by Jade Alters
“Lee!” Cece squeals, which sucks me right back into the Soul of Fire. A swirl of warmth wraps down around my penis as she orgasms. Thrust back into my spiritual body, I thrust up inside her. Sensation rushes back into me, enough to make me shudder. I look up into Cece’s eyes, pinched by her cheeks in a grimace of unreal pleasure. They look somehow more blue than usual. Almost fluorescent. I squint to see if it’s real until she screams and pins my hips down with hers. “Push! Push!” she demands. I’m in no position, literal or otherwise, to deny her.
I push my hips up. I push my penis in around the literal flames from within her. It infects me with a surge of adrenaline and feeling I can’t fight. My penis convulses against her inner walls, shooting firecrackers into her body. Still, she moans:
“Push!” I shove my releasing pillar up inside her as high as it can fit, as hard as I can.
My hips hit my desk. It scoots across the floor with a disruptive screech. About twenty heads turn in from around the room to see what happened. Even the professor has stopped talking to stare. The Soul of Fire is gone. Cece is no longer on top of me, but across the room, hiding her scarlet face. I straighten up my stance and sit as forward as I can to hide my throbbing erection. Already, my mind flings ahead to getting out of the room without revealing the wet spot on my pants to the world.
“Ah- sorry,” I say to the class, clearing my throat, “just a muscle spasm.” I wait until shoulders shrug and heads turn back to cringe. We must have done this a hundred times. Never before has one of us acted out our horizontal dance in the classroom. I hardly glance Cece’s way for the rest of class. I feel her lazy arm weave around mine on the way out, though.
“What was that?” Cece whispers to me. “Besides amazing.”
“Unusual,” I whisper back. “I mean, more than unusual. That doesn’t-”
“Well, you can have body echoes from the Soul of Fire like that, can’t you?” Cece breaks in. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before in Basic Dragon Connectivity.
“Body echoes, sure. Like a twitch or a cough. But not…acting out,” I tell her. I elect to leave out the frightening connection my mind has already begun to wander towards. She told me to do something…and I did it. Almost like you were controlling me, I bite my tongue, so as not to tell her.
“I guess I’m just that good,” Cece sighs. She leans her head on my shoulder. I can’t help but chuckle and give her a little peck on top of it. We’re both exhausted too, like it happened in the physical world. But that’s another mystery for another time. For now, I want to do the only reasonable thing to do, after having my world so shaken.
“I guess so,” I tell her. We head back to my room and pass out on my bed.
Lunch Dates
Serge,
The Broken Academy, B-Wing Courtyard
I watched him all through Mystical History, so closely in fact, that Fey Hartgen had to remind me of other duties several times. Bart. I couldn’t find an ounce of trust for him at an emotional supermarket. It’s something about the way he holds himself. He’s got way too much confidence for a first-year. Even though he’s got a young face, he looks so out of place somehow in the desks that line Fey Hartgen’s classroom. He listens with his eyes on the instructor at all times, even when he jots the occasional note. Who does that? Who doesn’t check to make sure they’re getting everything, at least once or twice? Or maybe it’s just the way he looks at Cece.
But, when my duty as a member of the ASTF is done for the morning, I’ve got nothing to show for it. I watched a suspicious character, like I’m supposed to, only to find the complete lack of any suspicious behavior. If anything, it’s odd how perfect he behaves, all the time. Maybe that’s it. He’s operating with a certain bearing that speaks of experience, when Thise specifically told us this is his first year. For now, all I can do is trust that the Dragonlord trusts him, and keep an eye out elsewhere. After lunch, that is. It’s Wednesday, after all, time for one of my most oddly treasured weekly pastimes. Today, I meet someone in a different Wing than my own to eat on her turf.
I cross the courtyard, distinguished from my own D-Wing one by entirely different, more blue-and-purple flowers. I flop down my tray of saffron-sauce tofu and spiced rice beside Emery’s on one of the lawnside tables between the gardens and the open-faced cafeteria. We share a glance at one another’s food, then laugh together at the fact that we’ve chosen the same dish. We had a conversation just last week about how Mother and Father would vomit, could they see what “horrid imitations” we’ve stooped to eating. Personally, I prefer most anything to the family recipes nowadays. Avoiding them has inspired me to expand my culinary repertoire by four sizes, at least.
“Any developments in your top-secret mission?” Emery asks. “Any threats to homeland security I should know about?”
“Can’t you just enjoy your time at the Academy without such high pressure?” I whine back at her. She never fails to ask, since Thise denied her own entry to the ASTF. “For once, you’ve got a minute without our family breathing down your neck. So the first thing you do is look for someone new to do it instead?”
“It’s that boring, huh?” Emery counters. She throws back a mouthful of creamy tofu while I shake my head at her resourceful insistence.
“Yes,” I tell her between crunches of my side of broccoli, “so stop worrying about it.” The two of us munch in quiet for a few seconds, heads turned out to the pleasant beds of flowers all around us. Then I feel Emery’s eyes burning a hole in the side of my head again. I sigh. “We have a new member. Thise must have some special plan for him, since he’s a first year-”
“What? I’m a second-year, and she told me no!” Emery pouts.
“I wonder why that is, sister?” I poke fun at her rare display of immaturity. She shakes off the sour look to say:
“Sorry, sorry. Who is it?”
“A Vampire named Bart,” I tell her. The immediate shift in her facial geography is almost enough to make me spit out my tofu. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her forehead so wrinkled, or red.
“What?” Emery shrieks. Then etiquette snaps back into her head. She clears her throat and straightens up for another bite of her food. “It just seems odd. A first-year Vampire added to a Task Force explicitly designed to root out insurgents of a group run by a Vampire? And a Dragon, for that matter. Yet they had no trouble signing your mistress up.”
“My mistress?” I laugh. “Listen to you. Like you’re not putting your chips in more than one pot, yourself. Besides, let’s not forget you were working for the Kyrie just a year ago. Did you ever factor that into your weird envy of my…partner?”
“See!” Emery pokes at me with a plastic fork. “I’ll give you the Kyrie point. I see why they wouldn’t trust me there. But that doesn’t change the fact that you don’t know what to call Cece. Can’t call her your girlfriend, because you know she’s sleeping with two other men.”
“She hasn’t slept with Bryant,” I amend. “And how is that any different than what you do? What do you call Rock, Hoster and Darius?”
“Friends,” Emery tells me with the utmost, annoying level of confidence. That is, until she adds, “That I’ve slept with.”
“Hypocrite,” I murmur, and return to my lunch.
“Well, at least I’m the one choosing this. Can you say the same, brother?” Emery prods back.
“Yes, I can. Don’t you think I’d have walked away from Cece long ago, if I didn’t care that much about her? To tolerate two other men being around us all the time? I mean, it’s not like I hate them, either. Not two people I’d have hand-picked as friends, but…maybe it’s a good thing,” I figure. Odd as it is, Lee, Bryant and I have shared too many things for me to imagine my life without them. Battles. Family strife. A woman. Then I notice how quiet Emery has gotten. She stares up at the passing clouds while she downs the last bites of her lunch.
“I hope Hoster, Rock and Darius feel that way,” Emery says.
“Speaking of Darius…” I lead
in to the next part of our little Wednesday tradition.
“Yeah,” Emery remembers. “Let’s go.” We drop our trays off and head for the corner of the courtyard. Under the high-arched ceilings of the hallway, there awaits a pair of doors, behind each of which is a staircase. The one on the right is one I’m familiar with. It goes up to the perimeter walls that enclose each wing of the Academy, as well as the entire building. The leftmost door is one I’ve only recently become more acquainted with. It’s sealed to all those without visitation permits, and even those with them outside of hours. Emery and I happen to have one, since the imprisonment of an old friend in the cells beneath the Academy.
It seemed macabre to me at first. Prisoners interned for the misuse of their powers right under the feet of students training to use them. After a few visits, though, it made a little sense. The more I visited, the more sense it made. Many of the students who are free to roam the grounds and attend classes now began their Academy journey behind bars, beneath it. The prison carved through the foundational rock of the Broken Academy is a rehabilitation facility, in the truest sense of the word. More than any facility I’ve seen in the Norman world. It’s designed to contain those who cannot contain themselves, until they can. Or, in the case of Darius Jecks, to restrain those not deemed trustworthy, until they are.
The click of our shoes changes from the soft sounds of impact on wood to the hard clack of stone, the deeper we go. Comforts of the homey, open Academy dissolve away as we venture deeper. The walls take on the rugged texture of the rock beneath, and close in around us. The dim lights of lanterns fade away for the flickering glow of eternally enchanted torches. Their light dances over the carvings of runes set deep in the walls. They prevent escape by magical means similar to the way a MED-F dampens the powers of players on a Sealbreaker team.
The staircase lets Emery and I out in a long, narrow hallway-shaped cave. We’re deep beneath the grounds where students eat, sleep and learn, now. Down here, you’d never know there was a whole school a few hundred feet above you. Everything is silent. Dark. Cold. The perfect place for a loose cannon to meditate on the benefits of self-control, and miss the sunlight. We bypass a long row of dense iron cages set into the stony walls. The bars that enclose the silent prisoners are packed close together, with countless cross-bars. Most of them are so tight, in fact, that it would take a remarkably tiny arm to fit between them.
Emery leads the way around a sharp right corner to a hallway almost identical to the first. When we first came here, it was with a detailed map and pen in tow. Now we know the way well enough. We take another right, then a left and head straight down a long, narrow pass to a withered old iron cell, just like all the rest. But the man inside is hardly like the rest. He’s a Vampire that even I, his oldest friend, have no idea how old he is. He’s watched me grow from a boy while he never aged. When I’m old and gray, he’ll look just the same as he does now. As he always has.
“Look alive, prisoner,” I toot as Emery and I arrive at Darius’ cell. I kick the bars for good measure. He gives an irritable little snicker without lifting his head from where it slumps over towards his feet. He looks fuller than ever, and his skin has even regained some of its color compared to when he came in from living on the lam, yet his posture has never been worse. Spending all day in a rocky prison cell will do that to you, I guess.
“Get it in while you can,” Darius laughs. “I’ll be out of here before you know it…and I’ll kick that prissy ass of yours all around that double room you’ve got to yourself right now.”
“Love to see you try,” I taunt him again. Darius has always been an odd fellow. Maybe that’s why I enjoy his company so much. It’s quite different from sharing company with anyone else. The more I dig into him, cajole him, the more his mood seems to improve. He looks up at last to quip back at me, only to notice that my sister is along for the ride this time. He covers his forehead with the back of his hand, as if mopping the sweat of a good swoon.
“Oh my stars and garters. My sweet seductress!” Darius sings.
“Bite me,” Emery chuckles, shaking her head. Darius lets his eyes down to flutter at my sister in a way that makes me feel dirty for witnessing.
“I promise you, when I’m on the loose, it’s the first thing I’ll do,” he growls.
“Gross,” I interject, to remind them there’s an unwilling spectator present.
“You were always such a prude,” Darius waves me off.
“My sister, Darius,” I remind him, two hands presenting the prize he’d better well respect. If I know Darius, he’s done nothing of the sort.
“Fair enough. Why don’t you go take a walk then? I could use a minute to pay proper reverence to your sister in private,” he teases me. I imitate a gag for him, to let him know he’s won. Darius enjoys a hearty laugh of victory on his way to lean back against the grubby stone wall behind him. He lets the back of his head thump on it to watch the flicker of the torch outside his cell on the ceiling. “Has it really been a year?” he mumbles.
“It has,” Emery whispers, the sweetest note of sorrow in her voice. It cracks through any mask humor put on the situation. “Has anyone from the Council paid you a visit lately? Talked to you about a release?”
“Old Chris Farley came to see me about four days ago,” Darius recounts. “To literally pick my brain with some kind of trick.” I try not to give him the satisfaction of a laugh as I shake my head. I know exactly who he means.
“Maybe if you stopped calling him shit like that, Reynold would speak more on your behalf at the meetings,” Emery scolds Darius.
“It hardly matters what I say, when they send him in. He just pries his way inside to see what I really think. That’s part of the reason I’m still in here, I’m sure,” Darius tells us.
“What do you mean? You’re still being cooperative, right?” I ask. Darius’ eyes roll around in his skull for an escape route. “Darius!” I chirp to call him back.
“Cooperative as I can be, alright? I mean, he knows I don’t mean any harm to anyone at the Academy. He can see that in my mind. But…he also knows how vested I am in Lucidous’ plan. It’s why I got involved in the Kyrie in the first place,” Darius admits. The clammy darkness must really be getting to him. In all the times we’ve come down to visit him, he’s never talked about the Kyrie like this.
“Believe me, Darius, I’m only trying to help you by saying this, but…don’t those two things directly contradict one another?” I prompt him.
“If you still support the Kyrie…you still support a separatist supernatural world with no overarching rules,” Emery mulls quietly. “No wonder they won’t let you out.”
“This is exactly it,” Darius sighs. “Listen to me, please, because they won’t.” There’s just enough genuine plight in his voice to draw both Emery and I closer to the bars. Whatever he’s about to say, we both want so badly to believe it. We hang on the edge of his next word. “I said I’m vested in Lucidous’ plan. He doesn’t give two shits what the Kyrie does in this Realm, because he wants out of it. And so do I. It’s what most of us want…who’ve been here for a while. Lucidous is using the Kyrie as a means to an end.”
“Out of this Realm, like…go through a Runic Gate to another one?” Emery asks.
“Bingo. To whatever one our…condition originated from. We’ll be more at home there than here, where we’re treated like a parasite. Hated… Sometimes hunted,” Darius shivers.
“But Lucidous treated you worse than that! He tried to drown you without even hearing a word of what you tried to say,” Emery pleads back.
“You think I don’t know that?” Darius’ voice froths up from him like a swell of lava. “You think I don’t think of that every day? I believed in him, and he…bah,” he waves off the useless thought. It’s pointless to be angry now. A man in a cell knows that better than anyone. “But his plan was good. Humans and Vampires can share a living space about as much as a lion and a gazelle. It’s uneasy. Unstable. An eternal d
ance of one party or the other biting the big one so the other can go on. Lucidous found a way to get us out.”
“Which is why he wanted Helena at Point Arena so badly…” Emery realizes.
“What about blood?” I interject. “Won’t you just have to feed on some other creature in this new realm?”
“Lucidous had an idea to combat that… Blood Farms. I don’t know exactly how they work, since I never saw them. I never made it to the Stronghold,” Darius grunts. For a moment, his body almost fully deflates. He’s a husk of the man he once was. Then a deep, exaggerated breath vacuums in enough to blow him right back up to size. It’s a transformation so abrupt, I twitch back from the bars. “Look at what you did! Got me talking about it and shit. I need to forget this stuff, if good ol Saint Prick is ever gonna let me out of here.”
“Fair enough.” I can’t help but laugh at the sudden return of the friend I know.
“Maybe call him Reynold, just once. He’ll do more to help you, trust me. He’s a good man,” Emery sighs.
“Oh I’m sure he is, when he’s full of eggno-”
Darius cuts himself short when he notices the violet light shimmer through my pocket. Our visitation pass. Its irritating heat reminds me that hours are just about up. The heavy footsteps of the gaoler, a huge-framed Demon, echo down the hall we came from. His motto, which he doesn’t hesitate to share, is, anyone down here at the end of visiting hours, besides me, goes in a cell.
“Alright, get out.” Darius shoos us with the back of his hand, like he couldn’t care less. At the tail end of it, though, I catch a glint of honest sorrow. I wish there was anything I could say to alleviate it, but there’s not. Not something heartfelt, anyway.
“Yep. Rot and die,” I smirk at him.
“Fuck you,” he snorts back with an involuntary smirk. Emery’s hand slides up the bars to his, separated by an inch of iron. They share a longing look that pangs my stomach before her fingers slide away.
