Chapter 32
Nemesis Khapoor—one of the five who ruined my life—had through presence alone stolen the breath of everyone in the room. There on that stage she shimmied and swayed through the song’s relatively few verses. Belted with abandon its chorus out to a crowd that sang with her. Returning ten-fold every iota of energy she tossed out as crumbs to the cult of adoration that had revealed its face. She may have only been a regional Lodgemaster, but here in this moment she was a queen, their saint, the idol of which all Lodgemembers sought to emulate.
It took all my effort to look away. An effort that was rewarded by getting to glimpse the despair and loathing that stewed in Amber’s face. Every muscle tensed in anticipation of Nemesis deciding to strike just then. A possibility that Amber no doubt saw as a surety.
“Amber,” I said, squeezing her wrist so she’d look at me and not her. “What’s wrong?”
Her eyes drifted downward, hesitant to look away from the monster in our midst.
“I can’t be here.”
“Why?” I asked. “Help me understand.”
“She—we—fuck.” She wrenched her arm free from my hold. “Just trust me, Temple. I’m doing this for you. Always for you.”
I was a summoner, an adult in the eyes of society, but I wasn’t so old as to resist the urge to physically express my displeasure—my rejection of this. My hand whipped across her face.
“You don’t get to say that,” I said. “I do trust you. I’ve stayed trusting you, but you can’t tell me why you have to run? Why you look so afraid? Trust me, Amber, trust me for once with the weight of you.”
I steadied myself by clinging to her face. My heart was treading water as I sought to rediscover the connection that had been between us only moments before Nemesis killed it. Amber closed her eyes rather than look at me.
I pleaded, “I can carry it.”
“We have history, her and I.” She said, “And my feelings are…they’ll give me away.”
“Then be here with me. We had a plan, but maybe we make a new one. We stand together, support each other, and—”
“And what, Temple?” she asked. “And what?”
I whispered, “We—”
“Kill her? Temple, that’s impossible. It…”
I stopped listening. Why listen to a traitor? A liar. Instead, I shoved her. She looked surprised, and so wasn’t ready when I threw her jacket at her nor when I grabbed an unattended drink from the bar to launch as a projectile. The glass shattered against her upraised arm. Shards falling off into darkness.
It was a blessing that Nemesis proved so arresting that no one spared a glance at my argument with Amber. Not even to witness the way my hand rose, shaking with an Atomic Glory pointed at her face. She knew how dangerous my spell was, but even at this point blank range her eyes could only flick back to watch Nemesis fucking Khapoor.
“Run then,” I said. “Better I know you won’t stand with me now than when it’ll actually matter.”
Amber said, “There’s no point standing now if it doesn’t matter. That’s just throwing away your life. You can come with me. We could—”
“No,” I said. “I refuse to be a coward even if it’s with you. Everything about what we’ve done was to get me in the room with her. Well here I am and here she is. In the same room.”
I shook the spell from my hand. Despite her abandoning me, there underneath the Suppression of my higher reason and the cloying muck of Indulgence pulling me toward impulse was the line I refused to cross. The oath I’d sworn to her and to Melissa. Even if they betrayed me, I couldn’t and wouldn’t harm them.
Though even with this commitment, if I’d counted emotional harm then in that moment I’d already proven that the oath was something ephemeral rather than ironclad. The slow nod of acknowledgment Amber gave me—something that belonged on the face of a soldier speaking to a superior, rather than one lover to another—was the only action that could restrain the pain which would otherwise overwhelm her words. Then she left. Disappearing as she always did.
Abandoned and reeling, I looked towards my home—Melissa—only to discover Ina had reclaimed her. The two were peeling off toward the club’s exit. Ina no doubt her mind on whatever reward was waiting for her, and Melissa not even sparing a glance in search of me or Amber. She was free, and ultimately unburdened by the weight of purpose that I carried.
It was a weight that I realized I’d forgotten. Beneath the exam, the party, and the stirring of my heart I had stopped hearing the wailing moan for justice that spoke in the voice of Dad and Mom. I could hear their condemnation of the world for abandoning them. The sorrow and hurt at my betrayal of them. Yet there was a path to forgiveness if I was strong enough to take it. First, I had to find a piece of glass.
I dropped to my knees, hands roaming the ground, as my eyes adjusted to the bloody shadow beneath the bar. As I turned my head I saw it—a crimson glint—and grasped it. The shard refused to budge. Pinned by something immovable.
“What’s a cute puppy like you doing on your knees?” a voice asked. The same voice that had stopped singing at some point earlier.
My eyes finished adjusting. The glass was pinned beneath the toebox of Nemesis’s heels. I tilted my head. Tracing a path along her ankle, her leg, across her finely sculpted abs, to her rather modest bust hidden within well developed pectoral muscles. Until I arrived at her bemused handsome expression that she balanced atop a single finger attached to an arm corded in noticeable muscle.
“Picking up some broken glass,” I said. Attempting to remove all malice from the statement.
She beamed, “How responsible.”
Then lifted her foot allowing me to claim the shard—its point was sharp and its edge malicious. I rose slowly under her gaze until she was forced to look up at me. This close I realized how small she was. Well below me and Secretary, and only a step or so above Melissa.
We stood there silently for a moment. The shard of glass becoming slick in my palm. I looked away from her to see the rest of the club having returned to its hedonistic business from earlier. Though it was obvious everyone was conspicuously going through the motions in a way that still allowed them to spy on us.
“You’re making a scene,” I said.
“I always do,” she chuckled. “It’s rare for one of my dogs to be shy. Normally your sort beam when praised. I mean, it’s not every examinee that I give my attention to.”
“I’m sure you tell everyone that.”
“Oh, they wish I did, but I find a hungry hound works so much harder.”
I looked away from her. “I’m not hungry for anything. Just trying to pass.”
“Yet here you are, having achieved so much in such a short time with no backing,” she said. “If that’s you without hunger then I can’t wait to see what you’d do when you have it.”
She took a step toward me. Then another. The crowd leaned in without moving from their position. My own heart beat in time to her footsteps. Everything hung on the second by second motions of this woman. The passage of which drove the vengeance—the Bloodlust—to a mad froth. My thoughts screamed in unison, take one more step! In one more step I could swipe out, Bisect the Sun, and make a slit hose of her throat so I might dance, joyous as a child in her raining blood.
Nemesis took a half-step. My heart briefly syncopated as my thoughts came skidding to a halt. This wasn’t close enough, but if I really tried then maybe I’d make it? No, it wasn’t worth it, not unless it was guaranteed. Yet what was guaranteed in this life? Those five took a chance to kill a god and their tender, so why couldn’t I take a chance to kill one Lodgemaster?
“Look at me,” she ordered.
My eyes moved and my head followed in an elegant glide down to her fingers held out for my chin to perch upon. The Bacchanalian Ballast prevented me from realizing how instinctually I’d obeyed. An instinct that should’ve had me do anything else but put my head in her hand. Though the idea of resisting repulsed something in me that I couldn’t pin down.
“Listen closely,” she said. “It’s annoying when a dog of mine is too humble. Makes people question my taste in hounds. So when I tell you you’re special, I promise I don’t say it lightly. Especially a hound with such pretty eyes, that remind me of mine.”
Before, I’d thought her eyes were a trick of the light. It was so red in here that it’d drowned out every color in the room. At a distance you’d struggle to make out the true hue of anything. However, at this distance—my head in her hand—I knew that what I was seeing was true. Nemesis’s eyes were red. So red that the lights of the room seemed like a poor attempt at rendering the color whose origin could be found in her gaze.
Locked like this, I felt myself fall into the black void of her pupil while surrounded by waterfalls of sanguine carmine that fell and fell in a never ending flow from some distant eternal battlefield. If the bloody flows pooled anywhere, I couldn’t tell. There was a bottomlessness that I saw in her which would never be filled and she wasn’t bothered by it in the slightest. In fact, the sense I had was that she was elated. Who the fuck could be happy at that?
Then her hand fell away from my chin. My wits returned to me, I stumbled backward. There was no moving forward. Not toward that thing in its blood dress which chuckled at my newly discovered fear. Everything about Nemesis—even her teeth, bright and shark-like—was all in service of an existence that saw poetry in slaughter.
She took a step toward me. Then another. Another. Each one increasing an undetectable weight on my spirit and my body. Oh, she was in range but—I dropped the shard of glass. It tinked demurely as it disappeared off into darkness again. My body wanted to crumple. My blood wanted to flow backward. Here before me was a power that ran deeper than the charisma and social clout she’d wielded on stage. It was the source of Amber’s fear. The originator of my own. Standing in front of Nemesis Khapoor I had a better idea of what could kill a god; right now, so close to me that she tranced a cartoon heart against my chest, I felt like one tilt of her head could crumple my spirit that—compared to the cosmic density of hers—was but paper.
“You should drink more, Nadia,” she said, “you were so close to making a very interesting decision. Everyone else here is too boring and respectful. Though a word of advice…”
She pointed down with her finger and I felt as if my legs were severed below the knee. So quick had I fallen. She loomed above me. The physical difference in our heights now in proper alignment to our ranks within the Chain. Then she whispered into my ear.
“We can be more creative than using a shard of glass. We’re summoners after all.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Good. Maybe I don’t either,” she said.
Whatever force she’d exerted on me—it was something stranger than a field-spell—was retracted back into herself. With a blink her eyes were no longer the origin of all red, but some unknown color masked by the chroma rich lighting of the club. In a moment she’d re-assumed her mask of being a person rather than a monster. She turned away from me—I was no longer worth her time—and took in the party. I had the sense she was searching for someone. Though not too hard, as she soon shrugged.
“Guess I was feeling nostalgic,” she muttered.
When she walked away, I didn’t get up. When her voice was a whisper in the distance, I didn’t get up. I only rose when the lights shifted from red back to blues and purples—the sign that she’d left the building. As I pulled myself up, my body proved a bit too sluggish and weak for the rather minor action when it was also expected to balance atop the thin heels I wore. All of which combined to send me tumbling backward to the floor and away from the bartop that’d been the raft I’d intended to cling to in the aftermath of Nemesis’s visit.
I fell in tottering steps backwards until only the edge of my heel caught the floor, slipped, and deposited me into the air. I’d expected to feel the unyielding ground crack against my skull. Instead, the small of my back landed into a hand. Wide, firm, and strong as it halted my momentum leaving me in a dip most dramatic. A face drifted into view—handsome and square with a scar some girls would call roguish as it cut through lips curled into a smirk. Eyes half-lidded made an examination of me, my body, and rose back to my face.
“Drop me or stand me back up,” I said. “Either way, let me go.”
“Why would I let you go when I just found you, Orchard?” he asked.
“Piggy?”
He tossed me into the air, corkscrewing up and then down to land in a bridal carry within his arms. From my new vantage, I could better appreciate the light playing across Piggy’s face and dying his mane of hair that looked unwilling to be tamed. As well as sinking into the small crystal tusk earrings that swayed with every tilt of his head. There was a humor that sparkled in his eyes and reminded me of the irreverence that he carried the night we’d met.
“Unless you have a different butch who calls you Orchard,” he said. “Though I think I’d prefer to tell you my actual name.”
I scoffed, “What makes you think I want to know it?”
“It’d bring us closer,” he said.
A growl erupted from within my chest as I flashed my fangs at him and the idea of becoming closer to anything. I had enough attachments that’d abandon me when I needed them, and attempt to seduce me from the purpose the dead crooned from within me. The offer of more of that was a poison pill I wanted no more of. Piggy flashed his own fangs in a grin.
“What’s your angle?” I asked.
He shrugged, his earrings dancing, “To not be strangers anymore?”
“Sure, and then what? We become friends, allies in the exam, and over time we start to grow attached to one another. Only to realize our bond is something so much deeper than we gave it credit. Then, unable to deny it any longer, we admit our love to each other and have sex.”
Piggy said, “If that’s the way you see it going then I’m willing to follow.”
“Then let’s skip to the end and get to the bit where you fuck me,” I said.
He rapidly blinked as my statement sunk in. Then furrowed his brow.
“Is this a test?” he asked.
“Only yes or no,” I said. “Which is it?”
He nodded and smiled that same lazy lopsided grin. “Yes, if that’s how it’ll go. I never was that patient. We can head back to my place, and—”
“We’ll do it in the bathroom,” I said.
I didn’t want to know his actual name, or see how he kept his room. Anything that would’ve made him into more of a person—another vector to compromise my commitment—was to be steered away from. If it took giving him some meaningless sex to have him leave me alone then so be it. Those were my terms. They were unyielding, and I could tell Piggy wanted to argue. Push and prod to see where they were weak. Unfortunately, his ‘Orchard,’ wasn’t weak and he’d get nothing from me.
He nodded and carried me off to the bathroom. Inside it was a different world. The lights weren’t the unnatural rich syrupy colors inside the rest of the club, but instead reminiscent of the setting sun. A melancholic orange that flickered like a candle flame making shadows dance and deepen. As we passed in front of the long mirror which snaked above a number of sinks, I saw myself in Piggy’s arms. I was small and almost frail compared to the trunk-like limbs that held me aloft as if I weighed nothing at all. However, rather than their size, my attention was arrested when I noticed how different the skin on his arms was to the skin of his neck and face.
Piggy was pale. White as a snowbank with a little hint of blue from how his veins wound beneath his skin. Yet his arms—especially his hands and forearms—were translucent. If they had any color it was a faint bluish-tinge like glass. Underneath which I could see his bones and veins. His eyes caught mine looking at his arms in the mirror, and he winked.
“It’s a funny story,” he said. “If you want to know, of course.”
“I don’t,” I lied.
“Of course.”
He stopped in front of a sink—it was relatively dry—and all but dropped me atop it. My ass felt the chill of the porcelain through my skinsuit, but my face was hot as I saw what Piggy had chosen to wear. For his top half he wore star-shaped pasties over his nipples. A modicum of modesty that did little when his tits were the size of my head even when backed by the muscle that filled out his door-wide bulk. Around his waist he’d wrapped a richly patterned skirt. The wrap was tight enough that I had a vague idea of what he’d be pushing inside of me soon.
Piggy slowly unwrapped his skirt. My eyes didn’t move away as it unwound from about his waist to reveal a cock forever stuck in a slight downward tilt due to its own weight. Of which came less from its length—its only approachable characteristic—and more from the ponderous girth that brought to mind the thickness of my glaive’s shaft. Though as I watched his cock fill out under my oversight I realized that such a comparison still undersold its quality. At best, I could say that it was thick in the way that every part of Piggy was thick.
He slung the skirt over his shoulder. Stepped forward, his cock sliding against my still hidden crotch—fuck, he was firm as a table—eliciting a moan from me as its weight asserted itself against my clit.
“That’s a good noise,” he said. “Though I need you to use your words for me.”
“I don’t want to say anything to you,” I said, the words struggling to come out with conviction rather than dripping with lust.
“Sure, but after you answer my question. Do you want to take it like this, sitting down, or do you want to stand?”
The idea of taking it as I was had its own upsides. He’d be able to be deeper. I could hold onto him—a necessary concern if he was as rough as his personality. Though I would also see his face. Observe as I wrung pleasure from him with every thrust sliding within me. He could even kiss me. I shook the thought from my head. I wasn’t doing this for that. I needed him gone from my life, and so this had to be mechanical. Purely biological. Nothing more, and if possible maybe something even less.
My thoughts were interrupted by a roll of his hips—the fucking bastard—which ripped another moan from me. He did it all so lazily, but as I looked up I saw the intensity with which he watched me. Where Amber’s eyes would burn in their want, his were calm and reflective. A deep blue that verged on black that allowed me to sink within them as much as I wanted until I found what I needed—I couldn’t bear to accept what I’d find.
“Standing,” I said. “I don’t want to look at you.”
He shrugged off my poor attempt at a barb, and slid me from my place down so my heels could touch the tiles. His hands were large enough that they nearly encircled my waist perfectly. Then he flipped me without any effort or affection. Pressed me down against the sink. I lifted my head to meet my own reflection.
Why was my face so simpering? Lips parted like I wanted him to slide his cock between them. While my eyes were wide and wet—when had I cried? I turned away from myself to try and look behind me. Piggy’s face was hidden behind my ass. His fingers teased the inside of my thighs in a lazy trace upward. As if in anticipation, I felt that heat work my muscles into a wanting clench.
“Hmm, no zipper,” he said. “This outfit of yours is it conceptual?”
“Yes,” I stuttered. “Why does that matter?”
“Means it’ll self-repair most likely.”
“Most likely—?”
A screech slashed through the low ambiance of the bathroom.
“Alls below, what was that?” I asked.
Piggy answered by rising from behind me with a section of cosmic ‘fabric’ dangling from between his teeth. He removed it from his mouth and laid it gingerly on the sink next to us. My breath quickened as I could feel the warm air against my bare labia. While Piggy shuffled into place behind me. The round wide head of his cock sliding against my pussy.
“Damn it, Piggy, you can’t just shove that thing in me. I need preparation or something.”
He rolled his eyes. Then I gasped as three thick fingers plunged inside of me in one wet go. The jerk curled them and pressed against my most sensitive spot like it was a button to summon more lubricant. I answered this administration with a weeping moan. Then, swift as they were in, he pulled them out. My pussy clenched around the sudden lack of him.
Piggy held his hand in front of my eyes, spread his lubricated fingers showing me the wet-sticky threads between them. Then returned the hand to my waist where his other one still gripped me.
“You’re fine. Besides, foreplay is for sex. I’m here to fuck you, or did you change your mind?”
His voice was lightly dusted with amusement, but gentle enough to not come off as some sort of recrimination. If I wanted sex it would be sex. If I wanted him to fuck me then he’d fuck me. In this moment Piggy was just another mirror to myself, and right then I hated everything that I was. So I hated everything that was him. I looked into my reflection in the mirror and answered.
“Fuck me.”
“As you wish.”
Piggy pulled me backward. Sliding myself around his cock as it shoved aside the walls of pussy with its entrance. It felt like a gut punch. It felt like I’d shoved an entire meal down in one go. I felt briefly complete as this minor void within me was filled. Then I felt my body crash back into the sink. My hands slid on the porcelain in an attempt to grab hold as that one thrust knocked me forward. I found my grip just in time as Piggy’s cock dragged itself out—though my own needy pussy fought to keep every inch inside—only before his hips reversed, meeting my ass with a meaty slap that rippled through my body.
“Aaaah,” a voice warbled out in a rolling moan that echoed in the sink bowl.
Whoever made the noise—it wasn’t Piggy and I don’t make sounds like that—had only spurred him onward. His pace quickened and he shifted his angle of penetration to drive into the spot his fingers had pressed against earlier. The head of his cock grinding against it before slipping past.
“Ah, ah, ah,” repeated the voice.
The bastard, the oaf, Piggy fucked the way he fought using every ounce of his brutish strength because who needed skill when he was him. Though much like his punches which were perfect, so too was every thrust as each drag backward pulled my ass back just in time to meet his hips as he’d already reversed course. The result of which drove him deeper and deeper inside of me.
“You really do make the best noises, Orchard.”
“T-that’s not me,” I stammered out.
“Who knew you were such a liar?”
He moved a hand from my waist to my head. His fingers curled up a fistful of my hair at the root. His thrusts stilled as he yanked my head up to face myself in the mirror. He’d fucked my sense of time sideways, so I don’t know how long it’d been. All I knew was that I looked well on my way to orgasm as tears welled in my eyes, my face was flush, and with another teasing brutish thrust I watched my mouth open and throat tense.
“Ah!” I squeaked.
Then I whimpered at the state of myself. I looked pained and pleased. When I shut my mouth I’d bit my lip only to groan as Piggy thrust hard inside of me. Each one a resounding thwap of flesh on flesh. While internally he bullied my g-spot like the utter asshole he was. There wasn’t a hint of anger on my face. I couldn’t see any retort or scolding in my expression. At this moment I was just a girl being railed by the hottest fucking butch in the club.
“You look beautiful, Orchard,” he said.
I moaned at the comment, and hated myself as it made me happy. This whole affair was for him, to fuck me and leave me alone, so I could be what?
“Dead,” I answered.
I needed to be dead as my family. Dead to the world, my heart, to consequences. Dead to the fear that Nemesis had inspired in me. Dead to even the simple primal pleasure of feeling a cock thicker than anything I’d used with Melissa. Dead to the way Piggy looked at me in the mirror—calm and patient. Dead to the shame that I felt looking into the mirror and seeing a fucked up broken slut who couldn’t take a step forward and cut one throat.
Piggy shifted speeds again. They’d become longer drags. Harder thrusts. He was driving me to the edge of climax, and aimed to push us both over. The Nadia in the mirror—I’d disowned that she was me—smiled like the fucking traitor she was as our cunt clenched and climax neared. I reared back with my fist and in time with each thrust of Piggy’s dick, punched that Nadia in the face. Again. Again. Again.
Whorish moans leaking out from my throat as the mirror’s glass cracked, spiderwebbed, and cratered inward beneath my knuckles. The Nadia in my mirror deserved so much worse, deserved to feel nothing at all, but I knew I’d be forced to feel one more thing.
Piggy made his final thrust within me. Pushed as deep as I could take him. His cock twitching and clenching as he silently came inside my pussy. Warm spurts that filled my canal as I clenched and squirted around his cock. With a scream I slapped the mirror—my muscles fired erratically keeping me from making a fist—in one final act to Di**** the two Nadias.
The mirror split. A perfect line cutting it in twain. It held itself on its own edge for a moment before bursting apart in a powdery explosion of glass. Though none of it cut me or Piggy. Instead shredding the stalls behind us as glass shrapnel at such speeds proved its own deadliness. However, a small circle of glass—spider-webbed from repeated assaults—remained on the wall. In it, I saw the face of a fractured Nadia that graced me with a sorrowful smile I wasn’t wearing. Then my legs buckled as I slipped back from the sink and into darkness.