Twig

by wildbow

  She turned and saw that Sy had grabbed the length of hair that normally framed one side of her face.

  “Stay,” he said.

  She swallowed hard. Her heart drummed. She couldn’t find words.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Come here.”

  She approached, and watched as he reached out to take hold of the other lock of hair.

  “I’m going to kiss you,” he said, staring down at her with those penetrating eyes. “If that’s alright.”

  Her lips moved but no air passed through them. She gave him a nod.

  “Then stand on your tiptoes,” he said.

  He tugged lightly on her hair, urging her up and forward, to meet him as he leaned down.

  She obliged.

  Somewhere, in her fantasies about kissing boys, she had most definitely thought about what kissing Sy would be like. A part of her had told her that no, it wouldn’t be great, first kisses never were, and Sy was usually terrible at something until he’d had a little practice.

  He was a good kisser. His lips were cool to the touch, but he was gentle. His lips brushed hers, then pulled away. She raised herself up a bit further to kiss back, and he kissed her again as a reward. It wasn’t long until she was standing on the very tips of her boots, leaning forward, hands on his thighs, trying to meet him, only to experience feather touches of kisses.

  Then, like he was hungry, a real kiss, full lipped instead of a simple touch, while her entire body was straining up and forward, as if everything led to that contact.

  The knuckles of one hand that held her hair brushed against her cheek. It was so nice and she’d already been so close to crying earlier that she wondered if she might tear up.

  If she dropped down, she knew, it would probably tug her hair against his hand, and it would hurt and it was probably the least of the reasons she didn’t want to stop straining up and forward, the least of the reasons she didn’t want this to end.

  He pulled away, then kissed her, pulled away, and stopped.

  Teasing.

  “More,” she whispered.

  Sylvester cleared his throat.

  Lillian dropped down to the ground, spinning around.

  It was worse than she’d thought.

  Not just Sy’s doctor, but Hayle as well.

  “Lillian,” Hayle said. “A word?”

  Lillian remained frozen, a deer in the headlights.

  Sy leaned down, his mouth by her ear.

  “Tonight, if you come to my room, I’ll give you another.”

  The worst. He was the absolute worst.

  But it was reason enough to flee the room.

  She knew she was blushing bright red for Professor Hayle. The professor closed the door.

  He pointed, and the two of them walked a distance down the hall.

  “Do I need to worry?” he asked.

  Lillian shook her head.

  Then she remembered the greater situation. “Do—do we need to worry? The Lambs?”

  “We’re waiting to talk to Jamie tomorrow. He’s having an appointment now. The others want to talk and figure out what questions to ask, as he can provide us the clearest perspective, for what he’s seen, if nothing else.”

  Lillian felt a sinking feeling in her gut.

  “I know,” Hayle said. “I think things will be fine.”

  Lillian didn’t feel convinced.

  “I came to ask a question. Now I feel we might need to have a discussion.”

  “Please no,” Lillian said.

  “You’re a favorite student of mine, with all the promise in the world—”

  “Please, sir.”

  “Okay,” Hayle said, raising his hands. “Alright. Just let this old man say his piece.”

  Lillian couldn’t stop blushing.

  “There was a time, not so long ago, where I worried about Sylvester. All of the Lambs, but Sylvester was among them. When it came to… interest in others.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When a youth comes of age, it can be hard. Hormones surge, judgment isn’t always there, unfamiliar feelings… if you combine the intensity of feeling with the natural ability of the Lambs to get what they desire, through trickery, problem solving, or sheer charm, keeping in mind Sylvester meets all of the marks, that’s a difficult issue.”

  “Yes sir. I don’t think he’s dangerous.”

  “No, but he’s been retarded in physical and emotional growth by the chemicals we inject him with. He’s a late bloomer in everything but mental faculties. I worried that he would be a danger if he were to turn his attention toward someone in the public, but then he seemed to turn his sights to Mary, and if anyone can defend themselves, it’s her.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I don’t want to sound as though I don’t have faith in you, Lillian. But, the Lambs being what they are, it warps them in many ways, in growth and emotion and other things. The arena of love stands to be very dangerous ground. Enough that I considered chemically emasculating the boys and doing much the same for Mary.”

  Lillian swallowed.

  “I’m not going to do that. I won’t tell you not to do this. But I wanted you to know how, looking at the bigger picture, I was wary.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I would like you to be wary.”

  “Yes sir. Um. The other question? That you came to ask?”

  Professor Hayle sighed, as if she’d disappointed him somehow. She hated that.

  “The Lambs will be splitting up, depending on how the verdict goes. We’ll find a way to broach the news to them tomorrow, but—”

  “They know.”

  Hayle paused. “I should have figured.”

  “Yes sir. I mean, sir, I didn’t mean to sound like I was saying you should have, only that—”

  “Yes, Lillian. I know. Do you have any recommendations, from students in your age group?”

  “I don’t have many classes with students in my age group. But I could give you names.”

  “Thank you, Lillian. Your parents are coming to visit in a month, I’m having them to my place. I expect you’ll come?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If there’s anything you need,” Hayle said, glancing in the direction of Sy, “You’ll let me know?”

  “Yes, sir,” she lied.

  Previous Next

  Bleeding Edge—8.1

  A carriage passed us, the wheels cutting through the golden leaves that had collected at the street’s edge. The man atop the carriage looked down at us and tipped his hat, smiling.

  Weird.

  I watched as the carriage continued down the long, well-maintained road. The properties on either side were well spaced out, each one less than a proper manor, but more than a mere home. Walls both short and tall surrounded each. Stitched in servants’ uniforms were busy raking up leaves and pruning some peculiar trees with charcoal black bark and autumn-yellow foliage. I wondered if the grass was a similar type of affectation, because it wasn’t green, but a color comparable to wheat.

  Peaceful, idyllic, every scene an image from a painting, juxtaposed by the contents of the carriage—a large cage with a dozen people and one monster crammed within. A young child gripped the bars with both hands, staring back at me as the beaked monster peered over her shoulder.

  She let go of the bar, reaching out in my direction.

  I lifted my hand, as if to take her hand, but she was already ten feet away, the gap growing.

  I’d pulled ahead of the others, so I turned and started walking backward, looking at the Lambs.

  Our contingent of Lambs were dressed up. It wasn’t a huge change for Jamie, who wore a shirt with a straight, stiff-necked collar, a jacket, and slacks, but Gordon had really come into his own with the finer clothes, dressing up in very much the same, but without the jacket. His shirt was tucked in, and a stylized belt buckle drew the eye. Even Hubris was groomed, his short coat brushed until there wasn’t a stray hair.

  Lillian, though, had gone t
he extra mile, with a new dress, navy blue and pleated with a folded collar and a coat stylized after the doctor’s lab coats, new, fashionable, and nice enough that it could be worn in high society. She had a daub of makeup on her lips and the ends of her hair were curled outward and up.

  It wasn’t her. She was prettier than I’d ever seen her, unless I counted some mental images of her in a nightgown, lit in just the right way by the light from the window, but I found myself itching to mess up her hair or clothes. I didn’t want to see her upset, but surprised would be nice. Smiling would be better.

  I wasn’t sure how to reconcile the feeling or how to make it happen.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You had a look in your eye.”

  “Lies,” I said.

  “You did,” Gordon said.

  “Can confirm,” Jamie said. “Perfect recall. In prior moments when you’ve had that look, you’ve been up to mischief.”

  “Okay, okay!” I said. I turned around, taking exaggerated steps to the left and then the right, before letting myself crash into Lillian’s shoulder. “Minor mischief.”

  Lillian looked at me out of the corner of one eye, wary and getting warier by the second.

  “You look nice,” I said.

  “You said as much, just ten minutes ago, when you saw me come through the door,” Lillian said. “Are you saying it again because you want to distract me from what you were really saying or thinking?”

  “So paranoid!” I admonished her.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “It’s a partial yes. The two ideas are linked.”

  I watched her turn her eyes forward, picking her way through the possibilities.

  No blush, but I could see the change in her expression as she connected the dots.

  “Be good,” she said, suppressing a smile.

  “Never,” I said, reaching down to take her hand. I squeezed.

  “I’m serious,” she said. She didn’t pull her hand away. “This is really important to me. If you play around or mess up here, then I’m going to be really upset.”

  I swung our hands back and forth.

  “I know you want to, Sy. I know how your brain works, as much as anyone can. These people are as important as people can be, without having the power to cancel the Lambs project or call in favors to end us. They are probably the most important and powerful people you can get away with practicing your own Sylvester brand of villainy on, without repercussion.”

  I started swinging with more and more vigor.

  “Now it sounds like you’re trying to convince me to do something.”

  “No!” Lillian said, her voice suddenly sharp. She pulled her hand away from mine, letting mine flop to my side, while stabbing a fingernail at my throat. It had been artificially grown or else glued on. Lillian didn’t normally have longer nails. Sharp. “No joking. No turning around thirty minutes from now and saying I convinced you to do it, no nonsense at all, Sy.”

  The more serious and stern she got with me, the more I wanted to do something. Seeing her all prettied up just made me want to tease her more.

  I could kiss her and make her melt, and smudge that makeup that made her look less like our Lillian and more like someone else’s Lillian.

  It was a nice mental image.

  “Yes ma’am,” I said. I smiled, but it might have looked more like a smirk.

  Jamie turned to Gordon, pointing at his own eye, “Mischievous glimmer, right?”

  “I saw it,” Gordon said, expression flat.

  Lillian took that as excuse to stab my jugular with her fingernail again. “Be good, Sy. I want this. One day, I’m going to have to choose what I do with everything I’m studying. Professor Ibott wants to attend the nobles and have the most power a non-noble can have. I asked for this job, we didn’t have to do it, you agreed to do this for me, they did too, but you agreed.”

  “I’m entirely on your side,” I said.

  “I don’t trust you for a hot bloody second, Sy, not when it comes to unfamiliar territory like this. If I’m ever going to be a black-coated professor, I need friends, contacts, patrons. I need to make friends, and I need to look like I know what I’m doing. Please. Please, please, please, I’m begging you, don’t muck this up. Please.”

  “We could have him wait outside,” Gordon suggested.

  Lillian snapped her head around to look at Gordon, and I could tell that she was actually pleased at the notion.

  “I don’t want to wait outside.”

  “It’s a possibility,” Lillian said, not acknowledging me.

  “I miss the old days. When I had backup,” I said, staring out off to one side, at the houses and the trees.

  “Jamie would have been backing Lillian,” Gordon said. He looked at Jamie, “Sorry.”

  “It’s alright,” Jamie said. “If it matters, I don’t think we should leave anyone outside. People like this, they’re liable to worry about subterfuge. Not being able to watch or keep track of every member of a group of visitors? I think it would put them in a warier mindset.”

  Did he actually just back me up?

  “That’s a good point,” Gordon said. “Where did you pick that up?”

  “A book series I’ve been reading. Intrigue in noble courts. Not like ours.”

  “Huh,” Gordon said.

  “I’ll be good,” I said, with emphasis.

  “I wish I had something on you,” Lillian said. “Something you wanted that I could take away, some weakness I could exploit, but you don’t leave any good openings. It’s so one-sided. How do I punish you if you ruin this for me?”

  “I won’t.”

  “You can beat him up, or wrestle him into submission and make him cry uncle and admit he smells like butt, or whatever you want him to say,” Gordon said. “I’m pretty sure you could beat him in a fight. He still can’t seem to grasp the basics.”

  “First of all, not necessary, because I won’t do anything to deserve a beating, but she tried that this one night this past summer,” I said. “I teased her too much and she—”

  “We’re not talking about that,” Lillian said, louder than was necessary.

  “—tried—”

  “Not talking about it!”

  I dropped the subject.

  “Silent treatment, then,” Gordon said.

  Won’t work, I thought with confidence, as I saw Lillian glance at me, working through the idea in her head. She’ll crack before I do. And I can make her break the silence.

  “I’ll do it too,” Gordon said. “Silent treatment. Solidarity.”

  “Hey,” I said. It’s like he read my mind and deftly countered my preliminary strategy.

  “Me too,” Jamie said. “If it’s deserved.”

  “Hey!”

  “We can pass on word to the others, too, just in case Sy got the bright idea of joining with the others the next time the teams got shuffled around,” Gordon said. “Mary would play along.”

  “She would,” Lillian said.

  “Helen too, if we bribed her.”

  “Yep,” Lillian said.

  “Ashton, well, if Sy really wants conversation, I don’t think Ashton would really suffice.”

  “You boys are the best,” Lillian said. She put her hands on Gordon’s upper arm, then rose up on her tiptoes to give him a kiss on the cheek. He had to bend down a fair bit to even allow it. Lillian quickly skipped around to Jamie. She didn’t have to bend down or even raise up on tiptoes too much to do it. She beamed a smile as she looked at me.

  “I’ll be good,” I said.

  “You better,” she warned.

  The rest of the way to our destination, she walked between Gordon and Jamie.

  The properties to our right had given way to a downward slope and a view of a slice of beach and a lake filled with docks and fancy boats. The cart that had passed us earlier was now parked by the water, the door open, occupants and monster gone.

  The houses
to our left grew greater and grander the closer we got to the water. The modifications to each home changed, too. Where the smaller houses were riddled with signs of the cheaper means of building, trees growing into and through them, the bigger houses were more carefully done, the growth and alterations set in the gardens and into the walls. The stone walls had branches and vines creeping through them, covered in bright red berries and thin yellow leaves, crowned with greater clusters of golden yellow foliage at the tops. More conventional, old-fashioned houses in more alien settings.

  Those leaves would be security measures, I knew. Poisonous to the touch, or covered in tiny fibers that would cause pants-crapping levels of agony for days on end.

  The house at the road’s end was the capstone. A true manor, larger than any of the rest. The walls to the left and right of it encased rows of the black-barked, yellow-leafed trees, and the gardens were weird and wiry, more black wood and autumnal colors. The house itself was a sprawl, the wood done dark, the highlights and shingles pale enough they stood out. Stitched waited at the gates.

  I tugged my shirt into position and straightened my collar as they began opening the gates, lifting and dragging them back and away.

  Lillian appeared next to me. She looked at me.

  “Please, Sy.”

  “Your lead, Lil.”

  “Don’t call me Lil. If they start calling me Lil because you did, I can’t correct them, and if this somehow works and I get an opportunity, I’ll have to live with that for a really long time. I know you’d get the biggest kick out of that, but—”

  I raised my hands, putting them over her mouth, cupping them so I didn’t smudge her lipstick.

  “Lillian,” I said.

  She huffed, then nodded. I let the hands drop.

  “I’m all agitated now.”

  I turned to face the gate. People were coming down the long path. I wondered if it was more polite to meet them halfway. Under my breath, I said, “Your own fault you’re agitated.”

  “No it isn’t,” Lillian said. She was facing squarely ahead as well, talking out of the corner of her mouth. “Two years of experience have led up to this, Sy. Gordon, Jamie, do I look alright? I’m not all ruffled, or red in the cheeks? Or—”

  “You look fine,” Gordon said. Jamie nodded.