Teddi Lundegard was an empathic telepath, which I imagined made it really easy for most of her patients to let her know what was going on in their lives and how they felt about it… they could just open up. My mind was hostile terrain to living, mortal creatures who were of the material plane. Any direct contact with a plane-touched mind could have adverse effects on a subtle artist, but a demon’s mind contained elements that were directly inimical to mortal life.

I was mortal enough that indirect contact… like picking up thoughts and feelings leaking from my head… was largely safe, though I’d been told it could be uncomfortable to be around me when I had a lot on my mind. Shielding against such background noise was a natural knack for most telepaths, but something that could impede the mental healing process.

Teddi had a magic item that worked like a filter. It didn’t keep everything out… that was the difference between a filter and a shield, I supposed. With guidance from some think tank back on the coast she’d learned to do a sort of indirect scan… was how she’d explained it, though I was pretty sure that a gorgon’s gaze actually did transmit through reflections and the mirror thing was a myth that dated back to before it was common knowledge that gorgons needed to turn their petrifying glare on in the first place.

The session rooms in the mental healing office were designed to be comfortable and relaxing, and as a result they were homier than the dorms most of the university students lived in, which hadn’t been. Over the summer they’d evidently been remodeled. The room that Teddi had used had been something like a large and open living room, with the feel of a cabin or lodge complete with comfortable furniture and a great big fireplace. She was still using that room, or a part of it. It had been cut in half.

It seemed like she’d opted to give up more of the office part of the office in order to keep the sitting area comfortable.

I’d opted to sit on the floor, and Teddi had done the same. She’d cut her hair short over the summer, and without so much weight holding it down the remainder had gone all curly. I complimented her on it because it seemed like an easy way to start talking.

“Thanks,” she said. “You look like you’re growing yours out?”

“I guess maybe by default, at first,” I said. “Now I kind of feel like I might like to see it a little longer, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“Well, you know, most salons have a glamour mirror that can show you what it would like, and different ways to wear it,” Teddi said.

“What I really mean is that I wouldn’t know how to do anything with it,” I said. Teddi nodded. The subject of my grandmother and her thoughts on hair, vanity, and utility were an old subject between us. “Though I guess… well, I’m becoming friends with this G&D student who does effects with her hair. I don’t know if she does regular styling or not, because with her own she goes for sculpting and bright colors… but I could ask her advice. And Two could help me. She’d love that.”

“You say that with less… resignation… than you might have before,” Teddi said. “As I recall, you weren’t a fan of Two fussing over you.”

“No,” I said. “But she’s mostly over her phase of wanting to make me into a copy of her. She still treats me like a doll, but… I don’t think she has a dichotomy in her head between people and things. She believes she was just a thing before she was freed, but becoming a person didn’t make her stop being a thing, if that makes sense.”

“I’m sure it makes sense to her,” Teddi said. “It doesn’t need to make sense to me.”

“It makes a kind of sense to me,” I said. “She’s taking me shopping for clothes this weekend. Nicki… that’s my new friend… might be coming, too. I have to ask her. But, anyway, Two’s a bit better about things like compromise now.” I gestured down at my shirt. “Like this top. It’s me… like me, embellished. But still me.”

“She got that? It’s nice.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not something I’d wear day-to-day, especially when I’m in a fighting class five days a week, but it’s something that I can at least see myself wearing on purpose.”

“You’re suitemates now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I think it’s going to work out better in the long run than being roommates, though we’ve kind of got to find a balance, I think, between living on top of each other and only seeing each other at meals.”

“Maybe you could join some of the groups she’s involved with,” Teddi said. “I can’t think of a campus bake sale I saw last year that she wasn’t part of.”

“I don’t think she belongs to all those groups,” I said. “She just likes bake sales.”

“Still, that’s something you could do with her,” Teddi said. “But I know what a difference it can make, being adjacent to someone instead of sharing space with them… up through last year, we all shared offices here. Now I have my own little sanctum.”

“Yeah, I noticed you’ve been remodeling,” I said.

“Well, the mental healing department’s budget has about doubled in size,” she said. “But demand has more tripled or quadrupled, so…”

“Isn’t that kind of… alarming?”

“I don’t think anything has happened to make people need our services more in particular,” she said. “It’s more that people are more aware of the opportunity, and less reticent about seeking help. That’s a good thing. We’ve been somewhat… underutilized for most of the time I’ve been here. That’s one reason I didn’t mind taking on the cases that my colleagues felt less comfortable about handling. That, and I thought everyone was entitled to the same care. But it wasn’t a hardship, it was just work… the kind of work I’ve wanted to be doing all along.”

“In retrospect, it does seem a little weird to wait two days to get in,” I said.

“I hope you would have said something if it was urgent,” Teddi said. “I can tell you’ve been talking around something since you sat down… I mean, if I wasn’t empathic, the fact that you said something about my hair would have been a dead giveaway. I don’t mind playing catch-up, Mackenzie, especially when we haven’t seen each other for months. But is there something important?”

“Yes,” I said. “But when I contacted you, iit didn’t seem too… time-sensitive. I mean, it’s an ongoing issue, but by definition that means it’s not going anywhere.”

“You know that things can get worse if you ignore them.”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “This isn’t exactly something I can ignore… I guess I’m looking for something more like a consultation than our typical healing sessions. I was actually wanting to talk more about mental defense than anything else..”

“Your father?”

“Yeah, he’s been back,” I said.

“Well, like I’ve told you before, the kinds of defenses you’re looking for… they’re really more your domain than mine,” she said. “The subtle arts aren’t magic like you know it. I can form a shield of thoughts around another person or even a space like a room, but that’s my thoughts… when I’m not there and not focusing on them, it’ll fade. There’s no way to weave that into an enchantment that will make it stay.”

“But magic can affect thoughts in similar ways to your thought-shield,” I said, pointing to the circlet she wore.

“It can,” she said. “It’s just not my particular area of expertise. I did look into it a little, in case that the assertive dreaming and forced waking you practiced didn’t do the trick. There are potions that prevent dreaming, but dreaming is a part of the mind’s natural healing and defenses… going too long without doing it will make you more vulnerable to outside influences. There are amulets that encourage good or peaceful dreams, but I haven’t found anything that suggests this would prevent someone from coming into said dreams. There were some more possibilities, like astral seals, but they didn’t seem necessary… did he bother you more over the summer?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I went a long time between visitations… anyway, it’s not him alone that’s brought me here.”

“You’ve been having other visitations?”

“One,” I said. “Or visitor, multiple visitations. It’s… complicated. When I contacted you, I was looking for a way to tell if someone had been in my head. Preferably an early warning system, but even something that let me know for sure, after the fact…”

“So you’re not sure if this new visitor is real, or just a dream?”

This was the part that I’d been reluctant to broach. Dee was also a patient of Teddi’s, and while that could make it easier to explain the owl-turtle thing, we could also get into awkward territory because of confidentiality issues.

Also, Dee had made it sound like Teddi didn’t quite believe in the owl-turtle thing as an entity in its own right. It was possible that hearing confirmation from a second person would assuage her doubts, but it was also possible that she’d maintain her existing skepticism would win out.

“You know Dee… Delia Daella… right?” I said.

“I know Dee,” Teddi said.

“You know about her, um… owl-turtle thing?”

“You’ve been dreaming about it?”

“No,” I said. “Not dreaming about it, really, as such.”

“…I take it that Dee has shared with you some of her theories about its nature,” Teddi said.

“They aren’t just theories, Teddi,” I said. “It’s been in my dreams… and sometimes maybe skulking around them. I’m pretty sure of that fact now, but the confirmation comes from a questionable source, so it wouldn’t hurt to be sure.”

“Okay,” Teddi said. “Let’s maybe start at the beginning.”

“That would actually be last year, when things got weird and the ambassadors from Ceilos were here to protect Dee and the other underworld students in Harlowe Hall,” I said.

“Just before you started seeing me,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “The underworlders had this creature from the outer planes who was…”

“The big, sightless fish thing,” Teddi said.

“Yes,” I said. “And one night it turned its attention to Harlowe Hall in a way that sort of… messed up the rules of dreaming in a way that made spontaneous dream-sharing possible.”

“…my instinct is to say that that’s impossible, but I guess I don’t know what sort of effects a cross-planar distortion might have,” Teddi said. “I am skeptical of the existence of the owl-turtle thing as more than a construct of imagination because as a telepath I’m aware that dreams aren’t an actual ‘place’ or ‘thing’, they’re just thoughts… with all the weight of thoughts and usually with less coherence. The idea of a dream object or creature having any persistence outside of a dream… well, it’s the same problem you’d have with a psychic enchantment.”

“Yeah, the owl-turtle thing actually pretty much said that itself,” I said. “That’s there no ‘world of dreams’ it exists in or anything like htat. But it has the coherence that a very literal and coherent mind could give it. Two’s mind is… okay, I think if you could look inside her skull you’d probably see something that’s a lot like a brain. But her mind was made by a human, and it was made to be very… task-oriented. So if you or I dreamed and in the dream there was… a filing cabinet in the corner of the room… it might just be a thought that says ‘there’s a filing cabinet there’ and we just sort of fill in the details, but Two’s mind would actually create a filing cabinet and define its properties.”

“That sounds plausible, from what I know about golem psyches,” Teddi said. “Which I admit is not much. Audra and my family’s other house golems aren’t as mindful as Two. Still, though… I know you’re not really in a position to know, but do you think it’s possible that Dee herself is reaching out subconsciously in her sleep?”

“Do you think she’d be able to do that without a reaction between our minds?” I said. “Extraplanar influences, demonic tendencies… I’m pretty sure you know better than most people what my mind can do to a telepath who wanders in, and Hissy was awake when she tried to read me.”

“Yes, but Dee’s a more powerful and better trained telepath,” Teddi said. “Hissy’s a more efficient communicator, but that would work against her… she could have had as many as four or five separate channels open between her mind and yours.”

“How much of it is Dee acting under some kind of heavy psychic impression from Two and how much of it is an actual thing in itself, I really don’t know,” I said. “But for now it’s more useful for me to take it at its word that it’s real. And that night was the first time I encountered it… and the only time, until recently.”

I gave her a rundown of the way my dreams had been going, including the cat-and-mouse games between the owl-turtle thing and the man, and the effects they’d apparently had on my sleep those nights.

“I have to tell you something and I want you to know I’m only saying it because I’m being completely honest,” she said.

“I, uh, kind of expect that,” I said.

“Well, it’s been a few months,” she said. “Anyway, if you were anyone else and I weren’t more aware of your history, I’d be wondering about your fantasy life right about now.”

“My fantasy life involves things like getting rich for designing the next big TV, or being collared… or knights riding around on motorcycles, though it’s been ages since I had time for that,” I said. “This stuff… night time cloak-and-dagger, tangling with Law agents… it’s not the sort of thing I’d ever wish for. I mean, there have been times I’ve wished for my life to be more exciting, or to involve some sort of, you know, conflict… who doesn’t want to be a hero?”

“I think some people would prefer to be a villain,” Teddi said. “But most people want, at least, to be a pivotal figure in the story of their lives.”

“I don’t want to be the bad guy, but I really don’t feel particularly heroic,” I said. “I feel… well, actually, I just feel really put-upon. I’m sure that sounds… I don’t know what it sounds like. But I feel like I’m being intruded upon and inconvenienced for a bunch of stuff that I really… okay, I actually know how to explain exactly how I feel.”

“Okay.”

“Ever since she got back, Steff has been telling people this story about me fighting some sort of dread lord or something,” I said. “It’s really just Steff being Steff… and in a pretty innocuous way for Steff, but I find it more frustrating than I probably should. It’s just the idea of my school year and my social life being interrupted because somebody’s got some kind of evil master plan that I have to foil… in a book or TV show, it would all kind of neatly fit together, but my life doesn’t have room in it for fighting evil. So it’s like, I don’t know what my father wants and I wish I didn’t have to care, because I don’t have time to deal with him. I don’t want to ‘vanquish’ him or come up with a plan to stop him, because I don’t think I should have to.”

“I think that’s valid,” Teddi said.

“But he’s my father.”

“That doesn’t make him your responsibility,” Teddi said. “When he manipulates you, he’s making himself into your problem, but there isn’t an actual tie of obligation between the two of you. And it’s fair to resent him for that.”

“You know, it’s funny, but I actually worry about that,” I said. “I hate him and I’m sure he’s evil, but now that we’re talking about it… I feel kind of petty about resenting him, and it’s hard to feel petty and fair.”

“Well, he is a person,” Teddi said. “Not necessarily a good person and not a person you need to have in your life. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that he’s a person, or turn off your normal emotional responses to people. That doesn’t mean you owe him anything. You can feel bad about cutting someone out of your life but it doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do, just like you can feel sorry for someone without being obligated to help them.”

“He keeps trying to convince me that he has nothing but my best interests at heart,” I said. “But he’s… pushy. When he pretends to care about me, it reminds me of the old comedy cliche where the guy is told to be quiet and he goes on a monologue about of course he’ll be quiet when he’s told to be quiet. You know?”

“I do,” Teddi said. “You’re talking about someone who shows every sign of ignoring your boundaries and no sign of respecting you. You’ve never asked me if I agree with your decision to shut him out, but I support it completely. Whatever you have to do to establish a boundary…”

“I’m not sure you’ll agree when I tell you what I did,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“I asked a guy I sort of know with access to his government file to slip it to my grandmother,” I said.

“Do you regret it?”

“No,” I said, and if I sounded surprised it was because I was. “You know, I was pretty sure that once I started explaining this to someone outside my life I’d be like ‘What have I done?’, but really… no, I don’t regret it. It was something to do, a way of striking back. I did it.”

“Do you think it’ll accomplish anything?”

“At the very least I hope it will give him something to worry about other than digging around in my head and trying to run my life,” I said. “I don’t know if anything will come of it. It’s like trying to hit someone with a double ricochet. But I felt like I had to do something… I was angry at the time I decided to do it, but it was a pretty calm rage, considering. I don’t think it’s a revenge thing.”

“I think we might want to explore that further, but I did have a thought pop up from my head and I wanted to share it before I forget,” Teddi said. The wording was unusual, but professional telepaths tended to be more specific about where thoughts originated. “Depending on the exact channel that’s being used to enter your mind, something like my filter circlet might impede entrance… it’s not exactly a cheap or common magic item, but I don’t have a pressing need for mine outside of my sessions with you. And it is mine, not the office’s. If you would like to borrow it for a few nights to see how it works… I think it’s got a good chance of keeping out Dee’s owl-turtle, because one way or another it’s using her natural telepathy.”

“How about my father?”

“I’d file that under ‘it could work’,” Teddi said. “From what you’ve told me about him, though, I think his way in is deeper and more… well, I suppose I’d say ‘primal’. That’s what’s going to make him hard to keep out.”

“Then I think I’m going to decline,” I said. “If I could keep both of them out, I would, but the owl-turtle thing is more benign, and it makes him nervous. He doesn’t understand it, and that scares him a little. When I contacted you I was hoping to get some help in dealing with it, but now… now I’m starting to think about making a deal with it.”

“Is that really wise?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Dee’s pretty sure it means well, though. This isn’t a matter of the lesser of two evils or the devil you know… I definitely know my father better, even if I don’t know him well. It’s more of a choice between evil and not evil, or the devil I know and the… anomalous dream-thing I don’t. But the owl-turtle thing just wants to exist, and it doesn’t need to hurt anyone to do that. That, and Dee thinks it might be some sort of representation of self-awareness.”

“Sounds like her theories have evolved,” Teddi said. “She told me it was an avatar of annoyance.”

“It’s… hard to like,” I said. “Dee thinks that’s because Two didn’t like it, so ‘unlikeable’ is part of its make-up.”

“I don’t mean to treat your life like it’s a subject for a paper, but this is pretty interesting,” Teddi said. “I think I might be able to help you more if I knew more… and maybe I could help you and Dee both if I actually observed this owl-turtle thing. Would you mind passing along a message that I’d like a chance to talk to her about it some more?”

I wondered at the fact that Teddi had doubted Dee’s reports of the owl-turtle thing but I’d apparently trusted mine. That probably had little to do with her or me personally, though. It was just a matter of one person telling her a crazy, impossible thing being easier to write off than two.

“I don’t know how she’ll take that, but I can pass it along,” I said.

“That’s all I can ask,” Teddi said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you actually enjoy that?”

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

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

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

“So you are into it?” she said.

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

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

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

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

“No,” I said. “It was all his idea.”

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” she said. “Um… oh.”

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you making fun of me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You gave me this shirt,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian gave Amaranth a meaningful look, and she smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s our pseudowench,” Steff added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could definitely like this.

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

Submission.

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

Was it possible that I was overlooking an easier way?

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

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

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

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

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

I worked the way that I worked.

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

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

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

“Actually, no,” I said.

“Whatever you took for it agrees with you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like what?” I asked.

“Up,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Him,” I said.

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

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

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

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

Or I had been.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why isn’t he Plan B?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?” he said.

“Agent Kent? It’s Mackenzie Blaise.”

“I know,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Won’t you be asleep then?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was never updated?”

“We never recruited her.”

“She was an imperial agent,” I said.

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

“Like that actually means anything to you guys.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This can’t come from me,” I said.

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

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

“She’ll be looking for a motive.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’ll cost me time.”

“Minutes.”

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

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

“And you came out the other side unharmed.”

“I came out the front door, actually.”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

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

“Do you want to talk about it?”

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

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

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

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

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

“That doesn’t get me anything.”

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

“And you’re saying I won’t.”

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

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

“You put a trace on me,” I said.

“That only took a minute,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” I asked.

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

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

“It’s me,” I said. “I promise.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A father knows,” he said.

“So how did you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I kept breathing. Slow, steady.

“What?” he asked. “What do you know?”

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

“What were you doing?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not so far as she knows.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Didn’t think so,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that?”

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

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was not disappointed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She giggled.

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

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

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

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

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

“No, ma’am,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“Good luck, ma’am,” I said.

“Goodnight, baby,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

Luckily I had been right, though.

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

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

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

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the idea.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I like her,” I said. “She’s fun.”

“I mean… never mind.”

“No, what?”

“I mean, do you like her?” Ian asked.

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

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

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

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

“What do you think about her?”

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

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

“I meant as a person,” I said.

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

“That seems pretty perceptive,” I said.

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

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

“Do you?”

“You think Steff’s right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, my life is pretty complicated already.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You have a problem with that?”

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

“No,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like what?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I like your top,” Two said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, Two,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is ‘Mouse’ a… um…”

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

“I like Mouse,” Two said.

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

“It’s true,” Two said.

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

“That’s submission,” Amaranth said.

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

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

“Is Shiel her dom?” Nicki asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So… you noticed?” she said.

“Nicki did,” I said.

She laughed.

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

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

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

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

She sighed and took the paper from me.

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

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

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

“What?”

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

“Okay,” I said.

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

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

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

“If that happens, I’ll ask,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“I’ll have it back to you tomorrow.”

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

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

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

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

“I will,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

“And screaming, of course.”

“Of course.”

I didn’t want to go to the extremes of the old timey TV boxes that had indirectly inspired my aquarium theme because that would not tastefully blend in to a modern living room, but I thought maybe adding some kind of trim around the edge of the box wouldn’t necessarily go amiss.

After class, Nicki and I walked out together, since neither of us had anywhere to hurry off to.

“Oh, you want to take the scenic route?” Nicki said as I headed down the long irregular curving hallway that seemed to be the only way out of the Emily Center.

“Funny,” I said.

“Ooh!” Nicki said.

“What?” I said.

“I just had an idea for how to salvage the drawing of you,” she said. “You could make it into a feature of the fish tank.”

“But I don’t want a naked image of me to be a feature of the fish tank,” I said.

“No, I mean, you could say that it will display the owner’s face,” Nicki said. “Then yours is just like a placeholder to demonstrate the concept?”

“So, the idea is that everybody who buys it would have a tiny naked picture of themselves hidden inside their living room whenever they aren’t using the TV?” I asked.

“…it’s possible I didn’t think that one all the way through,” she said.

“Making the entire image customizable makes a lot of sense in the long run,” I said. “If I were making an actual product, I’d be focusing on that as the actual goal and then have a few pre-made ones to choose from. But we’re going to be graded on our design skills, and for the aesthetic effect I’m going for there’s a lot more to work with inside the box than outside it.”

“I guess that makes sense,” NIcki said.

“Speaking of aesthetic effects… I guess you decided to keep your hair orange?” I asked.

She’d glamoured it up for the dance, but while she’d relaxed the shaping and given herself a little trim it was still the same vivid color it had been on Thursday. She’d told me the spell didn’t cost much to maintain, but it did have to be maintained.

“Well, I think it’s more interesting this way,” she said. “I mean, you seemed to like it, so…”

It was weird to think that she was doing things to impress me… it might have been flattering, but I hated to think that she was altering her appearance to suit what she imagined my tastes to be. Okay, as a glamourist, that wasn’t really as drastic as it might have sounded, but I still felt it would be better if she would relax and just do what she wanted.

“Well, it is cool,” I said. “It’s more that I didn’t really notice it before you glammed it.”

“Well, yeah, exactly,” she said.

“I mean, you’re a creative person,” I said. “You can probably do lots of things that are cool with your hair… and you don’t have to all the time. You’re not going to like fade into the background if your head’s not on fire. I noticed you because you talked to me and we got along.”

“Sorry,” she said. “But I do fade into the background? You know a gnome ran into me one time?”

“That’s… kind of impressive, in a way,” I said.

“I mean, she seemed distracted,” Nicki said. “But still…”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Anyway… if it makes you feel any better about the mermaid, I don’t think most would recognize at a glance that the body is yours. I mainly recognized it because I’ve seen you drawn in that style.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Though I don’t spend a lot of time looking at my body… but, yeah, that’s why I think I’ll be okay if I just alter the face. Even if I make it less distinct… but how many people do you think have seen Steff’s sketches, though?”

“I don’t know,” Nicki said. “She let me flip through it at a rainbow meeting… I said I was looking for tattoo ideas, and I kind of was, but it was really more of a conversational gambit? Like, I’d dared myself to talk to three new people that week, I mean really talk and not just say hi or something, and so I had to find something to talk to them about. I thought being interested in her sketches might break the ice, but it kind of backfired… she handed it to me and said I could look through it if I wanted to and walked away to talk to someone else.”

“She wasn’t trying to blow you off, I’m sure,” I said. “She probably felt embarrassed and didn’t want to show it.”

“Oh, I figured that out, eventually,” Nicki said. “I mean, from what I could tell, it seems like she’s more likely to show off with her knives than with her drawing, which is nuts because she’s crazy good with a pencil.”

“Well, she learned how to fight in a mostly-human class,” I said. “That makes it a little bit easier for her to see her natural grace than competing with a bunch of full-blooded elves. It’s funny, you don’t seem to have much trouble talking to me.”

“Don’t I? Well, I spent the whole first day trying to work up the courage,” she said. “I’m lucky Professor Stone encourages collaboration or else I’d probably still be doing it. Poor Professor… do you think he’s in trouble?”

“With the clan or the school?”

“The clan,” Nicki said. “I mean, that’s his mom’s clan, right?”

“I think so,” I said. “But I don’t think they’d hold an attempt against him, when it failed and the thieves were caught. Dwarves can be unforgiving of theft and people who fail to prevent it, but I think they accept the existence of thieves as a fact of life. He might have been in an uncomfortable position between the university or the imperium and the clan about how to deal with the thieves. The fact that they came to a private bond agreement means there was an agreement, but who knows how much negotiation and pressure it took to come to that point?”

“I guess,” Nicki said. “So… see you Thursday?”

“Definitely,” I said. “But, you know, you’re welcome to hang out with me outside of class. I mean, there doesn’t have to be a specific event or anything. We eat dinner at the Arch pretty much every day, for instance… I’ve got the last class of the day in our group, so it’s usually after I get back from my melee class.”

“And it’s okay if I come to?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Like… tonight.”

“Any night,” I said. “You don’t even have to check in or anything… you can just plop down at our table.”

“I might do that sometimes,” she said. “But I wouldn’t want to intrude…”

“I’m pretty sure everybody in the group likes you,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll come by tonight, then!” she said.

“Great!” I said.

At the front door, she kissed the tips of two of her fingers and touched them to the door frame as she went out. It was a weird kind of affectation, but a lot of the G&D majors seemed pretty fond of the unconventional building.

“See you tonight, then, I guess,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

It was only when she started heading off that I started to think about the downside to adding another person to our circle… like, we’d have a lot of backstory to explain if we wanted to talk about the owl-turtle thing or anything else that was going on.

I made it through the gauntlet of Callahan’s melee class by keeping my head down and powering through it. I was glad that it was my last class of the day… there would be days when I would be really worn down by the time I got to it, but it gave me plenty of time to get over a bad beginning.

The design drawings that Steff returned to me at dinner really were sketches, but they were good sketches, with intricate shading and a lot of detail work. Most importantly, she had absolutely nailed the look I was going for.

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re a lifesaver.”

“I prefer the term ‘deathkeeper’ or ‘soulbinder’, but I guess ‘lifesaver’ is halfway accurate from a certain point of view,” Steff said. “Just remember our deal.”

“Remember your part of it,” I said. “Somewhere safe and private.”

“Right,” she said. “Do you think there’s any chance you could do it in slow motion?”

“Burn my clothes off… in slow motion?”

“Isn’t there some kind of elemental manipulation you can do?” she asked. “Like, a slow burn?”

“Yeah, if you want to watch my clothes get kind of singed,” I said. “Slow burn equals cool burn.”

“Well, maybe we’ll start slow, then, and build to a jaw-dropping climax,” Steff said. “Are you going to have a problem with me capturing some images of it?”

“Of me being full-on demonic and then naked?” I said. “It’s hard for me to imagine two things I would enjoy the thought of floating around less than that.”

“It won’t be floating around,” Steff said. “Just my own one private copy, for personal use. Archival purposes only.”

“You’re getting a live show,” I said.

“You know I’m not picky about that part.”

“Yeah, well, it’s what you agreed to and what you’re getting,” I said.

“But I am definitely getting it, right?” Steff said. “I mean, these fulfill my side of the bargain? Let’s be explicit about this.”

I looked at the pictures. Where’d I’d originally suggested a merman, she’d drawn a mermaid… this was probably her idea of a sick joke, but it was mild from her. Anyway, I couldn’t really complain since I’d put a merfolk in there to begin with. I hadn’t even thought about it. It was just one of those things people put in aquariums.

The only real problem was that the mermaid was naked and human-looking from the waist up. That was accurate to their usual habits and presentation, but might present some marketing difficulties.

“Can you do something about her nipples?” I asked. “I don’t want to do the shell bra thing because that’s playing into a stereotype.”

“Right, let’s not stereotype the anthropophagous monsters we’re using to evoke warm fuzzy feelings of enchantment-under-the-sea-ness,” Steff said.

“Okay, I wasn’t thinking when I put the merman in, but I’d still rather stay true at least to how they present themselves to the surface world,” I said. “Just maybe put some jewelry on her, or reposition her hands or something?”

“How about this?” Steff said, and she pencilled in a stand of seaweed plastered to her chest, and then some similar ones around the rock the mermaid sat on so it didn’t look so random.

“That’s perfect,” I said. “Yes, definitely, you’ve earned your reward. Quest complete.”

Steff’s grin was priceless.

“You have no idea how happy I am to hear that,” she said.

Monday night was relatively untroubled, but though I didn’t remember even a tiny fragment of a dream I woke up with a certainty that I’d been observed while I slept. The feeling was too strong for me to write off and was with me as soon as I woke up, but it had even less foundation than my suspicions of the night before. This was the worst thing about dream problems: they made even less sense than real ones.

There was something almost taunting about it. I could force myself out of a dream if I knew it was happening. I was good at recognizing dreams, and as far as I knew I had a perfect record for spotting the ones that were being sent by an intruder. But if nothing happened that I could feel or identify while I was asleep, I could do nothing about it… allowing me to realize my headspace had been violated after the fact just seemed to be rubbing that in.

I acknowledged the possibility that I was being paranoid. Not in feeling like someone had been watching… that certainty had came out of nowhere. If it wan’t true, something must have planted it as a suggestion.

But it was possible I was being paranoid in ascribing motives. Maybe whatever method of penetration was being used couldn’t be done without leaving some kind of trace that would be noticed when I woke up.

Unless that was what someone wanted me to think…

I was inclined to blame my father over the owl-turtle thing, because the thing didn’t seem like the type to creep around and play this kind of head games. That wasn’t to say that it couldn’t be manipulative, but its conception of itself as a champion of self-awareness meant it would probably be less sneaky about it.

That was assuming it was on the up-and-up. I was more inclined to suspect my father, but there was something satisfying about laying the blame at the owl-turtle-thing’s feet.

Of course, it was possible that some third force was impinging on my sleep, knowing that there were two ready-made suspects for the blame to fall onto…

If just two nights of this was enough to have my head whirling around like this, I didn’t want to find out what a week or two would do to me. But I decided that no matter how I felt this morning or the next one, I was going to push all concerns about what may or may not be going on in my head to the back of the shelf.

I couldn’t be certain of anything on my own, and I couldn’t do anything about it, so there was no point in getting worked up about it.

I did check my a-mail as soon as I could Tuesday morning. I found a reply from Teddi asking me if seven on Thursday evening would work for me. I might have liked something sooner, but I hadn’t asked for anything specific or said it was urgent so I sent her a message back saying that it would work. I also sent an a-mail to Lee Jenkins to tell him I would like his lawyerly opinion on the letter that Professor Ariadne was apparently circulating.

With all that was going on in my head, I had a harder time paying attention in my lore and history discussion class. It was a participation-based class so I managed to throw out the answer to a couple of pretty obvious questions Professor Hart threw out to try to encourage discussion, but I had a hard time offering or taking in anything substantive.

I got my focus back in my first afternoon class, when I walked in and noticed two things that were missing. The dwarf-made model for the coronation sword that had been given pride of place among the various items Professor Stone had on display for inspiration was gone, and so was the girl who’d been a little too interested in it.

My heart sank. Trying to steal from dwarves was dangerous on a level that bordered on suicidal, but I wasn’t a big fan of disproportionate punishments. I’d almost had my own ass sold to a fairly deranged slaver as a result of a lopsided deal with a dwarf… my own carelessness, but it hadn’t left me with a positive opinion of the traditional dwarven standards of fairness and justice.

“I’m afraid the coronation sword has been removed ahead of schedule,” Professor Stone said at the start of class. He sounded genuinely regretful, though that could have meant a lot of things. “Our rare opportunity to study it up close will probably be all the rarer for a few generations. I did not become a teacher because I enjoyed lecturing, but let me take this opportunity to say that seeing a beautiful work of art should inspire you to create something of equal magnificence.”

“I heard someone stole it,” Nicki whispered to me. There were other murmurings around the room that I imagined were of a similar content.

“Just to prevent any rumors: it was not taken by thieves though, in fact, an attempt was made,” Stone said. “The sword’s protections were sufficient to stop the thieves, one of whom was apprehended shortly thereafter and released on a private bond. The vice-chancellor assures me that the other would be dealt with internally and then expelled.”

Knowing the vice-chancellor as I did, I couldn’t help but feel like this might be less benign a fate than it sounded. I wasn’t the only one who looked at the vacant spot where the overly inquisitive Ms. Anderson had been.

“To forestall any further rumors: Ms. Callie Anderson was not one of the thieves, but as I understand it she had at least a tenuous connection to some of them,” Professor Stone continued. “I believe she has withdrawn on a temporary holiday for her health, pending the negotiation of a satisfactory cure. Let us say no more on the subject! You should all have some designs for me, I think. I’m a little behind in my preparations for today, so instead of collecting them and moving on, why don’t you form into groups by table and present your designs to each other? Collect written feedback from at least two people, and then decide what changes, if any, you’d like to make. When you hand your work in Thursday, explain what you changed or didn’t change, in regard to the feedback, and why.”

Nicki and I immediately turned and handed our papers to each other.

“I bet some of the dwarves here tried to steal it,” she said. “I mean, they’re boy dwarves, so they’d be the enemies of the Schwertgriffs, right?”

“I don’t think it works like that,” I said. “I mean, male and female dwarves fight each other, but I don’t think they jockey for position or go for symbolic or strategic victories. Anyway, the Underhall went on some kind of lockdown over the weekend.”

“That could really go either way, though,” she said. “I mean, if they were working with the thieves, they’d be expecting retaliation.”

“I don’t think Professor Stone would have brought the sword into disputed territory.”

“Please,” Professor Stone announced to the class in general, “focus your attention on the subject hand. There is little to be gained in idle speculation, and there is nothing moe I can tell you than what I have already said.”

“What does ‘private bond’ mean?” Nicki asked me, a little more quietly. “Is that like out on bail?”

“Sort of,” I said. “It means there’s an agreement between a person and someone with standing in a case, where they’re basically not pressing charges on a certain condition. They used to be really common but it’s really easy to abuse them and turn it into extortion, so now they’re only allowed in certain conditions and have to be done through a tribunal. I’d guess in this case it means someone’s paying a hefty ‘fine’ to Clan Schwertgriff, possibly annually.”

“Wow,” Nicki said. “And the other person only got expelled.”

“Well, we only know that they weren’t caught and arrested,” I said. There was no reason to burden her with my suspicions. “They might be paying, too.”

“I guess,” Nicki said. She looked at my paper. “Wow, this is really good… this is… it’s not Steff’s art, is it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“Oh, it’s just weird that she drew something and nobody’s like all impaled or decapitated or something,” Nicki said. She pointed to the mermaid sitting on a rock. “I’d expect her to at least have a fish hook through her cheek or something.”

“I take it you’re familiar with her ouvre,” I said.

“Well… I know she has a lot of pictures of you.” She blushed. “When I said I’d seen you naked… I haven’t actually… I just… um, anyway, that’s how I recognized her drawing style, because of the mermaid. That’s how she always draws you. You know, minus the seaweed strands.”

“What do you mean, the pose?” I asked. I’d never made a habit of flipping through Steff’s sketchbook, but I’d seen her doodling me in a variety of positions, none of which looked half as comfortable or pleasant as perching on a jagged rock would be.

“No, not really the pose, more your face and the shape of your body and, um, breasts and stuff,” she said.

When I looked at the mermaid, I was surprised I hadn’t seen it sooner… and once I saw it, I could not unsee it. Steff had modeled the mermaid off of me. No, that was putting it too mildly: she’d used me as the mermaid. It was a drawing of me with a tail for my legs and a bit of seaweed obscuring my nipples.

“Oh, fuck!” I said.

“Please, class, let’s keep a certain level of decorum in our discussions,” Professor Stone said, exactly as if it hadn’t been any one person who had just screamed profanity. This transparent attempt to not single me out left me feeling more embarrassed than if he’d just said something to me.

“You didn’t notice?” Nicki asked.

“I didn’t think to look at her face,” I said. “And her hair’s all floaty… mine hasn’t been even this long for all that long, and I don’t spend a lot of time looking at my own boobs.”

“No, you’ve got much better ones to look a… oh, I didn’t mean it like that!” she said. “Yours are very nice. I mean…”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Well, at least you have time to fix it,” Nicki said.

“Yeah… oh,” I said, and it occurred to me why Steff had wanted me to explicitly validate the deal with her. I hadn’t thought that was weird because we were both used to the idea of affirmed assent.

But it meant if I noticed her insertion and wanted her to change it, she could refuse… or hold out for something else. She’d given the pictures back to me knowing it was possible I wouldn’t catch it at all until it was too late and I had to turn them in as they were, but that probably didn’t bother her.

“Sorry,” Nicki said.

“What for? If you hadn’t said anything, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.”

“But now you’re gonna be all mad at her,” she said.

“Less mad than I might have been if I noticed it when I got it back,” I said. “Or if Professor Stone noticed and commented on it. Anyway, I did kind of twist her arm into doing this. I mean, I made it worth her while, but maybe I should have taken the hint that she’s not fully comfortable with the idea of having her artwork submitted for a grade.”

“I don’t think we’re being graded on artistic ability,” Nicki said. “And she sure isn’t, since she’s not in this class.”

“Yeah, but she still probably feels exposed,” I said. “I’ll apologize for pushing her and ask her nicely if she’ll alter the mermaid. If not, I’ll change it a bit myself. Make the face a little less distinct. It won’t look as good, but like you said, we’re not being graded on artistic ability.”

“Um… since you’re going to change it, do you want me to write down that the mermaid looks like you as my feedback?” Nicki said. “Because then you’re half done.”

“No,” I said. “The last thing I want is to leave a paper trail.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’d better find something else to put, then.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We both turned our attention fully to each other’s projects. Her sketch for her mirror was a simple picture of a standard public mirror with slightly more rounded corners and a dotted outline around it showing the margin for illusions around it, next to a picture of the same mirror with a fancy scrollwork design around it and one where the mirror was wreathed in flames. The scrollwork in particular was pretty sharp.

She had additional pictures showing a mirror with a face in it going “Blah, blah, blah” and vital statistics about the person hovering in little bubbles around it. That was a cool idea, but I thought it was a little busy and the position of everything seemed random. For my written feedback, I suggested something more condensed and to the point hanging beneath the mirror, with the possibility that the user could expand it to get more information showing up like as sidebars. It was less quirky, but arguably more useful.

Once we finished with each others, we had to find someone else to exchange papers with. I ended up with a guy who looked like he’d started from the same sort of ground that Nicki and I had both started with, a plain and functional sword that was illusioned up to be all fancy. He’d gone one step further, though, and dropped the real sword entirely. His product was a hilt that could project an illusion around itself, complete with a phantasmal blade. Taking Professor Stone’s advice, he’d presented the facts about his product as advertising copy.

The Phanblade 250 is the ultimate weapon in non-lethal self-defense. It’s light. It’s portable. It’s safe indoors and out. Never injure yourself or your loved ones even temporarily with a personalized white list. Customize your blade and trade designs with your friends.

Phanblade 250 may not be effective on mindless constructs or undead. Damage restrictions may apply.

He had a page and a half of notes that sketched out how the enchantment would function, in general terms, which wasn’t actually required but it seemed like a good idea now that I was looking at it. Technically until we got to the product we actually had to produce we could probably hand in ideas that were completely unfeasible as long as the reasons for that had nothing to do with aesthetics, but I had a feeling that Professor Stone would prefer that we stuck to things that could actually come about. Using the television’s own illusion spells to show an aquarium seemed pretty self-explanatory, but I decided to add at least a brief mention in my own notes about it.

For my feedback on the Phanblade 250, my first thought was that I would have more use for it personally if it wasn’t limited to swords, but telling the guy that he should make something else instead didn’t seem to be actually addressing the product in front of me. Then I realized that if he simplified the actual physical part of the hilt… drop the cross piece, just basically make it a short grippy stick… then it could become part of an axe handle or a staff or the haft of a mace as easily as it became a sword hilt.

I wrote out some brief words to that effect and handed it back.

“Thanks,” he said, looking at them. “I think I’m probably going to stick with the sword hilt, though. It’s simple and iconic.”

“A full sword hilt is simpler than just a straight grip?”

“I mean the concept is simpler, easier to graps,” he said. “Easier to sell people on. That’s my instinct, anyway.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

I looked at what he’d written on mine.

Cool idea, but using the creator’s face for the naked mermaid seems a little weird.

“Is there any chance I could get you to write something else?” I asked.

Some of the missing people might have just partied too hard over the weekend to show up for their early classes on Monday, but I had a feeling that at least some of them were more pointedly absent.

Of course, it was possible that there was some overlap there… someone who didn’t take the substitute teacher seriously or wanted to assert themselves against her authority might be more likely to blow off a day’s class. I really kind of hoped that her main critic at least would decide to drop it entirely, because I wasn’t looking forward to the continued disruption to the class if Acantha had to continue to deal with his bullshit.

Acantha acknowledged the absences only very briefly, saying, “I will look into what policies my colleague Professor Leclerc held regarding absences and decide how it would be best for me to deal with them. I will have a handout prepared by Friday that will address this topic, and will be available to discuss it either immediately after class or during my listed office hours. You will be happy to know that under no circumstance will any of your valuable classroom time be devoted to the topic.”

The rest of the class went smoothly and was entirely on-topic, which was awesome. It was amazing but not really surprising how much difference it made to only have people who were ready to listen and learn in the classroom. I hoped it lasted forever.

The class itself didn’t, though, and when it ended Acantha sent a whisper to my ear.

“If you have a moment, Ms. Mackenzie, please nod once and stay at your desk.”

This took me by surprise, but was less shocking than it might have been if I hadn’t been used to dealing with elven whispers. So I nodded and took my time packing up my notebooks and materials. She glided over and closed the door behind the last lingering student who wasn’t me. I’d never really paid attention to the sound of the classroom door closing before, but I thought I heard a second click.

That sent a shiver of apprehension through me. People wanting to be alone with me in a locked room was rarely a good thing.

“Is something the matter?” I said, trying to sound calm. I stayed standing at my table. If she had some kind of problem with me, I didn’t want to do anything to escalate it.

“Possibly,” she said. “Are you acquainted with an Ariadne, called Einhorn?”

So she probably wasn’t going to pull out a wand and blast me, but I still didn’t like where this was going. Ariadne Einhorn was unusually bigoted against demonbloods for an elf, apparently because she’d lost her husband to a demon. From the way Acantha referred to her it didn’t sound like they were friends or even knew each other, but she might have heard that Professor Ariadne had had a problem with me or vice-versa. If she’d heard the story through the elven grapevine she might have got a very skewed version of it.

“Yes,” I said. “I was briefly in one of her classes, but we had a personality conflict.”

“I received a letter from her via intracampus post,” Acantha said. “The subject of this letter was you and the danger she believes you pose. There was no threat or suggested course of action; it was couched as crucial information. I do not know if I received it because I am one of your instructors, or because she expected some greater sympathy from me because we are both elves, or if she has simply taken to writing letters to the entire faculty in the hopes of stirring up some support. I was uncertain of what the most appropriate course of action was, so I sent copies of the letter to the head of the history department and the college of enchantment, and the office of the chancellor. The original is in my dimensional vault… I am afraid I do not know if this is a purely administrative matter, or one for civil or criminal law, so I felt it best to preserve it somewhere safe.”

“Could I get a copy of it, too?” I asked. “I don’t think there’s anything criminal here, but I’d like to show it to my attorney anyway.”

“Of course,” she said. “My vault is accessible only at certain arbitrary intervals, but I will have it for you by the end of the week.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I hope you don’t get any trouble for rocking the boat like this.”

“It helps to not see oneself as a passenger on the boat,” she said. “In my ordinary professional life, I am forced to make certain sacrifices and compromises to get along, never mind getting ahead… here, I have little to gain from playing the game but a small measure of temporary comfort, so it is with some measure of personal pleasure that I take the opportunity to do what seems to me to be the right thing.”

“Well, I really appreciate it,” I said. “Thank you.”

She smiled, and it was the first genuine smile I’d seen on her. Elves have such control over their faces that they can look disconcertingly similar to statues. When she stands in front of the class and puts on her placid smile, it’s easy to see that it’s a put-on.

“Well, I have work to do, and I’m certain this isn’t your last class of the day,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, gathering up my things. Because I felt the need to say goodbye or something but couldn’t figure out a way to say it that wouldn’t sound awkward or force, I added, “See you Wednesday.”

“Yes.”

Before going to lunch I sent an a-mail to Teddi asking for an appointment to see her, which I preferred to reflecting. I always felt so awkward talking to people in mirrors, even more so than talking to them in person. It had taken me several sessions with Teddi to figure out why this was true even though it was in theory a step more removed from an actual face-to-face conversation. The reason was that when I was talking to someone who was there, I could avoid looking at their face. In a mirror conversation, that was really obvious and just looked weird.

I hadn’t realized this because of anything Teddi had said to me or anything that I’d said to her. Rather, it had hit me because her office was laid out in such a way that we could have a conversation without having to be facing each other but not pointedly looking away. It was amazing how much of a difference that made in my ability to just open up and let words fall out of my mouth.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t have been looking forward to my first afternoon class, as I was taking the local hazards course out of necessity rather than preference, but I really liked the teaching assistant and we were in the process of getting a virtual tour of the campus environs courtesy of an interactive geomantic survey map of her invention.

The actual map was large and immobile, but she had a sort of virtual crystal ball set up in the form of an illusion cast over a table that could display a cylindrical section of the map.

She and a white human woman in a modern-style robe were fussing over it when I came into the room. The area over the table was occupied with a solid gray column wrapped in red dwarven runes. A dwarf was under the table lying with his back on a roller, tapping the table with a segmented metal rod.

This didn’t look good, but since there was obviously applied enchantment going on I drew closer.

“No, it still says access is denied,” the wizard was saying into a hand mirror. “Are you sure you’ve carved the new permissions?”

“This is some bullshit,” Eloise said to the dwarf, and at least partially to the world at large. “I hope you know that. I have a contract.”

“Your contract’s not with me,” the dwarf said.

“You’re still being paid.”

“Yelling at me isn’t going to make it go faster,” the dwarf said.

“I’m not yelling,” Eloise said, and amazingly she wasn’t.

The human wizard hugged her mirror in close and said to Eloise, “They want to know, is there anything in your matrix that would possibly be interpreted as hostile?”

“Nothing in my matrix’s been changed,” she said. “This is something on their end, I’m telling you.”

“Well, yes, obviously,” the wizard agreed. “Clearly they’ve changed something in their protections, but we can’t expect them to be forthcoming about their security procedures…”

“Why not? I’m paying them extra for space I can scry into,” Eloise said. “If I can’t scry into it, I’m not getting what I paid for. Don’t dwarves take that thing seriously?”

“She says nothing hostile,” the wizard said into the mirror.

“It could be a compatibility issue,” someone said, and when both women and the dwarf turned to look in my direction I realized it was me.

“Oh, hell, she’s right,” the dwarf said. “This thing is lousy with druid magic.”

“Excuse me?” Eloise said. “My magic has never been a problem before.”

“And it wouldn’t be, if your guys downstairs are only using modern magic,” the dwarf said. “That’s why I didn’t think of it sooner. The older dwarf stuff doesn’t use ‘magic’ as you know it at all for enchantments, and is completely incompatible with druidry. It doesn’t get used a lot any more because the new stuff is more flexible and better designed, but if something spooked them and they wanted to beef their security up in a hurry they might have just thrown up everything they had available, and a lot of it would be badly in need of updating.”

“Oh, yeah, that would do it,” the wizard, nodding.

“And they didn’t think that might cause some problems for their paying customer?” Eloise asked.

“Lady, you’re talking about students,” the dwarf said. “A lot of them are enchantment students, but they’re only a little bit older than you and they haven’t necessarily had a lot of experience in all the messy real-world interactions like this. Hell, I’ve been at this for almost forty-nine years and I almost didn’t think of it.”

“That’s great, but what am I supposed to do?” Eloise asked him.

“I’ll go shoot them a message and let them know that whatever they’re doing, they need to put a hole in it,” he said. “They won’t necessarily be happy about it, but if you’ve got a contract like you say, they’ll honor it.”

“How long is that gonna take?”

“To send the message? Just as long as it takes me to get to a warded room,” the dwarf said. “For them to comply? No idea, sorry.”

“Thanks,” Eloise said. She blew a puff of air out of the side of her mouth to push a dangling lock out of her face. “I’m not angry at you, Fred… just frustrated.”

“Be frustrated at the dumbasses who triggered the alert,” Fred said.

“I’m already beyond frustrated with them, believe me,” Eloise said.

“No, I think we’re done here,” the wizard said into her mirror. “Thank you so much for your help. Bye-bye!” She shook the mirror and looked at Eloise. “Do you need anything else from me?”

“No, and thanks,” Eloise said. “Told you it was on their end.”

“It was worth checking out,” she said. “Tell your professor I said hi!”

“Hi yourself,” Professor Swain said, though the departing enchanter didn’t seem to notice that. I hadn’t noticed the professor’s presence, either. Gnomes had a way of retreating from the foreground like that. “So, are we going to have our presentation?”

“Maybe,” Eloise said. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ll be on my way and try to get the carts rolling for you,” Fred said.

“Thanks,” Eloise said to him. She turned to me. “And thanks for speaking up. Who knows how long it might’ve taken otherwise.”

“It was just a shot in the dark,” I said. “A lot of stuff about the history of enchantment talks about the peculiarities of dwarven enchantment before modern wizardry… I wasn’t even sure there was a specific issue with ancient dwarven magic and druidry, I just knew there was a lot of finicky bits about what different things could go together in the old days.”

“Yeah, come to think of it, I do remember all that being mentioned as a reason for why there aren’t many dwarven druids still these days,” Eloise said. “I just didn’t think it would bite me in the ass. Pardon my Elvish… I’ve probably been swearing up a storm in front of you. That’s probably a bad habit for a teaching assistant.”

“Oh, you’re fine,” Professor Swain said. “She’s a grown woman and she’s not a student for another twelve minutes yet.”

“You do have a habit of showing up bright and early,” Eloise said.

“I like to keep my classes spaced out so I never have to run anywhere,” I said. “Running and me doesn’t really mix. What was that about an alert?”

“Dwarven business,” she said. “Nothing that should concern you unless you’re dumb enough to put your hands on something that isn’t yours.”

If she hadn’t put it that way, I might have thought that someone had tried to breach one of the secret entrances to Underhall, the dwarven complex beneath the university… but the talk about people’s hands on things that didn’t belong to them made me think of something else.

There was an important and historical dwarf-made sword on temporary display in the design building. I’d suspected a group of delving students with more ambition than good sense might have been planning to try to snatch it for bragging rights or the sheer experience of it. As much as I had good reason not to like these people, I kind of hoped that I was wrong in my suspicion, or that the “alert” was because someone had overheard them planning rather than them being caught in the act.

Dwarves took their privacy and property rights very seriously.