As I pushed my way through the crowd it felt like every shoulder that bumped me was checking the firmity of my conviction. How much was I ready to apologize for? How much would I be willing to reveal? Could I handle it if…if it was over?
The questions sliced through me faster than I could process. I don’t think they were questions one could easily answer, or if they were then they hid behind the wisdom of more years and broken hearts than I or Melissa had dealt with. Yet despite it all I still walked. Clack. Clack. My head held high, shoulders rolled back, chest out, and confident that when I reached them I’d have the words to answer those very questions.
It took one interminable minute to arrive at the bar where the trio stood. Melissa nursing a drink of something blue and bright—though that could have easily been the lights—while Amber swirled the marble-sized ball of ice in their tumbler. Ina didn’t hold a drink, but her face was squished and tight like she’d taken a hit of pure citric acid. It was a funny enough image that it brought a smile to my face which might as well have been an open door for the two Bacchanalian Ballasts I’d drunk earlier to press me back down into the moment.
I cocked my hip, and leaned forward just slightly—doing my best to present an image to Melissa that reminded her of what I had to offer, at least in part. An action which proved effective as she caught sight of me from the corner of her eye, but rotated her entire body to actually see me. Back to the bar, her mouth fell just slightly agape.
“Oh-oh,” she moaned.
“Hey, Melissa,” I said. “I missed you.”
Then I let my own gaze roam across her body to accentuate my words. She wore a dress made from a shifting slime mold whose contractions and expansions created brief evanescent gaps where you could see her soft flesh underneath.
“Your dress is amazing,” I said.
“This thing, oh no, it’s more a project than an actual outfit. I mean, compared to yours—” she said.
“It’s actually clothes,” Ina sniped.
“Ina!”
Melissa snapped her hand into Ina’s stomach. It was a light blow with no malice behind it. Ina rolled her eyes at the half-heard reproach. From the blush that dusted Melissa’s face, I figured it was a sentiment that she shared on some level—though from the smile which teased its way onto her face again and again it was sentiment that was hardly negative.
“We were just talking about you, Temple,” Amber said.
“Really?” I asked.
Ina snorted, “Narcissist.”
“Be good,” Melissa reminded Ina, “or do you really not want your after party treat?”
A dreamy look passed across Ina’s face as she hurriedly nodded. Melissa, satisfied with that, pressed a soft kiss to her cheek. The sight of it all was sandpaper against my heart. My own mind swiftly erecting far too vivid ideas of what the ‘treat’ in question would be. It was Amber who pulled me back from the production before it started with a quick squeeze of my hand.
“So you were talking about me,” I said.
Melissa whipped back to me. “Right, right. We, um, well Amber was…telling us about what you’ve been dealing with lately.”
I glanced at Amber, unaware of what secrets she knew and had revealed. “Really?”
“Not much that’s new, Temple,” Amber said. “I only helped frame it with some context.”
With her other hand she laid it across Melissa’s arm. Gave her a small squeeze that seemed to still the nerves she’d also brought to the party. The two of them shared their own look of understanding, and then returned their attention to me.
“I realized that we need to talk,” Melissa said. “About everything. Even the stuff neither of us wants to say.”
I said, “I’ll say anything.”
“I know you would, but right now I—we—need honesty.”
A low breath just shy of a whistle escaped my lips. The pressure of the conversation warring with the Indulgent mood I’d rather stay within. I nodded then offered my hand to her.
“Of course. Can that come with a dance?” I asked. Terminating the thought there before my anxieties made me voice the hanging worry that it’d be our last.
She handed her drink off to Ina. Then took my hand as I pulled us back toward the dance floor that had settled into a slow sensual groove at the direction of the music.
“Mel, I don’t—” Ina said.
“It’ll be fine. This has to happen, for me.”
Ina swallowed and—alls below, I hated the woman but I understood—she looked worried. Then eyed me down like I was a predator aiming to abscond with the life of her sheep. I’d yet to know if my fangs were real or imagined, but if they were real then I understood. Unlike her, in a dress made from frills and fabric composed of stitched together talismans, I didn’t look like anything human. Instead standing tall, cosmic in body, claws tipping my fingers, and a horn that stood prominent as any crown. Yeah, I think I understood how she could look so worried about me.
It was hard, but I swallowed my pride to get what I wanted. “Ina, I promise after we’re done talking she’s all yours. If, um, that’s what you want, Melissa.”
“It is. Does that work for you?” Melissa asked Ina.
“Yes,” she said.
The bitter pride and protectiveness in her eyes deflated. If I was no threat then she had no reason to push and strike me like she did. Instead, she had to smile and nod. Wishing Melissa luck with the being who’d held her heart before the two of them knew the other existed. Before I could abscond with her, Melissa latched her hand about Amber’s wrist.
“Amber, you have to come with,” Melissa said. “All of this involves you too.”
Amber glanced up at me. Is it okay?
My answer was me grasping Amber’s other hand and pulling her with us alongside Melissa. If she needed Amber—and alls below, I often needed Amber—then she’d be there.
The three of us changed in arrangement from a vague triangle to something closer to a sandwich as the dance floor was too congested with pressed together couples. There was me on the outside, hands on Melissa’s hips pulling her close to me. My thigh pressed between her legs as hers was to mine. Behind her, also pushing her in, was Amber who loomed over the two of us and wrapped her hands around my waist. As a triad we danced to the syrup thick voice of the singer currently on stage. It was a song that dripped slow with desire in all its messy and mechanical beauty.
“So how do we start?” I asked.
Melissa thought for a moment, then answered, “Finish what you were saying back at the room.”
“Are you sure? I thought it was making you mad.”
She blushed and stuttered, “Mad, n-no. I was a little overstimulated. Not in the right mindset for everything.”
“And this isn’t overstimulating?” I asked. A roll of hips grinding my thigh against her.
She let out a squeak that dragged into a chuckling moan. “No.”
Amber crooned, “It’s a bit more fair in this context than only one person being naked.”
She pulled on me while giving a solid thrust of her own hips behind Melissa. Pressing the both of us onto the other’s thigh unleashing a harmonious moan that wound up toward her.
“Point taken,” I muttered. “Okay, so I said I was sorry…”
Melissa and Amber nodded.
“And, well, I was feeling so much when I woke up. I’d just found out I was a Baron—well a pseudo one—and even though I played it off, I basically died. So when you said to stop using the spell that way, I felt scared. At the time it seemed like they’d already killed you, Amber, and I worried about what Ina and her team would’ve done to you, Melissa.”
“They didn’t kill her though,” Melissa said. “We were fine.”
“This time. You were fine this time, and I want to be strong enough that you’ll always be fine. Not cause of luck, but because I kept you safe. When I saw their illusion I thought I’d already failed one of you.”
“No one can be safe forever, Temple,” Amber said.
Melissa added, “The safest thing we could do is go back home.”
“And that’s not even that safe,” I said. “They killed Mom and Dad there after all.”
“They did, and so it means you want the impossible. Unless you’re willing to put me in a box and shove it into Amber’s storage-spell, you can’t guarantee anything, Nadia.”
“I know. I know. We’d said that I couldn’t make decisions for you any more…”
“When?” she asked.
“At the outpost. You said it when you and Amber took out the cultists.”
“Nadia, I was just mad and…”
Amber whispered, “Within your right. The two of you needed—and still need—to find terms you can live with when it comes to the other. Not talking and just imposing won’t make the hurt stop.”
I asked, “When’d you become the master of love?”
“Never. This is just how I helped settle issues between me and my siblings. Boundaries are a universal concern. Anyways, continue, Temple.”
So I did. “Right, so since I couldn’t tell you or keep you from doing something dangerous I decided to take on the danger myself. If I burned then you didn’t have to.”
Melissa laid her head against my chest. Wrapped her arms around my neck.
“If you burned, I’d never forgive myself. It’s why I wanted you to stop using it.” She said, “Which puts us on the same problem, I suppose.”
Amber said, “You both want the other to be safe.”
I pressed my chin against the top of her head. She smelled of Amber, myself, her surprisingly fruity drink, and she smelled of home. Not the geography of my ruin of a house, but the very security I’d felt so adrift in lacking.
“Melissa, I’m sorry for everything. I shouldn’t have lashed out. I should’ve told you about the spell when I first developed it with Sphinx—let alone using it that way—but above all I’m sorry for changing. We had something really good, and we didn’t really talk about how to keep it before I tossed it aside. It’s all my fault.”
It felt good to cry then. I mumbled quiet apologies into Melissa’s hair as my tears moistened her curly ash tresses. Amber raised a hand to stroke my hair as I let it out. How much I just wanted to go home.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“No,” she said. I leaned back in shock, but her eyes were soft and glistening. Tears of her own on the edge of flowing.
“I mean, I do accept your apology, but it’s not all your fault. People change Nadia, for good reasons and sad reasons and bad reasons. I’m just sorry I couldn’t handle that,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
Her voice stopped as she choked up her next words. Amber guided us back together. Her voice low and swirling around us like the nebula mist that surrounded me and by extension them.
Amber said, “Princess, this is where you tell the truth. Like you said, honesty, even if it’s the stuff you don’t want to say.”
Melissa groaned, “I did say that.”
“You did, and I can handle it,” I said.
She buried her face back into my chest. As Amber swayed us from side to side along with the bobbing tide of the music.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t handle you changing because I was seeing you become something other than the girl I fell in love with back home.”
The words sunk into my gut. A long metal weight within me causing my own motion to stall.
She continued, “I just hoped that that Nadia was still in there. The one before you know…”
I dragged myself back in step with them. Though my hands rose from Melissa’s hips to cling to Amber’s back. We were in the rapids now and I needed something to be my support.
“She might be, but I don’t know,” I admitted. “I feel so divided all the time. Leaning one way one moment and another way the next. Maybe that’s her just trying to come back…” or maybe that’s her dying gasp I continued in my head.
I asked, “What was she—me—I like…what was I like before everything?”
Melissa smiled as she glanced away from me to a happier past.
“She—you—were like the sun in the sky. Energetic, boisterous, brilliant especially when forced to think on your feet. Though you’d drag those same feet when you didn’t want to do something.” The adoration was a light through her words as she spoke. “You were pretty lewd most of the time, but you had a great heart. Sometimes a little black and white in your thinking. Though not so bad that it ever caused trouble. It solved trouble more times than not. There was even this time…”
She continued on to describe a story I don’t remember. It involved me rather intensely, and it landed like words read on a page versus the resurrection of some recollection. It moved me so little I briefly imagined that it was just a story Melissa had confused with history. Though, the bright energetic person she described sounded wonderful. Nothing like the crying mass murderer who she clung to in the moment.
“...so yeah. You maybe did sort people into friends or foes. If the latter they got the full brunt of a righteous Nadia, and if the former they—I—had a source of pure love.” She took a moment, then said, “I’d worried for a while now that you’d moved me from the former to the latter.”
“Melissa, I still need you,” I said.
She smirked and flicked my nose in recrimination. “I said, love, Nadia. Not need. The old you could love someone no matter their position to you. It was a perpetual love found whether I was absent or present, needed or wanted or there if I just saw you passing in the hall.”
“Melissa, I…” I trailed off. My gaze skipped around at all the micro expressions I needed to track to stay present. She had a smile, but her eyes were wet, and her face was blushed, yet there was no light in her eyes, and…I closed my own. Laid my head down into her neck. Kissed and sucked and teased the flesh to a bright coloration of a newly birthed hickey. My fangs begging me to bite down with the full force of what I felt. Consuming her piece by piece so she could know without a doubt that I loved her in her entirety.
Through the dialect of sentence distorting sobs, I said, “I love you. I’ll never stop loving you. It is there, it is perpetual, I promise you.”
“Then why not tell me that your mom was a Sovereign? The old Nadia never kept secrets. You were in and knew or out and did not matter. I was in. I’ve always been in.”
Behind my shut eyes, I saw the answer. It was in the moment I first knew what I was—even if I denied it and still do.
“It was that night when you looked at me like I was a monster—”
She hurried out, “I told you, I was just scared that night and—”
“Melissa,” Amber said, “let her finish.”
“Right,” she said.
“Melissa, I don’t blame you for being scared. I just felt ashamed that you were right. Whatever this Nadia is, and all the things she—I—have already done in my brief time existing was a reason, after a reason, after a reason for you to see me that way,” I said. “I’d only said I was going to kill some people and I got that look. It became easy to imagine that if I said, ‘Hey, Melissa, babe, I’m the child of an entity—whatever that means.’ And you’d just look at me like I was something inhuman.”
“Nadia, most of my family pushes the boundary of the human form already. I have four pupils. I can handle you being adopted. Even by something as wild as a Sovereign.”
“Really?” I asked. “Cause that’s not a thought you had to consider about the old Nadia. She gets to be normal forever, and I’m…”
“You’re what?” she asked. “Who is this Nadia?”
I raised my head from her shoulder. Smiled with fangs on full display. Her eyes widened in fixation of their sharp flesh rending point—so they were real, to some extent—then swallowed.
“I’m a killer—I think—I’ve at least killed enough people to feel like I am.”
“It was in self—” she tried to argue. Amber pressed a kiss to the other side of Melissa’s neck silencing her.
“My first were in question. When I was off with Secretary, I landed into such a problem that the only way out was the one I could cut through. So I cut through them. Burned them with my spell, and watched as their very fate snapped away from them. No one will remember them because I made it so they can’t. Then there was our first night here, I’d gotten picked for an opportunity to gain more points for us, and so joined this thing they called a wild hunt. I stabbed a man, decapitated a woman, slaughtered most of the summoners from a few nights ago who got denied to take the test. One of them I crushed beneath my feet. I let their blood coat me. Then there was Ina and her team who I tried to kill. Then of course all of the Lurkers who I’d slain since I met Secretary to even the test yesterday. Melissa, I don’t even know my proper body count at this point.”
Melissa looked away from me as I admitted to the fullest extent of what I’d done. I leaned in toward her ear to make sure she heard me.
“Melissa,” I said. “I’m likely City Killer’s daughter, and I have the body count you’d expect. I know you wanted to keep me from crossing that line, but if there’s any line between us it’s that one. It’s not how much I love—that is immense—and it’s not how much I’d sacrifice for you—that’s everything—but it all comes at the understanding that I’m—this Nadia—is very very good at two things. Not truly dying and making sure everyone who attempted to put me down finds themselves slain by my glaive or my spells.”
“Why can’t you just be a normal grieving person?” she asked.
“Unfortunately, this Nadia—me—is likely a monster that can’t do that. Why grieve when I can act. Especially when it seems to be my talent,” I said. “So, tell me, can you love this Nadia?”
Melissa was silent.
“Even if you don’t want to say it,” I reminded her.
She glanced up at me—it was the only way she could meet my eyes—and shook her head.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know and I…” she lost her words. Then found new ones, “If my Nadia isn’t coming back can you let me go?”
Her hands slid over my body like I was too hot to hold. I caught her wrists, and pressed her forward into Amber. Then let my lips hover just above her mouth.
“No,” I said.
She cried at the denial of her freedom by me. I wanted to say yes, but I wasn’t ready to lose my home in her heart. Watching her describe someone with my face and name with the kind of love and affection this me wasn’t born to…it made me hungry for it. I’d become sated on death, but I needed so much more love if I was to ever be brought to something akin to a balance. Sphinx’s love for me wasn’t enough. Amber’s love for me wasn’t enough. In the dark part of my spirit I knew, Melissa’s love wouldn’t be enough. Yet I would feel the lack of them all if I lost any.
I kissed away her tears as if it was something I hadn’t caused. Watched Amber from that strange angle as she maintained an egalitarian expression. There was care for Melissa in it. She’d even had care for me within it. Yet wrapping all of that up was an acceptance of what was playing out as if it was a story she’d seen before. I only took pleasure in knowing that Amber didn’t see me as something lesser for it all.
“Melissa,” I asked, “can you give me—this me—a chance? By the exam’s end if you still don’t love me then yes, I’ll let you go. Just don’t abandon me beforehand.”
She released a shuddering breath. “Okay, but we’re doing this differently and intentionally because you’re someone else.”
“Of course,” I agreed.
“So first, no more secrets. If you keep a single one and I discover it, then we’re done.”
“I can agree to that.”
“Second, you have to be nice to Ina.”
I groaned. Melissa frowned and fixed me with her eyes that retained a sort of stalwart defiance.
“I am not yours alone anymore,” she said. “I belonged to my Nadia, not you, and especially not after our engagement was broken. If you love me and want me, then you’re one of my suitors on equal footing as everyone else.”
“So you and Ina?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said, “and per our agreement to no more secrets, I’ll tell you if you want to know all the details.”
I pouted. Alls below, I didn’t need the details about her with her, ugh.
She said, “Don’t pout. Not like I haven’t noticed you have your eye on others. That’s one thing you and my Nadia have in common, you both like to look around.”
“I haven’t done much beyond looking,” I said.
“So what have you done?”
“Do you want me to demonstrate?” I asked. My eyes fixed on her lips.
She pressed against me, but glanced up toward Amber. Then smirked.
“No, but I do want to see. Show me who it was with.”
I chuckled, “It wouldn’t be polite if I summoned Sphinx out here just for a makeout.”
Amber laughed as she rolled her hips into Melissa sliding her up on my thigh. While bringing me closer to her in the space above Melissa’s head.
“Knew it,” she said.
Melissa tilted my head from below until I locked eyes with Amber. It was like staring into an open furnace as the flames attacked their confines with a primal indignation. Amber was trying to be on her best behavior as our mediator, but couldn’t help but want me. I groaned as Melissa’s thigh ground against me loosing all the feelings I kept inside.
She said, “No lies, Nadia, show me what you did with Amber.”
“Okay, any chance you have whiskey in that storage-spell?” I asked Amber.
She reached into it and pulled out a glass bottle blown to look like an Old World Japanese temple.
“I thought you didn’t get to have the imported stuff?” I asked.
She winked. “I have to make this stuff last, so I can have it for moments like these.”
Then she tilted the bottle forward trusting I’d catch it with my mouth. I did, and let the deep amber liquor pool into my mouth until it had become an ocean. Drops of it escaped the side of mouth before finding its way to my throat where Amber—standing on her tiptoes—caught it with her own kisses.
When Amber felt I’d had enough, she removed the bottle, dropping it back into storage. Then snaked her fingers through my hair. Grabbed at the root and used it to lead my mouth to hers. We kissed. Not as the explorative promise of more were one of us to cross the line, but an abandonment of any line between us at all. Her tongue snaking about mine to tease and taste me. My teeth nipping at her bottom lip stretching it before letting it snap back so no drops were spilled. We kissed like there was no more whiskey between the earth and the moon. There was only now, this taste, and our desire to have more of it. Amber tried to pull back—she always wanted to pull back first—so I reached past Melissa to capture her by the lapels of her coat and pulled her forward.
I growled in victory at keeping her close. Ground my hips forward as if I could do it hard enough that Amber would feel it through Melissa. Amber, to her credit, met my lust with her own as I loosened her reins to know what she felt when wild. It felt like a bucking as she thrust again and again using Melissa as the vector by which she’d rip pleasure through me. Moans that saw me swallow some of the drink.
“I want some,” Melissa said.
We opened our eyes, and Amber looked like I’d found her about to steal away the last slice of cake. She whimpered—oh she whimpered—but wouldn’t move without my go ahead. So I took Melissa’s head and tilted it back as she opened wide. Then met Amber’s gaze and winked. Only if I’m around. Then together we pulled apart and let the whiskey that still remained waterfall into the waiting mouth between us.
It was messy, and I was happy for it. As Amber lifted Melissa up so we could both kiss and lick away the alcohol that hadn't perfectly landed in her mouth. Whatever this was was good, I thought—and still think. As our mouths found each other in a three-way kiss I realized how much was happening beyond my vision. Amber was a comfort for Melissa in a way I wasn’t—couldn’t be. While for me she was the hand that kept me from staying in the mud when I fell. In this moment I realized that, maybe this could work, and Melissa could find a way to love me again. Especially if I had Amber to be the catalyst.
It was a perfect moment, and then the lights changed. Blues and purples banished in favor of an all consuming red that made the club out to be some charnel venue. The ever falling rain becoming fat droplets of some unseen giant’s heartsblood. Which completely killed the mood myself, Amber, and Melissa had finally found.
It only got worse when a voice that oozed like a slit throat sang, “Do you want it?”
Amber’s head shot up as her eyes dilated in the light. Her head on a swivel in search of the voice’s origin.
“Do you want it?” the voice sang again. This time the crowd of Lodgemembers and secretaries joining in.
Amber backed away from us. She looked actually scared.
The voice screamed, “Do you want it!”
“Fuck no,” Amber said before retreating.
“What’s wrong?” Melissa asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll find out.”
Then I chased after her. Pushing past people in rapt attention awaiting the arrival of whatever made Amber run. As I slid and juked around other party goers I caught up to her. My hand snagging her coat. She slipped free of it.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
The band had started playing. It was the opening notes of a song that my dad was always surprised survived the Changeover. The song was about the world’s end, about being fringe-standing fuck-ups, and the twisting serpent of truth across time. It was as they played that a crimson miasma snaked across the floor and swam through the air before coalescing on stage. Spinning together like twine about a spindle, before blossoming into an open spider lily. Within which stood—clad in a cocktail dress that flowed with the viscosity of blood, and might’ve been made from blood—was the Lodgemaster Nemesis Khapoor, my enemy and the source of Amber’s abject terror.