Faeted: A Dark Prince New Adult Bully Romance

by Deiri Di

  A special type of fear laced through her.

  There is a kind of fear that women face that unlucky men understand. It is the idea that someone bigger and stronger than you will violate your right to your body, that they will do it because of their own internal demons, because of their own desire to satiate their desire for dominance.

  That another person will not see you as a person.

  That he will hurt you for no reason other than to hurt you.

  The drunk took a step over the backpack.

  A hiss rose into the air from his feet.

  "A whore like you gets what she deserves."

  The man lunged forward, grabbed her shirt, and slammed her back against the dumpster, knocking the breath to scream out of her before she could finish sucking it in. His other hand grabbed her throat. He lifted her up off the ground.

  "Prince Charming isn't going to save you now," he spat.

  This was... this was...

  Mari couldn't think. She couldn't move.

  All she could do was be afraid.

  The man screamed.

  He let go of her, and she slid down to the ground. He hopped backward as he grabbed at his ankle. "Something bit me!" He fell down to the ground. "Oh god, it hurts!" He rolled about on his back, clutching his leg.

  Then he started choking.

  Mari stared at him, her back against the dumpster.

  He reached out a hand to her.

  His body rocked, spasming.

  Was he convulsing?

  Mari reached a hand to her throat and felt the bruises on her neck.

  As she stood there, watching, the drunk stopped moving.

  He stopped breathing.

  Her mind raced around in circles, gibbering with words that tripped and fell over with their urgency to make no sense at all. Fear had taken the reigns, and it was cackling as it rode her thoughts into the ground.

  Mari took a deep breath.

  Exhale.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  What just happened?

  She had dealt with far worse than this. She had been pummeled, stabbed, and locked in a cell the size of a coffin. One alcohol-fueled human monster wasn't enough to unsettle her for long.

  What happened to him?

  Mari shuddered.

  She rolled forward onto the balls of her feet, balanced her hips above her heels, and rose slowly to a crouch, then all the way to standing. She crept forward. His chest wasn't moving.

  Miss Kitty slithered on top of the man, sniffing.

  She nuzzled his belly.

  Mari stepped towards them. Yes, he definitely wasn't breathing. That, and there were two puncture marks on his legs, wounds that were spaced out about the same distance as the dragon's fangs. As she watched, ribbons of black spread out into the man's skin from the holes, twisting their way up until they vanished under his shorts.

  Miss Kitty dug her claws into the man's belly and ripped it open.

  His entrails bulged through the tears in his skin and shirt.

  "NO!" Mari lunged forward. "BAD KITTY!"

  Miss Kitty looked up at her with those silver eyes and hissed.

  Mari didn't really think about what she did next. She didn't stop to absorb the fact that her tiny little baby dragon was chock full of deadly poison.

  She didn't pause to become afraid.

  She wasn't afraid of her responsibility.

  She couldn't let her dragon start eating humans. Cognitive creatures were off the dinner menu. This little monster was her's to train, and she was going to teach it to interact with the world in the way that she desired.

  To do that, she couldn't stop to be afraid.

  She couldn't stop to think.

  She could only do.

  Mari swiped out with her hand. She was trying to grab Miss Kitty by the neck, right below the bulge of her reptilian head, essentially immobilizing those fangy needles of death.

  She wasn't fast enough.

  Miss Kitty bit her.

  The dragon's teeth slipped deep into the fleshy bit between her thumb and fingers. Mari didn't yank her hand back. Fear was not an option. Recoiling from the pain would reward the predator for violence.

  So instead, Mari grabbed the dragon's freaking face.

  She wrapped her fingers around the back of Miss Kitty's head, trapping her, jaw wedged open by the throbbing instrument of Mari's hand. She lifted the dragon off the corpse and up to eye level. Miss Kitty struggled, stretching her mouth wide and pulling back, trying to disentangle herself from prey that turned out to be anything but a victim.

  Miss Kitty snarled.

  She took a deep breath, and the radiant red cracks that glowed through her black skin shone brighter for one, intense moment.

  Mari's spine buzzed with the vibrations of magic.

  Miss Kitty exhaled, and fire awoke.

  It rolled out, consuming Mari's hand, rolling up her wrist until it exploded against her, enveloping her in a cocoon of flame.

  All she could see was the fire.

  Then it stopped.

  "Magic," Mari smiled. "Your fire is made of magic." Adrenaline surged through her, and she began to giggle. She was immune to dragon fire.

  The corpse behind her was not immune.

  It smoldered, burnt by the flame.

  Miss Kitty stared up at Mari with her big silver eyes.

  Mari held eye contact with her dragon.

  "That was not acceptable behavior. You will not eat humans," Mari kept her tone firm, ignoring the ache that crept up her forearm to her elbow. "You can't kill them unless I say so. No more fire unless I say so."

  The words she spoke were accompanied by images in her head.

  Miss Kitty purred.

  Mari carried her over to the pile of meat.

  She set her down and let go, barely able to hold in a pained gasp as the teeth slid free from her skin. The world began to spin. The black tendrils began to spread out from the wound along the lines of her ligaments.

  The poison that killed the drunk was in her body.

  Mari pointed at the dumpster meat.

  "Eat that."

  Miss Kitty slithered over to the meat.

  Her Mari's knees gave out. Mari sat down hard on the ground, the dirty asphalt digging into her jeans. Why couldn't it be dirt? The earth would embrace her. Fainting on this scabby mess of so-called progress was just going to hurt.

  Mari gripped her wrist with her uninjured hand.

  The tendrils had crept up to her forearm.

  If the dragon was anything like a snake, then it only had so much venom at one time. The man had died almost instantly, and though there were funny spots filling up her vision, she was still conscious. She had gotten a lower dose.

  It was going to hurt.

  If it didn't kill her, it would only make her stronger.

  Every moment, every survival, she became that much stronger.

  #

  Her head throbbed.

  It wasn't just her head. There was an ache that radiated down her spine, spikes of pain that stabbed into her with the added accents of small irritations. The unforgiving LA sun, unfiltered through the smoggy sky, left her skin prickling with the warning of an imminent sunburn.

  Even brown skin burns in the sunshine state.

  Hard.

  She was lying on something hard, unforgiving.

  Miss Kitty nuzzled against Mari's neck, and the full gravity of the world collapsed back into the befuddled recesses of her conscious mind. Her eyes flew open.

  Dumpster.

  Alley.

  Mari sat up.

  The world whirled around her. Every inch of her body groaned with the dull ache, the acidic aftertaste of the tone of poison. The sun was in the process of rising, a sliver of buildings still touching the edges of its radiant light.

  She hadn't been unconscious for that long.

  She could get home before her parents woke up.

  Mari rolled slowly up to standing. Th
e world spun, the sky wibble wobbling in her vision before settling down in one place. Miss Kitty chirped and snuggled closer, tail tightening around Mariposa's neck.

  There was something wrong with her hand.

  Like an opera glove made out of her own flesh, the skin was black and silken, darker than the spaces between the stars. The black stopped just below her elbow, tendrils of absent color reaching up in perpetually frozen motion.

  Mari flexed her fingers.

  Still worked – just looked different.

  Mari reached up and pet Miss Kitty with her blackened fingers.

  "No more biting me – okay?"

  The dragon purred.

  The pile of dumpster meat was gone, but the lump of crisped flesh that used to be a man sat, charred meat filling the air with its stench. Mari didn't look closer. Her dragon didn't eat the human monster. That was all that mattered.

  The rock came down over and over and over again.

  Mari couldn't stay there. The dragon might be invisible, but a corpse was very real, and she didn't have any way to explain what she was doing there. She didn't even know how she could explain. Even trying would just land her in the nuthouse... or juvie if they decided she was a murderer.

  The rock-

  She didn't want to think about it.

  Tomorrow she would be back at school, have to hide a baby dragon, keep it from killing anyone else, and see Benjamin again. She couldn't wait to see him again, to talk to him again, to experience his pleasant joy.

  She'd rather think about him than the fact that she was a bringer of death.

  #

  Mari closed the front door behind her.

  The house was silent, dark with the slumber of her parents, tucked away in their bedroom upstairs. She slipped through the narrow hallway. The tiny townhouse was more cramped than it was a year ago. Each year was like that.

  The piles grew bigger.

  Mari didn't pay much mind to the piles when they first started. It wasn't like she had any right to complain – she had piles of books in her room. If there wasn't space in the closet or on the shelves, then, of course, a neat little pile on the floor made sense. It's just... every year, the piles grew larger.

  Cathy was addicted to bargain shopping.

  If it was something they might need, one day, then they had to have it. Didn't matter if they didn't have room. Didn't matter if they didn't actually use the item. Half of the stuff Cathy purchased remained in its original packaging, still stuffed in plastic shopping bags stacked into piles.

  The ceiling creaked.

  Someone was waking up.

  Mari hauled ass up the stairs and into her bedroom. She didn't want to have to lie to them again. She had years of practice lying to her parents. Years of hiding the signs of a fairy attack so her folks didn't think that she was cutting herself. Years of child psychologists who specialized in disturbed children.

  She didn't want to lie anymore.

  But explaining she was out all night because a jerk attacked her in an alleyway where she was dumpster diving for her pet dragon would not go over well.

  Better to take a shower.

  Mari slipped into the bathroom. She set the sleeping Miss Kitty on top of the fuzzy pink toilet cover – there was no way she was going to leave a poisonous beast alone in a room for a second, not when one of her parents could walk in and start messing with stuff.

  What you can't see can still kill you.

  As the water ran, working its way from cold to hot to steam away from the chill of the morning, Mari stripped off her clothes, habit keeping her back turned towards the full-length mirror.

  As she dropped her bra in a pile on the ground, Mari hesitated.

  Why did she always turn her back on herself?

  Cathy did that. Cathy didn't pay attention to her own strange habits. She couldn't step away from the desperate need to cling to things she didn't need. She couldn't see herself from an outside perspective. Cathy went from a fit model to a lump that sits on the couch and mediates her depression with tv and shopping.

  Mari didn't want to be a slave to unconscious habits.

  She turned to look at herself in the mirror.

  There were the stretch marks.

  They ran along her sides like tiger stripes, the flag of the moment in her life when she went from very small to the taller, more adult shape that she constantly hid under baggy clothes.

  There were the pockmarks of cellulite.

  The cheerleaders didn't have thighs like those, chunks of meat that pressed together, squishing with softness. They didn't have bellies that folded over themselves. Instead of mountains and valleys of flesh, those pretty peppy bounce machines had stomachs that were flat and hard.

  The girls on the track team didn't jiggle like she jiggled.

  Why was her body like this and not like theirs?

  Mari knew the answer already.

  The Internet was such a resource for figuring out the whys and what's behind things that make one unhappy. Mari had spent time reading forums about fat. There were two reasons that she spent her life trying not to look at her body in the mirror.

  The first was diet.

  The food that Cathy whipped up – reheated boxes of frozen meals, packaged together with sugar and preservatives, the drive-through garbage made of the ends of animals who lived their lives in filth and misery – those weren't nutritious. Her father's new attempt at urban gardening aside, the food they ate in the house was packed with ingredients that Mari didn't even know how to pronounce.

  Their regular take out was fast food.

  Burgers were delicious.

  But Mari knew now where that meat came from. It came from cows in stalls so packed with mud and feces and other cows that they regularly fall sick and die. Meat loaded with antibiotics, and antibiotic resistant bacteria, because farms overused modern medicine to keep animals alive in horrid conditions.

  Fast food was made out of food mass-produced by a pesticide company that genetically modified the produce so that it could resist the chemicals they were doused in.

  Mari was unhealthy because she ate unhappiness, poison, and sickness.

  She knew it.

  But there was a solution.

  She could help her father start his garden in the back. She could apply herself in her gardening course and ask the teacher if she could have a portion of the heirloom produce to take home. She could watch videos online to learn how to cook the food without the use of butter pumped from caged and tortured beasts.

  Then there was the second reason.

  The second was exercise.

  Mari didn't do anything outside of her physical education course, which she didn't have to take anymore now that she was a senior. She didn't play any sports. She didn't run on the track team.

  School wasn't that far away.

  She didn't have to drive with her dad.

  She could jog to school every morning.

  Mari stared at the folds in her belly.

  It was her own responsibility to change her life.

  She was the only one who could.

  Miss Kitty stood up, stretched out her long black claws, and yawned, her forked tongue licking the air. Then she squatted.

  Mari whirled and grabbed the dragon. She flipped open the toilet lid, set the dragon down on the edge of the toilet, and aimed that little fire-breathing butt at the water. Miss Kitty barely had time to blink, let alone stop doing her business.

  So she did, right into the toilet.

  "Good girl!" Mari stroked the soft leathery skin. "What a good girl."

  Miss Kitty watched as Mari flushed the toilet.

  She lounged against Mari's arm, not even squirming when Mari carried her into the shower. As the water pebbled against her black cracked skin, she opened her mouth to catch it.

  Mari frowned.

  She would have to set out a water bowl with filtered water.

  #

  Mari dug through the bottom of her closet.
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  There it was. In the back corner was the box of things she didn't want to get rid of but couldn't look at every day. She dug into it and pulled out a cat harness.

  The silver name tag, shaped like a heart and soldered in the little tag creating machine at the local pet convenience store, had two words, a street address, and a phone number.

  "Miss Kitty," Mari said.

  Miss Kitty didn't respond.

  She was curled up into a little ball of snooze on the bed.

  Mari crawled over to her, the little black harness held gently in her hand. It used to belong to a cat a long time ago, one that she'd had before Cathy.

  Mari lifted Miss Kitty's head and slipped the harness over that flat reptilian triangle skull. She worked the wings and the front legs through the holes in the harness, tightening the straps so that it settled comfortably with still a little bit of extra room to grow into.

  She would have to keep an eye on it.

  Who knew how fast dragons grew.

  "Mari!" the door swung open without a knock.

  Cathy stood in the opening, her eyes latching onto the dragon sleeping on the bed. "What is that?"

  Wait – Cathy could see the dragon? No. That didn't make sense.

  "What does it look like?" Mari responded.

  Cathy squinted at the shape on the bed. "Is that a... I think..."

  "Her name is Miss Kitty," Mari offered.

  "A cat," The confusion blinked it's way off of Cathy's face as her brain came up with an acceptable perception filter for the situation. "Mariposa, what have I told you about pets in the house."

  "She won't make a mess," Mari wasn't sure she could keep that promise. She wasn't even completely sure she could keep the dragon from killing another person. Defecating in the house was the least of her worries. It wasn't really that important in the long run.

  "I don't care. If she is still here when you go to school tomorrow, I'm tossing her out." Cathy stomped back out of the room.

  "Your rules are stupid!" Mari shouted after her.

  "My house, my rules," Cathy shouted back.

  [ 9 ]

  Mari tightened the laces of her sneakers.

  Why was she still going to do this?

  The sun hadn't quite touched the edge of the horizon, but it was making itself known with the lightening of the grey morning sky. It was much earlier than she usually got up, but it was necessary.