She shrugged.

“I honestly wasn’t expecting it to stick to me in the first place,” she said. She giggled. “I suppose Two could have warned me, if I’d asked.”

“What, is she some kind of an expert on body paint?” Ian asked. I was just as perplexed as he was by this idea.

“No, but she’s an expert on things doing what they’re supposed to,” Amaranth said. “And body paint is supposed to go on bodies. I might have remembered, if I’d thought about it, that we sometimes get decorated with woad and henna for festivals. It wipes right off, though, because whatever residue would be left behind is mess, and I simply don’t do mess.”

“Isn’t it already a mess when it gets smeared on your skin by accident?” I asked.

“Probably, but I think she was decorating me… that girl is really into the idea of marking people,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, that sounds like Semele,” Ian said.

“Oh, do you know her?” Amaranth asked. “You should introduce us sometime. She seems like she might be fun if she learned how to relax a little… Semele.” She sounded it out a few times like she was trying it on for fit. “Semele, Semele. That‘s kind of a pretty name. I’d love to get to know her.”

“What, did she just run off when you finished?” I asked.

“Well, she did kind of mess up her costume,” Ian said.

“Oh my kosh, is she okay?” Winnie asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Amaranth said to Winnie. “It was a very emotional experience for her… I think, in spite of my best efforts, it still wasn’t quite what she was expecting… but maybe she’ll have a better time the next time around, now that she’s got some idea what it feels like.”

“I’m just happy she got laid,” Winnie said.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met,” Amaranth said. She held out a spotless hand. “I’m Amaranth.”

“Winnie Champlain,” she said.

“Oh, I have class with William Champlain!” Amaranth said.

“I’m related to at least three Williams, and two of them are here now,” Winnie said.

“Oh, this is the one with an incest fixation,” Amaranth said.

“Boy, I wish I could tell you I needed more to go on,” Winnie said. “But I know exactly who you mean.”

“He has brown hair,” Amaranth said.

“Brownish-blond?”

“No, more like a dark chestnut.”

“That’s not… oh. Oh!” Winnie said. “Ew.”

“As transgressive fantasies go, it’s one of the more harmless ones,” Amaranth said. “There isn’t even an implicit power differential, in cousin or sibling incest… and the extension of the taboo to include cousins is kind of a recent innovation in the first place. Before the most recent advances in communication and transportation, most people never met enough people to be sure of a match they weren’t related to.”

“Really?” Winnie asked. “That’s interesting.”

“Oh, yes,” Amaranth said. “And in fact, while it’s kind of become an entrenched view in the Imperium, it’s far from universal among humans. And that’s to say nothing of other races. Some elves consider it enough to avoid a partner who shares both their parents, and dwarves don’t even track kinship with the opposite sex.”

“So, a dwarf could end up dating his sister?”

“For a certain value of ‘date’, I suppose,” Amaranth said.

“It’s amazing how much she knows about how other races fuck,” Ian said to me.

“Wasn’t Winnie grossed out a moment ago?” I asked him. He shrugged.

“So, what about other races?” Winnie asked Amaranth. “Like, gnomes.”

“Well, gnomish attitudes pretty much mirrored human ones at the time they both colonized the Westering Lands,” Amaranth said. “But their insularity and isolation means that they haven’t changed as much. So on the one hand things like cousin marriages never really became taboo, but on the other hand, things that are seen as perfectly normal in human society would be scandalous in theirs. Things are slightly different in the riverfolk subculture… they travel more, so they’re exposed to wider influences and as a consequence, they end up being a little more adventurous about some things.”

“Hey!” Hazel yelled from a short distance away, where she was dancing with… or rather, around… Two. “Watch it with the ‘a-word’!”

“I can’t think of a better word for a woman in shoes,” Honey said. “No, wait, I can. I’m just not going to say it.”

“Sorry, Hazel!” Amaranth said. She giggled a little, which was cute, and Winnie giggled, too… which was not. “What’s really interesting is when you look at cultures that have entirely different kinship systems, like the lizardfolk in Blackwater, or the Kaha Moai people.”

“Everybody’s making new friends,” Ian said. I followed his gaze to where Pala and Sooni were hanging out on the dance floor. Pala was clutching the dolled-up Kai to her chest, the giant costume head very badly askew. I hoped for her sake that they’d left Kai’s sword in the baby buggy, if not back at the dorm. “Want to dance?” he asked me.

I looked at Amaranth, who it seemed had somehow got onto the topic of the reproduction habits of freshwater hydras… and Winnie, who seemed to find the topic humorous. Ugh… that laugh of hers. It went right through me like a red-hot skewer.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

“You don’t have to jump into my arms or anything,” Ian said.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head to try to clear out the lingering sound. “I want to… I’ll be a little better when we get some distance between us and that laughter.”

“Winnie’s?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It is a little infectious,” he said.

“That’s not the word I’d use,” I said. I put my arms on his shoulders, then realized it was a fast song, then decided to leave my arms there anyway. Fast meant it would be over fast, and I didn’t want us to devolve to awkward conversation or something while waiting for a slow song and then miss it.

“It’s okay,” Ian said. “I’ve had to get used to the idea that you’ll be easily distracted by pretty girls.”

“Winnie Champlain is not pretty,” I said.

“Also not deaf,” Ian said, wincing. “Though I might be. Khersis, Mack. Okay, yeah, she’s kind of plain, but she’s got a nice laugh and I’m not going to be jealous if you notice it.”

“What? No. She laughs like the bizarre offspring of a barghest and a howler monkey,” I said. “Who was raised by woodpeckers. Woodpeckers with an annoying laugh.”

“Whatever,” Ian said. “I’m not going to stand here and argue with you about a girl’s laugh.” The song finally changed to something good, and he put his hands just above my hips. “Not when I’ve got you to myself and there’s music.”

“Yeah, sorry,” I said, and we started to sway. “There’s something weird about her, though… her whole family.”

“Oh, don’t start,” Ian said. “She’s related to Puddy. So what? All that means is that they could get married in gnomeland.”

“Be serious,” I said.

“You be serious,” he said. “Are you seriously going to start judging people based on their family relations?”

“I don’t think of that side of my family as family, per se,” I said.

“And you think everyone who shares a little blood with Puddy’s going to own her?” Ian asked. “Anyway, the only person on your other side that I’ve heard of besides your mother is your grandmother. Would you want to be judged by your relationship to her?”

“I don’t not like Winnie because she’s Puddy’s cousin,” I said. “I dislike her, I dislike her cousin in my history class, and I dislike Puddy, all independently of each other… and then I find out they’re all from the same family.”

“So’s half the human student body, it seems,” Ian said. “A group that includes a lot of jerks and losers, but also a lot of people who came out to rally for you when you went poof, and who walked out of your history class with you, who’ve been writing letters to the student paper…”

“What letters?”

“You could try reading it every once in a while and finding out,” he said. “My point is you’ve probably bumped into a lot more LaBelles than those three.”

“Yeah, and the three I’ve had enough contact with to find out their family background all turned out to be…”

“What?” Ian asked. “Slightly annoying?”

“Puddy’s not just slightly annoying.”

“She’s naked.”

“No, she’s… what?”

He turned us around so that I was facing the entryway. There was a crowd gathering, and I had to stand on my tippy-toes to try to see what was going on. I couldn’t see more than the top of Puddy’s strawberry blonde head, which had a circlet of laurel leaves. Then the crowd shifted a bit and there she was, in all her… glory. She was naked except for the wreath, and holding a gold-colored lyre and a big scroll wound around wooden roller thingies.

I let go of Ian and he turned around.

“What’s she supposed to be… a muse?” Ian asked.

“Looks like,” I said.

“She’s really not bad looking,” Ian said. “She could lose some weight, but she’s carrying it pretty well. She’s a lot smoother than I… would have thought.”

There was a commotion out on the dance floor.

“But why do I have to leave?” Pala said, her voice carrying clearly now that all conversations everywhere else had stopped. She sounded like she was near tears.

“Yes, why does she have to leave?” Sooni demanded.

“Just step into the ladies’ room for five minutes, Tiny,” Callahan said to her. “Just five minutes, okay? I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I’ll buy you stilts.”

“Fine! I am going!” Pala said, turning and storming towards the restrooms. “But don’t think I’m not going to…”

The rest was unintelligible blubbers.

“What the heck was that about?” Ian asked as Callahan headed over to deal with Puddy.

“No idea,” I said. “But I think Puddy’s about to get a bit of a talking to.”

“You mean a dressing-down?” Ian asked.

“Funny,” I said.

“I don’t think she can do anything, really,” Amaranth said, coming over to join us. I felt a stab of jealousy that she was holding hands with Winnie, and I took her other hand.

“What do you mean?” Ian asked. “I know it’s a costume party, but… I’m not sure that qualifies.”

“Yes, but… nymph,” Amaranth said.

“No offense, but I don’t think your presence in a room this size negates the need for her to wear clothes, especially when you aren’t even together,” Ian said.

“Not me,” Amaranth said. “Puddy. She’s got her bloodline registered with the Hamadryad Preservation Board. One-sixteenth… the smallest proportion they recognize, but legally, she’s a nymph.”

“You don’t really buy that, do you?” I asked her.

“Oh, no, it’s true,” Winnie said. “Her great-grandmother Eugenie Banks was an oak tree who fell in love with a woodcutter.”

“That must have made for some awkward holiday visits,” Ian said.

“They say that’s why the Bankses are so, you know, wild… and why they have so many daughters,” Winnie said. “It’s in their blood.”

“So what about her dragon and her giant blood?” I asked her.

“I don’t know anything about that.”

From the way Callahan stomped off, it looked like Puddy had won the argument. Mariel, who had some kind of djinn/harem girl thing going on with her costume, just looked like she could die.

I felt a cool hand touch my neck.

“Hey, Mack,” Feejee said, leaning her body against my back. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Were you looking for a dance, Feejee?” Amaranth asked, letting go of my hand so she could turn and look at us.

“What? Oh, no… I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m… you know,” Feejee said, draping her arms down my front and feeling my sides. I tried to see if I could smell anything on her breath, but there was just the slightly salty scent of Feejee herself. “I just thought… well, I kind of wanted to talk to her about something she said earlier.”

Amaranth gave her a pleasant but fixed smile.

“If it’s not something you’re comfortable talking about in front of everybody, I don’t think it’s a conversation you need to be having with my Mack,” she said.

Feejee looked back at her. I couldn’t see her face, but her body went tense and her hands kind of clutched at me. One of them was kind of right between my legs at that moment. Under other circumstances, it might have been kind of… actually, it was pretty arousing.

“I just wanted to give Mack a chance to talk about her true feelings, now that they’re out in the open,” Feejee said.

“True feelings?” Amaranth said.

“What she said… what she did… this morning,” Feejee said, and my stomach fell out of my abdomen. What had I done that morning? Pretty much try to jump into her mouth and climb down her throat. “It was very revealing.”

“I don’t think you should pay much attention to anything she said or did while under the influence of alchemical products,” Amaranth said.

“Even when those products are doing nothing but revealing people’s inner desires?”

“Feejee, I know this must be confusing for you, but there are desires and there are desires,” Amaranth said. She put her hands on Winnie’s shoulders. “For instance, Winnie’s cousin William masturbates while he imagines having sex with her, but that doesn’t mean he’d actually desire a relationship with her if the chance came up. It’s the idea that…”

“I know what I saw,” Feejee said, letting go of me and straightening up. “And we are going to talk about it, whether you want to or not… now that I know for sure we both want the same thing, I’m not going to let anything stop me.”

“Wow, is everyone gay for you?” Winnie asked while Feejee walked away, her naked butt peeking out from beneath the apron strings like a present beneath a little bow.

“I don’t understand it, either,” Ian said. “And I never figured you for the jealous type,” he said to Amaranth.

“I just don’t want to see anyone getting hurt,” Amaranth said.

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My scream of unadulterated horror at the appearance of the scarecrow backlit by a lightning flash cut through the ambient noise and the general atmosphere of fear.

I recovered a bit when the figure jumped away from me in obvious surprise, if not fear, letting out a distinctively womanish shriek. Recovered mentally, anyway… my heart was still pounding in my ears and my limbs were shaking like jelly in an earthquake. I’d landed on my ass, my cape tangled up beneath me and pulling on my neck.

The afterimage from the lightning burst cleared away from my eyes, and I found myself looking up at Barley, in her most immodestly modest outfit yet: coveralls over a long-sleeved shirt, with straw sticking out around the openings and a floppy straw hat.

Seen clearly, she looked more goofy than anything… it had only been the timing of the thunderburst and the resulting silhouette that had kicked off my fear reflex.

Not that I was positively ecstatic to see Barley… I’d take her over the shadow scarecrow from the cursed farm any day of the week, but I wouldn’t have sought out either of their company. The relief I felt was relative. My reaction to her was pretty visceral in its own right.

“Oh my goddess, I didn’t mean to startle you!” she said. “I hope that was just you being startled, I mean… because I also kind of hoped that we could get past, well, you know, everything…”

“Everything” was a funny of saying “attempted rape”, I thought, but my tongue was pretty much still pressed against the roof of my mouth by my heart and my stomach.

“What… what are you doing here, Barley?” Amaranth asked, her voice croaking a little.

“It’s a school party,” Barley said. “That means it’s for everybody, not just you and your special friends.”

“There’s room for everybody, but I thought you were supposed to stay away from us,” Amaranth said. “Mother Khaele told me…”

“Mother Khaele told you that I’m not your concern,” Barley said. She reached out a hand to me. “Here, Mackenzie let me help you up.”

“Don’t touch her!” Amaranth shrieked, getting between us… but not fast enough for me to miss the look of pain on Barley’s face.

“I think she can speak for herself,” Barley said. “Unless you’ve beaten that out of her.”

I found my voice then… anger will do that. Calm, rational thought isn’t so great for pushing back even the silliest and most baseless mortal terror. Anger, though, cuts through it like an enchanted knife through warm butter.

“I can,” I said. “And I don’t want you touching me.”

I reached a hand up to Amaranth and she helped me up.

“Well, you shouldn’t need her to say it,” Barley said.

“I agree,” I said. “It should go without saying. Barley, you tried to rape me.”

“But Puddy…”

“I don’t want Puddy touching me, either,” I said. “I might be… adventurous… a little, sometimes… but I’m not public property, and I don’t like people who treat me like I am.”

Barley’s eyes rolled over to Amaranth in a way that made me glad that nymphs weren’t related to basilisks.

“No?” she said. “But you love her.”

“Amaranth has her values,” I said. “They’re not always the same as mine. We… we compromise sometimes. But she’s never tried to rape me.”

“Listen, can we not use that word? I’m willing to talk about what I did, but…”

“Great… good for you. But I’m not willing to talk about it,” I said. “Not with you.”

“Could you just hear me out for one minute?”

“Were you possessed?” I asked. “Had you been messing around with strange pitchforks? Were you under the influence of strange alchemical vapors?”

“Oh, yeah. See, that’s the thing. I actually drank some of Puddy’s wine to get my courage up…”

“Up for what?” I asked. “Look me in the eye and tell me that you hadn’t already made up your mind about what you were going to do before you took the first swig.”

She steeled herself up, swallowed, and then she did look me in the eyes.

I didn’t know if it was something that was against their nature, or if going for a dozen and a half years of mature existence with nothing worth lying about just didn’t cultivate the habit of deception. I knew the truth as soon as her eyes met mine, all big and bright and brittle as Two’s… but not nearly as innocent.

There was a calculation in there. Not a particularly complicated one… one that was straightforward and direct as two plus two equals four. I’d just told her what she had to say for me to give her a chance, and she was about to say it.

“Honestly, Mackenzie, I don’t remem…”

“Stop,” I said. Her eyelids ratcheted down and her blue eyes flashed with anger. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see her face any more. “Stop, Barley… you’re lying to me.”

“That’s because you won’t listen,” she said. Her straw-stuffed pants crinkled as she stomped her foot.

“Barley… if you really are trying to change, I’m glad,” I said. “For so many reasons. But it’s not my job to forgive you. I don’t owe you that. Your mother was right… the best thing we can do is stay away from each other.”

“I will,” she said. “I was going to, except for this one night when she’s not looking… I just thought I’d be big and apologize, but if you don’t even… if you won’t… if… I wonder if it’s the demon blood that makes you so petty, or if it’s her.”

“Barley… just go,” I said. I kept my eyes closed as I heard her crinkling away, then let out a very relieved breath.

“That was… that was really pretty good, baby,” Amaranth said.

“Thanks,” I said. I turned to Ian as we started to wander away from the scene of the… scene. “Were you planning on jumping in at any point?”

“Not even a little bit,” he said.

“I guess there’s a reason you didn’t go as a knight in shining armor.”

“Maybe because you didn’t need one?” he said. “I don’t know what I could have added except another loud voice, and I don’t think that’s the same thing as helping.”

“Is doing nothing really better?” I asked.

“Excuse me,” Pala said. She held up a furry bikini bottom that looked a lot like mine, except for the broken strap and the not even barely covering up my girly parts. “Is this yours?”

Ian’s gaze flicked down. I was suddenly intensely aware of the feel of my cape on my barer-than-before butt. While my face turned into another glowing pumpkin, Amaranth reached out and took the broken garment from the demi-giantess.

“Thank you so much, Pala,” she said. “Hold your cape closed, baby… I’ll just go grab Two. Unless you just wanted to slow dance real close against Ian for a while?”

“Uh, yeah, no,” I said, pulling the cape around myself. “Hurry back.”

“It was just a thought,” Amaranth said. “Making the best of what could be a fortuitous accident. I’ll go get this fixed, though,” she said, and she hurried off towards Two’s group, which had gone straight for the refreshments.

“I don’t get a vote on the slow dancing thing?” Ian asked. “You impressed Amaranth with how you handled that whole deal… it could be like a whole streak.”

“That’s pretty much what I’m worried about. Anyway, you can dance if you want to,” I said. “It’ll be like a compromise. She likes those, too.”

“Miss Mackenzie!” another voice said, the speaker coming up behind me. “Miss Mackenzie!”

This time, I knew exactly who it was, even though the voice was a little muffled and echoey… Sooni was one of the few people apart from teachers who ever used a title when she addressed me, and her yippy little voice was fairly distinctive even when she wasn’t quite screaming at the top of her lungs.

“What, Sooni?” I asked, turning to face her. “What is… ack!”

I had an excuse for being startled that time… even if her voice might have suggested a mask, the last time I’d seen her, her head had been uncovered, and in any event, the last thing I would have expected was to see her entire head covered with a “realistic” (as far as that went) foam representation of an animated character.

“You’re bunching up the cape! It doesn’t look right!” she said, slapping at my hands where I was clutching it. I yelped and let go. The big foam head rocked back a bit. “Actually, I think maybe it did look better the other way.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, closing it.

“Science Princess!” Pala yelled, running over… well, stepping over. We weren’t that far away from her, comparatively. “You are the Pretty Neko Science Princess!”

“Yes!” Sooni said. She looked up at Pala and her badly abused elven gown. “I like your swimming costume!”

“Thank you!” Pala said. “It is in my room at the inn. Why do you not have Science Princess’s science boots?”

“Oh, these are my mother’s shoes,” Sooni said. “She gave them to me when I was very young. I liked them because they made me look tall.”

“Oh,” Pala said. “Maybe I should get some?”

“You look pretty tall already.”

“They must be working already,” Pala said. “I need to stand next to you some more.”

“You… you aren’t a lesbian, are you?” Sooni asked.

“That is a type of sex pervert?”

“Yes!” Sooni said, nodding her head so enthusiastically I thought it was going to fall off.

“No!” Pala said.

I mouthed “Let’s get out of here,” to a very bemused Ian, and we began to shuffle away from the new best friends, in the direction of Two and Amaranth.

“If that head doesn’t win for scariest costume, I’m demanding a recount,” Ian said.

“Don’t speak too soon,” I said. spotting something that would give Sooni’s head a run for its money: two people who could only have been Suzi and Maliko wearing similar outfits complete with heads, and… most frightening… pushing a stroller with Kai, who was wearing a giant Baby Kai-Kai head with giant oval eyes taking up almost all of the face that wasn’t covered by the giant pacifier. “Don’t stare at her,” I said. “She’s probably already plotting to kill me in my sleep.”

“She could probably sneak out of that and nobody would ever know,” Ian said.

The nekos were parked at one end of a long table covered with Veil treats. Amaranth and Two’s group were at the other end, fortunately, next to a big placard welcoming students to Anna Paradox Tower and Residence Hall for the Veil Ball.

“Hey, baby,” Amaranth said as we approached. She held up the repaired garment. “Two put it right for you.”

“Thanks, Two,” I said. “Sorry for making you work during the dance.”

“It’s okay, I forgive you,” Two said. “Anyway, it isn’t your fault that you were made clumsy.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Hey, listen,” Hazel said. “I don’t know the whole thing that’s been going on between you and that stuffed shirt, but if she gets up in your business again, I’ll be happy to show her how we do things on the river.”

“Oh, Hazel, don’t,” Honey said, looking as mortified as she ought to have looked in her mock-goblin costume. “Not in your…”

“Not another word from you on that, or I’ll give you a refresher course,” Hazel said. “I’m as fit as the day I was I popped Andy one for putting his hands where oughtn’t've, and a woman who can whoop a dwarf could take on just about anyone in this room, up to and including the very tall elf.”

“You didn’t ‘whoop’ him, Hazel, you took him by surprise,” Honey said. “Which he had every right to be, considering that you apparently weren’t so modest as to…”

“Not another word, Honey,” Hazel said.

“Where… um… so, where is Andy tonight?” I asked Hazel.

“He’s… we’re taking a little bit of a breather, actually,” Hazel said.

“I can’t believe that even a dwarf would cut and run when…”

“Owain! Will you please shut it? I will belt you one, Heather Callaway!”

“Let’s go find the ladies’ room, baby,” Amaranth said, grabbing my cape-wrapped elbow and pulling me away.

“Yeah, I think I’ll just join you,” Ian said.

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I was treated again to fragmentary nightmares: running across the penthouse pool towards a rapidly fading Steff while dark shapes bit and slashed at my legs and pulled me down, Caron trussing me up to an X-shaped frame and hammering great big spikes through my parts of me, Mercy chasing me on a motorcycle.

My sex dreams had been strange and frightening to me before I’d been able to accept what many of them actually were… I would have hoped that being more at peace with my desires would allow me to enjoy them, but it seemed like I just plain didn’t remember them as often, if I was still having them… and in their absence I was getting these fun little scenarios.

None of my nightmares were complete stories. They weren’t even complete scenes… just snatches, vignettes. That made them worse. They could start at any time, repeat at any time, and they never ended. There was no conclusion until I finally woke up… or in this case, until Two woke me up with some less-than-gentle shaking.

It was a good thing sleep wasn’t ready to release me completely when she did, because it startled the fuck out of me to have a tiny, feminine hand grabbing my shoulder roughly at the same time when Mercy caught up to me and grabbed hold. I could barely manage a hoarse scream, much less a physical reaction.

“I’m sorry, Mack,” Two said. “I did not mean to frighten you, but you were shaking the bed. Also, it’s almost time to meditate with Dee.”

“Huh?” I said. “Oh… Dee.” I sat up slowly and yawned. “I haven’t really been keeping that up, have I?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Two didn’t even seem to hear it. Her eyes were locked on my bare chest. My first thought was that she was going to chastise me for not wearing anything to bed, despite Amaranth’s insistence that it was none of her business.

“You need to go to the healing center!” she said, her eyes huge as moons and luminescent in the darkness.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re hurt!” she said. She pointed at my nipple piercing. “You have metal stuck through you. You need to get healed.”

“Two, those are piercings,” I said. “Like earrings.”

“No they aren’t,” she said. “Earrings go in the ears and are pretty.”

“These are kind of pretty,” I said, trying to look down at my heart lock.

“No they aren’t!” Two said. “They’re stuck in your nipples. That isn’t pretty at all.”

“Well, thank you for your opinion, Two,” I said. “But these were a present from Amaranth, and they’re supposed to be like that.”

“Oh, okay,” Two said. “Are you going to come meditate today?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. “Has Dee asked about me, other mornings?”

“No,” Two said. “I asked her if she thought we should wake you up and she said you would wake up or you wouldn’t.”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess that makes sense.”

“It does make sense,” Two agreed, nodding sagely. “You would have to.”

“I’d have to what?”

“Wake up or not,” Two said. “I don’t think you could not do that.”

“I suppose you’re right about that,” I said.

“Yes.”

It was just past five thirty in the morning… Two’s interruption of my troubled sleep meant we had time to shower beforehand, which I chose to do because I’d woken up all sweaty.

When we got to the bathroom I kind of wished I’d decided to forego it… the place was a disaster area. One of the sinks had been plugged up and left on, resulting in a swamp centered around the drain in the middle of the floor. There were sodden wads of toilet paper stuck to the walls and rolls draped over the stalls and the curtain rods of the bathtub. The mirrors had been smeared with soap and lipstick and what looked like blood but didn’t smell like the kind that came from a vein. The artists responsible had written “FEEJEE PLUS MACK 4 EVER” in soap across all the mirrors. There was water all over the floor around the far right stall that couldn’t have been from the sinks, and the place smelled like… well, like a toilet.

Not a place with toilets in it, but an actual toilet.

Two looked like someone had punched her in the gut, there was so much wrongness all around. I didn’t want to keep walking, even in my flip-flops… there was too much moisture on the floor between us and the shower and I didn’t trust that all of it was water.

“Feejee is going to be in big trouble,” Two said, looking at the mirrors.

“Feejee didn’t write that,” I said.

“You did?”

“No,” I said. “I’d bet platinum to peanuts it was the Leightons, but see if Kiersta lifts a finger to punish them. You might as well go back to the room.”

“I want to take a shower,” Two said, looking across the bathroom at the open curtain. I could tell from the conflicted look on her face that she didn’t want to keep walking any more than I did.

“You should be okay using the next one down,” I said. I figured I’d skip it… I was more likely to encounter hostility for simply being out of perceived bounds than she was. “Don’t take any orders from anybody while you’re doing it, if anybody asks what you’re doing there tell them that ours is out of order, and if anybody gives you a serious problem just leave and come back up here.”

“Okay,” she said. “You aren’t coming, too?”

“No, I’m going to have a little talk with Kiersta,” I said. “Probably best if you’re not around, that way she can’t hold a grudge against you.”

“Okay,” she said.

We left the wreckage of the bathroom, Two turning left and heading downstairs while I turned right. I waited until I couldn’t hear Two’s footsteps and then knocked, firmly enough that I figured it would rouse even a drunken resident advisor.

There was no immediate response, so I knocked again. This time I heard blankets moving and the bed shifting, and then a crash of breaking glass followed by a groan.

“Kiersta?” I said through the door.

“Fuck off…” she moaned.

“You need to come out here,” I said.

“I’m sleeping.”

“You’re the R.A.,” I said.

“What the hell do you want from me?”

“I want you to come look and look at what your drinking buddies did to the bathroom!” I said.

I heard her coming closer and thought she was going to open the door. Instead she stopped at the other side of it and said, slightly more clearly and awake-sounding, “That’s your problem now.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not my problem. Cleaning the bathroom is one thing, but that’s just nasty.”

“It’s a bathroom,” Kiersta said.

“It’s vandalism,” I said. “And it’s disgusting.”

“You should have thought of that before you had sex in the shower.”

“I don’t even want to guess what they did in the shower,” I said. “And don’t forget, you’ve got to use it, too.”

“Do you think I would actually go in there? I shower in the fitness center.”

“Do something about it, or… I’m going to report you for drinking.”

“Good!” she yelled. The door ripped open inward and she was screaming in my face. “Do that! And when you find someone who gives a shit what anybody does in this hellhole, let me know!”

She stepped back and slammed the door so hard it bounced back from the frame instead of latching, then did that again before finally closing it forcefully but with her hand on the knob and locking it. Other doors were opening down the hall… Mariel, Maliko and Suzi, the twins, and both of the gnomes.

“Oh, of course,” Maliko said, looking at me before turning and going back into her room while Suzi stood there blinking sleepily. Sooni’s door opened and Maliko jumped and turned right back around, but it was Kai.

“Will everybody be the fuck quiet?” Kai shrieked. “Some of us have an examination this morning!”

Suzi’s head lolled to the side and she looked at Kai for a second before lashing out with one paw-like hand and swiping at her face. It was so random it seemed instinctive. Kai just stepped back out of the way and glared at her. She looked around the hall and spotted me, her lantern eyes locking with mine. Kai had no subtle arts that I knew of, but she might as well have been a telepath for how loud and clear I got the message: this is your fault and if it affects my grades, I will kill you for it.

“What in Owain’s name is going on?” Hazel asked.

“Hazel Willikins, bite your tongue!” Honey said, pinching her elbow and then making a tossing gesture over her shoulder.

“Er, I meant Owain,” Hazel said. I must have misheard her the first time, because I was sure she’d said that.

“Of course you did,” Honey harrumphed.

The Leightons, of course, could barely contain themselves through all this.

“You think this is funny?” I asked, stomping over towards them. Sara got a gleam of panic in her eye while Tara looked defiant. “Other people have to use that bathroom!”

“Oh, yeah, I guess you’ll have to find somewhere else to take Feejee out,” Tara said. “Hopefully your next date spot will be almost as classy.”

“People are going to have to start getting ready for class soon,” I said.

“Oh, wow, better get cleanin’, then,” Tara said. “And, in case you haven’t seen the shower yet… brace yourself before you go in there.”

“I didn’t do that!” Sara said. “That was all…”

“Oh, shut your mouth,” Tara said. “We didn’t do anything… we just got up early and saw it.”

“Wait a tick,” Hazel said, which I guessed was like shire slang for “a second” or something. “What did you two do to the lav?”

“The lav?” Sara repeated, and they both snickered.

“They wrecked the place,” I said. “Water, toilet paper… other stuff. It’s disgusting. You wouldn’t want to go in there with your bare feet.”

“Oi!” Hazel said, turning scarlet and smoothing down the front of her floor-length robe. “You don’t have to tell the whole world about that!”

“I thought you said ‘everyone does it’,” Honey said, rolling her eyes.

“Not the point!” Hazel said.

“We don’t know what she’s talking about,” Sara said. “We didn’t do anything. It was like that when we got there.”

“Yeah, all I know is that I’d hate to be the one who has to clean it up,” Tara said.

“Well, you’re going to be, because I’m not doing it,” I said.

“Kiersta said…” Sara said.

“Fuck Kiersta,” I said. “What’s she going to do? One shout to my lawyer and she’d lose her job,” I said, not having any clue if this was true or not but pretty sure Kiersta could hear every word. “I’m not cleaning up your mess, and if you don’t clean it up, nobody’s going to be able to use the showers.”

“That’s not our fault,” Sara said. “You’re supposed to clean it up. Kiersta…”

“Shut up about Kiersta,” I said.

“Hold on,” Hazel said, shuffling over. “I have a headache, I’m queasy, I ache all over, and I’m not a big fan of being woken up early in general. I have to get up at the crack of eleven today and the first thing I’m going to want is a shower. Is it going to be fit to use then, or isn’t it?”

“Don’t talk to us, bunny,” Tara said. She pointed her thumb at me. “Talk to the help.”

“I’m talking to you,” Hazel said. “Call me bunny again and I’ll kick both your arse.”

“‘Arse’,” Sara repeated, and they both giggled.

“What is wrong with you? Were you born in a barn?”

“Were you born in a dollhouse?” Sara asked.

“I was born on a boat,” Hazel said.

“Hazel!” Honey said, more urgently than she had objected to Hazel’s evidently profane pronouncement earlier.

“I don’t care who knows,” Hazel said to her. “I’m proud of it.”

“Honestly, I wish you could hear how you sound,” Honey said.

“I am!” Hazel said. “I’m proud of where I come from.”

“Why in the world would you be proud of your mother’s smelly, rancid cunt?” Tara asked.

Hazel turned a shade of purple-red normally reserved for eldritch abominations.

“Hazel… think about your condition…” Honey pleaded, sounding terrified.

I took a step back. As I did, I remembered Steff’s description of Hazel “going orcshit” over the term “motherfucker”… but that was only after I’d started backing away. I didn’t have to know anything about Hazel or her past behavior to see where this was going. I’d step in if things went too poorly for Hazel… the twins seemed pretty athletic and she was no fighter, though I thought the way Sara seemed to be trying to turn and scramble away while Tara tried to stand their ground might take away some of her disadvantage

“Hazel, they didn’t mean it!” Honey shrieked.

“Oh, I fucking meant it,” Tara said. “What are you going to do, bunny? Dig me to death?”

With an angry howl, Hazel charged forward, barreling into their legs and knocking them down. Tara’s arm punched her in the face while Sara’s flailed around, but she might as well have been punching an ogre or a dwarf’s skull for all that it slowed Hazel’s fury. She pulled herself up until she was straddling the twins’ torso and started punching at Tara’s head with alternating fists.

“Kiersta! Kiersta!” Sara shrieked as Hazel pretty much beat Tara’s face in.

More doors had opened. Everybody who lived on the floor was out in the hall except for the skirmishers, Celia, Leda, Amaranth, and Dee… and Kiersta, naturally. I was trying to figure out how to get Hazel off of Tara without hurting her, especially given her “condition” as Amaranth had diagnosed it. Tara was trying to push her off with her one arm; Sara was useless, sobbing with her eyes squeezed shut.

Before I could decide what, if anything, to do, a powerful force wrapped itself around me and yanked me backwards off my feet. I flew down the hall away from the melee, passing the swishing robes of Dee as she flew forward.

“Hazel Willikins!” she called as I landed on my butt halfway down the hall. “Be at peace!”

That worked about as well as you might have expected it to. Dee waved her arms in the air and became too bright to look at. When my vision cleared, Hazel was floating up off of the twins, a placid expression on her face. Dee guided her mentally back towards Honey while she herself crouched by the fallen form of the Leightons and grew bright once more as she gave them healing energy they didn’t deserve.

“Hazel, I wish you’d think about your daughter!” Honey said.

“I am not having any daughters!” Hazel said, snapping out of the divinely-bestowed serenity at once, but fortunately not reverting back to her state of unreasoning rage.

Sara suddenly started shrieking and kicking spasmodically. Dee stepped back at once. Tara groaned and touched her head.

“I apologize for any unexpected familiarity,” Dee said to them.

“Get away from us, you cowl headed freak!” Sara said.

“Somebody provide a concise summary of events, please,” Dee said, looking around the hall. Her eyes settled on me. “Mackenzie?”

“They trashed the bathroom,” I said coming forward. “Because Kiersta said I have to clean it.”

“Why under earth should that task fall to you?” Dee asked. “Never mind. I think I can surmise.” She looked around. “And then one of the twins said a word against Two’s friend Hazel’s departed mother, I suppose?”

“Hey, that’s right!” Hazel said.

“Let it go,” Honey said, grabbing Hazel’s sleeve.

“I believe you owe Miss Hazel an apology,” Dee said to the Leightons. “And then she will apologize to you.”

“Like hell,” Tara said, as they got to their feet. She groaned and clutched at her head with her hand.

“That goes for double for me,” Hazel said.

“I can’t force you to apologize,” Dee said. “But I’ll ask again once I’ve finished healing you, as duty…”
“You’re not touching us!” Sara said.

“Please,” Dee said. “I would not be offering if it were not dire. The most superficial portion of your wounds healed first. I do not believe the underlying damage is…”

“Go fuck yourself, drow bitch,” Tara said. “I’m not letting you do any more black-ass demon witchcraft on me.”

The twins turned to go back into their room.

“Go to the healing center, then,” Dee said. They both flipped her off. “Don’t let her fall asleep!” Dee called after them as they closed the door. “Willful… willful idiots!” Dee shouted at their door, then let off a stream of what certainly sounded like swear words. She turned around to face Hazel, her eyes narrow and her nostrils wide. “And you! Your kinswoman has the right of it! Does avenging the memory of your mother take precedence over the safety of your daughter?”

“I… don’t… have… a… bloody… daughter!” Hazel yelled. “I can’t have a daughter, I won’t have a daughter, I don’t have a…”

There was a pop and a flash of light and Hazel was asleep on her feet. Dee’s mental powers caught her mid-slump, tilted her gently back, and then floated her past a very stunned looking Honey into their room, where I have little doubt she continued floating until she reached her bed.

“Please try to keep her calm when she wakes,” Dee said to Honey, who snorted. “And, out of curiosity, how do you know she’s having a daughter?”

“Oh… um… how do you?” Honey asked.

“I was merely repeating what I heard from you,” Dee said. “But it’s the default assumption… or it is, among my people.”

“Oh… the same,” Honey said. “For mine, I mean.”

“I did not realize gnomish culture was so gynocentric,” Dee said.

“Oh, well, if a woman’s expecting we say it’s a daughter and if a man is, we say it’s a son,” Honey said.

“Indeed,” Dee said.

“I should get back to bed,” Honey said, hurrying into her room and shutting the door, then locking it.

Other people, apparently deciding the show was over and realizing just how fucking early it was, were also drifting back towards their beds. Mariel was still standing in front of Puddy’s room, staring at the bathroom door and then whipping her head around in a dizzying pattern down the rest of the hall before staring at the bathroom.

“Don’t be so fucking dainty!” Puddy grumbled sleepily from the depths of her room.

I sighed.

“We’ve got to do something about the bathroom. Or I guess I do,” I said. “They only did it because of me.”

“That doesn’t make it your responsibility,” Dee said. “Is it simply untidy, or have they… befouled… it?”

“I think it’s beyond befouled,” I said.

“I will see to it then,” Dee said.

“Dee, you don’t have to,” I said.

“Somebody must… I have never cleaned anything beyond the chapel floor, but I believe I can remove the mess without having contact with it,” Dee said. “No one else, perhaps save for Two, could do that, and she does enough cleaning after others as it is. Do you intend to join me this morning?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Please go downstairs and reserve us a chamber. I will join you shortly.”

“Thanks,” I said. I hesitated, torn. “Uh… are you sure you don’t want any help?”

“I need not touch your mind to see that you are hoping I will say no,” Dee said. “Your offer is appreciated, but your efforts would not combine effectively with mine. Thank you, but no.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I turned and I headed past Mariel for the stairs. Dee followed behind me. I glanced back from just inside the stairwell and saw that she was turning to face Kiersta’s door.

Part of me wanted to know what she was going to do or say, but most of me didn’t want to be anywhere near the kind of ass-chewing I thought Dee just might be able to administer.

Discuss this story.

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.

Sleeping with Amaranth was everything that it always was, and despite only having four or so hours of sleep, I felt slightly less dead than normal as five a.m. approached.

I couldn’t see the time from inside our cocoon, so when I first awoke I just stayed pressed up against Amaranth’s sleeping body, enjoying the feeling of her sun-warmed skin on mine while waiting for the inevitable hammering on the door that would signal the beginning of my weekly quality time with Sooni. When it didn’t come, I wondered exactly how early it was… was my body playing a practical joke on me?

I climbed over Amaranth as carefully as I could and slid out of bed. The air outside hit me like a frosty fist. There may have been some minor yelping.

“Good morning, Mack,” Two murmured from her bunk.

It was three minutes to five. I grabbed my clothes off the floor and threw them on, expecting the knock to come any moment and wanting to cut off Sooni’s angry ranting by being ready. The staccato outburst never came, though.

I headed out into the hall. The crack beneath Sooni’s door blazed with light, so it seemed like she was up. I knocked on the door.

“Hey, Sooni?” I said, trying to keep my voice down since most of the floor would be sleeping.

Kai opened the door, dressed in her infantile swimming costume. She had dark splotches under her eyes.

“Shhh,” she hissed. “Sooni just fell asleep an hour ago.”

“What’s with all the light?” I asked. The way the room was flooded with bright light, it was no wonder Sooni hadn’t been able to sleep.

“We were stuck in the fitness center during the storm,” Kai said. “Sooni thought it was coming for her.”

“She thought what was coming for her?” I asked, feeling like I was missing an antecedent.

“The storm,” Kai repeated. “She wouldn’t leave even when they gave the all-clear because she thought it was a trick. We only got back around three.”

It made a kind of Sooni-sense, I supposed. She was the star of the show… what storm wouldn’t take a personal interest in her?

“Don’t,” Kai said.

“What?” I asked.

“Make that look, like you think she’s crazy,” Kai said.

“Why do you care?” I asked. “She is crazy, and anyway, you hate her.”

“I hate her,” she said. “I’m entitled to. I know her. You don’t. Anyway, it isn’t the craziest idea… that storm was here because of somebody, even if it wasn’t her.”

“Yeah, but when an entire campus with thousands of people is caught in an unnatural thunderstorm, I don’t immediately think, ‘maybe this has something to do with me’,” I said. “I may be oblivious and self-centered sometimes, but I think that’s pushing things a little too far.”

“Whatever,” Kai said. “I’m letting her sleep. You do what you want.”

She stepped back inside the room and closed the door quietly behind her.

I was awake and dressed, and Dee wouldn’t be expecting us for another hour. I decided I might as well go watch TV anyway. Not because I cared about Pretty Neko Science Princess, but I thought it might be a good idea to be able to tell Sooni what she’d missed, if the show’s paper-thin plot happened to be advanced in some tiny, shallow way.

I started to head for our own lounge before realizing the replacement TV still hadn’t arrived, and headed downstairs instead. It was even quieter in the basement than it had been upstairs… and colder, too. It felt like a cold wind was blowing off the huge glass windows at the front of the room. I found myself wishing I’d brought my coat. I tried pulling a little warmth out of the air, but it was hard to find and I knew if I tried too hard I’d end up with a fire. That wouldn’t end well. So, I just put up with it, suffering through the chill and the stupid adventures of Science Princess until Mecknights came on.

It wasn’t fair how Sooni’s show seemed to drag on forever and mine was over in the blink of an eye, but that was the way it went. Dee was in the first floor hallway when I headed back up.

“You are surprisingly prompt,” she said. “Is Amaranth with you?”

“She was sleeping, last I saw her,” I said. “I can go get her.”

“Please do,” Dee said. She put her hand on the doorknob of one of the empty labs. “I will be here when you are ready.”

Amaranth was out of bed and shaking out her long wavy hair when I got back to our room.

“Hi, baby,” she said, smiling. “Two’s going to make us all breakfast when this thing with Dee’s over.”

“Oh, cool,” I said. “Um… she’s ready for us downstairs.”

“Okay,” Amaranth said. She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead. “You know… you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” she said. “If any part of this makes you uncomfortable, if you’re hurt or afraid…”

“This isn’t just play,” I said. “This is important. This is for real.”

“I know!” she said. “But it’s still your body and your mind that are going to be under examination here. I’m sure Dee has the right idea and that she’s very competent, but she is only an initiate.”

“If she can’t deal with this, somebody else will have to,” I said. “And I’d rather it be a friend than a Khersian priest or a sketchy diabolist.”

“Okay,” she said. “If you’re sure.”

I wasn’t… Dee had said “unimaginable pain”, and she didn’t seem the type to hyperbolize about that sort of thing. I said that I was, though, because this needed doing and the only way for that to happen was for me to bite the strap and do it.

We headed downstairs. I led Amaranth to the room where Dee was waiting.

“Can we get some light in here, or will that mess things up?” Amaranth asked.

“My apologies,” Dee said, and she turned on the light. “Darkness was more conducive to my preparations. I passed much of the night in study, prayer, and reflection, and I believe I know now what must be done. Mackenzie, if you will please lie on the floor here?”

She pointed to a space where she’d drawn seven sides of an octagon on the floor. The sides were all slightly concave, and the curved lines extended slightly past the corners. The impression was the outline of a stylized spiderweb.

The fact that she’d left it unfinished strongly suggested that it was analogous to a circle of protection, that once completed it would be a barrier that I wouldn’t be able to cross. I’d said I was ready, though, and I trusted Dee. I stepped over the line, careful not to scuff the design, sat down, and then stretched out, careful to make sure I was within the lines.

“Thank you,” Dee said.

She took up her chalk and drew the eighth line. I felt/heard something like a snap or a crack and knew intuitively that the barrier was in place. I was trapped… until somebody else physically damaged the circle, nothing I did could affect it or the world beyond it.

“In this case, the web’s restraint is for the protection of all,” Dee said. “If the pain of the process causes you to lash out… or if something within you interprets my actions as a threat and responds… the circle will contain that reaction, obviating the need for me to subdue you. Once we are finished, I will remove it and you will be free.”

I experienced a moment of doubt which quickly blossomed into dread. Was this whole set-up a ruse? Had Dee decided that I was too dangerous to be allowed to live?

She was a priestess, and even if demons didn’t fall under her normal purview, being on the surface and among humans put her into an unusual position. For as much as she had a superiority complex about her own race, would she pass up the chance to save human lives?

I would have given almost anything to undo what had been done… possibly including my own life, but the fact was giving my life wouldn’t undo it. I felt awful, but it wasn’t ultimately my fault, and I wasn’t prepared to die for it.

I was being crazy, though… if I knew anything about Dee, it was that she didn’t take friendship lightly. If she thought something that drastic needed to be done, she’d say so… wouldn’t she?

Unless she thought the kindest route was to make it quick and avoid any unpleasantness.

Dee had never struck me as being a liar… but she’d spent the night in reflection, she said. What if her plan had changed since she first outlined it? What if she’d only come to a decision about what to do after the last time we’d talked? She’d told me to get in the circle and I had done so without asking why.

“Dee… tell me again what we’re doing here?” I asked.

“We have gone over this before. We have to be absolutely sure,” she said. Yeah, that was reassuring… sure of what? That I didn’t harm anybody ever? “Now please be silent while I say a necessary prayer. The web should shield you.”

She knelt by the circle and bowed until her forehead was on the floor just outside it. She prayed out loud in her own melodic dialect of Elvish, slowly raising her body back up to a vertical position as the prayer reached what sounded like its conclusion. She opened her eyes, and they had gone completely black.

“Brace your…” she said, and she stretched out her hands.

“Unimaginable pain”, she had said. That about summed it up.

Thanks to the magic of spectral weapons, I had a pretty good idea of what having a sword shoved through a vital organ felt like. This was like that, only more… and all over. It was a bit like the time Dee had frozen me in my tracks with a field of divine power that burned when I struggled against it, only aggressive rather than passive… like being enclosed in an iron maiden of holy power. I was being slowly impaled on a thousand glittering points of agony.

It went on and on, and I thought I was going to die… and then it ended, and I knew that I had. The pain ceased so abruptly.

I could feel nothing.

I could see nothing.

I could hear…

“…self,” Dee said.

The world came back into a blurry sort of focus.

“What did you do?” Amaranth shrieked.

“I believe she is unharmed,” Dee said. “And I have learned what I needed to from her. Now all that remains is for me to view your aura, and compare the energies I find there with hers.”

“You aren’t doing anything else to her!” Amaranth said.

“Amaranth, I’m fine,” I said, sitting up. The words sounded dull and echoey in my ears. My body was stiff and numb, and my mouth was full of cotton. It was like all my senses had been completely overwhelmed and shut themselves down.

“You misunderstand,” Dee said. She reached out a gloved finger and smudged one of the lines. I felt something falling away. “I do not need to do anything further to Mackenzie. Her part is finished, and your part should not be nearly so unpleasant.”

I got up and stumbled over to Amaranth, who was white as a sheet and ready to cry. It was probably a good thing that the ordeal had apparently only lasted a moment from an external point of view… if she’d had any inkling what I’d really gone through, it probably would have destroyed her.

It was over, though, and I was fine… I felt a little guilty for mistrusting Dee, but I was unscathed. She’d done no more or less than she’d said she would.

Amaranth fell against me, sobbing.

“I thought… I thought…” she sputtered.

“Take a moment,” Dee said. “Gather yourself.”

She turned away, and I held Amaranth until she stopped shaking. It was at that point that I realized I was shaking, too.

“If you are ready,” Dee said, “then Mackenzie will either need to exit the room or be confined to the circle again… under the circumstances, I feel that a direct viewing of the aura will be the most efficacious.”

“What?” I asked.

“Need more hairbrush, please,” she said, then reached out and batted at my head. I jerked back.

“We don’t have time,” Kai said, taking the coat and hat from Suzi and handing them to me. “Put these on.”

I didn’t argue. I could hardly have looked less conspicuous with the hat pulled low over my face, but I wasn’t going to complain about the get-up… it beat the hell out of going out in the cold night air with nothing but Sooni’s handiwork to protect me from the cold. The coat didn’t feel magic… it would probably be a good idea to slap an insulation spell on it, I thought.

“Can you guys give me a second to…”

“No,” Kai said. She and Suzi hurried me downstairs, all the way down to the basement lounge. We came out into the sunken patio, out of sight of the street.

“Ooh, shit, that’s cold,” I said, as freezing air rushed inside the slitted dress. I felt like somebody had slapped an ice pack between my legs. On instinct, I jerked back towards the door, but Suzi grabbed me by the elbow and marched me forward.

She was stronger than I would have expected. Not in a Puddy way… she wasn’t any stronger than she could have been without serious magic, but she was definitely stronger than she might have been. Kai signaled for us to stop at the end of the patio. I pulled the collar of the coat up over my face and tried to use my breath to warm my cheeks while she headed partway up the stairs, then stopped and climbed the cinderblock wall to poke her head above the ground.

“Go, go, go!” she said, ducking back down. Suzi gave me a shove, Kai grabbed my hand and started pulling me up towards the street level while Suzi pushed.

The whole sneaking-out-incognito thing might have been kind of exciting, if it hadn’t all been so surreal.

Also, I probably would have managed to stumble a lot less on the way up the stairs if they hadn’t been “helping” me.

A sleek black carriage with opaqued windows pulled up over the curb and onto the sidewalk as we reached the top of the stairs. Kai hopped up and opened the door and Suzi pushed me inside. The carriage was in motion as soon as my feet were off the ground.

“Why, Miss Mackenzie… I was starting to worry you weren’t coming, after all,” Sooni said while I scrambled into my seat, panting and shivering. The door swung closed and the carriage lurched as it went down off the curb.

“I know you were,” I said, trying to get my chattering teeth under control. “That’s why you put Kai on me, remember?”

“You do say the silliest things, Miss Mackenzie,” she said. She held up a gloved hand in front of her mouth and giggled. “Why don’t you take off that coat and hat?”

The air inside the carriage was warm on my skin, so I did so.

“Um… why don’ t you put the hat back on?” Sooni said.

“Sorry,” I said, slipping it on again. “I just got out of the shower and I didn’t have time to really…”

“Shh,” she said. “Just let me look at you for a moment.”

While she did that, I looked at her. She was wearing a glittering red dress, with a high neck that went around behind like apron strings and a cut-out over her cleavage. I wondered if she had made it herself, too. That was assuming she actually had made the black dress… I wouldn’t put it past her to count her contribution in selecting and handing over the money for a dress to be tantamount to that of actually designing and fabricating it. Her absurd hair was up in a tall beehive, with a single braid hanging down by the side of her face like an overgrown out-of-place hair. Her earrings each had three red beads strung on a black cord. She was… I had to admit… the very picture of elegance, if you could look past the ugly, clunky, oversized sandals she was still wearing.

Her eyes had ended up in the same place as mine.

“Oh. Are those really the nicest shoes you own?” she asked.

“How many shoes do you think I have?” I asked her. If she’d wanted me to have nicer footwear, she should have done something about it. Considering that she’d given me stockings and garters, why hadn’t she thought of it in the first place? “Anyway, you’re one to talk.”

“What do you mean?”

I pointed at her sandals.

“Oh, do you like them?” she asked, swinging her feet like a little kid. “My mother picked them out for me.”

“Well, your mother has some pretty weird tastes,” I said.

Okay, so maybe Dee or Amaranth would have had some words to say about me insulting somebody’s mother… but I didn’t think it was all that, what I’d said. Sooni’s reaction, though, was completely overblown. Her lip started to tremble, and her big black eyes filled up with tears.

“Wah!” she said. And I mean that… she actually said “wah”, like it was a word. The strange part is, she really was crying. “Y-y-you hate my mother’s shoes!”

“I don’t!” I said. “I don’t hate your mother’s shoes!”

Her mother’s shoes? A moment ago, they’d been shoes her mother had picked out. It was amazing how fast she could change things around in order to make things more dramatic.

“You do!” she said, blubbering louder and louder. “You hate them!”

“No, I don’t!” I said. “They… they suit you.” They kind of did, anyway… at least, it was hard to picture her without them.

“Say more nice things!”

“They… show off your feet?” I said, looking at her tiny toes with their red-painted nails that looked like little beads.

“Say you love them!” she yelled. “Say you love my shoes!”

‘I… uh… I’ve had dreams about them,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, drying her eyes. She pulled a tissue out of her handbag and blew her nose, then another one to dab at her eyes. “Oh! I have champagne,” she said. She pulled a cloth napkin off of a bucket beside her seat. “See?”

“Sooni, I’m not a good person to be drinking,” I said. “And we’re underage, and there are reporters all around…”

“They would not dare to intrude upon our moment,” Sooni said. She pulled out two tall, narrow flute glasses and handed them to me, then pulled the bottle out of the ice bucket. She popped the cork off it and tipped it towards one of the glasses in my hands. “Say ‘when’!”

“When,” I said, before the fizzy liquid had even begun to flow. Once the bubbles had gone down a bit, the glass was about half full. “That’s plenty,” I said, and I started to pull the glass back but Sooni topped it off.

“Hold it still!” she said. “I don’t want to waste any.”

She took the other glass from me and filled it about a third of the way up.

“I’m going to go easy,” she said. “I don’t have as much experience as you do, and I don’t want to forget anything about tonight.”

“What, you think I go out every night and get drunk?” I asked.

“Hush, Miss Mackenzie,” Sooni said. “You needn’t talk about your sordid past. We’re putting that behind us. Drink up, before it goes flat.”

I slowly lifted the glass towards my face, looking at it dubiously. I was just about to take a first… and possibly last… experimental sip, when Sooni shrieked, “Wait!”

“Fuck!” I said, sloshing wine on my hand and the front of my dress. “What?”

“A toast!” Sooni said. “A toast to… friendship! And the power of love!”

“Um, okay,” I said, holding my glass immobile while Sooni clinked hers against mine.

“I feel so sophisticated,” she said, then she put a finger up to her nostrils. “And my nose burns.” She looked at me. “Does that mean it’s working… hey, you aren’t drinking.”

“You know, we made the toast, so I don’t think I need to actually drink it,” I said.

“But if you don’t drink, it won’t come true,” she said.

“It’s a toast, not a wish,” I said.

“You don’t believe in the power of love?”

Of course I believed in the power of love. How could I have had somebody like Amaranth in my life and not believed in that? I wasn’t going to say that, though. Just to forestall any further arguing, though, I swallowed a mouthful of the stuff.

“There!” Sooni said. “Now the toast is official. I’m so glad we’re friends now, Mackenzie. We were enemies for so long…”

“We only met a month ago, Sooni,” I said.

“Yes, I remember,” she said. “You were so angry, so bitter that night. I told you that you had nothing to prove to me, but you insisted on fighting.”

“You made fun of me and then walked away, snarking with your nekos,” I said.

“You’ve come so far since that night, so long ago!”

“Yes… yes I have,” I agreed, then emptied my glass.

If I’m very lucky, I thought, I won’t remember any of this tomorrow.

Oh, and champagne? Tastes awful, for the record. I didn’t even like grape juice that much to begin with. I couldn’t imagine why anybody ever thought it would a good idea to wait until it went bad and then bottle it.

“Let me pour you another glass,” Sooni said.

“No, that’s fine,” I said. “One’s plenty.”

“Yes, but, you spilled most of that, so you haven’t had one yet,” she said. She filled my glass back up to the top and then poured a bit more for herself.

“Sooni, seriously, I don’t want to get drunk,” I said.

“You can’t get that drunk on champagne,” she said. “It’s mostly bubbles, right? You can’t get drunk from air, or we’d be drunk all the time.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “But, bad things happen when I lose control.”

“You won’t lose control with me here,” she said. “I won’t let you.”

I sighed. I didn’t know why Sooni thought she would have any say in the matter… maybe she thought that I simply wouldn’t dare to lose control against her wishes, or maybe she thought “the power of love” would save me. Whatever… it occurred to me then that she wasn’t human, and didn’t have any human blood inside her. If I did slip into a less-than-restrained mindset, she would be as unappetizing… and as safe… as Mercy had been.

With that in mind, I dutifully choked down a second glass.

“Hey! Do you think our mothers could be friends?” Sooni asked suddenly.

“What?”

“Your mother and my mother,” Sooni said. “Do you think they might be friends with each other?”

“Sooni… my mother is dead,” I said, trying not to get upset. She might have forgotten, if she’d ever even known that. It was a ridiculous idea in the first place, given the size of the world and the number of people in it, but it was harmless.

“Yes,” Sooni said. “Do you think she could be friends with mine? Think about it… it would explain so much of what’s been happening.”

“What, you mean, if they had met?” I asked. “Yeah, I guess it’s possible they might have been friends.”

I didn’t think it was likely, even allowing for their paths to have crossed in the first place. My mother hadn’t really had a harsh word for anybody, but I couldn’t picture her hobnobbing with Sooni’s family. More to the point, I couldn’t imagine Sooni’s family hobnobbing with her.

“I will ask my mother,” Sooni said, beaming with pride as if this was the best idea in the history of ideas.

“You do that,” I said, holding out my glass. The third glass of champagne was a bit better than the first two had been. “Why was Maliko in the healing center?” I asked.

“She broke several of her limbs and ribs,” Sooni said.

“How did she do that?”

“Arguing,” Sooni said.

I felt a chill going down my spine. When Sooni started talking like she thought she was in a comic book, it was easy to forget just how dangerous she could be to those who were under her power. Of course, if she had been a comic book character, she’d either have to be a harmless kook or a homicidal lunatic. In real life, there wasn’t one type of crazy for the good guys and another for the bad guys… there probably weren’t even really good guys or bad guys, just people who did good and bad things.

“Could I have a bit more?” I asked, holding out my glass. Sooni held up the bottle and patted the seat beside her. I came over, and she poured the last of the champagne into my glass.

“Would you like to scratch my ears?” Sooni asked, leaning in towards me.

“I’d like to lick your breasts,” I said, then giggled and snorted at the same time I unwisely took another sip of champagne. The bubbles did burn your nose. Before I had recovered from that, Sooni’s red beaded handbag slammed into my face.

“No!” she said, swatting me again and again. “No, no, no! That’s gross and wrong!”

“Okay, okay!” I said. “Stop hitting me!”

“It’s too soon,” she said, settling down. “You have to wait until after dinner for that sort of thing, I think.”

“Would this be a good time to mention that I have no clue what we’re doing here?” I asked.

“Well, I guess we’ll just have to find out,” Sooni said, putting her handbag down beside her and smoothing out the front of her dress. “Together.”

Kai sat outside the curtain with her book while I headed into the showers. I didn’t know what she would do if one of the other yokai came in… she hadn’t brought a towel or changed out of her regular clothes. It seemed like she’d rather be caught shirking her duty guarding me than jump into the shower area naked with me.

In deference to her, I’d worn my robe in and hung it up on one of the other fixtures. I went as quickly as I could without neglecting hygiene, and with at least a bare minimum of time to relax under the hot flow. While I soaked in the steam, I did my best to forget about Amaranth’s resigned spirit and focus instead on my coming date.

Part of it was that I wouldn’t be able to do anything to help the situation. Part of it was that it didn’t seem fair to Sooni, to have my mind full of my own problems during our promised date.

Most of it was the fact that I didn’t want to give Sooni an excuse to throw a plate at my head during dinner, or something. Having her make a big scene and getting us kicked out of the restaurant was the last thing I needed, image-wise.

It wasn’t easy getting my mind off of Amaranth…but I tried to remember the meditation that Dee had led me through and bit by bit, I let the warmth and the wet wash over me, until my mind was clear and free to turn to other things.

It had been an incredibly eventful week, even given the tumultuous time I’d been having so far. This date felt like it would be the culmination of so much more than my… well, I didn’t really have a relationship with Sooni.

I didn’t even know if “flirtation” would be the right word. I hadn’t been flirting with her. She’d flashed her underwear at me and shoved her bikinied boobs in my face… but she did that to the whole world. Amaranth had said Sooni was a hard read, sexually. If she hadn’t disappeared, I’d have to ask her if she’d noticed anything different about the fox girl’s aura, or whatever it was she looked at.

She’d tried being my rival, my enemy, and my friend… had there ever been any hints of attraction? Real attraction? Her reaction to anything that smacked of lesbianism had always been “ew, gross!” She’d seen me in various states of undress with so little reaction I might as well have been wearing sets of black censor bars. The one time she’d physically contributed to me getting off, she’d been angry at me for stealing focus from her “victory”.

Once again, the only conclusion I could come to was that Sooni didn’t really know what she wanted from me. I could relate to that. It might have been the only thing about her that I could relate to. Two parents who spoiled her rotten, the best friends money could buy… she and I could hardly have had less in common if we’d tried.

But maybe that was why she’d singled me out. Opposites were supposed to attract. I didn’t know how true that was, but in the world of popular fiction that apparently drove Sooni’s thought processes, they did tend to make pretty good spunky sidekicks.

“Finally,” Kai said when I came out of the shower. “Did you remember to wash…?”

“I washed everything,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “If she asks, I checked.” She tucked her book under her arm, went over to the sink, ran some water over her hands and then wet down her hair and the fur on her face. “There. That should cover me, at least against Suzi’s dull wit. You need to be changed into your outfit before she gets here.”

“Yeah, about that… do you have any idea what Sooni made for me?” I asked.

“Why don’t you go see?”

“I’d like to be able to prepare myself,” I said.

“You didn’t look?”

“No,” I said. “She made me promise I wouldn’t.”

“Was the box warded?”

“Not that I noticed,” I said. “But I didn’t check.”

“You just assumed it was?” Kai said.

“No,” I said. “I promised I wouldn’t open it.”

“Do you always keep your promises?”

“The ones I actually make,” I said. “I try to. I’m not perfect. Don’t you? I mean… try.”

“I try to do whatever’s most likely to get me through the day unscathed,” Kai said. “Of course, if you’re only pretending to be somebody’s plaything, I guess you don’t have to worry so much about that kind of thing, do you?”

She said everything matter-of-factly, with a pronounced air of disinterest.

“Why do you hate me so much?” I asked her. “I used to feel sorry for you.”

She started walking towards the front of the bathroom.

“Hey, I asked you a question,” I said.

“And then you answered it,” she said, without turning around.

“I what?” I asked, then I realized what she meant. “Well, excuse me for caring… sorry I tried to help.”

“I already told you that I don’t need a hero,” she said, spinning around on her bare heel. “I need a college degree. I need a visa. I need employment in this land. Can you provide me with those things? Can your magical girlfriend pull them out of her secret pocket for me? If not, then it seems I need Sooni’s help more than I need yours.”

“You could work something out without her… get asylum or something,” I said. “We have laws here…”

“Which I am here in violation of,” Kai said. “It is a small technicality, but without the patronage of Sooni’s father it would be more than enough to get me deported. Her father has no special love for nekos. If I’m not here watching his daughter, he would sell my contract in a heartbeat. Can you not imagine how much worse my situation could be?”

“Frankly, no,” I said. “Sooni almost killed you once that I know of. She messed up your fingers and didn’t let you heal them…”

“I messed up my fingers,” she said. “And I told you before, it wasn’t the sort of thing that you heal. If you truly cannot imagine a worse use to which I could be put than having shoes flung at my head, then I envy and pity you at the same time.” She pointed at the spot over her eye. “This is supposed to be lucky. It was just my luck that Sooni spotted it before some middle-aged pervert saw me and decided he wanted a Baby Kai-Kai of his own.”

“What was your name before?” I asked. “I mean, your real name.”

“No,” she said.

“Your name is ‘No’?”

“My name is my own,” she said. “And it will stay that way until I’m ready to reclaim it.”

“You know, I get that you haven’t had an easy life,” I said. “But I haven’t exactly…”

“What you break, other people fix. What you start, other people finish,” Kai said. “You have people who care about you, who take care of you.”

“Well, I do now,” I said. “Since coming here, I’ve met people who care about me, because I was open when they reached out. Before that…”

“Your grandmother went on television to say that she was worried about you.”

“Don’t talk to me about my grandmother,” I said, and I was able to match her frosty tone without even trying. “You don’t know anything about that.”

“I know that she is your family and she cares. My grandmother was run over by a delivery cart. They paid my grandfather the equivalent of five silver in compensation. He was arrested five months later, for teaching skills that nekos aren’t supposed to know. The last time I saw any of my family was moments before I met Sooni. That was my younger sister. My older sister left a few years before that, to go to the city with an inuyokai man.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “Inuyokai.”

“Like a canid,” she said. “A dog man.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know anything about Yokano racial politics, but the imagery of dog vs. cat seemed like something that would translate across borders. I couldn’t imagine that a neko going off with an inu was likely to end well.

“He’d bought her a dress. The first new dress from a store she’d ever owned. He promised to give her more, and set her up with an apartment. I could have told her that he was a pimp, but she wouldn’t have believed me. He was her way out, you see. Her only way out. I don’t even blame her for it. Maybe her life is better for it. Maybe she has good clients who treat her nicely and buy her things.” She shrugged. “It was her way out. She couldn’t hope for another one. She wasn’t clever or graceful.”

“Why are you telling me all this if you don’t want my sympathy?” I asked.

“I want you to understand the difference between you and I,” she said. “The difference between a lower middle-class girl with human blood living in the Imperial Republic, and a nekoyokai living on Yokan. What are your hardships, Mackenzie? Did you get a sweater for Khersentide when you wanted a doll? Were you not popular in school?”

“My grandmother, who impressed you so much by telling the world what an abomination I am, used to lock me in the basement,” I said. “She didn’t let me have any normal food for nine years.”

“I suppose you win, then,” Kai said, turning away. “The longest I’ve ever gone without eating was only a handful of days. Considering the pain in my belly and the weakness in my limbs that caused, I can hardly imagine what you must have gone through.”

“It isn’t a contest,” I said. “I’m not saying I’ve suffered more than you… just that I’ve suffered.”

“Fine, you’ve suffered,” she said. She gestured over her shoulder towards me. “Come along, please. You have to make yourself ready for your next ordeal.”

I sighed and repressed the urge to catch up to Kai and strangle her. We were both stuck with Sooni, for the time being. Even if I didn’t know what it was like to be a member of an oppressed underclass, I had my own stigma to worry about. The fact that our experiences were different didn’t mean that we couldn’t relate to each other.

There was just no talking to her, though.

When we got to my room, I found that Amaranth and Steff had made themselves scarce, and Two hadn’t returned. I might have liked their company… and their help if whatever Sooni had made proved to be too complicated… but I was also kind of glad to be alone for a minute. I’d worked hard to get past my emotions in the shower… seeing Amaranth would just bring it all flooding back.

I got out the box that Sooni had given me and looked it over. A quick visual and mystical check showed that there were no wards on the box. Of course, any that were there would have had to have some kind of timed or remotely deactivated component, or they would have been a booby trap rather than a protection. Once I was sure I wasn’t going to get blasted with lightning or ice the instant I opened it, I slid the ribbon off the box and closed my eyes.

“Okay,” I said out loud, lifting the top off. “Let’s see what I’m about to get myself into… literally.”

I opened my eyes and saw shiny, glittery black fabric. Lifting it out of the box, I found a relatively simple dress… low cut, with a single shoulder-strap, and a wide slit up the side. The fabric was glammed up with little twinkling lights like stars. Inside the box were a pair of lacy black panties, what looked like pantyhose, and a strapless bra. Lifting the items out, I saw that the pantyhose were actually separate stockings… and the panties were missing a key component that was pretty integral to the primary function of such garments.

“Oh, she has got to be kidding,” I said. I didn’t think she was… but could she really expect me to go around all evening, exposed under the dress like that? With my “lady parts”… however clean they might be at the moment… just sort of there, framed by black lace? It was unthinkable. I’d go crazy long before dinner was over, just thinking about it.

Though at least it clarified her intentions a little bit more, if nothing else.

There were a pair of garters in the box, too. It took me a few tries to work out how everything went together. When I was done, I had to admit that it was almost a sexy look… it probably would have been one on somebody else. It just looked weird on me. I felt like a kid playing dress-up, or something.

I got the bra on, and then slipped the dress over my head. Sooni’s magical measurements had been accurate, it seemed… it felt like it was clinging a bit much, but everything looked fine in the mirror. Actually, it looked good… very good. At least, from the neck down. My hair was a mess and I couldn’t do anything about my face, make-up wise. I wondered if I had time to find Steff… and if there was even the tiniest chance she could be persuaded to help make me pretty for Sooni.

Before I could make up my mind to go look for her, there were two quick raps on the door. “Get decent,” Kai said, and then she opened the door a crack and slipped through it, with her eyes closed.

“I’m done,” I said, and she opened them.

“Suzi’s coming,” she said. “Remember…”

“You never left me alone,” I said.

“Shoes,” Kai said, looking at my feet.

“She didn’t give me any,” I said.

“You don’t have some?” she asked.

“I guess I could wear my black ones,” I said, heading to the closet to get out the shoes from the dance.

“I would assume that was the intent,” Kai said. “Hurry, please.”

She was starting to look a little antsy. I had one shoe on and was working on the other when there was a heavy thunk on the door.

“Hello?” Suzi said, in her kind of dazedly bored voice. “Kai-Kai? Lesbian? It can be go times now?”

Kai opened the door.

“Yes, I think so,” Kai said. “You are ready, Miss Mackenzie?”

“Ready as I can be,” I said.

“I don’t think this did anything,” I said, holding my finger up for Amaranth to see. “I mean, I didn’t feel anything.”

“I almost told you not to bother,” Steff said to her. “Considering how Mack reacts to the ice magic, and that I don’t usually do the baby-making thing, and we should both be pretty resistant to begin with…”

“Yes, but a small risk is still a risk,” Amaranth said. “Even if you had sex a hundred times without getting sick, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Anyway, there’s a reason Mack didn’t react this time.”

She smiled and held out the wrapper. I took it from her and read it: “Lysander’s Certified Elementally-Neutral Magic For Personal Protection”.

“It’s my surprise for you,” Amaranth said. “I’ve been doing some research… I mean, there are humans… or people who are mostly human… with elemental affinities and vulnerabilities, too. So, I started doing some research… looking for tapestries about elementals and health issues, and things like that. A lot of what I found was stuff we’d already thought of, like using necromancy to stop pregnancy and divine magic to block or just cure the diseases. But, I figured that even if most solutions wouldn’t be geared towards a half-demon, many people who would use one of those two things might have a moral or philosophical problem with the other… so I kept looking for another solution.”

“And you found it?” Steff said.

“Yes,” Amaranth said, beaming with pride. “But I didn’t do it by myself… I thought, ‘Who would know about people with elemental affinities?’ So, I went to see Professor Bohd in her office the other day.”

“You what?” I asked, feeling the heat rising up in my face to the very tips of my ears.

“Oh, she was very helpful, baby,” Amaranth said. “She told me that it isn’t just fire types who have problems with the ice rings. People who are water-aligned also have stronger than typical reactions to them, and they don’t work at all for the ice-resistant. So, she gave me the name of a small company that makes sexual barrier rings… they’re more expensive and are only rated for thirty minutes, but they’re actually more effective than the ice spells. She told me the weave site to order them from, and I had a box rushed out… I was hoping to have them for you yesterday, but they just missed it.”

“Amaranth, you went to talk to my teacher about my sex life?”

“Well, I didn’t say ‘Hi, your student Mackenzie Blaise wants to have sex but is vulnerable to cold.’,” Amaranth said. “I just asked her what would be a good solution for somebody who can’t use an ice-based ring for elemental reasons.”

“Yeah, but if she pays any attention to campus gossip… or the news…”

“Oh, baby, after spending even two minutes talking to her, I’m honestly surprised you’d be worried about that,” Amaranth said. “She struck me as the very soul of discretion, which isn’t surprising considering her taste for… um, well, anyway, the box should last you for a good long while, and it’s got the address to get more, if I… if I can’t do it for you.”

“Amy, hon, there’s no reason to talk like that,” Steff said.

“I just want Mack to be safe and happy,” Amaranth said. “If I can’t be the one… well, you guys don’t have to worry about each other’s germs now.”

Steff laughed.

“Hon, you can’t get germs from somebody who doesn’t have them to begin with,” she said.

“Oh… I knew that,” Amaranth said. “But, you both have sex with other people, and I don’t know if you can carry germs when they don’t make you sick or not. It just doesn’t seem like we… like you should risk it.”

I shook my head. I didn’t understand their “germ” beliefs to begin with, but it hardly seemed to matter… Amaranth’s defeatism was disheartening. That word might have been completely inadequate, unless it was used with the understanding that it could literally mean “removing the heart from somebody.” That’s what I felt like… like my heart was being ripped slowly out of my chest.

“Amaranth… we still have a chance,” I said. “Mother Khaele might not…”

“She might not… but she might, and I’m going to take as good care of you as I can, while I can,” Amaranth said. “I also ordered you a healert bracelet while you were in classes this afternoon, with your vulnerability to sanctity and cold listed on it, along with your dietary needs.”

“Is that really necessary?” I asked. “The diet thing?”

“Well, what if you’re unconscious for a long time and they can’t wake you up?” she said. “Or you’re found hurt and half-starved already? I don’t want something to happen to you because you’re hungry and nobody can figure out what you need.”

“In that case, I don’t really think it’s likely a bracelet’s going to change the outcome,” I said.

“But it might,” Amaranth said. She sounded a little bit desperate, to the point where I felt bad for saying anything. “It improves your odds. That’s what this is about… minimizing the chance of something bad happening, as much as I can.”

She put her hands on my shoulders and looked down into my face… not sternly or threateningly, just looking. I thought about saying something, but she was concentrating so intensely that I didn’t want to interrupt. It was like she was trying to chisel me into her memory in as much detail as possible.

After a few moments, Steff faked a cough. She wasn’t very good at it, and so it was pretty obvious. Imagine somebody trying to imitate a cough by reading a random onomatopoeia of one off the page of a comic book, in a gruff and gravelly voice. Rather, in the elven version of a gruff and gravelly voice. That was Steff’s attempt at a discreet interruption.

A bit after that, Amaranth finally shook herself out of whatever it was she’d slipped into.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should be trying to keep a positive outlook for you… when I first started looking for the rings, I was looking for something for all of us to share, you and me and Steff, you and me and Ian… maybe not you and me and Ian and Steff… but when the package came today, after the interview… well, it was like a slap in the face. I looked at the box and said ‘What’s the point?’, and then I almost threw it away. Then I realized that would be horribly selfish, or at least self-centered… after all, I’d bought the rings for you, not for me… and I decided that I needed to do as much for you as I could.”

“Amaranth… you’ve done so much for me already,” I said. “Without you, I’d still be freaking out every time somebody looked at me. Without you, I’d probably still be Puddy’s personal punching bag and sex doll. Without you, I wouldn’t even be eating. All that has got to count for something.”

“It counts for a lot, baby,” she said. “I mean, to me… hearing you say that… it means the world. But, the problem isn’t what I can do for you.”

“It’s what I might do to you,” I said, turning and moving away. “Right.”

“This is such bullshit,” Steff said. “What can you do to her, Mack? She’s immortal and stuffed full of healing goodness… and let’s face it, if Mommy Divinest is worried about corrupting influences in her daughter’s life, she’d probably have bigger concerns than you.”

“Agree or disagree, Mother Khaele is a goddess,” Amaranth said. “She’s my goddess, in fact… my creator and the source of my power. That gives her authority…”

“That gives her responsibility,” Steff said. “For your happiness, not just your safety.”

“Steff, you’ve never been religious,” Amaranth said. “So I don’t expect you to…”

“No, but I’ve had parents,” Steff said. “A good one and a bad one. I know the difference. My mom wasn’t able to protect me from everything… and I think she would have gone crazy if she’d known what school was like… well, she couldn’t have helped it, anyway. My point is, if she’d only been concerned about keeping me safe, the smartest thing for her to do would have been for her to throw out my earrings and everything I owned that was remotely girly, and try to make me butch up a little. If she’d made me act like a straight boy all through high school, I probably wouldn’t have been attacked nearly as much… but I’d have been even more miserable than I was, and it’s anybody’s guess how I’d have turned out after that.”

“I suppose you have a point,” Amaranth said. “In a way… I mean, I think it’s a little different when we’re talking about a goddess and not a literal parent… and the fact is, even if I disagree with Mother Khaele’s judgment, I don’t really have a choice. So, it’s better to be prepared for… anything that might happen.”

I wanted to say something comforting to her… but even more, I wanted her to say something comforting to me. Selfish, huh? I had Steff, and I probably still had Ian… though our last date had been so weird it was hard to say… but Amaranth had nobody. She could love the whole world, in her way, but there was nobody in her life she shared anything special with… not even Barley, the “sister” who she’d thought the world of.

There was a quick, sharp set of knocks on the door. Kai’s voice came through it. “I hope you don’t plan to leave me out here all evening,” she said. “And don’t forget you need a shower.”

“I know!” I yelled back.

“Fucking hell, she’s annoying,” Steff said. “I always figured she’d be the nice one.”

“I’m sure she’s nice enough, if you get to know her,” Amaranth said.

“Save your condescension for somebody with a penis, please,” Kai said.

Steff and I glared at the closed door, but I went to my bag to get out my shower stuff. I really did need a shower, even more so after our shared exertions.

“Oh… I still have your money,” I said to Amaranth. “What you gave me, for emergencies.”

“Keep it,” Amaranth said. “For emergencies.”

“Amaranth, what if you need it?”

“I can’t possibly need it as much as I need to know that you’re safe,” she said.

“A gold coin’s not enough to buy safety for anybody, let alone Mack,” Steff said.

“But it could make a difference,” Amaranth said. She took my hands in hers and squeezed them gently in her own. “Baby, I need you to understand… I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to leave you. But if I have to… I want you to be prepared, and I want you to try to be happy.”

I didn’t have a response to that. How could I prepare for something like that? How could I hope to be happy if the first person who’d really cared about me in years… the person I loved the most… the person whose very touch calmed and thrilled me at the same time… how could I be happy if she was suddenly gone from my life, stripped away from me by divine decree? I’d always known the gods were against me in an abstract and general way. Having one reach down and take away the first good thing in my life… they might as well just destroy me outright.

I got out of my clothes and into my bathrobe, shared kisses with Amaranth and Steff both, and then hurried from the room before I broke down crying completely. Amaranth looked like she was on the verge herself… if I started crying, she would, too.

Kai pushed the chair inside the room when I opened the door, and then fell in beside me without a word as I headed down the hall. Feejee the mermaid came out of the bathroom when we were about halfway there, her legs in scaled form. She smiled at the sight of me. She had a nice, big, welcoming smile… a little too welcoming. I couldn’t look at all of her pearly white teeth any more without picturing them shifted.

“Oh, are you taking a bath?” she said, hurrying up to me. “I just got out, but I can go back…”

“I was going to take a shower, actually,” I said. “I’ve kind of got plans.”

“Oh. I was hoping I’d catch you in the baths sometime today, but they told me you went to class.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I do tend to do that, sometimes.”

She laughed, then pushed me on the shoulder in that kind-of-hitting way people do when they’re trying too hard to bond.

“You’re funny, you know that?” she said. She left her hand there, touching my shoulder. “Anyway, I was really hoping for a chance to talk to you… alone.” As she said the last word, her hand gripped my shoulder hard and the smile disappeared from her eyes, replaced by something cold and dark.

“I… I…” I stammered, paralyzed by the hunger stirring inside her eyes.

“Oh, whatever,” Kai said, shoving me towards Feejee’s room. “I’ll be out here. If I knock and you don’t come out…”

“Oh, she’ll definitely be coming back out!” Feejee said quickly. “We’ll be right back, seriously, and both of us alive.” She pulled me inside and closed the door. “First of all, I want to thank you for turning me on to that place,” she said. “Iona and I really appreciated a little taste of home. I was a little leery about it. I mean, it seemed wrong since we’re nowhere near the ocean, but Io convinced me that since we weren’t actually hunting… and, well… Amaranth said it would really save your bacon, so to speak.”

She laughed at her joke, but it was as forced and nervous-sounding as her laughter outside had been.

“Yeah, thanks,” I said.

“I was hoping that you might be… well, you’ve been avoiding me so much, since the party,” she said.

“That’s not… entirely true,” I said. “I see you in the bathroom, the same as always.”

“But you never want to come back here,” she said. “You never let me be alone with you.”

“I didn’t hang out in your room before,” I said. “So… nothing really changed.”

“I don’t want things to be weird between us, Mack,” she said. “I just want to be your friend.”

“Okay,” I said. “I can handle that.”

“And friends do things for each other,” she said. She sat down on her bed and patted the spot beside her. I stayed where I was. She shifted her legs and other lower parts from scales to smooth skin, and patted it again.

“If you want me to check over your essay or something, I’m a pretty good writer,” I said, resolutely looking at her face instead of her crotch. She’d changed her barbells for a pair of rings, I noticed. “I’m also pretty handy for moving furniture… as long as it’s not too breakable,” I said. It was my turn for a fakey, nervous chuckle.

She patted the bed again, frowning.

“I helped you yesterday,” she said.

“You just got done thanking me for that,” I said. “Don’t you think that kind of makes it a mutual thing?”

“Oh, I enjoyed it a lot,” she said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you would have been in very hot water without my help. I gave up one of my necklaces for you, you know that? And, besides… I seem to recall you enjoying yourself, last time… so this is sort of a mutual thing, too.”

“You just had an actual meal,” I said. “Why would you want just a taste after that?”

“I told you, I’ve got your scent,” she said. “And I like it. It’s… it’s exotic. Anyway, the meal was good and filling, but it didn’t last. You aren’t as satisfying… but I could suck on you forever, and never run out.”

The way she said it, it sounded more erotic than it was… and in actuality, it was pretty damn erotic to begin with. The nibbled-by-mermaids part was, anyway… the actual eating of people was anything but.

“I have to go, Feejee,” I said, backing towards the door.

“You’re running away from me again,” she said, her green lips curling into a frown.

“Feejee, I’ve got a date with Sooni,” I said. “And she’s not really good at sharing… if I’m not ready…”

“Go, then,” she said. “But promise me you won’t run off next time… because I think we really need to talk about this, come to some sort of understanding, if we’re going to stay friends.”

“Okay,” I said. “We will.”

She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose, then stuck out her tongue and tasted the air. Her tongue was greenish, too, and fairly large. It might have looked gross… but it didn’t. Not sticking out between her thick green lips.

“I can’t believe Celia thinks you smell bad,” she said, shivering with pleasure.

“Where is Celia, anyway?” I asked. “It seems like I’ve hardly seen her around the last week.”

“Oh, I think she’s been avoiding you, actually,” Feejee said. “After the election, she was sure you were going to be pissed at her.”

“What, because she missed it?” I asked. “Tell her I don’t care. I’ve got way too much going on to worry about who did or didn’t show up to vote me into a job I didn’t want in the first place.”

“Okay,” Feejee said. “So… are you going out out, on this date or staying in?”

“Out,” I said.

“Do you think you’ll be back tonight?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Look, I’ve really got to go… I’ll talk to you tomorrow. We can take a bath together. Baths, I mean… separate ones.”

“Okay, but I want to see you in private,” she said. “Alone. Here.”

“We’ll talk about that,” I said.

“Promise?” she asked. Her eyes were shifting, the black in the center expanding to fill the whole of the orbs. I felt my chest constricting. It was disconcerting to see, but impossible to look away.

“I promise!” I said, my hand on the doorknob. I opened it and backed out before she could say or do anything more.

I’d only agreed to talk about being alone with her… not to actually do anything. I could only hope that Feejee’s comprehension in the area of promises was better than Sooni’s.

In a large house on a cliff overlooking the northwestern coastal waters of Yokan, a man with fur and features like those of a fox stood watching the wind beat the torrential rain against his window. He could not even see the fury of the ocean below, so dark was the sky and so thick was the water against the glass.

“This storm was supposed to land a week ago,” the kitsu businessman said to a younger fox-figure who stood a respectful distance away from both him and the spectacle of the storm. “I postponed my departure in order to avoid the typhoon, when I could have been safely away had I left as scheduled.”

“You would have been away, Hoshinotama-senpai, but your wife and unborn child would have been left alone to face the brunt of the storm’s power.”

“While I am honored to be known for my leadership abilities, Kiyoshi-kun, the walls do not gain strength in my presence,” Hoshinotama said. “My lovely wife would have been just as safe in any event. What concerns me is the distressful inaccuracy. For what purpose do I pay the diviners, if their information is no more reliable than that of a fisherman watching the sunset?”

The younger fox considered before answering.

“The missionaries say that of what men propose, the gods dispose,” he said.

“Missionaries,” Hoshinotama said. He snorted. “They may bear the egg and the arms, but beneath their robes they are traders and schemers, all.”

“Certainly you are right,” Kiyoshi said. “But it is true that the precepts of heaven must overcome the premonitions of mortal creatures. Can you not see a higher purpose in your presence here, when your wife struggles to bring your child into the world?”

“I was inclined to believe she was mistaken about the signs,” Hoshinotama said. “It is weeks too early, and the omens were all auspicious. But now the skies themselves have opened up to show me the folly of trusting in omens, and I have decided that it is good. My son is impatient to be born, and he will do so in his family home, in the sight of his ancestors.”

“It will be a son, then?” Kiyoshi asked.

The older fox let out a bitter bark and turned away from the window, taking his eyes off the raging storm for the first time in over an hour.

“The same fraudulent stargazers who prophesized an earlier landfall and an uneventful birth think it will be a daughter,” he said. “I can think of no more definitive proof that a male child is on the way… can you?”

“I would not disagree with you, Senpai.”

“You must not be worried, my friend,” Hoshinotama said. He smiled thinly. “My son will of course take my place in time, but not at the expense of your own future. My star is rising. There will always be a place for you in my business. I would not forget my promise to your father, and neither could I ignore your potential.”

“Your praise quite embarrasses me,” Kiyoshi said.

“Forgive me such unmanly emotion,” Hoshinotama said. “The impending arrival of my first son… it threatens to overwhelm me.”

“My forgiveness is not necessary, but it is yours for the asking,” Kiyoshi said. “But if I may have your forgiveness in turn, then I must ask… are you not concerned? The labor has gone on for most of the day… weather or no weather, it may be time to send for the healers.”

“I have already sent for them,” Hoshinotama said flatly. “They say they will come when they can. But… I am not overly worried. There is a reason it’s called ‘labor’, after all. The struggle… it will be good for my son, I think.”

“Then there is nothing else that you can do,” Kiyoshi said.

“Except to wait,” Hoshinotama said.

“Except to wait,” Kiyoshi agreed.

The storm and the labor had both been ongoing when Kiyoshi finally retired for the night. He awoke to an eerie calm outside the house, and to the realization that his host was standing at the end of his bed.

“Senpai?”

“My wife is dead,” Hoshinotama said.

“Your son?”

The fox shook his head.

“My most sincere condolences on both of your losses,” Kiyoshi said.

“I know nothing of the raising of girls,” Hoshinotama said. “One of the household nekos recently had a kitten. She can see to the child until it has reached a respectable age.”

“At least you will always have a part of your wife.”

“Not the part that I need.”

Despite his initial apathy, the businessman found that he had a certain fondness for little Suzune, the disappointing girl who had cost him his wife. At first he had only checked on her progress in a cursory fashion, out of a sense of obligation, but now he made a point to set aside a day as often as he could—often as frequently as every two or three weeks, when business didn’t keep him away—to visit with her, and to quiz her nurse on her education and her behavior.

She was an overly imaginative child, and a willful one… but truthfully, his expectations for her had never been that high, so it was difficult for her to disappoint him.

“And have her manners improved at all?” he asked the nekoyokai servant woman who had nursed and then raised her.

She lowered her head even further and explained, in halting and fearful tones, that there was only so much she could do when she was not permitted to discipline the child.

“You will have to make do,” Hoshinotama said.

At that moment, his daughter skipped into view. She was hand-in-hand with the neko’s daughter, her constant companion, Mariko… or “Leeko”, as she rendered it. She had problems forming some of her sounds.

“Sooooooni,” Mariko said, purring her butchered version of the young vixen’s name. “You can’t.”

“And what can my daughter not do, little one?” Hoshinotama asked.

“Father!” little Suzune said, excited as always to see him. “Father, father!”

“Hello, my little darling,” he said. “I hope you do not let your companion dictate your behavior.”

“No, I didn’t!” Suzune said proudly. “She said I can’t but I said I can and I will!”

Hoshinotama chuckled indulgently. His daughter’s willfulness wasn’t all bad. If only she had been a boy…

“That is good to hear,” he said. “But, what is it you will do?”

“Grow up to be a neko like her!” Suzune declared. Not registering the look of horrified shock on her father’s face, she added, “They’re so pretty!”

The servant was dismissed immediately… immediately following the most severe thrashing she could receive without causing a scandal. Hoshinotama watched her hobbling down towards the compound gate with her daughter slung over her shoulder. His daughter was at his side, restrained by two of his staff. The child was bawling, screaming “Leeko! Leeko!” over and over again. The nekoyokai kitten was answering in a similar fashion.

The kitsuyokai father signaled to one of his men. In later years, he would never be sure if he’d done this for his daughter’s peace of mind, or for his own, but it was such a small thing that it hardly mattered.

“Send someone to the neko village to buy the child,” he said.

“If the mother will not sell?”

“Bring her to an understanding.”

“Father, Maliko says there is a neko in the village who has my name,” Suzune said. She’d learned to form her Rs properly long ago, but she still retained the childish mispronunciation of her bond companion’s name. “Suzune the neko.”

“And what, my daughter, would you like me to do about this?”

“Maliko says you can have nekos killed.”

“Maliko should not speak about kitsu affairs.”

“I don’t want there to be a neko with my name,” Suzune said. “It isn’t fair.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“I don’t want her to be there any more,” Suzune said. “Either kill her or make her leave.”

“Suzune-chan, if we treat the nekos badly for no reason, it will fall back upon us,” Hoshinotama said. “Do you understand?”

“No!” Suzune said. She stomped her foot. The noise was appalling… she’d recently taken to wearing a pair of ugly wooden sandals, and none of the servants could convince her to take them off indoors. “It isn’t for no reason! She shouldn’t get to be Suzune the neko! If you won’t get rid of her, then change her name!”

“Darling daughter, we can’t go changing the names of people who don’t belong to us. It simply isn’t how things are done.”

“Then buy her! I don’t care!” Suzune said.

“I will not buy you another neko simply to change her name.”

“Are you saying that I can’t have her?”

Hoshinotama sighed.

“But you do not even want her,” he said. “You only want…”

“I do, I do, I do!” Suzune shrieked. The words turned into a loud, sustained wail. To Hoshinotama’s chagrin, the furry little child had inherited the power of her mother’s voice, if not the facility with which to use it.

He summoned a servant to go to the village.

“Ikayup! Ikayup!” the small striped cat girl shouted, running up to the bench where the pale spotted one sat reading.

“What is it?” Ikayup asked resignedly, not looking up from her book.

“I saw a girl who looked like you!”

“That’s nice,” Ikayup said. “I’d like to finish reading my book, please.”

“What is it?”

“A method of presenting pages of written material bound within a cover.”

Her sister didn’t understand exactly what Ikayup had said, but she understood that she was hearing a put-on and not a proper answer.

“Tell me, or I’m telling mother,” she said.

“It’s a Chung romance.”

“You can’t read Chung.”

“I can’t yet,” Ikayup said. “But I almost can.”

“Why do you want to read another language anyway? You read too much anyway.”

“I read because I want to,” she said. “Because I don’t want to spend my life as a servant.”

“Oh. Guess where I saw her.”

“Who?” Ikayup asked.

“The girl who looks like you.”

“No.”

“Just guess!”

“I don’t want to,” Ikayup said.

“Do you want me to tell you, then?”

“Not really.”

“Inside a television!” her sister exclaimed.

That got Ikayup’s atttention. She let the book close around one clawed finger and looked at her sister disgustedly.

“Where did you see a television, tiny liar?”

“Mother took me with her when she went to clean the big houses,” the younger neko said. “I got to watch the television while she dusted, and there was a girl who looked just like you, with a weird splotch on her eye and everything.”

“They aren’t splotches, they’re spots,” Ikayup said. “And some people think they’re lucky.”

“Mother says next year you can go cleaning with her,” the younger cat said. “I’m jealous. You’ll get to watch TV all the time.”

“I’d rather just read…” Ikayup started to say, only to be interrupted by a shrill, screeching scream from a passing carriage.

“Stop the coach! STOP THE COACH!”

Ikayup scowled in irritation. It was easily the most horribly piercing, grating voice she’d ever heard, even including that of her sister. She was happy to see that the coach did stop, if only because that stopped the screaming. If she went her whole life without ever hearing another spoiled, rich kitsu bitch throwing a tantrum like that, she’d consider her life well-spent.

She opened her book back up and buried her face in it once more, thus missing the coach’s door opening, and the figure who stepped out of it…

“Hey, Mack, we’re in… oh,” she said, stopping both speech and stride when she spotted the nekoyokai.

“Sooni thinks I need a handler so I don’t run off,” I said.

“What… Baby Kai-Kai?” Steff asked. “What’s she going to do, throw her binky at you?”

Kai said something in broken elvish. Steff burst out laughing.

“What is so funny?” Kai demanded.

“Kitty!” Steff replied. “Threaten me again… it’s adorable.”

“Steff, you aren’t helping,” I said. “Kai’s just trying to get her degree.”

“Don’t patronize me,” Kai said. “In fact, don’t speak to me.” She walked past us to the door of the room she unofficially shared with Suzi and Maliko, putting her ear to it and then to the room she shared on paper with Sooni. Apparently satisfied that none of the other yokai were about, she took her bag back from me and pulled out her book. “I just want to read in peace.”

Steff looked at me like she wanted my permission to say or do something. I gave her an imploring look… I didn’t want to make Kai’s life any more difficult than it already was, and if this insane assignment from Sooni gave her a chance to have a few hours’ peace, I could put up with a little misplaced bellicosity.

“Was it her, Steff?” Amaranth asked, popping out of my room. “Oh, hi, baby! And… you brought Kai with you?”

Kai ignored her, slipping past her and through the doorway without touching her.

“Hey!” Two protested from inside the room. “You can’t come into the room without… bags don’t go on the floor! Hey, you’re supposed to look at people when they talk to you.”

“Calm down, sweetie,” Amaranth said as Steff and I hurried towards the door. “Kai, why don’t you put your things on Mack’s desk?”

Kai had plopped herself down in the corner and was ignoring Amaranth as she had Two. Amaranth turned and looked at me for an explanation.

“She’s here to make sure I don’t ‘forget’ about the date with Sooni,” I said. “Sooni’s orders.”

“Oh,” Amaranth said. She turned to Kai. “Well, if you feel you have to be here, you might as well make the best of it, right?”

“I am,” Kai said, not looking up from her book.

“I just mean, we might as well get to know each other a…”

“No,” Kai said.

“Well, there’s no reason you have to be rude,” Amaranth said.

Kai said nothing.

“Let’s just leave her alone, okay?” I said.

“She didn’t ask to come in here,” Two said.

“Well, maybe Mack gave her permission,” Amaranth said.

“It’s my room, too,” Two grumbled. “Nobody asked me if I wanted a tiny rude cat person in my room. Nobody told her she could sit in my corner.”

“Two, that isn’t your corner,” I said. “And maybe I don’t want her here either, but…”

“Okay,” Two said. She turned to the corner where Kai sat reading. “Leave now.”

“Two…” I said.

“Did you hear me? Leave!” Two said, storming in closer to Kai. I felt a warning tingle of fear and excitement on the back of my neck… it was like seeing an impending collision moments before it happened.

“Oh, this is going to get ugly,” Steff said. Amaranth threw her arms around from behind me, surrounding me with her loving warmth while Steff ran and grabbed Two by the arm as Kai, still not looking up from her book, raised one hand and popped out her claws. I felt something constricting inside me, like a serpent coiling before a strike… but just for a moment before the scent and feel of Amaranth overwhelmed it.

“Hey!” Two protested as Steff pulled her back and grabbed the book out of Kai’s hand. Kai hissed angrily.

“Here’s the thing, Kai-Kai,” Steff said. “There’s a very simple rule about threatening Two: don’t. The rule is enforced by penalties up to and including horrible burning death, and since we don’t want our friend burning down the dorm when there are camera crews lurking around, we’re going to have to ask you to leave.”

Kai sprang at Steff, one hand in front of her like a spear. Steff twirled aside.

“Give me my book,” she said.

Steff dangled it up over her head, then tossed it at the open door. It had barely left her fingers when Kai snatched it out of the air.

“I am not leaving,” she said. “Nothing you can threaten me with is going to change my mind, so you might as well leave me alone and don’t touch my book.”

“Kai, you already left me to go to the bathroom and when I went into class,” I said. “And you said you’re going to leave when I change, so what’s the big deal?”

“I will set my own priorities, thank you,” she said. “Maliko and Suzi were unlikely to wander into the history building while you were in class.”

“You don’t seem concerned that they might decide to come back when I’m getting dressed,,” I pointed out.

“Less concerned than I would be about being in the same room as you, naked,” she said. “And it’s a smaller risk than leaving you for the whole time. Now, if you will please excuse me, I’d like to…”

“If you just want to sit and read, Kai, why don’t you take a chair and sit out by the door?” Amaranth said. “It’s the only way in and out of the room, so you could honestly say you had Mack covered the whole time. You won’t have to listen to our conversations if you don’t want to, and Two won’t have to deal with an, uh, unexpected visitor in her room.”

Kai glared at her, as if she resented the injection of logic into her martyr-like sulking. Then she turned to me.

“Don’t forget to shower,” she said. “I am supposed to make sure you are ‘extra clean in your lady-parts’.”

She reached for the nearest desk chair, which happened to be Two’s.

“You aren’t taking my chair,” Two said. “You didn’t ask.”

“Take mine,” I said, pulling it out for her.

“Say ‘thank you’,” Two said to Kai as she dragged the chair out the door. Kai ignored her.

“Hush, Two,” Amaranth said. “She’s fine.”

“No, she isn’t,” Two said. “She’s rude.”

“I don’t think she’s having a very good day,” Amaranth said.

“Look, can we not talk about Kai?” I asked. “The situation’s dealt with, so let’s move on.”

“Okay,” Amaranth said. She gave me a long, slow kiss, which I accepted with gratitude.

Two started straightening up the room, picking up my book bag and grumbling about being ordered to stay out of her classes. Evidently she’d reached a point in her development where she could process conflicting sets of instructions with poor grace instead of shutting down in the face of them.

“Mack went to her classes,” she said. “And she’s like my sister. If she got to go to classes, I should have been able to, too. That would have been fair.”

“Well, Two,” Amaranth said, “don’t you think that Mack is just a little bit better equipped than you are, when it comes to things like handling attention from the media?”

I watched Two think hard about it, her face going through all the little twitches and tics, before she answered.

“No,” she said, finally. “She isn’t.”

Amaranth sighed and gave Two a hug.

“You can go to classes on Monday,” she said. “If the circus hasn’t died down by then, we’ll… I don’t know… make the guards escort us. I know this is a public institution, but it’s ridiculous that they should give reporters the run of the place while we’re prisoners in our own dorm.”

“Okay,” Two said.

“How about you, baby?” Amaranth asked me. “Did you get to your classes okay?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“No problems with reporters?”

“I ran into a couple, but… uh… I got rid of them fairly quickly,” I said. I got an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach when I thought about Loretta, and how her line of questioning had turned from fairly innocuous to pointed.

Amaranth frowned, biting her lip.

“What?” I asked.

“I hope you didn’t say anything rash,” she said. “I’m pretty sure Lee didn’t want you talking to the media.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “But… we didn’t talk about the arbitration case.”

“No, but public opinion going against you isn’t going to help,” she said. “What did you talk about?”

“I’m not sure we should be discussing this in public,” I said, glancing at the door. I didn’t know what kind of hearing the nekos had, but even human ears were more than up to the task of listening through an open door..

“Hon, if you were talking to a reporter, I think privacy’s already gone out the window,” Steff said.

“What did you say, baby?” Amaranth asked.

“It wasn’t what I said so much as the way she was asking questions,” I said. “Some things came up… like my diet, and, uh, Steff’s habits.”

“The alchemical thing?” Steff said. “I’m clean, except by prescription, and if they want to make a big deal over my mood potions, they can take a flying fuck at a dragon.”

I didn’t say anything. If they were calling Steff a necrophiliac on the news, she’d probably see or hear about it herself sooner or later. That was assuming she hadn’t seen it already. I honestly didn’t know if it was true or not. She’d never been shy about her fascination with dead bodies, but… she was a necromancer. Just because she treated them like playthings didn’t mean she… treated them like playthings.

“Well, I suppose it’s too late to call the arrow back to the string,” Amaranth said, squeezing me tightly. “Just… be more careful, baby, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“I told you,” Two muttered.

“Yeah, they don’t need your help making us look like a bunch of freaks and monsters,” Steff said, putting her arms around both of us. “They’re more than capable of doing that on their own.”

“So, what did you guys do all afternoon?” I asked, glad to leave the topic of my impromptu interview behind.

“Oh, we hung out,” Steff said. She grinned. “Put a sock on the door for a while.”

Amaranth giggled.

“Steff is so much more relaxed now, it’s amazing,” she said.

“After our date, I feel like I’ve got an enormous load off my… chest,” Steff said, with a smirk and a wink. I blushed. “No, seriously, I’m feeling pretty good. It’s not just you, of course. The potions are helping… things are going well with Viktor, though he’s in a ginormous funk today…”

“What’s he in a funk about?” I asked.

I didn’t know what, if anything, Steff had told him about our date, either the disastrous parts or the more personal ones. I couldn’t begin to guess how he might react to talk of our love for each other, or of my attempts to get Steff to talk about other options for her future. He was just too alien, too outside my experience for me to really know how he’d take something like that… but it didn’t seem like too big a stretch to see him as the jealously possessive type.

“The networks got a hold of his mirror,” Steff said. “They were after him for a comment all yesterday evening, when he’d been looking forward to peace and quiet. He turned it around to face the wall eventually, but the damage was done… he just wasn’t in a mood to ‘create’.”

“That’s too bad,” Amaranth said.

“Gwynedd tried to cheer him up,” Steff said. “Did you know she has a nickname for you now, Mack?”

“Is it ‘Cunt’?” I guessed.

“Oh, yeah, I guess you have heard it,” Steff said.

“I really don’t like her,” I said.

“You just need to get to know her, baby,” Amaranth said. “It’s hard for her, since she can’t really communicate.”

“She communicates pretty well with her hands and feet,” I said. Amaranth was frowning at me. “What?”

“Baby, did she hit you?”

“Uh…”

“Answer,” she said, giving me The Look over her glasses.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, ducking my head.

“When?”

“When I was, uh, doing the thing with Viktor,” I said. I didn’t want to mention the specifics with Kai stationed outside the door.

“Last weekend? A week ago?” Amaranth asked.

“Not quite a week,” I said.

“What are you supposed to do when somebody’s abusing you, baby?” Amaranth asked. “What did I tell you?”

“I know!” Two said.

“Hush,” Amaranth said. “What is the rule, Mack?”

“It didn’t seem like a big…”

Amaranth put a finger on my lips, and I hushed up.

“Two, please excuse us. Steff, be a dear and close the door behind her,” Amaranth said. “I guess I haven’t been a very attentive owner. It seems we’ve been getting sloppy in the area of your discipline, baby, and I’m afraid it’s starting to show.”