Malia and Jeremy sat next to each other across the room from the fire. As they had the night before, they shared a flask of the homemade whiskey Pearl and Amanda distilled. I’d stopped drinking when we came back inside. It was churlish, I knew that, but I didn’t want to share a cup with Jeremy. I didn’t want to share several things with him in the moment.

Right then, as I stared daggers at him through the flames, Jeremy wasn’t sharing anyway. He and Malia huddled together and giggled. His face hovered too close to hers for my tastes. When Kain stepped into the room, I was half blind with jealousy.

When Kain motioned to Jeremy, the young man consulted with Malia. They both stood up in their stupor to walk the barrier between our safe zone and the outside. Rather than leave them alone in the snow, I stood up. “I’ll take the perimeter guard for you this pass, Jeremy.”

He blinked at me and shrugged. “Thanks Harry.”

Malia squinted at him, but I just turned away and fumed as I walked outside. I didn’t need a coat or any protective gear and I wanted to be alone. With the rest of the people around the fire, there was no way for the two to get up to any hanky-panky anyway.

The weather had turned even colder, based on the icicles that formed on the eaves of the shop, the way the ice had gathered on the windows. Despite the sub-zero temperatures, I felt like I stood in a well air-conditioned room under a heater.

The raw jealousy in my heart might have helped warm me too. If not for Jeremy, I wouldn’t have ever explained to Malia how I felt anyway. He wasn’t in my way as much as I was. Besides all of that, I don’t even know if Malia liked me in the way I liked her.

Uncertainly, fear, doubt, they all blocked me as well as Jeremy’s curly red hair and distant gaze. Maybe if I’d been willing to keep getting drunk it would have been different. After a few minutes outside, my head had cleared anyway. The fear loomed larger than the way I felt about Malia, as large and dark as the plume of snow around the dome of the shop.

Each time I passed them, I checked the runes on the quarters and on the cross-quarters. They looked undisturbed to me, though the only way I knew that was by the way the runes continued to writhe and dance in my vision.

With every pass around the border, I committed myself further to dispensing with my childish infatuation with Malia. What were the chances she was interested in me anyway? Meeting Pearl and Amanda had blown the odds out of proportion. All of those considerations aside, this was the end of the world, and we’d need people to re-populate. I wasn’t going to help do that with Malia, even if she liked me back.

When I walked back into the room several hours had passed. Tia huddled by herself under a blanket while Malia and Jeremy shared one on his side of the fire. The group ate from cans of food Jeremy had scavenged. I felt even more like an interloper then. He kept his arm draped over Malia while she told the story of our fight against the manticore. If Alaric had been awake, I would have asked her to beg off. But he was passed out and I enjoyed her slurred and broken rendition of the tale.

I played a more heroic and central role than I remembered. It made me want to thank her privately later. Tia contributed some details to the story, she’d been awake and terrified during, but her recall of the events impressed me. Of course, Tia was sober, so she had an advantage over Malia. No one asked me to elaborate, which I appreciated.

Rather than join in the heavy drinking after dinner, I retired to the corner of the room where I could watch most of the people as well as the main door. It wasn’t far from where Kain sat when he slept in the room with the rest of us, which made me wonder if he chose the spot on purpose.

I drifted off to sleep to the sound of laughter and clanking tin cups.

I woke to a door shutting further into the building. Amanda and Pearl’s door made more noise than I would expect for a bedroom door. When I jolted awake, I spotted Jeremy and Malia over on the opposite side of the fire. She rested her head on his shoulder with her eyes closed, while he breathed slowly and hardly shifted in his sleep.

My own ability to sleep continued to fail me. I got up once, used the bathroom and returned to my seat, but I couldn’t manage to drift off again. While I considered dipping into Pearl and Amanda’s booze stores, Jeremy shifted. I froze while I watched him raise his head and look over at Malia where she slept. He poked her nose and my cheeks flared with angry jealousy. But Malia didn’t stir one bit. For a second, my heart palpated with fear he might take advantage of her. My fists clenched and unclenched in time with my worried heart. But then Jeremy stood up and used the bathroom.

I sighed when he left and settled back against the wall. When the bathroom door opened back up, I shut my eyes and feigned sleep. Talking to Jeremy sounded like the worst possible world in the moment.

His foot steps circled the room, drifting closer and further from the fire. I peeked at him to find him stooped over first his little brothers, then Tia, and finally Alaric. When he turned back to me, I shut my eyes again and strained my ears to listen. He stepped in front of me and waited. I felt a breeze pass before my face as if he were checking to see if I was awake. I had no idea what he was up to, so I kept my eyes closed.

When his footsteps carried him away from me, I opened my eyes back up again. He was on all fours hovering over Malia. Aside from my brief moment of chill after sharing my energy with the others, I hadn’t felt this cold since the Collapse.

His hands moved to Malia’s side and she didn’t react. I wanted to be wrong about this, I wanted to mistake what I’d seen. At the same time, I would have clutched at any excuse to expose Jeremy. Faced with what I suspected he was doing, I regretted my own twisted desires and prayed to the silent gods for him to stop.

He didn’t.

When he turned Malia onto her back and slipped his hand into her blanket, I stood up as silent as as death. Grunting as he felt her up, Jeremy sickened me as I approached him.

“You need to stop that,” he trembled at my voice and turned his head over his shoulder to look at me. He’d pulled Malia’s shirt aside and exposed one of her breasts.

I averted my eyes and seethed with anger as he looked at me dreamily. “Jealous? Sorry, I don’t do guys…” My hands shook from the insult, from how close it cut to the bone. When he turned back to Malia, I failed to react at first.

But my reason and wits quickly recovered and I grabbed his shoulder. Strength I hadn’t known I possessed pulled him away from her. “I said you need to stop. Now. She’s passed out, can’t consent and I won’t let you rape her in front of me.”

He snickered at me and pushed my hand off his shoulder. “Shut up, hag. She wanted it before anyway.”

I slapped him faster than I could think, before he pulled his face away. “And I said stop!” Shouting the words didn’t help me right then.

Jeremy was a head taller than I and he brought his hand around with a lightning quick blow. I found out first hand that my azure barrier didn’t do anything about hand-to-hand attacks right then. Spots appeared in my vision as his fist connected with my jaw.

“Fuck you, tranny slut!” His words and the pain in my mouth ripped tears from my eyes as I raised my hands to block his attacks.

But the next several blows landed in my gut, driving the wind out of me. I forgot all about raising my hands as Jeremy switched back to my face. “You fucking disgust me!” In an out-of-body delirium, I had a hard time telling what hurt more, the words or the punches.

Voices soon added themselves to Jeremy’s shouting. But a blur shot between us with a vengeance.

“You leave her the fuck alone, asshole!” Blinking through blurry eyes, I spotted Alaric standing with his fist raised and something brandished in it. I appreciated that he called me her in the moment.

“Piss off cripple…” Jeremy’s words stopped abruptly when Alaric swung his hand down at the red-head’s face.

A scream cut through the melee, a little late now, as Alaric hit Jeremy twice across the face. He turned to me and dropped whatever weapon he’d been wielding. “Are you okay?” He wrapped an arm around me as my legs gave out. More shouting, all of it feminine broke out as I lost consciousness.

My last thought was, At least I saved Malia.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

When I woke up, I was alone in a strange room. A thick mattress, the kind I would have expected in our former modern home, filled most of the room with its girth. A few small crates of books littered the ground and a table made of a thin piece of plywood atop an empty crate sat in the corner.

My face still ached from where Jeremy struck me, so the first thing I did was raise the edge of Roo to my cheeks. As I narrowed my eyes and let my focus drift, I could see Roo’s edges fluttering against my skin. Green and gold energy flowed out of Roo and into my cheeks and jaw. Where it touched the latter, pain flared in my face but then quickly subsided. Acting on its own accord, Roo traced a line down to my belly and danced there for a few seconds, sending magical healing into my gut. It lingered there for quite some time, which made me realize how much damage Jeremy had done to me in a relatively short amount of time.

A door opened in the room, but I ignored it. Naiveté convinced me that no one would hurt me now, that the bonds of civilization remained firm despite everything. Luck protected me this time.

“Harriet, if you’re awake and feel up to it, can you come outside please?” Amanda’s voice held the stern tones of a teacher in them.

The moment I turned my attention to where she stood in the door, the magical healing from Roo faded. “Sure, give me a moment. I need to use the restroom.”

In the mirror I saw my face. Large black and blue bruises covered the left side of my face. When I lifted Roo out of the way, it exposed a massive series of bruises on my stomach and lower ribs. It ached to breathe as I stared at myself in the mirror. When I used the restroom, I checked the commode and didn’t find any blood. The absence surprised me and I felt certain without Roo, I would have have internal bleeding.

I stood up and took a deep breath. I didn’t want to reveal my injuries to these people, the shame of my beating. But then I remembered Alaric. I had no idea what they might have been doing to him in my absence.

Rushing out of the bathroom proved a poor choice. My legs wobbled and the hallway tilted like I’d seen someone draw my blood. I had to take a moment to balance against the wall. While I did that, Malia walked in.

Her cheeks were streaked with tears. The moment she spotted me, she rushed me and wrapped me up in a hug. “Oh god, what did he do to you?”

“Nothing permanent.” My voice croaked out more than it had when Amanda spoke to me. The tightness on the inside made it harder to speak to Malia than I expected.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Malia wore a look of horror on her face when she stared at me.

I opened my mouth to claim that Jeremy and I had a disagreement. But then I imagined myself in her position. If someone had done what Jeremy had to me, I would want to know so I could stay the fuck away from him. “Last night, after you passed out, I woke up in the middle of the night to find Jeremy groping you.”

Malia shook her head, “no…”

“I’m sorry, Malia, he had your shirt partially off and his hands down your pants.” I dropped my eyes and shook my head, “I’m so sorry.”

“Did you attack him?” Her tone was wrong, as if she were hoping I’d belted him in the face.

“Not exactly. I told him to stop and tried to pull him off you. But then he called me names so I slapped him…” Tears came back out of my eyes. I was ashamed at how weak and pathetic I’d been. “…then he started beating me, he did this to me.” I motioned to myself and kept my gaze away from her. “I am so sorry.”

From the tiny part of Malia’s front I could see, her hands clenched and unclenched much the way mine had. “Thank you.”

“What?”

Before I could raise my eyes, she pulled me into an embrace. “I said “thank you,” and I meant it. You don’t have anything to be sorry about, hon.” Her body shook and I found Malia crying into my shoulder for some reason. “I can’t believe that asshole. I told him I wasn’t interested.”

I bit my lip, which I immediately regretted as it was still sore from the previous night.

“Let’s go back in there and talk to the moms. They need to hear this, they think Alaric did most of the fighting.”

“How is that possible?”

When I walked into the main room, Tia ran for me with her arms outstretched. “Harriet, they’re mad at Alaric for protecting you and no one will listen to me!”

Amanda stood up with Pearl right beside her. Alaric squatted in chains with a gag in his mouth while Jeremy lay on the ground. The latter bore a larger mark across his face than I did, as if he’d been struck with a massive metal bar. For a second, I worried as I couldn’t see him breathing at first. With the rise of his chest, I sighed. Then I knelt down next to him and let my eyes lose their focus.

“What are you doing?” Pearl and Malia asked at the same time, but their tones were different from each other.

“I need some quiet to heal him, shush, please.” I turned back to face Jeremy, but then Malia’s hand grabbed my shoulder.

“After what he did?”

I opened and shut my mouth, but then I shook my head. “Yes. I don’t know what he deserves, but it isn’t death.” I didn’t pull away from her, instead I looked up into Malia’s eyes. If she’d insisted, I might have stopped trying to heal Jeremy that very moment. But she nodded and me and knelt down next to me, putting her hand in mine.

“You’re a better person than me.”

I snorted and shook my head. “I doubt that, but thanks.”

Without further interruptions, I entered my light trance and set Roo’s edge fluttering across Jeremy’s head and face. Power surged out of me and I felt dizzy a moment. The chill in the air reached in and grabbed the backs of my ankles as a torrent of green energy flowed out of my body and into Jeremy’s. He coughed a few times as the redness across his face faded, but he didn’t wake up before I ran out of energy. I wasn’t going to let him die, but I wasn’t going to pass out or risk myself on Jeremy’s behalf.

When I rocked back off my heels, I could feel the cold of the concrete below me. This was why I would never have concrete floors in my own home. They were too close to mechanic floors. With my energy depleted, my thoughts jumbled up in my head. Malia helped me scoot near the fire while Amanda and Pearl hovered.

“Can you tell us what happened now?” Pearl crossed her hands over her chest and peered down at me with a furious gaze. Amanda remained near her son, flitting one way and another as she worried over her.

“Yes. Last night I caught Jeremy molesting Malia while she was passed out…” I added in the few details I’d left out when I spoke to Malia the first time. When I described seeing him crouched over her on all fours, she tightened her grip in my hands. “…then he started beating me. If not for Alaric, I think Jeremy would have tried to kill me. Or would have succeeded.” I was pretty sure now that he’d been trying to kill me from the get-go.

“Bullshit!” Pearl snarled at me when I opened my hands. “You’re just covering for your friend!”

“You mean the one-armed guy you have tied up over there?” I stood up and walked over to Alaric. “Speaking of which…” I proceeded to loosen his chains and remove the gag from his mouth.

“You okay, Har… Harriet?” I snorted at him and rolled my eyes.

“Yeah, my hero.” I dropped the last chain off of his shoulders and patted him on the arm. “Thanks for stepping in.” He saved my life, he deserved a medal and a decent meal, not chains.

“What the fuck?!” Pearl advanced on the three of us, her voice as loud as she could raise it. “After everything we’ve done for you, you’d… do this?!”

I wasn’t sure what she meant, freeing my friend or accusing her son of rape, but it didn’t matter to me. “Yes. You’re not keeping Alaric tied up any longer.”

“God and Goddess, this is unaccept…” Pearl’s rage flowed out of her when Amanda stood and touched her arm.

“Thats enough, sweetheart.” She looked at me and then back at Malia. “Is what you’re saying the truth?”

“Yes.” I swallowed as I spoke, reviewing my memory for any possible inaccuracies or omissions.

Malia squirmed. “When I woke up this morning, when all of the shouting started, my shirt was half off and my pants were unbuttoned.” She looked green as she said it, in her place I would have been hysterical. Malia was made of stuff ten times stronger than me.

Amanda cupped her hand over her mouth as tears flared in the corners of her eyes. She glanced over at Jeremy. Before she could say anything, Pearl advanced on us again. “This is all your fault, if you hadn’t drank so much…”

“Pearl S Merriwether!” The words followed a slap and Amanda’s own gasp as she looked at her hand and at her wife’s cheek. The moment of surprise and shock faded and Amanda gritted her teeth. “After everything… how could you? We gave them that alcohol.”

Pearl, clutching her face, retreated in tears from the room to hide in the bedroom where I’d woken up. Amanda looked over at us, opened her mouth and then shook her head. She fled after Pearl with speed.

The moment the door to their room slammed, the shouting ensued.

“Did Jeremy do something bad?” Tia pulled on Roo where she stood next to me.

I lifted her into my arms and said, “Yeah, kiddo. He did.” I had nothing to add to that.

Kain did. “Well, this is a fine ol’ giant cow turd.”

“I’m not sleeping here with him in the room.” Malia pointed to Jeremy.

“Me neither. Not after what he did.” I squeezed her hand, but tried not to look at her.

“What do we do then?” Alaric asked the question as he eyed the door to the blizzard outside. The monsters hadn’t needed to attack us in several days; we’d found our own monsters.

“We leave.” I spoke with confidence I didn’t feel in my heart. “Today. As soon as we’ve packed.” I was terrified and nervous about what would happen outside. But at the same time, Jeremy would wake up soon and I didn’t want to be here when he did.

In order to be heard over the shouting in the mom’s room, I had to bang on the door. Pearl answered, her face flushed with rage. “What in the hell do you want now?” I could almost hear her add some version of the slur Jeremy used against me to the end of her sentence.

“Nothing. We’re leaving. I thought you two should know.” I turned away from the door, happy to have gotten the last word in with Pearl while Amanda shouted for me to wait.

Pearl sulked in her room while Amanda flitted about the main room of the mechanic’s. A part of me expected her to offer us sandwiches or some other ridiculous mom food. Another suspected she watched to see if we’d try to take anything that didn’t belong to us. Kain and the others moved through their steps silently, but Amanda approached me as I made my last pass through the room.

“Can you… do you mind checking on Jeremy again?” Her eyes wandered over the room behind me as she asked, too ashamed to face me.

I got that. “Sure.” I turned back to the others. “Hey yall, give me a few minutes?”

No one protested my final ministrations over Jeremy. What energy I’d expended healing him earlier had partially returned, enough that I managed to fill him with a bit more than the first time. I had the impression that the more I practiced releasing the energy in my body, the more accustomed I would become and my stores themselves would grow larger.

Amanda wrung her hands and fiddled with the edges of her coat as our group filed out of the room. I expected another plea for us to remain, or at least an apology. But all she managed was to open her mouth and wince as we turned and left. I didn’t blame her. In her position, if my son had done something like what Jeremy had done, I don’t know what I would have said.

In truth, I was impressed she managed to stand and face us the whole time. It made me respect her and pray for the safety of Amanda and her little family, despite everything.