“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.

Modern ideas mean that wizards tend to be more well-rounded these days… the notions that studying such base and mundane matters as arms and fighting or carrying weapons and wearing armor would actually inhibit the ability to use magic have all been pretty soundly dispelled. A robust education is seen as a good thing. This is why MU and most other modern universities all have a liberal arts approach to education, teaching mundane subjects and combat skills alongside such things as enchantment and elementalism.

But even if learning how to swing a sword or strapping on a shield wouldn’t damage your ability to use magic, my feeling was that it’s still true that time spent studying fighting isn’t time spent studying magic. You can’t study both at the same time, unless you were studying how to fight with magic.

That sort of thing might have sounded like the perfect way for wizards to defend themselves, but combat casting can take a lot of specialized training. To be able to throw off volleys of spells on demand like a siege engine or a one-person regiment of archers would require a lot of dedicated practice of evocation. Combat buffing is technically enchantment, but it’s a far cry from the sort of enchantment I was formally studying. I could use my limited knowledge of enhancement to give myself a bit of a boost before or during a fight, but the techniques for doing that well were different than the ones I’d use to better enhance an item.

In other words, learning combat magic effectively would pretty much require taking a double major, so almost everyone gets stuck taking weapon classes.

For my first semester at MU, I’d enrolled in a class called Basic Knife. Basic Knife and Basic Staff were the softest of the soft options for fulfilling the school’s minimal weapon proficiency requirements. That they existed at all was a bit of a bone thrown to the old days when the world divided neatly into categories like users of magic and men who fought.

They weren’t the only options available for people who carried daggers or staves, but they were the best options for someone who wasn’t really interested in fighting but hadn’t been able to find a way around the requirement for one weapon proficiency class.

I hadn’t realized how much of a joke Basic Knife was when I took it… it was nicknamed “Bladies For Ladies” and the major focus of the class seemed to be how to carry a dagger about one’s person without hurting oneself.

I still would have taken it, though. I had no interest in fighting, and I’d resented the fact that I was required to spend three hours a week one semester learning how to do it.

Circumstances and my friends had impressed on me that fighting was something that could happen whether I wanted it to or not… and like swimming, it’s better to have the skills before they become essential than to try to pick them up on the fly. Or on the sink, as the case may be. So, I’d transferred to a more advanced class at Amaranth’s insistence.

That class was recommended by Steff, and it was taught by her favorite teacher outside the necromancy program: Coach Jillian Callahan.

The rumors I’d heard about Callahan were the same as the rumors you heard about any tough teacher, only more… well, more. They said she’d liked to kill a few students for demonstration purposes, before the school rules were altered to prevent that.

Well, actually, she had said that, though a lot of the people who spread rumors about her rejected that as being unbelievable. Not that the things that the same people breathlessly repeated were at all plausible. Depending on who you asked, Steff’s “Jillybean” was either some kind of god-killing abomination in humanoid form, a super soldier bred by the old empire, or some sort of eternal warrior who had fought in every major war of the past several centuries.

While those things were pretty obviously not true, she had made no pretense of hiding the fact that she would have just as soon killed me as taught me anything, but as long as the former wasn’t an option she had done her best to see that I learned something in her class.

Unfortunately, as she’d pointed out, the Mixed Melee class that I’d joined was actually a bit above my level. It didn’t have any prerequisites, but it assumed a basic competence that I’d lacked. I wouldn’t have necessarily failed it, but it would have killed my GPA for the semester even if I gave it my best shot. So, we’d forged a deal: I would give it my best shot and then she’d give me a pass/fail grade, as long as I agreed to take another class of hers.

It had seemed like a good deal at the time. Well, more than that, it had seemed like a necessary deal at the time. But it really just deferred the basic problem, which was me being graded on my fighting ability. Three credit hours of a weapon proficiency class were part of the general education requirements for graduation, and a pass/fail class didn’t count.

So I’d sought out Callahan… Coach Callahan… during the second semester and asked her opinion of which of her classes I could score the highest grade in. I had counted on her being able and willing to give me an honest appraisal, because her whole motivation seemed to be to get me into the class I was best suited for. She had flat out told me that there was only one class she could see me getting an A in… and then she’d told me it was a five credit hour class.

“It’s not about pretty techniques,” she had said. “And it’s not about fancy footwork. It’s about ending fights quickly and decisively. It’s about surviving. It’s a five-day-a-week class because it’s my baby. I’d make all my classes daily if I could, but I fought for this one because I believe in it. It’s also the class you need.”

It was probably the longest thing she’d ever said to me without yelling, swearing, or calling me a name. In fact, she’d sounded surprisingly at peace as she said it. So with a little misgivings… she’d said that I could earn an A, but that didn’t mean that I would… I’d signed up for five credit hours of hitting people with a stick.

My new fighting class met in a location that was familiar to me, the memorably named Kessherrakh Salle in the fitness center. It was a long room, equipped with floor mats. The cabinets along the backwall were enchanted as mockboxes. Any weapon… any object, really… placed within them would be duplicated in phantasmal form. The mock weapons were illusions, complete with the illusions of tactile presence and heft. They could inflict illusionary pain and even wounds, depending on how the box was set.

In my Mixed Melee class, I’d been used to mocking my staff as soon as I arrived so I would be ready when class started. For this new one I thought it was better to wait until I received instructions. I arrived in the salle to find a bunch of other students… mostly human, or at least outwardly appearing to be.

There were three guys who looked like they were mostly elven… more elven than Steff, but with some traces of human ancestry. On slightly closer look, at least one of them was a slightly butch girl. Or maybe very butch, for an elf. There was a guy who looked like he either had some orc blood or a smaller proportion of ogre blood.

There was also a kobold who I almost overlooked completely, she was so small… kobolds weren’t tall to begin with but this one was tiny, maybe two feet tall. My brain wanted to code her as female and it took me a few seconds to work out why. Kobolds were goblinoids, and goblinoids aren’t mammalian. There were no identifiable secondary sex characteristics I could pick out.

Oru the goblin tended to wear things that were identifiably skirts and dresses, and did things with her hair that somewhat paralleled human standards of femininity, but kobolds valued conformity. Head-shaving was expected. Shiel the kobold had been smooth-headed when she showed up, but had stubbornly and proudly grown a head of short, bristly fuzz over the course of our freshman year… she’d explained to anyone who would listen and more people who wouldn’t that kobold women were expected to keep smoothly-shaved heads while men could get away with a head of stubble to show that they were busy.

The fact that the kobold in the class had a shiny-smooth pate didn’t prove that they were a girl, as the reason for the shaving preference was that most kobolds were naturally hairless, but I’d heard Shiel give her spiel often enough that my mind associated the look with women.

Something else about the tiny kobold was tugging at the corner of my memory, but I couldn’t place her. I was almost positive that Shiel had been the only one of her kind attending Magisterius University the previous year.

The kobold girl looked so scared and out of place that I almost went over and introduced myself to her, but in the end my good intentions were no match for my own social awkwardness… while I was sure that a friendly face would make her feel better, I couldn’t convince myself that my face was friendly enough for her to welcome its intrusion before Coach Callahan arrived.

She said nothing and made little noticeable noise as she walked through the propped open door, her steps bouncy and light… but almost everyone in the room turned and looked at her, anyway. I had seen her manage to blend into a crowd of students before, but she definitely had presence when she wanted to.

Coach Jillian Callahan looked human, more or less. She looked more human than anything else, anyway, but if you really looked at her and thought human there would be a few things that would just barely register as being off. Something about the way the muscles were attached to her bones, the way they flexed when she moved… something about the shape of her bones underneath it all.

She looked enough like a human that even if you caught onto the wrongness you’d probably think that it was her dominant bloodline, but she didn’t have a drop of human blood in her body. According to Steff, she was a mixture of elf, dwarf, orc, and ogre that somehow averaged out into a mostly-human-like shape. Her typical dress was pure urban barbarian, all studded leather and with her arms and legs bare for easy movement. She carried a sword or a battle axe depending on the day… today both were on her back. Both were big, well-made, and enchanted to almost artifact-level.

I had no idea how old Coach Callahan was, but she had to be older than she looked because she could easily have passed for a student… a cheerfully psychotic student.

“Welcome to Fighting To Disable,” she said with a big, sharp grin on her face. Some people have a disarming smile. Coach Callahan’s smile would take your arm off at the shoulder. “Formerly called Disabling Strikes. Renamed when I took it over because naming an entire class after the last step in a process is fucking stupid. I am Coach Callahan. You will call me Coach Callahan. I will call you whatever name I think you deserve. I will give you whatever grade I think you deserve.

“I am the fairest fucking teacher you will ever have, because you will never get more or less from me than exactly what I think you deserve, except in those circumstances that school rules prevent me from doing so. Before you get too comfortable about that last caveat, let me remind you that you signed a waiver for this class exempting myself and the school from penalty for any healable injury you may suffer in the course of your education. If it ain’t permanent, I can get away with doing it to you. Believe me when I say that I’ve tested the limit of this thing. I don’t mind testing it again.”

She wasn’t bluffing even a little bit. I already knew of her willingness to break bones and inflict pain and damage on students who annoyed her.

“I prefer to think of this class as fighting to win. I mean, that’s how you win a fight: be the last one standing who’s still able or willing to fight. Be advised this is not a non-lethal fighting class. Our focus is on ending fights quickly and efficiently, which means removing your opponent’s ability to continue fighting, which often means killing the living shit out of them.

“If you didn’t actually read the fucking class description and just assumed from the title that we would not be using lethal force in this class, you will want to talk to the registrar while we’re still in the grace period. The class you’re looking for instead would either be Subdual Damage or Unarmed Grappling, both taught by Princess Periwinkle the Pretty Prancing Pony. But don’t call him that to his face… it’s Professor Pretty Prancing Pony. Respect is not just for your betters, kids.

“Also, be aware that even though unarmed fighting classes make up less than five percent of the fighting classes held on this campus, more students have been killed in them than all other combat classes put together. You can’t mock a fist. At least not while it’s attached to a living being. On that subject…”

She pointed to a tall, upright red cabinet near the corner of the room.

“The first thing I want you to do every day when you arrive for class is use the red mockbox, and only the red mockbox. To prevent a line, do this before class begins. That box is going to be set up all semester long for maximum realism, because all we care about in this class is what will really happen when you really hit someone. Go to it!”

I had no doubt that Callahan had my best interests at heart, as she saw them… this was the first really strong indication that the class she thought was best for me was not necessarily the class I would enjoy the most. My dislike of fighting could take on some snobbish overtones, I’ll admit, but it has always been rooted in a visceral reaction to violence.

In the years before my demonic nature manifested, I’d just plain disliked it… witnessing real violence or even strong anger had always left me shaking and queasy. After I turned, it got even worse. When my grandmother took me in, she had made it very clear to me what I would be capable of if I ever lost control, and I’d had a few glimpses that confirmed her word.

But I was already committed to the class two or three times over, so I sucked it up and dutifully got in line with everyone else. As a bright point, I realized that if I only ever had to de-shrink my staff in class then I wouldn’t have to use up any of its charges… I’d still need to periodically add a charge to stave off the drain, no pun intended, but as long I put the scaled-down staff in the cabinet and enlarged the duplicate, then I’d only ever be taking the mocked enchantment off of the mocked staff.

Coach Callahan had ambled over to the front of the line and was leaning against the wall, inspecting her students and our weapons. I kind of expected her to say something about my having what looked like a two-foot-long baton, after having done so much work with long hafted weapons the year before.

“Blank? Interesting choice, Frybaby,” was what she said. I really didn’t appreciate her nickname for me, but it was less obviously insulting than the one it had evolved from. “You’re an AE nerd, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yes, Coach Callahan.”

“And you’re still with What’s-Her-Cunt, I see,” she said. The fact that I didn’t flare up at this was a testament to either my self-control or my memory, given that I was within casual dismemberment range of Callahan. Either way, I had to imagine Amaranth would approve of me not blasting my mouth off in response to an insult aimed at her. “You pulled off some interesting things with on-the-fly enhancements last year. That was good. You want to use what you’re good at. Don’t get all caught up in the cool factor of things like size-changing tricks. Remember that at the end of the day a weapon is for hitting and hurting people. Remember it before the end of the day, if you can.”

I nodded at the advice, which I had to admit was good… it felt a bit like a slight at my convenient repackaging job, of which I had been pretty proud, but I tried not to focus on that.

“Everybody feeling sufficiently mocked?” the coach said once the last person, one of the elven students, had finished with the cabinet. “Good… form a circle, children. It’s time to get your murder on.”

Amaranth looked at me, and though she was making a valiant attempt to keep up the firm demeanor, her lower lip was trembling. I knew that what she had just done was very close to an act of violence for her. There was no way in hell that she would out Caron and Mouse… if word got back to the dwarven community that one of their own had taken up with a kobold, it would make things uncomfortable at best and fatal at worst for them.

I had no idea how much danger they’d actually be in. Dwarves had a reputation for following their own traditions over human laws when dealing with things among themselves, but I was in no position to know how much of that was truth, how much of it was things that might have been true once, and how much was simple stereotyping. Caron evidently had some real worries about the repercussions, though.

I gave Amaranth the best smile I could, knowing that my best smile on my best day was nothing more than a pale reflection of the warm light she radiated on me. She smiled back and took my hand by the index and middle fingers, squeezing them gently. She put her other hand up by her face, pointing a finger upwards by the tip of her ear, and then held her finger to her lips.

I took her meaning: with Mercy in the room, the less said the better. Mercy seemed to be willfully obtuse on a few scores, but she was clever enough to capitalize on opportunities when they presented themselves. Blackmail was a sordid business… if she noticed that her intended “Puppy” and her current informal owner seemed to be holding something over “Lady” Caron, she might decide to try to turning it around on us.

Standing there in the middle of the room with nothing to say or do, though, left me right where I’d been shortly before Mercy found me: listening to people shrieking and breathing in the scent of freshly spilled blood. Amaranth’s fingers wrapped around mine gave me something else to cling to, and I worked on my meditative breathing.

I only had half the hunger of a full-blooded demon. It still might have been boundless, but it was a smaller boundlessness. I had a half-human mind and a human soul. Demons could put their hungers aside when it suited their purposes, and that meant that I could, too.

It smelled so good.

Lulu was out there still, somewhere. I could just almost taste her in the air, but “just almost” was almost enough. The traces of her scent spread throughout the club were like a sauce washing over everyone else.

I closed my eyes to help myself focus. An image jumped up behind my eyelids… the girl I’d seen being shocked a minute or so before. She was kind of heavyset. Not really fat, but plump. She had dark hair in the kind of short bowl cut that I thought looked stupid on guys and worse on girls, but it kind of worked for her. She certainly looked tasty enough. I imagined the wizard holding her until she started to cook, until skin started to sear and fat started to sizzle and muscle started to break down through the strange alchemy by which flesh became meat.

Amaranth started humming something to herself. It sounded like a tango or something. I wondered where she’d picked it up… I’d never noticed her listening to music before. She could definitely carry a tune better than Two.

I could smell her, too, of course. I could smell her body and her sex… a subtle womanly musk without a hint of the sweat that usually went along with it. Behind that I could smell something earthy and sweet. I felt something like the kiss of sun on my forehead and a touch of wind on my cheek, rustling my hair.

Was that always there?

That was how nymphs introduced themselves without names, she’d told me… and shown me… once before.

“Ma’am?” I said. I’d reached for Amaranth’s name and that was what had come out. It was just where I was at the moment, it seemed. The distant promise of blood all around wasn’t enough to pull me out, so far.

“Yes, baby?”

“Did you… did you just do something?”

“I was just humming a silly little song,” she said. “I can stop, if it bothers you.”

“No, ma’am, it doesn’t bother me.”

I’d imagined it, it seemed… my focus on the sensory impression of Amaranth had conjured up my memory of the time she’d “told” me her name.

It was a thoroughly pleasant memory, though, and far removed from the thoughts of blood and teeth that were trying to claw their way out of the back of my brain, so I held onto it, focusing on it as I worked on my breathing. I lived in the sensation of sun and wind and scent until I heard a man’s voice.

“Ladies? I’m Master Celyddon, the Dungeon Master of Ceremonies,” he said. “We’re about ready… so if you would please come with me?”

“Well, that didn’t take long,” Amaranth said happily as she improved her grip on my hand.

I had to take her word for it. It had seemed to me to have taken far more than five minutes.

“Indeed. Lady Caron seems to have taken a liking to you,” Celyddon said as he led us towards a door at the edge of the room. “Not surprising… we don’t get a lot of ladies who are six foot in their bare feet. But her good word carries a lot of weight. And she’s not the only one who has expressed interest. Several members have asked if you’ll be getting up on stage. More than a few are hoping to get you up with themselves.”

“Really? It seems to me like we’ve been given a pretty wide berth, considering,” Amaranth said. “People here seem really shy.”

“Members and regular guests don’t like to crowd unattended newbies,” he said. “You’ll find most people are fairly approachable.” He gestured for us to go ahead of him through the door, which opened directly onto a spiral staircase going downward.

“That’s really good to know,” Amaranth said. She let go of my hand and indicated that I should follow her. As I did, she called back over her shoulder to Celyddon, who followed behind us. “We’re kind of focused tonight, but if I ever get a chance to get back here…”

Celyddon laughed.

“If?” he said. “Not all our events are closed, and I have a feeling you could get an invitation any time you wanted if you mingled a little… and I think Mistress Mercy was applying to get your friend permanent guest status. I think she’d try to get together a quorum of the membership committee to rush through full membership if she thought anyone would let her.”

“I had the impression Mistress Mercy was somewhat highly regarded around here,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, well, she brings a lot to the club,” he said. “But she has a habit of bringing people in as a prelude to pursuing a more permanent personal arrangement. No one objects to such things among consenting adults… and Mistress Mercy has always been beyond reproach in obeying the letter of the law in such things, but… well, there are some reputations a club can’t afford to have. Now, how would you like to be introduced?”

“Well, I’m not comfortable taking the title ‘Mistress’ for myself,” Amaranth said. “It seems presumptuous. On the other hand… just ‘Amaranth’ sounds terribly plain. What does the ‘Lady’ signify, in ‘Lady Caron’?”

“In her case? It’s an inherited title,” he said. “Unofficially. Her grandfather was a Merovian Lord, but the estate was abolished when he was just a child. He continued using the title, and passed it onto his son. He adopted our Lady Caron, and she adopted the title, though she only uses it for social occasions.”

“Well, I certainly don’t want her to think I’m tweaking her,” Amaranth said.

“May I suggest ‘Madame’?”

“Would you introduce us ‘Madame Amaranth the Divine and her Infernal Toy’?” Amaranth asked. “No name for her. There are some sensitive issues that…”

“There is no need to get into them, Madame Amaranth,” Celyddon said.

“Is there something else we need to fill out?” Amaranth asked. “Those forms at the door were pretty short.”

“That they are, but they are also all-encompassing,” Celyddon said. “We live in an enlightened society where the private business of adults is very correctly regarded as just that. But there is a saying in the sadomasochism scene: everyone starts at the bottom.” He chuckled. “That is among the reasons why the entrance to the Virgin Cage is gained from below.”

He led us through a tunnel-like hallway that was more drably utilitarian than anything upstairs. There was a circular platform set into the floor at the end of it, surrounded on three sides by railing.

“Just stand there,” he said. He pointed up towards an opening the same size in the ceiling above. “In a minute, you’ll hear me announcing your debut from the edge of the stage. Please keep all limbs you are dead set on keeping within the protective confines of the circle as it lifts you to the level of the stage. From that point forward, what you do is entirely between the two of you. If you would like to back out, now would be the best time to do so. I would say it’s the last chance, but nothing stops you from stepping off the circle before it rises or from getting up on the stage and doing nothing but bowing out. However, if you’re feeling self-conscious, such a remedy is often worse than the complaint. Therefore, if you aren’t certain you are up to performing, it is best to say so now.”

“I prefer self-confidence to self-consciousness,” Amaranth said. She pushed me into the circle, and then stepped in with me. “And we are fully committed to this.”

“Excellent,” Celyddon said. “Then I will be seeing you presently.”

“Just one question,” Amaranth said. “Which way will be facing out towards the front of the stage when we come up?”

“Back down the way we came,” he said. “Towards the gap in the railing.”

“Thank you,” Amaranth said, and she shifted us around so that I was facing that way and she was behind me.

I could feel my stomach doing flip-flops. What was for all intents and purposes my “first time” with Amaranth had been a public performance, but I hadn’t realized it until after it was finished. I probably would have spontaneously combusted if I’d been faced with the prospect from the beginning of it, but I hadn’t even realized that what we were doing was sexual.

Now I was far more self-aware, at least with regards to those things… and in a club full of people for whom things like domination and discipline were inextricably tied to sexuality. Did that make it better, or worse? I wasn’t sure… but one thing was certain: there could be no illusions. Everyone who watched would understand perhaps better than I did just exactly what it was that we were doing.

“Baby?” Amaranth said quietly.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Do you remember the night we made up, when I asked you what you wanted?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. It was the night I’d asked to be her toy.

“Do you regret that at all?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. I regretted going to Caron’s shop and agreeing to a stupid deal with a lopsided penalty, but that had been all me. Stupider things had been done by people trying to impress or please their partners within the confines of more conventional relationships, I was sure.

“I’m glad,” she said. “I’m glad you decided that and I’m even more glad that you don’t regret it. I hope that ultimately you don’t regret coming here, even under the circumstances. I think it might prove educational and rewarding… or at least kind of fun. But it would have been better if we had made the decision freely, by seeking out a place like this or by accepting the leather shop man’s invitation. Do you agree?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“I know it seems like you have terrible luck… and really, there have been some unfortunate things in your life… but I think you have a habit of falling into bad situations not just by making bad decisions, but by also not making the good ones,” she said. “When you said you wanted to be my toy, that was you… that was entirely you. Nobody put that image or idea into your head, so I hope you find it rewarding. On the other hand, you dithered on your Veil costume until it was too late to do anything yourself, and you didn’t seem terribly excited about what Ian came up with. You might not have been unhappy with it, but you didn’t seem to be terribly happy, either. Is that about right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Maybe it seems like that didn’t cost you anything or hurt you… but you could have had a costume you enjoyed, one that had personal meaning,” Amaranth said. “So it did sort of cost you that. Do you see what I mean?”

“I… I think so, ma’am,” I said.

“I guess what I’m saying is… while we have certain responsibilities to each other as part of our relationship, you are responsible for yourself,” she said. “For the direction of your life, for your own happiness and pleasure. I’ll always be here to support you, to share your happiness, and increase your pleasure, baby, but I can’t do everything for you. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“When we get up to the stage, I’m going to… well, I want this performance to mean something more for us than the fact that we’ve wriggled out of trouble again,” Amaranth said. From above us, I could hear Master Celyddon saying something. Amaranth began to speak faster. “So… I’m going to be trying something. If you don’t like it, or you think I’m asking too much, say your safeword once and I’ll switch it to a straight spanking scene. I don’t want you to think that you have to comply with something you don’t like in order to avoid Mercy’s clutches. I want it to be your decision. Got that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Also… we don’t often have to worry about the possibility of physical harm from our play, but when it comes up… well, you have to trust in my judgment and concern for your well-being, and I would have to trust in your willingness to tell me when I’ve misjudged something,” Amaranth said. “Tonight it’s going to come up. I think I can do what I want without harm, but you need to feel free to stop me if it’s too much. Can you do that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” she purred, ruffling my hair.

I took deep breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth. I closed my eyes as Master Celyddon’s voice continued to ring out from up above. I couldn’t make out the words of his impresario patter… he sounded more like he was announcing a pro gladiator match than anything else. The platform began to rise as he spoke, and the last thing he said rang out loud and clear as my ears cleared the level of the stage:

“…presenting Madame Amaranth the Divine and her Infernal Toy!”

I opened my eyes as the platform clicked into place. Amaranth was still behind me. I ignored the urge to turn around and look at her. I was her toy. It was not just the role I’d chosen for myself, it was the one she had chosen to present me in, so toy I would be.

She hadn’t said anything about it to me… it was my decision, and I felt a fierce and defiant pride in it. Nymph’s toy, nymph’s toy, nymph’s toy echoed in my head the same way it had when she’d marched me around with that written on my forehead.

The name “Virgin Cage” proved to be somewhat descriptive. The black cloths had come down to reveal bars. They were spaced widely enough that anybody could get through them sideways and most people would be able to squeeze through barely turning. There was no door or entrance area that was any wider… I supposed that having us coming up from below helped heighten the illusion that it was an actual inescapable enclosure.

Beyond that, there were people, I supposed… but I couldn’t see them. The inside of the cage was brightly illuminated both from above and via little footlights. There was nothing but haze beyond it.

I knew that people were out there, though. I could smell them.

Amaranth put her hands on my shoulders and turned me at a right angle. She gave me a push.

“Walk,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and I did so.

“Stop,” she said when I got about a halfway between the center of the stage and the bars. I complied in my usual fashion.

“Now, look,” she said. “Turn around and look at me.”

I did, but my compliant ejaculation died on my lips when I obeyed the second half of the order.

After stepping onto the lift, Amaranth had supplemented her peacock mask with a cape of feathers that trailed down her back and draped her arms. She had to be skirting the edges of the nymphly edict against clothing, at the very least.

“How much do you love me, my toy?” she asked in a loud, clear voice… not as cold as she’d used on Caron and certainly not nearly as cold as she’d been to Mercy, but cool in comparison to her usual voice, much less the honeyed, sunny tones she used for me.

“Very much, ma’am,” I said through a constricting throat.

“How much?” Amaranth asked, inflecting the question with more skepticism than she’d ever displayed towards any subject in my hearing.

“C-completely, ma’am,” I said.

“Will you prove your love for me, toy?”

“I will do what you want me to, ma’am.”

“Will you prove your love for me, toy?” she repeated.

“Yes, ma’am!” I said, minding what she’d said about things being my decision. It would prove more if I decided to prove my love because it was what I wanted. Even if I only wanted to do it because she asked me, there was still an important distinction there.

“Then look,” she said. “Look unflinchingly on the face of your owner as she reveals her truest self to you.”

She spread her arms out like wings, her fingers splayed out wide. I watched, staring intently at her. I had no idea where she was going, but that hardly mattered. I’d been told to look and I looked.

And then her hands began to glow… dimly and uncertainly, like flickering candles, but they pierced my eyes as if they were the first light I saw after spending years in darkness.

It was beautiful, but painfully so.

It didn’t just sting my eyes, either. It stabbed at my mind, my essence, my very soul… or at least the part of my soul that wasn’t human. But I’d been ordered to look, and I looked. It was hard… possibly the hardest thing I’d ever done… but Amaranth had done so much for me. She had taught me about sex, about love, and about pleasure… three things I would have been unlikely to enjoy without her. Even just that night, she’d taken all the necessary steps to undo the mess I had created.

The fact that she’d ordered me to look did weigh into the decision. It was my choice to be her toy, and my choice to obey. Fully committed, Amaranth had said. Maybe she had just meant that we were fully committed to fulfilling our contract with Caron, but it was how I felt towards her. I was fully committed to her.

I would miss Ian’s steady support and fiery challenges if he were gone from my life. I would miss Steff’s painful longing if she were gone from my life.

If Amaranth were gone, on the other hand, I had a feeling I wouldn’t miss her for long.

I needed her like I needed blood.

So I looked at her, pushing past the pain. My knees started to wobble, and I threw myself down before I had a chance to tumble gracelessly and lose my line of sight. I stared… maybe not quite unflinchingly, but as well as I could manage… as the glow spread out to cover the rest of her body. She lifted the peacock mask from her head as her face lit up, and I looked up at her, at her radiance and her beauty and her love.

Every part of me that wasn’t human cried out in agony, and the rest of me cried with it… only not quite as badly. The hunger receded. The awareness of the sea of humanity beyond the stage left me. I thought I could still feel Lulu out there, although that was probably my imagination… but she was outside and I was inside, safely wrapped up in bars of steel and love and pain.

The mask fell from Amaranth’s hands and the glow fell with it. The scents and the hunger came rushing back all at once. They seemed to be even stronger than before… but they also seemed to matter less.

I had proven my love.

I had looked at Amaranth while she radiated divine power… only a little bit, obviously. Likely less than she’d need to channel to heal even so much as a paper cut, but I had looked straight at her. I could barely see now… I had a pair of splotchy Amaranth-shaped afterimages slowly fading in front of me, but I didn’t care because I’d done it.

“Stand,” Amaranth said.

It took both arms and all the effort I could muster, but I managed to do so. I blinked my eyes to clear my vision faster. Beyond the stage, there was nothing… I couldn’t detect anything on the air but its own slightly stale taste, I couldn’t hear any shuffling feet or breathing or murmuring from the crowd. The two of us might as well have existed in our own private plane.

Probably the audience had simply grown bored with a drama that meant nothing to them, and turned their attention back to the other scenes unfolding around the club or to their own fun.

“Come here,” Amaranth said, and I did.

As I walked forward, she twirled sideways, putting a sawhorse into place. I blinked to be sure of what I was seeing… Amaranth producing objects from out of nowhere was nothing new, but that was taking it to a new height. There were ankle binders attached to two of the legs, just like the other one I’d seen, but she’d placed it sideways across my path rather than in line with me. I stopped when I came up to it… she’d given me no order, but it was clearly a barrier and a deed could be as good as a word.

“Step back one step,” she said, and as I did so I realized exactly what was coming. I was ready when she gave her next order. “Bend over.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, leaning over and placing my hands across the beam of the sawhorse.

“You’ve shown me how much you love me,” she said. “Now, I’m going to show you how much I love you. Anyone who shares in your enjoyment is welcome to it, but what I do now, I do for you and for no one else.”

She carefully separated the bottom part of my improvised outfit, pulling it down my legs and then lifting my feet to get it completely off. I remained still while she positioned me exactly how she wanted me, with my butt sticking out and my legs splayed just so. I knew more or less what was coming, and I welcomed it like I’d welcome a hug and a kiss at the end of a long day.

It was only my decision to be her toy that kept me from wriggling in anticipation.

A barehanded spanking was probably about the tamest thing the club had ever seen, but I didn’t care. If Caron felt ripped off, I really didn’t care. We were performing, and that was all it took to fulfill our deal.

She gave me about two dozen good, hard smacks across my ass in a slow, steady rhythm. It should barely have qualified as either punishment or foreplay even for me, but halfway through it I was sobbing and then I was coming by brains out during the last three.

It was as Ian had said: all the emotions were mixed up in my head, and they were all magnifying each other. Amaranth’s forceful attention was pushing the emotions out, bringing them to a head and letting me release them. When she finished, I wasn’t propping myself up on the sawhorse… I was draped over it. She stroked my backside with her fingers, both across the cheeks and down the line from the base of my spine.

“Would you like more, baby?” she asked me.

“Yes… yes, ma’am.”

It wasn’t a bare hand this time, and it wasn’t my familiar leather strap. It was something whippy and sharp and thin, and she wielded it with more creativity and care than she had shown during the spanking. She used it like a wizard’s wand, conjuring pain and summoning the pressure that lead to pleasure welling up from deep within me. Stray flicks that happened at just the right or just the wrong moment caught me low and to the center, striking parts more tender and sensitive than my somewhat well-padded cheeks. I cried out all the harder at these, but as the initial sting faded it left behind tingling warmth and heightened excitement.

Although it had taken nothing more than a firm spanking to get me off the first time, the swishing slashes never did more than get me close… perhaps no further than the width of the instrument she used. With no climax or grand finale, I didn’t begin to suspect that she was done until the momentary pause between two strokes lasted a moment longer than the one before.

As it happened, my suspicion was slightly off.

Amaranth wasn’t finished, she’d simply moved on. I heard the next stroke whistling towards me and knew that it was going to be different, but I had barely an instant to get ready for it… and as it happened, an instant wasn’t nearly enough.

She caned me, right across both cheeks… with an actual cane. I would have guessed that on the scale of instruments of discipline, a wide leather strap with metal bits would have been greater than a wooden cane, but… ow. It had speed and force behind it that the strap just couldn’t equal and it bit like it was studded with mermaid teeth.

The beam of the sawhorse cracked and splintered beneath my hands. I shifted my grip so I could try to hold onto it without breaking it to pieces, bracing myself mentally for the next blow.

I might as well have been trying to hold back the swing with my mind. I was as unprepared for the second blow as I had been for the first, and as the third one hit me the sawhorse broke into three pieces. It and I both fell onto the stage. Amaranth hauled me up and ordered me to hold onto my ankles while she administered a fourth and then a fifth. I fell again, and was ordered to get to my feet and remain there for five more. She paused longer between each one, but it hardly made a difference. The pain hadn’t begun to die from the first one when the fifth one hit me… I wasn’t sure it was going to die away. Every stroke of the cane was lined up in a perfect line with the previous one. I felt like I had a highway of fire running across my backside.

“Are you ready to come home?” Amaranth asked me after the tenth stroke.

I sobbed an affirmative answer, not even knowing what she meant… and then I felt the slap of leather and metal, as welcome as a hug and a kiss, and I knew exactly what she meant. I knew what she’d meant when she’d said she would prove her love to me. My ass burned from her attention, it throbbed and ached with it and would probably do so for some time… but the cane and whatever else she had used, they could just have been fucking. Amaranth’s art and skill aside, they could have been done by anyone.

My strap, on the other hand… that was Amaranth and me. That was making love.

I couldn’t keep count of the strokes, but they were enough to take me through one set of explosive orgasms and into another, more drawn out chain. She finished me off completely with an underhanded slap right across my pussy that wrenched more than an orgasm out of me… I actually caught fire. This might have been alarming, but I was too far adrift in pain and pleasure to even care. I had only just barely realized it had happened when there was a thunderclap from above and heavy rain fell down onto the stage, dousing my fire and covering the stage in thick clouds of steam instead. I sank down onto the floor and closed my eyes, imagining I was closed up in the shower with Amaranth.

Exhausted and enveloped in love and warmth and pain, I started to drift off, only vaguely conscious of the sound of applause.

Next Time: When Caron Met Nae