The beginning: Shackles—Day 3, hour 21
Sixty-eight hours, three minutes, and fourteen seconds had passed since Lothaire left me in the room with the kings and told me to wait.
Not that I was counting.
The room was dark and cold. Soft snores sounded from across the room. The kings were asleep or dead.
I prayed that their wheezing was a symptom of rigor mortis.
The fireplace was empty, and no flames screamed at me like usual. Disappointing. I missed the shrieks.
The screaming flames added a certain je ne sais quoi to the room. An ambiance if you will.
They matched my aesthetic.
Yes, my aesthetic was mental illness; no, I didn’t want to talk about it.
I wanted to wallow. That was the bloody point.
Now the room was creepily quiet.
It was pitch-black. Even after my eyes adjusted, I could only see a few inches in front of my face. Immediately after I’d gotten the tattoo, I’d been able to see sharper and more colors, but the effect had faded.
A heavy bass thumped as the party raged in the great hall. The pounding music made my bed vibrate beneath me.
At least the darkness was giving a depressive ambiance.
I’d been fine when I first got back to the room, if you defined fine as a state of being in perpetual agony and manically hallucinating. The delusion was that I thought I was fine.
It was a vicious cycle.
Truly traumatic.
I shivered for dramatic effect and picked at my lip.
When I’d fallen asleep after Lothaire left, I’d passed out for over forty-eight hours and had woken up feeling like the living dead. I knew how much time had passed, because when I’d gotten up to pee, I’d pressed my face close to the clock on the wall so I could read the date and time.
It ticked at me aggressively.
I’d tapped my finger on the glass and ticked back.
Dr. Palmer would just love that shit. I imagined her pulling down her spectacles and asking me if I’d drawn in my journal this week while her face crinkled up with judgment.
I snorted remembering when I showed her the flip book that I’d spent hours creating. If you turned the pages quickly it showed a tree falling over and crushing a family of chipmunks.
Instead of applauding my impressive drawing skills, Dr. Palmer had asked me if I was trying to be institutionalized.
I missed her energy.
After I tapped at the clock for a few minutes, I dragged the sack of bones that I called a body to my bed and collapsed.
Things went downhill. Fast. Which was frankly impressive because I’d already thought I was at rock bottom.
The last twenty hours had been pure hell.
Limbs locked.
Chest crushed against my bed.
All I could do was smoke my pipe. Inhale enchanted drugs and exhale them until reality became a little less flat and a little more warped.
I lay like a zombie as the memories played. Blood rained around me. Dead eyes stared at me accusingly. Skin cold beneath my hands.
Horace gasped.
For a mostly powerless fae who could only create two small ice daggers, I’d killed many people.
What did you call a murderer who didn’t want to kill? A coward or a bad bitch? I couldn’t decide which.
My lungs ached from smoke inhalation.
My soul ached from killing.
My shoulders ached from carrying the weight of being the coolest person at the academy.
The longer I lay on top of my covers, the more tangible the images became. Crystal clear. Painted in saturated colors so it was impossible to look away.
Tears leaked out of Sari’s eyes.
Horace’s blood was neon red, pooling against his pale skin.
Tara stared at me with wide eyes. She was dead.
In the present, my crow pecked at my nose, I fingered his feathers, and the smoke was soft beneath my fingers.
“Why?” Horace asked as he gurgled beneath me choking on blood. “Why, cousin?”
I rolled out of bed.
Didn’t bother to catch myself.
Horace was close behind, so I crawled across the carpet as fast as I could. I needed to get away.
Horace yelled after me, “Come back, cousin! Explain it to me!” His voice was loud and desperate. “I thought we were friends?”
Great, I was being chased by a specter of the man I’d murdered.
Normal girly things.
I stumbled to my feet, grabbed the door, and wrenched it open.
The red light was too bright, and I struggled to focus on the empty black marble corridor. Chandeliers and stained-glass windows refracted brightness everywhere. It burned my corneas.
“Come back, friend!” Horace yelled. “I did nothing wrong.”
Great, I was being gaslit by a ghost.
I needed to get away.
Now.
I sprinted.
Lightning streaked down the halls, and my teeth hurt from the electricity traveling through the marble.
The great hall was only a few doors down. I rubbed at the tattoo on my hip as I ran and prepared for the pain. Still, I had to try.
I slipped through the open doors and walked into the party. It was as dark as the bedroom, but bursts of neon lights flashed every few seconds.
It was disorienting.
Loud.
The music was cranked up to a decibel level that made my bones vibrate and my chest hurt. The sweaty crowd flowed like a hive, and I let myself be pulled around by the frenzy of gyrating bodies.
I rubbed harder at the tattoo on my hip.
No pain came.
The bedroom must have been close enough to the party that the slave brand hadn’t acted up. Or all three of the kings had died in their sleep.
It was definitely the latter.
For once the sun god had truly blessed me. If I could cry, I would have sobbed with relief.
My eyes were bone-dry.
Tipping my head back, pipe between my lips, I closed my eyes and lost myself to the music. Celebrated the demise of my enemies.
It was so loud that I couldn’t hear Horace yelling at me. The bass was so deep that I couldn’t see Tara.
A man grabbed my hips and pulled me back against his crotch.
A voice slurred in my ears, “Hello, my pretty princess. You visiting?” Hands groped my hips and ass roughly. “I haven’t seen you around.”
White horns curled off the top of the head of the blond man who was touching me.
I was no man’s princess. However, I was a whore.
Being a slut wasn’t a title, it was a lifestyle.
The student’s eyes were glazed, and three different glowing cigarettes hung from his mouth. From his disheveled look, he’d been partying for days. A green tie was askew, and his white shirt was unbuttoned to his navel. It clung to his narrow, sweat-soaked frame.
I could barely see his face in the flashing neon lights.
It didn’t matter what he looked like.
His fingers dug harder into my flesh as he pressed his sweat-soaked body flush against mine. One of his hands groped at my chest.
Did he think my tits were fish that were going to flop away? Because he was grabbing at them like they were.
“Why?” Horace asked from nearby.
I shoved my hips forward and ground myself against the man. Grabbed a joint from his lips and pushed it beside my pipe. Inhaled with all my might and squeezed my eyes shut.
“You a slut?” the man whispered against my ear as he groped harder at my chest. My back didn’t even hurt.
I grinned because his words went well with my new maladjusted depressed girl aesthetic.
Finally, someone got it.
“Yeah. I am.” My voice was scratchy from smoke inhalation.
I rolled my hips faster, and he struggled to match my pace. Bodies crushed around us and pushed us together until I didn’t know where I began and he ended.
Sweat dripped down my face.
A foreign drug filled my bloodstream, and Horace didn’t say another word.
The problem was someone else did.
“What do you think you’re doing? Slave,” Scorpius whispered against the shell of my ear.
Streaks of pain stabbed down my back.
I didn’t open my eyes.
The body I was pressed against was ripped away, and I staggered back with confusion.
I opened my eyes.
My enemies were alive.
Neon green flashed.
Orion wrapped his hands around my dance partner’s head.
Darkness.
Neon red flashed.
Orion snapped his neck.
Darkness.
Neon purple flashed.
A man was sprawled dead in the middle of the dance floor. White shirt unbuttoned, tie askew. One of his white horns was snapped in half.
Darkness.
The rational part of me gasped with horror while the irrational part of me casually noted that the deceased body fit well with my vibe.
Sometimes life was a chill, but then there were the horrors.
It was exhausting being a girl.
Hands grabbed the back of my neck, and sharp nails pricked my sensitive skin. The fingers tightened painfully as they dragged me off the dance floor. Someone snarled in my ear, “Don’t be a brat.”
“Kinky,” I mumbled under my breath.
A tongue licked across my face. “Don’t tempt me.”
I blinked at the sudden bright light of the hall as we left the party and rubbed moisture off the side of my cheek.
Scorpius threw me to the ground.
I didn’t save myself.
In a clatter of limbs I flopped backward. The marble was icy beneath my sweat-slicked skin. I closed my eyes and breathed roughly.
Another person was dead.
Because of me.
I sucked on both pipes desperately and shivered because death followed me. Everywhere I went. He wouldn’t leave me alone.
Stupid stalker, he was such a pervert.
Most men were.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Malum snarled. He stood beside his mates, and all three of them loomed above me. “Are you fucking crazy?”
Shocker, they were violently angry.
Men had no emotional range.
“Yes, sir!” I raised my middle finger to my forehead and saluted them sarcastically. Closed my eyes. Fantasized about death and a week-long shopping trip.
