I could find no fault in her reasoning about how the platinum had ended up in there, but that aside there was no doubt in my mind that she had been the one who earned the windfall. I couldn’t have put on an erotic display on my own if my life had depended on it… or rather, even though my life had depended on it.

It wasn’t like I could argue with her when she said she didn’t want it, though. Anyway, it seemed like her own legal status was a little murkier than she’d thought. If she put a bunch of money in the bank, would it belong to her, or to Paradise Valley?

And what would all this mean, in terms of any future we might have together? I’d assumed that most of the potential pitfalls there would come from me… from my nature, from what I am, but if Amaranth was not wholly her own person then it might be that she wasn’t free to plan her own future at all.

On the other hand, maybe Paradise Valley needed an enchanter.

There wouldn’t be a lot of money there, but assuming they could tolerate me… and that I could tolerate whatever stray divine energy might be permeating the place… it could bring its own form of security.

It was something more to think about, but we had literally years ahead of us to figure it out in. There was no sense getting too worried about what a farming commune would make of our relationship when we’d already resolved to stand up to a goddess, if need be.

“You got all quiet, baby,” Amaranth said. “Well, quieter… you’re not thinking about the money, are you?”

“No,” I said. “The future.”

“Good,” Amaranth purred. “I’ve been thinking more about the present lately, myself. We’ve got our share of problems in front of us… but there’s a path through them, if only we take the time to find it.”

She smiled at me, and we both reached for each other’s hand, then walked out together.

The atmosphere in the club had changed. This had probably begun before, but it was really noticeable. There were more people, and a larger number of them were doing more than standing around and talking or watching. More little scenes were being played out all around us and it seemed like the people who weren’t explicitly doing anything were now more in character or in scene or whatever. A lot of the same faces that had looked polite or friendly were now blank or stern or commanding or adoring.

It was the people who were in obviously submissive postures that I found myself looking at… the looks on their faces were nothing like the haunted, hunted look Mercy’s half-demon slave had worn. I saw contentment, security, excitement… not all three at once, at least not in equal measure. Some of them looked more relaxed than I could have imagined feeling in a social setting, even one that didn’t involve fetish gear and public displays.

“Come on, baby,” Amaranth said, tugging my hand. “Let’s see about getting you fed and getting back to Ian. I’m sure you’ll get a chance to meet some of these folks, if that’s what you want.”

Meet them?

Amaranth simply handled it in her usual direct and cheerful fashion.

“Hi!” she said to the bartender. “Do you sell virgin blood?”

“Well, we have some,” she said. “It’s private stock, though. We have regular blood in human, elven mix, and dwarven.”

“Elven mix?” I repeated.

“Pure blooded elves don’t have a lot of reason to sell their blood,” she said. “But our elven mix is sourced to individuals who are at least fifty percent elven. Would you like to try it?”

“Um…” I said, stalling mostly to block out the surprisingly strong urge to say yes. I’d had a little taste of Steff’s blood before… it hadn’t exactly been nutritious, as far as that went, but it had been sort of interesting.

“Some people like elven blood because they think it extends the lifespan,” the bartender said. “Would you like to try it?”

“No, thank you… we don’t drink blood recreationally,” Amaranth said. “Do you think that we could make an inquiry with whoever owns the virgin blood? We might be able to come up with an interesting trade…”

“Oh, I don’t think they’re here tonight,” the bartender said. “Big crowds aren’t exactly…”

“That will be fine, Berenice,” the unmistakable voice of Mercy said. Her body caught up with it a moment later. “Javier’s a friend of mine. Give them a glass from his cask and I’ll replace it.”

“Yes, Mistress,” the bartender said.

“You should probably let me pour it,” Mercy said. “Otherwise this could get… unfortunate.”

“How about I pour it?” Amaranth said.

Mercy held the small barrel out to her, but the smirk on her face stopped Amaranth midway through reaching for it.

“If you think that flesh you’re wearing isn’t human enough to set her off, then by all means,” Mercy said.

“Be my guest, Mistress Mercy,” Amaranth said.

Mercy took the little crystal goblet and glided down towards the end of the counter with it. She popped open the cask and poured out a small amount of dark liquid. I was moving without an invitation, from herself or myself.

There had to be some preservation magic in the barrel for it to just pour out like that… if nothing else, it was warmer than it had any right to be. Warm and delicious and sweet on my tongue.

I missed Mercy moving around me to go talk to Amaranth, but when I’d finished feeding… and felt a really pleasant sensation of relief spreading out through my body… they were consulting quietly at the other end of the bar.

“Baby,” Amaranth said to me when she saw that she had my attention. “I need to go discuss a few things with Mistress Mercy. Wait right there for me until I return, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. If I had been closer, I might have asked what she was up to or why she thought it was a good idea to go off with Mercy, but it would have felt horribly improper to have that conversation across the distance, and she had told me to wait where I was.

The air in the club smelled the same as it had before: all sweat and sex and blood, with magic crackling around. I closed my eyes and drank it in. The blood had relieved a need within me, but if anything, it had only awakened a stronger urge to feed.

Everything around me smelled delicious. I couldn’t do anything to block it out.

Well, I could just enjoy the smell… and I did.

I knew Amaranth was coming before she reached my side or spoke. Her scent cut through the crowd like a ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds. I caught another fleeting impression of her name-trace… maybe it was always there and I just didn’t notice.

“Okay, baby,” she said. “There’s a coach coming for us… the dispatcher said it wouldn’t take a minute. Let’s wait until we’re in it before you ask, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I didn’t have to ask what she meant or why. Having a private conversation about an elf was a tricky proposition.

We stopped just outside the main floor so Amaranth could give me back my street clothes, which I put on quickly… it was so cold in the hall, I didn’t know how the hobgoblins could stand to go shirtless. I zipped up my coat and threw as much energy as I could into shielding myself from the cold. I seemed to have a bunch of it to spare… the insulating spell snapped shut around me like a bear trap, shutting out the icy draft so completely that it seemed like someone had slammed the door at the top of the stairs.

Once outside, we didn’t have to wait. A commercial carriage pulled up to the curb right as we got outside.

“So… what did she want?” I asked Amaranth.

“What doesn’t she want?” Amaranth said. “From me, though… well, she was actually offering me a job.”

“I thought she didn’t want to tempt divine wrath,” I said.

“Oh, not that… that’s what I thought she was going to be driving at, at first, but no, she wanted me to work with her half-demon slaves,” Amaranth said.

“What?” I said.

“She thinks that I might have something she’s missing,” Amaranth said. “That’s how she puts it… ‘something she’s missing’. I could think of a few things, personally. I told her no, of course… I would like to think that I could improve their lives a little by showing them the sort of kindness that Mercy doesn’t… but, well, I couldn’t give them the help they really need as long as they’re Mercy’s slaves. And I have a responsibility to you, and to myself. She’s talking about a full-time position of indefinite length… she said she’d pay me enough that I wouldn’t need to worry about school, but I’m not going to MU for money.”

“That sounds like a euphemism for slavery,” I said, remembering Mercy’s remark about not having employees.

“Well, nymphs can’t be enslaved, legally,” Amaranth said. “Which just makes that thing at the door more infuriating. She said it would be a ‘contract job’. Even if I had no other reasons to refuse, I’d want to read that contract very carefully. Anyway, it wasn’t an entire waste of time… I took the opportunity of being alone with Mercy to tell her that in future visits to the club, I’m not going to appreciate it if she bothers my submissive.”

“You… Amaranth, what?”

“What, baby? It needed to be said, and it was probably better said in private,” Amaranth said. “You don’t want her attention. A shiny coin and a bit of blood that we didn’t ask her for doesn’t buy her access to you.”

“But she’s… she’s…”

“What is she?” Amaranth said. “A member? You saw how Master Celyddon flushed when he realized he’d been disrespectful. Mercy is a law-abiding citizen, Mack. No matter how deadly and dangerous she is to people in chains that the law won’t protect from her, she can’t really do much to us. I doubt she’ll even throw any petty, lawful retribution our way… it’s in her interests for us to like her, no matter how unlikely that is. I doubt she even sees it as a slight against her. She saw an unexpected opportunity to get closer to you and she tried to take it.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said. “She seems like a bad person to underestimate.”

“I really hate to say it, but she seems like a bad person, period,” Amaranth said. Her hands twitched, clenching and unclenching at her sides. I was surprised she wasn’t digging her nails into her skin, as she usually did when she was this upset. “If she isn’t going to respect our boundaries, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to go play at the club again. Not that there aren’t other issues in that place… but then, the membership seems pretty diverse. There’s good as well as bad there. Anyway, baby, I did learn something that you might find interesting.”

“Disturbing, maybe, but I’m really not that curious about Mercy,” I said.

“It’s not about Mercy,” Amaranth said. “The dispatcher from the carriage company? She was a Ceridwen.”

“So, it’s a surprisingly popular local name,” I said. “I knew that.”

Even sitting beside her, I could picture the way Amaranth’s face twisted up in a frown as I finished talking.

“You sure got cranky in a hurry, missy,” she said. “If wearing street clothes makes you forget your manners, maybe we need to have a conversation about your wardrobe.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” I said, dropping my head.

“Anyway, the interesting thing wasn’t that her name was Ceridwen,” Amaranth said. “I told her that I liked the name and asked her where it came from.”

“And what did she say?” I asked.

“Well, she said it was a family name… yes, I know you already knew that, baby, don’t look so impatient,” she said. “She said it was a family name, that was handed down in honor of an ancestor who fought to preserve faerie groves… probably that same woman that Ian found in the history book, I’d guess.”

“It is interesting to have that confirmed, more or less,” I said. “But that still doesn’t really explain why the family is still honoring her.”

“No, but I didn’t really want to dig any more,” Amaranth said. “She was pretty forthcoming to begin with… I didn’t want to seem rude by keeping her in the frame for longer.”

“Well, thank you for asking for me,” I said.

“You’re very welcome, baby,” Amaranth said. “And good job, thinking to say that… anyway, I’m all in favor of healthy curiosity, but I still don’t understand why this is so important to you.”

“I… I don’t really know if I can put it into words any better than I have,” I said. “I’m just trying to understand.”

“Puddy’s behavior isn’t likely to be explained by something that happened long before she was born,” Amaranth said.

“I know that,” I said. “Intellectually, I mean… but… well, I think I’d still kind of be interested even without Puddy. This is history. Before I came here… before I got all this craziness in my life… this was the sort of thing that interested me. The little untold stories, the puzzles. Anyway, I think it’s good to have something to think about that’s not so dire, you know?”

“Well, like I said… curiosity is a good thing,” Amaranth said. “But there are other things you could be focusing on. You do have actual schoolwork…”

“Which this kind of ties into,” I said, then realized I’d interrupted her. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Amaranth said. “And then there are your relationships with other people.”

“Those already get a lot of my attention,” I said.

“Well, I get a lot of your attention, baby,” Amaranth said. “But Ian kind of has to fight for it, it seems like… I mean, yes, we did have legitimate obligations tonight, but the fact that he was willing to skip his match to come here should tell you something.”

“His match?” I said, and then a memory popped into place: the day before, Ian had asked me if I could come to his match. That had been when I’d first mentioned having something to do… all of that had eventually led to my decision to let him in on what was happening at the club, but in the process I’d forgotten what had started it all.

“Well, I assumed he had one… there was an arena night on the schedule,” Amaranth said. “Did he not mention anything to you?”

“Yeah, he did,” I said. “But I forgot about it… he didn’t mention it at all when he decided to join us.”

“He probably thought you might feel guilty,” Amaranth said. “You saw how determined he was to keep you on target. I’d say it was a wise decision… you really didn’t need another distraction today.”

“No, ma’am,” I agreed.

“He really has done a lot to reach out to you these past two days,” Amaranth said. “If you really like him, baby… and I’m pretty sure that you do… then I think you need to start reaching back.”

I nodded.

“I don’t just mean tonight,” she said. “Though, the physical connection is important. He went above and beyond today… and so did you, baby. You both deserve a reward.”

“I kind of feel like I already got enough out of it,” I said. “I mean, I fucked up, right? That’s why we had to go there… because I did something stupid. And now not only did I avoid the consequences, but I got a ton of money in the process.”

Amaranth laughed.

“I hope that wasn’t the only thing that you found rewarding about this evening,” she said.

“No… no, ma’am,” I said. I blushed. “Far from it.”

“Listen, baby… I hope you don’t take away the wrong lesson from this,” Amaranth said. “You do need to be more careful about things like signing your name to something before you know all the details, and weighing risks… but the reason for that isn’t that being careless will always definitely make something bad happen. If things worked like that, it wouldn’t be so hard to be careful.”

“I guess,” I said.

“We don’t always get rewarded for doing the right thing,” Amaranth said. “And we don’t always get punished… at least not automatically… when we don’t. You get more than your share of bad things you don’t deserve, as far as I’m concerned.”

“So, you’re saying I deserve two platinum and a big bag of coins?” I asked.

“I’m not saying you deserve them, but you do have them,” Amaranth said. “Desert doesn’t enter into it… I think maybe the only way you can be truly deserving of the things life gives you is by what you do with them.”

“That’s… that’s actually an interesting way of thinking about it,” I said. I didn’t agree, but I was picking my words carefully so that I could tell her that without just snapping. “But I’m not sure it’s really practical. I mean, I’ve already got the money, no matter what I do with it… so what does it matter if I’m not ‘deserving’ in how I act with it?”

“Well, think about what you could do with it,” Amaranth said. “If you put it away in a bank for when you really need it, you’ll earn interest and you’ll have a safety net… compare that to if you bought a bunch of junk with it. Or think about what it could do for your life if you used it do good works for others, versus if you spent on illicit potions or something else that could get you into trouble. Good deeds are their own reward, baby, but they can also carry rewards.”

“But they don’t always,” I reminded her.

“That’s still true,” she said. “I’m just saying, they can build on each other. You won’t always catch a break every time you do something nice, but I do believe that things tend that way, and each time is another chance.”

“I guess,” I said.

“So… are you up for this with Ian tonight?” Amaranth asked.

“You’re asking me?”

“Of course, baby,” she said.

“I got the impression you kind of expected me to go through with it,” I said.

“Well, I do expect it,” she said. “He really wants it, and I know you’ll be into it, and it frustrates me to no end how little sex you have even with my encouragement, baby… but it’s still ultimately up to you, and you’ve had a pretty emotional evening.”

“Yeah, I have,” I said. I thought about how I felt… and I had to think about it, because everything felt kind of small and understated after the highs of the club. “I’m not tired,” I said, and that seemed like a good start. “I feel okay. I mean, you know… that was kind of a big release, but I don’t think there’s any reason I couldn’t be up for a little more tonight.”

“Well… I guess the best thing to do is see what happens when we get back to the inn,” Amaranth said.

“What, are you saying you’re going to stand back and let things take their course?” I asked.

“Oh, baby, I think it’ll be better for everybody if I’m giving some hands-on guidance,” she said. “But… I’ll be taking some cues from you, definitely.”

In the end, though, we both took our cues from Ian… who was sound asleep when we got back to the inn room. He was a very sound sleeper, and kind of a cute one, too… not that he wasn’t always pretty good-looking, but there was something about seeing him like that and knowing that he could be such a powerhouse when he was awake.

He had also drooled a tiny bit… not enough to be totally gross, just enough to make the whole thing a little more heart-melting.

Amaranth and I looked at each other. She gave me a wry little smile and shrugged.

“Let’s let him sleep,” she said quietly.

We both climbed into bed and arranged the blankets a little better, and that was how our adventure ended: not with a bang, but with a whisper.

Next Time: Blood in the water.

Discuss this chapter on the Livejournal feed.

Two pieces of parchment slid out of a slot on the wall and one of the hobgoblins flipped them around and held them out, along with a pen. Amaranth took them. They were liability waivers with a bunch of disclaimers, a signature line, and check boxes in a section labeled “Privacy” at the bottom. One of them said “Miss Mackenzie Blaise” at the top and the other one said “Miss PVFC Nymph #4I.”

Amaranth scowled at the form but didn’t say anything about it.

“What’s the difference between image privacy and identity privacy, please?” she asked.

“Image privacy means you won’t appear in any pictures, illusions, or memory transfers of tonight’s event,” the hobgoblin told her. “Identity privacy means you may appear but your face will be blurred.”

“Is the whole event being captured?”

“There are scrying orbs throughout the premises for your safety, Madame,” the hobgoblin said. “Selected images from them may be used on the members’ weavesite or for publicity purposes.”

“Is there a fee for the privacy services?”

“No, there is not, Madame,” the hobgoblin said. “A private atmosphere is an essential club function.”

Amaranth looked at me sideways.

“I’m going to put image privacy for you, baby, considering,” Amaranth said. She glanced up at the hobgoblin. “Um, also, there’s a mistake here… up at the top, under status, your autoscribe checked ‘wholly owned creation/construct’.”

“Yes, Madame,” the hobgoblin she was talking to said. “That’s not a problem as long as your companion is your owner or an authorized representative.”

I tried to catch Amaranth’s eye to let her know that what she was about to do was a really, really bad idea, that if ever there was a time when it would be necessary to bend the truth, we’d found it, but I could already feel the umbrage rising.

“Well, she isn’t my owner because I don’t have an owner,” Amaranth said. “I am wholly my own creation, and even though it might not seem like a big deal to you, I’d appreciate it if I could get a form that has the right status.”

“I’m afraid it is a big deal, Madame,” the hobgoblin said. “I cannot allow you to enter the club without the permission of your owner.”

“This is ridiculous,” Amaranth said. “Look, here’s my student ID card,” she said, holding it out to him.

“Your identity is not in doubt,” the hobgoblin said. “It’s already been verified, along with your legal status. Whatever personal relationships and arrangements our guests may have, legal chattel is not…”

“I am not chattel!” Amaranth yelled, stomping her foot. “Look, only free persons are allowed a university education, so the fact that I even have a student ID card proves your stupid form wrong.”

“Madame, university admissions are not ours to decide, and neither is admission to our private club a matter for a university to decide,” the hobgoblin said as laughter and footsteps echoed down the stairs from the entrance. He glanced past us. “If you would care to step into the security office, we do have a mirror you can use.”

“Oh, bother… you go on ahead, baby,” Amaranth said to me. “If I can’t get in, I’ll have them take a message to you… you’ll have to manage without me in that case. Just see if you can find that helpful man from the leather store, I’ll bet he’s a member. If you can’t find him, I’m sure you can find loads of people who’d like a chance to flog you or something… stress that you’re invulnerable and have no hard limit on force. Look for somebody tall. A woman would be better than a man, now that I think about it… you know, if all else fails, you can just challenge people to come up and smack your butt as hard as they can. It won’t be very refined, but it’ll be something nobody else can match.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, a lump in my throat at the prospect of facing the club alone.

“Oh, Mack… chances are this won’t take more than a minute to get this taken care of,” she said. “This is just in case… just try to stay out of trouble and don’t do anything rude or wild or crazy. Look, watch… don’t speak or touch. Okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get somebody from home to straighten this out,” she said. She gave me a kiss on the forehead. It was a sadly numb gesture, with the black rubber mask between my skin and her lips.

“Amaranth?” I said quietly, in a tone that I hoped worked both for asking permission to speak and apology for not having it in the first place.

“Yes, baby? You can say what you need to say.”

“Thank you, ma’am… tonight, it’s more important that you get to go inside then it is that you prove a point,” I said.

“Of… of course, baby,” she said, her eyes fluttering. “You’re right… you’re absolutely right. Tonight’s not about what’s fair or right. I’ll just get someone from the village in the mirror and tell them I need permission.”

She gave my form, and I signed it. After making sure that her neat little x was in the image privacy box and that the “Free” box was filled in, I handed it to the other hobgoblin, who touched my hand with a wand. The rune of youth appeared on it.

“See you in a bit, baby,” she said.

I didn’t want to break out of my submissive mindset any more than I had so I just waved in acknowledgment, then turned my attention to the Tomb of Horrors.

The first thing I noticed was that there was blood in the air… it was faint and it was distant, but it was there.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised… not everybody who shared my turn-ons had invulnerable skin. It wasn’t a lot, but it was everywhere. I was surprised to note that some of it was clearly virginal… surprised that I could recognize it and surprised that somebody would have their skin broken at a bondage club before they had their hymen broken.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath… it had been a reflexive action to steel myself, but in retrospect it wasn’t the wisest idea.

I could also tell that most of the blood was human, and that it was overwhelmingly female. The thought made me a weird mixture of hungry and horny… horny because I could taste arousal.

Also scared… if I lost control, the best case scenario would be getting maced in the face by security and thrown out, and even that would be a life-ending disaster under the circumstances.

My eyes were still shut, but I couldn’t shut out the scents, nor the sounds that reached my ears: murmured conversation, clinking glasses… leather hitting flesh, metal hitting flesh, restraints creaking and clanking, people moaning and screaming and crying out.

I decided to stand there with my eyes closed a bit longer. It seemed safest… or at least it did until somebody bumped into me from behind and I realized I was standing in the doorway.

“Excuse me,” I said, and I stepped aside. My eyes snapped open just long enough to catch a glimpse of a bit of smooth skin showing through a cut-out in a tight black sleeve.

It looked… yummy.

I made sure I was positioned well out of the way of traffic and closed my eyes again. I breathed in again, but this time I did so consciously, focusing on what Dee had taught me.

I should have been practicing this all along, I thought.

My afternoon under Amaranth’s stern directions helped make up the deficit a bit, though… she had given me my orders, to stay out of trouble, to not touch, to not get thrown out. I couldn’t do anything about the appealing scents and sounds, but I could cling to that. I could stand in meditative silence, listening to my own breath and denying my desires.

I started to worry about how weird I looked, standing there rigidly with my eyes closed, controlling my breath… then I remembered where I was. Wasn’t the D in BDSM for “discipline”? Or maybe it was domination. Either way, it really was nobody’s business why I was standing out of the way and breathing, and I was in one of the few places where that would probably be acknowledged.

The only problem was that I had no way of knowing how long I stood there… the longer I did it, the more disconnected I felt from everything. Had it been a minute? Five minutes? Fifteen? Amaranth had said she’d send word in to me if things didn’t work out for her, but there was the possibility that something would happen to prevent that… like she might lose her temper and be thrown out without a chance.

It was time to open my eyes to the world, I decided… Amaranth had told me to look around, and I’d probably cope better with being on stage if I had some idea of what all that entailed. I let out a breath and opened my eyes slowly.

The first thing I noticed were the skeletons carrying drink trays, as a pair of them were crossing right in front of my field of vision. I wondered if they were a usual fixture at the Tomb or if it was a Veil thing. I supposed it was better in one way than using intelligent automata, though there was the issue of where the bones came from.

As they moved out of my focus, I saw just beyond them. There was a circular stage with naked girl… woman, really… on it, with her arms and legs lashed to the legs of a sawhorse. A man was cracking a whip thing with a bunch of knots across her ass. Her face was red and streaked with tears. Her ass and thighs were both kind of big… meaty. I looked away from her, and there was another woman suspended upside down in a magical web that had been strung between two poles. There was a person wearing a black leather mask with big exaggerated elf ears prodding at her with a wand. That was just tasteless.

Taking my eyes off the stage, I looked around at the crowd. There were a lot of people in corsets, both male and female… a lot of masks, too, but as with the skeletons I didn’t know how much of that was because it was the Feast of Veil and how much of it was just to be expected. The fact that they had a face-blurring service suggested that not everybody wore masks.

I noticed the collars, too… my neck kind of itched when I saw them, maybe in the way that some girls’ fingers itch for rings. Fuck Caron, I thought. I wanted one. Maybe something tasteful and discreet, something that didn’t scream out my kinks to everybody who saw it, but if we made it through this I wanted to wear Amaranth’s collar.

Maybe our relationship was pretty new, but we’d earned the right to decide how to handle it.

Even some of the people who weren’t currently in the spotlight were in some kind of restraints or being led around on leashes. I was kind of surprised to see that a lot of the people there, in fetishy clothes or not, were actually just kind of standing around and talking. There were some couples where I could see one of them was sort of standing quietly and politely at attention and being really deferential, but there were also ones where if somebody was a submissive, you couldn’t tell by looking.

And then there were the ones like the woman who had a man wearing nothing but a net of leather straps down on the floor, licking her boot.

I saw at least three people with black wizards’ robes on… three more than I’d ever seen in person in real life, assuming they weren’t Veil costumes or fetish roleplaying outfits. I got chills looking at them.

I didn’t see Caron, but I was on one side of a fairly large space that had a bunch of raised stages in the center of it. There were almost sure to be private rooms, too.

Well, if she missed the performance, that was her fault… we’d be sure to have plenty of witnesses.

Then I saw someone that made my heart freeze.

Mercy was in the club.

She was wearing an outfit made of some kind of glistening black carapace stuff that covered half her body… her left foot was bare up to the ankle, then her left leg was covered up to the top of her thigh while her right leg was exposed. Her left hip and pelvic region were exposed, though she had full coverage in the middle. The pattern continued above the waist, with a corset-like structure coming up to just below her left breast, which was completely exposed. Her right breast and shoulder were covered. She was wearing a half-mask over the left side of her face.

She saw me, too.

“Puppy!” Mercy called, gliding towards me. “Well, this is a happy surprise.”

“My name is Mackenzie,” I said.

“Your name is Puppy,” she said. “I had planned on coming up with another one, but honestly, after even a week of thinking of you as ‘Puppy’, nothing else sounded right… and of course, I couldn’t very well call you Lulu now. Anyway, if I wanted to be snapped at by lower animals, I’d sign on with the Imperial Army again. I don’t tolerate it when my boys bark or growl at me, and I won’t put up with it from you at this stage in your adoption.”

“‘Adoption’ is a funny word for what you have in mind,” I said.

“I don’t have any illusions about anything I do,” she said. “But I am allowed my cute little affectations. It amuses me, and I think it’s a better reflection of my feelings towards my pets than the nomenclature I use in my business dealings. Anyway, as I say, I won’t tolerate it… I’m giving you three strikes, just like in rapier dueling… you’ve already used two of them. If I hear anything from you that isn’t fond, appreciative whimpering, I will have you shown to the door. You have to start learning now, Puppy, that if you misbehave, you don’t get to do the things you want.”

I froze, willing my lips to lock together. It seemed she didn’t know about my deal with Caron, but if she really could have me removed… and as a wealthy member of the club, it seemed very likely that she could… then she had me dead to rights and she didn’t even seem to know it.

My only hope was to get things over with as quickly as I could.

I tried to figure out if it would be safer to excuse myself politely, or if Mercy would be insulted by even the attempt at courtesy from a “lower animal”.

“Oh, don’t slink off yet, Puppy,” Mercy said. “Come with me. Come!”

Reluctantly, I followed her to where there were leather-upholstered benches lining part of the wall, with little peninsulas jutting out to form u-shaped seating areas. She sat down on one of them and pointed at the floor in front of her.

“Sit,” she said. “Stay.”

Seeing no other choice, I sat down on the floor.

“There’s someone I want you to meet… she’s off being exercised right now, but she should be back presently. Anyway, since you’re here, I thought we might as well have a little chat… well, I’ll have a little chat and you’ll listen. I’m rational enough to know you aren’t capable of holding an actual intelligent conversation, even if I do enjoy talking to you. Oh, look!”

I turned and saw a man… the same stubble-headed, wiry man who had made the delivery from Mercy to the suite I’d shared with Steff… was heading towards us, leading a naked blonde girl by a leash. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, and she appeared to be moving automatically.

She looked scared completely out of her wits, was probably a good thing to be for one of Mercy’s slaves.

I had a horrible thought about where this was going. Mercy had said she wanted me to meet her… she’d also said she intended to give me “treats”. Was she going to try to teach me some kind of horrible lesson about my “true nature”?

The worst thing was that the thought that should have turned my stomach instead made it growl. I had to admit that my mouth watered at the sight of the slave girl… I could smell her skin… her sweat, her fear… from where I was sitting, and it smelled good.

Had Mercy done something to make her more appetizing?

Or was it just the faint tang of blood in the air?

The man took the leash off her collar and made a silent bow to Mercy, who didn’t even look at him. She reached out and grabbed the girl around the waist, pulling her onto the bench and squeezing her tight.

“This is my new little darling, my Lulu,” she said, stroking the naked girl’s stringy hair… “Lulu II, honestly, but I don’t want her to feel second-best to anyone. Isn’t she precious?”

This is what I smell like to Feejee, I realized. I didn’t have any words for it, but the other half-demon… I refused to think of her by the absurd pet name Mercy had foisted upon her… smelled absolutely irresistible. I couldn’t look at her and not see meat.

I didn’t look at her, but I could still smell her.

“I swear, if I had any doubts about my long-term plans, they’ve flown out the window since I met you, Puppy… I won the freaking half-demon lottery. My buyers found four of them, born in a town that was the site of a rampage forty or fifty years ago,” she said. “On some little speck of rock off the coast of the Mother Isle… all the males of the litter were put down when they turned, but the bitches were shipped off to an institution. There were more of them, but sadly, only the ones who could be fed the most easily were kept… anyway, the island’s got a new proconsul who wanted the place shut down, and so I found myself with four bitches for my breeding program. They were just gated in yesterday morning… that actually cost me more than they did, but I wasn’t going to risk sending my precious babies on a long voyage before I even met them.”

Mercy with four female half-demons was a terrifying thought, but less terrifying to me personally than Mercy with no female half-demons.

“Oh, don’t despair, Puppy… Mama Mercy hasn’t given you up for them,” she said. “I’ve been busy, I admit… I found out about this opportunity just two days after our first little encounter, and overseeing the deal’s kept my hands pretty full. But now that it’s all taken care of… well, I have to confess, I’ve fallen a little in love with you. You’re just so stupid and awkward and helpless… maybe not the best breeding stock after all, pedigree aside, but an adorable pet. Anyway, it’s not like I could afford to pass up on breeding you… not after what happened with the rest of the bitches.”

She laughed ruefully, shaking her head the way she had when she’d told me about the last female half-demon she’d procured. My stomach found a lower floor to sink to than ever before, and I suddenly didn’t feel quite so hungry.

Okay, that was a lie… I felt even hungrier. Sick at mind and heart, but hungry in mouth.

“My boys… if I could stay angry at my boys, I’d be furious now,” she said. “I learned my lesson with Lulu, so for their new sisters, I had reinforced crates built for them, with pain and lightning wards on the bars… magic, of course. I’ve tried using holy wards, but they wouldn’t have been good for the new arrivals, and anyway, sanctity never lasts very long, does it? I don’t know why so many people swear by it.”

That made perfect sense to me… if someone as relatively innocuous as Steff could de-sanctify a place, there was no way a holy ward could survive around Mercy… at least not the run-of-the-mill kind that anybody who’d deal with her in the first place could make.

“So, once the bitches arrived, I crated them and put them in the boys’ kennel so they could have a chance to get used to each other before I tried mixing them. Three hours later I went to check on them… all four of the crates had been demolished, and only one of the bitches was still alive. The boys were lying on the floor… the wards on the fourth cage finally knocked them out. So, I’m in the process of feeding them three-quarters of my enchanter team… I try to be fair in my punishments. It’s a slow process because I’m doing it by weight. Oh, but I couldn’t punish them, Puppy… I disciplined when training them, but I don’t have the heart to really punish them. They know what they did, and I think they feel bad about it… they left the skins completely almost intact in the wrecked cages, like they thought I wouldn’t notice what they’d done.”

Assuming the other three had tasted at all like this one smelled, I couldn’t imagine anyone keeping the presence of mind it would take to do that and not just devour them skin and all.

“Oh, but I was telling the story,” Mercy said. “So there they are, lying on the floor and twitching, and there’s Lulu, my favorite of the four, absolutely rigid… well, she was catatonic, really. I wasn’t planning on letting her sleep in my bed until she was thoroughly trained, but I didn’t have anywhere else to put her… and if you want to talk about irony, Puppy, my usual method of training a female is to start by raping her until she’s catatonic, so it was kind of funny… it was actually good, in a different way. Even at my age, there are still new things to see and do and feel… I tell you, Puppy, whoever it was who talked about ‘the banality of evil’ didn’t know what she was talking about. Talk about a failure of imagination.”

I stared at the poor girl… I couldn’t begin to imagine what it had been like, being caged and then watching as three other women were torn apart and devoured… and then being taken into Mercy’s bed…

“I see the way you’re looking at her, Puppy, and it’s okay,” Mercy said. “I did my homework… I know you like a nice rack. That’s one of the reasons she was my favorite to begin with. When you decide to become her sister, you’ll be able to play with her all the time. You aren’t as aggressive as my boys. I can tell I won’t have any trouble leaving the two of you alone.”

The feelings of horror and pity melted away from the sudden heat that idea sparked inside me. My heart raced at the thought… my heart raced and my mouth watered. I couldn’t take my eyes off Lulu now. I didn’t care that it was a stupid name or that it wasn’t her name, she was food and food didn’t need a fucking name…

She looked at me, too… it was the first sign that anybody was home upstairs. Her eyes locked on me, and I saw my hunger reflected back in them. She looked at me and gave a little sound that was something between a purr and a whimper, and she licked her lips.

Suddenly she didn’t look so much like food. With just those small gestures, the balance had shifted. Maybe it was positional… she was up high by Mercy, I was down low.

Or maybe it was just my nature… I was no predator.

If I was shut up in a room with Lulu, I would be prey.

“Oh, look at that! She likes you already!” Mercy said. “You know, if you wanted to see what your life will be like with me, we could set up a little puppy play-date where you could come sleep over. Wouldn’t that be fun? I could introduce you to my boys, of course, in a controlled setting… you know about Brutus… my first… and then there’s his younger brother Cassius. If I had had any inkling I might run into you here, I would have brought pictures. Oh, no, what am I talking about? I would have brought them. I can still send for them…”

“Excuse me,” Amaranth said from behind me, and her voice never sounded warmer or more beautiful. “I need to collect my toy.”

I turned around and threw my arms around her legs, clinging to her aura of warmth and comfort like a lifeline.

“Ah, you must be Amaranth,” Mercy said.

“At least somebody here knows my proper name,” Amaranth said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

“You know who I am, I’m sure,” Mercy said. “You may call me Mercy. I’ve been hoping for a chance to speak to you.”

“That’s just fabulous, because I’ve been wanting to talk to you, too,” Amaranth said. “The Imperium may have some blind spots in its collective morality, but there are such a thing as anti-discrimination laws.”

“Anti… what?” Mercy said.

“Ma’am… can we please go?” I said quietly.

“Hush, baby, I’m talking,” Amaranth said to me. “Mercy, your advertisements claim that you’ll serve any race, but persons in your employ have repeatedly refused to do business with me.”

“First, I don’t have any persons in my employ,” Mercy said. “I have animals in my possession. That both simplifies things and gives me more options. Secondly, I wasn’t aware that nymphs ate meat, but I’m fairly certain we did make a deal with you at one point, and I’ll be happy to accept your gold in the future.”

“I’m talking about selling, not buying,” Amaranth said. “As reprehensible as the way you deal with unwilling victims of every other race is, the fact that you refuse to consider an offer from a consenting adult-equivalent nymph not only compounds your moral issues, but it may leave you exposed to legal consequences as well.”

“Okay. Wow, ” Mercy said. “You are the brightest flower in the field, aren’t you? Let me explain some things to you. First of all, even if you were human, you wouldn’t have a case… nobody has a right to force another person to buy them as a slave. Second, even if that were not the case, I get the feeling you’re talking about renting, not selling, and since we don’t enter into similar agreements with anyone else, it wouldn’t be discrimination to refuse to do so with you. Third, even if you wanted to sell yourself and I wanted to buy you, I couldn’t… nymphs can’t be enslaved, under current law.”

“Yes, but this is the beauty of it,” Amaranth said. “I don’t have to be a slave if I’m consenting, and as an immortal nymph…”

“As an immortal nymph, you have an immortal mother who’s made her thoughts on exploitation and abuse of nymphs almost apocalyptically clear,” Mercy said. “But I’ll make you a deal: you have your little toy poodle sign my little piece of paper, and in a century or two… when I’m ready to deal with Khaele as an equal… I’ll eat you as many times as you want. Okay?”

“Now you’re adding blasphemy to your sins,” Amaranth said. She reached for my hand. “Come along, Mack.”

Profoundly grateful, I grabbed her hand and let myself be led away as fast as I could totter.

“And she growls about being called ‘Puppy’,” Mercy said.

Wednesday: A command performance.

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Eventually, the blood stopped flowing from the jug. I gave it a nudge and it rolled sideways. When a few repetitions of that only coaxed a tiny bit of the precious fluid from the jug’s neck, I put my mouth around the opening, clasped it between my hands, and rolled over on my back.

The chair shifted, and the woman spoke again.

“I’m going to be honest, puppy… you’re a lot scrawnier than I expected,” she said. “But we can fix that.”

Before too long… certainly not long enough… the blood stopped flowing. I kept sucking at the jug, both because the air inside tasted of it and because part of me refused to believe it could just go empty like that. It was a jug of blood, after all… surely there had to be more blood in it somewhere.

Motion caught my eye just as I was starting to get frustrated with the jug’s stubborn refusal to produce. I rolled over onto my side to see a gloved hand waving around a bit of meat on a bone near the floor. The jug fell to the floor and I crawled towards the seated figure. With a flick of her wrist, she tossed the rib in an arc just over my head. I reared up to catch it, snapping at the air as the morsel bounced off my forehead and went skittering across the floor.

“Must be drunk,” she said. “I can’t imagine either of my doggies missing a treat like that.”

I snatched up the sweet meat and chomped it, savoring both the flavors of meat and bone and the satisfying way the latter crunched between my teeth. More pieces… and bigger pieces… quickly joined the first, and I gobbled them up greedily.

A few more ribs were thrown my way, followed by a whole rack of them all at once, and then two big meaty strips of flaky flesh. I devoured it all, licking the floor when it was all gone, and turning to look at the lady who’d provided it all.

“All gone, puppy,” she said, holding her hands out wide. “It would have been fun to save some of the blood to drizzle over your boyfriend when he comes back upstairs, but I suppose one or the other of us would have to take the fall for what would come next,” the lady said. “And by ‘one or the other of us’, I mean ‘you’… but after waiting so long to find an adult female, I’m not going to risk having you put down, puppy.”

She laughed. What was funny? I was hungry and she wasn’t giving me any more food. There had to be more… I could smell it all over the room. I growled, baring my teeth at her, and she laughed harder.

“As adorable as you are like this, I’m going to need you to use your words,” she said.

She reached inside of a cloak, pulled something out, and tossed it towards me. I tried to catch it out of the air in my mouth, but the tiny glass ball broke against my face, releasing a cloud of caustic, stinging smoke. I fell back, choking and coughing, and as the scent of the smoke overwhelmed my senses, I started to come back to myself.

Between the smoke and the inescapable awareness of what I’d just done, what happened next was almost inevitable. I made it to the sink, even though my knee bashed through the cabinet door beneath it.

When I’d finished retching… with my eyes closed so I wouldn’t have to see the contents of my stomach… I turned around to properly look at… my visitor for the first time.

She was a woman with strong elven features, but she had a gray skin color that I’d never seen on anybody, elven or human. She sat serenely in one of the unbroken chairs, her cloak pushed back on her shoulders like a cape to reveal an outfit of black leather. The bustier she wore supported breasts that were small for a human, but large for an elf. It was subtle, but all in all she seemed to be just a bit on the “bulky” side for a full elf… I thought that maybe she was a subterranean elf with a bit of human blood.

“Hello, puppy,” she said.

“What the hell are you doing in my suite?” I asked.

“I paid for it,” she said.

“It’s still in my name,” I said. “If I ask security to show you out…”

“Then I’ll be gone before they get here,” she said. “Your boyfriend didn’t see me here, so it’d be…”

“Steff is a girl,” I said. Weak and disoriented as I felt, this one thing pissed me off enough to cut through the fog.

“Beg pardon?”

“You said my ‘boyfriend’,” I said. “Steff is a girl.”

She burst out laughing at this.

“Okay! Whatever you say, puppy,” she said.

“I’m not a puppy,” I said, my anger rising. She insulted Steff, laughed when I corrected her, and called me a demeaning name… yeah, I probably should have felt intimidated by somebody of her grace and beauty, but she was pushing all of the wrong buttons. “And I understand that she looks a bit masculine, but as a part-human yourself…”

“Oh, if I had a single drop of human blood in my body, one of us wouldn’t have survived your little feeding frenzy,” she said. I saw where she was going before she finished. “And by ‘one of us’, I mean ‘you’.”

“I’m pretty sure you used that line already,” I said.

“Sorry, my conversations with people don’t often last this long,” she said. “I usually ‘cut’ them short before I start repeating myself. See what I did there?”

It seemed nobody had ever told her that it wasn’t a good threat if you had to explain why it was funny.

“So, if you’re not a half-elf… what are you, exactly?” I asked.

“They told me you were a little slow, but I didn’t believe it would be quite this bad,” she said. “You do know that elves come in more than one color, right?”

“What… was your mom a subterranean elf and your dad a surface elf, or something?” I asked.

“No, of course not. Don’t be ridiculous… can you imagine a dark elf woman getting with a member of any other race, much less a light elf?”

“Then what?” I asked.

“I’m the last surviving member of the ancient race of gray elves, from whom both varieties of modern elves descended.”

“Seriously?” I asked. From what I could tell, both elven races claimed primacy… but if the first elves had actually been gray, that just might explain everything.

“No, not seriously,” she said. “My dad was a dark elf and my mom was a light elf.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“You haven’t worked that out?” she asked. “You know, that order of yours caused more than a little bit of excitement.”

“Did it?” I asked. Unless I’d placed even more orders that I didn’t want to know about, the odds seemed pretty good that I was talking to Mercy herself, “old school” assassin turned restaurateur.

“It did. Most of our orders come from clients with whom we have a long-standing relationship… if we get a new order out of the blue without a referral, it’s almost always a human dilettante looking for what they imagine will be a wickedly decadent thrill. Most of those get cold feet and we end up collecting the gold without having to provide a single scrap of meat… unless, of course, it ends up being college students who think they’re being ‘edgy’. We don’t get those very often, but we usually have to…”

“Your guy said it was taken care of.”

“I know. I took care of it… don’t interrupt the deadly assassin when she’s talking, puppy,” Mercy said. “We usually have to turn those over to collections, which is more trouble than it’s worth… parents, you know? They tend to raise a fuss… never mind that I’m completely within my legal rights to harvest a non-paying customer who entered into a binding contract with me… and of course, because I’m a legitimate businessperson, I can’t just shut them up. Honestly, if MU hadn’t blocked access to us, I would have raised the minimum ordering age to twenty-five just to save myself from having to put up with bitchy parents.”

She paused and looked at me… for sympathy or what, I didn’t know. I just looked back. I couldn’t claim to be the victim in our little transaction, but she deserved far more blame than I did.

“Anyway, when your order came through, I was sure it was going to be one of those… nobody orders that much food from us for same-day delivery,” she said. “And good thing, too… if somebody orders a ‘steak’, that can come off any of the meatier parts of any body that’s handy. When you order something like a whole torso, though… that’s a presentation piece. I have certain minimum standards for those, and they always require a fresh kill. If it’s an advance order, I can shop around…”

“You know, I really don’t want to hear about this,” I said.

“Tough,” she said. “Because of your order, I have to find and train a new personal assistant way earlier than I expected to. Oh, what’s that look on your face? Did you think that because you were placing an order through a crystal ball, it meant it wasn’t real? Or that I was polymorphing pigs or carving up homunculi?”

“I wasn’t myself when I placed that order,” I said. “Otherwise, I would never…”

“Except you would,” she said. “Were you not yourself when you looked at your… excuse me.” She raised a hand to her face and faked a coughing fit while her eyes danced with mirth. I glared at her. “When you looked at your… your girlfriend… like he was a great big slab of beef?”

“Fuck you,” I said. “That wouldn’t have happened if your ‘products’ hadn’t set me off.”

“It would have… sooner or later, it would have,” she said. “Something would set you off eventually… I’d bet money it’s happened in the past, and I’d bet money it will happen again. It isn’t even a gamble… the only thing that’s up in the air is how long it’ll be before you go after somebody with slow enough reflexes for even you to catch.”

“I was doing pretty good for a long time,” I said. “If I’m having a run of bad luck, it’s just because I’m adjusting to new things.”

“Yeah, and you’re never going to encounter any of those again… look, puppy. I’m offering you a chance to make the people you care about very wealthy, while removing a lethal threat from their lives,” she said. “And as a reward for this selfless act, you will spend the rest of your life pampered and cared for.”

“You want me to sell myself to you?” I asked.

“Name your price,” she said.

“A million platinum,” I said sarcastically.

“Okay. And the beneficiaries?”

“I’m really supposed to believe you’d pay a million platinum for me?” I asked. “Or that ‘the rest of my life’ would be any time worth speaking of… do you really think I’ve forgotten what you do with slaves?”

“Oh, I’m not buying you for my restaurant,” she said. “I plan on breeding you.”

I stared at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Are you hiding a penis under that leather, or something?”

“That’s got nothing to do with it,” she said. “I mean breeding you with other half-demons. I love half-demons, you see… you make the perfect pets… like adorable little puppies, except you don’t make messes on the carpet. Well, okay… you don’t make the same messes on the carpet. I have two males, but I’ve never successfully bred them… the one time I had a breeding female before, I made the mistake of leaving her unsupervised with them. I figured nature would take its course, you know? It did… just the wrong half of it.”

She threw back her head and laughed until her eyes started to tear up. I considered running from the room or making a move against her while she was distracted… but I knew from experience that I’d probably end up hurting myself, and who knew what she might do if she could claim self-defense? I was pretty sure it was against the law for her to have snuck into my room like this, but I hadn’t so much as asked her to leave yet.

“I shouldn’t be laughing… I shouldn’t,” she said when she’d got herself under control again. “It isn’t the least bit funny, really… I mean, I paid a fortune for that bitch. But if you could have seen what they did to her… and I only left them alone for a weekend.”

“I guess you had to be there,” I said.

“Well, no, because they did this thing with her intestines that reminded me of… well, I guess maybe you did have to be there,” she said. “But it was funny at the time. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about that. What’s the saying? ‘Once bitten, twice shy?’ If you sell to me, I will take care of you for the rest of your life… which I can promise you will be a lot longer than if you don’t.”

“Yeah, threatening me’s going to help,” I said.

“I don’t know, it might,” she said. “But I’m not about to do anything that could be used to fuck me over on a technicality later… no, I’m not threatening you. Do you know what the lifespan of a half-demon is?”

“Uh, no,” I said. “Not really.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “And neither does anybody else… nobody I’ve talked to knows any that have died of old age. Nobody I’ve talked to knows any that have lived to old age. In captivity, though? I’ve had my Brutus for almost three hundred years. He looks about forty or so.”

“Somebody named a half-demon ‘Brutus’?”

“I did,” she said. “I haven’t picked your name out yet. I was thinking Lulu II, but that seems a touch disrespectful to the original Lulu. Anyway, puppy…”

“My name’s Mackenzie,” I said.

“I haven’t picked your name out yet, so you’re ‘puppy’. Anyway, we checked you out when we got the order,” she said. “We know you’re having legal trouble with the school…”

“Uh, no,” I said. “The school’s having legal trouble with me.”

“Whatever, it can’t be a picnic for you,” she said. “What’s more, we’ve picked up a bit about your fetishes… I think if you take the time to think about it, you’ll realize the life I’m offering you is really in your best interest. You would have a real, legal owner… you could wear a collar and sleep in a little kennel. Strict discipline and regular meals… what more could you ask for?”

“Those ‘regular meals’…”

“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t enjoy it,” she said. “I watched you eat just a few minutes ago, and you were in hog heaven.”

“This is why I have to say no,” I said.

“You’d rather wait until you snap and eat a friend or lover than be fed bits of people who would have died anyway?” she asked.

“I’m not eating anybody, ever again,” I said.

“If I had so much as a finger on me, I could prove you wrong in a second,” she said. “Think about that.” She got to her feet. “Anyway, this offer is open-ended… you know how to get a hold of me. If things start to get too hairy, you get bored, or you just realize that I’m right, give me a shout and I will come running. Even if you’re already in trouble… I have much better lawyers than you’ll find at Pendragon and Associates. One million platinum. Split it between your friends however you want.”

“One million. Why not ten?” I asked.

“Don’t get greedy, puppy,” she said. “Though, honestly, in a hundred years even that would seem like a bargain. Of course, just in case you’re stupid enough to pass this offer up, I have a second one.”

Here comes the threats, I thought.

“Six hundred platinum for the use of your womb,” she said. “We make sure you produce a girl…”

“Hold on, there’s no magic that does that,” I said. I knew this because my grandmother was firmly opposed to any research into methods that would allow it.

“No, but there is aborting and starting over,” she said. “I love my boys fiercely but I’m not paying six hundred plat to get another one. Think about it, puppy. It doesn’t have to interfere with your schooling. We’ll provide all the necessary healing care, and you’ll be sitting pretty for whatever you have in mind for your life. It’s a good deal… though not as good as the other one.”

“Yeah, I’ll… uh… think about it,” I said.

“You say that, but you’re thinking that the answer’s going to be no,” Mercy said. “But you know what? You will think about it. Every time you look at one of your little fuck buddies and get a strange urge… every time you smell a bit of virgin blood and feel your mouth water… every time you see your friends struggling and wish you could do something to make their lives easier. A million platinum, puppy. That could set a lot of people up for life.”

“How am I worth that much, to you?” I asked. “Why would ten million be a bargain in a hundred years?”

“Good question, isn’t it? I mean, your pedigree is interesting, on both sides, but you’re scrawny, clumsy, and nothing special to look at… but the fact remains that you’re a breeding female, puppy,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how much you’re actually worth in and of yourself, I can use you to make more of you… and all of those little puppies can be trained from birth.”

“And what would you do with all of those ‘puppies’?” I asked.

“Whatever I wanted,” she said. “That is, as they say, the nature of the beast… but you would be well-cared for. Scrawny or not, you are kind of adorable, in that helpless, stupid pet kind of way.”

“You’re really laying the charm on thick,” I said.

She shrugged.

“I knew coming up here that the immediate answer would be no regardless of what I say,” she said. “Just as I know that long-term the answer will be yes… also regardless of what I say. It’s just a question of you coming to your senses soon enough, before you get yourself put down. Now, I know something about where your predilections lie… so, I’ll point out that while I wouldn’t dilute your infernal blood or my immortality by breeding you myself, you would be my personal pet… and even if I’m not hung like your little girlfriend, I do have real boobs. I think you’re going to be thinking about that, once the taste of vomit and stinging smoke’s not so fresh in your mouth.”

She headed towards the doorway, then stopped when she got to it.

“I’m going to be keeping an eye on you, puppy,” she said. “Don’t worry, nothing illegal… I’m not going to be stupid enough to break into a dorm room personally or anything. I just want to make sure you live long enough to make the right decision. I might send you some puppy treats from time to time, too.”

“Don’t,” I said.

“Oh, but, you don’t have to eat them, of course,” she said with a smirk. “You have a great rest of your vacation. I’ll have the kitchen send up another entree, and find your ‘girlfriend’ and tell her it’s safe to come back.”

She headed into the living room, and her voice floated around the corner to echo in my ear.

“At least, as safe as it’s ever going to be.”