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

Well, “barely recognizable” was probably not quite the right phrase… I couldn’t have mistaken her for anybody else. She was still Steff, just… Steff transformed.

Steff tugged on her arm and turned around, and after a moment Amaranth did the same, but my eyes were still on Steff. She had an arrangement of silver roses coming to a point on the front of her hairdo, like a floral tiara, and was wearing silver drop earrings that looked like abstract stalactites or icicles. Her face had been dusted with a glittery powder, and her lips and eyelids looked frosty, too.

I stared, my breath caught in my throat, not knowing what to do or say. Steff blinked, her eyelashes… which were considerably longer than I remembered… fluttering.

The twins’ door opened and they barreled past her, Sara’s head whipping around and catching a glimpse. Their body kind of lurched to a stop as she froze in her, uh, track, and a glaring Tara looked to see what the hold-up was. Steff gave them a beatific if somewhat smirking smile.

“The Veil party’s not until tomorrow, half-freak,” Tara said.

I expected Steff to have a smart ass comeback to that, but she just turned her face away from them, still smiling. Tara looked like she’d just swallowed her gum. She started to say something else, but then Sara’s half of the body kind of lurched forward and after a few moments, they both headed down towards the stairs.

“Hey, baby… look who’s on her feet!” Amaranth said, exactly as if nothing had happened.

“You’re… you look beautiful,” I sputtered, feeling the words were utterly inadequate. If Two had been there, she could have simply proclaimed Steff to be “pretty!” and it would have been enough.

“Thanks,” she giggled. “Viktor and I spent a lot of time… well, we’ve been talking, and I feel better about some things, and so he’s taking me out to dinner tonight.”

“And you got dressed now?” I asked. I couldn‘t imagine myself making it through lunch without ruining an outfit and glamour job like that. “Steff, if you show up for melee like that, Callahan will rip your head off.”

“Well, I’m going to change out of the dress,” she said. I had a feeling that Callahan wouldn’t have the best reaction to Steff’s even girlier makeover and would take great pleasure in demolishing it, but I didn’t want to argue about that, especially with Amaranth right there.

“On the subject of melee… you have to get a book, missy, and I have to go find her office,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, Amy doll, that is not going to end well,” Steff said, shaking her head. “I mean, for most people’s values of ‘well’.”

“Oh, hush,” Amaranth said. “I’m just going to talk with her.”

“Maybe I should come with you,” Steff said.

As much as I agreed with Steff’s analysis of the probable outcome, I couldn’t see that improving things. Callahan seemed to prefer thinking of Steff as a “faggot” rather than a girl, and didn’t seem to think much of her no matter which way she presented herself.

“Oh, it’ll be fine,” Amaranth said. “Why don’t you take Mack to the library and help her find a useful book on staff stuff, so you two can get caught up?”

“Could we get lunch first?” I asked.

“Baby, you know I like for you to eat, but improving your standing in class and learning how to defend yourself are both higher priorities than that is,” Amaranth said. “I don’t want any chance of you putting it off or forgetting, so take care of the book first and then you can go eat if you like.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“And on the subject of priorities, I would like you to give me your mail key,” she said. “So I can make sure the invitations are there and deal with it if they’re not.”

“Okay,” I said, digging for my key ring in my pocket. “Yes, ma’am.”

I got it out and got the smaller key off it, leaving only the one for my room. She took the mailbox key from me and then gave me a hug and a quick kiss.

“And I’m off,” she said. “I’ll see you two… well, I guess just you… at dinner.”

“Bye, Amy!” Steff said.

“Bye,” I said, and then impulsively added, “Goodbye, ma’am,” and she beamed with pleasure.

We both watched her walk down the hall.

“So, Amy tells me she’s been riding you pretty hot and hard these past few days,” Steff said.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, my face heating up. “I guess she has.”

“How’s that going?”

“It’s… interesting,” I said. A door opened at the end of the hall and Shiel and Oru headed past. I waited until they were gone before I went on, realizing I could have moved the conversation into my room only after they’d headed downstairs. It would feel funny and even more awkward suggesting that after standing there not saying anything for that long, though, so I just finished the thought. “I’m finding myself slipping into submissiveness more often.”

“Slipping? Like you can’t control it?” she asked.

I had to think about that.

“Not quite,” I said. “More like… like it feels natural to do so, so I do?”

“Oh,” Steff said. “Well, that’s good. I mean, I’ve kind of thought you had a natural submissive streak all along.”

“If I do, then why isn’t it easier for me to not blow up at people?”

“I said ’streak’,” Steff said. “Honey, nobody’s… almost nobody… is completely submissive or completely dominant. It would be hard to get through life if you were. But I think if you figure out what works for you and go with it, you’ll have a better handle on the non-submissive parts of your life, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Okay, well, Amy told me about your latest little ’blow-up’ with that fat cow with the extra hole in her head,” Steff said. “Surprisingly, I’ve got a different opinion from her about whether or not an insult was justified, but you lost your temper and so she had the upper hand conversation-wise. Right up until the moment she decided to season you like a cut of pork.”

Steff giggled.

“It wasn’t that funny,” I said, my stomach kind of turning at the association with meat. Kind of.

“It’s kind of funny,” Steff insisted. “Sounds funny, anyway. But if you want to leave somebody choking on their own rage instead of you drowning in yours, you have to be master of yourself.”

“And I can do that by being submissive?”

“Maybe,” Steff said. “I don’t know. I do know that it’s easier to control yourself if you know exactly what it is you’re controlling.” She giggled again. “Yeah, I know, here I am talking like I’m Ms. Self-Control… I know I don’t quite have anything nailed down in this area yet, either, but I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been learning about it. And I’m definitely better at not flying off the handle at anybody else… or at myself… since I started embracing the parts of me I kept bottled up.”

I heard a chair scooting back in one of the rooms… a reminder that we were in a very public place.

“We should get to the library, if we’re going,” I said.

“What do you mean ‘if’?” Steff asked. “You heard the pseudolady, ‘missy’,” she said, and she tickled my sides. “We’re going and that’s that.”

“Okay, okay!” I said.

We met Two on our way down and asked her if she wanted to join us, but she prioritized lunch and she reminded me of my standing order. Steff explained Amaranth’s counter-order, which Two naturally accepted.

“I think you’re getting better at being a toy,” she told me before continuing up.

“High praise,” Steff said, and we continued on our own way.

“So… will me embracing myself or mastering myself or whatever… will I become a ‘toy’ all the time?” I asked once we were outside in the chilly air.

“I don’t think so,” Steff said. “Once again, we’re talking about a streak, an aspect of yourself, not the whole. A lot of people are only submissive in the bedroom, or even just certain times in the bedroom… it’s a part of them that they can’t deny and it’s not healthy to ignore, but a part can be important without being huge. You?” She put her arm around my waist, then slid her hand back towards her, groping my ass through my bulky coat. “Yeah, I don’t think you’re like that, but you’re also not a golem.”

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked Steff, realizing she wasn’t wearing anything other than the dress that couldn’t have been much thicker than one of Mariel’s, even if it was harder to see through.

“Cold? I’m freezing my bony little ass off,” Steff said. “This must be what having a vagina feels like. But I don’t have a coat that goes with this dress, and I don’t want to cover it up anyway.” She threw up her free arm and gave a little shout. “I’m alive, I’m in love, and I feel pretty.” I thought she was talking about Viktor, considering she was dressed for their date, but the arm that was feeling me slipped back around and up to squeeze my breast. It was more of a formless mashing than a good squeeze, with the coat in the way, but that didn‘t stop the key-shaped piercing from digging painfully in. “Oh Dee’s gods,” she said. “What have you been up to?”

“Amaranth… um… Amaranth got me pierced,” I said.

“Oh, that’s what she was gigging and hinting about,” Steff said. “You sneaky little slut.” Suddenly I felt deliciously and deliriously warm. “Where’d you go? Tell me it wasn’t some little bazaar stall… I wish Amy would have checked with me so I could make sure you went to Caron‘s or some place else where they know what they‘re doing.”

“Uh… we did go to Caron’s,” I said.

“Oh, cool,” Steff said. “Did she give you a discount? She used to always give cute girls discounts, especially if they… well, I think she must be seeing somebody now.”

“She… she gave me a kind of a discount anyway,” I said.

“Oh, you are such a whore!” Steff said, tickling me again. I pulled away, not sure if I should correct her misapprehension or not. Amaranth clearly hadn’t told her the story… was that because she’d wanted the piercings to be a surprise to Steff, or did she think we should keep this a secret?

I decided to bring her into the loop, if only because Caron was sort of her friend and Steff apparently trusted her.

“Yeah, it’s not quite what you think,” I said, and I told her.

“I don’t know how you can stand it, Mack,” Steff said. “If I knew an evil mistressmind had the hots for me and wanted to use me in a super soldier breeding program, I’d be too afraid to leave my room… I’d be masturbating furiously in there to the idea of it, but I’d also be scared shitless.”

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“What?”

“How do you be turned on by something at the same time that you know it’s horrible?” I asked. “I mean, I used to think a lot of the stuff that turns me on was horrible… and sometimes I still kind of do… but that’s… well, I mean, that’s a bit different.”

“It is,” Steff said. “But ideas… ideas don’t kill people. Fantasies don’t kill people. I mean, I knew, even when I was stabbing myself with that knife…”

“You were stabbing yourself?”

“The novelty of cutting got old after a while,” she said. “I wanted to see how far I could go. Anyway, even when I was stabbing myself, what I was feeling wasn’t the same thing that I was imagining… magic let me experience a fantasy in real life, but it wasn’t what I… well, it’s the same thing that happened in the pentho… I can’t help what I fantasize about, I guess is the point, but as long as it’s a fantasy I shouldn’t have to.”

“I guess that kind of makes sense,” I said. “So… how are you, physically?” I asked, since she’d brought up the subject of the knife.

“Good!” she said. “Fine. I was fine yesterday, really, but he was being such a protective… well, he didn’t want me walking around and I didn’t want to fight with him. He was so sweet.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“He doesn’t blame you, you know,” Steff said. “He’d happily use you as a punching bag to get out some feelings about it all, but he doesn’t blame you.”

“That’s good to know, I guess,” I said.

“But let’s not talk about that,” Steff said. Her hand closed around mine. “We haven’t seen each other for a few days, you know. So, let’s not talk about anything… let’s just bask.”

And bask we did.

Discuss this story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’d have to what?”

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Feejee didn’t write that,” I said.

“You did?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” she said.

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

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

“Kiersta?” I said through the door.

“Fuck off…” she moaned.

“You need to come out here,” I said.

“I’m sleeping.”

“You’re the R.A.,” I said.

“What the hell do you want from me?”

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

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

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

“It’s a bathroom,” Kiersta said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course you did,” Honey harrumphed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not the point!” Hazel said.

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

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

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

“Kiersta said…” Sara said.

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

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

“Shut up about Kiersta,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was born on a boat,” Hazel said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, that’s right!” Hazel said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The twins turned to go back into their room.

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

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

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

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

“Oh… um… how do you?” Honey asked.

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

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

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

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

“Indeed,” Dee said.

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

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

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

I sighed.

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

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

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

“I will see to it then,” Dee said.

“Dee, you don’t have to,” I said.

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

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

Discuss this story.

Seven days… I wondered if they were going to be tender and raw that whole time. It hardly seemed worth it. I didn’t know how people with multiple piercings could stand doing it more than once

I skipped my robe, since I didn’t want it to get soaked, and simply hurried down to the bathroom in my wet underwear with my towel and robe in my hands. Feejee was dozing in her accustomed tub when I got into the bathroom. I did my best to be quiet and not wake her, but of course the water doesn’t come with a volume control.

“Hey, Mack,” she said sleepily as I was stripping off my slinging my wet stuff up over the curtain rod from inside the tub.

“Hey,” I said. “Have a good afternoon?”

“Say what?”

I opened the curtain.

“I said, did you have a good afternoon?”

“Oh!” she said, in a heart-melting, face-scrunching tone of voice that sounded like it was saying, “You brought me puppies! My favorite!”, “Did you do all that for me?”

“What, the piercings?” I asked. “No, they’re for Amaranth.”

“No, I mean… you shaved all your hair off down there,” she said. “I had been thinking how much better it might be… when I saw, I thought maybe you were thinking…”

“That’s for Amaranth, too,” I said.

“I thought she was an herbivore,” Feejee said.

“It’s not for… it’s a sexual thing, okay?” I said.

“Oh,” Feejee said. “I thought that hair down there was. That’s why I assumed you getting rid of it meant you… well, never mind. I guess why you originally did it doesn’t matter. I appreciate it all the same.”

“Well, don’t,” I said. I remembered what Amaranth had said. “Oh, Amaranth wants to talk to you about… all that.”

“She does? Great,” Feejee said. “She seems really understanding. I’m sure we’ll be able to explain our position to her in a way that makes sense.”

“Yeah, um… I don’t think it’s going to go like that,” I said. “I think she’s looking for some kind of middle ground, though I can’t imagine what that would be.”

“Maybe if we just took half… ooh, wait. Are we sure she’s an herbivore?”

The door opened and Trina breezed past, talking into a very familiar-looking sleek black octagonal mirror case. I was so shocked by the sight that I didn’t close the curtain.

“Oh, my fucking Lord Khersis, Gladys, she’s showing off her new elven wax and tit piercings, and Feejee’s slobbering all over her,” Trina said, heading back towards the showers. “She used to be cool before she turned gay. It’s tragic.”

“Tell Amaranth we should talk soon,” Feejee said. “The sooner we get this done, the fewer people are going to think I’m gay for you.”

“Hey!” I yelled at Trina, stepping out of the tub. Feejee’s skewed priorities and her kneejerk not-gayness could wait. “Where’d you get that mirror?”

“Why?” Trina asked. “Do you want to break this one, too? My mom rushed it out to me so she could keep in touch with me, if it’s any of your business… which it’s not.”

“Oh,” I said. I supposed it might have simply been the same model from the same house, especially if Trina’s mom had ordered one locally for speedier delivery. As far as I knew mine was safely in my coat pocket, or on my dresser, or wherever I’d left it. “Sorry.”

“Can you believe this, Gladys?” Trina said into her mirror, turning back towards the showers. “The little freak is sorry my mom sent me a mirror, after she broke my last one.”

“That’s not… at least I don’t have a fat ass!” I yelled.

Trina froze with her hand on the shower curtain.

“I’m going to have to get back to you,” she said. She closed the compact and put it down on the bench, then turned around to face me. It was my turn to freeze. Her one bigger eye seemed to be bulging out of its socket as she stalked across the bathroom towards me. When she was eye to eye plus one with me, she let a snort of hot air out of her flared nostrils. “What did you say to me, you disgusting little feeb?”

“I… sorry,” I said.

“What are you doing, looking at my ass anyway?” Trina asked. “My ass is not here for you.”

“I’m sorry,” I sputtered. Amaranth was going to kill me. That would be her performance on Saturday. Killing me. “It was… it was rude and inappropriate and…”

“The only thing that’s stopping me from grabbing you by the hair and smashing your face into the first open toilet is I’d have to touch your hair, and there’s not enough soap in the world for that,” Trina said. “So instead I’m just going to tell you that everybody in the gladiator program knows your supposed ‘boyfriend’ is fucking that psycho barbarian coach.”

“Fuck you!”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’d rather do that than fuck him, which is probably why he ended up with her,” Trina said. “Khersis knows she’s grody and scary enough as it is. Kills one student at the start of all her classes, just so the rest know she’s serious, you know.”

“If you wanted to convince me that Ian’s cheating, you should have shut your mouth after that,” I said. “Each thing that falls out of it is more ridiculous than the last thing that… fell out of it.”

“Oh, wow, witty comeback,” Trina said. “Were you there for the first day of her class? I don’t think so. Otherwise you would know that she cut some elven kid in half with his own axe for smarting off at her… the long way… and it wasn’t that big an axe!”

“She gets away with a lot of shit but she wouldn’t get away with murder,” I said. “Much less in every single one of her class.”

“Yeah, well, I heard that there’s a clause buried in the middle of the liability waivers that says that melee coaches can’t be held responsible for anything on the first day of class,” Trina said. “They call it the First Day Clause. It was put there because students would show up and start shit and get injured on purpose so they could sue, then dropped the class.”

“You heard? Trina, you had to have signed one of those things,” I said. “You have to know what’s in it and what’s not.”

“Who can tell, for sure?” Trina asked. “The way they’re written they could be anything. It’s all lawyers.”

“What does that even mean, ‘it’s all lawyers’? It’s a simple, straightforward… for fuck’s sake, it’s not even that long,” I said.

“Well, I’ve heard this from more than one person, so you’re calling all of them liars, and since you’re the demon I don’t thin you’re qualified to do that,” Trina said. “And whether or not she did kill one particular student, she’s definitely fucking your ‘boyfriend’.”

“Trina… that’s ridiculous,” I said. “And I want you to know the only reason I’m not kicking your ass is that I couldn’t do it without hurting you.”

“Oh,” Trina said. “Oh. You’re worried about hurting me.”

“Yeah, Trina, I am,” I said.

“You let a nymph beat you up,” she said.

“That’s… that’s not a very good characterization of what I do,” I said. “But the key word is ‘let’.”

“You’ve been in a fight like every day since you’ve been here and you’ve lost every one of them,” Trina said. “Mariel had you on the floor crying for mercy in like three seconds.”

“Fucking hell, Trina… do you believe every rumor you make up?” I asked.

“I don’t have to make shit up,” she said. “I just keep my eyes open and my ears to the ground. This is stuff everybody knows… like how the golem fought you off the first time you tried to rape it.”

I couldn’t answer that. It was taking every ounce of self control not to punch through her face. I remembered how badly I’d freaked her out when she’d caught sight of my flaming eyes when I was hungry. I pushed the anger I was feeling into a tight little ball and I lit up.

And Trina just stood there. She smiled smugly, reached into the pocket of her robe, whipped out a seasoning shaker, and threw a bunch of garlic salt in my face.

“Fuck!” I yelled. Eyes of fire may be cool looking, but they don’t do much to protect you from having particulate matter shoved into them.

“I toldyou I keep my ear to the ground,” Trina said, continuing to throw the seasoned salt at me, though luckily not in my face. “I know your secret weakness is garlic.”

“Fuck!” I yelled again. “Trina, it’s not a weakness… you threw salt in my fucking eyes.”

“Whatever, it’s totally your weakness,” she said, and she turned and walked back to the showers. “There’s plenty more where that came from, and I’ve always got it with me.”

“No, you idiot, my weaknesses are holy power and magic,” I said, my eyes squeezed shut. “That just fucking stings.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Trina yelled back. “Why would you tell me that if it were true?”

“You know, if you can get some garlic-infused olive oil, it might be even stronger,” Feejee called to Trina.

“Don’t freaking encourage her,” I said, trying to rub the stuff out of my eyes.

“Well, I don’t want her thinking I’m gay,” Feejee said. “And quit doing that, you need to flush them out. Turn off the water.”

The tub, which I’d forgotten about, was almost full now. Opening my eyes a sliver for a split second at a time, I found the knobs and shut it off as Feejee shifted her tail into legs and climbed out of hers. She grabbed my hand and pulled me towards the showers.

“I’m okay, Feejee, really,” I said.

“Quit touching your eyes, you’re only going to make it worse,” she said. “You need to stand under cold water and…”

“Fuck, no!” I said, pulling away.

“Lukewarm water, then,” she said.

“What’s wrong with hot?”

“I’m just saying what they taught me in my intro to alchemy lab,” Feejee said.

I heard Trina say, “Oh, I am fucking out of here,” as Feejee pulled me into the showers. A shower turned off, then another one turned on. Feejee put her hands on me and pushed me into an icy cold stream. Fuck.

“It’s about half hot, half cold,” she said, clearly lying or deluded. “Compromise. Tilt your face up like this,” she said, moving my head, “and open your eye.”

I forced my eye open, but the sight and sensation of water thudding into it as well as the sting forced it closed.

“Keep it open,” Feejee said. “Mother Ocean, you smell so damned good. Keep your eye open.”

It was weird and it was hard, but the water on my eye actually did seem to help, and then I did the other one for a bit.

“I’m just gonna…” Feejee murmured, and she stood behind me, her cool breasts pushing against my skin. I could feel her breathing in near my neck and the side of my face. The way she was standing, it was impossible to miss how similar her build was to Amaranth. Feejee was a little wider at the shounders and while she looked just as soft and feminine, her flesh was tauter and firmer all over, to say nothing of colder.

She was Amaranth without the softness and warmth, and full of sharp pointy danger instead of love.

But for all that she was chickenshit about being seen as gay, she’d reacted to seeing me in pain by administering the proper treatment. It seemed as hard for me to wrap my mind around her ability to see me as both a friend and a meal as it was for her to see the conflict there.

Her mouth closed around the side of my neck, her teeth flat and human. She murmured, the sound transmitting as a hum into my flesh. I moaned. She opened her mouth and withdrew a tiny bit.

“You know how I said… I didn’t want… that it was weird…?”

“Uh huh,” I murmured. My eyes still felt scratchy even with all the salt flushed out of them. I could taste garlic in my mouth, smell it in my nose.

I was unbelievably horny, considering I’d just been assaulted with spices. My butt tingled in memory of where Amaranth had spanked me.

“I think… I’m gonna…” she said, and then she bit down hard, with her still-untransformed teeth. I let out a yelp and that was all it took.

She stayed mostly human, except for her eyes and her teeth, and her teeth went everywhere. She licked my face, especially around my eyes, and everywhere else that the garlic salt had stuck, though it had long since dissolved and washed away.

As far as vivid illustrations of the difference between being invulnerable to harm and being invulnerable to pain went, having salt thrown in your eyes was a pretty good one… but it couldn’t hold a candle to having a predator tugging on a piece of metal jammed through a sensitive part of your anatomy.

The spell kept the piercings from coming undone and my own nature kept me from coming undone… it was a “something had to give” situation, and there was nothing to give but my ability to process pain.

I was coming hard before she even got below my legs, and when she did…

Fuck.

Or maybe eat.

Feejee looked even more self-conscious than she had after last time when she’d finally had enough. I was on my back in the middle of the showers, and she was getting to her feet.

“So,” she said. “That should get the garlic stuff out of your eyes.”

“Yeah,” I said, weakly. “Thanks.”

“I’m going back to my tub,” Feejee said. “Um…”

“I’m just going to go to bed,” I said.

“Celia hasn’t been back to the room the past two nights,” she said. “If you wanted…”

“No!” I said. “Thank you.”

“Oh, I’m not going to… I wouldn’t… not before I talk to Amaranth,” Feejee said. “I just thought…”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Thanks but no thanks. I have a lot of stuff to do tomorrow.”

“Well, okay,” she said.

I headed back towards the door, grabbed my robe and threw it on, scooped up my towel and my underwear and bolted out into the hall… where I almost collided with Kiersta, who was standing there cross-armed in flannel pajamas and bunny slippers, the perpetual dark circles around her eyes making her look like a belligerent panda.

Behind her was Trina with her shower kit, the Leightons with toothbrushes, and Oru with… something that might have been a hairbrush and might have been a bed of nails for a particularly disciplined hamster.

“Who else is in there?” Kiersta asked me.

“Uh…”

“Get them,” she said.

I stepped back and opened the door a crack. “Feejee, uh, Kiersta wants to talk to us.”

“Can’t she come in here? I just…”

“Get out here now,” Kiersta said.

There was a splash as Feejee hurried to obey, joining us a few seconds later.

“Was it just the two of you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, ducking my head.

“Mack was trying to eat me!” Feejee blurted.

Kiersta gave her a look.

“The showers are not for sex,” she said.

“We weren’t!” Feejee said. “Oh, Kiersta, I swear I didn’t…”

“Neither are the bathtubs or the stalls or the lounge or anywhere else that’s not your own room, and if you’re that noisy, you can take a place in town,” Kiersta said.

“Kiersta, I swear…”

“Don’t swear,” Kiersta said. “Just don’t fuck in the showers. Everybody else has to use them. From now on, when you’re in the bathroom she isn’t. When she’s in the bathroom, you aren’t.”

“She sleeps in the bathroom!” I said.

“Not any more,” Kiersta said.

“What?” Feejee asked. “That’s not fair. I can’t sleep in a bed.”

“Get used to it,” Kiersta said. “It’s not fair to everyone else that you’re in there all the time, especially when… yeah.”

“I’m not fucking gay!” Feejee yelled. “I have a boyfriend. I like boys. I don’t like girls. I’m not gay.”

“Pipe down and go to bed,” Kiersta said. She turned to me. “Close your robe and go to bed. Everybody else, do what you need to do, the bathroom’s clear now. Unless there’s anything in there I should know about?”

“No,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “You two are going to be cleaning in there for a week.”

“But you said we can’t be in there at the same time,” I said.

“Alternate days,” she said.

“But that’s an odd number of days,” I said.

“Then you can do it for one week and she can do it for the next,” she said.

“I don’t even think you can do this!” I said.

“Yeah, I don’t think I can, either,” Kiersta said. “You want to come with me and help me look up what I’m really supposed to do when I catch you having sex in the public spaces?” I said nothing. “No? Then you can clean the bathroom for a week. I’ll tell housekeeping not to bother. Come see me tomorrow when you’re ready to do it and I’ll unlock the supply closet for you. No getting your golem to help.”

“Stop calling her my golem,” I said. “She has a name.”

“If you can call it that,” Kiersta said. “Look, I’m sick of dealing with everybody’s shit. People treat you badly, human oppression, I get all that… that’s no excuse for you people to act like animals all the damn time. It’s hard enough being a resident advisor in this dorm.”

“Yeah, poor you,” I said as she turned and opened the door to her room. Looking past her, I could see empty liquor bottles on the windowsill and dresser. “Oh, that’s nice. Room full of booze.”

“Hey, I have a racial exemption,” she said.

“Yeah, what?”

“Only fucking human in this madhouse,” she said.

“Hey!” Tara and Sara both said, having stuck around to watch while everybody else went about their business.

“You heard me,” Kiesta said, and she slammed her door.

The twins looked at each other, then looked at me and smiled evilly before heading for the bathroom. I turned to Feejee, the only person left out in the hall.

“I’m going to talk to Amaranth tomorrow,” she said. Her skin was tinged a more visible and less healthy green than normal. “Maybe once you’re… they won’t think I’m…”

She turned and headed into her own room without another word, leaving me alone.

“Oh, fuck!” one of the Leightons yelled from inside the bathroom. “Watch where the fuck you’re… oh my Khersis, all over the seat!”

It was going to be a long week.

Discuss this story.

Two wakes up in the glass case, which means that she hadn’t woken up at all.

The case, like everything else in the full but tidy basement workshop, bears a label. Its label says “Golem Case”. The block letters were applied to the glass almost directly across from her eyes, and so she can see the backs of them without moving or looking around and so she knows without moving or looking around that she was in the proper place, that she was in her place and so she knows that much at least is right in the world.

This means she’s dreaming.

She hears the bolts on the door at the top of the stairs sliding open, one after another. She tenses up. She hears the door open and she sucks in her lips a bit.

This time I won’t do it, she thinks as she hears feet tread on the stairs. I won’t say it. I don’t have to. I don’t have to say anything I don’t want to ^{I WANT TO DO WHAT I’M TOLD} but I’m a free being ^{but if I were a free being I wouldn’t be back here} but if I’m back here and not a free being then Miss Ruth never told me to say it and so I don’t have to.

Then she hears the bolts on the door at the bottom of the stairs and that door opens, and the man steps inside.

“Good morning!” Two says, and he freezes. The perfect dream of her perfect life begins to crack and fray around the edges. She doesn’t know what he says in response to this. She doesn’t know what happens next.

She had never said “good morning!” to the man.

Sometimes when this happens she wakes up and she cries because she ruined the dream and she can’t get it back. Other times she keeps dreaming. The workshop falls to pieces and is blown away, leaving her on a vast, flat, featureless plain (labeled “A Vast Flat Featureless Plain”) in an infinitely expanding empty space (labeled “An Infinitely Expanding Empty Space”), alone except for some sort of ridiculous owl turtle thing sitting on a post, both labeled appropriately.

The ridiculous owl turtle thing has occupied the vast featureless plain ever since the day that Two, wanting something to replace the workshop dream that had been her refuge until Miss Ruth’s increasingly specific admonitions to be more personable had finally destroyed it, had asked her friend Hazel what sort of things people dreamed about. Her friend Hazel had told her that a lot of her dreams had impossible things that were not quite one thing and not quite another. The next time Two had fallen asleep, after she wrecked the workshop dream, there it was: not quite an owl and not a quite a turtle.

It perched upright on the top of the post on bird-like talons, but it had a reptilian underbelly and a turtle shell. The things that stuck out of the holes at its shoulders might have been flippers and might have been wings. Its head was turtlish, but with owl-like tufts over big yellow eyes and a beak that almost might have belonged to a snapping turtle as much as a bird.

“Oh,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “Back again?”

“Yes,” Two says sullenly. “I am back again.”

“Did you try what I said?”

“No,” Two says. “I did not.”

“Well, there’s no use glaring at me like that if you aren’t going to take my advice.”

“Your advice isn’t any good,” Two says. “I cannot make something up about my own… my maker. Making things up about people is called lying and gossip, and it’s wrong.”

“It’s only gossip if you tell other people and it’s only lying if you act like it’s true,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing said.

“I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think I know those things,” Two says. “So I don’t know how you could possibly know them.”

“I am a ridiculous owl turtle thing,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing responds, “and I am clearly impossible.”

“I am going to ignore you,” Two says. She looks around the vast, flat, featureless plain. “I think I am going to sweep.”

“Going to sweep? But you’re alweady sweeping,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “This is all a dweam.”

“That isn’t very funny,” Two says.

“It’s your nascent sense of humor, honey. I just work here.”

“I need a broom,” Two says, looking around the infinitely expanding space, but of course, there is no such thing as a broom there.

“And who told you to sweep?”

Two freezes, looking guilty. Her face in the dream takes on the spasmodic tic that it does when she’s stuck in a chain of thoughts. In her bed, under the blankets, her whole body kicks and twitches.

“I… I… I… this is my space and I am supposed to keep my space clean and tidy,” she says with a measure of triumph as she works the justification out.

“Looks pretty neat and tidy to me,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“Miss Ruth says that practice makes perfect.”

“I don’t think she was talking about sweeping perfectly clean surfaces.”

“She did not specify,” Two says. She says again, “I need a broom.”

“Have you tried the other side of my post?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “It seems to me that you can see everything there is here from where you’re standing, except for the other side of my post. So if you can’t see a broom, that’s the only place it could be.”

“Oh, okay,” Two says, and she walks around the ridiculous owl turtle thing. There is no broom leaning up against the post. “No,” she says. “There is no broom here.”

“Well, of course,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. It’s facing her again. “That’s this side of the post. You want the other side.”

“But I went to the other side,” Two protests.

“I beg to differ,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “You did not go to the other side. You came to this side. The other side is always the one at which you are not.”

“That poor chicken must be very tired, then,” Two says. “And dizzy.”

“Now who isn’t very funny?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing asks as Two reached around to the other side of the post and feels her hand closing around a wooden handle. She pulls out the improbably-placed broom. It’s labeled “Improbably-Placed Broom”.

“You,” Two says, and she begins to sweep the perfectly flat, perfectly clean surface of the vast, flat, featureless plain. “You aren’t funny. Still. Now be quiet. I have sweeping to do.”

“How will you know when you’re done?”

“When I’ve swept the whole place.”

“But it’s endless.”

“Yes,” Two says, and she smiles.

“You aren’t very good at dreaming, you know,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“I don’t care,” Two said as she starts to sweep.

“Your name isn’t even Two,” it says. “You just made that up.”

“I think I hate you, ridiculous owl turtle thing,” Two says.

“You aren’t supposed to hate anybody.”

“You aren’t anybody,” Two says. “So that’s okay.”

Steff doesn’t have the self-awareness to know that she’s dreaming, but when she wakes up it will seem like it should have been obvious to her… so obvious that in the moment she awakens, she’ll manage to convince herself that she knew it was a dream and was just going with it.

There is no room in the fortress at Kilrest as big and expansive as the throne room in her dreams. While the ogres tower over her, they don’t build their structures any bigger than they need to. They lack the architectural cunning to build a great big hall with a high vaulted ceiling like the one Steff always imagined before she saw the real place, the one she still pictures more than half the time when she imagines her life after graduation.

Steff sits on her throne in the hall, and it is her throne. Viktor doesn’t factor into this dream. She has dreams about Viktor and she has dreams about Kilrest, but ever since they went there she hasn’t had any dreams about Viktor and Kilrest. Her sleeping mind cannot make them fit together. Her brooding lover does not fit with her idealized fantasy life of wicked decadence.

The hall is full of her subjects… ogres and reanimated skeletons and zombies… and her victims, which this time around consist entirely of people she went to school with. The ones who attacked her, the ones who teased her, the ones who snubbed her, the ones who happened to be present for the worst years of Steff Johnson’s life are being torn apart, being impaled on spits, being tortured to death in a dozen ways, but none of them are dying because Steff’s dark magic is too awesome to allow them that escape.

They’re starting to twist off Cindy Mears’s head now. What had Cindy done? Steff couldn’t remember anything in particular. But she was hot and effortlessly popular and Steff had popped so many boners over her while trying to figure out if she was a gay boy or a straight girl or what and that hadn’t made things easier for her.

Not that Cindy had been alone on that score. An adolescent male body is on a hair trigger to begin with. Adding in fifty percent elven blood… for a while it had seemed like everything turned Steff on, and this at a point in her life when she regularly found herself thinking of violent and/or morbid things…

It really was no wonder that certain associations had stuck in her head, though Steff has never had the self-awareness necessary to think about how she might have come to associate violence and death with sex. Even asking the question could seem to imply that there was something wrong with doing so, and Steff had spent too many years and too many tears convincing herself that she was fine to do that.

Life in her dream of Kilrest was so good. She didn’t feel like rocking the boat with a lot of moody self-examination.

“Why, yes, I do see your point,” Mother Khaele tells Amaranth in an utterly realistic and wholly plausible scenario in which the nymph has just pointed out the fundamental flaw in existing cosmological models which results in the perceived division between the so-called higher and lower races, the people and the animals. “You’ve worked it out quite nicely. In fact, I have to admit that I left that mistake there on purpose to see which of my children would be the first one to spot it, so that I would know who would be worthy of sharing my…”

At this point, Mack’s leg twitches in her sleep and she kicks Amaranth in the ankle, jarring her awake. She blinks her myopic eyes several times in the perfect darkness of the blanket tent before she realizes where she is and that her Mother’s praise had simply been a dream. She sighs, and tries to go back to sleep.

Moeli’s working the desk when She comes in, cool as ever. She doesn’t look at anyone when she comes into the room. She keeps her head down, thinking her important thoughts, but She‘s not afraid to say anything to anybody. Really.

She‘ll just blurt out things that would make a bugbear blush without even thinking about it. Just like that.

Eventually She sidles up to the counter, the way She does, like whatever She has got to do isn’t even that important.

“Hey,” She says, with that quiet, husky voice that drives him wild. “I, uh, found your notebook.”

“Oh?” Moeli asks. His hearts skip a couple of beats as She puts it down in front of him. He’d wanted to show his notebook to her, but he’d always chickened out. It was a million to one chance that She would be into something so weird.

“I hope you don’t mind I looked through it… well, I had to figure out whose it was. I thought the drawings of motorcycles were kind of cool. Did you do them?”

“Yeah,” Moeli said. “I did.”

“I like motorcycles,” She says. “I think they’re awesome.”

“I do, too,” Moeli says.

“In fact,” She says, leaning in close. “I’ve got one outside. A real one.”

“No shit?” Moeli says.

“Yeah,” She says. “Half-demons have motorcycles. But I can’t seem to figure out how to make it go. You seem like you know a lot about them, though. Do you think maybe we could try to take a ride… together?”

“Well, I’m kind of working now,” Moeli says. “And I can’t just walk away. Also, you said you weren’t into me.”

“I’m a bitch and I was lying to you for no reason,” She says. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Of course,” he says. “You know what? My shift’s over.”

Two has been sweeping for what seems like hours, and the ridiculous owl turtle thing is a distant memory behind her, as she’s sweeping in the way she’s been taught: one straight line until she comes to the wall or carpet, and then move over.

She doesn’t expect to find a wall or carpet any time soon. She doesn’t expect to find anything, as there has never been anything in the vast, flat, featureless plain except the post with the ridiculous owl turtle thing on it. But there had also never been a broom behind the post (that she knew of, anyway), and unfortunately for her, Two understands that one runs across unexpected things in dreams.

However, there are an infinite number of things she does not expect to run across, so it won’t necessarily have to be a wall or carpet or something else that would force her to turn around and start heading back towards the ridiculous owl turtle thing.

In fact, the first unexpected thing she runs across is her teddy bear, Hand Wash. In her dream, he’s as tall as she is, though he still just sits there with his firmly stuffed legs jutting out in front of him to support him and his upper body leaning slightly forward to keep him balanced on those legs.

“Hello, Two,” he says.

“Hello, Hand Wash,” she says. “I can’t stop to talk. I’m busy sweeping and I have to keep going until I’m done.”

“Sweeping? I thought you were dreaming.”

“I can do both,” Two says.

“I can’t do anything,” Hand Wash says.

“I know,” she says.

“I’m a teddy bear,” he adds.

“Yes.”

“I’m not even supposed to be talking,” he says. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “I forgive you.”

And onward she sweeps.

Ariadne knows the dream before it starts, because it’s the same one she’s been having for weeks now. That thing is in her class. It wears a mousey, unassuming little face, but the elven professor knows the fire and death and hate that lie behind that mask. She can’t say anything about it, though. She can’t do anything.

Nobody else sees. Nobody else knows.

Every time she turns her back, even if it’s only for a second, another of her students is gone. The thing is clearly responsible. Why can’t anybody else see this?

And now there’s more of it. More of them. It’s brought in its friends.

How much longer can this go on?

How long before the school’s overrun?

Something must be done.

Something must be done.

Amaranth, having just found out that she had aced all of her classes (as expected!), was getting ready to go home for winter break, but she was planning on taking the fast route home and traveling there in style. Steff had helped get her “dressed”, so to speak… arranging her on the platter with roasted potatoes and other vegetables, brushing her body down with garlic oil, and even stuffing an apple in her mouth for aesthetic purposes. Steff had wanted to use garlic butter, but Amaranth had felt that using an animal product would be more likely to bring Mother Khaele’s disapproval.

Now Steff is wheeling the trolley with the covered platter on it to the elegant dining room where her Mack waits along with Viktor and their new best friends, Iona and Feejee. This was such a brilliant idea, she thinks to herself, enjoying the smell of the garlic and the pepper and the fire roasted onions, and when she surprises all of her sisters by arriving home early and explains how she got there, they’ll all be so excited to try this… the ultimate carnal experience, the ultimate sharing of self… and the new phenomenon of responsible, consensual cannibalism utilizing renewable resources will put places like Tender Mercy’s out of business, she just knows it.

Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it, too?

And then the trolley stops and she knows that the moment of revelation is upon her and Mack is going to be so surprised and everybody’s going to think she looks sexy and delicious and she’s going to taste so good…

…and then Mack rolls over in her sleep, pulling on the blankets and Amaranth isn’t on the platter at all.

“Oh, phooey,” she says, and then she tries to go back to sleep.

Some dreams are simpler than others.

In Trina’s dream, everybody had four eyes, except for her, and this made them all freaks. Sara Leighton dreams that the teleport accident which in reality had joined her with her sister had actually sent her twin to another plane of existence. Tara’s version has it so that it merged them fully and they’d become one person. On occasion, they’ve each dreamed it the other way and broke out in a cold sweat in their sleep.

Feejee dreams of blood in the water.

Iona dreams of blood.

Kai, who often thinks of nothing but murder all day, dreams a surprisingly peaceful dream about her grandfather’s calligraphy pens. Suzi dreams of invisible cheeseburgers. Maliko dreams about her Sooni.

Scylla dreams that she’d made it to the damned rabbit before the snake-eyed bitch did. The snake-eyed bitch dreams of cutting off her pink skin and finding scales underneath. Gladys dreams of being up on stage, hundreds—no thousands—of people’s eyes upon her. Cetea dreams that she can use a damned mirror without it breaking.

Honey dreams absolutely nothing, as six crushed flower petals in a tall glass of vodka have rendered her oblivious even to oblivion.

“Hey, hey Two!”

“What is it, ridiculous owl turtle thing?” Two asks as the clearly impossible thing flaps its flipper wings in ungainly flight alongside her, oblivious to her attempts to sweep away from it.

“How come you never dream about your friends?” it asks her.

“I do,” she says. “Sometimes. But not when I dream about the workshop, because they weren’t in the workshop.”

“You never dream about them here, either.”

“They were never here,” Two says. “And anyway this is still the workshop dream. It’s just broken, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

“You could stop saying good morning,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“No,” Two says, shaking her head. “I tried that.”

“You could stop freaking the hell out when it happens,” it says. “That’s what breaks the dream, you know.”

“I don’t care,” Two says. “I have a different dream now. I’m sweeping.”

“But have you considered the ramifications of that?”

“No,” she says.

“Do you think there really was a broom on the other side of my post?”

“Yes,” she says.

“It was there because you dreamed it up,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says. “You could dream up anything you wanted.”

“I don’t care,” Two says. “I’m sweeping.”

Dee is a child in the marketplace. One of her hands is being held by Dehsah, and the other by her mother.

No, that’s wrong. My mother never took me to the marketplace.

Dee is a child in the marketplace. Her mother, pretty Dehsah…

No.

Dee is in the marketplace, with her lover, Dehsah.

Dehsah hasn’t been out of the house since we became lovers.

Dee passes a fitful night, her subconscious unable to provide any dreams of succor which her conscious mind does not reject out of hand.

Amaranth looks beautiful in her wedding dress, and so does Mack. They are having an outdoor ceremony, of course, and even a hilltop shrine was out of the question under the circumstances, so they’re holding it in a beautiful elven forest bower. Everybody from Paradise Valley is there, and so are all the students she’d worked with during her years of study (in which she’d attained multiple degrees and many honors), and nymphs and satyrs and fauns of all stripes.

Mack had agreed to have a Mechan officiate, to get around her little disability, but when they get to the end of the aisle Amaranth sees that it’s not the scientist there at all, but Mother Khaele herself. Amaranth looks in alarm at Mack, but Mack is standing unharmed in the presence of the divine.

“Rest easy, my daughter,” Mother Khaele says. “For your love has redeemed this demon-tainted soul completely, and now I will happily join the two of you as one, after which you will be taken to your honeymoon in a carriage pulled by specially trained horses, who will join you for…”

“Sooni!” Mack blurts out, and Amaranth looks at her in confusion as the wedding dissolves and she finds herself in bed once more, where Mack blurts out Sooni’s name a few more times.

“Suzune-Darling, there is something you must know,” her mother tells Sooni, who sits anxiously by her feet, hanging on every word. Her mother is so wise and so beautiful, just like herself. “We have kept this from you for years, for your own protection, but now you must be told.”

“What, Mother?” Sooni asks. “What is it?”

“I only hope you can forgive my dishonesty towards you,” her mother says.

“I’m sure if you were not truthful towards me, it was for a very good reason,” Sooni says, bowing her head.

“You are such a good daughter, Suzune-Darling,” her mother says. She gets to her feet. “Perhaps it would be easier to show you than tell you.”

She turns around in a circle, and when she does her features have changed. It’s the same kind, wise eyes that are looking down at Sooni, but they’re yellow instead of black. The same calm smile, but with a shorter snout.

Her mother is a nekoyokai.

“Mother… you’re…?”

“Yes,” her mother says, nodding. “And not just that, but I am Queen of the Nekos. Which means that you, my humble daughter Suzune-Darling, you are the Neko Princess. You look like you do because you are half kitsu, but now that you know the truth you will be able to change between the two at will. You must keep your identity as Neko Princess secret, though, or else you will be in terrible danger.”

“That’s why Father always became angry when I acted like a neko!” Sooni exclaims.

“Yes. He was simply worried about you,” her mother says. “And you must know that Kai…”

“Kai is my true sister!” Sooni says. “I’ve known it all along!”

“Yes! Your heart knows the truth, Suzune-Darling, my Neko Princess!”

A door slams downstairs, pulling Sooni away from her mother. She sits upright in bed, shaking her head in confusion. What had she just been dreaming? It had been about her mother, she’s sure about that… but the details are all slipping away. Her mother and nekos.

Oh, well. It couldn’t have been a True Dream if I can’t remember it.

She reaches down and gets her mother’s shoes, the shoes she wears everywhere, even inside the house, off the floor and holds them to her chest as she lays back down, hoping her mother comes back to her soon. She had left a map of the Imperium with Prax circled on it at the family shrine, along with a brochure for the campus with her room number on it, but she wasn’t sure if her mother could come this far, or that she’d have the time.

She had a lot of work to do, her mother did. She was a very important person.

“My friend Hazel used to keep a dream diary,” Two says.

“Oh, so you’re talking to me now?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing says.

“I’m talking,” Two says. “I don’t think it matters if I’m talking to you or not, since you are not real. Her mother made her keep a dream diary from when she was eleven until she turned twenty-two. She made my friend Hazel write her dreams down every morning, and then she read it. She wanted to make sure that my friend Hazel didn’t get the curse.”

“No, she wanted to find out if your friend Hazel already had it,” the ridiculous owl turtle thing replies. “That’s a different thing. And it isn’t a curse.”

“I know,” Two says. “I told my friend Hazel that, and she said ‘Well, it isn’t a blessing.’ And then she told me not to talk about it.”

“But you are.”

“I’m dreaming,” Two says. “I’m not really talking.”

“So why can’t you stop yourself from saying ‘good morning’ to the man?”

It’s the war again.

The bridge.

Theona’s down by the bridge, trying to finish her spell of unmaking before the orcs overwhelm her. Jill can see that she’s just going to make it… get the spell off, that is. She doesn’t have time to finish it and escape.

The rest of Hydra Company… all four of the other survivors… have their hands full. Nora’s gone dead to the world again, seemingly conscious of nothing but the bow in her hands. Ironically she’s doing the most to help Theona, sending arrow after arrow at the thundering horde as it bears down on her.

She makes every shot she takes, and every shot is a fatal one, but she might as well be standing on a beach trying to shoot down the waves as they head towards the shore.

Mur-Si is… who the fuck knew where Mur-Si was? The most Jill could see was where she had just been, as ogres collapse with the legs cut out from under them and orcs die in fountains of spurting blood. Jill had been told… some hundred years before… that she had been bred to be the greatest warrior the world had ever seen… but the bastard elven hybrid is a strong argument that the Founders had wasted their efforts.

Jill and Fayborn are fighting back to back, Fay’s gleaming sword and Jill’s giant axe cleaving a circle around them. Jill keeps getting glimpses of the kid in the wizard robes down by the bridge, kneeling helpless and alone as she focuses on her spell.

“What’s the plan for extraction?” Jill asks.

“Soon as we see the bridge go down, we bug out,” Fay says. “Simple enough for you, Flattop?”

“What about The?”

“She bugs out, too.”

“She’s never going to make it back up to us,” Jill says.

“She might,” Fay says. “Didn’t think we’d make it this far at all.”

“We’ve got to get down to her,” Jill says.

“Can’t,” Fay says. “If she fails, we’ve got to be ready to try Plan B.”

“She’s our wizard,” Jill says. “What are we supposed to do to the bridge without her, have Mur-Si stab it to death?”

“Need to know basis.”

“You sent her down there to die,” Jill says.

“We were all sent here to die,” Fay says. “Some of us are better at it than others.”

Jill headbutts the orc in front of her and then charges through the gap left as it goes down, trampling goblins, shouldering past orcs, and dodging around ogres. Fay yells out behind her, something about sticking together, but let the bitch yell. She stands a better chance on her own than the neophyte mage who had, completely unwittingly, become the linchpin of the entire mission.

And as she thunders down the side of the ravine towards the bridge, Jill remembers that this has all already happened and that it’s just a dream, and she realizes she’s not going to make it in time.

The bridge starts to crumble and Theona stands and turns to run up towards her. The bridge is collapsing as a pair of ogres catch hold of her.

They don’t even have weapons out. Why would they? She doesn’t. If she’d been fighting them, they might have been forced to kill her, but instead they’ve got her in their hands…

“Opening the first charity brothel together was the best idea ever, Amaranth,” Mack says.

“Oh, it just seemed like the natural thing to do, after you and Two overcame your inhibitions and embraced the nymphly codes as a way of life,” Amaranth replies. “But this is just the start. Once we start teaching our classes, we’ll get more women of all races to subscribe to my new revolutionary philosophy and soon the entire world will be at peace because everybody will be too busy loving one another to hate anybody. Of course, some credit belongs to Mother Khaele.”

“No, she told me it’s all because of you,” Mack says. “And that you shouldn’t need to feel humble about it, but that’s just like you to think of her.”

“But, Mack, you couldn’t have spoken to… oh, poop. This is a dream again, isn’t it?” Amaranth says as she wakes up.

“Huh? What?” Mack murmurs sleepily beside her in the darkness.

“Nothing, baby,” Amaranth mutters, frowning. “Nothing.”

Leda is dancing across the smooth, glassy surface of the lake. It’s winter, her favorite time, but though a dusting of snow coats trees and the ground on the shore around the lake, the water remains unfrozen. Even in human form, though, it bears her weight. She leaps and she glides about in the moonlight, and then she heads for the thicket of reeds in the center of the lake, where on this side there is a small island, barely more than a bump of rock jutting up above the surface of the water.

That small island of reeds is the gateway to the other side, where her mother’s castle and where her true kingdom is. On both sides, the kingdom of Mariinsky Lake is not more than the lake itself, but on the Other Side, that lake is much bigger.

Even though she loves the castle and she loves the true lake far more than she loves the dreary, cramped one she’d just been dancing upon, she feels cold dread seeping down her spine as she passes through the reeds and finds herself on the large island with her home in front of her. It’s daylight on this side, but the sun doesn’t seem to warm her up much.

She knows what’s coming next.

Leda is a true princess: grace defined, possessing endless reserves of natural charm and refinement. But somehow—witches, probably—she screwed up and got herself exiled for four years to a moonforsaken frontier outpost in an empire of human barbarians. It was unthinkable, it was impossible… but it had happened, and it was going to happen again.

What would it be this time? Would she upset a tureen of soup? Lean against a priceless tapestry? Would she tread on an ambassador snail’s tail? Accidentally insult a visiting frog prince?

Knowing that her doom was coming but not knowing what shape it would take was terrible torture, but no matter how much she fights against it, her body still insists on passing over the drawbridge, under the portcullis, and through the gatehouse. She exchanges polite pleasantry with the guards in their bright red uniforms.

Her mother and her stepfather are waiting for her in the throne room, and in between her and them is a gauntlet of respected courtiers, servants bustling around with important loads, and guests of high social rank. But no matter what Leda did, no matter how careful she was, something would go wrong because when she reached the throne room, her stepfather would smile that sneering smile at her and say those nine most hated words:

“Your mother and I have been discussing your education.”

And so the dream went.

“Do you want to know what I think?” the ridiculous owl turtle thing asks.

“No,” Two says. “I really think I do not.”

“I think you say ‘good morning’ because you want to.”

“I want to do what I’m told,” Two says.

“Among other things,” it says. “But I think you want him to acknowledge you.”

“No,” Two says, shaking her head. “You are mistaken.”

“I think you know you couldn’t go back to being a piece of lab equipment now that you’ve been a person, and you want to know if he could relate to you as a person.”

“No,” Two repeats decisively.

“I think part of you would like to have a conversation with him.”

“You are mistaken.”

“I think you want to know what he thinks about you… if he thinks about you. Does he miss you like you miss him? Would he take you back as you are now? Would he hire you as a free person? Would he like you?”

“No!” Two yells. She turns and clobbers him with the broom. “I hate you, some sort of ridiculous owl turtle thing!” she yells as she hits him again and again. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

“Amaranth, you’re so smart!” the professor proclaims. “In all my years of teaching, I’ve never met a student who understood the material so quickly and so completely. That a nymph should be the one to…”

Under the covers, Mack begins to masturbate furiously. Amaranth, awoken once again, sighs, reaches over, and guides her lover’s hand to a slightly better spot. Mack moans in her sleep.

“At least somebody’s having pleasant dreams tonight,” Amaranth says.

It wasn’t Dee who was chasing me all around the campus in my dream, though… it was Mercy. She rode a black chariot being pulled by a pair of slavering man-beasts that had to be her “pet” half-demons. She wore an armor like Puddy’s and carried my pitchfork like a trident. Crackling red and black energy surrounded her gray skin like a halo.

It wasn’t one of those dreams that had a real story, or even a beginning and an end. She was just chasing me. Over and over again. Sometimes they caught up to me and she threw the pitchfork at me or turned loose the team, but then the whole thing was going again before anything actually happened. There was no sense of starting over… I fell, she closed in for the kill, and then I was up and running again.

The dream continued until I woke up, panicked and starved for air, beside Amaranth. I felt more tired and edgier than I had been before we went back to bed. I tried to sit up, but my arms and back weren’t quite there yet.

Outside the blanket barrier, the fridge door closed.

“Two?” I said. My throat felt constricted and my mouth was dry, so not a lot of sound came out. I tried again. “Two?”

I had a fleeting vision of Mercy pushing back the curtain, but then Two said, “Yes, Mack?” and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Why was Mercy my bogeywoman of the moment? She was out there, but she wasn’t an immediate threat to me… it was the pitchfork that should have been weighing on my mind. It had featured in the nightmare, of course, but it had hardly been given the starring role…

But of course, that was it. The pitchfork couldn’t come after me on its own. It was only dangerous when it was in somebody’s grip, or vice versa.

“Mack?” Two said questioningly.

“Just… just seeing if you were awake,” I said. Beside me, Amaranth stirred a little but didn’t wake up. Sleep seemed to be something like a leisure activity for her, but when she did it, she did it for real.

“Oh, okay. I am,” Two said.

I disentangled myself from the blankets and from Amaranth and slipped out of bed. Two was already dressed. She’d poured herself a glass of milk and was peeling a banana from the bowl.

“Did you have a good nap?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said. “Would you mind giving me the room for a minute? I really have to talk to my lawyer.”

“Okay,” she said, picking up her glass of milk with a napkin and heading for the door. She stopped when she got there, one hand holding a half-peeled banana and the other with the glass. I went to help her and then realized I’d gone back to bed naked, not taking the time to change.

“Hold on, let me throw on some clothes,” I said. I pulled on my shirt and underwear and then got the door open for her. The sliding part on the doorknob still seemed to be sticking more than normal, I noticed… it occurred to me that I may have stretched a few definitions in focusing on an unintended defect as a functional property to be enhanced. It sticking around could be the universe pushing back, saying, “Oh, you think this is supposed to work this way, do you?”

It was annoying, but a comparatively minor side effect for a comparatively minor transgression. Maybe I’d be able to use it as an example when I started taking more theoretical classes.

I closed the door behind Two and locked it again, then picked up my mirror and flipped it open. There was no sense putting off telling Lee any longer… especially when nobody was around to talk me out of it.

What was I going to tell him, though? I kept calling him “my lawyer”, but it wasn’t like I was paying him a huge retainer to solve all my problems. He was helping me with my case against the school with the idea that he’d get paid out of whatever settlement we got. At the same time, he’d be the first one to tell me that he needed to know about the pitchfork, as it touched on the case… and I hoped he’d want to see something done about it.

But telling him the whole story would involve bringing him into the loop about Tender Mercy’s. Unless more had gone on that I didn’t know about, I hadn’t broken the law… but how would he feel about continuing to represent me when he knew about that? Of course, I’d be leading with the information about the possession and the pitchfork… so he’d hear about it with the understanding that it hadn’t been me… but still…

It was the possibility of being judged that I was afraid of. Lee was my advocate, my ally… the one person in the world who was supposed to be completely on my side. If he dropped me, I wouldn’t know where to go or what to do.

Unless he decided he wanted a full blow-by-blow accounting of everything over the mirror, I’d leave out what had happened during my possession until we were face to face. That way I’d have time to work up the nerve, he’d have time to digest the fact that I really hadn’t been myself, and if the worst case scenario came to pass he’d have to actually throw me out of his office instead of just terminating a reflection.

On second thought, was that actually better?

I sighed and asked the mirror for him. Maybe I’d get lucky and get an echo trap.

I did.

“Hey, uh… Lee,” I said to the little tiny image of him dressed in the smartest of smart suits. “I just learned something about the pitchfork I got from the school labyrinth, and I kind of need to talk to you about it.” I stopped and thought for a moment. Was that enough? I felt weird trying to explain the whole thing to an echo trap, but “I kind of need to talk to you” somehow lacked urgency. “It doesn’t just have some kind of rage curse on it, it’s actually possessed… and the thing that possesses it can possess people. We were going to have it checked out by the diabolism department but we don’t think it made it there.” Once I started talking, the words kept coming in a torrent. “So… we don’t know where it is, and we don’t know what to do, and I thought this might have some bearing on the case and I really don’t want to be blamed if somebody gets all stabbed up with my pitchfork…”

The static image wavered and then I was looking at a very different Lee, from the chest up. His hair was messy and he was wearing a white shirt with no tie and the collar unbuttoned.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” he said. “When was the last time you saw it?”

“Uh… Thursday, I think.” I said. It had been before the date with Steff. “Yeah, Thursday.”

“And it only occurred to you to mention this now?”

“Well, we didn’t actually know what had been going on with it then,” I said. “I had been… acting weird… and didn’t remember doing… some stuff… that I did, apparently.”

“Mackenzie?” he prompted. Yes, his keen lawyerly instincts had seen through my cunning evasions.

“I… I can’t really go into it right now,” I said. “It might be better, in your office…”

“Understood,” he said. “Can you give me an idea how bad it is?”

“I didn’t break any laws, that I know about,” I said. “But… it’s bad, Lee. I could have broken a hundred laws and not done anything worse. But I didn’t remember having done it, and we’d been meaning to get the pitchfork looked over anyway, but we didn’t know at that point… well, we still don’t know a lot.”

“I… see,” he said. “This was on Thursday?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Amaranth went to take the pitchfork to have a diabolist look at it, and she doesn’t remember what happened after that. She didn’t even realize that she didn’t remember until we tried to pin down what had happened.”

“And how did you come to learn that you had been possessed?”

“Dee… Delia Daella d’Wyr,” I said. “She’s a priestess and a subtle artist. She examined our auras… Amaranth’s and mine… to see if she could figure out what happened, and there was a remnant on Amaranth’s that attacked her and possessed her. She was able to defeat it, and learn a few things about its nature.”

“Okay. Here are the problems with her as a witness,” Lee said. “One, she’s a dark elf. Two, she’s been in trouble with the law… trivial transgression, no charges filed, but very public and embarrassing. Three, whatever she is in her homeland, up here she’s a first year student. It doesn’t help that she looks eighteen.”

“You don’t believe me?” I asked.

“I’m thinking out loud,” he said. “I’m outlining weaknesses. We can’t go before the arbiter and say ‘Oh, that pitchfork you told me to keep? It possessed me and made me do bad things. I don’t have it any more, but my friend the dark elf priestess says so.’”

“She can’t testify under geas?” I asked.

“There has been study after study done, showing that people who aren’t inclined to believe a witness’s testimony don’t trust them further under a geas,” Lee said. “They assume the person would not consent to it if they didn’t have a way around it.”

“Okay, yeah… with a human jury, maybe,” I said. “But her words are going to be weighed by a single impartial arbiter.”

“Who happens to be an elven oathspeaker,” Lee said. “We favored an elf because he would not carry an automatic bias against you, remember?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And you might recall I mentioned that Philomenes has, pardon my elvish, low bullshit tolerance.”

“This isn’t bullshit!” I said.

“No, but if he dismisses it as such, it’s going to affect his judgment of the rest of your case in exactly the same way as if it was,” Lee said.

“So you’re saying we can’t do anything with this,” I said.

“I’m saying we cannot make Miss… Ms. Delia Daella’s testimony the cornerstone of our case,” Lee said. I watched him becoming more and more awake as he went. I could see him thinking as he spoke. “If we can avoid having her testify at all, it would be a good thing. Otherwise we risk the whole thing turning into a pissing contest between her people and the oathspeaker. We’ll have experts investigate this thing from top to bottom, get some thorough findings we can enter into the record…”

“Um… sort of on that subject, my grandmother’s an exorcist,” I said. I knew as I said it that Lee would probably shoot this down… in fact, that’s why I said it. I was looking for a counter to use when Dee brought it up. “Sorry, my lawyer has advised me not to.”

“I was under the impression that you weren’t close,” he said.

“We aren’t,” I said. “Lately. But she is sort of an expert, and so… well, Dee’s suggested…”

“Mack, ‘Dee’ doesn’t represent your interests,” Lee said. “Don’t start taking cues from her, and don’t get your grandmother involved in this. Apart from raising a similar set of bias questions, this is shaping up to be enough of a circus without a famous ex-demon hunter hitting town.”

“Uh, she isn’t really…”

“Mack, I didn’t take you on because there was a sword to my throat or because the paycheck was too huge to be ignored,” Lee said. “I’m trying to do right by you. If you can’t trust my professional judgment, then maybe…”

“No, I trust you,” I said. I hadn’t been arguing about his judgment, just his knowledge of my grandmother. I wondered if people were just getting her mixed up with some other, more famous person… like the “Brimstone Blaise” Gloria had mentioned… or if this was a case of the media blowing up her quiet little career as a country exorcist into something more sensational. Maybe it was a little of both.

In any case, he’d told me what I wanted to hear.

“Okay,” he said. He shuffled some out-of-sight papers. “Listen, yesterday the courier dropped off that interrogatory I told you about. Can you come by the office tomorrow after your classes so we can go over it?”

“Uh, yeah, that should be fine,” I said. I remembered that we had plans for Two’s party on Tuesday, and despite having been in town for two of the past three nights, I hadn’t got anything for her yet. I’d have to ask the others if we were still on for that. “You’re going to help me fill this thing out, right?”

“It’s your testimony, Mack,” he said. “But we’ll go over it for any problem areas.”

“Okay,” I said. “Um… the other thing…”

“There’s more?” he asked.

“Well, just the pitchfork… but… it’s out there,” I said. “Somebody has it, or it has somebody.”

“Right,” he said. “We’ll send an alert to the Enwich police and the campus security about a cursed pitchfork, to be approached cautiously, and that anybody seen wielding it may be under infernal influence.”

“Is that all?” I asked. I remembered how Steff and I had disagreed over whether the pitchfork had been with me during my missing time. “If it’s possessing somebody, they may not be visibly carrying it.”

“Well, that might be important to know,” he said. “In any event, there isn’t much else to do at this point. I’m sure you’re thinking of your classmates’ safety, but please do not let this information circulate any further than it has. We don’t want a panic. One sentient weapon directing the actions of a single person can’t do a tenth as much harm as rumors of possession in an environment like a college campus. We’ll get what you’re saying confirmed and verified, find out as much as we can, and when we have detailed information about what we’re dealing with and how to find it, we’ll share that with the appropriate authorities.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So, I’ll pencil you in for six, how about?”

“Six tomorrow?” I asked.

“Can’t be today, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m in Praxis right now on another matter.”

“Praxis?” I asked, surprised. I’d talked to Lee just the day before and he hadn’t mentioned going out of town. “When’d you get there?”

“About a quarter after midnight last night,” he said.

“Um… I have a late history class on Monday,” I said. “And I really can’t skip it.”

“What does your schedule look like Tuesday?”

“You know, I’ve got like a huge block in the middle of the day tomorrow where I don’t have anything,” I said. “I get out of thaumatology at eleven fifteen and I don’t have another class for four hours.”

He consulted something.

“How about one?” he asked.

“Okay,” I said. “One on Monday. Got it.”

“Was there anything else?”

“No,” I said. “Um, bye?”

“Goodbye, Mack,” he said, and waved me away.

“One on Monday,” I repeated. I started to wonder if I should even bother putting an appointment for the very next day in the planner Steff had given me, then I realized that the mirror probably had a function that would make that redundant.

I found the calendar and invoked it, adding the appointment using the illusionary powder and brush. Then I put a reminder to go off at a few minutes after the end of my first class, so I wouldn’t forget and go to lunch or whatever. I added another memo to myself, too, which simply said “TWO’S DAY”.

That made me remember that I’d kicked Two out of the room to talk to Lee, so I headed out into the hall to tell her it was okay to come back in while I checked out the other bells and whistles I could find.

I almost bumped into Sara and Tara on my way to the lounge… I probably wouldn’t have been able to stop in time to keep from colliding with them, if they hadn’t already been stopped in their tracks staring me.

“What?” I asked.

“Nice fashion statement, freak,” Tara said.

Of course… I’d wandered out of my room without any pants.

Fun.

Thursday, Calendula 8th 222 (morning)

I woke up feeling warm, secure, and happy. I felt better than I had in a long time… for the last couple weeks, at least. I felt completely and utterly at peace with myself, like there was nothing wrong with the world…

Like there was nothing wrong with me.

It was a good feeling, and one that I wasn’t at all familiar with, but I felt like I could definitely get used to it.

I got out of bed to find that Two was marinating herself in something that smelled like raspberries, humming a really fucking annoying song repetitively to herself as she squirted it on.

She’d just come back from the showers, and was naked except for the towel which completely concealed her hair… leaving nothing showing but her milky white skin. Her body was moist but not dripping, which only emphasized the succulence of her long legs and her juicy thighs.

They were, I noted with interest, the fattest part of her lean little body… her upper thighs and haunches, like yummy little Khersentide hams.

“Good morning, Mack!” she said. “Are you ready for breakfast?”

Was I ever. I just needed to figure out how to get Two alone… somewhere quiet.

“I would have awakened you for meditation, but I couldn’t find my friend Dee,” she said apologetically.

“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “We could always go meditating by ourselves, though.”

“Okay!” Two said brightly. She was so trusting… so innocent. That would make it all so much easier… and so much better, too.

There was a knock on the door.

Shit. Breakfast was either about to be delayed or doubled in size. How much could I eat at one time? I didn’t know… and it struck me as weird that I’d never bothered to find out. I felt like I could gorge myself on the world and still be hungry.

There wasn’t flesh or blood enough in the world to fill the black pit that was opening up within me.

Two announced, “I’ll get it!” and immediately went to open it.

The hallway outside was painfully bright. I couldn’t quite make out who was in the door. Strangely, whoever it was didn’t seem to be backlit… if anything, they were giving off the light. I closed my eyes and staggered back from the visual assault. My senses were reeling. My skin seemed to be sizzling, and there was a sound like steam escaping inside my head.

“Hey, baby!” a voice… sweet, saccharine, and awful… said.

I felt punishing waves of pressure rolling into me as the source of that awful, burning radiance barreled towards me. I wanted to scream, but my voice was frozen in my throat. I wanted to run, but I seemed to be rooted to the spot.

I was in agony. I was dying. I could feel myself being torn apart, dissolved…

Suddenly, I was in Amaranth’s arms, and I wasn’t sure how I’d got there. Hadn’t I just woke up?

“Baby, are you okay?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I felt… deflated. Something had just flown out of me, like the receding memory of a half-forgotten dream. What had I just been thinking about? I couldn’t remember. I had a pain in my head, and a dull ache all over my body… was it possible that I was still sore from the wonderful beating Ian had given me?

“You look a little woozy, baby,” she said, putting her arms around me.

“I kind of feel like I stood up too quickly or something,” I said.

“You aren’t getting hungry, are you?”

Was I? I didn’t have any craving… but I had an odd feeling that… well, just an odd feeling. I couldn’t even say what feeling it was, really. It was too small and nebulous to really tell any more.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, I’ve got something lined up to help you with that this weekend,” she said. “But you let me know if you think you’re starting to get hungry before then, okay?” She gave me a kiss on the forehead. “We don’t want a repeat of last time.”

“No, ma’am,” I murmured, appreciatively leaning into her warmth. It was so cold in the room… frigid air was seeping in from beneath the curtain. I really wanted to get back in bed and pull the covers over myself, preferably with her.

“You get dressed for breakfast now, baby,” Amaranth said. “And bundle yourself up. We had a bad frost, early this morning.”

“Frost?” I groaned.

“Yes, frost. Winter’s coming,” she said. “We might be looking at snow before Veil.”

“I knew I should have gone somewhere farther south,” I said.

“Don’t even joke about that, missy,” Amaranth said. “How can you say you wish you’d gone somewhere else when this is where I am? And where Two is? And everybody else who loves you?”

“I know,” I said. “But it wouldn’t hurt to transfer some place tropical…”

She gave me a swat on the rear.

“Hey, get a room!” one of the Leightons said as they breezed past the door. I suddenly realized that the three of us were just standing there, all naked, with the door open.

“We have a room!” Two called after them, provoking fits of laughter that echoed through the hall. “Stupid heads!”

“Two, shut the door, please,” Amaranth said. “And don’t call people ‘stupid heads’.”

“Okay,” Two said, shutting and locking the door. “Amaranth, do you have the key to my friend Dee’s room yet? She didn’t answer when I knocked on her door this morning.”

“No, honey, I sure don’t,” Amaranth said.

“You don’t think she put herself into a sleep loop again, do you?” I asked Two.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I am worried about her.”

“Well, we’ll see if she turns up for breakfast,” Amaranth said. “Then decide what to do if she doesn’t.”

“Okay,” Two said.

I peeked behind the curtain. The window wasn’t completely glazed over, but the lower half of it was partly obscured.

“Do we have to go to the union for breakfast?” I asked, letting the curtain slip back into place.

“Baby, get dressed,” Amaranth said. “You’ll be a lot less cold when you put some clothes on.”

“Yeah,” I said. putting my arms around her and snuggling up against her nude body. Maybe it was all in my head, but contact with her seemed to physically dull the ache I was feeling and draw the pain out of my head. “But I’ll be a lot more cold when we go outside.”

“You have to go outside for your classes, anyway,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “But I can stay inside a little bit longer.”

Amaranth sighed and rolled her eyes.

“I think somebody is way behind in their spankings,” she said.

“It’s Mack,” Two said knowingly as she bustled about, getting dressed. “She wouldn’t be if I was allowed to spank her.”

“Hush, Two,” Amaranth said. She disentangled my arms from herself and pushed me gently away. “Mack, baby, get dressed. We’ll get you caught up on your punishment this evening, so you can be nice and obedient for the sit-down with Viktor… but right now, I think the best cure for your brattiness is to not give in to it.”

I sighed and started to put together an outfit for the day, moving slowly in the hope that Amaranth would spontaneously declare that she’d changed her mind and she’d rather stay in bed all morning and snuggle. Maybe I’d been a bit on the bratty side, but I’d missed her… she’d slept with me so often lately that waking up alone was evidently enough to rattle me badly. I couldn’t think of a better cure for that than getting back into bed with her and staying there long enough to have a proper wake-up later.

I had one small, fleeting moment of hope when Amaranth went over to my bunk and opened the curtain, but then I realized she was just making the bed. I heaved a profound sigh and got my coat out of the closet.

“There, now,” Amaranth said after I’d put it on. “Don’t you look… well, you should be warm enough, anyway.”

I put insulating spells on my socks and my jeans, and would have put one on my coat, too, if Amaranth hadn’t noticed what I was doing and stopped me.

“Don’t go overboard, baby,” she said. “You have two labs today, remember? You need to save your energy.”

“It won’t matter how much energy I have if I freeze to death on the way to breakfast,” I said.

“Oh, stop being so melodramatic,” Amaranth said. “Honestly, I wish I hadn’t mentioned the frost… I was just trying to be a good and responsible owner by telling you to bundle up.”

We headed out through the back of the nexus and walked right out into a cold north wind that cut right through the one hole in my defense in order to seem to freeze my nose and lips solid in one blast.

“If it’s this cold in the afternoon, I won’t be able to go to mixed melee,” I said, turning my head away from the chill.

“Oh, stop it,” Amaranth said. “It’s a sunny day. Of course it won’t be as cold in the afternoon… and even if it was, you’d still have to go. I’m sure when it starts to get really cold, they’ll move the class indoors.”

“It is really cold right now,” I said. “And you don’t know Coach Callahan. She’d probably make us fight in the snow for her own twisted amusement.”

“Steff says she’s nice.”

“Ogre-nice, maybe.”

“Stop.”

Even though I hadn’t really wanted to go in the first place, I was profoundly relieved when we made it to the student union. I went straight for the hot chocolate mix, and after having a cup or three of that I went to load up on hot food. The pancakes didn’t look that appealing to me that morning… the eggs looked a little, but the bacon, ham, and sausage all smelled intoxicatingly wonderful. I got a plate loaded up with all of them, to the bemusement of the server behind the counter.

“Is that really what you want?” Amaranth asked me once I sat down with my food.

“Yeah,” I said.

“And you’re sure you’re not hungry-hungry?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just in the mood for meat today.”

“Okay,” Amaranth said.

“I’m in the mood for waffles with ice cream,” Two said, returning to the table. She had a stack of four waffles with ice cream in between them, whipped cream on top, and chocolate syrup drizzled over the whole thing. I had no idea where she’d found the syrup and whipped cream.

The whole thing was a little overblown, but all in all it seemed like something that should have appealed to me. Looking at it, though… actually thinking about eating it… turned my stomach. I could smell the cloying sweetness of it, and it made my breakfast want to rise. I looked away from it and tried to focus on other smells, like the comfortingly familiar scent of Amaranth, or Two’s sweet flesh with the hint of raspberry, and ate the rest of my breakfast.

“So, my friend Dee hasn’t shown up,” Two noted.

“I know, sweetie,” Amaranth said. She sighed. “I’m going to lean on Gwen about getting my room officially changed… if she gives me the key this morning, we can check and make sure Dee’s not asleep again. After that… I don’t know. I think the morning paper comes out around ten. That might give us a clue as to whether or not she made it over to the newspaper office yesterday, and how it went.”

“Maybe she killed the fuckers,” I said, picking up my plate and licking it clean. I was getting a headache again, but the taste of the bacon grease was doing something to make up for it. “That would teach them to mess with a ‘drow’.”

“Baby!” Amaranth said sharply. I froze with my plate tilted up in front of my face.

“What?” I asked, then lowered the plate sheepishly. “Oh, sorry.”

“I can’t believe you’d say something like that,” she said. I could hear the disappointment verging on condemnation ringing in her voice, but I couldn’t understand what I’d said to provoke it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I put my plate down and leaned up against her, and the headache began to recede. “I guess I’m just not feeling myself this morning.”

The student healers who volunteered to meet the experience requirements for their degrees shared two of these in a rotation, but Theadora Lundegard had one that was ostensibly her own. She permitted students to use it when she wasn’t in.

Thus, even though they’d never visited with her in particular, this wasn’t the first time that Sara and Tara Leighton had been in her room. They’d ignored the comfortable chairs and sat their shared body instead in the dead center of the two-seat divan, speaking to each other in the language they’d shared since they were babies, the language that nobody could understand but themselves.

These various seats were arranged around the illusionary fire that crackled realistically in the brick fireplace with a dummy chimney. The desk was some distance away. Its marble surface was kept clean and free of both clutter and sensitive material, as other people might need to use it.

The twins craned their necks—that and their heads being the only truly independent body parts they each owned—at the sound of the door opening. The owner of the office had just entered, and was striding confidently towards them on one-inch heels.

“Hello, Sara,” she said, smiling reassuringly. “Hello, Tara. I’m…”

“Where’s Edward?” Tara asked. “We were talking to Edward last time.”

“We liked Edward,” Sara said.

“I’m afraid Edward’s not available,” the healer said. “I’m Teddi, and I’m taking his appointments this evening.”

“‘Teddy’ is a boy’s name,” Tara said.

“Well, it isn’t a proper name in and of itself,” Teddi said. “It can be short for Theodore, or, in my case…”

“If it isn’t a proper name, why should we call you it?” Tara asked. “Why introduce yourself by something if it isn’t a name?”

“I meant, as opposed to being a nickname,” Teddi said.

“Why are you so opposed to nicknames?” Tara asked. “What did they ever do to you?”

Sara snickered.

“I only meant…”

“Do they call you ‘teddy’ because you like to wear them?” Tara asked.

“What?” Teddi asked.

Sara laughed.

“Do you wear teddies?” Tara asked.

“I…”

“Are you wearing one now, under your clothes?” Tara said.

“Now…”

“When everybody’s gone, do you shimmy around the office in it?”

“That will…”

“Do you do a little teddy dance?”

“Out,” Teddi said.

“Or do you dress up like a teddy bear? Maybe a teddy bear, in a t…”

“Out,” Teddi repeated, pointing at the door.

The two girls stared at her in shock.

“Out of my office,” she said. “Go. Now.”

“Hang on, you can’t kick us out,” Sara said. “We’re your patients.”

“Yeah,” Tara said. “We’re entitled…”

“Let’s talk about what you’re entitled to,” Teddi said, settling down into a chair. “As students, you are entitled to healing services. As human—as free beings—you are entitled to a certain modicum of dignity. You are not entitled to walk into somebody else’s office and make fun of their name, or take up their valuable time which could be spent giving another student the services that she is entitled to.”

“But… I didn’t say anything,” Sara said. “Can’t I even talk? It isn’t fair to kick me out just because she…”

“Oh, again with this,” Tara said. She looked at the healer. “You know, she used to have a sense of humor, back before the accident. She used to love it when I did something funny, instead of acting like she’s above it.”

“I do not act like I’m above it!” Sara said. “I just think, we’re in college now, and we should be…”

“Oh, like you weren’t laughing. She used to egg me on,” Tara said to Teddi. “She’d be like, ‘Oh, there’s the Brighton boy tying his shoes, go over and kick him over.’”

“I never told her to kick anyone,” Sara said. “Never, ever.”

“Then we got back from break, and all of a sudden she’s dragging our feet every time I go to do something funny.”

“Why do you think it’s funny, kicking someone?” Teddi asked.

“I don’t!” Sara said.

“Hold on,” Tara said. “We’re here to talk about our problems with each other. Not the stuff we got up to in high school.”

“You mentioned it, not me,” Teddi said. “But if you’d like to work through your differences, then I think we have one right here. You say it’s funny, she says it isn’t. Let’s talk about that. Tara, why do you say it’s funny to kick someone?”

“Okay, first off… when you say ‘kick someone’, it makes it sound like I’m going up and stomping somebody in the ribs, or something,” Tara said. “No! I’m just talking about planting a shoe on his butt. He falls over, but nobody’s hurt. Big difference.”

“‘Nobody’s hurt’?” Teddi repeated. “That doesn’t strike you as being mean?”

“It isn’t nice, but… Willy Brighton’s not a nice person,” Tara said. “I mean, you should have seen him. No friends, always staring, dressed like a total gaywad.”

“He was kind of a creep,” Sara admitted.

“And he breathed funny.”

“None of that adds up to ‘not nice’, to me,” Teddi said.

“Well, she’s not explaining it very well,” Sara said.

“Oh, shut up,” Tara said. “You try, then.”

“Trust me, if you’d known him… even the teachers thought he was asking for it,” Sara said.

“Doesn’t sound like school was very pleasant for Mr. Brighton,” Teddi said.

“Well, maybe if he would’ve got some better clothes and stopped shuffling around with his head down… but, anyway, when we came back from break, all…” Tara gestured with her hands, moving them from far apart to very close together. “…everybody’s looking at us like we’re fucking Willy Brighton or something, and I try to set things straight, but she goes weak sister on me.”

“What changed?” Teddi asked Sara.

“What changed?” Tara echoed, incredulously. “We’re joined at the shoulders. We shit out of the same hole. Everybody said we were inseparable before, but now…”

“I’m talking to Sara,” Teddi said. “What changed, for you?”

“Well…” Sara began. “I guess… I kind of got a taste of what it was like… to be an outsider?”

“Oh, shut your fat mouth!” Tara said. “You still thought Brighton was a little freak. You just didn’t want to get in trouble. You’d gotten so used to being the nice one, to watching teachers tell me, ‘Oh, why can’t you be more like your sister?’, and you couldn’t stand the thought of being lumped in with me.”

“Well… honestly,” Sara said. “Is it any kind of fair that I should be?”

“See?” Tara said to Teddi. “She admits it.”

“Well, I’d call that progress, actually,” Teddi said. “You’re being honest with each other.”

“Like we can exactly keep secrets,” Tara said. “I have no privacy anymore. I can’t write in my diary without her seeing, and now that I have a boyfriend…”

“I think you mean I have a boyfriend,” Sara said.

“Oh, shut up,” Tara said.

“How do you handle intimacy?” Teddi asked.

“She’s supposed to close her eyes and just sort of hang back,” Tara said. “That’s what we agreed, when we first talked about this sort of thing.”

“But he’s my boyfriend,” Sara said. “He looks at me when he’s talking.”

“Oh, whatever,”

“Have you tried talking to the boy about this?” Teddi asked. “See what he thinks?”

“I would, if I could talk to him alone,” Tara said. “But that’s not happening.”

“‘Oh, whatever’, yourself,” Sara said. “You don’t want to ask him which one of us he likes because you know what he’ll say.”

“See? This is what my life is like,” Tara said.

“Our life,” Sara corrected.

“This is what I have to put up with, twenty-four hours a day,” Tara said.

“How long ago did you get… joined?” Teddi asked.

“Senior year,” Sara said.

“Just last winter,” Tara said.

“If you don’t mind a little telepathy, I’d like to join our minds. You can go back in your memories to that time, and the three of us will experience it as a shared vision. That might give me a better idea of what you’ve experienced than anything you could tell me, as well as letting the two of you see from each other’s points of views.”

“It’s not enough that we’re stuck in the same body, you want to sew our minds together, too?” Tara asked.

“Temporarily, and not completely,” Teddi said. “You’ll still retain your own individuality through the entire process.”

“Done cleaning out your locker yet, slowpoke?” Tara asked, swinging her book bag into Sara’s arm. Sara muted her annoyance at the intrusion into her personal space.

“Yeah,” Sara said, slamming her locker shut. “I am so glad they finally ditched the alphabetical order for locker assignments.”

“Tell me about it,” Tara said, though she had in fact been disappointed that her locker would not be right next to her sister’s for once. It stung her to know how happy this development made Sara. “I don’t have to smell your stank-ass sweat socks all the time any more.”

“Yeah, you can finally smell your own,” Sara said.

They both laughed.

“Hey, guys!” their friend, Georgia said. She was in Sara’s skirmish squad. Tara thought she was a bit of a brown-noser and a kiss-up. She wished Sara could see it. “You ready for break?”

“Tell me about it,” Tara said. “I wanted to cut out at lunch, but it’s not like I could give any excuse that would wash with my doppelganger hanging around.”

“I thought you were my doppelganger,” Sara said, trying to laugh off the joke, because that’s all it was. Tara had to go out for all the same activities she did. How did that make her, Sara, the copy? “Anyway, we’re still leaving early.”

“Are you guys still going to your grandma’s place?” Georgia asked.

“Yeah,” Sara said. “We’re leaving next Wednesday.”

“But that’s Eventide Day!” Georgia said. “Didn’t you tell me that your grandma lives in Phale?”

“Yeah,” Tara said, grinning. “She does.”

“But our dad’s a genius,” Sara said, proudly. “He’s got his new teleport system perfected now, and the five of us are going to use it for the round trip. We’ll make it to Phale and back, cheap and easy as sending an a-mail.”

“It won’t work,” a quiet, husky voice said. The three girls turned to see the stocky frame and greasy face of Willy Brighton.

“What do you mean, it won’t work?” Tara demanded. “It has worked. It does work. We’ve all done it.”

“The second principle of balance,” Willy said. “It says…”

“What do you know about balance, Wet Willy?” Tara said. She shoved him hard and he fell loudly against a row of purple-painted lockers, then fell to the floor.

“Tara!” Sara chided, alarmed that Tara had done something so openly and blatantly. There wasn’t even plausible deniability. He’d been facing them when she did it. Then the bell rang, and they high-tailed it for the doors.

“See what I mean?” Tara said. “She was standing right next to me so she acted all horrified…”

“I was all horrified,” Sara said.

“You were horrified you’d be caught,” Tara said.

“Was Willy alright?” Teddi asked.

“Far as I know, yeah,” Tara said. “He was okay when we got back.”

“Do you want to jump to the accident?”

The two girls looked at each other. They couldn’t actually turn their heads very far in those directions at the same time, but they angled them and looked out of the corners of their eyes.

“We can’t tell you about that,” Sara said.

“Our dad would sue you if you read it from our minds,” Tara said.

“Anything you tell me is in strict confidence,” Teddi said.

“Yeah, right,” Tara said. “In strict confidence with you and all your mind-melter friends. How’s it go, ‘telepath, tell the world?’”

“I’m a bonded and fully licensed professional,” Teddi said. “But if you aren’t comfortable… the basic details are in your file, so we can certainly skip to the aftermath.”

“See? It’s on file,” Tara said. “That’s not very confident.”

“Only the barest details, and they won’t be released outside this office,” Teddi said. “But please, let’s move on.”

“Oh, Mom was furious,” Sara said. “She cried for days.”

“She made Dad destroy his device,” Tara said. “She thinks he destroyed the notes, too, but he says he can fix it.”

“What about you two?” Teddi asked. “What was it like for you?”

“We didn’t realize what was wrong at first,” Sara said. “I just felt something on my shoulder, but then we noticed Dad and Brian were staring.”

“Mom started screaming,” Tara said. “We had to take an airship back. She wouldn’t let anybody go back through.”

“We had to learn how to do everything again,” Sara said. “Walk, get dressed, eat… we had to get all our tops altered.

“We didn’t want to go back to school at all,” Tara said. “They had this big assembly with everybody… we were supposed to be there, but we wouldn’t go. We came back a day late.”

“It was awful,” Sara said.

“All our friends… they kept looking at us like we were some kind of freaks,” Tara said.

“Some kind of freak,” Sara said. “Singular.”

“Let’s go back,” Teddi said.

“Here we are, side-by-side again,” Sara said while Tara hung her backpack up. They couldn’t both use their lockers at the same time with any effectiveness, though they’d tried. The door in the middle got in the way. “I can’t believe I had to move lockers.”

“It would have been hard to get from one to the other between classes,” Tara said. She didn’t know why Sara was grumbling about this. With everything that had actually gone wrong, why complain about this? “It’s hard enough walking with your foot getting in the way of mine.”

“At least they gave in and let me have my own,” Sara said. “I can’t believe they expected us to share one.”

“Would’ve been easier, though,” Tara said. “Wouldn’t it?”

“Not the point.”

“Oh… hey… guys,” Georgia said. Jennifer and Cori were both with her. They were keeping their distance. There was a wariness the sisters had never before seen in their eyes, and the smiles they wore were normally reserved for small children or teachers. “I heard you were back today.”

“Yeah,” Sara said.

“We are,” Tara added. “How were you guys’ breaks?”

“Good,” Georgia said.

“Good,” Jennifer said.

“Okay,” Cori said. “Nothing special.”

“Yeah, well, ours was a blast and a half,” Tara said sarcastically.

Everybody laughed nervously.

“You guys getting around okay?” Jennifer asked. “I mean, any problems?”

“We had some,” Sara said. “We’ve mostly got it licked, but it’s going to be a lot of fun at practice, trying to coordinate everything.”

“Practice?” Georgia repeated.

“Uh, yeah, George,” Tara said. “You know, skirmish practice? Hitting each other with sticks? Remember? I know it’s been a long break, but…”

She trailed off when she saw the guilty looks the three girls were giving each other.

“What?” Tara and Sara asked at the same time.

“Bostick said you guys were going to take some time off from the team,” Cori said.

“He might have ran that by us before he announced it,” Tara said.

“Who are the new girls’ squad leaders?” Sara asked.

The girls looked at each other, but said nothing.

“Who?” Sara repeated.

“Bostick split up one squad and combined it with the other two,” Georgia said.

“Did he split my squad or Sara’s?” Tara asked.

“Who’s the new squad leader?” Sara repeated.

Jennifer and Cori both looked at Georgia.

“Look, you guys had an accident, and that’s nothing to be ashamed about…” Georgia said.

“Who the hell is ashamed?” Tara said. “We only got stuck in a teleport accident. It isn’t like our mom banged a half-orc, Jennifer!”

“That’s… she didn’t…” Jennifer sputtered.

“And Cori, maybe if you could fit your fat fingers into a ring, you wouldn’t have ‘cold sores’ all the time,” Tara said. “Mike B. said your cunt looks like something that’s been ran over and left out in the sun, did you know that? And you, George, you gave us so much shit for copying off Wet Willy last semester, but everybody knows the only reason you’re passing naturalism is because you wear those tiny skirts and sit in the front row. Maybe you can teach your new squad how to distract the opposing side? And Cori’s crotch can be your secret weapon!”

“Kheez, Tara, calm down,” Sara said, panic filling her as she saw what remained of their social life crumbling away.

“Did you ever talk to the coach about re-joining the team?” Teddi asked. “Once you were more… acclimated?”

“He burned those bridges,” Tara said.

“Anyway, do you think he’d have made us squad leader after that?” Sara asked. “And how would that work, exactly? Which of us would be in charge? If I couldn’t have my own squad again…”

“It was our senior year,” Tara said. “We’d earned those positions. We’d earned some respect. We had freshmen… we had middle schoolers… pointing and laughing at us.”

“What about the team here?”

“They’d stick us with the freaks,” Tara said. “Just like they did for housing. They told our parents we’d be more comfortable in a ‘diversity friendly environment’.”

“You’re housed in Harlowe, then?”

“Yeah,” Sara said. “It has its high points. I mean, we get free food and all, but the closest thing to normal there, aside from us, is a girl with an eye in her forehead and a mermaid. Everybody else is some kind of a monster or a complete dork.”

“When you say, ‘the closest thing to normal, aside from us’… do you think other people see it that way?” Teddi asked.

“We know we’re normal,” Tara said. “Who cares what others think?”

“Is that why you yelled insults at your best friends in the hallway of your old school?” Teddi asked gently. “Because you didn’t care what they thought about you?”

Tara said nothing to this.

Teddi leaned forward in her chair.

“Ladies… Tara, Sara… I’m going to be honest with you,” she said. “We had a rough beginning here, and even now I’m not sure that we’re going to get anywhere.”

“Who’s fault is that?” Tara said. “You’re the professional.”

“It’s not about whose fault it is,” Teddi said. “It’s about whose choice… it’s up to you here. If you want to proceed, you’re going to have to drop some barriers and be willing to look at some of your thought patterns, your preconceptions about the world. We’re going to have to talk about what your goals are, too… learning to live with each other, learning to live with the world, learning to live with yourselves…”

“I live with myself just fine,” Sara said.

“If that’s true, great,” Teddi said. “But, let’s get down to it: are you two really ready to move forward and figure out your places in the world and what to do with your lives? Or are you just going to keep—pardon my elvish—dicking around?”

Sara and Tara looked at each other.

They didn’t answer for a long time.

He did take some time to question the possible applications of my mirror finish enhancement. I’d just wanted to make my knife look cool, since I had to lug it around anyway… but since I’d lost both the knife and that requirement, I wasn’t sure what to tell him.

“I just wanted to see if I could do it,” I said.

“That is an admirable sentiment, and you are a remarkably apt young woman,” he said. “If this interruption had come any later in the quarter, it might have set you back, but I think you’ll be fine with simply moving forward.”

He left me to finish up the spell on my practice knife. I was glad I’d sketched out an initial version of the enhancement the last time I’d been in class, a week before. That made it easier to pick back up where I’d left off. I was more careful this time not to just pour my energy into it like I had before. Though I no longer had to worry about “overdrawing”, I did have to watch that I didn’t exhaust my ordinary stores.

I didn’t spend much of the work period actually working magic. Instead, I’d spend a few seconds concentrating on the knife, then a few minutes adjusting the formulae I’d laid down and then trying out the new variation. It was pretty tedious going.

I couldn’t help but think how close this approach was to the old “scientific” method of formalizing spells that had been left behind in the dark ages, the way that resulted in spells that only worked at all under highly select circumstances and could rarely be duplicated by more than a handful of people. It was basically a lot of guesswork and predictions about the behavior of forces that could only truly be experienced directly… but the property I was working with was nebulous and could only be “held” so tightly or so long before the strain got to me.

The “basic principle of magic” was sometimes jokingly defined as “It behaves in unexpected ways except when you expect it to, when it either will or won’t.” Sitting around bullshitting about what might or might not work, or how something might react, could ultimately be no substitute for actually doing it. Several times during the course of the period, I found I had to change my tactics around completely as what I’d worked out no longer worked… but I was able to keep a flexible enough approach that it was a matter of ten steps forward, nine steps back.

Even with the variables shifting around on me, by the end of the class period I had outlined a technique that I could repeat with reasonable consistency. It wasn’t a formal spell, but I could refine it before Thursday and come in ready to do some proper work, and then have a spell ready to turn in by the end of the period.

After that it was back to Harlowe. I decided to change into some of my older surviving clothes while I was grabbing my pitchfork. There was no sense getting my nicer things messed up. Steff certainly wouldn’t be wearing her gorgeous elven style dress to a fighting class, after all.

My anger of a couple hours ago had long since faded, but I was feeling plenty frustrated from my attempts to grapple with a specific enchantment on the theoretical rather than the practical level. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the next hour and a half, but it would be nice if I had a chance to work through some of my stress.

Also, there would be Gloria.

“Oh, there you are!” I heard one of the Leightons say from their doorway as I headed out through mine. I turned to see them looking at me, with big fake looks of concern and sad puppy dog eyes. “We just wanted to let you know that we are so sorry about that article,” Tara said. “We feel terrible.”

“I just bet you do,” I said, turning away. The anger was returning, but it would be more productive to use it out on the field than to blow my top in the hallway, especially holding such a stereotypical weapon as the pitchfork. Who knew when Mr. Angstrom would come back for a follow-up piece?

“No, really!” Sara said. “We were misquoted!”

I found that hard to believe, but it piqued my curiosity.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yes,” Tara said. “He took our words completely out of context. See, we were talking about how bad you smell, and your toilet regime is only part of that. He left out the rest. Would you like to hear it?”

“No,” I said, turning and walking away as fast as I could without whacking my leg into the bottom of the pitchfork pole. I was carrying it upright, of course. The last thing I wanted to do was impale somebody on the way to class.

“I guess you’ll have to read it on the letters page, then!” one of them said, and they both shrieked with laughter.

Fucking hell, they were a couple of annoying cunts. Well, to be accurate, they were one cunt with a couple of annoying heads. Maybe that was their problem… too many girls and not enough holes to go around? I could fix that problem real quick. They’d probably like having separate gashes for a change.

Or maybe I could just separate them completely, right down the middle.

I stopped myself, mid-thought and mid-step, halfway down a flight of stairs. It wasn’t the best place to do so… my foot stopped but my body kept going, and I took another tumble down to the landing. That was enough to jar me completely from the state of mind I’d been in.

Holding the pitchfork and getting angry was apparently not a good thing. I would seriously need to find a different weapon or get myself into some kind of unarmed class… probably the former. I felt I’d made too much progress in my sessions with Gloria to simply throw it away.

Well, the school owed me a magic knife, didn’t they?

I tucked the shaft of the pitchfork under my arm, thinking it might “count less” if it wasn’t actually in my hand, and tried to think positively on the rest of the way to the field.

The fork hadn’t had nearly as noticeable an effect on me when I’d first picked it up, but a lot of curses worked incrementally like that. If you knew something was bad news when you first laid hands on it, you’d never come to depend on it.

Two surprises were waiting for me when I got to class.

One was Steff, looking absolutely stunning and completely out of place in her princess dress.

The other was Gloria, who was nowhere to be seen.

I headed towards Steff, but Callahan had just arrived on the scene and blew her whistle.

“What in the name of the Dark Herald are you wearing, Johnson?” she asked Steff while the class was coming to attention.

“It’s called a ‘dress’, sir,” Steff replied loudly. “If it looks sort of familiar, that’s probably because I took it off of your mother last night.”

“Johnson, come here,” Callahan said, and Steff swaggered over with a shit-eating grin. I could have told her that she was about to be punched in the face… but I would have been wrong. As soon as Steff was within arm’s reach, the instructor reached out and grabbed her by the crotch and squeezed.

“Go change,” she said loudly as Steff’s knees buckled and her eyes bulged “Back in ten minutes or you’re marked absent, and if you ever show up for my class not dressed for combat, I’m keeping these. Understand?”

Steff nodded, gasping and sputtering, and Callahan let her go and turned away dismissively to talk to her teaching assistant. I shifted my pitchfork to my hand as she sank to the ground, and I was by her side in an instant.

“Are you okay?” I asked. As ever, a stupid question to ask. I knew the answer. I’d seen what happened and rushed to her aid, after all.

Steff nodded, though.

“I’m… fine,” she said, breathing hard and ragged. “Oh, sweet fucking hell, I hope she does that again before… before she fucks me.”

“What?” I asked. I knew Steff enjoyed receiving pain as well as giving it, but it didn’t seem possible for somebody with her anatomy to enjoy that.

“Sent her a strap-on through campus mail last week, along with… along with a calendar, with the last day of classes circled,” Steff said, starting to get to her feet. I helped her up. “Black leather. She didn’t say anything, so I think… she must be into it. That… what you just saw… was just foreplay.”

“Or she hates you,” I said.

“Of course she does,” Steff said. “That’s what makes it hot. Anyway, I’ve got to go change.”

“Can you really make it to the dorms and back in under ten minutes, like that?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Steff said. “According to her, she’s already counted me absent every day so far. It’s just… just flirting, Mack.”

I thought she was kidding herself, but didn’t want to argue. “Do you want some help getting back?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“You need to stay here and practice,” she said. “And pick somebody else.”

“I guess I might have to,” I said.

She kissed me, leaning on me for support as she did.

“Swap spit on your own time, Johnson! Shift!” Callahan barked.

“Yes, sir, ma’am, sir!” Steff said, saluting, and then she hobbled away.

“Crybaby,” Callahan said. “I wanted to see you next, anyway. Well, not ‘wanted’, exactly. I’ve yet to come up with any scenario in which the sight of you would actually be desirable.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked, stomping right up to her.

Just let her try to punch me, I thought. I’ll burn her hand off.

“Khee, I don’t know, maybe I’m having a bad period?” she said. “Do you want to see my note?”

“You just assaulted a student,” I said, biting back the urge to call her a crazy bitch… by biting my lip. I tasted a faint trace of blood in my mouth.

“That’s what they pay me the big bucks for.”

“They pay you to teach us to fight!” I yelled right up in her face, my voice rising out of control.

“Riiight,” she said, calmly wiping blood mixed with spittle off her face. “Which brings me to the question of why you’re here. Honestly, Crybaby, I’m having a hard time seeing why I shouldn’t boot your ass out.”

Was she for real? Hadn’t she got the fucking memo?

“I had an excuse for last week!” I said.

“How about the week before?” she asked.

“Um, I was here the week before,” I said.

“Yeah, and so what’s your excuse?” she asked.

“For what?”

“Spending all your time making goo-goo eyes at your island girlfriend instead of sparring,” she said.

“We were sparring,” I said.

“You were dancing,” she said. She turned and looked around the crowd. “Dhambizao!”

A knot of students parted as Gloria, looking very grave, came forward. Any delusions I might have harbored that we’d be able to get past our misunderstanding were shattered with one look at her face.

“Yes, ma’am?” she said, her voice completely neutral. Her eyes were fixed straight on Coach Callahan, not even glancing at me.

“You and Crybaby here are going to fight each other one more time,” Callahan said. “Or should I say, one first time?”

“Respectfully, ma’am, I have no wish to…”

“Do I look like a fucking djinni, Dhambizao?” Callahan said. “Do you see a veil on my head or smoke coming out of my fucking ass?”

Gloria shook her head.

“No, ma’am,” she said.

“Then save your wishes for somebody who cares,” the coach said. “You aren’t going to coddle her. You’re not going to let her dance around and dodge your attacks. You’re going to go for her fucking throat, every time. And you,” she said, turning to me, “are going to do the same. Don’t just bore holes through her tits with your eyes.” I couldn’t miss the sharp intake of air from Gloria at these words. “Take that fork and ram it through them. Now, you two go get your weapons mocked and get to it. Dobbs will watch to make sure you’re really fighting while I drill the rest of the class.”

“How long do we have to fight?” I asked.

“How much time is left in the period?” she answered. “Go get your weapons mocked and get it on, ladies. Everybody else, form a circle. Those of you who have any progress will have it evaluated today.”

Silently, Gloria and I headed over to the tables where the mockboxes were kept. She laid her ornate sword in a long one on the table and closed the lid while I went to the largest one, which actually stood upright like a wardrobe, and placed my pitchfork inside.

“I see you have finally relinquished one charade,” Gloria said as she opened the lid. She was inspecting the spectral duplicate, not looking at me. “Does this mean you are done with the pretense of wounded innocence?”

“What charade?” I asked.

“You have laid aside the puny knife with which you mocked me, and brought forth your own weapon,” she said, holding the sword up to the sunlight.

“The knife was my weapon,” I said. “I lost it. Well, I didn’t lose it, but…”

“I have heard enough lies,” she said, turning to face me for the first time. Her eyes blazed so fiercely, they might have been on fire. “I have been deceived by my charitable nature for the last time. Bring your best violence to bear, Mackenzie Blaise… today, we fight.”