Chapter Twenty-One - Tammy

“I – you – what? Of course I am!”

Rita raised an eyebrow and looked over to Alyssa, who was leaning forward in the seat next to me. The sphinx’s pupils were dilated and just starting to shrink back again. She was gripping the table hard and the fur up her arms was standing on end.

“Truth as far as she knows it. I’m sorry Tammy, I…”

The alchemist who, at this point, I was starting to think might be a bit more than that cut her off with a wave of her hand. Alyssa’s mouth moved, but the sound just died as the air between us shimmered. It faded when she slumped and shut her mouth.

“Good enough. Objective truth is so much less convenient and I’m not going to watch the heiress to an arsenal that can level countries get dominated by someone with an instinctive predilection for conquest just to get it. That sounds hot, but no – too young for me and I need plausible deniability. We’re pushing this far enough as it is.”

She shook her head before I could process any of the things she’d just said. Her grin was predatory as she went on, “So. You’re human, then. Mmhmm. Must be quite a medical mystery – since mana starvation and rejection do not happen to anyone that that label still fits.”

“But I’m…”

“Kid, let me talk. You’re an Aufrey, and we all know your old man got up to some weird shit. You don’t get names like his without that. The Rain of Blood, The Flowering Death, The Archshaper – shit, I don’t even know them all. Thing is, he did some of everything. Necromancy, biomancy, Blood: he was one of the bastions of forbidden magic that nobody could touch. You’re his kid’s kid, of course something’s gonna be weird with you. This matters because, if you run yourself that low on mana again? Either you’ll get back here fast or you’ll die.”

She gestured. I thought for a second she was doing something magic, but nothing happened as she traced out a square and tapped the middle of it.

“See, humans are boring. Stick us in a box without mana for a month and we’ll just get cranky. Maybe stab you a bit when we get out. Stick your friend there in it and she’ll get weak. If her wings worked before, well, they’d be atrophied at the end. Too weak to stab you. Oh, and she wouldn’t be able to have kids. For people like her, the magical parts of the body would wither and die, but they’d live. Stick an elemental in there and there’d be nothing left by the end. For this metaphor? You’re the elemental.”

My hands started shaking again. I took another bite, and the relief felt…less this time.

“I don’t understand.”

“Tough luck – your friend here just paid me to say it. Now, to up the ante, say you buried a fire elemental in a casket made from water crystals. It wouldn’t just fade away – it would die, messily, screaming all the while. That’s still you. Whatever the old bastard did, it looks like you’ll only be at home in and around your manor. Outside of it you’ve gotta keep your reserves up - whatever that off-color mana you’ve got is, it needs to be concentrated enough to convert your passive intake. If it can’t, well, I was watching your body start to eat itself when you got here. It’s fascinating. I’d pay you for a few samples. Just for research purposes.”

She raised that same eyebrow again. By this point I was getting sure that she’d done her makeup just to accentuate that. She sighed when it got obvious that I wasn’t going to answer.

“Offer’s on the table. Guess you’re gonna be boring and just pay cash if you need my network though. Damn rich kids. You’re worse than the frats. Feh, my job’s almost done – I told you what happened, and there’s how to stop it. If you screw up again, get more of this: the potion in that ice cream’s a few of my specialties, mixed in with purified and stabilized mana. Don’t worry about what it’s usually for – just be glad that your body’s at least sort of processing it. Too much too quickly and you might have a stroke, by the way. Now, I’m out of here. Use the room as long as you want – someone’ll be back with food later. Remember: call me if you need anything.”

She flicked a business card across the table. Alyssa caught it before it could fly off, then Rita was gone, the door swinging shut behind her and leaving the room quiet and empty except for us and the wonderful, wonderful bowl of ice cream that had apparently saved my life.

The shaking hands might have been from nerves. It had almost happened before – the first time I wrecked the car and somehow came out unhurt. The night in the hospital when we were still at the boarding school, before Grandpa flew down himself and I recovered and everyone ignored it. The pain was still there when I thought about it even though I somehow hadn’t scarred. Each time I barely saw it coming, until someone else pulled me back.

It hadn’t been Teresa this time. She wasn’t here to save me. And if something went wrong…

“It’s not your fault Tammy. It’s mine. I didn’t think – it shouldn’t have happened like this. We’ll just watch things going forward.”

I shook my head and, conscious of Rita’s warning, resisted the urge to take another bite when it started to spin. I could deal with it and space out the doses. Meeting Alyssa’s eyes was harder.

“Hah. No, this is all me. The wild child, fucking up everything I touch. It’s funny – grandpa’s the only one that never said I was a bad influence, and that’s just because he didn’t care. The tutors, my classmates, the teachers. Even Teresa said it once when we were fighting. I was cursed even before the Fae. So you had to sell a feather that apparently is Really Important to help me because the other option was watching me die, too out of it to even offer to pay.”

I might have been incoherent, but that was obvious. The feather trade was something that could get her in big trouble. I’d sworn secrecy – the memory of that horrific pain as the mana rippled across me wasn’t going to fade any time soon – but that she even had to do it made me feel terrible.

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“I get it if I’m too much trouble. I’m sure your mom can find someone else to deal with me.”

“What?”

A wing dropped onto my shoulder, an odd mix of soft and stiff until she pulled it back. When I looked over, her mouth was hanging open. She looked like she was on the edge of crying. “Sorry, sorry, but I don’t see where that came from. I told you I’d be here to help every step of the way, like, an hour ago. I’m not going back on my word at the first roadblock, or at seeing you hurt. I just…I don’t know why you’d think so little of me.”

I turned away, the shakes soothing as I finally gave in and took a bite. Something in my forehead throbbed as I watched the bright river of magic settle into my stomach, slowly fading away. My skin started to get its own softer, darker glow back, but that hadn’t spread very far yet.

“I didn’t mean that you were lying. It’s just that I don’t see why you’d put up with this. I barely remember getting here. I don’t know what I said or did, and I really don’t think I’m going to get any less depressing as this goes.”

“Tammy, I’m your friend! Or at least, I want to be. Just because I’m teaching you doesn’t mean everything has to be a lesson or an exchange. You’re the first person in years to really talk to me, like, at all. Everyone else has been family. Or Belmont jerks. Or Rita. People that look at me and see a collared monster, not a person. Mirin and them care, but… you’re my one chance to feel normal, since Mom doesn’t plan to ever let me go to Pinecrest or wander out. She’ll just keep bringing in tutors and aunts and distant cousins, trying to prove I’m an actual exception and not a failure. I’ll be fucking lucky if I get to leave town before I’m two goddamned centuries old.”

“You’re…”

I could feel the glare on my back. She was still choked up as she hissed, “Asking a lady her age is rude. Sphinxes grow slow and I’m not even a quarter of the way there yet, if you must know.”

“I guess misfits like us are always gonna be stuck with each other.”

“That’s the spirit!” A hand landed on my back. I twitched, then slowly relaxed, slumping onto the table and hiding my face. “Since we’re stuck here, well, I did promise you some juicy stuff. If you’re up for it, I can let you know a bit about things now.”

“That would be nice. I just…I feel so lost, about everything.”

I assumed she was nodding. She patted my back again, then hummed a few offkey bars to an oddly familiar song. I couldn’t quite place it, but it felt like I should have.

“No duh! People expect me to just know stuff too, so, I get it. Well uh, to start with…there’s actually a lot of practitioners here compared to a normal town, but only three dominant factions now that your grandpa’s gone. He drew some big players in like the Cult and the Pride. I’m not allowed near the Cult for a bunch of reasons, but I hear you’ve met Mordo so, that should sum them up pretty well.”

“Frat guys and girls with magic, yeah. I…no, they definitely said they were ‘like a Pope that can fuck’.”

“Yep! Their clergy is a bit weird about pronouns – you probably noticed that. The Drunken God wants their worshippers to be flexible. Literally, almost all of them are bi, and past a certain point stuff gets weird. I hear their patron starts to change things around so the servants are as fluid as they are. They’re uh, like, two dozen different harvest and fertility gods and goddesses that got squished together as they tried to stay relevant, so apparently the entire thing is a bit chaotic depending on what face is up at the front.”

“Oh, so that’s why Mordo…”

“Yeah. Hot, right? That’s very much intentional. I wish I could go see them perform, but I’m not allowed out alone and my aunts won’t take me. Prudes.”

I blushed as a wave of heat rolled through my spinning head. She wasn’t wrong, though. Mordo had been a real piece of androgynous eye candy from what I could actually remember of that night. Hadn’t Weylan said…

“They do under-21 nights on Tuesdays I think. Maybe we could go – you wouldn’t be alone if I was there.” The words came out unbidden, like my tongue was moving on its own.

“Great! It’s a date then!”

D…did she just?

“Anyway! You’ve met me and Mom, seen our compound, and gotten a feel for what we are. Officially speaking, we’re the Pride of Inquiry, smallest and youngest of the Eleven Prides. Mom brought us out here in the 1930s so she could bug your grandpa a bit more, and a lot of people started getting skittish about her, specifically, leading the family this far out. Most of our people are still in and around the fertile crescent.”

The heat faded and my tongue ended up mostly back in my control. I took another bite, savoring the cold, before I spoke up, “You’re…”

“Yeah, I know. Naming an entire nation-state of Sphinxes – and that’s literally what a Pride is – after asking questions. It was Mom’s decision when she made her case to the other matriarchs. Since we’re a foreign government and our people haven’t gone the way of the Djinn yet, everyone’s a bit careful about provoking us. We have a bit of an outsized influence around here, though it’s not like I get a say in how we throw that weight around.”

“That really sucks. The last one is gonna be the Belmonts. Beatrice and her family. I know them – we went to galas a few times. We’re between their generations so they didn’t have kids our age, but I saw her at the council. I can’t imagine that they aren’t big players.”

“Yup! Though it might be best to say they’re big fish in a small pond. They insist on calling themselves House Belmont in practitioner circles. They aren’t one of the old families that goes back to Charlemagne’s conquest, though, so it’s just bullshit. They’ve been here mooching off your grandad and his library for centuries, and every few generations they tried to kill him.”

I whipped my head toward her as the words clicked. She made an x with her hands, fast, while shaking her head.

“No, no, they didn’t pull it off! People checked. Thoroughly. The Belmonts have their share of sins, but they definitively did not kill your grandpa. Even the Keepers of the Ivory Grave dipped in to make damn sure of that. One of the kids Beatrice drove off is their local liaison, and trust me, she’d take any chance to screw over the family. I can’t remember her name – she says I’m not her job whenever she comes by and then ignores me – but the point is, there’s no love lost there and even they cleared the Belmonts. A house of average enchanters just can’t put down someone like your grandpa. Their last real prodigy was apprenticed to him, even, after getting kicked out. That was back when your mom was alive.”

I heard that last bit, and my mouth started running before I could stop it.

“Wait. Wait. Wait! This apprentice was recent? They knew Mom? Could I find them? I…”

Alyssa’s entire body tensed as the first question left my lips. Her wings shivered and she wrapped her arms around herself. By the second, her eyes had widened, the pupils wide and dark. Her fur shivered, standing on end, while her tail stuck straight out instead of curling around her leg like usual. Her lips drew back to show sharp, sharp teeth. By the time I shut up, her eyes were darting around, settling anywhere but me.

Her chest heaved with each breath, wobbling visibly. I couldn’t focus on it – she was shoving herself up, her body dissolving into a blur that lasted three blinks. The illusion that snapped down around her was harder to focus on, like my eyes kept sliding away.

“I – FUCK!” The words were half-growled, half-roared as she lunged past me. She visibly fought to correct a lurch toward me before she made it to the door. “Don’t do that! I’ll…. damn it!”

There was a clatter as she forced her way out. Someone complained, but all I could hear were her choked parting words. Just before she was gone, a tear the tone of freshly-spilled blood fell to the floor.