A dull thud quivered through the floor, as much vibration as actual sound, though JC thought she heard, faintly, sharper notes of breaking glass. She paused in cleaning the bathroom of Phrixos' suite, distracted from her usual wish for gloves up to her shoulders by the question of what that had been and where it was. Somewhere in the building... downstairs, maybe the ground floor?
The sitting room door slammed open.
“Phrixos!” Felix shouted. “Need you in the kitchen! We've got a situation! Phrixos!”
A what?
Oh god. Erica and Zach are in the kitchen.
Ali? Please, Ali, answer me this time?
No response. She could only assume that it was due to conflicting demands on Alison's attention; surely going a step further towards being fae couldn't take away an ability that was obviously fae, and once Alison had time to adjust they could get back in contact.
At least, she fervently hoped so, because right now, she felt very alone.
She abandoned the cleaning, and went to the bedroom doorway. She wasn't sure how she could explain herself if anyone demanded to know why she wasn't working, but then, it was bad for humans to see her while she was working, wasn't it? She couldn't currently think why, but she should be doing the housework while they were asleep anyway. And she needed to know what was happening to her friends. She flattened her back against the wall just inside the bedroom where she could hear more easily.
The door of Phrixos' study opened, less loudly.
“Can't you manage anything alone?” Nestor snapped peevishly.
“A faeling trashing the kitchen isn't in my job description,” Felix snarled back. “Barry's keeping an eye on her. If you want to have a kitchen, or Barry, left, then we need some help down there. Where the fuck's Isabel?”
“Probably checking on one of the others,” Phrixos sighed. “I knew seven all at once was going to be a problem, we should have separated and confined them when they were due to change, or at least right after the first one did. Let's go.”
“If you have to kill this one, do it,” Nestor said bluntly, which made JC shiver and bite her lower lip hard to keep from reacting.
It's your fault we're here at all!
“I'd rather not,” Phrixos said calmly, from a different spot, possibly out in the hall now. “We can learn too much.”
Once all was quiet, not even any sounds of motion, JC dared to peek around the corner.
The study door had been left open, and the room beyond—which did basically look like a study, with a desk and multiple chairs and many books, a closed door on the far side—was vacant. She heard a door slam in the direction of Nestor's suite, so he must have stormed off to his own. Acting like a petulant child when things didn't go the way he wanted seemed to be normal for him.
Cautiously, she crept to the sitting room door, also still open, and checked for anyone in the hall before darting out and down the stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs, she stopped again, waiting until she no longer heard feet on the stairs and then a moment beyond. From here, she could hear the shattering of china.
What was going on? Were her friends safe?
Getting down the lower stairs and out of sight again was going to be the tricky bit, if they were paying any attention.
Being noticed by humans was, after all, a bad thing.
She ducked into the sitting room, went through it and used the French doors linking it to the dining room, and paused just inside the dining room door.
“The Sleep command is bouncing,” Phrixos said thoughtfully. “Either it's unusually resistant or just too agitated.”
“See?” Felix said, over one last, rather muffled, crunching thud, which was followed by an enraged shriek that echoed off the walls and was probably audible in their own prison and beyond.
“Kill the bitch,” Barry growled. “This is the same one that broke my fingers and tried to pick a fight in the first couple of days. She's trouble.”
“No, we aren't killing it,” Phrixos said. “Although I admit, a rather strong cage comes to mind. It's valuable for exactly the same reason that it's trouble. It's rather reptilian, let's see if bringing the temperature down will help.”
Silence for a long moment, while JC wrapped both arms tightly around herself and tried to pretend she didn't feel like crying. That had to be Zach. What was happening? Reptilian?
How did being reptilian match with Zach's fundamental nature? But then, what was Zach's fundamental nature?
Protecting. Guarding the things that matter to him.
Guarding the things he considers valuable.
What's reptilian and guards valuable things?
Oh, there's no way...
“Too bad Isabel's the only one who can keep them under control efficiently,” Barry said, which presumably meant that the crisis was over and there was no longer any danger.
“Oh, yes,” Phrixos said. “And I suppose you know exactly how to not only coalesce energy into cuffs that last indefinitely, but how to set them to both respond to a non-wizard wearing a given item and at the same time remain responsive to wizard commands but not responsive to the will of the damned faeling actually wearing them? No? Then I hardly think you're in a position to criticize. I stopped it before it got what it wanted, which appears to have been your blood. I'm not going to ask what you've done to make it hate you in particular, because I really don't care. But suppose you show a little gratitude that it did not get what it wanted?”
“Who's going to clean up this mess?” Felix demanded.
“There's still one in the house who hasn't changed yet,” Phrixos said dismissively, with a long-suffering sigh. “Put it to work at it, it'll keep it busy until it changes. I'll check with Isabel once this one is safely confined somewhere and see if any of the others are still in any condition to be useful. Otherwise, if we're going to eat, you'll have to get Lloyd and Gord and the four of you will have to take care of it yourselves.”
“Oh, you have got to be kidding!”
“How about you let me take care of our problem here, hm? You can bitch at Isabel about employment terms later. After you get patched up, Barry. Try not to bleed all over the kitchen, it's unhygienic.”
As little as she wanted to be seen, that sounded like a chance to get in the kitchen openly and see if Zach was okay. She took a deep breath, another, trying to calm and centre herself, and went back around to the sitting room door so she could approach down the hall.
“Speaking of which,” Barry said. “Hey! Get over here! There's cleaning to do in the kitchen!”
Some indication of how rattled he was: he didn't even grope her while she passed between them to pause in the kitchen door.
But then, he was spotted with blood down one side of his face and one arm, small cuts but some of them were bleeding freely, and she thought some might still have fragments embedded in them.
In the kitchen, the floor was carpeted with shards of glass and china of multiple colours; the fridge lay face-down, in the middle of a puddle of mingled swirls of hues and consistencies. The table had been flipped on its side, heedless of anything that had been on it, and even at a glance, at least two benches had one or more broken legs.
Only a few feet from the door to the hall was... Zach? Yes, obviously, but the clothes were gone, replaced by fine violet scales; there was something about his feet, his toes more claw-like maybe, but she couldn't see clearly from here, and maybe his hands as well. More scales, tiny ones, crossed his eyes and part of his upper face like a mask, most of them a gold much the same colour as his skin but violet immediately around his eyes; platinum hair was much shorter and all spiky instead of a long straight cascade.
He was curled into an improbably tight ball, not moving, his own snake-like tail wrapped around him. Alarmed, JC took a closer look to be sure he was breathing, and relaxed only when she saw the very slow rise and fall of his chest.
It's cold in here.
Phrixos brought the temperature down.
If Zach's reptilian, then that would slow him down, maybe all the way into torpor of some kind. Which means he's probably okay.
Phrixos poured the thin viscous fluid from a dark glass bottle in a circle around Zach, completely ignoring JC, and stepped inside it himself. With a few muttered syllables and a complex two-handed gesture, both simply vanished.
Unable to do anything for Zach, she turned her attention to the devastated kitchen.
Oh my god, what a mess he made. Are there any intact dishes left?
I don't know what you're going to be eating, or eating from, tonight, even if I do manage to clean this up.
Felix prodded her. “Don't just stand there.”
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
The broom closet was on the other side of the kitchen, near the outer door, and walking across that in bare feet was just not going to happen.
She turned around and went back along the hall, disregarding Felix's demands to come back and Barry's muttered curses. Out the front door, around the house.
Some way off, she thought she saw a figure that was substantial enough to be Erica kneeling next to one of the round garden plots, but it was too distant for a clear view. Still, it was reassuring to know that Erica was probably out of the kitchen before this had happened.
She opened the back door, and stepped carefully inside, sliding her feet to push bits of china and glass out of her way without bringing her weight down on them. The broom closet was close; she took out a handful of cleaning rags and tossed them along the edges of the puddle, hoping they would help keep it from spreading much farther until she could safely reach it.
Once she had a broom, which felt familiar and somehow comforting in her hands, she started sweeping, clearing a gradually larger area around herself. She avoided the mess immediately around the fridge for the moment, since introducing wet sticky stuff to the job would only make it harder than necessary to sweep up the dry bits first.
Barry and Felix left; she could hear them complaining back and forth, the sound growing farther and farther away.
The densest areas of shrapnel were around the swinging doors to the main hall; that must have been how Barry got hurt. Quite possibly, Zach had been aiming for him, and the minimal damage inflicted must have been disappointing.
That puddle around the fridge looked rather disgusting, actually, though it couldn't be any worse than cleaning other people's bathrooms with no protection at all.
Why do my hands feel strange?
Why does my skin feel strange all over, actually?
She paused in her sweeping, regarding her own hands around the broom handle.
Her skin felt oddly tight, and when she let go with one hand so she could open and close it curiously, it felt a bit less pliable and inclined to flex, though she didn't think the already-high sensitivity was impaired at all. Nor could she really call it uncomfortable, though it was definitely disconcerting.
As she watched, the texture of the unmarked softness changed: faintly glossy, absolute monochrome with no hint of shading, no texture, no veins visible beneath.
More like something inorganic than like skin. Latex, plastic, rubber, silicone, she had no idea which given how many varieties of each there were, but something like that. Even the faint pattern of fingerprints faded away, the creases on her palm much less distinct. The hand of a doll.
In alarm, she raised an altered hand to her own throat, but felt only mildly less worried when she found her pulse still beating strong and steady—if faster than normal, at the moment.
What the hell am I turning into?
She dropped the broom, all interest in cleaning up forgotten for the moment.
From her hips to her lower ribs, her skin felt tighter and less flexible than anywhere else, enough so to put substantial pressure on her abdomen and diaphragm. Without intending to, she found herself standing straighter, shoulders back, and discovered that her spine was less inclined to bend than it had been, keeping her upright unless she made a deliberate effort to lean forward.
In fact, all of her joints locked in place unless she consciously moved them, though she found no resistance or restriction when she did choose to do so.
I'm alive, I'm breathing, my heart's beating, but I must look like a life-sized doll!
Her skin tingled under the red clothes, and then it spread farther, right down to her feet, where something definitely was happening because her heels were now higher than the balls of her feet even though she could feel support under both.
She looked down, but got distracted even before she got to her feet.
Her practical, if none-too-substantial-feeling, clothing had changed into a dress, still the same deep red in some rich-looking mostly-matte fabric. It fit as closely to her upper body as her previous clothing had, the rounded neck very wide and low, but the skirt flared quite a lot before it ended a hand's width above her knees. A narrow satiny white frill edged the neck and the bottom of the skirt, and similar white trim drew in the ends of the very loose short sleeves, giving them a slightly puffed look. Over it, from her hips to just under her breasts, which were their same moderate size at least, something satiny white with dark red ribbon lacing it together down the front—that's a bloody corset!—was wrapped around her abdomen, though she didn't think it was really all that tight or that it was the real reason for the sense of compression. After all, that feeling had begun before her clothes had changed. At least, she thought it had.
Farther down long bare legs of that same monochrome smooth whatever-it-was, and she found that she was now wearing ankle-height boots with wide satiny white laces, clearly with heels but she didn't feel off-balance.
She reached for the broom, which turned out to be more awkward than she'd expected, between the stiffness of her spine and her skin feeling like it was a fraction too tight and thick. After a moment, she did wrap her smooth fingers around the handle again; there was, at least, no problem of slipperiness, her grip was as firm as ever. She swept enough of the broken glass out of the way to be able to reach the doors to the main hall and the bathroom.
Every stride felt very different from before, the heels on her boots shortening her steps and combining with the corset to give her hips a more pronounced sway.
In the bathroom, she steadied herself against the wall and lifted one foot up to the closed toilet seat.
Her boots were the same red as her dress, and had the same kind of subtle gloss as her skin. The heels were, she figured, no more than maybe three inches, enough to create an effect without being stripper-heel-stupid, and better still, they were solid wedges under her entire foot, not narrow spikes. The transparent cuffs remained, just above them.
Wondering what she was going to see, she turned to look in the mirror.
Same face, though with this too-smooth new skin instead, which being less flexible seemed to show emotion less, making her look much more serene than she felt. Same very red lips. Same wide grey eyes, with heavy dark brown lining them, same dramatic reds and browns shading the lids. Her hair was no longer its increasingly-familiar very dark brown, but had changed to an improbably-vivid candy-apple red with no trace of the colour varying at the roots; still perfectly straight, it was now drawn back in a sleek tail high on her head, which turned out to be tied with a white satin bow. Her warm beige-brown skin contrasted in interesting ways against the red and white, with not a blemish in sight anywhere.
She stared at her own reflection, down at her body, back at the mirror, in shock that barely showed in her expression.
What the fuck? My own subconscious just turned me into the Canada Day edition of French Maid Barbie? What is wrong with me, way down inside?
There's still a major mess to clean up in the kitchen.
Who cares? It can wait!
No it can't. Things are out of order. Everything should be in its place. Everything is supposed to have a place to be and it's supposed to be there. Even if that's in the trash.
I... She hesitated, still trying to get her mind around that doll-like face in the mirror being her own, while the nagging awareness of the chaos nearby kept prodding her.
I can clean up more effectively now. The glass can't hurt me as easily.
I have to get things back the way they should be.
She left the bathroom, went back to the kitchen, and retrieved the broom. No longer barefoot, she was much less hampered by avoiding injury, and while she was sure she could be damaged since there was still blood under her new skin, it resisted better than her previous skin had. That seemed like a fair tradeoff for the very slight pressure all over.
Having swept clean the space against one wall, she stacked the damaged benches there and heaved the table over, still on edge, to join them. Nothing had reduced her strength, that was for sure. That got it out of her way so she could work more easily.
With the dry shrapnel all swept up and gathered and dumped in the bottomless black hole under the sink that would break it into component molecules and recycle it, she turned to the fridge. There was little chance she was strong enough to heave it upright by herself, but the humans couldn't safely approach it until there was no more broken glass around it.
She collected the rest of the cleaning rags and dropped to her knees at the edge.
Watching the mixture of milk, drinks, liquids from various foods, drip off her hands and leave no trace, she changed her mind entirely about her new skin.
Nothing can touch me.
Everything just slides right off.
Who needs gloves for yucky stuff? My own skin is better protection than anything else could possibly be, and without ever interfering with dexterity or sensation.
And while she knew that at least a few of the things in the mixture in front of her had strong scents, ones that would probably be less than pleasant mingled and in concentration, her sense of smell failed to register more than faint traces of them.
I'm safe.
Not free of this collar, not off this damned island, but I'm safe in myself no matter what needs to be done and no matter what anyone does.
And now I'm getting used to it... I think I even kind of like how my skin feels.
“I was rather hoping you'd be a house fae,” Isabel said from the back door. “What on earth did you used to do with your spare time to have a mental image like that? Well, whatever, as long as things get done. I doubt you can lift the fridge upright by yourself. Good god, she must have thrown one hell of a hissy-fit.”
“And what were you doing while it was?” Phrixos asked from somewhere past her.
JC carefully didn't look up, kept working on mopping up the mess and gathering the larger pieces of glass and china, but listened intently.
“Doing my nails,” Isabel snapped. “Even not counting the water fae and this one, there are still four others out there and I can only be in one place at a time. We've got a green fae who seems to be quite content fussing around in the gardens so we can get to her later, one who appears to be going equine who's running laps and apparently is oblivious to anything else, and a bloody cat out prowling around and sliding right through any attempts at fixing her position. I only just found the last one, she's wrapped herself up in a cocoon of some kind. Probably another will-o'-the-wisp, but I suppose we'll have to wait until she comes out before we can tell for certain.”
Green fae's got to be Erica, someone running has to be Ali, and if anyone's a cat it's Des. I guess fae nature did bleed through all along and help make us who we are. And I'm house fae, which I suppose works, too. But that leaves Suzi. Please let her be okay!
“I may need help catching the cat,” Isabel continued. “The horsey one is probably going to tire herself out before dark and then she'll be easier to deal with. We haven't had a cat before but I seem to recall that they're notorious for barriers not stopping them and alarms not detecting them.”
“Do what you can.”
“Could you straighten the fridge up?”
“I suppose so, since I imagine Felix is picking bits of shrapnel out of Barry upstairs and it doesn't sound like any of our other help will be cooperative anytime soon. You, house fae, move back.”
JC got to her feet—which required more thought than usual, all things considered, although it felt less awkward as she adapted to this.
“That's an unusual manifestation,” Phrixos commented.
“There are stories of full-blood house fae being able to turn into, or at least create a comprehensive glamour of being, inanimate objects to avoid being seen by humans,” Isabel said. “But that's a rather perverted form of it.”
“Visually appealing, however, more so than most house fae.”
JC retreated away from the fridge, choosing a direction midway between the door to the rest of the house and the door Isabel and Phrixos were in. That actually put her near the table.
Phrixos made a couple of broad gestures, his fingers twisting into patterns, and spoke a dozen or so consonant-heavy syllables that meant nothing to JC.
The fridge quivered, and slowly righted itself and pushed back against the wall.
As it returned to its proper place, JC felt more of that nagging anxiety lose ground. One more thing was set right.
“I doubt we'll be eating anything out of that fridge,” Phrixos sighed. “Or that there's anything breakable left intact in the whole room. Felix will have to actually exert his imagination as far as supper, for a change. All right, get back to work.”
Finish what was already on the floor, JC decided, then open the fridge and deal with that. She tucked a few of the dryer rags under the front edge to soak up whatever continued to drip, and went to the broom closet for the mop, the two humans no longer of any interest.