Seduction

by Jaymin Eve

  “Greetings, One,” she corrected herself.

  “And I’m just Willa.” I attempted to push my luck with the name again.

  “Greetings, Sacred Willa,” she said, turning to me. How she was still wearing that blank expression was beyond me.

  “If I hear greetings one more time, I’m going to put her back into Silence,” Yael announced.

  I gasped, whirling on him as my mother hung her head a little. She almost looked dejected—oh, nope, she was just plucking a thread from her clothing.

  “I wouldn’t really!” Yael had his hands up, hoping to ward off an attack from me—but I was now slightly distracted by the fact that my mother was wearing normal, dweller clothing.

  “Why does she still have hair?” I asked the others, running my eyes over her again. “And why is she still dressed in her normal clothes? Where’s the perverted little skin-suit thing? And … come to think of it … aren’t Staviti’s servers a little … younger-looking? There was a guy in the outer rings who picked me up in his cart and he said that the guardians didn’t like taking dwellers as servers after a certain age—”

  “What guy?” Aros demanded, his hands on my shoulders spinning me around.

  “Picked you up in his cart?” Coen added angrily. “What the fuck does that mean? Is that dweller-slang for something dirty?”

  “Define dirty?” I asked, thinking back to the dead bodies packing the cart.

  The five brothers seemed to swell then, gathering so much temper about themselves that even my mother took a hasty step backwards. She covered it up by bending to the crate and pretending to rummage around inside it for something. She came up a micro-click later with what looked like the broken handle of a serving spoon, and stuck it in her mouth as though it was a breadstick. She tried to bite it, frowned, sniffed it, and then tried again.

  “That’s not for eating.” I sighed, reaching out and confiscating it off her before turning back to my guys. “What’s the problem? I forget his name; it was Zane, or Gary, or Zac—or something. He was pretty nice, I guess. Lonely. Wanted a friend. I wish he’d have put me in a more comfortable position—it was super cramped, pressed up against the little window that looks out to the driver’s seat of the cart—”

  There was a flurry of activity then, and more than one curse slipped out as five angry gods began to jostle into motion. Rome seemed to be storming toward the entrance to the cave, but Aros grabbed the back of his shirt and managed to haul him back to the others. Coen picked up a nearby rock the size of a bucket, and tossed it toward the back of the cave. I heard the sound of cracking stone, and then suddenly they were huddling around in a circle.

  “We need to find him,” I caught Yael muttering, “And we need to kill him.”

  I could feel my mouth dropping open, and I tried to ignore the dull thud of panic that was starting up in the back of my skull. I pushed forward, inserting myself into the middle of their circle.

  Suddenly, I was at the center of five very angry sets of eyes. And was that … disappointment? What the hell?

  “Someone needs to tell me why this is such a big deal,” I demanded, my voice only a little bit shaky. “It was just a cart ride. Without him, I would have died.”

  “Just a cart ride?” Siret was the one to speak, and I registered confusion in his face. I nodded, and his frown deepened. “But you just said it was code-speak for when dwellers did dirty things to each other.”

  “Things that should not have happened after you became one of us,” Yael added.

  If I thought my mouth had dropped open before, it was nothing compared to now. “I …” I was actually speechless. I opened and closed my mouth a few times, before managing to get a few words out. “I … did not say that.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what she said,” Yael argued. “Pain asked if it was dweller-slang for something dirty, right, Pain?”

  Coen nodded—and while it was great to see them all working together as a team, it was not great to be on the wrong side of that team.

  “That’s right, Persuasion,” he confirmed, as though we were in a dweller court-of-commons, and I had been sentenced with the theft of a very valuable loaf of bread. “Instead of denying it, she asked for clarification on the level of dirtiness.”

  “And then she admitted that it was very dirty,” Rome added.

  “And said something about being pushed up against a window.” Even Aros was on their side.

  I let out an exaggerated breath. “It was dirty because of all the dead bodies. And before you even go there, the answer is no: we were not doing dirty things with the dead bodies, honestly what the hell is wrong with you five?”

  “Tensions might be a little high at the moment,” Aros murmured, sounding defensive.

  “So you didn’t have sex with a dweller named Gary or Zac or something in the back of a cart?” Siret apparently needed clarification.

  “No,” I growled, pushing against his chest.

  “Oh, well, in that case. Back to bed!” He spun on his heel and sauntered back to his blanket, completely ignoring the daggers that I was staring into his back.

  “Um … yeah, I’m going back to sleep, too.” Yael took a step back to match Siret’s, and then he was turning and retreating to another blanket: typically, he was the only one not sharing a blanket.

  Coen had fallen asleep on his rock, leaning up against the wall—and that was where he returned now, soundlessly, as though he wasn’t quite sure how to take back the whole dweller-sex-cart incident. He had his feet resting on a blanket, though, and that was the blanket that Rome returned to now. He could only fit his torso and head onto it, while he stretched the rest of his massive body out onto the rock, folding his hands up behind his head and closing his eyes.

  “Wake me up when it’s my turn to be on watch.” His soft grumble echoed through the cave, rousing my mother from her position by the crate.

  “Yes, Sacred One!” she called out, scrambling to claim the task as her own. I think she felt better having a task, so I decided to give her another one.

  “Why don’t you take the last blanket and try to catch some …” I paused, wondering if the servers actually rested at all. If they had a thing called Silence, then probably not, and I really didn’t want her to mistake my order and send herself back into a weird comatose state that she may or may not wake up from again.

  “What would you like me to catch, Sacred Willa?” she questioned. “Some of my usual catching tasks include: Greg, the other lowly being under the command of Staviti the Great, Wise, and Benevolent. Our master likes to tell Greg to run, and tell me to catch. It is one of his favoured pastimes.”

  “He sounds like a joy,” I replied dryly. She only returned my sarcasm with a blank stare, and I let out a sigh. “Okay, well … forget the catching. Why don’t you just find somewhere comfortable to sit? Maybe that blanket right there?” I pointed to the blanket hanging over the side of the crate. “Maybe you could lay on it? And maybe you could close your eyes but not send yourself into Silence? Can you do that?”

  “As you wish, Sacred Willa.”

  She moved obediently to the blanket, lifted it from the side of the crate, and shuffled over to the side of the cave opposite Coen and Rome. I didn’t blame her, after their recent show of anger—even though they were pretending to slumber now like the giant, gentle beasts that they weren’t. I watched as she spread out the blanket, stared at it for a moment, and then lowered herself onto it, face-down, her arms awkwardly outstretched to either side.

  “Am I doing it right, Sacred Willa?” she called out, her voice muffled by the blanket.

  I had no response for that. I stared at her, shaking my head, while Siret and Aros tried to control their laughter by the fire. They were the only ones not pretending to sleep. Probably because it was still their watch duty.

  “Are your eyes closed?” I called back.

  There was a pause, and then another muffled reply. “Yes, Sacred Willa.”

  “Then yo
u’re doing it … right.” I struggled to say that without laughing myself, or cursing, or groaning out in frustration and throwing a giant rock at the back wall—but some of us had to show a little maturity. Clearly, my mother wasn’t going to do it.

  I was roused awake when Aros shifted to my right. He was standing, but that meant that the warmth I had been sleepily snuggled into was leaving—my yellow dress, while extremely comfortable, was not very warm—so I reached out for his arm, trying to pull him back. He fell back down beside me, his eyes tired as his hand slipped around the side of my face.

  “I need to wake Coen and Yael up,” he whispered. “They’re taking the next watch shift.”

  “I’ll take over the watch shift,” I murmured back, pushing myself into a sitting position.

  Siret was on my other side, and his arm slipped from my waist to my lap. I thought that I had woken him, but he only made a small grunt and slipped his hand into my dress, settling it against the warm skin of my hip. Aros’s touch against the side of my face shifted, and then he was turning my head back to him and pressing his lips to mine. It was a sleepy acknowledgement.

  “Wake someone up if you get tired,” he said, before lowering himself back down. He knew better than to fight me on staying up.

  I was one of them. Part of the team. I needed to pull my weight.

  Even if pulling my weight turned out to be really, really, really boring. Several times, I thought I saw a rock move, but it was just the flicker of the dying fire making patterns on the cave wall. I wasn’t sure how long I sat there for, but when footsteps sounded at the entrance to the cave, I was almost relieved. I disentangled myself from Siret and Aros—who had both somewhat curved around me in their sleep, their hands claiming part of me to hold onto—and reached for the knife that someone had left on the rock beside my mother’s cooking pot.

  I was so ready for a fight. Or anything, really. Anything but more wall-staring.

  Unfortunately, the god who appeared was more of the scary-but-still-annoying kind than the attacking kind.

  “Cyrus,” I said, a little disgruntled.

  “Doll.” He was speaking almost in a whisper, though it still managed to carry the derisive tone that always underlined my nickname. “We should speak outside.”

  I glanced back to my sleeping Abcurses, and nodded. He was right—if they woke up and found him standing right in front of them, there was no way that they would go back to sleep after that. There were only so many interruptions they would be able to handle before they gave up on the whole idea of ‘rest’ and decided to find a different cave to hide away in while we worked on a better plan.

  I followed Cyrus out to the cave’s entrance, and then hugged my arms around myself as he kept going, further and further, into the cover of trees. It wasn’t warm and balmy as it had been earlier in the night: the air had a snap of cold to it now, and I started to wish I was wearing that stupid red robe after all.

  “What do you want?” I asked, when it seemed like Cyrus wouldn’t stop moving.

  He did, then, spinning around to face me. “So many things,” he replied thoughtfully, cocking his head as I drew level with him. “I want a change. A new system. I guess you could call me a revolutionary—but I also want to survive, and revolutionaries generally don’t have a great history of surviving.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I didn’t have much of a chance to argue before a flash of red in the trees caught my eye. I craned my neck to get a better look, panic starting to swell up in the base of my stomach. Flashes of red were never a good sign: especially out in an isolated, dark place.

  “If you scream,” a grating, high-pitched voice announced from the trees, “I’ll make sure those boys of yours don’t wake up at all.”

  “Rau,” I hissed, moving around Cyrus to face the cloaked man as he strode from the trees.

  I pulled my knife up, holding it out in front of me with both hands gripping it tightly. I still had no idea how to use a knife in self-defence, which seemed like a substantial oversight given how often I ran into perilous situations. I thought about screaming through my mental link for the guys, but I wasn’t sure just how well Rau would be able to follow up on his threat. Could he really defeat them? Maybe he isn’t alone … I glanced into the trees to see if I could spot any more flashes of colour, but Rau was moving toward me quickly, forcing my attention back to him.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a knife—eerily similar to the knife I held in my own hands. Wait a click … it wasn’t just similar, it was the same! I glared down at the blade I held, feeling as though it had betrayed me in some way, only to find that I was clutching a short, smooth stick. It wasn’t even sharp at the end.

  “What the hell?” I threw it aside, the panic inside me growing to an overwhelming point. “I didn’t know Chaos could do stuff like that,” I said, hoping that maybe if I started talking, Rau would stop moving toward me.

  I glanced to my side, at Cyrus. I was almost surprised to see him still standing there, but then it dawned on me that maybe he had drawn me away from the Abcurses on purpose.

  “Chaos can do most things,” Rau told me, that voice of his rubbing up my skin the wrong way. “There’s a potential for Chaos in almost every situation. You just need to know how to use it. But I can teach you.”

  His eyes were gleaming, and I cast another look at Cyrus. Why wasn’t he saying anything?

  “Did you set this up?” I growled out at him, taking a subtle step backwards.

  Rau had stopped moving, finally, but he was still too close. I could see the spots of precipitation marking his robes from the damp grass, and the way his eyes flickered in constant appraisal of both myself and Cyrus, along with the environment around us. He couldn’t seem to keep his attention on one thing long enough to even identify what it was, before he was moving on to the next thing. I would have thought him distracted and skittish, except that his posture was braced. Ready for something.

  “This might be a little bit my doing,” Cyrus admitted, as Rau’s hand suddenly flicked, and the knife that he had been holding sailed through the air toward me.

  I flinched, lurching out of the way as fast as I could, but Cyrus had already reached out. He plucked the knife from the air only an inch or so away from my face.

  “That wasn’t nice,” he said—the words directed at Rau.

  I was shaking, my eyes on the blade. What the hell was going on? I thought Cyrus had betrayed me, but there he was, saving my life. I fell back a few more steps, trying to control my urge to turn and run away from the situation.

  “I can’t protect you if you’re standing all the way over there,” Cyrus told me, though he hadn’t actually taken his eyes off Rau—who, in turn, still hadn’t taken his eyes off me.

  He didn’t even seem shocked that Cyrus had foiled his death-by-flying-knife plan. He was simply staring at me. Waiting for something. I moved closer to Cyrus, stepping partway behind him. If I couldn’t wake the Abcurses up, he was the best chance that I had, and if he had saved me once, then maybe he would do it again.

  “What do you want?” I asked Rau, my voice almost steady despite how much I was shaking.

  “I want you to die already.” It was almost a whine. “Why won’t you just die?”

  “I …” I didn’t really know how to answer a person who was actually whining about the fact that I wouldn’t up and die. “I’m not ready?” I finally replied. “I guess?”

  “You’re ready when I say you’re ready.” He drew up to his full height, crossing his arms and ceasing the flickering movement of his eyes—resting them solely and heavily on me. “Do you know why?”

  I swallowed. I had that feeling that I sometimes got when I knew that I was about to be told something that I really didn’t want to hear.

  “Why?” I finally gritted out, when it didn’t seem like he had any more secret knives hidden up his sleeves and Cyrus didn’t seem to be handing back the one he had thrown.

  �
�Because I am the God of Chaos, and you, little girl, are my Beta.”

  Cyrus turned, then, and I only got a flash of the apology in his eyes before he was shoving the blade toward me. I felt the shock of something piercing my skin, pushing past the barrier of my ribcage and searing through me with an agony that seemed to go beyond pain. It was ripping me apart from the inside out. I tried to scream, but the sound died off in my throat as a hand wrapped over my mouth. I lifted my arms, trying to fight off whoever was restraining me—but even the slightest movement seemed to twist the knife deeper, and I started to tilt toward unconsciousness.

  The image of the trees wavered before me, and I would have collapsed, if an arm hadn’t wound beneath my neck, cutting off my air supply. The space where Rau had been standing was empty—only Cyrus was still visible to me, his eyes swimming in front of my face.

  I couldn’t tell if he still looked apologetic or not, because the tears were blurring him out.

  “Die.” A high-pitched whisper sounded, directly behind my left ear, and the arm around my neck tightened. “Why won’t you die already?”

  Nineteen

  Pain.

  Suddenly, it was everything I knew.

  My limbs felt like they were burning and my head was aching with the memory of pain ricocheting through my entire body. My stomach cramped violently, and I opened my eyes, attempting to sit up.

  Everything was white. The ceilings were white; the wooden furniture had been painted white; the sheets wrapped around my body were white; and my rage, when Cyrus came into view, was white-hot.

  “I’m going to kill you,” I announced, my voice croaky and weak. I cleared it, and tried again. “I’m going to kill—” this time the words died off on a cough that seemed to seize through my whole body.

  Dying was hard.

  Wait a click—

  “You stabbed me!” I pointed a finger at his entirely too-neutral face. “How am I still alive? Was it a trick? Is Five here? Was it an illusion? Why did he have to make it so damn painful?”