The question of exactly what to tell Amaranth and how to tell her began to weigh on me as soon as I closed the compact… I couldn’t lie to her, but I didn’t want to put her in an awkward spot in dealing with Lee. The easiest way to do it would be to tell her that he had thought of someone else who might know and could be convinced to come forward. That was the truth… or at least it was true, which was almost the same thing… and it might not be all that different from how I would have explained it if he hadn’t impressed the need for secrecy onto me.

But he had, and that meant that anything short of the whole truth… both what I knew and what I suspected… would feel like a lie. I’d lived my life by such “technical truths” before. It had been part of my initial strategy for dealing with life at MU, and it had been Amaranth who had first made me question whether it was any better than lying.

That Amaranth didn’t come to bed with me didn’t so much take away the pressure as much as it left me to suffer under it all night. I didn’t have any unwelcome visitors in my dreams that night, but that may have been a side effect of never falling into a deep enough sleep long enough to have any proper dreams. Every time I woke up I found myself treading over the same ground in my head.

Deciding to speak up and tell the truth should have made everything simpler, but things were only getting more complicated… I was back to half-truths and keeping things from people I cared about.

Of course, we’d made things complicated by trying to have the best of both worlds by sharing our information but keeping out of the investigation. I didn’t think I could be blamed for that… I’d already been more entangled in it than I should have been because of what I was. I couldn’t be blamed and it couldn’t be helped. Not unless I wanted to take a gamble on a straight-up anonymous tip.

By the time morning came around, I’d more or less made peace with the decision. This didn’t mean I was feeling great about what I’d have to tell Amaranth… or about the likelihood that I’d run into Feejee sometime before the hammer came down, knowing what I’d put into motion while she was none the wiser… but I’d accepted that it was likely to be the best of several bad choices.

I could avoid the bathroom for a while. I’d miss baths, but a couple days without showering wouldn’t kill me.

I was already awake when Two began preparing for her meditation session, though I begged off accompanying her… I needed more rest to make up for my lack of actual sleep. When I did decide I’d had enough of lying there in the semi-darkness, it was earlier than I needed to be up for breakfast or anything else… Two wasn’t even back yet. I had a moment of regretting that I hadn’t gone with her… what was the point of regretting? Learn from it and move on, I thought, and felt kind of better for it.

I’d spent the night beating myself up over things that were perhaps at least worth wrestling with a bit, but how to spend an hour of the morning wasn’t it.

I decided to go out and take a shower. It was cold in the dorm room and hot water sounded nice… if I ran into Feejee, well, that was going to happen eventually. I wouldn’t be lingering right near her in the other bathtub or anything, I’d just breeze past. Chances were good she’d be still be asleep, anyway.

I got my things together and headed for the door, but froze at the sound of voices on the other side of it. It was a little bit early for conversation in the hall. I was used to stray sounds coming in through the front of the room, as people headed towards the lounge or the stairs, but people didn’t really hang out in the hallway that much, and they especially didn’t do it early in the morning.

Very carefully, I leaned my head in close to the door and then put my ear against it. I wasn’t interested in eavesdropping… I just wanted to see if I could recognize the voices. I was interested in knowing who I might end up having to walk through to get to where I was going.

“…not going to… for you,” was the first thing that I heard. I couldn’t make out the whole thing, and I didn’t recognize the voice.

“Nobody’s asking you to spy,” said another voice, that I did recognize: Trina. “Just help Gladys here get into position where she can find something out.”

It probably said something that I assumed they were talking about spying on me, but they did seem to be pretty close to my door. On the other hand it wasn’t smart to discuss their plan so close to the intended target, but if one person was getting cold feet then Trina and Gladys might not have any choice.

The next thing I heard was a kind of buzzing hiss. I couldn’t tell if somebody was whispering and it was carrying weirdly, or if it was something else entirely.

I put my eye to the peephole… I could see Trina, Mariel, who was gesticulating urgently with all four arms and saying something to the speaker whose voice I hadn’t quite recognized: Twyla. Gladys wasn’t in sight, but the group was clustered just at the edge of the peephole’s distorted field of vision.

I hadn’t had nearly as much contact with Twyla, good or bad, as I had with some of the other girls on our floor. It was easy enough to forget that she was there. I wasn’t the least bit surprised to find that the other girls were trying to bully her into doing their dirty work for them.

I realized that whether or not they were talking about me, I could break up their little meeting and at least temporarily end Twyla’s predicament just by opening the door at that moment. Having realized that, I felt something cold and hard twisting its way around through the lower regions of my torso. I’d come a long way from feeling like I was going to throw up whenever people looked at me, but that didn’t mean I was comfortable just jumping into the spotlight.

Being led around on a stage by Amaranth was one thing… she was my owner, I was fulfilling my function as her toy… but race aside, Trina and Mariel were every bit the kind of girls whose attention I’d tried and failed to avoid in high school.

That thought was still crossing my mind when my hand went for the doorknob. The fact that it stuck a little meant there was no chance of dramatically throwing the door open and catching them off-guard, but Trina and Twyla were still standing there when I got it open. Mariel and Gladys were nowhere to be seen. Mariel moved very quickly and seemed to perceive time at a very different rate from the rest of us, and evidently Gladys had a similarly incredible reaction time and speed.

I thought about throwing out a chipper “Good morning” or something, but I wasn’t sure I could manage more than an awkward “hi”. I wasn’t even sure I could handle that. I managed to stop myself from feeling guilty at having busted them… they were the guilty ones, and the look on Trina’s face dispelled any doubt from my mind that I was the target of the planned espionage. She didn’t say anything, though, she just turned and walked off.

“You… um… might not want to stand there with your door open,” Twyla said, before heading down the hall towards the stairs or the bathroom.

“Um, thanks?” I said, then stepped back and closed the door.

What had that been about? Good advice for somebody with nosy neighbors, but what the hell could anybody see by looking in through my open door? Trina and company’s sudden interest in the goings-on they imagined to be… going on… in my room was no doubt related to Leda’s death, which meant that they suspected I had something to do with it. But since I didn’t, there was no evidence in my room, much less anything that you could see just by walking past when the door happened to be open. Still, I didn’t necessarily want gawkers hanging around outside of it… and I really didn’t want people trying to eavesdrop on what was happening inside it.

It hit me that what they’d probably been asking Twyla for was access to her room. It was right next to mine. I wondered why they’d be going to her and not her roommates, but I didn’t exactly keep up with the dorm politics of people who didn’t like me.

Since I couldn’t manage a shell of silence like the one Lee had used through my mirror, I’d have to ask Steff if she had a spare sound-damping blanket I could hang over that wall… that would put a serious crimp in their plan.

I waited until Two got back before I went to take my shower. Mercifully, Twyla wasn’t in there, and even more mercifully, neither was Feejee. The bathroom was empty except for us, and nobody else came in until we passed Celia on the way out. It was an eerie reminder that with Sooni and her entourage and Dee gone, there were at least three dorm rooms standing empty because of Leda’s death.

That could be another reason Trina had been leaning on Twyla instead of going to the Leightons, I realized. Maybe they weren’t around to let her friend into their room.

Amaranth looked to be in a very good mood when she came upstairs to walk to breakfast with us. Once we were outside, she pulled on my arm to get me to walk a bit behind Two. That suited me, since I had things I needed to talk to her about, too.

“You know what you were saying yesterday,” she said, “about how they wouldn’t necessarily take my word at face value because I’m just a nymph?”

“I’m not sure that’s exactly how I put it,” I said.

“Oh, baby, I’m not saying I took it personally,” she said. “But you were right. It’s not that I have any special legal standing, it’s just my mother’s protection. So I was thinking about how to make my idea work, and I think I’ve come up with something.”

“Amaranth… we already contacted Lee,” I said.

“Yes, but I figured it would be at least today before he got back to you, and in the mean time I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she said. “And once I did, the answer seemed so obvious, so simple. I couldn’t believe I didn’t think of it when we were first talking about this.”

“Well, the thing is… Lee did get back to me last night,” I said. “And, uh, he also had a kind of simple solution. Simple-ish. It doesn’t need anything from us, it keeps me out of it completely.”

“Oh,” Amaranth said. It sounded like there was some disappointment in her voice.

“Of course, I’d still like to hear what you came up with… it might be useful, if we ever… um… if this situation… it might be interesting,” I said.

I couldn’t even pretend I thought that we’d ever have a use for Amaranth’s plan.

If the same situation ever came up again, I was going to quit and move to another, less absurd plane of existence.

“Well… the thing is… I thought it was such a simple and obvious solution… elegant really,” she said, “that I couldn’t see any reason to wait…”

“Amaranth, you didn’t,” I said. I felt like the ground beneath my feet and the bottom of my stomach were both in a race to get to the bottom of a deep pit.

“Baby, you don’t even know what I did,” she said. “I promise you, it’s a really great idea, or else I wouldn’t have…”

“Well, what is it, then?” I asked.

“Like I told you: you made me realize that the problem is that the protection I have doesn’t belong to me, but my mother,” Amaranth said. “She is the one that the Imperium respects enough to back off of, not me. So…”

“So you asked her to get involved?” I said. Somehow I felt relieved… I didn’t know Mother Khaele, but somehow I couldn’t imagine she’d casually get involved in mortal legal affairs, and I had to believe she was used to being petitioned by Amaranth that she’d be inclined not to take her requests seriously. When she appeared on TV, she made the point about how often people died, right before a giant monster wave made the point for her.

“Not directly,” Amaranth said, which sounded even better.

“Indirectly involved?”

“I asked her sort of indirectly,” Amaranth said. “I mean, I thought if I just up and asked her she’d probably shut me down out of hand… she’s sort of getting in the habit of not really listening to me, sometimes. Also, she wasn’t available when I tried to commune. So I… well, it’s basically the equivalent of leaving a reflection. She’ll get the message when she gets back from… the thing she didn’t tell me that she was going to be doing this week.”

“She’s gone all week?” I asked, not even bothering to try to parse how a goddess could be “gone” or where she’d go to.

“That’s what it seems like,” Amaranth said, her lower lip wobbling. I gathered that this was a new experience for her.

“Well, then you just have to leave a new message for her,” I said. “Because Lee’s already taking care of it. Um… since you’re the one who left the echo, you could always just say that you handled it yourself.”

“I guess,” she said. I couldn’t tell what she was more bothered by: that her elegant and simple idea wouldn’t be used, or that Mother Khaele had apparently stepped out.

Actually, as soon as I thought that, it seemed obvious… and I felt a little unworthy of her for even thinking it. Of course she was bothered by the thought that her brilliant plan wouldn’t fix everything. She was Amaranth. But it was even more obvious that she wasn’t bothered half as much by that as she was by the fact that her mother, her goddess… the only constant in her life now that she’d left her home and lost her closest companion… had gone away without telling her.

Personally, I didn’t think that a goddess actually needed to update all of her followers with her travel itinerary, and Mother Khaele had evidently used some means of letting her daughters know that she was away and when she’d be back. Pointing that out to Amaranth didn’t seem terribly helpful, and I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I just hugged her.

That turned out to be the right thing to do.

“Thank you, baby,” she said when we were done. There were tears in her eyes and on her cheeks, but she was already done crying. “So… what did Lee say?”

“His thoughts were actually pretty close to yours,” I said, figuring this out as I said it. “Get someone, you know, powerful and credible to give the information. He had someone in mind but, you know, since the whole point is that we have nothing to do with it, we’re not supposed to know. Or talk about it.”

“That makes sense,” Amaranth said.

“So, basically… we can sit back and things should sort themselves out,” I said. “As much as they can be.”

“I need clarification!” Two yelled, from maybe thirty feet up the path. Two had a habit of shouting… and whispering… like a very small child, or someone who was accustomed to talking at one set volume. She understood the theory behind modulating what came out of her mouth, but the finer points of variation escaped her.

“We’re still going to breakfast with you, hon,” Amaranth called. “You can go ahead or wait for us to catch up.”

“Are you going to be doing anything before catching up?”

“We’ll be right there,” I said.

“Then I’ll wait,” Two said.

We didn’t keep her waiting long.

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Friday: Ian brings important news to the table, plus Goldman’s class.

“The investigators have set up shop here, on the first floor,” he said, frowning. “I wasn’t really expecting that.”

“Does that mean we should go somewhere else?” I asked hopefully.

“No, I don’t think so… they’ve asked students to stay in their own residence halls as much as possible,” Lee said. “Let’s head on in and get the lay of the land.”

We clambered out of the coach and headed down the slightly uneven concrete steps to the front patio. Lee entered the basement lounge ahead of us, holding open the door.

The room was fuller than I’d seen it any other time since the first weekend and its hall-wide meeting. It wasn’t just students, either. Some of the larger groups were sitting with humans, who I figured were their resident advisers, judging by their ages. The dean of non-human students, who probably hadn’t been back in Harlowe since the first weekend, was talking quietly to a couple of guys who were probably either somebody’s lawyers or plain clothes investigators.

The gorgon girl who lived in the room directly beneath me was standing with a couple of figures in all-encompassing black cloaks similar to the ones that Dee wore, and another person who looked like a humanoid mushroom standing about three and a half feet tall.

“It looks like there was an all-night Veil party,” Lee said.

It took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about… he was looking at Sooni, who was dressed in her latest Science Princess outfit. Maliko and Suzi were huddled around her. Sooni was bawling her eyes out, Maliko looked scared. Suzi looked oddly serene, as if she possibly didn’t understand what was happening.

Arrayed around them were men who looked like body guards… easterners, three who looked human and two who were canine yokai.

Interestingly, Kai was standing just outside the ring of bodyguards, looking sort of adorably stern in her baby clothes. She had a weapon belt strapped around her padded diaper, with a pair of long and short curved swords and wicked-pronged throwing blades.

“No, that’s actually just… Sunday morning,” I said.

“Ah, well… looks like Gregory’s not at the Crystal Palace any more but he hasn’t turned up here yet, either,” Lee said quietly, his eyes going back down to his tablet. “He might be at the admin building. Most of the agents and officers on premises are blanks to me… I don’t want any contact between them and you if he’s not in earshot of an uproar.”

“Is this one guy really going to make that much difference?” Ian asked. “I mean, if someone decides to play a little game of blackguard, paladin, with us don’t you think we can count on at least one honest cop hearing? Dorms aren’t known for efficient soundproofing.”

“Mike Gregory’s one of the ‘good guys’, no doubt about that,” Lee said. “But that’s not why I want him. I told you, I spent part of the morning studying him.”

“Um, no offense,” Ian said, “but I really hope you’re not staking everything on some hunch you gleaned from reading news clippings. I admit I don’t know much about these things except what I’ve seen on TV… but that sounds like something I’ve seen on TV.”

I nodded my own agreement. I trusted Lee… but I wasn’t sure what he could have learned in an hour or two that would make him seem so certain.

“Let’s just say that my firm’s information on Mr. Gregory is better than news clippings,” Lee said.

“What, do you have a psych profile or something?” Ian asked.

“I really can’t say anything about the specific nature of the information,” Lee said.

“Holy shit,” Ian said.

“Please do us all a favor and don’t go jumping to conclusions, or spreading them around,” Lee said. “Now, I’d rather not leave you completely alone but I’m kind of on my own here for the time being. Will the three of you be okay sitting tight here while I go up and have a chat with the people on-site here?”

Ian and Amaranth both looked at me. I knew they weren’t deferring to me. It looked more like they were sizing me up somehow… maybe wondering how well I’d handle myself if someone confronted us, or if I’d say or do something rash.

While that kind of concern had some basis ordinarily, I resented the idea that I couldn’t be counted on to control myself when it counted.

“Yeah, we’ll be fine,” I said, trying to force myself to be nonchalant. “Go on, have fun.” Okay, maybe I could stand being a little more chalant than that. “I mean, do what you have to.”

“Right,” Lee said. “If anyone official… imperial, provincial, school, or other… wants to talk to you, tell them your attorney is upstairs and will be with them shortly. Don’t listen to anyone who says you don’t need me. I’ll make this as quick as I can.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be polite but firm,” Amaranth said.

“Okay, but if someone presses you to the point that balancing those two things becomes tricky, make sure you remember which of them is optional,” Lee said. “I’ll be back.”

He left us alone. We all looked at each other, but nobody said anything. Amaranth stirred as if she were about to speak and break the silence, but then she seemed to think better of it. It was like she shrank back inside herself.

The atmosphere inside the main lounge was somber. That didn’t seem too odd, considering that Leda was dead, but it was surprising that so many people would seem so deeply affected by her death. Sooni was the only one who was weeping so openly, but there were more tears throughout the room.

Harlowe was a place of insular cliques, in my experience… and indeed, the room was full of islands of people with no more than half a dozen students in each and many smaller than that. Leda had been standoffish… at the risk of speaking ill of the dead, she’d been more than a bit of a snob.

Then I became aware of an undercurrent to the scene: fear. I could feel it, I could smell it… and once I knew it was there I could see it on the faces of everyone in the room.

One of their own… our own… had died, been killed. Imperial suspicion was on someone from our building. Who wouldn’t be afraid? The fierce and feral-seeming had to worry about being accused and brought to trial for a crime they might not have done… or worse, accused and not brought to trial. The more conventionally vulnerable had to worry about becoming victims themselves.

I was probably creating a dichotomy that didn’t exist, I realized. I myself was proof that someone could look innocuous by human standards and still be both physically powerful and dangerous. The gnomish students would probably garner little suspicion, but everyone else would be fair game for the investigators.

Lee had kept my mind on my plight, my defense, to the extent that I hadn’t had much thought for the question of who might have done it. Now I found my mind turning to that subject.

The fact that Leda had been human-like and killed in water suggested one very strong possibility to me… or rather, one or two of them. If she bore bite marks and was torn apart to the point that resurrection didn’t seem to be in the cards for her royal personage, as it seemed was the case, then that made it even more likely.

Suspicion wasn’t proof… although it might turn out to be just as good for the imperials if it gave them a satisfactory resolution. Lee seemed like a good guy, and he definitely had my back… but that was the thing. He had my back. I was sure he’d want me to share my information about the mermaids if he thought it would help me out.

I couldn’t even say that he’d be wrong to do so. I hadn’t killed anyone. Feejee and Iona, by their own admission, had. Would it be such a terrible injustice if… say, Iona… were to take the blame for this one?

Of course it would, I realized. Someone had killed Leda. Trying to punish Iona for unrelated deaths without knowing for sure she was responsible for this one would only mean someone else might get away with murder.

And, of course, I’d had no interest in seeing Iona punished before doing so coincided with a chance to shield my own ass.

But maybe I was overthinking it… the investigators weren’t going to take the unsupported word of a demonblood murder suspect as damning evidence. They’d at least check Iona out because I had a lawyer who would use it against them if they ignored a tip that could clear me, and they’d either find proof of her involvement or…

…or the’d discover that under her smooth, red-tinged skin, she was hiding something a lot scarier looking than any demon and forget about finding evidence of anything else.

Also, I was thinking of this in terms of blaming Iona, but there was no way I could shield Feejee. While Feejee was hardly innocent… she seemed to be, in some ways, an innocent. She knew nothing but her people’s own peculiar system of morality. There was no connection in her mind between the idea of humans as people she could talk to and befriend and humans she could eat… or there was no conflict between the two.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, either way. I had the feeling that if she ate me, she might miss me afterwards, but I didn’t expect any remorse.

If Leda hadn’t died in water, I would be pretty sure Feejee hadn’t been involved. That she had been killed in the fountain muddied the… metaphorical water. It might even have made it more likely to be her than Iona… I could see Feejee not giving a second thought to the victim’s identity or standing as long as she was in water.

On the other hand, I could also see Iona just not caring. Feejee could overwhelm me with fear when she shifted into her less human-looking states. Iona was just plain scary, no matter what face she wore.

“Holy shit!” Ian said.

“What?” I said, looking around.

Hovering over the underworld contingent was what could only be the observer Lee had described as “some sort of eyeless fish-beast”… it was at least five feet across, generally flat and maybe three feet tall at the center, with wavy fringed fins protruding a foot and a half farther on each side. The front of it seemed to be all mouth, except for a small knob over the center of it from which a pair of whisker-like undulating antennae protruded. Its coloration was… hard to describe.

Dark and glistening, but just when I thought I was getting a handle on exactly what dark and glistening color it was, my mind slipped off it.

“Did I miss that thing somehow, or did it just show up?” Ian asked just as the thing faded back out of sight. “Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s… interesting.”

“It probably exists simultaneously on multiple planes,” Amaranth said. “Physical, ethereal…”

“The ether doesn’t extend that deep below the surface,” I said. “Probably some place stranger than that… somewhere that’s farther removed from anywhere up here. That could be why it seems to have trouble manifesting.”

It shimmered back into view, slowly turning in the air as it did. I had a distinct sense of unease as I realized that it was “looking” towards us, its long, whippy appendages streaming out through the air. Something rolled over me… a feeling like being pounded by a cold, strangely dry surf, and then the thing reoriented itself back the way it had been.

“Oh, so that’s how you say ‘mind your own business’ in extraplanar fishese,” Ian said. “I’ve been wondering.”

“Actually, it was just saying hi,” Amaranth said. “Introducing itself.”

“What’s it doing now?” Ian asked.

The fish turned its attention towards the door at the back corner of the room, where the stairwell to the boys’ side was. A moment later, the door swung open so hard and fast that I thought perhaps its attention had caused it to move, but then Dee came flying through it in a dark-dark green robe… as far as I could tell, her feet were on the ground, but there was really no other word for it but flying. She used the unearthly smooth elven stride, but she crossed the room over to the group of her compatriots far too quickly to call it “gliding”.

Her appearance took them by surprise. I could imagine the substance of what Dee was saying had something to do with her obligations to Steff, though I couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, or even hear what the cloaked elves said to her in response. They were either sticking to telepathy or modulating their voices to a degree Dee wasn’t bothering to do. They seemed deeply concerned with her state of dress, though… one of them actually stripped off her cloak, revealing herself to have spiky black hair, and tried to throw it over Dee’s body. Dee batted it aside mentally, her voice getting slightly louder.

“Do you think we should go help her?” Amaranth asked.

“It looks like she’s doing okay to me,” Ian said.

“We probably shouldn’t be getting involved with anything right now,” I said. “Remember what Lee said?”

“I think we could support our friend without getting entangled with officialdom,” Amaranth said.

“Right, except we’d be supporting her to ambassadors or lawyers or oathspeakers or whoever those are,” I said.

“Looks like it doesn’t matter anyway,” Ian said, as Dee threw up her arms and then turned and zipped back towards the door.

The woman who’d taken off her cloak made a lunge for her, but the other one grabbed her arm and held her back. As soon as Dee was out of sight, the uncloaked one shook her head sadly, then let out an audible “oh!” and disappeared. The discarded cloak seemed to pick itself up and then settled itself into an elf-sized shape.

“Apparently they’re privacy advocates?” Ian said.

There was a loud scoffing sound from behind us. I turned to see Trina had just come in. All three of her eyes looked bleary and red.

“I can’t believe you’re joking at a time like this,” she said. “Or actually, I can. Come on, Gladys,” she said half over her shoulder, apparently not even realizing that her friend had fallen behind her at some point and wasn‘t even in sight. “Let’s go find Mariel.”

“…she sure told me?” Ian said as Trina headed for the stairs.

“Everybody deals with tragedy differently,” Amaranth said.

I thought that maybe Trina’s way of dealing with it differently was by dealing with it exactly the same way she dealt with everything else, but I didn’t say that. I looked around the room, looking for something else to say, something else to talk about… and I was again struck by the amount of fear there seemed to be. Some people even had the look on their face that I recognized as being a certain kind of “guilty”… the look that says you know you’re going to be punished and you at least halfway feel you deserve it, irrespective of anything you’ve actually done. It looks the same as being guilty to a lot of people… particularly people who think that the innocent don’t have any reason to fear punishment.

“I think the really sad thing is that no one’s really dealing with what happened yet,” I said. “I don’t know who’d be mourning Leda, but right now everybody’s worried about what happens next… everybody’s waiting for the hammer to fall.”

“We’re sort of lucky, in a way,” Amaranth said, nodding. “Or we will be, if Lee’s right and he can get them to move on from you fairly quickly. You know you’re under suspicion, and you can look forward to a quick resolution.”

“I can hope for one,” I said. “It’s not a guarantee. I think I’d rather not be under suspicion in the first place.”

“Well, yes, but you can’t choose that, any more than you were able to choose your birth,” Amaranth said. “And even the people who don’t share your circumstances are under a cloud… they just don’t know exactly how bad it is yet.”

“Amaranth… I know you’re trying to look on the bright side, but it sounds to me like you’re talking about ’having a big enough problem to notice it’ like it’s a good thing,” I said. “And yeah, Lee’s got confidence and I’ve got confidence in him, but he‘s always been pretty upfront about the fact that there are no guarantees. There are a lot of things that could go wrong… there’s no way of knowing for sure that I’ll be cleared of suspicion, much less that it‘ll happen quickly.”

“Um, your coat’s buzzing,” Ian said.

“Oh!” I said, and I pulled my mirror out of my coat pocket and flipped it open. “It’s Lee,” I said for the others’ benefit as I accepted the reflection. “Hello?”

“Hello, Mackenzie?” he said. “Yes, I think things either got a whole lot simpler or more complicated. They have a demon expert here insisting there was no infernal handiwork in the killing.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Amaranth said, leaning over my shoulder. “Wouldn’t that make things simpler for Mack?”

“For a demonblood who’s under suspicion?” Lee said. “Very likely yes. For Mackenzie Blaise? That depends.”

“Depends on what?” I asked.

“On your relationship to a Martha Blaise.”

Next time: Do you really need a teaser?

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“Is everything okay?” Ian asked her.

“So far,” she said. “I need to talk to my Mack later, about something… but you guys have fun, okay?”

“About what?” I asked. As if I didn’t have enough to be worried about already without one more thing hanging over my head… well, okay, so it was probably statistically likely that what she wanted to talk to me about was just one of the things that was already hanging over my head. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” she said. “Nothing new, I mean… I just think that maybe we might want to have a talk with Ian about a few things, before… before tomorrow.”

“Before tomorrow?” Ian said. “That would be tonight.”

“I mean, before tomorrow night,” Amaranth said. “I want to talk to Mack about some things so that we can talk to you, probably sometime tomorrow during the day, before it’s too…morrow night.”

“Before it’s too ‘morrow night’ for what, exactly?” Ian asked.

“Nothing, probably!” Amaranth said. “Hopefully… probably. Almost definitely. But I don’t want to just blurt it all out, I need to talk to Mack about it first.”

“Wow, you all have some complicated lives,” Winnie said, and then she giggled nervously. I winced. I was getting a headache.

“Can you excuse us?” Ian said. “Mackenzie wanted to dance.”

“Oh, sure,” Amaranth said. “Please, go on… enjoy yourselves.”

We moved away from Winnie and her, but instead of putting his arms back around me, Ian said, “So what is it she wants to talk to me about, eventually?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Could be a couple of different things…”

“Oh, that’s good to know.”

“I don’t want to talk about anything right now,” I said. “I just want to dance, okay?”

As I said that, the nice slow love song that was playing hit a long sustained note and then faded away. A peppy faux-elven song with a fast crystal bell beat started playing… it wasn’t my kind of thing at all, but I tried moving my arms a little bit. Ian made a valiant effort to get into the groove, but his heart just wasn’t into it, and I was just not enough of a natural dancer to keep it up without someone to dance back at.

As we were not talking and I didn’t have anything else to distract me, my eyes took in the crowd. There was a group of girls… Argenti, or probably Argenti-Imperials… sitting on one of the couches by the nearer the edge of the dance area. They were wearing feathered and beaded masks and stylish dresses, like it was a real masquerade ball and not a Veil party full of college students.

I felt a twinge of envy… they’d obviously spent some time planning things out, and then selecting just the right masks and outfits to set them off. Ian had made a good effort at coming up with a costume, but it was cheap and gaudy and while that was very much in the spirit of the occasion I felt like if I’d just made a little effort a little earlier, I could have come up with something more… well, just something more.

I made up my mind not to leave it to the last minute, next time… whether “next time” was another costume party or whatever. I’d be ready.

They looked poised and confident… one wearing black just radiated the kind of cool self-assurance that normally left me feeling tiny and insignificant. Maybe I was maturing a little, but it didn’t bother me. If anything, I caught a little of it myself. I felt a bit less self-conscious and started moving a little bit more.

I felt kind of good… dancing felt kind of good, and it was better than standing there moping about stuff I couldn’t do a thing about at the moment. I had the weirdest flash of deja vu at that feeling, but it didn’t last long.

“Guess you caught the bug finally,” Ian said, as we both picked up the pace a little.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. I gave him a smile, raised my hands and shook my hips a little bit… it felt weird, but it must not have looked terrible because he moved in a little closer.

“Somebody slip you a potion?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I just… maybe it’s the fact that it’s Veil? It was my favorite when I was a kid. My mom said…” I trailed off, something connecting in my head. “I guess that’s it.”

“You guess what’s what?”

“Why I felt so good all of a sudden,” I said.

“Because it’s Veil?” he asked.

“No, because… well, it’s kind of silly,” I said.

“What?”

“I just kind of feel like I did when I got home from school and I wasn’t feeling so great, but my mom would give me a smile and… well, it was hard to be sad around my mom. I don’t know if that makes any kind of sense.”

“Sure it does,” Ian said. “She was your mom.”

We danced our way through a few songs. People came and went, the occupants of the couch changed a couple of times, but eventually we’d moved out more towards the middle of the floor.

I was doing a pretty good job of avoiding looking at Puddy, but in doing so I caught sight of Trina and her body-painted friend, half-dancing next to each other while Trina ran her mouth… I really couldn’t understand the appeal of body paint, in a school full of glamour students. I might have supposed that Semele just plain didn’t know anyone who could glam her, but I thought Trina and Mariel were semi-tight. I couldn’t imagine she wouldn’t have tipped Gladys off.

And it was a lame costume. I might have been wearing a fur bikini, but at least I was something. She was just… naked and green and glittery. There was a whole crowd of guys dancing around her. Some of them weren’t even dancing, just standing there and ogling her.

“Who are you staring at?” Ian asked. He started to move around me.

“I’m just looking, not staring,” I said. “At Gladys, the painted girl… and don’t you look, she’ll think we’re staring.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t want that.”

“How come she gets all those guys hanging off her, anyway?” I asked.

“Do you want more guys hanging off you?” Ian replied.

“I mean, compared to Amaranth,” I said. I looked back over at her and saw that since we left her, she had attracted a guy or three, but they weren’t staring at her body with as much open interest as Gladys was attracting, and one of them actually seemed to be looking at Winnie for some reason. “When there’s a completely nude and incredibly gorgeous nymph around, why would anyone…”

“You’re doing it again,” Ian said. “Or maybe still.”

“What?”

“Do you even know that girl?” he said. “Or are you just ragging on her because you don’t like her friend?”

“They don’t like me,” I said.

He stopped dancing and just stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“Mackenzie, I don’t mean to be… mean, but… did you have any friends in high school?”

“Yeah, everyone wanted to be friends with the cool demon girl,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“How about elementary school?”

“I don’t know, I guess I was just pretty much normal, I guess,” I said. “I wasn’t, you know, the super-popular one, but I kind of turned around the age that stuff gets really pronounced, anyway. But I had friends. School friends, anyway.”

“You were, what… nine when it happened?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh,” he said.

“What?”

“Well, you kind of act like a third grader about this stuff sometimes,” he said. “I just wonder if maybe that’s got something to do with it.”

“You really think I act like a third grader?”

“Um… sometimes,” he said. “About certain things. Don’t get all mad…”

“I’m not all mad,” I said. “I’m hurt.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t be,” he said. “I’m not just saying this to be a dick, Mackenzie.”

“Yes, the fact that you really mean it makes it less hurtful,” I said.

“I just thought that maybe if I pointed out what you were doing, you could learn to recognize it when you do it yourself, and that could be the first step in, you know… not doing it,” he said.

“So now you’re trying to fix me?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I’m not that stupid. But I am stupid enough to think I can help you, if you want to fix yourself. Or, you know, make a personal improvement… maybe that’s a better way to put it.”

“Just answer me straight up,” I said. “Do you even like me?”

“I like you plenty, a lot of the time,” he said. “I’d like to like you more often. But what I’d really like is if you were…”

“If I were what, exactly?” I asked.

“Happier.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. Righteous anger had been ready as my default, but that wasn’t going to work.

“Mackenzie, I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have…”

“No,” I said. “You’re right. It isn’t fun being like that… I guess my first reaction is to defend whatever it is I’m doing, but if I stop and actually look at it, I’m not really proud of myself.” I sighed. It didn’t seem likely that I’d be able to recapture the same feeling I’d had before I spotted Trina. “Maybe I should go.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be proud… but you don’t have to beat yourself up over it, either,” Ian said. “I mean, punishing yourself for it isn’t going to change what happened… is it going to actually change anything next time?”

“I don’t know, I like to think that Amaranth’s helped me change some,” I said. “A little, anyway.”

“Okay, but does she do that by making you feel even shittier about yourself, or because she gives you something to aim for?” he asked. “Come on… this is your first Veil party as a grown-up.”

“So I should act like one?”

“So you should enjoy it,” he said. “It’s a party. Dance. Meet people

“You know what?” I said. “I think maybe part of the problem is that even here, even when I go out, I’m not really meeting new people. I mean, you try… but a big campus party, or the drama students on lunch hour… there’s too many people. I’m not good with big groups. So I don’t really connect with anyone.”

“Winnie tried to connect with you.”

“Yeah, well, Winnie bugs me,” I said. “And maybe that’s not her fault, and maybe it’s not fair to her, and maybe I’m a horrible person, but I can’t just turn off a dislike like that.”

“Semele tried to connect with you,” he said. He smiled a little.

“Semele sounded more interested in disconnecting with me,” I said. “Maybe… maybe next week, we should do something together with people. Not like this, going to a place where other people are, but… you know. An activity. You know?”

“Oh, sure, all the kids are doing activities these days,” Ian said. “It’s the hot new thing.”

“Smartass,” I said. “I mean something like that time we played cards, only, you know, pick people you actually like and not, you know, the people who happen to be in your dorm and are antisocial enough to not have anything else to do on the weekend.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll do that, and this time, you don’t get drunk and try to eat and/or have sex with anyone.”

“This is it,” I said. “We have concocted the best plan ever.”

We both had a good, only semi-awkward laugh at that… but somehow that seemed to make Winnie’s laugh at something unrelated cut across the dance floor and find my ear.

“Hey, can we just get out of here?” I said.

“What, you want to go back to your room already?”

“No, just for a bit,” I said.

“You mean go outside? Aren’t you going to be cold?”

“Probably, but I just really need to get out of here,” I said. “Not for long… probably just until the cold makes me miserable enough to forget why I left here.”

“Okay,” Ian said, looking around. “Amaranth has your coat?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Could you please go get it for me?”

“Um, yeah, I don’t see her,” he said. I looked over to see that Winnie was talking to Semele, who looked like she’d just got out of the shower. “I could go look for her if you want, but I wouldn’t look very hard because I’m afraid I’d find her.”

“Maybe we can just go hang out in the hallway,” I said… right as a group of latecomers let out a bunch of screams.

“Oh, that’ll be fun,” he said. “Listen, this is a dorm… there’s going to be lounges on the floors, if you want to go up and just sit down somewhere quieter.”

“But are we allowed to just…”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Ian said. “I’m sure if we looked really carefully in the rulebooks there would be some little thing about students who are residents of a hall and hours of visitation or whatever, but… they’re hosting a party. They know there are going to be people who don’t live here hanging around.”

“Okay,” I said. “I just… I don’t like feeling like I’m going out of bounds.”

“Well, if we get up there and see a sign with a skull-and-crossbones on it, we’ll know to turn back,” Ian said. “Or else, you know, proceed with a lot of caution.”

Discuss this story on the Livejournal feed.

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

I had to admit, it worked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know about that,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s a shocker,” Ian said.

“Oh, hush,” Amaranth said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mariel flitted over and buzzed angrily at her.

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

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

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

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

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

“That would take an illusion,” I said.

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

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

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

“Wow,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Seems that way,” Ian said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can’t believe that even at her…”

“At her what?” Hazel said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” Two said.

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, Two,” Ian said.

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

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

“What?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re welcome, baby.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discuss this story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What exactly is going on?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Down on the floor, beast,” she said.

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

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

“Yes, ma’am,” I said and obeyed.

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

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

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

“No, ma’am,” I said.

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

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

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

Dee told me to sit on my hands.

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

“Dee, my friend Hazel needs…”

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

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

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

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

“Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s okay,” I said.

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

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

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

“Seriously, it’s okay,” I said.

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

“That’s… nice,” I said.

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

“Dee… wait,” I said. “The circle?”

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

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

“I will be back before then.”

Discuss this story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Me, neither,” I said.

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

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

“Mack?” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You climbed into my tub,” I said.

“What?”

That was when I realized where I was.

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

“What?”

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

“People walk in their sleep?”

“Not usually,” I sad.

“But you do?” she asked.

“Not usually.”

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

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

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

“Stuff?”

“From your…”

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

“Sorry,” I said.

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

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

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

“I don’t,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You can’t say that!” her twin said.

“What? Yes, I can.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was Rocky, who’d tasted so good.

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

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

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

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

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

Discuss this story

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.

It didn’t look like they’d showered, as they were both in their pajamas… Hazel’s an all-concealing forest green robe and Two’s a nothing-concealing sky blue gauze. Hazel looked like hell warmed over, then frozen and reheated the next day. Two had her most alarmed look on… the one she only wore when she was bursting to do something she was sure needed to be done but had been told not to.

“Hi, Mack. Hi, Amaranth,” Two said.

“Hi, Two,” we both said.

Amaranth frowned sympathetically down at Hazel.

“Oh, Hazel, are you alright?” she asked.

“She’s been throwing up more. I think she needs to go to the healing center,” Two said. “But she won’t.”

“Two, your friend Hazel is an adult,” Amaranth said. “She’s older than any of us, and she can make up her own mind about when she’s ready to deal with something.”

“I usually start when there’s something to deal with,” Hazel said stiffly. “But thanks so much for your concern.”

“You’re welcome,” Amaranth said. “I’m always available if you ever have anything you want to talk about.”

We headed into the bathroom. Feejee was asleep in one of the bathtubs. Trina was in one of the stalls… it sometimes seemed like she lived in there… prattling away to her unseen friend. Her jeans weren’t even down.

“…golem’s birthday or something,” she was saying. “Big drunken party. That sneaky little shit with the curly hair’s totallyhungover. Honey, I think.”

“Ignore her,” Amaranth mouthed to me.

“Probably up all night eating each other out,” Trina continued. “They use the golem as a sex doll, you know. Should probably be illegal.”

I turned and reached out for the stall door. Amaranth gave me a hard bare-handed swat on the ass, and I yelped. Trina did, too, louder. There was a loud crash as her hand mirror hit the floor.

“Careful where you step, baby,” Amaranth said loudly. “The tile’s a little wet.”

There was stunned silence from Trina’s stall as her hand came down and picked up the remains of the mirror, then she got to her feet and threw open the door. She was red in the face as she started shrieking, and the only part of what she said were the first three words, “What the fuck…?”

“Oh, what’s that? We were just going to the showers,” Amaranth said.

Trina waved the broken mirror in Amaranth’s face.

“What are you going to do about this?” she demanded.

“Kosh, Trina, I’m sorry, but you probably want to have a professional look at that,” she said. “And you should probably be more careful about where you try to use it. It’s all sharp corners and hard surfaces in here.”

So saying, she gave me a firm shove on my tender backside in the direction of the showers, leaving a stunned Trina… in shock, if not outright mourning, over the loss of her favorite appendage… to stand there, probably glaring after us with all three of her eyes.

“Can you keep it down?” Feejee called. “Some people are trying to sleep in.”

Trina exhaled through her nose and then turned and stomped, rubber flip-flops making slapping noises on the tiles as she headed to the door.

“Hand me your paddle, baby, so it’s not just lying around out here” Amaranth said, and I did. She tucked it out of sight before stepping into the shower.

“You know, by the end of the day the story of how I broke her mirror is going to be all over school,” I said.

“You can’t stop Trina from spreading gossip,” Amaranth said. “And if it bothers you that she’s got new fodder, maybe you should remember that it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t decided to try.”

“So, it is my fault, in other words,” I said.

“It’s not your fault,” Amaranth said. “She got startled and dropped the mirror. That’s her own accident… but the opportunity for it came about as an unforeseeable consequence of your action, which happened to be a bad idea anyway for other reasons.”

“But it was unforeseeable,” I said. “It’s completely random. It’s not like I can’t do everything right and still had somebody break something as an unforeseeable outcome and blame it on me.”

“Baby, if the universe handed out neat little judgments for everything we did, you wouldn’t need me or anybody else to tell you these things,” Amaranth said. “Not every little thing in life has a built-in moral. This is just one thing that does happen to have one… kind of.”

“The moral could be for you not to spank me when I’m about to put another hole in Trina’s head,” I said.

Amaranth reached over and turned the hot water off just as I working the shampoo into my hair.

“Oh, fucking fuck!” I yelled, jumping back out of the spray.

“I told you I’m going to be giving you more immediate correction,” she said. “Now finish washing up, with the cold water. We’ll just pray… uh, hope, I mean… that the germs don’t get you.”

“That’s not fair!” I said.

“Isn’t it?” Amaranth said. “Even ignoring the fact that violence is never right, and ignoring the fact that you of all people can’t be heard threatening violence against humanbloods, you just complained about Trina spreading rumors about you before you turned around and gave her something even more damning.”

“It’s not like she could hear it,” I muttered.

“As far as she knew, we couldn’t hear her when she decided to talk about Two,” Amaranth said. “And of course, we shouldn’t ignore the first two things. You had every reason to be smarter than that, baby.”

“I just hate people like Trina so much,” I said.

“Yes, well… I can’t do anything about that,” Amaranth said, frowning and biting her lip. “But it would be irresponsible of me as your owner to let you get in the habit of making casual threats of violence against anybody, much less a… a… person who’s really good at spreading news around.”

“It wasn’t a real threat,” I said. “It’s just… hyperbole.”

“More like hyper-bully,” Amaranth said. “I know you’re a big ol’ pussycat, baby, but to everybody else, you’re the monster under the bed. Whether you want it to or not, all of your strength and all of your heritage are standing behind you when you interact with a human. I know you don’t like to dwell on these things, but you have to be aware of them, because everybody else will be.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just… she makes me so angry.”

“There are better ways to express anger than that,” Amaranth said.

“Like?”

“Um… I’ll have to think about that,” she said.

The air in the shower was almost as cold as the water that continued to pour from my showerhead was. I edged around the stream so I could stand between it and Amaranth’s shower, from which clouds of steam were billowing.

“You go back to your own shower,” Amaranth said. “And finish washing up. You don’t have to stand underneath it. You can just stand next to it and use the water. The faster you finish, the sooner you can get dried off and dressed.”

It was a miserable experience. As great a pleasure as a long, hot shower was, a cold, drawn-out one was hell. I didn’t draw it out on purpose, but Amaranth wasn’t about to let me skimp on cleaning anything.

“Have you given any thought to your Veil costume, baby?” she asked, as I scrubbed my shivering skin.

“How about an icicle?” I said.

“You brought it on yourself, baby,” Amaranth said. “It isn’t as though I like watching anybody else really suffer, especially you. But think about it… what would you have done, if I hadn’t stopped you from confronting Trina? Attacked her?”

“No!” I said.

“Threatened her?”

“No,” I said.

“Had a reasoned discussion with a willing listener?”

“Um…”

“Probably not, right?” she said.

“No… probably not,” I admitted.

“Right now she’s mad at herself and she’s displacing that onto you,” Amaranth said. “So you’ve got the moral high ground at least, and there’s a chance she’ll be too embarrassed by what really happened to make too much of a big deal out of it. But if you’d broken down the door and started yelling at her, you would have given up that high ground and more, and for what?”

“Am I not supposed to protect my friends?” I asked.

“How would that have protected her?” Amaranth asked. “Bursting in on Trina wouldn’t have improved Two’s reputation, or her situation.”

I sighed.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. Really. I wasn’t thinking.”

“I know,” Amaranth said quietly. “This is so that next time, you will.”

“Can I please turn the hot water back on?” I asked. “I don’t know how I’m going to rinse my hair out…”

“You can use handfuls of water or you can stick your head under a bit at a time,” Amaranth said. “Or you can suck it up and get underneath it. Mundane cold isn’t going to kill you, baby… I looked it up.”

“You were planning this?” I asked.

“No, I was worried about winter,” she said. “But when I saw you standing there shivering in the bedroom, I thought that cold might be one teacher you wouldn’t be able to ignore.”

“I listen to my teachers,” I said.

“Oh? What about Coach Callahan?”

“She’s a coach, not a teacher,” I muttered, but she didn’t hear. Probably a good thing. There was no way I was sticking my head under the faucet, so I cupped my hand and caught freezing handfuls to try to get the suds out.

The curtain rustled as Two came in. One good thing about freezing my ass off to begin with was that the draft which blew in wasn’t noticeably colder.

“Hi, Mack. Hi, Amaranth,” she said.

“Hi, Two.”

“She’s showering wrong,” Two said to Amaranth.

“She’s being punished,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, okay,” Two said. “That’s good.”

“Good?” I repeated, spluttering a little.

“Yes,” Two said. “You aren’t a very good toy.”

“Two, honey, expressing negative opinions about other people’s relationships is rude,” Amaranth said.

“Okay,” Two said.

“So, did you guys have fun last night?” Amaranth asked her.

“I have been told to tell you that I did not give my friend Hazel a foot rub,” Two said. “I really think she should go to the healing center. She threw up a lot.”

“Two, what’s wrong with her can’t… well, it isn’t even wrong,” Amaranth said. “She should be talking to healers before too long, though, because it could get difficult for her.”

“Amaranth, I’m not getting the shampoo out,” I said. “I’m just dumping cold water on my head for no reason.”

“No, you’re dumping cold water on your head because you were bad,” she said. “But you may turn on the water now to finish washing your hair and do a quick rinse on your skin.”

The quick rinse turned into another full scrub under the steaming hot water, as Amaranth was unable to repress her fear that I would be eaten by invisible science bugs if I didn’t kill them all with hot water. I didn’t care what her reason was. The hot streams pounding against my skin were heaven after the bone-chilling cold I’d endured.

After I turned off the water, Amaranth reached over and squeezed my hand.

“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” I said. “I’m sorry. I should have thought before… it’s just that Trina was pissing me off so badly.”

“Me, too, but we can’t do anything about what she does, baby,” Amaranth said.

“She shouldn’t be able to say shit like that,” I said.

“That’s true, too,” Amaranth said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that we can’t do anything.”

“But…”

She reached out and shushed me.

“Don’t dwell on this,” she said. “You’ll only work yourself up again, for no reason.”

I didn’t think Trina’s antics constituted “no reason”, but I didn’t argue.

My much-abused ass had gone completely numb by the time Amaranth relented, and the hot water had been soothing even as it had reawakened my sense of feeling. I was still smarting when we got back to the room… especially after squeezing my seemingly ever-expanding butt into the tight-ass jeans Amaranth picked out for me… but it was approaching tolerability.

When we left to go to breakfast, Two stopped in the hallway and stared indecisively at Hazel’s door.

“Two… I know you mean well, honey, but Hazel’s the sort of person who’s got to make up her own mind about what she does,” Amaranth said.

“I know,” Two said. “But she should go to the healers.”

“Hazel’s old enough to do what she shouldn’t,” Amaranth said.

Off to our side, Dee’s door opened.

“Good morning,” she said, bowing. “I hate to intrude on a prior conversation, but I would add that Miss Hazel can generally be counted upon to act with more maturity than many students. If she is acting under some amout of shock at the moment, I feel we can trust her to do what is necessary when it becomes necessary.”

“Thank you, Dee,” Amaranth said. “That’s exactly what I think.”

“And I think when somebody throws up that many times they should go to the healer,” Two said.

“Well… you’re entitled to think that,” Amaranth said. “But Hazel’s entitled to do what she wants.”

“But…” Two said, and I watched her working the concepts around. Then something clicked into place. “I can’t make Hazel go to the healer, but I don’t have to stop thinking that she should?”

“Yes, honey, that’s right,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, okay,” Two said, and she relaxed. She still knew she was right, and that there was nothing she could do about it… and rather than the weight of that twin knowledge overwhelming her completely, they canceled each other out, leaving her at peace.

It was a neat trick. I’d have to learn how to do it sometime.

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.

“Ugh… morning, baby,” she said, getting off of me and sitting up.

“Morning,” I said.

“Good morning!” Two said from outside our enclosure. I sat up and opened the curtain. She was wrapped in a towel, with her hair up.

“Good morning,” I said. “How come you didn’t wake me up for meditation?”

“My friend Dee said she’s sorry but she needed more sleep,” Two said.

“Oh,” I said. Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure I would have liked being awakened any earlier than I needed to be.

“Poor Dee,” Amaranth said. “I wonder if she was already awake, or if the commotion woke her up?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“On the subject of sleep schedules, though… Two, what time does your friend Hazel usually wake up, do you know?” Amaranth asked.

“Ten,” Two said.

Amaranth bit her lip.

“Well… could you tell her that I’d like to speak to her about something?” Amaranth said.

“Okay,” Two said.

I doubted there had ever been an easier person to plan a surprise party around than Two. She seemed completely incurious.

“And don’t forget, you need to talk to Steff,” Amaranth said to me.

“Why?” I asked. I added quietly, “She already knows about it. It was her idea, remember?”

“About your date,” Amaranth clarified.

“Oh… yeah,” I said. “Shit.” I looked at Amaranth and said, “You could order me not to go with Sooni.”

“You’re the one who insisted I not order you to spend time with her,” Amaranth said. “Then you went and promised to, anyway. If you want to get out of this one, little missy, I’ll support you entirely, but I’m not going to solve this problem for you.”

I sighed.

“Oh, don’t forget… Ian told you to wake him up for breakfast, right?” Amaranth said.

“Right,” I said. It was Wednesday. Dance night. At least I had one date that wasn’t complicated by conflicting engagements. Maybe I could forget about everything else for one night. If only I could put off telling Steff until tomorrow… but, no. That was only one day before she thought we were going out. It had to be today.

Oh, well, I thought. First things first, and at least the first thing wasn’t a bad one. I went and got the mirror off the dresser, flipped it open, and asked for Ian.

“Turn around so the mirror’s pointing at the wall,” Amaranth said. “Two’s getting dressed.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Sorry, Two.”

“That’s okay,” Two said, from over by the closet. “I forgive you.”

The image swirled around for a bit before Ian finally came into focus.

“Mackenzie,” he said, his eyes half-lidded. “Whuh… what’s up?”

“Breakfast?” I said.

His eyes opened.

“Oh, right,” he said. “Just let me grab some clothes.”

He turned away from the mirror, and I got a flash of his cock and then the top of his ass before he was out of sight. He came back a moment later with an armful of clothing.

“Doesn’t your roommate mind you, um, flopping around like that?” I asked.

“He doesn’t even sleep here most nights,” Ian said. “I think he’s got a girlfriend or something.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I keep a pair of boxers by the bed just in case, anyway,” he said.

“You didn’t grab them before you answered?”

“Didn’t think to,” he said. “And anyway, I figured I was out of frame. I got time for a shower?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I should get one, too.”

“Okay,” he said. “Want me to meet you over there or at the union?”

“Here’s fine,” I said, smiling like an idiot. At first, he’d been reluctant… afraid, even… to set foot in Harlowe. Now he was offering like it was no big deal. I didn’t know what the turning point had been, or even if there had been any one thing. Maybe he’d just got to know so many of us that it seemed silly to be worried?

“Okay,” he said.

“If you get over before I’m done, you can check to see if Two’s in the room, or hang out in the lounge.”

“Alright. See you in a bit.”

“Bye.”

“Bye,” he said. “Oh, hey! It’s Wednesday.”

“Is it?” I said, smiling even more widely. “I’ll see you.”

We waved each other away. I snapped the mirror closed and then put it back on the dresser. With my arm stretched out, I caught a stale remnant of the spicy amber spray and a faint smell of night sweat. I held my arm up to my face and sniffed.

Nothing else. Nothing that I could smell.

“Amaranth, how do I smell?” I asked.

“Um, like yourself?” she said. “Which is pretty good, to me,” she added quickly. It sounded like she was covering.

“I think you smell much better now that the stinky spray wore off,” Two said.

“I’m going to go shower,” I said. “And put on some body spray.”

“If you want to, baby, but maybe use a little less than you did last night,” Amaranth said. “It was a little overpowering.”

Good, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Maybe I just needed to use a different scent? I grabbed some vanilla-raspberry body wash and shampoo. The plain vanilla was a little… well… vanilla, but the sharper scent of the raspberry would probably do the trick.

“I think I’ll come along, too,” Amaranth said. “To shower. It would probably be inconsiderate to do anything, this time of day… other people will be at the sinks and looking to use the showers.”

“Nobody ever comes in to use the shower when I’m using it,” I said.

“I guess people are probably shy about the open showers?” Amaranth said.

I really doubted that was the whole explanation, but I let it go.

I put on my robe and we headed out of the room, hand in hand. Sooni’s room was open. She was nowhere in sight, but Suzi and Maliko were hauling garbage bags full of kindling out of it.

Looking at that made me feel strangely sad. Six gold. That was like tuition for one semester, and she’d spent it on a whim and then destroyed the proceeds in a fit of panic. That kind of money was apparently nothing to somebody like her, Feejee, or Puddy, but it was painful to see it going to waste.

“Poor girls,” Amaranth said quietly as the nekos trudged towards the stairwell. “I hope they’re alright.”

“A little heavy lifting won’t hurt them,” I said.

“I meant Kai and Sooni,” Amaranth said. “They both had a rough night.”

“Yeah, Kai was almost murdered and Sooni was almost arrested for it,” I said.

“Baby,” Amaranth said, sternly. “You can’t tell me the pain on her face wasn’t real.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just having a hard time finding sympathy for her.”

“Well, it’s not that simple for me,” Amaranth said. She sighed. “Let’s just go get cleaned up, okay? I don’t want to argue about this.”

“Okay,” I said.

We walked hand-in-hand down to the bathroom. Kai was brushing her teeth at a sink, but she turned and walked out without a word, clutching her toothpaste and brush. With the toothpaste suds on the fur all around her mouth, she looked rabid. Amaranth gave me a sad look, but didn’t say anything.

Trina was in one of the stalls, talking loudly to somebody… her friend Gladys, unless she‘d managed to find another one somewhere… about Sooni going “way psycho and demolishing the dorm.”

At least she was gossiping about somebody else this time.

It was nice to get in the shower with Amaranth, even if we weren’t going to be doing anything. Anyway, after having spent the whole night pressed together naked, it just felt natural. We kissed before letting go of each other’s hands and going to stand underneath separate fixtures.

I turned the hot water on all the way and waited for the air to warm up before I took off my robe and went to hang it up on the pegs just outside the curtained door. Not wanting to fully expose myself to the cold, I stuck my arm out through the gap. The bottom of the robe caught on something.

“Hey, watch where you’re swinging that, Mack!” Hazel said. She was wearing an ugly brown bathrobe, with a cap over her curly hair, a wicker case in her hand, and what looked like a canvas folding chair under her arm.

“Sorry,” I said, lifting the robe off her face. I hung it up quickly and stepped aside so that she could come through.

“Is that Hazel?” Amaranth called.

“’tis. I’m not, er, interrupting anything, am I?” she asked.

“No,” Amaranth replied. “Just showering. Come on in!”

“Okay, then,” Hazel said. She came in and set up her folding seat on the floor alongside one of the showers, then climbed up to turn it on.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked. It didn’t look terribly steady.

“A bit, maybe, but it’s quicker than waiting for the rain,” she said, climbing down and taking off her robe. She hung that over the back of the seat and then moved it so that it was facing the spray.

With the rather modest dresses that Hazel wore, it was easy to miss the fact that the gnome was a woman and not a surprisingly mature little girl. I almost felt like I was seeing her head pasted on top of another body… then I realized I was staring, and turned my attention back to my own shower. I started to lather my hair up. I figured I’d do everything twice, just to be sure.

“You know, Two said that you usually sleep in later,” Amaranth said, after a few minutes.

“Who could sleep with that row, last night?” Hazel said. “I never got back to sleep properly after that, and finally decided to give up when I started hearing folks moving about in the hall.”

“Well, I wanted to ask you about something, anyway,” Amaranth said. “What are you doing next Tuesday?”

“Can’t think of a blessed thing,” Hazel said. A spurting hiss made me glance over, to see her squirting shaving gel all over the top of her foot.

“Are you shaving your feet?” I asked her. As far as I had known, gnomes had… and were proud of… the thick hair on their feet. When I’d caught a glimpse of Hazel’s feet, bare in every sense of the word beneath her dress, my thought had been that I was mistaken.

“Why, don’t you?” she asked. She’d frozen, gel can in one hand and razor in the other.

That took me aback. I’d made a distinction in my mind between ordinary human “maintenance” and the idea of Hazel de-furring her feet. Was there really a difference?

“Well, yeah,” I said. “I guess I do, sometimes. When they get to be really noticeable. I mean, I have dark hair, so even tiny little hairs show up.”

“Oh, alright,” Hazel said, visibly relaxing. She gave a shaky laugh. “The way you said it, I thought maybe I was doing something weird. I wouldn’t be shaving my delicate parts with anybody else in here, but you two don’t seem very prudish.”

“Whatever you care to do with your body is nobody’s business but your own,” Amaranth said.

“Got that right,” Hazel said. “On that note, I’m almost afraid to ask what you were thinking of inviting me to on Tuesday.”

I snorted, getting some vanilla-raspberry-shampoo-infused water up my nose in the process.

“Baby!” Amaranth cried as I coughed and spluttered, my nostril burning.

“You alright, there?” Hazel asked.

“I’m okay,” I said, with my hand on my nose. “I got shampoo up my nose.”

“Oh, I made that same mistake,” Hazel said. “Apparently, it goes on the hair.”

“Funny,” I said.

“Anyway, Hazel, a few of us are throwing a party for Two,” Amaranth said. “But we want it to be a surprise. We wanted to invite you, of course, but we also thought you might know if she had any other friends from class who might want to come?”

“I’d have to think about that,” Hazel said. “It’s a chummy enough class but I don’t know if that makes anybody chums, you know? And I’m not sure who all would take to your crowd, no offense meant.”

“None taken,” Amaranth. “Also, we hoped you might be able to take care of the refreshments, since obviously we can’t involve Two in that.”

“That one, I might be able to help with,” Hazel said. “Tuesday, you say?”

“Yeah,” Amaranth said. “I’m going to see if the party room in the union can be reserved.”

“Honey and I wandered in there once,” Hazel said. “We were after a few rounds of darts, but we couldn’t figure out how to lower the boards and she wasn’t interested in balancing on stools.”

“I’ll ask if they can be taken off the wall,” Amaranth said.

“What kind of spread are we talking about?” Hazel asked. “Finger foods, a full meal? Oh, are we going to want a cake?”

“If it’s not too much trouble,” Amaranth said. “I think we’re leaning towards something like a birthday party.” She giggled. “Steff called it ‘Two’s Day’.”

“A Two’s Day party,” Hazel mused. “How ’bout presents, then? I gather you tallfolk don’t usually give them out on birthdays.”

“Actually, we do, but I think we’ll leave it up to individuals whether they want to bring something,” Amaranth said. “Being as it’s short notice.”

“Oh, no, I meant, the honored guest doesn’t give them,” Hazel said. “Be hard to do that, anyway, when she doesn’t even know it’s her Two’s Day. Well, I’ve had my eye on a little something for her, anyway. Goodness knows, if anybody deserves a bit of a party, it’d be Two.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think we all feel like that.”

Amaranth and Hazel talked back and forth about the menu for a bit, Hazel talking over her shoulder while she shaved her legs. They were both thinking big, but Amaranth had everybody’s dietary needs in mind and reminded Hazel of them.

I only half-listened, though some of the delicacies being mentioned made my mouth water. I was concentrating more on getting myself clean, and drinking in the scent of the body wash. It really did smell good, when it wasn’t going directly up my nose… tart and a little sweet.

“Maybe what we need to do is make it buffet-style,” Hazel said after several other ideas had been shot down. “Instead of trying to find one menu that’ll suit everybody. We can do something similar with the desserts, so Miss Delia Daella could have a little cheesecake, for instance, and you could have… maybe crystallized pineapple? Chocolate strawberries?”

“Chocolate has milk in it, usually,” Amaranth said.

“Oh, right,” Hazel said.

“Dee likes fruit, I think,” I said. “She might go for that pineapple thing.”

“We’ll put it on the list for sure, then,” Hazel said. “Hey, you don’t mind if I invite my cousin, do you? A proper party would do a world of good for her spirits, but she won’t go anywhere there’s drinking.”

“Oh, well, I don’t see why not,” Amaranth said. “I mean, it might be rude to exclude her, since you couldn’t really keep the planning from her.”

“Let’s not go crazy and invite the whole floor, though,” I said.

“Baby, honestly,” Amaranth said, giving me a hurt look. “I know better than that.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“I just want there to be a big enough crowd, so that Two knows she’s loved,” Amaranth said.

“I think you might do that better by sticking to the crowd that loves her the best,” Hazel said.

“Maybe,” Amaranth said. “I guess so.”

“And their boyfriends,” Hazel added. “Andy’ll grumble less when I make him take me shopping for this if he knows he’ll be getting some of it himself.”

Amaranth laughed.

“Oh, bring him,” she said. “And you can bring Ian, baby. I think Two’s warming up to him, a bit.”

“I think so, too,” I said.

This might sound sappy, but it really warmed my heart to know that Two could inspire such loyalty in such a diverse group of people. I wondered how long she’d languished in that group home, with nothing to occupy herself but household chores… and nobody to protect her from the advances of her fellow abandoned golems. She’d come here thinking, in so many words, that there was “nothing interesting” about her… but a change of scenery and people who cared about her had been enough for her to find her voice.

“Er, are you two going to be much longer?” Hazel asked, interrupting my running thoughts. “I’ve a bit of a date tonight, and there’s a few more things I was planning on shaving if I could get the place to myself.”

“Oh!” Amaranth said. “If you’re not comfortable… baby, are you still scrubbing under your arms? Just rinse off and we’ll leave Hazel to it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

Technically, I had been scrubbing under them again, but I didn’t want to argue.