Missing a day because...

 I've got a persistent health problem I'm trying to keep from becoming chronic, and today's a bad day. I'm sorry, darlins! I'll try to have Lord of Unkindness on Thursday :(

Lord of Unkindness: Chapter Twenty-Seven

 Notes: Oooh, we're not playing around now. Things are about to get very messy for Ciro.

Title: Lord of Unkindness: Chapter Twenty-Seven

***

Chapter Twenty-Seven

 

 

Photo by Madelynn Woods

He comes back to himself in fits, his hearing resurfacing before anything else. Stupid, so stupid, I should have set up guardrails. Ciro knows how to defensively disengage from his magic; it’s almost an unconscious reaction to potential threats for him at this point. He was so flustered and so worried about Annette that he didn’t even think of it, though. Jesus Christ, Annette, what is she—

“—take to leave us alone?” That’s her, teary and fragile. Ciro vaguely registers arms around his body. Annette is holding him close, protective.

“More than you’ve got,” Nephele says in Maria’s voice. Everything about her is grating like this; Ciro can’t believe he didn’t realize the switch immediately. Then again, what could he have done even if he had? She had Annette at gunpoint. “I’m quite impressed you and your family managed to fake your death so well, and trust me, my uncle will be getting back to your parents about that, but you better than anyone should realize that there’s nothing that can keep me and Ciro apart. Nothing and no one.”

“He’s not going to be happy with you,” Annette tries.

Nephele just laughs. “Who cares about happiness? None of us are in this for happiness; happiness is a chemical trick of the brain. I can order him a dose of happiness in a syringe every morning if it means he’s mine.”

“Don’t you care that he doesn’t love you?”

Nephele’s voice drops to a growl, hard to force out of Maria’s petite frame. “What the fuck would you know about it, huh? Did you care that he didn’t love you? Did you care that he’d rather screw boys in bathrooms or go for joyrides on your friend Angelo’s cock in the back of a limo than give you his loyalty, huh? Did you care that he only ever thought of you as a friend, never a fuck?”

Ciro feels Annette tense. It’s a tension he recognizes, the kind that comes from holding the truth inside rather than spewing it like venom at your target. She sounds appropriately cowed when she murmurs, “I thought love would come over time, like it did between his parents.”

Nephele laughs. “Who’s been feeding you fairy tales, huh? One of the cousins? Maybe my dad? He loved to play pretend, but it’s all bullshit, Annie. Ciro’s parents married for the same reason mine did—to make powerful children who would help expand our family’s empire. But Aunt Mei’s family didn’t let on that she had a history of cystic endometriosis. She was lucky to get carry Ciro to term; she lost half a dozen pregnancies, I think.” She hums, and Ciro can hear the leer in it. “You know what would have been great? If good ol’ Uncle Victor had married you instead of promising you to Ciro. Then he and I could be together without worrying about making weird babies, while you and his dad pumped out a new generation of Hamblys.”

Annette pounces on that, but she seems a bit distracted too. Not physically—magically. She arrived at the house with just one familiar, but Ciro knows she has more. Where are they? “You just said it yourself, it’s not safe for you and Ciro to have children together. Surely his father won’t let you two marry.”

“Eh, I’ve had my eggs plucked out already and frozen. We can do IVF, test the little brats for abnormalities before putting them in a surrogate. We’ll get enough good ones that way. Besides, I’m not marrying Ciro because I want to have his babies.” Her voice sounds closer, like she’s leaning in. “I’m marrying him because he’s mine. From the second I saw him, I knew he was going to be mine. One single fucking thing in this world is going to be mine, and I decided it was going to be Ciro when I was five years old, so don’t even think about trying to screw me out of it now.”

Maria leans back again. “You’re just a bonus, bitch. A means of keeping Ciro in line. Maybe you’ll get lucky and Victor will let you become his concubine after all, instead of killing your whole family as punishment for your filthy lies, but I kind of doubt it.” She’s satisfied by that, Ciro can tell. “Now, be quiet until my actual body gets here and I might even let you travel in a seat on the plane instead of in a pet carrier in the hold.”

“I wondered why you looked like this,” Annette murmured. “Is she magical?”

“Nope,” Nephele says with a pop to the “p.” “Not that it matters, since bullets can kill a familiar just as well as a spell. Now how about you be a good little girl and guuuhhhhhh…” Her voice drops a full octave, going lower and lower until Ciro hears the thud of her hitting the ground.

“Ciro!” Annette pats his face, gently at first, then harder. “Ciro, c’mon, I can’t get you out of here without your help. We don’t have much time!”

Ciro forced his body to remember he’s got eyes. They blink, scratchy and painful, but a few more and he can see well enough to catch sight of Annette’s fearful but determined face. To the right, he sees Maria lying on her front, face blank, as one of Annette’s cats sits heavily on her back, teeth buried in her neck.

“I can’t keep her down for long,” Annette warns as she gets up, three more cats happily curling around her feet. Ciro has a raven perched on either side of the couch, unnaturally still, but they begin to stir as he does. “We’ve got to leave, now.”

He shakes his head with a wince. “I can’t go without Maria,” he says.

“She’s working with Nephele!”

“No, she’s being compelled. She’s important to Angelo, I can’t…” He can’t believe he’s about to say this, but he’s still reeling from magical aftershock and there’s no Angelo to talk him out of it right now. “I have to stay.”

“With Nephele?” Annette couldn’t sound more horrified. “Are you crazy? Did you hear any of what she just said? She’ll destroy you! She wants to marry you, she wants to leash you. She’ll never let you go once she gets her claws into you.”

Ciro knows all that. He also knows that he can’t let someone else pay for the mistake he made in making himself known in the first place. Maria doesn’t deserve that; if he goes along, he might be able to bargain for her release, or to force his family to leave Angelo and Annette alone. If he runs, though…if he runs again, if he runs with her, there will never be any chance of reconciliation. Just death. Given the resources the Hamblys can bring to the table, probably the deaths of the people he loves instead of the ones he loathes. He won’t do it. He can’t.

“Leave,” he insists. “You can make it. Leave now, go to…go to Angelo, or…”

“I’m not leaving you!” Annette insists, her chin trembling even as her voice firms.

“You have to. Please, you have to.” He grips her hand as tight as he’s able. “You’ve got to warn Angelo. Tell him what’s happened. Tell him I’m…I’m working on getting back to him.”

Maria stirs. Annette’s familiar bites down harder, but it’s clear the spell is losing its potency.

“Go now,” he says, pointing at the door that leads to the garden. “Over the wall. Hide yourself however you have to, just go, and don’t stop until you’re with someone safe.”

Annette shakes her head, tears falling now, but she knows he’s right. “I want you to come.”

“I wish I could.” But you know them as well as I do. They found me. They’ll never let me live any other way. Go while you can.

She helps him up onto the couch, stifling sobs, then kisses his forehead before recalling her familiar. One of Ciro’s ravens takes its place and he bears down, down, down with it, until Maria  has a hard time breathing. “I’ll find a way to help you,” Annette promises.

“Be safe,” Ciro says. “That will help me most of all.”

“What do I tell Angelo?”

Tell him that I love him more than I ought to, and I’m so grateful for him, and I’m so sorry that I ruined everything. “Tell him I need him to be safe too.” God, he’s going to be so mad. Hopefully Annette can quell the worst of it. “Now run for it.”

She runs. Ciro watches her go until he can’t anymore, and finally the potency of her spell vanishes as her familiar is called back to her, evaporating like mist. Maria sits up with a groan, looks around, and settles on Ciro. When she smiles at him, it’s pure Nephele—huge and toothy. “And here I thought you were dumb.”

“And here I thought you were smart,” Ciro parrots back. Maria chuckles.

“Smart enough to make you stay. You’re all levers, baby.” She crawls over so that she’s practically in his lap. “I look forward to pushing them,” she murmurs. “One by one.”

“You can try.”

“Oh, I will. It’ll be a lot easier once I convince your daddy to let me go ahead with the operation this time.”

Ciro suppresses a shudder. “One of us needs to be mobile.”

She laughs. “Oh Ciro, you’re underestimating just how furious your father is. You’ll be lucky if he lets you keep both your legs after this shit.” She grabs him by the arm and stands. “Time to go, baby. I can’t wait to see you again…in the flesh.”

This time the shudder breaks through. Maria just laughs and hauls him toward the door. “Hope you didn’t leave anything you like in here,” she says as they leave. “Because I’m going to burn this place to the ground.”

Ciro pulls back against her grip. “No! You can’t do that, it’s—”

Maria pulls him in close and shoves the muzzle of her gun against his gut. “You don’t dictate terms anymore,” she growls. “I do. So you can sit and watch, or you can sit and watch while bleeding from the stomach, your choice.” Ciro doesn’t so much as twitch. “That’s what I thought. Now be a good boy for me and get the gasoline out of the trunk.”

Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Catie

 Notes: It was time to check in with our favorite drama girl and see how she's coping. And the answer is...well, read on and you'll see.

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Interlude: Catie

***

Interlude: Catie

 

 

Photo by Thomas Koukas

It felt like dreaming.

With her power hovering around five percent, Catie was sluggish and sleepy, all her internal processes slowed to a crawl in an effort to keep her most necessary functionality alive. Her central core, her heater so Daddy didn’t get too cold, her most basic sensors to help monitor whether or not someone or something was getting close to them. Apart from that, she just had the hardware that was built into her frame, a part of the metal itself—which included vibration monitors.

Vibrations told her a lot, honestly. Even with her optical array off, she could still tell what her Daddy was doing. A little movement here, a fumble over there, the soft shudder of a sharp exhale in the air as he shifted his broken leg…poor Daddy. Catie didn’t know how it felt to have a broken leg, but maybe it felt a little like getting her communications array shot to pieces. Like a part of herself was missing all of a sudden, something she’d taken for granted before it stopped working altogether.

No, humans didn’t just stop working like that, though. Daddy still had his leg, after all. It just hurt. Catie’s mood festered as she thought about how useless she was to him right now. But what could she do at five percent power? He told her to wait until ten percent before trying anything, and she wanted to listen to him, but…

It was the work of moments to calculate the ambient level of sunshine in the air and the time it would take to produce five percent more power if she put her solar sail out. The problem was, extending her solar sail would use up at least three percent of her remaining power, and once she dipped into one percent she’d be put all the way to sleep. That left her one percent of leeway, which really wasn’t very much, even for a person with a mind made to calculate like she had. Surely it was safer just to wait for the solar cells in her exoskin to absorb enough power to get her back to full functionality, then do it. It should only take—one-point-two standard days, or two-point-five-three Hadrian days. Not that long. Not that bad.

Kieron would be all right. He would. He would. He was always kind and understanding, and she knew he didn’t blame her for leaving him behind. She knew he wanted her to be safe and to take care of Daddy first and foremost. She knew he didn’t think that she’d abandoned him, even though she felt like she had.

Plus, like Daddy said, he had Blobby. And Blobby was dumb, and Blobby was just a baby, and Blobby didn’t know how to do hardly anything at all, but Kieron would teach him something useful, probably, and then maybe even before Catie was at full power again, they’d find them, because Kieron always found her, and then almost all the family would be together again and Daddy would be happy and…

Daddy? Catie didn’t have the power to vocalize, but she directed her remaining sensory power to where Elanus was lying on the floor, trying to figure out what had her spooked. Continued respiration…continued heartbeat, but…both were below normal, and slowly decreasing.

Oh no…Daddy was in trouble. Catie sent a pulse of vibration to the floor where he was lying, and he groaned faintly, but it wasn’t enough to wake him up.

Oh no oh no oh no…what was she going to do? She couldn’t leave Daddy to lie there for another two-point-five-three days while she charged to ten percent; that would be incompatible with his continued health. She needed to trigger the medbot to prepare a stimulant and a painkiller and produce a better splint for his leg, but that intense fabrication would run her power down too fast. She’d hit one percent before she could administer it to him.

Catie ran more calculations. If she extended her solar sail, she ought to be up to seven percent power in approximately three-point-four hours. Once she hit seven percent, she could begin fabrication and only lose five percent power, which would keep her above the one percent critical shutdown mode. She could start fixing Daddy and keep powering herself up. Three hours was better than two days…unless someone found them in that three hours and she didn’t have the power to escape. Or if the thicker storm clouds moved in overhead and blocked the sun, reducing the effectiveness of her solar sail. Or if—

Stop. Be decisive. That was something Daddy had talked a lot to her and Lizzie about—being decisive. Making a decision and sticking with it, even if you couldn’t prove a hundred-percent chance of success by taking that path. Catie knew she tended to be conservative with her numbers—who could blame her when confronted with the potential for disaster? She had a brain capable of massive amounts of complex calculation! Surely it was always best to follow percentages.

But a percentage was just a chance. There was no perfect way to predict the future, and for once Catie decided she was glad of that. If she could perfectly predict the future with her calculations, then she’d already have decided that between Kieron’s uncertain fate and Daddy’s poor health, the odds of them all meeting again, much less escaping from Hadrian’s Colony together, were almost negligible. But Catie refused to entertain that idea. If she did, if she started letting doubt seep into her mind now, she’d just start screaming again, and no one needed that.

It was time to act like an adult. Be decisive. Fine. Catie prepared a series of subroutines to take automatic effect even if she lacked the power to direct them consciously. Keeping a sharp eye on her battery levels, she readied herself to launch the solar sail. The material was lightweight but tough, and as long as the current levels of wind, sun, and rain persisted for the next three hours, she would be able to do everything she needed to for Daddy without running herself down to nothing. It was her best chance. She hadn’t made a thorough enough study of human physiology to know for sure what was happening with him, but it scared her that he wasn’t waking up and talking to her. He always talked to her when she needed him.

Be decisive. For Daddy, for Kieron. Even for dumb Blobby. Catie took the equivalent of a deep breath, a pulse of energy briefly lighting up her wiring, before she initiated the launch of the sail. The panel on top of her body slid open.

Four percent.

The trigger mechanism launched the sail up and out, forcing it to spread itself over her chassis.

Three percent.

It settled over her chassis, tugged a bit here and there by the wind, but overall stable. Now, to orient the cells in the proper direction…just a little more…

Two percent. Warning. You are reaching critical power failure.

Catie felt the cells ping comfortingly as they hit the proper angle for maximum sun exposure. Muzzy and fuzzy, she released the subroutines, then settled into her quiet, dreamy headspace again.

Three hours. Daddy would make it three more hours. She would help him, she would fix him, and he’d fix her right back.

Then they’d go get Kieron back.

Lord of Unkindness: Chapter Twenty-Six

 Notes: Dun-dun-DUUUUUUNNNNN!!!!

Title: Lord of Unkindness: Chapter Twenty-Six

***

Chapter Twenty-Six

 

 

Photo by Mauro Lima

It isn’t getting any easier to say goodbye to Angelo, but Ciro thinks he does a decent job of it the next morning. He makes the coffee, even throws together a quick breakfast burrito from the plethora of ingredients Angelo’s stocked the place with that he can eat on the road. When he kisses him at the door, his hands don’t shake; when he hugs him, his breath doesn’t tremble in his lungs. The Machados aren’t pushovers, but neither is Angelo. He’ll be back soon, and until he’s back Ciro will be with Annette, delighting in her company and learning things he probably should have cottoned onto a long time ago but never did. He’s got a few theories as to why he never learned these things before, when they could have been so useful.

It's always best for the person on top to keep the workforce dependent, after all. Better to make Ciro hoard his magic like a dragon for his father’s use than realize he doesn’t actually have to run out of it. That, in fact, it might be impossible to run out of it, as long as he doesn’t exhaust himself. It’s a heady thought, and one he plans to investigate further with Annette today. But for now…

“Drive safe, kick ass, come back soon.”

Angelo grins. “Don’t worry, baby. The Machados don’t scare me.”

“A rampaging gorilla familiar doesn’t scare you,” Ciro scoffs. “I think it’s safe to say that nothing does.”

The light in Angelo’s eyes dims a little. He doesn’t say anything, but they both know what he’s thinking. I scare him. I scare him all the time. Ciro’s trying to stop, though. He’s trying to be better. He’s committed to being better—no more running from the people he loved. No more looking for excuses to be at his worst when he could be fighting to be at his best instead. He’s going to make this work. He’s not going to run anymore.

Ciro leans in for a kiss, going for demanding but veering more into swooning territory when Angelo weaves his fingers into Ciro’s hair and tilts his head just the way he wants it, coaxing his lips to part and breathing him in like Ciro is his own personal source of oxygen. It’s a little ridiculous; Ciro had Angelo literally inside of him less than twelve hours ago, and now he wants him again. A little food, a little care, and all of a sudden his body is picking up on the fact that it’s okay to have a libido and, in fact, someone actually likes it. Ciro would go to his knees right now to satisfy the heat rising inside of him. He starts to, before Angelo shakes his head and pulls him back upright.

“Save it for me,” he says instead, the curve of his mouth a little wicked. “Don’t touch yourself until I get back.”

Ooh boy, a day of celibacy, so hard…and yet there goes Ciro’s nascent plan to jerk off in the shower the second Angelo’s car pulls away. “Bastard.”

“Call me whatever you want, just be here and waiting for me when I get back.”

“I will be,” Ciro promises, and that’s finally enough to get Angelo moving out the door. He drives off into the pale, washed-out light of the early morning, and Ciro watches him until he can’t see the car anymore, then heads back into the kitchen. He’ll get some French toast started for Annette. It’s her favorite, if he remembers right…and he’s even got some oranges he can juice for the syrup, plus some zest to go in the batter.

It takes longer than he expects for Annette to finally knock. The coffee has long since gone cold, and the French toast is piled on a plate in the oven to keep it warm, but it’ll still taste good. Ciro goes over to the door, opens it, and—

It’s Annette, and she’s clearly scared out of her mind. Her hands are up in the air, and she’s got just one cat with her, the biggest of her orange familiars, coiled around her neck like a scarf and purring in an effort to comfort her. And behind her is… “Maria?”

“Hey, Ciro!” Maria waves the hand that isn’t holding a gun on Annette at him. “Man, such a crazy world, isn’t it? I was on my way to see you when I caught sight of this pretty lady hiking up the hill, and I thought, ‘Huh, there’s something about her. Where have I seen her before?’ It didn’t take too long to figure it out.” She prodded Annette in the back with the barrel. “When you surface, you don’t do it by halves, huh lover? Bringing your old girlfriend back from the dead, too—pretty impressive.”

Lover…what the fuck?

“How about you let me in this time, babe,” Maria continues. “Or, I guess we could have it out on the porch, not like anybody’s around to hear us up here, but I don’t want to be disrespectful to your girlie’s corpse, you know? Better she go down in there, where the rats can’t eat her face off, than out here.”

“Ciro,” Annette whispers, fear and desperation plain in her voice.

“Ah-ah,” Maria says sternly. “No talking, that’s one of the rules. I didn’t say you could speak to him with your filthy mouth.” And she raises her the gun in her hand and hits Annette across the back of the head with it.

“Fuck!” Ciro jumps forward and catches her as she collapses with a groan, hauling her inside. Maria follows insouciantly, a look of perverse interest on her face as she glances around Angelo’s family home.

“Pretty,” she comments. “Kind of weird, but pretty. I like the lights. They look like antiques.” She grins. “No one will be surprised that lights like that could burn a house down.”

Ciro does his best to ignore the awful things she’s saying as he carries Annette over to the couch and lays her down. Her cat settles on her chest, a growl rumbling in its throat, and it never takes its eyes off Maria.

“Who even knew Angleo had this kind of deception in him?” the young woman goes on, like she’s not talking about her own boss, the person she’s supposed to be close friends with as well. “To be able to hide this for as long as he has, especially with all the scrutiny he’s been under lately—that takes guts, man. Real guts. I’m looking forward to ripping him open and seeing them for myself.” She giggles.

It’s the giggle that cinches it. Everything about this has felt incredibly wrong, like Ciro is talking with a doppelganger of some kind, but real doppelgangers are incredibly rare magical beings. And there’s no doubt in his mind that whoever he’s dealing with right now, it’s not the real Maria. It’s not a construct; the way she moves and holds herself is completely human, as far as he can tell. This isn’t some enchanted homunculus running around with Maria’s face on it. This is something else entirely.

“Nephele.”

His cousin claps with exaggerated appreciation. “Aw, there you go, lover! I knew you’d get it eventually! Thought it would be sooner, frankly, but you’ve never been the smartest Hambly, have you? My side’s the one that got all the smarts, although—” She shrugs. “I’m willing to admit that your side got the looks. Your mom was good for that much.”

The painful insult slides right off the panic already fizzing to the surface of Ciro’s mind. Nephele found him. She knows that Angelo’s helping him. She knows where he is, she’s inside of Maria, she knows about Annette. It’s the worst possible thing, with one exception—she’s not here herself. She’s riding Maria somehow, maybe driving one of her familiars into the poor girl’s skull like Ciro did with Uncle Magnus.

Does that mean she could wipe Maria’s mind the way Ciro fears he did with his uncle? He can’t let that happen. Apart from the fact that she doesn’t remotely deserve that kind of shit, it would destroy Angelo. And Annette…he’s got to save her.

Just as his first raven begins to move, Maria raises her gun and fires.

The bird shatters, and Ciro collapses to the ground.