by Jade Alters
“What’s wrong?” I ask. Serge’s eyes seem suddenly half as attentive as they just were, sliding from one corner of the room to the next. Anywhere but my eyes. “Serge. Come on.”
“I…had a special assignment from Thise yesterday,” Serge mutters. He manages to look me in the eye at last, which only highlights how deep the bags have sunken under his. I put a hand to his cheek to massage out some of the stress lines. I can hardly contend with them for control of his face, which speaks more than words ever could.
“To watch me?” I infer.
“I was supposed to watch Bart,” Serge says, “but he hardly did anything all day. I mean anything.”
“Well, he did tell me that Lucidous is on to him, so he had to make himself inconspicuous,” I explain.
“It was a little too inconspicuous. He ate a sandwich, talked to some Fey and played chess. With Lucidous,” Serge objects. “If he wanted to make himself seem loyal to the cause, he should at least have done something. I think he knew I was watching him. I don’t trust him.”
“That aside,” I draw Serge’s mind and my own away from the topic. I’m not entirely sure where, on the spectrum of trust, my own feelings for Bart reside and I didn’t come here to talk it over with someone else who doesn’t trust him. “You didn’t say no. Before. You watched me?”
“Bart wasn’t doing anything, so I decided to just check in on you… Not that that’s an excuse. I know I shouldn’t have. I should have trusted you,” Serge tells me. Again, his eyes bolt around everywhere but my face. I can hardly stand to see so proud a face so shady. I seize his chin and force it up to mine.
“So you saw me with Dorian. It’s not like it’s a secret. I’ll have to report to Thise on it. I wish you hadn’t spied on me,” I tell him, though the edge of anger is fairly dull in my voice. I’d be a whole lot more angry if I didn’t feel like I’d done something wrong, myself. I feel caught. It wouldn’t be troubling Serge so much if he hadn’t overheard something troubling. If I’d just been doing my job, asking questions and learning whatever I could about the Kyrie to bring back, Serge probably would never have mentioned it. “But let’s talk about it. You obviously feel like we have to.”
“I shouldn’t…but it’s just the way you talked to him. The way you acted. And maybe that’s all it was. Acting. But…” Serge can’t bring himself to say it. He can’t bring himself to point the finger. So I’ll turn it right around on myself. One of us has to, or we’ll never work through this.
“You’re afraid I’m starting to believe what he says?” I prompt. “What the Kyrie says?”
“You’re not. Tell me you’re not,” Serge pleads with me.
“You want me to lie to you? I thought we were better than that,” I murmur. Serge’s face begins to sink before I add, “I’m not about to drop everything and join their cause, Serge. But I can’t help but notice when some of the things coming out of the man’s mouth…make sense.”
“The man, your father,” Serge says. The way the word jumps off his tongue, a man who forsook his own blood, stings.
“I don’t see him as a father. But I can’t see him as a bad man. Believe me, I tried. He’s given me nothing but reason to listen to him. And that’s all I’m doing, Serge. Listening,” I try to assure him. “I’m still here, aren’t I? I came back to the Academy. I came here, to see you. I’m still me. This is just…trickier than I thought it would be. Can you find it in your heart to give me some sort of break?” A rush of guilt wrinkles Serge’s brow. He leans back to link his hands together behind my back. Right there, where his hands are supposed to be, everything feels better. He lifts me up to his face.
“I don’t know… My heart’s pretty small. Don’t think there’s room in there for a break,” Serge teases me.
“Shit… Angry sex it is, then,” I laugh and push my breasts up into him. “Oh, wait,” I remember. I pull my face back an inch away to ask, “Did you see that crazy Lab that your parents are running?”
“See it, no. I can’t do that without them catching on. But I heard you and Dorian talking to them,” Serge tells me. The cracks of worry split their way back across his face.
“You don’t happen to know anything about it that I wouldn’t? Nothing they mentioned to you about a… What was it- an Inhibitor Chamber?” I prompt him. Serge’s head is shaking before I hit the end of the sentence.
“Never. It might be a new development, but I wouldn’t know,” he says. “Dalshak children are generally regarded as pawns until the age of thirty. Before that, we’re hardly permitted the most basic details of plans made by the more senior members of the family. We just get shuffled around the board, no questions asked.” I bob my head slowly. There’s not a trace of dishonesty in his eyes. It’s been entirely absent from them since the end of our first term together, when he turned on that family for attacking me and Darius.
“It’s a wonder more of them don’t rebel,” I say.
“They’re afraid. But don’t let any of them hear you say that,” Serge chuckles. “They’d say Emery and I are the cowards, for fleeing our responsibility.” I give Serge a long, wet kiss to distract him from the weight of it all. I feel some of the tension leave his cheeks and mouth as they synchronize with mine. I pull back to tell him:
“You’re not just the bravest man in your family, Serge.” I feel his hand on my hip, then up my shirt onto my breast. I open my legs for his hand and lean back to let him take the lead. To take me. Just before Serge can snap us away to an illusory space where we can cut loose, another set of hard knocks rattles his door. I frown and prop up an eyebrow as his fingers slide away from my chest.
“Let me just check,” Serge whispers. When he crouches to peer through the eyehole on the door, however, he turns back to me with an even bigger frown than my own. “Think it’s for you,” he says. I straighten out the wrinkles in my shirt as he pulls the door in.
“Ri-ri-River?” I cough when she appears in the open door. She’s redder in the cheeks than I am.
“Sorry if I interrupted anything,” she says. In her hand hangs a tiny duffel bag. She’s dressed in traditional Tribal hide and bone-wear that covers her chest, waist-to-thighs, and little else. “It’s time to go,” she tells me. She doesn’t need to mention where. I packed a bag first thing when I got back from the Stronghold, since I knew it was today. I just didn’t think it would be in the middle of the day.
“Sorry, Serge,” I offer as I pass him by.
“Rain check,” he smirks through his disappointment. I leave one last kiss on his lips before I head out into the hall with River.
We make a short stop back at the room for me to scoop up my bag for a few days in Yosemite Village. The ancestral home of the Ahwahneechee Shapeshifters.
Serge,
The Broken Academy, Containment Block
“Darius,” I call into the dark, just before the match strike. I lower my tiny fire into the oil lantern the gaoler was kind enough to lend me. I wonder how long ago they put out Darius’ cell light and why. My firelight flickers him to life in the corner, if alive is the right term for him anymore. I wonder how little they’re feeding him now, with how much of his skeleton shows through his skin. “Holy shit. What did they do to you?”
“They’re cutting me this great new deal. Loyalty for food,” Darius chuckles. “Turns out I don’t need all that much to scrape by. Where’s your sister?”
“It’s just me this time,” I tell him. The disappointment in his body language is so immediate I can’t help but laugh. He all but implodes into a pile of skin and thinning muscle.
“Shit. You at least smuggle me something to ea-”
Darius cuts himself short when a cookie sails through the bars, right onto his lap. He looks down at it in disbelief when he gets a whiff of it.
“You did not soak this in blood,” Darius laughs, despite what his acute sense of smell tells him.
“I’ve got a better arrangement for you. Food for info,” I tell him, and sit down across from h
im on the other side of the bars. I put the lantern on the floor to flicker over both of us. “Can’t believe they turned your cell light off, too.”
“Nah, I did that. I thought it’d make it easier to let the days bleed away, so I smashed it. Huge miscalculation,” Darius snorts. “What can I learn you today, friend?”
“You ever heard of a Vampire named Bart?” I ask as Darius downs half of his cookie in a single bite. He does his best to look away from me while he gnashes the plasma-infused treat to bits. “Savor that. It wasn’t easy to get a blood bag from the emergency supply.”
“This is me savoring. What’s with the latent racism, anyway? Taking after your dad in your old age?” Darius pokes at me. “You assume, just because we’re both Vampires, I’ve heard of him?” He knows as well as I do it has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with the fact that both of them were members of the same supernatural separatist party.
“Latent racism aside, you know him?” I ask again. Darius thinks on it over a long chew.
“Nope. No goons named Bart in the Kyri… Wait. Long time ago, there was a Bartholomew,” Darius tells me.
“Sounds like him. Scarlet eyes, like Lucidous, but brighter?” I ask. Darius nods. “How long ago are we talking?”
“Shit man, maybe thirty years now. He disappeared for a while, but he and Lucidous used to be thick as thieves,” Darius tells me.
“Thirty years? You’re sure?” I blurt. Bart doesn’t look a year over eighteen, and a young eighteen at that.
“Am I sure that this vague Bart character is actually Lucidous’ long-lost buddy based on a description of eye color? One hundred percent,” Darius mocks me. Even in that cell, whittled down to the bone. Even in the dark all day, without a visitor. Where the fire within him comes from within his frigid, pale body, even a few Dragons could take notes on.
“Alright, alright. What can you tell me about the guy? Besides the fact that he was so close with Lucidous?” I try again. Darius scratches his chin. His eyes wander around the ceiling of his cell, like he’s trying to recall the graphic of an old shirt he lost.
“Well, no one really knows how old the two of those guys are. Just that they’re old. So old that they want to change the game. Last I heard of it, it was just a loose concept, but the idea was: no more violence for Vampires to live. Or at least to organize and control the violence. Treat humans like livestock, to stop hunting them,” Darius tells me.
“Holy shit,” I murmur. It’s not exactly what Darius said, but the combination of many details that brings it all together into one, horrifying image. I can only pray it’s not actually all connected. My family’s Lab, full of supernatural inhibition experiments... Lucidous and Bart both at large in such a sprawling Stronghold… The sudden interest in Cece. The only thing more frightening than the nightmares this is going to give me might be the truth, whatever that is.
“It’s not like you’ve got much to worry about, trickster. They wouldn’t farm people who could so easily fight back. Probably just Normans.” Darius tries to comfort me just before he tosses back the last chunk of his blood-wafer. Not that that would be any more comforting, but he also doesn’t know about the Lab. It all depends on how intensely my family plans to uphold their alliance with the Vampires.
“I’m not so sure,” I mutter.
Setting the Table
Cece,
Yosemite Village, Ahwahneechee Village
Light rains down around us like a thousand shimmering fists. Yet I feel no impact, and each of those fists beams right through the clay floor. No matter how many times I use the Tether Teleporters, they still amaze me. It’s a few more seconds of flooding light before I can bear to open my eyes fully. What I find when I do is almost just as astounding.
Even more modest than the inside of the San Francisco back-alley broom closet, the Yosemite Village Teleporter lets us out inside what must be some type of yurt. It looks and feels like the inside of a clay pot. Plain, grainy red color encloses us from all sides but up. There, when I glance up, I find an overturned cone of dried grass. Blades of yellow sunlight cut in between the wide strips of the stuff. It’s a wonder it doesn’t ignite in the heat, but then the whole energy-based transit deal of the Academy is a wonder. There are no windows in the building, only a single door hanging off half its hinges. When I can see again, I see River at my side, a duffel bag like mine in her grip. She takes the lead without a word. I follow her through the rickety old door to the outskirts of Yosemite Village.
At first glance, it looks like we’ve stumbled out into the middle of nowhere. Possibly because we have. We’re at the top of a big, stony rise over a gigantic pine forest. I walk out onto a gray cliff edge for a view of Yosemite Valley. Straight across the treetops from us is another rocky face, frothing over with the foamy spray of a waterfall. Aside from that, it’s all tree-splotched peaks and pines. It doesn’t look like there’s a village anywhere down there. Yet River walks with a purpose, right along the edge of the cliff. I give one last longing look back to the Tether. There’s incredibly little trace of the massive energy current running up to the Academy, holding it aloft. My assessment of the building was even a little generous, I find now. The word yurt has some culturally charged luxury attached to it – this place hardly qualifies as a shack with its cracked walls, patchy roof and unhinged door. It has an odd, humble sort of charm.
“You coming?” River calls back to me.
“Ye-yeah!” I cough back and shoot glances around to find her. I just barely catch the top of her head descending below the cliffside. I rush after her to find a set of thick, split-log steps impaled in the stone. I creep out onto the first few, only to find them rock steady. River leads the way down the side of the cliff, below the needled canopy of pines. Then I see it. Yosemite Village, in all its glory.
I figured the word village was just a cute title to attract tourists. As it turns out, the title is pretty honest. The whole place is visible from the high, wooden steps in the cliff. It looks like little more than a massive campground. The roads are packed dirt or gravel. There are tents everywhere, though not the tribal kind I pictured. It’s a world of nylon and backpacks as tourists file from one trail entrance to the glass-paned General Store, and back. A row of uniform cabins is all that qualifies it to be called a village.
The place slowly vanishes again behind a thick veil of interlocked needles as River leads us down, to the base of the forest. There, I find that the village is hardly our destination. There is a well-traveled trail there that winds alongside the cliff wall and leads out, away from the dirt roads and cabin resorts of Yosemite Village. The happy campers going about their business there will never even know we walked by. I keep low and close to the wall for fear of being seen, though now I notice the ripple in the air between us and the village. The illusory curtain encloses everything from the forest just outside our little path to the shack on top of the cliff and beyond. A secret world right on the border of the one I used to live in, the Norman world, just like San Francisco.
River follows the path as it swings out and then turns straight into a split in the cliff we climbed down from. The precipitous gorge is lit only by faint rays of sun that bounce down from above. She grasps a particularly worn part of the wall to lower herself down a natural rocky stair, to the runoff-worn floor of the crevasse. I follow her down and in. More than once, we have to turn our shoulders to fit between outcrops that once connected the two halves of this split in the mountain.
“So…you walk this way every time you go to and from the Academy?” my voice slays the awkward silence. It leaps around, up, and down the close walls of the cavern. I can’t help but glance up to trace the path of sound, all the way to the sky-colored crack in the peaks above us.
“Ye-yeah,” River stammers just as she reaches a boulder blocking her path. She puts a foot high up on it and leaps over to the other side.
But when her feet come back down, they’re not in shoes. They’re not human feet at all. Th
ick, muscular talons rip down from River’s tribal skirt. Her body contours into a feathered torso that can’t quite fit in the narrow pass. Her long neck cranes back to let out a panicked ostrich yip. I rush in over the boulder to try to dislodge her, but by the time I do, it’s too late. It’s no longer necessary. River’s frame implodes to a tiny formless mass, then sprouts four legs, a hairless tail and two big ears around a pointed nose. I try not to chuckle too loud as I offer my arm to the little rat. River stares at my wiggling fingers from her rocky little perch on the cavern wall for more than a few hesitant seconds. She finally concedes with a little hop onto my hand. River scampers up to my shoulder and melts into it, disappointed. A pang of sympathy stabs my chest. I know it’s not me she’s disappointed in.
“Listen. It’s about time we dropped the act,” I tell her as I walk along. I cross through the cavern like watching her shift involuntarily between forms is the normalest thing I’ve seen all day. After three years in the same room, it pretty much is. River’s tiny rodent face turns toward me with bright, curious eyes. She gives my cheek a few adorable little sniffs. A silent, what do you mean? “Yes, we’re co-members of the ASTF. Yes, we’re roommates, and yes it only makes sense that I’d be the one to come home with you for Thanksgiving. But…we’re friends too, aren’t we?” I ask. River’s powerful incisors grind together near my ear. I recognize it as a sign of affection – this is hardly my first time as a rat-interpreter. “Isn’t that really why you asked me to come with you?”
