Nemesis Khapoor—one of the five who ruined my life—had through presence alone stolen the breath of everyone in the room. There on that stage she shimmied and swayed through the song’s relatively few verses. Belted with abandon its chorus out to a crowd that sang with her. Returning ten-fold every iota of energy she tossed out as crumbs to the cult of adoration that had revealed its face. She may have only been a regional Lodgemaster, but here in this moment she was a queen, their saint, the idol of which all Lodgemembers sought to emulate.
It took all my effort to look away. An effort that was rewarded by getting to glimpse the despair and loathing that stewed in Amber’s face. Every muscle tensed in anticipation of Nemesis deciding to strike just then. A possibility that Amber no doubt saw as a surety.
“Amber,” I said, squeezing her wrist so she’d look at me and not her. “What’s wrong?”
Her eyes drifted downward, hesitant to look away from the monster in our midst.
“I can’t be here.”
“Why?” I asked. “Help me understand.”
“She—we—fuck.” She wrenched her arm free from my hold. “Just trust me, Temple. I’m doing this for you. Always for you.”
I was a summoner, an adult in the eyes of society, but I wasn’t so old as to resist the urge to physically express my displeasure—my rejection of this. My hand whipped across her face.
“You don’t get to say that,” I said. “I do trust you. I’ve stayed trusting you, but you can’t tell me why you have to run? Why you look so afraid? Trust me, Amber, trust me for once with the weight of you.”
I steadied myself by clinging to her face. My heart was treading water as I sought to rediscover the connection that had been between us only moments before Nemesis killed it. Amber closed her eyes rather than look at me.
I pleaded, “I can carry it.”
“We have history, her and I.” She said, “And my feelings are…they’ll give me away.”
“Then be here with me. We had a plan, but maybe we make a new one. We stand together, support each other, and—”
“And what, Temple?” she asked. “And what?”
I whispered, “We—”
“Kill her? Temple, that’s impossible. It…”
I stopped listening. Why listen to a traitor? A liar. Instead, I shoved her. She looked surprised, and so wasn’t ready when I threw her jacket at her nor when I grabbed an unattended drink from the bar to launch as a projectile. The glass shattered against her upraised arm. Shards falling off into darkness.
It was a blessing that Nemesis proved so arresting that no one spared a glance at my argument with Amber. Not even to witness the way my hand rose, shaking with an Atomic Glory pointed at her face. She knew how dangerous my spell was, but even at this point blank range her eyes could only flick back to watch Nemesis fucking Khapoor.
“Run then,” I said. “Better I know you won’t stand with me now than when it’ll actually matter.”
Amber said, “There’s no point standing now if it doesn’t matter. That’s just throwing away your life. You can come with me. We could—”
“No,” I said. “I refuse to be a coward even if it’s with you. Everything about what we’ve done was to get me in the room with her. Well here I am and here she is. In the same room.”
I shook the spell from my hand. Despite her abandoning me, there underneath the Suppression of my higher reason and the cloying muck of Indulgence pulling me toward impulse was the line I refused to cross. The oath I’d sworn to her and to Melissa. Even if they betrayed me, I couldn’t and wouldn’t harm them.
Though even with this commitment, if I’d counted emotional harm then in that moment I’d already proven that the oath was something ephemeral rather than ironclad. The slow nod of acknowledgment Amber gave me—something that belonged on the face of a soldier speaking to a superior, rather than one lover to another—was the only action that could restrain the pain which would otherwise overwhelm her words. Then she left. Disappearing as she always did.
Abandoned and reeling, I looked towards my home—Melissa—only to discover Ina had reclaimed her. The two were peeling off toward the club’s exit. Ina no doubt her mind on whatever reward was waiting for her, and Melissa not even sparing a glance in search of me or Amber. She was free, and ultimately unburdened by the weight of purpose that I carried.
It was a weight that I realized I’d forgotten. Beneath the exam, the party, and the stirring of my heart I had stopped hearing the wailing moan for justice that spoke in the voice of Dad and Mom. I could hear their condemnation of the world for abandoning them. The sorrow and hurt at my betrayal of them. Yet there was a path to forgiveness if I was strong enough to take it. First, I had to find a piece of glass.
I dropped to my knees, hands roaming the ground, as my eyes adjusted to the bloody shadow beneath the bar. As I turned my head I saw it—a crimson glint—and grasped it. The shard refused to budge. Pinned by something immovable.
“What’s a cute puppy like you doing on your knees?” a voice asked. The same voice that had stopped singing at some point earlier.
My eyes finished adjusting. The glass was pinned beneath the toebox of Nemesis’s heels. I tilted my head. Tracing a path along her ankle, her leg, across her finely sculpted abs, to her rather modest bust hidden within well developed pectoral muscles. Until I arrived at her bemused handsome expression that she balanced atop a single finger attached to an arm corded in noticeable muscle.
“Picking up some broken glass,” I said. Attempting to remove all malice from the statement.
She beamed, “How responsible.”
Then lifted her foot allowing me to claim the shard—its point was sharp and its edge malicious. I rose slowly under her gaze until she was forced to look up at me. This close I realized how small she was. Well below me and Secretary, and only a step or so above Melissa.
We stood there silently for a moment. The shard of glass becoming slick in my palm. I looked away from her to see the rest of the club having returned to its hedonistic business from earlier. Though it was obvious everyone was conspicuously going through the motions in a way that still allowed them to spy on us.
“You’re making a scene,” I said.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“I always do,” she chuckled. “It’s rare for one of my dogs to be shy. Normally your sort beam when praised. I mean, it’s not every examinee that I give my attention to.”
“I’m sure you tell everyone that.”
“Oh, they wish I did, but I find a hungry hound works so much harder.”
I looked away from her. “I’m not hungry for anything. Just trying to pass.”
“Yet here you are, having achieved so much in such a short time with no backing,” she said. “If that’s you without hunger then I can’t wait to see what you’d do when you have it.”
She took a step toward me. Then another. The crowd leaned in without moving from their position. My own heart beat in time to her footsteps. Everything hung on the second by second motions of this woman. The passage of which drove the vengeance—the Bloodlust—to a mad froth. My thoughts screamed in unison, take one more step! In one more step I could swipe out, Bisect the Sun, and make a slit hose of her throat so I might dance, joyous as a child in her raining blood.
Nemesis took a half-step. My heart briefly syncopated as my thoughts came skidding to a halt. This wasn’t close enough, but if I really tried then maybe I’d make it? No, it wasn’t worth it, not unless it was guaranteed. Yet what was guaranteed in this life? Those five took a chance to kill a god and their tender, so why couldn’t I take a chance to kill one Lodgemaster?
“Look at me,” she ordered.
My eyes moved and my head followed in an elegant glide down to her fingers held out for my chin to perch upon. The Bacchanalian Ballast prevented me from realizing how instinctually I’d obeyed. An instinct that should’ve had me do anything else but put my head in her hand. Though the idea of resisting repulsed something in me that I couldn’t pin down.
“Listen closely,” she said. “It’s annoying when a dog of mine is too humble. Makes people question my taste in hounds. So when I tell you you’re special, I promise I don’t say it lightly. Especially a hound with such pretty eyes, that remind me of mine.”
Before, I’d thought her eyes were a trick of the light. It was so red in here that it’d drowned out every color in the room. At a distance you’d struggle to make out the true hue of anything. However, at this distance—my head in her hand—I knew that what I was seeing was true. Nemesis’s eyes were red. So red that the lights of the room seemed like a poor attempt at rendering the color whose origin could be found in her gaze.
Locked like this, I felt myself fall into the black void of her pupil while surrounded by waterfalls of sanguine carmine that fell and fell in a never ending flow from some distant eternal battlefield. If the bloody flows pooled anywhere, I couldn’t tell. There was a bottomlessness that I saw in her which would never be filled and she wasn’t bothered by it in the slightest. In fact, the sense I had was that she was elated. Who the fuck could be happy at that?
Then her hand fell away from my chin. My wits returned to me, I stumbled backward. There was no moving forward. Not toward that thing in its blood dress which chuckled at my newly discovered fear. Everything about Nemesis—even her teeth, bright and shark-like—was all in service of an existence that saw poetry in slaughter.
She took a step toward me. Then another. Another. Each one increasing an undetectable weight on my spirit and my body. Oh, she was in range but—I dropped the shard of glass. It tinked demurely as it disappeared off into darkness again. My body wanted to crumple. My blood wanted to flow backward. Here before me was a power that ran deeper than the charisma and social clout she’d wielded on stage. It was the source of Amber’s fear. The originator of my own. Standing in front of Nemesis Khapoor I had a better idea of what could kill a god; right now, so close to me that she tranced a cartoon heart against my chest, I felt like one tilt of her head could crumple my spirit that—compared to the cosmic density of hers—was but paper.
“You should drink more, Nadia,” she said, “you were so close to making a very interesting decision. Everyone else here is too boring and respectful. Though a word of advice…”
She pointed down with her finger and I felt as if my legs were severed below the knee. So quick had I fallen. She loomed above me. The physical difference in our heights now in proper alignment to our ranks within the Chain. Then she whispered into my ear.
“We can be more creative than using a shard of glass. We’re summoners after all.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Good. Maybe I don’t either,” she said.
Whatever force she’d exerted on me—it was something stranger than a field-spell—was retracted back into herself. With a blink her eyes were no longer the origin of all red, but some unknown color masked by the chroma rich lighting of the club. In a moment she’d re-assumed her mask of being a person rather than a monster. She turned away from me—I was no longer worth her time—and took in the party. I had the sense she was searching for someone. Though not too hard, as she soon shrugged.
“Guess I was feeling nostalgic,” she muttered.
When she walked away, I didn’t get up. When her voice was a whisper in the distance, I didn’t get up. I only rose when the lights shifted from red back to blues and purples—the sign that she’d left the building. As I pulled myself up, my body proved a bit too sluggish and weak for the rather minor action when it was also expected to balance atop the thin heels I wore. All of which combined to send me tumbling backward to the floor and away from the bartop that’d been the raft I’d intended to cling to in the aftermath of Nemesis’s visit.
I fell in tottering steps backwards until only the edge of my heel caught the floor, slipped, and deposited me into the air. I’d expected to feel the unyielding ground crack against my skull. Instead, the small of my back landed into a hand. Wide, firm, and strong as it halted my momentum leaving me in a dip most dramatic. A face drifted into view—handsome and square with a scar some girls would call roguish as it cut through lips curled into a smirk. Eyes half-lidded made an examination of me, my body, and rose back to my face.
“Drop me or stand me back up,” I said. “Either way, let me go.”
“Why would I let you go when I just found you, Orchard?” he asked.
“Piggy?”
He tossed me into the air, corkscrewing up and then down to land in a bridal carry within his arms. From my new vantage, I could better appreciate the light playing across Piggy’s face and dying his mane of hair that looked unwilling to be tamed. As well as sinking into the small crystal tusk earrings that swayed with every tilt of his head. There was a humor that sparkled in his eyes and reminded me of the irreverence that he carried the night we’d met.
“Unless you have a different butch who calls you Orchard,” he said. “Though I think I’d prefer to tell you my actual name.”
I scoffed, “What makes you think I want to know it?”
“It’d bring us closer,” he said.
A growl erupted from within my chest as I flashed my fangs at him and the idea of becoming closer to anything. I had enough attachments that’d abandon me when I needed them, and attempt to seduce me from the purpose the dead crooned from within me. The offer of more of that was a poison pill I wanted no more of. Piggy flashed his own fangs in a grin.
“What’s your angle?” I asked.
He shrugged, his earrings dancing, “To not be strangers anymore?”
“Sure, and then what? We become friends, allies in the exam, and over time we start to grow attached to one another. Only to realize our bond is something so much deeper than we gave it credit. Then, unable to deny it any longer, we admit our love to each other and have sex.”
Piggy said, “If that’s the way you see it going then I’m willing to follow.”
“Then let’s skip to the end and get to the bit where you fuck me,” I said.
He rapidly blinked as my statement sunk in. Then furrowed his brow.
“Is this a test?” he asked.
“Only yes or no,” I said. “Which is it?”
He nodded and smiled that same lazy lopsided grin. “Yes, if that’s how it’ll go. I never was that patient. We can head back to my place, and—”
“We’ll do it in the bathroom,” I said.
I didn’t want to know his actual name, or see how he kept his room. Anything that would’ve made him into more of a person—another vector to compromise my commitment—was to be steered away from. If it took giving him some meaningless sex to have him leave me alone then so be it. Those were my terms. They were unyielding, and I could tell Piggy wanted to argue. Push and prod to see where they were weak. Unfortunately, his ‘Orchard,’ wasn’t weak and he’d get nothing from me.