“Oh, if you can avoid finding out, you should.” Fryn’s snakes hissed in agreement.
As Fryn replaced the bottles and gathered up more linens, Amma climbed into the last pool. Her stomach tightened at the cooler water, the scent much lighter, but the redness cleared from her skin, and no more dirt leeched off her arms when she moved them about. She leaned her head back, running fingers through wet hair and splashing her face, but her mind wandered, a jumble of too much information and not enough at once.
Fryn’s call woke her of the muddled thoughts. She held out a fluffy linen, urging her to get out of the pool, and once shewas wrapped up to dry, Fryn guided her to a chair and started running a comb through her hair. “I know just what to do with you.”
As she picked up a hot, glowing stone, Amma leaned away. “Uh, are you sure?”
All the little serpents gravitated toward the stone, their eyes shining in its warm glow. “Oh, yeah. I didn’t always have these,”—Fryn gestured to the snake nest—“it’s a curse.”
Amma’s eyes went wide, but she fell still, and Fryn brought the stone to her hair, drying up the excess water from it while she simultaneously brushed it out.
“I know that look, but don’t be sorry; I love my girls. I fell into the Everdarque like a decade ago, had no idea where I was, and I met this fae. He was real handsy, but what was I supposed to do? I was lost and alone and sixteen, so I just sort of did whatever he said. But then this other fae showed up real jealous-like, and boom, snake-hair.” As Fryn came around to Amma’s front, all the little serpents nuzzled against her neck and chin. “At first, it was awful when they sent me back to our plane—I couldn’t even go home without my own parents being terrified of me, but then I met these lamia and they were so sweet, taught me how to take care of the girls and took care of me too. The only thing bad about it now is I gotta sleep on my stomach, but it’s a small price to pay to be supported by thirteen ladies who will poison anybody who touches me without permission.”
Amma eyed one of the snakes, its jaw dropping open to reveal pointy fangs, but then it closed up again and there was that cute, little smile. “That actually sounds nice.”
“Sure is!” Fryn traded the stone for a jar of something red, dipping a finger into it to pat over Amma’s lips and rub into her cheeks. “Makes me trustworthy to the villains too since, by everybody else’s standards, we’re all monsters, so, that means more gold for me. There! Let’s get you dressed.”
Amma followed Fryn back down to the lower level of the bath chamber where the woman dug through a wardrobe. Amma’s actual clothes were still piled up in the corner. Fryn offered up a few pieces of fabric and made grabby hands for Amma’s drying linen. She hesitantly made the trade, but clearly got less out of the deal, holding up the scraps of mostly transparent, crimson silk. “Um, what’s this?”
“Clothes, duh.” Fryn snickered and showed her how to wrap the material around her chest to cover up the most indecent bits, then used thin chains that rested on her hips to fasten two panels, one hanging between her legs and another, narrowly, over her backside. It could only justifiably be called an outfit if one squinted, but Fryn was thrilled with her work. She skipped back to the wardrobe, and Amma expected footwear, but instead returned with a thick, metal circlet. “So, I’m not happy about this part, but you have to go to jail now.”
Amma’s insides tightened right up, and the circlet went from mundane to harrowing.
“I mean, it’s notreallyjail, I guess, it’s just a cell where you have to wait until the Grand Order decides if you can stay or…whatever.” She grimaced and moved again in her too quick way so that Amma didn’t even think to stop her.
The circlet was pressed up against Amma’s neck, there was a click and a jolt of arcana, and the collar was locked in place. Amma’s hand flew to her throat, but there was no removing the thing, thick, sturdy, and pulsing ever so slightly with magic.
“Sorry. We don’t really do slaves anymore since the slavers we used to get them from all got eaten by vampires, but sometimes the villains bring their own personal ones, and that’s you. I’m sure you’ll be fine though,” Fryn insisted. “The Grand Order hasn’t killed anybody who showed up unregistered in, like…four years? They haven’t had anybody unregistered in, like, four years either, but that’s not the point! Come on, I’ll makesure you get the nicest cell.”
Fryn’s arm warmly looped into Amma’s again, but the heat had drained right out of Amma’s veins. One of Fryn’s snakes gave Amma a piteous look, and she was swept back out into the dark corridors of the place that wasn’t really anywhere, wearing clothes that weren’t really anything, and wondering if she was still anybody at all.
CHAPTER 3
KILL, CACKLE, CONDEMN
YOU ARE LATE.
Damien ground his jaw. It was all he could do to keep from barking back.Hewas late, buttheyhad kepthimwaiting. Him. Damien Maleficus Bloodthorne, blood mage, son of Zagadoth the Tempestuous, Ninth Lord of the Infernal Darkness and Blah, Blah, Blah, half demon and wholly pissed. But then, that was what the Grand Order of Dread was wont to do in their own, private dimension when one deigned to break their insufferably arbitrary rules.
“I was…busy.” Despite his fury, shouting would do Damien no good, so he kept his teeth clenched. There was a saying about how low voices lent themselves to closer heads which made them good for cleaving off, but Damien couldn’t quite remember it, brain buzzing instead with irritation and time keeping. Four hours and thirty-nine minutes. It had been four fucking hours and thirty-nine abhorrent minutes since he’d walked away from Amma, and that was too long.
TOO BUSY FOR THE GRAND ORDER OF DREAD?asked the voice that was one and many at once, the voice of GOoD itself.
He would have liked to holler back that, yes, he was indeed far too busy for their pompous council and this ridiculous gathering. He had other concerns—breaking his father out of a crystal prison, exacting revenge on his rival, surviving a swirling vortex of chaotic destruction—and he only stood before the Grand Order now, bathed and dressed in attire they would approve of, because it was at the root of his greatest concern: thewoman that was being kept from him.
But Damien instead just flared his nostrils, clenched his fists, and glared at the ground. The blood mage was familiar enough with the Grand Order’s history of poor record keeping and the troubles that had once plagued Yvlcon because of it, so he knew bringing Amma along with him sans paperwork was indeed quite the fuck up. GOoD wasted more parchment on writing and revising regulations than committing actual atrocities—the council once lent him a chimera, the damn thing ate its own rental forms, and it took an extra moon and a half of feeding, bathing, and cleaning up its shit before he could return the dumb beast—so fixingthiswas going to require his complete composure.
Trying and succeeding only marginally to relax his brow, he lifted his gaze once more to the chamber he’d been summoned to for this dressing down. There were ornate illusions of some war gone past cast onto the grimy walls, a landscape painting of a hydra wreaking havoc in an armory hung at a slight but infuriating angle, and a pithy wood carving in Chthonic that readKill, Cackle, Condemn. When his eye began to twitch, he focused on the council themselves instead.
Swathed in shadows, the beings that made up the preeminent order of evil sat atop a dais. Villains adored their daises, as did those considered heroic, he supposed—everybody wanted to be as high up as possible while still sitting down—but this dais was an unnecessarily tall, giant slab of stone raised just to the height of Damien’s chin. Though he had to tip his head up to see them, their hooded robes still obscured the council members’ faces, both fabric and arcana casting endless hollows in place of features.
Above, a miasmic cloud undulated with a faint pall of blue light. A constant presence of arcana, alive and throbbing with something like breath, it connected the members of the councilto one another, allowing them to share a mind and a voice. That, at least, made Damien squirm instead of sneer.
He cleared his throat, flexing fingers and stretching shoulders. An excuse—he needed to come up with an excuse for being late. “I received the summons with little warning for this Yvlcon, and so—”
LITTLE WARNING?Only one leaned forward, but the voices still spoke in unison, shared amongst the whole and echoing off the walls.IS THE IMPENDING ECLIPSE NOT NOTIFICATION ENOUGH?
Damien’s mouth opened, eyes darting down as he thought. The moons had been inching nearer one another, and, darkness, did the Grand Order ever love their astronomical anomalies.
