Saori

On the first day, I’m jolted awake out of a sound sleep. Literally jolted; they shove something like a cattle prod against my neck, and I wake up screaming in pain. I don’t immediately remember where I am or how I got there. I’m confused and everything feels very sludgy somehow, like it’s hard to even think.

Before I can adjust to anything at all, the instant I open my eyes, someone sprays what feels like pepper juice into them. It feels like my eyes are on fire, and the vision I hadn’t even begun to sort through is immediately obscured by tears. I scream again, and then again when the first lash lands on my back a few seconds later.

Someone grabs my hands, pulling them out to either side. I struggle, something that didn’t even occur to me until they grabbed me, but I’m weak and clumsy, and they have no difficulty pinning me like this. I feel very exposed, even before the cattle prod returns and starts on my breasts. That hurts so much that I can’t even scream, even before someone grabs my hair and then hits me in the face. He yells at me and I can sort of understand that he’s telling me to look at him.…

New Year’s Eve

Stories are universal. Everyone has at least one, and some have a great many, indeed. There have been stories for as long as there have been people to need them, and perhaps a little bit longer. And wherever you go, whatever language you speak, some things stay the same. Every culture has its heroes, paragons of whatever they call virtue, legendary and awe-inspiring. Every culture has its tragedies. Every culture has its jokes.

But every culture has its villains, too. Anywhere you go, you will find them. There have been villains, been nightmares and horrors and evildoers, for as long as there have been heroes to need them, and perhaps a little bit longer. There are countless kinds, in epics and tragedies and jokes alike.

And of all these stories, all the narratives people weave to make events into meaning, there are perhaps none that are held quite as deeply inside a person as the scary ones. There have always been stories to tell around the campfire, when the night presses in close around you and there are monsters in every shadow. There have always been monsters to tell those stories about, and not all of them were the people sitting beside you.…

Epilogue

I stood on the staircase and looked at the manor. This was, I had learned, what it was; it wasn’t just the mansion itself that I now owned, but also a sizable chunk of land around it, which was apparently the distinction.

I had not been expecting to live here. I had been fully expecting to pawn it off along with the rest of Cormac’s belongings. But it wouldn’t actually have brought much, with how far out into the ass end of nowhere it was. And it was, I had to admit, pretty much ideal for my needs in some ways. Out so far into a post-industrial wasteland that it was all the way into the forest, plenty of room to work with, a landed estate sufficiently large that neighbors were a complete nonissue even without it being all the way out in fucking Fairywood. The trip into town would be a pain in the ass, but not an unreasonable one.

I had still been resistant to the idea of living in anything that could be called a landed estate, or the manor house therein. But Saori liked the idea, surprising no one, and she’d decided to fight dirty and rope Raincloud in on the pleading. I could hold up under a vixen applying bedroom eyes or a puppy applying, well, puppy eyes. I did not think I could reasonably be blamed for caving under the pressure of both.…

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Waking up was slow, difficult, and deeply unpleasant. I normally woke up quickly, but this hadn’t been sleep. It hadn’t even been like sleep, just a window of unconsciousness while I was seizing. And coming back from that usually felt a lot like this; there was a feeling like I was trying to push my way back while swimming in honey, the resistance and drag making every cognitive movement a struggle. I dragged myself out of it, but it took a while, and I was still dazed.

But I hadn’t been out long. Not long at all, in fact, which was convenient. That part was hard to predict; longer periods of unconsciousness usually indicated a more severe seizure, but it wasn’t consistent. I tended to be out for anywhere from five minutes to an hour; this seemed to have been on the short end of that range, under ten minutes.…

Chapter Thirty-Six

It seemed like Shadow had stepped up out of absolutely nowhere. But it hadn’t, nothing of the sort. I knew that, because as soon as I saw it, I realized that I’d been seeing it. Shadow hadn’t been invisible, hadn’t even been behind a veil. It was more like I just…hadn’t registered it as important. It was like I’d known that it was there, but its presence didn’t register as significant enough to even pay attention to.

Which was an impression that didn’t change as it moved, and that may have been the strangest thing I’d experienced all month, which was saying things. There was a little bit of anxiety as I suddenly realized it was there, and then a little bit of hope as I parsed what I was seeing.

But both emotions felt…muted, washed out. There was no real force behind them; I felt apathetic in a way that was obviously, deeply unnatural, and that fact should itself have been disturbing, but it wasn’t. It didn’t seem important.…

Chapter Thirty-Five

A throne room. An actual, literal fucking throne room. Because of course he had one of those. If I’d learned anything about him, and despite having never met the Sidhe nobleman I felt I had learned far more than I wanted to at this point, it was that Cormac Goldenblade was not prone to subtlety.

I was strangely but deeply glad that my kingmaker position had been better situated to side with Ekaterina. Sure, she was a bitch who took vendettas more seriously than could possibly be healthy, and her followers were violent, impulsive, and somewhat idiotic. I still found myself feeling a sort of kinship with her just on the basis of hating this guy.…