Chapter Fourteen – Teresa

The Faerie had one hand on his hip as he strolled around my frozen form and into view. Only my eyes moved to track him. His other hand went to his chin. When I felt the pressure fade around my mouth, I managed to swallow. That was it.

“Still not speaking? Perhaps the flaw is deeper, then. I do hope that the Lady didn’t take your tongue as a trinket. Such would be her right, of course, but I do so hate damaged goods.”

He lazily swung his right hand toward me as he stopped directly in front of the door.

“Open up then, let’s have a look and see.”

His digits twitched fractionally closer together and then fingers that weren’t there dug into my cheeks. Cold and hard, they pushed against my jaw until my muscles suddenly went limp and my mouth opened. They settled there as more invisible digits dove inside. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, couldn’t even twitch as more than could possibly fit just – just appeared inside.

They tasted like smoke and felt like glass.

Four slid along my gums, one felt along and then under my tongue. Four more latched on and began to pull it around when that one disappeared, while what felt like an entire hand peeled my lips back as far as they could go. Two poked my tonsils then slid down my throat to what had to be the very base of my tongue, pushing and prodding in a way that should have made me throw up.

Through it all, he just stood there. One hand outstretched, a bored expression on his face with just the slightest tilt to his head as he looked and did – did whatever this was. The ice was back in my veins now, the anxiety that spawned it entirely mine as my eyes started to fill with more tears than I could blink away.

A finger wiped them away as they fell, the drops glistening in the spot of air that felt like a glass digit, before falling to the ground. Seeing that just made me cry more, even once the fingers pulled away and my throat was clear. The hold on the outside and the mocking tenderness stayed as the tapping started. A single hard click as something poked into each tooth, one by one. For what felt like forever.

When it hit my last molar, everything vanished but the lingering taste, the tears, and the shaking that started the second he stopped holding me completely still. I was still being propped up, but now I could vibrate. At least above the neck.

He waited for me to stop coughing, only frowning slightly when I spit a glob of ashy paste onto the floor. I had no idea where it had come from.

“Are you quite done?”

This time, I nodded. Shakily.

“Good. Your meat, as it were, is entirely intact. No hex, oath, or enchantment binds you from speaking. Silence is not a choice anymore, Seedling. Speak, or I will be quite cross.”

Fae didn’t lie. I think. The way he was looking at me – as if I was a phone he was deciding to keep or throw away – cooperating sounded like the best option. My voice rasped as I said, “I…”

My mouth froze again. It wasn’t like when the Lady had done it; I could feel the pressure holding me in place. With her, my movements had just failed to make a sound at all.

“That’s enough. It would have been a shame to have exchanged what I did for a tool even more defective than expected.” He twirled his hand and my head unfroze again. “Now, I have a list of ground rules. You will be playing at being civilized, here. That means you must know your place. Do you understand?”

I only got halfway through a nod and opening my mouth before the pressure returned after a dismissive flick of his hand.

“Do not speak further. I have no interest in listening to you beg or plead; knowing you are able is enough. In fact, you will not speak to your betters unless prompted. Conversations with other servants had best serve a purpose, if in earshot of one of the Firstborn. Your image reflects on my own and I do not stand for imperfection.”

Again, the grip loosened just enough to nod.

“You will refer to me as Master. My compatriots with stake in your existence will share this address. Others of the Courts are to be referred to solely as Firstborn, regardless of any claims otherwise. Ash does not play into the petty games of the vain, and our servants shall be no exception.”

He gave a long sigh when he saw the way my eyes flicked, then added, “If, by some twist of the Weave, you encounter another august personage such as the esteemed Lady of Sighing Boughs, then you will use their Name, or simply their titles. Barring specific knowledge, Highborn will suffice.”

When he saw me relax his eyes shifted to something back and to my right. He tapped the fingers of his left hand against his hip, staccato beats of glass-on-glass ringing out as he did.

“You will do as you are told, when you are told. The Grower must have built you well enough to understand that, at least. My orders are supreme, then your other Masters. Then other Firstborn of Ash, then those of the other courts. Other personal servants and those with duties to the House come last. The only allowance you have, until you have proven your worth, is to preserve yourself. I will not have my possessions damaged unduly, whether by their own hands or others’. Is this understood?”

My mouth went dry. The instinctive, nervous swallow as my mind ran wild nearly choked me.

“Good. Remember: disobedience will be punished.”

I did not like his tone there. Or the way he started tilting his head slowly, shifting angles every fifteen seconds as he stood and stared.

“If you have even an ounce of intelligence that wasn’t baked into your brain, you should know what we planned. You, Seedling, are to be the centerpiece of our little soiree, the new gem in our possession just waiting to be polished. Obviously, your current state will not do. Those rags are a crime, draped across a masterwork as they are.”

He twirled his hand and met my eyes. That was when it struck me that he hadn’t blinked, not once.

“Now, I need to see what I’m working with. Strip.”

I was halfway through a nod when I froze of my own volition. It took that long for what he’d said to actually register through the racing thoughts about what the Fae did in the real stories that Grandpa had in that dark office.

He wanted me to…?

“What? I –”

The words were out before I could stop myself. I didn’t even have time to stiffen before the pressure bore down on me again, cold and overbearing. This time, it came with more hands, one on each limb.

It felt like the wall of a deep cave had grabbed me. Cold, hard fingers pressing in, everywhere, as the Faerie gave a sigh longer than anyone with actual lungs could’ve sustained. The whole time, his head was shaking. He started to walk around me, circling.

“Not even five minutes and you’ve already broken the rules. Mortals never learn, it seems, and I must do everything myself.”

He flicked his wrist just before passing out of sight behind me. The hands, squeezing just on the edge of pain, pulled. My legs slid to the side and my arms flew up until I made an X. The hands rippled against my skin and then copies of them, from full appendages to individual fingers, slid out of each. Some rushed outward, to my extremities while others went inward, tracing cool trails and goosebumps behind them as they began to squeeze and pull.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The first visual change was in my own hands. I felt one settle in against each and interlace with my fingers in a dark mimicry of affection. My fingers began to snap backwards and forwards, each movement pushing the boundary of what should have hurt before it relaxed. They moved in sync like something was testing their range of motion even while I watched my nails clean out and align themselves into perfect half-moons.

He had come back into sight, on my other side, when the fingers had started moving as a whole instead of individually. His eyes, stern and impassive, met mine. The same movement from earlier was there, the same ephemeral colors dancing inside. This time, they came with something in my peripheral vision. A single, disembodied hand holding each of mine. Crystal the color of a wet firepit, dirty and decayed, all color faded out and cast under a grey pall. They were pressed against my hands in a way that made my stomach churn.

The Sight, unbidden, sprang up and I could see the dark shades of light roiling beneath my skin. Where it touched the visible hands, and nowhere else, it leached into them, the colors inside it painfully vivid compared to the monochromatic abyss that was the hands.

He took another step and broke eye contact. The Sight, along with the hands, faded back to invisibility.

The ones on my arms had begun to bend my hands at the wrist. Then my elbow started to act like the fingers had. The eerie sync they were in was broken when my right arm twisted just far enough for whatever had been messed up in the elbow to click. The other one kept moving, but that one stopped. It was like they were testing range of motion without hurting me.

Could he hurt me, could any of them? Nothing they’d done on their own had actually done anything I could think of as being actual harm, not directly. Maybe…

My shoes popping off knocked my thoughts off track. The hands tickled but I couldn’t even twitch as they started giving my toes the same treatment as my fingers. It felt dirty, the exasperated stare on his face making it worse. I had to be off the ground with how my ankles started to move.

The angle I’d been frozen at left me a choice between staring at him, the wall, or the ceiling. I chose the ceiling. The immobility, the dread, the building numbness – it was like when the wolf-thing had pinned me down. Everything had faded away and I’d just stopped caring, then. But it just wouldn’t come now, even when I willed it. I wished I could just pass out, or sink down into the warm embrace of whatever was inside me until this was over.

Either would work.

My concentration shattered before I could start trying for either.

They were tugging on the hem of my pants.

A second later my sleeves joined them. He’d said to strip, I knew that. But was he really going to…?

A second tug did nothing. They pulled, but the fabric was held tight against me. My shirt, though, started to ride up. The air was colder than it should have been as it brushed against my stomach. The hands that followed it were colder still. When they slipped up under my sleeves, even while the shirt kept sliding up, the panic overpowered everything else.

Even my reflexes didn’t work. I couldn’t flinch, couldn’t shake, couldn’t pull back or push him away. He wasn’t even touching me himself and he looked so bored, like this, all of this, was just a chore for him. That made it worse. He was doing all of this and he didn’t even care that his impossible, invisible hands were going places they should not be.

He’d made it clear he didn’t think of me as a person, but…

A snap rang out. The button on my pants pulled free and I started crying again. Everything blurred out as the tears overflowed. That was all the physical response I could give. My screams were only in my head, going out to an audience of one. That one rustled softly, vague pulses of sympathy, confusion, and understanding radiating from it.

The hands paused on my shoulders in a mockery of a massage.

The next yank moved my pants a couple of inches. The zipper was still done so they snagged at my hips, riding uncomfortably low but stopping no matter how hard he pulled. The groping limbs moved off my shoulders, most pairs going down as one went up my neck, keeping pace with the rise of my shirt. All of it moved agonizingly, horrifyingly, degradingly slowly. Like time didn’t matter.

What was happening – it was all too soft. Too gentle. It was a perversion of intimacy, scenes from my romance novels and fantasies I’d had for years playing out in the worst possible way. The hands that I’d imagined as being warm felt like cold rock as they traced along my cheekbones and cradled my face. Others slid through my hair and untangled knots, not in the loving way I longed for, but more as a methodical chore. The sensations overlapped as he cupped my chest, the brown blur through my tears turning red as my shirt blocked out the wall.

Hands settled around my hips and started tugging at the belt loops on my jeans. They still refused to budge.

This wasn’t – it was too many hands. Too cold. Too hard. He wasn’t someone I’d grown to love, just someone that was hurting me. It wasn’t what I wanted, wasn’t how I wanted, wasn’t….

All I wanted was for it to stop. To push him away, make him stop, to run. Fight, scream, pass out – literally anything that wasn’t being frozen here as a helpless audience that had to feel everything as it happened.

Through the connection in my chest I could feel that distant presence start to shift. I didn’t know what it was going to do. Maybe it didn’t even know. But it was reaching out anyway. Pressing something sharp into me from that unfathomable distance. I didn’t get to see what would happen because I felt something different.

Pain.

The hands had tugged at my pants, again. This time, they shifted. The zipper caught on my flesh. Not for long, not even too roughly, but enough to pinch.

As soon as the pain hit the hands vanished. So did whatever had been holding me up. I crumpled up as I hit the ground and that hurt too. It didn’t matter though; I could move.

I managed a single deep breath before I started screaming. The tears exploded out even heavier than they’d been before now that I had conscious control again, dripping down onto my arms as I curled up into as tight of a ball as I could manage. It hurt more as I dug my nails into my arms, but that was good. Something else to focus on.

If they were digging into one spot and I wasn’t moving any more than what the shaking from my sobbing screams caused, then I couldn’t scratch. My arms, my chest, my face; everything felt dirty. He’d touched me and…

When I had to stop to breathe, he tried to say something. I just sucked in air and screamed louder, drowning him out. I didn’t want to hear him; even the brief snippet of his voice made my skin crawl as I tried to scoot away. The wood was too smooth to scrape even my exposed skin as I did that.

I was almost disappointed about that.

I didn’t stop screaming until I tasted blood and the throbbing in my throat became nearly debilitating. Any sound I managed to make after that was too quiet to drown him out as I rushed to pull my shirt back down all the way. Then I was just blinking away the stinging that came from running out of tears.

“Are you done?”

His voice felt hollow. The glow in his eyes was dimmer and his skin looked like it had cracked, slightly. Imperfect. He’d been standing in front of me, almost at the door, but when he saw me actively looking at him, he sat down. It wasn’t as undignified as collapsing, but it was very close.

Good. I had no idea what had hurt him, but he deserved it and worse.

I wanted to turn away and ignore him. Just looking made me start to shake again. It – it felt like a bad idea to do that, though. The only working part of my brain reminded me that something worse could’ve happened, and that it would happen if I upset him or another Faerie enough. There was literally nothing I could do to stop them, not on my own. If I did something risky and it didn’t work, if something like this happened again and didn’t get stopped, I would break badly enough that there’d be no coming back.

So I sat up, slowly. Tugged my jeans back up as high as I could and redid the button, pulled my shirt down further, and hugged my knees. Then I just stared at him.

I flinched when he moved his hands, half expecting more of the invisible ones. Instead both of the physical ones were held out to his sides, palms up and angled at me. I wasn’t sure, but it looked like he had tremors running up and down his arms, off-sync and vibrating through his entire body. It took him what had to be at least a minute to speak. His voice was cold and distinctly unfriendly, the indifferent tone long gone. There was no warmth or kindness to it, just a thin and brittle air of condescension.

“It appears, Seedling, that I have erred.”

There was another minute of complete silence before he realized I wasn’t going to say anything to him.

“Clearly, what a hollow shell like you considers to be harmful is more complex than expected. Make no mistake, you are mine. But this Court – myself included – is bound by our agreement all the same. This punishment appears to have crossed an unspoken line in a way that infringed upon our oath. It will not happen again.”

He looked down his nose at me and sniffed. Affronted.

“What you clearly fear will not happen. Even were your origin entirely different, I would not sully myself. Even the highest of mortals are beneath my notice in such matters.”

The shaking was slowing down, his features molding themselves back to perfection.

“Inconvenient as it is to owe an owned tool, my impatience has made it a necessity. You have my word that, for so long as I possess you, this shall not be allowed to happen again. It will not occur by my hand, nor those of my cabal. You will be barred from the touch of others, and, should I fail to prevent it, my full attention will turn to punishing the offender to your satisfaction. I swear it on my being as a child of the Jewel-in-Repose and a scion of the Court of Ash.”

The words were bitter, practically spat at me, but they hung in the air. A thread of magic snaked from his torso toward me, glimmering in an indescribable rainbow. I shrank back from it, but it didn’t hurt as it touched me. It didn’t feel like anything, really, as it sank into me and faded away into just the faintest connection between us. The second-brightest of dozens of threads that raced out from me when I strained my eyes to look.

The only other thing it left behind was a foreign, calming, certainty that the Faerie couldn’t break that promise.

That didn’t do anything for the way my skin crawled when I saw him, or the urge to scrub myself raw. It still looked like he was mentally undressing me; that he wouldn’t touch me was hardly any relief.

“Another servant will arrive soon to prepare you; it would be best to clean yourself beforehand. Until then, reconsider what you value most. Even a beast should know that comfort is second to safety. If you fail to impress others when presented – the consequences are yours and yours alone.”