Olesya Hua, sister of the famed warlock Viveca, buys the freedom of the powerful weretiger Dallas. But some things, like love and loyalty, must be earned…
BY BENJANUN SRIDUANGKAEW AND DEVI LACROIX
Attending the auction is an obligation I could not refuse without insulting certain people, and my existence is insult enough; my powers are not what they once were, and I must keep my few allies happy. But for all the touted uniqueness of this event, I have not been impressed—the conversation is droll, this year’s fashions even droller, the wares already forgotten. I wish my sister Viveca were here; at least then I could speak the shade I am thinking.
Onstage, the first two items wheeled out are a gazelle and a swan, prey animals both; weak and insipid. Caged, too—unnecessary, I would think, but I have heard that swans can be murderous. In neither can I glimpse any sort of sapience; I wonder how they have been forced to stay in animal forms—drugs, perhaps, or arcane items, alloy acupuncture cleverly hidden—or if they are really wereanimals at all.
The received wisdom is that wereanimal parts confer all sorts of virtues (or vices), that some of them can guide you to the world’s mysteries; any rumor you can think of, one has sprung up around a werewolf, werehawk, any sort of shapeshifter. It’s a lucrative market, hunting things that look human but are not quite; mages like to imagine themselves as just one potion away from obtaining the swiftness of a gazelle or a… I’m not quite certain what a swan would confer. Obstinacy and an unhealthy love of bread? But the common wisdom has some truth to it: wereanimals are often centuries old, their very names ringing with promise—vessels of power, one way or another, excellent reagents for certain rites.
I sip the provided wine—my alchemist Chang’er has checked it for poisons and curses—and attempt to appreciate it. Very vintage. Red, though, where I prefer white. That surprises most people.
“You’re not having a good time, Ms. Olesya,” says Chang’er, a little amused. Few look at her and think alchemist: too sleek, too much like a fox, none of the mustiness most associate with someone who spends all day with mortar and pestle and alembics. It can take a lot of arguments to even convince people she’s entirely human—there’s something of the deep forest in her gaze, the canopied depths in her voice. Before she came into my employ, it was said that she had a cannibal habit, with an especial taste for livers.
I nod at her. “Do either of them strike your fancy?” She likes being spoiled, and I can afford to indulge a woman who’s both my alchemist and bedmate.
“No.” She sniffs. “Most of what they say about wereanimals is superstition, you know. Besides, I don’t want you to purchase some pretty fawn of a girl and give her all your attention.”
“You’ll always have my attention.” I cup the back of her head, stroking the fine hairs at the base of her skull. She closes her eyes and nearly purrs. Most alchemists are the glum sort; Chang’er is anything but, though she can shade into petulance if she thinks another woman has caught my eye.
I’m thinking of leaving when the third item is wheeled onstage.
Contained, like the rest, but in a cage that looks even sturdier than the others: thicker bars, stronger base, and much larger. The monitor gives me an up-close look, such that I can delineate every tuft of fur. They’ve cleaned her up, but there are gouges under the striped, gleaming coat; there are marks of a battle hard-fought. Her eyes are this peculiar, harsh green that cannot be found in any human, and her maw is beautiful.
She is a tiger of unparalleled beauty, crowned with a majesty only queens and apex predators know. I wonder how many she took down before she was captured; how many bodies she crunched in that powerful jaw. I want to see her teeth.
My fingers tap lightly on the touchscreen.
Next to me, Chang’er makes a face. “Really, Ms. Olesya?”
“Maybe I want to harvest her for parts.”
The alchemist’s pout is very pretty. It’s an art form she has perfected, almost more than alchemy. “We know you’re not going to do that. She’s too expensive.”
I win the bid without effort.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
My warlock sister is a specialist in rituals of containment, and it’s in one of the chambers she has built for me that I have placed my new purchase.
Outsiders believe that practitioners are unable to touch technology, or our proximity alone breaks their circuits, as though our existence is an electromagnetic disruption. We’ve let the notion lie. The more we’re underestimated, the better. And what we have built here, my sister and I, is a beautiful blend of magic and technology, designed to contain the dangerous and the beautiful.
My prize is both.
On the CCTV, the tiger—now a woman—is eerily still on her bunk bed, gaze steady and straight on, not in the way of resignation or defeat but in patience. I would have expected a tiger to be bulkier in human form, but the way she occupies space is more length than breadth, defying the conservation of mass. Long-limbed, long-backed; I imagine her spine would be a sinuous thing, a curve into which I can fit my hand when I press into her skin the ink that’ll bind her against doing me harm.
When the tiger arrived, I found her hide pierced by dozens of tiny needles, the method by which the auctioneers kept her contained. I removed them one by one with gloved fingers. Chang’er was muttering that the tiger would eat me whole.
“You’re not going in there, are you?” my alchemist mutters again, through my earpiece. I can almost hear her moue.
“It is rude to keep a guest waiting.”
“Don’t come crying to me, Ms. Olesya, when that creature mauls you right open.”
The door unlocks at my authentication. I shut it behind me.
Inside, the air is frigid. Viveca’s work will keep the tiger weak, but her penchant for cold gets a little much. My guest does not seem greatly bothered by the arctic temperature; she has put on the provided trousers but lies on her back bare-chested. Nudity probably doesn’t mean much to her.
“What kind are you?” she asks, without getting up or even looking at me.
I spread my hands wide. “You’ll need to be more specific than that.”
“They told me who bought me,” she replies, still looking at the ceiling. “I’ve heard of your name before, out in the city. For some reason, I thought you’d be… older.”
“Well, do go on. Feel free to continue your frank assessment.”
Now she sits up. Even in this form her gaze is lambent, her mouth unexpectedly quirked. She looks me over, thoughtfully; despite the imbalance in our power—me the captor, her the half-naked captive—I feel as if I’m being put under the scalpel, exact incisions made to hew into the crux of me.
“I think,” she says, “that you look hungry.”
Heat coils in my stomach, near-instantaneous. I have never quite been seen through like this. I step a little closer. “Your name?”
“Dallas Seidel.”
“Like the city.”
“Sure.” She shrugs, light, as if it were just as likely that the city was named after her. “What do you want with me?”
Now it is my turn to study her, more than I already have. For all that she is slender, there’s muscle to her—her stomach is hard, not the ladder of ribs one might expect; her breasts are small and inviting, and what I can see of her narrow hips intrigues me. Atop her head, wild hair as dark as her stripes, except where light gathers and makes it shine an impossible gold.
“What if I tell you I don’t want anything?” I suggest.
“Then you’d be lying.” Said quickly, easily, by a complete stranger.
Faintly I imagine sinking my hand into her black-and-gold hair. The texture looks so luxuriant, for all that she needs a haircut and a haircare routine. Perhaps I can persuade her to let me brush it. “I saw you on the stage. A creature like you shouldn’t be held in a cage.”
“Well, in that, we agree,” she snorts, turning away. She moves with grace and purpose, in both her forms. She begins to pull on a shirt; her back is a work of art, sculpted planes and sharp geometry, tightly gathered muscles. “The flesh market—I plan to kill everyone involved. Am I to count you among that number, or will you stand aside?”
It is my turn to snort. “You have remarkable confidence, for someone who started the day in one cage, and is ending the day in another.”
“Ah, the mercy of cages,” Dallas growls, so low the air seems to tremble; she has turned back just enough to fix me with one jade eye. “How readily they make mortal men feel safe.”
Despite all my training and power, I am still a woman, still flesh and blood—some atavistic part of me freezes in place, torn between disabling fear and overwhelming arousal; I am seized by the image of her crushing me in her jaws.
And then she flounces back onto the bed, cool and collected, a detached smile on her lips. Mercurial like a cat, or the performative predation of an apex hunter; I should not be drawn into fascination. “Eight guards, give or take, conventionally armed. Two mages among them, including a naga. And I’ll remember the scent of the warehouse when I am at the docks.”
“You let yourself be captured.” There is admiration in my voice.
She looks very satisfied, to be recognized so. “It’s a good way to get the measure of a place. Or a person.”
I think to ask her, And what could you have learned about me in this short a time? Instead, I answer the question she has asked of me: “I will not keep you here, but I am not stepping aside, either—I’m joining you on this hunt.”
This, finally, genuinely startles her. “I’ll pretend that is a serious proposal. What will you ask of me in recompense?”
“That you accept a binding.” I hold up a vial of ink, blue-black, the shade of hadopelagic depths. “It spells out a promise that you cannot harm me or mine, and lasts for a year. That’s it; you are free to do anything else. After I’ve put this on you, we leave this room together.”
Her stare goes on a little longer, unblinking. “I’d accept, but that isn’t what you really want.”
“I—” My cheeks color slightly. “Explain.”
“If you wanted safety, you’d have a nice little kitten; if you wanted a leash, you’d have a trained dog. I think you want to be bitten. So let me: I will take your blood—” this, she says, as casually as she might ask me for water or tea “—and you will have my loyalty.”
My mouth widens into a smile. Oh, if she thought this would fluster me. “As you like.”
Another flicker of surprise, but she hardly misses a beat. “From where would you prefer?”
Now I’m grinning, showing her my teeth. “Can you manage a thigh without hitting an artery?”
“I have the incisors of a surgeon.”
Which does not actually make sense, but I accept the assertion in the spirit it is meant. I join her on the bed. There is every chance that she will penetrate an artery and I’ll die here of hemorrhage, barring Chang’er rushing in with help and an I-told-you-so. But I like to think I am a fair judge of character, and Dallas strikes me as honorable in her own fashion.
They say that tigers owe a debt to the one who’s freed them from their chains. They say that blood makes an unbreakable oath.
I hike my skirt up, not far, above my knee. A modest distance.
Dallas says, “Higher.”
A dare. I oblige, lifting the fabric until it is nearly up to my waist, raising an eyebrow at her. “Normally I make women wine and dine me first.”
“They weren’t tigers, were they? It seems,” she adds, bold, “that I’ll be your first in that regard.”
Her head lowers. Her breath grazes my knee. She inhales deeply, as though she means to gather all that I am into her lungs, until my scent is a permanent part of her memory. She licks and I discover that, while her tongue is not as rough as a cat’s, it is more so than any human’s.
Dallas pierces skin. Pain flares, then slows to an even throb. The wound cannot be so large, and yet when she descends to it, it feels enormous. Her golden head brushes against me, and I cannot help myself; I run a hand through her mane, eagerly confirming that her hair is a delight of texture, finer to the touch than any silk.
She parts my legs a little wider as she sucks. I grip at her shoulders, conscious that a tiger’s instincts may drive her to tear out actual flesh, telling myself that I am holding her back to keep myself safe, not pulling her closer to—
But she is able to restrain herself; her mouth latches on, catching every drop. Very gently, she runs her tongue along the wounds.
When she’s finished, her head rises, her gaze meeting mine. Her eyes and lips are bright, and her breathing fast.
So is mine. I smell my own blood, but underneath that there’s something else, a tiger’s musk, earthy. The punctures have already closed. I cover myself up, smoothing out my skirt. “Does that suffice?”
“Yes.” She licks her lips. Her nipples are hard little points against the white shirt. “You heal fast.”
“Personal protection. It deals with scratches.” It deals with more than that, but no point revealing all my secrets. “Now let us get you dressed properly and fed. We have a long night ahead of us.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The meat plated before Dallas is variously beef and pork, all of it raw. She declined the wagyu I have in stock, citing that it is too soft, too fatty. I half-expected her to dig into her dinner with her hands, but she keeps to the civility of utensils. It is an interesting spectacle, to watch the raw proteins seep and puddle, and then to watch her spoon up even the blood: this is a woman who doesn’t like to waste.
For myself I have nothing but jasmine tea, warm and diluted. Attempting anything more substantial while Dallas carves through kilograms of meat is too much, even for me.
Halfway through demolishing the meal, she pauses to say, “I figured out what kind you are.” The category of practitioner, she means—the very first question she asked me, when I stepped into her cell.
“Oh?”
“You’re the woman mages hire when they want to kill other mages. I’ve been wondering how you have gotten away doing that year after year, and with what appears to be a high success rate too.” She puts down her fork. “There’s something in your blood, isn’t there?”
“I’m afraid the secret to my success is that I have very good snipers.” Hand-picked, loyalty fostered over years. They are nearly extensions of me.
“What kind of ammo do they use?”
I laugh. “Rifle rounds. What else? You can’t possibly think I dip every bullet in my blood before sending them out.”
“It took a lot of self-discipline,” she says, holding my gaze, “not to take more from you than I said I would.”
So far she has not even glared at me threateningly. Tame as a domesticated cat, or putting up a good pretense. “I must be especially delicious.”
“A forest of tigresses would fight to close their jaws around you. Your taste is… potent, like light—like how you think warmth and summer days should feel.” Her face darkens. “And shadow, too, like poison and occultation.”
My jaw clenches tight, impotent fury ill-contained. This, I did not want a stranger to know. Even my sister is ignorant—how dare this tiger see so much, and how dare she speak of it. “Ah. So you can taste that, too.”
She stares at me, hard, like she is hunting for a wound in my flesh, trying to find what is wrong with me. I feel naked before her; I have known this beast for only hours, but to her I am as glass, utterly transparent under her emerald gaze.
“I don’t know,” I finally admit. I try to keep my voice light, even wryly detached. One day I was hale. The next I was not. The vector of contagion, the mechanisms of it, whether it targeted me specifically: all of these remain mysteries. “A wasting disease of sorcery, it seems—a curse that feasts on my magic when I draw it out.” Feast it does. It is consuming me, this affliction—slow when I do not use my magic, fast as wildfire when I do. “Only my alchemist knows of my unique ailment, so I would appreciate you keeping this to yourself.”
She starts to say something, and I cut her off. “Enough of your flattery.” I motion to the wall-mounted monitor. “You’ve already earned your dessert.”
On the screen, a view comes to life, both visual and audio clear—a result of mixing scrying and conventional cameras. A dark alleyway; a man is emerging from the back entrance of a club, lit in red neons. The asphalt gleams wet from a fresh, warm rain.
Dallas draws herself straight. She recognizes him—but of course she would, he was one of the hunters who captured her. I wait for her fangs to come out, for the tiger to emerge piecemeal. This doesn’t happen—her control must be iron. Hard-earned, perhaps.
The man in the monitor takes a step, looks around, lights a cigarette. The cinderous point of it is like a demon’s eye.
It is also like the red laser dot that appears on his temple, a few seconds later.
One shot. He drops. Mages can be difficult to kill—most have woven into what they wear, or into their bodies, armor against mortality. They can take terrible gut wounds, even head injuries and bullets. A conventional sharpshooter would need to fire twice, thrice—or more—if they want to end the mage before the mage can come end them.
The rounds my personnel use are made differently, though. A single bullet, aimed well, typically does the job. I did not lie to Dallas: I don’t dip the ammo in my blood. It’s more a matter of anointing them in the concept of what I carry, of infecting them. Subdividing your vitality is a draining matter and shortens the lifespan. Transmuting it into something more like a contagion and the process turns much easier, less demanding on my body.
“Each kill,” Dallas says slowly, “what does it take out of you?”
“Less than you think.”
Her brow furrows. “What is your life expectancy?” It is as if the man on the screen is already forgotten, and her only concern is me.
“More than you think. The curse in my veins is nullified by… certain processes.” Overseen primarily by Chang’er, by the fact that I use magic as little as possible, by the restorative techniques I’ve learned—teeth gritted, angry that I have to—over the years. “What’s released in the world is not subjected to such constraints.”
“But that’s not how you should be,” she says. “You are a woman made to burn bright.”
I shrug, feigning acceptance. “I’ve gotten most of what I wanted out of magic.” My body, to be specific. I finished reshaping it in my early twenties, well before the curse came along. What good fortune, I keep telling myself. How much worse it could have been, to be imprisoned not just within this affliction but in the vagaries of my birth.
“I hear,” she says dryly, “that the heart and brains of a tiger can confer immortality.”
“I have no need of it. I’ll live out the terms given to me, or I’ll break them with my own hands. You’re too handsome to cannibalize, and in any case I do not require outside aid.” A thought my sister would disagree with: if she finds a demon who can give her immortality, she’ll strike a deal without hesitation. Warlocks are a different breed, but then she was the one to inherit our mother’s power, with my full support—I never wanted that particular mantle, and these days I have forged myself into a different sort of weapon, to spread a different sort of fear. Fear: it’ll protect you until it no longer does.
“All right,” says the tiger. “I’m in. We will see what happens afterward.” She cocks her head in sudden thought. “But why did you kill just the one?”
“Dallas, haven’t you ever scared your quarry back to its den, the easier to slay the whole damn pack?” The surprise with which she looks at me is priceless.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
We’re coming through the door of the club when a half dozen mooks open fire.
There is a precise art to disrupting the trajectory of a bullet. It travels so fast that it leaves behind the sound of its own discharge; you can be dead before you finish hearing it.
Of course, spells exist with comparable penetrative force, without the hassle of carrying a firearm. But it’s so convenient a tool that modern mages employ guns freely; let it never be said that non-practitioners have never invented anything useful. Such a simple instrument, but terrifying in its potency and its finality. Once a bullet leaves a muzzle, there’s not much you can do to prevent its impact; you cannot rely on eyes or ears—both are too slow.
Two options remain: erect a barrier of such resilience that it can absorb and deflect the bullet’s force, or create one that nullifies vectors beyond a certain speed within your radius. Nothing reaches you, that way. My curse-coated bullets puncture through both, like a pin into a ballon.
Now, however, the tables are turned, and I am compelled to shield us from perforation. To use magic, for me, is to tempt fate; it is to invite agony. But magic is the moment when I feel alive. It is the moment when colors return to my world.
The bullets fall at our feet, harmless as pebbles. Noiseless, because the carpet is so plush, so luxurious that it’s swallowed up all sound save the gunshots.
Dallas is already on the move. The golden vector of her cuts through the lavish dining room, opening crucial seams: the throats, the stomachs, the femoral arteries. The rank, dark fluids of the human system spill in her wake.
I follow up with exacting, surgical lines of force. One must take care, with a body like mine, to expend power in the most efficient manner possible. Inside me, the curse blooms. It pulls my gut tight. It clenches, a vise, around my heart.
But I’m used to it. I’m used to moving past the knowledge that I am inching a little closer to my end. And violence grants me an outlet. The poachers and sellers of the flesh market didn’t expect it, either—the mage-killer rarely leaves her lair, delegating violence to hired help. I am not a face most anticipate in public, let alone doing my own wetwork. But I take satisfaction. One day it’ll be one outing too many, but for now my fortune and my physique hold; the curse will not yet breach the line.
The tiger lifts her paw from a throat, the movement almost delicate. She rises, and becomes a woman once more, nude and wearing the gore like a rich, savory suit.
Around us, the dead are still.
“I can smell your mortality’s edge,” says Dallas, no tact, no diplomacy.
“How dare you, when I have so effortlessly vanquished our enemies.” Sometimes I wonder whether I might have been the sorceress of my age, but something burns in the back of my mouth—the sour, vile taste I get then the curse flares up, acid bubbling up my esophagus. I don’t allow it to stagger me. I do not permit myself any outward sign.
But she can see, or scent; tiger senses must be many times more granular than human. She reaches for me, then draws back, self-conscious perhaps that she’s about to stain my clothes. “You did not have to do this—to come personally, to test the bounds of your affliction.”
How do I explain to her what it is like to sit in my estate day in, day out, as outside my walls the world moves on without me? How do I tell her that without the curse I could have been my sister’s equal, practicing in my own field and honored for it? In the afterglow of combat, adrenaline still pounding, my affected detachment slips for just a moment. “Tell me how it’d feel if you’ve been forced to stay in your human form for years. Would it chafe?”
“It’d drive me to insanity. I—”
I sweep my hand across the corpses. “Have we got them all, the hunters who wronged you?”
She barely looks at them—she’ll already have counted them off by smell and visceral certainty. “Yes.”
Victory intoxicates, every time. It affirms to me that I remain capable, that I may still assert myself upon the balance of things. When we were young, that’s what Viveca and I talked about with children’s solemnity: who will make a mark on the world more, the warlock or the sorceress?
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
We return to my stronghold clothed in our enemies’ blood.
Strange that a sense of our can so swiftly cohere. Dallas trots by me, once more on four legs, as we enter the estate grounds.
Chang’er fusses over me as we come in. She is a little angry, and she pointedly ignores the enormous beast at my side. “You didn’t have to go to the frontline yourself.”
But the truth is that I am uninjured. Not even a scratch. Supporting fire from my snipers, yes; more than that though, it was because Dallas as much avenged herself as put her body between me and harm. “I am fine.” I bend to kiss my alchemist on the mouth, careful not to get gore in her hair. “Come to my room tonight.”
She scowls at the tiger and when she tiptoes to kiss me back, she bites, as if to remind everyone present who has the prior claim.
Dallas, like any housecat, follows me into the shower. It is there that she retakes her other form, and watching the quicksilver matter of her flow and shape into bipedalism is an intriguing sight. She kneels before me, naked and wild and gorgeous. Blinks as water gets in her eyes before she draws to her full height. “Did you do all that so I would be in your debt, sorceress?”
“To what end, tiger?”
“Practitioners always have a motive.” Her head cocks. “What do you really want?”
I touch the side of her neck—she does not flinch from the contact—and once more enjoys the texture of her hair. There’s so much of it, an endless mane. “I told you. A being like you should not be in a cage.”
She fetches the soap bar from its marble holder. “And you—are you in a cage, Olesya?”
My affliction is a chain that binds my every waking moment, a shackle that keeps me prey, weak and insipid. Less of me, each time I breathe; less of me, each time I weave my magic.
But I’m less frank with my next words. I don’t want to be that transparent, to admit that at the auction, sympathy drove me. The mage-killer experiences no such emotion. “The world itself is composed of prison bars. That’s what most mages seek—to escape its perimeter, to seek what lies beyond.”
“It’s not an answer.” But she shrugs, relenting. “Does your alchemist have something against tigers?”
“She has something against butches, and she’s possessive.”
“I don’t mind sharing.”
I snatch the soap from her. “Who said there’s anything you get to share with Chang’er?”
“You fed me. We fought together, and you went above and beyond. I owe you much. But what we did is as good as a courtship ritual for tigers, and—unless your feelings have changed in the last few hours—I have been able to smell your intention from the start.”
She is so simple, and so frank. I can’t help laughing. “Then you’re staying with me. The mage-killer. The scourge of polite arcane society.”
“I am. Why would I care about sorcerer mores?” Her eyes take in the whole of me, and now her expression changes, darkening to a hunger that matches my own. Her hand, wet and very warm, slides up my hip; she leans over, her mouth at my earlobe—the same mouth that, not so long ago, ripped flesh apart and splintered bones. “But first,” she growls, “I’m going to finish what I started, Olesya. How much do you like teeth?”
I wind my arm around her neck, pushing her toward the cold, wet wall. The negotiation has reached its immediate conclusion. Down the line, the terms may alter and solidify.
In the meantime, we are about to mark each other—in more ways than one.
“Oh,” I say, cradling her hardening length in my hand, “we’re going to get along. Bite as much as you like, Dallas.”