Chapter 15
"Good God…"
I came to lying in a bathtub. Continuously filling — water coming from the faucet, water coming from me. The sound of it splashing hit my ears and reverberated through my skull, my ears, my chest, and for some reason my wrists. No idea how those were connected.
I pried my eyes open, tried to move as little as possible and make as little noise as possible, and attempted to get out. A few minutes of heavy, genuinely pathetic-looking effort later, I realized I had no idea where I was.
"Okay. Need to… need to reconstruct the timeline." Muttering to myself, pushing wet hair off my face, I looked around. "Right. I'm definitely not home."
The reason was simple. This alleged bathroom was larger than my entire room in Grandma's house. And I was not, in fact, lying in a bathtub — I was lying in an actual, genuine jacuzzi. Next to a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking Los Angeles. A beautiful view, exactly like the ones in nineties movies and TV shows where naive young women get seduced by rich men in penthouses.
I wrapped my arms around myself and looked around with the careful, frightened eyes of a man trying to locate said rich man before the rich man located him.
In the few seconds it took me to get my bearings, my still partially drunk brain went to work cataloguing the surroundings, noting small details that might have escaped others. Other drunk people, presumably — I had no idea why I thought that was impressive.
"What the…" I got to my feet with considerably more purpose this time, using the wall for support, carefully not presenting anything to the window, and wrapped myself in the first towel I could locate. "Who lives here? Hagrid?"
The towel was three or four sizes too large for a normal person. You could have made a functional sail from it.
Still faintly unsteady from the previous evening, I shuffled to the door and found myself in a full-scale Wolf of Wall Street mansion on the other side. Expensively gorgeous, beautifully appointed, gleaming floors in neutral tones — the inventory of impressive details could have gone on considerably longer, if the entire picture hadn't been compromised by the enormous vomit-covered bat hanging by one foot from the ceiling.
"Sonar. *Victor.* Victor!" I stage-whispered, not wanting to draw attention. Zero result. The werebat dangled from one talon, wings spread and occasionally twitching, mouth open, a puddle of drool forming beneath him on the floor that would have been impressive even by old Herman's anxious standards. "Wake up, you ridiculous Dracula."
I tried jumping to reach him, but the ceiling was too high, and the stubborn narcotics enthusiast apparently heard me and responded by curling tighter into his usual ball — wings folded over himself like a blanket. His face was still sticking out of the bundle, mouth open, nose liberally coated in white powder.
"Damn it." I considered my options. The only reasonable one was a water ball, which was mildly disrespectful to a person you called a friend, but — "Sorry, man. I'm not waiting half the day for you to resurface."
I was already gathering moisture in my palm when something closed around my wrist. A grip like iron. My entire arm was locked in place, as thoroughly as any shackle from an old cartoon — the only thing missing was a chain attached to a ball.
A large shadow covered me from behind. And my nose caught a warm, sweet smell of shampoo and soap — I'd noticed it in the bathroom too, but hadn't thought about it.
Something began moving around my waist. My entire lower body clenched involuntarily, but when I looked down instead of a snake I found a red… tail.
"Uh — that's a — so—"
I didn't finish. One smooth motion spun me around one-hundred-eighty degrees with enough precision that I went face-first into a pair of airbags.
The residual alcohol made the world swim. I barely kept the moisture inside my body. The dizziness wasn't helped by the extremely pleasant smell now surrounding me. Almost without deciding to, I pressed slightly closer, shoulders relaxing a fraction, already halfway convinced this was just a hangover hallucination and I was being very cozy with a pillow — and then a low, faintly husky female voice pulled me out of that comfortable theory.
"What are you doing, water boy?" I pulled my face back with some effort and looked up.
Red skin. Symmetrical horns curving upward. Yellow eyes without pupils, framed in dark shadow. A pair of gold earrings in pointed ears. A figure that the word *impressive* would significantly undersell, wrapped in an outfit that belonged in a nineties commercial — white tank top and denim shorts of the variety known colloquially as extremely abbreviated.
We looked at each other for a few seconds.
"Hey — are you okay?" A wave of goosebumps ran down my spine, my hands clenched to contain the moisture, and I swallowed hard and managed a jerky nod before stepping back. The demon girl had released my wrist, so I took another step.
Yellow pupil-less eyes tracked every movement with careful attention. I was putting real effort into not staring directly into them.
"W-who are you?" The words came out with difficulty. I was trying hard not to let my gaze drift to the white tank top.
Flashes of memory were sparking through my head — a genuine slideshow of damaged fragments, and in several of them the red-skinned woman currently in front of me appeared with some regularity.
"Did you actually do lines with Victor?" She crossed her arms — which did interesting things to the general visual situation — and fixed me with a look combining amusement and mild concern. "Listen to me — it seems fun at first. I'm not going to pretend it doesn't feel good. But trust me, it makes your life worse. You seem like a decent kid and you're Sonar's friend, so if I have to, I will shake every milligram of that powder back out of you by the appropriate handle."
The mental image of a panicked Sonar frantically trying to sweep cocaine off a table the moment he spotted his old friend appeared in my head and made me smile despite everything. It would have worked better if the powder hadn't still been all over his nose when she got to him.
But none of this answered the basic question.
"I didn't — I don't think I — no." I'd been half-listening, giving most of my attention to her appearance, and only the last part had fully registered. "Who are you, ma'am?"
"God, I told you not to call me that." The tip of the red tail flicked across my chest and then snapped against my nose. The powerful woman put her hands on her hips and gave me a brilliant smile that suggested she was remembering something. "And you forgot my name again? That stings, you know. Are you going to introduce yourself to me every time you sober up?"
"Every time?" A scene almost identical to the current one played before me. The personification of strength and beauty, making the most of both, while I barely managed to produce words around the powerful smell of stale alcohol on my own breath. "You're Sonar's friend, ma'am—"
"Say that one more time and you'll be eligible for a baroque boys' choir." Her fingers performed an eloquent scissors motion in the general vicinity of my future prospects. I started nodding before I'd consciously decided to. "Fine. We'll 'get acquainted' — for however many times this makes — on the way. Get dressed, let's go. We need to be at SDS headquarters in half an hour."
She walked past me, hips doing what hips do in situations like this, and gave me a firm pat on the backside that sent my entire nervous system into an involuntary standby state. I turned my head stiffly to watch her go, attempting not to look too transparently, which was not going well — the perpetually swishing tail kept pulling the eye.
"Wait — why? What?" I pulled the enormous towel more tightly around myself. Honestly, I felt like a freshman girl waking up in Mr. Grey's apartment. "First day isn't until Monday—"
"It is Monday." Clean and final. Then, without any visible effort, she opened one hand, and a shimmering purple haze of shifting violet appeared beneath it. She reached in, grabbed Sonar by the scruff, pulled him out, shook him once — he made a disgruntled noise — and set him on his feet one-handed, his full weight apparently registering as negligible. "And the first meeting starts in twenty-five minutes."
"Malevola, let me sleep." Sonar was back to himself — the flat, monotone voice now carrying layers of exhaustion and the distinct discomfort of a serious hangover. "Bother Herman. The little masochist will enjoy this."
"I'm — what? I'm not a masochist." Malevola's left eyebrow moved upward. Sweating steadily and genuinely grateful for the thickness of the oversized towel, I backed toward the bathroom with a lopsided smile, looking for my clothes — anything to avoid that deeply ironic gaze. "I believe in traditional relationships."
The second eyebrow joined the first.
I squinted involuntarily as another memory surfaced. Our first meeting — she'd looked at me with exactly this expression, having clearly not anticipated that Sonar's friend would turn out to be a sunlight-averse suburban kid who'd recently done a stint in prison.
"The first time we met, you showed up drunk with a teenage girl."
"Amanda — she's just a friend—"
She didn't let me finish. Apparently thinking out loud without particularly meaning to, Malevola started sharing information I hadn't asked for, and I genuinely couldn't tell if she was teasing or simply narrating.
"Right." She snapped her fingers, smiling brightly at some memory. "Good girl. Strong, loyal. Shame about the abilities."
She studied me for a moment with an unreadable expression, then redirected to my cellmate.
"She tried to make a deal with me when she was drunk." Her attention returned to the werebat. "I told her immediately — I'm only half demon."
"Mm." Victor had shifted back to human form and was currently presenting himself in children's underwear with the Batman logo.
He attempted a quiet retreat. She grabbed him by the scruff again, shook him gently, then turned her yellow eyes to me with a silent question that translated clearly as: *do you need the same treatment, or are you going to be reasonable?*
The answer was obvious, especially as more of the weekend was coming back — arriving with a headache accompaniment. Details filling in. Most importantly, I was starting to genuinely remember that I had, in fact, already met the woman currently standing in front of me, had personally driven to pick her up on her release.
Images, one after another. The empty ground around the women's facility. A parking lot with a handful of cars. This magnificent creature leaning against a lamppost with the ease of someone waiting for a bus.
It was coming back — Sonar's car, not mine. And we'd abandoned it there, because Malevola preferred to travel by portals she opened with a casual wave of her hand.
"And as for you, continuing from before." She settled Sonar at the table, disappeared briefly into the kitchen, and returned with three beers and some basic food, which she arranged in front of us. My clothes arrived via tail — launched at me with a look that clearly said *change now, or I'll do it myself, or I'll take you to SDS exactly like this.* "Last night when you were drunk, you asked me to sit on your—"
"That didn't happen."
A vivid image formed of the four of us — me, Victor, Amanda, Malevola — in a different bar, drinking to unconsciousness, resurfacing, and diving back in, entertaining the other patrons with escalating nonsense. Three days of continuous drinking had pushed my phobias so far underground that I'd been surprising myself constantly, doing things I never would have attempted sober.
"—between your thighs—"
"I — I c-couldn't have—" Truth or Dare. Some other game with forfeits. A whole series of things I had no previous experience with, and that the original Herman certainly hadn't known either — he might have wanted to, but that required friends, which he hadn't had.
As it turned out, Malevola genuinely loved board games and party games of all varieties. The moment she'd had a sufficient quantity to drink — to Sonar's resigned suffering — she'd immediately proposed competitions and games.
She'd nearly broken my arm at arm wrestling.
While I was reconstructing all of this and simultaneously pulling on my freshly washed clothes, Malevola came closer and looked me over with a focused eye.
"Not bad." She said nothing else. One final sweep from head to foot, then she opened a portal and stepped through without ceremony, giving Sonar a warning look on her way.
"Move it." Victor clapped me on the shoulder and weaved through the portal with the rolling walk of a sailor three sheets to the wind.
Nothing else for it. I looked around the expensive apartment one last time, remembered Malevola's brief account of how she'd acquired it — she'd worked for some organization, received this as payment for something complicated, and simply stayed, ignoring the tax implications and the various authorities who would inevitably want a conversation with her at some point.
I splashed water on my face, took a breath, and stepped through.
I arrived in an entirely standard office meeting room. Generic long table, chairs along the edges, and at the head of it — a familiar blonde with a gentle, ironic smile, observing our arrival as a group.
"At last, everyone's here." Blond Blazer laced her fingers together and tilted her head toward the empty seats, which we moved to claim under the eyes of everyone already present. There were quite a few of them.
A thin clerk at her left shoulder and someone who resembled a Black Einstein at her right.
The rest of the assembled group was varied, to put it charitably.
An enormous mass of dirt and debris with a vaguely thoughtful expression, listening to music through headphones and not acknowledging our presence at all.
Two dark-skinned girls in unusual clothing — one resembling a pop star with a vivid hairstyle and an aggressively form-fitting outfit; the other like a ballerina, if the ballet company operated in a Mad Max setting.
Across from them, a shirtless white guy picking his teeth with the expression of someone who belonged in a very specific genre of animated content.
And among the unfamiliar faces — a few I recognized. My old acquaintance, the Invisible Bitch, the small-time thief whose robbery had been the indirect starting point for my friendship with Amanda.
The second familiar face was Colm — the short leprechaun with arms the size of my torso. He spotted me looking and threw me a cheerful wink and a thumbs up, though any further conversation was cut off as everyone settled and Blond Blazer stood.
"Welcome." The voice that came out of her drew every eye in the room effortlessly. Only the Black Einstein beside her gave a small, displeased sniff and looked over our assembled criminal faces with visible reservations. "I'm glad to see you all here, and even more glad that you chose to take part in the Phoenix Program."
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