Ian was right, though… Amaranth would be very happy to see what was happening in the lounge. I supposed I was pleased, too… I hadn’t given much thought to Belinda since she hadn’t really been around all that much, though in retrospect I probably should have. For all I’d known about what was going on with her, she could have been just biding her time and waiting for another chance to get at me.

I remembered our confrontation in the empty class room… it had caught me by surprise that she could feel looked down on and excluded by me. It really sounded like she’d had the same kind of revelation, as a delayed result. Put in those terms, it seemed even more like Amaranth would really want to know what was going on. By declining to fight her, by finding another way… even a slightly violence-and-intimidation-based way of dealing with Belinda, I had indirectly contributed to her growth as a person.

Not that I could take credit or anything… it would have taken a lot of thought and reflection for Belinda to come around so completely. But with how much I had changed since coming to MU, who was to say that she couldn’t have done the same?

Of course, there was still a core of me underneath it all that was still the same… I was still stubborn and a little quick to jump to conclusions sometimes. I still had the same interests I’d always had, though maybe with a few new ones on top of them.

And Belinda was doubtlessly still the same person underneath, too… she’d always been concerned with being the best. She was just defining it a little differently… and maybe, having realized that there could always be someone better than her, she was more concerned with bettering herself than besting others.

I could imagine that Belinda had been treated as if she were stupid for most of her life. That was the stereotype of ogres. Their culture was primitive and unrefined in comparison to human society and people equated that with stupidity, but there was no evidence that ogres were any less intelligent than humans, any more than humans had been in earlier ages when they were less interested in complex enchantments and the more complicated way of life it enabled.

I realized I’d exhausted the short distance between the lounge and my own door and had been standing outside my own room like I was selling ranger cookies or something. I almost lifted my hand to knock, then felt silly. The door wasn’t even locked, as it turned out.

Amaranth was sitting with her back against the wall, right under the window. For a moment I couldn’t believe she wasn’t freezing, but then I remembered that she walked around outdoors wearing nothing but her smile. It was really no surprise that she wasn’t cold… her smile was certainly warm enough for me.

“Well, hey there,” Amaranth said, looking up from my mirror. “Oh, baby… what’s wrong?” she asked in her most supportive voice, the one that was both kind and carrying hints of pain that she felt in sympathy.

It caught me off guard and left me feeling a pang of sympathetic pain towards her… that posed an interesting ontological question. If she felt pain in sympathy for me and I felt it for her, then from where had the pain first come from? We were two mirrors reflecting misplaced concern for each other, and misplaced or not the feeling was very real.

“Baby?” Amaranth said, her tone now even more worried. The warm enveloping smile she wore most of the time was sliding off her face, and I realized that I felt colder for it.

“I… sorry,” I said. “I got distracted… sorting through feelings, I guess. Nothing’s wrong… nothing new, I mean. But Ian thought you might like to see what’s going on in the kitchen.”

“Why, what’s going on?” she asked.

I spent a few seconds trying to figure out a brief way to convey Belinda’s apparent epiphany in a way that would really capture what had happened, and then realized that words were inadequate to the task… or I was.

“You kind of have to see it,” I said.

“Okay, baby,” she said.

“What made you think that something was wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t really read the look on your face. You looked… not exactly sad, but thoughtful, maybe.”

“Yeah, I was feeling thoughtful,” I said. “I haven’t really had a lot of time to myself lately, I guess… I think a little more time to stop and think about things might be a good thing, for everyone.”

“Oh, I agree,” she said. “But what did you want me to see?”

“You’ll have to…”

“See it, I know,” she said with a laugh.

She glanced down at the mirror in her hands and waved something away out of it and snapped it shut. Seeing her pushing herself up off the floor, I hurried forward to offer her a hand.

“Thank you, baby,” she said. “Just be careful, I’m a little bit bigger… oh!” she said as I pulled her up to her feet. She giggled. “It’s easy for me to forget how strong you are, sometimes. You’re so small and…”

“Weak?” I suggested.

“Uncertain,” she said.

“Except when I’m resolutely uncertain about something I’m completely wrong about.”

She put her other hand over the hand that she still held and gently squeezed.

“Baby, you have some amazing convictions that are anything but wrong,” she said. “You can be brave, Mack… you can be fierce. I’ve seen it.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d approve of fierceness,” I said. I started to pull away, but she tightened her grip. That was all it took. I stayed where I was, as I was… my hand wrapped up in hers, my heart wrapped up in hers.

It was a nice place to be.

“I don’t want you to be fierce in your judgments,” she said. “But you can be fiercely loyal, fiercely protective… few things are entirely bad, entirely without their uses, Mack. Unmoderated fierceness, unrestrained fierceness… well, it can be attractive, I suppose. Just like unrestrained passion can be, and probably for the same reason.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s terribly freeing,” she said. She let go of my hand and grabbed me by the hips, her fingers splayed out wide behind me, gently pressing in on the sides of my ass. “You don’t have to think… it feels good.”

“Not… not everything that feels good is bad,” I said.

She laughed.

“Oh, perish that thought!” she said, her hair bouncing gloriously as she shook her head from side to side. “Banish it to the farthest corner of the furthest plane! If anything is truly bad, it’s definitely not feeling good… or making other people feel good. You make me feel so good, Mack.”

“It’s mutual, believe me. I haven’t forgotten how incredible last night was… the club, the stage and everything… I’ve had other things on my mind, Amaranth, but I haven’t forgotten,” I said. “You were like a goddess up there.”

“Up where?” she asked, and at first I thought she was just being silly. Then I remembered that I had been on the stage with her… I hadn’t exactly forgotten that, but the significance of it had paled somewhat in my head compared to Amaranth’s performance.

“Above me,” I said, hoping it would be enough for Amaranth to understand what I meant.

“Oh,” she said, and she blushed a little. She took my hands… both of them this time… and looked down into my eyes. “I hope you know that even when you’re beneath me, Mack, you’re never beneath me… and when I said that you make me feel good I didn’t just mean that you give me pleasure. You make me feel like I am good… like I’m a good person.”

“What, was that ever in doubt?” I asked her. “You’re… you’re probably the closest thing to inherently good of anyone I know.”

“Divine,” she said. “But that doesn’t make me inherently good any more than you’re inherently evil… and don’t you dare argue about that, baby. If ever there is a time for you to go around casting aspersions on your moral character, right now is not it. Anyway, I’ve had my doubts… I mean, I’m kind, and I try to be decent, but good? Before I came here, I didn’t really have as much serious one-on-one interactions with anybody except… Barley… and I’m not sure that I really did right by her. If nothing else, I definitely didn’t do any good for her.”

“You’ve definitely done good for me,” I said. “You’ve been good for Two, and I think Steff, too. Dee would probably tell you that she appreciates your friendship.”

“I wonder what friendship means to Dee,” Amaranth said. “I don’t think she’s ever had, you know, peers before… I think she’s kind of lived in a bubble. I have to wonder what it’s going to be like for her to go back down there… will she be lonely? Will she try to mingle with more people, like she does up here?”

“Oh!” I said, my memory spurred on. “I was going to show you what’s going on in the lounge.”

“Oh, yes,” Amaranth said. She laughed again… I loved her laugh, and I loved how easily she laughed. “Come on, baby, let’s go.”

She took my hand one more time and we headed towards the door. I had a thought that… as thoughts so frequently did… stopped me in my tracks. If Belinda could change and grow and be a bigger person, maybe I should try to do the same thing.

“What is it, baby?”

“Just thinking again,” I said. “Ian’s probably going to want to know what you found out about my grandmother… and you know, I really don’t care if you talk about it.”

“I’m glad you said that, baby,” she said. “I don’t like to think that you’re so afraid of her that you can’t stand to even hear her name.”

“I wasn’t… okay, yeah, I am afraid of her,” I said. “But I also just plain don’t like her much. Maybe those two facts aren’t completely unrelated, but it was more the dislike than the fear that was making me so irritated with it all… and that’s just kind of juvenile.”

“It’s very juvenile,” Amaranth said. “But you’re only eighteen, after all. You’ve been a juvenile for most of your life.”

“Yeah, well, so have you,” I said. “You might have sprung fully-formed from your field, but if you’re any wiser today than you were back then, then you can’t really deny that you had some growing to do.”

“No, I suppose not,” she said. “But what put that into your head?”

“What you said about Barley,” I said. “It’s not your job to be good for her. You loved her…”

“I still do,” Amaranth said.

“Well, yeah,” I said. “But she can make her own decisions.”

“I guess I never realized some of the things she was deciding,” Amaranth said. “Like, that she was only coming here because she wanted to get away from me.”

“Oh, I doubt that was the only reason,” I said. “Amaranth, I wanted to get away form my grandmother but that wasn’t my only impetus for coming here. Barley’s got interests that don’t have anything to do with you or me… she could have decided to focus on them instead of dwelling on you. She could have gone out and made friends outside Harlowe. I mean, it seems like she’s doing those things now anyway. She could have done them from the start.”

“Or I could have been more sensitive, like the sister I thought I was,” Amaranth said. “Instead of just following her around, nipping at her heels like an overeager puppy, I could have…”

“What, bowed out?” I said. “Maybe you didn’t have a well-thought out plan like she did, but you can’t tell me that you only came here to follow her, any more than you can say that she only came here to get away from you. Even if you didn’t think about going to school until after she did, the idea had to have appealed to you.”

“Well, yes,” she said, playing with a bit of her hair. “I thought it would be nice to learn new things. I’d read so much about the world but seen so little of it. Barley… well, until she started telling me about her plans, I never really thought that much about the difference.” She giggled. It was nice to see that she could laugh, even while thinking about Barley. Barley had hurt me, but Amaranth felt a pain all her own when it came to the other nymph. “And also I thought that there were bound to be loads more books here, if nothing else… and I was right.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Amaranth?”

“Yes, Mack?”

“I love you so much,” I said, and I rocked forward a bit, standing on my toes to reach up and kiss her. She bent into it.

“Hey, guys is everything… oh,” Ian said, sliding into view in the open doorway. We both jumped. Amaranth bit my lip. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” Ian said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just getting worried.”

“That’s quite okay, Ian,” Amaranth said. “We were just about to come join you. Are you okay, baby?”

“Yeah,” I said. I probed my lip. It was tender, but intact. Invulnerability for the win. “It’s not like you broke the skin, obviously.”

“I wonder why not,” Ian said. “Doesn’t divine stuff hurt you?”

“Yeah, but Amaranth’s body is flesh,” I said. “Her spirit’s divine, but I’m not touching it.”

“Okay, but can’t you bite yourself with your own teeth?” Ian said. “I’d think her teeth would be the same as a blessed weapon.”

“Well, I don’t think her teeth are exactly weapons, is one difference,” I said. “And again, they’re really just teeth, not blessed teeth. In fact, even if it would be hard to find a human who looks exactly like her, there are probably few intrinsic differences between her body and a human’s.”

“In fairness, baby, it’d be hard to find a human who looks exactly like Ian,” Amaranth said. “Everybody is unique, after all.”

“Yeah,” Ian said. “But you’re unique in ways that most people aren’t, especially teenage guys.” He gave a little laugh. “You know, it’s weird to call myself a ‘teenager’. When you’re in high school, that’s like a synonym for ‘high schooler’. You think of college kids as being mostly grown-up.”

“Which is a sure sign that few high schoolers live in college dorms,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s weirder to think of myself as a kid or to think of myself as an adult.”

“I’d say it’s weirder to think of you as an adult,” Ian said. “But that’s only because I know you.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, and I gave him a kiss.

“Whoa,” he said. “What was that for?”

I looked at him.

“What do you mean, what was that for?” I asked.

“You don’t usually just… do that,” he said. “Anything like that. I don’t mind, I don’t hold it against you… I just figured you were self-conscious or something.”

“Oh,” I said, and now that he’d said it, I was self-conscious.I looked down at the floor and stuffed my hands in my pockets.

“You don’t have to be like that,” he said. “I liked it.”

“I wasn’t even thinking about it,” I said. “I’d just been kissing…”

“…Amaranth,” Ian said. “Yeah, I saw.”

“It just seemed like the thing to do,” I said.

“For heaven’s sake, it’s not something you have to explain or excuse,” Amaranth said. “You’re getting more comfortable, with him or with physical affection or both, or something else. Whatever it is, it’s hardly a change for the worse.”

“Though I am going to miss it if you stop blushing like that,” Ian said.

“Like what?” I asked, though I could feel my cheeks flushing with crimson heat at the mention of blushing.

“Like that!” Amaranth and Ian both said at the same time, laughing. Two very different hands reached for mine, and we headed out into the hall together. Hazel, Rocky, Belinda, and Two were all visible in the kitchen. Two was sweeping up… apparently her dislike of mess had overruled her desire to see the one who’d made it clean it up. Rocky and Hazel were at the table. Belinda was at the counter, her back to us.

“Rocky and Belinda decided to help out,” I said to Amaranth. “Belinda’s apparently had some time to think and has kind of undergone a change of heart. She talked Rocky around, too.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Amaranth said. “I knew Hazel was right about the community coming together, but that’s really a better start than I could have imagined.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “It’s amazing.”

“I’m proud of you, getting along with the skirmishers,” Amaranth said.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m not doing anything. They’re the ones who were aggressive towards me…”

“Well, I’m proud of them, too,” Amaranth said. “But I’m proud of you for being willing to let it go… and anyway, you can’t pretend like you didn’t prejudge them at all.”

I sucked in a breath to exhale an argument, but then I just let it out.

“No, you’re right,” I said.

“Hazel has Belinda chopping up vegetables while she talks to Rocky about seasoning proportions, or something,” Ian said. “Honestly, I think she’s just trying to keep Rocky engaged… not a bad idea, probably.”

“No,” I said.

“So what’s the thing you wanted me to see, anyway?” Amaranth asked.

“You’re joking, right?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Rocky and Belinda,” I said. I stopped and dropped my voice, so that we wouldn’t walk into the lounge talking about them. “Don’t you think that’s amazing?”

“I think it’s wonderful, Mack, but hardly wondrous, in the strictest terms,” Amaranth said. “It happens… people come together, even if they’re different. Look at Dee and Steff… Steff’s never going to be like Dee, and I’m sure Dee has no aspirations to become like Steff, but they’ve been becoming better friends all the time. In fact, I think Steff is probably the closest thing Dee has to a best friend up here.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” I said. “Sometimes I get the feeling that Dee barely tolerates Steff… like she only puts up with her because of the obligations of the label of friendship.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s the case at all,” Amaranth said. “Dee can be a little stiff… especially when dealing with someone as, well, loose as Steff, to use the term as an antonym for ‘stiff’ in the metaphorical sense, and not as a pejorative based in sexual shaming… but there’s real warmth there. She certainly wasn’t obligated to try something so desperate and stupid as giving Steff that potion.”

“No,” Ian agreed. “That kind of stupid takes love.”

“You think you’re joking, but I absolutely agree,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, I kind of agree with me, too, actually,” Ian said. “I mean, I tolerate Steff, so I know what that looks like.”

“We should go join in,” Amaranth said, and we did… Hazel welcomed Amaranth and Ian back and put them to work on her grand soup plan. I stayed on the edges of the group. Part of it was me trying to keep out of the way and part of it was that I didn’t have a lot to say, even as Amaranth’s presence added to Hazel’s turned the lounge into a veritable maelstrom of pleasant conversation .

The fact was Belinda still made me uncomfortable. She was still big and she still had a look on her face that looked like she suspected someone was taking advantage of her and she couldn’t see who or how and so she might just take a swing at the first target that presented itself… or maybe that was just her face. She seemed genuinely interested in helping Hazel’s drive towards solidarity, and I wasn’t going to be the one who rocked that boat over hurt feelings or my dislike of jocks, no matter how justified… or maybe “understandable” was the better word… it might have been.

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It seemed like much of Harlowe shared our plans. On our way down the boys’ side we passed a few guys who were carrying garment bags and things that were obviously costume props. One of the other canids whose name I didn’t know had evidently decided to highlight his appearance by dressing up like a stereotypical werewolf. In the girls’ stairwell, we passed Trina… dressed like a faerie princess, complete with wings and sparkles in the air all around her… and a girl I’d never seen before, who seemed to have painted her entire body with gold and green paint. There was only the faintest outline of pasties over where her nipples would be. You could only just barely make them out if you looked really closely. I wasn’t sure what she was going for with the costume, exactly, except for “sexy mostly naked girl covered in body paint”.

I had to admit, it worked.

“Oh my kosh, Gladys, did you see her checking you out?” Trina said once they were a flight down. So that was Gladys. I wondered what her racial background was… she’d looked human enough, except for maybe being bald. Though it was possible that might have been a skull cap… I hadn’t been paying that much attention.

“Man, did you see her eyes?” Ian asked.

“Um, what about them?” I asked. I hadn’t really noticed anything out of the ordinary about them.

“They weren’t there,” he said. “She had like an illusion effect or something… it was like you could see straight through to the wall behind her, like she had a chameleon spell just in that spot. Or those spots.”

“That’s weird… why would she do that?” I asked.

“Maybe because she couldn’t paint them?” Amaranth suggested. “I mean, maybe she wanted her costume to feel complete?”

“I don’t know why she wouldn’t just use glamour for the whole thing,” I said. “That paint had to be a hassle for whoever helped her put it on…”

“I don’t know about that,” Ian said.

“…and it’s probably going to make a mess everywhere she goes,” I said.

“Maybe she’s glamour-resistant?” Amaranth suggested.

“I don’t think anyone’s specifically resistant to glamours,” I said. “Except in the ‘able to see through them’ or ‘dispel them through contact’ senses. It’s nothing more than an alteration of appearance. I suppose if somebody were resistant to alterations, or to magic in general, that might make it harder to apply a glamour, but anyone or anything that has an appearance is equally susceptible to having that appearance manipulated.”

“Well, then it’s probably a tactile thing,” Amaranth said. “She was feeling very sexy, and very confident in her sexiness. I’d imagine that if she were just wearing a skimpy bikini and had her skin glammed, she might feel more exposed compared to the feeling of the paint against her skin. It could be her way of being both daring and coy, by covering herself and revealing herself.”

“It’s kind of a weird costume, though,” I said. “I mean, she’s not really going as anything, as far as I can tell. She’s just going as herself covered in paint.”

“I think it’s a bold choice, and I hope I have a chance to tell her so at the dance,” Amaranth said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “That’s Trina’s friend she’s reflecting to every minute of every day with the latest up-to-date reports on every tiny little thing anyone does.”

“Yes, well, we can hardly judge her for that,” Amaranth said. “I mean, you’ve never heard her side of those conversations… maybe she just tolerates Trina’s gossipy ways because she wants to be a friend to her?”

“Okay, I don’t exactly have a lot to go on here, but from my one almost-run-in with her, I’m pretty sure it’s a mutual relationship,” I said.

“Well, I’m withholding judgment,” Amaranth said.

“That’s a shocker,” Ian said.

“Oh, hush,” Amaranth said.

There was a strong breeze and a high-pitched buzz when Amaranth opened the door at the top of the stairwell.

“Whoa,” she said, laughing and rocking back a little. She stuck her head into the hall, then laughed and stepped through. Ian and I followed.

The hallway was pretty busy. Mariel the sylph was zipping around like a hummingbird on haste. She stopped in front of us… well, hovered might have been a better word since she didn’t actually stop moving. An incomprehensible torrent fell out of her mouth in Amaranth’s direction, though her eyes kept darting over towards me. From the look she was giving me, I thought she was complaining, but Amaranth just said, “Yes, please, if you aren’t too busy.”

Mariel’s four delicate arms moved like a tornado, and a wash of rich woody color spread over Amaranth’s skin while her hair darkened and turned green.

“Thank you!” Amaranth said. She dropped a few coins, but Mariel had already zipped off… though she zipped back and caught them before they hit the floor.

Leda was out and about, dressed as a prima ballerina. She was talking in low tones with a tall, athletic human girl who looked a little familiar. She didn’t seem to be in costume, though from the way she kept staring at her hands like she was on something, I almost wondered if it wasn’t Celia in a really elaborate illusion. Celia would have been probably the second last person to dress up like a human, but she might have done it for irony purposes.

“Yo!” Celia called from by her room, dispelling that theory. “Can I get a little help?”

Mariel flitted over and buzzed angrily at her.

“Hey, slow it down,” Celia said. “I don’t speak bumblebee.”

“…have time to slow down I have people waiting on other floors and I thought you said you didn’t need my help and anyway I know you don’t have money to pay and I’m not doing this for my health and…”

“Please help her out,” Feejee said from within the room. “I’ll pay for her.”

Mariel sighed, then went to work on Celia. Her pink skin tinted itself orange and slightly metallic. The texture changed, looking leathery and scaly.

“Can you do wings and a tail?” Celia asked. Mariel exploded into another hypervelocity outburst, and then flitted away towards the other end of the hall.

“That would take an illusion,” I said.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Celia said. “That’s why I told her I didn’t want her weaksauce glamour in the first place. Oh, well… I guess I can use this as a base and whip up the full effect at key moments.”

“Hello, Mack!” Feejee said, sauntering into view of the doorway.

She was wearing a chef’s hat, a long white apron with a barbecue fork, a basting squirty thing, a brush, and a squeeze bottle of some kind in the pockets. That was all she was wearing. She’d gone the opposite route of Celia, melting her scales into mammalian-looking flesh.

“Wow,” Ian said.

“Oh, do you like it?” Feejee asked, leaning against the doorframe and striking a pose. “I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows lately. Something about the look just appealed to me.”

“Well, I think you look just great, Feejee,” Amaranth said.

“What do you think, Mack?” Feejee asked.
“I… uh… I have to get my own costume on,” I said.

“I look forward to seeing it,” Feejee said, and she turned and headed back into her room.

“I don’t know who she thinks she’s fooling,” Celia said. “That girl is so queer for you.”

“Seems that way,” Ian said.

“Yeah, um, let’s get changed,” I said, and I started heading down the hall… though I stopped outside my room when I saw Honey’s outfit.

She had let Mariel tinge her skin a mottled goblin green. Her curly hair was pulled up into three short spikey pigtails. Her dress was kind of an approximation of something that Oru might have worn, though the top came up much higher and the skirt went down much lower than was the goblin style. She was wearing Oru’s lock necklace around her neck.

“Um… have you seen Shiel?” I asked her. What I really meant was, had Shiel seen her.

“Oh, Shiel can go soak her fat head,” Honey said. “We’re just having good clean fun. It’s Hazel who should be ashamed of herself. Her costume doesn’t hide anything. You can see the shape of her legs, all the way up.”

“Go soak your own head!” Hazel yelled from down the hall… from the door to my room, in fact. Her hair had been glammed blonde, and she had vaguely runic-looking letters stenciled on her forehead that said “TFH”. “There is nothing wrong with my costume.”

As far as I could see, she was right. Far from being more revealing than Honey’s, hers actually covered more than her cousins. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a fuzzy sweater. They maybe clung to her small form a bit more snugly than her everyday clothes, but that was the look she was evidently going for… everything Two wore was pretty perfectly fitted to her.

It was a little shocking to see Two’s friend in anything other than an earthy shapeless house dress. I’d seen Hazel in the showers before, so I knew that she’d been hiding a mature woman’s body under those dresses, but this was a whole new context to process it in.

“Hazel, you forgot the band,” Two called.

“I didn’t forget it, love, I just had to straighten my cousin out a little,” Hazel said.

“If you think I’m going to let you walk out of the hall dressed like that…” Honey said, her bare feet slapping the tile of the hallway as she stomped her way past us towards her cousin.

“Let? I don’t at all hate to tell you this, Miss Honey Callaway, but you are not my mother,” Hazel said.

“No, but it’s her I’m thinking of,” Honey said. “What do you think she would say, if she knew her only daughter was strutting about in trousers, like the commonest trash that ever floated down the river?”

I braced myself for an explosion, but Hazel just drew herself up to her full height… she seemed to be an inch or two taller than Honey, though I’d never noticed before… and said, “I don’t know, Honey. Maybe she’d say, ‘That’s my daughter’.”

“I can’t believe that even at her…”

“At her what?” Hazel said.

“Most rebellious,” Honey said. “I can’t believe that even at her most rebellious, she would have countenanced her daughter gallivanting around in trousers, with her feet shoved into shoes.”

“They’re sandals,” Hazel said, and I realized that was the source of Hazel’s elevation… I hadn’t registered the unusualness of a shireling with footwear because the clunky wedges she was wearing went with the rest of her outfit. “And they’re just part of the costume. Golems don’t go around bare. They’ve got regular feet of clay.”

“They’re shoes, Hazel, whatever you want to call them,” Honey said. “May Owain the Merciful have mercy on your soul, because Owain the Just probably won’t.”

“I don’t see what’s…” I started to say, but Amaranth reached out and shushed me with her finger.

“Come on, baby, don’t put yourself in the middle of this,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, I have to side with her,” Ian said quietly, drawing me towards my door. “This is cultural and it’s family… you really don’t want to get involved.”

We ducked into the bedroom while Honey and Hazel continued to quarrel loudly in the middle of the hall.

“Hi, Mack,” Two said. She was wearing a human-sized copy of one of Hazel’s dresses. Her runes had been masked over, and her hair was curled and chestnut color. “Hi, Amaranth. Hi, Ian.”

“Hi, Two,” I said, along with the others. “Wow, you guys really went all out.”

“Yes,” Two said. She scowled. “My clothing is not indecent. It’s just regular clothing. And it’s pretty.”

“Oh, honey, Honey’s just from a different culture,” Amaranth said. “She has different values.”

“Well, her values are wrong,” Two said. “There is nothing wrong with girls wearing trousers and there is nothing wrong with the shape of my legs, so there is nothing wrong with letting people see them.”

“She’s not talking about you, sweetie, she’s talking about her cousin,” Amaranth said.

“She’s talking about the way I dress,” Two said. “She just won’t say it to me because she knows it’s none of her business.”

“Well… it isn’t,” Amaranth said. “So don’t worry about it. It’s her culture and her values, not yours, and so whatever she thinks, it doesn’t really hurt you, does it?”

“No,” Two said. “She’s still wrong, though.”

“Well, let her be wrong,” Amaranth said.

“Okay,” Two said.

“Are you done getting ready?” I asked. “Because Ian needs to get changed.”

“Yes, I’m done,” Two said. “I think you are the last one on the floor to get ready.”

“Well, we’ll take care of that if you’ll just excuse us for a few minutes,” I said.

“Okay,” Two said. “I have to go to the bathroom, anyway.”

“Thanks, Two,” Ian said.

“You’re welcome,” she said, and she left the three of us alone.

“Man, if I could attract girls the way you seem to…” Ian said, leaving the sentence hanging unfinished in the air.

“What?” I said.

“I’d attract a lot of girls?” he said, pulling off his jeans.

“It’s not all great,” I said. “Believe me, some attention is not worth the trouble it causes.”

“You’re talking to the human guy who’s dating a half-demon,” Ian said. “When you’re sexually involved with someone who might occasionally look at you like you’re a tasty snack cake, then you can talk about trouble.”

I would have liked to change the subject, but what could I say to that? Some dramatic irony we’ve been having lately, huh? So instead I just let it hang awkwardly, while I kicked off my shoes and pulled off my shirt. We got changed in silence, Amaranth helping me get the bikini top on.

“I am going to freeze to death,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror. It was amazing how my boobs seemed to have stayed just as tiny as ever while my tummy was starting to hang out and my ass had blown up like a pair of balloons. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You can put an insulation spell on the cape,” Amaranth said, holding it up. “The fur… even if it’s fake… will be good for that, right? And of course, you can wear your coat on the way there… I’ll take it when we get inside.”

“Looking good,” Ian said. He took a step back behind me. “You know, I’m not even sure you need the cape.”

“Oh, I am wearing the cape,” I said, grabbing it from Amaranth. “I can feel myself hanging out in back.”

“While I agree she looks better without it, Sooni might feel put out if she doesn’t wear the cape after she took the time to fix it up,” Amaranth said. “The poor girl tries so hard to be a good friend, and I think she actually came pretty close here. It would send the wrong message to reject that.”

“Thank you,” I said, though I suddenly felt a lot less sure about the cape. I’d forgotten Sooni’s part in it.

“You’re welcome, baby.”

I finished decking myself out with the accessories. The boots, which were fuzzy inside, were a big surprise… not only did they fit my feet snugly, but they were pretty damn toasty inside.

“Oh, wow,” I said. “I am so keeping these boots.”

“Feel free,” Ian said. “I rescued them from the garbage… I mean, I saved them from going into the garbage. I didn’t rescue them from out of the garbage.”

“I think I’d probably wear them anyway, as long as I’d already put them on before you told me that,” I said. “I think they’ll even kind of go with my coat, as long as the color change is permanent.”

“With that coat, I don’t think it would matter if they were hot pink,” Ian said.

“Can I put making fun of my coat on the black list?” I asked Amaranth.

“The important thing is that you like it,” Amaranth said.

“I think the important thing is that it keeps me warm,” I said. “That’s what a coat does. That’s what it’s for.”

“Who’s dressing up as a golem, again?” Ian asked.

“I’m just saying form’s not as important as function. If it keeps me toasty on a cold night, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world by default.”

“The most beautiful thing?” Amaranth repeated, arching an eyebrow at me.

“Uh… well…” I said, starting to shrink down inside myself. I recovered, though, and slipped an arm around her. “That criteria isn’t just for coats.”

Discuss this story.

Feejee had abandoned all caution and her own personal morals. Sara looked like she was trying to literally tear her sister and her apart. Trina was giving a blow-by-blow of the fight, as if us poor two-eyed folks couldn’t see, and she kept punctuating it with remarks about what freaks the Leightons were and how everybody should stare at them.

Me? I was a messy mass of conflicting desires… I wanted to climb back in the tub with Feejee. I wanted to jump on the Leightons and tear them apart. I wanted to eat and be eaten, I wanted to cower and I wanted to roar, I wanted to obey and obliterate, consume and consummate, hide in the basement and set the world on fire.

“Everybody… get… out!” I yelled, trying to put some kind of authority into my voice. It came out kind of fierce, gravelly and growly… kind of poorly modulated, but that didn’t make it sound any less scary in my head.

The crowd by the door scooted back a tiny bit, if only reflexively. Trina stood her ground, less concerned by the second with what was happening than she was with pushing the “freak” label onto anybody but her

“Look at them, they’ve got four eyes on one body!” Trina said. “And Twyla has horns!” she added, even though I didn’t think Twyla was even there. “What is she, part minotaur? Everybody in this dorm is a freak except me!”

The twins ignored her, me, and everything else except for each other. They sounded like they were speaking in tongues, some weird kind of sing-song baby talk that reminded me vaguely of Yokano… though that may have just been because I couldn’t understand either of them. I gave them a shove… I didn’t really care if they tore themselves apart, but the spectacle would keep everybody else hanging around.

“Everybody get out!” I yelled again. Yeah, okay, it hadn’t worked so great the first time, but my brain was still dripping with misty molasses. I felt very detached from everything that was going on even as I considered the situation urgent. “Something in the bath is making people crazy!”

I was being vague on purpose… I had just enough presence of mind to know that suggesting it was my peppermint bubble bath that was doing it would be a bad idea… that would sound even weirder and the confusion it was likely to engender would just make people stand around asking clarifying questions when they needed to be getting back.

Also, there was already enough likelihood I’d be handed the blame for this without me putting the idea in Trina’s head that it was my fault… assuming she even noticed over the sound of her own ranting, which wasn’t even restricted to people from our floor anymore.

“Michelle wet the bed all the way until seventh grade!” Trina gleefully yelled. “Becky Davis picks her nose and leaves it under her desk! Becky Jones started the fire in the girls’ room to get the smokers in trouble! Estelle wears pads because she thinks tampons are sinful! Myra’s grandfather was a half-dwarf!”

I supposed she must have been talking about girls she went to high school with or something… it was too much to hope that getting all this off her chest would be healthy for her. Feejee had jumped from the tub and was running from the room, shoving her way through the door while shouting that she wasn’t gay, she just wanted to eat me. Luckily for her, it didn’t seem like anybody heard or paid attention.

Behind the first ranks, Two was getting ever more shrill in her objections, and Sooni was joining, her voice even shriller. The whole noisy spectacle was happening right outside Kiersta’s door, but I didn’t entertain any hope that she’d come riding to the rescue… if she did intervene, it would probably be just to blame me. Chances were she’d get one whiff of the peppermint and either barricade herself in her room or take up Trina’s slack in shouting about what freaks everybody in Harlowe was.

I saw Rocky pushing forward past Trina… I could guess what she had in mind, if the fumes were reaching her… and probably even if they hadn’t. Bad shit was going down and I was there. Clearly it had to be my fault.

I couldn’t move, paralyzed with conflicting desires… I wanted the beat-down she surely longed to give me, I deserved it, every inch of it, and certainly she had every right to give it to me… but I also remembered the crunch of stone skin and brittle bone in my mouth, the candy-sweet taste of her virgin flesh and blood.

It’s the morning bathroom rush. Nobody’s fully awake. Nobody’s armed. I could kill them all.

But I didn’t want to… no, I did want to, but I also wanted not to.

Feejee hadn’t been the least bit conflicted. Trina and the twins didn’t seem to be, either. Was I the only one whose innermost thoughts and desires were so completely twisted around?

“Oh my kosh, look at her… does anybody really believe the stoneskin story?” Trina said. “Her mother probably fucked an earth elemental!”

Rocky wheeled around as Sooni of all people shrieked “Don’t talk about her mother!” and Two started saying something about her friend Dee, who had just that moment joined the throng and added her voice to their objections.

“Everybody get out!” I yelled again. Third time was the charm, right? Just in case my voice hadn’t gained magical hypnotic properties in the last thirty seconds, I decided to try another tack: asking effective people for help. “Dee, Two… get everybody away from the door!”

I couldn’t say if that would have worked on its own, because the unmistakable sound of vomiting from the back of the crowd grabbed everybody’s attention. I fought the urge to vomit myself… even though I couldn’t see it, it was enough to send my stomach into a twisting fit.

“Please, everyone, let us stand back and give her some room,” Dee said, politely but firmly, and the crowd began to withdraw.

Getting people to stand back from a dangerous spectacle was no easy task, but getting them to clear away from throw up was a little easier. It’s possible she applied something more than regular persuasion, too… she moved forward through the flow of people and seemed to calm Sara and Tara with a touch, then drew them by the hand out of the bathroom. Once they were clear, she closed the door and locked it.

“What exactly is going on?”

“Don’t breath too deeply!” I said. “I think it’s something alchemical, in the bath water.”

“Perhaps we should let it out,” Dee said.

“Yeah, good idea,” I said. I held my breath, but before I could stick my head behind the curtain I heard the water start to gurgle and realized that Dee had taken care of it herself. I knew from experience that the water didn’t drain super fast… I’d enjoyed the sensation of it slowly drawing away, emptying the tub bit by bit instead of getting out and leaving me to linger in the warmth it left behind. Actually, that didn’t sound like a bad idea… most of my bath had already been ruined. Why not enjoy the rest of it?

“Mackenzie,” Dee said sharply as I started to pull the curtain back.

“Oh, right,” I said. letting it fall back in place. I could feel swirling eddies of steam tickle my face.

Are you an enchanter or aren’t you? I thought again. I’d turned the shower curtain into a barrier to keep steam in before… I threw the strongest formulation of my insulation spell I could muster onto the bath’s curtain. I could feel it taking hold, but it was hard to say how well it worked for its intended purpose since there was already so much of the stuff hanging around in the aisle.

Well, enchantment wasn’t my only lab… I’d only just started on directed evocation, but air out of air seemed like a no-brainer. I took a few steps towards the door and called forth air, pushing it back towards the showers. It would have been better to direct it towards a window, but there weren’t any in the bathroom. I supposed we’d have to open up the windows in the stairwell and prop open the door to help it dissipate fully, but getting the main cloud dispersed seemed like a good start.

“That was a good beginning, but perhaps we should leave the bathroom before we succumb to lingering influences,” Dee said, staring holes through my bare breasts.

Was she looking at my piercings? Impossible as it seemed, I was actually getting used to having pieces of metal rammed through my sensitive bits, but maybe in her culture that would be shocking or outrageous.

“Yeah,” I said. I blushed and grabbed for my bathrobe and my other stuff, slipping on the wet floor as my fingers wrapped around the squeeze bottle of peppermint bubble bath. My hand closed spasmodically and the top of it exploded, sending a gout of pinkish-white goo up right in front of my face and all over my hand.

The sharp mint smell seemed to ram itself up my nostrils like a pair of skewers, right into my brain. The world vanished in an icy white hot haze.

“Give me that,” Dee said, grabbing my robe.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said as she roughly wiped my hand clean then threw the robe aside. She grabbed my other hand and pulled me from the bathroom. The hall was still full of people, though they were mostly hanging out in clusters in front of open doors.

“Stay still,” Dee whispered in my ear, even as I looked around and thought yummy.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I couldn’t even make out specific people… it was just food and not food. Was that how Feejee and Iona saw the world? Feejee… I should try to find her while she was still in the mood.

“Nobody has told you to move,” Dee said icily, and I froze. “The bathroom is out of service until further notice,” she announced, and I heard a click behind us. “There has been an alchemical accident. I advise everyone not to linger too long by the stairs.”

There was a chorus of protests and questions, but Dee ignored all of them. She dragged me towards her room. The door opened in front of her and she shoved me inside, with more force than was in her arms.

“Down on the floor, beast,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, but something inside me said why? Why was I letting myself be cowed by this slip of an inexperienced priestess? I was a demon… I was tooth and fire, I was power and pain, hunger and hatred… I was made of malice and magic and she… she was not.

“Close your eyes and sit on your hands,” she said. “Remain perfectly still.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said and obeyed.

I heard soft scratching sounds, and then Dee said, “It is done. You may open your eyes.”

When I saw that she had inscribed an octagon around me, I felt a surge of hatred and anger rising up within me, but I stayed still. She hadn’t told me I could get off my hands.

“That was not the only variety of bath product you use, was it?” she asked me.

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“I am going to have Kiersta notify the university that our bathroom is contaminated, and then I am going to enter your room and inspect the rest of your hygiene products,” Dee said. “Remain here. Do not struggle against the bonds.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and then I was alone.

The fog was starting to lift from my head, but I still felt most comfortable remaining in that framework. I was naked and trapped in a protective circle. My hand still smelled like that peppermint stuff and the longer I sat there in the circle, the more aware I was of that and how good it smelled… I wanted to shove it in my face and drink it down.

Dee told me to sit on my hands.

After a few minutes, I heard a voice outside the door… Two. I felt the same mix of emotions and urges as I had in the bathroom.

“Dee, my friend Hazel needs…”

“I’m fine!” Hazel protested. “I keep telling you, I’m fine!”

“You can help her clean up in the kitchen,” Dee said. “Our bathroom is off limits.”

“But that isn’t fair. Also, I have to pee… and I have to get ready for class,” Two said. “But I really have to pee.”

“It isn’t safe… please, Two, use the fourth floor.”

“Okay.”

Then the door opened, and Dee entered. She looked down at me cautiously, then stepped around the warding circle, inspecting each line. Finally, she spoke.

“If there was any doubt that you received a genuine visitation last night from an infernal presence, it is now effectively erased,” Dee said. “It was not just a mental sending, either… a demon has been in your room.”

“In my room?” I repeated, the impact of the idea shocking me out of my sub space. While I was sleeping… with Amaranth right there on top of me… “Are you sure?”

“The traces had been deliberately obscured, but once I looked for them, they were unmistakable,” Dee said. “Particularly around your dresser. I am sorry to say that every bottle I checked seems to have been contaminated with the same potion. I attempted a brief purifying ritual on one, but it reduced the contents to slightly discolored water. Slightly discolored holy water, at that. Amaranth is disposing of it, along with the rest.”

“She’s disposing of all my bubble bath?”

“And your shampoo and body spray,” Dee said. “It was all contaminated.”

“Do you know how much I spent on that stuff?” I asked.

“It had already been rendered unusable, Mackenzie,” Dee said. “It is not any more wasted for having been safely removed. I can only surmise that your visitor sought to unleash what he saw as your ‘true self’… fortunately, your true self is rather more deeply conflicted than he imagined. In the absence of overwhelming hunger, your demonic side can be overwhelmed by your other desires.”

I couldn’t help but notice that as she said this, her eyes were again fixated on my breasts.

“I apologize,” she said, noticing that I’d noticed. “In the absence of sophisticated alchemical knowledge, my method of investigation was rather direct… I inhaled quite a bit of the altered scents from your bath products.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“My interest in your body is not personal, I assure you,” she said. “While my mental training allows me to minimize the influence of the alchemical fumes, my natural interest in the female body is considerable and the elven sexual drive is… considerable.”

“You don’t have to explain to me,” I said. I’d been known to have similar reactions to other women, in my unguarded moments.

“Your breasts might be impressive to one of the stunted women of the surface elves, but they are rather underdeveloped by my tastes,” she said.

“Seriously, it’s okay,” I said.

“You would really not be my first choice for a partner, even if I were to consider taking a non-elven lover,” Dee said. “I can assure you of that.”

“That’s… nice,” I said.

“In fact, I would sooner dip a holy chalice in a toilet than defile the altar of my body through sexual contact with you,” she said. Her face darkened. “It is within the realm of possibility that my mental training is not as effective as I had thought,” she said, backing towards the door.

“Dee… wait,” I said. “The circle?”

“I’ll return to release you when my own head is clear,” she said. “That should be a fairly accurate indication of when it’s safe to do so.”

“I have class this morning!” I said. “Ten fifteen.”

“I will be back before then.”

Discuss this story.

Unless he planned on handing out some more free hundreds before the end of the semester, I couldn’t really afford to skip any more Fridays. So, I decided to steal a bit of relaxation and get in the bathtub before the rest of the dorm woke up.

Feejee was snoozing in her usual tub when I got in there. She had the curtain drawn for once, but her flipper… or fluke, I guess she called it… was kind of poking out. I didn’t want to wake her up, but it wasn’t like the tub came with a volume control… though I could see how that would be useful. Not only would it help you not disturb your neighbors if you were the sort of person who took baths at odd hours, but it could be useful if you wanted to listen to music while the tub was filling, or whatever.

That seemed like the kind of feature that a really high-end tub might have. There hadn’t been anything like that in the Empress Suite, but I could see a custom bath with its own music box also having a silence spell on the faucet, or even something that transformed the sound of it.

Of course, the simple stone tubs in the dorm bathroom wouldn’t have anything like that… but was I an enchanter, or wasn’t I?

I wasn’t, in point of fact… but I had spent like a month and a half learning how to alter the intensity of a property. I could probably make a loud thing louder. It seemed to me like I should have been able to make a loud thing less loud… or at least make a very slightly quiet thing more quiet.

Of course, there was a problem… the water pouring out of the faucet wasn’t a single discrete thing, it was a bunch of amorphous stuff that would crash against the bottom and fall apart as soon as I grabbed hold of it. Even still water was hard to enchant. What I really needed was an actual silencing spell to throw around it. I could have maybe made the walls in the alcove less echoey, and the curtain more muffling, but they were very echoey and it wasn’t much of a muffler. Trying to turn the bathtub into a zone of silence for the duration of the tub filling wouldn’t have made for a very relaxing start to my bath.

But it was interesting to think about it, about what I could do with my limited knowledge and how far I had to go. That was what applied enchanting was about: finding uses for this stuff. In the bad old days, you’d throw a silence spell on a pair of boots or a cloak or something so you could sneak around and kill people or things without getting noticed. Now it could be used for privacy, for greater comfort in travel, or to avoid awkward and disturbing conversations with ravenous floormates.

I giggled a little at that last thought… I tried not to, and only succeeded in sublimating it into a loud and kind of painful snort that resounded way too loudly all around me. I froze. Feejee muttered a “huh, what?” kind of sound and shifted around a bit in the water.

I considered very quietly picking up my things and going back out the way I came, but only for a moment. I’d come there to take a bath. Why did it have to be a whole big operation? Well, partly because of Feejee, but I was letting that happen. I could have just come in all matter-of-fact, turned on the water, and climbed in. If I wasn’t letting Kiersta’s lame attempt at being an authority figure keep me from enjoying a morning soak, why was I letting a little thing like… okay, it wasn’t a little thing. It was a serious problem that needed dealing with.

But it had nothing to do with me taking a bath or not.

I turned on the water, slipped out of my robe, climbed in, and closed the curtain. A liberal application of bath products and a few minutes later, I was in steamy peppermint heaven. Dee’s deep-breath-through-the-nose thing was so much easier to practice when the air tasted like soothing candy.

Why couldn’t I smell like this all the time?

Not rotten eggs, not Feejee’s favorite treat with a possible side of supernatural addiction, but just… a pleasant peppermint haze. It would be nice to smell like that… like anything other than what I was, anything other than a demon or a human or a mixture of the two.

I must have drifted off, because I didn’t hear Feejee getting out, or the curtain sliding open, but I opened my eyes after a particularly deep and soothing breath, and there she was, looking down at me.

With the whole “don’t eat me” thing, I’d kind of lost sight of how beautiful she was. Feejee’s skin… when she wore it as skin and not scales… was incredibly clear and smooth, but it was a color you didn’t find in most races: like a deep tan, but tinged slightly green. Not what people call “olive skin” on humans: just deep tan, mixed with a bit of green. She was very solidly built, broad across the hips and shoulders.

For all that they were equally unsupported, her breasts hung more freely than Amaranth’s did.. and while I liked Amaranth’s, there was something very free about Feejee’s. She was wild and untamed. Amaranth was cultivated.

I realized that my hand was between my legs, and I didn’t care. Neither, apparently, did she.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said, my finger rubbing all around the area around my… well, the general clitoral area.

“You smell like candy canes,” she said, breathing in.

“Yeah,” I said. My finger flicked back and forth.

“I like candy canes,” she said. “In fact, I love candy canes.”

That was a little surprising to me… I wouldn’t have guessed she would have known what they were, much less that she had a taste for them.

“Me, too,” I said. Had I had a candy cane that I could remember? Not that I could think of. I didn’t fucking care. Feejee loved candy canes. I had enough scent clinging to me that could have been one. I loved them, too.

“I like to lick them,” she said, flicking her green tongue out around her lips. “Until their stripes come off in my mouth. I like to suck on them, until they’re worn down to little nubs. That’s what I like to do, when I can… but I’m usually not that patient.”

“Me, neither,” I said.

“I’m going to eat you now,” she said, and she started to climb into the tub with me.

“Okay,” I said, only hoping that she wouldn’t finish before I did. I could feel it building up inside me, getting closer and closer… I had this idea that all I needed for a truly epic climax was Feejee’s teeth sinking into me.

“Mack?” she said.

“Okay,” I repeated. I closed my eyes and drank in more of that scent. Closer… closer. “Eat me.”

“Mack?” she said louder. She bent down and started shaking me, and that was all it took… I was off. I was bursting off like bubbles rising to the top of a cauldron.

“I said you could eat me!” I shouted through the waves of pleasure. “Go ahead!”

The world seemed to flip around, the water of the tub sloshing up past me to envelop her. My leg was tangled up in the curtain somehow. Feejee had resumed her fishy lower form for some reason.

“Mack!” Feejee said again, her voice suddenly seeming much closer to me even though she’d been right in front of me all the time. “Mack, I’m glad you’re coming around but… time and place?”

“What?” I asked, kicking free of the curtain.

Her tail melted into a pair of scaled legs and she sat up, scooting out from under me.

“We can’t do this here and now,” she said. “Among other things, Iona would never forgive me… and we’d never get away with it.”

“Hey, you started it!” I said, trying to get to my feet. What had I been thinking? “And I am not coming around, Feejee. Not to that… not for real.”

“Then why’d you climb into my tub telling me to eat you?” she asked.

“You climbed into my tub,” I said.

“What?”

That was when I realized where I was.

“Oh,” I said. “Um… I guess maybe I was sleepwalking?”

“What?”

“I think I was asleep,” I said. “I was dreaming.”

“People walk in their sleep?”

“Not usually,” I sad.

“But you do?” she asked.

“Not usually.”

“Then why do you think you were doing it now?” she asked.

“Because I was dreaming that you and I were having a conversation about candy canes and then I woke up over here,” I said. No sense going over the details.

“Uh huh,” she said. I could tell she wasn’t buying it. “And that stuff you sprayed was part of the dream?”

“Stuff?”

“From your…”

I was probably already blushing, but the realization that I’d probably gushed all over her stomach really turned up the steam.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s kind of interesting. I always wondered if being lesbian meant you were part guy. I guess now I have proof that I’m not one.”

“What? Feejee, that’s just… you know… an orgasm,” I said. “Every woman does that. It’s normal.”

Not that I had a lot of basis of comparison there, but Amaranth hadn’t said that anything was wrong the many times I’d came in her presence, and neither had Steff or Ian.

“I don’t,” she said.

“Yeah, well… maybe yours isn’t completely functional,” I said. “Like a decoy. Actual mammalian vaginas do that. It’s normal.”

“If mine’s not doing anything it’s supposed to, Rick’s been a pretty big gentleman about it,” Feejee said.

“Well, maybe he doesn’t have a lot of experience,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess you would know better than most,” she said. She stretched her legs back out, slipping one of them across to trip me up so I landed with my butt on her ankles. “This is kind of nice, you know. Sharing water.”

She gave me the hungry look that let me know exactly what she meant.

“You’re not worried that someone will come in and realize we’re in here together?”

“I don’t really care about that now,” she said. She tilted back a bit and lifted up her legs so I started to slide towards her. Her legs seemed to be surprisingly strong, but then, she did swim with them. “I just want to keep you close to me.”

“You don’t care if someone thinks you’re a lesbian?”

“If someone comes in, you can be very quiet, can’t you?” she asked. Darkness started to swirl out of the centers of her eyes, turning them into black pits. “Very still?”

Push back, I thought… and then I wondered if I really wanted to listen to the advice of a demon. If not listening will get me killed…

But I didn’t want to push back, not too much. I wanted to be close to Feejee. The scent of peppermint still hung over me like a shroud, still filled my nostrils. I felt my hand moving.

“No gay stuff,” Feejee whispered. “We don’t need that. I know what you want, Mack. I know what I want.”

“Feejee, whatever I said… I was dreaming,” I said. “Raving.”

“Shh, shh,” she said, her eyes boring into me. “Food doesn’t talk… and anyway, maybe you were just saying what you really felt.”

She pulled me in against her chest, turning me around to face away from her. Breaking contact with her eyes didn’t seem to lift the heady fog that filled my brain. But even through that haze, I realized there wasn’t anything she could do to me… she didn’t have a magic blade with her, and her teeth couldn’t pierce my skin.

I felt her teeth closing in on the skin of my neck, as if to confirm that. She bit hard and she pulled hard to the side like she would rip and tear, but of course all that did was spike the pain in a wonderful way. She let go of that mouthful and began to nibble up and down my shoulder.

This wasn’t so bad. The scent of peppermint and the teeth of a mermaid, her breasts pushing against my back… it wasn’t bad at all.

“We’ll just enjoy a little nibble,” she whispered in my ear. “And then I’ll take you back to my room. I caught you in water. That’s close enough, I think. It’s close enough. I mean, you’re only halfway human, so even if it only halfway counts… you know?”

Something was badly wrong… beyond the fact that I was getting snuggly with a mermaid who wanted to devour me, beyond the fact that a mermaid wanted to devour me. Even though Feejee’s self-control wasn’t much better than mine, she should have at least reacted to the possibility of being caught in another supposed lesbian tryst. She’d always been as scrupulous about the restriction to feeding in water as Dee and Amaranth had been about their own religious beliefs.

“Celia,” I said. Feejee didn’t have a private room. No matter how muddled she had me, she couldn’t risk doing me in the bathroom, but she couldn’t take me back to her room. “What about Celia?”

“Probably didn’t sleep in our room,” she said.

“Iona!” It was a weak objection, but it could stall.

“I saw you first,” she said. She turned me around again. Her mouth split open wide, her teeth gone long and pointed. “But Mack, I keep telling you food doesn’t talk… I think it’s time for us to go before you get more ideas.”

Her head whipped to the side, and then I heard voices outside the door: Trina and one of the Leightons. The door swung open. We both froze, I felt as guilty as Feejee looked, for some reason.

“Oh, kheez, what the hell happened in here?” Trina said. “There’s more water on the floor than in the tub.”

“What happened, Feej… wet the bed?” one of the Leightons said, and the other laughed.

I tried to make myself very small… as Feejee had said, very quiet and very still. Why was I hiding with the ravenous, me-eating monster to escape from mere bullies? It was a good question. I could have screamed murder as soon as they interrupted Feejee’s hold over me… or could I?

Maybe the fact that I still felt paralyzed with fear proved that I couldn’t… but it wasn’t fear of Feejee, it was fear of them, of their scorn. I knew that Feejee longed to literally eat me alive, but in that moment I was almost convinced that what Leightons and Trina would do would amount to the same thing.

“It was probably the other one,” one of the Leightons said. “Look at all these fruity bubbles… by the Dark Herald, if I didn’t know she was a dyke I’d think she was a faggot.”

Fortunately, the sound of my gasp was covered by the sound of her sister’s and Trina’s.

“You can’t say that!” her twin said.

“What? Yes, I can.”

“Are you crazy? We’re attached. You can’t say that kind of shit, Tara, not when you’re stuck to me,” the one who by the process of elimination had to be Sara said. “You can’t!”

“Oh my khosh, I have to tell everyone, right now,” Trina said, and she did just that, her flip-flops making splat noises on the wet floor as she ran for the door yelling, “Everybody was up! You won’t believe what Tara said!”

The vague silhouette that was the Leightons began moving in the strangest way as they both stopped talking and instead starting making other sounds. It took me a moment to figure out that they were fighting. Trina, still in the doorway, reported this new development: “Everybody get up right now, the twins are killing each other.”

Thinking there wasn’t going to be a better time, I stood up and slipped out of the tub… “slipped” in the sense of “my foot failed to find purchase and I ended up landing smack on my ass with my legs going in directions no gods of good had intended for them to go in”, not in the sense of “with commendable stealth and grace”.

Oh, well. I had a feeling I was going to be in trouble no matter what happened, but it would be far, far better to not be in the bathtub when people responded to Trina’s summons, as they would… it was the time of day when people would be heading there anyway.

The Leightons were really going at it. Tara seemed to be trying to choke her sister with her one hand when she could get a grip on her neck, and was otherwise grabbing and pulling on her. Sara was just straight out beating on her. Neither of them was doing anything to defend herself from the other. They’d been wearing nothing but a towel when they came in, and now they were wearing nothing.

It was… well, they had kind of an athletic build that didn’t do a lot for me. Tara had gouged out some scratches on her sister’s arm and shoulder, and Sara had bloodied her nose in return. The tangy sweet coppery scent mingled with the smell of the peppermint, so strong in the aisle between the tubs.

Feejee climbed out of the tub. She put her hand on my shoulder and I felt torn: eat or be eaten. They both seemed like valid choices in that moment.

More people were crowding around the door, though there was a bit of a logjam with Trina of the creepy eye and the plump ass standing in the way. I could see the people milling around behind her, though.

There was Rocky, who’d tasted so good.

Sooni… why couldn’t she have been as mature on the inside as she looked on the outside? My insides ached for her, but she was every bit the baby she pretended Kai was… otherwise I’d fuck her brains out. It would be worth the trip to Yokan just to smack some sense into the idiot mother who’d spoiled her.

Who was I kidding? If I wasn’t Amaranth’s, I’d trade places with Kai in a heartbeat. I’d be a better match, anyway. Sooni could throw shoes at me all day long and not even dent me.

Oru was peeking around Trina’s legs. She creeped me out. Goblinoids creeped me out. That was all there was to it.

There were more, but they were at the front. Behind them all was Two… I couldn’t see her, but I could smell her through the peppermint haze and I could hear her complaining about people blocking the door when she needed to take a shower. The sound of her voice… I wanted to deck her. That wasn’t all, though. I wanted her to spank me, I wanted to eat her, I wanted to hold her forever, I wanted to kill everybody who’d ever hurt her, I wanted to build her a box and hide her away from the world, I wanted to climb inside her dreams with Dee and watch her fly.

What the hell is happening to me? I thought, and then I watched the Leighton’s foot smash down on a pile of bubbles I must have tracked across on my way to Feejee. Peppermint, I thought. Peppermint haze.

Discuss this story

Spectators filled all six sections of stands which surrounded the battlefield a mile outside of town. For this game, the visitors had selected the heavily wooded side five for their home base, leaving the home team defending side two.

The visitors’ team was actually a coalition from two smaller school districts, one of which overlapped an elven forest. While all their fighters were ostensibly human, they had an unusually high concentration of skilled archers and lightly armored, highly mobile infantry.

They’d managed to hold their wooded turf with a small number of defenders using traps and hit-and-run tactics, freeing the rest of the coalition to concentrate on offense.

It seemed like a good strategy on the face of it, but two hours into the skirmish match it was becoming apparent that the coalition’s generals would have done better to reverse the starting positions, forcing their opponents to try to defend the wooded section against a force of highly-skilled elfbloods.

Instead, the home team had erected their standard on the largest hill on side two and massed their defenders around it. The two-school coalition had lost so many men in their assaults on the hill that they would lose handily by default once the five hour mark was passed.

As the tipping point had already been reached, they couldn’t wait the other side out… if they couldn’t win outright, they would have to inflict more casualties. They’d begun to get creative in their attacks.

Five different groups of archers launched volleys of arrows in waves, concentrating their aim near the top of the hill. Each flight of arrows was obviously smaller than a massed volley would have been, but by loosing their projectiles in turns they were able to keep a more or less constant stream going.

A wavery blue energy shell appeared in the sky seconds after this assault began. It was curved like a section of a dome, and it intercepted most of the arrows. They were ready this time, but the defenders’ wizards hadn’t always been so quick, and the side of the hill was dotted with shafts, and a handful of bodies lying motionless.

A figure stood near the top of the hill, dominating the scene in much the same way that the hill itself did the surrounding terrain.

She, too, was dotted with the red-fletched arrows of the opposing team. The arrows’ tips hadn’t quite penetrated through her tough hide, and while she could no doubt have just brushed them off of her arm like the irritants that they were, she instead left them in place so that anybody who charged up the hill would see them sticking out of her arm like the quills of a porcupine.

At the same time that the rain of arrows began, a magical wind rammed into the line of defenders who guarded the hillside in a ring halfway up its slope. One group of lightly armored fighters in red charged through the hole this made. The wind-battered soldiers picked themselves up and quickly closed the gap, fighting back the rest of the attackers and preventing any more from joining the charge up the hill.

However, the attackers started to lose momentum almost as soon as they were past that first obstacle. They slowed, their formation losing cohesiveness, and more than one of them actually glanced behind at the path of retreat through the enemy line.

Just as they’d known would happen, the massive figure gave a fierce bellow and swooped down in a counter-charge, sending the lead warrior flying with a swipe of her gauntleted arm, bowling several over, and breaking up the tight formation. The other hilltop defenders rushed in after her, slaughtering the scattered and distracted soldiers. The attack was quickly repelled with no casualties among the hilltop group, though two soldiers were sent down to replace those who’d fallen on the line.

The hulking fighter hadn’t even taken the sword off her back.

On a floating disk hovering high in the air ten yards outside the hexagonal boundary of the skirmish field, a representative from Magisterius University watched with an air of practiced skepticism.

“Let’s be honest,” he said to the head coach. “She’s not that great a solo fighter. She broke their formation with momentum and because they’re afraid to engage, but in a straight one-on-one fight I think a good swordsman could take her out.”

“That’s why she’s a skirmisher, not a gladiator,” the coach said. “Look, we’re seven and two so far this season and she wasn’t even playing for one of those losses.”

“Well, she holds the line well enough on a small field like this,” the man said. “But we have one of the largest skirmish fields in the Imperium.”

“That means you’ve got a lot of spaces to fill,” the coach said. “You can’t tell me that you don’t have room for an ogre among them.”

“Half-ogre,” the scout said. “Raised by a human parent. ‘Belinda’ doesn’t sound very imposing, does it?”

“When she’s out on the field, the other team doesn’t know if she has a flower print comforter on her bed or if she has jam and toast with her tea,” the coach said. “And for somebody who’s never met a full one, she’s ogre enough.”

“Still, I can’t guarantee her a spot.”

“Are you telling me you’ve got other players on the hook that can hold a hundred and fifty yard radius all by their lonesomes?” the coach said. This was an exaggeration, of course, as the figure on the hill was hardly holding the entire field, but the scout was used to dealing with hyperbolic coaches. “Look, I know you’ve got a bigger operation than we do, but you give her a squad to lead and she’ll do the same thing for you that she’s done for us as team captain.”

“Being the captain of a small team isn’t anything like being squad leader on a big team,” the rep said. “Do you think she’d be able to handle that?”

“For a chance to play with the big boys?” the coach said. “We didn’t start her out as captain. She worked her way up. She knows how it goes. Anyway, why so many questions? You can see how she handles herself. You’ve met with her. We know you’re not going to have an answer for her immediately… but you know, of all the teams that have scouted us—and that’s a lot of teams this year—nobody’s seemed as, well, skeptical about our little Lindy as you are.”

“We’ve been burned before,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing I want to talk about, but let’s just say I’m going to be damned sure they’re really interested in college skirmish before I sign any more ogrebloods.”

“You won’t be burned by her,” the coach said. “Skirmish is her life… literally. Maybe I’m not doing her any favors by telling you this, but you have to understand, she’s got no prospects, nothing to look forward to. Her grades are shit right across the board. We help her out, but she just manages to scrape by with the minimum passing grades. She doesn’t have any interests or aptitudes except for fighting. I’d be worried about the kid, but we both know she’s got a future with some school’s program. I guess it’ll probably come down to who wants her the most.”

Monday, Astera 7th 222

“This is your squad’s room, Belinda,” the earnest young woman with the clipboard said as she led the half-ogress into a long, narrow room that looked more like a hallway with beds and footlockers. “As freshmen, we had to let the school assign you dorm rooms but you’re more than welcome to stay here.”

“What was that other room?” Belinda asked.

“What other room?”

“The barracks one,” she said. “The big open one.”

“Oh, those are the regular quarters,” the coach’s assistant said. “Since you guys in the seventh squad are kind of a special project, you get your own all to yourself.”

“We don’t get to be in the main room with everybody else?”

“Only the best squads get their own quarters. Oh, and see that door at the end? That leads to your personal quarters. It’s also your office. The joke around here is that the officers’ quarters are just broom closets with the signs painted over, but in actual fact, they are slightly larger. Now, if you’d like to meet some of your squadmates…”

“They told me I could pick my squad,” Belinda said.

“Who did?”

“The recruiters.”

“Oh, well,” the assistant said, flipping through the pages on her clipboard as though they had any information aside from room assignments and schedules on them, “of course squad leaders are allowed to have some input, but the final choice belongs to the general coach.”

Belinda glowered. While what the assistant said was technically true, everything she’d ever heard had led her to believe that skirmish team officers had a more active hand in things and that the coaches only moved people around after seeing how they fit together.

“But if I’ve already got squadmates, how can I have input?” Belinda asked.

“Well, again, the seventh squad is a special project this year, and in order to maximize the effectiveness of your unique contributions…”

“Whatever,” Belinda said. “Let’s meet them.”

“Go ahead and send them in, John!” the assistant called.

One of the doors opened and an extremely varied group of beings began to file awkwardly in: a half-orc, a woman made of rock, a big burly bear of a man with a bushy brown beard, a minotaur, a weedy-looking human boy dressed in black and wearing heavy eyeliner, a harpy, a muscular triclops, a ratman, and three lizardfolk… two in a pair and one who stood off alone. Some of them were freshmen, like Belinda, and they looked around the room and at each other. Others simply glared at the new squad leader. These were returning students who’d played on other squads and who now found themselves reassigned under a freshman.

“Belinda, these are the men and women of the seventh squad,” the assistant said. “Squad, this is Belinda. She’ll be leading you in battle.”

Nobody said anything.

“Well, I’ll leave you all to get acquainted with each other. You all are free until three, when you need to form up on the practice field for team orientation,” the assistant said. “And, if nobody else has said it yet, I’d just like to welcome the new fighters to Magisterius University.”

With that, she left. About half of the seventh squad did, too. Among those who remained, no one approached Belinda immediately.

“This is bullshit,” the dark-clad boy said to nobody in particular. He went to the one of the twelve beds that was furthest from the officer’s room and dumped the contents of his duffel bag out into the locker at the foot of it. “This is my bed. Nobody take the bed next to it. I want a buffer between me and all you freaks.”

“Watch who you’re calling freaks, corpsefucker,” the stony woman said.

“Watch who you’re calling corpsefucker, freak,” the boy said. “I am a necromancer, and I wouldn’t even be wasting my talents on this stupid game if the narrow-minded nitwits who run the university had given me any other choice. Honestly, they acted like I’d siphoned an entire soul… meanwhile, an actual corpsefucker just got a semester of community service… in the vaults. Three years, and I never had to lock my materials up before.”

Belinda watched the exchange, absolutely bemused. She hadn’t had any idea what to expect, but she’d had a vague idea that her squad would consist of squishy little full humans who would be intimidated by the sight of her. Nobody in the room seemed especially intimidated.

The woman rolled her eyes at the necromancy student, then strolled over towards Belinda.

“Hi,” she said, holding out a hand. “I’m, uh… well, just call me Rocky. I was a squad leader in high school… they usually had me lead charges and take point on difficult missions. I wondered what kind of strategies do you prefer to employ?”

“Uh… I like to make people come to me,” Belinda said. “But I like going on the attack, too.”

“Flexibility,” Rocky said. “I like that. They said you were captain, your junior and senior year?”

“I was,” Belinda said.

“What was it like leading an entire team?”

“I didn’t really do much leading, actually,” Belinda said. “I just went where the general told me to.”

“But you were the captain.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” Rocky said. “Okay. Well, good to meet you. I’m going to go stow my stuff. Are you planning on assigning bunks?”

“Um…”

“I’ll just go stow it, then,” Rocky said. “And if you need any help with strategy, or planning, or anything, let me know. I was a good officer.”

Friday, Astera 11th 222 (Morning)

“I think our squad’s really starting to shape up,” Rocky said as they watched the rest of the squads practicing coordinated maneuvers. “With Hissy coordinating our movements, you on point, Scylla doing air support, and Jimmy’s skeletons to do surprise flanking, I think we can be a real force to be reckoned with.”

“Yeah,” Belinda grunted.

“I think once they see us in action, they’ll start fitting us into the overall strategy instead of using us as a bunch of ‘scary monsters’ to spook the other side,” Rocky said. “I mean, we can fight. Even Jimmy can. It’s stupid for them not to make use of us. We are good for something besides holding a spot they don’t want to have to defend.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there are two weeks of practice between now and the first match,” Rocky said. “I’ve been working on getting the coaches to put us on the field wherever we would most likely be during the actual match… supposedly so that the rest our team gets used to us, but hopefully everybody will see how well we do our things.”

“Hopefully.”

“I mean, you’re used to standing there and looking scary, but some of us are real fighters,” Rocky said.

Saturday, Astera 19th 222

“I have great news!” Rocky announced, after walking into Belinda’s private room without knocking. “I’ve been talking to Coach John and after seeing us beat squads one through three during practice maneuvers, he says they’re going to revise the battle plans for the game against Blackwater. Instead of just cutting off one chokepoint, we’re going to be working with one and three. Depending on which side BPC picks, we might actually be the ones capturing their standard.”

“Really?” Belinda said. “That’s… awesome.”

“Isn’t it?” Rocky said. “I’ve worked up some contingency plans based on the side they think Blackwater’s general will pick, and the rest of the squad is excited about them.”

“The rest of the squad?”

“Oh, yeah, I showed them to everybody,” Rocky said. “Actually, I wanted to get Knossos and Scylla’s opinions before I did anything, but I’ve got everything just about finalized now. If we can pull off what I’ve got in mind, we’ll never be relegated to static defense again. It’ll be tricky, but with Hissy coordinating and you soaking up their attacks, I think we can manage it.”

Friday, Astera 25th 222 (Final Practice Before The First Game)

“Where’s Belinda?”

Friday, Calendula 2nd (Night)

As the time for the meeting drew nearer, Hazel tried to solicit contributions for a pizza order to be delivered afterwards. This was not met with much enthusiasm, as three of those present did not eat cheese, and Honey and myself were both in favor of going to bed before too long.

“Come on, an army marches on its stomach,” Hazel said. “And as general, it’s my duty to set a good example.” She looked at me. “Come on, Mack. After your ordeal, don’t you think you deserve a nice pizza pie?”

The eternal siren song of the pizza party… it was tough for a former outcast like myself to resist, but tonight I had a bed calling my name. The fact that the bed would be full of Amaranth was icing on the cake.

“I’m sorry, Hazel,” I said. “It sounds tempting, but I really need some sleep. Some other time?”

“I suppose,” Hazel said. She sighed. “We’re going to have a rematch, anyway, right?” she asked Shiel.

“If you haven’t had enough already,” Shiel said.

“Never! I say we make this a weekly thing,” Hazel said. “How about it? Same time next Friday?”

“Why not?” Shiel said.

“Right,” Hazel said. “And we can do some pizzas for me and my supporters, and sandwiches or whatever for yours.” She looked at me. “You’ll be in my corner, right, Mack?”

“Definitely,” I said.

“Um, hon?” Steff said, tugging on my sleeve.

“What?” I asked.

“You kind of already made plans for next Friday, baby,” Amaranth said.

“Huh?” I said. Oh, right. My date with Steff, assuming it was still on. I hadn’t forgotten about that… no way in hell would I do that. I just hadn’t consciously put it together with the mention of “next Friday”. “Oops. Guess I wasn’t thinking.”

“We have really got to get you a calendar or a planner or something,” Amaranth said. “We’ll go to the bookstore tomorrow around lunchtime and see what we can find.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s probably a good idea.”

“We should probably get going,” Amaranth said. “The meeting will be starting soon.”

“Hon, the lounge is like right outside,” Steff said. She’d been watching the game avidly, almost to the point of forgetting about her relationship worries. “I’m sure we’ll hear them begin.”

“Yes, but Mack should make a strong impression by being there early,” Amaranth said. “To make up for her missed opportunities.”

“Is it possible for her to show up yesterday?” Shiel asked. She reached for a row of her soldiers and started picking them up.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Hazel asked.

“Are you really going to make me play this out to the bitter end?” Shiel asked.

“We can call it a draw if you like,” Hazel said.

“Not on your life,” Shiel said.

“Then we fight on,” Hazel said, and Shiel replaced the soldiers.

“I’m afraid you’re going to be short a couple spectators,” Amaranth said, putting her arm over my shoulders and pulling me in. “We have about a week’s worth of snuggling to catch up on.”

“That’s fine,” Hazel said. “As long as I’ve got my trusty lieutenant.” She patted Two’s knee. “You won’t abandon me, will you?”

“I do not would like to abandon anybody,” Two said. “But I’m tired, and I have to go to work tomorrow.”

“I’ll stay and watch,” Steff said. “I think I’m getting the hang of this game.”

“Maybe you should share it with Hazel,” Shiel said.

“Just how long do you think this game is going to last?” Oru asked. “I’d like to go to bed before too long, myself.”

“Not much longer,” Shiel said. “Two, maybe three hours. We should definitely have it wrapped up before midnight.”

“What?” Oru asked. “You’ve been slaughtering her.”

“Most of her long-ranged offensive capabilities are destroyed, but she’s still got quite a bit of her heavy cavalry, and those pikemen are positively entrenched,” Shiel said. “While her offense was disastrous, Hazel’s surprisingly skilled at fighting a defensive battle.”

“What you really mean is I learned quickly,” Hazel said. “And sooner or later I’ll have learned enough to turn this thing around.”

“I find that unlikely,” Shiel said.

“Why risk it?” Oru said. “Crush her quickly and get it over with.”

“It’s going to take some time to do that without exposing my troops to unnecessary losses,” Shiel said.

“Why not just throw everything you’ve got at her?” Oru said. “You’ve got her dead to rights. You could lose ten men for every one she does and still wipe her out.”

“That would be poor leadership,” Shiel said. “And I prefer the term ‘soldiers’ to ‘men’.”

“Soldiers, men… they’re made out of rock, whatever you call them,” Oru said. “They’re not going to be leaving any widows behind!”

“Or widowers,” Steff said with a smirk. The roommates both glared at her.

“Take my bed, if you’re so bothered,” Hazel said. “I think Miss Shiel is being overly optimistic. Or did you forget I’ve still got my priests?”

“It seemed like you forgot,” Shiel said.

“Don’t you wish. I’ve just been holding them in reserve,” Hazel said.

This went on after we left Shiel’s room. Two went to wake up Dee while the rest of us headed to the lounge. Sooni and her nekos were already there. Sooni was dressed in a beautiful dress that was similar to but unlike her usual skirt and blouse combos. Its hemline fell quite a bit lower than her panty-baring skirts, but the way it hugged her curves was something to behold. I had to admit, it was actually kind of hot. Her hair was bound in thin braids which were piled in a cone on top of her head, with two spirals off to the side, each framing one of her fox ears.

I was expecting her to be furious at me for continuing to obstruct her ambitions by not bowing out of the race as she’d demanded. To my surprise, she greeted me with a big smile even before we entered the lounge.

“Hello, Miss Mackenzie!” she said as we filed in. I looked for a hint of aggression or predatory hunger in her face. Aside from the fact that her smile incidentally bared her impressive canine teeth, there was none. Her black eyes were bright and shining with what seemed to be genuine good will.

“Hi,” I said.

“Maliko told me you didn’t drop out,” she said.

Maliko was staring daggers at me from behind her. Her hand was over her shoulder, on the hilt of her sword. Sooni was oblivious to her pet’s hostility.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“I think it will be so much better this way,” Sooni said. “Much more fitting.”

“Right,” I said.

“I’m so glad the two of you are getting along, Sooni,” Amaranth said. “I hope you’ll have a talk with your other friends about their attitude towards Mack.”

“Of course it’s natural that they’d harbor some suspicion until Mack’s proved herself,” Sooni said. “Though it will probably help when she stops associating with such terrible influences all the time.”

Kiersta came into the lounge then carrying the ballot box, the ballots, and a deck of cards. She walked past all of us an put them down on the counter, then turned and looked around the room.

“You’re not on this floor,” she said to Steff.

“I’m here for immoral support,” Steff replied.

“Oh,” Kiersta said. “Okay. Just don’t try to vote, or anything.”

Two and Dee arrived after that. Dee, appropriately enough, looked like she’d just woke up. Her long white hair was a bit on the messy side and her eyes were half-shut. Dee was wearing a black nightgown with dark green trim. Actually, upon a slightly closer inspection, the whole thing was green… just very, very dark. It was patterned, too, with spirals and swirls. You couldn’t really see them unless you stared.

The robe did not reach down as far as her all-enveloping priestess’s robes and her customary cloak, leaving her bare feet and ankles exposed. It was kind of interesting to note that her feet were about the same size as Sooni’s, though her toes were longer.

“Are you alright?” Amaranth asked Dee again.

“Yes, thank you,” Dee said. “My sleep was not particularly restful.”

Feejee arrived next, followed by Puddy and Mariel, who said nothing but took one of the TV chairs. Rather, they took the chairs that would have faced the TV had a TV been there. After that, everybody from the Leightons’ room came in, including Finbar. Kiersta didn’t say anything about the presence of another outsider, even a male. I guess her token protest of Steff had used up all her reserves of concern for the subject.

Rocky was the last one to arrive. Kiersta waited until five minutes past eight and then announced the voting was going to start. She didn’t ask the candidates if we wanted to say anything. I looked at Sooni, wondering if she was going to protest, but she just kept on smiling. I didn’t have anything prepared, anyway, and I’d used up most of my nerve on the chancellor.

It hit me then that I should have mentioned my talk with the chancellor, but Rocky had already gone over and filled out her ballot, and now Feejee was doing the same. I looked around the room, counting inside my head.

Assuming all the fifth floor girls at dinner actually were my supporters, that gave me eight votes including myself. Puddy and Mariel would be nine and ten, if they voted for me. Feejee could be number eleven.

Sooni and her nekos were four votes. Trina was definitely against me. I wasn’t even a person to her. I doubted Twyla was for me. It was hard to say, but my instinct was no. She certainly wasn’t eager to meet my eye. The Leightons would vote against me. So would Rocky. That was nine.

Twyla and Feejee were the only ones I was uncertain of. I’d had some okay conversations with Feejee. The only time I’d spoken to Twyla had been pretty close to disastrous, but maybe she would appreciate the fact that I’d saved her angel drawing. Or maybe she’d be offended or freaked. I counted Feejee as a yes and Twyla as a no. I’d find out soon enough if I was right or not.

Belinda and Leda hadn’t shown up again, and we were missing both Hissy and Celia. I tried to think of the last time I’d seen Hissy… had it been when she’d attacked me the previous weekend?

Her absence could be for any number of reasons. It didn’t necessarily have anything to do with our fight, or the horrified and horrifying reaction she’d had to reading my mind. She might not even have been missing for the whole week. The fighters weren’t always around the dorm, anyway, and I could possibly have passed her in the hallway without noticing.

Yeah, because giant lizard women are so easy to overlook…

The tiny pragmatic part of myself reminded me that her absence would help cancel out Celia’s, since Hissy had almost certainly voted against me before and would definitely have voted against me this time. I hated myself for thinking it, but it was true.

And where was Celia? I couldn’t say. She came and went from our group as she pleased, usually showing up when she had something she wanted to show off.

Sooni was down one likely previous supporter and so was I. As Shiel had said, nothing seemed to have changed, except for the presence of Puddy and Mariel. That could give me a two vote lead. I was still nervous.

After the nekos filed back to the ballot box one by one and filled out their votes, it was down to Sooni and me. She gave me a little bow and gestured towards the counter. I smiled nervously and went to cast my ballot, and then she did the same.

“That everybody?” Kiersta asked when she’d finished.

Everyone nodded.

“Anybody not vote?” she asked. “Last chance… anybody here from the floor who hasn’t voted?”

Nobody said anything.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to go count the ballots.”

The room was silent as she counted, then counted again.

“Another tie,” she said, to a chorus of protests from around the room.

“Recount!” the Leightons called.

“I counted twice,” Kiersta said.

I was looking around the room doing my own recount, trying to figure out who from among my expected supporters might have voted against me. I didn’t know Shiel that well, but she had said I was the better candidate, and she hadn’t denied it when Hazel had lumped her in with my supporters. Neither had Oru. I couldn’t say about Oru either way, but I had the feeling that Shiel at least would have felt compelled to speak up if that wasn’t true.

I could have been wrong about Feejee. Her face showed mild surprise, but that didn’t tell me anything.

Then I saw Mariel’s triumphant smirk, directed right at me. Puddy looked livid, but there was no way she could see Mariel’s face when the sylph was on her lap… a fact which was probably beneficial to Mariel’s well-being.

She saw me looking, though, and her expression changed… darkened. She tightened her grip on Mariel’s waist. I looked away. Had Puddy guessed at the same thing I had?

“According to the student handbook, in the event of a tie during the run-off, the winner is to be determined by lots or another random method,” Amaranth announced over the din, bringing my attention back to the matter more immediately at hand.

“You want to let me run this meeting?” Kiersta said. “I brought a deck of cards,” she said to Sooni and me. “I’ll shuffle, you each draw, and high card wins. Is that okay?”

“Of course,” Sooni said, without hesitation. Her smile had returned in full force. If anything, she seemed even more pleased.

Drawing cards? I supposed they couldn’t keep having elections indefinitely, and I don’t think I could hope to do any better. Too many of the absentees were against me. I looked at Amaranth for support. She shrugged and nodded.

“Okay,” I said.

Kiersta shuffled the cards a little clumsily, then pushed them together into a neat stack and set them down on the counter. I waved a hand at them.

“I voted first,” I told Sooni.

“No, please,” Sooni said. “It will be so much better if you draw first.”

“Better how?” I asked.

“It just will be,” she said. She leaned close and whispered, “This is the way it’s supposed to be.”

There was that word again. It was occasionally cute from Two, but otherwise, nothing good ever seemed to follow it.

“Hey, no whispering,” Kiersta said.

“Right, we’re rigging the election against each other,” I said. I sighed and closed my eyes, then took the top card off the deck. I lifted it up to my face and opened my eyes. It took a moment for my vision to focus, and another for my brain to register what it was seeing.

“Queen of cups,” I announced, smiling like an idiot with relief as I showed it around.

Sooni drew a card.

“Queen of swords,” she said, holding it up.

“The ranking of suits is…” Amaranth started to say, but Kiersta cut her off.

“Draw again,” she said.

I again offered Sooni the chance to go first, and she again refused. This time I drew with my eyes open, glancing at it briefly before displaying it to Kiersta and Sooni.

“King of swords,” I announced.

Okay, it seemed like Kiersta had done a really shitty shuffling job, but I wasn’t about to complain. Even if Sooni got another face card, odds were she’d still lose. She seemed utterly unperturbed, heedless of the odds against her. I might have wondered if she’d rigged the game somehow, except her smile was all bliss and no craft.

I turned to show the card to the room and the smile fell off my face. Puddy and Mariel had left. I could see them through the glass wall, heading down towards the end of the hall, Puddy hurrying Mariel along.

Shit.

“Sooni, draw,” Kiersta said.

I took my eyes off the hallway and watched Sooni reach for the deck. I glanced back, but Puddy and Mariel had vanished into their room.

Sooni had her eyes closed and her hand on the top card. She was smiling triumphantly. I wondered again if she was cheating. I reached out, but felt no magic operating on the deck or her.

“Sooni?” Kiersta prompted.

Sooni said nothing, but flipped the top card over onto the counter. With her eyes closed, I saw it before she did.

She’d drawn the ace of wands.

Shit. She was throwing spells, actual spells, at me. They must have allowed serious magical training to start earlier in her homeland.

“Don’t you hurt my sister!” Two yelled, charging forward. Sooni’s finger swung around, and I leapt to my feet, putting myself in the way of the next blast. This was a brilliant move on my part, as it allowed me to strategically fly backwards into Two, who was running forwards.

She let out an “Oof!” as we collided and tumbled to the floor.

“Two! Are you okay?” I asked, horrified at what had happened. I was completely uninjured, but was she? I helped Two to her feet, and couldn’t help noticing she was favoring one knee.

“Quit fussing over your girlfriend and finish our fight scene!” Sooni demanded, stomping her sandaled foot once more for emphasis. While I was distracted by the curvature of her leg, she shot a more focused bolt of green force at Two, which knocked her back down and sent her sliding down the hallway.

I growled and got to my feet, advancing on Sooni.

Sooni shouted something in Yokano, and the nekos came pouring out of their rooms, curved short swords drawn. They were barefoot and running on the tips of their toes, and from the way they held their blades it seemed like they didn’t carry them just for show.

I turned to face the new threat, but then Sooni said, “Not her, she’s mine. Just keep the golem away.”

The nekos ran past me and advanced at Two, who was just getting to her feet. She stopped to brush off her clothing before she picked up her mace.

“Leave her alone!” I shouted, right before another of Sooni’s force blasts took me off my feet.

“Pay attention to me!” Sooni yelled.

I watched helplessly as the three nekos closed on Two, who held her mace out two-handed in front of her. Suzi and Maliko exchanged smug glances and raised their blades. Kai followed suit.

Then, Suzi’s fur stuck up and she gave a fierce yowl, tossed her sword away, and pounced, claws out. Two flung her head back, covering her eyes with her hand while holding her little mace out like some kind of feeble shield.

“Two!” I yelled.

There was a crackle of energy as Two’s mace prodded Suzi in the stomach, and the nekoyokai crumbled to the floor, shaking convulsively as little mini lightning bolts seemed to course around her body.

Two put both hands back on her mace handle and continued to hold it out in front of her like a talisman.

“Just keep her back!” Sooni barked. Her sandals were clicking on the tile floor, coming nearer. I turned to see her standing almost right on top of me, her finger still aglow with mystical energy.

I considered my options quickly.

Elemental invocation would take some creativity to be useful, and it wouldn’t work without more breathing room. Also, it would drain me too quickly if I leaned on it since I was still at the stage of raw manipulation. The only formal spells I’d managed so far were for sharpening weapons and turning curtains into barriers.

My knife was already plenty sharp, and I wasn’t about to pull it out. Sooni hadn’t drawn her knife, and I very much doubted she’d be much more capable than I was with weapons. Why should she be, when she could make her “friends” train and drill to protect her? The magic she’d thrown hadn’t done more than toss me around. I could hardly escalate to deadly force, but I was at a serious disadvantage.

Then it occurred to me that clothing was a sort of barrier, too.

I tried to remember what I’d done in the shower. I’d never repeated the spell or written it out. Another force wave slamming into me, batting my body against the floor, jogged my memory. I called to mind the formulation I’d used, varied it slightly to try to apply it to clothing and mumbled it to myself as I concentrated on my shirt.

Sooni paused mid-spell, a ball of green energy suspended in front of her finger tip, ready to be released.

“What are you saying?” she asked. “Are you saying you are sorry? That you take it back?”

I finished the spell and then jerked my legs around, trying to trip her up. If I’d known what I was doing, it would have been a really slick sweep-kick that would have landed her on her back. As it was, she kind of half-stepped, half-jumped backwards. It spoiled her concentration enough for the green ball to evaporate, and I got to my feet, squaring off with her.

“This is crazy,” I said. “Call off your cats before somebody gets hurt.”

“Take it back!” Sooni said. She zapped me with a quick blast, not bothering to spend the time building it up. She probably figured she didn’t need the full effect, but she didn’t know about my barrier spell. The energy hit me full in the chest and dissipated harmlessly.

Her eyes went wide and she backed away, chanting frantically under her breath. She had both hands in front of her, and a larger green ball began to form between them.

What to do? I couldn’t let her get the spell off but I didn’t dare strike her physically.

I reached out my hands, physically feeling the air around me and concentrating on calling its water aspect, “gathering” a mass of heavy, watery air around me, then shoving it forward with my hands and mind while yanking hard on the water element. A ball of water came into view about halfway to Sooni, bursting her green energy ball and splattering the front of her stupid silk blouse.

Sooni shrieked in outrage, and lifted one hand, chanting out loud in what sounded like Yokano. Crackling green energy appeared inside her cupped hand. Somehow I figured this one wouldn’t be a “throw you around” spell. I’d never called on earth before, but desperation inspired me.

I grabbed the air in front of me and focused on making it as earthy as possible, then tried to up its barrier-quality. The “curtain of air” had far less in common with an actual curtain than my clothes did, so it was a bit like when I’d been throwing a lot of energy in class without having a precise target. Still, I felt it take hold just before Sooni threw a chain of three green lightning balls.

I let go as the last one was absorbed by my barrier, and swayed a bit on my feet as the drain caught up to me. I was honestly surprised that it had worked, but I remembered what Amaranth had said: menstruation could make it easier to channel magic, though my body paid the price.

I couldn’t keep improvising responses forever while Sooni drew from a repertoire of well-practiced spells. My luck or my reserves would give out sooner or later. I needed to end the fight.

I threw myself forward before Sooni could react to her spell’s failure or start her next one. She threw her hands up, and I grabbed her wrists. I couldn’t use my strength to strike her, but I had more than enough to control her.

“Do not dare to touch me!” she cried.

She brought her leg up and kneed me in the groin as hard as she could. My eyes teared up at the crushing blow to my (currently a little extra) sensitive flesh., and I swooned a bit.

Because of the pain.

While I was distracted, one of her arms slipped free and she bit me on the arm which held her other one.

“Ow!” I cried, though I didn’t let go. Although they couldn’t break my skin, Sooni still had really sharp teeth. “That fucking hurt!”

“Hey! You get your filthy hands off her!” Rocky yelled, thundering down the hallway from behind me.

The cry saved me. I let go and threw myself to the side as the stone-skinned swordswoman barreled into Sooni instead.

“Assassins!” Sooni cried as they went down together. She began slapping at Rocky in a way that probably would have been equally ineffectual on a skin-skinned person. “Murderers! Lesbians! Help!”

Rocky got to her feet and wheeled around to see Maliko and Kai running at her, with Suzi tottering a little wobbly after them. Her fur was frizzed out from Two’s energy mace.

“I’ll take on all of you little monsters!” Rocky declared, though of course she pointed her sword at me when she said it.

“No!” Sooni declared, blasting Rocky away. “Nekos, keep everybody away! This is something I have to do for myself!”

She smiled with pride as she said that. From the way she emphasized every word, I would have guessed that either she’d waited her whole life for a chance to say it, or she’d spent her life saying it every chance she got.

I cringed at the sight of Two hobbling down the hall towards us. The nekos formed a line to block her and Rocky.

It was time to get serious and end this fast. I rushed Sooni and wrapped my arms around her, tackling her.

“Rape!” Sooni cried. “I am being lesbian raped!”

I heard the sound of metal on metal behind us. I hoped the nekos were as competent as they looked, or else Rocky might end up killing them trying to get at me.

“Sooni, call this off!” I said. “I’ll let you up if you end this.”

She said something then, but I couldn’t make it out… she was speaking softly, in Yokano.

“What?” I said. “Speak Pax! I don’t want to hurt you, but if you make me…”

Her eyes opened wide and she smiled, and I realized I’d made the same mistake that she had, earlier. She hadn’t been talking, she’d been casting. Green fire sprouted up in her eyes and suddenly she was a lot stronger. Not stronger than me, but strong enough to catch me off guard. She pushed off the floor with her legs and arms, catapulting me over her head and flipping herself upright.

She turned as soon as her feet touched the floor.

I picked myself up off the floor.

“Foolish one, you cannot defeat me, evil one!” she said.

“Sooni, I don’t want to defeat you,” I said. “This is stupid. We’re not on a TV show. We’re in a dorm, and there’s rules against fighting and throwing destructive spells around, so why don’t you stop this now? We can just settle it on Friday. I have a headache, I’m on my period, and I really want to take a nap before logic class.”

I stood, waiting for her response. I’d had some success with talking people out of further violence, but I have to admit I wasn’t really surprised when she answered with another bolt of green force. My protective charm held, but I felt it weaken.

I returned fire, solidifying a ball of air in my hand and throwing it at her. She tensed and started to twist when she saw the throwing gesture, but she couldn’t see the attack coming and couldn’t dodge.

That might have mattered a little bit more if I could aim. I think she might have felt it rush past her head, though. She was thrown off-balance, and the attack she released at the same time went wide. There was a huge crash as the glass wall at the front of the lounge splintered.

Sooni’s eyes went huge and round, and I thought for a moment the physical damage she’d caused would let reality sink in a bit.

“The TV!” she yelled. “You broke the TV!”

I turned and looked over my shoulder. The TV box had been knocked off its cabinet; actual condition unknown.

“I will kill you!” Sooni cried, and I turned back to see her charging at me, eyes glowing green and a green glow surrounding her teeth and fingernails.

Magical weapons. Not good.

I hoped her strength enhancing spell did something for her durability as I threw a punch at the charging fox woman. Again, aim would have helped that concern to be slightly less hypothetical in nature. I was going for her chin and glanced past her shoulder.

She swiped her nails across my face, and I felt them digging into my cheek. Four hot lines of blood and pain blossomed in their wake. Her next blow hit my shirt, and I felt the protective spell rending and tearing, though it saved me and the garment from actual damage. I put up my arms to shield myself and got another couple sets of slashes.

“Sooni, stop!” I yelled. Yeah, that was going to work, all of a sudden.

She pounded me on the head as hard as she could and my vision swam. She wasn’t demon-strong or even ogre-strong, but she was definitely in the upper reaches of human-like strength.

She shoved me to the ground and kicked me in the side.

I gasped.

Because of the pain.

“You… broke… the TV!” she repeated and proceeded to kick and stomp me with all the enhanced strength she could muster. The pain was intense, incapacitating. I moaned and writhed beneath her blows. My vision went dark and then exploded into bright lights.

“Quit enjoying this!” Sooni commanded, stomping on my chest. Somehow a combination of my generally messed-up bodily state and the superficial resemblance of the situation to some of the things my sleeping mind had come up with lately got to me, and I came. I came hard. I came screaming. I felt a sticky wetness pouring out from me.

“Stop! Having! Orgasms! When! I’m! Defeating! You!” Sooni yelled, bringing her sandal down on me to punctuate each word. With the last one, she brought her heavy wooden platform down directly on my face, harmlessly crushing my nose.

If I’d been mortal or she’d been wearing her magic shoes that day, she would have flattened my skull, killing me for sure. As it was, the pain was simply incredible, it brought me past the brink and over the edge.

“Don’t. Stop,” I pleaded.

“You should have thought of that before you became a lesbian!” Sooni said, pausing with her foot raised to strike a pose with her hands on her hips.

I reached out with all the power I could muster and latched onto the earth in the air over Sooni. I pulled with all my remaining might. Tiny pebbles popped into existence and rained down on her. Not even pebbles, really. More like grit. How completely useless… nothing more than a minor annoyance.

Of course, minor annoyance seemed to be Sooni’s main weakness.

“My hair!” she shrieked, reaching up and frantically brushing. She looked up to see where the sudden rain of tiny rocky particles was coming from. “My eyes!”

Sooni’s hand groped for her poniard… and then she went down, her knee buckling with a loud crack. My eyes fell from her face to floor level, where I saw Hazel, cradling a regular human-sized rolling pin. She’d apparently managed to come up behind Sooni unnoticed, and whack her across the back of the knee with a rolling pin.

Sooni clutched at her leg, sobbing and jabbering in Yokano. Tears bulged from the edges of her tightly-shut eyes.

“Alright, Mack?” Hazel asked.

I nodded, still panting and breathless. I would need a few minutes before I tried to stand. My limbs were weak and shaky, despite not having taken the brunt of Sooni’s wrath. There was no way I’d want to live through that kind of beating again.

Though, I had survived and the kicking and stomping part hadn’t actually done any harm.

“Sooni!” Maliko wailed, running towards us. Hazel wheeled around and brandished her rolling pin like a war club, but Maliko had thrown her sword aside. She ran to her mistress’s side and began cooing to her in what might have been Yokano or simply baby-talk, it sounded so sing-song. She cradled Sooni, and Sooni clung to her, sobbing and babbling.

I didn’t understand the language, but I’d bet part of it translated to “It’s not fair!” over and over again.

Sooni’s eyes were still squeezed shut, or she might have noticed that Maliko looked like Khersentide had come early. Maybe it was a cultural thing.

I sat up. Two was limping towards us. The other nekos were hanging back. It looked like Rocky had slipped away… maybe when the glass broke, she’d wised up a bit and realized she didn’t want to be caught at the scene? I didn’t blame her. If Sooni’d had that kind of brains, the whole mess could have been avoided.

“You alright there, Two?” Hazel asked.

“I hurt my knee,” Two reported. “And my head.” She felt her butt. “And I lost a sequin. But Mack, you’re bleeding!”

I reached up and felt the scratches on my face.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “It probably looks worse than it is.” I’d heard that about facial cuts, somewhere.

“No,” Two said, pointing. “There.”

I looked down and wanted to die. I’d drawn way too deeply during the fight, and managed to bleed through my pad, underwear, and jeans.

Two was looking wide-eyed at the shattered glass panel and the destruction beyond it. She looked at Sooni.

“You are going to be in so much trouble,” she said, her voice filled with awe and maybe a little bit of joy at the sheer amount of trouble she envisioned Sooni being in.

“It is you who will be in trouble!” Maliko snarled. “You and all your sick, lesbian, pussy-eating, girl-kissing, panty-licking lesbian friends! Because we will tell everybody that you started it!”

“But that’s not true!” Two said.

Sooni chimed in with something that might have been Pax, but was so high-pitched and blubbery that it didn’t matter. Maliko started soothing her in between yelling at Two while Two tried to argue matter-of-factly and then Hazel pitched in, her little voice growing louder and louder.

I couldn’t take it. I was lying on the floor, covered in glass shards, air-grit, and blood, and if the pressure in my head was any indication, I’d discovered a new condition that might be described as cancer of the migraine. I closed my eyes and slumped back down to the floor, waiting for the argument to die.

It ended abruptly, as the last voice I expected to hear cut through the noise.

“What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

“Hey, Two,” I said as we left the union. “Would you like to help me deliver my campaign letters?”

“Okay,” Two said.

“That’s a wonderful idea… I’ll see you guys at dinner, then,” Amaranth said, giving me a kiss on the forehead and then on the lips while Two received her accustomed tokens of affection from Steff.

When we got back to our room, I was startled to find two more of my grandmother’s letters waiting on my desk, along with the unfinished campaign letters.

Well, startled probably wasn’t the word. There was a moment I thought I’d been petrified.

“What the hell?” I asked, staring at the letters.

“I brought the mail up,” Two said. “You can get it Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and I will get it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That’s fair.”

“Okay,” I said, wishing my heart would start beating again. For a moment, I thought my grandmother had actually started delivering her letters in person. I held them up. “Two, if I get any more of these, just have whoever’s on the desk vanish them.”

“Okay,” she said. “But… I can vanish paper.”

“You can?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Would you like me to vanish those?”

“Yes, please,” I said, handing them to her. For a moment I had a crazy image of her tipping her head back, opening her mouth extra wide and swallowing them. Instead, she just waved her hand over them and they dissolved into smoke.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Why did you not would like to read them?” she asked.

“Because there’s not going to be anything good in them,” I said.

“I thought they were letters from yourself,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Just make sure you vanish any more that show up,” I said. “Anyway, let’s get to work.”

I started quickly signing the bottoms of the letters and then passed them to Two to address, until we finished enough for our side of the hall, then I let her go deliver them while I finished up the rest.

A short time later, a letter slid under our door. Smiling at Two’s relentless completism, I went over to pick it up and saw that she had addressed it to both herself (with her name written in runes) and me.

I was standing close enough to the door that I clearly heard the sound of the next door over opening, and one of the Leighton twins saying, “Hey, what are you doing, messing around with our door?”

“I am not messing around with your door,” Two said. “I am putting letters under it. Could you please close it again? I have two more letters that I need to…”

I opened my door just as the Leightons’ slammed closed. I hurried up to Two to give her support, but she simply said “Thank you!”, crouched down, and slid the other two letters under the door. They came sliding out almost immediately, followed by another one, which was crumpled up.

Two was already on to the next door, absolutely untroubled.

“That’s real mature, guys,” I said through the door, picking up the letters.

“Dork!” the two girls said, not quite in concert.

“Seriously, did you guys go straight from fifth grade to college?”

“Who is that?” one of the twins said. “I’m looking out through the peephole and I can’t see anybody there.”

“Maybe she’s standing too close.”

“Maybe it’s one of the gnomes.”

“Or the kobold.”

“I am not that short,” I said.

“Hey! I hope you know we wiped our ass on that letter!” one of them said.

“Tara did that, actually,” (apparently) Sara said. “That was all her.”

“Only because you’re such a prissy little wuss about everything.”

“I am not a wuss!”

That was followed by a sound of impact and simultaneous exclamations of pain, and then what sounded like a miniature brawl.

It was no wonder they were in counseling. I shook my head and headed after Two.

“I was going to pick those up after I finished with the letters,” Two said, pointing at the discarded letters. “We’re not supposed to leave trash in the hallway.”

“This is actually Twyla’s letter,” I said, looking at the one that the Twins had apparently defaced. I held it by the edges, though there was no obvious sign they’d actually put it to the use Tara had claimed. “I’d really like to get it… well, a clean copy of it… to her, but I don’t think the Leightons are going to make that easy.”

“I can fix this,” Two said, taking it from me.

She concentrated on it, moving her lips in the silent recitation of a spell. The crinkles in the paper smoothed themselves out as she stared down at it, her forehead furrowed.

“There,” she said when it was once again completely flat. “It’s restored.”

“Thanks, Two,” I said. “Um, would that have cleaned anything off it?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding.

“That’s good,” I said. “Now I just have to figure out how to give it to her. I hardly ever see her around the hall.”

“You could put it in her mailbox,” Two said.

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Unless the twins check the mail first. I guess I could put it in an envelope, though. If I had an envelope.”

“I have envelopes,” Two said. “Would you like me to do that?”

“Sure… wait, no,” I said, remembering the copy I’d made of Twyla’s angel drawing. This would be a good chance to get it to her. “Let’s do it together, after we get the rest of these delivered.”

“Okay,” Two said. “I did all of these doors so it’s only fair if you do the others, but I do not mind keeping you company.”

I smiled.

We started at Hazel and Honey’s door. Two crouched down and took the marker board off and started writing on it while I slid the letter underneath. She bent down and reattached the board. I stepped back so I could see what she’d written.

Hi, Hazel. How are you? Mack’s delivering campaign letters and I’m helping. Goodbye.

-Two.

After that, it felt like I was going into hostile territory. The next door down was Hissy and Belinda’s. I strongly considered skipping them, given the letter’s references to the events of the weekend, but Two prompted me to act when I stood frozen in front of the door.

“Mack, you’re supposed to be delivering letters,” she said.

“You’re right,” I said, taking a breath. I crouched and slid the letters under the door, quickly moving on to Sooni’s room, and then the nekos’.

I hadn’t even stooped down in front of the next door when it opened and Leda the swan maiden almost crashed into me on her way out of her darkened room. I stared at her, startled.

“What?” she said. She had bags under her eyes and her accent was thickened, making it sound like “vhat?”

I held out her and Rocky’s letters. She snatched them out of my hand without giving them a glance. Her eyes were fixed on me. She stood uncomfortably close, and it hurt my neck to look up at her.

Somehow, it didn’t occur to me until just that moment that I could step back.

“You are friends with Steff?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, remembering how Steff’s problems had seemed to start after the encounter Dee had told me about. “What happ…”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “Tell him, neither does he.”

She slammed the door in my face. I stared at the wood, a strange fury building up inside me.

Steff claimed not to care how people referred to her, but the way she latched onto me thinking of her as a girl said otherwise. I wondered how much of her current problems could be chalked up to a world full of people who’d treat her as a freak or a confused guy… it sure couldn’t have helped things.

“Steff’s a she!” I yelled. “And what do you mean, you don’t remember?” There was no response. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

The continuing silence infuriated me. I knocked on the door. Well, I pounded on it… kind of gently, though.

“Come on out here and say she’s a she!” I said. “Hey, I’m talking to you, you…” Words escaped me. “Stupid!”

The door opened, and I opened my mouth to give Leda a further piece of my mind… and choked on my words when I saw it was Rocky, with her sword out.

“Give me an excuse,” she said. She had the campaign letter in her other hand. “You think anybody’s going to vote for you? You may have some people fooled with your helpless little nerd act, but I know what you are.”

“Do you have any idea what Sooni is?” I countered.

She shut the door. I let out a frustrated grunt through my closed mouth. I was getting the sick, shaky feeling I seemed to get after violence, even though nothing had actually happened.

“Come on, Two,” I said. “Let’s go get Twyla’s letter taken care of.”

“But you have two more letters to deliver,” Two said.

“No, I don’t really feel like tempting fate any more today,” I said, since those letters belonged to Puddy and Mariel. “Let’s just do Twyla’s and call it a day.”

“Okay,” Two said, though she sounded slightly disappointed at the thought of leaving the task uncompleted.

“Well, I guess we could put theirs in their mailbox, too,” I said.

“Okay,” Two said, more sincerely.

That was probably a better idea. My days of trying to please Puddy were over, but she might feel hurt if she thought I’d intentionally left her out, and that could lead to bad things. I wouldn’t kowtow to Puddy, but I wouldn’t do anything to provoke her if I could avoid it.

Two produced three envelopes when we got back to our room and started addressing them. I’d just planned on asking whoever was at the desk to put the letters in their mailbox, but she hummed as she filled them out so I let her do it.

“Don’t put a return address on Twyla’s,” I reminded her, after seeing her do the ones for Puddy and Mariel.

I scrawled a quick note on the bottom of Twyla’s campaign letter, explaining that I’d scribed off a copy of her picture in case she decided she wanted it later, then folded the picture and letter up and sealed them while Two did the other two.

We took them downstairs. Moeli the hobgoblin was on the desk again. Oru the goblin was sitting on the counter, picking cheese off a convenience store hamburger and talking to him when we approached. He put a hand almost as big as Oru’s head up to her when he saw me.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” I said. “Um, I don’t mean to interrupt…”

“It’s okay,” he said. “You got some mail to go out? I can put postage on it for you.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s actually intra-campus.”

I handed him the envelopes. He looked at them, then looked at me.

“These are all on your floor,” he said. “Can’t you just stick them under a door or something?”

“Could you please just take care of it for me?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll do it now.”

He lumbered off behind the row of mailboxes. I gave Oru a shy smile.

“Hi,” she said, a little snippily.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi!” Two said.

“You know,” Moeli said, returning to the counter, “if you ever do have any outgoing mail, if you make sure you come by when I’m on duty I can totally take care of the postage.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” Two said.

“Thanks, Moeli, really,” I said. “But there’s absolutely nobody I’d want to write to.”

“Not even your pen pal with the red envelopes?”

“Especially not her,” I said.

Oru was glaring at me.

“Come on, Two,” I said.

“Tonight is bingo night,” Two reminded me on the way back up the stairs. “My friend Hazel is going and her cousin Honey might, too. Do you think you will go?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll have to see how I feel.”

“Do you mean because of your period or because you do not like bingo?”

I smiled.

“Bingo’s okay,” I said. “It’s just not my favorite thing. I’ll think about it. Ask me at dinner.”

“Okay,” Two said.

When we got back upstairs, I received yet another shock: Sooni was hammering furiously on my door.

“Um… can I help you?” I asked.

She turned on me, her face a snarling mask.

“Just what is the meaning of this?” she demanded, the letter clutched in her hand.

“It’s my campaign letter,” I said.

“Hi, Sooni,” Two said.

“How dare you insult me like this?”

“I gave one to everybody,” I said, thinking she must have thought I’d singled her out or something.

She stomped her sandaled foot. I jumped, feeling an odd tingle for some reason.

“Well,” she said, “you had best start getting them back before anybody else reads them!”

“When somebody says ‘hi’, you’re supposed to say ‘hi’, back,” Two said.

“What exactly do you object to in my letters?” I asked Sooni.

“I’m not giving you any more cookies if you won’t say ‘hi’.”

“You should probably let it go, Two,” I said.

“Listen to what you wrote!” Sooni said. She began to read, tossing her head back and forth and speaking in a mocking sing-song. “‘I hope that you all will vote for the candidate you think will do the best job, not the one who is the more socially acceptable race.’”

She finished and glared at me, a triumphant smirk on her face as if she dared me to deny I’d written such damning words.

“Uh, yeah?” I said. “So?”

“I am the more socially acceptable race!” Sooni raged.

Was that some kind of insult, to her?

“In a lot of people’s minds, yeah,” I said.

“That means you think people should think you are the best candidate!”

I stared at her, trying to figure out where she was going… and eventually figured out she’d already arrived.

“Well, that’s why I’m running, Sooni,” I said. “Because I think I can do a better job than you.”

“Ooh… you take that back!” Sooni said, stomping again. I stared at her foot. She had such tiny, delicate feet and she wore such big, clunky sandals. She said something else. I started to form a reply and then I realized I hadn’t quite caught exactly what she’d said.

Did she paint her own toenails, or did one of the cats do it?

“You… aren’t… even… listening!”

“What?” I said, looking up just in time to get smacked in the face with a wave of green energy.