a leg in her grip and was taking a huge bite out of it.

The conversation was starting to edge back into unsettling territory. I took another swig of mead, and that seemed to help.

“The thing you have to realize is, we don’t go around eating humans all the time,” Feejee said. “If we did, it probably wouldn’t be half as exciting, you know? It’s for special occasions. It’s an event.”

The mead was adding a layer of surreality to the whole experience, above and beyond simply being locked in a steam room with two gorgeous, exotic, naked women who were cheerfully describing their love of human flesh. It was making it easier for me to handle the topic, to try to get my head around it a bit.

“So, it doesn’t seem like you’d run into a lot of humans out in the middle of the sea,” I said. My thoughts seemed to be lining up a little sluggishly, but this seemed like an important point to clarify. I mean, eating people was eating people, there was no two ways about it… but it was certainly less objectionable if they were already dead, and possibly a little bit better if they might have died, anyway. “Do you only eat people when they go overboard or shipwreck?”

“Well… sort of, I guess,” Feejee said, though from the way she wound a strand of damp hair around her finger and looked off to the side, it was obvious this was kind of stretching the truth. “I mean, our laws say that humans in the water are fair game, and from a purely practical standpoint it’s easier that way.”

“But nothing says we can’t sort of help them on their way, if they insist on staying in their little boats,” Iona said. “Anyway, don’t call it ‘eating people.’ They aren’t people when I eat them.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“They’re food,” she said. “People you talk to or hang out with. People have thoughts and feelings and rights. Food, on the other hand, is just delicious and sustaining.”

“But… they still have thoughts and feelings,” I said. “That doesn’t magically change just because they’re in the water, or because you’ve got your mouth on them.”

Iona shook her head stubbornly.

“It does,” she said.

“Well, I’m sure from their point of view…” Feejee said.

“Food doesn’t have a point of view, Fee-Fee,” Iona said. “I’m not trying to be racist, but that’s just how it is. You probably won’t understand this until you go back this summer and make your next kill.”

“So… do other people know about this?” I asked. “I mean, nobody seems to be afraid of you the way they are of me.”

“It’s not exactly common knowledge, no,” Feejee said.

“We’d kind of like to keep it that way, by the way,” Iona said. “We figured we could count on a little solidarity from you, on that point.”

“Yeah. Just think about it this way,” Feejee said. “If word gets around and there’s a panic, then we’ll probably have to kill a bunch of people in self-defense.” She was smiling an extremely friendly smile as she said this, as if she thought this was the most reassuring thing in the world that she could say. “But if it stays quiet… well, you’re keeping more people than us safe.”

They were both looking at me expectantly. Feejee handed me the bottle again. I didn’t know what to say, so I took a long pull from it. Fucking hell, that shit was good… and it seemed to get better the more of it I drank.

They both nodded, and it seemed as if my acceptance of the bottle had been taken as an answer.

I was fine with that.

I was fine with pretty much anything.

“I’d eat Trina,” I said again, picking at a piece of pork. Both mermaids were watching me. Iona looked avid. Feejee looked amused. Rather than making me self-conscious about my declaration, their attention emboldened me. “I’d sneak up behind her and strangle her… wait, no, I’d keep her alive so she can watch and feel it. I’d just have to gag her first so she didn’t talk me to death while I was doing it. Maybe with an apple, like the pigs upstairs.”

“What if she tastes as nasty as she acts, though?” Feejee asked. “Wouldn’t that be funny? If personality and flavor were the same? Like, sweet and good people would taste sweet and good.”

“Not much incentive for being nice,” I said.

“No, but it would be kind of fitting,” Feejee said. “Don’t you think?”

“You two are crazy,” Iona said. “It’s just meat.”

I giggled. The talk of sweet people tasting sweet had struck a chord. An earlier image, one I’d tried to forget, had just returned to my head: Two on a platter, with an apple in her mouth. Trina was meatier and would be more satisfying on several levels, but if Two ended up being half as good a meal as she was a person…

“See, it’s not so bad to think about,” Feejee said. “It’s natural, for us.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, letting the word out slowly. “Natural.”

It was probably better to eat Trina than Two, I thought in a lazy sort of way. I mean, eating Trina would be a public service. But as long as it was just my imagination, why not go for the whole hog, so to speak?

Two with one of her alice bands and an apple in her mouth… or better, a great big bow in her hair, like she was wrapped up with a ribbon.

Though, there would be something infinitely satisfying about taking a nice, big bite out of Trina’s juicy rear. Maybe she could describe the sensation to Gladys over her mirror while I did it.

Or I could just have another go at Rocky. She’d tasted so good the first time… and just like Trina, it would be one more recurring headache gone.

Why not? She’d probably kill me if she had the chance, and not even for any reason. If I got her first, at least she wouldn’t go to waste.

“If you think about it,” Iona said, “you could probably get away with it easier than we could, Mack.”

“Oh, no fucking way,” I said, my mind snapping back to cold reality, where killing and eating people was a very bad idea and fundamentally wrong. “I couldn’t actually do this… and even if I could, guardsmen and clerics would be all over me.”

“No, think about it,” Iona said. “The way you eat bones and all? No evidence. Somebody just… disappears. Not like it doesn’t happen, you know? Might as well happen in your favor. Or… our favor.”

“We’re just talking here, Io,” Feejee said. “Remember? That was the plan. Just talk about it. Get it out of our systems in a healthy way.”

“Well, if we’re going to talk about it, let’s talk about it,” Iona said. “If you think about it, if we actually did eat somebody, that’s probably the best way to get it out of our systems.”

“Not me,” I said. “I didn’t even have a taste for human flesh until like a week ago, when I sort of accidentally had some. I had no idea I’d enjoy it. I just knew I needed virgin blood… and I had no idea how good that was, fresh.”

My body shuddered with remembered pleasure and I let out a little whimper as the sensual memory of the taste of Tyler’s blood dripping from his arm, the feeling of Rocky’s soft flesh in my mouth, washed over me.

“Must have been a good meal,” Feejee said, nodding and grinning that knowing grin.

“Yeah,” I said, in a small voice. “It was.” I reached for the mead and took another drink.

“Anyway, Io… on a practical level,” Feejee said, “it would take so much planning to make sure that we wouldn’t get caught that the semester would probably be half over before we could do it, and if we can wait half a semester before we actually eat someone, we can wait the other half. Right?” She looked at me, silently appealing for support.

“I’d prefer to go my whole life without actually eating someone,” I said. “And I thought it was only people in the water you ate?”

“Well, we could lure somebody into the river or a lake or something,” Iona said, with a shrug. “I mean, when you get right down to it, it’s more of a tradition than anything else.”

“It’s probably best to just keep it as a fantasy, for now,” Feejee said. “We can talk about it, and we can dream. That doesn’t hurt anything.”

“No,” I agreed. I blushed. “I actually… well…”

“What?” Feejee asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Tell us,” Iona said.

“Well, when I’m with Ian… the thing is, he’s kind of… I mean, his skin tastes…”

Feejee laughed.

“I do that with Rick, too,” she said. “It drives him wild, and he’s got no idea why I’m so interested in licking his skin. He thinks it’s some big thing I’m doing for him.”

“So that’s why you two date the livestock,” Iona said.

We both gave her a dirty look.

“That isn’t the reason I’m with Rick,” Feejee said. “It’s just an added benefit.”

“No, but it makes sense now,” Iona said. “And to think of all those times you swore up and down you’d never dream of eating him.”

“I wouldn’t,” Feejee said indignantly. “There’s a difference between fantasizing about something and actually doing it.”

“But fantasizing is pretty much the definition of ‘dreaming of’,” Iona said.

“Oh, shut up,” Feejee said. “You know, though… while we’re on the subject, I’d bet we could talk a couple of the Rampant Badgers into coming in here and giving us a little taste-test.” She giggled. “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind having a couple of beautiful women drooling all over them for an hour or so.”

“Uh, two of us have boyfriends,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it wouldn’t be sexual for us,” Feejee said. “Though we don’t have to tell them that. What do you think?” she asked Iona. “Should we go ‘fishing’?”

“I say yeah,” Iona said.

“I don’t think this is really a great idea,” I said. I still felt pretty sharp and focused, all things considered… but on the other hand, the room was wobbling a little bit around the edges. “What if we get out of hand?”

“Oh, well, if you don’t want to…” Feejee said. “It was just a thought.”

“The thing is, Fee-Fee,” Iona said, getting up from the bench and walking around Feejee to stand over me, “she’s practically food herself. I mean, look at her.” She leaned in close and I saw her nostrils twitch. “Smell her. Half-human, right?”

I was very uncomfortable with the level of scrutiny, but her eyes sort of… held me. She bent forward and ran her tongue along my cheek. I shivered.

“And,” she said, pausing to brush my hair out of the way and then lick across my forehead, “if she’s worried about things getting out of hand… she’s invulnerable, right?”

She sank her teeth into the soft tissue of my ear. I gasped. She wrenched her head around and it turned into a scream, and then a moan.

Iona released and sprang back, grinning down at me. Her smile seemed wider than before and I noticed her teeth appeared to be extra sharp… and numerous. My body shook. That within me which was human knew it was looking at something higher up the food chain than it, and it was reacting.

“Smell that, Fee-Fee?” Iona said, breathing in. “That’s the scent of fear. That’s the scent of prey.”

“Hang on,” Feejee said. “I think I’m going to need some more mead in my system if we’re going to do this.” She lifted the bottle to her mouth and knocked back the rest of it in one go, then set it on the floor. “Okay, ready.”

“If you’re going to do what?” I asked. I had an idea. I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. Rather, I was sure that I liked it and I was sure that I didn’t.

“Just… taste, a bit,” she said. “We wouldn’t… I mean, we couldn’t if we wanted to, you know? You’ll be perfectly safe.”

“Oh, don’t take all the fun out of it,” Iona said, sliding onto the bench beside me, on the other side from Feejee.

“Take off your towel, Mack,” Feejee said quietly.

I got to my feet and unwrapped myself, letting the towel fall to the floor. Feejee moved the plate to the other side of the bench and scooted closer, pulling me back down onto the bench

They both ran their hands over my body. It would have been erotic, in another context… okay, fuck that. It was erotic. Feejee leaned in and ran her nose up and down the length of my forearm, drinking in my scent for almost a minute before she extended her tongue and licked.

“Oh, Father and Mother, that’s good,” she said, and it was almost a groan. She pressed her mouth to my forearm and sucked, then pressed her teeth down gently. I felt them shift from mostly flat and round to needle-like before she bit down, and so was able to make a little startled gasp before it turned into a moan.

“You know, Fee-Fee, if I didn’t know better, I’d think this bit of meat likes being eaten,” Iona said. She slid off the bench and began rubbing her hair over the side of my leg, sniffing and licking. “I think she’s into it.”

“I told you there was something wrong with her head,” Feejee said. She held my arm up to her mouth and was moving down its length in a way that anybody watching would have thought she was kissing it.

That was really the key to it all, of course. Naturally I didn’t like the idea of being eaten… and that was so not me being in denial and saying that I didn’t like something when clearly I did. Not that I do that to begin with.

But the thing was, having two gorgeous mermaids in human guise putting their mouths all over your body was having two gorgeous mermaids in human guise putting their mouths all over your body, any which way you sliced it.

So long as the “slicing” was metaphorical, anyway.

Being called “meat” was more than a little creepy, but it also did something for me. It was demeaning, dehumanizing, objectifying… it was wonderful.

Under all that was a healthy dose of paralyzing fear, as my human side experienced the true meaning of the words “mortal terror.”

We had our empires, and our magic and metal, but the world was not ours. Wander outside the boundaries… stray outside the lighted paths… and you could be stepping into the waiting jaws of death.

Here there be monsters.

The world was not ours.

We only lived in it, and that briefly.

They both bit, nibbled, and sucked like their lives depended on it, pulling my limbs this way and that like some obscene tug-of-war. I could feel the strength in their muscles… not demon-strong, but strong enough that I could imagine being pulled in two.

I was turned sideways up on the bench and then laid down, with my head facing Feejee and my legs more or less in Iona’s lap. Feejee leaned over and planted fierce mermaid kisses on my cheeks, then down my neck, and onto my shoulder. Iona took up a position with her head between my legs—subtle parallel, that—and was biting hard on my thigh. I think she’d lost herself in the act, forgotten that it was play, forgotten that she couldn’t actually rend and tear and sever and end. She growled her frustration and shook like a dog with a bone.

The attention, the pain, the everything… all the feelings were bleeding together and it was driving me wild. I was writhing, bucking, gasping, moaning, crying.

I was dying. I was living.

I was pretty much coming by the gallon, too.

There was an intrusion at the corner of my consciousness, an anomalous presence or impression or sound, but I couldn’t place it or focus on it.

Not while I was being devoured.

Iona released her hold and raised her head, giving a howl of wordless rage. My head was raised enough that I could look down and see her through the haze of steam and mead. Her hair had become feathers. Her eyes were black and beady. Her lips had turned scaly and were pulled apart in a terrifying rictus, displaying rows of teeth like knives.

It was the eyes that grabbed me, though. It was like looking into a void, a pair of twin black vortices sucking everything down into oblivion.

I screamed. I think Feejee, latched onto my neck like a lamprey, came. Iona looked down and saw what was right in front of her: the loose folds of my labia, dark and swollen with blood.

What did that look like, to her? What else could it have looked like but food.

I didn’t even see her move. The pain was white-hot. The only thing that compared was being smote with true faith.

I was screaming again, or still, and this time it was a chorus. There was another voice screaming alongside mine, somewhat remote but cutting through the clutter of pain and pleasure and fear and sex.

The biting pressure stopped all at once. The pain receded more slowly. The stars cleared from my vision and I looked up to see Iona’s face melting back to normal.

We’d stopped, but the screaming hadn’t.

The first thing I realized was that it was coming from outside the door.

The second was that it was Ian.

The bit I worked out last was that he was screaming my name.

I passed a couple of the Badger boys who were headed up. They’d stripped down to shorts but were still wearing their ceremonial tabards over their otherwise bare chests. They stopped talking as soon as the winding staircase brought us in sight of one another, but one of them was staring at me as if he could see right through me… or my clothes. I blushed and ducked my head, hurrying past.

At the bottom, the hallway—or tunnel, as the passages had a very unfinished look—branched off in three directions, with runic markers which probably would have told me where each one led if I had been able to read them. I headed right, figuring the dwarven residence hall was probably more amenable to reason than the labyrinth was.

It took me to a sort of locker area. There was a damp and kind of smelly mess that I hoped was intended for returning dirty towels and not meant to be a distribution point, and a bunch of metal boxes. Most of them were open, but a few here and there were closed. There were no visible keys or keyholes, but something that looked like a pretty heavy-duty latch on the inside of the doors.

My guess was that they either had assigned owners that they would open for, or they were for general use and would attune to whoever closed them. Since most were standing open, the latter seemed most likely, but it wouldn’t hurt to check before I even thought about putting something inside them.

After setting my food and drink down on a bench, I went over to one and peered inside. There were no instructions, in any language. I put my hands on either side of the open door and “felt”, extending my senses to try to probe out the nature of the enchantment.

I just barely managed to get my hand out of the way before it snapped shut with a bang. Apparently, it could hurt to check.

I grabbed my stuff and hurried out of the locker room before somebody came to check on the noise, or possibly to answer a silent alarm. I didn’t want my hosts thinking I’d been trying to steal their techniques.

The middle passage ended up taking me right up to the edge of the underground lake/pool, which was more extensive than I’d guessed. It was a long crescent, like you’d get if you had a big oval with an oval shaped bite taken out of it. The water came right up almost on a level with the surrounding area, which I guess was probably to the dwarves’ benefit.

What I took to be the hot springs and steam rooms were actually nestled in the same massive chamber, in a raised area off to the left-hand side. There were several mixed groups sitting in round stone enclosures from which rose clouds of steam, and there were also square wood-frame cubes.

I headed off towards that area, giving the frigid waters a wide berth. A sound like a whip crack… or what I thought a whip crack might sound like… made me turn just in time to get soaked down the front with a wave of water Feejee had evidently sent at me with a slap of her tail. She was leaning back in the water, a big grin on her face.

“What the fuck was that for?” I said.

“You could stop and say hi,” she said.

“Hi, Feejee,” I said, a little icily. “I was actually looking for the steamrooms.”

“They’re over there,” she said, flicking her tail in the direction I’d been headed. “You mind if I keep you company?”

“If you want to,” I said.

“Great,” she said. “I’ll just run upstairs and get some food, then.”

“Okay.”

There were stacks of clean, if a little rough-looking, towels on the platform, and I grabbed one as I walked past. It didn’t have a very pleasant texture, but it was big enough.

Five of the eight cabin-like structures were occupied, or at least had their doors closed. I could tell that some of them were “in use”, because of the moaning and giggling that was coming out of them. The whole area was permeated with a rich and tantalizingly meaty aroma that made my mouth water. It seemed to be seeping out from around the doors. I wouldn’t have guessed from what I’d seen that the dwarves would have a rule against taking food into the steam rooms, but it was nice to know I wasn’t the only one doing it.

I took a chamber on the far side of the cavern from the entrances. I looked back to see Feejee, her tail transformed back into smooth-scaled green legs, toweling herself by the other end of the pool. She waved and I waved back, and then I headed inside.

It was body-pleasingly warm inside the structure, which had a stone floor and wooden benches along three sides. There was a big long trough filled with red stones in the center of the room, and the heat seemed to be emanating from that. There wasn’t any steam, but I figured if I couldn’t work that out, Feejee might know.

I put my plate and drink down on the bench and closed the door. As soon as it was latched, there was a hiss from behind me. I turned and saw that beads of moisture had appeared on the red stones and were quickly boiling away. I stripped quickly, then wrapped the towel around myself and set my clothes outside. I figured that apart from keeping them dry, that might make it easier for Ian to find me if he came looking.

The steam shut off when the door was opened, but resumed as soon as it was closed again. I sat down on the bench and picked at my chicken. It was good, but did little to satisfy my hunger. I could still smell whatever they were eating in the other steam rooms… the pork, probably. Either the scent had clung to me or it just permeated the area.

The room was nice and warm but not really hot, and the steam was dissipating into invisibility almost as fast as it appeared. I looked around and noticed there was an arrow on the back of the door, pointing to a single “I” mark, with marks for “II”, “III”, and so on, leading to a seventh mark which looked like a “V”. Dwarven numerals?

I got up and turned the arrow to the second mark. There was an immediate sizzle from the heat stones, and the rate of steaming visibly increased. I turned it up a couple more times, then turned it to seven.

In almost no time the room was filled with billowing clouds of steam, and I was in heaven… warm all over, warm through and through. The chicken was good. I mean, it was chicken, which I like, and it was a pretty big piece. Eating around the bones was kind of a new experience for me, though, and a little bit annoying.

The lager had tasted pretty good when it was still ice-cold, but now that it was merely cool the bitterness was a little closer to the forefront. It wasn’t bad. It would just have to take some getting used to. I took a bigger sip and let it move around in my mouth a bit before swallowing.

There was a knock on the door before too long.

“Come in,” I said automatically.

I immediately thought that I should have asked who it was, but then Feejee said, “You’ll have to let us in… they lock when somebody’s inside them.”

“Oh,” I said. I got to my feet, secured the towel, and hurried over. I had the door open before I registered the “us”, and was surprised to see Iona there with her. They both stood back from the blast of heat and steam. I stepped back away from the freezing draft which swept inside in answer.

“Whoo, hot enough?” Iona said as the steam cleared away. She turned the dial back to three on her way inside.

“Mack, this is Iona,” Feejee said, stepping in after her and closing the door.

“We’ve kind of met,” I said. I watched as the scales on both mermaids’ legs shimmered and melted away into their skin, leaving them with the appearance of beautiful, long-legged human women with exotic coloration.

Feejee’s hair, of course, was tinted sea green, as were her lips and nipples and to a very small extent her skin. Iona’s hair was blazing red, with similar touches elsewhere. I hadn’t really had a lot of opportunities to see them, but her nipples were striking up close.

“She’s staring at my tits,” Iona said out of the corner of her mouth.

“She does that,” Feejee said.

“I don’t!” I said, jerking my gaze away. “I mean, I’m not!”

They both laughed.

“Stare,” Iona said. “I’m not sure what else they’re good for.”

“Rick’s found a couple of interesting uses for mine,” Feejee said, settling herself down on the bench opposite me. “I hope you don’t mind, by the way,” she said, waving a hand over her legs, “but scales tend to dry out pretty quickly in the heat. Otherwise, we don’t really sweat, so we can stay in here forever.”

“It’s actually kind of nice, breathing with this much water in the air,” Iona said, taking a deep breath.

“I don’t mind,” I said.

The sight of Feejee’s legs folded in front of her was very affecting. It was an exotic touch, like seeing Amaranth with a mermaid’s tail might have been. I reasoned that she wasn’t really any more nude in this state than she usually was when I saw her, but… she didn’t normally have anything remotely resembling a vulva when I saw her.

It was a little odd to get to the end of those long, lithe legs and see the large, vaguely flipperish feet, but they hardly detracted from her beauty.

“I was starting to think you were avoiding me,” Feejee said.

“Oh,” I said. “Um… it’s just kind of cold for me, down by the pool.”

“I didn’t just mean the pool,” Feejee said. “I never see you except in the bathroom.”

“Well, you’re always hanging out with Sara and Tara,” I said. I couldn’t keep the scorn out of my voice, which made it sound like an accusation. Then I decided I didn’t care. They were idiots, and jerks besides. What was she doing, hanging out with them?

“Do you know why I hang out with them?” Feejee asked.

“No.”

“They ask me to,” she said. “They invite me along. They talk to me.”

“Oh,” I said.

Well, she’d kind of told me, I guess.

Feejee had brought a larger, unlabeled bottle of what looked like wine that was about two-thirds full, and a big plate full of pig meat. The word “pork” made me think of greasy-looking slabs, but this looked moist and… not exactly “flaky”, though “stringy” probably carries the wrong connotation. But it looked about half ripped apart, and that didn’t look half bad. Iona had two beers and another plate, similarly laden.

“Mother Above, I’m starving,” Feejee said, picking up a handful of meat from her plate and shoving it into her mouth, then washing it down with a swallow of the golden liquid. “The smell down here… I love it, but I hate it, you know?”

“It just drives me frenzied,” Iona said, nodding in agreement. “It’s like they’re teasing us.”

“Why does it smell so strongly down here?” I asked. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but the aroma of roasting meat hadn’t been nearly as noticeable up on the top level, where the meat had actually been roasting.

“Because they pack themselves in and turn on the heat, practically cooking themselves,” Iona said. “The sweat and odor mixes with the steam, which carries it everywhere.”

I stared blankly. Pork sweated? That was kind of gross.

No, actually, it was really gross.

Iona and Feejee looked at each other.

“You do know what we’re smelling, right?” Feejee asked.

“Meat?” I said.

Iona laughed and nodded.

“That’s right… meat,” she said. “Have you tried the pork yet, Mack?”

I shook my head.

“I kind of prefer chicken,” I said.

“Okay, but what do you like better than chicken?” Feejee asked.

“Anything sweet,” I said. “Or tart.”

“What’s your favorite, though?”

“Lemon, I guess,” I said.

She shook her head.

“I like lots of stuff,” I said. I wasn’t sure where this was going, but the looks on the mermaids’ faces, the knowing grins, unsettled me.

“It’s okay, Mack,” Feejee said. “You don’t have to pretend. There’s nobody here but us ‘monsters’.”

Iona laughed.

I didn’t say anything, but my mind was racing back to my ordeal in the labyrinth, when I’d been compelled to answer three questions truthfully. One of them had been on the subject of my favorite thing to eat.

“Try some of the pork, Mack,” Iona said, still grinning as she held out a piece. She looked ghastly, her face looming in the steam clouds. It was just the color and the moisture, but her lips looked almost bloody. “It’s not quite like the real thing, of course, and when we’re sitting here practically breathing them in, it’s a pretty sorry substitute… but it’s really the best thing we can get, safely.”

“Legally,” Feejee said. “Morally.”

“Morally?” Iona asked.

“Okay, ethically,” Feejee said. “We’re guests here. It just seems… wrong.”

“I think I’ll stick with my chicken,” I said. My throat felt very dry, despite the humidity. I took a big drink, not remembering what it was a big drink of, and nearly choked.

“Little judgmental for a demon,” Iona said, sounding half-amused and half-hurt. “Or maybe you think we’re trying to trick you into admitting something?”

“Oh, just leave it alone, Io,” Feejee said. “She’s probably used to being judged for this. They‘ve got a reputation that we don‘t.”

“I suppose,” Iona said.

There was an awkward silence after that for a bit, and then Feejee blurted out, “But you have to have thought about it a bit, right, Mack?” she asked. “I mean, I would never… but every once in a while, I just look at Twyla and go, ‘Who would miss her?’, you know?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t.”

“Right,” Feejee said. She sighed. “Me, neither, really. Oh, hey! Were you wearing shackles upstairs?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I figured they’d be a bit inconvenient in here, though.”

“I knew it,” Feejee said. She turned to Iona and held out her hand. “Pay up.”

“Bitch, you know I only got one pocket in this outfit and there ain’t anything in it,” Iona said, then burst out laughing at her affectation. “Anyway, she’s not wearing them now.”

“The bet was on whether she’d wear them or not,” Feejee said.

“And she’s not.”

“But she did.”

“Wait, you guys bet on whether or not I’d wear the cuffs?” I asked. I felt a vague sense of indignation at this, which was a welcome change from the unease the previous conversation had filled me with.

“I figured you were too independent and strong-minded,” Iona said. “After the way you acted in history class.”

“And I told you that you didn’t know her very well,” Feejee said. “You can pay me later, anyway.”

“Like you need five silver,” Iona said.

“You shouldn’t place bets if you don’t want to pay them,” Feejee said. She turned to me. “I tried to get Hazel to bet against me, but she said it was no contest. What do you think she’d taste like?”

“Hazel?” I asked, horrified by this rather jarring segue.

“Twyla,” Feejee said. “Sorry. It’s just been on my mind. I don’t know how human she is or what. Not that I’ve ever eaten a half-human, though, so…”

“Can we please not talk about that?” I asked. The conversation was bothering me… particularly in that I was very aware of that I was basically undisturbed. It should have been more disturbing.

“Okay,” Feejee said. “Sorry. I just thought… you might like having somebody you could speak freely about this stuff with, without worrying about them freaking out and trying to kill you for mentioning it. I mean, you do like the way they taste, right? We figured you must.”

“That isn’t the point,” I said. “On top of all the other ways in which it’s wrong, I’m dating one. Last time I checked, so were you.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s not like I’m going to shove Rick in an oven,” Feejee said. “Or anybody else. But it doesn’t hurt to talk, or imagine.”

“I like them raw and wriggling, anyway,” Iona said. “Much more satisfying. Though, they are pretty good, spitted over…”

“Enough!” I said. The phrase “raw and wriggling” was echoing in my mind… and throughout my body. Worse, there was an image forming in my head of Twyla, the bicorn girl from our floor, turning over coals like the pigs upstairs. This was not a good conversation for me to have. “I don’t want to talk about this stuff!”

“Okay,” Iona said.

“Sorry,” Feejee said. She sounded disappointed. “I just thought…”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t like this part of myself. I’m not sorry about that, I mean. I’m sorry if I’m not what you expected.”

I took another big bite of chicken. It was surprisingly and satisfyingly crunchy, with new currents of flavor that I’d never noticed before. I finished the rest of it pretty quickly, and then licked my fingers without any trace of self-consciousness.

“What?” I asked. Feejee and Iona were staring.

“Do you always eat the bones and all, like that?” Iona asked.

I blushed when I realized that’s what I’d just done, then waited for my stomach to turn as I recalled the last time I’d bitten through bone.

It didn’t.

Also, I was still hungry.

“Maybe I will try some of that pork,” I said. If it was as near a substitute as Iona said, maybe having some would be a good thing. “If you don’t mind sharing.”

“Come over and help yourself,” Feejee said, patting the bench on the other side of the plate from her. “I brought plenty, and there’s more where that came from.”

“Thanks,” I said, moving over to their side. I drank some more of the lager and then picked up a small, single piece of the shredded pig. I opened my mouth and placed it on my tongue. It was so juicy it seemed to melt a little bit, and I immediately noticed the similarity… though I could also tell the difference.

The appeal of human flesh to me was supernatural in nature. It wasn’t because humans tasted like humans. It was because they were humans. Artificial human flavor wouldn’t cut it.

The pork was good, though… better than I’d expected, and the meat on my tongue with the scent of lightly cooked humanity permeating the area was something.

“What do you think?” Feejee asked, after I’d washed the morsel down with another swallow.

“Good,” I said, and at her encouraging nod, I took another handful.

“Of course,” Feejee said, “the twins wouldn’t be any real loss to the world, and they are full humans… but they’ve got too many friends and their mom checks in on them all the time. I mean, hypothetically. I wouldn’t actually do it.”

“Yeah,” I said, popping another bite of meat into my mouth. “Of course.”

“Anyway,” Iona said, “it’s probably healthier to have some outlet, you know? Even if it‘s just in your head.”

“Yeah, and that’s all it is,“ Feejee said. “It’s just a harmless fantasy. Like… talking about a really sleek guy you know that nothing would ever happen with, you know?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I took another drink from my bottle and found that it was almost empty. “Um… I think I need another of these.”

“Here,” Feejee said, passing me her clear glass bottle. “Have some of this.”

I looked at the golden liquid a little skeptically. I’d had bad experiences with wine, by proxy, but this was richer and thicker than Puddy’s favorite white.

I raised it to my lips.