by Jade Alters
“Relax,” I laugh, “You’re not going to die.” I can tell from the two shades her skin has lightened that she still thinks she will. Emery unclenches the side of her neck, loosely. Two ruby streams that make my mouth water spout out, but they’ll stop in a few minutes. She holds two violently trembling hands out at me, one stained with tantalizing bursts of red.
“And why…is that?” Emery growls. Like a wounded animal, it comes out less threatening, more threatened.
“I didn’t sink my teeth in deep enough to-”
“Fuck you, Darius! You know what I mean!” Emery cuts me off. There it is. An icy whiplash snaps out from beneath her mask of composure. “Why didn’t you sink them in? Why didn’t you kill me?”
“You tracked me down just to ask why I didn’t kill you?” I chuckle. Emery’s hands twitch with the urge to fling me into some mirror-dimension. Perfect, for my demonstration. “Ah-ah, easy, little Dalshak. I’m not sure what kind of trick you put on the Tether to hide what you’re doing here, but it won’t protect you if you use a trick outside the Academy training ground,” I remind her. I throw a pointing finger back at the illusory curtain wavering behind her for effect. “That’ll set off every alarm you must be trying to avoid.”
“The question remains…why?” Emery asks while she steps back behind the illusory curtain. The surprise spreads even farther across her face when she realizes what an advantage I had over her a second ago. Twice now I could have drained her dry, and she wouldn’t have been able to stop me.
“Maybe you were onto something earlier,” I say. I do my best to keep my tone flat, despite the emotions running high between us. About being lonely, I elect to let her figure out herself. “If I kill you now, I’d sever a connection I could otherwise use to reconnect with the world…I belong in.”
“What, you think I’m going to come back here for a little late-night powwow with the guy who just bit halfway through my neck?” Emery marvels, almost laughing. Her hands begin to lower.
“I invite you to come try and bring me in again, if you want to run through this whole exercise over,” I shrug, like I really don’t care either way. “But…Emery.” Her eyes light up when I say her name, like I’ve just jostled her from a long sleepwalk. Maybe it’s because, for a second, I almost let myself stir from my own. I remember my real age, the age of my mind and body, despite its look. “Don’t put one foot in the door of the family business. Even if it is your mission to kill me, take it from someone who’s already watched one child from your family go through this. You’ve got to jump in, or get out. You’ll need to know where your loyalties lie, when Dorian finds out your family sacrificed me because it was convenient.”
“Dorian?” Emery shakes the name out of her head. “Oh, like you know us so well. And who say-”
I don’t hear the rest of her sentence. I vanish, right back to the street I came from. I won’t tell Lisa I left our street to feed, or where I actually got my satisfaction for the night. I might even make a stupid joke about Miranda to make sure everyone’s properly intimidated. But I will go to sleep this night with something to look forward to, for the first time in months. Who would ever have guessed it would be Emery Dalshak?
Boy Problems
Emery,
The Broken Academy, Room B-22
“Who says I give a shit about the words of a dead man?” is what I wanted to say to Darius. I didn’t remotely mean it, but I wanted him to hear it. I wanted - I needed - to prove I wasn’t afraid. I’m hardly sure who it is I needed to prove it to, or even what I was or wasn’t really afraid of. I didn’t have a chance to get any of it out before he was gone. I never wanted anyone to come back so badly in my life. How dare he? How dare he graze the edge of my neck with the threat of death, pull the rug from everything I swear fealty to and vanish? It fills me with such exhausting rage that despite the two sore holes in the side of my throat, that night I faceplant in my pillow and fall instantly asleep.
I wake up no less consumed with the same troubling thoughts. At least I’ve got time not to deal with it today. It’s the one day this week I’m not up before light to practice Sealbreaker with Rock. Helena and Fey Deller float around the room in their remarkably quiet morning routines. I roll over on my stomach to pull up a few texts and notebooks from Cooperative Casting. There’s a test today, so at least burying my nose in studies is a good excuse.
I make it about as far as wondering what I could have done differently - what I should have done with Darius. He was right there. He wasn’t expecting a counterattack, I could tell by his relaxed body language. Maybe that’s what made it so hard to pull the trigger. I was expecting a strike that never came. I did expect to die the second I felt his teeth around my throat. But I didn’t. Darius shielded himself in the plated armor of the hardest question to answer: why? Why didn’t he just clamp down another inch? He looked like hell, so I know he needed the drink. And why leave a loose end to come back and- there it is. He wants me to come back. He needs me to come back. But this only swings the door open to more questions! He can’t possibly expect me to share information with him, so why in the hell did he bait me to return? I let my forehead thunk down in the musty pages of my textbook.
It’s not like I even want to kill Darius. Like all things ordered by Mother or Father, I don’t consider elements of desire, I do them. But then, murder isn’t the average order. Careful, Emery, I remind myself, killing a traitor is justice, not murder. But Father’s words ring flat across my mind. They’ve never sounded more alien. When I think about how else it could have ended… I had those mirror shards in him. Had I more a flair for the sadistic, I’d have set them to spiral and reduced Darius to literal vampiric ribbons. But that would have been cruel, when I was given permission to leave him alive, if I could. Listen to me! I…might even go as far as saying I don’t want to kill Darius.
It’s like she can smell it, no matter where I am. Doubt. The first whiff of something growing in me, rotting away all the hard-fought conditioning her and Father have put into me, swirls right up Mother’s nose. I feel her call immediately.
“Emery, report,” rings in my ears. I shake my head hard enough against my textbook pages to give myself a little rash. “Emery, report,” she tries again. Her voice digs in like a screw, piercing, then threading itself through my skull.
But I can’t report to her right now. Not only have I failed to capture Darius, I’ve somehow captured something far worse, in the back of my previously pristine mind. Corrosive, black clouds of doubt swirl around far too obvious for me to stand before Mother in her illusory conference space. It would show plain as day. I cringe to fight off the migraine-inducing roar her voice climbs to. My fingers rub together, piping hot with friction. They slip past one another with a sharp snap long before I have the chance to wonder what the hell I’m doing. That’ll come later. At the moment I deploy my trick, my brain is home only to a single thought: make it stop. And it does. The snap of my fingers snaps my mental connection with Mother in twain. The silence that ripples across my mind is almost as striking as the sound of her grating voice. I’ve never been without it.
I heave my head up from my textbook with a sigh. This is going to be a blast to explain to her later. It’s not like I don’t have time, at least, to figure out what to tell her. It’s not like she can pop into the Academy to check on me, after all.
“What’s wrong with you?” Helena asks. She’s stopped in front of my bed, curling iron jutting from a tuft of hair. I spring upright and away from the sound of her voice. It’s remarkably loud without any of the usual background static of the Dalshak family radio in my brain. I do my best to compose myself, but there’s no hiding the red smear of book-rash still fading from my forehead.
“No-nothing, why?” I ask. Her mouth is hardly open to answer before I cut her off with, “I mean, nothing. I’m fine. I’m good. Just studying for the Cooperative Casting test.”
“That’s what I mean,” Helena chuckles at my uneasiness. She circles
my bed while I regard her like a prowling beast. She hops up on the edge of my bed anyway. It feels so odd - like some kind of funhouse mirror version of what’s supposed to happen. It’s supposed to be me jumping up on her bed. It should be Helena with the troubled mind. It should be me helping her figure it out. “You’re studying. For Cooperative Casting. I’ve never seen you open a book for that class once.”
“I’m worried about this one,” I object. “The unit on assistive Fey spells really confused me.”
“Bullshit,” Helena shoots back, “I’ve never seen you confused a day in your life, until now. And it’s got nothing to do with assistive Fey spells.” My face twists up in another objection. But, before I can hope to get it out, Helena adds, “I’ve never heard you ramble before either. A Dalshak tongue needs sharpening every day, right? What was it… To cut… Clean…”
“Cut your words wisely. Precise in length, size and style,” I amend the lesson from Father for her. Dammit, she knows me too well. I never imagined it would be my undoing this way.
“Right. That. So what’s got you tongue-tied?” Helena asks. She looks over at me with such disarming concern, I can’t deny her. I have to come up with some decoy worry. I wrack my brain while I stare at my lap in search of something, anything to take cover behind. It can’t be academics - that plan already failed. I could try Sealbreaker, but Helena has seen me play. Chances she’d buy that are slim. That leaves me with but one option - the truth. The strategy is in which one I choose to share.
“It’s just…ugh, I can hardly believe I’m about to say this,” I grunt. Now that’s honesty. Concerns like this one hardly have a place on the docket of a Dalshak family spy deep in enemy territory. But, as well as I’ve been able to shove it down, it has been on my mind. “The…men? In my life?” I let it inch out of my mouth, like a glance around a corner before a blind charge through enemy fire. Helena’s eyes fill with a kind of light I’ve never seen before. She crosses her legs on the bed and leans close to me like I’m a pinata full of wisdom, about to burst.
“Emery Dalshak…consumed with the lust for not one, but two men?” Helena pries. My flushed cheeks lift with an uncomfortable smirk as I try to tell her. “Oh my - is it more than two?”
“No!” I slam my palms down between my own crossed legs. I clam up even tighter when our bathroom door swings open. Through a rolling wave of humid fog comes Fey Deller, wrapped in a towel that’s almost the shade of her teal skin. She peers over at me with her shimmering, otherworldly eyes.
“What is wrong?” she asks.
“No way!” I bark back, “There’s no way it’s so obvious that even you picked up on it!” Fey Deller’s puzzled gaze floats over my face.
“Emery’s got the hots for two men!” Helena chimes, like it’s exclusively her secret to tell. I’m left with my arms hung out in the air ahead of me, like I want to seize the information and take it back into myself. “At once!” Helena adds, which appears to do nothing to alleviate Fey Deller’s confusion.
“Is this…uncommon for humans?” Fey Deller asks. She stands near the center of the carpet, water dripping from the viny growths in her hair to the floor as she waits for the explanation. I clap a palm to my forehead.
“It depends on the human,” Helena does her best.
“For me…yes. Even one would be unusual,” I admit, to extract even an ounce of the oddity from the situation. Fey Deller nods in some level of understanding.
“It must be…Hoster from down the hall, and Rock!” Helena determines, somehow, from the painful discomfort in my face.
“You want to pick between them for me, too?” I chuckle at the accurate tidbit she’s gleaned at the contents of my heart.
“I can’t pick for you…but maybe I can help you pick,” Helena figures. She wraps a considerate hand around her lips and chin. When it uncovers, she asks, “How far have you gone with Rock?”
“I kissed him during Sealbreaker practice,” I admit. Considering how close I came to killing someone last night, I can’t believe how hot admitting this makes my face. I never pictured myself here. Between two girls, pouring out my heart on the floor. It makes me want to vomit just a little. At the same time, I feel butterfly wings flutter through my chest when I remember Rock’s lips on mine.
“Alright, alright. I’m going to assume it was good, or you wouldn’t be smiling right now,” Helena says. Smiling? I reach up to touch the edge of my lip, to test it myself. My God, she’s right. I’m grinning like a little girl. “And his personality?”
“What about it?” I ask.
“Do you like it?” Helena chuckles. “God, Emery. Did you decide if you like the guy before you put the squeeze on him?”
“Of course I like it!” I bark, not even sure why I’m so angry. As I go on, the anger unravels into something else. Before I know it, I’m in a sort of trance. I recall details with an unfamiliar fondness as I see them in my mind’s eye all over. “He’s…tough, in front of everyone but…he has more compassion than he shows. It’s all part of keeping appearances for his family.”
“My oh my, does that sound familiar,” Helena hums. She puts a finger on her lips and stares at the ceiling like she just can’t recall who else she knows like that.
“And he acts so confident about becoming Chief. But I can see he has his doubts. Somehow…I admire it. The face he wears, even though it’s hard,” I try to explain. Helena’s eyes tinge with a sickening note of sympathy. Does that really sound so much like me?
“And what about Hoster? Did you kiss him, too?” Helena asks.
“Not yet.”
“But you want to!” Helena sings, like one child teasing another.
“Sometimes,” I admit.
“Yeah, I see that in class,” Helena shrugs. Why did you bother asking then? I feel like asking her. “Does he still visit you in your mind-trap?”
“A few times a week,” I tell her. “I keep telling him it would be easier to just meet during the day, but he says he likes the control I have over everything there…and if he’s stuck in the Blue Plane at night anyway, he’d rather spend the time with company he enjoys.”
“That’s why you like him!” Helena shouts, which makes me flinch again, “You’re smiling again.” I feel the edge of my lips. Jeez, look at me. If Mother could see me now…but I’ve made sure she can’t. I’m free to smirk about boys and chatter like some schoolgirl, not just a girl in school. I can’t pinpoint if I love it or hate it just yet.
“I guess so,” I admit, “Hoster’s just so…out of it. He’s not from this world, and it shows. He doesn’t understand the pressures of being from a family like mine. He hardly understands how powerful he is. Being with him is like…taking a break from pressure.”
“And all the things that stress you out,” Helena adds.
“I’m not stressed,” I object.
“Right,” Helena sighs. “Well, anyway. It sounds like you’ve got a tough choice in front of you…”
“Thank you for your expert analysis,” I roll my eyes.
“Hey now. Who’s sitting on your bed trying to help you figure this out?” Helena reminds me. She covers her mouth again, deep in thought. “Which one of them makes you feel more comfortable?” I weigh the faces of two men on an impartial scale behind the blackness of my eyelids. Hoster… Rock… I chew my lip, reliving the intensity of my body mashed against Rock’s. I remember the night I laid my head on Hoster’s shoulder for hours through the night.
“I…don’t know,” I growl when the scale refuses to tip one way or the other.
“Well, which one of them makes you feel more excited?” Helena tries instead.
“Um…” I hum. I imagine myself walking out on the Sealbreaker field. I try to imagine the thump of my heart in my chest when I see Rock waiting for me for practice, first thing in the morning. I picture the tingle that ran through me when I saw Hoster in the bleachers, come to see my first match without my asking. “Damnit, I don’t know, Helena. You just pick.”
/> “Emery!” Helena laughs and rocks back.
“If I might interject,” Fey Deller surprises me. I’d almost forgotten she was a sentient being, and not just a tree sprouting up from our carpet, with how still and quiet she’s been.
“You might,” I permit her.
“Why impose the condition of exclusivity on yourself, with these partners?” Fey Deller asks, “It sounds to me like you haven’t discussed such matters with either of them.”
“Goddamn, the girl has a point,” Helena exclaims. Her face twists in baffled amazement that she didn’t think of it herself.
“You mean…go down both roads to see which one I like more?” I ask. It’s like being outdone in a chess match by a move I didn’t know existed when Fey Deller nods her head.
“Yes. If you don’t have to choose between them, don’t. Not yet. You clearly haven’t had enough time to consider the decision,” she says. More like I haven’t had the concentration, with everything else going on. But she’s got a point.
“Wouldn’t it be something, if you brought both of them to the Heritage Ball?” Helena chuckles. A single word fires across my neurons at the sound of it. Fuck. The Heritage Ball. I completely forgot. I’ve been so focused on everything else Mother pushed onto my plate, I forgot about the goddamned Heritage Ball. “Hey, you okay?” Helena asks.
She must have noticed the color rush out of my face at the mention of it. Dancing. Parading. Showboating. Everything I’ve been taught for years never to do, all consolidated into one night of celebration I’m obligated to attend, as a member of a founding family. The great paradox that was the downfall of my family’s formality.
“Yep. I’m good. Just the boy trouble,” I lie. Like it has nothing to do with the infernal dance. Like it has nothing to do with the death of Darius Jecks that’s been assigned to my hands. “I’ll be fine, once I have a second to think.”