And while having Marcel around for more than business was nice, it also proved to be a distraction, so on a slow weekend when Marcel had to go take care of business in Rome, MaLeila decided to catch up on homework assignments and school projects that she hadn’t had time to get to.
“You’re home,” Devdan said, breaking MaLeila’s focus on her math homework.
She looked up to see him lounging on the couch on the other side of the coffee table where she was doing homework. She was surprised to see that he was even home, let alone making such an unnecessary observation. It wasn’t that she minded, but Devdan never stated the obvious, nor did he participate in small talk.
“Yeah,” MaLeila finally replied. “I’m catching up on homework. Marcel’s been a distraction lately.”
Devdan moved to sit on the floor next to her and grabbed her Spanish homework and a pencil before beginning to swiftly and easily fill out the handouts.
“Devdan.”
“Yes, MaLeila.”
MaLeila had taken his early small talk as a sign that he needed to talk to her about something, but he had obviously changed his mind if he was so irritated with her calling his name. Even in his irritation though, MaLeila enjoyed the way her name rolled off his tongue. He rarely if ever used her name, but when he did he said it like it was something tangible, something that hand to be handled delicately like a glass ornament or a precious jewel less it break or get worn out if he said it in any other way except gently.
“First, not so neat. Second, Ms. Laney will wonder how I got a perfect score on all the homework and still have trouble with the classwork. She’ll think I cheated.”
Devdan promptly flipped the pencil in his hand over, erased an answer, and rewrote it, this time less neat and without the accent mark that had been above one of the letters before. MaLeila tried and failed to bite back a smile. It was little things like this, Devdan sitting next to her and doing her homework, even when he never did his own, that endeared him to her more and more, made it harder to ignore the flutter in her heart for him. It was easy to be impressed by the big things, the willingness to fight, the willingness to protect, the willingness to kill if needed for her. But even still, nothing was ever too little or too much of a bother if she needed help and he could give it, even if he acted like he didn’t care to be bothered.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
MaLeila blinked and then fought to keep the heat from rising to her cheek at being caught staring at Devdan. He looked at her with an expectant guarded expression.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” she said.
“Didn’t answer my question.”
MaLeila could go back to her homework without answering him and she knew Devdan wouldn’t ask her again, but unlike Devdan, she wasn’t good at leaving things hanging out in the open.
“Just… glad that you help me so much, even when you don’t have to.”
“Nothing I wouldn’t have done for Claude. It’s nothing special.”
“That’s what you say.”
“Is that why you have so much trust in me?” Devdan asked.
Though MaLeila had expected him to bring the point back up, it had been so long, she thought he might have decided against it by now. As much as she had been expecting it though, she was still unprepared to answer it.
“Because I do. Why do you need a reason for it?”
“I guess why would you bother telling me that is the better question?” Devdan decided.
“Is it a crime?”
“Just seemed pretty pointless.”
“There you go, belittling my feelings again,” MaLeila grumbled.
“I’m not belittling you.”
“Then why are you making such a big deal out of a harmless comment.”
“Because telling someone you trust them is far from harmless. In my experience, it’s usually what someone says in an effort to get someone to trust them.”
“And what’s so bad about me wanting you to trust me. What’s so bad about me wanting you to open up to me a little so I can get to know you the same way you seem to know me?”
“Because it’s just deceit in the end.”
Upon hearing Devdan’s answer, MaLeila realized too late that Devdan had purposely goaded her into giving him the answer to the question he wanted answered in the first place, into saying things that she would never actually say to him because she knew he might react badly.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Give trust to gain trust only so you can break that trust in the end.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Not on purpose, but that’s just the nature of trust.”
MaLeila groaned and put her math book on the coffee table. Then she turned all the way to Devdan and said, “That makes absolutely no sense.”
“It does.”
“Maybe to you, but I can’t even understand how it might make sense to you because you won’t open up and tell me what you mean instead of talking in fucking riddles.”
Devdan didn’t say anything immediately, but MaLeila could sense that he had something else to say. Finally he said, “I’m just warning you that whatever it is you want from me or you’re trying to get from me, you’re better off not trying. Play those games with Marcel. You’ll have better luck with him.”
Anyone who didn’t know Devdan like MaLeila did, at least as much as he let her, wouldn’t understand why those words stung as much as they did. When talking to Devdan, it was one thing to listen to what he said, but more important was what he didn’t say, what was between his short clipped words. In this case the translation was clear to MaLeila. It meant that she should stop trying to figure him out. Stop trying to find a way in. Stop hoping that one day, if she was patient the sexual tension between them might be something more than just tension, that it had the potential to be something more. It had been the clear cue MaLeila had been looking for, just not the one that she had been hoping for.
“How long is it going to take?” MaLeila finally asked. When Devdan didn’t answer, MaLeila continued. Even though she didn’t know the entire story, even though she had only pieced together bits and pieces of the puzzle, which only gave her more questions than answers, she elaborated anyway. “How long is it going to take for you to figure out that I’m not Claude?”
Predictably, Devdan stood up and walked away, but whereas MaLeila had expected him to go to his room, instead he left the house.
5
She could try to take the world by force. Force them to see that having her as queen would be their best chance at true freedom. But if she took the world by force in the name of giving the world the supposed freedom it craved, they would accuse her of taking their freedom. The thought that the world might accuse her of taking something they had never experienced in the first place amused Tsubame. The freedom regular people thought they possessed was a sham used to herd them so their slave drivers could continue to use and abuse them.
So no. Taking the world by force wasn’t the answer. Tsubame didn’t have access to all of her powers anyway. Being queen of this world would take all the skill, diplomacy, and conniving she had learned in the last few centuries, particularly during her first ascension to a global throne. Back then, she had become queen by a series of stressful mishaps and accidents that left her with little choice but to cement her power. This time would be different. This time it would be fun.
The first thing she needed was to get noticed and getting involved in a war was the perfect way to do it. She could have started one, but sowing the seeds of a war could take years and though Tsubame was patient, she didn’t feel like waiting that long to see any fruit from her seeds. And why start a war when you could just join one? The unrest and fighting and refugee crisis in the Middle East was perfect. A complicated conflict that all boiled down to who would control the area and the oil beneath their feet led by men who couldn’t care less about the civilian and infrastructural casualties they inf
licted and didn’t stop to think that they would only be ruling ruins at the rate they were fighting.
If there was one thing Tsubame had learned in centuries of being queen, it was that one of a woman’s best assets and greatest weapons was her body. With it, she could bring down entire nations because there was hardly a man who could think straight when a woman stood naked before him. Tsubame had met very few that could and the only reason they could do so was they had a greater love for something or someone that transcended sex. But there weren’t many men that supernatural. So it was hardly a gamble when she pretended to be Nadiyyah—a native dessert woman with her dark hair, young heart shaped face and pouty lips. She positioned herself alone in a community that had been torn apart by civil war and bombings near the principle territory of the current military usurpers, and hadn’t been surprised when one of the soldiers, with guns on his back and black fatigues grabbed her by the chin and forced her to look at him while he inspected her beauty. And though she shook and pretended to be nervously defiant, she had to keep from smiling when they offered to let her live and come back with them willingly to be a sex slave or they could force themselves on her and leave her to die.
Of course she agreed to go with them to the compound they’d seized when they first took the city and now used as a base of operations. As a courtesy for being so cooperative, they let her bathe, gave her a few days to rest and eat, to get a feel of her surroundings and replenish her strength. Though Tsubame was far from weak or tired, she acted as though she was slowly regaining her strength and used the days to watch her captors. As she walked through the compound and got to know where everything was, she learned a few things. The first thing she learned, not to her surprise at all, was that magic was involved in this war.
Specifically, there were two magic clans in a clash over territory with everyone else involved only lesser players comparatively. But they could fight all they wanted and the council would pay no mind so long as they didn’t expose the magical world or the ancient magic families; who controlled the world from the shadows using democracy, communism, socialism and every other political ideal to make people think they were in control when those ideals were actually fabricated by the ones who really ruled; who would never be exposed because they controlled the media, the corporations, and the families who supposedly controlled the corporations. They kept people fighting and squabbling over silly ideas about race, gender, sex and whatever else they could think of and then herded the masses into thinking the way they wanted them to in order to keep control over their countries, because it was much more effective to make people think they had their own minds and wills when they actually didn’t than to force them to bow.
It was a closely guarded secret that the run of the mill sorcerers didn’t know, that not even the children of these families knew until they came into power as the heads and leaders of their families, that Tsubame wouldn’t have ever known if she hadn’t stumbled upon it when she first began her ascension to rule. Most run of the mill sorcerers went their whole lives being herded like everyone else.
The second thing Tsubame learned during her supposed recovery was who was in charge. She figured it out after two days and the other servants, who took it upon themselves to help new girls get accustomed, confirmed Tsubame’s guesses. The commander was Ahmed, a military man in his mid-forties with average magic for a sorcerer. He was somewhat warm to those he considered allies and ruthless to his enemies with a weakness for women if the way he was always touching and fondling on the other women and girls was any indication. Then there was his second, Fathi, a large and muscular man, ruthless in battle and with an icy personality to match. The man never betrayed an emotion. Ahmed gave him an order and Fathi carried it out.
Tsubame chose Fathi as her target. She could get in bed with Ahmed, but it was always much more fun to turn two people against each other because it was those who were a person’s greatest supporters who had the potential to be their worst enemies.
Once her rest days were over, they put her in simple but nice garments and put her to work. After showing a propensity for healing, they put her to work helping their wounded, bringing their sick back to health. When she wasn’t doing that, she helped tend to their captors every want and whim. For a few days, she didn’t even see her target, but Tsubame was nothing if not patient… when it came to some things.
It was as she was bidding her time that she heard the other servants debating about something in the kitchen. Being the new girl, overly curious, but mostly shy (or at least Tsubame acted the part) she made her way over to see what was going on.
“Fathi’s back and he needs to be served in his room.”
“Oh? Why won’t he eat with the others?” Tsubame asked.
“Probably got hurt in the fight and doesn’t want to show weakness in front of them.”
“Then what are you fighting about?” Tsubame asked.
All the girls looked at her and then at each other before an older one said, “I forgot you just got here. No one likes to serve Fathi, especially when he’s hurt. He just stares at you like this.” The woman narrowed her eyes, frowned, put her shoulders back, and curved her arms outward in her best impression of looking intimidating. The rest of the servants fell out laughing.
Tsubame simply shrugged. “He can stare all he wants. I mean, he doesn’t… do anything, right?”
“We don’t stick around long enough to find out.”
Tsubame paused and then said, “I’ll serve him.”
The woman, whose name Tsubame didn’t know but had just mocked Fathi in front of her, became serious and shook her head.
“You’re new. I wouldn’t do that to you. Besides, you’ll have your hands full once they start really noticing how pretty you are.”
She said nothing else in reference to Tsubame being pretty, but Tsubame had noticed that for a woman who had been taken because she was pretty enough to be a sex slave, she hadn’t been forced into anyone’s bed yet. Based on the woman’s comment, Tsubame assumed it was because everyone had their favorites, not to mention most of the Ahmed’s soldiers were in the field for the foreseeable future.
“It’s okay,” Tsubame said, feigning timidity. “I’ll do it. Where’s his room.”
The older maid, whose name Tsubame finally learned was Saha, told her where the room was and sent Tsubame on her way. She used her first time serving him to discreetly observe him as she set up his dinner. Seeing that Tsubame seemed not to be unnerved by Fathi, Saha sent her to serve him the next evening. All the while, Tsubame felt his eyes on her, felt his curiosity spike at seeing her serve him for a second time. She didn’t glance up at him as she set up his dinner though, pretending to be more interested in the empty cigar case on the stand. Yesterday there had been cigars in it and the fact that the room smelt of smoke more than it had yesterday told Tsubame that they hadn’t been just for decoration.
Without prompting, she grabbed the box and said without looking at him, “I’ll bring this right back.”
When she came back with the full cigar case, she sat it on the table and just barely turning her head to him, gave him a glance. A quick movement of the eyes, barely anything that anyone else would notice, but in that brief split second, they caught each other’s gaze.
That miniscule glance told her everything she needed to know. Some men respected innocence, would do anything to preserve it. Some respected wit, knowledge, strength, morals, passion. But there were plenty of servants in the complex like that. However, what seemed to attract a warrior like Fathi’s attention and respect was courage, bravery; that even after what the servants said she had the courage as the new girl to serve him not once, but also not being intimidated by him enough that she came a second time and left to come back again within a five minute span.
Tsubame kept herself from smiling and decided to leave. But before she left she felt him reach out curiously with his mediocre magic to get a feel for her. What she did next was a gamble, but if done right it wou
ld make her task, while still somewhat challenging, a lot easier. Since she came to this world, she had been shielding her magic for the most part, but right as she felt Fathi’s magic reaching out, she let her magical aura briefly flare as though reacting to his magical touch; let him get a feel for her potential; that there was potential power that could match her stupid courage and make her a potential force to be reckoned with as a woman, making her certainly worth his attention. As quick as she allowed her magic to flare, she reined it back in, pretending to act totally oblivious to his magical senses touching her as she left the room and closed the door behind her.
Tsubame remained passive, responding shruggishly that she got Fathi more cigars when Saha asked what took her so long. Saha held her gaze for a moment before shaking her head and going about her other tasks, and only then did Tsubame look up in the general direction of where Fathi’s room was in the house.
Now, the fun part began.
6
If there was one thing MaLeila knew about Devdan over the years, it was that no matter how much he left, no matter how long he was gone, he would always come back, usually unannounced. MaLeila never asked where he went, and whatever his vices were, he never brought them to the house. Never had she smelled alcohol on him or cigarettes, never did he look like he was high (not that she thought she’d be able to tell because she had a feeling Devdan would be functional even when he wasn’t all the way sober). But no matter what he did when he left, he came back on his own and almost certainly always before she would need him again.
It was the same this time. After only three days away, she was pleased but not surprised to find him in the kitchen nursing a cup of coffee and leaning on the counter as he waited for her so they could go to school. What she wasn’t pleased about was how he was so distant. His aura was withdrawn and any time she unconsciously reached out to touch it with her senses, it retreated from her touch. At the very least, Devdan would usually allow her to brush her aura along his if only to reassure herself that he was indeed himself.
The Immortal Queen Tsubame: Awakening Page 5