by Jade Alters
“It goes without saying,” I promise her, gripping her hands tight.
“No, it doesn’t. I don’t…tell you enough. With everything else going on, you’re always there. You were there when I lost my brother… I don’t like admitting it, but…you saved me, Lee.” With each phrase, heartbeats swell through Cece’s chest into mine. “You opened the door into your world and brought me through…and then you followed me out of it. I can never thank you for it. No words-”
“We don’t need words,” I remind her. I smile at her and close my eyes. Cece is confused for a moment, before she realizes what I’m doing, and closes hers too.
Orange and blue wrap around one another in an infinite, twisting embrace of shared emotion. It’s overwhelming, euphoric. I feel her gratitude. She feels my infatuation. Excitement, desire, longing, comfort and intoxication swirl around and between us in the Soul of Fire. When it all flares out to a blue-orange tornado, we open our eyes. Neither of us dare say what we both think it is, because we’ve never felt it before. Not really. Because we don’t want to break this fragile thing we have. Love. Before I can ruin the moment with a word, Cece grabs my shoulders. She pulls me down on top of her. In seconds she’s got both our pants off, her shirt pulled up, and me stiff as a board.
I slide inside her. Cece’s hands glide all over me, sending tingles of hot and cold everywhere. She hugs my waist with her thighs and pulses up into me as I thrust. It’s like she can’t have me far enough inside her. True to her prediction, we scrape the bed across the floor several times. But neither that, nor the sound of our grunts and moans make it through the rock wall. Bodies and souls link together as one in the most heated, passionate sex we’ve ever had.
Right as Cece’s about to finish, she grabs my neck to pull herself up. I put my legs out in front of me to support her. This time, when she asks for more, she manages not to possess me. I give it to her anyway. Both sitting half upright, I bounce her breasts with a few more hard pushes. My penis throbs at the height of my pleasure between her own trembling muscle walls. Cece buries her face in my shoulder to muffle her screams. When the last of my liquid passion comes out of me, she collapses backwards, legs open for me to push between her hips a few more times. Lingering shivers tickle both of our bodies and minds.
My head on Cece’s chest, my first night in the Kyrie Stronghold may be the best sleep I’ve ever gotten.
The Missing Spark
Cece,
Kyrie Stronghold, Conference Room
I want to break out laughing when a look of such pure, unadulterated annoyance wrinkles the former Magister Horace’s face as the door to the Conference Room swings in one last time. His eye twitches at River as she walks in, rustling her still wet hair somewhat into line.
All that stops me from getting my sweet vengeance on him in jest is a certain, unexpected part of Dorian’s tale of my birth. According to him, I owe my life in no small part to Horace. I hardly see him and Dorian as friend material, but then I suppose you’d feel closer to anyone who saved your unborn daughter’s life with a trick-based artificial womb. Stranger things have happened. Like how much I’ve come to care about the sometimes-form-challenged Shifter that has just come through the door. Just when I think I’ve choked down the last of my laughter at Horace, he just has to grunt:
“Are we all accounted for now?” I put a fist over my mouth to muffle the snort of laughter.
“So-sorry,” River stammers. At the sight of so many familiar faces, all regarding her with a certain level of irritation, she rushes to the last open seat. “This place has really good water pressure,” she murmurs as an excuse. A few Kyrie members shake their heads in disbelief, but most of them are just eager to get this meeting started.
“We’ve waited a long time for this one. A very long time,” Dorian announces. He sits at the head of a long, glossy table of twisted cypress branches. They are blanched white and coiled together so tightly, the impressive furniture is virtually solid. On one side of my father sits me, River and Lee. On the other sits the former VampKing, Lucidous, Fey Rorelia and the former Magister Horace. At the foot of the table, opposite Dorian, sits the bridge between these previously polarized groups. Bart. “It’s almost time to make our move on the Broken Academy. Now that so many students have gone missing and they know the general vicinity of the Stronghold… It won’t be long until they come for us.” says Dorian.
I swallow hard. We’ve only just left. Suddenly it’s almost time to make our move? The woman I once embraced, who I only left behind last night is now my enemy? I knew the risk of things like this being asked of us when I left for the Stronghold. I had no idea it would be on our first full day. Still, I can’t help but see Dorian’s point. The Council is going to want a reckoning for River and me, for the Ahwahneechee Thanksgiving incident. When they find out that we’re gone, and where to…I guess it really could be any day.
“Explain to me, on behalf of the Fey, what we have now that we haven’t before, to make this move. A few extra Academy students?” Fey Rorelia posits.
“They will be of great help, yes. But the key is the missing spark, now returned at last,” Dorian tells her. “My daughter. Ceceli- er Cece.” Damn, I think to myself with a little smirk, and he was doing so well.
“Any of us who have dealt with the little...firecracker,” Horace redirects his language mid-sentence in a painfully obvious attempt at respect. “Know that she is a force to be reckoned with. But how does having her make so tremendous a dif-”
“Your trick has finally worn off, Horace,” Dorian interrupts him. Horace’s mouth hangs ajar, unaccustomed to being silenced. He’s so unused to it, in fact, that it takes a few extra seconds for his brain to truly absorb what he’s just heard. I see the shift in his face when it finally does. His cheeks and forehead sink down while his eyes open wider than I thought they could.
“You mean… The girl is…”
“The girl is right here,” I pipe up. When I see Dorian scoot forward in his seat to defuse the situation, I know I can’t let him. Not if I want to be taken seriously. And I’m not about to be strung along by the Kyrie, pulling all my most important people behind me, without being taken seriously. “Let me tell them, Dad,” I say without thinking. We both gasp quietly together. For just that second, we forget all about being head of the Kyrie and their new secret weapon. I didn’t mean to call him that for the first time at a top-secret meeting, but I can’t well take it back now. I clear my throat while we both try to compose ourselves again. “For anyone unaware, Dorian’s wife was an Astral, and so am I.”
“You’re a Dragon,” Lucidous tries to correct me, enslaved to the preconceived notions of possible in his mind.
“Yes, I am,” I tell him. I see a glint of recognition in his eye. He knows what I mean, but he just can’t understand yet. Not just from one of us.
“This is why the Academy murdered my wife,” Dorian murmurs, to corroborate the tale. “They hoped to kill our child along with her, simply for what she was… Special. She only lives thanks to Horace.” Still weird to hear that out loud. It does give an even eerier tone to the memory of him trying to get me to kill Darius Jecks. Of him, guiding my choice towards the Kyrie long before I ever knew what it was.
“So…the girl can manifest the powers of both an Astral and Dragon?” Fey Rorelia tries to piece together.
“Again. The girl is right here,” I break in. The powerful Fey turns her crystal jade eyes on me. That’s it. That’s the respect I need to command, if I don’t want the rest of the Kyrie to make us all into pawns. I doubt Dorian would let it happen, but…I’ve never relied on anyone else before. Starting now seems like ill timing. “Right now, I can only call out my Dragon side, on command. The Astral side…tends to come and go,” I lay out for them.
“She needs time, like all of us, to master herself,” Bart’s voice comes to my aid. I shoot him a discreetly grateful glance.
“You’ve spent more time with her than any other in the Kyrie,” Luc
idous supposes. “If you were to place a bet…would your money say she could do it? Wield the powers of both heritages?”
“All in,” Bart tells him without a second’s thought. It comes straight from the gut. A flutter of warmth spreads out from my already piping chest. It’s not just my chips at risk on the table. How can I let myself fail now?
“So what’s the actual plan, Dorian?” Horace asks, arms crossed. “I can’t imagine you’re suggesting we use your own daughter as fuel for our Runic Gate configuration.” Though I know Horace is right, I still get a shiver. Trust and distrust for Dorian have almost completely reversed quantities inside me – with the tiniest sliver still doubting him. But it’s enough, just knowing I would never make it out if I ran now. If the most remote of possibilities proved true and my only hope was to escape, my friends and I would be dead before we reached the Conference Room door.
“Of course not,” Dorian scoffs. A wave of relaxation undoes the tension in my, Lee’s and River’s muscles at our side of the table. Though silent for the meeting, their body language reflects mine in an unspoken show of support. “No, I suggest that we seek out the only supernatural battery we know of capable of handling such a power draw. Helena Bartos. With Cece’s power of possession, and some practice, Helena could walk right to us on her own two feet. We’d be there to intercept her. The Council would have no chance to respond in time.”
“You want me to possess Helena Bartos…so you can hook her up to a bunch of Runic Gates?” I say out loud to process it. Each member of the Kyrie looks to another, the weight of their decisions balanced with guilt in a stressed concoction that adds ten years to their expressions. The only one who maintains a steady face is Dorian.
“I know it sounds cruel…because it is,” he admits. “I don’t know if the process will be painful, or just tiring for her. But Helena represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us. We can never let her die. She will survive the process we need her for, and then be free to go. One person’s temporary suffering for liberation.”
“I…” I want to tell him yes. I’ll do it. For the first time in years, the fear of disappointment creeps into the back of my mind again. But the thought of using my unique nature to capture someone else not too different, to be used as a battery…even if it is temporary...
“For liberation? Or vengeance?” a voice strikes its way through the room. It seems, somehow, to come from every direction at once. I recognize it instantly, having heard it every day for the past two years. I look around, to find the gathering particles of energy in the Blue Plane long before she’s visible to anyone else. It starts as blue mist that swirls together and builds itself into a body from the feet up. As soon as her face materializes, I see my father lose his composure for the first time. “Hello, Dorian,” she says. He scoots back in his seat so sharply, it tips over.
“Ste-Ste-Ste-Stephanie?” he whimpers, his usually deep voice a mess of clashing octaves. He scrambles to get his feet back under him. “Jesus Christ, Stephanie?”
“It’s me,” Stephanie tells him. If I could send a message to my younger self in a bottle, telling her she’d witness this one day, she’d have thrown it right out. Mother and father, and daughter, reunited. One a disembodied spirit, one the most infamously fierce Dragon, and one who inherited the strength of both. Dorian clamors to his feet and takes a clumsy step towards his wispy wife. Stephanie floats back from him in hesitation. “Not the me you remember,” she warns him. “I only see parts of who I was… I remember the car ride and a few days before. And you… You’re not the same you I remember, either.”
“You…you really thought losing you wouldn’t change me?” Dorian murmurs, his fingers trembling in a fist around the edge of the table.
“I didn’t think anything. For the longest time. I drifted in the Blue…not sure who or what I was. Then, a few years before our daughter came to the Academy, I started to form in this Realm. I didn’t remember anything about my life until this year. And now…I see a man who lives for revenge, not liberty. Revenge for me.”
“Of course I want revenge!” Dorian surprises me with a roar. “Look at what they did to our family! Look at what they took from you, and Cece… Everything I’ve done was my choice, but you two had none. And we were just the first. Who knows what else they could do… If someone doesn’t resist. If someone doesn’t free the supernatural world from the vice grip of the Council! I want revenge…and freedom. For all of us.” His firestrike hazel eyes lift to Stephanie’s shimmering silver ones. “You may not know this new me too well, but…tell me, from what you do remember, Steph. Was I ever a liar?” Steph. Just like I call her. The sweetness in his tone when he says it is enough to gloss over my eyes.
“No,” Stephanie admits eventually. Dorian gives her another few seconds to think it through before he tries again.
“Please…help us. All we want is the freedom to govern ourselves. To stop catastrophes like the one that ripped our family apart from happening again,” he pleads, with more heartbreaking authenticity than I’ve ever seen in him before. “Please, help our daughter.”
Stephanie’s head droops low. The harder she thinks, the more her misty frame begins to twist and fade. For a second, I think she might just drift out of the Realm to escape. Then she solidifies again. Though her face is something that’s only recently been made clear to me, I’ve never seen it so driven. I’m surprised when she turns it right to me.
“It’s going to take more than some practice to be ready for this. To do this, in the amount of time he needs it done,” Stephanie shoots a glance back to Dorian. “Before…the Academy comes knocking… It’s going to be non-stop practice, dawn to dusk. Every day. Are you up for it?” she asks. In the long seconds I linger to answer, a different question visits her, one that she thinks better to ask. Her face morphs with a type of concern I haven’t seen since I left my home on Scott Street. The maternal kind. “Is that what you want to do?” she asks.
“I…” I stall as best I can. If I could buy even a few seconds, maybe the answer would scream clearer in my head. Louder than all the other voices telling me what to do. Giving me doubt. But there are too many, all crammed together in the fight for my mind. “I do,” I force myself to decide.
“Then I’ll help you. Starting today,” Stephanie smiles at me. It could be the approval of the plan, or simply the reunion he probably believed he’d have as much as I did, but Dorian smiles too.
Left Behind
Bryant,
The Broken Academy, Dragonlord’s Office
It’s been a long day, full of investigations. Full of questions. Empty of answers. It started with an unexpectedly long wait in the D-Wing courtyard. Cece always crosses through there around noon to get from Supernatural-Human Dynamics to Advanced Transformation. So where was she today? That was the first question that plunged me into a troublesome string of others, mysteries yet to be solved.
I waited a full hour before I decided, for whatever reason, Cece wouldn’t come through the courtyard today. I wasn’t too concerned then, but I missed her after several days of absence, so I decided to pay a visit to her room. That’s when the concern started. Not only was Cece away, but so were River and Stephanie. I’ve never been by to find all three of them out. Their schedules are too different.
This is what brought me to Serge’s room. When yet another hollow knock yielded no answer, I began to think I made a mistake. Perhaps I missed a notice that the ASTF was supposed to meet. That must be it, I told myself. I let myself get fixated, if only to distract from the other possibility. The one that had haunted the back of my mind since the last time I saw Cece. Having sex with her was incredible, but also incredibly distracting. We never finished talking out her confusion over the Kyrie. Thise has been sending her there so frequently lately, and now everyone is missing… No, I can’t let myself go there. There’s just an ASTF meeting I didn’t hear about. I set a new destination in my mind.
My fist rises to the door of the Dragonlord’s
office. Just then I’m visited by a sensation so alien, I’m not entirely sure what it is for a few seconds. I know I haven’t lost motor function in my arm. I was able to lift it, after all, but it just won’t knock. No matter how many times I remind myself, this is what I came here to do. To clear things up. If it weren’t for Cece, this would have been the most perplexing mystery of all. Why I wasn’t just knocking. It takes a while, but thanks to her teachings, I know…it’s because I’m scared. Terrified, actually. What if I clear things up, only to find… It’s almost better not knowing. But I know the mystery will eat me alive if I don’t figure it out. If I never see Cece again. So, finally, I click my rocky knuckles on the door.
“Come in,” Dragonlord Thise calls through. “Bryant. What can I do for you?” she asks as soon as she sees me. She is the sole occupant of the office. I gulp at the realization that part of my question has been answered already. I don’t answer the Dragonlord until the door is shut behind me, and I’m halfway to her desk. I can’t shake the feeling that the look on her face means she already knows exactly what she can do for me.
“I was wondering if…” it’s even harder to get out than I thought it would be. I let out a few coughs to dislodge something in my throat. I’ve never had anything caught in there before. Nor have I ever coughed. Perhaps my human half holds more sway over me than I thought. “Have you seen Cece? I stopped by her room, but no one was there…and neither was Serge”
I sense something unsaid that I would never have picked up on, even a year ago. Thise closes the folder she was adding files to. She folds her hands over the top of it. She looks me square in the eye. She’s preparing for a discussion that will require her full attention. It looks, from the down-slanted shape of her eyes, that there is a heavy emotion attached to it as well.
